The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  The interrogations of Cagni, on the other hand, were to be feared. Cagni was the spy who had had us captured: a total spy, in every ounce of his flesh, a spy by nature and inclination more than by Fascist conviction or self-interest: a spy in order to do harm, with a sportsman’s sadism, like a hunter killing game. He was a clever man. With good credentials, he had joined a partisan group adjacent to ours, and passed himself off as a repository of important German military secrets; he had revealed them, and they had later been shown to be phony, skillfully manufactured by the Gestapo. He organized the group’s defenses, insisted on scrupulous firing practice (carried out in such a way that a good part of the ammunition was used up), then fled to the valley and reappeared at the head of the Fascist units assigned to the roundup. He was thirty and had soft, pale flesh. He began the interrogation by placing his Luger in plain sight on the desk, and continued for hours without rest; he wanted to know everything. He continuously threatened torture and execution, but luckily I knew almost nothing, and the names I did know I kept to myself. He alternated moments of simulated cordiality with equally simulated bursts of anger. To me he said (probably bluffing) that he knew I was Jewish, but that that was good for me: either I was a Jew or I was a partisan; if a partisan, he would shoot me; if a Jew, fine, there was a collection camp at Carpi, they were not bloodthirsty, I would remain there until the ultimate victory. I admitted that I was a Jew: in part out of weariness, in part also out of an irrational point of pride, but I didn’t believe him in the least. Hadn’t he himself said that the command of this very barracks would, in a few days, pass to the SS?

  In my cell there was a single weak lamp, which stayed lit even at night; the light was barely enough to read by, but I read a lot just the same, because I thought that the time left to me was short. On the fourth day, during my hour outside, I secretly put a large rock in my pocket, because I wanted to try to communicate with Guido and Aldo, who were in the two adjoining cells. I succeeded, but it was exhausting: it took an hour to transmit a sentence, beating in code on the dividing wall, like the miners in Germinal, buried in the mine. With your ear to the wall to get the response, you heard instead the joyful, robust songs of the soldiers sitting at their mess above our heads: “the vision of—Alighieri,” or “but I’ll never leave my machine gun,” or, poignant among all of them, “Come, there’s a path in the wood.”

  In my cell there was also a mouse. It kept me company, but at night it gnawed on my bread. There were two cots: I took one apart, and got a long, smooth spar from it; I set it upright, and at night I put my bread on the tip, leaving a few crumbs on the floor for the mouse. I felt more mouse than he: I thought of paths in the woods, the snow outside, the indifferent mountains, the hundred splendid things that if I were free I would be able to do, and my throat constricted as if I had a lump in it.

  It was very cold. I pounded on the door until the soldier who functioned as a cop arrived, and I begged him for a hearing with Fossa; the cop was the one who had hit me at the moment we were captured, but when he learned I was a “doctor” he apologized. Italy is a strange country. He didn’t get me a hearing, but he obtained a blanket for me and the others, and permission to warm ourselves for half an hour every evening, before silence, near the boiler for the heating system.

  The new regime began that very evening. The soldier came to get me, and he was not alone: with him was another prisoner, of whose existence I hadn’t known. Too bad, it would have been much better if it had been Guido or Aldo; anyway, it was a human being with whom I could exchange a few words. He led us into the boiler room, which was dark with soot, squeezed by a low ceiling, and almost entirely taken up by the boiler, but warm: a relief. The soldier had us sit on a bench, and he himself sat on a chair in the doorway, so as to obstruct it: he kept his machine gun upright between his knees, yet a few minutes later he was dozing and uninterested in us.

  The prisoner looked at me with curiosity. “Are you the rebels?” he asked. He was perhaps thirty-five, thin and slightly hunched; he had curly, uncombed hair, a roughly shaved beard, a big hooked nose, a mouth without lips, and furtive eyes. His hands were disproportionately large and gnarled, as if baked by the sun and the wind, and he couldn’t keep them still: now he scratched, now he rubbed one against the other as if he were washing them, now he drummed on the bench or a thigh; I noticed that they trembled slightly. His breath smelled of wine, and I deduced from that that he had just been arrested; he had the accent of the valley but did not seem a peasant. I answered his questions generically, but he wasn’t discouraged.

