The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  This viaticum of directives and prohibitions would have made me permanently unhappy if, upon entering the laboratory, I had not found Giulia Vineis, perfectly at ease, sitting at her counter. She wasn’t working; rather, she was mending her stockings, and seemed to be expecting me. She greeted me with affectionate familiarity and a sarcastic smile full of insinuations.

  We had been colleagues at university for four years and had been together in all the laboratory courses—which are remarkable matchmakers—without ever forming a particular friendship. Giulia was a small, lively, dark-haired girl; she had elegantly arching eyebrows, a smooth, sharp face, quick but precise movements. She was more open to practice than to theory, full of human warmth, Catholic without being rigid, generous and disorderly; she spoke in a husky, dreamy voice, as if she were definitively tired of life, which she was not at all. She had been there for almost a year; yes, it was she who had given my name to the Commendatore. She knew vaguely about my precarious situation at the Mines, thought I would be good at this research job, and then, why not admit it, she was tired of being alone. But I mustn’t get the wrong idea: she was engaged, very much engaged, a complicated and tumultuous affair that she would explain to me later. And I? No? No girls? Bad: she would take care to give me a hand, racial laws or not—all nonsense, how important could they be?

  She urged me not to take the Commendatore’s fixations too seriously. Giulia was one of those people who, apparently without asking questions and without going to any trouble, immediately know everything about everybody, something that to me, I don’t know why, doesn’t happen; therefore she was an excellent tour guide and interpreter. In a single session she taught me the essential, the pulleys concealed behind the scenes of the factory, and the roles of the principal characters. The Commendatore was the boss, although subject to obscure other bosses in Basel: but the person in charge was Signora Loredana (and she pointed her out to me through the window in the courtyard: tall, dark, shapely, coarse, a bit faded), who was his secretary and his lover. They had a villa on the lake, and he, “who was old but a lecher,” took her out sailing: there were some pictures in the administrative offices, had I seen them? Signor Grasso, in the Personnel Office, was also after Signora Loredana, but for the moment she, Giulia, had not been able to establish if he had gone to bed with her or not: she would keep me up to date. Living in that factory was not difficult; it was difficult to work there, because of all the obstacles. The solution was simple: not to work. She had realized this right away and, modesty aside, had done practically nothing; all she did was set up the apparatus in the morning, enough to satisfy the eye, and take it apart in the evening, according to the rules; the daily reports she made up. Apart from that, she was getting her trousseau ready, she slept a lot, wrote torrential letters to her fiancé, and, against the rules, started conversations with anyone who came within range. With Ambrogio, who was half deaf, and took care of the rabbits for the experiments; with Michela, the custodian of all the keys, who was probably a Fascist spy; with Signorina Varisco, the woman who, according to the Commendatore, would make my lunch; with Maiocchi, who had fought for the Fascists in Spain and was a dandy and a womanizer; and with, impartially, the pale, gelatinous Moioli, who had nine children and had been in the People’s Party, and whom the Fascists had beaten severely, breaking his back.

  Varisco, she explained, was her creature: she was devotedly attached to her and would do anything she asked, including special expeditions into the Organotherapy Production Department (off-limits to those who were not employed there), from which she returned with livers, brains, adrenal glands, and other precious offal. Varisco, too, was engaged, and between them there was a deep solidarity and an intense exchange of intimate confidences. From Varisco, who, being in the Cleaning Department, had access to everything, she had learned that the Production Department was heavily swathed in anti-spy trappings: all the pipes for water, steam, vacuum, gas, naphtha, and so forth ran in tunnels or were set in concrete, and only the valves were accessible; the machines were housed in complicated, locked casings. The dials of the thermometers and gauges were not graduated: they bore only conventional colored marks.

