by Primo Levi
It is another path that you must take . . .
if you would leave this savage wilderness;
“Or:
That was no path for those with cloaks of lead;
for he and I—he, light; I, with support—
could hardly make it up from spur to spur.
“And also:
. . . he’d see another spur,
saying: ‘That is the one you will grip next,
but try it first to see if it is firm.’
“Forgive me if I get a little carried away. You see, I’m not a Dante expert, and yet, believe me, one of these days an honest man will come along and prove that Dante couldn’t have just invented these founding principles of rock climbing—he must have been here or in a similar place. And when he says:
Remember, reader, if you’ve ever been
caught in the mountains by a mist through which
you only saw as moles see through their skin—1
“I congratulate him! I, for one, never doubted that he was a professional.
“At any rate, we were climbing at a brisk pace, saying and doing foolish things. And so it happened that we reached the pass at six, not at four, near collapse, and with a certain trembling in our knees that wasn’t just from exhaustion. Saverio was the worst off. Luigi and I were already at the top and saw him struggling among the loose rocks fifty meters below us. ‘Now you must cast aside your laziness!’ Luigi had the gall to shout to him. At which the poor boy paused to catch his breath, looked upward like Christ on the Cross, then clambered up to us and breathed out, in a faint voice, the implausible yet utterly correct reply: ‘Go on, for I am strong and confident.’
“When all three of us were at the pass, two unhappy truths became clear. One, that night was falling; and I swear on this bottle that I have never since then (and many years have passed) seen darkness fall in the mountains without feeling an emptiness here in the pit of my stomach. The other truth was that we were trapped.
“From the pass, there was no logical descent to the hut. There was a gentle, rocky valley, with no human trace, and beyond it a terrifying precipice, not vertical, no, but of broken rock and gullies of crumbling earth—one of those places no one ever wants to go because you’ll break your neck without glory or satisfaction.
“With the last light, we pushed on all the way to the edge: you could see the big dark leap of the valley and, if you stuck your nose out, even the light in the hut, almost beneath you. But as for getting down there on our own, we couldn’t even consider it; we sat there and started shouting. We took turns. Saverio shouted and prayed. Luigi shouted and cursed. I just shouted. We shouted until we were hoarse.
“Toward midnight, the light in the hut split into two lights, and one of the two blinked three times. It was a signal: we shouted three times in response. At that, a faraway voice called, ‘We’re coming,’ and we replied with a cacophony of shouts. The voice asked, ‘Where are you?,’ and we three, without a single match among us, blurted out confused and irrelevant information, all at the same time.
“Our rescuers, poor devils, cursed as they climbed, and stopped now and then to sing, drink, and laugh loudly. They weren’t very enthusiastic. Many years later, I also happened to be part of a rescue party, so I know exactly how they felt. These expeditions are tedious and dangerous affairs, and in most cases they can only lead to trouble, because no one wants to pay for the emergency supplies—least of all the rescued, who are rarely solvent.
“They reached us at around two in the morning; and here I must tell you that, on top of everything else, they were members of the border patrol. Once they’d found us, a signal was sent to the valley with a flashlight. ‘Who are they?’ a voice asked from below. ‘It’s just three whiny gagnô’ was the fierce reply, in dialect. Then, turning to us, ‘Is this what they teach you in school?’
“After that, they tied us up like salami and lowered us down to the valley without talking to us but stopping often to drink, and curse, and guffaw among themselves.
“Pass me the bottle, please.”
I passed him the bottle and asked him what a gagnô was.
“Gagnô,” he said, “means child, but it’s a word loaded with mockery. Second-grade kids say it to first graders.
“That’s how I started. It’s not a story to be proud of, you might say. And I’m not. But I’m sure that even this foolish adventure was useful to me later. These are things that make your back broad, which isn’t something Nature gives everyone. I read somewhere—and the person who wrote this was not a mountaineer but a sailor—that the sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the opportunity to feel strong. Now, I don’t know much about the sea, but I do know that that’s the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions—facing blind, deaf stone, alone—with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head. . . . But, excuse me, that’s another story. The one I told you ends like this. They called me ‘whiny gagnô’ for years. Some people still do and, I assure you, I don’t mind at all.”
