The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  “At first I thought the girl was pretty strange, because I wasn’t experienced and I hadn’t yet learned that all girls are strange in one way or another, and if you meet a girl who doesn’t seem strange that means she’s actually stranger than most, because she’s out of the ordinary, if you see what I’m saying. This one was from Calabria, by which I mean to say that her parents came from Calabria, but she had gone to school up north here, and the only way you’d know where she came from was by her hair and her coloring, and because she was fairly small: you couldn’t tell from the way she talked. In order to go up to the mountains with me she had to have some words with her parents, but it wasn’t too bad, because they had seven children, so one more or less didn’t make such a big difference; she was also the oldest, and a teacher, so she was pretty independent. I told you that she seemed strange to me, but it was more that the situation was strange, because she had never gone away from her family or her city and, furthermore, I was taking her somewhere she’d never been before. Everything filled her with wonder, and the summer snow and all the hoops I jumped through to impress her were only the beginning. Anyway, I’ll never forget the first night we spent up there.

  “It was the off-season, so we were the only ones in that hotel and I felt like I was king of the world. We ordered a huge dinner because we—well, maybe not her so much, but after a full day outdoors and all my acrobatics, I was as hungry as a bear; and we also drank a lot. I can hold my liquor, as you know, but she, between the sun she’d had all day, and the wine she wasn’t used to, and the fact that we were alone there, as in a desert, and the few people around didn’t know us, and the thin air—well, all this is to say that she started laughing like a madwoman and talking all kinds of nonsense, even though she was usually pretty reserved, and finally she got so flushed that I started to get worried. I think she might have even had a touch of fever, because that can happen to someone who isn’t used to getting a lot of sun. Anyway, to get to the point, we went for a walk after dinner, and there was still a little light outside, but it was already getting cool and it was clear that she wasn’t entirely steady on her feet, or maybe she was just pretending, but she held on to me tightly and said she wanted to go to sleep. So I took her to bed—not her bed, of course, because the two separate bedrooms were just for show, though it’s not like there was anyone there who cared what we did. There’s really no need for me to tell you anything else about that night, because you can imagine it yourself, and besides, if someone feels compelled to learn more about that kind of stuff, well, it isn’t hard to find out about it.

  “I’d finished my welding in just three days of work, and since all the other towers were ready, it was time to begin laying the cables. You know, when you see them from the ground they look like sewing thread, but they’re made of copper, ten millimeters thick—completely impossible to deal with, in other words. Sure, compared to that rigging job in India that I told you about, this was easy, but you need to remember that this was my first job, and that the tension had to be precisely regulated—especially on the two lateral cables, the ones that hung from the two branches of the Y—otherwise the whole base of the tower would get twisted. But don’t worry, there aren’t any accidents in this story, except for the one suffered by the rigger who had come before me; there weren’t any accidents after me, either, I mean at least not at the tower, which is actually still standing there as good as new, as I told you. Because, you see, there’s quite a big difference between a power line and a suspension bridge like that famous one in India, in that bridges carry people, while power lines carry only kilowatts; in short, power lines are a little like the books you write, which may well be very beautiful, but, let’s be honest, if there is something inadequate in them, no offense, nobody gets killed, and the only person who loses out is the customer who bought it.

  “Cable wiring isn’t really my thing, and I should’ve left, but after I’d finished my welding and it had been tested, I went into the office and volunteered for the wiring job, just so the situation with the girl could continue for a few more days. I should explain that, back then, I was ballsy in a way I’d never dream of being now. I can’t say why, maybe it’s just because, at the time, I needed to be, and where there’s a will, there’s a way. The fact is, they called Turin, reached an agreement, and extended my engagement; it’s not like I was any brighter than the rest of the guys there, it’s just that they were all a bunch of wusses, and they certainly had use for another guy who—and I don’t mean to brag—was pretty strong. Well, guess what: though I didn’t realize it at first, it was a brutal job, at least the way it was done back then; the work at Lancia seemed like child’s play by comparison. Copper cable weighs a ton, you know, it’s rigid and at the same time delicate, because it’s braided, and if a single thread is damaged by rubbing against the rocks, then forget about it, everything is ruined—like when a stocking gets a snag in it—and you need to throw out several meters of cable and splice the ends together, though only after making sure the client approves; but it always turns out badly. And then, in order not to let the cable drag on the ground, you need to hold it high and pull it taut so that it doesn’t sag, and unwind the spool from the top instead of the bottom, to give it greater height; in short, our crew, which, excluding present company, was made up of about a dozen rejects, reminded me of ‘Volga-Volga,’8 except that, instead of working until we died, we worked until six p.m. In order to steel myself I thought of the girl, but in the meantime, with every passing day, I developed more blisters on my hands, which was annoying when I was alone with the girl, but it was even more annoying to have her see me tied to the cable like a mule to a cart. I tried to get myself a spot with the lifters, meaning the guys who pull the stretched cable up from the ground and attach it to the insulators, but it wasn’t going to happen; as you know, whenever there’s a comfortable, high-paying job, the Camorra is there. I had no chance, and had to go along with the ‘Volga-Volga’ all week. The last two days it was uphill, and it wasn’t just my hands bothering me—the cable had also started to chafe my shoulder.

