The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  “The fact is that no one ever taught me to swim when I was child, because where I’m from there’s no water you can swim in; and the one time I had a chance to learn, it went badly. I’d decided to learn on my own, I had the time and the will, but it went badly. This was a number of years back, in Calabria, when they were building the highway, and they sent me down there with a crane operator—I was to assemble the gantry crane, and he was going to learn how to maneuver it. Do you know what a gantry crane is? I didn’t know, either, at the time. It’s a clever way to make a concrete bridge, a thing that seems simple enough when you look at it, with its rectangular piers and the beams set on top of them. These bridges may have a simple structure, but they’re not so simple to build; they’re like any top-heavy thing, such as belltowers and so on, though of course the pyramids of Egypt are something else altogether. They had a proverb about this in my father’s village: ‘Let your neighbors worry about building bridges and belltowers’—but in the local dialect it rhymes.

  “Anyway, imagine a fairly narrow valley, and a road that has to cross it at its highest point, and the pylons are already in place at intervals of, let’s say, fifty meters. The ones at the center, you see, might be as high as sixty or even seventy meters, and there’s no way to lift up the girders with a crane, apart from the fact that the ground underneath is not always stable, and in that location that I was telling you about, in Calabria, there really wasn’t a foundation at all, it was the mouth of one of those streams of theirs that fill with water only when it rains—which is hardly ever, but when it happens the water sweeps everything away. An exposed streambed of sand and rocks—you can’t even begin to imagine putting a crane on land like that, and the middle pylon was already several meters out in the sea. Also, you have to understand that those girders weren’t exactly toothpicks: they were mammoth, as long as Corso Stupinigi3 is wide, and they weighed a hundred or even a hundred and fifty tons. It’s not like I don’t trust cranes—they’re basically my profession—but they’ve yet to invent a crane that can lift a hundred tons seventy meters high. So they invented the gantry crane instead.

  “Now, I don’t have a pencil with me, but you should imagine a long trolley, so long that you can only assemble it on site—that was the job I had to do. To specify, the trolley needed to be long enough so that it would always rest on top of at least three pylons. In this case, taking into account the thickness of the pylons, that meant it had to be a little less than a hundred and fifty meters long. So this is a gantry crane, and it’s used to launch the girders. Within the crane there are two tracks, which run its entire length; on these tracks run two smaller trolleys, each of which has a winch. The girder is on the ground, somewhere within the crane’s span; the two winches first pull it all the way up into the trolley, and then the crane advances, moving very slowly, like a caterpillar, traveling on rollers that are set on top of the pylons. It advances with the girder inside it, making you think of a pregnant animal; it goes from pylon to pylon until it reaches the right place, and there the winches turn upside down and the crane gives birth to the beam, by which I mean that it drops it into the exact right slot. I saw it done, and it was a nice piece of work, the type that’s satisfying, too, because you could see the machine was working smoothly, without effort and without making a sound; also, and I don’t know why this is, but to see large things move slowly and soundlessly—like, for instance, a ship when it leaves port—has always affected me, and I’m not the only one, other guys have told me that they’ve felt the same way. When the bridge is finished, the crane is dismantled; it’s carried away by trucks and can be used another time.

  “I’m telling you how it goes in an ideal scenario, that is, how the job should’ve gone, but in fact things started to go wrong almost immediately. I won’t bore you with the details, but there were constant problems, beginning with the sections that I was to assemble myself—the segments of the crane that I told you about. They hadn’t been built to specification and we had to trim them all, one by one. As you can imagine, I protested, in fact, I was stubborn about it: the idea that I’d have to pay for someone else’s mistake, that a rigger should have to start fooling around with a hacksaw and a file, was absurd. I went to the foreman and I let him have it: all the pieces had to be the right size, stacked properly in the right order, at the site—otherwise, no Faussone. They could go find another rigger in Calabria, because in this world, if you let anyone get the best of you, you’re finished.”

