The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Maria felt a delicious shiver of fear run through her, as when the ogre arrives in a fairy tale. Observing carefully, she determined that the man didn’t have a knife, in his hand or nearby: he might, however, have one hidden. So she asked, “Mi tagli che cosa?—What are you going to cut off?” and at this point he should have answered, “Ti taglio la lingua—I’ll cut off your tongue.” Instead he said only, “Not ti taglio: titanium.”

  She concluded that he must be a very powerful man: yet he didn’t appear angry but, on the contrary, rather kind and friendly. Maria asked, “What is your name, sir?” He answered, “My name is Felice.” He hadn’t taken the pipe out of his mouth, and when he spoke it danced up and down, yet didn’t fall. Maria stood quietly for a while, watching alternately the man and the cupboard. She was not at all satisfied with the answer and would have liked to ask why he was called Felice, but she didn’t dare, because she remembered that children should never ask why. Her friend Alice was called Alice and she was a child, and it was truly strange that a big man like that should be called Felice. But little by little it began instead to seem natural that the man was called Felice, and she felt, in fact, that he could not have had any other name.

  The painted cupboard was so white that the rest of the kitchen looked yellow and dirty in comparison. Maria decided that there was nothing wrong with going to see the cupboard up close: just to look, without touching. But as she approached, on tiptoe, an unpredictable and terrible event occurred: the man turned around and in two steps was beside her; he took a piece of white chalk from his pocket and drew a circle around her on the floor. Then he said, “You mustn’t go outside of this.” Then he struck a match, lit the pipe, with strange contortions of his mouth, and began painting the sideboard again.

  Maria sat on her heels and considered the circle carefully for a long while: but she had to conclude that there was no exit. She tried rubbing it with her finger in one place, and she observed that the chalk line did disappear; but she realized perfectly well that the man would not consider that system valid.

  The circle was plainly magical. Maria sat quietly and peacefully on the floor; every so often she tried to move forward until she could touch the circle with the tip of her toe, and she leaned over so far that she almost lost her balance, but she quickly saw that she still had a good handsbreadth before she would be able to reach the cupboard or the wall with her fingers. So she sat and watched as, little by little, the sideboard, the chairs, and the table also became beautifully white.

  After a very long time the man put down the brush and the can and took the newspaper boat off his head, and she saw that he had hair like all other men. Then he went out on the balcony side, and Maria heard him rummaging around and walking up and down in the next room. Maria began to call “Sir!” first in a whisper, then louder, but not too loud, because really she was afraid that the man would hear.

  Finally the man returned to the kitchen. Maria asked, “May I come out now, sir?” The man looked down at Maria and the circle, laughed heartily, and said many things that she couldn’t understand, but he didn’t seem to be angry. At last he said, “Yes, of course, you can come out now.” Maria looked at him in bewilderment and didn’t move; then the man took a rag and very carefully erased the circle, to undo the spell. When the circle had disappeared Maria got up and went skipping away, feeling very happy and satisfied.

  9. Felice Fantino was a paint technician whom Levi met at the paint factory “by the shore of a lake” where he worked just after the war.

  Arsenic

  He had an unusual aspect for a client. A variety of people came to our humble, daring laboratory—men and women, old and young—to have the most disparate goods analyzed, but they were all obviously connected to the large shrewd and shadowy network of commerce. Those who buy and sell by profession are easily recognizable: they have a sharp eye and a tense expression, are afraid of a scam or planning one, and are on their guard like a cat at dusk. It’s a profession that tends to destroy the immortal soul; there have been philosophers who were courtiers or lens cleaners, even philosophers who were engineers and army generals, but no philosopher, as far as I know, was a wholesaler or shopkeeper.

