by Primo Levi
Marchín, a former barba, had an unhappy love story, too. He had fallen in love with Susanna (which means “lily” in Hebrew), a lively and pious woman, who was the repository of an age-old recipe for making goose salami: the neck of the bird is itself used as the casing for these salamis, and, as a consequence, in the Lassòn Acòdesh (in the “holy language,” that is, in the dialect we are concerned with) three synonyms for “neck” survived. The first, mahané, is neutral, and of technical and generic use; the second, savàr, is used only in metaphors, like a rôta ’d savàr, at breakneck speed; the third, khanèc, is charged with meaning, alluding to the neck as a vital pathway that can be obstructed, occluded, or cut off, and is used in curses like c’at resta ant ’l khanèc, “may you choke on it,” and khanichésse, meaning “go hang yourself.” Marchín was Susanna’s salesclerk and assistant, both in the mysterious kitchen-workshop and in the shop, on whose shelves salamis, religious ornaments, amulets, and prayer books were all mixed up together. Susanna refused him, and Marchín took revenge in a detestable way, by selling the recipe for the salami to a goy. Probably this goy didn’t appreciate its value, since after Susanna’s death (which took place in historical times) it was impossible to find goose salami worthy of the name and the tradition. For this despicable retaliation Uncle Marchín lost the right to be called uncle.
Most distant of all, prodigiously inert, wrapped in a thick shroud of legend and improbability, and fossilized in every fiber of his rank of uncle, was Barbabramín of Chieri, the uncle of my maternal grandmother. He had become very wealthy at a young age, having acquired from the local nobility numerous farms, from Chieri to Astigiano; counting on his inheritance, his relatives squandered all their property in banquets, balls, and trips to Paris. Now it happened that his mother, Aunt Milca (“queen”), got sick, and after much argument with her husband she was induced to agree to a havertà, that is, a maid, something that until then she had firmly refused to do. Barbabramín was promptly overwhelmed by love for this havertà, probably the first woman less than holy it had been granted him to approach.
Her name has not been handed down, but rather some attributes. She had an exuberant beauty and possessed splendid khalaviòd (breasts: the term is unknown in classical Hebrew, where, however, khalàv means “milk”). She was, naturally, a gôià, and she was insolent and didn’t know how to read or write; on the other hand, she was a very skilled cook. She was a peasant, ’na pôñaltà, and went barefoot in the house. With all this, precisely, Uncle fell in love: with her ankles, her freedom of language, and the food she cooked. He said nothing to the girl, but he declared to his father and mother that he intended to marry her; his parents flew into a rage, and Uncle took to his bed. He remained there for twenty-two years.
Of what Barbabramín did during these years different stories are told. Certainly he spent a good part of them sleeping and gambling; it is known with certainty that he was ruined financially, because “he didn’t cut the coupons” of the treasury bills, and because he had entrusted the management of the farms to a mamsér (“bastard”), who sold them for a song to a straw man; in accord with the forebodings of Aunt Milca, Uncle thus dragged the entire family into his ruin, and even today they lament the consequences.
It’s also recounted that he read and studied, and that, finally, considered wise and just, he received from his bed delegations of the notables of Chieri and settled controversies; and it’s said, of this same bed, that the way was not unknown to that same havertà, and that, at least in the first years, the uncle’s voluntary seclusion was interrupted by nocturnal sorties to play billiards in the café next door. But, after all, in bed he remained, for almost a quarter of a century, and when Aunt Milca and Uncle Salomone died, he married the havertà and brought her to bed definitively, because by now he was so weakened that his legs would no longer support him. He died poor, but rich in years and in fame, and in peace of spirit, in 1883.
The Susanna of the goose salami was a cousin of Nona Màlia, my paternal grandmother, who survives as a tiny, dolled-up enchantress in some studio portraits taken around 1870, and as wrinkled, angry, slovenly, and fabulously deaf in my most distant childhood memories. Even today, inexplicably, the highest shelves of the closets yield up her precious relics: shawls of lace embroidered with iridescent lamé, elegant silk embroideries, a muff of marten fur mutilated by the moths of four generations, massive silver cutlery marked with her initials—as if, after almost fifty years, her restless spirit still visited our house.
