The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  In general I could understand Faussone well enough, but I didn’t know what he meant here by the word “budge.” I asked him about it, and Faussone explained that it referred to the situation in which a long object passes into a rectilinear duct and then reaches a curve or an angle, and you can’t budge it—it gets stuck, in other words. That time, in order to get it sliding again, they had to chip away the ice centimeter by centimeter, following the instructions in the rigger’s manual: real shit work.

  “Anyway, through good and bad, we reached the day of the inspection. More bad than good, like I said; but on the job, and not only on the job, if there weren’t any problems the story wouldn’t be fun to tell afterward; and telling stories, as you know—you’ve even said as much to me—is one of the joys of life. I wasn’t born yesterday, and I had performed my own part-by-part inspection beforehand; all the operations went divinely, and even the loading test was fine. On the day of the inspection there’s always a festive atmosphere: I gave myself a smooth shave, put Brilliantine in my hair (yeah, right here in the back—I still got a little left), put on my corduroy jacket, and got to the site bright and early, a good half hour ahead of time.

  “So the interpreter arrives, the head engineer arrives, and then one of those little old ladies of theirs who you never understand what they have to do with it—they stick their noses into everything, ask you nonsensical questions, scribble your name down on a piece of paper, eye you skeptically, and, after all that, they sit down in a corner and start knitting. The engineer of the dam also arrives—she was actually an engineeress, nice, radiant as the sun, with shoulders like this and her nose broken like a boxer’s. We had run into each other several times in the dining hall and we’d even started a little friendship: she had a good-for-nothing husband and three children (she showed me a photograph), and, before she got her degree, she had driven a tractor on the kolkhozy. At meals, she made an impression: she ate like a lion, but before her first bite she’d toss down a hundred grams of vodka without batting an eye. My kind of person. A few other good-for-nothings arrived and I had no idea who they were: that early in the morning they were already bombed; one had a large flask of liquor, and they all just kept drinking by themselves.

  “Finally the inspector arrived. He was a little black man, dressed in black, in his forties, with one shoulder higher than the other, and a face that gave the impression of poor digestion. He didn’t look like a Russian at all: he looked like a cat, yes, one of those cats that develop the unfortunate habit of eating lizards, after which they stop growing, become melancholic, don’t lick their fur, and instead of meowing go hhhh. But almost every inspector is like this. It’s not a very cheerful job; if you don’t have a little bit of malice, then you’re not going to be a good inspector, and if you’re not malicious to begin with, you will be in time, because life isn’t easy when everyone gives you dirty looks. And yet they’re necessary—even I can admit it—in the same way that laxatives are necessary.

  “So he arrives and everyone gets quiet. He turns on the current, climbs up the little ladder, and closes himself in the cabin, because at the time cranes had all their controls in the cabin. Now? Now they’re on the ground, so that they’re protected from lightning. He closes himself in the cabin, yells down to get out of the way, and everyone clears out. He tests the gearshift, and it’s fine. He moves the dolly along the arm, and it glides as smoothly as a boat on a lake. He hooks one ton and lifts it up—it works perfectly, like it doesn’t even feel the weight. Then he tries the rotation and Armageddon breaks out. The arm, which is more than thirty meters long, jerks all the way around, with such an awful shriek of iron it’d make your heart weep. You know, when you hear equipment that doesn’t work right, that stutters and grinds, it’s even more painful than watching a Christian suffer. It jerked three or four times, and then all of a sudden it stopped, and the whole structure trembled and swayed from right to left, left to right, as if it were saying, Oh, no, for heaven’s sake no, I can’t go on like this.

  “I ran up the ladder, all the while yelling to the guy up there not to move—for the love of God, don’t try any more maneuvers. I got to the top and I swear it was like being in the middle of the ocean during a storm, but there’s my little man sitting there all calm, on his little seat, already writing his report in his booklet. I didn’t know much Russian then and he didn’t know any Italian, so we did the best we could with a little bit of English, but you can imagine that, between the cabin that kept jigging about, the terror, and the language problems, our discussion was pretty nonsensical. He kept saying, Nyet, nyet, that the machine was kaput, that he couldn’t give us a pass. I tried to explain to him that I wanted to figure everything out calmly and clearly before he wrote his report. At this point, I already had my suspicions: first of all, as I already told you, I had done my own tests the previous day and everything had been fine; second, because I had known for some time that there were certain Frenchmen around. You see, there was another contract available for three cranes just like the one we built, and I knew that we had only won the competition for our crane by a hair, and those Frenchmen had been the runners-up.

  “I didn’t do this for the boss, you know. The boss doesn’t mean anything to me, as long as he pays me the right amount and lets me do the rigging my way. No, I do it for the job, and to assemble a machine like that, work on it with my hands and with my head for so many days, see it grow, as tall and straight, as strong and slender as a tree, only for it not to work—it’s painful. It’s like a pregnant woman giving birth to a crippled or mentally deficient son, if that idea makes any sense.”

