by Primo Levi
The easy ridge might well have been easy, in fact elementary, in summer, but we found it in uncomfortable conditions. The rock was wet on the sun side and covered with black ice in the shadow; between one outcrop and the next there were pockets of wet snow where we sank up to our waists. We reached the summit at five, I dragging with exhaustion, Sandro prey to a sinister cheerfulness that I found irritating.
“And to go down?”
“We’ll figure it out,” he answered, and added mysteriously, “The worst that can happen is we’ll taste bear meat.” Well, we did taste bear meat, in the course of that night, which we found long. We went down for two hours, not much helped by the rope, which was frozen: a malicious stiff tangle that caught on all the outcrops and banged against the rock like the cable of an aerial tramway. At seven we were on the shore of a frozen lake, and it was dark. We ate the little we had left, built a useless wall on the windward side, and prepared to sleep on the ground, leaning against each other. It was as if even time had frozen; every so often we got up to reactivate our circulation, and the hour was always the same—the wind was always blowing, there was always a specter of a moon, always at the same point in the sky, and in front of the moon the same fantastic cavalcade of ragged clouds. We had taken off our shoes, as described in the books by Lammer that Sandro liked, and kept our feet in our packs; at the first gloomy light, which seemed to come from the snow and not from the sky, we got up, our limbs stiff and our eyes wild with sleeplessness, hunger, and the hardness of our bed: we found our shoes so frozen that they rang like bells, and to put them on we had to sit on them like hens.
But we returned to the valley on our own, and when the innkeeper asked us sardonically how it had gone, meanwhile glancing furtively at our dazed faces, we said brashly that we had had an excellent outing, and we paid the bill and departed with dignity. That was bear meat: and now that many years have passed I regret having eaten so little, since, of all the good that life has given me, nothing, even at a distance, has had the taste of that meat, which is the taste of being strong and free—free even to make a mistake—and master of one’s destiny. So I am grateful to Sandro for having knowingly got me in trouble, in that and other adventures senseless only in appearance, and I know absolutely that these were useful to me later.
They were not useful to him, or not for long. Sandro was Sandro Delmastro, the first in the Piedmont military command of the Action Party to fall. In April of 1944, after some months of acute tension, he was captured by the Fascists; he wouldn’t give up and tried to escape from the Casa Littoria in Cuneo. He was killed, with a burst of machine-gun fire to the neck, by a monstrous child executioner, one of those wretched fifteen-year-old thugs whom the Republic of Salò recruited from the reformatories. His body lay abandoned in the street for a long time, because the Fascists had forbidden the people to bury it.
Today I know it’s hopeless to try to clothe a man in words, make him live again on the written page, especially a man like Sandro. He was not a man to talk about, or build monuments to, he who laughed at monuments: he was all in his actions, and when those ended nothing of him remained, nothing except words, precisely.
2. Emilio Salgari (1862–1911), an author of adventure stories that take place in exotic lands.
3. Situated in the Val di Cogne, in the mountains of the Valle d’Aosta.
4. The Old Man of Crete, a reference to Inferno Canto XIV.
Potassium
In January of 1941, the fate of Europe and of the world seemed to be sealed. Only the deluded could still think that Germany would not win; the stolid English “didn’t know they had lost the match” and stubbornly endured the bombardments, but they were alone and were suffering bloody defeats on all fronts. Only someone who was willfully blind and deaf could doubt the lot reserved for Jews in a German Europe: we had read Feuchtwanger’s The Oppenheim Siblings, smuggled from France, and a British white paper, arriving from Palestine, in which the “Nazi atrocities” were described; we believed half of it, but that was enough. Many refugees from Poland and France had landed in Italy, and we had talked to them: they didn’t know the details of the slaughter that was unfolding under a monstrous veil of silence, but each was a messenger, like those who hastened to Job to say, “I alone escaped to tell you.”
