by Primo Levi
We had arrived at the airport; our escort said goodbye to us, spun the vehicle around with a loud screech of the tires—as if he were in an extraordinary rush—and sped away. Faussone, his gaze following the van, which flew off between two curtains of mud, grumbled, “The mother of fools is always pregnant, even out here.” Then he turned back to me: “Sorry, but could you hold off on telling the rest of your story for a minute? I want to hear it, but we have to go through customs now. I’m interested, because I once had to deal with a crane that broke down on certain days and on other days didn’t. Later we figured it out—it wasn’t anything unusual, just the humidity.”
We got in the line for customs, but right away a little middle-aged woman who spoke decent English came over, and took us to the front of the line without anyone protesting. I was astonished, but Faussone explained that we had been recognized as foreigners; in fact, the factory might have called ahead to alert them to our presence. We went through in a second—we could have smuggled out a machine gun or a kilo of heroin. The only delay was when the customs officer asked me whether I had any books. I had one, written in English, about the life of dolphins, and the officer, perplexed, asked me why I had it, where I’d bought it, and whether I was English and an expert in fish. I wasn’t? Then how did it come into my possession, and why did I want to take it to Italy? After listening to my responses, he consulted with one of his superiors, and then let me pass.
The airplane was already on the runway, prepared for takeoff, and almost every seat was filled; it was a small turboprop, with a cozy interior. There were entire families, evidently peasants: children sleeping in their mothers’ arms; baskets of fruits and vegetables all over the place, and in one corner three live chickens tied together by the legs. There was no partition separating the pilot’s cabin from the passenger area, or it had been removed; the two pilots, waiting to receive the signal for takeoff, were nibbling on sunflower seeds and chatting with the stewardess and—by radio—with someone in the control tower. The stewardess was a beautiful girl, very young, compact and pale; she wasn’t in uniform, but wore a little black dress and a violet shawl wrapped casually around her shoulders. After a while she glanced at her watch, came over to the passengers, and greeted two or three she knew; then she announced that her name was Vyera Filíppovna and she was our stewardess. She spoke with a soft voice, in a familiar manner, forgoing the mechanical intonation used by so many of her colleagues. She continued, saying that we’d take off in just a few minutes, or maybe half an hour, and that the flight would last an hour and a half or maybe two. Would we please fasten our seat belts, and refrain from smoking until takeoff? From her handbag she took out a bundle of long plastic envelopes and said, “If you have a fountain pen in your pocket, please drop it in here.”
“Why?” asked one passenger. “Isn’t this aircraft pressurized?”
“Yes, it’s somewhat pressurized, comrade; but follow my advice just the same. Besides, everyone knows that fountain pens often leak, even on the ground.”
The airplane took off, and I resumed my story.
“As I was saying, there were, roughly speaking, good days and bad days; and in general the test samples done in the morning were inferior to those done in the afternoon. I spent the days doing the test samples, and the evenings thinking about them, and not reaching any conclusions. When they called me from Turin to find out how things were going, I’d turn red with shame—I made promises, I delayed, and I felt as if I were rowing, I mean, rowing a boat tied to an anchor, slaving away like a dog and not advancing an inch. I thought about it all evening, and into the night, because I couldn’t sleep; once in a while I’d turn on the light and start reading the book about dolphins to pass the time.