In her good days she was known as la Strassacoeur, the Heartbreaker: she became a widow very early, and the rumor was that my grandfather had killed himself in despair because of her infidelities. In Spartan fashion she raised three children and educated them, but at an advanced age she let herself marry an old Christian doctor, majestic, bearded, and taciturn, and from then on she inclined to avarice and strangeness, although in her youth she had been royally generous, as beautiful, well-loved women tend to be. With the passing of the years she estranged herself totally from family affections (which she probably never felt deeply anyway). She lived with the doctor on Via Po in a dark, gloomy apartment, warmed in winter only by a Franklin stove, and she threw nothing away, because everything might come in handy at the right moment: not even the cheese rind, or the tinfoil chocolate wrappers, with which she made silver balls to send to the Missions “to free a black child.” Maybe out of fear of making the wrong choice, she went on alternate days to the scòla on Via Pio V and the parish church of Sant’Ottavio, and it seems that she even went sacrilegiously to confession. She was over eighty when she died, in 1928, in the presence of a chorus of neighbors, disheveled, dressed in black, and mad like her, led by a witch who was called Madama Scílimberg: amid the torments of kidney failure Grandmother watched Madama Scílimberg until her last breath, out of fear that she would find the maftèkh (“key”) hidden under the mattress and take away her mañòd and the hafassím (“jewels,” which all turned out to be paste anyway).
At her death, her sons and daughters-in-law devoted themselves for weeks, in dismay and disgust, to sorting out the mountain of domestic debris that had invaded the apartment: Nona Màlia had saved, indiscriminately, refined objects and revolting rubbish. From severe walnut wardrobes came armies of bugs dazzled by the light, and then linen sheets that had never been used, and others patched and threadbare, worn to transparency; curtains and coverlets of double-sided damask; a collection of straw hummingbirds, which crumbled to dust when they were touched. In the cellar were hundreds of bottles of precious wine turned to vinegar. Eight brand-new coats belonging to the doctor were found, packed in mothballs, along with the only one she had ever let him use, all patches and mends, the collar shiny with use, and in the pocket a Masonic shield.
I remember almost nothing about her; my father called her Maman (in the third person), and loved to describe her with a gluttonous taste for the bizarre, barely tempered by a veil of filial piety. Every Sunday morning, my father brought me to visit Nona Màlia: we walked slowly along Via Po, and he stopped to pet all the cats, to sniff all the mushrooms, and to leaf through all the used books. My father was l’Ingegnè, the Engineer, his pockets always bursting with books, known to all the salami makers because he checked with a slide rule the multiplication on the bill for the prosciutto. Not that he bought it with a light heart: rather superstitious than religious, he felt uneasy about breaking the rules of kashruth, but he liked prosciutto so much that, before the temptation of the shop windows, he yielded every time, sighing, cursing under his breath, and looking at me furtively, as if he feared my judgment or hoped for my complicity.
When we reached the gloomy landing of the apartment on Via Po, my father rang the bell, and to Grandmother, who came to open the door, he shouted in one ear, “Al’ è ’l prim ’d la scòla!” “He’s first in his class!” Grandmother invited us in with evident reluctance and led us through a string of dusty, uninhabited rooms, one of which, scattered with sinister instruments, was
the half-abandoned office of the doctor. The doctor was almost never seen, nor certainly did I wish to see him, from the day I had surprised my father telling my mother that when children who stuttered were brought to him he took a pair of scissors and cut off the membrane under their tongue. Reaching the good living room, my grandmother took out of a hiding place the box of chocolates, always the same one, and offered me one. The chocolate was moth-eaten, and, filled with embarrassment, I hid it in my pocket.
Hydrogen
It was January. Enrico came to call me right after lunch: his brother had gone off into the mountains and had left him the keys to the laboratory. I got dressed in a second and joined him in the street.
