The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Because he was so busy talking, James had lost his breath, and also the way. “We’ll have to ask someone.”

  “Do you know everyone here?”

  “We almost all know one another. Basically, there aren’t so many of us.”

  He knocked at the door of a wooden hut and went in. Smoke was rising from the chimney, and through the walls a strongly rhythmic martial song could be heard, but he came out again shortly. “They’re nice, but they never leave home, and they couldn’t give me any directions. They’re also a bit timid. Who are they? The little Germans of All Quiet on the Western Front: Tjaden, Kat, Leer, and all the others, and also Paul Bäumer, naturally. I often go and visit them—what fine boys! They were lucky to come here as young men; otherwise, who knows how many of them would have had to take up arms again twenty years later, and lose either their skin or their soul.”

  Fortunately, soon afterward they met Babalatchi,7 who knew everything: where François’s chalet was, that there was in fact an empty bed, how long it had been empty, why and how, all those with whom François had quarreled recently, and all the women he had received.

  In that area the sky was the color of lead; a damp angry wind blew, howling around the corners like a wolf, and in fact when the chalet came into view snow began to fall: dirty snow, gray and sooty, which came down at a slant, got in your eyes, and took your breath away. Antonio couldn’t wait to get inside, but James told him it would be better if he waited a little distance away: François was a lunatic type, and James preferred to knock on the door alone; a new face might set him off.

  Antonio took cover as well as he could; there was a pile of broken barrels nearby, and he got into a tub and huddled inside to wait for James to return. He saw him knock, wait a good two minutes, knock again: the shutters were closed, but thick smoke was rising from the chimney so there must be someone home.

  James knocked a third time, and finally the door was opened. James disappeared inside, and Antonio realized that he was very tired, and began to wonder if it would be possible to have a warm bath: on the banks of the Congo he had sweated a lot, the dust had stuck to his clothes, and now the sweat was cooling on him unpleasantly. But he didn’t have long to wait: the door burst open as if someone inside had fired a cannon, and the worthy and dignified James shot out like a meteor, and landed among the barrel staves, not far from Antonio’s temporary abode. He got up and quickly brushed himself off:

  “No, no, please don’t be upset. I happened in at a bad moment—he was with some friends who needed to be handled with care. There was also Marion I’Ydolle, La Grosse Margot, Jehanne di Bretaigne,8 and two or three other girls; one it seemed to me was the Maid of Orleans. Listen, for the future we’ll see, but tonight come and sleep with me: there’s not much room, but I’ll happily give you the bed, and for me a mattress on the floor is just fine.”

  Antonio settled in to the park with surprising ease. In a few weeks, he had made friends with his neighbors, all cordial people, or at least varied and interesting: Kim with his sword, Iphigenia in Aulis, Ettore Fieramosca, Tommasino Puzzilli, who was engaged to Moll Flanders, Holden Caulfield, Commissioner Ingravallo, Alyosha with the Pious One, Sergeant Grischa with Lilian Aldwinkle, Bel Ami, Alberto da Giussano, who was with the Virgin Camilla, Professor Unrat with the Blue Angel, Leopold Bloom, Mordo Nahum, Justine with Dracula, St. Augustine with the Novice, the two dogs Flush and Buck, Baldus who couldn’t get through doors, Benito Cereno, Lesbia living with Hot-Blooded Paolo,9 Tristram Shandy who was still only two and a half, Thérèse Raquin and Bluebeard. At the end of the month Portnoy arrived, crass and complaining: no one could bear him, but in the space of a few days he had settled in Semiramis’s house, and the rumor went around that things between them were steaming right along.

  Antonio moved in with Horace, and was very comfortable there: he had different habits and hours, but he was clean, discreet, and tidy, and he had welcomed him gladly; furthermore, he had a lot of odd stories to tell, and he told them with an enchanting enthusiasm. And, in turn, Horace never tired of listening to Antonio: he was interested in everything, and up to date even on the most recent events. He was an excellent listener: he seldom interrupted and only with intelligent questions.