“One night, instead of reading my book, I started to reread my diary. It’s not really a diary—it’s just notes that I took every day, a habit that everyone who does somewhat complicated work develops, especially as the years pass and you start to mistrust your memory. So as not to make anyone suspicious, I didn’t write during the day, but I put down my notes and observations in the evening, as soon as I got back to my room—which, by the way, was really depressing. But rereading the diary was even more depressing, because truly nothing constructive came of it. There was a pattern, but it couldn’t have been more than a coincidence: the worst days were the ones on which Ms. Kondratova showed up—yes, the woman with the children and husband who died in the war, remember? Perhaps it was the misfortunes she had suffered, though as a matter of fact that poor woman didn’t just get on my nerves, but on everyone else’s. I had noted what days she came by, because she was the person handling the visa issue, or, rather, she should have been handling it, but she was too busy telling me about her woes—both ancient and recent—and distracting me from my work. She also teased me about the anchovies; I don’t think she was mean, perhaps she didn’t even realize that I was being held personally accountable, but she certainly wasn’t someone who was lovely to be around. In any case, I don’t believe in curses, and I refuse to accept the notion that Kondratova’s misfortunes could become lumps in the varnish. Besides, she didn’t touch anything with her hands and she didn’t come every day. But when she did come she arrived early, and the first thing she did was scold everyone in the laboratory because, she said, it wasn’t clean enough.
“It was this question of cleanliness that put me on the right path. It’s true enough that night brings counsel, but only if you don’t sleep well, and if your head doesn’t go on vacation but keeps churning. That night I seemed to be at the movies and they were showing a terrible film: besides being terrible, it was also malfunctioning. It kept stalling and starting all over again, and the first character who came on the screen was Ms. Kondratova. She entered the laboratory, greeted me, made her usual complaints about the cleanliness, and then the film snapped. And what happened next? Well, after who knows how many interruptions, the scene unfolded for a few more frames and I saw the woman send one of the girls to get some cleaning rags; then I saw a close-up of the rags, and some of them weren’t rags but a thin white fabric that looked like one of those hospital bandages. You know how it is—it’s not that the dream was some kind of miracle, it’s likely that I had actually witnessed the scene but was distracted, maybe I was thinking of something else, or Ms. Kondratova was telling me the story of Leningrad and the siege. I must have stored the memory without realizing it.
“The next morning, Ms. Kondratova wasn’t there. I acted as if everything were normal, and headed immediately to the chest containing the rags. They were bandages all right, bandages and scraps. Relying on gestures, persistence, and intuition, I figured out from the technician’s explanations that these were medical supplies that had not passed inspection. Clearly the man was playing dumb, taking advantage of our language problems; it didn’t take me very long to understand that the stuff had been obtained illegally, perhaps through bartering or from friends. Perhaps the monthly shipment of rags was missing or late, and he had made do—with the best of intentions, naturally.
“It was a sunny day, the first sunny day after a week of clouds; to be honest, I think that if the sun had come out before then, I would have figured out sooner what had happened with the granulose test samples. I took a rag out of the chest and shook it two or three times; a moment later, in the opposite corner of the laboratory, an almost invisible ray of sunlight was filled with tiny luminous particles, which flickered like fireflies in May. Now I should tell you (though perhaps I already have) that varnish is sensitive, especially when it comes to hair, or really anything that flies through the air; a colleague of mine once had to pay a small fortune to get a local property owner to chop down a row of poplar trees six hundred meters from the factory, because otherwise, in May, those lovely tufts, which carry seeds in them and fly great distances, would end up in the batches of varnish during the milling phase, and would ruin them. Mosquito nets and fly catchers didn’t help at all, because the tufts entered through every crack in the wind
ows, they collected overnight in hard-to-reach places, and in the morning, as soon as the ventilation fans got going, they started twirling through the air like crazy. And I once had a bad experience with fruit flies. I’m not sure whether you know this, but scientists love fruit flies because they have very large chromosomes; in fact, it seems that almost everything we know today about heredity, biologists learned from the bodies of these flies, crossbreeding them with one another in every possible manner, shredding them, injecting them, starving them, and giving them strange things to eat—so, you see, showing off can often lead to trouble. Drosophila, as they’re called, are beautiful, with red eyes, they’re just three millimeters long, and they don’t harm anyone—in fact, maybe against their will, they’ve done us a lot of good.
