The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  PATRICIA: Yes, Mr. . . . Baldur, that’s your name, isn’t it? Yes, Baldur. But I have three gifts, not two. Eternity, youth, and solitude. And this last is the price I pay for risking as much as I have risked.

  BALDUR: But what an admirable experience! To fly where others crawl, to be able to compare in person the customs, events, heroes from decade to decade, century to century! What historian wouldn’t feel envious? And I who consider myself a connoisseur of the subject! (On a sudden impulse) You must let me read your diary.

  PATRICIA: How did you know . . . I mean, what makes you think I keep a diary?

  BALDUR: Then you do keep one! I guessed it!

  PATRICIA: Yes, I keep one. It’s part of the project, but no one knows about it, not even Thörl. And no one can read it: it’s in code, which is also part of the project.

  BALDUR: If no one can read it, what’s it for?

  PATRICIA: For me. It will be useful to me after.

  BALDUR: After what?

  PATRICIA: After. When I have arrived. Then I plan to publish it. I don’t think I’ll have any difficulty finding a publisher, since it’s an intimate diary, a genre that always appeals. (In a dreamy voice) I plan on becoming a journalist, did you know? And publishing the intimate diaries of all the powerful people on earth from my era, Churchill, Stalin, et cetera. I could make quite a lot of money.

  BALDUR: But how did you come into possession of these diaries?

  PATRICIA: I don’t have them. I’ll write them myself. Based on true events, naturally.

  Pause.

  BALDUR: Patricia! (Another pause) Take me with you.

  PATRICIA (she thinks about it; then very coldly): It’s not a bad idea, in the abstract. But you mustn’t think that all it takes is for you to get into the fridge: one has to have injections, take a training course. . . . It’s not that easy. And then not everyone has the appropriate body. . . . Of course, it would be nice to have a travel companion like you, so alive, so passionate, so rich in spirit . . . but aren’t you engaged?

  BALDUR: Engaged? I was.

  PATRICIA: Until when?

  BALDUR: Until half an hour ago, but now that I’ve met you everything has changed.

  PATRICIA: You are a flatterer, a dangerous man. (PATRICIA’s voice changes abruptly and she is no longer complaining and languid, but clear, energetic, sharp) In any case, if things really are as you say, something interesting could come of it.

  BALDUR: Patricia! Why delay! Let’s leave: run away with me. But not in the future—right now.

  PATRICIA (coolly): Exactly what I was thinking. But when?

  BALDUR: Now, right away. Let’s walk across the room and out the door.

  PATRICIA. Nonsense. We would have everyone at our heels, with him in the lead. Look at him: he’s already suspicious.

  BALDUR: When, then?

  PATRICIA: Tonight. Listen carefully. At midnight everyone will go, they will refreeze me and put me in naphthalene. It’s much faster than the revival, a bit like the deep-sea divers, you know, coming up you have to go slowly but immersion can be fast. They stick me in the fridge and attach the compressor without much ceremony, but for the first few hours I remain pretty flexible and can easily return to active life.

  BALDUR: And so?

  PATRICIA: And so it’s simple. You go out with the others, take home your . . . well, that girl, then come back here, sneak into the garden, and come in through the kitchen window.

  BALDUR: Done! Two more hours, two hours and the world is ours! But tell me something, Patricia, won’t you feel remorse? Won’t you regret interrupting your journey into future centuries for me?

  PATRICIA: Listen, my boy, if we pull this off we’ll have loads of time to talk about all these wonderful things. But first we have to succeed. Look, they’re going; go back to where you were, take your leave in a civil manner, and try not to do anything stupid. I would really hate to lose this opportunity.

  The voices of the guests fade, sounds of chairs moving.

  Sentence fragments:

  —See you next year!

  —Good night, if that’s the appropriate thing to say . . .

  —Let’s go, Robert, I didn’t realize it was so late.

  —Baldur, let’s go, you have the honor of taking me home.

  Silence. Then LOTTE’s voice, directed to the audience.

  LOTTE: . . . And so everyone leaves. Peter and I remain alone, with Patricia, something which is never pleasant for the three of us. And I’m not saying this because of the antipathy that I described to you a little earlier, perhaps a bit impulsively. No, it’s a situation that’s objectively disagreeable, cold, false, extremely awkward for everyone. We talk a little of this and that and then we say our goodbyes, and Peter puts Patricia back in the fridge.

