The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  –5 × 107. We landed. There wasn’t much choice: the sea gets colder and saltier by the day, and it’s filling up with creatures that I’m not too fond of—fish with teeth, more than six meters long, and other, smaller ones but poisonous and quite voracious. My wife and I decided, however, not to burn our bridges. You never know: maybe someday it will be a good idea for us to go back into the water. I therefore thought it best to maintain the same specific weight as seawater, which meant I had to fatten up a bit in order to offset the weight of bones. I also tried to keep my plasma at the same osmotic pressure as seawater, and with more or less the same ionic composition. Even my wife recognized the advantages. When we go swimming in order to clean off or exercise, we float with no trouble, we can submerge ourselves with no effort, and our skin doesn’t wrinkle.

  There are things that are both good and not so good about staying in the dry air. It’s more uncomfortable, but it’s also more entertaining and more challenging. As for locomotion, I can easily say that it’s now a problem solved. I first tried to wriggle across the sand as one does when swimming, then I even reabsorbed my fins, which gave me more trouble than anything else. It worked all right, but I could never attain satisfactory speeds, and it was difficult to move, for example, across smooth rocks. For now, I still propel myself by wriggling on my belly, but soon I intend to grow myself some legs: two, four, or six—I haven’t decided yet.

  More challenging, I said. You see and hear more things, smells, colors, sounds. You become more versatile, prepared, more intelligent. For this reason, someday I would like to have my head erect. From up there you can see farther. I also have a little project regarding my front limbs, and I hope I can get to work on it soon.

  As for my skin, I’ve found it’s insufficient for use as a respiratory organ, which is a shame, because I was counting on it. But, in any case, it turned out all right. It’s soft and porous and at the same time nearly impermeable; it’s magnificent at resisting the sun, water, and aging, is easily pigmented, and contains a great quantity of glands and nerve endings. I don’t think I’ll need to keep on changing it, as I’ve had to do until recently; it’s no longer a problem.

  There’s a big, mind-boggling problem, however, when it comes to reproduction. My wife says it’s simple: not many children, pregnancy, breast-feeding. I’ve tried to support her in this, because I love her, but also because the lion’s share of the job is hers. But when she decided to convert to Mammalianism, she certainly didn’t realize what a mess she was getting herself into.

  I told her: “Be careful. I don’t care if our kids are three meters tall, weigh half a ton, and can crunch a bison’s femur with their teeth. But I do want my kids to have quick reflexes and well-developed senses, and above all to be alert and full of imagination, so that maybe, in time, they’ll be able to invent the wheel and the alphabet. For this they’re going to need lots of brains and therefore a big skull, so how are they supposed to get out when it’s time to be born? Giving birth will end up causing you a lot of pain.”

  But when she gets an idea in her head, she doesn’t budge. She got busy, tried different methods, made a mess of it several times, and finally chose the simplest solution: she widened her pelvis (hers is bigger than mine now) and she made the skull of the little one soft and supple. In short, she’s able to give birth easily enough, maybe with some help, at least nine times out of ten. It is, however, painful, and she admits that I was right about this.

  –2 × 107. Dear Diary, today I had a lucky escape. A great beast, I don’t know what it’s called, came out of a swamp and chased me for almost an hour. As soon as I caught my breath, I came to a conclusion: in this world it’s imprudent to go around unarmed. I thought about it, made a few sketches, and then came to a decision. I made myself a beautiful protective armor out of bone, four horns on my forehead, nails on my fingers, and eight poisonous spikes on the top of my tail. You won’t believe it, but I made it all using only carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, with a pinch of sulfur. I’m sure I’m being obsessive, but I don’t like novelties when it comes to construction materials. For example, I find metals unreliable. Maybe it’s because I don’t understand inorganic chemistry very well. I’m much more at ease with carbon, colloids, and macro-molecules.

