by Primo Levi
And yet this story does not end here. In spite of the many years that have passed, the liberalization of trade and the lowering of the international price of nickel, the notion of the enormous wealth that lies in that valley, in the form of detritus accessible to all, still kindles fantasies. Not far from the Mines, in cellars, in stalls, on the border between chemistry and white magic, there are still people who go at night to the dump, return with sacks of gray pebbles, grind them, cook them, treat them with new reagents. The fascination with buried treasure—with two kilos of a noble silvery metal bound to a thousand kilos of discarded rock waste—is not yet extinct.
Nor are the two mineral stories that I wrote at the time. They have had a troubled fate, almost like mine: they have suffered bombardment and flight, and I had given them up for lost; I found them recently when I was putting in order papers forgotten for decades. I didn’t want to abandon them: the reader will find them here, inserted, like the escape dream of a prisoner, among these stories of militant chemistry.
5. The gironi are the circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno.
6. A song that became popular during the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, about romantic relations between Italian soldiers and the faccetta nera: “black-faced” Ethiopian girls.
Lead
My name is Rodmund, and I come from far away. My land is called Thiuda; at least, that’s what we call it, though our neighbors, that is, our enemies, have different names—Saksa, Nemet, Alaman. My land is different from this one: it has vast forests and rivers and long winters; swamps, fogs, and rains. My people, I mean those who speak my language, are shepherds, hunters, and warriors: they do not like to cultivate the earth; in fact they despise those who cultivate it, driving flocks into their fields, sacking their villages, and making slaves of their women. I’m neither a shepherd nor a warrior; I’m not even a hunter, although my work is not very different from hunting. It binds me to the earth, but I am free: I’m not a peasant.
My father and all of us Rodmunds in the paternal line have always followed this trade, which consists in recognizing a particular heavy rock, finding it in distant lands, heating it in a particular way we know, and digging out the black lead. Near my village lies a large deposit: they say it was discovered by a great-grandfather of mine, who was called Rodmund Blue Tooth. It’s a village of leadsmiths: everyone knows how to melt it and work it, but only we Rodmunds know how to find the rock, and make sure that it’s true lead rock, and not one of the many heavy rocks that the Gods have scattered in the mountains to deceive man. It’s the Gods who sow the veins of metal underground, but they keep them secret, hidden; those who find them are almost their equal, and so the Gods do not love them, and try to confuse them. They don’t love us Rodmunds, but we don’t care.
Now, after five or six generations, the bed has been exhausted: someone suggested following it underground by digging tunnels, and tried, to his detriment; finally more prudent judgment prevailed. All the men took up their old trades, but not I: as lead without us does not see the light, so we without lead cannot live. Ours is an art that makes you rich but leads to an early death. Some say that this is because the metal enters the blood and, little by little, thins it; others think, rather, that it’s the Gods’ revenge, but in any case we Rodmunds don’t care that our life is short, because we are rich and respected, and we get to see the world. In fact, the case of my great-grandfather with the blue teeth is exceptional, because the deposit he discovered was exceptionally rich: in general we searchers are travelers. He himself, they told me, came from far away, from a place where the sun is cold and never sets, the people live in buildings of ice, and marine monsters a thousand feet long swim in the sea.
Thus, after a halt lasting six generations, I began traveling again, in search of rocks to melt, or to have other people melt, teaching them the art in exchange for gold. You see, we Rodmunds are necromancers: we turn lead into gold.
I left alone, heading south, when I was still young. I traveled for four years, through many lands, avoiding the plains, ascending the valleys, tapping with my hammer and finding little or nothing. In summer I worked in the fields, in winter I wove baskets or spent the gold that I had brought with me. Alone, I said: among us, women serve to produce male children, so that the race doesn’t die out, but we don’t take them with us. What use would they be? They don’t learn to find the rock, and in fact, if they touch it when they have their period, it dissolves into dead sand and ashes. Better the girls we meet along the way, good for a night or a month, whom we can have a good time with and not think of tomorrow, the way wives do. It’s better to live our tomorrow alone. When the flesh begins to grow flabby and pale, and the stomach hurts, and the hair and teeth fall out, and the gums go gray, then it’s better to be alone.
