by Primo Levi
It was quite clear that he was possessed by a desperate senile madness; but there was a greatness in his madness, a force and a barbaric dignity, the trampled dignity of beasts in a cage, the dignity that redeemed Capaneus and Caliban.
The Moor hardly ever got up from his bunk. He lay there all day, his enormous, yellow, bony feet sticking out of the end of the bunk half-way across the room; next to him on the floor lay a large shapeless bundle, which none of us ever dared to touch. It contained apparently all his worldly possessions; a heavy woodcutter’s axe hung from its outside. Normally, the Moor stared into the distance with bloodshot eyes and stayed silent; but the minimal stimulus was enough, a noise in the corridor, a question asked of him, an incautious brush against his obtrusive feet, an attack of rheumatism; then his deep chest rose up like the sea swelling in a storm, and the mechanism of abuse was once more set in motion.
We respected him, and feared him with a vaguely superstitious fear. Only Cesare approached him, with the impertinent familiarity of a bird scratching about on the craggy back of a rhinoceros, and he amused himself by rousing the Moor’s anger with stupid and obscene questions.
Next to the Moor lived the inept Ferrari with his lice, the bottom of the class at the Loreto school. But he was not the only member of the San Vittore confraternity in our dormitory; it was also well represented by Trovati and Cravero.
Trovati, Ambrogia Trovati alias Dusk, was not more than thirty years old; he was of small stature, but muscular and extremely nimble. ‘Dusk’, he explained to us, was a stage name; he was proud of it, and it fitted him perfectly, for he was a man of a darkened mind, who lived on fanciful expedients in a mental state of perpetual frustrated rebellion. He had passed his adolescence and youth between prison and the stage, and it seemed as if the two institutions were not clearly distinguished in his confused mind. Imprisonment in Germany must finally have tilted the balance.
In his conversation, the true, the possible and the fantastic were intermingled in a varied and inextricable tangle. He spoke of prison and the law courts, as of a theatre, in which nobody is really himself, but everybody is acting, showing off his talents, imitating somebody else, reciting a part; and the theatre, in its turn, was a great obscure symbol, a dark instrument of perdition, the external manifestation of an underground sect, evil and ubiquitous, which rules at everybody’s expense, and comes to your home, takes you, puts a mask on you, makes you become what you are not, and do what you do not want to do. This sect is Society; the great enemy, whom he, Dusk, had always fought: he had always been defeated, but had always heroically risen again.
It was Society who had come down to search for him, to challenge him. He used to live in innocence, in a terrestrial paradise; he had been a barber, and had owned his shop, at the time of the visitation. Two messengers had come to tempt him, to propose to him diabolically that he sell his shop and give himself to Art. How well they had known his weak spot; they had flattered him, they had praised the shape of his body, his voice, the expressiveness and mobility of his face. He had resisted twice, three times, then he had given way, and with the address of the film studio in his hand had begun to wander around Milan. But the address was false, they had sent him from door to door; until he had realized that it was a conspiracy. The two messengers had followed him in the background with a movie camera, they had stolen all his words and his gestures of disappointment, and so they had made him an actor without his realizing. They had stolen his image, his shadow, his soul. It was they who had made his sun set, and who had baptized him ‘Dusk’.
This was the end for him. He was in their hands: his business sold, no contract, little money, a small part every now and again, a little theft to keep alive. Until his great epopee: fleshy homicide. He had met one of his seducers in a street, and had knifed him; he had become guilty of fleshy homicide, and for this crime had been dragged into court. But he had refused to retain a lawyer, because the whole world was against him, to the last man, and he knew it. Nevertheless, he had been so eloquent, and had presented his case so well, that the Court had acquitted him on the spot with a great ovation, and everyone had wept.
This legendary trial stood at the centre of Trovati’s nebulous memory; he relived it at every moment of the day, he spoke of nothing else, and frequently, after dinner in the evening, he forced all of us to join him in enacting his trial as a sort of mystery play. He assigned a part to each of us: you the judge, you the prosecutor, you the jury, you the clerk, you the public – everybody was given his part peremptorily. But the accused, and at the same time the defence counsel, was always himself; and when the moment of his torrential harangue arrived, at every performance he explained first, in a rapid ‘aside’, that fleshy homicide occurs when somebody sticks a knife not into the chest or the stomach, but here, between the heart and the armpit, in the flesh; and it is less serious.*
He would speak without stopping, passionately, for a whole hour, wiping authentic sweat from his brow; then, throwing the folds of a non-existent toga over his left shoulder with a broad gesture, he would conclude: ‘On, on, ye snakes, deposit your venom!’
The third former inmate of San Vittore, Cravero from Turin, was, by contrast, an accomplished rogue, uncontaminated, without refinements, one of those rare beings in whom the abstract criminal hypothesis of the penal code seemed to take flesh and human shape. He knew all the jails of Italy well, and had lived in Italy (he admitted it without reserve, in fact with pride) as a thief, burglar and ponce. Possessing such qualities, he had found no difficulty in settling in Germany; he had worked for only one month for the Todt Organization at Berlin, then he had disappeared, ably blending himself into the murky background of the local underworld.