He drank and silently busied himself with the complex rituals of a pipe smoker.
“I, too, started with an extremely foolish act,” a voice interjected at this point, and then we noticed that there were no longer four of us but five at the table. The voice had come from a man who, in the dim light, appeared to be thin, balding at the temples, with a sharp face furrowed by shifting wrinkles. He told his story at an uneven pace, swallowing his words and leaving sentences incomplete, as if his tongue had difficulty following the thread of his thoughts; at other times he struggled to find the words and would stop as if under a spell.
“There were three of us, too, but not so young—in our twenties. One was Antonio, and I wouldn’t want to say much about him, nor would I know how to. He was a fine, handsome youth, smart, sensitive, tenacious, and bold, but with something in him that was elusive, dark, wild. We were at that age when you have the need and the instinct and the immodesty to inflict on others everything that is seething in your head and elsewhere; it’s an age that can last a long time, but ends at the first compromise. Yet with him, even at that age, nothing had slipped out of his wrapping of restraint; nothing escaped from his inner world—though we sensed it to be rich and dense—except some rare allusion dramatically cut short. He was like a cat, if I may put it this way, whom you live with for years but who never allows you to get under his sacred skin.
“The third was Carlo, our leader. He is dead; it’s best to say it right away, because one can’t help speaking in a different way of the dead than of the living. He died in a way that suited him, not in the mountains, but the way one dies in the mountains. Doing what he had to do: not the kind of duty imposed by someone else, or by the state, but the kind that one chooses for oneself. He would have put it differently, called it ‘reaching the end of the line,’ for example, because he didn’t like big words, or, for that matter, words.
“He was the kind of boy who doesn’t study for seven months, who is known as a rebel and a dunce, and then in the eighth month he absorbs all the courses as if they were water and comes through with straight As. He spent the summer as a shepherd—not a shepherd of souls, no, a shepherd of sheep, and not to show off or to be eccentric but happily, for love of the earth and the grass. And in the winter, whenever he got restless, he would tie his skis to his bicycle and ‘go up’ alone, with no money, only an artichoke in one pocket and the other full of salad. He would come back in the evening or maybe the following day, having slept who knows where, and the more storms and hunger he had endured, the happier and healthier he was. When I met him, he already had a considerable mountaineering career behind him, while I was still a novice. But he was reluctant to talk about it: he wasn’t the type—which I respect, because I’m like that, too—who goes into the mountains to be able to tell a story. On the other
hand, it was as if no one had taught him how to speak, just as no one had taught him how to ski: because he spoke the way nobody speaks, he voiced only the essence of things.
“He seemed to be made of steel. If necessary, he could carry a backpack that weighed thirty kilos as if it were nothing, but usually he traveled without a pack: his pockets were enough. Besides the greens, they held a piece of bread, a pocketknife, sometimes the Alpine Club guidebook, and always a spool of wire for emergency repairs. He could walk for two days without eating, or eat three meals in one sitting and then be off. Once, I saw him at three thousand meters in February, in the sleet, bare-chested, eating calmly, a spectacle so upsetting to two men nearby that it turned their stomachs. I have a picture at home of the whole scene.”
He paused, as if to catch his breath. People from the other tables had gone to bed: in the sudden silence we distinctly heard the deep roar of a serac, like the bones of a giant trying in vain to turn over in his bed of rock.
“I beg your pardon. I’m no longer young, and I know that it’s a desperate endeavor to clothe a man in words. This one in particular. A man like this, when he’s dead, is dead forever. He’s not the kind you tell stories about or build monuments to; he’s all in his actions and, once those are over, nothing remains—nothing but, precisely, words. So, every time I try to talk about him, to bring him back to life, as I’m doing now, I feel a great sadness, an emptiness, as if I were on a cliff, and I have to be silent, or else drink.”
He was silent, drank, and continued.
