The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  We are again carbon dioxide, for which we apologize; this, too, is an obligatory passage; others can be imagined or invented, but on Earth that’s how it is. Again the wind, which this time carries him far away, crossing the Apennines and the Adriatic, Greece, the Aegean, and Cyprus; we are in Lebanon and the dance repeats. The atom we are concerned with is now trapped in a structure that promises to last a long time: the venerable trunk of a cedar, one of the last. The atom has passed again through the stages that we have already described, and the glucose it’s part of belongs, like the bead of a rosary, to a long chain of cellulose. It’s not the astounding geologic fixedness of rock, not millions of years, but we can speak of centuries, because the cedar is a long-lived tree. We are at liberty to abandon it there for one year or five hundred: let’s say that after twenty years (we are in 1868) a woodworm gets busy. He has dug his tunnel between the trunk and the bark, with the blind and obstinate voracity of his kind; drilling, he has grown, as his tunnel expanded. There he swallowed the subject of this story and embedded it in himself; then he pupated, and emerged in the spring in the form of an ugly gray butterfly that is now drying in the sun, bewildered and dazzled by the splendor of the day: he is there, in one of the insect’s thousand eyes, contributing to the cursory, crude vision with which it orients itself in space. The insect is fertilized, lays eggs, and dies: the little corpse lies in the underbrush, and its fluids drain away, but the shell of chitin lasts a long time, almost indestructible. Snow and sun return to it without making a dent: it is buried by dead leaves and soil, has become a corpse, a “thing,” but the death of atoms, unlike ours, is never irrevocable. You see at work the omnipresent, tireless, and invisible gravediggers of the underbrush, the microorganisms of the humus. The shell, its eyes now blind, slowly disintegrates, and the former drinker, former cedar, former woodworm has again taken flight.

  We’ll let him fly around the world three times, until 1960, and, to justify this interval, which is so long with respect to human measure, we’ll point out that, on the other hand, it’s much shorter than the average: which, we are assured, is two hundred years. Every two hundred years, every carbon atom that is not frozen in a now stable material (like limestone, or a carbon fossil, or a diamond, or certain plastic materials) enters and reenters the life cycle, through the narrow door of photosynthesis. Do other doors exist? Yes, some syntheses created by man; they give man the maker a reason to feel proud, but so far their quantitative importance has been negligible. These doors are even narrower than that of vegetable green: consciously or not, man has not yet sought to compete with nature on this terrain, that is, he has not endeavored to obtain from the carbon dioxide of the air the carbon necessary to nourish himself, clothe himself, warm himself, and the hundred other more sophisticated needs of modern life. He has not done it because he has not needed to: he has found, and is still finding (but for how many more decades?), gigantic reserves of carbon already in the form of organic compounds or at least reduced. Beyond the vegetable and animal world, these reserves consist of beds of fossil carbon and oil, but these, too, are an inheritance of photosynthetic activity carried out in distant epochs, and so it can be firmly stated that photosynthesis is not only the unique means by which carbon becomes living but also the only means by which the sun’s energy can be chemically utilized.

  One can demonstrate that this story, while completely arbitrary, is nevertheless true. I could recount innumerable different stories, and they would all be true: all literally true, in the nature of the transitions, in their order, and in their date. The number of atoms is so large that one would always find one whose story coincides with any story invented at random. I could tell stories without end, of carbon atoms that become color or scent in flowers; of others that, from minute algae to small crustaceans to increasingly larger fish, return carbon dioxide to the waters of the sea, in a perpetual frightening round of life and death, where every devourer is immediately devoured; of others that, instead, reach a decorous semi-eternity in the yellowed pages of some document in an archive, or in the canvas of a famous painter; of those which had the privilege of being part of a grain of pollen, and left their fossil imprint in the rocks for us to wonder at; of still others that descended to join the mysterious messengers of form in human seed, and took part in the subtle process of division, duplication, and fusion from which each of us is born. Instead I’ll tell only one more, the most personal, and tell it with the humility and modesty of someone who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means weak, and the occupation of clothing facts in words failure in its deepest essence.

  Again he is among us, in a glass of milk. He’s inserted in a long, very complex chain, yet such that almost all its rings are accepted by the human body. He is swallowed; and since every living structure harbors a wild distrust toward every injection of other material of living origin, the chain is meticulously fragmented, and the fragments, one by one, accepted or rejected. One, the one important to us, crosses the intestinal threshold and enters the bloodstream: he migrates, knocks at the door of a nerve cell, enters and supplants another carbon that was part of it. This cell belongs to a brain, and this is my brain, of me who writes, and the cell in question, and in it the atom in question, is assigned to my writing, in a gigantic tiny game that no one has yet described. It is this cell which at this instant, out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, causes my hand to run along a certain path on the paper, to mark it with these swirls that are signs; a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy guides this hand of mine to impress upon the paper this point: this.

