by Primo Levi
“So, as I was saying, it wasn’t too hard to position the hydraulic jacks that would allow us to slide the truss into the sea; it wasn’t too exhausting or labor-intensive, all we had to do was put the jacks in place and make sure they were perfectly level. That took a day, and then we began to push. But don’t think for a second that we just eyeballed it and gave a shove. There was a control room: it was well heated and it had a Coke machine, a closed-circuit television, and a telephone that connected to the hydraulic jack operators. All you had to do was push the buttons and you could see on the television whether everything was lined up. Oh, and I forgot—between the jacks and the sledges there were also piezometric cells, whose dials were in the control room, so you could monitor the force at every moment; and while I was sitting in that control room, in a comfortable chair, in the middle of all those devices, I thought back to my father and his sheet metal, a blow here and a blow there, to repair any defects, morning to night in the dark workshop with his sawdust stove—and I felt a lump form in my throat.
“But I couldn’t stand to sit there for too long. At some point I ran out into the cold to watch the derrick move. You couldn’t hear a thing, just the wind, the hum of the oil pumps in the control room, and the sea that was washing against the docks, three hundred meters away, but it wasn’t visible through the fog. And in the middle of the fog, obscured by the fog, you could see the derrick advancing, as big as a mountain and as slow as a snail. I had adjusted the control panel just as the manual instructed, and the derrick was moving a half-meter per minute. You had to go right up close in order to see it move, but, once you did, it was impressive, and I thought of an army advancing and no one being able to stop it, or when the lava erupted from the volcano and buried Pompeii—because one Sunday, with that sassy girl I told you about, I went to see Pompeii.
“Sorry, but from the way you’re looking at me, I’m not sure whether you have a clear understanding of the job. Let me explain: there was this truss lying on its side on the ground, on top of three sledges; the plinths were on three tracks, which led down to the sea, and they were pushed slowly along by eighteen hydraulic jacks. The truss was built to float, but so that it would be easier to maneuver, it was to slide on top of two pontoons, or steel barges that—again, before I even got there—had been filled with water and settled on the bottom of the basin, in the right position. After the truss had been moved onto them, we had to pump all the water out and make them float again, so they would support the weight of the truss and hold it above the water, and then tow the pontoons and the truss to the seabed, sink the pontoons again, put the truss upright, and settle it on its legs.
“The derrick moved calmly toward the basin and it was time to bring up the pontoons—but nothing was happening. The wind had been blowing for a while, and though it had swept away the fog, it had also begun to agitate the sea. I don’t have much experience with the sea, and that was the first job I ever had to do near—or, rather, in—an ocean, but I saw the engineer sniffing the air like a hunting dog, crinkling his nose and making gestures as if to say that things weren’t going well. Actually, the waves were already pretty big that day. The manual had prepared us for this possibility—no lifting if the waves were more than two feet high. These were easily more than two feet high, so we took a break.
“We waited three days, and nothing really changed. We passed the time drinking, sleeping, and playing cards; I even taught the four men on my crew how to play rummy, because with the wind like that, and in that enchanting landscape that I’ve told you all about, nobody really wanted to go for a walk. The Indian, however, did something that surprised me: in his typically rude manner, and without ever looking me in the eye, he made me understand that he wanted to invite me to his house, which wasn’t far away. Since he was something of a wild man, he didn’t sleep in the guesthouse like the rest of us, but at his own place, a wooden hut, with his wife. The others laughed, but I couldn’t figure out why. So I went there with him, because I like to see how other people live, but as soon I was in his hut, I realized that he was asking me to sleep with his wife. His wife, just like him, looked off to one side and didn’t speak; I was embarrassed because there wasn’t even a curtain and no privacy, and then I got scared. So I babbled something completely incoherent in Italian, which I knew he wouldn’t understand, and I left. Outside, the others were waiting for me, and then I realized why they’d been laughing. They explained that in his tribe it was the custom to offer your wife to your boss, but that I’d done the right thing because their women don’t wash often, and when they do, they use seal grease.
“When the sea calmed, we began to pump air into the pontoons. It wasn’t a very good pump—low pressure, no larger than that stool over there, but it ran smoothly. It seemed nearly impossible that it could do all the work itself and be strong enough to lift thirteen thousand tons—just think how many cranes would be needed to do the same amount of work. But in two days, without a sound, the pontoons rose to the surface; we tied them tightly to their supports, and by the evening of the second day the derrick was afloat; it even seemed as if it wanted to set off, but that was only an effect of the wind. I admit I was a little jealous of the designers who had invented that trick of making air, water, and time do all the work; it never would have occurred to me, but I already told you I don’t have much confidence with water, to be honest I’m not even a good swimmer, and one of these days I’ll tell you why.
