The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  We didn’t give in right away; we struggled for a good month in an effort to obtain vanillin from eugenol with a yield that would allow us to survive, and didn’t succeed; we secreted several quintals of pyruvic acid, produced with troglodytic equipment and on a schedule of hard labor, after which I raised the white flag. I would find a job, maybe go back to paints.

  Emilio accepted with sorrow, but manfully, our shared defeat and my desertion. For him it was different: in his veins ran the paternal blood, rich in remote pirate enzymes, in mercantile initiatives, and with a restless passion for the new. He wasn’t afraid of making a mistake, or of changing occupation, place, and style of life every six months, or of becoming poor; he had no fixations about caste, either, and felt no uneasiness in going on a tricycle and in a gray uniform to deliver our laborious chloride to clients. He accepted, and the next day already had other ideas in mind, other deals with people more experienced than me; he immediately began the dismantling of the laboratory, and wasn’t even very unhappy, while I was—I felt like crying, or howling at the moon the way dogs do when they see the suitcases closing. We got started on the sad task helped (or rather, distracted and impeded) by Signor Samuele and Signora Ester. Familiar objects, sought in vain for years, came to light, along with other, exotic ones, buried geologically in the recesses of the apartment: a silencer for a Beretta 38A machine gun (from the time when Emilio was a partisan and traveled the valleys distributing spare parts to the groups), a miniature Koran, an extremely long porcelain pipe, a Damascene sword with an inlaid silver hilt, an avalanche of yellowed papers. Among these surfaced a proclamation from 1785, which I greedily appropriated, and in which F. Tom. Lorenzo Matteucci, Grand Inquisitor of Marca Anconitana, specially Delegated against Heretical Depravity, with much arrogance and little clarity, “orders, prohibits, and expressly commands, that no Jew dare to take from Christians lessons in any sort of Instrument, and even more in Dancing.” We put off until the next day the most agonizing job, taking down the fume hood.

  Emilio’s opinion to the contrary, it was immediately clear that our forces would not be sufficient. It was painful to us to enlist a couple of carpenters, whom Emilio instructed to uproot the hood from its anchorage without dismembering it: this hood was in short a symbol, the sign of a profession and a condition, indeed an art, and it was to be deposited in the courtyard intact and in its entirety, to find new life and use in a future for now not specified.

  A scaffolding was constructed, a hoist mounted, guide ropes tightened. While Emilio and I watched from the courtyard, the hood emerged solemnly from the window, balanced ponderously, was silhouetted against the gray sky of Via Massena, was skillfully hooked to the chain of the hoist, and the chain groaned and broke. The hood plummeted four stories, to land at our feet, reduced to splinters of wood and glass; it still smelled of eugenol and pyruvic acid, and with it our every desire and daring in enterprise was reduced to splinters.

  In the brief instants of flight the instinct for preservation made us jump back. Emilio said, “I thought it would make more noise.”

  Uranium

  You can’t send the new employee to do customer service and sales. It’s a delicate, complex job, not very different from what diplomats do: to perform it successfully you have to instill trust in the client, and so it’s indispensable to have trust in ourselves and in the products we sell; it’s therefore a salutary exercise, which helps one to know oneself and strengthens one’s character. It’s perhaps the most hygienic of the specialties that constitute the decathlon of the factory chemist: the one that best trains you in eloquence and improvisation, in quickness of reflexes and in the capacity to understand and make yourself understood; furthermore, it lets you travel around Italy and the world, and brings you face-to-face with a variety of people. I must also mention another curious and beneficial consequence for the customer service and sales representative: after some years of this occupation, of making a show of respecting our fellow man and finding him likable, we end up by doing so truly, just as someone who feigns madness often becomes mad.

