The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  “Everyone ran off the bridge—even the Indians hurried a bit more than usual—and there was a lot of screaming and chaos: no one knew what to do. Even the suspension cables were in motion. You know how it is in those moments, when one person is saying one thing and another says something else; but after a few minutes you could see that, though the bridge wasn’t completely still, the waves had somewhat stabilized: they were rolling between the two ends at a steady rate. I don’t know who gave the order, or maybe someone just took the initiative, but I saw that one of the tractors from the worksite was driving onto the roadbed of the bridge, laying down two three-inch cables: maybe they wanted to lay them diagonally to restrict the oscillations; certainly whoever was doing it must have been pretty brave, or more likely reckless, because I don’t think you can really tame a structure like that, even if you managed to clamp down those two cables—and that roadbed was eight meters wide by one and a half high, so you can figure out how many tons were involved. There was no time to do anything anyway, because by that point everything was happening too fast. The wind might’ve picked up, I’m not sure, but around ten o’clock the vertical waves got to be about four or five meters tall, and you could feel the earth shake, and you could hear the vertical suspension cables stretching and tightening. The tractor driver, seeing that he was in danger, ditched the tractor right there and jumped out onto the shore—which was good thinking, because immediately afterward the roadbed began to bend as if it were made of rubber, the tractor swerved all over the place, and finally flew right over the parapet, or maybe crashed through it, and fell into the river.

  “You could hear what sounded like cannonballs firing, one after another; I counted six of them, and it was the sound of the vertical suspension cables snapping: they snapped clean off the roadbed, and the recoil caused the stumps to fly up. Even the roadbed began to crack, splitting apart at the joints, and sections of it fell into the river; some of the other pieces, however, stayed put, hanging on the beams like rags.

  “Then it was over: everything was frozen in place, like after a bombardment, and I don’t know what I looked like, but the guy next to me was trembling all over and his face was a sickly green, even though he was one of those dark-skinned Indians with a turban. All in all, two lengths of the roadbed had almost completely broken off, as well as a dozen vertical suspension cables, but the main cables were fine. Everything was as still as a photograph except the river, which continued to rush by as if nothing had happened. The wind hadn’t died down; actually, it was stronger than before. It was as if someone had set out to do a certain amount of damage and then, having achieved it, was satisfied. And a stupid notion came to me: I once read in a book that, in ancient times, when they began to build a bridge, they killed a Christian; well, maybe not a Christian, because Christians didn’t exist yet, but a man, and they buried the corpse in the bridge’s foundation—though later they’d kill an animal instead—and then the bridge wouldn’t collapse. But, like I said, it was a stupid idea.

  “I left then; the large cables had held up, so I didn’t have to redo them. I found out afterward that when they tried to figure out why and how it all had happened, they couldn’t agree on anything, and they’re still debating it today. As for me, when I saw the length of the roadbed start to flap up and down, I immediately thought of my landing in Calcutta, and of the wings of the Boeing that flapped like a bird’s, which made me sick for a moment, even though I’d flown lots of times; but I don’t know what to tell you. Clearly the wind had something to do with it; I’ve been told, in fact, that they’re now rebuilding the bridge, but with ducts in the roadbed, so that there’s less wind resistance.

  “No, I haven’t worked on any other suspension bridges. I left without saying goodbye to anyone, except Peraldo. It’s not a nice story. It’s like when a girl you like dumps you one day out of the blue and you don’t know why, and you suffer, not just because you’ve lost the girl but because you’ve lost your confidence. Ah well, pass me the bottle and we’ll have another round—I’m buying tonight, anyway. So, yeah, I went back to Turin, and I almost started going out with one of those girls I told you about before, the ones my aunts wanted to set me up with, because my morale was so low that I couldn’t put up a fight—but that’s another story. Ultimately I got over it.”

