The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  “So, at the end of April, the boss fell sick. It was never clear what exactly he had, but the rumors got around in a hurry—you know how these things go. From the start it seemed serious. No, he had nothing wrong with his face, this story is strange enough already. His family wanted to put him on a plane to Switzerland, but there wasn’t enough time: he had something in his blood, and ten days later he was dead. And to think, he was a robust guy, who never got sick—always traveling around the world on an airplane, and between flights always chasing women, or gambling all night until the sun came up.

  “The family accused the workers of murder, or, rather, of ‘murder with malice aforethought’—that’s what they told me it’s called down there. They have criminal courts, of course, but it’s best not to fall into their clutches. They don’t have one legal code, but three of them, and they choose which one to use depending on which works best for the more powerful side—or the side that pays more. The family, like I said, maintained that he’d been assassinated: there was a motive for murder, there were actions taken to cause a death, and there was the death. The defense lawyer responded that the workers’ actions did not implicate them in murder—if anything they were only intended to bring about some kind of skin problem, I don’t know, a breakout of acne or boils. He said that if the photograph had been cut in half, or had been drenched in gas and set on fire, then, yes, that would have had grave implications. Because apparently that’s how this type of spell goes—from a hole comes a hole, from a cut a cut, and so on. We might find this kind of thing amusing, but they believed it all, even the judges, and even the defense lawyers.”

  “How did the trial end?”

  “You must be kidding. It’s still going on, and it will continue until who knows when. In that country, trials never end. But that inspector I told you about promised to keep me posted, and, if you like, I’ll keep you posted, since the story seems to interest you.”

  The waitress came over to serve the prodigious portion of cheese that Faussone had ordered. She was about forty, skinny and hunched over, her straight hair greased with some substance or other, and she had a sad face, like that of a frightened goat. She stared insistently at Faussone, and he returned her gaze with an ostentatious show of indifference. When she left, he said to me, “Poor girl, she looks a little like the Jack of Clubs. But what can you do? You have to take what life gives you.”

  Gesturing toward the cheese with his chin, he asked me, without much enthusiasm, whether I wanted some. He then attacked it greedily and, between the workings of his jaw, continued:

  “As you know, here, as far as the female situation goes, well, we’re a bit hard up. You have to take what life gives you. Or rather, what the construction site gives you.”

  Cloister

  “. . .Yeah, this stuff is incredible: I can see why you want to write it all down. I did know about some of these things from my father, because he was in Germany, too, but for different reasons than you; anyway, the point is that I’ve never taken a job in Germany. I’ve never liked Germany, and though I’ve made an effort to learn a lot of languages, even a little Arabic and Japanese, I don’t know a single word of German. One day I’m going to have to tell you the story of my father, a prisoner of war, but it’s nothing like your story—no, it’s more something to laugh at. I’ve never been in prison myself, because nowadays you have to do something really stupid in order to end up in prison. That said—and I know it’s hard to believe—I once found myself in a job that, for me, was worse than prison. (But if I ever had to go to prison for real, I don’t think I’d last two days. I’d bang my head against the wall, or I’d die of a broken heart, like a nightingale or a sparrow locked in a cage.) And it’s not like this happened in some distant land; I was pretty close to our country, in a place where, when the wind blows and the air is clean, you can see Superga and the Mole1—but over there the air usually isn’t very clean.

  “They asked me—me and some other guys—to do a job that really wasn’t anything special: it wasn’t in an unusual place, it wasn’t particularly difficult. I told you about the place, though I didn’t get very specific; the fact is that we riggers have to maintain some element of professional secrecy, just like doctors or priests in confession. As for the difficulty, it was only a truss tower, thirty meters high, with a six-by-five-meter base, and I wasn’t working alone; it was autumn, not too cold or too hot—in other words, it wasn’t really much of a job at all, more like a job that allowed you to recover from other jobs and breathe again the air of our homeland; and I needed it, because I’d just come back from a terrible gig, the building of a bridge in India—one of these days I’ll tell you all about it.

