The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Where Bonino had found the cadmium wasn’t very interesting: probably in the Cadmium Plating Department of his factory. More interesting, but indecipherable, was the origin of his story: profoundly his, his own, since, as I later found out, he told it often and to everyone, but without the contribution of the material to substantiate it, and with details increasingly more colorful and less credible as the years passed. It was clearly impossible to get to its source; but I—caught in the net of sales and customer service, of social and business duties and those of verisimilitude—envied in him the boundless freedom of invention, of one who has broken down the barriers and is now master of constructing the past that most pleases him, of sewing for himself the hero’s robes, and flying like Superman through the centuries, the meridians, and the parallels.

  12. The reference is to partisans loyal to General Pietro Badoglio. The term was not liked by the partisans themselves, and was used by the Fascists and the Germans.

  Silver

  We usually throw a mimeographed letter in the wastebasket without reading it, but this one, I immediately realized, did not deserve the common fate: it was an invitation to a dinner in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of receiving our degrees. Its language offered something to think about: the recipient was addressed with the familiar tu, and the sender made a show of musty old school terms, as if those twenty-five years hadn’t passed. With involuntary humor, the text concluded by saying, “In an atmosphere of renewed camaraderie we will celebrate our silver anniversary with Chemistry by narrating in turn the chemical events of our daily life.” What chemical events? The precipitation of sterols in our fifty-year-old arteries? The membrane equilibrium of our membranes?

  Who could the author be? I mentally reviewed the twenty-five or thirty surviving colleagues: I mean, who were not only still alive but hadn’t disappeared beyond the headland of other professional activities. First of all, eliminate the women: all mothers of families, all demobilized, no longer in possession of “events” to recount. Eliminate the climbers, the ones who had climbed, the favorites, the former favorites who had become givers of favor: these are people who do not like confrontations. Eliminate the frustrated, who do not like confrontations, either; the shipwrecked may come to a gathering like this, but to ask for sympathy or help—it’s unlikely that they would take the initiative to organize it. From the small group remaining a probable name emerged: Cerrato, the honest, clumsy, and eager Cerrato, to whom life had given so little and who had given life so little. I had met him by chance, briefly, after the war, and he was inert, not shipwrecked: shipwrecked is someone who departs and sinks; who proposes a goal, doesn’t reach it, and suffers. Cerrato had proposed nothing, had exposed himself to nothing, had remained shut in his house, and certainly must have continued to cling to the “golden” years of his studies because all his other years had been lead.

  At the prospect of that dinner I felt a two-pronged reaction: it wasn’t a neutral event; it attracted and repelled me at the same time, like a magnet brought near a compass. I wanted to go and I didn’t want to go: but the motivations for both decisions, looked at carefully, were not very noble-minded. I wanted to go because it appealed to me to compare myself to the others and feel that I was more open, less attached to earnings and idols, less resigned, less defeated. I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to be the same age as the others, that is, my age: I didn’t want to see wrinkles, white hair, memento mori. I didn’t want to count on it, or count the absent, or do any reckoning.

  And yet Cerrato excited my curiosity. We had sometimes studied together: he was serious and not self-indulgent; he studied without genius and without joy (he seemed to be unacquainted with joy), successively knocking down the chapters of the texts like a miner in a tunnel. He had not compromised with fascism and had reacted well to the reagent of the racial laws. As a boy he had been opaque but self-assured, someone who could be trusted: and experience teaches that precisely this, trustworthiness, is the most constant virtue, and is neither acquired nor lost over the years. One is born worthy of trust, with an open face and steady eyes, and remains so for life. Those who are born warped and slack remain that way: someone who lies to you at six lies to you at sixteen and at sixty. The phenomenon is noteworthy, and explains how certain friendships and marriages survive for many decades, in spite of habit, boredom, and the depletion of subjects: I was interested in testing it on Cerrato. I paid the amount, and wrote to the anonymous committee that I would attend the dinner.

  • • •

  His figure was not much changed: he was tall, bony, dark-complexioned; his hair still thick, his face clean-shaven, his forehead, nose, and chin heavy and as if crudely drawn. He still moved clumsily, as in the past, with the abrupt yet hesitant gestures that in the laboratory had made him a proverbial breaker of glassware.

  As is customary, we devoted the first minutes of conversation to bringing each other up to date. I learned that he was married, without children, and simultaneously realized that this was not a welcome subject. I learned that he had always worked in photographic chemistry: ten years in Italy, four in Germany, then again in Italy. It was indeed he who had been the organizer of the dinner and the author of the invitation. He felt no shame in admitting it: if I would allow him a professional metaphor, the years of school had been his professional Technicolor, the rest was black-and-white. As for “events” (I restrained myself from pointing out to him the awkwardness of the expression), they really did interest him. His career had been rich in events, even if for the most part, in fact, they had been only in black-and-white: mine, too? Yes, I confirmed: chemical and nonchemical, but in recent years the chemical events had prevailed, in frequency and intensity. They give you a sense of the nicht dazu gewachsen, of impotence, of inadequacy, isn’t that true? They give you the impression of fighting an interminable war against an opposing army that is obtuse and slow but tremendous in number and weight; of losing all the battles, one after another, year after year; and you must content yourself, to soothe your injured pride, with those few occasions when you glimpse a break in the enemy ranks, rush into it, and hit the target with a single rapid shot.

