by Primo Levi
The elevator finally arrived, and it was already full of employees coming from the basement and the sub-basement. Arrigo made his way in energetically but without shoving. The elevator rose, stopping with a jerk at every floor, and people got on and off, greeting each other distractedly. On the ninth floor, Arrigo himself got off and punched his time card. For two years now there had been a time clock on every floor. It had been a sensible innovation. Previously, there had been only one, on the ground floor, which always caused a terrible bottleneck, partly because there was little discipline, and people tried to push in front of you. In the office, people were already at their desks. Arrigo sat at his post, pulled the color photograph of his wife and their little girl out of the top drawer, and from the second drawer took writing supplies and the index cards left over from the previous day. This was the result of one of the boss’s obsessions: at the end of the day, all the desks had to be cleared. Who knows why, certainly not for cleaning, because the desks were cleaned only two or three times a year: if you didn’t want dust on your desk, you had to clean it yourself.
Arrigo’s job was administrative in nature. Every day, he received a packet of index cards from the floor above. Each card contained the name of a human being and the date of his or her death; Arrigo had only to specify the cause. He would often get angry, for various reasons. The expiration date wasn’t always the same: it could be years ahead, or months or days, for no apparent reason, and he felt that this was an injustice. Nor did it seem reasonable that there were no rules regarding age: some days he was handed hundreds of cards for newborns. Then, the boss complained if Arrigo kept to generic formulas: the man must be a sadist or a fan of crime news. It wasn’t enough for Arrigo to write ‘accident.’ He wanted all the details and was never satisfied. He always demanded a correlation between the data on the cards and the cause of death, and this often embarrassed Arrigo.
The first index card of the day wasn’t a problem. It bore the name of Yen Ch’ing-Hsu, fifty-eight years old, single, born in Han Tou, where he still resided, dockworker, no illnesses to speak of. Arrigo had no idea where Han Tou was: if he were to check the atlas every time, he’d never get anything done. Yen still had thirty-six days to live and Arrigo imagined him against the backdrop of an exotic sunset, sitting on a roll of cable before a turbid sea the color of a ripe banana; he was exhausted by his daily work, sad and alone. A man like this doesn’t fear death and doesn’t seek it, either, but he may act carelessly. Arrigo thought about it for a moment and then had him fall from a scaffold: he wouldn’t suffer much.
Pedro Gonzales de Eslava didn’t give him much trouble, either. In spite of the pompous name, he must have been a poor devil – he drank, had been involved in many fights among illegal immigrants, was forty-six years old, and had worked on half a dozen farms in the far south. He had five more months and would leave behind four children, who, however, lived with his wife and not with him. The wife was Puerto Rican, like Pedro; she was young, and she also worked. Arrigo consulted the medical encyclopedia and came up with hepatitis.
He was studying the third index card when Fernanda called him on the phone. She had seen in the paper that Metropolis was playing at some art house cinema; why not go see it tonight? Arrigo didn’t like being interrupted at work and was noncommittal. The third index card was fairly obvious; everyone knows what happens to a man who races motorbikes. No one was forcing him to do it; he had only to choose a different profession – in cases like this, there’s no need to have scruples. But he felt obliged to provide the details of the fatal accident and the hospital record.
He had no sympathy for Pierre-Jean La Motte. He was born in Lyons, but at the age of thirty-two he was already a full professor of political science at the University of Rio: evidently he was a man with connections. He had only twenty days to live, though he was in excellent health and played tennis every morning. Arrigo was racking his brains for an appropriate cause of death for La Motte when Lorusso came by and invited him to go for coffee. Arrigo went down with him to the vending machines on the fourth floor. Lorusso was dull. He had a son who wasn’t doing well in math, and Arrigo thought that, with a father like that, it would be surprising if the son were a prodigy. Then Lorusso started to complain about his wife, who spent too much money, and about the heat that didn’t work.
The coffee machine didn’t work well, either. Lorusso banged on it and at long last it spat out two cups of coffee, pale and insipid but boiling hot. As Arrigo forced himself to gulp down the coffee, scalding his throat, Lorusso talked on about the paycheck that always came late and the deductions that were always too high. Finally, back at his desk, Arrigo squashed Pierre-Jean like a worm: brain hemorrhage – that’ll teach him.
At around ten, Arrigo was finished with the cards left over from the previous day, but the office boy had already put the new cards on his desk. The first was all crumpled, maybe by the dating machine: he could make out only that it was for a person of the female sex, by the name of Adelia. Arrigo put the card aside, so much the better for Adelia: it’s always useful to gain time. At any rate, he might decide to write a report: more and more often it happens that the first card of each packet is damaged … a regrettable occurrence … will maintenance please take care of it … sincerely yours. Instead he paused over the next card. Karen Kvarna, aged eight, born in Slidre, a mountain village in the heart of Norway. Karen, only child, illnesses N.A. (not available), student, was to die the following day. Arrigo was stuck. He imagined her flaxen-haired, kind, cheerful, serene, against the backdrop of solemn, immaculate mountains: if she had to die, then it would be without him, he would not take part in this. He grabbed the card and knocked on the boss’s door: he heard a grumbled ‘Come in,’ entered, and said that it was a disgrace. That the work was poorly organized, that the purchase of the randomizer had been an idiotic idea, that the cards were full of mistakes – for example, this one right here. That they were all sheep and careerists and no one dared protest and no one took the job seriously. That he had had enough, that he couldn’t care less about promotion, and that he wanted to be transferred.