Yet if one wished to live, if one wished in some way to take advantage of the youth that ran in our veins, there remained no other recourse than willful blindness: like the English, “we didn’t know,” we banished all threats into the limbo of things either not perceived or immediately forgotten. One could also, in the abstract, throw off everything and flee, migrate to some distant, mythical country, choosing among the few that had kept their borders open: Madagascar, British Honduras. But to do this required a lot of money and a fabulous capacity for initiative, and I, my family, and my friends possessed neither. Besides, seen from close up and in detail, things did not then seem so disastrous: the Italy around us—that is to say (at a time when people didn’t travel much), Piedmont and Turin—was not unfriendly. Piedmont was our true native land, the one where we recognized ourselves; the mountains around Turin, visible on clear days, and within bicycling distance, were ours, irreplaceable, and they had taught us hard work, endurance, and a certain wisdom. In Piedmont and in Turin were, in other words, our roots, not powerful but deep, extensive, and fantastically intertwined.
Neither in us nor, more generally, in our generation, whether we were “Aryans” or Jews, had the idea that one should and could resist fascism yet made much headway. Our resistance at the time was passive and limited to rejection, to isolation, to not getting contaminated. The seed of active struggle had not survived into our day; it had been suffocated some years earlier, with the final stroke of the scythe that consigned to prison, to internment, to exile, or to silence the last eminent Turinese witnesses: Einaudi, Ginzburg, Monti, Vittorio Foa, Zini, Carlo Levi. These names said nothing to us, we knew almost nothing of them, the fascism around us didn’t have opponents. We had to start again from nothing, “invent” our own anti-fascism, create it from the seed, the roots, our roots. We looked around us and took paths that didn’t lead far. The Bible, Croce, geometry, physics seemed to us sources of certainty.
We met in the gym of the Talmúd Thorà, the School of the Law, as the old Jewish elementary school was proudly called, and taught one another to find in the Bible justice and injustice and the force that beats down injustice: to recognize in Ahasuerus and Nebuchadnezzar the new oppressors. But where was Ha-Kadosh Baruch Hu, “the Holy One, Blessed be He,” who breaks the chains of the slaves and drowns the chariots of the Egyptians? He who dictated the Law to Moses, and inspired the liberators Ezra and Nehemiah, no longer inspired anyone; the sky above us was silent and empty. He had let the Polish ghettos be wiped out, and slowly, chaotically, the idea dawned in us that we were alone, that we had no allies to count on, on earth or in heaven, that we would have to find in ourselves the power to resist. The impulse that then impelled us to learn our limits was therefore not completely absurd: to ride hundreds of kilometers on a bicycle, to furiously, patiently climb rock walls we hardly knew, to voluntarily suffer hunger, cold, and weariness, to train ourselves to endure and to decide. A nail goes in or not; the rope holds or doesn’t—these, too, were sources of certainty.
Chemistry, for me, had ceased to be one. It led to the heart of Matter, and Matter was our ally, precisely because Spirit, dear to fascism, was our enemy; but, reaching the fourth year of Pure Chemistry, I could no longer ignore the fact that chemistry itself, or at least what was dispensed to us, did not answer my questions. To prepare bromobenzene or methyl violet following Gattermann was entertaining, even exhilarating, but not that different from following the recipes of Artusi. Why that way and not some other? Having been stuffed in high school with the truths revealed by the Doctrine of Fascism, I was fed up with or suspicious of all truths that were revealed, not demonstrated. Were there theorems of chemistry? No: so you had to go beyond, not be content
with the quia, go back to origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the caves of the alchemists, their abominable confusion of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine deceptions, like those of charlatans or wizards. At the origin of physics, on the other hand, was the valiant clarity of the West, Archimedes and Euclid. I would become a physicist, ruat coelum: maybe without a degree, since Hitler and Mussolini forbade me.
A short course of physics experiments was part of the program for the fourth year of Chemistry: simple measurements of viscosity, surface tension, optical rotary power, and so forth. The course was conducted by a young assistant lecturer, who was thin, tall, slightly hunched, kind, and extraordinarily timid, and who behaved in a way we were not used to. Our other teachers, almost without exception, were convinced of the importance and superiority of the material they taught: some were like that in good faith; for others it was openly a matter of personal supremacy, of a game preserve. This assistant, instead, had an air of almost apologizing to us, of being on our side. In his rather embarrassed, courteous yet ironic smile one seemed to read: “I, too, know that with this antiquated worn-out equipment you won’t accomplish anything useful, and that, in any case, this futility is marginal; knowledge lives elsewhere. But it’s a job you have to do, and so do I, so, please, try not to do too much damage, and learn what you can.” In short, all the girls in the class were in love with him.
