by Primo Levi
But the night did not penetrate those thick walls; Fascist censorship itself, masterpiece of the regime, kept us separate from the world, in a white limbo of anesthesia. Some thirty of us had made it over the high bar of the first exams, and had been admitted to the Qualitative Analysis laboratory of the second year. We had entered the vast smoke-darkened hall like those who, entering the House of God, reflect on their steps. The previous laboratory, of zinc, now seemed to us a childish exercise, as when children play at cooking: something, directly or indirectly, always came out. Maybe the yield was scant, maybe it wasn’t very pure, but you had to be a real dunce, or a contrarian, not to succeed in getting magnesium sulfate from magnesite, or potassium bromide from bromine.
Here no, here things got serious: the confrontation with Materia-Mater, the hostile mother, was harder and more intimate. At two in the afternoon, Professor D., with an ascetic and distracted air, handed each of us precisely one gram of a certain powder: by the next day, we had to complete the qualitative analysis; that is, give an account of what metals and non-metals it contained. An account in writing, in the form of an examination, yes and no, because doubts and hesitations were not admitted: it was a choice each time, a deliberation—an adult and responsible undertaking, for which fascism hadn’t prepared us, and which gave off a good dry, clean odor.
There were easy and guileless elements, incapable of hiding, like iron and copper; others were insidious and fugitive, like bismuth and cadmium. There was a method, a ponderous, primeval scheme of systematic research, a kind of comb and steamroller that nothing (in theory) could escape, but I preferred to invent my path every time, using the quick, improvised thrusts of the privateer rather than the exhausting routine of the war of position: sublimate mercury into drops, transform sodium into chloride or look at it in hopper-shaped crystals under the microscope. Here, one way or another, the relationship with Matter changed, became dialectic: it was a fencing match, a duel. Two unequal adversaries: on one side, interrogating, the unfledged, unarmed chemist, with Autenrieth’s text beside him, his sole ally (because D., often called on to help in difficult cases, maintained a scrupulous neutrality; that is, he refused to give an opinion—a wise position, since one who gives an opinion could be wrong, and a professor must not be wrong); on the other, answering enigmatically, Matter, with its sly passivity, as old as the All and prodigiously full of tricks, as solemn and subtle as the Sphinx. I was then beginning to read, with difficulty, German, and I was enchanted by the word Urstoff (which means “Element”: literally, “primal substance”) and the prefix Ur, which appeared in it, and expresses ancient origin, remote distance in space and time.
Nor had many words been wasted here on teaching us to defend ourselves against acids, caustics, fires, and explosions: it seemed that, following the crude morality of the institute, the work of natural selection could be counted on to choose among us those most fit for physical and professional survival. Vacuum hoods were few; following the instructions in the text, each of us, in the course of systematic analysis, conscientiously vaporized into the free air a good dose of hydrochloric acid and ammonia, and so a thick white fog of ammonium chloride stagnated permanently in the laboratory and was deposited on the window glass in tiny sparkling crystals. Into the hydrogen sulfide chamber, with its lethal atmosphere, couples in search of intimacy withdrew, as did a few solitary souls to have an afternoon snack.
Through the haze, and the bustling silence, a Piedmontese voice was heard to say: “Nuntio vobis gaudium magnum. Habemus ferrum.” It was March of 1939, and a few days earlier, with an almost identical solemn announcement (“Habemus Papam”), the conclave that raised Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli to the Throne of Peter had been dissolved. Many placed their hopes in him, since you had to hope in something or someone. The boy who had uttered that sacrilege was the taciturn Sandro.
Among us, Sandro was solitary. He was of average height, thin but muscular, and he never wore a hat, even on the coldest days. He came to class in threadbare corduroy knickerbockers, gray wool knee socks, and sometimes a black cloak that made me think of Renato Fucini. He had large, calloused hands, a rugged, bony profile, a face baked by the sun, and a low forehead beneath the line of his hair, which he wore very short, in a crew cut. He walked with the long, slow steps of a farmer.
