by Primo Levi
Each of those rabbits, by order of the Commendatore, lived in its own cage, male and female in strict celibacy. But one night there was a bombardment that, without doing much other damage, smashed all the cages, and in the morning we found the rabbits intent on a meticulous and general campaign of copulation: the bombs hadn’t frightened them in the least. As soon as they were free, they had dug in the flower beds the tunnels (cunicolo) from which they get their name (coniglio), and at the slightest alarm abandoned their wedding nights midway and took refuge. Ambrogio had a lot of trouble catching them and putting them in new cages; the work of the glucose tests had to be suspended, because only the cages had been marked and not the animals, and after they dispersed they could no longer be identified.
Giulia came in between one rabbit and the next and said, point-blank, that she needed me. I had arrived at the factory by bicycle, right? Well, that evening she had to go urgently to Porta Genova, she would have to take three trams, she was in a hurry, it was an important matter: could I please take her on the crossbar, all right? I, who according to the maniacal staggered schedule of the Commendatore, left twelve minutes before her, waited around the corner, sat her on the crossbar of the bicycle, and we left.
There was nothing reckless about going around Milan on a bicycle then, and carrying a passenger on the crossbar, in a time of bombs and evacuations, was practically normal: sometimes, especially at night, strangers might ask for a ride, and in exchange for transport from one end of the city to the other would give you four or five lire. Giulia was normally quite restless, but that night she compromised the stability of the equipment: she gripped the handlebars convulsively, hampering the driver; suddenly changed position; illustrated her conversation with violent gestures of hand and head that unpredictably shifted our common center of gravity. At first her conversation was fairly generic, but Giulia was not the type to let a secret work in her body like a poison; halfway along Via Imbonati it came out vaguely, and at Porta Volta it was explicit. She was furious because his parents had said no, and she was dashing to the counterattack. Why had they said no? “I’m not pretty enough for them, you see?” she growled, shaking the handlebars angrily.
“How stupid. To me you seem very pretty,” I said seriously.
“Wise up. You don’t get it.”
“I only wanted to pay you a compliment; and I really do think so.”
“It’s not the moment. If you try to flirt with me now, I’ll tip you over.”
“You’ll fall, too.”
“You’re an idiot. Come on, pedal, it’s late.”
In Largo Cairoli I knew everything: or, rather, I possessed all the factual elements but so confused and displaced in their temporal sequence that it wasn’t easy for me to make sense of them.
Mainly, I couldn’t understand how the will of that “he” was not enough to cut the knot: it was inconceivable, outrageous. There was this man, whom Giulia had at other times described to me as generous, strong, in love, and serious; he possessed that girl, who, splendidly disheveled in her anger, was wriggling between my forearms, which were busy steering; and, instead of rushing to Milan to assert himself, he was holed up in I no longer know what barracks on the border, defending his country. Because, being a gòi, he was, naturally, doing his military service: and while I was thinking that, and while Giulia was arguing with me as if I were her Don Rodrigo, I was overcome by an absurd hatred for my unknown rival. A gòi, and she a gôià, according to the atavistic terminology: and they would be able to marry. I felt, perhaps for the first time, a nauseating sensation of emptiness growing inside me: this, then, meant being other; this was the price of being the salt of the earth. To carry on the crossbar of your bicycle the girl you desire, and to be so distant that you can’t even fall in love: to carry her on the crossbar to Viale Gorizia to help her become another’s, and disappear from my life.
In front of 40 Viale Gorizia there was a bench: Giulia told me to wait for her, and she went through the doorway like the wind. I sat and waited, giving free rein to the course of my thoughts, which were jumbled and painful. I thought that I should have been less of a gentleman, less inhibited and foolish, and that for my whole life I would regret that between her and me there had been nothing other than some memories of school and work; and that perhaps it was not too late, perhaps the “no” of those parents out of an operetta would be immovable, Giulia would emerge in tears, and I would be able to console her; and that these were wicked hopes, taking cruel advantage of the misfortunes of another. And finally, like a shipwrecked man who is tired of struggling and lets himself sink, I fell back into the thought that was dominant in those years: that the existing fiancé and the laws of separation were only foolish pretexts, and that my incapacity to get close to a woman was a sentence without appeal, and would accompany me to my death, restricting me to a life poisoned by envy and abstract desires, sterile and without purpose.
Giulia emerged after two hours—rather, erupted from the doorway like a shell from a howitzer. There was no need to ask questions to know how it had gone. “I made them feel this high,” she said, all red in the face and still panting. I did my best to compliment her in a credible way, but you can’t make Giulia believe things you don’t think, nor can you hide things you do think. Now that she was relieved of her weight, and happy in victory, she looked me straight in the eye, saw the cloud, and asked, “What were you thinking about?”
“About phosphorus,” I said.
Giulia was married a few months later, and she said goodbye to me sniffling, and giving Signorina Varisco detailed instructions about meals. She had many travails and many children; we remained friends and we see each other in Milan every so often and talk about chemistry and sensible things. We are not discontent with our choices or with what life has given us, but when we meet we both feel the curious and not unpleasant sensation (we have many times described it to each other) that a veil, a puff of wind, a roll of the dice turned us off onto two divergent paths that were not ours.
