by Primo Levi
“I had been assigned to design a varnish to coat the interior of tin cans, for export (the paint, not the cans) into this country. I can assure you that it had to be an excellent skin: it needed to adhere to the tin, withstand sterilization at 120°C, bend this way and that on a mandrel without cracking, withstand abrasion when tested with a device that I couldn’t begin to describe to you; but, above all, it needed to be able to withstand a whole series of onslaughts that we don’t usually encounter in the laboratory, including anchovies, vinegar, lemon juice, tomatoes (the varnish couldn’t absorb the red coloring), brine, oil, and so forth. The varnish couldn’t take on the odors of these goods, and it couldn’t impart any odor to them—but in order to test these characteristics we had to rely upon the nose of an inspector. Finally, the varnish needed to be applied with special tinplate printing machines, where the sheet of metal enters at one end, unrolling from a spool, receives the varnish from a kind of ink roller, passes into an oven, to be baked, and winds around a shipping roller; under these conditions, it had to produce a smooth, polished coating, with a yellow-gold color that fell in the spectrum between the two color samples stipulated by the terms of the contract. Are you following me?”
“Yeah, I get it,” replied Faussone, in a somewhat offended tone. I suppose I might be losing the reader, here and elsewhere, whenever there’s talk of mandrels, molecules, ball bearings, and crimp terminals. If so, I don’t know what to do about it. I’m sorry, but there just aren’t any synonyms for these terms. If you’ve ever gotten through one of those nineteenth-century seafaring books, as I’m sure you have, then you would have had to digest bowsprits and sloops, so be brave, and either use your imagination or consult a dictionary. Besides, it might even come in handy, since we now live in a world of molecules and ball bearings.
“I’ll tell you right away that I wasn’t being asked to invent anything—there already exist a large number of varnishes like this—but it was crucial to pay attention to detail in order to make sure that the product could pass all the scheduled tests, especially the baking time, which was to be fairly short. The bottom line was that I had to design a type of Band-Aid made out of a rather closeknit fabric, with stitches that weren’t too tight, so that it could maintain a certain amount of elasticity, but not too loose, either, otherwise the anchovies and the tomatoes might get through it. It also had to have a lot of sturdy, tiny hooks that would mat together and cling to the sheet metal during the baking, but would fall away afterward, so that the varnish wouldn’t absorb color, odor, or taste. And it goes without saying that it couldn’t contain any toxic elements. You see, that’s the way we chemists think about things. We try to imitate you, like that monkey who was your assistant. We mentally construct a mechanical model, even though we know it’s crude and puerile, and we follow it as closely as possible, but always with that old envy for you men with five senses, who fight between the sky and the earth against eternal enemies, working in centimeters and meters instead of our invisible tiny sausages and nets. Our exhaustion is different from yours. We don’t feel it in our spine, but further up; it doesn’t hit us after a tiring day, but instead when we try to understand something and fail. Sleep doesn’t usually cure it. Yes, this is how I’m feeling tonight, and that’s why I’m telling you about it.
“So everything was going well; we sent the sample to the state agency and waited seven months for the response, which was a positive one. We sent a prototype can here, to this plant, waited nine more months, and then we received a letter of acceptance, the ratification, and an order for three hundred tons; soon afterward, who knows why, we received another order, with a different signature, for another three hundred, and this second one was marked extremely urgent. Probably it was merely a duplicate of the first, the result of bureaucratic confusion; in any case, it was properly documented, and it was exactly large enough to allow us to meet our production goal for the year. Everyone was suddenly in a good mood, there were huge smiles in all the hallways and workshops of the factory—six hundred tons of a varnish that wasn’t difficult to produce, all of the same composition, and at a price that was nothing to sneeze at, either.
“We’re conscientious people: from each batch we fastidiously drew a sample and tested it in the laboratory, to make certain that the specimens would be resistant to all those substances I mentioned before. Our laboratory was full of new and pleasant scents, and the inspectors’ office looked like a grocery store. Everything was going well, we felt that we were in the clear, and every Friday, when the fleet of trucks that carried the drums of varnish was driven to Genoa to be shipped off, we had a little party, and even made use of the provisions intended for the inspection, ‘so that they wouldn’t go bad.’
“Then we had our first alarm: a polite telex, proposing that we perform the anchovy resistance test again on a certain batch that had already been shipped. The girl who had done the test chuckled and told me that she’d be happy to repeat it immediately, but she was quite sure of the results—that varnish would resist sharks even. But I knew how these things go, and I began to get stomach cramps.”
Faussone’s face crinkled into a surprisingly sad smile. “Yeah, I get that, too, only I get the pain here, on the right side—I think it’s my liver. But in my opinion a man who’s never failed an inspection is not a real man; it’s like he’s not yet past his first communion. Needless to say, it’s something I know a lot about. When it happens, you feel bad, but if you don’t suffer through it, you don’t mature. It’s kind of like getting bad grades in school.”