  The same sounds as the defrosting, but in reverse and

  accelerated. Sigh, yawn. Lightning-fast closing up of the casing.

  The metronome is started, then the pump, hissing, etc. The

  metronome keeps going, the rhythm gradually melds with the

  slower ticking of a pendulum clock. It strikes one, half past one,

  two. The sound of an approaching car is heard, it stops, a door

  slams. Far away, a dog barks. Footsteps on gravel. A window

  opens. Footsteps on the wooden floor creaking ever nearer. The

  fridge door is opened.

  BALDUR (whispering): Patricia, I’m here!

  PATRICIA (confused and muffled voice): Cnnoputtp ht ncosssngn!

  BALDUR: Whaaaat?

  PATRICIA (a bit more distinctly): Cut the casing!

  Sound of cutting.

  BALDUR: There, all done. And now what? What should I do? You must forgive me, but I’m not very practical, you know, it’s the first time such a thing has happened to me . . .

  PATRICIA: Oh, the hardest part is over, now I’ll take care of myself. Just give me a hand, so I can get out of here.

  Footsteps. “Careful” “Sh-sh-sh” “This way” . . . Window.

  Footsteps on the gravel. The car door. BALDUR

  turns on the car engine.

  BALDUR: We’re out, Patricia. Out of the ice, out of the nightmare. I feel like I’m dreaming: for two hours I’ve been living in a dream. I’m afraid I’ll wake up.

  PATRICIA (coolly): Did you take your girlfriend home?

  BALDUR: Who, Ilse? Yes, I took her home. I broke up with her.

  PATRICIA: You broke up with her? Definitively?

  BALDUR: It wasn’t as hard as I was afraid it would be, just a little scene. She didn’t even cry.

  Pause. The engine is running.

  PATRICIA: Young man, don’t judge me too harshly. I suppose the moment has arrived for an explanation. You must try to understand: I had to find a way to get out of there.

  BALDUR: . . . so that’s all this is? A way of getting out?

  PATRICIA: That’s all it is. A way of getting out of the fridge and out of the Thörls’ house. Baldur, I owe you a confession.

  BALDUR: A confession is the least of it.

  PATRICIA: I can’t give you anything else, and it’s not even a very nice confession. I am truly tired, frozen and unfrozen, frozen and unfrozen, over a long period of time—it’s really exhausting. And then there’s something else.

  BALDUR: Something else?

  PATRICIA: Yes, something else. His nighttime visits. At 33 degrees, barely tepid, and I couldn’t defend myself in any way. And I had to stay quiet, I couldn’t speak! And perhaps he thought . . .

  BALDUR: My poor dear thing, how much you must have suffered!

  PATRICIA: A real bother, you have no idea. An indescribable bore.

  The sound of a car moving farther and farther away.

  LOTTE: . . . And this is how the story ends. I had suspected something might happen, and that night I heard strange noises. But I stayed quiet: why should I have raised the alarm?

  It seems to me that it’s better this way for everyone. Baldur, poor guy, told me the whole thing.
It seems that Patricia, on top of everything else, also asked him for money, to go who knows where, to find a friend who lives in America, naturally he, too, in a fridge. As for Baldur, whether or not he got back together with Ilse, no one cared very much one way or the other, not even Ilse herself. We sold the fridge. As for Peter, we’ll see.

  The Measure of Beauty

  The beach umbrella next to ours was empty. I went to the sun-scorched shack on which MANAGEMENT was written to see if I could rent the umbrella for the entire month. The beach attendant consulted the reservations list, then told me: “No, I’m sorry. It’s been rented since June to a man from Milan.” I have good eyes and spotted the name Simpson next to No. 75.

  There can’t be many Simpsons in Milan: I hoped it wasn’t him, Mr. Simpson, the NATCA agent. Not that I don’t like him, not at all. But our privacy is very important to me and my wife, and vacations are vacations, and any revenant from the business world ruins them for me. Furthermore, his particular intolerance, his puritanical rigidity, which revealed itself all too clearly during the duplicator incident, had put something of a damper on our relationship, so having him as my neighbor on the beach was not exactly desirable. But the world is small: three days later under beach umbrella No. 75 Mr. Simpson appeared in person. He had with him a very voluminous beach bag, and I had never seen him so embarrassed.