  –107. Among the many innovations on Earth are the plants. Grass, bushes, algae, trees thirty or fifty meters high. Everything is green, everything sprouts and grows and turns toward the sun. Plants seem stupid, yet they steal energy from the Sun, carbon from the air, salts from the earth, and grow for a thousand years without spinning or weaving or slaughtering one another as we do.

  There are those who eat plants, and then there are those who observe them, then eat those who eat the plants. On the one hand, the latter system is more efficient; you can quickly gorge yourself on big, beautiful molecules without wasting time on synthesis, which not everyone is even capable of. On the other hand, it’s a difficult life, because no one likes to be eaten, and so everyone defends himself as best he can, either with classic methods (like mine) or by more imaginative means, such as changing color, causing an electric shock, or stinking. The simpletons train themselves to run.

  As for myself, it was rather a struggle to get used to grass and leaves: I had to elongate my intestine and split my stomach in two, and then I even made a contract with certain protozoa I met in the process. I agree to keep them warm in my belly and they break down the cellulose on my behalf. I never could find a way to get used to wood, though, which is a shame, because there’s a lot of it.

  I forgot to mention that for a while now I’ve had a pair of eyes. It wasn’t exactly an invention, but a series of little tricks. Initially, I made myself two black spots, but with them I was able only to distinguish light from dark. It became apparent that I needed lenses. At first, I tried to make them out of horn, or from some polysaccharide, but then I changed my mind and decided to make them from water, which ultimately was the obvious, but brilliant, solution to the problem. Water is transparent, cheap, and I’m very familiar with it. In fact, when I came out of the sea (I don’t remember if I’ve already written this here), I myself consisted of a good two-thirds water. And it’s even rather amusing to consider that this 70 percent water feels, thinks, says “I,” and writes a diary. To make a long story short, the lenses made of water came out beautifully (I had to add only a little gelatin). I even managed to give them a variable focus and completed the job by adding a diaphragm. And I used not a milligram of any element other than my preferred four.

  –5 × 106. As for the trees, by dint of living among them, and occasionally even on top of them, my wife and I grew to like them. What I mean is that we liked them not only as a source of food but for other reasons as well. They are beautiful structures—but we can discuss their aesthetic qualities another time. They are a marvel of engineering, and virtually immortal. Whoever said that death is an integral part of life wasn’t thinking of trees—every spring they’re young again. I need to give them some serious thought. Wouldn’t they actually be the best model? Think about it. While I’m writing, right in front of me is an oak, thirty tons of good dense wood. Well, it’s been standing tall and growing for three hundred years, never has to hide or flee, no one devours it, and it has never devoured anyone else. That’s not all. I recently realized that the trees breathe for us, and that you can safely live on them.

  Yesterday, in fact, something strange happened to me. I was idly looking at my hands and feet—just to be clear, by now mine are made more or less like yours. Well, they’re made for trees. With my forefinger and thumb, I can make a circle capable of grabbing a large branch up to five centimeters. If it’s fifteen centimeters, I can do it with both hands, thumb to thumb, finger to finger, and they still make a perfect circle. For even bigger branches, up to fifty or sixty centimeters, I can do it like this, with my two arms making a circle with my chest. The same is pretty much true for my legs and feet, and the arch of my foot molds perfectly to a branch.

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sp; “But this is what you wanted!” you’ll say. Sure, but you know how things can happen without your really paying attention. It’s true that I made myself all by myself, but I changed the models many times. I did various experiments, and sometimes I forgot to eliminate certain details—above all, when they didn’t bother me too much. Or maybe I kept them on purpose, the way you do with ancestors’ portraits. For example, I have a little bone in my auricle that’s of no use to me whatsoever anymore, because it’s been quite a while since I’ve needed to orient my ears. But I’m very fond of it, and wouldn’t let it atrophy for all the gold in the world.

  –106. For some time now, my wife and I have understood that walking is the answer, but that walking on four legs is only half an answer. It’s obvious that someone as tall as I am who stands erect will dominate the horizon with a radius of around a dozen kilometers, as if master of the land. But there’s more: my hands would be free. They already are, but until now I hadn’t considered using them for anything other than climbing trees. Well, I just realized that with a few slight adjustments they can be used for various other little jobs that I’ve been planning for some time.

