The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  “Everything is cheap in Calcutta, but I didn’t dare buy anything, I didn’t even go to the movies, out of fear of dirt and disease; I stayed at home instead and chatted with the Parsi woman, who was very courteous and sensible—actually that reminds me, I have to send her a postcard—and she told me all about India, a subject without end. I was getting impatient, though, and every day I called the worksite, but the engineer either wasn’t there or was avoiding me. On the fifth day I finally got hold of him, and he told me that I could return, that the river was lower and the job could proceed, so I went.

  “I reported to the engineer, who still seemed to have his head in the clouds, and I found him at the barrack, standing in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded by about fifty men, and he seemed to be expecting me. He greeted me in that peculiar manner of his, with his hands against his chest, and then, in turn, he introduced me to my workers: ‘This is Mr. Peraldo, your Italian foreman’; and they all bowed with their hands pressed together and I just stood there like a fool. I assumed he had forgotten my name, because you know how foreigners always have trouble with names, and it always seemed to me, for example, that every Indian was named Sing, so I figured the same thing had happened to him. I told him that I wasn’t Peraldo but Faussone, and he gave me his angelic smile, and said, ‘Sorry, it’s just that all you Europeans look the same.’ In other words, it gradually became clear that this engineer, who was called Chatanya, didn’t only bungle his work, he also bungled names, and this Mr. Peraldo wasn’t someone he had dreamed up—he was a real person, a worker from Biella who, coincidentally, was scheduled to arrive that morning. He was in charge of anchoring the bridge cables, and in fact, he did arrive a little bit later; and I was happy because it’s always a pleasure to meet a fellow countryman abroad. How the engineer managed to confuse him with me, and say that we had the same face, is a mystery, because I’m tall and thin and he was short and squat, I was in my thirties and he was past fifty, he had a little mustache like Charlot,6 and even then I didn’t have much more hair than the little I have now, here in the back; in other words, if we resembled each other, we resembled each other in the crook of our elbow, and we both liked to drink and eat—not, by the way, an easy thing to do well over there.

  “It wasn’t a complete surprise to meet a worker from Biella in such an out-of-the-way place, because if you travel you’ll find, in every corner of the globe, a Neapolitan who makes pizza and a Biellese who makes walls. One time I met one at a worksite in Holland, and he told me that God made the world, except for Holland, which was made by the Dutch; but the dikes in Holland were made by Biellese workers, because no one has invented a machine that can build walls—well, it was a nice proverb, even though it’s not really true anymore. I was lucky to have met this Peraldo, because he had traveled the world more than me, and he knew a thing or two, though he didn’t talk a lot; and also, though I don’t know how he managed this, because he had in his room a good supply of Nebbiolo, and every now and then he’d offer me some. He’d only offer me a little, not much, because he wasn’t that magnanimous and he didn’t want to make too big a dent in his supply; and he was right, because the job dragged on, and it has to be said that that’s how it is, it’s the same all over the world—I haven’t seen many jobs finish on schedule.

  “He took me to see the tunnels for the anchorages: you see, the bridge’s cables would have to endure a lot of friction, and standard cable terminals wouldn’t do. They had to be anchored in a wedge-shaped block of concrete, which was sunk into a tunnel bored deep into the rock. There were four tunnels in all, two for each cable. But what tunnels! They were like caves. I’d never seen anything like them, eighty meters long, ten meters wide at the opening and fifteen at the bottom, at a thirty-degree angle. . . . Come on, don’t make that face. I know what it means—you’re going to write this stuff down. I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t want any big mistakes to get out. Or if so, I’m sorry, but not because of me.”