After two or three attempts, he had found the right sort of widow. He helped her with his experience, procured her clients, and took over the financial side of disputed cases, even including knifing; in return she looked after him. He felt himself perfectly at home in that house, despite the difficulties of language, and certain curious habits of his protégée.
When the Russians reached the gates of Berlin, Cravero, who did not like disturbances, weighed anchor, leaving the woman in the lurch, although she burst into tears. He had been overtaken, nevertheless, by the rapid advance and, shifting from camp to camp, had ended up at Katowice. He did not stay there long. In fact, he was the first of the Italians to decide to attempt repatriation by himself. Accustomed as he was to living outside the law, he was not particularly worried by the obstacle of the numerous frontiers he had to pass without documents and of the thousand miles he had to travel without money.
As he was going to Turin, he very courteously offered to take a letter to my home. I accepted, with a certain levity, as will be seen; I accepted because I was ill, because I have great and deep faith in my neighbour, because the Polish post did not work and because Marya Fyodorovna had paled and changed the subject when I asked her to write a letter on my behalf to be sent to the west.
Cravero left Katowice in the middle of May, and reached Turin in the record time of one month, slipping like an eel through innumerable check-points. He traced my mother, gave her the letter (it was my only sign of life in nine months to reach its destination) and confidentially described to her my extremely worrying state of health; naturally I had not written this in my letter, but I was alone, ill, abandoned, without money, in urgent need of help; in his opinion, I had to be provided for immediately. Certainly it was no easy undertaking; but he, Cravero, my bosom friend, was there to help. If my mother gave him 200,000 lire, he would bring me home to safety in two or three weeks. In fact, if the young lady (my sister, who was listening to the conversation) wanted to accompany him…
It is to my mother’s and my sister’s credit that they were not wholly taken in by the messenger. They sent him away, asking him to call again in a few days, as they did not have the sum of money available. Cravero went downstairs, stole my sister’s bicycle, which was in front of the house, and disappeared.
Two years later, at Christmas, he sent me an affectionate greetings card from prison in Turin.
The evenings when Dusk exempted us from rehearsing his trial, Mr Unverdorben took the stage. This strange and attractive name belonged to a mild touchy little old man from Trieste. Mr Unverdorben, who would not reply to anybody who did not call him ‘Mr’ and who insisted on being addressed with respect, had lived a long adventurous double existence, and like the Moor and Dusk was the prisoner of a dream, in fact of two dreams.
Inexplicably he had survived the Birkenau Lager, and emerged from it with a terrible phlegmon on one foot, and could not walk; so he was the most assiduous and obsequious of those who offered me company and help during my illness. He was also very loquacious, and if he had not repeated himself so frequently, as old men do, his confidences would be enough to make a novel. He was a musician, a great misunderstood musician, a composer and conductor; he had composed a lyric opera, The Queen of Navarre, which had been praised by Toscanini; but the manuscript lay unpublished in a drawer, because his enemies had examined his music with such indecent application that in the end they had discovered four consecutive bars in his score which were identical with four in I Pagliacci. His good faith was obvious, crystal clear, but the law does not joke about such matters. Three bars yes, four no. Four bars are plagiarism. Mr Unverdorben had been too much of a gentleman to dirty his hands with lawyers and law-suits; in a virile manner, he had said good-bye to art, and had created a new existence for himself as a chef on board transatlantic liners.
He had travelled a lot, and had seen things which no one else had seen. Above all, he had seen extraordinary animals and plants, and many secrets of nature. He had seen the crocodiles of the River Ganges, which have a single rigid bone running from the tip of the nose to the tail, and which are extremely ferocious and race like the wind; but, because of this singular bone structure, they can only move backwards and forwards like a train on railway lines, and all you have to do to be safe is to place yourself by their side, at a slight angle from their axis.
He had seen the jackals of the Nile, which drink while they run so as not to be bitten by the fish; at night their eyes shine like lanterns, and they sing with raucous human voices. He had also seen Malaysian cabbages which are like our cabbages, but much bigger; if you merely touch their leaves with a finger, you cannot free yourself again; the hand, and then the arm, and then the rash person’s entire body is drawn inwards slowly but irresistibly, into the monstrous sticky heart of the carnivorous plant, and digested little by little. The only remedy, which almost nobody knows, is fire, but you have to act quickly; it is enough to light a match under the leaf that has seized its prey, and the plant’s grip slowly relaxes. In this way, thanks to his promptness and knowledge of natural history, Mr Unverdorben had saved the captain of his boat from sure death. Then there are certain little black snakes which live buried in the squalid sands of Australia, and which dart out at a man from afar, in the air, like bullets; one bite of theirs is enough to knock out a bull. But everything in nature is balanced, there is no offence without a defence, every poison has its antidote; it is enough to know what it is. The bite of these reptiles is promptly cured if treated with human saliva; but not the saliva of the person who has been attacked. This is why no one ever travels alone in those parts.
