The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  He was a remarkably endowed man. He gave off intelligence and shrewdness the way a radio gives off energy: with the same silent and penetrating continuity, without effort, without pause, without signs of exhaustion, in all directions at once. That he was a skillful doctor was evident at the first contact. Whether, then, this professional excellence was only one aspect, one facet, of a lofty intellect, or whether it was in fact his instrument of discernment, his secret weapon for making friends and enemies, for nullifying prohibitions, for turning nos into yeses, I could never establish; this, too, was part of the cloud that enveloped him and moved with him. It was an almost visible cloud, which made it hard to decipher his gaze and the features of his face, and led one to suspect—under every action, every phrase, every silence—a tactic and a technique, the pursuit of imperceptible ends, a continuous shrewd work of exploration, elaboration, integration, and possession.

  But the intelligence of Dr. Gottlieb, completely intent on practical ends, was nevertheless not inhuman. Confidence, the habit of victory, faith in himself were so abundant that he had a large supply left over to use for helping his less well endowed neighbor, and especially to help us, we who had escaped like him from the death trap of the Lager, a circumstance he turned out to be oddly sensitive to.

  Gottlieb brought me health like a thaumaturge. He came a first time to examine the situation, then several more times, equipped with vials and syringes, and a last time, when he said, “Rise and walk.” The pain had disappeared, my breath was free; I was very weak and hungry, but I rose and was able to walk.

  Nevertheless, for some three weeks I didn’t leave the room. I spent the endless days in bed, reading eagerly the few odd books I could get my hands on: an English grammar in Polish, Marie Walewska: le tendre amour de Napoléon, an elementary trigonometry textbook, Rouletabille à la guerre (Rouletabille at War), I forzati della Cajenna (The Prisoners of the Cajenna), and an odd novel of Nazi propaganda, Die Grosse Heimkehr (The Great Repatriation), which depicted the tragic fate of a Galician village of pure German stock, attacked, looted, and finally destroyed by the fierce Poland of Marshal Beck.

  It was sad to be within the four walls while outside the air was full of spring and victory and from the nearby woods the wind brought stirring odors of moss, of new grass, of mushrooms; and it was humiliating to have to depend on my companions even for the most elementary needs, to get food from the dining room, to get water, in the first days even to change position in the bed.

  There were about twenty in the dormitory, including Leonardo and Cesare; but the biggest of them, the most remarkable, was the oldest, the Moor of Verona. He must have been descended from a race tenaciously bound to the earth, since his real name was Avesani, and he was from Avesa, the washermen’s neighborhood of Verona celebrated by Berto Barbarani. He was more than seventy, and it showed: he was a large, rugged old man, with the skeleton of a dinosaur, tall and straight in the hips, and still as strong as a horse, although his gnarled joints had stiffened with age and toil. His bald head, nobly convex, was surrounded at the base by a crown of white hair; but his gaunt, wrinkled face had a jaundiced color, and his eyes, flashing violently yellow and veined with blood, were sunk under enormous arched eyebrows, like ferocious dogs at the back of their dens.

  In the Moor’s skeletal yet powerful breast, a gigantic but undefined anger boiled without respite: a senseless anger against everyone and everything, against the Russians and the Germans, against Italy and the Italians, against God and men, against himself and against us, against the day when it was day and the night when it was night, against his fate and all fates, against his trade, although it was in his blood. He was a mason; he had laid bricks for fifty years—in Italy, in America, in France, then in Italy again—and finally in Germany, and every brick was mortared with curses. He cursed continually, but not mechanically, he cursed methodically and deliberately, bitterly, stopping to look for the right word, often correcting himself, and racking his brains when he couldn’t find the right word; then he cursed the curse that wouldn’t come.

  It was clear that he was besieged by a hopeless senile dementia, but there was grandeur in his dementia, and also force, and a barbaric dignity, the trampled dignity of a beast in a cage, the same that redeems Capaneus and Caliban.