  “That fellow’s sleeping, you can talk if you want. I can get news out; and maybe I’ll get out soon.”

  He didn’t seem a very trustworthy type. “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “Smuggling: I didn’t want to share with them, that’s all. We’ll come to an agreement, but meanwhile they keep me inside: it’s bad, with my job.”

  “It’s bad with any job!”

  “But I have a special job. Smuggling is one job, but only in winter, when the Dora freezes; anyway, I have several jobs, but no bosses. We are free people: my father was and my grandfather and all the great-grandfathers from the beginning of time, ever since the Romans.”

  I hadn’t understood the reference to the frozen Dora, and I asked about it: maybe he was a fisherman?

  “You know why it’s called the Dora?” he answered. “Because it’s made of gold—d’oro. Not all, of course, but it carries gold and when it freezes you can’t dig.”

  “There’s gold in the bottom?”

  “Yes, in the sand: not everywhere, but in many stretches. The water carries it down from the mountain and piles it up randomly, in one bend yes, in another nothing. Our bend, which we pass on from father to son, is the richest of all: it’s well hidden, very out of the way, but still it’s best to go at night, so no one comes poking around. That’s why, when there’s a strong freeze, like last year, for example, you can’t work, because as soon as you’ve made a hole in the ice it freezes again, and then, besides, your hands can’t stand it. If I were in your place and you in mine, word of honor, I’d explain to you where it is, our spot.”

  I felt wounded by that phrase of his. I knew perfectly well how matters stood, but I didn’t like hearing a stranger tell me. The other, who realized his blunder, tried awkwardly to remedy it.

  “All I meant is that these are private things, things you don’t even tell your friends. I live on this, and I’ve got nothing else in the world, but I wouldn’t change places with a banker. You see, it’s not that there’s so much gold: in fact there’s very little, you wash all night and get one or two grams—but it’s never used up. You go back when you want, the next night or the next month, according to your pleasure, and the gold has returned; and so it always has and always will, the way the grass returns to the meadows. And so there is no people freer than us: that’s why I feel I’m going mad in here.

  “Then, you have to understand that not everyone is capable of washing sand, and that is satisfying. In fact, my father taught me, and only me, because I was the quickest; my brothers work in the factory. And he left his pan to me alone”—and cupping his enormous right hand slightly, he made a professional rotating movement.

  “Not all days are good: it goes best when it’s clear and the fourth quarter. I couldn’t tell you why, but it’s like that, if you ever have a mind to try.”

  I appreciated his good wishes in silence. Of course, I would try: what would I not try? In those days, as I was waiting fairly courageously for death, I harbored a piercing hope for everything, for all imaginable human experiences, and I cursed my preceding life, which it seemed to me I had taken little and poor advantage of, and I felt time slipping through my fingers, escaping from my body minute by minute, like a hemorrhage that cannot be stanched. Of course, I would look for gold: not to get rich but to try a new skill, to revisit earth, air, and water, from which a chasm that grew wider every day separated me; and to find my chemical work i
n its essential and primordial form, the Scheidekunst, the art of separating metal from dross.

  “I don’t sell it all,” the other continued. “I’m too fond of it. I keep a little apart and, twice a year, I melt it and work it: I’m not an artist but I like having it in my hands, beating it with the hammer, engraving it, scratching it. I don’t care about getting rich: what matters to me is to live free, not to have a collar like a dog, to work when I want, without anyone saying to me, ‘Get going.’ That’s why I suffer being inside here, and then, above all, the day’s wasted.”

  The soldier slumped in his sleep and the machine gun between his knees fell to the ground with a clatter. The unknown man and I exchanged a rapid glance; we understood each other right away, and jumped up from the bench: but we didn’t have time to take a step before the soldier had retrieved his weapon. He composed himself, looked at the hour, cursed in Venetian, and told us gruffly that it was time to go back to our cells. In the corridor we met Guido and Aldo, who, escorted by another guard, were going to take our place in the dusty haze of the boiler: they greeted me with a nod.

