The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  “Putting your ear against sheet metal, with disaster looming, is not for the faint of heart; it sounded like a case of intestinal distress, and my own bowels got a little disturbed themselves—they didn’t move, but that was only because I held them tight, so as not to lose my dignity—and as for the thermometer, well, obviously it wasn’t a thermometer like the one you put in your mouth, or elsewhere, when you have a fever. It was a multiple thermometer, with a lot of bonded metals strategically placed in different parts of the plant, a display, and thirty buttons so you could choose where, exactly, you wanted to read the temperature; it was, in other words, a rather sophisticated affair. But since the center of the large duct—the sick duct, that is—was the heart of the entire system, in that spot they had also affixed a thermocouple, which controlled a thermograph, which, as I’m sure you know, is a stylus that charts the fluctuations in temperature on a roll of graph paper. Anyway, that was even scarier, because we could see its whole clinical history, beginning with the evening when they had started up the plant.

  “We could see the starting point, where the line began at twenty degrees Celsisus and climbed in two or three hours to eighty, and then it leveled out, very flat, for about twenty hours. After that there was something like a shudder—so fine it was barely visible, and it lasted only five minutes—and then there was a whole series of shudders, getting stronger and stronger, each one lasting exactly five minutes. And the last ones, the ones from the previous night, were not shudders so much as waves that oscillated ten or twelve degrees, rising sharply and falling abruptly; and then we were riding one of these waves, the designer and me, we saw the line rise as, on the inside, everything began to stir, and then it plunged dramatically and we heard the drumbeat and the sound of cascading gravel. The designer—he was a young guy, but he knew his stuff—told me that the client had called him in Milan the previous night to get the authorization to shut everything down; but the designer didn’t trust the guy, so he decided to get in his car and come up himself, because it wasn’t a simple thing to shut down the whole plant, and he was worried that the client might make a mistake. Now, however, there was nothing else to do. So he did the job himself, and in half an hour everything had stopped, you heard a loud silence, the thermograph line descended like an airplane landing, and it seemed like the whole plant breathed a sigh of relief—like when a sick person gets a shot of morphine and falls asleep, and, at least for a little while, he ceases to suffer.

  “I kept telling him that I had nothing to do with it, but the client sat us all down around a table so each of us could speak his mind. At first I really didn’t dare to speak mine, though I did have one thing to say, as the person who had dropped in the rings: since I have a pretty good ear, I noticed that the sound of the moving intestines was the same sound that the rings made when we dropped them from the buckets into the duct: a roar. It was like when a truck unloads gravel, and there’s a hum that gets louder, and louder, until all of a sudden the gravel starts sliding out and crashes down like an avalanche. Ultimately I whispered this theory of mine to the designer, who was sitting next to me, and he rose to his feet and repeated it, as if it were his own idea, but using fancier language, and adding that, according to him, the duct’s sickness was a case of flooding. You know how it is when someone has a propensity for self-aggrandizement, he takes advantage of every possible opportunity. So the duct was flooding, and we needed to open it up, drain it, and look around inside.

  “As soon as he said that, everyone started talking about flooding, except the lawyer, who was laughing to himself like an imbecile and telling the client some private joke; maybe he was already thinking about filing a lawsuit. And everyone was looking at yours truly, as if it had already been decided that I was the man to take care of the situation; and I have to say that deep down I wasn’t unhappy about this, partly out of curiosity, and partly because that duct, which was groaning and collecting stardust and doing its business all over itself—oh, perhaps I haven’t mentioned that part yet. It was obvious that the pressure was building, because at the height of every wave you could see brown waste seeping out of the manhole gasket at the bottom and dripping onto the foundation. Well, I felt sorry for the thing—it reminded me of someone who’s suffering too much to speak. I felt sorry and also irritated, the way you are with a sick person who, even if you don’t particularly like him, you end up caring for, just so he stops complaining.

  “I’m not going to tell you about our efforts to explore the interior of the duct. It turned out that it contained two tons of acid, which cost a certain amount of money; besides, we couldn’t just flush the acid into the sewer, because it would have polluted the whole region; and since it was acid, after all, you couldn’t even store it in any kind of cistern—it had to be one made out of stainless steel, and even the pump had to be acid-proof because the stuff had to drain upstream, since there was no incline that would allow it to drain naturally. But by working together we figured it out—we drained the acid, scoured the duct with steam so that it didn’t stink too badly, and then let it cool.