  The Moor almost never got off his cot. He would lie there all day, with his enormous bony yellow feet sticking out half a meter into the room. On the floor next to him sat a large shapeless bundle, which none of us would ever have dared touch. It contained, it seems, all his possessions on this earth; a heavy woodsman’s ax was hanging on the outside. The Moor usually stared into emptiness with his bloodshot eyes and was silent; but the least stimulus, a noise in the corridor, a question addressed to him, an incautious stumble against his cumbersome feet, an attack of rheumatism, and his deep chest rose like the sea swelling in a storm, and the mechanism of vituperation started up again.

  Among us he was respected, and feared with a vaguely superstitious fear. Only Cesare went near him, with the impertinent familiarity of the birds that scratch around on the rhinoceros’s rocky back, and he enjoyed provoking his anger with foolish and indecent questions.

  Next to the Moor lived the inept Ferrari of the lice, the last in his class in the school in Loreto. But in our dormitory he wasn’t the only member of the brotherhood of San Vittore; it was represented notably by Trovati and Cravero as well.

  Trovati, Ambrogio Trovati—known as Tramonto (Sunset)—wasn’t more than thirty; he was small in stature, but muscular and very agile. Tramonto, he had explained, was a stage name: he was proud of it, and it fit him to a T, because he was dim-witted, and got by on extravagant improvisations, in a state of perpetual frustrated rebellion. He had spent his adolescence and youth between prison and the stage, and the two institutions did not seem to be clearly differentiated in his confused mind. Prison in Germany, then, must have been the final blow.

  In his conversation, the true, the possible, and the fanciful were tangled up in a variable and inextricable knot. He spoke of prison and the courtroom as of a theater where no one is truly himself but rather plays, demonstrates his skill, enters into another’s skin, takes a role; and the theater, in turn, was a grand obscure symbol, a shadowy instrument of perdition, the external manifestation of a subterranean, spiteful, and omnipresent sect, which rules to the detriment of all, and which comes to your house, seizes you, puts a mask on you, makes you become what you are not and do what you don’t want to do. This sect is Society: the great enemy, against which he, Tramonto, had been fighting forever, and he was always defeated but, every time, rose again heroically.

  It was Society that had come to look for him, to challenge him. He lived in innocence, in the earthly paradise: he was a barber, owner of a shop, and had been visited. Two messengers had come to tempt him, to make him the Satanic proposal of selling the shop and devoting himself to art. They well knew his weak point: they had flattered him, praised his physique, his voice, his expression, and the mobility of his face. He had resisted two, three times, then he had given in, and, with the address of the movie studio in his hand, had set off for Milan. But the address was false, he was sent away from every door to another door, until he had understood the plot. The two messengers, in the shadows, had followed him with the movie camera pointed, they had stolen all his words and gestures of disappointment, and so had made him an actor without his realizing it. They had stolen the image, the shadow, the soul. It was they who had caused him to fade, and baptized him Tramonto, Sunset.

  So it was over for him: he was in their hands. The shop sold, no contracts, almost no money, some little part every so often, some stealing to make ends meet, until his great epic, the pulpable homicide. He had met on the street one of his two tempters, and had stabbed him; he had been accused of pulpable homicide, and for that crime he was dragged into court. But he hadn’t wanted lawyers, because the whole world, down to the last man, was against him, and he knew it. And yet he had been so eloquent,
and had laid out his arguments so well, that the court had absolved him immediately with a great ovation, and everyone wept.

  This legendary trial was at the center of Trovati’s cloudy memory; he relived it in every moment of the day, he spoke of nothing else, and often, in the evening after dinner, he forced us all to indulge him and perform his trial as a sort of medieval religious pageant. He assigned each of us a part—you the judge, you the prosecutor, you the jurors, you the court clerk, you others the spectators—and he assigned the parts in a peremptory manner. But the accused, and at the same time the defense attorney, was always and only he, and at every performance, when the moment came for his torrential harangue, he first explained, in a rapid “aside,” that pulpable homicide is when the murderer sticks the knife not in the chest, or in the stomach, but here, between the heart and the armpit, in the flesh, and it’s less serious.