In the long Polish evenings, the air in the dormitory, heavy with tobacco and human smells, was saturated with senseless dreams. This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air. Everyone, except perhaps Cravero, and certainly D’Agata.
D’Agata had no time to dream, because he was obsessed by the fear of bugs. Of course, nobody liked these unpleasant companions; but in the end we had all grown accustomed to them. They were not few and scattered, but a compact army, which invaded all our pallets at springtime; during the day they nestled in the chinks of the walls and in the wooden bunks, and as soon as the confusion of the day died down, they sallied forth. We would willingly have ceded them a small portion of our blood; it was less easy to accustom ourselves to feel them running furtively over our faces and bodies, under our clothes. The only people to sleep peacefully were those who were fortunate enough to be heavy sleepers, and who managed to fall into unconsciousness before the bugs woke up.
D’Agata, who was a minute, sober, reserved and extremely clean Sicilian bricklayer, was forced to sleep by day, and spent the nights perching on his bed, staring around, his eyes dilated with horror, insomnia and spasmodic concentration. He clutched a rudimentary tool in his hand, which he had constructed from a stick and a piece of wire grating, and the wall next to him was covered with a lurid constellation of bloody spots.
At first, these habits of his had been derided; was his skin thinner than ours? But then compassion had prevailed, mixed with a trace of envy; because, of all of us, D’Agata was the only one whose enemy was concrete, present, tangible, capable of being fought, beaten, crushed against the wall.
8
Southwards
I had been walking for hours in the marvellous morning air, drawing it deeply into my battered lungs like medicine. I was not very steady on my feet, but I felt an imperious need to take possession of my body again, to re-establish a contact, by now broken for almost two years, with trees and grass, with the heavy brown soil in which one could feel the seeds chafing, with the ocean of air wafting the pollen from the fir trees, wave upon wave, from the Carpathians to the black streets of the mining city.
I had been wandering around like this for a week now, exploring the environs of Katowice. The pleasant weakness of convalescence ran through my veins. At the same time, powerful doses of insulin also ran through my veins, prescribed, found, bought and injected in agreement by Leonardo and Gottlieb. While I walked, the insulin carried out its prodigious work in silence; it ran through my blood searching for sugar, took care of its diligent combustion and conversion into energy, and distracted it from other less proper destinies. But there was not much sugar available; suddenly, dramatically, almost always at the same time, the supplies ran out; then my legs folded under me, everything grew black and I was forced to sit on the ground wherever I was, frozen and overwhelmed by an attack of ferocious hunger. At this point, the labours and gifts of my third protector, Marya Fyodorovna Prima, came to my aid; I took a packet of glucose from my pocket and swallowed it greedily. After a few minutes, light returned, the sun grew warm once more and I could begin my walk again.
When I returned to the camp that morning, I came on an unusual scene. In the middle of the square stood Captain Egorov, surrounded by a dense crowd of Italians. He was holding a large revolver, which, however, he only used to emphasize the salient parts of the discourse he was making with broad gestures. Very little of his speech could be understood. Basically only two words, because he repeated them frequently; but these two words were heavenly messengers: ‘Ripatriatsiya’ and ‘Odyessa’.
So, we were to be repatriated via Odessa; we were to return home. The whole camp instantly ran wild. Captain Egorov was lifted from the ground, revolver and all, and carried precariously in triumph. People bellowed in the corridors: ‘Home! home!’; others turned to their luggage, making as much noise as possible, and throwing rags, waste paper, broken shoes and all sorts of rubbish out of the window. In a few hours the whole camp emptied, under the Olympian eyes of the Russians; some were going to the city to take leave of their girls, others quite simply to paint the town red, others still to spend their last zloty on provisions for the journey or in other more futile ways.
Cesare and I also went to Katowice, with this last programme in mind, carrying our savings and those of five or six comrades in our pockets. For what could we hope to find at the frontier? We did not know, but we had seen enough of the Russians and their ways so
far, as to make it seem unlikely that we should find a money exchange at the frontier. So common sense, as well as our euphoric state, counselled us to spend the not excessively large sum we possessed to the very last zloty; to use it all up, for example, in organizing a large Italian-style dinner, based on spaghetti al burro which we had not eaten for so long a time.
We walked into a grocery store, placed all our money on the counter, and explained our intentions to the shopkeeper as best we could. I told her, as usual, that I spoke German but was not German; that we were Italians about to leave, and that we wanted to buy spaghetti, butter, salt, eggs, strawberries and sugar in the most opportune proportions for a total of exactly sixty-three zloty, not one more nor one less.
The shopkeeper was a wrinkled old woman, with a shrewish and diffident air. She looked at us closely through her tortoise-shell glasses, then stated flatly, in excellent German, that according to her we were not Italians at all. First of all, we spoke German, albeit somewhat badly; then; and above all, Italians had black hair and passionate eyes, while we possessed neither. At the most, she would concede that we were Croats; in fact, now that she thought about it, she had met some Croats who resembled us. We were, quite indisputably, Croats.