by Primo Levi
Now it was a matter of distilling a second time in the presence of sodium. Sodium is a degenerate metal; in fact, it’s a metal only in the chemical sense of the word, certainly not in everyday language. It’s neither rigid nor elastic but soft, like wax. It isn’t shiny, or, rather, it is only if it’s preserved with maniacal attention; otherwise, it reacts instantaneously with the air, developing an ugly, rough rind. And it reacts with water even more rapidly, floating on it (a metal that floats!), dancing frenetically and releasing hydrogen. I searched in vain through the belly of the institute: like Astolfo on the Moon, I found dozens of labeled flasks, hundreds of abstruse compounds, other indeterminate anonymous sediments apparently untouched for generations, but no sodium. Instead I found a vial of potassium: potassium is sodium’s twin, so I took it and returned to my hermitage.
I put a lump of potassium “the size of half a pea” (thus the handbook) in the small flask of benzene and distilled the whole thing diligently; toward the end of the operation I dutifully turned off the flame, dismantled the apparatus, let the small amount of liquid left in the flask cool a little, and then, with a long, pointed metal rod, speared the “half-pea” of potassium and extracted it.
Potassium, as I’ve said, is the twin of sodium, but it reacts with air and water even more energetically; everyone knows (and I knew, too) that on contact with water it not only releases hydrogen but also catches fire. So I treated my half-pea like a holy relic; I placed it on a piece of dry filter paper, wrapped it up, went into the courtyard of the institute, dug a tiny tomb, and there buried the devilish little corpse. I carefully packed the dirt over it and went back up to my work.
I took the empty flask, placed it under the faucet, and turned on the water. There was a sudden crash, a flame shot out of the neck of the flask straight toward the window, which was near the sink, and the curtains caught fire. As I fumbled around for even some primitive type of extinguisher, the panels of the shutters began to turn brown, and the place was full of smoke. I managed to pull over a chair and tear down the curtains; I threw them on the floor and trampled them madly, while the smoke half blinded me and the blood beat violently in my temples.
When it was all over, when all the burning shreds were put out, I stood for a few minutes, blank and as if stupid, with my knees like rubber, contemplating the traces of the disaster without seeing them. As soon as I had got my breath slightly, I went to the floor below and told the Assistant the story. If it’s true that there is no greater grief than to remember happiness in a time of sorrow, it’s equally true that to recall an anguished moment with a tranquil mind while sitting quietly at one’s desk is a source of profound satisfaction.
The Assistant listened to my account with polite attention but with an air of curiosity: who had forced me to embark on that voyage, to distill the benzene with all that care? Basically it served me right: these are things that happen to the profane, to those who linger, playing at the doors of the temple, instead of entering. But he said nothing; he assumed for the occasion (unwillingly as always) a hierarchical distance and pointed out that an empty beaker doesn’t catch fire: it must not have been empty. It must have contained, if nothing else, benzene gas, besides, naturally, the air that came in through the neck. But benzene gas, cold, has never been observed to catch fire spontaneously; only potassium could have ignited the mixture, and I had removed the potassium. All of it?
All, I answered: but I had a doubt. I went back up to the site of the accident and found the shards of the flask still on the floor; on one of them, if you looked carefully, you could see, just visible, a white speck. I tested it with phenolphthalein: it was basic—potassium hydroxide. The guilty party was found: a minuscule fragment of potassium must have been stuck to the glass of the beaker, just enough to react with the water I had introduced and ignite the benzene gas.
The Assistant looked at me with amusement and a vaguely ironic eye: better not to do than to do, better to meditate than to act, better his astrophysics, the threshold of the Unknowable, than my chemistry, smeared with smells, explosions, and trivial little mysteries. I thought of another moral, more earthly and concrete, and I believe that every militant chemist will be able to confirm it: you must not trust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium; but with sodium nothing would have happened), the practically the same, the nearly, the or, any surrogates or stopgaps. The differences may be small but can lead to radically diverse results, like railroad switches; the chemist’s work consists largely in watching out for these differences, in knowing them from close up, in predicting their effects. Not only the chemist’s work.
