by Primo Levi
I was observing him as he talked, and I refrained from interrupting him, although he was telling me things I already know. Talking was doing him good: his eyes shone, perhaps partly because of the cognac, but he was calming down. Talking is the best medicine.
“Well, as I was saying, every so often I glanced at the mixture, and I was thinking about the things I was telling you, and also about others that had nothing to do with this. The motors were humming calmly, the cam was rotating slowly, and the needle of the thermograph was drawing on its face an outline that corresponded to the movement of the cam. Inside the reactor the agitator was turning regularly and you could see that the resin was slowly becoming thicker. Already around seven it was beginning to stick to the walls and make little bubbles: this is a sign that I discovered, and I also taught it to Morra and the guy on the third shift—it’s always someone different, so I don’t even know his name. Anyway, it’s a sign that the heating is almost done, and that it’s time to take the first sample and test the viscosity.
“I went down to the floor below, because an eightthousand-liter reactor isn’t a toy, and it sits a good two meters below the floor; and while I was there, fooling with the discharge valve, I heard the motor of the agitator change tone. It changed just a little, maybe not even by a sharp, but this is a sign, too, and not a good one. I threw away the sample and everything, and in an instant I was upstairs with my eye glued to the spy hole, and it was a really hideous sight. The whole scene had changed: the blades of the agitator were slicing a mass that looked like polenta, and was rising right before my eyes. I stopped the agitator, since by now it was useless, and stood there as if spellbound, with my knees shaking. What to do? It was too late to unload the mixture, or to call the doctor, who at that hour was still in bed: and besides, when a batch spoils it’s as if somebody had died: the best remedies come to mind afterward.
“A mass of foam was rising, slowly but relentlessly. Coming to the surface were bubbles as big as a man’s head but not round: deformed, in all shapes, with the walls striped as if with nerves and veins; they burst and immediately others appeared, but it wasn’t like beer, where the foam subsides, and rarely overflows the glass. This mass kept rising. I called, and several people came, including the head of the department, and they all said what they thought but no one knew what to do, and meanwhile the foam was only half a meter below the spy hole. Every time a bubble burst, bits of spit flew out and stuck under the glass of the spy hole and smeared it; soon you wouldn’t be able to see anything. By now it was clear that the foam wasn’t going to subside: it would keep rising until it clogged all the cooling pipes, and then goodbye.
“With the agitator off, it was quiet, and you could hear a growing noise, as in science-fiction films when something horrible is about to happen: a murmur and a rumbling that kept getting louder, like an upset stomach. It was my eight-cubic-meter molecule, with the gas trapped inside it, all the gas that couldn’t get out, that wanted to emerge, give birth to itself. I could neither run away nor stand there and wait: I was terrified, but I also felt responsible, the mixture was mine. By now the spy hole was blocked, all you could see was a reddish glow. I don’t know if what I did was right or wrong: I was afraid that the reactor would burst, and so I took the wrench and removed all the bolts on the hatch.
“The hatch rose by itself, not suddenly but gently, solemnly, as when tombs open and the dead arise. A slow thick stream came out, disgusting, a yellow mass full of lumps and nodules. We all jumped back, but it cooled right away on the floor, as if it had sat down, and you could see that the volume wasn’t so great after all. Inside the reactor the foam subsided about half a meter, then stopped and gradually hardened. So the show is over; we looked at each other and our faces were not a pretty sight. Mine must have been the ugliest of all, but there were no mirrors.”
I tried to calm Rinaldo, or at least distract him, but I’m afraid I didn’t succeed, and for a good reason. Among all my experiences of work, none is so alien and inimical as that of a batch that spoils, whatever the cause, whether the damage is serious or slight, if you’re guilty or not. A fire or an explosion can be a much more destructive accident, even tragic, but it’s not disgraceful, like a gelatinization. The spoiled batch contains a mocking quality: a gesture of scorn, the derisiveness of soul-less things that ought to obey you and instead rise up, defying your prudence and foresight. The unique “molecule,” deformed but gigantic, that is born and dies in your hands is an obscene message and symbol: a symbol of other ugly things without reversal or remedy that obscure our future, of the prevalence of confusion over order, and of unseemly death over life.
A Tranquil Star
Once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far away from here, lived a tranquil star, which moved tranquilly in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of tranquil planets about which we have not a thing to report. This star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous: and here a reporter’s difficulties begin. We have written “very far,” “big,” “hot,” “enormous”: Australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning I had a hot bath, Everest is enormous. It’s clear that something in our lexicon isn’t working.
If in fact this story must be written, we must have the courage to eliminate all adjectives that tend to excite wonder: they would achieve the opposite effect, that of impoverishing the narrative. For a discussion of stars our language is inadequate and seems laughable, as if someone were trying to plow with a feather. It’s a language that was born with us, suitable for describing objects more or less as large and long-lasting as we are; it has our dimensions, it’s human. It doesn’t go beyond what our senses tell us. Until two or three hundred years ago, small the meant scabies mite; there was nothing smaller, nor, as a result, was there an adjective to describe it. The sea and the sky were big, in fact equally big; fire was hot. Not until the thirteenth century was the need felt to introduce into daily language a term suitable for counting “very” numerous objects, and, with little imagination, “million” was coined; a little later, with even less imagination, “billion” was coined, with no care being taken to give it a precise meaning, since the term today has different values in different countries.
