by Primo Levi
But the bulk of his time, in every season, was devoted to food: in fact, during the forays that Trachi frequently undertook in the vigor of his youth among the barren cliffs and gorges of his native island, he always, following an instinct for prudence, brought along, tucked under his arms, two large bundles of grass or foliage, gathered in times of rest.
Even if centaurs are limited to a strictly vegetarian diet by their predominantly equine constitution, it must be remembered that they have a torso and head like a man’s: this structure obliges them to introduce through a small human mouth the considerable quantity of grass, straw, or grain necessary to the sustenance of their large bodies. These foods, notably of limited nutritional value, also require long mastication, since human teeth are badly adapted to the grinding of forage.
In conclusion, the centaurs’ nourishment is a laborious process; by physical necessity, they are required to spend three-quarters of their time chewing. This fact is not lacking in authoritative testimonials, first and foremost that of Ucalegon of Samos (Dig. Phil., XXIV, II–8 and XLIII passim), who attributes the centaurs’ proverbial wisdom to their alimentary regimen, consisting of one continuous meal from dawn to dusk; this would deter them from other vain or baleful activities, such as avidity for riches or gossip, and would contribute to their usual self-restraint. Nor was this unknown to Bede, who mentions it in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum.1
It is rather strange that the classical mythological tradition neglected this characteristic of centaurs. The truth of the fact, however, rests on reliable evidence, and moreover, as we have shown, it can be deduced by a simple consideration of natural philosophy.
To return to Trachi: his education was, by our criteria, strangely fragmentary. He learned Greek from the island’s shepherds, whose company he sought out now and again, despite his taciturn and shy nature. From his own observations he also learned many subtle and intimate things about grasses, plants, forest animals, water, clouds, stars, and planets; and I myself noticed that, even after his capture and under a foreign sky, he could feel the approach of a gale or the imminence of a snowstorm many hours before it actually arrived. Though I couldn’t describe how, nor could he do so himself, he also felt the grain growing in the fields, he felt the pulse of water in underground streams, and he sensed the erosion of flooded rivers. When De Simone’s cow gave birth two hundred meters away from us, he felt a reflex in his own gut; the same thing happened when the tenant farmer’s daughter gave birth. In fact, on a spring evening he indicated to me that a birth must be taking place and, more precisely, in a particular corner of the hayloft; we went there and found that a bat had just brought into the world six blind little monsters, and was feeding them minuscule portions of her milk.
All centaurs are made this way, he told me, feeling every germination, animal, human, or vegetable, as a wave of joy running through their veins. They also perceive, on a precordial level, and in the form of anxiety and tremulous tension, every desire and every sexual encounter that occurs in their vicinity; therefore, even though usually chaste, they enter into a state of vivid agitation during the season of love.
We lived together for a long time: in some ways, it could be said that we grew up together. Despite his advanced age, he was actually a young creature in everything he said and did, and he learned things so easily that it seemed useless (not to mention awkward) to send him to school. I educated him myself, almost without realizing it or wanting to, passing on to him in turn the knowledge that I learned from my teachers day after day.
We kept him hidden as much as possible, owing, in part, to his own explicit desire and, in part, to a form of exclusive and jealous affection that we all felt for him, and, in yet another part, a combination of rationality and intuition that advised us to shield him from all unnecessary contact with our human world.
Naturally, his presence among us had leaked out among the neighbors. At first, they asked a lot of questions, some not very discreet, but then, as will happen, their curiosity diminished from lack of nourishment. A few of our intimate friends were admitted into his presence, the first of whom were the De Simones, and they swiftly became his friends, too. Only once, when a horsefly bite provoked a painful abscess in his rump, did we require the skill of a veterinarian; but he was an understanding and discreet man, who most scrupulously promised to keep this professional secret and, as far as I know, kept his promise.
Things went differently with the blacksmith. Nowadays, blacksmiths are unfortunately very rare: we found one two hours away by foot and he was a yokel, stupid and brutish. My father tried in vain to persuade him to maintain a certain reserve, which included paying him tenfold as much as was due for his services. It made no difference; every Sunday at the tavern he gathered a crowd around him and told the entire village about his strange client. Luckily, he liked his wine, and was in the habit of telling tall tales when he was drunk, so he wasn’t taken too seriously.
It pains me to write this story. It is a story from my youth, and I feel as if in writing it I were expelling it from myself, and that later I will feel deprived of something strong and pure.
One summer Teresa De Simone, my childhood friend and cohort, returned to her parents’ house. She had gone to the city to study; I hadn’t seen her for many years, I found her changed, and the change troubled me. Maybe I had fallen in love, but with little consciousness of it: what I mean is, I did not admit it to myself, not even hypothetically. She was rather lovely, shy, calm, and serene.
As I have already mentioned, the De Simones were among the few neighbors whom we saw with some regularity. They knew Trachi and loved him.
After Teresa’s return, we spent a long evening together, just the three of us. It was one of those rare evenings never to be forgotten: the moon, the crickets, the intense smell of hay, the air still and warm. We heard singing in the distance, and suddenly Trachi began to sing, without looking at us, as if in a dream. It was a long song, its rhythm bold and strong, with words I didn’t know. A Greek song, Trachi said; but when we asked him to translate it, he turned his head away and became silent.
