by Primo Levi
We’d entered the forest, a splendid autumnal forest decorated in unexpected colors: the green-gold of larches that were just beginning to shed their needles, the dark purple of beeches, and here and there the warm brown of maples and oaks. The bare trunks of the birch trees made one want to pet them like cats. Between the trees, the underbrush was low, and there weren’t many dead leaves yet: the ground was firm and resilient, as if tamped down, and it echoed strangely under our feet. Faussone explained to me that, if you don’t let the trees get too thick, the forest will clean itself: the animals, large and small, take care of it, and he showed me the tracks of a hare in the mud, hardened by the wind, and the yellow and red galls on the oak trees, and the dog roses with worms sleeping inside them. I was somewhat surprised by his familiarity with plants and animals, but, as he pointed out to me, he was not born a rigger: his happiest childhood memories were of filching (meaning petty thefts of farm produce), group excursions in search of birds’ nests or mushrooms, teaching himself zoology and the theory and practice of trapping, and communion with the modest natural world of the Canavese in the form of blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, and wild asparagus—all heightened by the cheap thrill of illicit behavior.
“Yes,” continued Faussone, “because when I was a child my father would always say that he wanted me to hurry up and finish school so I could go join him in his workshop. He wanted me to be just like him: at the age of nine he was already in France learning the trade, because that’s what everyone did back then, they were all tinkers down in the valley, and he worked as a tinker until the day he died. He always said he would die with a hammer in his hand, and that’s just what happened, poor man. But it’s not the worst way to go, because many people, when they stop working, get ulcers or start drinking or begin talking to themselves, and I think he would have been one of them, but, of course, he died before that happened.
“He never did anything but work metal, except when they put him in prison and sent him to Germany. Especially copper plates. They made everything of copper, because stainless steel wasn’t yet in style: vases, saucepans, pipes, even unlicensed stills for making bootleg grappa. Where I’m from, since I was born during the war, there was always a lot of pounding going on. Mostly, they made tin-plated copper cooking pots, large and small, because magnino means ‘tinker,’ someone who makes pots and coats them with tin—and even now there are a lot of families named Magnino, but they probably don’t know why.
“You know that when you beat copper it hardens . . .”
I knew this, yes. As we spoke, it came out that, though I’d never beaten metal myself, I had a lot of experience with copper—battles silent as well as fierce—marked by love and hate, enthusiasm and exhaustion, victory and defeat, and an increasingly refined knowledge, the kind you have when you’ve lived with people for a long time and you can predict their words and actions. I knew, oh yes, the feminine suppleness of copper, metal of mirrors, metal of Venus. I knew its warm splendor and its noxious taste, the soft cerulean green of its oxides and the vitreous azure of its salts. I knew firsthand how copper hardens, and as I said this to Faussone I almost felt as if we were related. Copper, if treated badly—beaten, stretched, bent, compressed—is just like us: its crystals grow larger and it becomes hard, crude, hostile, or, as Faussone would say, “arverse”—averse. I told him that I could explain the science behind this phenomenon, but he replied that it didn’t matter to him and, besides, it wasn’t always that way: just as we aren’t all the same, and behave differently when faced with difficulties, so it is that there are some materials that improve when you beat them, like felt and leather, and also iron, which discharges its slag when you hammer it and gets stronger and becomes wrought iron. I added that you have to be careful with these comparisons, because, although they may be poetic, they don’t actually tell you very much, so you should be cautious about drawing educational—or edificational—conclusions from them. Should the educator follow the example of the smith, who, by beating hard on iron, gives it nobility of form, or of the vintner, who obtains the same result with wine by storing it out of sight in the darkness of a cellar? Is it best for a mother to model herself on the pelican, who plucks out all her own feathers in order to fashion a soft nest for her newborns, or on the bear, who pushes her offspring to climb to the top of a fir tree and then abandons them there and leaves without looking back? Does tempering or hardening make a better didactic model? Watch out for analogies: they corrupted medicine for millennia, and perhaps they’re to blame if there are now so many different pedagogical systems and, despite three thousand years of debate, nobody knows which one is best.