  “Even the design wasn’t especially tricky: it was all standard-issue steelwork, L and T beams, no tricky welding required, UNI-formatted floor grilles; and the plan was to assemble the tower while it lay on the ground, so that we never had to climb higher than six meters up or put ourselves in a harness. At the end of the job, a crane would hoist the whole structure and set it upright. At first I had no idea what the tower was for; I had seen from the blueprints that it was intended to support a rather complex chemical plant, which had small, thick columns, heat exchangers, and a bunch of pipes. They told me only that it was a distillation plant, for recovering a certain acid from waste water, but—”

  Without meaning to, and without being aware of it, I must have assumed a particularly rapt expression, because Faussone broke off and, in a tone that was halfway between stunned and irritated, said, “You know you’re going to have to tell me, if it’s not some big secret, what your business is, and what you’re doing all the way out here—” But then he continued with his story.

  “Even though I didn’t have enough expertise to figure out what was going on, I liked seeing it grow, day by day; it seemed to me I was watching a child, a fetus I mean, when it’s still in its mother’s belly. Though I guess it’s a little strange to think of it as a baby, since the steel alone weighed sixty tons, and it didn’t grow any which way, like a weed—no, it came along in the ordered, precise manner marked out by the blueprints, so that when we’d built the steps that led between one story and the next, which were rather complex, they fit right away, without us having to make cuts or splices—a satisfying thing, just like when they made the Fréjus tunnel; the job took thirteen years, but when the French section and the Italian section met they were off by no more than twenty centimeters, such a success that they went on to build that monument in Piazza Statuto, the black one with the flying woman on top.

  “Like I said, I wasn’t alone on the job, though with a job like that, if they gave me three months and a couple of capable workers, I’d be able to manage well enough on my own. But there were four or five of us, because the client was in a hurry and wanted the truss to be standing in twenty days maximum. No one asked me to be the team’s leader, but from the first day it seemed natural for me to take over, since I was the one with the most experience; in our line, experience is the only thing that counts—it’s not like we get service stripes on our sleeves. I didn’t speak much with our client, because he was always in a hurry and I was, too, but we were instantly in agreement, since he was one of those guys who aren’t pretentious about it but know their stuff and are capable of leading without ever raising their voice, the type who don’t scrimp on payment, and who, if you make a mistake, don’t get too angry, and when they make a mistake they’re gracious about it and apologize. He was from our country, a small guy like you, but slightly younger.

  “When all thirty meters of the truss were complete, it filled the whole yard, and it looked a bit clumsy, ridiculous even, like anything that’s meant to stand up when it’s lying on the ground: in fact it was pitiful, like a fallen tree, and we hurried to call for the cranes so that it could be raised. It was so long that we needed two cranes, which hooked it at each end and transported it, very slowly, to the reinforced-concrete foundation, which had already been laid in position, with the anchorages ready
, and one of the two cranes, with its telescopic arm, was to pull it up and lower it. Everything went well, it made the trip safely from the assembly yard to the warehouses; in order to pivot it around the corner of the warehouses we had to take off a little bit of the masonry, but nothing serious, and when the bottom of the tower was set on the foundation the smaller crane was sent away, and the other one extended its arm fully, with the truss hanging from it, and little by little the tower was set in place. Even for someone like me, who’s seen his fair share of cranes, this was an impressive spectacle, partly because the motor was humming so quietly that the crane barely had to exert itself. It lowered its cargo precisely, the openings clicking right onto the anchorages; we bolted it in, had a drink, and left. But then our client came running after me—he said that I’d earned his respect and that there was a more difficult job he’d like me to do. He asked whether I had any other obligations and if I knew how to weld stainless steel, and anyway, to get to the point, since I didn’t have any other obligations and I liked him, and I liked the work, I told him yes, and he hired me as the construction director for the distillation tubes and the service and work ducts. The service ducts are what transport the cooling water, the steam, and the compressed air; the work ducts convey the acids—anyway, that’s what they called them.

