The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  It’s spirit that tames matter, right? Was that not what they had pounded into my head in the Fascist, Gentilian8 high school? I threw myself into the work in the same spirit in which, in a not far-off time, we had attacked a wall of rock; the adversary was the same, the non-me, the Big Curve, Hyle: stupid matter, lazily hostile the way human stupidity is hostile and, like human stupidity, firm in its passive obtuseness. Our job is to wage and win this interminable battle: a livered paint is much more rebellious, more refractory to your will, than a lion in its mad attack; but of course it’s also less dangerous.

  The first skirmish took place in the archives. The two partners, the two fornicators from whose embrace the orange monsters had emerged, were the chromate and the resin. The resin was made in the factory: I found the birth records of all the batches, and they presented nothing suspicious; the acidity varied, but was always less than 6, as prescribed. A batch found to have an acidity of 6.2 had been dutifully thrown out by an analyst with a flowery signature. In the first instance, the resin was not at issue.

  The chromate had been acquired from various suppliers, and it, too, had been dutifully tested batch by batch. According to the purchase order, PDA 480/0, it was supposed to contain no less than 28 percent total chromium oxide; and, indeed, I had before my eyes the interminable list of tests from January 1942 up to the present (one of the least fascinating readings that can be imagined), and all the results satisfied the prescription; in fact, they were all the same—29.5 percent, not one percent more, not one less. I felt my fibers as a chemist twitching in the face of that abomination: you should know, in fact, that the natural oscillations in the method of preparation of a chromate like that, added to the inevitable analytic errors, make it extremely improbable that the many results found in different batches and on different days will coincide so exactly. Was it possible that no one had become suspicious? Well, yes, at that time I hadn’t yet become acquainted with the frightening anesthetic power of company papers, their capacity to hamper, muffle, blunt every flash of intuition and every spark of intelligence. Besides, the experts know that all secretions are harmful or toxic: in pathological conditions, it’s not unusual for paper, a company secretion, to be reabsorbed to an excessive degree, and to put to sleep, paralyze, or even kill the organism that exuded it.

  The story of what had happened began to take shape: for some reason, some analyst had been betrayed by a faulty technique, or by an impure reagent, or by an incorrect method; he had diligently tabulated his results, so obviously suspicious but formally irreproachable; he had punctiliously signed every analysis, and his signature, expanding like an avalanche, had been reinforced by those of the head of the laboratory, the technical manager, and the general manager. I pictured him, the wretch, against the background of those difficult years: no longer young, because the young were soldiers; perhaps hunted by the Fascists, or maybe even a Fascist sought by the partisans; certainly frustrated, because analyst is a job for the young; entrenched in the laboratory in the fortress of his tiny knowledge, since the analyst is by definition infallible; derided and disliked outside the laboratory for his very virtues, as an incorruptible guardian, a small pedantic Minos, with no imagination, a spoke in the wheels of production. To judge from the anonymous, polished handwriting, his job must have worn him down and, at the same time, led to a coarse perfection, like a pebble rolled over and over until it reaches the mouth of the stream. It wasn’t surprising if, in time, he had developed a certain insensitivity to the true meaning of the operations he carried out and the notes he wrote. I resolved to investigate, but no one knew anything about him anymore: my questions evoked rude or distracted answers. Besides, I began to feel around me and my work a teasing and malevolent curiosity: who was this newcomer—this kid at 7000 lire a month, this maniacal scribbler who disturbed nights in the dormitory with his typing, of who knows what—to meddle in past errors and wash the dirty laundry of a generation? I even had a suspicion that the job assigned to me had the secret purpose of leading me to collide with something or someone: but by now the matter of the livering had absorbed me body and soul, tripes et boyaux, and in short I was in love with it almost the way I was with that girl I mentioned, who in fact was a little jealous of it.