In any case, Faussone reminded me that the copper plate, having been worked over until it’s hard—meaning you can no longer use a hammer on it, it’s no longer “malleable”—has to be cooked again, that is, it has to be heated for a while at 800°C, so that it can regain its original pliability. As a result, the work of the tinker consists of alternating between heating and beating, beating and heating. I knew about all this, more or less, but I didn’t have as much experience with tin—I’d had only a fleeting, youthful dalliance, and even then I was mostly concerned with its chemical composition—so I listened closely to what he had to say:
“Even when the pot is finished, the job isn’t done, because if you cook in a pot of so-called naked copper, it’ll ultimately make you sick—you and your family. I can’t rule out the possibility that if my father died at only fifty-seven, it had something to do with the copper that was circulating in his blood. The moral of the story is that the inside of the pot needs to be coated with tin, and don’t think for a second that this is easy, even if you know, in theory, how it’s done: theory’s one thing, practice is another. Well, to get to the point, you first use sulfuric acid, or nitric acid if you’re in a rush—but only for a second because otherwise it’s see you later, pot—then you rinse it with water, and finally you remove the oxide with cooked acid.”
This last term was new to me. I asked him to clarify, but I didn’t anticipate that I’d open an old wound in the process. It so happened that Faussone didn’t exactly know what l’acid cheuit was, and he didn’t know because he’d refused to learn—in short, there had been some rancor between him and his father. When Faussone was eighteen, he’d gotten bored with making pans in the village; he wanted to move to Turin and work at Lancia. That’s what he did, in fact, but it didn’t last long. Well, there had been an argument about cooked acid. At first his father was angry, but then he became silent because he understood that there was nothing he could do.
“Anyway, you make it with hydrochloric acid, you cook it with zinc and ammonium chloride and I don’t know what else—if you want, I can find out for you, though I hope you’re not planning to coat any copper pans with tin yourself. But at that stage it’s still not finished: while the cooked acid is working, you need to have the tin ready. Virgin tin. This is where you can tell whether the tinker is a professional or a slacker. You need virgin tin, meaning tin in its purest form, when it’s fresh off the boat, as opposed to soldering tin, which is alloyed with lead. I’m telling you this because there are people who line pans with soldering tin. We even had a few of them in my village. When the job is done you can’t tell the difference, but you can imagine what happens when the people who buy those pans cook with them for, say, twenty years, and the lead seeps into everything they eat.
“I told you that it was essential to have the tin ready, hot enough so that it’s molten but not too hot, otherwise a red crust forms and you’ll waste the material, and, you know, now it’s easy, but back then only the rich had thermometers, and the way you’d estimate the heat of something was by spitting on it. Sorry, let me explain: you’d watch to see whether your saliva sizzled a lot, or a little, or if it jumped right off. When this happened, you’d take the cucce—I don’t even know whether there’s a name for them in Italian, but they’re like thick hemp strands—and you lay the tin on the copper like
you’re spreading butter in a terrine, if that makes sense. As soon as it’s done, you dunk it in cold water, because if you don’t, the tin, instead of having a beautiful shine, will stay dull. You see, it’s a trade like any other trade, relying on tricks both big and small, invented by some other Faussone in some bygone era, and the whole story of how it evolved could fill a book, but it’s a book no one would ever write, which is a shame. Now that so many years have passed, I regret that fight I had with my father, the way I talked back to him and silenced him, because he understood that this trade, which had always been practiced the same way, and was as old as time, was going to die with him. When I told him that I didn’t care about cooked acid, he didn’t say anything, but he felt like a part of himself died right then. That’s because he liked his job, you see, and I understand that now, because I like mine, too.”