The racial laws had been promulgated a few months earlier, and I, too, was becoming solitary. My Christian classmates were civil people, and neither they nor the professors had directed at me a hostile word or gesture, but I felt them growing distant, and, following an ancient code, I grew distant from them: each look exchanged between me and them was accompanied by a tiny but perceptible flash of distrust and suspicion. What do you think of me? What am I to you? The same as six months ago, the peer who doesn’t go to Mass, or the Jew who “in your midst does not mock you”?
I had observed, with amazement and joy, that between Sandro and me something was happening. It wasn’t at all a friendship between two similar types: on the contrary, the difference in our origins made us rich in “goods” to exchange, like two merchants from remote and mutually mysterious lands. It wasn’t even the normal, marvelous intimacy of twenty-year-olds: with Sandro I never reached that. I soon realized that he was generous, perceptive, tough, and bold, with even a touch of bravado, but that he possessed an elusive, wild quality, because of which—although we were at the age when you have the need, the instinct, and the immodesty to inflict on others everything that’s swirling in your head and elsewhere (and it’s an age that can last a long time, but ends with the first compromise)—nothing seeped out of his wrapping of restraint, nothing of his inner world, which you felt was full and fertile, except some rare allusion dramatically cut short. He was made like a cat, a creature you could live with for years without ever being allowed to get under its sacred skin.
We had much to exchange with each other. I told him that we were like a cation and an anion, but Sandro did not appear to acknowledge the similarity. I was born on the Serra d’Ivrea, a beautiful, miserly land; he was the son of a mason and spent the summers as a shepherd. Not a shepherd of souls: a shepherd of sheep, and not out of Arcadian rhetoric or eccentricity but happily, for love of the land and the grass, and generosity of spirit. He had a curious talent for mimicry, and when he talked about cows, chickens, sheep, and dogs he was transfigured: he imitated their look, their movements and voices; he became lighthearted and seemed to turn into an animal, like a sorcerer. He taught me about plants and animals, but of his family he said little. His father had died when he was a child; they were simple, poor people, and since the boy was smart they had decided to send him to school, so that he could bring home money. He had accepted this with Piedmontese seriousness, but without enthusiasm. He had traveled the long route of elementary and high schools, aiming at the best result with the least effort: he didn’t care about Catullus and Descartes, he cared about promotion, and on Sundays he went skiing or rock climbing. He had chosen chemistry because it seemed to him better than other subjects: it was an occupation of things that are seen and touched, a less laborious way of earning one’s bread than being a carpenter or a farmer.
We began to study physics together, and Sandro was amazed when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas I confusedly cultivated at that time. That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, consisted in making himself master of matter, and that I had enrolled in Chemistry because I wished to keep faith with this nobility. That to conquer matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary in order to understand the universe and ourselves; and that the Periodic Table of Mendeleev, which in those very weeks we were laboriously learning to sort out, was therefore a poem, loftier and more solemn than all the poems we had absorbed in high school: if you thought carefully, it even had rhymes! That, if he was seeking the bridge, the missing link, between the world of papers and the world of things, he needn’t look far: it was there, in Autenrieth, in these smoky laboratories of ours, and
in our future occupation.
Finally, and fundamentally, didn’t he, who was honest and open, smell the foul odor of Fascist truths that were polluting the sky, didn’t he find it disgraceful that a thinking man should be asked to believe without thinking? Didn’t he feel disgust for all the dogmas, all the unproved declarations, all the imperatives? He did: and so how could he not feel in our subject a new dignity and a new majesty, how could he be unaware that the chemistry and physics on which we nourished ourselves were, apart from vital nourishment themselves, the antidote to fascism that he and I sought, because they were clear and distinct, at every step verifiable, and not tissues of lies and vanity, like the radio and the newspapers?