“I just knew it—I know how these things go. Two days later, another telex arrived, and this one wasn’t polite at all. That first batch couldn’t withstand the anchovies, nor could the successive ones that had arrived in the meantime; we were to send immediately a thousand kilos of effective varnish by air delivery, otherwise we’d get a stop payment and a citation for damages. The heat was on now, and the laboratory was full of anchovies: Italian, big and small, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian; and two hundred grams that we intentionally let spoil, to see what effect that had on the varnished tin. You see, we could all make varnish well enough, but none of us were anchovy specialists. Like madmen, we prepared sample after sample, hundreds of samples a day, we exposed them to anchovies from every sea in the world, but nothing happened—all our tests turned out fine. Then it occurred to us that Soviet anchovies might be more aggressive than ours. We sent off a telex right away, and seven days later the specimen was on our table. They hadn’t messed around: the anchovies arrived in a thirty-kilo drum when thirty grams would have been sufficient. It was probably the kind of package used for shipments to school cafeterias or the armed forces. And I can attest to the fact that they were excellent, because we tasted them. But even these anchovies did nothing, they had no effect on any of our samples, not even on those we prepared in the sloppiest manner, in an effort to reproduce the least favorable conditions—insufficiently baked, not thick enough, creased before the inspection.
“Meanwhile we had received from Sverdlovsk the expert’s report, the one I mentioned earlier. I have it up in my room, in the drawer of the bedside table, and I swear, it gives off a stench. No, not of anchovies: it’s a stench that rises out of the drawer and poisons the air, especially at night, because at night I’ve been having some strange dreams. Perhaps it’s my fault. I’ve taken it too much to heart—”
Faussone looked sympathetic. He interrupted me to order two vodkas from the girl who was dozing behind the counter. He explained that this was a special kind of vodka, illegally distilled, and in fact it had an unusual aroma, not displeasing, which I preferred not to inquire about.
“Drink, it’ll do you good. Of course you took it to heart—that’s natural. When you put your signature on something, it doesn’t matter whether it’s an IOU or a crane or an anchovy—sorry, I mean a varnish—you have to answer for it. Drink, and you’ll sleep well tonight, and won’t dream about test samples, and tomorrow, you’ll see, you’ll wake up w
ithout a headache. This stuff may be black market, but it’s the real deal. And, in the meantime, tell me how the story ends.”
“It hasn’t ended yet, and I can’t really say how it will, or when. I’ve been here for twelve days, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll have to stay. Every morning they send for me, sometimes with a car and a driver, sometimes with a Pobieda;10 they take me to the laboratory and then nothing happens. The interpreter comes by and apologizes: either the technician isn’t there, or there’s no electricity, or the whole staff is in a meeting. It’s not that they’re rude to me; it’s just that they seem to forget I’m there. I haven’t spoken with the technician for more than half an hour so far; he showed me their test samples, and I’m completely stumped, because they’re nothing like ours; ours are smooth and clean, while theirs have lots of small lumps. It’s clear that something happened in transit, but I can’t imagine what; or there’s something wrong with their tests, but, as you know, it’s bad form to blame others, especially your clients.
“I told the technician that I wanted to observe the whole process: the preparation of the test samples, from start to finish. He seemed irritated and though he said it would be fine, he hasn’t shown up since. Instead of the technician, I’ve had to deal with this terrible woman. Ms. Kondratova is small, fat, elderly, with a ravaged face, and it’s impossible to get her to keep to the subject. Instead of talking about varnishes, she’s spent the whole time telling me her life story, which, by the way, is an awful story—she was in Leningrad during the siege, her husband and their two sons died at the front, and she worked in a bullet-making factory where it was always ten degrees below zero. I feel sorry for her, but I’m also furious, because my visa expires in four days, and how can I return to Italy without having resolved anything, and, more important, without having understood anything?”
“Have you told this woman that your visa is going to expire?” asked Faussone.
“No. I don’t think she has anything to do with my visa.”
“Listen to me—tell her. From what you’ve said, she must be a pretty important person, and when a visa expires the people here get on it right away, because otherwise they’re the ones who get in trouble. Give it a try: trying never hurt anyone, and you have nothing to lose.”
He was right. At the mere mention of the imminent expiration of my visitor’s visa, there was a surprising change all around me, as in the final scene of an old comedy. All of them, beginning with Ms. Kondratova, suddenly accelerated their actions and their words; they were sympathetic and cooperative, the laboratory opened its doors to me, and the man who prepared the test samples put himself entirely at my disposal.
Not much time remained, so I started by asking to examine the contents of the last containers to arrive. It wasn’t easy to identify them, but by midday we succeeded. We prepared the test samples with the utmost care, they came out smooth and shiny, and after spending an intimate night with the anchovies, their appearance had not changed. One could conclude either that the varnish had been compromised by the conditions of their local warehouse, or that something had happened when the Russians drew their sample. The morning of my departure I had just enough time to examine one of the oldest shipments: there were some suspect test samples, streaked and granular, but at this point there wasn’t time to study them in depth. My request for an extension had been refused. Faussone came to see me off at the station, and we parted with promises to meet again, either there or in Turin; but probably there. In fact, he would be remaining there for several months: with a group of Russian riggers he was repairing one of their colossal excavators, which are as tall as a three-story house and can range over any terrain, walking on four giant legs like a prehistoric saurian; and I needed to take care of two or three things at the factory, but undoubtedly I’d be back within a month at the latest. Ms. Kondratova had told me that they’d go ahead for a month, anyway; just that day she’d received the news that another canning factory was using a German varnish, which so far didn’t seem to be causing any problems. They would have a shipment sent immediately while they tried to clear up our situation. Yet, with an inconsistency that surprised me, she insisted that I return as soon as possible: “all things considered,” our varnish was preferable. For her part, she’d do everything in her power to get me a new visa that could be extended as needed.