The boss must have been expecting a scene from Arrigo for quite a while, because he gave no sign of surprise or indignation. Perhaps he was even glad to be rid of a programmer with such an unstable character. He told Arrigo to stop by again the next day. And the next day he gave him his transfer orders and made him sign two or three explanatory documents. Thus Arrigo found himself demoted from grade 7 to grade 6 and transferred to a small office in the attic of the building, in charge of determining the shape of the noses of newborns.
Buffet Dinner
Immediately upon entering through the front door, Innaminka felt uneasy and regretted having accepted the invitation. There was a butler of sorts, with a green sash around his belly, who took people’s coats. Innaminka, whose coat was part of his body, shivered and felt dizzy at the thought that someone might take it from him. But there was more: behind the butler rose a great spiral staircase of beautiful polished black wood, broad and majestic but unmanageable. Unmanageable for him, that is. The other guests mounted it with ease, while he didn’t dare even try. He kept turning in circles, embarrassed, waiting till no one was looking. On level ground he was good, but the length of his hindquarters alone was an obstacle – his feet were more or less twice as long as the stairs were deep. He waited a little more, sniffing at the walls and trying to appear indifferent, and once everyone else was upstairs he endeavored to go up as well.
He tried different methods: grabbing the banister with his front legs, or bending over and trying to climb on all fours, even employing his tail – but actually it was the tail, more than anything else, that got in the way. He ended up climbing clumsily sideways, placing his feet lengthwise on each step, his tail folded ignobly over his back. It took him a full ten minutes.
Upstairs was a long, narrow room, with a table placed crosswise; there were paintings on the walls, some depicting human or animal forms, others depicti
ng nothing. Along the walls, and scattered around the floor, were bronze or marble figures that Innaminka found pleasing and vaguely familiar. The room was already crowded, but more people kept arriving: the men were in evening attire, the women wore long black dresses and were bedecked with jewels, their eyelids painted green or blue. Innaminka hesitated for a moment and then, sidling along the wall and avoiding abrupt movements, took refuge in a corner. The other guests looked at him with mild curiosity. In passing, he overheard a few casual comments: ‘He’s pretty, isn’t he?’ ‘… no, he doesn’t have one, dear. Can’t you see he’s a male?’ ‘I heard on TV that they are almost extinct. … No, not for the fur, which isn’t worth much anyway. It’s because they destroy the crops.’
*
After a while, the young hostess emerged from a group of guests and came toward him. She was very thin, with large, wide-set gray eyes and an expression between annoyance and surprise, as if someone had brusquely woken her up at that very moment. She told him that she had heard a lot about him, and this Innaminka found hard to believe: maybe it was just a form of greeting, and she said it to all her guests. She asked him if he’d like something to eat or drink: she didn’t seem very intelligent, but she probably had a kind heart, and it was precisely because of her kindness rather than her intelligence that she realized that Innaminka understood her fairly well but could not answer her, and she moved on.
Actually, Innaminka was hungry and thirsty: not to an unbearable degree, but enough to make him uncomfortable. Now, the dinner was one of those melancholy buffet affairs, where you have to choose what you want from a distance, craning between heads and shoulders, find the plates, find the silverware and the paper napkins, get in line, reach the table, serve yourself, and then back away, making sure not to spill anything, either on yourself or on anyone else. Besides, he could see neither grass nor hay on the table: there was a rather appetizing-looking salad, and peas in a brown sauce, but as Innaminka hesitated, debating whether or not to get in line, the one dish and then the other were finished. Innaminka gave up. He turned his back on the table and, proceeding with care through the crowd, tried to return to his corner. He thought with loving nostalgia of his wife, and of his youngest, who was growing up: he was a good jumper and went out to pasture by himself, but now and then he still demanded to return to his mother’s pouch – indeed, he was a little spoiled, and liked to spend the night in that warm darkness.
During his laborious retreat, he encountered several waiters who carried trays and offered glasses of wine and orangeade and canapés that looked tempting. He didn’t even think about taking a glass in the middle of the crowd, while everyone was bumping into him. He gathered up his courage, grabbed a canapé, and brought it to his mouth, but it instantly fell apart in his fingers, so that he had to lick them one by one and then lick his lips and whiskers for a long time. He looked around, suspicious, but no, no one was paying any attention. He crouched in his corner, and to pass the time he began to observe the guests closely, trying to imagine how they would behave, men and women, if they were being chased by a dog. No mistaking it – in those long wide skirts, the women would never get off the ground, and even the swiftest among the men, even with a good running start, wouldn’t be able to jump a third of the distance that he could jump from a standstill. But you can never tell, maybe they were good at other things.