  Of course, if I wanted to work, and if diabetes research interested me, I should go ahead with it, we would get along just the same; but I should not count on her collaboration, because she had other things to think about. I could, however, count on her and on Varisco as far as cooking was concerned. They, both of them, had to practice, in view of their marriages, and they would prepare food that would make me forget ration cards and rationing. To me it seemed slightly irregular that complex cooking should be done in a laboratory, but Giulia told me that, apart from a certain mysterious consultant from Basel who seemed to be embalmed, and who showed up once a month (and, besides, was announced far in advance), looked around as if he were in a museum, and left without opening his mouth, no living soul ever came to that laboratory, and you could do what you liked, provided you left no traces. In the memory of man, the Commendatore had never set foot there.

  A few days after I was hired, the Commendatore called me to his office, and on that occasion I noticed that the photographs with the sailboat, although very chaste, were indeed there. He said that it was time to get to the point. The first thing I was to do was go to the library and ask Signorina Paglietta for Kerrn, a treatise on diabetes: I knew German, right? Good, that way I could read the original text, and not a bad French translation that the people in Basel had had made. He, he had to admit, had read only the latter, without understanding much, but he was convinced that Doktor Kerrn knew what was what, and that it would be wonderful to be the first to translate his ideas into practice. Of course, he wrote in a rather convoluted way, but the people in Basel, and especially the embalmed consultant, attached great importance to this matter of the oral diabetes medicine. So I should take Kerrn and read it carefully, then we would discuss it together. But meanwhile, in order not to waste time, I could start work. His many concerns had not permitted him to devote to the text the attention it deserved, but he had got from it two basic ideas, and one could attempt to test them in practice.

  The first idea had to do with anthocyanins. Anthocyanins, as you well know, are the pigments of red and blue flowers: they are substances that, like glucose, are easy to oxidize and deoxidize and diabetes is an anomaly in the oxidation of glucose; “therefore,” using anthocyanins one could attempt to restore the normal oxidation of glucose. Anthocyanins are abundant in the petals of cornflowers; in view of this, he had had a whole field of cornflowers planted, and the petals gathered and dried in the sun: I was to try to make extracts, administer them to the rabbits, and check their glucose levels.

  The second idea was equally vague, at once simplistic and muddled. Also according to Doktor Kerrn, in the Commendatore’s Lombard interpretation, phosphoric acid had a fundamental importance in the replacement of carbohydrates. Up to that point, there was little to object to; less convincing was the hypothesis, elaborated by the Commendatore himself from Kerrn’s obscure principles, that you had only to administer to the diabetic a little phosphorus of vegetal origin to straighten out his disrupted metabolism. At that time I was still young enough to think it possible to persuade a superior to change his ideas, so I put forward two or three objections; but I immediately saw that under the blows the Commendatore hardened like a copper plate under the hammer. He cut me off and, in a peremptory tone that transformed his proposals into orders, advised me to analyze a good number of plants, to choose those which were richest in organic phosphorus, to make the usual extracts, and insert them in the usual rabbits. Good luck with the work and good evening.

  When I reported to Giulia the outcome of this conversation, her opinion was immediate and indignant: the old man is mad. But I had provoked him, descending onto his terrain and showing from the start that I took him seriously: it served me right, so now I had to extricate myself, with the cornflowers and the phosphorus and the rabbits. According to her, that man
ia of mine for work, which went so far that I prostituted myself to the Commendatore’s senile fairy stories, came from the fact that I didn’t have a girl; if I had, I would have thought of her rather than of anthocyanins. It was a real pity that she, Giulia, wasn’t available, because she knew my type, I was one of those who won’t take the initiative, who, in fact, flee, and have to be led by the hand, slowly overcoming the obstacles. Well, she had a cousin in Milan who was also a little timid; she would find a way for me to meet her. But I, too, good heavens, had to get busy; it pained her to see someone like me wasting on rabbits the best years of his youth. This Giulia was a bit of a witch; she read palms, went to fortune-tellers, and had premonitory dreams, and sometimes I dared to think that her rush to free me from an old anguish, and to get for me a modest portion of happiness immediately, came from an obscure intuition of what destiny had in store for me, and was aimed unconsciously at deflecting it.

  We went together to see Port of Shadows and found it marvelous, confessing to each other that we had identified with the protagonists: Giulia, slender and dark, with the ethereal Michele Morgan and her icy gaze, I, meek and withdrawn, with Jean Gabin, deserter, charmer, tough guy, and murder victim. Ridiculous, and then the two of them were in love and we were not, right?