  In the cell solitude welcomed me, and the cold pure breath of the mountains that came through the little window, and the anguish for tomorrow. Straining my ears, in the silence of the blackout I could hear the murmur of the Dora, lost friend, and all friends were lost, and youth, and joy, and perhaps life: the river ran close by but indifferent, carrying gold in its womb of melted ice. I was gripped by a painful envy for my equivocal companion, who would soon return to his precarious but monstrously free life, to his inexhaustible rivulet of gold, to a line of days without end.

  Cerium

  That I, a chemist, engaged in writing here my life as a chemist, lived a different experience, has been recounted elsewhere.

  At a distance of thirty years, I find it difficult to reconstruct what sort of human specimen, in November of 1944, corresponded to my name, or, rather, my number: 174517. I must have overcome the harshest trial, that of inserting myself into the Lager system, and I must have developed a strange callousness, if I was then able not only to survive but also to think, to register the world around me, and even to undertake a fairly delicate job, in an environment infected by the daily presence of death and at the same time frenzied by the approach of the Russian liberators, who by now were within eighty kilometers of us. Despair and hope alternated in a rhythm that would have crushed any normal individual in an hour.

  We were not normal because we were hungry. Our hunger at that time had nothing in common with the well-known (not entirely unpleasant) sensation of someone who has skipped a meal and is sure that he will not miss the next: it was a need, a lack, a yearning that had been with us for a year, had put down deep and permanent roots in us, lived in all our cells and conditioned our behavior. To eat, to get food, was the primary stimulus, which was followed, at a great distance, by all the other problems of survival, and, even farther back, memories of home and the very fear of death.

  I was a chemist in a chemical factory, in a chemical laboratory (this, too, has been recounted), and I stole in order to eat. If you don’t start as a child, learning to steal isn’t easy; it took several months for me to repress the moral commandments and acquire the necessary techniques, and at a certain point I realized (with a flash of laughter and a pinch of satisfied ambition) that I was reliving, I a respectable university graduate, the involution-evolution of a famous respectable dog, a Victorian and Darwinian dog who is deported and becomes a thief in order to live in his “Lager” of the Klondike, the great Buck, of Call of the Wild. I stole like him and like the foxes: on every favorable occasion, but with sly cunning and without exposing myself. I stole everything, except the bread of my companions.

  In terms of substances that could be stolen with profit, that laboratory was virgin territory, all to be explored. There was gas and alcohol, banal and troublesome prey: many stole them, at various points of the worksite—the price was high and so was the risk, because liquids require containers. It’s the great problem of packaging, which every skilled chemist knows; the Heavenly Father also knew it, and resolved it brilliantly, for his part, with the cellular membranes, the eggshell, the multipart peel of the orange, and our skin, because in the end we, too, are liquids. Now, at that time polyethylene didn’t exist; it would have been useful to me because it is flexible, light, and splendidly impermeable, but it is also a little too incorruptible, and not for nothing the Heavenly Father Himself, who, though a master of polymerization, refrained from patenting it—He doesn’t like incorruptible things.

  In the absence of suitable packaging and boxes, the ideal thing to steal should be, therefore, solid, not perishable, not bulky, and above all new. It had to be of a high unit value, that is, not voluminous, because often we were searched at the entrance to the camp after work; and it had finally to be useful to or desired by at least one of the social categories that made up the complex universe of the Lager.

  I had made various attempts in the laboratory. I had stolen a few hundred grams of fatty acids, with difficulty obtained through the oxidation of paraffin by some colleague on the other side of the barricade: I had eaten half, and it had truly sated my hunger, but the taste was so unpleasant that I gave up on selling the rest. I had tried to make pancakes with cotton wool, which I pressed against the plate of an electric stove; they had a vague taste of burned sugar, but they were so unsightly that I did not judge them to be salable. As for selling the cotton directly to the infirmary in the Lager, I tried that once, but it was too bulky and had little value. I also tried to ingest and digest glycerin, relying on the simplistic reasoning that, as a product of the splitting of fats, it must surely in some way be metabolized and provide calories: and perhaps it did provide them, but at the cost of disagreeable side effects.