Sandro listened to me with ironic attention, always ready to take me down with a few polite, dry words when I crossed the border into rhetoric: but something matured in him (certainly not thanks only to me: these were months filled with fateful events), something that disturbed him, because it was both new and ancient. He, who up till then had read only Salgari,2 London, and Kipling, suddenly became a furious reader: he absorbed and remembered everything, and in him everything spontaneously arranged itself into a system of life; he also began to study, and his average jumped. At the same time, out of unconscious gratitude, and maybe also out of a desire for revenge, he in his turn began to occupy himself with my education, letting me understand that it was deficient. I, too, might be right. Matter might be our master, and maybe even, for lack of a better, our political school, but he had another matter to show me, another educator: not the powders of Qualitative Analysis but that true, authentic timeless Urstoff, the rock and ice of the nearby mountains. He easily demonstrated that I did not have the credentials to speak of matter. What commerce, what intimacy had I had, before now, with the four elements of Empedocles? Did I know how to light a stove? ford a stream? Did I know a high-altitude blizzard? the germination of seeds? No, and so he, too, had something vital to teach me.
An alliance was born, and a frenetic time began. Sandro seemed made of iron, and he was bound to iron by an ancient kinship. The fathers of his fathers, he told me, had been coppersmiths (magnín) and blacksmiths (fré) in the Canavese valleys: they fabricated nails on a coal forge, rimmed the wheels of carts with red-hot iron, beat metal plates until they were deaf; and he himself, when he saw in a rock a red vein of iron, seemed to have found a friend. In winter, when he got restless, he tied his skis to his rusty bicycle, set off early, and pedaled up to the snow, with no money, only an artichoke in one pocket and the other full of salad. He returned at night, or even the next day, sleeping in haylofts, and the more storms and hunger he endured, the more content he was, and the healthier he felt.
In summer, when he went off on his own, he often brought his dog along for company. It was a yellow mutt with a meek expression: in fact, Sandro had told me, miming in his way the animal episode, as a puppy he had had a run-in with a cat. He had come too close to a litter of newborn kittens, and the mother cat, offended, had begun to hiss and puff up; but the puppy hadn’t yet learned the meaning of these signs and sat there like an idiot. The cat had attacked, pursued, caught him, and scratched his nose, and the dog had suffered a permanent trauma. He felt disgraced, and so Sandro had made a ball of rags and explained to him that it was a cat, and every morning he gave it to him so that he could revenge the insult and restore his canine honor. For the same therapeutic reason Sandro brought him to the mountains to play: he tied him to one end of the rope, tied himself to the other, nestled the dog carefully on an outcrop, and then climbed up; when he reached the end of the rope, he gently pulled the dog up, and the dog had learned to walk, head raised, with his four paws against the almost vertical rock face, whimpering under his breath, as if he were dreaming.
Sandro climbed rocks more by instinct than by technique, relying on the strength of his hands and, wherever they gripped, greeting with irony the silicon, calcite, and magnesium he had learned to recognize in the mineralogy course. It seemed to him that he had wasted a day if he hadn’t in some way consumed his reserves of energy, and then, too, his gaze became more lively. And he explained to me that if you lead a sedentary life a deposit of fat forms behind the eyes, which isn’t healthy; with activity, the fat is consumed, and the eyes retreat to the back of the sockets, becoming sharper.
He was extremely sparing in recounting his adventures. He didn’t belong to the race of those who do things so that they can talk about them (like me): he didn’t love big words, or, indeed, words. It seemed that, as with climbing, no one had taught him to speak; he spoke the way nobody speaks, saying only the essence of things.