  I received him, since Emilio was out. He could have been a farmer philosopher: he was a robust, ruddy old man, with heavy hands disfigured by work and by arthritis; his eyes were clear, mobile, and youthful, in spite of the large, delicate pouches that hung empty below the eye sockets. He wore a vest, with a watch chain dangling from the pocket. He spoke Piedmontese, which immediately made me uneasy: it’s not polite to answer in Italian when someone speaks to you in dialect; right away it puts you behind a barrier, on the side of the aristocrat, of respectable people, of the luigini, as an illustrious fellow with the same name as me called them:10 and yet my Piedmontese, correct in form and pronunciation, is so smooth and enervated, so pale and polite, that it scarcely appears authentic. Rather than a genuine atavism, it seems the fruit of diligent study at a desk, by lamplight, of grammar and lexicon.

  In excellent Piedmontese, then, with penetrating traces of Asti, he told me that he had some sugar to be chemically analyzed: he wanted to know if it was sugar or not, or if there might be some muck (saloparía) in it. What sort of muck? I explained to him that if he could be precise about his suspicions it would make the task easier, but he responded that he didn’t want to influence me, that I should do the analysis as well as I could, and he would tell me his suspicions afterward. He left in my hands a paper bag with a good half kilo of sugar in it, told me that he would be back the next day, said goodbye, and went out: he did not use the elevator, but walked in leisurely fashion down the four flights of stairs. He must have been a man without worries and in no hurry.

  Few clients came to us, we did few analyses, and we earned little money: so we couldn’t buy modern, fast instruments, our responses were slow, our analyses took much longer than normal; we didn’t even have a sign on the street, and so the circle narrowed and the clients became even fewer. The samples that they left for analysis constituted a not negligible contribution to our sustenance: Emilio and I were careful not to let it be known that generally a few grams were sufficient, and we happily accepted the liter of wine or milk, the kilo of pasta or soap, the package of agnolotti.

  Still, given the case history, that is, the old man’s suspicions, it would have been imprudent to consume that sugar blindly, or even just to taste it. I dissolved a little in distilled water: the solution was cloudy—something was certainly not right. I weighed a gram of sugar in the platinum crucible (the apple of our eyes) to reduce it to ash over a flame: the domestic, childhood odor of burned sugar rose in the polluted air of the laboratory, but immediately afterward the flame became livid and a very different odor was perceptible, metallic, garlicky, inorganic, indeed, counter-organic—a chemist who doesn’t have a nose is in trouble. At this point, it’s hard to make a mistake: filter the solution, acidify it, take the Kipp generator, pass hydrogen sulfide through it. There it was, the yellow precipitate of sulfur: arsenous anhydride, that is, arsenic—the Masculine, Mithridates’ arsenic and Madame Bovary’s.

  I spent the rest of the day distilling pyruvic acid and speculating about the old man’s sugar. I don’t know how pyruvic acid is prepared these days; at that time we melted sulfuric acid and soda in an enameled casserole, obtaining bisulfate, which we threw on the bare floor to harden and then ground in a coffee grinder. We then heated to 250°C a mixture of that bisulfate and tartaric acid, by means of which the latter dehydrates to pyruvic acid and is distilled. We first attempted this operation using glass receptacles, breaking a prohibitive quantity; then we bought from the ironmonger ten metal canisters, of ARAR11 provenance, of the type used for gas before the advent of polyethylene, which proved suitable for our purpose. Since the client was satisfied with the quality and promised new orders, we took the leap and had the neighborhood blacksmith construct for us a crude cylindrical reactor of black steel, equipped with a hand agitator.
We embedded it in a well of solid brick, which had on the bottom and the sides four 1000-watt resistors connected illegally outside of the meter. Colleagues who read this, don’t be too amazed at our pre-Columbian junk-shop chemistry: in those years we were not the only ones, and not the only chemists, who lived like that; all over the world, six years of war and destruction had caused many civilized habits to regress and had attenuated many needs, primarily the need for decorum.

  From the tip of the coil condenser, the acid fell into the collector in heavy gilded drops, glistening like gems: “distilling,” in other words, drop by drop—stilla per stilla—every ten drops a lira of profit: and meanwhile I was thinking about arsenic and the old man, who didn’t seem the type to plot poisonings or to suffer them, but I couldn’t figure it out.