  He spoke without stopping, passionately, for an hour straight, wiping real sweat from his forehead; then, throwing over his left shoulder a nonexistent toga with a broad gesture, he concluded, “Go, go, O serpents, and deposit your venom!”

  The third from San Vittore, the Turinese Cravero, was on the other hand a complete thief, unadulterated, without nuances, of a type you rarely find, in whom the abstract criminal hypotheses of the penal code seem to take shape and human form. He was familiar with all the jails of Italy, and in Italy he had lived (he admitted it shamelessly, in fact proudly) on stealing, robbing, and pimping. Thanks to these skills, he had found no difficulty in settling himself in Germany: he had worked for only a month with the Todt Organization, in Berlin, then he had disappeared, fading easily into the dark background of the local underworld.

  After two or three attempts, he had found a widow who was suitable. He helped her with his experience, found clients, and took care of the financial aspect in contentious cases, stabbing included; she welcomed him. In that house, in spite of the difficulties of the language, and certain curious habits of his protégée, he was perfectly comfortable.

  When the Russians were at the gates of Berlin, Cravero, who didn’t like turmoil, had raised anchor, abandoning the woman, who dissolved in tears. But still he had been overtaken by the rapid advance and, moving from camp to camp, had ended up in Katowice; yet he didn’t stay long. In fact he was the first of the Italians who decided to try to get home by his own means. Accustomed as he was to living outside every law, the obstacle of the many frontiers to cross without documents, and of the fifteen hundred kilometers to traverse without money, didn’t worry him too much.

  Since he was heading to Turin, he very politely offered to take a letter to my house. I accepted, with a certain thoughtlessness, as it turned out; I accepted because I was sick, because I have a great innate faith in my neighbor, because the Polish mail system wasn’t functioning, and because Marya Fyodorovna, when I proposed that she write a letter for me to the countries of the West, had turned pale and changed the subject.

  Leaving Katowice in mid-May, Cravero arrived in Turin in the record time of a month, slipping like an eel through innumerable blockades. He tracked down my mother, delivered the letter (and it was the only sign of life from me that reached its destination in nine months), and explained to her confidentially that I was in an extremely worrisome state of health. Naturally I hadn’t put that in the letter, but I was alone, sick, abandoned, without money, in urgent need of help, and in his opinion it was urgent to act immediately. Of course the undertaking wasn’t easy; but he, Cravero, my brotherly friend, was available. If my mother gave him two hundred thousand lire, in two or three weeks he would bring me safely home. In fact, if the young lady (my sister, who was present at the interview) would like to come with him . . .

  It is to the credit of my mother and sister that they didn’t immediately trust the messenger. They put him off, asking him to come back in a few days, because the sum wasn’t available. Cravero went down the stairs, stole my sister’s bicycle, which was in the entranceway, and disappeared. Two years later, at Christmas, he wrote me an affectionate card of good wishes from the New Prisons, in Turin.

  On the evenings when Tramonto exempted us from the performance of his trial, Signor Unverdorben often claimed our attention. A mild, old, and touchy little man from Trieste answered to this strange and beautiful name. Signor Unverdorben, who wouldn’t respond to anyone who didn’t call him “signore,” and insisted on being addressed with the polite “you” form, had had a long, adventurous double existence, and, like the Moor and Tramonto, was the prisoner of a dream or, rather, of two.

  He had inexplicably survived the Lager of Birkenau, and had come out with a horrendous abscess on his foot; he couldn’t walk, and was the most assiduous and obsequious of those who offered me company and assistance during my illness. He was also very talkative, and if he hadn’t often repeated himself, as old people do, his confidences would make up a separate novel. He was a musician, a great unappreciated musician, composer, and orchestra conductor. He had composed an opera, The Queen of Navarre, which had been praised by Toscanini; but the manuscript lay unpublished in a drawer, because his enemies, searching among his papers with vile patience, had finally discovered that four consecutive measures of the score were identical to four measures in Pagliacci. His good faith was obvious, crystal clear, but in these matters the law is no joke. Three measures, all right, four no. Four measures constitute plagiarism. Signor Unverdorben was too much of a gentleman to dirty his hands with lawyers and lawsuits; he had manfully said goodbye to art and made a new life as a cook on transatlantic liners.

