by Primo Levi
“It’s that strong? Once is enough?”
“No, but it’s a chain reaction, drink it once and you’re shackled. You become tense, unnerved, restless, and you know you will find peace only in the presence of . . . the animal, the source. Only then can you quench your thirst. And she—they . . . are diabolic. They’re corrupt and are good at corrupting. They don’t understand much, but what they understand well is how to seduce a human being. They can decipher the desire in your eyes, or I don’t know where else, and they circle around you, rub up against you, and the poison is there, all day and all night, offered to you permanently, at home, free. You have only to extend your hands, your lips. You extend them, drink, and the circle closes, you’re trapped, for the rest of your years, which can’t be many.”
Lore suddenly jumped up, went over to the curtain, and climbed up it to the height of the massive grandfather clock that stood in the corner. I noticed that her legs ended in four coarse little hands with opposable thumbs, brown on top and pink inside. From the curtain she leaped onto the clock and crouched on it, intently listening to the slow ticking.
“They’re fascinated by clocks,” Paul said. “I don’t know why. Also the one I had before. . . .”
“This isn’t your first?”
“No. It’s not here that it happened. We were traveling in Beirut. In the hotel there was a fellow, I don’t know who he was, partly because we were both drunk; he had a vilmy with him, she was lovely, blond, and the first I’d ever seen. As I told you, I had just quarreled with Virginia, and he grinned at me as if he understood. He offered me the milk and I accepted. I didn’t know what I was doing, but the next morning I realized what had happened. I searched for the stranger on every street of the entire city until I found him, and offered him an insane amount for the animal. He laughed at me, we fought, and you should have seen the animal. She was crouching, wagging her tail, and laughing—yes, because they laugh, not like us, in their own manner, but they laugh, and it’s a laugh that makes the blood boil in your veins.
“I hit the guy worse than he hit me, but I felt utterly beaten. I dreamed of that vilmy every night. I must tell you that it’s not like with a woman. It’s an oppressive, savage, and idiotic desire, and hopeless, because with a woman you can speak, at least to yourself; even if she’s far away, if she’s not yours, or is no longer yours, you hope at least to speak to her, you hope for love, for reunion; it may be a vain hope, but it’s not insane, it has a conceivable gratification. This instead does not. It’s a desire that damns you because it has no gratification. You can’t even find it in your imagination. It’s pure desire, without end. The milk is pleasant, it’s sweet, but you guzzle it and you’re just as before. And even their presence, touching them, caressing them, it’s nothing, less than nothing, a whetting of one’s desire, nothing else.
“Virginia didn’t know the facts, but she understood that something was wrong. So she went back to London, and I hung around that man so that he would sell me the animal; he didn’t want to, or, rather, he couldn’t, he was a slave like me. But every time I could get near him, I persisted and I felt like a worm. I would even have shined his shoes. One day he left, without leaving an address. So I thought that if I couldn’t have that one, another would be better than nothing. I went to the souk and found one—she was kept on a leash by a young man with a gaunt, indifferent look, and he made her dance in the dim light of a dead end. She was thin and mangy, but she had swollen breasts, and she was young, and inexpensive. I asked for a sample of her milk. We went down into a stairwell and the seller milked her right then and there and gave me some. I seemed to feel the effect, as right afterward I observed that the animal’s eyes were beautiful and deep, something I hadn’t noticed before. I paid for her and brought her here. She was a fiend. She couldn’t stand to be enclosed. Her house was not here but the rooftops. There was no way to have her near. If I shut her inside she went berserk, biting, scratching, hiding under the furniture. After a few weeks, it got worse, because she learned how to withhold her milk. I tried in vain to hurt her, I thrashed her, and she disappeared.”
Paul snapped his fingers and Lore lifted her head. She leaped from the grandfather clock onto the couch, then onto the floor, and curled up at his feet with a happy little squeal.