I came to a place where, on clear days, you could see a mountain range to the south. In spring I started off again, determined to reach it: I was bored with that sticky soft earth, good for nothing, good for making clay ocarinas—earth without virtues or secrets. The mountains are different, the rocks, the bones of the earth, are exposed, they ring under hobnailed boots, and it’s easy to discern their different qualities: the plains are not for us. I asked around where the easiest pass might be; I also asked if the people had lead, where they bought it, how much they paid for it—the more they paid, the more carefully I searched the surrounding regions. Sometimes, they didn’t even know what lead was: when I showed them the slab that I always carry in my pack, they laughed at its softness, and asked derisively if in my country plowshares and spades are also made of lead. Most of the time, though, I couldn’t understand them or make myself understood: bread, milk, a bed, a girl, the direction to take the next day—that’s all.
I went over a broad pass in midsummer, and though the sun was almost directly overhead at noon, there were still patches of snow on the meadows. A little lower down were flocks, shepherds, and paths, and you could see the valley floor, so far down that it seemed to be buried in night. I descended, finding villages, one in fact quite large, beside the stream, where the mountain people came to trade beasts, horses, cheese, furs, and a red drink they called wine. I couldn’t help laughing when I heard them speak; their language was a crude, indistinct mumbling, an animal-like bar-bar, so that it was amazing to see that they had weapons and tools like ours, some even more ingenious and elaborate. The women spun, as our women do. There were houses built of stone, not so beautiful but solid; others were of wood and, supported on four or six wooden logs surmounted by disks of smooth stone, were raised about a foot above the ground. I think this was to keep mice from getting in, and it seemed to me an intelligent invention. The roofs were not of straw but of broad, flat stones; beer was unknown.
I immediately saw that, high up the valley walls, there were holes in the rock and flows of debris: a sign that someone was searching even here. But I didn’t ask questions, in order not to rouse suspicions; a stranger like me shouldn’t rouse too many. I went down to the stream, which was fairly swift (I recall that the water was cloudy, whitish, as if it had been mixed with milk, something that has never been seen in my land), and began to patiently examine the stones. It’s one of our tricks; the rocks in a stream come from far away, and speak clearly to those who understand. There was a little of everything: flint, green rocks, limestone, granite, rocks with iron, even a little of what we call galmeida, all stuff that didn’t interest me. And yet I had a kind of bee in my bonnet that in a valley made like that, with particular white stripes on the red stone, and so much iron around, there had to be rocks with lead.
I was going along the stream, sometimes on the boulders, sometimes wading where I could, like a hunting dog, eyes nailed to the ground, when, there, just beyond the confluence with a smaller stream, I saw a rock amid a million other rocks, a rock almost the same as all the others, a whitish rock with black grains, that made me stop, tense and motionless, like a pointing hound. I picked it up, and it was heavy; next to it was a similar, smaller one. We’re
not likely to make a mistake: but in any case I broke it, picked up a fragment the size of a walnut, and took it away to test it. A good searcher, who’s serious and doesn’t want to lie to others or to himself, shouldn’t trust appearances, because rock, which seems dead, is actually very deceptive: sometimes it changes its state just as you’re digging it up, like certain snakes that change color in order not to be seen. So a good searcher carries everything with him: the clay crucible, the charcoal, the tinder, the flint, and yet another tool, which is secret and can’t be named, and is used to find out if a rock is good or not.
In the evening I found myself an out-of-the-way spot and built a fire, on which I placed the well-layered crucible, heated it for half an hour, and let it cool. I broke it, and there was the heavy, gleaming disc, which you can scratch with a fingernail, which gladdens the heart and revives road-weary legs, and which we call “the little king.”