  So he had traveled widely, and had seen things that no one else had seen. Mainly, he had seen extraordinary animals and plants, and many secrets of nature. He had seen the crocodiles of the Ganges, which have a single rigid bone that goes from the tip of the nose to the tail, are very fierce, and run like the wind; but, precisely because of this singular structure, they can move only forward and back, like a train on a track, and so all you have to do is place yourself next to them, just a little to the side of the straight line that constitutes their length, to be safe. He had seen the jackals of the Nile, who drink while they run in order not to be bitten by fish; at night their eyes shine like lanterns, and they sing in hoarse human voices. He had seen Malaysian cabbages, which are made like ours but much bigger; if you merely touch their leaves with a finger, you can’t extricate it, and the arm and then the entire person of the incautious are drawn in, slowly but irresistibly, into the monstrous sticky heart of the carnivorous plant, and digested little by little. The only remedy, which almost no one knows, is fire, but you have to act quickly; the little flame of a match under the leaf that has grabbed the prey is enough, and the plant’s vitality melts. In this way, thanks to his quickness and knowledge of natural history, Signor Unverdorben had saved the captain of his ship from certain death. Then, there are some little black snakes that dwell in the bleak sands of Australia, and attack man from a distance, in the air, like rifle shots; one bite can make a bull fall on its back. But everything in nature is connected, there is no offense against which there is not a defense, every poison has its antidote: you just have to know it. The bite of these reptiles is readily healed if it’s treated with human saliva, but not that of the person who has been attacked. Thus, no one ever travels alone in those lands.

  In the long Polish evenings, the air of the dormitory, heavy with tobacco and human odors, was saturated with foolish dreams. This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of being uprooted: the dominion of the unreal over the real. All of us dreamed dreams of the past and of the future, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythic and improbable enemies: perverse, subtle cosmic enemies, who pervaded everything, like the air. All, with the exception possibly of Cravero and certainly of D’Agata.

  D’Agata didn’t have time to dream, because he was obsessed by the fear of bedbugs. No one liked these uncomfortable companions, naturally, but we had all ended up getting used to them. They were not few and s
cattered but a solid army, which with the arrival of spring had invaded all our beds; they nested during the day in the cracks in the walls and the wooden bunks, and left on forays as soon as the bustle of the day ceased. We had willingly resigned ourselves to giving up to them a small portion of our blood; it was less easy to get used to feeling them running furtively over our faces and body, under our clothes. Only those who had the good fortune to be heavy sleepers, and who could fall into unconsciousness before the bugs awakened, slept peacefully.

  D’Agata, who was a tiny, sober, reserved, and very clean Sicilian mason, was reduced to sleeping during the day, and he spent the nights curled up on his bed, looking around with eyes dilated by horror, by wakefulness, and by his agonizing wait. He gripped tight in his hand a rudimentary contraption, which he had made with a stick and a piece of metal mesh, and the wall next to him was covered with a lurid constellation of bloody spots.

  At first these habits were derided: was his skin more sensitive than that of the rest of us? But then pity prevailed, mixed with a trace of envy—because, among us all, D’Agata was the only one whose enemy was concrete, present, tangible, and could be fought, beaten, crushed against the wall.

  Heading South

  I had walked for hours in the marvelous morning air, breathing it like a medicine deep into my battered lungs. I wasn’t very steady on my legs, but I had an imperious need to retake possession of my body, to reestablish contact, cut off for almost two years, with trees and grass, with the heavy brown earth in which you could feel the seeds trembling, with the ocean of air that carried the pollen of the firs, wave upon wave, from the Carpathians to the dark streets of the mining city.