by Primo Levi
Farnham came from jets, and aboard a rafter he felt as if he had retired. He was both mortified and embarrassed. Okay, so it was a useful service, but how can one forget those missions into the jungle with the B-28—two, sometimes three trips a day, and sometimes also at night with the enemy fire of the rebels who peep up at you through the foliage, six machine guns spitting flames, and twenty tons of bombs on board? But, of course, he had been fifteen years younger then. When your reflexes get a little slow, they bump you to the rafters.
If only Himamoto were awake. But not a chance. That guy slept through his entire eight hours. With the excuse that he suffered from nausea, he stuffed himself full of pills, and as soon as his shift was over he fell asleep like a rock. A rafter, by the way, isn’t very fast. It takes thirty-five to forty solid hours to cross the Atlantic, and when it’s fully loaded—that is, with 240 tons of milk on board—it handles like a tram at rush hour.
Even looking out the window wasn’t too satisfying. It was still the dead of night and the sky was cloudy. In the beams of the headlights, both ahead and behind, all you could see were swollen, lazy waves, and the monotonous torrent of water raised by the six blowers and showered over the tennis-court-size platform and the absurdly small cabin.
You could hear the sound of Himamoto snoring. He snored in the most irritating way: first very softly, almost like a sigh, then suddenly he’d let fly a nasty, dry grunt, then stopped as if he were dead. But no such luck—after a minute of anguishing silence he started again from the top. It was the first trip Farnham had made with Himamoto, and the guy was polite and pleasant when awake, intolerable when asleep. Awake, Himamoto was likable because he was young, had little navigation experience, and was willing to play the part of the disciple with the right combination of diligence and naïveté. Since it meant a lot to Farnham to be able to show off his experience, the two had gotten along pretty well, and the best shift was the one during which Kropivà slept, which explained why Farnham couldn’t wait for six o’clock to arrive.
Contrary to Himamoto, Kropivà was likable when he slept and annoying when he was awake. Awake, he was an atrocious stickler. Farnham, who had traveled the world extensively, had never met such a Russian and he wondered where the Organization had dug him up. Maybe in some administrative office lost in the tundra, or among railroad or prison employees. He didn’t smoke or drink. He spoke only in monosyllables, and was constantly keeping accounts. Once or twice Farnham had glanced at the sheets of paper that Kropivà left lying around and saw that he counted everything: how many years, months, and days he still had to go before retirement; how many dollars they would give him, down to the cents and fractions of cents; and how many rubles and kopecks he could exchange those dollars for, on the black market and officially. He counted how much each minute and each mile the rafter cost in fuel, wages, maintenance, insurance, amortization, as if he owned it. He also counted how much he would earn the following month using that vertiginous list of items,* which Farnham stuck in his pocket without even looking at. Kropivà was fascinated by it and delighted in doing advance calculations that included everything—family allowances, meal reimbursements while in port, the bonus for crossing the date line, compensation for night shifts, for overtime, for heavy work, for tropical or glacial climates, for holidays, and all the deductions for taxes, health insurance, and pension. All perfectly fine, but to Farnham it seemed stupid and petty to spend your day this way, as if there were no processing center to do it for you, or as if it made mistakes. It was lucky that Kropivà didn’t talk, but even so his very presence made Farnham disconcertingly uncomfortable.
At six o’clock on the dot Farnham woke up Himamoto, and Kropivà went off to bed without even a parting grumble. In the stern, through the rain made by the blowers, you could see the sky clearing, a delicate green glow announcing the day. Farnham manned the radio, and Himamoto, still sleepy, sat at the wheel. At least now they could talk a little.
“How long until we arrive?” Himamoto asked.
“Three or four hours.”
“And what’s the place called?”
“Recuenco. It’s the third time you’ve asked me that.”
“I know, but I keep forgetting.”
“Never mind. One place is no different from the next. In Recuenco we’ve got to get rid of fifty tons.”
“Should I reset the counter to zero?”
“I already did it while you were asleep. By the way, do you know you snore like the devil?”
“It’s not true,” Himamoto protested nobly. “I don’t snore.”
“Next time I’ll record it,” Farnham threatened good-naturedly.
Himamoto washed, shaved with an exquisite hand razor (evidently the custom in his country), and went to get a cup of coffee and a sandwich from the vending machine. He glanced at Kropivà. “He’s already asleep,” he noted, with a hint of satisfaction in his voice.
“He’s a strange one,” Farnham said. “But that’s all right. I’ve seen quite a few and he’s better than the ones who drink or take drugs or go wild in every port. There’s no one like him to supervise the loading and unloading of the milk and the kerosene, or to deal with all those customs obstacles and file the report of proceedings to the base. Because, you know, sometimes we come back with money in five or six different currencies and we have to account for every last cent. He’s extraordinary with these kinds of things, the equivalent of three computers.” Harmony and mutual respect, he thought, are first on board.
Behind them the sun was rising and immediately they were encircled by two radiant and concentric rainbows. “Oh beautiful! Very beautiful,” Himamoto exclaimed. His English was fluent and correct, but he lacked the words to express emotions.