  Cerrato, too, knew this army: he, too, had experienced the inadequacy of our preparation, and the need to substitute for it luck, intuition, stratagems, and a stream of patience. I told him that I was in search of events, mine and others’, that I wanted to put on display in a book, to see if I could convey to the uninitiated the strong and bitter flavor of our occupation, which is a particular case, a more strenuous version, of the occupation of living. I told him that it didn’t seem right to me that the world knew everything about how the doctor lives, the prostitute, the sailor, the assassin, the countess, the ancient Roman, the conspirator, and the Polynesian, and nothing about how we transmuters of matter live; but that in this book I would deliberately ignore grand chemistry, the triumphant chemistry of enormous facilities and dizzying profits, because that is collective and therefore anonymous work. I was more interested in stories of solitary, unarmed, pedestrian chemistry, on a human scale, which with few exceptions had been mine: but it was also the chemistry of the founders, who worked not in teams but alone, amid the indifference of their times, for the most part without gain, and who confronted matter without helpers, with their brains and their hands, with reason and imagination.

  I asked him if he would like to contribute to this book: if so, would he tell me a story, and, if he would let me make a suggestion, it should be a story of ours, in which you muddle along in the dark for a week or a month, you think it will be dark forever, and you feel like throwing it all away and changing occupations: then you glimpse a ray of light in the darkness, you grope in that direction, and the light gets brighter, and, finally, order follows chaos. Cerrato said to me seriously that in fact sometimes things did go like that, and that he would try to satisfy me; but that in general it was always dark, one never saw the ray of light, one beat one’s head more and more often against a ceiling th
at kept getting lower, and ended up crawling out of the cave on all fours and backward, a little older than when one had entered. While he interrogated his memory, gazing up at the pretentiously frescoed ceiling of the restaurant, I glanced rapidly at him and saw that he had aged well, without disfigurement, in fact growing and maturing: he was still heavy, as in the past, having been denied the refreshment of mischief and laughter, but this was no longer offensive; it was more acceptable in a fifty-year-old than in a twenty-year-old. He told me a story about silver.

  “I’ll tell you the essential: you can add the trimmings, for example how an Italian lives in Germany; besides, you’ve been there. I was in charge of the department where X-ray paper is made. Do you know anything about it? That doesn’t matter: it’s not a very sensitive material, and doesn’t cause trouble (trouble and sensitivity are proportional); hence the department was also fairly peaceful. But you have to remember that, if film malfunctions for amateurs, nine times out of ten the user thinks it’s his fault; or, if not, at worst he’ll curse you out in a letter, which doesn’t arrive because the address was incomplete. On the other hand, if an X ray goes wrong, maybe after the barium liquid or the descending urography, and then a second goes wrong, and then the whole package of paper—well, it doesn’t end there. The trouble mounts, getting bigger as it goes up, and it lands on you like a plague. My predecessor had explained all this to me, with the pedagogic talent of the Germans, to justify in my eyes the fantastic ritual of cleanliness that had to be observed in the department, from beginning to end of the process. I don’t know if it interests you: just imagine that . . .”

  I interrupted him: minute precautions, maniacal cleanings, purity with eight zeroes are things that make me suffer. I know perfectly well that in some cases these are necessary measures, but I also know that, more often, mania prevails over common sense, and that next to five sensible precepts or prohibitions lurk ten senseless, useless ones, which no one dares to revoke only on account of mental laziness, superstition, or a morbid fear of complications—when in fact it isn’t like the military, where the rules serve to smuggle in a repressive discipline. Cerrato poured me some wine: his large hand headed hesitantly toward the neck of the bottle, as if it were fluttering over the table in an effort to escape him; then he inclined it toward my glass, which he kept bumping. He confirmed that things were often like that: for example, the women in the department he was talking about were forbidden to use powder, but one time a girl’s powder compact had fallen out of her pocket and opened as it fell, and a lot of powder had blown around in the air; the production for that day had been tested with special rigor, and it was fine. Well, powder was still banned.

  “. . . but there is one detail I must tell you, or you won’t understand the story. That is the religion of hairs (which is justified, I assure you): the department is slightly pressurized, and the air that’s pumped in is carefully filtered. You always wear special overalls over your clothes and a cap over your hair: overalls and caps are washed every day, to remove growing hairs or hairs trapped accidentally. Shoes and socks are taken off at the entrance and replaced by anti-dust slippers.