“This, in fact, is the third. I bought her here in Soho at a public auction for four hundred pounds. A good price, don’t you think? She belonged to a Jamaican who died because of her, but I only learned that later. She’s old, as I said, and if you don’t cross her she’s fairly quiet. If, however, you want something that she doesn’t, she won’t simply withhold her milk like the other one; she dries up, and you have to go without it. No one can dissuade me from believing that she wills it to happen on purpose in order to blackmail me, to own me. And she certainly succeeds. Perhaps she’s not capable of understanding, but of willfulness, yes, oh yes. She’ll eat certain things but not others, at certain hours and not at others, I can invite certain of my friends but not others . . . no, you, God willing, you seem to please her no end. Let’s hope it lasts. . . .”
“But Virginia? . . .”
“She’s a wise woman. She has always refused the milk. She knows that I love her as much as I always have, that this is something else, like someone addicted to alcohol or morphine. She treats me like an invalid or a child, and in fact that’s what I am. Indeed, properly speaking, I’m an infant who whines when I’m hungry. And this one here is nine years old, she’s ancient, and the mere thought that she might die or dry up gives me vertigo.”
The vilmy approached me, breathing through her pink nose, and then rubbing the nape of her neck against my calf, as if caressing herself. To tell the truth, she didn’t seem at all old to me. I put my hand down to pet her, but Paul shot me a look and I stopped. In fact, when Lore got up on her hind legs in order to climb up into my lap, I said goodbye to Paul with a vaguely suitable excuse and went out onto the street. The fog was cold, thick, and yellowish but seemed fragrant, and with great pleasure I breathed it deep into my lungs.
With the Best Intentions
Anyone who needs to punish himself finds the opportunity everywhere. The engineer Masoero opened the newspaper and was filled with disgust: yet again, on the second page, the usual nauseatingly sarcastic item denouncing the inefficient service, the constantly occupied lines, and the poor sound quality of the connections. All the gospel truth, he knew, but, in the name of heaven, what was he supposed to do about it? It’s all fine and good to be district manager but if there aren’t any funds, or if the funds there are have been allocated to other public works, and if the Ministry, instead of helping you out, inundates you with lengthy memos that are both futile and contradictory, what can you do? Just about nothing. You go to work full of venom, call a meeting of department heads—the head of new installations, the head of preventative maintenance, the head of repairs (all of them nice guys, too)—and you give them a sermon, and when they leave, you know very well that as soon as they get out the door, they shrug their shoulders, and everything remains as it was, and you feel just as bad as you did.
He set about writing a vehement report for the Ministry: it wasn’t the first, but even a nail doesn’t penetrate the first time it’s hit with a hammer. Who knows, with enough hammering, they might finally listen. He spent the day working on it, and when he had finished he reread the report, eliminated a few overly virulent adjectives, and gave the manuscript to the typist.
The next day, on his desk he found not one but two memos from the Department of Complaints. He had not the slightest doubt that it was Rostagno, two doors down, who had written them. They were in his style—specific, detailed, and malicious. This time, however, instead of the usual generic customers’ complaints, two brand-new concerns were described with unusual anecdotal embellishment. In the first memo, it was reported that numerous customers, when picking up the receiver, had heard for hours straight the musical program from a cable radio station, and weren’t able to make or re
ceive any calls. The second memo described the disappointment and amazement of fifty or so other subscribers who had dialed various numbers in the network but persistently reached the same number every time and it inevitably belonged to someone with whom they regularly had frequent and long telephonic conversations: their in-laws, or a girlfriend, or the office, or a child’s classmate. As for the first complaint, it didn’t seem too difficult to resolve. As for the second, Masoero read it, reread it, and convinced himself that there was something suspicious about it. Rostagno was a charlatan. He’d been expecting a promotion for a while, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if he had chosen this as the way to clear the decks for himself. He was trying to provoke Masoero, force him to take unnecessary measures, trip him up. Everyone knows a telephone network is not a simple thing; it is easily broken, vulnerable to the wind, rain, cold, even subject to certain viruses, but they are few, well-known, and above all plausible. This one, however, was impossible. He put away the two memos and busied himself with something else.
