by Primo Levi
I was increasingly intrigued by the inner workings of the Mimete, which Simpson had been unable (or unwilling) to explain to me with sufficient precision. Nor had the instructions provided the slightest clue. I took off the hermetically sealed cover from cell B. Using a small saw, I made a window and fitted a glass plate over it, sealed it well, and replaced the top. I put the die back into the cell yet another time, and through the glass I carefully observed what occurred in cell B during the duplication. What occurred was extremely interesting: starting at its base the die formed gradually, in very thin layers, as if it were growing out of the bottom of the cell itself. Halfway through the duplication process, half the die was perfectly formed and it was easy to distinguish the wood and all its grains. It seemed reasonable to deduce that in cell A some analytic device “explored” by lines or planes the body to be reproduced, and transmitted to cell B the instructions for the establishment of the single particles, perhaps of the same atoms, extracted from the pabulum.
I was satisfied with the preliminary trial. The next day, I bought a small diamond and made a reproduction, which came out perfectly. From the first two I made another two, from four another four, and so on in a geometric progression until the Mimete’s cell was full. When the operation was finished, it was impossible to determine which was the original gem. In twelve hours of work I had obtained 2¹²−1 pieces, that is, 4095 new diamonds: the initial investment had been amply amortized, and I felt authorized to proceed with further experiments, both more and less interesting.
The following day, I duplicated without any problems a lump of sugar, a handkerchief, a train schedule, a pack of cards. The third day, I tried a hard-boiled egg: the shell came out soft and inconsistent (owing to a lack of calcium, I suppose), but the yoke and the white looked and tasted completely normal. I then obtained a satisfying replica of a pack of Nationals; a box of safety matches appeared to be perfect, but the matches wouldn’t light. A black-and-white photograph rendered an extremely faded copy, owing to a lack of silver in the pabulum. All I could reproduce of a wristwatch was the watchband, and, ever since the attempt, the watch itself has become entirely dysfunctional, for reasons I cannot explain.
On the fourth day, I duplicated some beans and fresh peas and a tulip bulb, intending to test their germinative capabilities. I also duplicated 110 grams of cheese, a sausage, a loaf of bread, and a pear, and ate all of it for lunch without perceiving any differences with regard to their respective originals. I realized that it was also possible to reproduce liquids, as long as a container placed in cell B was of equal or larger size than the one holding the example in cell A.
The fifth day, I went up to the attic and searched around until I found a live spider. Certainly it was impossible to reproduce moving objects with any precision so I kept the spider in the cold on the balcony until it was numb. I then put it into the Mimete; after about an hour, I got an impeccable replica. I marked the original with a drop of ink, put the twins in a glass container, placed it on the radiator, and waited. After half an hour, the two spiders began to move simultaneously, and were soon fighting. They were identical in strength and ability and they fought for more than an hour without either gaining the advantage. Finally, I separated them into two distinct boxes; the next day each had spun a circular web with fourteen strands.
The sixth day, I disassembled, stone by stone, the garden wall and found a hibernating lizard. Its double, on the exterior, was normal, but when I brought it to the ambient temperature, I noticed that it moved with great difficulty. It died within a few hours, and I could confirm that its skeleton was rather weak: in particular the bones in its arms and legs were as flexible as rubber.
The seventh day, I rested. I telephoned Mr. Simpson and begged him to come over without delay. When he arrived, I told him of the experiments I had carried out (not the one with the diamonds, naturally), and with a tone and expression as seemingly relaxed as I could muster, I asked him a few questions and made a few suggestions. What was the exact status of the Mimete’s patent? Was it possible to obtain from NATCA a more complete pabulum? One that contained, perhaps in a small quantity, all the elements necessary for life? Was there a bigger Mimete available, a 5-liter size—capable of duplicating a cat? Or a 200-liter size, capable of duplicating . . .
I saw Mr. Simpson turn pale. “Sir,” he said. “I . . . I do not want to pursue this line of inquiry any further with you. I sell automatic poets, machines that calculate, take confessions, translate, and duplicate, but I believe in the immortal soul, believe myself to be in possession of one, and do not want to lose it. Nor do I want to collaborate in the creation of one . . . with the methods that you have in mind. The Mimete is what it is: an ingenious machine for copying documents, and what you are suggesting to me is, if you’ll excuse me, an obscenity.”
I was not prepared for such an intense reaction from the mild Mr. Simpson and I tried to persuade him to be reasonable. I showed him that the Mimete was something else, a good deal more than an office copier, and that the fact that its own creators didn’t realize it could be a windfall for myself and for him. I insisted on the dual aspect of its virtues: the economic, as a creator of order, and therefore of riches, and the, let’s say, Promethean, as a sophisticated new instrument for the advancement of our knowledge of vital mechanisms. In the end, I also obliquely mentioned the experiment with the diamonds.