  I promised Faussone that I would follow his directions conscientiously, and in no case would I yield to the temptation, so common in my profession, to invent, embellish, and elaborate. I wouldn’t add anything to his account, but I might take out a couple of things, like a sculptor, when he carves a form from a block; and he expressed his approval. Carving, then, from the large block of technical details that he—in a not particularly orderly fashion—presented to me, I discerned the form of a long, narrow bridge, which was supported by five towers made out of steel boxes, and hung from four festoons of steel cables. Each festoon was 170 meters long, and each of the cables was made from a monstrous cord composed of 11,000 threads, each thread 5 millimeters in diameter.

  “I told you the other night that, for me, every job is like a first love. But in this case I understood right away that it was a demanding love—the kind that, if you can get out of it without losing your hide, you have to count yourself lucky. Before I started I had a week of schooling, taking lessons from the engineers. There were six of them, five Indians and one guy from the company: four hours in the morning writing things down in a notebook, and studying all afternoon. It was really like spider’s work, except spiders are born knowing how to do their job, and if they fall, it’s not very far, and it’s not a big deal anyway, because the thread is built into their body. Ever since I worked that job, whenever I see a spider in its web I think back to my eleven thousand wires—or, rather, twenty-two thousand, because there were two cables—and I feel like we’re related. Especially when there’s a wind blowing.

  “Then it was my turn to impart a lesson to my men, who were real Indians, unlike those Alaskans I was telling you about before. But I have to admit that at first I had no confidence, seeing them sitting there all around me, on their heels, or with their legs crossed and their knees apart, like the statues in the churches I’d seen in Calcutta. They stared at me and didn’t ask any questions, but then, over a period of time, I dealt with each of them, one by one, and I realized that they hadn’t missed a word; in fact, in my opinion, they’re more intelligent than us, or maybe they were just afraid of losing their jobs, because over there they don’t stand on ceremony. They’re just like us, even if they wear turbans and don’t wear shoes, and every morning, no matter what else is going on, they spend two hours praying. Sure, they have their problems, too: one of them had a sixteen-year-old son who was already shooting dice and he was worried because the kid always lost; another had a sick wife; and a third had seven children, but he said that he didn’t agree with the government and didn’t want to have an operation, because he and his wife liked kids, and he showed me a photograph. They were beautiful, and so was his wife; all Indian girls are beautiful, but Peraldo, who had been in India for a while, informed me that we had no chance with them. He also said that, though the situation might be different in the cities, there are certain diseases going around out there, so it’s best to forget about it; in other words, I was never more hard up than during my time in India. But let’s get back to the job.

  “I told you about the chetuòks—that is, the catwalks—and about the trick of using a kite to string the first cable. Obviously we weren’t going to fly twenty-two thousand kites. There’s a special system for stringing the cables of a suspension bridge: you set up a winch, and about six or seven meters above each catwalk you rig a looped cable—like one of those transmission belts they used to have, back in the day—which extends, between two pulleys, from one shore to the other; attached to this looped cable is an inactive pulley, with four holes; through each hole you pass a loop of wire from a large spool; and then you set the pulleys in motion and draw the inactive pulley back and forth between the shores—that way, with a single trip, you thread eight strands. The workers, except for the ones who were threading the loops and the ones who were removing them, stood on the catwalk, two every fifty meters, watching to make sure that the threads didn’t cross. But it’s one thing to tell you about it, and another thing to do it.

  “Fortunately, the Indians
are a submissive people, because you have to realize that going out on those catwalks isn’t exactly the same thing as taking a stroll down Via Roma. First of all, they’re on an incline, because they’re built at the same angle that the suspension cable will have; second, all it takes is a light breeze to make them wobble like crazy, but I’ll talk more about the wind later; third, since they need to be light, so as not to offer wind resistance, the walkway is made of a grating, so it’s best not to look down, because if you do you’ll see the river below, the water the color of mud, with all kinds of little things moving in it, which, seen from above, look like tiny fried fish, but are in fact the backs of crocodiles—but I already told you that in India everything always looks like something else. Peraldo told me that there aren’t many crocodiles left, but the few that are show up whenever you build a bridge, because they like to eat the scraps from the cafeteria and they lie in wait for workers to fall into the water. India is a nice country, but it doesn’t have any pleasant animals. Even the mosquitoes—besides the fact that they carry malaria, which means that you always have to wear not just a helmet but a veil, the kind women used to wear way back when—are this big, and if you don’t watch out, they’ll bite off a whole chunk of your flesh; it’s also said that there are butterflies that come at night to suck your blood while you sleep, but I really never saw them, and, as far as sleeping went, I always slept well.

