The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  I recorded, in several variants, a saga going back to a time even before Signor Pistamiglio, a time when, in the offices of the mine, a regime from Gomorrah ruled. In that legendary era, no one went home when, at five thirty every evening, the siren sounded. At that signal, liquor and mattresses came out from among the desks, and an orgy was unleashed that enveloped everything and everyone, unfledged young typists and balding accountants, from the director at the time all the way down to the disabled porters: suddenly, every evening, the sad rondeau of mining paperwork ceded the field to endless interclass fornication, public and variously tangled. No survivor had lived into our time, to bring direct testimony: a series of calamitous balance sheets had forced the management in Milan to a drastic, purifying intervention. No one except Signora Bortolasso, who, I was assured, knew everything and had seen everything, but wouldn’t speak because of her extreme modesty.

  Besides, Signora Bortolasso never spoke to anyone, except out of the strict necessities of work. Before she was called that, her name was Gina delle Benne: at nineteen, already a typist in the offices, she had fallen in love with a lean, tawny-haired young miner, who, without properly returning that love, nevertheless showed that he accepted it; but “her people” were inflexible. They had spent money on her education, and she was supposed to show gratitude, make a good marriage, and not go off with the first comer; and in fact, since the girl didn’t understand these things, they would take care of them; she had better break it off with her red-haired fellow, or out of the house and away from the mine.

  Gina was prepared to wait till she was twenty-one (it was only two more years), but the redhead didn’t wait for her. He was seen on Sunday with another woman, then with a third, and ended up marrying a fourth. Gina at that point made a cruel decision: if she could not bind to herself the man she cared about, the only one, well, she would not be anyone else’s. A nun, no, she had modern ideas: but marriage would be proscribed in a pitiless and sophisticated way, and that is by marrying. She now had special responsibilities, necessary to the management, and was endowed with a memory of iron and proverbial diligence: and she let everyone know, her parents and her bosses, that she intended to marry Bortolasso, the mine’s idiot.

  This Bortolasso was a middle-aged laborer, strong as a mule and dirty as a boar. He couldn’t have been a pure idiot: it’s more likely that he belonged to that human type of which it’s said in Piedmont that they play the fool in order not to pay taxes. Sheltered by the immunity granted to the weak of mind, Bortolasso performed his job as a gardener with extreme negligence. It was a negligence that bordered on a primitive astuteness: all right, the world had declared him irresponsible, now it must put up with him as such, in fact provide for and take care of him.

  Rain-soaked asbestos is difficult to extract, so the rain gauge at the mine was very important; it was in the middle of a flower bed, and the director himself took the measurements. Bortolasso, who watered the flower beds every morning, got in the habit of watering the rain gauge as well, severely polluting the data on the costs of extraction; the director (not right away) realized it and ordered him to stop. “So he likes it dry,” Bortolasso reasoned: and after every rainfall he went and opened the valve at the bottom of the instrument.

  By the time of my arrival, the situation had been stabilized for a while. Gina, now Signora Bortolasso, was about thirty-five; the modest beauty of her face had become rigid, fixed in a tense, alert mask, and manifestly bore the stigma of prolonged virginity. Because she had remained a virgin: everyone knew, because Bortolasso told everyone. This had been the agreement, at the time of the marriage: he had accepted it, even if afterward, almost every night, he tried to violate the woman’s bed. But she had defended herself furiously and still did: no man, and less than all others that man, would ever, ever touch her.

  These nocturnal battles between the unhappy spouses were a fable of the mine, and among its few attractions. On one of the first warm nights, a group of aficionados invited me to go with them to hear what was happening. I refused, and they returned soon afterward, disappointed: all they heard was a trombone playing “Faccetta Nera.”6 They explained that sometimes that happened; he was a musical idiot, and that was how he vented.