“I’m not a good swimmer, but that didn’t matter, because nobody would’ve been able to swim in a sea like that: it was the color of lead, and so cold that I have no clue how those famous shrimp, which continued to be served in the cafeteria—sometimes boiled, sometimes roasted—could live there; but they said the sea was full of fish. We all put on our life jackets, because that was also in the manual, boarded the tugboats, and went out to sea, pulling the derrick, which lay on the two pontoons, behind us, the way you lead a cow to market by its halter. It was my first time at sea, and though I wasn’t exactly calm, I tried not to let it show; I figured that as soon as we began the work of positioning the derrick, I’d be distracted and it would pass. The Russian Orthodox was also scared, but it didn’t affect the other three guys, though Di Staso was a little seasick.
“I told you we went out to sea, but that was just a figure of speech; I didn’t feel ‘out’ of anything. Off the coast there was a whole Cernaia of islands and islets, and channels that slipped one into another, some so narrow that the derrick could barely fit through, and when I thought about what would happen if it didn’t, it sent shivers down my spine. Fortunately, we had a good pilot and he knew the way. I went into the pilothouse to see how he was doing, and he was perfectly calm, talking on the radio with the pilot of the other tugboat, in one of those nasal American voices. At first I thought they were planning out the route, but they were talking about a baseball game.”
I hadn’t understood clearly the whole pontoon situation: if the derrick was built to float, couldn’t it have been launched directly into the sea, without all these complications? Faussone looked at me dumbfounded before responding with the impatient patience of a person addressing an eager, if somewhat retarded, child:
“You know, if it was Lake Avigliana, maybe you’d be right, but this was the Pacific, though I don’t know why the explorers named it that, because it’s always got waves, even when it’s calm—at least every time I’ve seen it. And it doesn’t take much to bend a contraption as large as that one, even if it’s made of steel, because it wasn’t meant to lie on its side. It’s just like us, if you think about it: we need a flat bed in order to sleep. Anyway, the derrick needed pontoons, because otherwise there was a danger that with the waves it might buckle.
“I was telling you how, when I was on the tugboat, I was a little scared at first; but this soon passed, because I convinced myself that there wasn’t any danger. They were some pretty great machines, those tugboats. Not particularly comfortable—they’re not built for pleasure cruises—but
solid, well designed, without a single excess bolt, and you can feel their extraordinary power as soon as you get on one; in fact, they’re used for tugging boats much larger than themselves, and there’s not a storm that can stop them. After we’d spent some time navigating between channels, I got bored of sitting there and watching the scenery, which was always the same, so I went belowdecks to take a good look at the engine room, and I have to say that I enjoyed it, even though calling it a ‘room’ might be an overstatement, because there’s barely enough space to turn around; but I’ll never forget those pistons, and most of all the propeller shaft, and the kitchen, too, in which all the little frying pans were bolted to the wall, so the cook never even has to move while he’s preparing a meal, because everything is within arm’s reach. And when night came, we stopped and they gave us rations like in the army, though they weren’t bad, except instead of fruit they gave us shrimp with jam. Then we went to sleep in berths and the boat didn’t rock too much: just enough to put us to sleep.
“We left that network of channels the next morning, and I took a deep breath. We only had a dozen miles to go before we got to our destination, where they had already set up a buoy with a headlight and a radio, so that we could find it even in case of fog, and there was always fog. We arrived at the buoy around noon. We attached the derrick to some other buoys, so that it didn’t start wandering off during the process, and we opened the pontoon’s air ducts, so that they’d sink a little and we could tow them away. I say we, but to tell the truth, I stayed on deck, and the Indian, who was the least affected of anyone by the sea, went onto the pontoons; but it all happened so fast anyway, we just heard a great puff of air, like a sigh of relief, and the two pontoons detached from the derrick and the tugboats pulled them away.
“At this point, no two ways around it, the spotlight was on me. Fortunately, the sea was almost calm. I assumed the grittiest attitude I was able to muster, boarded a small boat with my four men, and then we climbed up the ladders of the derrick. It was our job to conduct all the preliminary tests, and then remove the safety valves on the floating legs. You know how it is when you have to do something that you don’t want to do, but you brace yourself, because when you have to do something, well, you do it? And that’s especially true if you have to make others do it, and one of the others is seasick—or maybe just faking, which was my suspicion.