  It wasn’t hard for me to obtain, besides the PDA, the equally inviolable PDC, the Rules for Testing: in a drawer in the laboratory there was a packet of greasy cards, typewritten and many times corrected by hand, each of which contained the method for testing a particular primary material. The card for Prussian blue was stained with blue, that for glycerin was sticky, and the one for fish oil stank of anchovies. I took out the card for chromate, which from long use had become the color of dawn, and read it carefully. It was all sensible enough, and conformed to fairly recent academic notions: only one point seemed strange to me. It was stipulated that, once the pigment had broken down, 23 drops of a certain reagent be added. Now, one drop is not a unit so well defined as to support such a definite numerical coefficient, and then, all things considered, the prescribed dose was absurdly high: it would have flooded the test, leading in every case to a result consistent with the specification. I looked at the back of the card: it bore the date of the last revision, January 4, 1944; the birth record of the first livered batch was the following February 22.

  At this point I began to see the light. In a dusty file I found the collection of PDCs no longer in use, and there it was: the preceding version of the card for chromate bore the instruction to add “2 or 3” drops, not “23”; the crucial “or” was half erased and, in the following transcription, had been lost. The events were logically connected: the revision of the card had carried an error of transcription, and the error had distorted all the successive analyses, leveling the results to a fictitious value because of the enormous excess of reagent, and thus allowing batches of pigment that should have been thrown away to be accepted; these, being too basic, had provoked the livering.

  But woe to those who yield to the temptation to take an elegant hypothesis for a certainty: readers of detective stories know it. I got hold of the drowsy warehouseman, claimed from him the saved samples of all the batches of chromate from January ’44 on, and barricaded myself behind my desk for three days, to analyze according to the wrong method and the right one. As the results were tabulated, the boredom of the repetitive work was transformed into the nervous joy of when, as a child playing hide-and-seek, you make out your adversary squatting awkwardly behind the hedge. Using the wrong method I consistently found the fateful 29.5 percent; with the right method, the results were widely dispersed, and a good quarter of them, being lower than the prescribed minimum, corresponded to batches that should have been rejected. The diagnosis was confirmed and the pathogenesis discovered: now it was a matter of discovering the cure.

  This I found fairly soon, by drawing on solid inorganic chemistry—a distant Cartesian island, a lost paradise for us organic muddlers and macromoleculists. I had to somehow neutralize in the sick body of that paint the excess alkalinity caused by the free lead oxide. Acids appeared harmful for other reasons; I thought of ammonium chloride, which can combine in a stable manner with lead oxide, yielding an insoluble and inert chloride, and releasing ammonia. Tests on a small scale gave promising results: quick, get hold of chloride—cloruro d’ammonia (or demonio, as it was designated in the inventory)—come to an agreement with the head of the Grinding Department, put two of the livers, which were disgusting to see and touch, in a small ball mill, add a weighed quantity of the presumed medicine, give the starting signal to the mill under the skeptical gaze of the bystanders. The usually noisy mill, obstructed by the gelatinous mass gumming up the balls, started off almost unwillingly, in an ominous silence. I had only to go back to Turin and wait for Monday, recounting giddily to the patient girl the hypotheses that had been made, the things that had happened on the shore of the lake, the agonizing wait for the sentence that the facts would pronounce.

  The following Monday the mill had found its
voice: in fact, it was roaring happily, with a full, continuous tone, and no sign of that rhythmic collapse that in a ball mill announces bad maintenance or bad health. I stopped it, and cautiously loosened the screws of the hatch: an ammoniac gust emerged, whistling, as it should have. I removed the hatch. Angels and ministers of grace! The paint was fluid and smooth, completely normal, reborn from its ashes like the Phoenix. I composed a report in good company jargon, and the management increased my salary. Further, by way of gratitude, I received an allotment of two côrasse (tires) for my bicycle.

  Since the warehouse contained many batches of dangerously basic chromate, which had to be used, since they had passed the test and could no longer be returned to the supplier, chloride was officially introduced into the formula for that paint as an anti-livering agent. Eventually I resigned, decades passed, the postwar years ended, the noxious, too basic chromates disappeared from the market, and my report met the end of all flesh: but formulas are as sacred as prayers, law decrees, and dead languages, and not an iota in them can be changed. Thus, my Demon Chloride, the twin of a happy love and a liberating book, now completely useless and probably a bit harmful, is still ground religiously into the anti-rust agent for chromates on the shore of that lake, and no one any longer knows why.

