by Primo Levi
The spectacle went on all night, every so often subsiding, then regaining strength with a new series of explosions: it seemed that it would never end. Finally, around dawn, a hot wind came from the east, the sky cleared, and the noise grew gradually less intense, dwindling to a murmur, then silence. The dazzling yellow mantle of lava turned reddish, like coals, and by day had cooled.
My concern was the pigs. I told Maggie to go and sleep, the four men to come with me: I wanted to see what had changed on the island.
Nothing had happened to the pigs, but they ran toward us like brothers. (I can’t bear it when people speak ill of pigs: these beasts have cognition, and it pains me when I have to butcher them.) Several crevices had opened up, two big ones where you couldn’t see to the bottom, on the northwest slope. The southwest edge of the Weeping Forest was buried, and a strip about two hundred feet wide along the edge had dried up and caught fire; the earth must have been hotter than the sky, because the fire pursued the trunks down to the roots, burrowing into them. The mantle of lava was studded with burst bubbles whose edges were sharp, like glass splinters; it looked like a giant cheese grater. It emerged from the southern rim of the crater, which had collapsed, while the northern edge, which constituted the top of the mountain, was now a rounded crest that appeared much higher than before.
When we looked at the cave of Holywell we were dumbstruck. It was a new and completely different cave, as when you shuffle a deck of cards—narrow where it had been wide, high where it had been low. In one place the roof had caved in, and the stalactites, instead of down, were pointing sideways, like the beaks of swans. At the back, where the Devil’s Skull had been, there was an enormous chamber, like the dome of a church, still full of smoke and crackling sounds, so that Andrea and Gaetano wanted at any cost to turn back. I sent them for Maggie, so that she, too, could see her cavern, and, as I predicted, she arrived in a hurry, breathless with emotion; the two stayed outside, presumably to pray to their saints and say their litanies. Inside the cave Maggie ran back and forth like a hunting dog, as if the voices she said she heard were calling her: suddenly she let out a cry that made our hair stand on end. There was a crack in the vault of the dome, and drops were falling from it, but not water: shiny, heavy drops that fell on the stone floor, burst into a thousand tiny drops, and rolled away. A little farther down a pool had formed, and then we understood that it was mercury. Hendrik touched it, and I, too; it was a cold, living material, and it moved in angry, frenetic little waves.
Hendrik seemed transfigured. He exchanged with Maggie quick glances whose meaning I didn’t understand and told us some mysterious and muddled things, which she, however, appeared to grasp: that it was time to begin the Great Work; that the earth, too, like the sky, has its dew; that the cavern was filled with the spiritus mundi. Then he turned openly to Maggie and said, “Come here tonight, we’ll make the two-backed beast.” He took from around his neck a chain with a bronze cross and showed it to her: on the cross was a crucified serpent, and he threw the cross into the mercury in the pool, and it floated.
If you looked around carefully, you could see the mercury trickling out of all the fissures in the new cave, like beer from new vats. If you listened closely, you heard a kind of sonorous murmur, made by countless metallic drops as they broke off from the vault to splatter on the ground, and by the rivulets that flowed, quivering, like melted silver and sank into the cracks in the floor.
To tell the truth, I had never liked Hendrik; of the four, it was he I liked least, but at that moment he also inspired fear, anger, and disgust. He had an oblique and mobile light in his eyes, like that of mercury itself; he seemed to have become mercury, as if it ran in his veins and oozed from his eyes. He went through the cave like a ferret, dragging Maggie by the wrist; he plunged his hands into the pools of mercury, sprinkled it on himself and poured it on his head, like a thirsty man with water—he was practically on the point of drinking it. Maggie followed him as if under a spell. I endured it for a while, then I opened my knife, seized him by the chest, and pushed him against the rock wall: I’m much stronger than he, and he went limp, like a sail when the wind drops. I wanted to know who he was, what he wanted from us and the island, and that business of the two-backed beast.