In the space of several months I had made desperate attempts, with this and that professor, to enter as a degree student. Some, with twisted mouth, or even rudely, had responded that the racial laws prohibited it; others had had recourse to vague and flimsy pretexts. One night, having politely absorbed the fourth or fifth rejection, I was going home on my bicycle, cloaked in an almost tangible discouragement and bitterness. As I was listlessly going up Via Valperga Caluso, gusts of cold fog rising from Valentino Park overtook me; it was now night, and the light of the street lamps, masked with violet for the blackout, could not defeat the fog and the shadows. The passersby were few and hurried, and then one of them caught my attention. He was proceeding in my direction with a long, slow step; he wore a long black overcoat and his head was bare, and he walked slightly hunched over: he resembled the Assistant—he was the Assistant. I passed him, unsure what to do; then I plucked up my courage and turned back, and yet again did not dare to speak. What did I know of him? Nothing: he might be indifferent, a hypocrite, even an enemy. Then I thought that I risked nothing but another rejection, and asked straight out if it would be possible to be accepted for experimental research work in his institute. The Assistant looked at me in surprise, and, in place of the long speech that I would have expected, he answered with two words of the Gospel: “Follow me.”
Inside, the Institute of Experimental Physics was full of dust and ancient ghosts. There were rows of glass-fronted cabinets crammed with yellowed pages eaten by mice and moths: observations of eclipses, records of earthquakes, meteorological reports going back to the last century. Along the wall of one corridor I found an extraordinary trumpet, more than ten meters long, whose origin, purpose, or use no one knew: perhaps to announce the Judgment Day, in which all that is hidden will be made plain. There was an aeolipile in Secession style, a Hero’s fountain, and an obsolete, copious fauna of gadgets intended over generations for classroom demonstrations: a pathetic and innocent form of minor physics, in which the choreography counts more than the concept. It’s not illusionism or a conjuring trick, but it’s on the edge.
The Assistant welcomed me to the tiny room on the ground floor that he himself inhabited, and that was bursting with a different sort of equipment, exciting and unknown. Some molecules are carriers of two opposing electric charges, and in an electric field behave like tiny compass needles: they orient themselves, some lazily, others less so. Depending on the conditions, they obey certain laws with greater or less respect: the equipment served to clarify these conditions and this imperfect respect. It was waiting for someone to use it: he was busy with other matters (of astrophysics, he explained, and the information shook me to the marrow: I had before me, in flesh and blood, an astrophysicist!), and besides, he wasn’t practiced in certain operations that he considered necessary in order to purify the products subjected to measuring; for these he needed a chemist, and the welcome chemist was me. He willingly yielded the field and the instruments. The field was two square meters of table and desk; the instruments a small family, the most important being the Westphal balance and the heterodyne. The first I already knew; with the second I soon made friends. It was in substance a radio receiving device, constructed in such a way as to reveal tiny differences of frequency: and in fact it went horribly out of tune, and barked like a farmyard dog, if the operator merely shifted in his chair or moved a hand, or if someone entered the room. Also, at certain hours of the day, it revealed an intricate universe of mysterious messages, Morse code clicks, modulated hisses, and deformed, mangled human voices, which uttered sentences in incomprehensible languages, or in Italian, but these were in code, and meaningless. It was the radiophonic Babel of the war, messages of death transmitted by ships or planes, from who knows whom to who knows whom, beyond the mountains and the sea.