  I like conveniences and innovations. For example, tearing off branches and leaves to make a bed and a roof; sharpening a shell against a slate slab, and with that sharpened shell whittling down an ash branch, and using that smooth and tapered branch to fell a moose; and with that moose pelt making clothes for the winter and a cover to sleep under; and with the bones making a comb for my wife, a bodkin and an amulet for me, and a toy moose for my son, so he can play with it and learn to hunt. I have also noticed that in the process of making things you think of all sorts of other things to make. I often feel that I’m thinking more with my hands than with my brain.

  Not that it’s easy, but with my hands I can also break off a flint shard and tie it to the top of a stick and make myself a hatchet, and with the hatchet I can defend my territory, or maybe even expand it. In other words I can bash in the heads of certain other “I”s who are getting in the way, or who are courting my wife, or who are only whiter or blacker or more or less hairy than I am, or speak with a different accent.

  This diary might as well end here. With these last transformations and inventions of mine, the job was pretty much done. From that point on, nothing fundamental happened to me, nor do I think anything much will happen to me in the future.

  The Servant

  In the ghetto, wisdom and knowledge are cheap virtues. They’re so widespread that even the cobbler and the porter can boast of them, but don’t, since they’re really no longer virtues, just as washing your hands before you eat isn’t a virtue. Therefore, even though he was wiser and more learned than anyone else, Rabbi Aryeh of Prague owed his fame not to these qualities but to another, far rarer quality: his strength.

  He was as strong as a man could be both in flesh and in spirit. It was said that he defended the Jews from a pogrom using no weapons except the force of his large hands. They also said that he was married four times, and four times widowed, and that he had a great number of children, one of whom was the progenitor of Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein, and of all those who in the old heart of Europe pursued the truth in bold new ways. He married for the fourth time when he was seventy years old. At seventy-five, while serving as Rabbi of Mikulov, in that holy place Moravia, he accepted the appointment in Prague. At eighty, with his own hands he carved and erected the tomb that remains a destination for pilgrims to this day. This tomb has a crevice on top of its coffer: anyone who writes down a wish and slips it into the cleft—be he Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or pagan—has that wish granted within a year. Rabbi Aryeh lived in full vigor of body and spirit until he was a hundred and five. At ninety, he undertook the task of building a Golem.

  Building a Golem is not in itself a difficult undertaking, and many have tried it. In fact, a Golem is only a little more than nothing; it’s a portion of matter, or rather of chaos, closed up in a human or animal likeness. In short, it’s a simulacrum and, as such, good for nothing. Actually, it’s something essentially suspicious and to be avoided, since it’s written that “you shall not make for yourselves an idol . . . nor worship them.” The Golden Calf was a Golem, and so was Adam, and so are we.

  The difference among Golems lies in the precision and thoroughness of the instructions that guide their construction. If all they say is: “Take 240 pounds of clay, shape it into the form of a man, then put the simulacrum in the kiln until it has set,” the result will be an idol, such as Gentiles make. It will take longer to make a man, because the instructions are more numerous, but not infinite, having been inscribed in each one of our tiny seeds. Rabbi Aryeh was well aware of this, since he had seen many children born and raised and had contemplated their features. Now, Aryeh was not a blasphemer, and he wasn’t proposing to create a second Adam. He intended to construct not a man, but, rather, a po’el—let’s call him a worker—a servant, faithful and strong, if not too discerning: in other words, what’s called in his Bohemian language a robot. In fact, man can (and at times must) work hard and fight, but these are not properly human tasks. For such undertakings a robot is appropriate. He’s something more and better than a bell-ringing puppet, like the ones that march across the façade of Prague’s Town Hall when the hour strikes.