He was like a man waking from a dream, and didn’t have to be asked twice. He confessed that the story of the murdered quartermaster was a lie, but not the gallows that awaited him in Holland: he had proposed to the States-General that he transform the sand of the dunes into gold, had obtained an allocation of a hundred thousand florins, had spent a little of it on experiments and the rest on debauchery. Then he had been asked to carry out before the judges what he called the experimentum crucis, but from a thousand pounds of sand he had managed to get only two specks of gold, and so he leaped out the window, hid in the house of his lover, and then stealthily boarded the first ship leaving for the Cape; in his trunk he had all his alchemist’s equipment. As for the beast, he told me it’s not something that can be explained in a few words. Mercury would be indispensable for their work, because it’s a winged fixed spirit, or, rather, the feminine principle, and combined with sulfur, which is fiery masculine earth, it allows you to obtain the Philosophical Egg, which is the Beast with Two Backs, because the male and the female are joined and commingled in it. Quite a discourse, wouldn’t you say? Clear, direct speech, just like an alchemist’s, and I didn’t believe a word of it. Those two were the beast with two backs, he and Maggie: he gray and hairy, she white and smooth, in the cave or who knows where, or maybe in our own bed, while I was seeing to the pigs. They were getting ready to do it, drunk on mercury as they were, if they hadn’t already.
Maybe the mercury was running in my veins, too, because at that moment I truly saw red. After twenty years of marriage, Maggie wasn’t so important to me, but at that moment I was burning with desire for her, and I would have slaughtered him. Yet I mastered myself; in fact, I still had Hendrik pinned tight against the wall when I had an idea, and I asked him how much the mercury was worth—with his occupation, he would surely know.
“Twelve pounds sterling a pound,” he said in a whisper.
“Swear!”
“I swear!” he said, raising two thumbs and spitting on the ground between us; maybe it was their oath, those transformers of metals; but he had my knife so close to his throat that he was certainly telling the truth. I let him go, and, still frightened, he explained to me that unrefined mercury, such as ours, wasn’t worth much, but that it can be purified by distilling, like whiskey, in retorts of cast iron or terra-cotta, and then the retort is broken and in the residue lead, often silver, and sometimes gold can be found; that this process was a secret of theirs, but that he would do it for me, if I promised to spare his life.
I didn’t promise him a thing, and told him instead that with the mercury I wanted to pay for four wives. To make retorts and vessels of pottery had to be easier than turning the sands of Holland into gold: he had better get busy, Easter was approaching and, with it, Burton’s visit; for Easter I wanted to have forty pint jars of purified mercury ready, all alike, with tight-fitting lids, and they should be smooth and round, because the eye had to play its part as well. He was to get help from the three others, and I, too, would lend a hand. To fire retorts and jars, he needn’t worry: there was already the kiln where Andrea fired his saints.
I learned distilling right away, and in ten days the jars were ready: they were pint jars only, but they held seventeen generous pounds of mercury, and were hard to lift with an outstretched arm, and if you shook them it was as if a live animal were wriggling inside. As for finding raw mercury, that was nothing: the cavern was wallowing in mercury; it dripped on your head and shoulders, and coming home you found it in your pockets, your boots, even in your bed, and it went to our heads a little, so that it began to seem natural that it should be exchanged for women. It’s a truly bizarre substance: it’s cold and volatile, always restless, but when it’s still it’s a better mirror t
han a mirror. If you give it a spin in a bowl, it will go on spinning for almost half an hour. Not only Hendrik’s sacrilegious cross floated in it but also rocks, and even lead. Gold, no: Maggie tried her ring, but it immediately sank, and when we fished it out it was tin. In other words, it’s not a material I like, and I was in a hurry to get the business done with and be free of it.
At Easter Burton arrived, picked up the forty jars, which were tightly sealed with wax and clay, and left without making any promises. One evening around the end of autumn, we saw his sail take shape in the rain, grow larger, and then disappear in the murky air and the darkness. We thought he was waiting for daylight to enter the port, as he usually did, but in the morning there was no trace of Burton or his whaler. Instead, standing on the beach, drenched and numb, were four women, along with two children, huddled together because of the cold and their timidity; one of them silently handed me a letter from Burton. It was just a few lines: that, to find four women for four strangers on a desolate island, he had had to hand over all the mercury, and nothing remained for the commission, and on his next visit he would require, in mercury or lard, 10 percent; that they were not women of the highest quality, but he had found nothing better; that he preferred to put them ashore quickly and return to his whales, in order not to witness ugly brawls, and because he wasn’t a pimp or a pander, or a priest who could celebrate weddings; that in any case he recommended that we celebrate them ourselves, as best we could, for the health of our souls, which he already considered somewhat compromised.
