by Primo Levi
“As we drove down the hill, the gentleman explained to me that the Alaska of the snow and the sleds does exist, but it’s much farther north; where we were was still Alaska, but we were on a landmass that extended down the Pacific Coast, like a handle that connected to the real Alaska, and in fact that’s exactly what they call it in English, the Panhandle—which means the handle of a pan. As for the snow, he told me not to worry, this was the season for it and there’d be snow sooner or later, but if not, that’d be for the best. It was like he knew what was going to happen. And he acknowledged that yes, the derrick was rather large, but that’s the reason they’d sent to Italy for a ‘bright guy,’ which, modesty aside, meant me. He was a good fellow, that guy, despite all his talk about the eternal soul.
“As we were having this conversation, we went down the hill’s winding road and arrived at the site. The whole crew was there to greet us: the designers, the project’s engineering director, a half-dozen new engineers—all English-speaking and all with beards—and the team of Alaskan riggers, none of whom were actually from Alaska. One of them was a big fat pistolero, and they told me that he was Russian Orthodox, apparently there’s still a few of them left over from back when the Russians had the brilliant idea to sell Alaska to the Americans. The second guy was called Di Staso, so he obviously wasn’t very Alaskan. They told me that the third was an Indian, hired because they’re good at climbing on scaffolding and they’re fearless. The fourth one I don’t remember too well: he was a regular guy, the kind you find everywhere, with the face of a half-wit.
“The head engineer was on top of things, the kind of guy who doesn’t talk a lot and doesn’t stress any single word more than any other; in fact, to be honest, I got exhausted trying to understand what he was saying because he spoke without ever opening his mouth, but as you know, in America that’s what they’re taught—that it’s not polite to open your mouth. But he was on top of everything—he showed me the scale model, he introduced me to the odd team that I just told you about, and he told them that I would be in charge of rigging. We went to lunch in the cafeteria, and I probably don’t have to tell you that it was shrimp again; then he gave me a booklet that contained instructions for the rigging, and he said that he’d let me study it for two days, but after that I’d have to report to the site because we needed to get started on the job. He showed me in the booklet how all the operations had to be performed on certain days, some even at a certain hour, because of the tide. Yes, the tide: you don’t get it, right? I didn’t get it myself, in that moment, what the tide had to do with anything. I understood it later, and I’ll explain it to you later, too, if you like.”
That was fine with me: it’s always best to go along with someone who is telling a story, otherwise he’ll stumble and lose his train of thought. Besides, Faussone was in rare form, and as the story unfolded, I saw that his head kept sinking between his shoulders, the way it does whenever he’s about to reveal something big.
“Then we left, Compton and me. But I have to tell you that I had a strange feeling about all of it. That office, that cafeteria, and, more than anything else, those faces—it was as if I had seen them all before, and then I realized that it was true, I had seen it all before in a movie, though I couldn’t tell you when, or what film. So Compton and I, like I said, left for the city. I was going to return to the hotel to study the booklet, but the engineer told me that once the job started, I’d be staying in a room reserved for me in the guesthouse at the worksite; he said ghestrum, and I couldn’t figure out what the hell that meant, but I didn’t risk asking him because in theory I knew how to speak English.
“Anyway, we got back on the road in my man’s gorgeous Chrysler, and I shut my mouth and ruminated on the job. On the one hand it was a great job, the kind that you remember for a long time afterward and it makes you happy to have done it; on the other hand, that little word ‘tide,’ and the necessity of transporting that derrick, made me a little sick to my stomach. Because, you know, I’ve never liked the ocean: the way it’s always moving, the dampness, the soft sea air—the bottom line is that I don’t trust it, and it gets me down. And then, at a certain point while we were driving, I saw a strange thing: the sun was somewhat dim in the sky, and on either side of it there were two other, smaller suns. I pointed this out to Compton, and I saw that it made him anxious; in fact, a little bit later, all of a sudden, the sky went dark, even though it was still daytime, and it immediately began to snow like nothing I’d ever seen before. It was coming down heavily, first in hard grains, like semolina, then in a powder so fine that it entered the car’s air intakes, and finally in flakes the size of walnuts. We were still going up the hill, a dozen kilometers from the worksite, and it became clear that things were taking a bad turn. Compton hadn’t said anything, he just grunted once or twice; I watched the windshield wiper, I heard the engine whirr and turn over, harder and harder, and I thought to myself: If it stops, we’re toast.