“Those little creatures love vinegar, but I couldn’t tell you why; to be precise, they like acetic acid, which is in vinegar. They can smell it from impossible distances, they come from every direction like a cloud, for instance on must, which actually does contain traces of acetic acid. If they actually find an open container of vinegar they’re like drunks, they fly in very tight circles around the top, and often they end up inside it and drown.”
“Yep,” said Faussone. “Curiosity killed the cat.”
“As for smell—and that’s a figure of speech, because they don’t have noses, they detect scent with their antennae—but when it comes to smell, they’re superior to us, and to dogs, too, because they smell the acid even when it’s diluted, for instance in ethyl or butyl acetate, which are solvents of nitro paints. We once had a nitro nail polish of an unusual color, in fact, it had taken us two days to get the color right, and we began passing it through the three-cylinder mill. And I couldn’t say why—perhaps it was their mating season—but either they were hungrier than usual or maybe word had got around, but they arrived in swarms, came to rest on the cylinders while they were spinning, and were ground into the polish. We realized this only at the end of the process, and there was no way to filter it, so in order to avoid throwing out the whole batch, we had to recycle it in an anti-rust paint, which came out a nice pinkish color. Anyway, sorry for the digression.
“So at this point I finally felt that I was back in business. I explained to the technician my hypothesis, by now a conviction, which I held so firmly that I was about to ask permission to telephone the factory in Italy with the news. But the technician didn’t give in: with his own eyes he had seen a number of different varnish specimens, just taken from the drums, that flowed out of the viscometer in spurts. How would there have been time for these to pluck, out of the air, filaments from the rags? For him it was clear: the filaments might or might not have something to do with it, but the lumps were already present in the drums in the shipment.
“I had to demonstrate to him (and also to myself) that it wasn’t true, that there was a filament in every lump. Did they have a microscope? They had one, an unsophisticated model that magnified only by a factor of two hundred, but that was enough for what I wanted to see. It also had a polarizer and an analyzer.”
Faussone interrupted me: “Hold on a sec. When I was telling you stories about my line of work, you have to admit, I was never pretentious. I realize that this is a happy day for you, but even so, that’s no reason to get all pretentious. You need to tell the story in a way that a person can understand, otherwise it’s just no fun. Or have you already crossed over to the other side—one of those writers who make the reader do all the work, especially now that he has already paid for the book?”
He was right. I’d allowed myself to get carried away. On the other hand, I was in a hurry to finish my story, because Vyera Filíppovna had already come back through the cabin to announce that she thought we’d be landing in Moscow in about twenty or thirty minutes. So I limited myself to explaining to him that there are long molecules and short molecules; that only long molecules, whether they’re man-made or occurring in nature, can form strong filaments; that the molecules in these filaments, whether they’re wool, cotton, nylon, silk, or whatever, are oriented lengthwise, and in lines that are roughly parallel; and that the polarizer and the analyzer are instruments that allow you to observe this parallelism, even in a piece of filament that’s barely visible under a microscope. If the molecules are oriented—that is, if it’s a fiber—then you see beautiful colors, but if they’re scattered all over the place, you don’t see a thing. Faussone let out a grunt, indicating that I could continue.
“I also found, in a drawer, some beautiful glass teaspoons, the kind used for precise measurements—I wanted to demonstrate to the technician that there was a thread inside every lump that came out of the viscometer, and that where there weren’t threads, there weren’t lumps. I had them clean everything with wet rags, and remove the chest of old rags, and in the afternoon I began my hunt: I needed to catch the lump with the teaspoon right out of the air, as it fell from the viscometer, and hold it under the microscope. It could make for a good sport, I think, a type of skeet shooting you could do at home; but it wasn’t that fun while being watched by four or five pairs of skeptical eyes. I had no success in the first ten or twenty minutes; I kept getting there too late, after the lump had already fallen, or, overly anxious, I’d stick the teaspoon under an imaginary lump. Then I learned that it was important to sit in a comfortable position, use strong lighting, and hold the teaspoon very close to the flow of varnish. The first time I successfully captured a lump, I carried it over to the microscope, and there was the filament. I compared it with a filament I’d removed from one of the bandages, and, sure enough, they were identical, both cotton.