  “So that is the scene. I must add that for five or six years there had been no major accidents: a few isolated complaints from a few hospitals on account of a change in sensitivity, but it was almost always a matter of material that had already passed the expiration date. Troubles, you must know, do not come at a gallop, like the Huns, but quietly, stealthily, like epidemics. This began with a special-delivery letter from a diagnostic center in Vienna; the language was very civil, I would say it was more a signal than a complaint, and appended was an explanatory X ray: regular as far as the grain (of the emulsion) and the contrast were concerned, but sprinkled with oblong white spots, the size of beans. We answered with a contrite letter, in which we apologized for the involuntary, etc., but after the first lansquenet has died of plague13 it’s better not to deceive yourself: the plague is the plague, it’s pointless to bury your head in the sand. The next week there were two more letters: one came from Liège and hinted at damages to pay, the other from the Soviet Union, I no longer remember (maybe I’ve censored it) the complex logo of the commercial entity that sent it. When it was translated, it made everyone’s hair stand on end. The flaw, naturally, was the same one of the bean-shaped spots, and the letter was extremely harsh: it mentioned three operations that had had to be delayed, shifts lost, quintals of questionable sensitive paper, an investigation and an international controversy at the Court of I don’t know where; we were enjoined to send a Spezialist right away.

  “In such situations you at least try to close the barn door after some of the horses have escaped, but you don’t always succeed. Obviously all the paper had passed the exit test: therefore we were dealing with a defect that showed up later, during storage with us or with the client, or during transport. The director summoned me; he discussed the case with me, very politely, for two hours, but I felt as if he were flaying me, slowly and methodically, and enjoying it.

  “We made arrangements with the testing laboratory, and retested, batch by batch, all the paper in storage. Every batch for the previous two months was in order. In the rest, the flaw was found, but not in all: there were hundreds of batches, and around a sixth presented the problem of the beans. My deputy, a young chemist who wasn’t really too quick, made a curious observation: the defective batches followed one another with a certain regularity, five good and one bad. It seemed to me a trail, and I tried to get to the end of it: indeed, that’s how it was, it was almost exclusively the paper made on Wednesdays that was ruined.

  “You certainly must know, too, that late problems are by far the most malignant. While you’re looking for the causes, you have to continue to produce, but how can you be sure that the cause (or causes) isn’t still at work, and the material you’re producing a harbinger of other troubles. Of course, you can keep it in quarantine for two months and then retest it, but what will you say to the warehouses all over the world, when they don’t see the goods arrive? And the interest payments to the bank? And the name, the Good Name, the Unbestrittener Ruf? Then, there is that other complication: with any variation you make in the composition or the technology, you have to wait two months before you know if it’s useful or not, if it eliminates the flaw or makes it worse.

  “Naturally I felt innocent: I had respected all the rules, I hadn’t allowed any leniency. Above and below me, all the others felt equally innocent: those who had said the primary material was good, who had prepared and tested the silver bromide emulsion, those who had wrapped, packed, and stored the packages of paper. I felt innocent, but I wasn’t: I was guilty by definition, because the head of a department answers for his department, and because if there is damage there is sin, and if there is sin there is a sinner. It’s a matter just like original sin: you haven’t done anything, but you are guilty and have to pay. Not with money, but worse: you lose sleep, you lose your appetite, you get an ulcer or eczema, and you take a big step toward a serious workplace neurosis.

  “While letters and telephone calls of complaint continued to arrive, I persisted in the fact of the Wednesdays: surely it must have a meaning. Tuesday night a guard I didn’t like was on duty; he had a scar on his chin and the face of a Nazi. I didn’t know whether or not to talk to the director about it: trying to unload fault onto others is always bad politics. So I had the pay books brought in, and saw that the Nazi had been with us for only three months, while the problem of the beans had begun showing up on the paper made ten months earlier. What new thing had happened ten months earlier?

  “About ten months earlier we had accepted, after thorough checking, a new supplier of the black paper that is used to protect sensitive paper from the light: but the defective material turned out to be packed indifferently in black paper provided by both suppliers. Also ten months earlier (nine, to be exact) a group of Turkish women had been hired; I interviewed them one by one, to their great astonishment: I wanted to establi
sh if on Wednesday, or Tuesday evening, they did something different from usual. Did they wash? Or not wash? Did they use some particular cosmetic? Did they go dancing and sweat more than usual? I didn’t dare ask if on Tuesday evening they made love: anyway, neither directly nor through the interpreter did I learn anything.

  “You will understand that in the meantime the affair was becoming known in the whole factory, and people were looking at me oddly, partly, too, because I was the only Italian department head, and I could easily imagine the comments they must have been making behind my back. The crucial clue came to me from one of the porters, who spoke a little Italian because he had fought in Italy; in fact, he had been imprisoned by partisans in the neighborhood of Biella, and then exchanged with someone. He felt no rancor, he was talkative, and he rattled on about this and that without ever winding down: well, it was just this harmless chatter that functioned as Ariadne’s thread. One day he told me that he was a fisherman, but that for almost a year, in the nearby stream, you couldn’t catch a fish—ever since, five or six kilometers upstream, a tannery had been built. He said that on certain days the water turned brown. At the moment I didn’t pay attention to his observations, but I thought about them again a few days later, when from the window of my room, in the factory guesthouse, I saw the truck that brought the overalls from the laundry returning. I investigated: the tannery had started operating ten months earlier, and the laundry washed the overalls in water from the river where the fisherman could no longer fish, but they filtered it and passed it through an ion-exchange purifier. They washed the overalls during the day, dried them at night in a dryer, and delivered them the next morning, before the starting whistle.