  Some three years after his arrival, Antonio noticed a surprising fact. When he raised his hands, as a shield against the Sun, say, or even against a bright lamp, the light filtered through them as if they were wax. Some time later, he observed that he was waking earlier than usual in the morning, and he realized that this was because his eyelids were more transparent; in fact, in a few days they were so transparent that even with his eyes closed Antonio could distinguish the outlines of objects.

  At first he thought nothing of it, but toward the end of May he noticed that his entire skull was becoming diaphanous. It was a bizarre and alarming sensation: as if his field of vision were broadening, not only laterally but also up, down, and backward. He now perceived light no matter what direction it came from, and soon he was able to distinguish what was happening behind him. When, in mid-June, he realized that he could see the chair he was sitting on, and the grass under his feet, Antonio understood that his time had come: the memory of him was extinct and his testimony complete. He felt sadness, but neither fear nor anguish. He took leave of James and his new friends, and sat under an oak to wait for his flesh and his spirit to dissolve into light and wind.

  1. The hero of several stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron.

  2. From the poem “La leggenda de Teodorico” (“The Legend of Theodoric”) (1884), by Giosuè Carducci.

  3. Hero of a poem by Carlo Porta (1775–1821), “Desgrazzi de Giovannin Bongee” (“The Misadventures of Giovannino Bongeri”), written in the Milanese dialect. (Vottcentvott is dialect for “eight hundred and eight.”)

  4. Carlo Porta; see previous note.

  5. Valentino is the little boy in the poem “Valentino,” by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912), from the collection Canti di Castelvecchio; Pin di Carrugio Lungo is the hero of Italo Calvino’s The Path to the Nest of the Spiders.

  6. The Poor Lovers are from the novel A Tale of Poor Lovers (1947) by Vasco Pratolini; Cacciaguida is Dante’s great-great-grandfather, who appears in Paradise XV, XVI, and XVIII; and Somacal refers to the poem “Il soldato Somacal Luigi” (“The Soldier Luigi Somacal”), by Piero Jahier (1884–1966).

  7. A character in Almayer’s Folly, by Joseph Conrad.

  8. Characters in poems by Villon.

  9. Ettore Fieramosca is the hero of the eponymous novel of 1833 by Massimo d’Azeglio; Tommasino Puzzilli is the hero of Pasolini’s A Violent Life (1959); Commissioner Ingravallo is a character in Carlo Emilio Gadda’s That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (1957); Sergeant Grischa is from Arnold Zweig’s Sergeant Grischa (1928), and Lilian Aldwinkle is from Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves (1925); Bel-Ami refers to Maupassant’s novel; Alberto da Giussano was a legendary Lombard fighter of the twelfth century, and the Roman martyr Camilla appears in the Aeneid; Mordo Nahum is a character in Levi’s The Truce; Baldus is the hero of a sixteenth-century poem; Hot-Blooded Paolo is the eponymous hero of the novel Paolo il Caldo (1964), by Vitaliano Brancati.

  Psychophant

  We are a rather exclusive group of friends. We are joined together, both men and women, by a deep and genuine bond that is, however, also old and poorly maintained, formed by living together during important years and without too many moments of weakness. Afterward, as will happen, we went our separate ways; some of us made compromises, others hurt one another both inadvertently and on purpose, still others unlearned how to speak or lost their antennae. Despite everything, we are still happy to get together. We trust and respect one another, and, whatever subject comes up, we joyfully recognize that we speak the same language (some call it jargon), even if our opinions differ. Our children exhibit a precocious tendency to distance themselves from us, but they are tied to each other through a friendship not unlike our own, which seems to us both strange and beautiful, beca
use it came about spontaneously, without any intervention from us. They now constitute a group that in many ways is a reproduction of our own when we were their age.