“Yes, it’s beautiful,” Farnham responded. “But it’s always the same, at every sunrise and every sunset. You get used to it. It comes from the water the engines send into the air. Even the sun looks wet, do you see?”
For half an hour there was silence. Because he knew he was distracted, Himamoto paid extra attention to monitoring the course and the instruments. He saw a mark on the radar screen twenty miles off the bow. Instinctively, he grabbed the wheel.
“Don’t worry,” Farnham said, “it’ll do it all by itself.” In fact, with no jerks or jolts the rafter spontaneously veered to the right, bypassing the ship or the piece of wreckage or the iceberg, whatever it was, and then returned ponderously to its route.
“Tell me,” Himamoto said, “have you tried it?”
“It doesn’t taste like anything,” Farnham replied.
After a few minutes, Himamoto persisted: “I still want to try it myself. At home they ask me about it.”
“Nothing wrong with that. But then you should try it now, while he’s asleep. Otherwise he’s likely to make you sign a withdrawal voucher for it.”
“Where do I take it from?”
“From the tap below the purifier. But as I told you it’s got no flavor. It tastes like paper towel. Go ahead. I’ll stay at the controls.”
Himamoto took a plastic cup from the dispenser and, tripping over bright-painted valves and pipes, made his way to the tap.
“Well, it’s neither good nor bad, but it fills the stomach.”
“Of course, it’s not intended for us. It’s good for those who are hungry. You feel sorry for them, especially the children. You must have seen them, too, in those films at the training course. But the bottom line is that these people don’t deserve better, because they’re lazy, slovenly, and good for nothing. You wouldn’t want us to be bringing them champagne.”
A buzzer sounded and a green square lit up before Farnham. “Damn! I thought so. Another urgent request. Shangeehaydhang, Philippines. Who knows how you pronounce that one. 12° 5' 43" North, 124° 48' 46" East. Buck up, there’ll be no weekend in Rio. It’s at the other end of the Earth.”
“So why are they reporting it to us?”
“Despite everything, it seems we’re the closest, or have the lightest
load, or the other three are being resupplied. The fact is that they always keep us moving, and it’s understandable, because a rafter costs more than a lunar mission and the milk costs almost nothing. This is why they give us only three minutes to unload it. Even if there’s a little spillage it doesn’t matter. What’s essential is that we don’t lose any time.”
“It’s too bad it goes to waste. When I was a kid, I knew what it was like to be hungry.”
“We nearly always waste some. Sometimes we’re able to warn them by radio, and the job is well done, neat and clean. But, in the majority of cases, like the ones we’re going to resupply now, they don’t even know what a radio is, and so we make do as well as we can.”
Behind a bank of clouds on the left they could just glimpse a mountain range; one tall, conical snow-covered peak stood out.
“Once I went to the place where they make it. It’s not too far from here. There’s a vast forest, as big as Texas, and a super-rafter that travels back and forth across it. As it moves, it mows down all the plants in its path, leaving an empty wake thirty meters wide. The plants end up inside the hold, where they are chopped, cooked, and washed with an acid. Then the proteins are extracted, and they, in fact, constitute what we call the milk, though its official name is FOD. What’s left of the plants then supplies energy to the machine itself. It’s an excellent operation, worth seeing, and not too difficult to carry out. Every two years, they organize a trip as a reward for pilots with no penalties. I even took photos—when we’re back at base I’ll show you. It’s a guided tour, and they explain everything to you, even about the detectors that sense concentrations in the atmosphere of acetone—a chemical that’s produced in the intestines of starving people and causes foul breath—and then transmit signals back to the base computers.”
A few minutes later, they both saw a large barrier appear on the radar screen. It was only seven miles away, but the haze covering the sea prevented them from seeing it. “We’re there,” Farnham said. “Maybe I should take over the controls and you go wake up Kropivà.”
The platform vibrations increased; in the same moment the torrent surrounding them suddenly ceased and was replaced by a whirling cloud of yellow dust, sand, and bits of foliage. A chain of steep cliffs became visible. Farnham lifted the rafter to a safe altitude, and a few seconds afterward, in a small barren plain, the village of Recuenco appeared, made up of some fifty mud-and-gray-stone huts with palm-leaf roofs. Tiny human figures crawled in all directions, like ants in an uncovered anthill, some busy with picks and shovels. Farnham stopped the rafter directly over the village square. The platform’s shadow covered the entire village.
“Let’s go outside,” he said.
The three of them put on their coveralls and goggles and went out. They were struck, as if by a sledgehammer, by the heat, the noise, and the wind. They could communicate only by gesturing, or through bullhorns. Despite their coveralls, they felt rocks and splinters hailing down on them. Grabbing the handrails, Farnham dragged himself to the external controls, and noticed that the bolts fastening the panel to the deck were loose. He yelled to Himamoto to get the 24 mm. wrench and told Kropivà to prepare to launch the milk and the flyers. He lowered the machine until the six blowers were a few meters above the huts, then he released the hoses from their housing. Looking down over the railing, amid the eddies of suffocating dust, he saw that a pit had been dug in the middle of the square. He maneuvered so that at least two of the central hoses were directly over it. He then told Himamoto to tightly secure the panel bolts and Kropivà to start unloading.
