by Primo Levi
Close to the end of the third year of the contract, Laura discovered that she was expecting a baby, and she was very happy, even if with the recent increase in the cost of living their financial situation was not bright. They went to Rovati to propose a renewal, but they found him rather less congenial than he had once been; he offered them a ridiculous sum for a long and ambiguous text featuring Danish films of a certain kind. They refused, in mutual agreement, and went down to the graphics center to have their inscriptions removed. Despite the reassurances of the girl in the white coat, however, Laura’s forehead remained rough and nubby, as if it had been scalded, and upon closer observation the stylized lily was still distinguishable, like the faded Fascist graffiti on walls in the countryside.
The baby was born normally, at term. He was robust and beautiful, but, inexplicably, on his forehead was written “Homogenized Cavicchioli.” They brought him to the agency, and Rovati, having made the appropriate inquiries, declared that such a company title did not exist in any trade directory and was unknown by the Chamber of Commerce, and therefore could offer them absolutely nothing, not even any kind of compensation for damages. He nonetheless gave them a voucher for the graphics center so that the writing on the infant’s forehead could be removed free of charge.
1. A soccer team in Milan.
2. Italo Zilioli, b. 1941, a professional cyclist.
Best Is Water
In the solitude of the laboratory, Boero was debating with himself, but could come to no conclusion. In order to get that post, he’d worked and studied hard for two years, and he’d even done a few things he was rather ashamed of, like playing up to Curti, for whom he had little respect. In front of Curti, he had even (deliberately or ingenuously, he wasn’t sure even about this) cast doubt on the ability and qualifications of two of his colleagues and rivals.
Now he’d made it, he was a legitimate insider. His territory was small, but his own: a stool, a desk, half a cabinet of glassware, a square meter of a worktable, a lab coat, and a hanger to hang it on. He had made it, yet none of it was as marvelous as he had expected it to be; it wasn’t even fun. In fact, it was rather sad to think (a) that just being in a laboratory didn’t make you feel mobilized, a soldier on the scientific front; and (b) that, at least for a year, he would have to dedicate himself to a diligent and mindless job, diligent precisely because it was mindless, a job that required diligence alone, a job that had already been done by at least ten others, totally unknown, all of whom were probably dead, having died without any name greater than the one lost among thirty thousand others on the vertiginous list of authors found in Landolt’s tables.
Today, for example, he was to verify the value of the coefficient of viscosity of water. Yes, sir, of distilled water. Can you imagine a more tedious job? Washing the viscometer twenty times a day is a job for a launderer, not a young physicist. It’s a job for an accountant, a wonk, an insect. And that’s not all. The fact is that the values found today don’t match those of yesterday. These are things that happen, but no one will outright admit to them. There’s a difference, small but certain, obstinate in the way that only facts know how to be obstinate. The natural malevolence of inanimate things is, after all, well established. And so the machine is washed again, the water distilled for the fourth time, the thermostat checked for the sixth time, you whistle so as not to curse, and the measurements are taken again.
He spent all afternoon repeating the measurements but, not wanting to ruin his evening, didn’t do the calculations. He did them the following morning and, sure enough,* the difference was still there, and not only that, there was even a slight increase. Now, it should be said that Landolt’s tables are sacred: they are the Truth. One is given the task of retaking the measurements out of sadism, Boero suspected. Only the fifth and fourth significant figures have to be verified, but if the third doesn’t correspond, and this was his case, what the hell are you supposed to do? To doubt Landolt, it should be said, is far worse than to doubt the Gospels. If you are wrong, you are smothered with ridicule and risk your career, and if you are right (which is unlikely) you don’t get any more credit or glory than, in fact, the accountant, the wonk, and the insect. At the very most you got the pathetic joy of being right when another was wrong, which lasted as long as a morning.
He went to talk about it with Curti, who was predictably furious. He insisted that he retake the measurements. Boero told him that he had already done so numerous times and that he’d had it up to here with them. Curti told him to change careers. Boero walked down the stairs convinced that he would do just that, seriously, radically. Curti could find himself another slave. He didn’t go back to the Institute for an entire week.