It’s not that you’re set at this point: most of the work is still to be done. You have to go back up the stream, and at every fork find out if the good rock continues to the right or the left. I followed the biggest stream for quite a distance, and though the rock was there, it was increasingly rare; then the valley narrowed into a gorge so deep and steep that you couldn’t even think of continuing. I asked the shepherds in the area, and they led me to understand, with gestures and grunts, that there was no way of getting around the drop, but that if I returned to the larger valley I would find a very narrow path that went over a pass they called something like Tringo and descended above the gorge to a place where there were horned, mooing beasts, and therefore (I thought) fields, shepherds, bread, and milk as well. I set off, easily found the path and the Tringo, and from there arrived in a beautiful land.
Right before me as I descended was a valley green with larches and, in the background, mountains white with snow though it was midsummer; the valley ended below me in a vast meadow dotted with huts and herds. I was tired; I went down, and stayed with some shepherds. They were distrustful, but they knew (too well) the value of gold, and let me stay for several days without bothering me. I took advantage of this to learn some words of their language: they call the mountains pen, the fields tza, the snow in summer roisa, the sheep fea, their houses bait. The lower part, where they keep the animals, is stone, and the upper is wood, with stone supports, as I’ve already described; there they live and store their hay and provisions. They were surly people, of few words, but they did not have weapons and did not treat me badly.
Once I had rested, I took up the search again, always using the system of the stream, and I ended by threading my way into a valley that was parallel to the one with the larches, long, narrow, and deserted, without fields or forest. The stream that ran through it had a wealth of good rock: I felt I was close to what I was looking for. It took three days, and I slept in the open, or rather, I didn’t sleep at all, I was so impatient; I spent the nights scanning the sky for daybreak.
The deposit was very remote, in a steep canyon. The white rock was visible under stunted grass, within reach, and you had to dig down only six or seven inches to find the black rock, which is the richest of all: I had never seen it before, but my father had described it to me. A compact rock, without slag, that can be worked by a hundred men for a hundred years. The strange thing was that somebody must have been there already: you could see, half hidden behind a boulder (certainly placed there on purpose), the entrance to a tunnel, which must have been very old, because stalactites as long as my fingers were hanging from the vault. On the ground were rotted wooden stakes and a few broken bits of bone; the foxes must have carried off the rest. In fact, there were traces of foxes and, perhaps, wolves, but half of a skull sticking out of the mud was certainly human. It’s difficult to explain, but it’s happened more than once: someone, sometime, coming from somewhere, in a long-ago era, maybe before the flood, finds a deposit, says not a word, attempts to dig up the rock on his own, and leaves us his bones; centuries pass. My father told me that in whatever tunnel you may excavate you’ll find a dead man’s bones.
Anyway, there was a deposit. I made my tests, built a furnace as best I could out in the open, went down and came back with firewood, melted as much lead as I could carry on my back, and went down again. I said nothing to the people in the fields: following the Tringo, I descended to the big village on the other side, which was called Sales. It was market day, and I attracted attention with the piece of lead in my hand. People began to stop, to weigh it in their hands, and to ask me questions that I halfway comprehended: it was clear that they wanted to know what it was used for, how much it cost, where it came from. Then an alert-looking fellow, in a cap of braided wool, came forward, and we understood each other quite well. I showed him that you could beat the stuff with a hammer; in fact, I immediately found a hammer and post, and showed him how easy it is to make slabs and sheets; then I explained to him that by welding a sheet along one side with a red-hot iron you can make a pipe. I told him that wooden pipes—for example, the gutters of that town Sales—leak and rot; I explained that bronze pipes are difficult to make and when they’re used for drinking water cause stomachaches; and that lead pipes, on the other hand, last forever and you can easily weld one to another. Somewhat trusting to luck, I put on a solemn expression and tried to impress him by explaining that coffins can be sheathed in lead, in such a way that the dead don’t produce worms but become dry and thin, and thus the soul doesn’t disappear, which is a real advantage; with lead, too, you can cast funeral statues—not bright, like bronze, but slightly somber, shadowed, as is fitting for objects of mourning. Seeing that these matters were of great interest to him, I explained that, beyond appearances, lead really is the metal of death: because it brings death; because its weight expresses a desire to fall, and falling is for corpses; because its very color is deathly pale; because it is the metal of the planet Tuisto, which is the slowest of the planets, that is, the planet of the dead. I also told him that, in my opinion, lead is a material different from all others, a metal that feels tired, perhaps tired of being transformed, and doesn’t want to be transformed anymore: the ashes of unknowable other living elements, which thousands and thousands of years ago were burned in their own fire. These are things I truly think, I didn’t just invent them to clinch the deal. That man, whose name was Borvio, listened in astonishment, and then he told me that what I said must be true, and that that planet is sacred to a god who in his country is called Saturn, and is represented with a scythe. It was the moment to get to the point, and while he was still mulling over my sales patter I asked him for thirty pounds of gold, in exchange for the yield of the deposit, the technology of melting, and precise instructions on the principal uses of the metal. He made me a counteroffer of bronze coins with a boar on them, minted who knows where, but I pretended to spit on it: gold, and no nonsense. Besides, thirty pounds is too much for someone traveling on foot, everyone knows it, and I knew that Borvio knew: so we closed for twenty pounds. He had me lead him to the deposit, which was fair. When we came down again, he handed over the gold: I checked all twenty ingots, I found them genuine and of good weight, and we got very drunk on wine to celebrate the contract.