  In most cases, at the first contact you have to obtain or gain a rank superior to that of your interlocutor: but gain it stealthily, in a friendly way, without frightening or outclassing him. He should feel that you’re superior, but only a little: reachable, understandable. It’s no good, for example, to have chemical conversations with a non-chemist: this is the ABC of the job. But the opposite danger is much more serious, which is that the client outclasses you. It can easily happen, because he’s on his home field; that is, it’s he who employs in a practical way the products that you sell, and so he knows their virtues and defects the way a wife knows her husband’s, while you usually have only a painless, disinterested knowledge, often optimistic, acquired in the laboratory or the training course. The most favorable constellation is the one where you can present yourself as a benefactor in some way or other: convincing him that your product can satisfy an old need or desire of his, perhaps unnoticed; that, all things considered, at the end of the year it will cost him less than that of the Competition, which, besides, as everyone knows, is fine in the beginning but, well, don’t make me say too much. You can, however, help him in different ways (and here the imagination of the candidate for customer service is revealed): solving a technical problem that is only slightly relevant, or maybe not at all; providing him with an address; inviting him to lunch “at a traditional local place”; having him visit your city and helping him or advising him in the purchase of souvenirs for his wife or his girl; finding him at the last minute a ticket for the derby, at the stadium (ah yes, even this is done). My colleague in Bologna possesses a continually updated collection of bawdy stories and diligently reviews them, along with the technical bulletins, before setting off on his round of visits in town and country; since he has a short memory, he makes a note of the ones he’s told to every single client, because to dispense the same tale twice to the same person would be a serious lapse.

  All these things are learned with experience, but there are some technician-salesmen who seem that from birth, born reps, like Minerva. This is not my case, and I am sadly aware of it: when it falls to me to work as a rep, at headquarters or traveling, I do it unwillingly, with hesitation, compunction, and little human warmth. Worse: I tend to be brusque and impatient with clients who are impatient and brusque, and to be meek and compliant with suppliers, who, being, in turn, reps themselves, appear compliant and meek. In short, I am not a good rep, and I’m afraid that by now it’s too late to become one.

  • • •

  Tabasso had told me: “Go to the *** and ask for Bonino, who is the department head. He’s a good man, he already knows our products, everything has always gone well, he’s not a genius, we haven’t paid him a visit in three months. You’ll see, you won’t have technical difficulties; if he talks about prices, stick to generalities—tell him you’ll report, it’s not your business.”

  I had myself announced, was given the form to fill out, and was handed the card that, attached to your buttonhole, identifies you as a foreigner and immunizes you against rejection by guards. They had me sit down in a waiting room; after no more than five minutes Bonino appeared and led me to his office. This is an excellent sign, and things don’t always go like that: there are people who, coldly, make the reps wait thirty or forty minutes even if they have an appointment, with the deliberate aim of putting them down and imposing rank; it’s the same aim that, with more ingenious and obscene techniques, the baboons in the big cage at the zoo have. But the analogy is more general: the strategies and tactics of the rep can all be described in terms of sexual courtship. In both cases there is a relationship between two; a courtship or a negotiation among three would be unthinkable. In both cases, you note at the start a sort of dance or ritualized opening, in which the buyer accepts the seller only if he keeps strictly to the traditional ceremony; if that happens, the buyer joins the dance, and if the pleasure is mutual they achieve coupling, and that is t
he purchase, with both partners visibly satisfied. Cases of unilateral violence are rare; not coincidentally, they are often described in terms borrowed from the sexual sphere.

  Bonino was a round, untidy little man, vaguely doglike, with a poorly shaved beard and a toothless smile. I introduced myself and began the propitiatory dance, but he said to me immediately, “Ah yes, you’re the one who wrote a book.” I have to confess my weakness: this irregular opening does not displease me, no matter how little use it may be to the company I represent; in fact, at this point the conversation tends to degenerate, or at least get lost in anomalous considerations, which distract from the purpose of the visit and cause professional time to be wasted.

  “It’s really a fine novel,” Bonino continued. “I read it during the holidays, and made my wife read it, too. Not the children, no, because it might have upset them.” Such opinions normally irritate me, but when you’re acting as a rep you can’t be too sophistic: I thanked him suavely and tried to get the conversation back on the proper track, that is, our paints. Bonino put up resistance.