  It did make sense, that idea. Listening to Faussone, I felt cohering within me a tentative hypothesis that I had never before articulated and which I hereby submit to the reader: as everyone knows, the term “freedom” has many meanings, but perhaps the most accessible form of freedom, the most subjectively enjoyed and most beneficial to the social order, derives from being competent in one’s own work, and thus taking pleasure in doing it.

  “Anyway: I waited for him to come down, and I started to look around to see what was going on. There was certainly something wrong with the bevel gear . . . what are you laughing at?”

  I wasn’t laughing. I was only smiling, without being aware of it. I hadn’t had any dealings with a bevel gear since I was thirteen years old, when I stopped playing with my Meccano set, and the memory of that solitary, absorbing play-work, and of the tiny bevel gear of bright milled brass, had moved me for an instant.

  “You know, those things are more delicate than cylindrical gears. More difficult to rig, too, and if you use the wrong kind of grease, they seize up real bad. Besides—and I don’t know, it’s never happened to me—but doing conflict-free jobs, where everything goes smoothly, must be pretty boring, and in the long run makes you stupid. I think that men are made like cats, and I’m sorry to bring up cats again, it’s only on account of the profession. If they don’t know what to do with their time, if they don’t have any mice to chase after, then they scratch each other, they escape onto the roof, or maybe they climb up a tree and start meowing because they can’t get back down. I really believe that in order to live happily you need to have something to do, but it shouldn’t be too easy; or you should have something to wish for, but not an impossible wish—something that you can hope to achieve one day.

  “But back to the bevel gear: five minutes later I suddenly figured it out. The alignment—do you see? It’s the most delicate point, because a bevel gear is what you could call the heart of a crane, and the alignment is—well, without alignment, a gear, after two revolutions, is ready for the scrap heap. I won’t give you the whole explanation, but someone had been up there, a professional, and he had redrilled, one by one, the holes in the supports, and he had rerigged the base of the gear so that it appeared to be straight but was actually misaligned. It was a work of true artistry, and if it weren’t for the fact that they were trying to dupe me I would have even saluted them; bu
t, given the circumstances, I was as mad as a wild dog. It was the Frenchmen, see: I don’t know if they did it themselves or hired someone else—like that inspector, maybe, who was in such a rush to file his report.

  “. . . Yes, of course, there were charges filed, witnesses, expert opinions, legal action: but it stays with me still, like a shadow, like a grease stain, hard to get out. Many years have passed, but the trial is still going on: eighty pages of expert evidence from the Sverdlovsk Technological Institute, with the deformations, photographs, X-ray pictures, the whole thing. What do you think is going to happen? I already know. It’s the same thing that happens every time matters of iron turn into matters of paper: it comes out twisted.”

  Anchovies I

  I raised my mouth from the plate, saying to myself, “You want me to renew . . .”9 Faussone’s last words had hit me where it hurt. The Sverdlovsk Technological Institute was in fact my adversary at that very moment; it had torn me from my factory, from my laboratory, from my loved and hated desk, and had hurled me there. Like Faussone, I was oppressed by the menacing shadow of a dossier drafted in two languages; I, too, had arrived there in the role of defendant. I had been led to believe that this episode was in some ways a watershed, a singular point on my earthly journey, and furthermore I felt that a curious destiny had determined that my life’s most decisive moments would occur in that great and strange country.

  Since the role of defendant is not particularly comfortable, this would be my final adventure as a chemist. I’d had enough. With a sense of nostalgia, but without regret, I would choose another path—the path of the storyteller—since I had the ability to do it and I still had the strength. I’d start with my own stories, until I’d emptied my sack of them, and then I’d use other people’s stories: stolen, plundered, extorted, or received as gifts, like Faussone’s, for example; stories shared by everyone and no one, stories written in the clouds, painted on a veil—as long they had some meaning for me, or might provide the reader with a moment of wonder or laughter. Some people say that life begins at forty; well, for me it would begin, or begin anew, at fifty-five. And when your job for thirty years has been to stitch together long molecular strands, supposedly for the benefit of your fellow man, and you have the corresponding job of convincing your fellow man that your molecules are, in fact, useful to him, you surely learn something about the art of stitching together words and ideas, or at least about the general and specific properties of your fellow human beings.

  With some hesitation, and after repeated requests, Faussone finally granted me permission to use his stories, and that’s how this book was born. Upon my mention of the Sverdlovsk lawsuit, he gave me a wary, curious look.

  “So you’re here because of some problem. Don’t worry about it. I mean, don’t worry about it too much, otherwise you won’t be able to function. It happens even in the best families, you make a mess, or you have to clean up someone else’s mess; besides, I can’t think of a single profession that doesn’t have its own troubles. Well, okay, there are a few, but they’re not really professions, they’re like cows sent out to pasture—except cows at least make milk and, besides, they ultimately get slaughtered. Or like the little old men who play bocce in Piazza d’Armi and mumble to themselves. But tell me about your troubles. It’s your turn to tell a story, since I’ve already told you a bunch of mine, and that way I can compare. Besides, hearing about other people’s problems makes you forget your own.”