Not even with superlatives does one get very far: how many times higher than a high tower is a very high tower? Nor can we hope for help from disguised superlatives, like “immense,” “colossal,” “extraordinary”: to relate the things that we want to relate here, these adjectives are hopelessly unsuitable, because the star we started from was ten times as big as our sun, and the sun is “many” times as big and heavy as our Earth, whose size so overwhelms our own dimensions that we can represent it only with a violent effort of the imagination. There is, of course, the slim and elegant language of numbers, the alphabet of the powers of ten: but then this would not be a story in the sense in which this story wants to be a story; that is, a fable that awakens echoes, and in which each of us can perceive distant reflections of himself and of the human race.
This tranquil star wasn’t supposed to be so tranquil. Maybe it was too big: in the far-off original act in which everything was created, it had received an inheritance too demanding. Or maybe it contained in its heart an imbalance or an infection, as happens to some of us. It’s customary among the stars to quietly burn the hydrogen they are made of, generously giving energy to the void, until they are reduced to a dignified thinness and end their career as modest white dwarves. The star in question, however, when some billions of years had passed since its birth, and its companions began to rarefy, was not satisfied with its destiny and became restless: to such a point that its restlessness became visible even to those of us who are “very” distant and circumscribed by a “very” brief life.
Of this restlessness Arab and Chinese astronomers were aware. The Europeans no: the Europeans of that time, which was a time of struggle, were so convinced that the heaven of the stars was immutable, was in fact the paradigm and kingdom of
immutability, that they considered it pointless and blasphemous to notice changes in it: there could be none, by definition there were none. But a diligent Arab observer, equipped only with good eyes, patience, humility, and the love of knowing the works of his God, had realized that this star, to which he was very attached, was not immutable. He had watched it for thirty years, and had noticed that the star oscillated between the 4th and the 6th of the six magnitudes that had been described many centuries earlier by a Greek, who was as diligent as he, and who, like him, thought that observing the stars was a route that would take one far. The Arab felt a little as if it were his star: he had wanted to place his mark on it, and in his notes he had called it Al-Ludra, which in his dialect means “the capricious one.” Al-Ludra oscillated, but not regularly: not like a pendulum; rather, like someone who is at a loss between two choices. It completed its cycle sometimes in one year, sometimes in two, sometimes in five, and it didn’t always stop in its dimming at the 6th magnitude, which is the last visible to the naked eye: at times it disappeared completely. The patient Arab counted seven cycles before he died: his life had been long, but the life of a man is always pitifully brief compared with that of a star, even if the star behaves in such a way as to arouse suspicions of its eternity.
After the death of the Arab, Al-Ludra, although provided with a name, did not attract much interest, because the variable stars are so many, and also because, starting in 1750, it was reduced to a speck, barely visible with the best telescopes of the time. But in 1950 (and the message has only now reached us) the illness that must have been gnawing at it from within reached a crisis, and here, for the second time, our story, too, enters a crisis: now it is no longer the adjectives that fail but the facts themselves. We still don’t know much about the convulsive death-resurrection of stars: we know that, fairly often, something flares up in the atomic mechanism of a star’s nucleus and then the star explodes, on a scale not of millions or billions of years but of hours and minutes; we know that these events are among the most cataclysmic that the sky today holds; but we understand only—and approximately— the how, not the why. We’ll be satisfied with the how.
The observer who, to his misfortune, found himself on October 19th of that year, at ten o’clock our time, on one of the silent planets of Al-Ludra would have seen, “before his very eyes,” as they say, his gentle sun swell, not a little but “a lot,” and would not have been present at the spectacle for long. Within a quarter of an hour he would have been forced to seek useless shelter against the intolerable heat—and this we can affirm independently of any hypothesis concerning the size and shape of this observer, provided he was constructed, like us, of molecules and atoms—and in half an hour his testimony, and that of all his fellow-beings, would end. Therefore, to conclude this account, we must base it on other testimony, that of our earthly instruments, for which the event, in its intrinsic horror, happened in a “very” diluted form, besides being slowed down by the long journey through the realm of light that brought us the news. After an hour, the seas and ice (if there were any) of the no longer silent planet boiled up; after three, all its rocks melted, and its mountains crumbled into valleys in the form of lava. After ten hours, the entire planet was reduced to vapor, along with all the delicate and subtle works that the combined labor of chance and necessity, through innumerable trials and errors, had perhaps created there, and along with all the poets and wise men who had perhaps examined that sky, and had wondered what was the value of so many little lights, and had found no answer. That was the answer.