  I was still tempted by the water, a temptation renewed every second by the wash of small waves against the keel, and by the happy cries of the Russian children, so blond, sturdy, and radiant, who were chasing one another to the river and plunging in like otters. I didn’t understand the correlation between the gantry crane and Faussone’s antipathy toward water and swimming, so I asked him, warily, if he would explain. Faussone glowered at me.

  “You never let me tell stories my own way,” he said, and withdrew into a vexed silence. This reproof seemed to me then (and seems to me still) completely uncalled for, because I had always let him say whatever he wanted and for as long as he wanted, and the reader can testify to this. I said nothing, however, so as not to disturb the peace. But soon our mutual silence was dramatically interrupted. On the adjacent bench, Mr. Difference woke up, stretched, looked around with a smile, and began to undress. When he was down to his boxers, he awoke his obese friend and handed him the bundle of clothes; then he saluted us politely, climbed over the railing, and jumped into the water. With a few energetic strokes he escaped the pull of the propeller; then, swimming nonchalantly on his side, he headed toward a small group of white houses, from which a wooden pier extended. The obese guy went back to sleep immediately and Faussone resumed his story.

  “Look—did you see that? Well, it makes me angry, because I wouldn’t be good—I’ll never be good at that kind of thing, and the gantry does have something to do with the swimming, you just need to be patient and the connection will become clear. You see, I like being at a construction site as long as everything goes the way it should, but that foreman irritated me, because he was the kind of guy who doesn’t care about anything as long as he gets his paycheck at the end of the month, but he didn’t realize that when you don’t care about anything for too long, the paychecks stop coming—for you and everyone else. He was a tiny guy, with soft hands, and hair combed back with Brilliantine and parted in the middle; he was blond, so he didn’t look like a Calabrian, and he was pompous, strutting around like a cock. And since he talked back to me, I said fine, it was all the same to me if he didn’t want to cooperate, the weather was good, the sun was out, and the sea was nearby; I’d never had a beach vacation before, so I’d have one now until all the parts of my gantry, from top to bottom, were ready. I sent a telegram to the company, and since it was in their best interest as well, they wrote back right away, giving their approval—so it seems like I did the right thing, don’t you think?

  “For my vacation I didn’t move from that very spot, out of spite, because I wanted to keep an eye on the worksite, but also because there was no need: I found a room in a small house no more than a hundred meters from the concrete pylons. A nice family lived there, actually I thought about them a little while ago, when we were having lunch in Dubrovka, because good people are alike everywhere, and, besides, everyone knows that there’s not much difference between Russians and Calabrians. They were kind, clean, respectful people, always in good spirits; the husband had a strange profession, which was repairing holes in fishing nets, the wife kept the house and the garden, and the child didn’t do anything, but he was nice all the same. I didn’t do anything, either: at night I slept like a pope, in a silence disrupted only by the sound of the ocean, and during the day I sat in the sun like a tourist, and I decided that this was the right time to learn how to swim.

  “I told you before how, in that place, I had everything I needed. I had tons of spare time, no one paid any attention to me or bothered me or made fun
of me because I was almost thirty years old and trying to learn how to swim; the sea was calm; there was a beautiful beach to lie on; and there weren’t even any rocks on the bottom, just a fine, white sand, as smooth as silk, with such a gradual slope that you could go out nearly a hundred meters and still touch the bottom—the water came just up to your shoulders. But I must confess that, despite all this, I was terrified. It wasn’t just in my mind—and I’m not sure if I’m explaining myself properly here—but it was also in my stomach and my knees, an animal fear, in other words, but I’m pigheaded, as you’ve surely observed by now, so I drew up a plan for myself. First of all, I had to make myself get over my fear of water; then I had to convince myself that I could float, since everybody else could—children, even animals, so why not me? Finally, I had to learn how to move myself forward. Nothing was missing, not even a plan, and yet I still didn’t feel calm, at least not the way you should be when you’re on vacation. I felt like something was scratching me from the inside. It was all a little confused: the gnawing feeling about the work that wasn’t moving forward, the anger against that foreman I didn’t like, and also another fear, the fear of someone who sets out to do something but isn’t capable of doing it, so he loses faith and decides it’d be better if he didn’t even try, but since he’s stubborn he goes through with it anyway. I’ve changed a little since then, but I was like that back then.