  I was in love with my work from the first day, although in that phase it was nothing but the quantitative analysis of rock samples: attack with hydrofluoric acid, precipitate iron with ammonia, precipitate nickel (how little! a pinch of pink sediment) with dimethylglyoxime, precipitate magnesium with phosphate, always the same, every blessed day: in itself, it wasn’t very stimulating. But both stimulating and new was another sensation: the sample to be analyzed wasn’t an anonymous manufactured powder, a quiz that appeared out of nowhere; it was a piece of rock, guts of the earth, extracted from the earth by the force of an explosion. And, little by little, from the data of the daily analysis, a map emerged, a portrait of the subterranean veins. For the first time, after seventeen years of school, of aorists and Peloponnesian wars, the things I had learned began to be useful to me. Quantitative analysis, so stingy with emotions, as heavy as granite, became lively, true, and useful when inserted in a serious and concrete job. It could be used: it was set in a plan, a tile of a mosaic. The analytic method I followed was no longer a bookish dogma; it was retested every day, it could be refined, made to conform to our purposes, by means of a subtle game of reason, of trial and error. A mistake was no longer a vaguely comic accident, which spoils an exam or lowers your grade; a mistake was like climbing a rock face, a measure of yourself, an awareness, a step higher, which makes you more capable and fit.

  The girl in the laboratory was named Alida. She witnessed my neophyte’s enthusiasms without sharing them; rather, she was surprised and a little irritated. Her presence was not unpleasant. She came from the high school, she quoted Pindar and Sappho, she was the daughter of a completely innocuous local party official, she was clever and lazy, and nothing whatever mattered to her, let alone the analysis of the rock, which she had learned to carry out mechanically from the lieutenant. Like everyone else, she had interacted with various persons, and made no mystery about it to me, thanks to the curious quality of confessor that I mentioned earlier. She had quarreled with many of the women on account of vague rivalries; she had been a little in love with many men, a lot with one, and was engaged to yet another, a good dull, modest man, employed in the Technical Office, who was from her town, and whom her family had chosen for her. Even this didn’t matter to her. What to do about it? rebel? escape? No, she was a girl of good family; her future was children and stoves. Sappho and Pindar were things of the past, nickel an abstruse time filler. She did her work in the laboratory as she waited for that so little longed-for wedding, indifferently washing the precipitates and weighing the nickel dimethylglyoxime, and it took me some effort to persuade her that it wasn’t a good idea to exaggerate the results of the analyses, something she tended to do; in fact she confessed she had done it often, because, she said, it didn’t cost anyone anything and pleased the director, the lieutenant, and me.

  What, then, in the end, was the chemistry that the lieutenant and I were working so hard at? Water and fire, nothing else, as in the kitchen. A less appetizing kitchen, of course: with pungent or disgusting odors rather than domestic ones; otherwise, there, too, put on the apron, mix, burn your hands, wash up at the end of the day. No escape for Alida. She listened with dutiful attention and, at the same time, Italian skepticism to my accounts of life in Turin: they were very censored accounts, because both she and I had to play the game of my anonymity, yet something was bound to emerge, if only from my very reticence. After some weeks I realized that I was no longer nameless: I was a Dottor Levi who was not supposed to be called Levi, either in the second or the third person, out of good manners, and was not to cause trouble. In the gossipy, tolerant atmosphere of the Mines, the mismatch between my indeterminate condition of outcast and my obvious mildness of habits leaped out and, Alida confessed to me, was lengthily discussed a
nd variously interpreted: from agent of the secret police to someone with high-level connections.

  Going down to the valley was difficult, and also for me not very prudent; since I couldn’t spend time with anyone, my evenings at the Mines were interminable. Sometimes I stayed in the laboratory after the whistle blew or went there after dinner to study, or to meditate on the problems of nickel; at other times I withdrew to my monastic little room in the submarine to read The Stories of Jacob. Evenings when there was a moon I often took long walks through the wild landscape of the Mines, up to the edge of the crater, or halfway down, along the gray and broken ridge of the dump, a route of mysterious shivers and crunching sounds, as if busy gnomes really were lurking there: the darkness was punctuated by the distant howling of dogs on the invisible valley floor.