  “While I was slaving away there, the girl was going around town talking to people, and one fine evening she told me about her plan for the weekend. To be honest, just the idea of her making a plan while I was tied to the cable got me going a little, but, to be chivalrous, I pretended like it was no big deal; or at least I tried to pretend like it was no big deal, but the girl started laughing and said it was clear from the way I was scratching my nose that something was bothering me. I had some good excuses, however, since after six days of being tied to the cable I would rather have gone to sleep than climb a mountain; or maybe have had sex, but only so long as I didn’t have to leave my bed. But no: they had filled her head with a bunch of nature talk—how, in a valley near the one with the power line, there was a wonderful spot where you could see glaciers and ibex and the Swiss Alps and even moraines, though I still haven’t figured out what those are; I figured they were some kind of tasty fish. Anyway, to make a long story short, she figured out my weakness right away: my sense of honor. Half in jest and half serious, she called me spineless and a slacker—she might have been from Calabria but she’d been speaking our dialect since she was a kid. So on that Saturday, as soon as the sirens blew at the worksite, she took a pin and pierced all the new blisters I’d gotten that day, and she put tincture of iodine on the wound that I had on my shoulder, and then we packed our sacks and took off.

  “Look, I don’t even know why I’m telling you this story. Maybe it’s because we’re in this town, with its unending rain and its cars that never pick you up—it’s because of the contrast, in other words. Yes, because she was right, that girl—it really was a gorgeous landscape. There’s also another contrast, if you think about it, which is the difference between being twenty years old and being thirty-five, and between doing something for the first time and doing it after you’re used to it; but I have the feeling that there’s no need to tell you, someone who has a few ye
ars on me, about this kind of thing.

  “So, as I was saying, she was well prepared, and she decided that for our honeymoon (she was actually saying that, though I wasn’t quite convinced) we should go to a camping shelter, the name of which I no longer remember, but it’d be hard to forget the place, and the night we spent; not because we made love there but because of everything else. They tell me that they now lower those camping shelters down with helicopters, but back then the shelters weren’t much, and most people, even those who sleep in the Porta Nuova train station, would complain if they had to sleep in one of them. It was like a half-barrel, made of sheet metal, two meters by two meters, with a little entryway like a cat door; inside there was only a horsehair mattress, some blankets, a little stove the size of a shoebox, and, if you were lucky, a bit of dry bread left by whoever had come before you. Since the shelters were in the shape of a half-cylinder, about a meter high, you needed to crawl to get inside. On the roof there were some thin strips of copper that served as lightning rods, but more than that they served as braces so that a storm couldn’t carry the whole thing away. There was also a shovel, driven straight into the ground, with a handle more than two meters long, so that it would stick out of the snow in the off-season and function as a marker; it could also be used to shovel snow off the shelter when it was covered over.

  “Water wasn’t a problem—the shelter was built on a rock spur two meters above a flat glacier. I really wanted to walk on it, but the girl told me that it was dangerous because of the crevasses, and that if you ended up in a crevasse nobody would come pull you out, because they knew that it was your own fault and, besides, it wasn’t even worth the effort because you’re usually dead by the time you hit the bottom—from the force of the impact and the sheer terror of it all—and if you’re not, then you die from the cold before help can arrive. They had explained all this to her down in the valley, at the ranger’s office; whether or not it’s true I couldn’t tell you for certain because, seeing two fools like us, I’m sure they would have taken every precaution. Like I said, we had no problem getting water, because it had been warm for several weeks, the snow on the glacier had melted, the glacier was exposed, and, on its icy surface, the water had carved out a bunch of narrow, greenish channels, all running parallel, so that it looked like a hatching design. You see, you don’t always have to go to Alaska to find strange things. And also the water that ran down those channels was like nothing I’d ever tasted before; I wouldn’t know how to describe it, because as you know, tastes and scents are hard to describe without resorting to examples, like, for instance, the scent of garlic or the flavor of salami; but I can tell you that this water actually tasted like sky, and in fact it came, quite directly, from the sky.

  “We had no food problems, either, because we’d carried everything we needed and collected some wood along the way, and we even lit a fire and cooked over it, just like they did in the olden days; and when night fell, there was a sky over our heads like nothing I’d ever seen before, not even in my dreams—so full of stars that it seemed to me excessive. What I mean is, for two people like us—city people, a rigger and a school-teacher—it was too much, a luxury wasted on us. The foolishness of a twenty-year-old! Believe it or not, we spent almost half the night asking ourselves why there were so many stars, why they were there at all, how long they’d been there, and also why we’re here and so on, what happens after we die—questions that, in short, have no meaning for anybody with a head on his shoulders, and certainly not a rigger. As for the second half of the night, well, you can use your imagination, but the whole time we were in a silence so complete, and a darkness so thick, that we seemed to be in another world, and were almost frightened, especially since we heard noises that we couldn’t identify, like distant thunder or a crumbling wall—distant but deep, making the ground tremble under our backs.