“The next day, which was yesterday, I got good at it, and I taught the trick to one of the girls. There was no doubt about it, each lump contained a filament. The filaments were like a fifth column in the anchovies’ attack on the varnish, because cotton fibers are porous, so they functioned as a little channel—but the Russians didn’t request any further analysis. They signed my emancipation proclamation and sent me off with an order for a new shipment of varnish in my pocket. By the way—despite the fact that I have a very poor knowledge of Russian, I did understand that, with some pretext or another, they would have given me the order in any case, because the German varnish that Ms. Kondratova had mentioned last month was apparently behaving just like ours, at least with respect to lumps and anchovies. And it turned out that the technician’s discovery, which had caused me so much concern, had an equally ridiculous cause: between measurements, instead of washing the viscometer with cleaning solvent and then drying it, they were cleaning it directly with the rags from the chest, meaning that, as far as the lumps were concerned, the viscometer itself was the main source of infection.”
We landed in Moscow, retrieved our baggage, and boarded the shuttle bus that was to take us to our hotel in town. I was disappointed by my effort to match Faussone: he had listened to my entire story with his typically blank countenance, barely interrupting me or asking any questions. But he must have been deep in thought, because, after a long silence, he said:
“So you really want to close up shop? I’m sorry, but I’d think about it a little more if I were you. See, it’s a real blessing to work with your hands; you can size things up and see what you’re worth. You make a mistake, you correct it, and the next time you don’t make the same mistake. But you’re older than me, and maybe, over the course of your life, you’ve already seen enough.”
. . . What was needed of course was Captain MacWhirr. Directly I perceived him I could see that he was the man for the situation. I don’t mean to say that I ever saw Captain MacWhirr in the flesh, or had ever come in contact with his literal mind and his dauntless temperament. MacWhirr is not an acquaintance of a few hours, or a few weeks, or a few months. He is the product of twenty years of life. My own life. Conscious invention had little to do with him. If it is true that Captain MacWhirr never walked and breathed on this earth (which I find for my part extremely difficult to believe) I can also assure my readers that he
is perfectly authentic.
—JOSEPH CONRAD, FROM THE
AUTHOR’S NOTE TO TYPHOON
Translator’s Afterword
Work is fiction’s greatest blind spot. Work occupies more of our hours than sleep, love, and family, yet it’s rare to find a novel that takes as its main subject the daily routines, obligations, and petty indignities that consume most of our lives. (Novels about writers don’t count.) Work tends to be a secondary consideration, useful for providing character detail, a plot point, or a setting, and little more. It has been this way since the invention of the form. The earliest novels, written by people wealthy enough not to have to work, tended to be about the lives of people wealthy enough not to have to work. The subject of work has been largely avoided ever since, as if it is seen as pedestrian, tedious, even distasteful. Novels are about what happens after punch-out.
Primo Levi’s The Wrench (La chiave a stella) is a glorious exception to this rule. It is an unapologetic ode to the joys, and frustrations, of labor. It is a celebration of diligence, exertion, and the pride required to doing a job well, no matter what job—whether it’s erecting a derrick, designing a varnish to coat the interior of tin cans, or even combining words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs.
The translation of Levi’s novel, as it turned out, was one of the most challenging literary jobs I’ve had—not nearly as difficult as, say, rigging a gantry crane, but perhaps on the order of assembling a small truss tower, or at least just as time-consuming. One difficulty was posed by Faussone’s “particular language,” as clunky as a bag of hammers and screwdrivers, with its run-on sentences, liberal use of vernacular terms, phrases drawn from obscure regional dialects, and frequent divagations. But the greater challenge was his heavy use of industrial vocabulary: the cofferdams, ball bearings, mandrels, autogenous welding, coke forges, and bevel gears that, as Levi writes, “are effectively the heroes of the stories.”