  These wanderings granted me a truce with the bleak awareness of my father dying in Turin, of the Americans defeated at Bataan, of the Germans victors in Crimea, that is, of the open trap that was about to spring: they created in me a new bond, more authentic than the rhetoric of nature learned in school, with the brambles and rocks that were my island and my freedom, a freedom that I would perhaps soon lose. For that unquiet rock I felt a fragile and precarious affection: with it I had formed a double bond, first in my adventures with Sandro, then here, attempting as a chemist to extract its treasure. In this rocky love, and in these solitudes of asbestos, on other long evenings two stories about islands and freedom had their origin: the first stories I wrote after the torment of high school compositions. One fantasized a remote precursor, a hunter of lead rather than nickel; the other, ambiguous and mercurial, was inspired by a mention of the island of Tristan da Cunha that I happened on in that period.

  The lieutenant, who was doing his military service in Turin, came to the Mines only one day a week. He checked my work and gave me suggestions and advice for the following week, showing himself to be an excellent chemist and an acute, tenacious researcher. After a short period of orientation, a job with a higher ambition took shape beside the routine of the daily analyses.

  In the rock in the Mines there was, anyway, nickel: very little—from our analyses it was an average content of 0.2 percent. Laughable, compared with the minerals exploited by my antipodean colleague-rivals in Canada and New Caledonia. But maybe the raw material could be enriched? Under the lieutenant’s guidance, I tried everything that could be tried: separation by magnet, by flotation, by grinding, by sifting, with heavy liquids, with a flow table. I got nowhere: it couldn’t be concentrated. In all the samples we obtained, the percentage of nickel remained obstinately the same as the original. Nature was no help: we concluded that nickel accompanied bivalent iron, stood in for it like a deputy, followed it like an evanescent shadow, a tiny brother: 0.2 percent nickel, 8 percent iron. Any possible reagents for attacking the nickel would have had to be used in amounts forty times as large, even without taking account of the magnesium—an economically desperate undertaking. In moments of weariness, I saw the rock that surrounded me—the green serpentine of the Prealps—in all its hostile, alien astral hardness. By comparison, the trees in the valley, now clothed in spring, were like us—people, too, who don’t speak but feel heat and cold, enjoy and suffer, are born and die, spread seeds in the wind, mysteriously follow the sun in its course. Not rock: it receives no energy in itself, it’s dead from the beginning, pure hostile passivity; a massive fortress that I had to dismantle bastion by bastion to put my hands on the hidden elf, on the capricious nickel-Nicolao that jumps out now here, now there, elusive and wicked, with his long ears erect, always quick to avoid the blows of the searching pickax, and to leave you disappointed.

  But the time of elves, of Niccoli and Coboldi, is over. We are chemists, that is, hunters: ours are “the two experiences of adult life” that Pavese speaks of, success and unsuccess, kill the white whale or smash the ship; we mustn’t give in to incomprehensible matter, mustn’t sit back. We’re here for this, to make mistakes and correct them, to suffer blows and inflict them. One mustn’t ever feel helpless; nature is immense and complex but not impervious to intelligence; you have to go around it, prick, probe, look for the opening or make it yourself. My weekly conversations with the lieutenant seemed like battle plans.

  Among the many attempts we made was to reduce the rock using hydrogen. We placed the mineral, finely ground, in a porcelain boat, this in a quartz tube, and through the tube, warmed from the outside, we passed a current of hydrogen, in the hope that it would release the oxygen bound to the nickel and leave the nickel reduced, that is, bare, in the metallic state. Metallic nickel, like iron, is magnetic, and so, according to this hypothesis, it would be easy to separate it, alone or with iron, simply by means of a magnet. But after the treatment, we wriggled a powerful magnet in a watery suspension of our powder in vain: all we got was a trace of iron. Clear and sad: hydrogen, under those conditions, reduced nothing; the nickel, together with the iron, must be embedded in the structure of the serpentine in a stable state, solidly bound to the silica and water, content (so to speak) with its condition and averse to assuming another.

