by Primo Levi
It wasn’t an easy job. In addition to Anna’s enthusiastic help, Walter had to enlist four young assistants. Fortunately, Factor L was soluble in water and water was abundantly available there. Walter proposed that they spray the solution beyond the pass, where the heather grew thickly, and where the lemmings might be expected to stop and graze, but it was immediately apparent that the project was not achievable; the area was too extensive and the columns of lemmings were already approaching, heralded by dust eddies visible twenty kilometers away.
Walter then decided to nebulize the solution directly over the lemming columns on the obligatory path beneath the pass. It wouldn’t reach the entire population, but he believed that the effect would nevertheless be demonstrative.
The first lemmings appeared at the pass around nine in the morning; by ten the valley was full of them and the flow seemed to be increasing. Walter went down into the valley with the nebulizer tied to his back; he leaned against a rock and opened the propellant valve. There was no wind; from the height of the ridge Anna distinctly saw the release of the white cloud, expanding in the direction of the valley. She saw the gray tide stop in a swirl, like the water in a river against the pylon of a bridge: the lemmings who had inhaled the solution seemed uncertain whether to continue, to stop, or to go back. But then she saw a vast wave of fretful bodies wash over the first, and then a third wave over the second, so that the rolling mass reached the height of Walter’s belt. She saw Walter make rapid gestures with his free hand, gestures that were confused and convulsive and seemed to be a call for help; then she saw Walter stagger forward, wrenched away from the rock’s protection, and fall, and he was dragged, buried, and dragged farther, visible periodically like a swelling beneath the torrent of those innumerable, small desperate creatures who were running toward death, their death and his death, toward the marshland and the sea just beyond.
That same day, the package that Walter had sent across the ocean was returned. It didn’t come into Anna’s possession until three days later, when Walter’s body had been recovered. It contained a curt message addressed both to Walter y a todos los sábios del mundo civil.1 It said: “The Arunde people, soon no longer a people, send their regards and thank you. We do not wish to offend, but we are returning your medicine, so that those among you who might want to can profit from it. We prefer freedom to drugs and death to illusion.”
1. And to all the other wise men of the civilized world.
The Synthetics
It was nearly noon. One could already sense in the air that precise yet confused sound, the sum of a hundred imperceptible words and actions that seems to emanate from the classroom walls, swelling like a wind and culminating in the ring of the school bell; Mario and Renato were nonetheless still busy completing the final lines of their papers. Mario finished and got ready to turn his in; Renato, his intention obvious, said to him: “I’ll turn mine in now, too. I didn’t do the last question, but I don’t know the answer. Better blank than wrong.”
Mario responded in a whisper: “Let me have a look. . . . It’s really not that hard. Come on, write. It’s bordered by Italy, Austria, and Hungary to the north, by Romania and Bulgaria on the east; to the south. . . .”
At that moment, like a sign from heaven, the bell rang. The low murmur suddenly became an earsplitting din through which one could barely hear the voice of the teacher urging everyone to turn in his work, finished or not. In a chaotic and disorderly bustle, the kids were sucked into the corridor and down the stairs, and soon found themselves out in the street. Renato and Mario headed toward home. After a few steps they realized that Giorgio was running after them.
Renato turned and said, “Run, little piggy. Hurry up, we’re hungry . . . that is, I’m hungry. You never know with this guy. Maybe he lives on air.”
Mario, not catching the insinuation, responded, “No, today I’m hungry, too. And I’m also in a hurry.”
Meanwhile, Giorgio had caught up with them, still panting a little.
“In a hurry, why?” he asked. “It’s not exactly late, and your house is nearby.”
Mario responded that it wasn’t a matter of hunger or lateness, but that he was planning to collect caterpillars that afternoon. It was a caterpillar kind of day, and they almost certainly would be out. Laughing, Giorgio asked if the caterpillars came out every Friday, and Mario responded earnestly that yesterday it had rained and today there was sun, so the caterpillars he was interested in would have come out.
Unlike Giorgio, Renato feigned indifference. “Caterpillars, really? And once you’ve collected them what do you do with them? Fry them up?”
Giorgio pretended to shudder in disgust and said, “Spare me, it’s lunchtime.”
Mario then explained that he intended to raise them, to put them in a little box that he had already prepared and wait for them to make a cocoon.
Giorgio became curious. “Do they all make a cocoon? How do they do it? Are they fast? How long does it take? And is the cocoon like the ones made by silkworms?”
Renato was whistling and glancing around as if he weren’t listening.
“I don’t know,” Mario responded. “In fact, I want to see how they do it—if it’s like the books say it is. I have a book on caterpillars.”
“Will you lend it to me?”
“Yeah, okay, but you have to return it.”
“Sure thing. You know I always return books. . . . Listen, can I come with you today?”
Mario looked uncertain, or, rather, had the expression of someone who wanted to appear uncertain. “Well . . . I don’t know yet. I don’t know where I’m going. It depends if they let me take my bike. Call me around three.”
Renato interjected bitterly: “Can you believe this guy? He’s in such a hurry and yet he’s going to stay home until three. I bet you’re going to do your homework. So you’ve got yourself a disciple, huh? Collecting caterpillars and putting them in a little box. What fun.”