Brooding is unchristian, painful, boring, and generally not worth it. He knew it, but still for four days he’d done nothing else. He tried all the variations, went over all the things he had done, heard, and said. He examined the causes and effects of each and every one. He raved and negotiated. He stretched out on the gray sand beside the Sangone River, smoking one cigarette after another in an attempt to calm down and regain his sense of reality. He wondered if he really had burned his bridges, if he really would have to change careers, or if he should go back to Curti and come to some agreement. Or if, perhaps, it would make even more sense for him just to take his job back, flick his thumb against the scale, and falsify the results.
The sound of the cicadas distracted him and he became lost in observation of the eddies forming around his feet. The phrase “Best is water” came to mind, but who had written it? Pindar, maybe, or another of those worthy types you study in high school.1 In any case, on closer inspection, it appeared that something was wrong with the water. He’d known that river for many years, he’d played in it as a child, and later, exactly to this same spot, he’d brought a girl, and then another. Well, no doubt about it, the water was strange. He touched it, tasted it. It was cool, clear, had no taste, gave off its usual faint marshy smell, and yet it was strange. It seemed less mobile, less lively. The little waterfalls weren’t creating air bubbles, there were fewer ripples on the surface, even the rumble of waves on the shore was different, dulled, as if muffled. He went toward the deep part of the river and threw a rock into it. The radiating ripples were slow and lazy, and dissipated long before reaching the shore. He remembered that the municipal aqueduct water intake system was not far from there. Suddenly his sluggishness disappeared and he felt as keen and as shrewd as a snake. He had to get a water sample. He searched his pockets in vain, then climbed up the bank to where he had left his motorcycle. In one of the two saddlebags he found a sheet of plastic that he sometimes used to protect the seat from rain. He made a little container out of it, filled it with water, tied it tightly, and then took off like a rocket for the laboratory. The water was grotesque: 1.300 centipoise at 20°C, 30 percent higher than normal.
• • •
The water of the Sangone was viscous from its sources to its confluence with the Po. The water of all the other rivers and streams was normal. Boero had made up with Curti—actually it was Curti who had made up with Boero, forced to do so by the facts. They quickly and furiously drafted a paper under both their names, but when it was in proofs they had to write another, even faster and more furiously, because in the meantime the water of both the Chisone and the Pellice had started to become viscous, and the Sangone’s water had reached a value of 1.450 centipoise. These waters were unchanged by distillation, dialysis, and filtration through absorption columns. If subjected to electrolysis with a recombination of hydrogen and oxygen, water identical to the original was obtained. After lengthy electrolysis under elevated tension, the viscosity increased even more.
That was April. In May the Po, too, became abnormal—first only in a few stretches, then through the entire course of the river to its mouth. The water’s viscosity was by now visible to the untrained eye, the currents flowing silently and sluggishly, without a whisper, like a spill of degraded oil. The river’s upper parts were c
logged, and tended to flood, while farther down it was low and where it branched out near Pavia and Mantua had silted over in a matter of a few weeks.
The suspended sediments settled much more slowly than usual. By mid-June the delta, seen from the air, was surrounded by a yellowish halo with a radius of twenty kilometers. At the end of June, it rained all over Europe; in northern Italy, Austria, and Hungary the rain was viscous, had trouble draining off, and stagnated in the fields, which then turned into swamps. On all the plains, the harvests were destroyed, while in zones with even a mild incline the crops flourished more than usual.
The anomaly rapidly expanded in the course of the summer, by a mechanism that defied every attempt at explanation: viscous rains were reported in Montenegro, Denmark, and Lithuania, while a second epicenter was looming over the Atlantic, off Morocco. No instrument was needed to distinguish these rains from normal ones—the drops were heavy and large, like little blisters, cleaving the air with a slight hiss and squashing onto the ground with a particular crackling sound. Drops of two or three grams were collected. Doused with this water, asphalt became gluey and it was impossible to circulate on it with rubber-wheeled vehicles.