  But if one tried to take apart that structure? The idea came to me like a lamp switched on, one day when an old, dusty diagram, the work of some unknown predecessor, chanced to fall into my hands; it reported on the loss of weight in the asbestos from the Mines as a result of temperature. Asbestos lost a little water at 150°C, then remained apparently unchanged until nearly 800°C; here an abrupt drop was observed, with a fall in weight of 12 percent, and the author had noted, “Becomes fragile.” Now, serpentine is the father of asbestos: if asbestos decomposes at 800°C, serpentine should also do so; and since a chemist doesn’t think—rather, doesn’t live—without models, I paused to make an illustration, drawing on the paper the long chains of silicon, oxygen, iron, and magnesium, with a little nickel trapped in their coils, and then the same chains reduced, after their breakdown, to short stubs, with the nickel flushed out of its den and exposed to attack; and I didn’t feel very different from the long-ago hunter of Altamira, who painted the antelope on the rock wall so that the next day’s hunting would be successful.

  The propitiatory ceremonies didn’t last long: the lieutenant wasn’t there, but he might arrive anytime, and I was afraid that he would not accept, or not accept willingly, such an unorthodox hypothesis of a job. I felt itchy all over my skin, but said no more; better to get right to work.

  There is nothing more invigorating than a hypothesis. Under the amused and skeptical gaze of Alida, who, since it was by now late afternoon, was looking ostentatiously at her wristwatch, I got to work like a whirlwind. In a moment, the equipment was assembled, the thermostat set to 800°C, the pressure reducer of the tank regulated, the flow meter put in place. I heated the material for half an hour, then reduced the temperature and passed hydrogen through it for another hour. It was now dark, the girl had gone, everything was silent against the deep background hum of the Sorting Department, which also worked at night. I felt part conspirator, part alchemist.

  When the time was up, I extracted the capsule from the quartz tube, let it cool in a vacuum, then dissolved the powder in water; from greenish it turned yellowish, which seemed to me a good omen. I took the magnet and went to work. Every time I extracted the magnet from the water, it brought with it a clump of brown dust, which I carefully removed with filter paper and put aside, maybe a milligram each time; for the analysis to be reliable, it would take at least half a gram of material, that is, many hours of work. I decided to stop around midnight—to halt the separation, I mean—because at no cost would I put off the start of the analysis. Giving in to my urgency, and since it was a question of a magnetic sample (and hence presumably poor in silicates), I thought up on the spot a simplified variation. At three in the morning, I had the result: not the usual pink cloud of nickel dimethylglyoxime but a visibly abundant precipitate. Filter, wash, dry, weigh. The final datum seemed to me written in fire on the slide rule: 6 percent nickel, the rest iro
n. A victory: even without a further separation, an alloy that could be sent as it was to the electric oven. It was almost dawn when I returned to the submarine, with a keen desire to wake the director, to telephone the lieutenant, and to roll around in the dark, dewy meadows. I thought many senseless things, and did not think some sadly sensible ones.

  I thought that I had opened a door with a key and possessed the key to many doors, maybe all. I thought that I had thought of something no one else had yet thought, not even in Canada or in New Caledonia, and I felt invincible and taboo, even in the face of enemies who were close by, and closer every month. I thought, finally, that I had revenged myself, not ignobly, on those who had declared me biologically inferior.

  I didn’t think that, even if the method of extraction I had glimpsed could have found industrial application, the nickel produced would end up entirely in the helmets and bullets of Fascist Italy and Hitler’s Germany. I didn’t think that, in those same months, veins of a mineral of nickel had been discovered in Albania compared to which ours could slink away, and with it every project of mine, the director, or the lieutenant. I didn’t foresee that my interpretation of the magnetic separability of the nickel was essentially mistaken, as the lieutenant showed me a few days later, as soon as I had communicated to him my results. Nor did I foresee that the director, after sharing my enthusiasm for a few days, cooled mine and his when he was forced to realize that there existed no commercially available magnetic sorter capable of separating a material in the form of a fine powder, and that with a larger-grain powder my method wouldn’t work.