by Primo Levi
“. . . but tell me about Tino. He’s well, isn’t he? He doesn’t catch cold, up there on the scaffoldings? And what about food? You’ve seen what he’s like. He’s got hands of gold: he’s always been that way, you know, even as a child, whenever there was a leaky faucet, or the Singer broke down, or the radio gave off static, he’d fix it right away. But there’s another side to this story, in the sense that when he was studying he always had to have some object in his hands, something to take apart and put back together—and of course taking apart is easy but putting back together, not so much. But then he learned, and after that he never caused any more problems.” I could see them now, Faussone’s hands: long, solid, and quick, much more expressive than his face. They illustrated and clarified his stories, imitating, in turn, the shovel, the monkey wrench, the hammer; in the stale air of the company dining hall they traced the elegant catenaries of the suspension bridge and the spires of the derricks, coming to the aid of his speech whenever it stalled. They brought to mind long-ago readings of Darwin, of the craftsman’s hand that, making tools and bending matter, rescues the human brain from indolence, and still to this day guides, stimulates, and pulls it forward, as a dog does with his blind master.
“He’s like a son to us. You know, he lived eight years in this house, and even now—”
“Seven, not eight,” Mentina corrected, with inexplicable severity, and without looking at me. Teresa continued without noticing:
“—and you know, he barely gave us any trouble, at least as long as he stayed at Lancia, or, in other words, as long as he led a relatively normal life. Now, of course, he makes more money, but tell me, do you think someone can really go on like that his whole life? This way, like a bird on a branch, here one day and gone the next, boiling in the desert one moment, in the snow the next? Not to mention the exhaustion—”
“—and the danger of working at the top of those towers—I get dizzy just thinking about it,” Mentina added, as if to reproach, and perhaps blame, her sister.
“I hope he’ll calm down a little, as the years pass, but for the time being there’s nothing to be done. You should see him when he’s here in Turin. After two or three days he’s like a lion in a cage, he’s almost never home, and sometimes I even think that he goes to a pension and doesn’t bother to come visit us. If he keeps on like this, strong as he is, mark my words—he’ll end up ruining his stomach. There’s no way to make him come to our house at a reasonable hour, sit calmly at the table, and have a warm, hearty meal. It’s like he’s sitting on nails—a sandwich, a piece of cheese, and he’s off, and he doesn’t come back until the two of us are already asleep, because we go to bed early.”
“And cooking him a decent meal makes us happy, too, because just doing it for ourselves isn’t worth the effort, and he’s the only nephew we have, and we have all the time in the world. . . .”
By now we had established a set routine, though not without a certain discomfort on my part. When Teresa spoke, she looked at me; when Mentina intervened, she looked at Teresa; and while I listened, I mostly watched Mentina, sensing in her a kind of vague hostility. I couldn’t figure out whether it was directed at me, or at her sister, or at her far-off nephew, or at his fate, which after all didn’t seem particularly deserving of pity. I recognized in the two sisters an example of that divergence and polarization that one often observes in couples, and not only husbands and wives. At the beginning of their cohabitation, the differences between them—between the instinctively prodigal member and the avaricious one, the organized one and the disorganized, the sedentary and the world traveler, the loquacious and the taciturn—might be minimal, but over the years they become accentuated until each member has a distinct specialization. In some cases, this may be due to an avoidance of direct competition, as when one member shows signs of dominating in a certain field and the other, rather than fighting it out, chooses a different one, which may or may not be related; in other cases, it so happens that one of the members tries, consciously or not, to compensate for a deficit in the partner’s behavior, as when the wife of a man who’s either absent-minded or lazy is forced to take care of practical matters. An analogous differentiation can be observed in many animal species, in which, for instance, the male does all the hunting and the female has a monopoly on caring for the offspring. In this way Aunt Teresa specialized in contact with the outside world, while Aunt Mentina defended the fort at home: one handled foreign affairs, the other internal affairs, but evidently not without mutual resentment, irritation, and criticism.
I tried to reassure the two women:
“No, don’t worry about his eating. I saw how Tino lives: on the job, one needs to keep a regular schedule, no matter what country you end up in; and rest assured, the farther one is from the civilized world, the easier it is to eat nutritious food. Strange, perhaps, but nutritious, so it won’t ruin your health. Besides, from what I’ve seen, Tino is the picture of health, isn’t he?”
“He is, that’s true,” interjected Mentina. “He never comes down with anything, he’s always just fine. He never needs anything. He never needs anyone.” She was quite transparent, poor Aunt Mentina; unlike him, she needed somebody to need her—Tino, to be specific.
Aunt Teresa offered me a liqueur and macaroons, and asked my permission to open the package that I’d brought from Russia. It contained two fur shawls, one white and one brown. I’m no fashion expert, but I had the impression that these weren’t particularly expensive models; they were probably from one of the Beriozhka stores, a mandatory stop in Moscow for weekend tourists.
“How wonderful! And you’re so kind to bring them all the way here. We’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience—you could at least have telephoned, we would have come to get them. He must have spent a fortune, the poor boy. And these are much too luxurious for people like us. I suppose he thinks we like to go promenading up and down Via Roma. Well, why not? Maybe it’s time to change our habits. What do you think, Mentina? We’re not decrepit yet.”