  “Just as you see me before you, I was in danger of ending up like you. They had already shut us up in the courtyard of the barracks, in Corso Orbassano, but at a certain point I saw him come in, you know who I mean, and then, when no one was looking, I climbed the wall, jumped down on the other side, a good five meters, and slipped away. Then I went to Val Susa with the Badogliani.”

  I had never yet happened to hear a Badogliano call the Badogliani Badogliani.12 I withdrew into defense, and in fact surprised myself by taking a deep breath, like someone preparing for a long submersion. It was clear that Bonino’s story would not be short: never mind, I thought back to how many long stories I had inflicted on my neighbor, on the ones who did and the ones who did not want to listen; I recalled that it is written (Deuteronomy 10:19), “You will love the stranger, since you too were strangers in the land of Egypt”; and I settled myself in my chair.

  Bonino was not a good narrator: he wandered, he repeated himself, he digressed, and digressed from digressions. And then he had the curious vice of omitting the subject of a clause and replacing it with the personal pronoun, which made his story even hazier. While he spoke, I distractedly examined the place where he had received me, which had evidently been his office for many years, because it seemed shabby and disorderly, like his person. The glass in the windows was offensively dirty, the walls were smoke-darkened, and the stagnant air had a depressing odor of stale tobacco. Rusty nails were stuck in the walls, some apparently unused, others holding yellowed papers. One of these, legible from my observation post, began like this: “Subject: Rags. With ever-increasing frequency . . .”; elsewhere could be seen old razor blades, receipts from the soccer pool, forms from the health service, illustrated postcards.

  “. . . so he told me that I should go behind him, or, rather, in front: he was behind me, with his gun pointed. Then the other one arrived, the accomplice, who was around the corner waiting for him; and between the two of them they brought me to Via Asti, you know, where Aloisio Smit was. He called me in every so often, and said to me, You might as well talk, since your companions have already talked, it’s pointless for you to play the hero . . .”

  On Bonino’s desk there was a horrible aluminum-alloy reproduction of the Tower of Pisa. There was also an ashtray made from a shell, full of butts and cherry pits, and an alabaster pen holder in the form of Vesuvius. It was a miserable desk: no more than six-tenths of a square meter, at a generous estimate. There is no experienced rep who does not know this sad science of desks, maybe not at a conscious level, but in the form of a conditioned reflex: a small desk inexorably announces a worthless occupant; as for the employee who has not been able to acquire a desk within eight or ten days of being hired, well, he’s a lost man—he can’t count on more than a few weeks of survival, like a hermit crab without a shell. On the other hand, I’ve known people who at the end of their career had at their disposal seven or eight square meters with a polyester finish, obviously excessive, but appropriate as a coded expression of the measure of their power. What objects lie on the desk is not significant in quantitative terms: there are some who express their authority by keeping the desktop in the greatest disarray, with the largest pile of papers; there are others who instead, more subtly, assert their status by means of emptiness and meticulous neatness, as it is said Mussolini did at Palazzo Venezia.

  “. . . but none of them realized I had a pistol in my belt. When they began to torture me, I pulled it out, stood them all with their faces to the wall, and came away. But he . . .”

  He who? I was puzzled; the story was getting more and more tangled, time was marching on, and of course the client is always right, but there is a limit even to selling your own soul, and to faithfulness to the company’s orders: beyond this limit one becomes ridiculous.

  “. . . as far as I could: half an hour, and I was already in the neighborhood of Rivoli. I was walking along the street, and what do I see landing in the fields nearby but a German airplane, a stork, one of the type that land in fifty meters. Two fellows get out, very polite, and ask me please which direction is Switzerland. I’m familiar with the area and I told them right away: straight like this to Milan, then turn left. Dànche, they answer, and get back in the plane; but then one of them has a second thought, rummages under his seat, gets out, and comes toward me with something like a rock in his hand; he gives it to me and says, ‘This is for your trouble: take care of it—it’s uranium.’ You know, it was the end of the war, they felt lost, they were too late to make the atomic bomb, and the uranium was no use to them anymore. They were only thinking of saving their skin and escaping to Switzerland.”