  8. Giovanni Gentile, known as “the philosopher of fascism,” served as Mussolini’s minister of education and in 1923 reformed all the schools.

  Sulfur

  Lanza hitched his bicycle to the rack, stamped the card, went to the boiler, started up the agitator, and lit the flame. The jet of pulverized naphtha ignited with a violent thud and a treacherous flare backward (but Lanza, knowing that furnace, had swerved in time); it continued to burn with a good taut, full roar, like a continuous thunder, which muffled the faint hum of engines and gears. Lanza was still sleepy, and cold from waking suddenly; he crouched in front of the furnace, whose red blaze, in a succession of rapid flashes, made his enormous, contorted shadow dance on the wall behind him, as if in a primitive movie theater.

  After half an hour the thermometer began to move, as it was supposed to; the polished steel needle, gliding like a snail on the yellow face, stopped at 95°. This, too, was good, because the thermometer was wrong by five degrees. Lanza was satisfied, and obscurely at peace with the boiler, with the thermometer, and, in short, with the world and with himself, because all the things that were supposed to happen were happening, and because in the factory he alone knew that that thermometer was wrong: maybe someone else would have turned up the flame, or sat there studying goodness knows what to make it climb to 100°, as the work order instructed.

  The thermometer therefore remained fixed for a long time at its 95°, and then it started off again. Lanza stayed near the fire, and since, with the warmth, sleep began to bear down again, he allowed it to gently invade some of the chambers of his consciousness. Not, however, the one that was behind his eyes and watching the thermometer: that had to stay awake.

  With a sulfur diene you never know, but for the moment everything was going normally. Lanza tasted sweet repose, and yielded to the dance of thoughts and images that is a prelude to sleep, but without letting it overpower him. It was warm, and Lanza saw his village: his wife and son, his field, the tavern. The warm air of the tavern, the heavy air of the stable. Water trickled into the stable during every storm, water that came from above, from the hayloft: maybe from a crack in the wall, because the roof tiles (he had checked them himself at Easter) were all sound. There would be room for another cow, but (and here everything grew dim in a fog of tentative and inconclusive figures and calculations). Every minute of work, ten lire in his pocket: now the fire seemed to be roaring for him, and the agitator turning for him, like a machine for making money.

  Get up, Lanza: we’ve reached 180°, you have to unscrew the hatch and throw in the B 41; it’s really ridiculous, having to keep calling it B 41 when the whole factory knows it’s sulfur, and during the war, when everything was in short supply, many people brought it home and sold it on the black market to the farmers, who spread it on their vines. But, after all, the chief is the chief and you have to do what he wants.

  He turned off the fire, slowed the agitator, unscrewed the hatch, and put on the protective mask, which made him feel part mole and part boar. The B 41 was already weighed, in three cardboard boxes: he added it cautiously, and, in spite of the mask, which maybe leaked a little, he immediately smelled the foul, depressing odor that came from the heating, and thought that the priest might even be right when he said that hell had the smell of sulfur: besides, even dogs don’t like it, everyone knows that. When he had finished, he closed the hatch and started things up again.

  At three in the morning, the thermometer was at 200°: he had to create a vacuum. He raised the black handle, and the high, grating noise of the centrifugal pump was superimposed on the deep thunder of the burner. The needle of the vacuum gauge, which was vertical, at zero, began to decline, sliding to the left. Twenty degrees, forty degrees: good. At this point you could light a cigarette and relax for more than an hour.

  There are those whose destiny is to become millionaires, and those whose destiny is to die in an accident. As for Lanza, his destiny (and he yawned noisily, to keep himself company) was to make day out of night. Even if they didn’t know it, during the war they had immediately sent him off to do that nice job of sitting on the rooftops at night to shoot airplanes out of the sky.