In less than two minutes the counter reached 50,000 liters. Kropivà stopped the flow and launched the instruction flyers, which scattered in all directions like frightened birds. Farnham revved up the blowers, the rafter rose, first vertically, then obliquely, a little lighter and more manageable than before, and headed across a desolate mountain ridge. In the midst of the stony expanse, Farnham saw a small green plateau where a herd of goats was grazing. There was nothing else alive, nothing green, for miles around.
Kropivà filled out the delivery form, stamped it, signed it, had the other two sign it, then went back to sleep. Himamoto took over the controls but immediately slapped his hand against his forehead. “The wrench!” he said, and without his coveralls or goggles sprinted out onto the platform. He came back in almost immediately. “It’s gone. It must have fallen overboard.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Farnham said. “We have a spare.”
Kropivà added, “We must make a written report declaring the loss. I’m sorry, but it will have to be deducted from your salary.”
His Own Maker
To Italo Calvino
It’s better to be clear right from the start. I who am speaking to you am today a man, one of you. I’m no different from you, the living, except in one respect: my memory is superior to yours.
You forget almost everything. I know there are those who believe that nothing truly is forgotten, that every bit of knowledge, every sensation, every leaf from every tree that you have ever seen since infancy can be evoked under exceptional circumstances—following a trauma, a mental illness, maybe even in a dream. But what sort of memories are these which don’t obey your recall? What use are they?
More enduring is that other memory, the one inscribed in your cells, through which your blond hair is the memory (yes, the “souvenir,” the material memory) of other blond hair, all the way back to the ancient time when the seed of your unknown ancestor mutated inside him—without his knowledge. These things you have registered, “recorded,” and you remember them well, but, I repeat, what good are they if you can’t evoke them? This is not the meaning of the verb “to remember,” as it is universally spoken and understood.
For me it is different. I remember everything, and by that I mean everything that has happened to me since my infancy. I can rekindle a memory whenever I like and recount it. Even my cellular memory is better than yours. In fact, it’s complete. I can remember everything that ever happened to every one of my ancestors going back in a straight line to the most remote past, to the time, I believe, when the first of my ancestors was given (or had himself given) a differentiated brain. Therefore when I say “I,” it’s richer than yours, and reaches back deep in time. You, reader, will surely have known your father, or will at least know much about him. You will perhaps have known your grandfather, less likely your great-grandfather. A few among you might be able to reach back in time five or ten generations, through documents, personal accounts, or portraits, and you will find men who are different in their customs, character, and language, but still men. But ten thousand generations? Or ten million generations? Line them up and look at them: which of your paternal ancestors is not man but almost man? Which is no longer a mammal? And what did he look like?
“I” know all this because I have done and been through all that my ancestors have done and been through. I inherited their memories, hence they and I are one. The first ancestor mutated felicitously, acquiring this virtue of hereditary memory, and he transmitted it all the way down to me, with the result that I can say “I” with this unusual breadth.
I even know the why and wherefore of each variation, small or large. Now, if I know that something must be done, I want to do it, and it is then done, isn’t it as if I had done it? Didn’t I, in fact, do it? If I am dazzled by the dawn and want to close my eyes, and my eyes close, didn’t I close my eyes? But say I need to detach my belly from the ground, say I want to detach it, and over the millennia it is detached, and I no longer creep but walk, isn’t this my own work? I am my own maker, and this is my diary.
–109. Yesterday the water level went down another two millimeters. I can’t possibly stay in the water forever. I came to this conclusion a while ago. On the other hand, to equip myself for a life in the air is quite an undertaking. It’s easy to say: “Train yourself, go ashore, introflex your gills.” And there are a lot of other obstacles. For example, legs: I’ll have to calcula
te those with sizable safety margins, because in here I weigh hardly anything, or, rather, I weigh what I want, but once on land I’ll have to deal with my full weight. And what about my skin?
–108. My wife’s got it into her head that she wants to keep the eggs in her body. She says she’s studying a system for rearing the little ones in one of the cavities within her own organism, and then, once they’re autonomous, pushing them out. But she doesn’t feel right about suddenly separating from them like that. She says that she’d suffer too much, and she has the idea for a total nourishment—sugars, proteins, vitamins, fats—and intends to manufacture it herself. Of course, she’d have to seriously curtail the number of little ones, but she’s expressed to me her strong opinion that to raise children properly, until they’re able to truly take care of themselves, it would be better to have five or ten rather than ten thousand or a hundred thousand. You know women: when it comes to the little ones, they don’t know reason. They’d throw themselves into the fire for them, or let themselves be devoured. In fact, some do let themselves be devoured. Not long ago, I heard about a beetle from the late Permian age and, well, the larvae’s first food is actually the mother’s cadaver. I hope my wife won’t indulge in such excesses, but in the meantime this idea of hers—and she’s only been telling me about it a little at a time, so as not to shock me—amounts to pretty much the same thing. Tonight, she announced that she’s succeeded in modifying six epithelial glands to produce some drops of a white liquid that she deems suitable for the purpose.