“Hey, have you ever completely flubbed something?”
Yes, I replied, I had, and more than once, too, but I didn’t quite follow. Faussone said:
“I’ve done so as well, many times in fact, but never as bad as what Compton did then. He was skidding like crazy, so the only thing to do was to keep it in second gear, without braking or accelerating, and maybe giving the windshield wiper a rest once in a while; but instead, seeing a straightaway, he grunted again and slammed on the gas. The car spun around; it did a complete one-eighty, as sharp as a soldier doing an about-face, and came to a stop up against the mountainside, our two left wheels in a ditch. The engine stopped, but the wiper kept going back and forth like crazy, burrowing into the windshield, making two windows framed by snow. Clearly the car was a good make—or maybe they just build them better over there.
“Compton was wearing dress shoes but I was in army boots with rubber soles, so it was up to me to get out and see what could be done. I found the jack and I tried to position it; I wanted to lift the left side of the car and then slide some rocks under the wheels, in the ditch, and then try to head back to the worksite, since the car was already turned around and now faced downhill, and it didn’t seem to have suffered any real damage. But there was no way—it had come to a stop thirty centimeters short of the side of the mountain, so I could just slide myself in behind it, but there was no way I could get under the car and insert the jack securely. In the meantime the snow was ankle deep, it was only getting worse, and it was now almost dark.
“There was nothing to do but stay put, remain calm, and wait for daylight to come so that we could find a way to get out of the snow; the car had enough gas, so we could leave the motor and the heat on and go to sleep. The main thing was not to lose our heads—but Compton lost his right away. He started crying and laughing, he said that he felt like he was suffocating, and that I should run to the site and get help while it was still light out. Once he even grabbed me around the neck, at which point I punched him twice in the stomach, in order to calm him down, and in fact it did calm him down, but I was terrified to spend the night next to him—as you know, I don’t like being in narrow, enclosed spaces. So I asked him whether he had a flashlight; he did, he gave it to me, and I got the hell out of there.
“I have to say that, as far as bleakness goes, this was pretty bleak. The wind picked up and the snow again became very fine and started blowing in every direction; it went down my neck and in my eyes and I found it hard to breathe. It had snowed maybe half a meter, but the wind had swept it against the side of the mountain and the car was almost completely covered; even the headlights, which were still on, lay beneath a mantle of snow, but you could still see their light—a pale glow that seemed to emanate from Purgatory. I rapped on the glass and told Compton to turn them off and to sit there quietly, and I’d return soon. I tried to fix the car’s exact location in my mind, and then I took off.
“At first it wasn’t so bad. I figured I’d only have to go about ten kilometers, or even less if I took a shortcut
and headed in a straight line down the mountain, bypassing all of the switchbacks. And I said to myself, ‘You wanted Alaska? You wanted snow? Well, now you’ve got it. You ought to be happy.’ But I wasn’t very happy. Those ten kilometers felt like forty, because with every step I plunged knee-deep into the snow, and although I was going downhill, I began to sweat, my heart pounded, and partly because of the storm, partly because of my exhaustion, I kept losing my breath and had to keep stopping. The flashlight, by the way, was of no help whatsoever. All I could see were a lot of horizontal white lines and a glistening powder that made my head spin, so I turned it off and proceeded through the darkness. I was hurrying to get down to flat land, because I figured that once I was on flat ground the site couldn’t be much farther away. Well, this turned out to be an idiotic notion, because as soon as I got back to flat ground I realized I had no idea where to go. I didn’t have a compass—the only compass I’d had up to that point was the mountainside, and with that gone I had no idea what to do. I was paralyzed by fear—a hideous beast—and I don’t think I’ve ever felt it worse, even those times when, to be honest, the danger was greater, but it was because of the darkness, and the wind, and I was all by myself in a place at the end of the earth; and it occurred to me that if I were to fall down and lose consciousness, the snow would bury me alive, and nobody would find me until April, after everything had melted. And, though I don’t think of him often, I thought of my father.