7. Achille Starace was for many years the secretary of the Fascist Party; he promoted among other things purity of the language, which meant eliminating words of foreign origin, such as hotel and (below) hall (meaning “lobby”).
Gold
It’s a widely known fact that Turinese transplanted to Milan don’t grow there, or don’t thrive. In Milan in the fall of 1942 there were seven of us, friends from Turin, boys and girls, who had for various reasons landed in the big city that the war made inhospitable; our parents—those of us who still had them—had been evacuated to the countryside to escape the bombing, and we led a nearly communal life. Euge was an architect, who wanted to rebuild Milan, and said that the best urban planner had been Frederick Barbarossa. Silvio had a law degree, but was writing a philosophical treatise on tiny pages of parchment and was employed in a transport and shipping business. Ettore was an engineer at Olivetti. Lina made love with Euge and did some sort of work in art galleries. Vanda was a chemist, like me, but she couldn’t find a job and was permanently irritated by this fact, because she was a feminist. Ada was my cousin and worked at the publisher Corbaccio: Silvio called her a bi-doctor, because she had two degrees, and Euge called her cugimo, that is, the cousin—cugino—of Primo, which Ada resented a little. I, after Giulia’s marriage, was alone with my rabbits, feeling widowed and orphaned, and I fantasized about writing the saga of a carbon atom, so that the world would understand the solemn poetry, known only to chemists, of chlorophyllous photosynthesis. In fact, I did write it, but many years later; it’s the story that ends this book.
If I’m not mistaken, we all wrote poetry, except Ettore, who said that it wasn’t dignified for an engineer. To write melancholy, crepuscular poems, and not even very good ones, while the world was in flames, seemed to us neither strange nor shameful: we proclaimed ourselves enemies of fascism, but in fact fascism had worked in us, as in almost all Italians, alienating us and making us superficial, passive, and cynical.
We bo
re with spiteful cheer the rationing and the cold, in houses without coal, and accepted unconsciously the nighttime bombing by the English; it was not for us, it was a brutal sign of the power of our distant allies: they should go ahead. We thought what all humiliated Italians thought at the time: that the Germans and the Japanese were invincible, but that so were the Americans, and the war would go on for twenty or thirty more years, a bloody and interminable yet remote stalemate, known only through censored war reports, and sometimes, in certain families of my contemporaries, through the grim, bureaucratic letters that said “heroically, in the fulfillment of his duty.” The macabre dance, up and down the Libyan coast, forward and back in the steppes of Ukraine, would never end.
We all did our jobs, day after day, halfheartedly, without conviction, which happens to those who know they aren’t working for their own tomorrow. We went to the theater and to concerts, which were sometimes interrupted in the middle because the air-raid sirens sounded, and this seemed to us a ridiculous and gratifying accident. The Allies were masters of the sky; perhaps in the end they would win and fascism would be finished: but it was their business, they were rich and powerful, they had the aircraft carriers and the Liberators. We did not: they had declared us “other,” and other we would remain; we took sides, but we kept ourselves apart from the stupid, cruel games of the Aryans, discussing the plays of O’Neill or Thornton Wilder, going climbing in the Grigne, falling a little in love with one another, inventing intellectual games, and singing beautiful songs that Silvio had learned from some Waldensian friends. Of what was happening in those very months all over German-occupied Europe, in Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, in the ditch of Babi Yar near Kiev, in the Warsaw Ghetto, in Salonika, in Paris, in Lidice: of this pestilence that was about to overwhelm us we had no precise information, only vague and sinister hints brought by soldiers who were returning from Greece or from behind the lines of the Russian front, and whom we tended to censor. Our ignorance allowed us to live, as when you are in the mountains, and your rope is worn and about to break, but you don’t know it, and you go confidently onward.
But in November came the Allied landing in North Africa, in December came the Resistance, and then the Russian victory at Stalingrad, and we understood that the war had come close and history had started up again on its path. In the space of a few weeks each of us matured, more than in all the preceding twenty years. Out of the shadows came men whom fascism had not bowed, lawyers, professors, and workers, and we recognized in them our teachers, those from whom we had till then uselessly sought wisdom in the Bible, in chemistry, in the mountains. Fascism had reduced them to silence for twenty years, and they explained to us that fascism was not only a clownish and improvident bad government but the denier of justice; it not only had dragged Italy into an ill-omened and unjust war but had arisen and established itself as the guardian of a detestable order and law, based on coercion of those who work, on uncontrolled profits for those who exploit the work of others, on silence imposed on those who think and don’t wish to be slaves, on systematic and calculated lies. They told us that our scornful impatience was not enough; it had to become anger, and the anger had to be channeled into an organic and timely revolt. But they did not teach us how to make a bomb, or how to fire a gun.