  CONTENTS

  “With Malice Aforethought”

  Cloister

  The Helper

  The Sassy Girl

  Tiresias

  Offshore

  Metalwork

  Wine and Water

  The Bridge

  Without Time

  The Bevel Gear

  Anchovies I

  The Aunts

  Anchovies II

  TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

  Though this knave came something saucily into the world . . .

  there was good sport at his making.

  KING LEAR, ACT 1, SCENE 1

  “With Malice Aforethought”

  “No way—I’m not going to tell you everything. Either I tell you about the country or I give you the facts: if I were you, I’d take the facts, because they’re pretty good. Then, if you want to pass the story on to someone else, you can work it over, straighten it out, hone it, file off the burrs, flatten it with a hammer—and that way you’ll make it your own. You know, I might be younger than you, but I’ve got lots of stories. Okay: maybe you’ll figure out what country I’m talking about, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. But if I tell you its name—the country, that is—I’ll get in trouble, ’cause the people there are nice, but a bit sensitive.”

  I had known Faussone for only two or three nights. We’d met by chance in the cafeteria—the cafeteria for foreign staff in a factory very far away, where I had been brought by my job as a paint chemist. The two of us were the only Italians at the factory; he had already been there for three months, but he’d been to the region several times before, and he could get by all right with the language, which—like the four or five others he knew—he spoke imperfectly but fluently. He’s about thirty-five years old, tall, slender, nearly bald, tanned, always clean-shaven. He has a serious face, fairly rigid and not particularly expressive. He’s not a great storyteller: he’s rather monotonous, and relies too much on understatement and elliptical speech, as if he’s worried that he might be perceived as exaggerating, but he usually just drones on, and ends up exaggerating without even realizing it. He has a limited vocabulary and often expresses himself in platitudes that to him seem penetrating and original; if his interlocutor doesn’t smile, he repeats himself, as if he were talking to a moron.

  “. . . because, you know, I didn’t end up in this profession—going to const
ruction sites, factories, and ports all over the world—by chance. It’s what I wanted to do. Every child dreams of going to the jungle or to the desert or to Malaysia, and I did, too, but I like to have my dreams come true, otherwise they’re like a disease you carry around your whole life, or a surgical scar that aches whenever the air gets damp. So I had two options: wait to get rich, and become a tourist; or go into construction. I chose construction. Of course there were other options, like smuggling, stuff like that, but that’s not for me—though I like to travel the world, I’m really just a regular guy. I’ve made such a habit of it now that if I ever slowed down I’d get sick; the way I see it, the world is beautiful because it’s diverse.”

  He watched me closely for a minute, with peculiarly inexpressive eyes, and then patiently repeated himself.

  “If you stay at home, maybe you’ll be relaxed, but it’s like sucking on a nail. The world is beautiful because it’s diverse. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve seen all kinds of different things, but the single strangest thing that ever happened to me happened this past year, in that country I can’t name—though I can tell you it’s very far from here and far from our homeland, too, and when we’re freezing cold, down there it’s murderously hot, at least nine months out of twelve; the other three months it’s windy. I was there to work at the port, but down there it’s not like it is back home: the port doesn’t belong to the state, but to a family, and that family is run by the head of the family. Before I could start my job I had to go before him dressed up in a jacket and tie, have dinner with him, make conversation, and smoke, all leisurely; imagine that—no easy feat for someone who always has an eye on the clock. Our work doesn’t come cheap for a reason—and we’re proud of that. This head of the family was a half-and-half kind of guy: half modern and half old-fashioned. He had a beautiful white shirt, the kind you don’t need to iron, and when he entered his house he took off his shoes, and made me take mine off as well. He spoke English better than the English (which isn’t saying much), but he didn’t introduce me to the women of the house. Even as a boss he had to be half and half, kind of like a progressive slavemaster: if you can believe it, he had his framed photograph hung in every office in the land, and even in every warehouse, as if he were Jesus Christ! But the whole country is like that. There are donkeys and teletype machines; there are airports that make Caselle look like a joke, but often the quickest way to get somewhere is by horse. There are more nightclubs than bakeries, but you see people on the street with trachoma.

  “You probably know that rigging a crane is a tough job, and a bridge crane even more so, but the job can’t be done solo: you need one person who knows all the tricks and can direct the operation, someone like me, and then you find local workers to help out. This is where it starts to get interesting. In that port I was telling you about, the union situation is a total mess. You see, it’s the kind of country where a thief gets his hand cut off in the public square: the right or the left, depending on how much he stole, or perhaps even an ear, but with anesthesia, and with surgeons on hand to stanch the bleeding right away. This is true, I’m not making it up; and if someone spreads nasty rumors about an important family, they cut off his tongue, no questions asked.