  “The trick to rigging the wires is making sure that they all have the same tension—and, with wires of that length, it’s not easy. We did two shifts, six hours each, working from dawn to dusk, but then we had to organize a special team to work at night, before the sun came up, because during the day some of the wires would get direct sunlight, and the heat would cause them to expand, while others lay in the shade; so it was important to take measurements at night, because that’s when the wires are all the same temperature. And, without fail, I was the one they always asked to take those measurements.

  “It went on like this for sixty days, with the fixed pulley going back and forth, and the spiderweb kept growing, perfectly taut and symmetrical, and you could start to see what shape the bridge was going to take. It was hot, like I said. Okay, I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about it anymore, but it really was hot; it was a relief when the sun went down, in part because I was able to go back into the barrack and have a beer and a chat with Peraldo. Peraldo had started as a laborer, then he became a bricklayer, and then a cement worker. He had been all over the place; he even spent four years in the Congo building a dam, and he had plenty of stories, but if I start telling other people’s stories in addition to my own I’ll go on forever.

  “After we’d strung the wires, you could see, if you looked from a distance, the two cables stretching from one shore to the other with their four festoons, delicate and light, just like the threads of a spiderweb. But when you saw them close up, the two bundles, each one seventy centimeters thick, looked terrifying. We compacted them with a special machine, like a ring-shaped press, that as it moves along clasps the cables together by applying the force of a hundred tons, but I didn’t have any hand in this. It was an American machine, and they had sent it all the way down there with an American specialist who gave everyone a nasty look; he didn’t speak to anyone and he didn’t let anybody get near him, clearly he was afraid that they’d steal his secret.

  “At this point it seemed that the hard part was over; we’d rigged the vertical suspension cables in just a few days and fished them up with a block and tackle from the pontoons down below—it was like fishing for eels, except the eels weighed fifteen hundred kilos apiece; and finally it was time to begin laying the roadbed. No one would ever have guessed it, but that was the moment the real adventure started. I have to say that, despite the trouble with the flash flood that I told you about before, though they acted as if nothing had happened, they did follow my advice: while I was in Calcutta they called in a parade of trucks loaded with boulders, and when the water receded, they did a nice job of reinforcing the embankments. But you know the old chestnut about the scalded cat, who afterward was afraid of cold water? Well, the whole time I was on the job, standing up there on my catwalk, I kept my eye on the water. I’d gotten the engineer to let me have a mobile telephone, because I figured that if another flood was going to come, it’d be nice to have some advance warning. It didn’t occur to me that danger might come from another direction and, judging from what happened next, it didn’t occur to anyone else, either—not even the designers.