  “But then, at a certain point in the night, we began to hear a different sound, and there was no almost about it—this one really did scare me, a sharp fear, so that I put on my shoes and started to go outside and see what it was, but with such faint conviction that when the girl said to me, in a whisper, ‘No, no, let it be, you’ll get cold,’ I lay down and slid back under the covers. It sounded like a saw—but a saw with blunt, widely spaced teeth—that was trying to saw through the shelter’s metal wall, and since the shelter functioned like a sound box, there was a racket like you’ve never heard. It scraped feebly one or two times against the shelter, then there was silence, then it scraped one or two times more; between the scrapes we could hear snorting and a kind of coughing. The long and short of it is that, using the cold as our excuse, we stayed closed up indoors until we saw a sliver of light creep in all around the doorway—and we couldn’t hear the noise of the saw anymore, either, only the breathing, which was growing fainter and fainter. I finally went outside, and there was an ibex slouching against the wall of the shelter. It was large but it seemed sick, and it was ugly, too—all mangy, coughing and drooling. It looked like it was about to die, and it pained us to think that it might have wanted to wake us up so that we could help it, or that it simply wanted to die close to us.

  “What does all of this mean? It was a signal, as if by scratching the metal with its horns the ibex wanted to tell us something. Here I had thought that the girl and I were at the start of something, but really we were at the end. The rest of the day we didn’t know what to say to each other anymore; then, after we went back to Turin, I’d call her up and try to make plans, and though she didn’t say no, she assented in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t interested. I can’t say for sure, but it seemed like she’d found a better guy than me, probably a guy who punches a clock—and that’s not to say she wasn’t right to do so, considering the life I lead. I mean, right now, for example, she’d be alone.”

  The door was flung open and, along with a gust of mushroom-scented air, a driver entered. Bundled from head to toe in a waterproof outfit shiny with rain, he looked like a deep-sea diver. He informed us that our car had arrived and was waiting outside, in front of the gate. Two? No, there weren’t two cars, just one, but it was quite large enough. We explained to him that we had to go to two different places, but he said that wasn’t a problem—he’d take me first, and then Faussone, or vice versa, whatever we wanted. Outside, at the gate, there wasn’t a car but a tourist bus, with fifty seats, all for us; we’d arrive at our respective work destinations late—Faussone by two hours, and me by nearly three. “A land without time,” Faussone repeated.

  7. A reference to the forest of the Suicides in Inferno Canto XIII, where the damned, including Pier della Vigna, are transformed into trees and bushes.

  8. A popular Russian song sung by boatmen on the Volga; one line goes “Haul until you die.”

  The Bevel Gear

  “. . .Because you shouldn’t assume for a second that this type of scheming happens only in our country, and that we’re the only ones who are good at cheating people and not being cheated ourselves. I’m not sure how much you’ve traveled, but I’ve traveled a fair amount, and I’ve seen that countries aren’t always the way you’re taught about them in school, or the way they come across in jokes—you know, all the English are refined, the French are jokers, the Germans are severe, the Swiss are honest. It’s not like that at all; no, the whole world is the same.”

  In just a few days the season had changed: a dry, hard snow was falling outside, and every so often a gust of wind dashed a handful of tiny hailstones against the windows of the cafeteria. Through the veil of sleet you could make out, surrounding us, the implacable black forest. I tried, without success, to interrupt Faussone so I could protest my innocence; maybe I hadn’t traveled as much as he had, but certainly enough to appreciate the emptiness of the clichés on which popular geography is based. But no such luck: trying to stop a Faussone story was like trying to stop a tidal wave. He’d already got started, and it wasn’t difficult to make out, behind the drapery of the prologue, the corpulence of the
story he was introducing. We’d finished our coffee, which was detestable, as it is in every country (Faussone had explained this to me at great length) where the accent of the word “coffee” falls on the first syllable. I offered him a cigarette, forgetting that he didn’t smoke, and that I myself, the night before, thinking that I’d been smoking too much, had made a solemn vow to quit; but really, after a coffee like that, and on a night like that, what can you do?

  “The whole world is the same, as I was saying. That’s true of this country, too, and in fact it’s here that the story took place. No, not on this trip—six or seven years ago. You remember the boat ride with Difference, the wine, the lake that was almost an ocean, and the dam that I showed you from a distance? We ought to go one Sunday, I’d like to show it to you, because it really is a fine piece of work. The people here may be oafs, but when it comes to big jobs, they’re better than us, no doubt about it. Well, I was the one who constructed the biggest crane at the worksite: I mean, I was the one who organized the rigging, because it’s one of those things that rig themselves, sprouting out of the ground like a mushroom, which is really an amazing sight to see. Excuse me if I keep coming back to this, this matter of rigging cranes; by now you’ve probably figured out that I’m one of those guys who like their profession. Even if the work is sometimes uncomfortable—like this time that I’m telling you about, for instance, we were doing construction in January, working even on Sundays, and everything was frozen, even the cable grease, which we had to soften with steam. At one point a layer of ice formed on the truss, two fingers thick and hard as steel, and it was impossible to slide one piece of the tower into another; that is, they were sliding all right, but when they got to the top they wouldn’t budge.”