This was the crucial point, and I could tell that Faussone realized it. If you put aside those prodigious, singular moments that destiny gives us, love of one’s work (a privilege enjoyed, unfortunately, only by a few) is the best, most concrete approximation of happiness on earth—but most people don’t realize this. We know less about this vast region—the region of the trade, of the boulot, of the job, in short, of daily work—than about Antarctica, and it’s a sad, mysterious phenomenon that the people who speak about it the most, who make the greatest racket, are the ones who know the least about it. Whenever work is exalted by someone in official ceremonies, an insidious rhetoric comes into play, based on the cynical belief that a medal and a few words of praise cost less, and are more valuable, than a pay increase. There also exists, however, a rhetoric on the other side, not so much cynical as profoundly stupid, that tends to denigrate work, to portray it as vile, as if we could do without work, our own or that of others, not just in some future utopia but here, today: as if anybody who works were by definition a servant, and as if, conversely, anyone who doesn’t work, or doesn’t know how to, or doesn’t want to were therefore a free man. It’s the depressing truth that many jobs are undesirable, but it’s a mistake to rage against them if you’re prejudiced from the start; anyone who does so condemns himself to a lifetime of hatred—not only of his work but of himself and the world. We can and should fight to ensure that the worker benefits from the fruit of his own labors, and that the job itself is not a punishment. But love or, conversely, hatred of work is a personal matter, which depends greatly on the individual’s own history and less than one might think on the industrial structures within which the work takes place.
Faussone, as if he’d read my thoughts, replied, “You know what my first name is? Tino, which is pretty common, but my Tino is short for ‘Libertino.’ When I was born, my father actually wanted to call me Libero, and the mayor, even though he was a Fascist, was a friend, so he gave his consent, but the town clerk wouldn’t let it go through. My mother told me all this later; the clerk said that there was no such thing as St. Libero, that it was an unusual name, that he didn’t want any trouble, and that he’d need to get permission from the provincial party secretary and maybe Rome as well. He was lying, of course—the truth was that, to be on the safe side, he didn’t want the word ‘Libero’ in his records. Ultimately there was no way around it: the moral of the story was that my father resorted to Libertino, because, poor man, he didn’t understand. He thought that it would be the same as when someone’s named Giovanni and they call him Giovannino. So I remained Libertino, and anyone who happens to see my passport or my driver’s license laughs at me behind my back. It didn’t help that, as the years went by, traveling the world as I have, I really did become something of a libertine, but that’s another story, and besides, you’ve figured it out already. I am a libertine, but it’s not my whole identity. It’s not the reason I was put on earth, though if you asked me why I was put on earth, I’d be hard-pressed to give you an answer.
“My father wanted to call me Libero because he wanted me to be free. I don’t mean in the political sense—as far as politics went his only precept was never to wage war, because he’d been through enough of that already. Free, for him, meant not having to work for a boss. That could mean spending twelve hours a day in a workshop like his, completely black with soot and covered in ice during the winter, or maybe as an immigrant, or going around with a little handcart like a Gypsy—but never under a boss, or in a factory, spending your whole life on an assembly line performing the same action over and over again, until you’re no longer able to do anything else and they give you your severance pay and your pension and you sit on a park bench. This was why he was against the idea of me working at Lancia. Secretly he hoped that I would stay in his shop and get married and have children to whom I could pass on the family business. Listen, I do all right now in my line of work, but if my father hadn’t insisted, sometimes nicely and sometimes not, that after school I go with him to the workshop and turn the hand crank in the forge and he’d show me how, from a three-millimeter metal plate, he could, just by eyeballing it, make a picture-perfect half-sphere, without even relying on a model—well, as I said, if it weren’t for my father, and if I’d been happy to go along with what they taught me in school, then without a doubt I’d still be working on an assembly line.”