“Tino doesn’t say much, but his heart is in the right place. In this, he takes after his mother. To look at him, you’d think he was tough, but that’s just for show.”
I nodded out of politeness, but I knew I was lying. It wasn’t just for show, Faussone’s toughness: perhaps he wasn’t born with it, perhaps he had been different once, but it was quite real now, it had been acquired, and reaffirmed, by countless duels with his adversary, who was tough by definition—the iron of bolts and beams, which never forgives your mistakes, and often punishes them disproportionately. The man I had come to know was different from the personage that the two aunts (“One is clever, the other not so much”) had invented in order to make him the object of a love that was only tepidly reciprocated. Their cloistered hermitage on Via Lagrange, sealed off for decades, and perfectly epitomized by the causeuse in which I was sitting, made for a poor observatory. Even if Faussone had agreed to speak a little more, there was no way in the world that—amid all that upholstery—he would be able to bring to life his defeats and victories, his fears and inventions.
“What he needs, our Tino,” said Teresa, “is a good woman. Don’t you agree? We’ve thought about this God knows how many times, and many times we’ve even tried to do something about it ourselves. It may seem easy, too, because he’s a good man, a worker, he’s not ugly, he doesn’t have any vices, and he makes good money. It’s hard to believe, but when we introduce him to a woman, they meet, talk, go out two or three times, and then the girl comes here and starts crying—it’s all over. And it’s never clear what’s happened. He doesn’t say anything, of course, and with the girls it’s a different story each time. He’s antisocial, he made her walk six kilometers without saying a word, he’s full of himself—in other words it’s a disaster, and by now everybody knows, everybody talks about it, and we don’t dare set him up with anyone anymore. And yet though he might not think about his future, we do, because we’re a few years older than him, and we know what it means t
o live alone; and we also know that in order to be with someone you need a permanent residence. If not, you start to become uncivilized; I run into enough men like that, especially on Sundays. I can spot them right away, and, every time, I think of Tino and I get depressed. But maybe, I don’t know, one night when you’re talking, man to man, would you mind having a word with him?”
I promised I would, and again I knew I was lying. I wouldn’t say any such thing to him, I wouldn’t give him advice, I wouldn’t try in any way to influence him, to help chart his future, or divert the future that he was charting for himself, or that destiny was charting for him. Only a deep, ancient blood love, like the one his aunts felt for him, could presume to know what effects might spring from those causes—what metamorphoses the rigger Tino Faussone might undergo if tied to a woman and a “permanent residence.” It’s hard enough for a chemist to foresee, outside his own experience, the interaction between two simple molecules, and completely impossible to predict what might happen when two moderately complex molecules interact. How then to predict the interaction between two human beings? Or the reactions of an individual put into a new situation? Nothing can be known—nothing certain, nothing probable, nothing honest. Better to make an error of omission than of commission: better to refrain from guiding the destiny of others, since it’s already so difficult and uncertain to steer one’s own.
It wasn’t easy for me to take leave of the two ladies. They kept finding new topics of conversation, and they maneuvered to intercept me every time I tried to make my way to the front door. The rumble of an airline jet could be heard, and through the dining-room window the pulse of the landing lights came into view against the sky, which was already dark.
“Every time one of those passes overhead I think of him, how he was never afraid of crashing,” said Aunt Teresa. “And to think that we’ve never been to Milan, and only once to Genoa, to look at the sea!”
Anchovies II
“They’re wonderful, of course, only sometimes they can get a little meddlesome. Thanks for dropping off the package, I hope you didn’t waste much time. So you’re leaving on Tuesday, too? On the samolyot? Good, we can travel together: we’re going the same route—at least as far as Moscow.”
It was a long and complicated route, and I was happy to have company, especially since Faussone had done the trip many times, and knew it better than I did; most important, he knew all the shortcuts. I was also happy because my battle against the anchovies had been resolved, decisively, in my favor.
It was drizzling; according to our itinerary, a car from the factory was supposed to pick us up at the square and take us to the airport, which was about forty kilometers away. Eight o’clock came, then eight thirty; the square was full of mud and still no one was there. Around nine a van arrived, the driver got out, and he asked us:
“Are there three of you?”
“No, there are two,” replied Faussone.
“Are you French?”
“No, we’re Italian.”
“You need to go to the train station?”
“No, we need to go to the airport.”
The driver, a young Hercules with a radiant face, tersely replied, “Then get in.”
He loaded our baggage and we left. The road was disrupted by huge puddles. He must have been quite familiar with it, because he sliced right through some of them without slowing down, while others he maneuvered around with caution.
“I’m happy myself,” Faussone told me, “first because I was starting to have enough of this place, second because of that huge beast down there, that excavator with the legs, I was fond of it, and I saw it all the way through its construction. It hasn’t begun to work yet, but anyway I’ve left it in good hands. And your story, about the cans for the fish, how’d that turn out?”
“It turned out well: ultimately we were in the right, but it’s not a great story. In fact it’s a stupid story, and not particularly enjoyable to relate, because when I retell it I remind myself how dumb I was not to have figured it all out sooner.”