After one of our days, the surface of the star had reached the orbit of its most distant planets, invading their sky and, together with the remains of its tranquility, spreading in all directions—a billowing wave of energy bearing the modulated news of the catastrophe.
RAMÓN ESCOJIDO was thirty-four and had two charming children. With his wife he had a complex and tense relationship: he was Peruvian and she was of Austrian origin, he solitary, modest, and lazy, she ambitious and eager for social life. But what social life can you dream of if you live in an observatory at an altitude of 2900 meters, an hour’s flight from the nearest city and four kilometers from an Indian village, dusty in summer and icy in winter? Judith loved and hated her husband, on alternate days, sometimes even in the same instant. She hated his wisdom and his collection of shells; she loved the father of her children, and the man who was under the covers in the morning.
They reached a fragile accord on weekend outings. It was Friday evening, and they were getting ready with noisy delight for the next day’s excursion. Judith and the children were busy with the provisions; Ramón went up to the observatory to arrange the photographic plates for the night. In the morning he struggled to free himself from the children, who overwhelmed him with lighthearted questions: How far was the lake? Would it still be frozen? Had he remembered the rubber raft? He went into the darkroom to develop the plate, he dried it and placed it beside the identical plate that he had made seven days earlier. He examined both under the microscope: good, they were identical; he could leave in tranquility. But then he had a scruple and looked more carefully, and realized that there was something new; not a big thing, a barely perceptible spot, but it wasn’t there on the old plate. When these things happen, ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s a speck of dust (one can never be too clean while working) or a microscopic defect in the emulsion; but there is also the minuscule probability that it’s a nova, and one has to make a report, subject to confirmation. Farewell, outing: he would have to retake the photograph on the following two nights. What would he tell Judith and the children?
Dates of Original Italian Publication
PART I: EARLY STORIES
The Death of Marinese (Il Ponte, August–September 1949)
Bear Meat (Il Mondo, August 29, 1961)
Censorship in Bitinia (Il Mondo, January 10, 1961)
Knall (1968–70; in Vizio di Forma, 1971)
In the Park (1968–70; in Vizio di Forma, 1971)
PART II: LATER STORIES
The Magic Paint (Tantalio; Il Mondo, December 27, 1973)
The Gladiators (L’Automobile, June 15, 1976)
The Fugitive (La Stampa, July 6, 1979)
One Night (Tuttolibri, V, no. 48–49, December 22, 1979)
Fra Diavolo on the Po (La Stampa, December 14, 1986)
The Sorcerers (c. 1977–78; Lilit e altri racconti, 1981)
Bureau of Vital Statistics (La Stampa, June 21, 1981)
The Girl in the Book (La Stampa, August 15, 1980)
Buffet Dinner (La Stampa, January 22, 1977)
The TV Fans from Delta Cep. (L’Astronomia, no. 54, April 1986)
The Molecule’s Defiance (La Stampa, January 20, 1980)
A Tranquil Star (La Stampa, January 29, 1978; then in L’Astronomia, no. 3, March–April 1978)
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
ANN GOLDSTEIN has translated works by, among others, Roberto Calasso, Alessandro Baricco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Elena Ferrante. She Has been the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Award for Italian translation.
ALESSANDRA BASTAGLI is the translator from the German of Jurek Becker’s The Boxer. She works as a book editor in New York.
JENNY MCPHEE is the author of the novels No Ordinary Matter and The Center of Things. She is the translator of Paolo Maurensig’s Canone Inverso and Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Turin, Italy, in 1919 and trained as a chemist, Primo Levi was arrested during the Second World War as a member of the anti-Fascist resistance and, in 1944, was deported to Auschwitz. When, eventually, he returned home, after a roundabout journey through Eastern Europe, he resumed his career as a chemist. He also began to write. His two memoirs of the death camp, Survival in Auschwitz (If This Is a Man) and The Reawakening (The Truce), are among the most important books not only of the Holocaust but also of the century.
“Outstandingly beautiful and moving” is
how one critic describes Levi’s books, and Italo Calvino expanded the praise: “one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.” Saul Bellow, writing about Levi’s autobiographical work The Periodic Table, elaborated: “There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential.” During a remarkable forty-year career, Levi also wrote novels, stories, essays, and poems on a range of scientific, literary, and autobiographical subjects. He died in Turin in April 1987. His collected works were first published in Italian in 1987–90.
*The only other new work to appear in the United States since 1990 is entitled Auschwitz Report, a book about the conditions in Auschwitz, which was written by Levi with Leonardo De Benedetti in 1946, and published here by Verso in 2006.
* In English in original.
*In English in the original.
*Max and Moritz (A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks), by Wilhelm Busch, is a German children’s tale in verse, published in 1865.
*The hero of several stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron.
*Hero of a poem by Carlo Porta (1775–1821), “Desgressi de Giovannin Bongee” (“The Misadventures of Giovannino Bongeri”), written in the Milanese dialect. (Vottcentvott is dialect for “eight hundred and eight.”)