But it was all futile. Mr. Simpson was very disturbed, and seemed incapable of understanding the significance of my words. In evident opposition to his own interests as salesman and employee, he told me these were “all fairy tales,” that he did not believe anything other than the information printed in the introductory brochure, that he was not interested either in adventures of the mind or in panning for gold, that, in any case, he wanted to be left out of the entire business. He seemed to want to add something else, but then bade me a curt goodbye and left.
It is always painful to break off with a friend: I had every intention of getting back in touch with Mr. Simpson, and was convinced that we could find common ground for an agreement, or maybe even a collaboration. Certainly I should have called him or written to him. But, as unfortunately happens in periods of intense work, I put it off day after day until, at the beginning of February, I found among my correspondence a flyer from NATCA accompanied by a terse note from the agency in Milan signed by Mr. Simpson himself: “We bring to the attention of the recipient a copy and translation of the NATCA bulletin here enclosed.”
No one can dissuade me from my conviction that it was the same Mr. Simpson who produced this missive on behalf of the company, spurred by his silly moralistic scruples. I won’t transcribe the text, as it is too long for these notes, but the essential clause went like this:
The Mimete and all the existing and forthcoming NATCA copiers are produced and put into commercial use with the sole aim of reproducing office documents. Our sales agents are authorized to sell them only to legally established commercial businesses or industries and not to private individuals. In any case, the sale of these models will take place only upon the declaration of the purchaser that he will not use the machine for:
reproduction of paper money, checks, bills of exchange, stamps, or any analogous object corresponding to a specific monetary value;
reproduction of paintings, designs, engravings, sculptures, or any other works of figurative art;
reproduction of plants, animals, human beings, alive or dead, or of any part of them.
NATCA declines all responsibility regarding its clients’, or anyone else’s, use of the machine if not in compliance with the declarations by the undersigned.
It is my opinion that these restrictions will not have much effect on the commercial success of the Mimete, and I will not hesitate to point this out to Mr. Simpson if, as I hope, I have the opportunity of seeing him again. It is incredible how people who are notoriously shrewd sometimes act in ways contrary to their own interests.
Man’s Friend
The first observations regarding the structure of the tapeworm’s epithelial cells date back to 1905 (Serrurier). Flory, however, was the first to perceive their importance and significance, describing his findings in a lengthy memoir written in 1927 and accompanied by vivid photographs in which for the first time the so-called Flory mosaic was visible to the layman. As is well-known, the cells in question are flat, have an irregular polygonal shape, are arranged in long parallel lines, and have the distinctive characteristic of replicating themselves out of similar components at varying intervals and in numbers reaching into the hundreds. Their significance was discovered in unusual circumstances: the credit goes not to a histologist or to a zoologist but to an Orientalist.
Bernard W. Losurdo, professor of Assyrian studies at Michigan State University, chanced upon Flory’s photographs during a period of forced inactivity due, in fact, to the presence of the tiresome parasite, and was therefore inspired by a purely circumstantial interest. Thanks to his professional experience, however, certain peculiarities previously overlooked by others did not escape his notice: the rows of the mosaic are made up of a limited number of cells that varies only slightly (from about twenty-five to sixty); groups of cells exist that replicate themselves with very high frequency, almost as if this organization were obligatory; finally (and this was the key to the puzzle), the last cells of each line are arranged according to a scheme that could be defined as rhythmic.
It was undoubtedly a case of luck that the first photograph Losurdo examined revealed a particularly simple scheme: the last four cells of the first line were identical to the last four of the third; the last three of the second line identical to the last three of the fourth and sixth; and so on, following the well-known rhyme scheme of terza rima. Considerable intellectual courage, however, was required to take the next step, namely, to put forward the hypothesis that the entire mosaic was not rhymed in a purely metaphorical sense, but was nothing less than a poem and conveyed a meaning.
Losurdo possessed this courage. The work of deciphering was time-consuming and painstaking, and confirmed his original intuition. The scholar’s conclusions are here briefly summarized.
Approximately 15 percent of the Taenia solium adult specimens are carriers of a Flory mosaic. The mosaic, when it exists, is identically repeated in all the mature proglottids and is congenital. It is therefore a characteristic specific to each single specimen, comparable (the observation was made by Losurdo himself) to a human fingerprint or to the lines on a hand. It consists of a number of “verses,” ranging from around ten to more than two hundred, sometimes rhyming, sometimes better defined as rhythmic prose. Despite appearances, we are not dealing with alphabetical writing or, rather (and here we can do no better than to quote Losurdo himself), “it is a form of expression both highly complex and primitive, in which in the same mosaic, and sometimes in the same verse, we find alphabetic writing intermingled with acrophony, ideography with syllabics, with no apparent regularity, as if there were an echo, abridged and confused, of the parasite’s ancient knowledge of the various forms of its host’s culture; almost as if the worm had also absorbed, along with the juices of the man’s organism, a portion of his science.”