“You see, my father was born back in 1912—a member of that unfortunate generation. He had to do every kind of national service possible: he fought in Africa, then France, Albania, and finally Russia, and he came home with a frostbitten foot and some strange ideas, and later he was imprisoned in Germany, but I’ll tell you about that another time; parenthetically, it was then, while his foot was healing, that he manufactured me—that’s the word he’d always use when he joked around with me. Anyway, that time in Alaska I felt a little bit like my father, who had been abandoned in the snow—even though he was a good metalworker—and he told me that he had felt a great urge to sit down in the snow and wait for death to come, but finally he gathered his courage and kept walking for twenty-four days, until he was out of it. So I gathered my courage, too.
“I gathered my courage and told myself that the important thing was to think rationally. This was my reasoning: if the wind had driven the snow against the car and the mountainside, that meant it was blowing from the north, which was the direction of the worksite; assuming that the wind didn’t change direction, I’d just have to walk straight into it. Maybe I wouldn’t find the site, but at least I’d get close, and I’d avoid the danger of traveling in circles, like a roach when it sees light. So I continued to walk into the wind, and every so often I turned on the flashlight to see my footsteps behind me, but the snow filled them in immediately. Besides the snow that kept falling from the sky, there was another snow, raised by the wind, which whipped across the flat ground and into the darkness, hissing like a hundred snakes. Once in a while I’d look at my watch. It was odd: I felt like I’d been walking for weeks, but the clock never seemed to move. It was as if time stood still. All the better for Compton, I thought, so when we find him he won’t be frozen stiff. But I’m sure he felt like it had been a long time, too.
“Anyway, I was lucky. After walking for two hours I hadn’t found the site. Yet I realized that I was crossing train tracks, the service tracks, I mean; all right, the tracks themselves weren’t visible, but I could see those fences that they use to prevent the snow from piling up on the rails. The fences were totally useless, but they were useful to me, because they still jutted out a little bit, so I pressed on against the wind by following the fence posts and I arrived at the site. Everything went smoothly after that. They had a vehicle ready for, as they say, ‘emergencies’*—see what a funny language English is? Because not a damn thing was going to ‘emerge’ from that snow. It was a six-ton behemoth, with tracks almost a meter wide, so it wouldn’t sink in the snow and could go up forty-degree inclines without a hitch. The driver turned on the headlights, we were back up the slope in a minute, we found the spot, we had shovels ready, and we pulled out Compton, who was half asleep. Perhaps he had already started to freeze, but we shook him a little and gave him a nip of booze—which was against his principles, but he didn’t notice—then we gave him a massage, and he was all right. He didn’t say much, but then again he wasn’t a talkative guy. We left the car where it was.
“Back at the site they gave me a straw mattress and the first thing I did was ask for another copy of the construction booklet, because the first one was going to be spending the winter in the Chrysler. I was dead tired, and fell asleep immediately, but all night long I dreamed about the huge snowstorm, and about a guy walking through it, into the wind, and in my dream I couldn’t tell whether it was me or my father. But as soon as I woke up the next morning my thoughts turned to that other emergency, which was now only two days away—the loading of that absurdly long thing onto a boat and carrying it between various islands for eighty miles, and then standing it upright on the sea floor. I’m sorry, but you’re looking at me like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
I tried to reassure Faussone, promising him that I was following his story with great interest, which was true, and with complete comprehension—which was not entirely true, since there are certain things that, in order to understand them, you have to do yourself, or at least you have to see them for yourself. He guessed as much and, without hiding his impatience, he took out his pen and grabbed a paper napkin, and said he would show me. He was a good draftsman. He sketched the shape of his derrick to scale: a trapezoid, 250 meters high, with the broader base 105 meters and the shorter 80, and above this an assortment of trusses, cranes, and turrets. Next to it he sketched the Mole Antonelliana, which looked pathetic by comparison, and St. Peter’s, which was only half as tall.