  The man returned the next day. He insisted on paying the fee, even before learning the result of the analysis. When I told him about it, his face lit up in an intricate wrinkled smile, and he said, “I’m really pleased. I always said it would end like that.” It was clear that he was waiting only for a slight nudge from me to tell a story; I didn’t fail him, and the story is this, a little impoverished because of the translation from Piedmontese, a language essentially spoken, into the marble of Italian, which is good for tombstones.

  “I’m a shoemaker. If you start out as a young man, it’s not a bad job: you’re sitting down, it’s not too much work, and you meet people and exchange a word or two. Of course, you don’t make a fortune, and you sit all day with other people’s shoes in your hands: but you get used to that, and even to the smell of old leather. My shop is on Via Gioberti at the corner of Via Pastrengo: I’ve worked there for thirty years, the shoemaker”—but he said “’l caglié,” “caligarius”: venerable words that are disappearing—“the shoemaker of San Secondo is me; I know all the difficult feet, and for my work a hammer and thread are all I need. Well, a young man arrived, not from around here: tall, handsome, and ambitious. He set up shop a stone’s throw away, and filled it with machines. For lengthening, widening, sewing, resoling: I wouldn’t even know how to tell you, I never went to look, they told me about it. He put cards with his address and telephone number in all the mailboxes of the neighborhood: yes, the telephone, too, as if he were a midwife.

  “You can believe that business went well for him right away. The first months yes, partly out of curiosity, partly to put us in competition, some people went to him, and also because in the beginning he kept the prices low: but then he had to raise them, when he saw that he was losing money. Note that I’m telling you all this without any ill will toward him: I’ve seen so many like him, take off at a gallop and break their neck, shoemakers and not only shoemakers. But he, they said, bore me ill will: they tell me everything, and you know who? The old ladies, the ones whose feet hurt and they don’t feel like walking anymore and have only one pair of shoes: they come to me, they sit and wait while I fix the problem, and meanwhile they keep me up to date, they tell me all the news.

  “He detested me, and he spread around a heap of lies. That I resole with cardboard. That I get drunk every night. That I murdered my wife for the insurance. That a nail came through the sole of one of my customers’ shoes and he died of tetanus. And then, with things at this point, you know, I wasn’t at all surprised when, one morning, in the midst of the day’s shoes, I found this bag. I immediately got the game, but I wanted to be sure: so I gave a little to the cat, and after two hours it went into a corner and vomited. Then I put a little in the sugar bowl, yesterday my daughter and I put it in our coffee, and after two hours we both vomited. Now then, I have your confirmation, and I’m satisfied.”

  “Do you want to file charges? Do you need a statement?”

  “No, no. I told you, he’s only a poor devil, and I don’t want to ruin him. For our trade, the world is big and there’s room for two; he doesn’t know it, but I do.”

  “So?”

  “So tomorrow I’ll send the bag back by way of one of my old ladies, with a note. Rather, no: I’ll take it myself, so I can see his face and explain a few things.” He looked around, as one would in a museum, then added, “Good trade, yours, too: it takes an eye and patience. If you don’t have that, you’re better off finding another.”

  He said goodbye, picked up the package, and went down by the stairs, with the tranquil dignity that became him.

  10. Carlo Levi (1902–1975), in his novel The Clock, called the uncultured, arrogant bourgeoisie luigini.

  11. The Azienda Rilievo e Alienazione Residuati, the postwar agency charged with disposing of unused war materials.

  Nitrogen

  . . .And finally the dreamed-of client arrived, the one who wanted professional advice from us. Professional advice is the ideal job: you gain prestige and money without having to get your hands dirty, or break your back, or risk being burned or poisoned; you have only to take off your lab coat, put on a tie, and listen in attentive silence to the question, and you feel like the Delphic Oracle. You then have to weigh your response carefully and formulate it in vague, pompous language, so that the client, too, considers you an oracle, worthy of his trust and of the fee established by the Order of Chemists.