  “At this point, for better or worse, it was my turn to take over the situation. There were three manholes: one at the top of the duct, one toward the middle, and the other at the base: as you know, they’re called manholes because they’re round openings that a man can pass through; you also see them on the boiler of a steam engine, but a man can’t get through one of those very comfortably because they’re only fifty centimeters in diameter. I know some guys who have a bit of a belly that either couldn’t get through one or tried and got stuck. I, however, have no such problem, as you can see for yourself. I followed the designer’s instructions and began, very slowly, to unscrew the bolts of the manhole at the top of the duct. I had to work slowly to ensure that, no matter what, the rings wouldn’t come out. I push on the flange, I test it with my finger, then with my whole hand—nothing. But it made sense that the rings would have settled farther down. I remove the flange, and I see blackness. They pass me a light, and I stick my head in, and I still can only see blackness, no rings—it was like I’d dreamed up the whole experience of dropping them in. I could only see what looked like a bottomless well, and it wasn’t until my eyes had adjusted to the darkness that I saw a pale glow at the bottom, just barely visible. We lowered a weight attached to a string, and it touched down at twenty-three meters: thirty meters’ worth of rings had been reduced to seven.

  “There was a lot of talk and discussion, and by the end we’d gotten to the bottom of it—which is not just a figure of speech, because the rings were ground up at the bottom of the duct. Consider for a second what must have happened: like I told you, the rings were ceramic, and fragile, so fragile that we had to drop them through water, which served as a kind of shock absorber. Clearly some of them had begun to break apart, and the shards settled in a layer at the bottom of the duct; so the steam was trying to escape, until suddenly it broke through, and the force shattered the other rings, and so on. If you did the math—as the designer had, on the basis of the rings’ dimensions—it was clear that there couldn’t have been more than a few left intact. This indeed was the case: I opened the manhole in the middle of the column and found it empty; then I opened the one at the bottom, and could see only a mush of sand and gray gravel, which was all that remained of the rings—a mush so thick that when I removed the flange it didn’t even move.

  “There was nothing to do but arrange a funeral. I’ve seen a few of these funerals, the kind where you have to make something disappear, eliminate a mistake, a thing that stinks like a corpse, which, if you leave it there to decompose, is like a never-ending harangue, or a court ruling, a reminder to all those involved: ‘Don’t forget, you’re responsible for this mess.’ It’s no coincidence that the people most anxious to hold the funeral are precisely the ones who feel the most guilty; and this was the case with the designer, who came over to me and said, in the most casual manner, that all it needed was a nice rinse with water. All the grit wo
uld wash away in a second and then we’d plop in some new stainless-steel rings—at the client’s expense, naturally. The client had no problem with the rinse, or the funeral, but when he heard us talking about additional rings he went crazy, saying that the designer ought to hang a portrait of the Madonna in gratitude for not being sued, there’d be no more rings, and he’d have to come up with a better idea, and fast, because he’d already wasted a full week of work.

  “I wasn’t to blame for any of this, but being around all these grim people I became melancholy myself, especially since the weather had turned rotten and it seemed more like winter than fall. It suddenly became clear that it wasn’t such an easy job: that the mush—I mean the broken rings—was composed of rough shards, and they were all mixed together, so that the water we had squirted on them with a hose seeped out from underneath, completely clean, and all that sediment wasn’t being dislodged one bit. The client began to suggest that maybe one of us could go down inside the duct with a shovel—but he was talking to himself, without making eye contact, and in a voice so timid it was clear that he couldn’t even convince himself. We tried a few different things, and it became obvious that the best idea was to flood the duct with water from below, the way you always do when you’re constipated; so we screwed the hose to the mouth of the duct’s drain and turned the water pressure all the way up; for a second we didn’t hear anything, then there was something like a loud hiccup, and the mush began to shift and come out of the manhole like mud. I felt like a doctor, or maybe a veterinarian, because at that point, instead of a baby, the sick duct was beginning to resemble one of those beasts that lived in prehistoric times, as big as a house, but then one day the whole species drops dead, and no one knows why. Perhaps because of constipation.

  “I might be wrong, but I think I began this story in a different way, and let myself get sidetracked. I began by telling you about prison, and a job that was worse than prison. Of course if I had known beforehand how the job was going to affect me, I would have never accepted it, but, as you know, it takes a lot of experience to learn how to turn down a job, and to tell the truth, to this day I still haven’t learned how to do it. I was younger then, and they had offered me a figure that immediately made me imagine a two-month vacation with my girlfriend; and then, you know, self-advancement, especially while everyone else lags behind, was always pleasing to me—and it still is—and they understood full well what kind of guy I was. They buttered me up all right, saying that they could never find another rigger like me, they trusted me, they needed someone responsible, etc. So I said yes, but that was because I didn’t realize what was going on.

  “The bottom line is that the designer, though he was competent, had made a mammoth blunder: I could infer as much from the conversations going on around me, but I could also read it on his face. It seems that, with ducts like that one, rings would never work, whether they were ceramic or any other material, because they created an obstacle for the steam. The only thing to do was to use plates instead, or, rather, perforated discs, made of stainless steel, installed at half-meter intervals up the height of the duct, meaning about fifty plates in total. You know about these? These duct plates? Yes? Fine, but I guarantee you don’t know how they’re installed; okay, maybe you do, but you don’t know what it’s like to install them. That’s normal, after all. When you drive a car, you don’t think for a second about all the work that’s gone into it; or when you type numbers into one of those calculators that fit in your back pocket, at first you might marvel at it but then you become used to it and it seems natural. And of course it seems natural, even to me, that when I decide to raise this hand, look—the hand goes up. But it’s only habit. That’s exactly why I like talking about my jobs: because so few people think about such things. But let’s get back to the plates.