  “There were four tubes in all, three small and one large, and the large one was very large, but it wasn’t hard to assemble. It was just a vertical pipe of stainless steel, thirty meters high—that is, as tall as the truss that was supposed to hold it up—and a meter in diameter. It came in four sections, so we had to make three joins, one flanged and the other two welded on the edges, one of which we’d slipped on over the outside and the other on the inside, because the sheet metal was ten millimeters thick. To slip it over the inside part I had to be lowered into the pipe from the top, in something that resembled a parrot’s cage, tied to a cord, and it wasn’t very pleasant, but it only took a few minutes. When I began with the ducts, however, I thought I’d lose my mind, because I’m really just a rigger, and I’d never seen a job as complicated as that. There were more than three hundred ducts of all different diameters, from a quarter of an inch to ten inches; of every length, with three, four, even five joints per duct, and not all of them at right angles, either; and they were made out of every kind of material. There was even a pipe made out of titanium, a thing I didn’t know existed, and that one really had me sweating bullets. This was the duct that was used for the most concentrated acids. All the ducts connected the large tube with the smaller ones and with the exchangers, but the arrangement was so complicated that, though I studied it for a whole morning, by evening I’d already forgotten it. To be honest, I never really figured out how the whole plant was supposed to work.

  “Most of the ducts were made of stainless steel, and of course stainless steel is a fine material, but it’s not agreeable; what I mean is that when it’s cold it gets stiff. You didn’t know that? It doesn’t give, and if you heat it then it’s not so ‘stainless’ anymore. Sorry, I figured they taught you guys that stuff in school. Anyway, there was a lot of assembling, pulling, filing down, and then dismantling all over again; and when no one was looking I’d go over it again with a hammer, because a hammer fixes everything, which is why the guys at the Lancia plant call it ‘the engineer.’ By the time we’d finished this business with the ducts, the place looked like Tarzan’s jungle; it was exhausting just to try to walk through it. Then the insulators came to insulate and the painters to paint, so, when all was said and done, the whole project took a month.

  “One day I’m standing on top of the tower with a box wrench, making sure the bolts are tight, and I see my client coming up, though he’s taking his time, because thirty meters is about the height of an eight-story building. He was holding a small paintbrush and a piece of paper, and had a sly little look on his face; he was collecting dust from the main panel of the tube that I had finished assembling a month earlier. I started to get suspicious, and said to myself, ‘This guy’s looking for trouble.’ But no: a little later he called up and said he wanted to show me a bit of gray dust that he had brushed onto the paper.

  “‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked me.

  “‘Dust,’ I replied.

  “‘Yes, but the kind of dust you’d find in the street or in your house doesn’t get all the way up here. No—this dust comes from the stars.’

  “I figured he was messing with me, but then we climbed down and he showed me through a magnifying glass that it was composed of round particles, and he showed me that these particles could be attracted by a magnet—they were iron, in other words. And he explained that the dust was from shooting stars that had ended their journey: if you go to a high place that’s clean and isolated, you’d always find this type of dust, as long as you’re not on an incline and the rain doesn’t wash it away. You don’t buy this, and in that moment I didn’t believe it, either; but in my profession I’m often finding myself in high places, and I’ve seen that this dust is always there, and the more years that pass, the more there is, so that it functions like a clock, or, rather, like one of those hourglasses you use for timing eggs. I’ve collected samples of this dust in every part of the world, and I keep it at home in a little case; I mean I take it to my aunts’ house, because a home, well, I don’t have one. If we ever find ourselves back in Turin together, I’ll show you. If you think about it, it’s a melancholy thing, those shooting stars that are like the comets over Baby Jesus’ manger, you see one and you make a wish—but then they fall down, cool off, and become little iron particles, two-tenths of a millimeter. But don’t let me get sidetracked.