  “Overcoming my fear of water was the toughest thing. Though I should say that I didn’t overcome it at all—I just got used to it. I gave myself two days: I walked into the water until it was up to my chest, I took a breath, held my nose with my fingers, and put my head under the water. The first few times were like death. I mean that—I really felt like I was dying. I don’t know if everyone’s like this, but I had a kind of automatic mechanism that kicked in as soon as I put my head underwater. My throat clamped up and I felt water go into my ears, and it seemed like it was going down those two small passageways into my nose, then down my neck and into my lungs, until I drowned. So I had to stand up again. I almost felt like thanking God Almighty for separating water from dry land, like it says in the Bible. But it wasn’t even fear, really; it was horror, like when you suddenly see a corpse and your hair stands on end—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. In short, I got used to it.

  “Next up was floating, which I could see would be a bit more complicated. I’d seen how other people did it, on various occasions, how they play dead. I tried to do this, too, and I was floating, no problem, it was just that in order to keep floating I needed to refill my lungs with air, like those Alaskan pontoons I told you about; but you can’t always have full lungs, there comes a moment when you have to empty them out, and then I felt myself sink like the pontoons when it came time for them to be tugged away, and I had to kick in the water as fast as I could, still holding my breath, until my feet touched the ground; then I stood up straight, panting heavily like a dog, and I wanted to give up. But you know how it is when you encounter something difficult and it’s like you’ve made a bet, and you don’t want to lose? Well, that’s what happened with me, as it does when I’m working. I may quit an easy job, but never a hard one. The problem comes from the fact that we have our air pipes in the wrong place. Dogs and, especially, seals have them in the right place; they can swim without a hitch from birth and no one even has to teach them how. So I decided for that first time that I’d learn how to swim on my back. I would have been more than happy with that—even if it didn’t seem completely natural—because if you’re on your back you can have your nose out of the water and then, theoretically, you can breathe. At first I did some shallow breathing, so as not to empty the pontoons too much, and then I picked up the pace a little at a time, until I was convinced that it was actually possible to breathe without sinking, or at least without having my nose go under, which was the most important thing. But all it took was a small wave, just this high, and the fear would come back and I’d lose my bearings.

  “I did all my experiments, and whenever I got tired or out of breath I went back to the shore and stretched out in the sun near the highway pylon; I had stuck a nail in it so that I could hang my clothes, because otherwise the ants would get at them. As I told you, the pylons were some fifty meters high, maybe even higher: they were of plain cement, and they still bore the imprint of the mold. There was a stain on the pylon about one or two meters above the ground, and the first few times I didn’t really notice it; one night it rained, and the stain turned darker, but even then I didn’t give it much thought. It was certainly an odd stain: it was the only blemish, the rest of the pylon was clean, and so were the other pylons. It was a meter long, and divided roughly into two sections, one long and one short, like an exclamation point, only at a slight angle.”

  He was quiet for a long time, rubbing his hands as if he were washing them. I could distinctly hear the knocking of the engine, and the ferry house was already coming into view.

  “Listen, I don’t like to tell lies. Do I exaggerate a little? Yes, especially when I’m talking about my work, and I don’t think that’s a sin, because anyone listening to me understands this right away. Well, one day I noticed that there was a crack running across the stain, and a procession of ants going in and out of it. This got me curious, so I tapped on it with a rock and it sounded hollow. I tapped harder and the cement, which was no thicker than a finger, caved in; and there, inside of it, was the head of a corpse.