  I have known Simpson for many years, and I know that like all first-class salesmen and middlemen, he can be astute and ingenious; and he is also sociable, loquacious, good-humored, and a lover of good food. Instead, the Simpson that fate placed next to me was reticent and nervous: he seemed to be sitting on a fakir’s bed of nails rather than on a beach chair facing the Adriatic. During our very brief conversation he contradicted himself. He told me that he loved beach life, that he had been coming to Rimini for many years; right afterward, he told me he didn’t know how to swim, that he found roasting himself in the sun a great nuisance and a waste of time.

  The next day he vanished. I made my way over to the attendant: Simpson had relinquished his beach umbrella. His behavior began to interest me. I went around to the various bathhouses, handing out tips and cigarettes, and in less than two hours I had learned (and I wasn’t surprised) that he had looked for and found a beach umbrella at the Sirio bathhouse, at the far end of the beach.

  I became convinced that the puritanical Mr. Simpson, who was very married and had a daughter of marriageable age, was in Rimini with a young woman: this suspicion so intrigued me that I decided to spy on his movements from a terrace overlooking the beach. I have always loved this activity, seeing without being seen, especially from an elevated position. My hero is Peeping Tom, who preferred to die rather than give up peering at Lady Godiva through the slats of venetian blinds. Spying on other people, regardless of what they are doing or about to do, and of any ultimate discovery, gives me a profound sensation of power and gratification, perhaps an atavistic memory of the extended periods of waiting endured by our hunter ancestors, reproducing the vital emotions of chase and ambush.

  In Simpson’s case, however, some discovery seemed probable. The hypothesis of a young woman soon went by the wayside as there were no girls in sight; nevertheless, my man’s behavior was peculiar. He lay stretched out on his chair reading (or pretending to read) the newspaper, but everything he did indicated that he was devoting himself to an exploratory activity not all that different from my own. At regular intervals he emerged from his inertia, searched around in his bag, and extracted a gadget similar to a home movie camera, or a small video camera, like the ones used in television: he would point it obliquely toward the sky, press a button, and then write something in a notebook. Was he photographing something or someone? I watched more closely. Yes, it was at least possible; there are cameras fitted with prism lenses for filming at an angle, in such a way as not to cause suspicion in the person one is trying to capture on film, and they’re hardly novel, especially on a beach.

  By the afternoon, I was no longer in doubt: Simpson was photographing the bathers passing in front of him. Sometimes he would move down to the water’s edge, and, if he found an interesting subject, he would aim at the sky and take a picture. He didn’t seem to show a preference for the more beautiful bathers, or for bathers of any kind; he photographed randomly, adolescents, old matrons, gray-haired, bony gentlemen, stocky youths, both male and female, from Romagna. After every photograph, he methodically took off his sunglasses and wrote something in his notebook. I had failed to comprehend one particular detail: he had two identical photographic apparatuses, one for men, the other for women. By now I was certain. This was not an innocuous case of senile mania (I would have given a great deal, by the way, to be as senile as Simpson by the time I turned sixty) but something big, at least as big as Simpson’s embarrassment when he first saw me, and his haste to change beach umbrellas.

  From that moment, my idle voyeurism changed to focused attention not dissimilar to his own. Simpson’s maneuvers became a challenge to my intellect, like a difficult chess problem, or, better yet, one of nature’s mysteries. I was determined to figure it out.

  I bought a decent set of binoculars, but they didn’t help much; in fact, they made me even more confused. Simpson was taking notes in English, using many abbreviations, his handwriting terrible; nevertheless, I managed to determine that every page of the notebook was divided into three columns, and each of these had a heading: “Vis. Eval.,” “Meter,” and “Obs.” Evidently, this was an experimental job for NATCA, but what?

  In the evening, I went back to the hotel in a terrible mood. I told my wife about what I was up to: women often have a surprising intuition for these things. But my wife, for different and inexplicable reasons, was also in a bad mood. She said that in her opinion Simpson was a dirty old man and that the whole thing didn’t interest her in the least. I forgot to mention that there was bad blood between my wife and Simpson, which had begun a year earlier, when Simpson was selling the duplicators, and my wife was afraid that I would buy one and duplicate her, and had prepared herself to be jealous of herself. But then she thought the whole thing over and gave me a striking piece of advice: Blackmail him. Threaten to denounce him to the beach police.