Nickel
In a drawer I had a parchment saying, in elegant script, that upon Primo Levi, of the Jewish race, a degree in Chemistry, with honors, was conferred: it was therefore a double-edged document, half glory and half mockery, half absolution and half conviction. It had been in that drawer since July of 1941, and it was now the end of November; the world was hurtling toward catastrophe, and around me nothing happened. The Germans had streamed into Poland, Norway, Holland, France, Yugoslavia, and penetrated the Russian steppes like a knife in butter; the United States made no move to help the English, and they remained alone. I couldn’t find work and had worn myself out in the search for some remunerative occupation; in the next room my father, debilitated by a tumor, was living his last months.
The doorbell rang. There was a tall, thin young man, in the uniform of a lieutenant of the Royal Army, and I was not slow to see in him the figure of the messenger, the Mercury who guides souls, or, if you prefer, the angel of annunciation: he, in other words, whom each of us waits for, consciously or not, and who brings the heavenly message that changes our life, if for good or evil, we don’t yet know, until he has opened his mouth.
He opened his mouth and, in a strong Tuscan accent, asked for Dr. Levi, who, incredibly, was me (I was not yet used to the title); he introduced himself politely and offered me a job. Who had sent him? Another Mercury, Caselli, the inflexible guardian of another’s reputation: the “honors” of my degree had been useful for something.
That I was Jewish the lieutenant showed he knew (besides, my surname scarcely left room for doubts), but it didn’t seem to matter to him. Rather, it seemed something extra: the fact in some way appealed to him. He had a sharp, subtle taste for contravening the laws of separation; he was secretly an ally, and sought an ally in me.
The job that he offered was mysterious and alluring. “In some place” there was a mine that yielded 2 percent something useful (he didn’t say what) and 98 percent waste, which was dumped in a neighboring valley. In this waste there was nickel: very little, but the price was so high that retrieving it had to be considered. He had an idea, in fact a cluster of ideas, but he was serving in the military and hadn’t much free time: I was to substitute for him, try out his ideas in the laboratory, and then, if possible, and with him, carry them out on an industrial scale. It was clear that this would necessitate my moving to the “some place,” which was briefly described, and that this move would happen under a double seal of secrecy. In the first place, for my protection, no one was to know either my name or my detestable origins, because the some place was under the control of the military authorities; in the second, for the protection of his idea, I would have to pledge on my honor not to mention a word of it to anyone. Anyway, it was clear that one secret would reinforce the other, and so, in a certain sense, my condition of outcast suited him perfectly.
What was his idea and where was the some place? The lieutenant apologized: until I accepted provisionally he couldn’t tell me much, that was evident; in any case, the idea consisted of attacking the waste material in its gaseous state, and the some place was a few hours’ journey from Turin. I immediately consulted my parents. They were in favor: with my father’s illness there was an urgent need for money. As for me, I hadn’t the slightest doubt: I was worn out by inertia, confident of my chemistry, and eager to put it to the test. Besides, the lieutena
nt aroused my curiosity, and I liked him.
It was clear that he wore the uniform with disgust: his choice of me must have been dictated not solely by utilitarian considerations. He spoke of fascism and the war with reserve, and with a sinister gaiety that I had no trouble interpreting. It was the ironic gaiety of a whole generation of Italians, intelligent and honest enough to reject fascism, too skeptical to oppose it actively, too young to accept passively the tragedy that was looming and to despair of tomorrow: a generation to which I myself would have belonged if the providential racial laws had not intervened to age me precociously and guide my choice.