During the walk, I learned that his brother had not exactly left the keys: this was a condensed formulation, a euphemism, of the type spoken to those who are quick to understand. His brother, contrary to his usual practice, had not hidden the keys or taken them with him; besides, he had forgotten to repeat to Enrico the prohibition against laying hands on those keys, and the threats if Enrico should violate that prohibition. In the end, in short: the keys were there, after months of waiting; Enrico and I were determined not to miss our chance.
We were sixteen, and I was fascinated by Enrico. He wasn’t very active, and he wasn’t a good student, but he had qualities that distinguished him from all our other classmates, and did things that no one else did. He had a calm and stubborn courage, a precocious capacity to perceive his own future and to give it weight and shape. He spurned (but without sneering) our interminable discussions, by turns Platonic, Darwinian, later Bergsonian; he wasn’t vulgar, he didn’t boast of his athletic or virile abilities, he never lied. He was aware of his limits, but you would never hear him say (as we all said to one another, in search of comfort or an outlet for a bad mood): “You know, I’m a real idiot.”
He had a slow, prosaic imagination: he lived on dreams, like all of us, but his dreams were reasonable; they were dull, possible, close to reality, not romantic, not cosmic. He wasn’t acquainted with my tortured oscillations between heaven (a scholastic or athletic success, a new friendship, a rudimentary and fleeting love) and hell (a bad grade, remorse, a brutal revelation of inferiority that appeared each time to be permanent, conclusive). His goals were always attainable. He dreamed of promotion, and he patiently studied things that didn’t interest him. He wanted a microscope, and he sold a racing bike to get one. He wanted to be a pole vaulter, and he went to the gym every evening for a year, without putting on any airs or dislocating any limbs, until he reached the 3.5 meters he had fixed on, and then he stopped. Later, he wanted a certain woman, and got her; he wanted enough money to live in tranquility, and he got it, after ten years of boring, pedestrian work.
We had no doubt: we would be chemists, but our expectations and hopes were different. Enrico asked of chemistry, reasonably, the tools for an income and a secure life. I asked something else: for me chemistry represented a vague cloud of imminent powers, which enveloped my future in black spirals torn by flashes of fire, like the one that obscured Mount Sinai. Like Moses, I expected from that cloud my law, order in myself, around me, and in the world. I was sated with books, though I continued to devour them with indiscriminate voracity, and was looking for another key to the true heights: a key there must be, and I was certain that, because of some monstrous plot against me and the world, I would not get it at school. At school I was administered huge doses of notions that I diligently digested, but they didn’t warm my blood. I watched the buds swell in spring, the mica sparkle in the granite, my own hands, and said to myself, “I’ll understand this, too, I’ll understand everything, but not the way they want. I’ll find a shortcut, I’ll make myself a picklock, I’ll force the doors.” It was exhausting, nauseating, to listen to lectures on the problem of being and knowing, when all around us was mystery wanting urgently to reveal itself: the old wood of the desks, the sphere of the sun beyond the windows and the rooftops, the idle flight of milkweed in the June air. There—would all the philosophers and all the armies in the world be capable of creating that gnat? No, and not even of understanding it: this was a shame and an outrage, another path had to be found.
We would be chemists, Enrico and I. We would dredge the belly of mystery with our powers, with our genius: we would grip Proteus by the throat, we would bring a halt to his inconclusive metamorphoses from Plato to Augustine, from Augustine to St. Thomas, from St. Thomas to Hegel, from Hegel to Croce. We would force him to speak.
This being our program, we could not afford to waste opportunities. Enrico’s brother, a mysterious and quick-tempered person Enrico did not willingly talk about, was a chemistry student and had set up a laboratory at the back of a courtyard, in an odd narrow, twisting alley that goes off Piazza della Crocetta, and stands out in the obsessive Turinese geometry like a rudimentary organ trapped in the evolved structure of a mammal. The laboratory, too, was rudimentary: not in the sense of an atavistic remnant but, rather, in the sense of extreme poverty. There was a tiled counter, a little glassware, some twenty decanters containing reagents, a lot of dust, a lot of spiders, scant light, and extreme cold. All along the way we had discussed what we would do, now that we were going to “enter the laboratory,” but our ideas were confused.