  “Every plate is divided in two, like two half-moons that fit together: they’re split like this because if they were whole, the installation would be too difficult, maybe even impossible. Each plate is supported by eight little brackets welded to the walls of the duct, and that was my job: to weld these brackets, starting from the bottom. You weld the brackets all around yourself, going higher until you reach the level of your shoulder—it gets tiring, you know, if you go any higher. You mount the first plate on the first ring of brackets, then you climb up onto it in your rubber boots, and since you’re now about a half-meter higher up, you start welding another ring of brackets. The assistant lowers down two more of the half-plates, you place them one at a time under your feet, and then another turn of brackets and a plate, a turn and a plate, until you get to the top. But the top was thirty meters up.

  “Well, I marked it all out without any difficulty, but as soon as I was two or three meters off the ground I began to feel strange. At first I thought it was the fumes from the electrode, although there was a good draft coming in; or maybe the mask, which you have to wear over your entire face if you’re welding for a certain number of hours in a row—otherwise you get burned and your skin falls off. But it kept getting worse, I felt like I had a weight here, in the pit of my stomach, and my throat tightened the way it does when, as a kid, you feel like crying. Worst of all, my head was spinning: so many things I had long ago forgotten rushed into my mind, like my grandmother’s sister, who became a cloistered nun—‘Whoever walks through this door will never come out again, dead or alive’—and the stories that they told us in the village, like the one about the guy who’s buried but he’s not actually dead, and at night, in the graveyard, he’s banging on the coffin with his fists, trying to get out. It also felt as if the tube was constricting and would soon suffocate me, like a mouse in the belly of a snake. I was looking up and I saw that the top was still very far away, especially since I was going at a rate of one half-meter per step, and I was overcome by a great desire to be pulled out, but I resisted because, after all the compliments they had given me, I didn’t want to embarrass myself.

  “So it took me two days, and I never backed out, and finally I made it to the top. I have to say, however, that since then, every so often, somewhat unexpectedly, that sense of being a trapped mouse comes back to me: in elevators, most of all. It doesn’t really happen when I’m on a job, because after that I learned to let others handle rigging jobs in enclosed spaces; and I consider myself fortunate that in my profession most of the time you’re out in the air—you might have to endure heat, cold, rain, and dizziness, but there’s no chance of being cloistered. I never went back to look at that duct, not even from the outside, and I keep a good distance from all ducts, tubes, and shafts; and when there are stories in the newspaper about kidnappings I don’t read them. Look: it’s stupid, and I know it’s stupid, but I’ve never gone back to the way I was before. At school they taught me about concavity and convexity: fine, I’ve become a convex rigger, and concave jobs aren’t for me anymore. But I’d appreciate it if you kept this to yourself.”

  1. Two well-known landmarks in Turin: Superga is a hill and the Mole Antonelliana, a monumental building, is now a museum.

  The Helper

  “. . .Give me a break! There’s no comparison. Me, no—I’ve never complained about my lot in life. Besides, I’d have to be an idiot to complain, because no one chose it but me: I wanted to see the world, work hard, and not be ashamed of the money I earned, and I got what I wanted. Sure there are pros and cons, you’ve got a family, you know all about it—one can’t have a family, or even friends. Or maybe one has them—friends, that is—but they only last as long as the job: three, four, six months at the most, then you get back on a plane. . . . You know what they call a plane here? A samolyot. I always liked that word, it makes me think of the little onions we have back home—yes, the siulòt. And also of scimmiotti, little monkeys; but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You get on the airplane, as I was saying, and that’s the end of it. Either you don’t care, and you figure that they weren’t real friends anyway; or they were real friends, and then you’re sad. And with girls it’s the same t
hing—actually it’s worse, because it’s impossible to do without them, and you’ll see, one day or another, you’ll end up hooked.”

  Faussone had invited me to have tea in his room. It was monastic, and identical to mine in every aspect, down to the details: the same lampshade, bedcover, wallpaper, sink (which even dripped exactly like mine), the transistor radio missing the tuner knob on the shelf, the bootjack, even the cobweb above the corner of the door. I’d been in my room only a few days, though, while he’d been there three months: he had fashioned a kitchenette out of the built-in cupboard, hung a salami and two braids of garlic from the ceiling, and put up on the walls a view of Turin taken from an airplane and a grainy photo of the local team, covered with autographs. As far as household gods go, it wasn’t much, but then again I didn’t have anything on my walls, and I felt more at home in his room than in mine. When the tea was ready, he offered it to me graciously, but without a tray, and he advised—or rather demanded—that I take it with vodka, at least in equal parts, “so that you sleep better.” But in that out-of-the-way guesthouse I was sleeping well anyway; at night there was a total, primordial silence, broken only by the sighing of the wind and the plaint of some unidentified nocturnal bird.