  4. The American silent-film comic actor Larry Semon was known in Italy as Ridolini.

  5. Emilio Salgari (1862–1911), an author of adventure stories that take place in exotic lands.

  6. The reference is to Charlie Chaplin.

  Without Time

  It had rained all night, sometimes in silent gusts, with raindrops so delicate they could be mistaken for mist, and sometimes in violent bursts, beating loudly against the sheets of corrugated iron that served as a roof for the warehouse sheds, which had been built in a haphazard formation around the guest quarters. A modest stream that flowed nearby had swelled in size, and all night long its voice entered my dreams, commingling with the images of flood and ruin evoked by Faussone’s Indian story. At dawn—a sluggish dawn, humid and gray—we found ourselves besieged by the sacred, fertile mud of the Sarmatian plain, the brown mud, smooth and deep, that nourishes the grain and devours invading armies.

  Beneath our windows the chickens were scratching, as comfortable in the mud as the ducks; they were fighting one another for earthworms. Faussone made a point of saying that the chickens we have back home would have drowned under the same conditions—thereby affirming, once again, the advantages of specialization. The camp’s male and female Russian attendants moved about intrepidly, stomping around in their knee-high boots. The two of us waited until nine o’clock for the cars that were supposed to pick us up and take us to our respective places of work, and then we began making phone calls. By ten, it was clear that the very courteous response “as soon as possible” actually meant “not today, possibly tomorrow—if you’re lucky.” The cars were stuck in the mud, had broken down, were out on other assignments, and, besides, had never even been reserved for us, said the gentle voice on the telephone, with that well-known Russian indifference to the plausibility of an individual excuse or the mutual compatibility of multiple excuses. “A land without time,” I said, and Faussone replied, “Don’t worry about it. Besides, I don’t know about you, but I get paid just the same.”

  I was still thinking about the unfinished story of the girl his aunts had sent to him, the one who almost got him into trouble: what kind of trouble?

  Faussone was elusive. “Trouble, that’s all. With girls, three times out of four you get yourself in trouble, especially if you’re not careful from the very beginning. We didn’t see eye to eye; all we did was contradict each other, she never let me talk and always wanted to speak her mind, so I did the same. Now, she was bright, and her face was pretty enough, but she was three years older than me and, well, the chassis could have used some repairs. I mean, she had her merits, but she wanted a different type of guy for a husband, the kind of guy who punches the clock and shows up on time and keeps his mouth shut. And at my age one starts to become difficult—in fact, it might already be too late for me.”

  He had gone over to the window and seemed lost in melancholy thoughts. Outside, the rain was dying down, but a raging wind had risen; the trees were shaking their branches as if they were trying to gesture, and close to the ground you could see odd, globular mounds of twigs, half a meter to a meter in size, flying about, rolling and jumping, designed like that by evolution to scatter their seed elsewhere—arid, yet darkly alive, they seemed to be fleeing from the forest of Pier della Vigna.7 I muttered something vaguely consolatory, as seemed fitting, suggesting that Faussone compare his age with mine, but he began speaking again as if he hadn’t heard me:

  “It used to be easier: I didn’t even have to think twice about it. I really was timid by nature, but at Lancia, partly for the company, and partly because they put me on maintenance and I learned how to weld, I became bolder and more confident; yes, welding was an
important part of this, but I couldn’t say why. Maybe because welding is not a natural job, at least autogenous welding—it doesn’t come naturally, it doesn’t resemble any other job, your head, hands, and eyes all have to learn it independently, and especially the eyes, because when they put that visor in front of your eyes to protect you from the light, all you see is darkness and, in the darkness, the little bright worm of the welding cord as it advances, and it has to advance at a fixed speed. You can’t even see your own hands, but if you don’t do everything by the book, and you go off track even a little, instead of a weld you make a hole. The fact is that as soon as I became confident with my welding, I became confident with everything, down to the way I walked; and here again the practice that I had in my father’s shop paid off, definitely came in handy, because my father, God rest his soul, had taught me how to make copper tubes from sheet metal, back when there was no such thing as semifinished parts. You’d take the sheet metal and beat the edges until they were beveled; then you placed one edge over the other, painted over the joint with borax and brass chip, and passed it over the coke forge—not too slow and not too fast, otherwise the brass either melts off or won’t fuse. And you have to eyeball the whole thing. Can you imagine?