  So I told him:

  “My true profession, the one that I studied in school and which has provided me with a living up to now, is chemistry. I’m not sure how much you know about it, but it bears some resemblance to your line of work, except the structures that we assemble and disassemble are very small. We’re divided into two main branches, those who assemble and those who disassemble, and both types are like blind people with sensitive fingers. I say blind people because the things that we handle are too small to be seen, even by the most powerful microscopes, so we’ve invented a number of clever tricks that allow us to recognize these things without seeing them. You have to keep one thing in mind here, which is that a blind man has no problem telling you how many bricks there are on a table, what position they’re in, and the distances between them; but if, instead of bricks, you’ve got grains of rice, or, worse, ball bearings, then naturally a blind man would be embarrassed if you asked him where they were, because as soon as he touches them, they move: and that’s how it is with us. In fact, we often feel less like blind men than like blind elephants at a watchmaker’s workbench, so clumsy are our fingers when we try to attach or detach all those tiny parts.

  “The disassemblers—the analytical chemists—need to be able to disassemble a structure part by part, without damaging it, or at least without damaging it too much, and then line up these dismantled parts on the counter—again, without ever seeing them—and identify them, one by one, and be able to say in what order they were attached. Today there is some wonderful equipment that makes their job easier, but it used to be that you had to do everything by hand, and it required an incredible amount of patience.

  “As for me, however, I’ve always been an assembly chemist, a synthesizer, meaning someone who builds custom-made structures. They give me a little model, like this . . .”

  Here—just as Faussone had done, on many occasions, in order to explain his truss towers to me—I grabbed a napkin and scribbled on it a design that looked something like this:

  “. . . or sometimes I do it myself, and then I have to manage as best I can. With a little experience, you can easily distinguish from the start the structures that might work from the ones that will fail or go to pieces right away, or those others which are possible only on paper. But we’re always blind, even in the best-case scenario, that is, when the structure is simple and stable. We’re blind, and we don’t have those tweezers we so often dream about at night—the way a thirsty man dreams of a well—which would allow us to take a segment, hold it precise and straight, and glue it, facing in the right direction, onto the section that has already been assembled. If we had those tweezers (and who knows, maybe one day we will), we would have already done some pretty elegant things that, until now, only God Himself has accomplished, like creating, for instance—well, I won’t say a frog or a dragonfly but at least a microbe or a mold spore.

  “But we don’t have them yet, so the result is that, as assemblers, we’re rather primitive. We are like elephants who are given a small locked box containing all the pieces of a clock; we’re very strong and patient, and we shake the box every which way and as forcefully as possible, and maybe we even heat it, because heat is another way of shaking it up. Sometimes, if it’s not a very complicated type of clock, we succeed, as a result of the shaking, in assembling it; but of course it’s more sensible to get there by doing a little at a time, first attaching just two pieces, then the third, and so on. It requires more patience, but in fact you’ll get there faster, and most of the time that’s exactly how we do it.

  “As you can see, you’re luckier, since you’re able to see your structures grow in your hands and in front of your eyes, monitoring them as they develop, so that if you make a mistake it’s not hard to correct it. True, we have one advantage: each of our construction projects produces not one tower but many at a time. So many, in fact, that you can’t conceive of the number, a number with twenty-five or twenty-six digits. If this weren’t so, then obviously—”

  “Then obviously you could pick up and change professions,” said Faussone, completing the sentence. “Move on, because you can always learn something new.”

  “We could always pick up and change professions, and sometimes, in fact, we do: for instance, when things get screwed up, and our tiny towers don’t all come out the same; or they’re all the same but they have some unexpected feature, and we don’t realize it right away, because we’re blind. The client notices it first. Look, that’s the reason I’m here—not to write stories. The stories, if they happen, a
re a by-product, at least for now. I have in my pocket a letter complaining that our shipment doesn’t conform to the terms of the agreement. If we’re right, all is well, and they’ll even have to refund my travel expenses; but if they’re right, we have to replace six hundred tons of merchandise, plus damages, because it’ll be our fault if their factory can’t reach the quota mandated in the contract.

  “I mentioned that I was an assembly chemist, but I haven’t told you that I’m a paint specialist. It’s not a specialty that I chose myself, out of some personal preference. It’s just that after the war I needed work: it was an urgent need, and when I found a job in a paint factory I thought, Good enough; but I didn’t dislike the work, I ended up becoming a specialist, and, ultimately, I stayed put. I realized soon enough that making paint is a strange profession: what you’re really doing is making films, that is, artificial skins, which, however, should have many of the same qualities as our natural skin—no easy feat, as skin is a valuable commodity. Our chemical skins, likewise, need to have contradictory qualities: they need to be flexible but also injury-resistant; they have to stick to the flesh, meaning the surface, but dirt can’t stick to them; they need to have beautiful, delicate colors yet must also be resistant to light; they have to be permeable to water and at the same time impermeable, and this rule is so contradictory that not even human skin can satisfy it, because although it’s sufficiently resistant to rain and ocean water (it doesn’t absorb water, it doesn’t swell up, and it doesn’t dissolve), if you press your luck, you’ll come down with rheumatism—which means that a little bit of water does pass through, and of course sweat must pass through as well, but only from the inside out. You can see that it’s not so simple.