  When the film was nearly over, Giulia announced that I must see her home. I was supposed to go to the dentist, but she said, “If you don’t come with me, I’ll shout ‘Hands off, you pig!’” I objected, but Giulia took a breath and in the darkness of the theater began, “Hands . . .”; so I telephoned the dentist and took her home.

  Giulia was a lioness, who could travel ten hours, standing up, on a train crowded with evacuees to spend two with her man, radiantly happy if she could engage in a violent verbal duel with the Commendatore or Signora Loredana, but she was afraid of small animals and thunder. She would call me to get a spider off her desk (however, I was not to kill it but to put it in a weighing bottle and carry it out into the garden), and this made me feel virtuous and strong, like Hercules before the Hydra of Lerna, and at the same time tempted, because I perceived the intense feminine charge of the request. There was a fierce storm; Giulia endured two thunderclaps and at the third sought refuge with me. I felt the heat of her body against mine, dizzying and new, known in dreams, but I did not return the embrace; if I had, perhaps her destiny and mine would have gone crashing off the tracks, toward an utterly unpredictable common future.

  The librarian, whom I had never seen before, guarded the library like a barnyard dog, one of those poor dogs that are deliberately made vicious by means of a chain and hunger; or, rather, like the toothless old cobra, pale through centuries of darkness, that guards the king’s treasure in The Jungle Book. Signorina Paglietta, poor woman, was practically a lusus naturae: she was small, without bosom or hips, wan, melancholy, and monstrously nearsighted; she wore glasses so thick and concave that, when you looked straight at her, her eyes, of a light blue that was almost white, seemed very distant, as if pasted to the back of her skull. She gave the impression that she had never been young, although certainly she was no more than thirty, and that she had been born there, in the shadows, in that faintly stale musty odor. No one knew anything about her, the Commendatore himself spoke of her with irritable impatience, and Giulia admitted that she hated her instinctively, without knowing why, mercilessly, the way the fox hates the dog. She said that she smelled of naphthalene and had the face of someone constipated. Signorina Paglietta asked me why I needed Kerrn in particular, wanted to see my identity card, examined it with a malevolent expression, made me sign a registry, and gave up the volume with reluctance.

  It was a strange book: unlikely that it could have been written and published anywhere but in the Third Reich. The author was certainly not inexperienced, but every page exhaled the arrogance of one who knows that his statements will not be challenged. He wrote, or held forth, like a possessed prophet, as if the metabolism of glucose, in the diabetic and the healthy, had been revealed to him by Jehovah on Sinai, or, rather, by Wotan in Valhalla. I immediately conceived for Kerrn’s theories a spiteful distrust; perhaps I was wrong, but the thirty years that have passed since then have not led me to reevaluate them.

  The adventure of the anthocyanins ended quickly. It began with a picturesque invasion of cornflowers, sacks and sacks of delicate blue petals, dry and fragile as tiny fried potatoes. They yielded extracts with changeable colors, also picturesque but extremely unstable: after a few days of attempts, even before turning to the rabbits, I got authorization from the Commendatore to drop the matter. I continued to find it strange that this man, who was Swiss, and had his feet on the ground, had let himself be convinced by that fanatical visionary, and, given the opportunity, I hinted, cautiously, at my opinion, but he responded harshly that it was not my business to criticize professors. He gave me to understand that I was not paid for nothing, and invited me not to waste time, and to start on the phosphorus right away: he was sure that phosphorus would certainly lead to a brilliant solution. On with phosphorus.

  I set to work, scarcely persuaded, persuaded instead that the Commendatore, and maybe Kerrn himself, had succumbed to the cheap fascination of names and clichés. In fact phosphorus has a very beautiful name (it means “bearer of light”), it’s phosphorescent, it’s in our brains, it’s also in fish, and therefore eating fish makes us intelligent; without phosphorus plants can’t grow; fosfatina Falières are glycerophosphates for anemic children of a hundred years ago; it’s in the tips of matches, which girls hopeless in love would eat to kill themselves; it’s in will-o-the-wisps, the putrid flames that appear to the traveler. No, it’s not an emotionally neutral element: it was understandable that a Professor Kerrn, half biochemist and half wizard, in the magic-saturated environs of the Nazi court, had designated it a medicamentum.