  “Then, following this same procedure, you’d make smaller tubes from the large tube, pulling it with the hand winch, and passing it over the heat each time—it’s hard to believe. But by the end you almost couldn’t see the joint anymore, only the paler grain of the brass; and if you ran your finger over it, you didn’t feel a thing. Nowadays this work is completely different, of course, but I happen to be of the opinion that if schools taught vocations instead of Romulus and Remus, we’d all be a lot better off.

  “I was telling you how learning to weld taught me a little about everything. And it just so happened, on the first important rigging job I had—which was, in fact, a job that involved welding—I brought a girl along with me; but, to tell the truth, I really didn’t know what to do with her all day, so the poor girl trailed behind me, she sat on the grass under the pylons, smoking one cigarette after another, getting bored, and from way up above she seemed very small. The job was in the mountains, a beautiful spot in Val d’Aosta, and it was a nice time of year, too—the beginning of June. We had to finish constructing the pylons for a high-tension line, and then we had to rig the cables. I was twenty years old, I had just gotten my driver’s license, and when the company told me to take the Fiat 600 van with all the equipment in it, and paid me in advance and ordered me to go, I felt as powerful as a king. My mother was still alive at the time, and she lived in town, so I didn’t tell her anything, and of course I told my aunts even less—I didn’t want to upset them because, when it came to girls, they thought they had a monopoly. This girl was on vacation; she was a schoolteacher, I’d known her for only a month, I took her dancing at Gay’s; when I invited her, she was stunned, but she agreed right away. She wasn’t the type to make a fuss.

  “You can imagine that with these three things happening all at once—the girl, the work gig, and the car trip—I was revved up like a racing engine: being twenty years old then was like being seventeen now, and I drove like a moron. Although I hadn’t had much practice, and the van was straining, I tried to pass everyone, always giving them a close shave—remember, this was before the highway was built. The girl was scared, but you know what guys are like at that age: I enjoyed scaring her. At one point the car sneezed two or three times, and then came to a stop. I opened the hood and started feeling around in the engine, pretending like I knew what I was doing, but to tell the truth I didn’t have a clue, and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. It wasn’t long before the girl got impatient: I didn’t want her to, but she hailed a traffic cop on a motorcycle and asked for his help. Right away he dipped a twig into the gas tank and showed me that I didn’t have a drop of gas; in fact, I knew that the gauge was broken, but I’d forgotten about it because I’d been distracted by the girl. The cop drove off without another word, but I felt a little humbled, and maybe that was for the best, because from then on I drove more responsibly and we arrived without any accidents.

  “We got a good rate at a little hotel—two separate rooms, to keep up appearances—and then I checked in at the electric company office and she went out walking on her own. This job, compared to some I’ve had since, a few of which I’ve already told you about, wasn’t a big deal, but it was my first job outside the shop and I was really excited about it. They took me over to a pylon that was nearly finished, and explained that the other rigger had gone on sick leave. They gave me all the blueprints and details of the joints, and they put me to work. It was a truss tower made out of zinc pipes, the Y-shaped kind; we were at an altitude of eighteen hundred meters, and in the shadow of the rocks you could still make out patches of snow, but the fields were already in full flower. You heard water running and dripping everywhere, as if it had just rained, but in fact it was the sound of the thaw, because at night it would still freeze. The truss tower was thirty meters high; the supports had already been put in place; and below, on the ground, was the carpenters’ table, where they were preparing pieces for welding. They were looking at me strangely, and at the time I couldn’t figure out why. Then, once they got to know me a little, they explained that the previous rigger was not on sick leave after all, but had had an accident; you see, he had lost his footing and had fallen—luckily from not very high up—and the end result was that he was in the hospital with several broken ribs. They thought it was best to tell me this, not to scare me but because they were sensible people with long experience in the trade, and seeing as I was so cheerful and rosy, with the girl watching from below, and me goosandering twenty meters off the ground, without even a harness—”