But that same evening Silvia casually mentioned to him that throughout the day she had been unable to telephone the greengrocer, or her hairdresser, or Lidia, or even him at the office—every time, the only number she reached was her mother’s, and, as it happened, on that particular day Silvia had nothing to say to her mother. He realized that Silvia was not trying to offend him with this observation, which, by the way, had been made in a careless and offhand tone of voice. Yet he couldn’t help thinking that his wife knew him well enough, knew that he had a difficult character, and that he cared about his work—or, more precisely, he didn’t care that much about it, but to be caught out in any way, and especially at work, seriously burned him and caused him to lose sleep. In short, Silvia could have spared him that bitterness. He had already had quite enough himself, telephone-related and not.
So, Rostagno hadn’t made it all up, but it didn’t matter. He was still a charlatan and a parasite. In retrospect, his memo seemed to Masoero a distillation of malice, every line infused with schadenfreude. A dishonest, ambitious man, a social climber, that’s what he was. The Complaints Department was just the place for him, because he was someone who lived to catch others at fault, fed on their mistakes, thrived on their worries, and enjoyed their troubles. Masoero took two tranquilizers and went to bed.
After twenty days, a third memo arrived. This time, Masoero thought, it was supremely evident that Rostagno had enjoyed composing it, as it was more of a lyric poem or ballad than an office document. It was a catalogue of dialing errors; apparently, thousands of subscribers had complained, in the first place because the number of errors was abnormally high, and, second, because the nature of these errors was irritating. Irritating above all for Masoero, but Rostagno seemed to be gloating; he had gone to the trouble of compiling an extensive chart in three columns. The first column contained the numbers of the callers, the second the numbers of those called, the third the numbers of those who had responded instead of the ones dialed on the second list. Between the first column and the second there obviously was no correlation, but Rostagno pointed out (and, damn it, he was right!) that between the first and the third column there was a correlation. That was it. Rostagno didn’t formulate any explanatory hypothesis. He simply limited himself to pointing out a curious correspondence. However, when Masoero finished reading, he felt his blood begin to boil with rage, and was then quickly ashamed of his rage. He shouldn’t have felt it, and he prohibited himself from harboring any such abject envy and jealousy. If your neighbor makes an ingenious discovery (by chance, by chance, whispered a little voice inside him), you must acknowledge his accomplishment and admire him for it, not foam with anger and hatred. He did his best to compose himself; but, damn it, that guy on the other side of the wall could be as ingenious as you please, he was building his reputation on the mistakes and failings, or rather the misfortunes, of him, Masoero. Spin it however you like, but that’s the way it was. What for him was poison was food for Rostagno, steps for climbing up to overtake and then supplant him. He touched the chair he was sitting on. It had never meant much to him, but suddenly it felt almost a part of his body, as if it were wrapped over his own skin. If they took it away from him, it would be like flaying him alive, and he would die, his suffering atrocious. If then someone else were installed in it—and above all Rostagno—it would be as if that person had wormed his way into his marriage bed. He thought about it seriously, trying to be honest with himself, and concluded that actually it would be worse. He was sorry, but that’s the way he was and he couldn’t change it, nor did he want to. This chair or nothing—he was too old to change. He might be ashamed, but he couldn’t be different.
In any case, he could rant, scramble, or plod all he wanted, but the memo was still there before him, an official act, and he must drain the goblet, there was no way around it. Rostagno had noticed that between the numbers of the callers and the numbers that responded there was a correlation: very simple in some cases, less obvious in others. Sometimes the two numbers differed by only one unit more or less: 693 177 was erroneously responded to by 693 178 or 693 176. At other times, the second number was a multiple of the first, or the first read inversely; still others had the two numbers adding up to 1,000,000. In 15 cases out of 518 studied, the number was an excellent approximation of the natural logarithm of the other; in 4 cases, their product, minus decimal places, was a power of 10; in only 7 cases was it impossible to establish any correlation. Rostagno also noted that the most obscure correlations, and the 7 that remained unclear, were the last calls made.