  Abruptly he stood up, his ears straining and all his nerves alert. The sound of the pump had suddenly grown slower and thick, as if laboring: and in fact the needle of the vacuum gauge, like a threatening finger, had climbed back to the zero and, degree by degree, was beginning to lean to the right. Little to be done, pressure was building up in the boiler.

  “Turn it off and get out.” “Turn everything off and get out.” But he didn’t get out: he grabbed a wrench and tapped the vacuum pipe along its whole length: it must be obstructed, there was no other possible reason. He hit it and hit it again: not a thing; the pump continued to grind to no purpose, and the needle was bobbing at around a third of an atmosphere.

  Lanza felt all his hair standing on end, like the tail of an angry cat: and he was angry, a violent, bloody rage at the boiler, at that balky beast sitting on the fire, bellowing like a bull: red-hot, like an enormous hedgehog with its spines erect, so that you don’t know from which side to attack and capture it, and you’d like to fly at it kicking. His fists clenched and his head hot, Lanza went, delirious, to open the hatch and release the pressure. He began to loosen the screws and from the crack a yellowish spit sprayed out, hissing, with puffs of fetid smoke: the boiler must be full of foam. Lanza closed it quickly, with a tremendous desire in his body to grab the telephone and call the chief, call the firemen, call the Holy Spirit, to come out of the night and give him some help or some advice.

  The boiler was not made for pressure, and it might explode at any moment: or at least that was what Lanza thought, and maybe, if it had been day or if he hadn’t been alone, he wouldn’t have thought that. But fear had turned into anger, and when the anger cooled it left his head cold and clear. And then he thought of the most obvious thing: he opened the valve of the intake fan, started the fan, closed the vacuum breaker, and stopped the pump. With relief and pride, because he had worked it out correctly, he saw the needle climb back to zero, like a lost sheep returning to the fold, and incline gently again toward the vacuum side.

  He looked around, with a great need to laugh and talk about it, and with a sensation of lightness in all his limbs. He saw his cigarette on the floor, reduced to a long, narrow cylinder of ash: it had smoked itself. It was five twenty, dawn was breaking behind the roof of the empty racks, the thermometer was at 210°. He took a sample from the boiler, let it cool, and tested it with the reagent; the sample was clear for a few seconds, and then turned white, like milk. Lanza turned off the fire, stopped the agitation and the fan, and opened the vacuum breaker: he heard a long angry hiss, which sl
owly dwindled to a rustling, a murmur, and then was silent. He screwed on the suction pipe, started the compressor, and gloriously, amid white smoke and the usual acrid odor, the thick stream of resin settled in the collection basin in a shiny black mirror.

  Lanza set off for the gate and ran into Carmine, who was coming in. He told him that everything was fine, left him the instructions, and began to pump the tires of his bicycle.

  Titanium

  For Felice Fantino9

  In the kitchen there was a very tall man, dressed in a fashion that Maria had never seen before. He was wearing a boat made from a newspaper on his head, he was smoking a pipe, and he was painting the cupboard white.

  It was incomprehensible how all that white could be in a can so small, and Maria was dying with curiosity to look inside. Every so often the man set his pipe down on the cupboard and whistled; then he stopped whistling and began to sing; every so often he took two steps back and closed one eye, and sometimes he also went and spat in the garbage can and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. In other words, he did so many strange new things that it was very interesting to stand there and watch him: and when the cupboard was white he picked up the can and the many newspapers that were on the floor and took everything over to the sideboard and began to paint that, too.

  The cupboard was so shiny, clean, and white that it was almost obligatory to touch it. Maria approached the cupboard, but the man noticed and said, “Don’t touch. You mustn’t touch.” Maria stopped, disconcerted, and asked, “Why?” and the man replied, “Because there’s no need to.” Maria thought about it, then asked, “Why is it so white?” The man, too, thought for a bit, as if the question seemed difficult to him, and then said, in a deep voice, “Because it’s titanium.”