He was hot and thirsty, and at some point he realized with dismay that an increasingly urgent need was growing in him. He thought that it surely must happen to others, too, and for a few minutes he looked around to see how they dealt with it, but it seemed that no one else had his problem. So very slowly he approached a large pot in which a ficus tree grew, and pretending to sniff the leaves he sat astride the pot and relieved himself. The leaves were fresh and shiny and had a nice smell. Innaminka ate a couple and found them tasty but had to stop because he noticed a woman staring at him.
She stared at him and came closer. Innaminka realized that it was too late to pretend that nothing had happened and move away. She was young and had broad shoulders, massive bones, strong hands, a pale face, and clear eyes. To Innaminka, of course, her feet were of primary importance, but the woman’s skirt was so long and her shoes so complicated that he couldn’t get even an idea of their shape and length. For a moment he feared that the woman had noticed the business with the ficus tree and had come to reprimand him or punish him, but he soon realized that it wasn’t so. She sat down on a small armchair beside him and started talking to him sweetly. Innaminka understood hardly anything she said, but at once he felt calmer; he lowered his ears and made himself more comfortable. The woman came even closer and began to caress him, first on the neck and back, then, seeing that he was closing his eyes, under his chin and on his chest, between his front paws, where there is that triangle of white fur that kangaroos are so proud of.
The woman talked and talked, in a subdued tone, as if she were afraid the others would hear. Innaminka understood that she was unhappy, that someone had behaved badly toward her, that this someone was, or had been, her man, that this event had occurred a short time ago, perhaps that very evening: but nothing more than that. Since he, too, was unhappy, he felt sympathetic toward the woman, and for the first time that evening he stopped wishing that the reception would soon be over; instead he hoped that the woman would continue to caress him and, in particular, that her hands would go lower and run lightly and knowingly along the mighty muscles of his tail and his thighs, of which he was even prouder than of his white triangle.
This, however, was not to be. The woman continued to caress him, but with increasing distraction, paying no attention to his shivers of pleasure, and continuing all the while to complain about certain human troubles of hers that seemed to Innaminka not to amount to much – to one man instead of another man whom she would have preferred. Innaminka thought that, if this was how things stood, the woman would do better to caress this second man instead of him; and that maybe that was exactly what she was doing; and furthermore that she was beginning to bore him, given that for at least a quarter of an hour she had been repeating the same caresses and the same words. In short, it was clear that she was thinking of herself and not of him.
Suddenly a man sprang out of the seething crowd, grabbed the woman’s wrist, jerked her to her feet, and said something very unpleasant and brutal to her. He then dragged her away and she followed, without giving Innaminka so much as a farewell glance.
Innaminka had had enough. From his observation post he stretched up as high as he could, straightening his back and raising himself on his hind legs and tail as on a tripod, to see if anyone was starting to leave. He didn’t want to attract attention by being the first. But as soon as he caught sight of an elegant elderly couple making the rounds to say their goodbyes and heading toward the cloakroom, Innaminka took off.
He negotiated the first few meters slinking between the legs of the guests, below the level of breasts and stomachs; he stayed low, supported alternately on his hind legs and on his front legs with the help of his tail. But when he was near the table, which by now had been cleared, he noticed that the floor on either side of the table was clear, too, and so he jumped right over it, feeling his lungs fill effortlessly with air and with joy. With a second leap he was at the head of the stairs: rushing, he miscalculated the distance and landed off-balance on the top steps. There was nothing for it but to descend that way, like a sack, half crawling and half rolling. But as soon as he reached the ground floor he hopped to his feet. Under the expressionless gaze of the doorman, he took a deep, voluptuous breath of the damp, grimy night air and immediately set off along Via Borgospesso, no longer in a rush, with long, happy, elastic leaps.
Mini Modern Classics
RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA Hell Screen
KINGSLEY AMIS Dear Illusion
DONALD BARTHELME Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
SAMUEL BECKETT The Expelled
SAUL BELLOW Him With His Foot in His Mout
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JORGE LUIS BORGES The Widow Ching – Pirate
PAUL BOWLES The Delicate Prey
ITALO CALVINO The Queen’s Necklace
ALBERT CAMUS The Adulterous Woman
TRUMAN CAPOTE Children on Their Birthdays
ANGELA CARTER Bluebeard
RAYMOND CHANDLER Killer in the Rain
EILEEN CHANG Red Rose, White Rose
G. K. CHESTERTON The Strange Crime of John Boulnois
JOSEPH CONRAD Youth
ROBERT COOVER Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady
ISAK DINESEN [KAREN BLIXEN] Babette’s Feast
MARGARET DRABBLE The Gifts of War
HANS FALLADA Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Babylon Revisited
IAN FLEMING The Living Daylights
E. M. FORSTER The Machine Stops
SHIRLEY JACKSON The Tooth
HENRY JAMES The Beast in the Jungle
M. R. JAMES Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book
JAMES JOYCE Two Gallants
FRANZ KAFKA In the Penal Colony
RUDYARD KIPLING ‘They’
D. H. LAWRENCE Odour of Chrysanthemums
PRIMO LEVI The Magic Paint
H. P. LOVECRAFT The Colour Out of Space
MALCOLM LOWRY Lunar Caustic
KATHERINE MANSFIELD Bliss