Giorgio rushed to defend Mario.
“So what? One person likes to do one thing, and another something else. We’re not all the same, you know. I’m interested in them, too, for example.”
Renato stopped and looked hard at the other two, then deliberately spoke slowly and clearly. “What I meant was that it’s a real load of fun for someone like him.”
Mario was not a boy who always had a response ready. He hesitated a second, then, in a tone of bewilderment, asked, “What do you mean, someone like me?”
Renato sniggered and Mario continued: “I’m just the same as everybody. You like volleyball, Giorgio likes stamps, and I like caterpillars. And not only caterpillars. You know, I also like taking photographs, for example—”
But Renato interrupted him. “Come on, don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. In any case, the whole class knows.”
“Knows what?”
“Knows that . . . well, that you’re not like everyone else.”
Mario fell silent, stung to the quick. It was true, it was something he often thought about himself, and his only relief from it was by thinking and repeating to himself that no one was like anyone else. But he felt “more different,” perhaps even superior, and often suffered because of it. Feebly, he defended himself. “Baloney! I don’t know where you got that idea. Why should I be any different from anyone else?”
Renato had by now whipped himself into the self-righteous huff of one who discovers that his neighbor has transgressed. “Why? And why do you act all innocent now? Wasn’t it you who told us that your mother and father didn’t want to get married in church? And that illness you had last year, when you were absent for a month, and when you got better you didn’t speak to anyone and your mother came back with you to school and talked all hush-hush with the teacher and if anyone came near they changed the subject. Are these things straightforward, normal?”
“They’re my business. Last year I was sick, and they gave me medicine and then at night I couldn’t sleep so my mother took me to have some tests. It hap
pens to lots of people. There’s nothing special about it.”
“Right! And in gym class? I’m not the only one who notices that when you get undressed you always turn toward the wall. And you know why? You, Giorgio, do you know why?” He stopped, then added gravely, “Because Mario doesn’t have a belly button, that’s why! Haven’t you noticed it yourself?”
Giorgio, aware that he was blushing violently, responded that yes, in fact, he had observed that Mario didn’t like to be looked at when he got undressed, but it didn’t mean anything. He felt that he was betraying Mario, but Renato’s self-confidence overwhelmed him.
Mario’s knees were trembling from anger, fear, and a sense of impotence. “It’s all lies, all stupid made-up stuff. I’m just like the rest of you, like everyone else, only I’m a bit thinner. And I’ll show you if you want. Right now!”
“Well done, right here in the street! But I’ll hold you to your word. Tuesday in gym class, we’ll see if you’re brave enough. We’ll see who’s telling the truth.”
Mario had arrived at his front door. He said a brusque goodbye and went inside. The other two continued on their way.
Giorgio was silent, lost in thought. He was disturbed, and at the same time fascinated by the topic. “I said yes just so that you could be right . . . and then yes, it’s a fact that Mario doesn’t like to be seen naked . . . but I didn’t get that thing about the belly button. Were you saying it seriously or only to make him mad? I mean, does he actually have one or not? And if he doesn’t, what does it mean? Who else doesn’t have one?”
“Come on, aren’t you twelve years old?” Renato said. “Don’t you read the newspapers? Don’t you know that the belly button is really a scar from birth, I mean from when a baby is born from a woman? Have you ever had a good look at those paintings where you see the creation of Adam? Well, in fact, Adam wasn’t born from a woman and he doesn’t have the scar.”
“Sure, but from then on all babies were born from women. It’s always been that way.”
“And now it’s not like that any longer. Obviously, you’re not allowed to read the newspapers yet. Have you ever heard of the pill and the test tube and the syringe? Well, that’s how Mario was born, and many others like him. He wasn’t born in a hospital, but in a laboratory. I saw it once on television. It was in America, but soon they’ll build one here, too. It’s a kind of incubator, like the one used for chicks, with a lot of test tubes inside, and the babies are in the test tubes. Slowly, as the babies grow, they exchange the test tubes for increasingly bigger ones. Then there are ultraviolet lamps, as well as other colors, or the babies would be blind, and . . .”
“But what does the pill have to do with it? Isn’t that used in order not to have babies?”
Renato stumbled for a moment, but was quickly back on track. “The pill . . . yes, that’s a different story. I got confused. But they also put pills in the test tubes: red in order to have males, and blue to have females. They put them in right from the beginning, in the first test tube, together with the gamete. I meant chromosomes. Anyway, you get what I mean. It was even in the newspaper, in Chronicles of Science, and they have a kind of digest, sort of like a menu, from which the parents—but they’re not really the parents, let’s say the man and woman who want to have a child—can choose the eyes, the hair, the nose, and all the features, if he’ll be thin or fat, and so on.”
Giorgio was listening intently, but, as a reasonable boy, he was wary of being made a fool and wasn’t going to let himself be taken for a ride. “And the syringe? Why did you mention a syringe?”