The lieutenant acknowledged my assent, and without wasting time made an appointment with me at the station for the next day. Preparations? Not many were necessary: documents certainly not (I would start work incognito, with no name or a false name, later on we would see); some heavy clothes, my mountain-climbing things would be fine, a lab coat, books if I wanted. For the rest, there were no difficulties; I would find a room with heat, a laboratory, regular meals with a family of workers, and colleagues, nice people, with whom, however, he urged me not to get too friendly, for the obvious reasons.
We departed, got off the train, and arrived at the mine after a climb of five kilometers through a wood sparkling with frost. The lieutenant, who was a brisk type, introduced me briefly to the director, a tall, energetic young engineer, who was even brisker, and who had evidently been informed of my situation. I was shown the laboratory, where a singular creature awaited me: a girl of about eighteen, with fiery hair and slanting green eyes, both cunning and curious. I learned that she would be my assistant.
During lunch, which, unusually, I was invited to have on the premises, the radio broadcast the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war on Japan by the United States. My fellow diners (several employees, besides the lieutenant) greeted the announcement in various ways: some, and among these the lieutenant, with reserve and cautious glances in my direction; others with worried comments; still others asserting, combatively, the proved invincibility of the Japanese and German armies.
The “some place” was thus localized in space, without, however, losing any of its magic. All mines are magical, and always have been. The guts of the earth are teeming with elves, Coboldi (cobalt!), Niccoli (nickel!), who can be generous and let you find treasure under the head of your pick, or deceive you, dazzle you, making modest pyrite shine like gold, or disguising zinc in tin’s clothing; and in fact the names of many minerals contain roots meaning “trick, fraud, dazzle.”
That mine, too, had its magic, its savage enchantment. A vast conical pit was dug into a squat, barren hill, all boulders and scrub: an artificial crater, with a diameter of four hundred meters, similar to schematic representations of the Inferno in synoptic tables of the Divine Comedy. Along the gironi,5 day after day, volleys of mines were exploded; the gradient of the walls of the cone was the minimum needed so that the dislodged material would roll to the bottom but without gaining too much momentum. At the bottom, in place of Lucifer, was a sturdy shutter-like door, and below that was a short vertical shaft that emptied into a long horizontal tunnel; this, in turn, came out into the air on the side of the hill, above the plant. An armored train went back and forth in the tunnel: a small but powerful locomotive drew its cars up one by one under the door to be filled, then hauled them out to see the stars again.
The plant was constructed in tiers, along the slope of the hill and below the tunnel opening. The mineral was broken up in a monstrous crusher, which the director showed me and demonstrated with almost childlike enthusiasm: it was an upside-down bell, or, if you prefer, the corolla of a convolvulus, with a diameter of four meters, made of solid steel; at the center, suspended from above and controlled from below, a gigantic clapper oscillated. The oscillation was slight, barely visible, but enough to crack in the blink of an eye the boulders as they poured down from the train: they broke apart, were caught farther down, broke up again, and came out the bottom in fragments as big as a man’s head. The operation proceeded amid an apocalyptic noise, in a cloud of dust that could be seen from the plain. The material was then further ground down into gravel, desiccated, and sorted; and it wasn’t hard to ascertain that the ultimate purpose of that cyclopean labor was to extract from the rock the wretched 2 percent of asbestos trapped in it. The rest, thousands of tons a day, was dumped down the hill at random.
Year by year, the valley was filling with a slow avalanche of dust and gravel. There was still asbestos in the mass, which made it slightly runny, sluggish, and doughy, like a glacier: the enormous gray tongue, dotted with black boulders, advanced laboriously, ponderously, toward the bottom, some ten meters a year; it exerted on the walls of the valley a pressure that caused deep transverse cracks in the rock, and shifted by centimeters a year any buildings that had been constructed too far down. In one of these, called “the submarine,” precisely because of its silent drift, I lived.