They spoke of men unknown to us: Gramsci, Salvemini, Gobetti, the Rosselli brothers. Who were they? Did there exist, then, a second history, a history parallel to what school had administered from on high? In those few convulsive months, we tried in vain to reconstruct, to repopulate the historical void of the previous twenty years, but those new characters remained “heroes”; like Garibaldi and Nazario Sauro, they had no depth or human substance. Time to consolidate our education was not granted: in March came the strikes in Turin, indicating that the crisis was near; on July 25 came the collapse of fascism from the inside, the squares overflowing with brotherly crowds, the extemporaneous and precarious joy of a country that had been given its freedom by a palace intrigue; and then came September 8, and the gray-green serpent of Nazi divisions in the streets of Milan and Turin, the brutal awakening. The comedy was over; Italy was an occupied country, like Poland, like Yugoslavia, like Norway.
In this way, after the long intoxication of words, we descended into the field to measure ourselves: certain of the justice of our choice, extremely unsure of our means, with much more desperation than hope in our hearts, and against the background of a country undone and divided. We separated, to follow our destiny, each into a different valley.
We were cold and hungry, the most poorly armed partisans in Piedmont, and probably also the most inexperienced. We thought we were safe, because we had not yet moved from our refuge, buried under a meter of snow. But someone betrayed us, and at dawn on December 13, 1943, we awoke surrounded by the Republic: they were three hundred, we were eleven, with a machine gun lacking ammunition and some pistols. Eight managed to flee and scatter in the mountains; we did not. The soldiers captured the three of us, Aldo, Guido, and me, all still half asleep. As they entered, I had time to hide in the ashes of the stove the revolver I kept under my pillow. I wasn’t sure I knew how to use it, anyway; it was tiny, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the type that movie heroines desperate to kill themselves use. Aldo, who was a doctor, rose, stoically lit a cigarette, and said, “I’m sorry for my chromosomes.”
They hit us a few times, warned us “not to try anything rash,” promised to interrogate us later in a certain persuasive way they had and to shoot us right afterward, positioned themselves around us with great ceremony, and we set off for the pass. During the march, which lasted for several hours, I managed to do two things that were of great importance to me: I ate, bit by bit, the patently false identity card I had in my wallet (the photograph was particularly revolting), and, pretending to stumble, thrust into the snow the notebook full of addresses I had in my pocket. The soldiers sang proud war songs, shot at rabbits with their machine guns, threw grenades into the stream to kill the trout. Down in the valley several buses were waiting for us. They made us get in and sit separately; I had soldiers all around, sitting and standing, who paid no attention to us and went on singing. One, just in front of me, turned his back to me; a grenade was hanging from his belt, the German kind, with a wooden handle, that go off on a timer. I could have easily removed the safety, pulled the cord, and put an end to myself along with several of them, but I didn’t have the courage. They led us to the barracks, on the outskirts of Aosta. Their centurion was named Fossa, and it’s strange, absurd, and comical, in a sinister way, given the situation at the time, that he has lain for decades in some godforsaken war cemetery, while I am here, alive and fundamentally unharmed, writing this story. Fossa was legalistic, and he quickly got busy organizing for us a prison regime that followed the rules; thus he put us in the basement of the barracks, one to a cell, with cot and pail, rations at eleven, an hour in the open air, and a ban on communicating with one another. This ban was painful, because among us, in our minds, weighed an ugly secret: the same secret that had exposed us to capture, extinguishing in us, a few days earlier, any will to resist, indeed to live. We had been forced by our conscience to carry out a sentence, and we had done so, but we had emerged destroyed, destitute, desiring that everything be finished and to be finished ourselves; but desiring also to see each other, to talk, to help one another exorcise that still so recent memory. Now we were finished, and we knew it: we were in a trap, each in his own trap, there was no exit, except down. It didn’t take me long to become convinced of it, examining my cell bit by bit: the novels I had nourished myself on years before were full of marvelous escapes, but here the walls were half a meter thick, the door was massive and guarded from the outside, the window fitted with bars. I had a nail file, I could have sawed through one, maybe even all of them; I was so thin that I might have been able to get out. But I discovered that against the window there was a solid block of concrete to provide protection from the splinters of the bombing raids.
Eve
ry so often we were called to interrogations. When it was Fossa who interrogated us, it went pretty well: Fossa was an example of a man whom I had never met before, a textbook Fascist, foolish and courageous, whose career as a soldier (he had fought in Africa and Spain, and boasted of it to us) had girded him with solid ignorance and stupidity, but had not corrupted or made him inhuman. He had believed and obeyed for his whole life, and was candidly convinced that blame for the catastrophe rested on two alone, the king and Galeazzo Ciano, who had just recently been shot in Verona: not Badoglio—he, too, was a soldier, who had sworn loyalty to the king and had to keep his vow. If it hadn’t been for the king and Ciano, who had sabotaged the Fascist war from the start, everything would have gone well and Italy would have won. He considered me a reckless youth, ruined by bad company; in the depths of his class-conscious soul, he was sure that a university graduate could not be a true “subversive.” He interrogated me out of boredom, to indoctrinate me, and to appear important, without any serious inquisitorial intent: he was a soldier, not a cop. He never posed embarrassing questions, and he didn’t even ask if I was a Jew.