“Because it’s an entire system based on syringes. One to extract the gametes, another for the culture medium, and still more for all the hormones, one for each, and what a load of trouble if they get mixed up. It’s how monsters sometimes get born. Of course, it’s a tricky process. Then, when they get to the last stage, they break the test tube and deliver the baby to the parents, who bring it up, breast-feed it, et cetera, as if it were a natural child; and, in fact, it’s just like the others except, obviously, it doesn’t have a belly button.”
“Like Mario. You’re absolutely sure he hasn’t got one?”
Having by now convinced himself, Renato felt that he was in possession of unlimited persuasive powers.
“Up until half an hour ago, I was only suspicious, but now I’m sure of it. Didn’t you see how he turned red when I confronted him, to his face? And did you see what a hurry he was in to get away from us? He was on the brink of crying.”
“It’s obvious that deep down he’s embarrassed,” Giorgio said in a conciliatory tone. “Poor guy, he even makes me feel a little sorry for him. I turned red earlier myself just because I felt sorry for him. It’s not his fault. He didn’t choose to be born that way. If anybody did, it was his parents.”
“I feel sorry for him, too, but with these guys you have to be careful. You have to understand that they’re just like everyone else but only on the outside. If you pay attention, you’ll see what I mean. Take Mario, for example. If you look carefully you’ll see that his freckles are different from everybody else’s, and that he has them even on his eyelids and his lips. His fingernails are always covered with those little white spots, and you know what that means. He says his ‘r’ in a way that you have to get used to before you can understand him and not laugh at him, and his accent is one of those that you could immediately pick out even if you were in a crowd of a thousand people. And then, can you explain to me why he never fights, not even as a joke, and he doesn’t know how to swim, and he learned to ride a bike only this year, when you taught him? He does so well at school, you know, because he memorizes everything!”
Giorgio, who didn’t have such a good memory, asked in alarm, “And what does that mean?”
“It means that he has a magnetic memory, like a calculator. It’s easy to do well if you remember everything! Haven’t you ever noticed that at night his eyes glow like a cat’s? They light up like phosphorescent watches, which are now actually banned, because in the long term they cause cancer. If you think about it, we might be better off if we didn’t sit next to him at school.”
“So then why do you still sit near him?”
“Because I hadn’t thought of these things yet. Also, I’m not afraid of much, and I’m curious about Mario, curious to see what he does . . .”
“. . . and to copy his work!”
“And to copy his exercises, sure. What’s wrong with that?”
Confused, Giorgio didn’t answer. The whole thing, which he only half believed, still intrigued him. Why not talk about it with Mario himself, cautiously, without asking him any direct questions?
Two weeks passed and Mario had changed; anyone could see it. The teacher finished her lesson on Charlemagne, painfully aware that she was availing herself of the exact same words she had used on that occasion for the past eight years. She had tried, with little faith, the experiment of telling the students the legend of the dream and the cave, but immediately gave up. Finally she announced that for the last ten minutes of class the students would be given a surprise oral review quiz. She pricked up her ears and narrowed her eyes. If the school and the world had been as she wished they were, the students would have responded as if to a delightful dare. Instead, all she perceived was a rustle made up of sighs, books furtively opened beneath desks, and sleeves pulled back to check the time. The atmosphere and the mood of the room became a shade gloomier.
Giuseppe pointed out that the knights errant were descendants of Clovis. Rodolfo, when asked, responded that Liutprand was a king, failing to add other significant details. Behind him rose a cloud of almost visible whispers radiating the obvious “King of the Lombards,” but Rodolfo, out of arrogance, or out of a sense of fair play, or because he was deaf, or out of fear of complications, didn’t catch it. Sandro showed no restraint regarding Charles the Bald. He spoke easily about him for a full forty seconds, as if he were talking about one of his closest relatives, and correctly used the proper pa
st tenses. Mario, on the other hand, against every expectation, stumbled—and yet the teacher was sure that Mario must know the (basically trivial) fact of who had defeated the Arabs at Poitiers. Mario, however, stood up and with a cold insolence said, “I don’t know.” And yet he had known the week before and had even included it, though not required to, in his answers to the written set of questions!
“I don’t know,” Mario repeated, his eyes fixed on the floor. “I forgot.”
There are certain rules of the game, and she had the impression that Mario was cheating. She pressed on. “Come on. Think. A French minister, actually, a ‘Mayor of the Palace’ . . . who, in fact, because of this crushing victory was given a strange nickname. . . .”
She heard a voice, probably Renato’s, hiss, “Tell her! Why don’t you tell her?” followed by Mario’s voice, obstinate and cold: “It’s useless. I forgot. I don’t know it anymore. I never knew it.” Then many voices, among them Renato’s, filled the classroom with a morose and suffocating air as they hooted, “Tell her, tell her! Why don’t you tell her? You know it. You think she doesn’t know you know? If you tell her, you’ll be better off!” Finally she heard her own voice, unsteady and strained, say something like “Tell me, Mario, what’s wrong with you? You’ve been acting differently for some time now. You’re distracted and sullen. Or just a bit errant like those French kings?” Finally, against the menacing background noise of the agitated and restless class, she heard the firm voice of Mario, who was still standing: “I haven’t changed. I’ve always been like this.”