  Simpson swiftly capitulated. I began by telling him that I was unfavorably impressed by his running off, and by his lack of trust in me, and that by now our long friendship should have assured him of my capacity for discretion, but I immediately saw that my preamble was pointless. Simpson was the same old Simpson: he was dying to tell me everything down to the last detail; evidently he had been sworn to secrecy by his company, and had been waiting for a case of force majeure to induce him to break his silence. For him a sufficient force majeure was the first indication, however vague and clumsy, that I would report him to the police.

  He contented himself with a brief declaration of discretion on my part, after which his eyes lit up and he told me that the two apparatuses he had with him were not cameras but Calometers. Two calorimeters? No, two Calometers, two beauty gauges. One for men and one for women.

  “It’s from our new line: a small experimental series. The first models have been entrusted to our oldest and most dependable employees,” he told me without false modesty. “They instructed us to test them in various environmental conditions and with different subjects. We were not given the particular technical details of how they work (you know, they’re worried about the usual patent issues), firmly insisting instead upon what they call the philosophy* of the apparatus.”

  “A beauty gauge! That seems rather bold to me. What is beauty? Do you know? Did they explain it to you over there, at the headquarters, in Fort . . . what’s it called?”

  “Fort Kiddiwanee. Yes, they posed the question, but you know the Americans—I should say, ‘we Americans,’ right? But so many years have passed!—the Americans are much simpler than we are. They might have had doubts up until yesterday, but today everything is clear: beauty is that which the Calometer measures. Pardon me; what ele
ctrician worries about knowing the inner essence of difference in potential? Difference in potential is what a voltmeter measures; everything else is useless complication.”

  “Precisely. The voltmeter is used by electricians and is an instrument they need for their work. Who needs the Calometer? Over the years, NATCA has earned a good reputation for its office machines, merchandise that is solid and sensible, that calculates, duplicates, composes, translates. I don’t understand why it’s dedicating itself now to the construction of such . . . frivolous machines. Frivolous or philosophical: there’s no in-between. I would never buy a Calometer, what the devil could it possibly be used for?”

  Mr. Simpson became radiant. He put his left forefinger on his nose, forcefully pushing it to the right, then said, “Do you know how many pre-orders we already have? No fewer than forty thousand in the States alone, and the advertising campaign hasn’t even begun. I will be able to confide further details to you in a few days when some legal issues have been cleared up concerning possible uses of the device. But you couldn’t possibly think that NATCA would be capable of inventing and launching a model without intensive market research! Furthermore, the idea has tempted even our—how shall I put it?—colleagues behind the Iron Curtain. You didn’t know? It’s a bit of high-level gossip that got into the newspapers (but only referring generically to a ‘new device of strategic importance’), and made the rounds of all our affiliates, even raising some concerns. The Soviets deny it, as usual; but we have solid evidence that three years ago one of our industrial designers passed the basic idea of the Calometer as well as one of its initial designs to the Ministry of Education in Moscow. It’s already no secret that NATCA is a nest of crypto-Communists, intellectuals, and rebels.

  “Luckily for us, the entire affair ended up in the hands of the bureaucrats and Marxist theoreticians of aesthetics. Thanks to the former, a couple of years were lost; thanks to the latter, the type of device they will produce over there can in no way compete with ours. It’s destined for other uses, it seems, that have more to do with a Calogonometer, which measures beauty from the angle of social function, and is of no interest to us at all. Our point of view is very different, more concrete. Beauty, I was about to say, is a pure number, a relationship, or rather an amalgam of relationships. I don’t, however, want to take credit for the work of others; everything I am telling you can be found in the Calometer’s publicity brochure—and expressed far more eloquently—which is already available in America and in the process of being translated. You know, I’m just a small engineer, and nearly atrophied from twenty years of commercial activity, however prosperous. Beauty, according to our philosophy, is relative to a model, and changes at will, according to the discretion of the latest fashion, or perhaps the discretion of any observer, and there are no privileged observers. The discretion of an artist, a cult leader, or even simply of a single client. Therefore, every Calometer must first be calibrated by its user, and the calibration is a delicate and fundamental task. For example, the apparatus that you see has been calibrated according to Fantesca, by Sebastiano del Piombo.”1