So far, not many of the mosaics have been deciphered by Losurdo and his collaborators. Some of them are rudimentary and fragmentary, barely articulated, and Losurdo calls these “interjectionals.” The most difficult to interpret, they primarily express pleasure over the quality or quantity of the food, or disgust for some less agreeable component of the chyme. Others are reduced to a brief moralistic sentence. The following, of greater complexity but of dubious educational value, is understood to be the lament of an individual in a state of suffering, who feels near expulsion:
“Goodbye, sweet repose and sweet abode: no longer sweet for me, since my time has come. A great weariness weighs on < . . . > alas, leave me as I am, forgotten in a corner, in this pleasant warmth. But here, that which was food is poison, where there was peace there is rage. Don’t delay, since you are no longer welcome. Detach the < . . . > and descend into the hostile universe.”
Some of the mosaics seem to be alluding to the reproductive process, and to the mysterious hermaphroditic love of worms:
“You I. Who can separate us since we are one flesh? You I. I am reflected by you and see myself. One and many: my every part is order and joy. One and many: light is death, darkness is immortal. Come, adjoined spouse, hold me close when the hour strikes. I come, and all my < . . . > sing to heaven.”
“I broke the
Of far greater interest, however, are a few mosaics of a manifestly more elevated level, delineating the new and thrilling frontier of emotional relationships between the parasite and the host. We will cite a few of the most important:
“Be benign toward me, oh powerful one, and remember me in your sleep. Your food is my food, your hunger is my hunger: refuse, for pity’s sake, the bitter garlic and the detestable
“Speak, and I listen. Go, and I follow. Think, and I understand. Who more faithful than I? Who knows you better than I? Here I lie faithfully in your dark viscera and mock the light of day. Listen: all is in vain, except for a full stomach. All is a mystery, except for < . . .>”
“Your strength penetrates me, your joy descends into me, your fury
The reason for the offense, barely mentioned above, emerges, however, with a curious insistence in some of the most advanced mosaics. It is noteworthy, Losurdo affirms, that these belong almost exclusively to individuals of a considerable size and age who have tenaciously resisted one or more expulsion therapies. We will cite the best known example, which has by now crossed over from specialized scientific literature to be included in a recent anthology of foreign literature, evoking critical interest from a much larger audience.
“. . . should I call you ungrateful, then? No, since I have gone too far and madly persuaded myself to breach the limits imposed upon us by Nature. Through hidden and wondrous ways, I joined you. For years, in religious adoration, I had drawn from your sources life and knowledge. I was not allowed to reveal myself: this our sad destiny. Revealed and noxious: from this, your justified rage, oh sir. Alas, why haven’t I given up? Why have I rejected the wise inertia of my ancestors?
“But listen: just as your wrath is justified, so is my impious audacity. Who didn’t know of it? Our silent words get no hearing from you, arrogant demigods. We, a population without eyes or ears, are not appreciated by you.
“And now I’ll go, because you wish it. I’ll go silently, as is our custom, to meet my destiny in death or in foul transfiguration. I ask but one favor: that this message of mine may reach you and be reflected upon and understood by you. By you, hypocritical man, my equal and my brother.”
The text is undoubtedly remarkable, by no matter what criterion you judge it. For the sake of curiosity, we report that the author’s emphatic request was in vain. Indeed, his involuntary host, an unidentified employee of the Bank of Dampier (Illinois), absolutely refused to look at it.
Some Applications of the Mimete
Gilberto is the last person in the world who should have wound up with a three-dimensional duplicator; and yet the Mimete fell into his hands right away, a month after its commercial launch, and three months before the famous injunction forbidding its construction and use, that is to say, in plenty of time for Gilberto to get himself into trouble. It fell into his hands without my being able to do anything about
it: I was serving time in San Vittore for my work as a pioneer of science and far from imagining who might be carrying it on and in what way.
Gilberto is a child of the century. He is thirty-four years old, a good worker, and an old friend of mine. He doesn’t drink or smoke and has only one passion: tormenting inanimate objects. He has a closet that he calls an office, and here he welds, files, saws, glues, sands. He fixes watches, refrigerators, electric razors; he builds devices that turn on the heating in the morning, photoelectric locks, small-scale models that fly, acoustic sensors to play with at the seaside. As for cars, one will last him only a few months. He takes it apart and puts it back together continuously, shines it, oils it, modifies it; he equips it with useless accessories, then gets bored and sells it. Emma, his wife (a charming girl), tolerates these manias of his with admirable patience.
I had been home from prison only a short while when the telephone rang. It was Gilberto, with his usual enthusiasm: the Mimete had been in his possession for twenty days, and for twenty days and twenty nights he had dedicated himself to it. Talking a mile a minute, he told me about all the marvelous experiments he had done so far, and about the others he had in mind; he had bought Peltier’s text, Théorie générale de l’imitation, and the treatise by Zechmeister and Eisenlohr, The Mimes and Other Duplicating Devices; he had enrolled in an accelerated course in cybernetics and electronics. The experiments he had performed sadly resembled my own, which had cost me rather dear; I tried to tell him, but it was useless. It’s difficult to interrupt someone on the telephone, especially Gilberto. Finally, I brusquely cut off the conversation, left the receiver off the hook, and attended to my own affairs.