We’d arrived at a clearing, and Faussone pointed out to me the elegant labyrinths made by moles—bulges that barely rose above the ground, from which protruded conical mounds of fresh soil that the moles had turned up during the night. Earlier, Faussone had taught me how to identify the skylark nests hidden in depressions in the fields, and he showed me an ingenious dormouse nest, in the shape of a muff, half hidden amid the low branches of a larch. Later, he stopped talking and held me back, blocking my chest with his left arm, like a barrier. With his right hand he pointed out a slight quivering in the grass a few steps from our path. A snake? No; on a stretch of beaten earth an odd little procession appeared: a porcupine was advancing cautiously, with brief stops and starts, and following him—or her—were five cubs, like tiny train cars tugged by a toy locomotive. The first clenched the leader’s tail in its mouth, and each of the others clenched the tail of its predecessor in the same way. The leader stopped abruptly in front of a large beetle; she flipped the beetle on its back with her paw and took it between her teeth. The little ones broke rank and crowded around, and then the leader withdrew behind a bush, dragging all the little critters with her.
At dusk the overcast sky cleared; suddenly we became aware of a melancholy distant wail and, as sometimes happens, we also became aware of having already sensed it before, even though our minds had not yet identified it. It repeated at almost regular intervals, and we couldn’t tell from what direction it came, but then we spotted, high above our heads, orderly flocks of cranes, one after another, a long black line against the pale sky; it was as if they were weeping because they’d been forced to leave.
“. . . but he was still around when I got out of the factory and started the work I’m doing now, and I think that made him happy. He never said so, because he wasn’t the talkative type, but he let me understand as much in other ways. Whenever he saw me going off somewhere new he was clearly envious, but it was a friendly kind of envy—it wasn’t like when someone covets another man’s fortune, and curses him because he can’t have it himself. My father would’ve liked a job like mine, even if your company makes money off you, because at least it can’t take away the finished project. That stays put, it’s yours, no one can take it away from you, and he understood this. You could see it in the way he looked at his stills after he had finished and polished them. When his clients came to take them away, he gave them a little caress and you could tell that he was sorry; if they didn’t end up too far away, he’d sometimes take his bike and go look at them, with the excuse of making sure that everything was working all right. And he would have liked it because of the travel, too, since no one traveled much in his day; he hadn’t traveled much himself, and when he did, he did so wretchedly. He claimed the only thing he remembered from the yea
r that he spent in Savoy as an apprentice were the chilblains, the slaps, and the way they cursed at him in French. Later, as a soldier, he went to Russia and you can imagine what sort of traveling that was. It might sound strange, but he told me on numerous occasions that the best year of his life was the one after Badoglio took over, when the Germans rounded everyone up at the Milan station, disarmed them, packed them in cattle cars, and shipped them off to work in Germany. Amazing, isn’t it? But it always helps to have a trade.
“He really had to tighten his belt those first few months, but you don’t need to hear about that. He didn’t want to sign up with the Republic and return to Italy. All winter he went at it with the pick and shovel, and it wasn’t a good life; he wore nothing but his army uniform. He had signed on as a mechanic, though he’d already lost all hope of getting a job when, in March, they put him to work in a shop where pipes were made, and things improved a little. But it soon became clear that they were looking for railroad engineers, and though he wasn’t an engineer, he knew a thing or two about hot water boilers and he figured that sometimes you have to change horses midstream. He volunteered even though he didn’t speak a word of German—hunger being the mother of innovation. Luckily for him, he was assigned to work on coal locomotives, which at the time were used to pull freight cars and local trains. And he got two girlfriends, one at either end of the line. It’s not that he was particularly smooth—he said that it was easy, that all the German men were off at war and the women chased after you. Of course he never told me this story in much detail because when they took him prisoner he was already married with a small child, which was me. But on Sundays his friends would come over to our place for a glass of wine, and with a euphemism here, a snigger there, a conversation cut off in the middle—it wasn’t hard to figure it out, especially when I noticed that his friends were laughing the hardest, while my mother sat there with a drawn face, looking away and laughing uneasily.