Within a few months, in the contaminated zones all, or almost all, the trees with tall trunks were dead, replaced by weeds and shrubs. The fact was attributed to the difficulty the viscous water had in ascending the trunks’ capillary veins. In the cities, civic life continued almost normally for some months, though it was observed that there was a diminished flow in all the pipes carrying drinkable water; and bathtubs and sinks also took longer to drain. Washing machines became unusable: they filled with foam as soon as they were switched on, and their motors burned out.
At first, it seemed that the animal world offered a protective barrier against the entry of the viscous water into the human organism, but that hope was short-lived.
The current situation was established within little more than a year. Defenses gave way much earlier than was expected. All the body’s humors thickened and became defiled, just as the seawater, the rivers, and the clouds had. The sick are dead, and now all of us are sick—our hearts, miserable pumps created for another epoch’s water, tire themselves out from dawn to dawn trying to push the viscous blood through our network of veins. We die at thirty, or forty maximum, of edema, of sheer exhaustion, of a constant fatigue, merciless and unabated, which weighs upon us from the day we’re born and prevents any rapid or sustained movement.
Like the rivers, we, too, are sluggish. The food that we eat and the water we drink must wait hours before it can become absorbed into our bodies, and this renders us inert and heavy. We don’t cry. The lacrimal liquid remains uselessly in our eyes and doesn’t form into teardrops but oozes like a serum denying us all dignity and relief from our tears. Before we knew what was happening, we were ambushed by this evil, and now all of Europe is afflicted. In America and other places, they are only beginning to suspect the nature of the water’s alteration, but they are a long way from finding a remedy. In the meantime, it’s been reported that the level of the Great Lakes is rapidly increasing, that the whole of the Amazon is turning into a swamp, that the upper Hudson continually floods, destroying its banks, and that the rivers and lakes of Alaska freeze into an ice that is no longer brittle but as elastic and strong as steel. The Caribbean Sea no longer has waves.
1. The phrase “Best is water” is from the opening line of Pindar’s First Olympian Ode.
CONTENTS
Argon
Hydrogen
Zinc
Iron
Potassium
Nickel
Lead
Mercury
Phosphorus
Gold
Cerium
Chromium
Sulfur
Titanium
Arsenic
Nitrogen
Tin
Uranium
Silver
Vanadium
Carbon
Ibergekumeneh tsores iz gut tsu dertsailen.
(It’s good to tell past troubles.)
Argon
In the air we breathe are the so-called inert gasses. They bear curious Greek names of scholarly origin, which signify “the New,” “the Hidden,” “the Lazy,” “the Foreigner.” In fact, they are so inert, so satisfied with their condition, that they don’t interfere in any chemical reaction or combine with any other element, and so they passed unobserved for centuries: not until 1962 did a chemist of goodwill, after prolonged and ingenious efforts, manage to compel the Foreigner (xenon) to combine fleetingly with the avid, vivacious fluorine, and the enterprise appeared so extraordinary that he was awarded the Nobel Prize. These gasses are also called noble, and here it could be debated whether all the nobles are inert and all the inerts noble; finally, they are also called rare, although one of them, argon, the Lazy, is present in the air in the respectable amount of 1 percent—that is, twenty or thirty times as abundant as carbon dioxide, without which there would be no trace of life on this planet.
From the little I know of my forebears they resemble these gasses. They were not all physically inert, because that was not granted to them: rather, they were, or had to be, fairly active, in order to earn a living and because of a dominant morality according to which “if you don’t work you don’t eat”; but inert they undoubtedly were deep down, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty conversation, elegant, pedantic, and gratuitous argument. It can’t be coincidence if the activities attributed to them, while extremely varied, have in common something static, an attitude of dignified abstention, of voluntary (or accepted) relegation to the margin of the great river of life. Noble, inert, and rare: their history is meager compared with that of other illustrious Jewish communities of Italy and Europe. It seems that they came to Piedmont around 1500, from Spain through Provence, as certain characteristic toponymic surnames seem to demonstrate, such as Bedarida-Bédarrides, Momigliano-Montmélian, Segre (a tributary of the Ebro that flows past Lérida, in northeastern Spain), Foà-Foix, Cavaglion-Cavaillon, Migliau-Millau; the name of the small town of Lunel, near Bouche-du-Rhône, between Montpellier and Nîmes, was translated into the Hebrew Jaréakh (“moon” = luna), and from this came the Jewish-Piedmontese surname Jarach.