We were all silent for a long time; then Teresa went home. The following morning, Trachi drew me aside and said this:
“Oh, my dearest friend, my hour has come: I have fallen in love. That woman has got inside of me, and possesses me. I desire to see her and hear her, perhaps even touch her, and nothing else; I therefore desire something impossible. I am reduced to one point: there is nothing left of me except for this desire. I am changing, I have changed, I have become another.”
He told me other things as well, which I hesitate to write, because I feel it’s very unlikely that my words will do him justice. He told me that, since the previous night, he felt that he had become “a battlefield”; that he understood, as he never had understood before, the exploits of his violent ancestors, Nessus, Pholus; that his entire human half was crammed with dreams, with noble, courtly, and vain fantasies, and he wanted to perform reckless feats, to do justice with the strength of his own arms, raze to the ground the densest forests with his vehemence, run to the edges of the earth, discover and conquer new lands, and create there the works of a fertile civilization. All of this, in a way that was obscure even to himself, he wanted to perform before the eyes of Teresa De Simone: to do it for her, to dedicate it to her. Finally, he realized the vanity of his dreams in the very act of dreaming them, and this was the content of the song of the previous evening, a song he had learned long ago during his adolescence in Colophon, and which he had never understood and never sung until now.
For many weeks nothing else happened; we saw the De Simones every so often, but Trachi’s behavior revealed nothing of the storm that raged inside him. It was I, and none other, who provoked the breakdown.
One October evening, Trachi was at the blacksmith’s. I met Teresa, and we went for a walk together in the woods. We talked, and of who else but Trachi? I didn’t betray my friend’s confidence; but I did worse.
/> I quickly realized that Teresa was not as shy as she initially appeared to be: she chose, as if by chance, a narrow path that led into the thickest part of the woods; I knew it was a dead end, and knew that Teresa knew. Where the path came to an end, she sat down on dry leaves and I did the same. The valley belltower rang out seven times, and she pressed up against me in a way that rid me of all doubt. By the time we got home night had fallen, but Trachi hadn’t yet returned.
I realized immediately that I had behaved badly; actually, I realized it during the act itself, and still today it pains me. Yet I also know that the fault is not all mine, nor is it Teresa’s. Trachi was with us: we had immersed ourselves in his aura, we had gravitated into his field. I know this because I myself had seen that wherever he passed flowers bloomed before their time, and their pollen flew in the wind of his wake as he ran.
Trachi didn’t return. Over the following days, we laboriously reconstructed the rest of his story based upon witnesses’ accounts and his tracks.
After a night of anxious waiting for all of us, and for me of secret torment, I went to look for him myself at the blacksmith’s. The blacksmith wasn’t at home: he was at the hospital with a cracked skull; he was unable to speak. I found his assistant. He told me that Trachi had come at about six o’clock to get shoed. He was silent and sad, but tranquil. Without showing any impatience, he let himself be chained as usual (the uncivilized practice of this particular blacksmith: years earlier he had had a bad experience with a skittish horse, and we had, in vain, tried to convince him that this precaution was in every way absurd with regard to Trachi). Three of his hooves had already been shoed when a long and violent shudder coursed through him. The blacksmith turned upon him with that harsh tone often used on horses; as Trachi’s agitation seemed to increase, the blacksmith struck him with a whip.
Trachi seemed to calm down, “but his eyes were rolling around as if he were mad, and he seemed to be hearing voices.” Suddenly, with a furious tug, Trachi pulled the chains from their wall mounts, and the end of one hit the blacksmith in the head, sending him to the floor in a faint. Trachi then threw himself against the door with all his weight, headfirst, his arms crossed over his head, and galloped off toward the hills while the four chains, still constricting his legs, whirled around, wounding him repeatedly.
“What time did this happen?” I asked, disturbed by a presentiment.
The assistant hesitated: it was not yet night, but he couldn’t say precisely. But then, yes, now he remembered: just a few seconds before Trachi pulled the chains from the wall the time had rung from the belltower, and the boss said to him, in dialect so that Trachi wouldn’t understand: “It’s already seven o’clock! If all my clients were as currish as this one . . .”
Seven o’clock!
It wasn’t difficult, unfortunately, to follow Trachi’s furious flight; even if no one had seen him, there were conspicuous traces of the blood he had lost, and the scrapes made by the chains on tree trunks and on rocks by the side of the road. He hadn’t headed toward home, or toward the De Simones’: he had cleared the two-meter wooden fence that surrounds the Chiapasso property, and crossed the vineyards in a blind fury, making a path for himself through the rows of vines, in a straight line, knocking down stakes and vines, breaking the thick iron wires that held up the vine branches.
He reached the barnyard and found the barn door bolted shut from the outside. He easily could have opened it with his hands; instead, he picked up an old thresher, weighing well over fifty kilos, and hurled it against the door, reducing it to splinters. Only six cows, a calf, chickens, and rabbits were in the barn. Trachi left immediately and, still in a mad gallop, headed toward Baron Caglieris’s estate.