  “Well, in spite of all this they have some pretty serious workers’ organizations, and you have to worry about them, too: the workers carry a transistor radio at all times, as if it were a good-luck charm, and if the radio tells them that there’s a strike they drop everything. Not a single one of them would dare to raise a finger: if anyone so much as tried, he’d probably get stabbed, maybe not immediately but within two or three days; or a girder would fall on his head, or he’d drink his morning coffee and keel over. I’d never want to live there, but I’m glad I went, because there are certain things you simply have to see to believe.

  “Anyway, like I was saying, I was down there to mount a crane on a jetty, one of those huge bastards with a retractable arm, and a fantastic bridge crane, with a forty-meter-wide span and a hundred-and-forty-horsepower lifting motor—Christ, what a machine, tomorrow night you have to remind me to show you the photos. When I finished putting it up, and we’d done the tests, and it looked like it was walking in the air, as smooth as silk, I felt like they’d anointed me their leader, and I bought drinks for everybody. No, not wine—it was that nasty stuff they call cumfàn—it tastes like mold, but it’s refreshing and good for you. But let me tell this in the right order. Erecting the crane wasn’t easy. Not because of any technical problems—that was straightforward from the first bolt—no, you could sense something in the atmosphere, like heavy air right before a storm. People were muttering on the street corners, making signs and faces at one another that I didn’t understand; every so often a newspaper bulletin was posted on a wall and everybody would crowd around to read it or listen to it being read aloud, and I’d be left standing alone on top of the scaffolding, like an idiot.

  “Then the storm hit. I noticed that the people were calling out to one another, with gestures and whistles; they all ran off and finally, since I couldn’t get anything done by myself, I climbed down off the scaffolding and went to see where they’d gone. I found them in a warehouse that was under construction. In the back they had built a kind of stage, with beams and boards, and, one by one, people were going onstage to speak. I barely understood their language, but it was clear that they were angry, that they felt they’d been wronged. At a certain point an older man, apparently a local leader, stood up; this guy seemed confident about what he was saying, he spoke evenly and with authority, without raising his voice like the others; he had no need to anyway, since as soon as he took the stage they all got silent. After his speech, they seemed persuaded. At the end he asked a question, and they all raised their hands, shouting who knows what; when he asked whether anybody was opposed, not a single hand went up. Then the old guy called on a boy standing in the front row, and gave him an order. The boy hurried off to a toolshop and returned a minute later, holding in his hand one of the photographs of the boss and a book.

  “Near me stood an inspector; he was a native, but he could speak English. We were sort of friendly with each other because it’s always wise to be on good terms with inspectors: every saint demands his candle.”

  Faussone had just finished a huge portion of roast beef, but he had called the waitress over and was getting a second helping. His story interested me more than his proverbs, but he repeated, with determination:

  “In every country in the world, there’s no two ways about it, saints demand their candles: I had given this inspector a fishing rod, because it’s always wise to be on good terms with inspectors. So he explained to me that they’d been discussing a silly issue: the workers, for quite a while, had been asking the construction site’s kitchen to adhere to their religion’s dietary restrictions; the boss was making himself out to be a modern thinker, but in truth he was a bigot who had a different faith—but there are so many religions in that country you can’t keep track of them all. Anyway, through the head of personnel he had made it known that if the workers didn’t accept the cafeteria as it was, he’d get rid of it altogether. There had already been two or three strikes, and the boss hadn’t even given it a second thought, because sales were poor. Now someone had brought up the idea of getting physical with him, as retribution.”

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘getting physical’?”

  Faussone patiently explained that it would be like putting a curse on him, giving the evil eye, or casting a spell:

  “. . . maybe not even with the intention of killing him: in fact, at the time they surely didn’t want him to die, because his little brother was even worse than him. They just wanted to give him a scare—I don’t know, maybe make him sick, have an accident, something that might change his mind, and show him that they knew how to be persuasive.

  “So now the old man held up a knife, and he unscrewed the frame and detached it from the portrait. It seemed like he had a lot of practice in this
sort of job; he opened the book, closed his eyes, and put his finger on a page, then he opened his eyes and read something in the book that neither my inspector friend nor I could understand. Then he took the photograph, rolled it up, and crushed it in his hands. He had someone bring him a screwdriver, heated it over a spirit stove, and inserted it into the crumpled photograph. He smoothed out the photograph and showed it to the crowd, and they all clapped their hands: the photo had six holes burned into it, one in the forehead, one near the right eye, one on the corner of the mouth. The other three had landed in the background, away from the face.

  “Then the old man put the photo back into its frame, just as it was, creased and pierced. The little boy returned it to its place, and everybody went back to work.