There was asbestos everywhere, like an ashy snow; if you left a book on a table and a few hours later picked it up, you found the negative of its outline; the roofs were covered with a thick layer of dust, which on rainy days was absorbent, like a sponge, and would suddenly, and violently, slide to the ground. The mine chief, an obese giant with a thick black beard whose name was Anteo, and who seemed to draw his strength from Mother Earth, told me that, years before, a steady rain had washed many tons of asbestos off the walls of the mine; the asbestos had accumulated at the bottom of the cone, above the open valve, stealthily packing itself into a plug. No one had thought much of this; but it had continued to rain, the cone had functioned like a funnel, on top of the plug a lake of twenty thousand cubic meters of water had appeared, and still no one thought anything of it. He, Anteo, feared the worst, and had insisted to the director at the time that he should do something about it: like a good mine boss, he inclined toward exploding a submerged mine on the bottom of the lake, without delay; but a little of this, a little of that, it might be dangerous, it might damage the valve, management had to be consulted, no one wanted to decide, so the mine itself decided, with its evil genius.
While the sages were deliberating, a deafening roar was heard: the plug had given way, the water had engulfed the shaft and the tunnel, had swept away the train and all its cars, and had devastated the plant. Anteo showed me signs of the flood, a good two meters above the inclined plane.
The laborers and the miners (who in the local slang were called “the minors”) came from the nearby towns, traveling maybe two hours on mountain paths; the office workers lived at the mine. The plain was only five kilometers away, but the mine was in effect a small autonomous republic. In that time of rationing and the black market, there were no problems with supplies: no one knew how, but everyone had everything. Many of the office workers had their own vegetable gardens, near the square building that housed the offices; some even had chicken coops. Several times the hens of one had crossed into the garden of another, damaging it, and tedious controversies and feuds arose, which did not accord with the serenity of the place and the vigorous character of the director. He had cut the knot on his own: he had obtained a Flobert gun and hung it on a nail in his office. Anyone who saw from a window a strange hen pecking in his garden had the right to take the gun and shoot twice: but it had to be caught in the act. If the hen died on his land, the corpse belonged to the shooter: that was the rule. In the early days after the measure, many quick trips to the gun and shootings were witnessed, while those who had no interest made bets. Then the trespassing had stopped.
Other marvelous stories were told to me, like the one about Signor Pistamiglio’s dog. By my time, this Signor Pistamiglio had been gone for years, but the memory of him was vivid and, as often happens, had acquired the gilded patina of legend. Signor Pistamiglio was a very good head of his department, no longer young, a bachelor, full of common sense, well respected, and his dog was a beautiful German shepherd, equally upstanding and respected
.
One Christmas, four of the fattest turkeys in the village in the valley disappeared. Never mind: people imagined thieves, foxes, then forgot. But another winter came, and this time, during November and December, seven turkeys disappeared. A report was made to the carabinieri, but the mystery would never have been cleared up if Signor Pistamiglio himself had not let a word too many escape, one evening when he was a little drunk. The turkey thieves were the two of them, him and the dog. On Sundays he brought the dog to the town, walked around among the houses, and showed him which were the finest and least guarded turkeys; he explained to him in each case the best strategy; then they returned to the mine, and at night he let him go. The dog arrived unseen, creeping along the walls like a wolf, jumped the fence of the pen or dug a tunnel underneath, silently killed the turkey, and brought it back to his accomplice. Signor Pistamiglio didn’t sell the turkeys: according to the most credible version, he gave them to his lovers, who were many, ugly, old, and scattered throughout the Piedmontese Prealps.
Many love stories were told to me: as far as one could tell, all fifty inhabitants of the mine had interacted with the others, two by two, as in combinatorial analysis; I mean, each with all the others—specifically, every man with all the women, single or married, and every woman with all the men. It was enough to pick two names at random, better if of different sexes, and ask a third, “What was between them?” and, lo and behold, a splendid story unfolded, since everyone knew the history of everyone else. It’s not clear why these events, often intricate and always intimate, were told so readily to me in particular, who, on the other hand, couldn’t tell anybody anything, not even my real name; but that seems to be my planet (and I’m not complaining about it at all)—I’m a person to whom many things are told.