  There was a mysterious jar on a shelf. It contained twenty small gray, hard, colorless, tasteless cylinders, and it didn’t have a label. This was very strange, because it was a German laboratory. Yes, of course, the Russians were a few kilometers away, and catastrophe was in the air, almost visible; every day there were bombing raids; everyone knew that the war was about to be over. But, finally, some constants must endure, and among these was our hunger, and the fact that the laboratory was German, and that the Germans never forget labels. In fact, all the other jars and bottles in the laboratory had clear labels, typewritten, or written by hand in beautiful Gothic lettering: that alone did not have one.

  In the situation, I certainly did not have available the equipment or the peace and quiet needed to identify the nature of the cylinders. Anyway, I hid three in my pocket and at night brought them back to the camp. They were perhaps twenty-five millimeters long and had a diameter of four or five.

  I showed them to my friend Alberto. Alberto took a knife out of his pocket and tried to cut into one: it was hard, and resisted the blade. He tried scraping it: we heard a small squeak and a sheaf of yellow sparks burst forth. At this point the diagnosis was easy: it was ferrocerium, the alloy used for common flints in cigarette lighters. Why were they so big? Alberto, who for several weeks had worked as a laborer with a team of solderers, explained that they were mounted on the tips of oxyacetylene torches, to light the flame. At this point I felt skeptical about the commercial possibilities of my stolen goods: maybe they could be used to light a fire, but in the camp (illegal) matches were certainly not in short supply.

  Alberto reproached me. For him, giving up, pessimism, despair were abominable and culpable. He did not accept the concentration-camp universe, he rejected it with his instinct and his reason, he would not let himself be polluted. He was a man of strong goodwill, and had miraculously remained free, and his words and actions were free: he had not lowered his head, had not bowed his back. A gesture of his, a word, a laugh had liberating virtues, were a hole in the stiff fabric of the Lager, and all who came near him realized it, even those who didn’t understand his language. I believe that no one, in that place, was more loved than he.

/>   He reproached me: one must never be discouraged; it’s harmful, and hence immoral, almost indecent. I had stolen the cerium: well, now it was a matter of selling it, promoting it. He would see to that, he would turn it into a novelty, an article of high commercial value. Prometheus had been foolish to give men fire rather than sell it: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided the trouble with the vulture.

  We had to be more astute. This topic, the need to be astute, was not new between us. Alberto had often discussed it with me, and before him others in the free world, and still others repeated it to me later on, innumerable times, up until today, with modest results; indeed, with the paradoxical result of developing in me a dangerous tendency toward symbiosis with an authentically astute person, who would get (or consider that he had got) temporal or spiritual advantages from living with me. Alberto was an ideal symbiont, because he refrained from exercising his astuteness to my detriment. I didn’t know, but he did (he always knew everything about everyone, and yet he had neither German nor Polish and very little French), that there existed a clandestine lighter industry at the worksite: unknown craftsmen, in their spare time, made lighters for the important people and the civilian workers. Now, for lighters flints are needed, and need to be a certain size: we would therefore have to make those I had in hand thinner. Make them thinner by how much, and how? “Don’t create difficulties,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. You take care of stealing the rest.”

  I had no trouble following Alberto’s advice the next day. Around ten in the morning, the sirens of the Fliegeralarm, the air-raid warning, broke out. It was nothing new by now, but every time it happened we felt—we and everyone else—stricken to the core by anguish. It was not an earthly sound, not like a factory siren, but a sound of tremendous volume that, simultaneously throughout the entire area, and rhythmically, rose to a spasmodic high note and descended to a rumbling of thunder. It couldn’t have been an accidental discovery, because nothing in Germany was accidental, and, besides, it was too consistent with the purpose and the setting: I have often thought it was elaborated by an evil musician, who had put into it fury and lament, the wolf’s howl at the moon and the typhoon’s breath; the horn of Astolfo must have had such a sound. It caused panic, not only because it was announcing bombs but also because of its intrinsic horror, like the wail of a wounded beast that reaches as far as the horizon.