Rejected, or not warmly welcomed, in Turin, they settled in various agricultural towns in southern Piedmont, where they introduced the technology of silk; even in the most prosperous periods, they were never more than an extremely small minority. They were neither much loved nor much hated; no stories of notable persecutions have been handed down, yet a wall of suspicion, of undefined hostility, of scorn, must have kept them essentially separate from the rest of the population until many decades after the emancipation of 1848 and the consequent urban migration, if what my father told me about his childhood in Bene Vagienna is true: that his classmates, when school was out, used to mock him (benignly) by waving goodbye with a corner of their jacket held in a fist, so that it looked like a donkey ear, and chanting, “Ôrije ’d crin, ôrije d’asô, a ji ebreô ai piasô.” “Pig’s ears, mule’s ears, that’s what the Jews like.” The allusion to ears is arbitrary; the gesture was in origin a sacrilegious parody of the greeting that Jews exchange in the synagogue when they are called on to read the Bible, showing one another the hem of their prayer shawl, whose ribbons, minutely prescribed by ritual as to number, length, and form, are charged with mystic and religious significance. But the boys no longer knew the source of their gesture. I note here in passing that contempt for this prayer shawl is as ancient as anti-Semitism: from such shawls, confiscated from the deportees, the SS had underwear made, which was then distributed to the Jewish prisoners in the camps.
As always happens, the rejection was mutual: the minority erected a symmetrical barrier against all Christianity (gôjím, ñarelím: “the peoples,” “the uncircumcised”), reproducing, on a provincial scale and against a peacefully bucolic background, the epic and Biblical situation of the chosen people. On th
is fundamental displacement the good-humored wit of our uncles (barba) and aunts (magne) was nourished—wise patriarchs smelling of tobacco and domestic queens of the house, who still proudly called themselves ’l pòpôl d’Israél.
As for the term “uncle,” I should point out immediately that it has to be understood in a very broad sense. It’s customary among us to call “uncle” any old relative, however distant; and since all or almost all the old people of the community are, ultimately, our relatives, it follows that we have a large number of uncles. Then, in the case of uncles and aunts who reach an advanced age (a frequent occurrence: we are a long-lived people, ever since Noah), the attributive barba or, respectively, magna tends to slowly fuse with the name and, assisted by ingenious diminutives and an unsuspected phonetic analogy between Hebrew and Piedmontese, stiffens into complex, strange-sounding appellations that are handed down unvaried from generation to generation together with the deeds, the memories, and the sayings of those who bore them for so long. Thus originated Barbaiòtô (Uncle Elia), Barbasachín (Uncle Isacco), Magnaiéta (Aunt Maria), Barbamôisín (Uncle Mosè, of whom the story is told that he had his two lower incisors removed by a quack so that he could hold the stem of his pipe more comfortably), Barbasmelín (Uncle Samuel), Magnavigàia (Aunt Abigaille, who as a bride had entered Saluzzo riding a white mule, coming up the frozen Po from Carmagnola), Magnafôriña (Aunt Zefora, from the Hebrew Tzippora, which means “bird”: a splendid name). Nònô—grandfather—Sacòb must have belonged to an even remoter epoch; he had been in England to buy fabrics, and so wore “’na vestimenta a quàder,” a checked suit; his brother, Barbapartín (Uncle Bonaparte: a name still common among the Jews, in memory of the first, ephemeral emancipation, bestowed by Napoleon), had been demoted from the rank of uncle because the Lord, blessed be His name, had given him a wife so unbearable that he had himself baptized, became a monk, and went off as a missionary to China, to get as far away from her as possible.