Faussone asked me, since I was going to Turin, to deliver a package and a letter to his aunts, offering his apologies: he’d have to spend All Saints’ Day on the job. The package was light but bulky; the letter was just a card, and on it the address was printed in the clear, meticulous, somewhat pretentious handwriting of someone who has studied drawing. He urged me not to lose the document listing the value of the package’s contents, and we parted.
9. A reference to Inferno XXXIII:4, where Count Ugolino speaks.
10. A Russian economy car.
The Aunts
Faussone’s aunts lived on Via Lagrange in an old, two-story house, wedged between newer (but equally neglected) buildings at least three times as tall. On the modest façade, which was of an indistinct earthy color, fake windows and small fake balconies had been painted, in a brick red that had almost completely faded. Stairway B, which I was looking for, was at the back of the courtyard; I paused for a second to observe the courtyard, while two housewives eyed me suspiciously from their balconies. The courtyard and the entrance portico were paved in cobblestones, and under the portico ran two carriage lanes, of stone from Luserna, furrowed and worn away by generations of wagons. In one corner there was a discarded washtub; it had been filled with soil, and a weeping willow had been planted in it. In another corner was a pile of sand, evidently dumped there for some repair job and then forgotten; the rain had eroded it in such a way that it resembled the Dolomites, and cats had dug comfortable lairs in it. Opposite was the wooden door of an antique latrine; the bottom was worn away by humidity and alkaline fumes, while farther up it was coated with an ash-gray paint that had cracked over the darker background, assuming the aspect of crocodile skin. The two balconies ran around three sides of the courtyard, divided only by rusty gates with iron spikes that extended beyond the railings. In that courtyard, eight meters from the congested, overbearing street, one inhaled a vaguely cloistered scent that carried with it the humble charm of things once useful but now long abandoned.
On the second floor I found the nameplate I was looking for: ODDENINO GALLO. So they must have been the mother’s sisters, not the father’s—or maybe distant aunts, or aunts only in the vaguest sense of the term. Both of them came to the door, and at first glance I could see between them the false resemblance that, absurdly, we often recognize in two people, no matter how different they are, whom we meet in the same place at the same time. No, in reality they didn’t look much like each other: nothing beyond an indefinable familial likeness in their solid bone structure and the decorous modesty of their dress. One had white hair, the other’s was a dark brown. Dyed? No, I don’t think so—from close up I could see a few white hairs on her temples, which convinced me. They accepted the package, thanked me, and had me sit on a small sofa with two seats, which was rather threadbare and of a shape that I’d never seen before: it was twisted at the middle into two segments, set at a right angle to each other. The brown-haired sister sat on the other seat, the white-haired sister opposite us in a little armchair.
“Would you mind if I open the letter? Tino writes so little, you know, and . . . yes, indeed, look at this: ‘Dearest aunts, I’m taking advantage of a friend’s kindness to send you this little gift, warm greetings and kisses, you’re always in my thoughts, your Tino,’ period, end of letter. That certainly didn’t give him a headache. So you’re a friend of his, is that right?”
I explained that I wasn’t exactly a friend, if only because of the age difference, but we had found ourselves together in that distant place, and spent a lot of evenings together, so we were good company for each other, and he told me a lot of very interesting stor
ies. I caught a rapid glance from the white-haired sister to the brown-haired sister.
“Really?” she said. “You know, when he’s with us, he barely says a thing. . . .”
I tried to repair my error—I said that there isn’t much to do for fun over there, actually there’s nothing to do, so when two Italians find themselves amid so many foreigners, it’s only natural for them to start talking. Besides, he basically talked only about his job. In an effort to be polite, I tried to situate myself so that I could alternate between speaking to one woman and then the other, but it wasn’t easy. The white-haired aunt rarely looked at me; for the most part she stared at the floor, or, even when I turned directly toward her, fixed her eyes on her brown-haired sister’s. The few times that she spoke, she addressed her sister, as if she were speaking a language that I wouldn’t be able to understand, and the brown-haired one would have to serve as interpreter. When the brown-haired one was speaking, however, the white-haired one watched her intently, with her chest leaning toward her slightly, as if she wanted to keep a close watch and was ready to pounce on any mistake.
Brown hair was loquacious and in cheerful spirits. Before long I’d learned a great deal about her: she was a widow without children, she was sixty-three years old and her sister was sixty-six, her name was Teresa and the white-haired one was Mentina, short for Clementina; her poor husband had been a ship’s engineer in the merchant marine, but during the war they had shipped him out on a destroyer and he had gone missing in the Adriatic at the beginning of ’43, the same year Tino was born. They had just been married at the time. Mentina, however, had never married.