  I had to interrupt the narrative here because of this “goosandering.” The locution was familiar to me—“goosandering” means more or less “displaying bravado,” or “showboating”—but I hoped that Faussone might explain the origin of the word to me, or at least clarify what a goosander is. We didn’t get very far: he knew vaguely that a goosander was a bird, and that to goosander a woman meant to try to woo her by showing off, but he didn’t know anything beyond that. Later on, for my own purposes, I did some research, and found out that the goosander is the common merganser, a species of duck with beautiful plumage, which is now exceedingly rare in Italy; but no hunter could confirm for me that its behavior was peculiar enough to justify this metaphor, which is still widely used. Faussone resumed his story, with a hint of irritation in his voice.

  “Well, by now I’ve been around lots of worksites, in Italy and elsewhere, so I know that sometimes, especially abroad, they bury you under rules and safety measures, as if you were mentally deficient or an infant; other times they let you do whatever the hell you want because, even if you break your head, the insurance company will reimburse you for a new one. In either case, however, if you’re not careful, you’ll get in trouble sooner or later, but learning how to be prudent is more difficult than learning how to do the work. Usually prudence comes later, and only after you get yourself in trouble: fortunate is the man whose troubles are small and pass quickly. Nowadays there are safety inspectors who stick their nose into everything, and that’s all well and good; but even if they were all angels from heaven, and knew the ins and outs of every type of job, which isn’t even possible since there’s always new jobs and new tricks—even then, do you really think nothing would go wrong? That would be like saying there’d be no more car accidents if everyone obeyed the traffic laws. But tell me, have you ever met a driver who hasn’t had an accident? I’ve thought about it a lot: accidents shouldn’t happen, but they do happen, so you need to learn to always keep your eyes open; if not, then find a new profession.

  “Anyway, if I made it through that job in one piece and without even a bruise, it’s only because there’s a god for lovers and fools. But really I wasn’t one or the other—all I cared about was looking good for the girl who was wa
tching me down in the field, the way a goosander apparently does for his goosander girlfriend. When I think about it now I get the chills, even though many years have passed since then. I was going up and down the pylon, holding on to the crossbars, without ever using the ladder, as quick as Tarzan; when I was welding, instead of sitting or straddling a bar, like a sensible person, I stood upright, or even on one foot, and bam, down with the blowtorch; and I’d look at the blueprint, but not really. I should say that the inspector was a good guy, or maybe he couldn’t see very well, because when I told him that the job was finished, he climbed up, very slowly—looking like a real old fogey—and though I’d done more than two hundred welds, he only made me redo about a dozen; yet I fully realized at the time that mine were scrawls, coarse and full of air bubbles, while right alongside them were the ones done by the rigger who had gotten hurt, and those looked like embroidery by comparison.

  “But that goes to show you how fair the world is: the prudent guy fell, whereas even though I acted like a moron the whole time, nothing happened to me. I should add, however, that either my welds, despite being lopsided, were strong, or the structure was abundantly reinforced, because that tower is still there, and it’s survived some fifteen winters so far. Yeah, it’s a weakness of mine: it’s not like I’m dying to go all the way to India or Alaska, but if I do a job—whether good or bad—and it’s not too far off the beaten path, then I like to go visit it once in a while, the way you would with relatives of a certain age, or like my father did with his stills. So if there’s a holiday and I don’t have anything better to do, I just get up and go. That tower I was telling you about: I like to go see it, even if it’s nothing special and there’s not a single person who passes by and gives it so much as a glance—because it was essentially my first job, and also because of that girl I brought along with me.