I called the four men, and was going to propose drawing lots, but I saw immediately that it wasn’t necessary. There was a plump middle-aged mulatto, with a scar on her forehead, who looked insistently at Willem, and Willem looked at her with curiosity: the woman could have been his mother. I said to Willem, “You want her? Take her,” and he took her, and I married them as well as I could; that is, I asked her if she wanted him and him if he wanted her, but I couldn’t precisely remember the speech “for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health,” so I invented it on the spot, ending with “until death comes upon you,” which sounded fine to me. I was just finishing up with those two when I realized that Gaetano had chosen a cross-eyed girl, or maybe she had chosen him, and they were running off in the rain, so that I had to follow and marry them from a distance, running myself. Of the two who remained, Andrea took a Negress of around thirty, graceful and even elegant, with a feather hat and a soaking-wet ostrich boa, but with a rather equivocal look, and I married them, too, although I was still short of breath from my run.
There remained Hendrik, and a small, thin girl who was the mother of the two children; she had gray eyes and looked around as if the scene had nothing to do with her but amused her. She was looking not at Hendrik but at me; Hendrik was looking at Maggie, who had just emerged from the hut and hadn’t even taken out her curlers, and Maggie looked at Hendrik. Then it occurred to me that the two children could help me look after the pigs; that Maggie would certainly not give me children; that Hendrik and Maggie would do very well together, making their two-backed beast and their distillations; and that the gray-eyed girl did not displease me, even if she was much younger than me—in fact she made a cheerful, light impression, like a tickle, and I imagined I was capturing her in flight, like a butterfly. So I asked her what her name was, and then I asked myself aloud, in the presence of the witnesses: “Do you, Corporal Daniel K. Abrahams, take as your wife Rebecca Johnson here?” I answered yes, and since the girl agreed, we were married.
Phosphorus
In June of 1942 I spoke openly to the lieutenant and the director: I realized that my work was becoming futile, and they did, too, and advised me to look for another job, in one of the few niches that the law still allowed.
I had been searching in vain when, one morning, I was called to the telephone at the Mines—something extremely rare. At the other end of the line was a Milanese voice, which seemed to me rough and energetic, and, saying that it belonged to a Dottor Martini, summoned me for the following Sunday at the Hotel Suisse in Turin, without granting me the luxury of any particulars. But he really had said “Hotel Suisse,” and not “Albergo Svizzera,” as a loyal citizen should have done: at that time, the time of Starace,7 one was very attentive to such small details, and one’s ears were practiced in picking up certain nuances.
In the hall (excuse me, vestibolo) of the Hotel Suisse, an anachronistic oasis of velvets, shadows, and draperies, waited Dottor Martini, who was called Commendatore, as I had learned a little earlier from the porter. He was a thickset man of sixty, of medium height, tanned, and nearly bald: the features of his face were heavy, but his eyes were small and astute, and his mouth, slightly twisted to the left, as if in a grimace of disdain, was thin, like a cut. This Commendatore, too, revealed himself, in his first remarks, to be a brisk type: and I understood then that this curious haste of many “Aryan” Italians in regard to Jews was not random. Whether it was intuition or calculation, it served a purpose: at the time of Difesa della Razza, one could be courteous to a Jew, one could perhaps help him, and even boast (cautiously) of having helped him, but it was advisable not to maintain human relations with him, not to compromise oneself totally, so as not to be forced to show understanding or compassion later.
The Commendatore asked few questions, answered mine, which were many, evasively, and proved to be a man who was solid on two fundamental points. The initial salary he proposed amounted to a figure that I would never have dared ask, and it left me astonished. His company was Swiss; indeed, he himself was Swiss (he pronounced it svissero, rather than svizzero); hence there were no difficulties in the way of my possible employment. I found his Swissness, expressed with such a virulent Milanese accent, strange, in fact frankly comic; I found his reticence, on the other hand, justifiable.