  We profess to be open, universalist, cosmopolitan. We feel this in our hearts and intensely condemn any form of segregation by census, caste, or race, and yet, in truth, our group is so exclusive that even though we are generally respected by the “others,” over the past thirty years we have accepted a very limited number of recruits. For reasons that I can hardly explain, and in any case of which I am not proud, it seems unnatural to us to include anyone who lives north of Corso Regina Margherita or west of Corso Racconigi. Not all among us who have married have had their spouse accepted, endogamous couples being preferred, and these are the majority. Every once in a while, someone makes a friend from the outside and brings him along, but it’s rare that he is then integrated. Mostly, he’s invited once or twice and treated kindly, but the next time he won’t appear and the evening is devoted to analyzing, discussing, and categorizing him.

  There was a time when each of us, taking irregular turns, hosted all the others. Then, when children came, some went to live outside the city, others had their parents living with them and didn’t want to disturb them. Now it’s only Tina who invites people over. Tina likes to entertain and so does it well. She has good wines and excellent food; she is vivacious and inquisitive, always has something new to recount, and does so eloquently, knowing how to put people at ease. She is interested in the lives of others and remembers them in detail. She is capable of harsh judgments but loves almost everyone. She is suspected of having relations with other groups but she (and only she) is willingly forgiven this infidelity.

  The doorbell rang and Alberto entered, late as usual. When Alberto enters a home, the lights brighten, everyone is in a better mood, even healthier, because Alberto is one of those doctors who cure the sick merely by looking at them and talking to them. He never allows his patients who are friends (and few people in the world have as many friends as Alberto) to pay him, and as a result every year at Christmas he receives a flood of gifts. Indeed, that very night he had just received a gift, but it was different from the usual prized bottles of wine or superfluous automobile accessories. It was a bizarre gift, one that he couldn’t wait to try out with us, because it was a kind of parlor game.

  Tina wasn’t opposed, but it was easy to see that she wasn’t too keen on the thing. Maybe she felt her authority was being undermined and was afraid the evening’s reins might slip from her grasp. But it is hard to resist Alberto’s desires, which are many, unpredictable, lively, and compelling. When Alberto wants something (which occurs about every fifteen minutes), he instantly makes everyone else want it, too, which explains why he always has a mass of followers. He takes them to eat snails at midnight, or to ski the Breithorn, or to a screening of a risqué film, or to Greece for the mid-August holiday, or to his house for a drink while Miranda sleeps, or to visit someone who wasn’t in the least expecting him but who welcomes him all the same with open arms, him and everyone he has with him, including all those he has picked up along the way. Alberto said that inside the box there was an instrument called a Psychophant, and with a name like that how could anyone resist it?

  In the blink of an eye, a table was cleared, we all sat around it, and Alberto opened the box. He pulled out a large, flat, rectangular, tray-like object made of transparent plastic resting on a black metal base; this base extended beyond one of the short sides of the tray by about thirty centimeters, and a shallow cavity in the shape of a left hand was carved into this extension. We inserted the accompanying cord and plug into an outlet, and while the device was warming up Alberto read the instructions for its use aloud; they were very vague, and written in a terrible Italian, but essentially what they said was that the game, or pastime, consisted of putting one’s left hand into the cavity: what would then appear upon the tray was what the instructions clumsily defined as the player’s “inner image.”

  Tina laughed. “It’ll be like those cellophane fishes they sold before the war—you put one in the palm of your hand, and, depending on whether it folded up or vibrated or fell on the ground, it revealed some aspect of your character. Or it’ll be like daisy petals—he loves me, he loves me not.”

  Miranda said if that was the case she’d prefer to become a nun before she put her hand in that thing. Others said other things and the room got a bit noisy. I said that if it was cheap miracles we wanted, all we had to do was go to Piazza Vittorio. Others argued over who would be the first to experiment, still others designated this person or that person, and this person and that person then exempted themselves under various pretexts. Eventually, those who proposed to send Alberto on reconnaissance prevailed. Alberto was thrilled, took a seat in front of the device, put his left hand in the mold, and with his right hand pushed the button.