Masoero felt he was on the ropes. He sensed also from the smooth, satisfied style of the brief comment accompanying the chart that Rostagno wasn’t standing around with his hands in his pockets. He had made a brilliant observation, but he wasn’t the type to sit back and rest on his laurels; on the contrary, it seemed to Masoero, carefully rereading the concluding statement, that he’d taken one on the chin, been attacked; perhaps Rostagno was already preparing a diagnosis, if not an actual treatment. Masoero needed to wake up. He could do two things: jump into the race and outrun Rostagno, or call him into his office and make him talk in the hope of getting him to put his cards on the table, perhaps against his will or without his knowledge. Rostagno might be the better technician, but Masoero wasn’t born yesterday, and in a twenty-four-year career he had learned a thing or two above and beyond communications theory. He thought it over, and rejected the second option. Did he love his chair? Did he want to keep it? Well, he had what it took: time, brains, history, rank, an unquestioned and seasoned authority to use as a base of operations, a stake that would allow him to stay in the game. Rostagno had the advantage of being the first to receive the daily complaints reports, but it was time to rectify that. Let’s go, man, strip and fight: hit above or below the belt, it hardly matters. Masoero dictated a memo with precise instructions that from now on all complaint reports were to be sent to him personally: all of them, from all divisions. Let’s begin like this, then we’ll see.
He picked up the internal telephone, told his secretary to disturb him only if it was urgent, and prepared for a few days’ contemplation. Already he could hear ringing in his ears the big hypocritical question, the question that comes from above, from the one who has by now imposed a solid desk between the orders and their execution; the question so easy to formulate, and so difficult to respond to. “What the devil has changed? What have you done differently? Why was everything running smoothly until two months ago?”
What had changed? Nothing and everything, as usual. They had changed the one-millimeter-cable supplier because he was late with deliveries. They had standardized the shape of the T2-22 panels. Three of the area assembly crews were now working in a plant where they earned more and didn’t have to endure the cold. They had changed the tolerances of the carrier frequency, but you, Mr. General Manager, gave that order. And so, dear Mr. Manager, yes, there’s a lot to be said for sitting pretty, but if you don’t change you d
on’t live, and if you do change you’re sure to make a mistake. Be patient, Mr. Manager, and let’s discover where we’ve made the mistake. Suddenly, it occurred to him that the most conspicuous change was one that had been planned for many years, and completed three months earlier: the merger of the trunk dialing network with the German and the French networks, thereby potentially establishing a single network as vast as Europe. Could this be relevant? And then the most obvious question occurred to him: What was happening in other districts in Italy and in Europe? Were they all healthy?
In three days Masoero felt himself to be a different man: perhaps a unique case in the history of telecommunications, from a total of tens of thousands of incidents the birth of joy. Not the solution, not yet, but a broader and better-defined picture, and above all a big leap over Rostagno’s head. Yes, Mr. Manager, it’s not that things are going well, but that they are going badly everywhere in the same way, from the North Pole to Crete and from Lisbon to Moscow: it’s the same virus everywhere. The undersigned, an’ please Your Honour,* has nothing to do with it, or has to do with it only because the trouble was recognized and described in his district before it was in others. The merger of the networks matters or doesn’t matter, we don’t know, but it was part of the plan, and in any case what’s done is done. What’s urgent now is to write up a nice report, have it translated, and send it out to all the foreign capitals we’re connected to.
A period followed of complicated and anguished accusations and counteraccusations: each of the connected countries rejected all charges of inefficiency, and blamed another country, almost always a neighboring one. It was decided to convene a congress, and a date was fixed. But this had to be immediately postponed indefinitely owing to a new wave of disturbances.