It was at least six and a half kilometers away, on the other side of the valley, but Trachi got there in a matter of minutes. He looked for the stable: he didn’t find it with his first blow, but only after he used his hooves and shoulders to knock down many doors. What he did in the stable we know from an eyewitness, a stableboy, who, at the sound of the door shattering, had had the good sense to hide in the hay, and from there he had seen everything.
Trachi hesitated for a moment on the threshold, panting and bloody. The horses, unsettled, shook their heads, tugging on their halters. Trachi pounced on a three-year-old white mare; in one blow he broke the chain that bound her to the trough, and dragging her by this same chain led her outside. The mare didn’t put up any resistance; strange, the stableboy told me, since she had a rather skittish and reluctant character, nor was she in heat.
They galloped together as far as the river: here Trachi was seen to stop, cup his hands, dip them into the water, and drink repeatedly. They then proceeded side by side into the woods. Yes, I followed their tracks: into those same woods and along that same path, to that same place where Teresa had asked me to take her.
And it was right there, for that entire night, that Trachi must have celebrated his monstrous nuptials. There I found the ground dug up, broken branches, brown and white horsehair, human hair, and more blood. Not far away, drawn by the sound of her troubled breathing, I found the mare. She lay on the ground on her side, gasping, her noble coat covered with dirt and grass. Hearing my footsteps she lifted her head a little, and followed me with the terrible stare of a spooked horse. She was not wounded, but exhausted. She gave birth eight months later to a foal: in every way normal, I was told.
Here Trachi’s direct traces vanish. But, as perhaps some may remember, over the following days the newspapers reported on a strange series of horse-rustlings, all perpetrated with the same technique: a door knocked down, the halter undone or ripped off, the animal (always a mare, and always alone) led into some nearby wood, and then found exhausted. Only once did the abductor seem to meet with any resistance: his chance companion of that night was found dying, her neck broken.
There were six of these episodes, and they were reported in various places on the peninsula, occurring one after the other from north to south. In Voghera, in Lucca, near Lake Bracciano, in Sulmona, in Cerignola. The last happened near Lecce. Then nothing else; but perhaps this story is linked to a strange report made to the press by a fishing crew from Puglia: just off Corfu they had come upon “a man riding a dolphin.” This odd apparition swam vigorously toward the east; the sailors shouted at it, at which point the man and the gray rump sank under the water, disappearing from view.
1. Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
Full Employment
“Just as in ’29,” Mr. Simpson said. “You’re young and can’t remember, but it’s just as it was then: no faith, inertia, lack of initiative. And over there in the States, where things aren’t going so badly, wouldn’t you think they’d lend me a hand? On the contrary: even this year in which something new, something revolutionary would be needed, do you know what the NATCA Research and Development Office, with all their four hundred technicians and fifty scientists, have come up with? Here, look here; it’s all here.” He pulled a metal box out of his pocket and disdainfully placed it on the table.
“You tell me, how is one to do the job of a salesman passionately? It’s a beautiful little machine, I don’t deny it, but, believe me, it takes a certain hubris to run from one client to the next all year long with only this to show, trying to convince them that this is the latest great new thing from NATCA 1966.”
“What does it do?” I asked.
“That is precisely the point: it can do everything and nothing. Generally, machines are specialized: a tractor pulls, a saw saws, a Versifier makes verses, a light meter measures the light. This thing here, instead, is good at doing everything, or almost. It’s called a Minibrain;* even the name isn’t right, in my opinion. It’s pretentious and vague, and you can’t translate it into Italian; in short, it doesn’t have any commercial appeal. It’s a four-track selector, that’s what it is: do you want to know how many women with the name Eleonora were operated on for appendicitis in Sicily in 1940? Or how many among all the suicide
s throughout the world from 1900 to today were both left-handed and blond? All you have to do is push this button and you’ll have the answer in a second; but only if you have first introduced the protocols, and excuse me if that’s a small thing. In short, in my opinion they’re making a huge error, and will pay dearly. According to them, the innovation is that it can fit in your pocket and is inexpensive. Do you want one? Twenty-four thousand lire and it’s yours; the price couldn’t be lower if it were made in Japan. But do you know what I say? If they don’t give me something more original within the year, despite my thirty-five years of service and the fact that I’m sixty years old, I’ll quit. No, no, I’m not joking. Luckily, I have a few more cards up my sleeve: not to brag, but in times of economic hardship I feel I could do something better than sell selectors.”
During this entire discourse, which took place at the end of one of NATCA’s lavish banquets, which, in spite of everything, the company continues to organize every year for its best clients, I observed Simpson’s mood with curiosity. In contrast to his words, he didn’t appear remotely discouraged; on the contrary, he was unusually animated and happy. Behind his thick glasses, his gray eyes were shining brightly, or was that simply the effect of the wine, which both of us had abundantly indulged in? I decided to make it easier for him to open up.
“I, too, am convinced that with your experience you could do something better than go around selling business machines. Selling is difficult, often unpleasant; and yet it’s a profession that maintains vital human contact, that teaches something new every day . . . Ultimately, NATCA isn’t the only one of its kind in the world.”