by Primo Levi
“So, if I have understood correctly, we’re dealing with a differential apparatus?”
“Yes. Naturally, we can’t assume that every user will have advanced and differentiated tastes: not every man possesses a defined feminine ideal. Therefore, in this initial phase of trial and commercial introduction, NATCA is focusing on three models: a blank* model that comes already calibrated at no charge and according to a sample chosen by the client, and two models of standard calibration, for the respective measurement of female and male beauty. As an experiment, for the entire current year the model for female measurement, called Paris, will be calibrated according to Elizabeth Taylor’s features, and the model for male measurement (which, for now, has not had many orders) on Raf Vallone’s2 features. Which reminds me, I received a confidential letter just this morning from Fort Kiddiwanee, Oklahoma. They tell me that so far they haven’t found an adequate name for the male model and have announced a competition among us, the senior staff. Naturally, the prize will be a Calometer, any one of the three. You, being a cultured person, might want to throw your hat in the ring? I would be happy to enter you in the competition under my name . . .”
I don’t profess to think that Semiramis is a very original name, or very pertinent; clearly the imagination and the culture of the other contestants were even more sluggish than my own. I won the competition, or, rather, I let Simpson win; he then gave me as a gift the blank model of the Calometer, which made me happy for a month.
I tried out the device, just as it was when sent to me, but to no avail. It registered 100 no matter what object was put before it. I sent it back to the branch it came from and had it calibrated to a good color reproduction of the Portrait of Lunia Czechowska.3 It was returned to me with commendable speed and I tried it out under various conditions.
To express a final judgment might be premature and presumptuous; nevertheless, it seems to me that I am able to confirm that the Calometer is a notable and ingenious device. If its aim is to reproduce human judgment, this has been fully realized; however, it reproduces the judgment of an observer whose tastes are extremely limited or narrow, or, rather, that of a maniac. My device, for example, gave low marks to all feminine faces that were round and approved of elongated faces, to the point where it assigned a number of K32 to our milkwoman, deemed a local beauty, though on the plump side, and it even gave the Mona Lisa a value of K28 when I showed it a reproduction. It is, instead, extraordinarily partial to long, thin necks.
The most surprising quality (actually, under scrutiny, the only quality that distinguishes it from a banal system of photometers) is its indifference to the position and distance of its subject. I begged my wife, who got the decent result of a K75, with a mark of K79 when rested and calm and under favorable lighting conditions, to submit herself to measurement in different positions—frontal, left profile, right profile, lying down, with a hat and without, with her eyes closed and her eyes open—and the readings I took were always within five K units.
The markings changed decisively only when her face was at an angle of more than ninety degrees. If the subject is entirely turned around, and so offers the back of the neck to the device, the readings are very low.
I must here make note of the fact that my wife has a very oval and elongated face, a slender neck, and a slightly upturned nose; in my opinion, she deserved a higher rating, but my wife’s hair is black and the device had been calibrated to a honey-blond model.
If you aim the Paris at masculine faces, generally a response of less than K20 is obtained, and less than K10 if the subject has a mustache or beard. Notably, the Calometer rarely gives readings that are strictly zero; just as children do, it recognizes the human face even in the most rough or sketchy imitations. I amused myself by slowly moving the lens across an irregularly variegated surface (some wallpaper, to be precise): every jump in the gauge corresponded to a zone in which it was possible to recognize a vaguely anthropomorphic appearance. I got a zero reading only on subjects that were decidedly asymmetric or shapeless and, naturally, on uniform backgrounds.
My wife can’t stand the Calometer, but, as is her habit, she doesn’t want to, or can’t, explain to me the reason. Every time she sees me holding the apparatus, or hears me mention it, she freezes up and her mood sinks. This is unfair of her, since, as I said, she wasn’t given a bad rating: K79 is an excellent mark. At first, I thought she had extended her general distrust of the machines Simpson sold me or gave me to test, and of Simpson himself, to the Calometer; nevertheless, her silence and discomfort weighed so heavily on me that the other evening I deliberately provoked her indignation by playing around in the house with the Calometer for a good hour. And now I must admit that her opinions, even if expressed in a high-strung manner, are solid and reasonable.
In essence, my wife was outraged by the extreme submissiveness of the device. According to her, it is a conformity gauge, not a beauty gauge, and therefore an exquisitely conformist instrument. I attempted to defend the Calometer (which, according to my wife, would have been more accurately labeled a “Homeometer”) by pointing out to her that anyone who judges is a conformist, inasmuch as, consciously or not, he uses some sort of model as his point of reference. I reminded her of the Impressionists’ tempestuous debut; of public opinion’s hatred for individual innovators (in all fields), which then becomes docile love when the innovators are no longer innovators. Finally, I tried to show her that the establishment of a fashion or style, the collective “getting used to” a new form of self-expression, was exactly parallel to the calibration of the Calometer. I emphasized what I believe is the most alarming phenomenon of today’s civilization, which is that the average man, today, can also be calibrated in the most incredible ways, convinced that Swedish furniture and plastic flowers, and only those things, are beautiful; that certain tall, blue-eyed blondes, and only they, are beautiful; that only a certain toothpaste is good; a certain surgeon, the only one capable; a certain political party, the only repository of truth. I insisted that it was essentially not very sporting to denigrate a machine simply because it reproduces a human mental process. But my wife is a grievous example of Crocean education:4 she responded, “If you say so,” and didn’t appear at all convinced by my argument.