It seemed to us an embarrassment of riches, and was instead a different embarrassment, deeper and more fundamental: an embarrassment tied to an ancient atrophy, ours, our families’, our caste’s. What did we know how to do with our hands? Nothing, or almost. The women, yes: our mothers and grandmothers had quick, agile hands, they knew how to sew and cook, some even how to play the piano, paint with watercolors, embroider, braid hair. But we, and our fathers?
Our hands were clumsy and weak at the same time, regressed, insensitive: the least educated part of our bodies. Having completed their first basic experiences of play, they had learned to write and nothing else. They knew the convulsive grip of the branch of a tree, because we loved to climb, out of a natural desire and, at the same time (for Enrico and me), a confused homage and return to the origin of the species; but they didn’t know the solemn, balanced weight of the hammer, the concentrated force of blades, which had been too prudently forbidden, the eloquent texture of wood, the similar yet different malleability of iron, lead, and copper. If man is the maker, we were not men: we knew it and suffered for it.
The laboratory glass entranced and intimidated us. Glass, for us, was what one mustn’t touch because it breaks, and yet, on closer contact, it proved to be a material different from all others, sui generis, full of mystery and caprice. In that, it’s like water, which has no congeners: but water is linked to man or, rather, to life by immemorial custom, by a relationship of multiple needs, so that its uniqueness is hidden under the guise of habit. Glass, on the other hand, is the work of man and has a more recent history. It was our first victim or, rather, our first adversary. In the Crocetta laboratory there were glass tubes for lab use, in various diameters, in long pieces and short, all covered with dust: we lit a Bunsen burner and set to work.
Bending a tube was easy. You had only to hold a piece firmly over the flame: after a certain time the flame turned yellow, and the glass simultaneously became faintly luminous. At this point the tube could be bent: the bend obtained was quite far from perfect, but in effect something happened, a new, arbitrary form was created. A potential became actual, and wasn’t that what Aristotle intended?
Now, a copper or lead tube can also be bent, but we quickly realized that the red-hot glass tube possessed a unique virtue: when it became pliant you could, by rapidly pulling apart the two cold ends, create very thin filaments—in fact infinitesimally thin, so that they were drawn upward by the current of hot air that rose from the flame. Thin and flexible, like silk. But then where had the unyielding rigidity of solid glass gone? And what about silk, and cotton, too—if they could be obtained in solid form, would they be rigid, like glass? Enrico told me that in the village where his grandfather lived the fishermen u
sed to catch silkworms when they were already fat and, eager to make their cocoons, struggling blindly, clumsily, to climb the branches: the fishermen would catch them, snap them in two with their fingers, and, pulling apart the stumps, obtain a silk thread that was thick and coarse and extremely resistant, and which they then used as a line. This fact, which I did not hesitate to believe, seemed to me at once horrible and fascinating: horrible because of the cruel manner of that death and the pointless use of a natural wonder; fascinating because of the bold and reckless act of genius that it assumed on the part of its mythical inventor.
The glass tube could also be blown: this, however, was not so easy. You could seal the end of a small tube: then, when you blew hard from the other end, a bubble formed, which was very beautiful to look at and almost perfectly spherical but had absurdly thin walls. If you blew just a little too much, the walls took on the iridescence of a soap bubble. This was a sure sign of death: the bubble burst with a sharp pop, and the fragments scattered on the ground with the faint rustling of eggshells. In a way, it was a just punishment: glass is glass, and it should not have to simulate the behavior of soapy water. If you stretched the terms a little, the experience could be seen as an Aesopian fable.
After an hour of struggle with the glass, we were tired and humiliated. Our eyes were inflamed and dry from looking at burning glass, our feet were frozen and our fingers covered with burns. Besides, working glass isn’t chemistry: we were in the laboratory with another goal. Our goal was to see with our own eyes, to bring about with our own hands, at least one of the phenomena described so casually in our chemistry textbook. One could, for example, prepare nitrous oxide, which in Sestini and Funaro was still described by the not very proper and not very serious term “laughing gas.” Would it really make us laugh?