  “So, as I was saying, when we finished the job that tower looked like a forest; it also resembled those diagrams you see in a doctor’s waiting room, THE HUMAN BODY: one diagram is just the muscles, one is the bone structure, one is the nervous system, and one is all the organs. Our body didn’t really have muscles, because there was nothing in it that moved, but it had all the rest, and the veins and the organs I had assembled myself. The main organ, I mean the stomach or guts, was that large duct that I told you about. We filled it to the brim with water, and then we dumped into the water two truckloads of small ceramic rings, each one as big as your fist. The water was there so that the rings would sink slowly without breaking, and the rings, once the water was drained, were supposed to serve as a kind of filtration system, so that the mixture of water and acid that came in through the middle of the column had time to separate: the acid would drain out the bottom of the duct, while the water would escape from the top, as vapor, and then condense in an exchanger and end up I don’t know where; as I told you, I didn’t understand all that chemistry stuff very well. It was important, though, that the rings not break, that they sink very slowly, on top of one another, and ultimately fill the duct all the way to the top. It was fun to put the rings in the duct: we pulled them up in a bucket and dropped them in the water real slow, like children when they form wet sand into little Tomino cheese wheels, and the grown-ups say, ‘Watch out or you’ll get all wet’; and in fact I did get all wet, but it was hot out, so it felt nice. This took about two days. There were also the smaller ducts that we had to fill with rings, and I can’t tell you exactly what those were for, but the whole job only took another two or three hours. Then I said my goodbyes, went to the cashier to get my money, and, since I had a week of vacation saved up, I went to the Lanzo Valley to go trout fishing.

  “When I’m on vacation I never leave behind my address, because I know exactly what can happen. And in fact, on this occasion, I came home to find my aunts terrified; they’d been passing back and forth a telegram from my client and, poor women, a telegram is all it takes to work them up into a frenzy. It said, ‘Mr. Faussone, please contact us immediately.’ What could I do? I ‘contacted’ him, which sounds elegant but just means I called him on the phone, and right away I could tell from his voice that something was wrong. He sounded like someone who’s calling for
an ambulance and doesn’t show any emotion because he doesn’t want to seem ruffled. I was to drop everything and come right away, there was an important meeting. I tried to find out what type of meeting this could be and what it had to do with me, but I wasn’t able to because he was too busy insisting that I leave immediately. It sounded like he was about to burst into tears.

  “So I drop everything and go back, and I find that all hell has broken loose. The client, he had the face of someone who’s been out carousing all night, though in fact he’d been at the plant, which was going insane; the previous evening he’d let himself become overwhelmed by fear—it was like when you’ve got a sick person at home, and don’t know what’s wrong, so you lose your head and call six or seven doctors when it’d probably be better to call just a single good one. He had summoned the designer, the builder of the ducts, two electricians who were eyeing each other like a dog and a cat, his chemist—who had also been on vacation but had left behind his contact information—and a guy with a belly and a red beard who was speaking perfect Italian and I couldn’t figure out why he was there, but then it became clear that he was a lawyer who was friends with my client; I’m pretty sure he hadn’t summoned him in his capacity as a lawyer, however, but rather to boost his courage. So all these people were standing at the base of the duct, looking up, pacing around, treading on one another’s toes, trying to calm the client and generally talking nonsense. In fact, even the duct was talking—it was kind of like when you’re sick with a fever and start saying bizarre things but since you may drop dead soon everybody takes what you say seriously.

  “Yeah, that duct was sick, all right, anyone could’ve seen that, and I realized it too, even though it wasn’t my area of expertise and the client had called me only because I was the one who had dropped the rings into it. It was having a kind of attack every five minutes: first there was a light, soft buzzing noise, which got increasingly loud and irregular, like a huge, winded beast; the duct started to vibrate, and after a bit the whole truss also began to vibrate, and it seemed like there was going to be an earthquake, and even though everyone acted as if nothing was happening—one guy retied his shoe, another lit a cigarette—they moved away. Then you could hear something that sounded like a drumbeat, but muffled, as if it came from under the ground, and the sound of a backwash, I mean like falling gravel, then nothing else; and then you heard only the buzzing from before. This happened every five minutes, like clockwork; and I can tell you this because, though I really had little to do with it, of all the people there, only me and the designer had kept our composure and could see what was happening without losing our heads. The longer I was there, the stronger was my impression of having a sick child on my hands. It might’ve been because I had seen it grow up and I’d even gone inside it to do the welding; it might’ve been because it was groaning so oddly, like a kid who can’t speak but is obviously sick; it might also have been that I was approaching the situation like a doctor who, faced with a sick patient, first puts his ear to the person’s back, then taps him all over and takes his temperature, and in fact that’s exactly what the designer and I started to do.