“Look,” he said, pointing to the shorter side of the trapezoid. “Once it’s upright, the sea comes up to here. But they constructed it lying down, where it was mounted on three sledges, and the sledges were mounted on three ramps of reinforced concrete and steel; all this was done before I even showed up. Now I’ll show you that, too. But the best part, the trick—here, you can see it here in the drawing. The derrick’s six legs aren’t all equal: you see I’ve made the ones on this side bigger. And they were quite long, in fact: three tubes eight meters in diameter, a hundred and thirty meters long, just as high as St. Peter’s, which I’ve drawn here on the side. By the way, you know I don’t have much in common with priests, but whenever I’m in Rome I go to St. Peter’s—which you have to admit is a great piece of work, especially when you consider the limited means available to them back then. It’s not like I feel any desire to pray when I’m at St. Peter’s, not even a little bit; but when that contraption started slowly to turn in the water, and then stood up straight, all by itself, and we all climbed up to smash the bottle—well, yeah, I felt a little like praying, but unfortunately I didn’t know what prayer to say; none of them seemed exactly right. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
“Like I said, three legs were larger, and that was because they weren’t simply legs; they were also designed to be buoys. But let me get back to the story. I got settled at the site, and I spent two days peacefully reading the booklet, going over the details with the engineer, and drying my clothes. On the third day we began work.
“The first thing to do was position the hydraulic jacks: they’re like car jacks, only bigger. It wasn’t a difficult job, and it was a good way to evaluate the work team I told you about—the Russian Orthodox, Di Staso, the Indian, and the normal guy. As you can imagine, besides having trouble understanding what I was saying, they could barely understand one another; but ultimately we were all riggers, and we always figure out a way of communicating with each other, even if only through gestures. We get the idea right away, and if one guy is particularly bright, you can bet the next guy will listen to him,
even if he isn’t the boss. That’s how it is all over the world, and every time I think of my father—because he’s dead now—I think that if only the military worked like this, then certain things wouldn’t have happened; things like, for example, taking a metalworker from the Canavese and shipping him off to Russia with cardboard shoes to shoot at Russian metalworkers. And if governments worked like this, there would be no need for armies, because there’d be no reason to fight wars, since people with common sense would reach agreements with one another.”
The conclusions people come up with when they presume to hold forth on issues outside their area of expertise! I tried delicately to point out to him the subversive, even revolutionary undertones of what he was saying. Assign responsibility according to experience? Are you joking? This kind of system may work for riggers, but for other, more subtle and complex activities? But I had no trouble getting him back on track.
“Look, I don’t like ordering people around or taking orders. I like to work by myself, so that it’s like I’m putting my signature on the finished product; but of course a job like that was not for one man. So we got busy: after that huge snowstorm that I told you about, we had a little bit of calm and things went all right, though there was some fog from time to time. It took me a little while to figure out what caliber of guy each one of them was, because we’re not all made equal—and that’s especially true of foreigners.
“The Russian Orthodox was as strong as a bull. His beard ran up to his eyes and he had hair down to here, but he worked with care and you could tell right away that he was a professional. Except you couldn’t interrupt him, otherwise he’d lose the thread, become confused, and had to start all over again. Di Staso, I learned, was the son of a man from Bari and a woman from Germany, and in fact he seemed a bit mixed up; when he spoke, I found it as hard to follow him as I would a real American, though fortunately he didn’t talk much. He was one of those guys who always say yes, and then go ahead and do it their own way. So I had to keep an eye on him, but the problem was that he was bothered by the cold, so he would take breaks every second, and start dancing around—even when he was at the top of the truss, which gave me goose bumps—and he’d stick his hands in his armpits. The Indian was a real character: I found out from the engineer that he was from a tribe of hunters who, instead of staying on their reservation and going through the motions for tourists, had agreed to move to the cities and clean the façades of skyscrapers; he was twenty-two years old, and his father and his grandfather had been in that line of work. Which is not exactly the same thing—as a rigger you have to use your head a little bit more—but he had a good head. He also had some strange habits, however: he never looked you in the eye, never moved his face, and in general seemed a bit rigid, though on the job he was as nimble as a cat. He didn’t speak much, either: he was about as much fun as a stomachache, and when you criticized him, he talked back. He even cursed people out, but fortunately only in the dialect of his tribe, so you could pretend not to understand and there weren’t any problems. The last guy was the normal one; but I still haven’t figured him out. He was really something of a cretin. It took him a while to understand things, though he was willing, and he paid attention, because he knew he wasn’t very bright; so he tried to persist and not make mistakes, and actually he made relatively few mistakes—in fact I couldn’t understand how he made so few. I felt sorry for him because the others made fun of him, and I felt a tenderness toward him, as you would toward a child, even though he was almost forty years old and not particularly kind on the eyes. You know, one advantage of our line of work is that there’s a place even for guys like that, and they learn on the job the things that they didn’t learn in school. It’s just that, with this kind of person, you need to be a little more patient.