  A servant, but as strong as the Rabbi, heir to his power, able to defend and help the people of Israel when Aryeh’s days had reached their end. In order to achieve this, instructions were required of a more complex nature than those needed to make an idol that sits inactive and sneering in its niche, but not so complex as those needed for creating a second Adam—“a being made in the image of God.” You needn’t search for these instructions in the whirlwind of a starry sky, or in a crystal ball, or in the gibberish of the Python Spirit; they are already written, hidden in the books of the Law, all you have to do is read and choose—that is, select, elect. Not one letter, not one mark on the scrolls of the Law is there by chance; to one who knows how to read them, all appears clear, any undertaking, past, present, and future; the formula and the destiny of humanity and of every man, your own, and those of all flesh, down to the blind worm that makes its way in the mud. Aryeh made his calculations and produced the formula he desired for a Golem, one that would not surpass human abilities. Its composition filled thirty-nine pages, the exact number of his children, and the coincidence pleased him.

  The question of the prohibition against making idols remained. As is well-known, one must “put a hedge around the Law,” meaning that it is prudent to interpret precepts and prohibitions in their broadest sense, because, while an error due to an excess of diligence isn’t damaging, a transgression never heals, for there is no atonement. Nevertheless, perhaps owing to the Jews’ long cohabitation with Gentiles, in Prague’s ghetto a lenient interpretation had prevailed. You will not make images of God, because God does not have an image, but why shouldn’t you make images of the world around you? Why should the image of a crow tempt you to idolatry more than the crow itself, outside your window, black and impudent in the snow? So, if you’re called Wolf, you’re permitted to draw a wolf on the door of your house, and if you’re called Baer, a bear. If you have the luck to be called Kohn, and therefore to belong to that blessed family, why shouldn’t you have two blessing hands carved on the lintel over your doorway, and (as late as possible) on your tombstone? And if instead you’re a Fischbaum, you’ll be happy with an image of a fish (perhaps upside down and caught among the branches of a tree), or an apple tree laden with herrings instead of apples. If, then, you are an Aryeh, or lion, a shield appropriate for you is a shield carved with a tousled young lion that leaps at the sky, as if to attack it, gnashing his teeth and baring his claws, just like the many lions chosen by the Gentiles, among whom you live, for their insignia.

  In the cellar of his house on Široká, Rabbi Aryeh-Lion serenely began his work. The clay was brought to him at night by two of his disciples, along with water fr
om the Vltava and coal to feed the kiln. Day by day—rather, night by night—the Golem took shape, and was ready in the year 1579 of the Common Era, 5339 of the Creation. Now, 5339 isn’t exactly a prime number, but almost, as it’s the product of 19, which is the number of the Sun and of gold, multiplied by the 281 bones that make up our bodies.

  He was a giant with a human figure from the belt upward. Even this has an explanation: the belt is a frontier, only above the belt is man made in God’s image, while below he is a beast. For this reason, a wise man does not forget to wear it. Below the belt the Golem was truly a Golem—that is, a fragment of chaos. Behind his chain mail, which hung to the ground like an apron, all that could be glimpsed was a solid jumble of clay, metal, and glass. His arms were gnarled and strong, like oak branches. His hands, fidgety and bony, were modeled on Aryeh’s own. His face wasn’t truly human, but more lion-like, because a saviour should inspire fear, and because Aryeh wished to include his signature.

  So this was the figure of the Golem, yet the greater part remained to be done, since he lacked a spirit. Aryeh deliberated for a long time: should he give him blood, and with the blood all the passions of animal and man? No, since this servant would be excessively strong, giving him the gift of blood would be unwise. Aryeh wanted a faithful servant, not a rebel. He denied him blood, and, with the blood, Will, Eve’s curiosity, and the desire for experience; but he infused him with other passions, and did so easily, since all he had to do was draw upon his own. He gave him the anger of Moses and the prophets, the obedience of Abraham, the arrogance of Cain, the courage of Joshua, and even a little of the madness of Ahab. But he did not give him Jacob’s saintly perspicacity, or Solomon’s wisdom, or Isaiah’s clarity, because he did not want to create a rival.