  “I felt like I’d been shot in the face, and I lost my balance, but he was really there. And he was watching me. Shortly after this I got a strange illness, scabs started to appear on my waist, eating away at me, and when they fell off, new ones formed—but I was almost happy because finally I had an excuse to quit and go back home. So I never learned how to swim, not then or since, because every time I go into the water—whether sea, river, or lake—I start having ugly thoughts.”

  3. A street in Turin.

  The Bridge

  “. . .But when they proposed sending me off to India, I wasn’t really interested. It’s not like I knew a lot about India; you know how you can quickly get the wrong idea about a country, and since the world is big, and the whole thing is made up of countries—and you can’t visit all of them—you end up full of foolish ideas about every one of them, including, maybe, your own. I can tell you everything I knew about India in just a few words: they have too many children, they die of hunger because they have a religion that forbids them to eat cows, they killed Gandhi because he was too good, the country is bigger than Europe and they speak I don’t know how many different languages, so, for lack of any better solution, they all agree to speak English; and then there’s that story of Mowgli the Frog, which I believed to be true when I was little. Oh—I forgot the part about the Kama Sutra and the hundred and thirty-seven ways of having sex, or maybe there are two hundred and thirty-seven ways, I don’t remember for sure, I read about it one time in a magazine while I was waiting to get a haircut.

  “In other words, I almost would’ve preferred to stay in Turin: I was living in Via Lagrange at the time, with my aunts. Sometimes, instead of going to a pension, I go to their place, because they treat me well, they cook specially for me, in the mornings they get up very quietly so as not to wake me, and they go to the early Mass and buy me rolls still warm from the oven. The only problem is that they want me to get married. This isn’t so bad in itself, but the thing is that they’re heavy-handed about it, and set me up on dates with women who really aren’t my type. I have no idea how they find these women; maybe in those convent boarding schools. They’re all the same, like wax figurines—when you talk to them they don’t even dare look you in the face, which makes me horribly embarrassed, and I don’t know how to begin, so I start acting as awkward as them. So sometimes when I come to Turin I don’t even tell my aunts and I go straight to the pension; but it’s also because I don’t want to bother them.

  “Like I was saying, this was at a time when I was a little tired of traveling ar
ound and, despite my aunts’ mania, I would have happily stayed put. But at the office they kept encouraging me—they know my weak spot and they know how to manipulate me—saying it was an important job, if I didn’t go then they wouldn’t know who else to send. They kept at it, calling me every day. As I’ve said before, I don’t like to keep my engine idling and I can take only so much of city life, so by the end of February I started to think that maybe I ought to stop wearing out my sheets and start wearing out my shoes instead, and in early March I was at Fiumicino boarding one of the Pakistani airline’s yellow Boeings.

  “It was a completely ridiculous trip: I can safely say that I was the only serious traveler on the flight. Half of the passengers were German and Italian tourists who, from the moment we got on the plane, were all pumped about the idea of seeing Indian dance, because they thought that meant belly dancing, but later I saw it for myself and it’s a very solemn affair—they dance only with their eyes and their fingers. The other half were Pakistani laborers returning home from Germany with their wives and small children, and they were happy, too—because they were going home for vacation. There were also some female workers, in fact, there was a girl sitting next to me in a violet sari—a sari being that piece of clothing they wear, without sleeves, and without a front or back—and this girl, well, she was a beauty. I don’t know how to describe it, but she just seemed transparent, she had an inner glow, and her eyes spoke to me; unfortunately, it was only her eyes that spoke, by which I mean she spoke only Indian and a little German, and I’ve never had any desire to learn German. If I had, I certainly would have talked to her, and I’m sure it would’ve been a livelier conversation than I’ve had with the girls my aunts send me—no offense, but those girls are so flat it’s like St. Joseph himself has smoothed them over with his plane. Anyway, let’s drop the subject. The point is, and I don’t know if you’re like this, too, but, for me, the more exotic the girl, the more I like her, because she arouses my curiosity.