  “I’d never met those particular designers in person, I don’t even know where they were from, but I’ve known plenty of others, and I can tell you that they come in all kinds. There’s the elephant designer, the guy who always has to be correct; he doesn’t care about elegance or economy, he just doesn’t want any trouble, so he’ll use four of something when one will do; usually this designer is already a little bit over the hill and, if you think about it, it’s really a sad situation. Then, there’s the miser type, who acts as if he has to pay for every rivet out of his own pocket. There’s the parrot designer who, instead of working out the plans himself, cribs from someone else—the way you do in school—without realizing that everyone is laughing at him behind his back. There’s the snail designer, meaning the bureaucratic type, who goes very, very slowly, and as soon as you give him a nudge he jumps back and hides in his shell, which is made out of rules and regulations—and, no offense, but I’d also call him the moron designer. Finally there’s the butterfly designer, and I think that the designers of this bridge were that type, and it’s the most dangerous type, because they’re young and bold, and they’re always trying to trick you; when you talk to them about money or safety they look at you like you’re slime, and they only care about what’s new and what’s beautiful, without realizing that, if a work is well designed, it’s beautiful automatically. I’m sorry if I keep going on about this, but when you put all your feeling into a job and it ends up the way this bridge did, well, it’s upsetting. It’s upsetting for a number of reasons: one, because it wastes a lot of time, since afterward it’s always a mess with the laws and the lawyers and a thousand other idiotic things; two, because even if you had nothing to do with it, you end up feeling a little guilty; but most of all, seeing a work like that come down, the way it came down—one piece at a time, as if it were suffering, as if it were resisting—it breaks your heart the same way the death of a person does.

  “And just as when a person dies, and everyone talks about how they’d seen it coming from the way he was breathing and the movement of his eyes, it was the same thing with the bridge, after the disaster. Everyone had to put in their two cents, even the engineer—he said that he’d seen it coming from the start, that the suspension cables weren’t strong enough, that the steel had holes in it as large as beans; the welders said that the riggers didn’t know how to rig, the crane operator said the welders didn’t know how to weld, and everyone took it out on the engineer, ragging on him, saying he’d been sleepwalking through the job and dillydallying and he didn’t know anything about running an operation like that. Maybe everyone was right to some extent, or maybe nobody was, because even in this regard it was the same as it would’ve been with a person. I’d experienced this on numerous occasions: a tower, for example, which has been tested and retested so many times that you would’ve thought it’d stand for at least a century, begins to buckle after only a month; and a different one, which you wouldn’t have bet on, not even for two cents, doesn’t show so much as a crack. And if you leave it to the experts, then good luck; three of them show up and you get three different explanations—I’ve never met an expert that could figure out anything. Of course if someone dies, or a structure collapses, then there must be a reason, but there might not be only one, and if there is, then it might not be possible to find it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

  “I’ve already talked about how it was always hot on that job, every single day, a sweltering heat that wasn’t easy to get
used to, but by the end I actually did get used to it. Well, when the job was finished, and the painters were already perched all over the place like gnats in a spiderweb, it occurred to me that, all of a sudden, it wasn’t hot anymore. The sun had come up, but instead of heating everything as usual, it was drying the sweat off of us, which was refreshing. I was on the bridge then, too, halfway down the first segment, and besides that sense of refreshment I felt two other things that made me stop in my tracks like a hunting dog when he points: I felt the bridge vibrate under my feet, and I heard something that sounded like music, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from; by music I mean a sound, deep and faraway, like a church organ—see, I used to go to church when I was little—and I realized that it was all caused by the wind. It was the first time I’d felt wind since landing in India, and it wasn’t a strong wind, but it was constant, like the wind you feel when you drive very slowly and hold your hand out the window. I felt uneasy, I don’t know why, and I started walking back to the head of the bridge. Maybe it’s a legacy of our profession, but we tend not to like things that vibrate. I got to the abutment, I turned to look back, and I felt my hair stand on end. And I don’t mean that as a figure of speech, it really stood up straight, every single hair, and all at once, like every hair had just woken up and wanted to run away: because from where I stood you could see the entire profile of the bridge, and something unbelievable was happening. It was as if the force of the wind was waking the bridge itself. Yes, like someone who hears a noise, wakes up, tosses and turns, and gets ready to leap out of bed. The whole bridge shook: the roadbed wagged, like a tail, from left to right, and then it began to move vertically as well, you could see ripples running from my end to the other, like when you shake a slack cord; but they weren’t vibrations anymore, they were waves that must have been one or two meters high—I know that because one of the painters had abandoned his work and started running toward me, and I’d see him one second and he’d be gone from sight the next, like a ship in the ocean when there are enormous waves.