“The tests took a long time, but they went fine, none of the dents were worse than expected. As for the safety catches, I’m not sure I explained that clearly. Here, look: imagine my derrick as a truncated pyramid, floating on one of its sides, which is composed of three parallel legs—the flotation tubes. Well, we had to weigh down the lower sections of these legs, so that they would sink and the pyramid would stand erect. In order to weigh down the legs we had to pump them full of seawater: they were divided into segments with watertight bulkheads, and each segment had valves that allowed the air to escape and the water to enter at just the right rate. The valves were operated by remote control, but they had safety catches, and those had to be removed by hand, or, rather, hit off with a hammer.
“Right: so it was exactly at this moment that I realized that the whole tower was moving. It was strange: the sea seemed still, you couldn’t see any waves, but the tower was moving—up and down, up and down, rocking very gently, like a baby’s cradle, and I felt like my stomach was about to come up. I tried to resist, and I might’ve made it if I hadn’t happened to see Di Staso clinging to two wind braces like Christ on the Cross, eight meters above the water, throwing up into the Pacific Ocean—and that was it for me. We got the job done all the same, but, you know, as a rule I try to conduct my business with a little class, though this time—I’ll spare you the details, but the two of us looked less like cats than like those animals whose names I can’t even remember, you see them at the zoo, they have imbecilic faces, they’re always laughing, and they walk very softly, clinging, upside down, to the branches of trees, with limbs that function like hooks. Well, all of us except the Indian looked like that, and in fact those bastards back on the tugboat, instead of encouraging us, were laughing at us, making monkey gestures and slapping their thighs. But I guess you can’t blame them, if you see it from their perspective: the specialist who has been brought over from the other side of the world with a socket wrench hanging at his waist—since a wrench for me is what a sword was to a knight back in the olden days—puking like a little baby. Yeah, that must have been quite a sight.
“Fortunately, I’d prepared well for that part of the job, and I’d made the four men practice in advance. Anyway, though it wasn’t particularly elegant, it took us just fifteen minutes longer than the amount of time allotted in the manual. We reboarded the tugboat and my seasickness soon passed.
“The engineer was in the control room with binoculars and a chronometer, before the radio controls, and the show was ready to begin. It was like watching television with the sound off. He was pushing the buttons one at a time, like buzzers, though we could hear only the sound of our own breath, and we were breathing as if on tiptoe. At a certain point you could see the derrick begin to tilt, like a ship when it’s about to go down: even from a distance you could see the eddies made by the legs as they sank into the water, and the waves came all the way up to us and rocked the tugboat, but you still couldn’t hear a sound. It kept tilting, and the upper platform kept rising until, with a large splash, it stood upright; it dipped slightly and then it settled, like an island, but it was an island that we had made ourselves; I don’t know about the others, maybe they weren’t thinking of anything in particular, but I thought of God creating the world (if it really was Him), separating the sea from the dry land—even if that really didn’t have much to do with it. Then we got back in the boat again, and were joined by the guys from the other tug, and we all climbed up onto the platform; we smashed a bottle and made a bit of a ruckus, because that’s the ritual.
“Now, don’t go spreading this around, but at that moment I started to cry. Not for the derrick, but for my father: what I mean is, that iron sacrament planted in the middle of the ocean reminded me of a silly monument that my father once made with his friends; they put it together one piece at a time, on Sunday after their bocce game, a bunch of old guys, all of them a little senile and a little drunk. They were war veterans—some had fought in Russia, others in Africa, others who knows where—and they were fed up. Since they were all more or less in the same business—one knew how to solder, one could file, one could pound sheet metal, and so on—they joined forces to make a monument that they would donate to the village. But it was to be a backward kind of monument: iron instead of bronze, and instead of all the eagles and crowns of glory and the soldier advancing with his bayonet, they would make a statue of the unknown baker: yes, the man who invented the loaf of bread. And they’d do it in iron, using black sheet metal two millimeters thick, soldered and bolted. They actually went ahead with it, and it certainly was sturdy, no doubt about that, but as a work of art it wasn’t entirely successful. The mayor and the parish priest didn’t want it, and, instead of standing in the middle of the piazza, it’s rusting in a cellar, next to bottles of good wine.”
2. A reference to Jack London’s book Burning Light (1910).
* Here, and throughout The Wrench, an asterisk indicates that the word or phrase is in English in Levi’s original text.
Metalwork
“The places where my father was during the retreat weren’t too far from here, but it was a different time of year: he told me that the wine froze in their flasks and the leather of their cartridge cases froze, too.”