If necessary he could carry a thirty-kilo pack, but usually he went without: his pockets were enough, with some vegetable, as I said, a piece of bread, a knife, sometimes the CAI mountain-climbing guide, its pages creased, and always a roll of wire for emergency repairs. He carried the guide not because he had faith in it: rather, for the opposite reason. He rejected it because he felt it to be a chain, and also a bastard creature, a detestable hybrid of snow and rock and paper. He carried it to the mountains to vilify it, happy if he could catch it at fault, even at the expense of himself and his climbing companions. He could walk for two days without eating, or eat three meals at once and then set off. For him, all seasons were good. In winter he skied, but not in the fashionable, well-equipped places, which he avoided with laconic mockery; since we were too poor to buy sealskins for the ascents, he showed me how to sew rough hemp cloths, Spartan equipment that absorbs water and then freezes like a codfish, and on the way down you tie it around your waist. He dragged me on exhausting trips in the fresh snow, far from every human trace, following routes he seemed to intuit like a savage. In summer, going from hut to hut, we became intoxicated with sun, with weariness, with wind, abrading the skin of our fingertips on rock never before touched by the hand of man, but not on the famous peaks or in search of a memorable adventure; that did not matter to him. What mattered to him was to know his limits, to measure himself and improve; more obscurely, he felt the need to prepare himself (and to prepare me) for a future of iron, which came closer every month.
To see Sandro in the mountains reconciled you with the world and made you forget the nightmare weighing on Europe. It was his place, the one he was made for, like the marmots whose whistle and snout he imitated. In the mountains he became happy; it was a silent, contagious happiness, a light turned on. He stirred in me a new communion with earth and sky, in which my need for freedom, the fullness of my powers, and the hunger to understand things that had driven me to chemistry converged. We emerged at dawn, rubbing our eyes, from the doorway of the Martinotti hut,3 and all around were the white-and-brown mountains, just touched by the sun, as if newly created in the just vanished night, and yet immeasurably ancient. They were an island, an elsewhere.
Yet it wasn’t always necessary to go high and far. In the middle seasons, training grounds of rock were Sandro’s kingdom. There are several of them, two or three hours by bicycle from Turin, and I would be interested to know if anyone still goes there: the peaks of the Pagliaio with the Wolkmann Tower, the Teeth of Cumiana, Roca Patanüa (meaning “bare rock”), the Plô, the Sbarüa, and others, with modest domestic names. This last, Sbarüa, it seems to me, was discovered by Sandro, or by a mythical brother, whom Sandro never let me see but who, from his scattered hints, must have been to him as he was to the general run of mortals. Sbarüa is a deverbative derived from sbarüe, which means “frighten”; the Sbarüa is a prism of granite that sticks out a hundred meters from a small hill bristling with thorns and copses: like the Veglio di Creta,4 it’s broken from the base to the summit by a crack that narrows as it goes up, until it forces the climber to emerge onto the wall, where, indeed, he is frightened, and where there was a single nail, charitably left by Sandro’s brother.
They were curious places, frequented by a few dozen who, like us, loved them, and whom Sandro knew by name or by sight. We ascended, not without technical problems, amid an
irritating buzz of cow flies attracted by our sweat, scaling walls of good solid stone interrupted by grassy shelves where ferns and strawberries grew, or in autumn blackberries; often we used as handholds the trunks of stunted trees, rooted in cracks, and after a few hours we reached the summit, which wasn’t really a summit but generally a tranquil meadow, where the cows looked at us with indifferent eyes. We descended in no time at breakneck speed, on paths scattered with cow dung, ancient and recent, to retrieve our bicycles.
On other occasions the endeavors were more demanding: no pleasant escapes, since Sandro said that we would have time when we were forty to see the panoramas. “Dôma, neh?” he said one day in February: in his language, it meant that since the weather was good, we could leave that evening for a winter ascent of the Tooth of M., which for some weeks we had been planning. We slept at an inn and left the next day, not too early, at an unspecified hour (Sandro was not fond of watches: he felt their tacit continuous admonishment as a needless intrusion); we plunged boldly into the fog and emerged around one, into a splendid sun and halfway from the top of a peak that was not the right one.
So I said that we could go back down a hundred meters, cross the middle, and go up the next ridge; or, better still, since we were already there, continue on up and be satisfied with the wrong peak, since it was only forty meters lower than the other; but Sandro, with wonderful bad faith, said, in a few terse syllables, that he was all right with my last proposal, but that, “by the easy northwest ridge” (this was a sarcastic quotation from the aforementioned CAI guide), we could, in half an hour, just as well reach the Tooth of M., and that it was not worth being twenty if we could not afford the luxury of getting lost.