  Suddenly, we all became silent. At first a small, round spot, orange in color and similar to an egg yolk, formed on the tray. It then expanded and grew vertically, its top dilating so that it acquired the appearance of a mushroom cap. Polygonal specks—some emerald green, some scarlet, some gray—spread over its entire surface. The mushroom grew before our eyes, and when it had reached the height of a hand’s width, it became faintly luminous, as if it contained within it a small pulsating flame. It emitted a pleasing but pungent odor similar to the scent of cinnamon.

  Alberto took his finger off the button, the pulsation stopped, and the glow slowly faded. We weren’t sure if we should touch the object or not. Anna said it was better not to, because it was sure to instantly disintegrate; indeed, perhaps it didn’t even exist, but was a purely sensual illusion, like a mass dream or hallucination. In the instructions there was no indication of what one could or could not do with the images, but Henek intelligently observed that someone would have to touch it in any case, if only to clear the tray. It was absurd to imagine the device was only to be used once. Alberto plucked the mushroom from the tray, looked at it carefully, and declared that he was satisfied. Actually, ever since he was a child, he said, he had always felt himself to be orange. We passed the mushroom around. It had a consistency both firm and elastic, and was warm to the touch. Giuliana asked if she could have it. Alberto gladly gave it to her, saying that he could always make more if needed. Henek pointed out to him that the next ones might come out differently, but Alberto said it didn’t matter.

  Several people insisted that Antonio have a try. Antonio has been living far away for many years, so he is now only an honorary member of our group. He’d come that evening merely because it coincided with a business trip. Everyone was curious to see what might grow on the tray, because Antonio is different from us, more driven, more interested in success and money. These are virtues that we obstinately deny having, as if they were shameful.

  For a good minute nothing happened. Someone sneered and Antonio felt uncomfortable. Then we saw a square metal bar begin to push up out of the tray. It grew slowly and regularly, as if it were coming from below already perfectly formed. Soon four more bars pushed up, arranged in a cross around the first; four little bridges formed, joining them to the original, and then, slowly, other bars appeared, all of equal size, some vertical and others horizontal, so that finally on the tray was a small, elegant, lustrous structure, both solid and symmetrical. Antonio tapped it with a pencil and it rang like a tuning fork, emitting a long and pure note that slowly faded.

  “I disagree,” Giovanna said.

  Antonio smiled calmly. “Why?” he asked.

  “Because you’re not like that. All your angles aren’t square, nor are you made of steel, and some of your welding might actually be cracked.”

  Giovanna is Antonio’s wife, and she loves him very much. We didn’t think it necessary for her to make all those objections, but Giovanna said that no one knew Antonio better than she did, since they had lived together for twenty years. We didn’t pay much attention to her, because Giovanna is one of those wives who make a habit of c
riticizing her husband in his presence and in public.

  The Antonio-object appeared to be rooted in the tray, but at the first tug it snapped off cleanly and wasn’t nearly as heavy as it seemed. Anna’s turn was next. She was wriggling with impatience in her chair and saying that she had always wanted such a device, and many times she had even dreamed of it—only, her version created life-size symbols.

  Anna placed her hand in the molded black tray. All of us watched the tray, but nothing appeared on it. Suddenly Tina said, “Look, it’s up there!” In fact, half a meter up appeared a purplish pink puff of steam the size of a fist. Slowly, it unraveled like a ball of yarn, stretching downward and emitting numerous transparent vertical vaporous ribbons. It changed form continually: it became oval like a rugby ball, while always maintaining its diaphanous and delicate appearance, then it divided itself into rings, from which crackling sparks erupted, and finally it contracted, reduced to the dimensions of a walnut, and then disappeared with a pop.