  The dream client was around forty, small, compact, and obese; he had a mustache like Clark Gable and tufts of black hair everywhere, in his ears, in his nostrils, on the backs of his hands, and on the bones of his fingers, up to the nails. He was perfumed and pomaded and had a vulgar look: he was like a pimp, or, rather, a bad actor playing a pimp; or a bully from the slums. He explained to me that he was the owner of a cosmetics factory and had troubles with a certain kind of lipstick. Fine, he should bring us a sample. But he said no, it was a particular problem and had to be seen in the place; it would be better if one of us could visit him, in order to grasp the difficulty. Tomorrow at ten? Tomorrow.

  It would have been nice to arrive at the place in a car, but, well, if you were a chemist with a car, rather than a poor survivor, a writer in your spare time, and, besides, just married, you wouldn’t be here distilling pyruvic acid and chasing after dubious makers of lipstick. I put on the better of my (two) suits, and left the bicycle in a nearby courtyard, thinking it best to pretend to have arrived in a taxi, but when I entered the factory I realized I needn’t have had any scruples about appearances. The factory was a dirty, disorganized, drafty warehouse, where a dozen arrogant, indolent, slovenly, and heavily made-up girls wandered around. The owner explained things to me, proudly, boastfully: he called the lipstick “rouge,” aniline “anellina,” and benzoic aldehyde “adelaide.” The process was simple: one girl melted some waxes and fats in an ordinary enameled pan, added a little perfume and coloring, then poured the whole thing into a tiny ingot mold. Another girl cooled the molds under running water and took out of each twenty small scarlet cylinders of lipstick; others took care of the wrapping and packing. The owner rudely grabbed one of the girls, put a hand behind her neck in order to bring her mouth close to my eyes, and invited me to observe the outline of her lips carefully: there, see, a few hours after you put it on, especially when it’s hot, the color runs, gets into the tiny wrinkles that even young women have around their lips, and so forms an ugly spiderweb of red filaments, which blurs the outline and ruins the whole effect.

  I observed, not without embarrassment: the red threads were indeed there, but only on the right half of the girl’s mouth, which chewed gum as it submitted impassively to the inspection. Of course, the owner explained: the left half of her mouth, and that of all the other girls, was made up with an excellent French product, the very one he was vainly trying to imitate. It’s the only way a lipstick can be evaluated, by a practical comparison: every morning, all the girls had to put on lipstick, on the right his, on the left that other one, and he kissed each one of them eight times a day to check whether the product was solid to the kiss.

  I asked the bully for the lipstick formula and a sample of both products. Reading the formula, I immediately had a suspicion of what was c
ausing the problem, but it seemed to me more opportune to verify it and let the response come a bit loftily, and I asked for two days “for the analysis.” I retrieved my bicycle and as I pedaled thought that if the business went well I might perhaps exchange it for a moped and stop pedaling.

  Returning to the laboratory, I took a piece of filter paper, made two tiny red dots with the two samples, and placed it all in an oven at 80°C. After a quarter of an hour, you could see that the dot of the left lipstick had remained a dot, although it was surrounded by an oily halo, whereas the dot of the right lipstick had faded and spread—had become a pink aureole as big as a coin. A soluble dye figured in my man’s formula; it was clear that when the fat, thanks to the heat of the women’s skin (or my oven), reached the melting point, the dye spread with it. The other lipstick must have contained a red pigment instead, evenly dispersed but insoluble and therefore not migratory. I checked this by diluting the lipstick with benzene and centrifuging it, and there was the pigment, deposited on the bottom of the test tube. Thanks to the experience I had gained in the factory on the lakeshore, I could even identify it: it was an expensive pigment, difficult to disperse, and anyway my bully did not have the proper equipment for dispersing a pigment. Well, that was his problem, let him figure it out, with his harem of girl guinea pigs and his revolting timed kisses. I, I had done my professional duty; I made a report, attached the invoice, stamped it and added the picturesque filter-paper proof, returned to the factory, handed it over, collected the fee, and prepared to take my leave.

  But the bully detained me: he was satisfied with my work, and he wanted to propose a deal. Could I get some kilograms of alloxan for him? He would pay well, provided I contracted to supply it only to him. He had read in some journal or other that when alloxan is in contact with the mucous membranes it gives them an extremely long-lasting red color, because it’s not an overlay, a paint, like lipstick, but a real dye, such as you use for wool and cotton.