It was also a farewell drunk. Not that I didn’t like that country, but many reasons pushed me to go back on the road. First, I wanted to see the warm countries, where they say that olive and lemon trees grow. Second, I wanted to see the sea, not the stormy one that my great-grandfather with the blue teeth came from but the warm sea, where salt comes from. Third, there’s no point in having gold and carrying it around on your back, with the constant fear that at night, or during a drunken stupor, it will be stolen. Fourth and inclusive: I wanted to spend the gold for a journey on the sea, to learn about the sea and sailors, because sailors need lead, even if they don’t know it.
So I left: I walked for two months, passing through a large gloomy valley, until it opened onto the plain. There were meadows and fields of grain, and a sharp odor of burned stubble that
made me nostalgic for my country: in all the countries of the world, autumn has the same odor, of dead leaves, of earth lying fallow, of burning wood, in short of things that are ending, and you think, Forever. I came to a fortified city, bigger than any we have, at the confluence of two rivers; there was a slave market, meat, wine, dirty, robust, slovenly girls, and an inn with a good fire, and I spent the winter there. It snowed as it does among us. I left again in March, and after a month of walking I found the sea, which wasn’t blue but gray, roared like a bison, and hurled itself upon the land as if it wanted to devour it; at the thought that it was never at rest, never had been since the world began, I felt my courage fail. But still I took the road to the east, along the shore, because the sea fascinated me and I couldn’t part from it.
I found another city and stopped there, partly because my gold was running out. They were fishermen and strange people, who came by ship from various distant lands: they bought and sold; at night they squabbled over women and knifed each other in the alleys. So I, too, bought myself a knife, of bronze, solid, with a leather sheath, to carry at my waist under my clothes. They knew glass but not mirrors: that is, they had only cheap mirrors of polished bronze, the type that are easily damaged and distort colors. If you have lead, it’s not very hard to make a glass mirror, but I revealed the secret as if doing them a great favor, telling them it’s an art that only we Rodmunds know, that a goddess named Frigga taught it to us, and other nonsense that they lapped right up.
I needed money: I looked around; near the port I found a glazier who had a fairly intelligent look, and I made an agreement with him.
From him I learned various things, first of all that glass can be blown; I liked that system so much that I even learned myself, and one day or another I’ll try to blow molten lead or bronze (though they’re too liquid; it’s unlikely I’ll succeed). On the other hand, I taught him that you can pour molten lead on a hot sheet of glass and obtain a mirror that’s not too big but is luminous, without flaws, and will last for many years. He was very skilled, and had a secret for making stained glass, and he cast some very beautiful multicolored panels. I was full of enthusiasm for the collaboration, and I also devised a way of making mirrors with domes of blown glass, pouring the lead on the inside or spreading it on the outside: when you look into them, you see yourself bigger or smaller, or all distorted; women don’t like these mirrors, but all the children got one. All summer and fall we sold mirrors to the merchants, who paid us well; but meanwhile I talked to them, and tried to gather as much information as I could about a land that many of them knew.