On the other hand I, too, had recently lost some of my enthusiasm for the device, but for different reasons. I had run into Simpson at a Rotary dinner: he was in a very good mood, and announced his two “grand victories” to me.
“By now, I can relax as far as my sales campaign is concerned,” he told me. “You won’t believe me, but from our entire assortment of machines, there is none easier to sell. Tomorrow I will send my monthly report to Fort Kiddiwanee; we’ll see if I don’t get a promotion! I have always said there are two major virtues in a salesman: that he understands humanity and that he has an imagination.” He assumed a confidential manner and lowered his voice: “Escort services! No one had thought of it yet, not even in America. It’s truly a spontaneous census: I had no idea there were so many. The madams all immediately understood the commercial importance of a modern catalogue, complete with an objective calometric rating: Magda, twenty-two years old, K87; Wilma, twenty-six years old, K77 . . . do you get the idea?
“I then had another thought: . . . well, it wasn’t exactly my idea, since it came about owing to circumstances. I sold a Paris to your friend Gilberto: do you know what he did? As soon as he received it, he tampered with it, and altered the calibration to himself.”
“And so?”
“Don’t you see? It’s an idea that one can plant, so to speak, spontaneously in the minds of the majority of our clients. I have already prepared a draft of the publicity flyer that I’d like to distribute in time for the holidays. Actually, if you would be so kind as to have a look at it—you know, I don’t have full confidence in my Italian. Once the trend takes off, who wouldn’t give his wife (or her husband) the gift of a Calometer calibrated to his or her photograph. You’ll see, they’ll be few who can resist
the flattery of K100: just think of the witch in Snow White. Everyone likes to hear himself praised and to hear that he is right, even if it’s only from a mirror or a printed circuit board.”
I wasn’t familiar with this cynical side of Simpson’s character. We said goodbye stiffly, and I’m afraid that our friendship has been seriously compromised.
1. An early-sixteenth-century Mannerist painter of the Venetian School famous for his use of bright color combined with monumental forms.
2. An Italian leading man of the 1950s, known for his rugged good looks and often compared with Burt Lancaster. He began appearing in English-language films in 1960, with El Cid.
3. Painted in 1919 by Amedeo Modigliani, who was renowned for his portraits of women with elongated necks.
4. Benedetto Croce was a dominant figure in aesthetics, literary criticism, and philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century.
Quaestio de Centauris
et quae sit iis potandi, comedendi et nubendi ratio. Et fuit debatuta per X hebdomadas inter vesanum auctorem et ejusdem sodales perpetuos G.L. et L.N.
My father kept him in a stall, because he didn’t know where else to keep him. He had been given to him by a friend, a sea captain, who said he had bought him in Salonika: I, however, learned from him directly that he was born in Colophon.
They had strictly forbidden me to go anywhere near him because, they said, he was easily angered and would kick. But from my direct experience I can confirm that this was an old superstition; so from adolescence I never paid much attention to the prohibition and, actually, especially in the winter, I spent many memorable hours with him, and other wonderful times in the summer, when Trachi (this was his name) with his own hands put me on his back and took off at a mad gallop toward the woods on the hills.
He had learned our language fairly easily, but retained a slight Levantine accent. Despite his two hundred and sixty years, his appearance was youthful, both in his human aspects and in those equine. What I will relate here is the fruit of our long conversations.
• • •
The centaurs’ origins are legendary; but the legends that they pass down among themselves are very different from those we consider to be classic.
Remarkably, their traditions also begin with a highly intelligent man, a Noah-like inventor and saviour, whom they call Cutnofeset. But there were no centaurs on Cutnofeset’s ark. Nor, by the way, were there “seven pairs of every species of clean beast, and a pair of every species of the beasts that are not clean.” The centaurian tradition is more rational than the Biblical, recounting that only the archetypal animals, the key species, were saved: man but not the monkey; the horse but not the donkey or the wild ass; the rooster and the crow but not the vulture or the hoopoe or the gyrfalcon.
How, then, did these species come about? Immediately afterward, legend says. When the waters retreated, a deep layer of warm mud covered the earth. Now, this mud, which harbored in its decay all the enzymes from what had perished in the flood, was extraordinarily fertile: as soon as it was touched by the sun, it was immediately covered in shoots from which grasses and plants of every type sprang forth; and even more, within its soft and moist bosom, it was host to the marriages of all the species saved in the ark. It was a time, never again to be repeated, of wild, ecstatic fecundity in which the entire universe felt love, so much so that it nearly returned to chaos.