  Unknown hands left on my counter, at night, plant upon plant, one species per day. They were all singularly domestic plants, and I don’t know how they had been chosen: onion, garlic, carrot, burdock, blueberry, yarrow, willow, sage, rosemary, dog rose, juniper. Day after day, I calculated the amount of phosphorus in each, inorganic and total, and felt like a mule bound to a water wheel. As the analysis of nickel in the rock had exhilarated me in my previous incarnation, so now the daily measuring of phosphorus humiliated me, because to do a job you don’t believe in is distressing; Giulia’s presence in the next room, as she sang in a muted voice “Wake up, little girls, it’s spring” and cooked in Pyrex beakers, using a thermometer, was scarcely enough to cheer me up. Every so often she came to watch me work, provocative and mocking.

  We had noticed, Giulia and I, that, in our absence, the same unknown hands left barely perceptible traces in the laboratory. A closet, locked at night, was open in the morning. A stand had changed position. The hood, left raised, had been lowered. One rainy morning we found, like Robinson Crusoe, the outline of a rubber sole on the floor: the Commendatore wore rubber-soled shoes. “He comes at night to make love with Signora Loredana,” Giulia decided. I, on the other hand, thought that that obsessively well-ordered laboratory must be used for some intangible secret Swiss activity. From the inside, we systematically inserted sticks in the locked doors that led from Production into the laboratory: by morning the sticks had always fallen out.

  After two months I had undertaken some forty analyses: the plants with the highest phosphorus content were sage, celandine, and parsley. I thought that at this point it would be sensible to determine in what form the phosphorus was bound, and try to isolate the phosphoric component, but the Commendatore telephoned Basel and then declared that there wasn’t time for such refinements: go forward with the extracts, made simply, with hot water and a press, and then concentrated in a vacuum; insert them into the esophagus of the rabbits, and measure their glucose levels.

  Rabbits are not sympathetic creatures. They are among the mammals furthest removed from man, perhaps because their qualities are those of despised and rejected humanity: they are timid, s
ilent, and elusive, and all they know is food and sex. Except for some country cat in remotest childhood, I had never touched an animal, and faced with the rabbits I felt repulsion; so did Giulia. Luckily, however, Signorina Varisco was on very familiar terms both with the beasts and with Ambrogio, who took care of them. She showed us, in a drawer, a small assortment of suitable implements. There was a tall, narrow box, without a top, and she explained to us that rabbits like to be in a den, and if you grab them by the ears (which are their natural handle) and put them in a box, they feel more secure and stop moving around. There was a rubber tube and a small wooden spindle with a transverse hole: you had to force it between the animal’s teeth, and then stick the tube through the hole and down the rabbit’s throat without too much ceremony, pushing until you felt it touch the bottom of the stomach; if you don’t put in the spindle, the rabbit cuts the tube with its teeth, swallows it, and dies. It’s easy to squirt the extract through the tube into the stomach with an ordinary syringe.

  Then you have to measure the glucose level. What the tail is in mice, the ears are in rabbits, in this case as well: they have fat, bulging veins, which immediately become congested if the ear is stroked. From these veins, pierced with a needle, you drew a drop of blood and, without asking the why of the various manipulations, proceeded according to Crecelius-Seifert. Rabbits are either stoic or insensitive to pain. None of these abuses seemed to make them suffer; as soon as they were freed and returned to their cages, they began to nibble their hay in tranquility, and showed no fear the next time. After a month I could have measured glucose levels with my eyes closed, but our phosphorus didn’t seem to have any effect; one of the rabbits reacted to the celandine extract with a lowering of its glucose, but after a few weeks it got a huge tumor in its neck. The Commendatore told me to operate, I operated with a sharp sense of guilt and violent disgust, and it died.