The factory of which he was the owner and manager was on the outskirts of Milan, and to Milan I would have to move. The factory produced hormonal extracts: I, however, was to work on a very particular problem, and that was researching a remedy for diabetes that could be taken orally. Did I know anything about diabetes? Very little, I said, but my maternal grandfather had died a diabetic, and on the paternal side, too, several of my uncles, legendary pasta eaters, had in old age shown symptoms of the disease. Hearing this, the Commendatore became more attentive, and his eyes narrowed: I later learned that, since the tendency to diabetes is inherited, he wouldn’t have minded having available an authentic diabetic, from a race substantially human, on whom to test certain of his ideas and preparations. He said that the salary he offered was subject to rapid increases; that the laboratory was modern, well equipped, spacious; that there was in the factory a library of more than ten thousand volumes; and, finally, as when the magician pulls a rabbit out of his hat, he added that, maybe I didn’t know it (and I didn’t), but already working in his laboratory, and on the same problem, was a person I knew well, a schoolmate and friend, who in fact had told him about me, Giulia Vineis. I should decide in tranquility: I could find him at the Hotel Suisse two Sundays later.
The very next day I resigned from the Mines and moved to Milan with the few things I felt were indispensable: my bicycle, Rabelais, the Macaroneae, Moby-Dick translated by Pavese, and a few other books, my pick, my climbing rope, my slide rule, and a recorder.
The Commendatore’s laboratory lived up to his description: a palace, compared to the one at the Mines. I found, already arranged for my arrival, a counter, a hood, a desk, a cupboard full of glassware, and an inhuman silence and orderliness. “My” glassware was marked with a blue enamel dot, so that I wouldn’t confuse it with that of other cupboards, and because “you pay for breakage here.” This, in any case, was only one of the many instructions that the Commendatore communicated when I entered: he bluntly passed these off as “Swiss precision,” the soul of the laboratory and of the entire factory, but to me they seemed a lot of silly constraints, verging on a persecution mania.
The Commendatore expl
ained to me that the business of the factory, and specifically the problem that he intended to entrust to me, had to be carefully protected from possible industrial spies. These spies could be outsiders, but they might also be employees of the factory itself, in spite of the precautions he took in his hiring. Therefore I was not to discuss with anyone the subject that he had proposed to me, or its possible developments: not even with my colleagues, in fact with them less than with others. For this reason, every employee had his own particular schedule, which coincided with a single pair of trips on the tram that came from the city: A had to arrive at 8, B at 8:04, C at 8:08, and so on, and analogously on leaving, in such a way that two colleagues never had occasion to travel in the same tram car. For late arrivals and early departures there were heavy fines.
The last hour of the day, no matter what, was to be devoted to disassembling, washing, and putting away the glassware, so that no one, coming in after hours, would be able to reconstruct the work that had been done during the day. Every evening a daily report had to be compiled, and delivered in a sealed envelope to him personally, or to Signora Loredana, his secretary.
Lunch I could have where I wanted: it was not his intention to sequester his employees in the factory during the noon break. However, he said (and here his mouth twisted more than usual, and became even thinner), there were no good restaurants in the neighborhood, and his advice was to make arrangements to have lunch in the laboratory: I should bring the ingredients from home, and a worker would take care of cooking for me.
As for the library, the rules to be obeyed were singularly severe. One was not permitted to take books out of the factory for any reason: they could be consulted only with the consent of the librarian, Signorina Paglietta. Underlining a word, or even making a pen or pencil mark, was an extremely serious contravention: Signorina Paglietta was obliged to check every volume, page by page, when it was returned, and if she found a mark the volume had to be destroyed and replaced at the expense of the guilty party. It was also forbidden to leave a bookmark between pages or fold down the corner of a page: “someone” might deduce from it clues to the interests and activities of the factory, penetrate, in other words, its secret. Within this system, it was logical that keys were fundamental: in the evening, everything had to be locked up, even the analytic scale, and the keys deposited with the porter. The Commendatore had a key that opened all the locks.