“Don’t let it bother you,” said Faussone. “Stories about work are almost always like that. Really, it’s true of any story about trying to understand something. It’s the same as when you get to the end of a mystery novel, and you slap yourself on the forehead and say, ‘Of course!’—but it’s only an impression. In real life, things are never that simple. The only simple problems are the ones you’re assigned in school. So what happened?”
“So I stayed in Turin for more than a month, I redid all the tests again, and I came back here confident that the cards were in my favor. I found that the Russians, however, were sure that all the cards were in their favor; they had examined several dozen drums, and according to them at least one out of every five drums was defective, meaning that it produced granulose test strips; and there was no doubt that all the granulose test strips—but only those—could not withstand the anchovies. The technician treated me with all the patience one shows a dimwit: he himself had made a discovery—”
“Keep a safe distance from clients who make discoveries. They’re worse than mules.”
“No, no—he discovered something that I considered quite serious. You see, I was convinced that there was some local factor. I suspected that the granularity came from the thin sheet metal used for the test samples, or from the brushes they used to spread the varnish; but now my back was against the wall, because he had found a way to demonstrate that there were clots already in the varnish. He took a viscometer—not a very complicated instrument. It’s a cylindrical cup with a conical base, which tapers at the bottom to a calibrated nozzle; you plug the nozzle with your finger, fill the cup with varnish, and allow the air bubbles to float to the top; then you remove your finger and press a stopwatch at the same time. The time it takes for the cup to drain is a measure of viscosity. It’s an important check, because the viscosity of a varnish shouldn’t change while it’s in storage.
“So the technician discovered that he could pick out the defective drums even without applying varnish to the test samples. You just needed to watch the stream of varnish carefully as it drained from the nozzle of the viscometer. If it was a good drum, the flow would be as smooth and still as glass; if it was a bad drum, the flow would have some interruptions, it would sputter—three, four, even more times per cup. So the clots were already present in the varnish, he said. I felt like Christ on the Cross, and I argued that there was no other way they could be seen—the varnish was completely clear both before the measurement and afterward.”
Faussone interrupted: “I’m sorry, but it sounds like he was right. If you can see a thing, that means it’s probably there.”
“Of course, but as you know, blame is an ugly animal that no one wants to adopt. Standing in front of that little golden stream that was flowing in spurts, as if it were trying to mock me, I felt the blood rise to my head, and a lot of confused ideas were whirling around in my mind. On the one hand, I thought back to the tests I’d done in Turin, which had gone so well. On the other hand, I knew that varnish is more complicated than you might imagine. Some engineer friends of mine have explained to me that it’s quite difficult to know for certain even how a brick or a coil spring will perform over the long run; well, believe me, I’ve been doing experiments for many years, and I can tell you that varnishes have more in common with us than with bricks. Like us, they’re born, grow old, and die, and when they’re old, they get loopy; and they’re full of tricks when they’re young, too, they’re even capable of lying to you, of pretending to be something they’re not—sick when they’re healthy, healthy when they’re sick. It’s easy enough to say that the same causes should produce the same effects, but this notion was invented by people who don’t do anything themselves but have everything done for them. Try asking a farmer, or a schoolmaster, or a doctor, or, especially, a politician about that: if he’s honest and intelligent, he’ll laugh in your face.”
All of a sudden we were tossed into the air, our heads
slamming into the roof of the vehicle. The driver had come to a closed railroad crossing and swung the wheel abruptly to the right, sending us careening into a ditch, then off the road altogether, and now we were driving parallel to the tracks in a freshly plowed field. He turned around with a joyous look on his face—not to determine whether we were all right but to yell something that I couldn’t understand.
“He says we’ll go faster this way,” Faussone translated, without much conviction. A little while later, the driver proudly pointed out another closed railroad crossing, and gestured as if to say, “Did you see that?” and impulsively he clambered up the slope and put us back on the road. “That’s the Russians for you,” Faussone muttered. “They’re either boring or insane. Fortunately, we’re almost at the airport.”
“My Russian, that technician, was neither boring nor insane. He was just like me, playing his part and trying to do his duty, and only slightly too enamored of his discovery with the viscometer, but I have to admit that, these past few days, I haven’t felt like showing him the brotherly love that the Bible preaches. I needed some time to clarify my thoughts, and I begged him to allow me to conduct a full battery of tests. By this point all three thousand drums from our factory had arrived in their warehouses, numbered chronologically. I asked him if I could retest them, perform a kind of cross-examination—if not all of them, then at least a third. It was a long, tedious job (and in fact it took me fourteen days), but I didn’t see any other way out.
“We prepared test samples eight hours a day, hundreds of test samples. We didn’t even bother testing the rough ones, but placed the smooth ones under the anchovies at night; they all held up. After four or five days, I felt that I could detect a certain pattern, though I couldn’t put my finger on it and it didn’t appear to explain anything: it seemed that there were good days and bad days, meaning smooth days and granulose days. But there wasn’t a clear-cut distinction. On the smooth days there were still granulose samples, and on the granulose days there were a good number of smooth samples.”