  There is also a limit to control of one’s own features: Bonino must have caught on mine some sign of incredulity, because he interrupted himself and in a slightly offended tone said, “You don’t believe it?”

  “Of course I believe it,” I answered heroically. “But was it really uranium?”

  “Certainly: anyone would have known. It was incredibly heavy, and hot to the touch. Anyway, I still have it at home; I keep it on the balcony, in a locker, so the children don’t touch it; every so often I show it to friends, and it has stayed hot, it’s still hot.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “You know what I’ll do? Tomorrow I’ll send you a piece: so you’ll be convinced, and maybe you, you’re a writer, maybe, besides your stories, some day or other you’ll write about this, too.”

  I thanked him, dutifully gave him my number, explained a certain new product, marked down a fairly substantial order, said goodbye, and considered the business finished. But the next day I found a package deposited on my desk of 1.2 square meters, addressed to my kind attention. I opened it, not without curiosity: it contained a block of metal, half the size of a cigarette pack; rather heavy, in fact, and exotic in appearance. The surface was silvery white, with a faint yellowish patina: it didn’t seem to be hot, but it couldn’t be easily mistaken for any of the metals that long habit—outside chemistry as well—has made familiar to us, like copper, zinc, aluminum. Perhaps an alloy? Or maybe it really was uranium? No one has ever seen metallic uranium around here, and in the treatises it’s described as silvery-white; and it’s not as if a small block like that would be permanently warm—maybe only a mass as big as a house can maintain its warmth at the expense of the energy of disintegration.

  As soon as reasonably possible, I hurried into the laboratory, which, for a chemist from among the reps, is an unusual and vaguely inappropriate undertaking. The laboratory is a place for youths, and returning there one returns to one’s youth: with the same passion for adventure, discovery, and the unexpected that one has at seventeen. Naturally, it’s a while since you were seventeen, and, besides, a long career of para-chemical activities has humbled you, you’re atrophied, clumsy, ignorant of the location of the reagents and the equipment, forgetful of everything but the basic reactions: yet for those very reasons the laboratory revisited is a sou
rce of joy, radiates an intense fascination, which is that of youth, of a future that is undetermined and full of potential—that is, of freedom.

  But the years of non-use do not allow you to forget certain professional tics, certain stereotypical behaviors that identify you as a chemist in any circumstances: testing the unknown material with your nail, with a pocketknife, smelling it, feeling with your lips whether it’s “cold” or “hot,” seeing if window glass scratches it or not, observing it in reflected light, weighing it in the hollow of your hand. Evaluating the specific weight of a material is not so easy, but, come on, uranium has a specific weight of 19, much higher than lead’s, twice that of copper: the gift made to Bonino by the Nazi aeronaut-astronauts could not be uranium. I began to glimpse, in the paranoiac tale of the little man, the echo of a persistent and recurring local legend, of UFOs in Val Susa, of flying saucers bearing omens, like comets in the Middle Ages, erratic and ineffectual, like the spirits of spiritualists.

  And if not uranium, what was it? With a small saw I cut off a slice of metal (it could be sawed easily) and introduced it to the flame of the Bunsen burner: something unusual happened—a thread of brown smoke rose from the flame, curling in spirals. In an instant of voluptuous nostalgia, I felt the reflexes of the analyst, withered through long inertia, reawakening in me: I found a glazed porcelain evaporating dish, filled it with water, placed it over the smoky flame, and saw, forming on the bottom, a brown deposit that was an old acquaintance. I touched the deposit with a drop of solution of silver nitrate, and the blue-black color that developed confirmed that the metal was cadmium, the distant son of Cadmus, sower of the dragon’s teeth.