Those were the days in which the earth itself fornicated with the sky, in which everything germinated and everything was fruitful. Not only every marriage but every union, every contact, every encounter, even fleeting, even between different species, even between beasts and stones, even between plants and stones, was fertile, and produced offspring not in a few months but in a few days. The sea of warm mud, which concealed the cold and prudish face of the earth, was a single immense nuptial bed, boiling over with desire in all its recesses, and teeming with jubilant germs.
This second creation was the true Creation; because, according to what is passed down among the centaurs, there is no other way to explain certain analogies, certain convergences observed by all. Why is the dolphin similar to the fish, and yet gives birth and nurses its offspring? Because it’s the child of a tuna fish and a cow. Where do the delicate colors of butterflies and their ability to fly come from? They are the children of a flower and a fly. And tortoises are the children of a frog and a rock. And bats of an owl and a mouse. And conchs of a snail and a polished pebble. And hippopotami of a horse and a river. And vultures of a worm and an owl. And the big whales, the leviathans, how else to explain their immense mass? Their wooden bones, their black and oily skin, and their fiery breath are living testimony to a venerable union in which this same primordial mud got greedy hold of the ark’s feminine keel, made of gopher wood and covered inside and out with shiny pitch, when the end of all flesh had been decreed.
Such was the origin of every form, whether living today or extinct: dragons and chameleons, chimeras and harpies, crocodiles and minotaurs, elephants and giants, whose petrified bones are still found today, to our amazement, in the heart of the mountains. And so it was for the centaurs themselves, since in this festival of origins, in this panspermia, the few survivors of the human family had also taken part.
Notably, Cam, the profligate son, took part: the first generation of centaurs originated in his wild passion for a Thessalian horse. From the beginning, their progeny were noble and strong, preserving the best of both human nature and equine. They were at once wise and courageous, generous and shrewd, good at hunting and at singing, at waging war and at observing the heavens. It seemed, in fact, as happens with the most felicitous unions, that the virtues of the parents were magnified in their progeny, since, at least in the beginning, they were more powerful and faster racers than their Thessalian mothers, and a good deal wiser and more cunning than black Cam and their other human fathers. This would also explain, according to some, their longevity; though others have instead attributed this to their eating habits, which I will come to in a moment. Or it could simply be a projection across time of their great vitality, and this I, too, believe resolutely (and the story I am about to tell attests to it): that in hereditary terms the herbivore power of the horse does not count as much as the red blindness of the bloody and forbidden spasm, the moment of human-feral fullness in which they were conceived.
Whatever we may think of this, anyone who has carefully considered the centaurs’ classical traditions cannot help noticing that centauresses are never mentioned. As I learned from Trachi, they do not in fact exist.
The man-mare union, today, moreover, fertile only in rare cases, produces and only ever has produced male centaurs, for which there must be a fundamental reason, though at present it eludes us. As for the inverse of the unions, between stallions and women, these occur very rarely at any point in time, and furthermore come about through the solicitation of dissolute women, who by nature are not particularly inclined to procreate.
In the exceptional cases in which fertilization is successful in these very rare unions, a female bi-part offspring is produced: her two natures, however, inversely assembled. The creatures have the head, neck, and front feet of a horse, but their back and stomach are those of a human female, and the hind legs are human.
During his long life Trachi encountered very few of them, and he assured me that he felt no attraction to these squalid monsters. They are not “proud and nimble,” but insufficiently vital; they are infertile, idle, and transient; they do not become familiar with man or learn to obey his commands, but live miserably in the densest forests, not in herds but in rural solitude. They feed on grass and berries, and when they are surprised by a man they have the curious habit of always presenting themselves to him headfirst, as if embarrassed by their human half.
Trachi was born in Colophon of a secret union between a man and one of the numerous Thessalian horses that are still wild on the island. I am afraid that among the readers of these notes some may refuse to believe t
hese assertions, since official science, permeated as it is still today with Aristotelianism, denies the possibility of a fertile union between different species. But official science often lacks humility: such unions are, indeed, generally infertile; but how often has evidence been sought? Not more than a few dozen times. And has it been sought among all the innumerable possible couplings? Certainly not. Since I have no reason to doubt what Trachi has told me about himself, I must therefore encourage the incredulous to consider that there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.
He lived mostly in solitude, left to himself, which was the common destiny of all like him. He slept in the open, standing on all four hooves, with his head on his arms, which he would lean against a low branch or a rock. He grazed in the island’s fields and glades, or gathered fruit from branches; on the hottest days he would go down to one of the deserted beaches, and there he would bathe, swimming like a horse, with his chest and head erect, and then would gallop for a long while, violently churning up the wet sand.