Beyond the mountains and the sea, the Assistant explained to me, lived a wise man named Onsager, of whom he knew nothing except that he had worked out an equation purporting to describe the behavior of polarized molecules under all conditions, provided they were in a liquid state. The equation worked well for diluted solutions; it appeared that no one had taken care of verifying it for concentrated solutions, pure polarized liquids, or mixtures of the latter. This was the work that he offered me, and that I accepted with wholesale enthusiasm: I was to prepare a series of complex liquids and test whether they obeyed Onsager’s equation. As a first step, I would have to do what he didn’t know how to do: at that time it wasn’t easy to find pure products for analysis, and for several weeks I would have to devote myself to purifying benzene, chlorobenzene, chlorophenyl, aminophenol, toluidine, and others.
A few hours’ acquaintance was enough for the figure of the Assistant to acquire definition. He was thirty, had recently married, came from Trieste but was of Greek origin, knew four languages, loved music, Huxley, Ibsen, Conrad, and my beloved Thomas Mann. He also loved physics, but he was suspicious of every activity that tended toward a purpose: so he was nobly lazy, and detested fascism naturaliter.
His relationship to physics perplexed me. He did not hesitate to stab my latest hippogriff, confirming in explicit words that message about “marginal futility” that we had read in his eyes in the laboratory. Not only those humble experiments of ours but all physics was marginal, by nature, by vocation, in that it set itself to give laws to the universe of appearances, while the truth, the reality, the intimate essence of things and of man are elsewhere, concealed behind a veil, or seven veils (I don’t remember exactly). He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager, but without illusions: the Truth was beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to initiates; it was a long road he was traveling, with hard work, wonder, and deep joy. Physics was prose: an elegant gymnastics of the mind, the mirror of Creation, key to the kingdom of man on the planet—but what is the stature of Creation, of man, of the planet? His road was long, and he had just begun. I was his disciple: did I want to follow him?
It was a terrible request. Being the Assistant’s disciple was for me a pleasure every moment, a bond I had never felt before, without shadows, and intensified by the certainty that the relationship was mutual: I a Jew, made marginal and skeptical by recent events, an enemy of violence but not yet sucked into the necessity of opposing violence, I must have been for him the ideal interlocutor, a blank page on which any message could be inscribed.
I did not mount the gigantic new hippogriff the Assistant offered me. In those months the Germans destroyed Belgrade, broke the Greek resistance, invaded Crete from t
he air: that was Truth, that was Reality. There were no loopholes, or not for me. Better to remain on the Earth, play with dipoles, for lack of anything better, purify benzene, and prepare for a future that was unknown but imminent and certainly tragic. To purify benzene at that time, in the conditions to which the war and the bombs had reduced the institute, was not a small undertaking. The Assistant explained that I had a completely free hand, I could scrounge everywhere, from the cellars to the attic, appropriate any tool or product, but not buy anything. Not even he could; it was a regime of absolute autarky.
In the basement I found a bottle of technical benzene, 95 percent pure: better than nothing, but the manuals prescribed rectifying it, and then subjecting it to a final distillation in the presence of sodium, to free it from the last traces of dampness. “Rectify” means to distill fractionally, discarding the fractions that have a boiling point lower or higher than what is prescribed, and collecting the “heart,” which should boil at a constant temperature: in the inexhaustible cellar I found the necessary glassware, including one of those Vigreux columns, which are as delicate as lace, a product of the glassblower’s superhuman patience and ability, but (just between us) of questionable efficacy; the water bath I made with an aluminum pan.
Distilling is beautiful. First, because it is a slow, philosophical, and silent occupation, which absorbs you but leaves you time to think of other things, rather like riding a bicycle. Then, because it includes a metamorphosis, from liquid to gas (invisible) and back to liquid again; but on this double path, up and down, it reaches purity, an ambiguous and fascinating condition, which starts in chemistry and goes far. And, finally, when you prepare to distill you become aware that you are repeating a rite now consecrated by the centuries, an almost religious act, in which from an imperfect material you obtain the essence, the usía, the spirit, and in the first place alcohol, which cheers the soul and warms the heart. It took a good two days to obtain a fraction that was pure enough: for this operation, given that I had to work with a free flame, I was voluntarily banished to a small, empty, deserted room on the second floor, far from every human presence.