“So one Saturday morning in February Carlo came to us. ‘Tomorrow, eh?’ he said. In his language, what he meant was that, since the weather was good, we could leave the next day for the winter ascent of the Tooth of M., which we had been planning for a while.
“I won’t give you all the technical details. I’ll tell you, briefly, that we left the following morning, not too early (Carlo didn’t like watches—he felt their tacit, continuous warning as an arbitrary intrusion); that we plunged boldly into the fog; that we came out the other side at around one in the afternoon, the sun was shining, and we were on the ridge of the wrong mountain.
“Antonio said that we could go down a hundred meters or so, cross along the mountainside, and climb back up the next mountain. I, who was the most cautious and the least able, said that, while we were at it, we could just as well continue along the ridge and arrive at a different peak—it was only forty meters lower than the other one anyway—and be satisfied with that. Carlo, in perfect bad faith, said with a few harsh, cackling syllables that my proposal was fine but, then again, ‘by the easy northwest ridge’ we could reach the Tooth of M. in half an hour; and that it wasn’t worth being twenty-one if you didn’t allow yourself the luxury of taking the wrong path.
“‘The easy northwest ridge’ was described rock by rock in the battered guidebook that Carlo carried in his pocket, along with the wire I mentioned. He took this guidebook along not because he believed in it but for the exact opposite reason. He rejected it because he perceived it, too, as a constraint, and not just any constraint but a bastard creature, a detestable hybrid of snow and rock and paper. He took it with him into the mountains to scorn it, delighted if he could catch it in error, even if that error was to his own detriment and that of his climbing companions.
“The easy northwest ridge was truly easy, in fact elementary, in the summer, but the conditions we found that day were difficult. The rocks were wet on the side that faced the sun and glazed with ice on the side in the shade; between one rock spike and the next were pockets of wet snow where we sank up to our shoulders. We arrived at the right peak at five, two of us dragging ourselves pitifully, while Carlo was seized by a sinister hilarity that I found slightly irritating.
“‘How will we get down?’
“‘We’ll figure it out,’ Carlo said, adding mysteriously, ‘The worst thing that happens is we taste bear meat.’
“Well, we tasted it, bear meat, in abundance, during the course of that night, the longest of my climbing career. It took us two hours to descend, feebly assisted by the rope. I’m sure you know what an infernal instrument a frozen rope is: ours had become a stiff, evil tangle that got caught on all the outcrops and clanged against the rock like a steel cable. At seven, we reached the shore of a small frozen lake. It was dark.
“We ate the little we had left, built a useless wall of stones to shelter us from the wind, and lay down on the ground to sleep, huddled side by side. We took turns—the man in the middle slept while the others acted as a buffer. For some reason I can’t explain, our watches had stopped—perhaps because we had forgotten to wind them—and without watches we felt as if time, too, had frozen. We stood up now and then to get our circulation going, and it was always the same: the wind was always blowing, there was always a semblance of moon, always in the same spot in the sky, and in front of the moon a fantastic cavalcade of ragged clouds, always the same. We had taken off our shoes, and put our feet in our backpacks. At the first ghostly light, which seemed to radiate not from the sky but from the snow, we got up, our limbs numb and our eyes glazed from sleeplessness, hunger, and darkness, and found our shoes so frozen that, when struck, they rang like bells. In order to put them on we had to sit on them for half an hour, as if we were hatching eggs.
“But we returned to the valley on our own: and when the innkeeper asked us, chuckling, how it had gone, all the while stealing glances at our two-day stubble, we answered without hesitation that it had been a great outing, paid the bill, and left without losing our composure.
“That was bear meat. Now, you must believe me, gentlemen, many years have passed, and I regret having eaten so little of it. I think and hope that each of you has gleaned from life what I have—a certain measure of ease, respect, love, and success. Well, I’ll tell you the truth, none of these things, not even remotely, has the taste of bear meat: the taste of being strong and free, which means free to make mistakes; the taste of feeling young in the mountains, of being your own master, which means master of the world.
“And, trust me, I am grateful to Carlo for having deliberately got us into trouble, for the night he made us spend, and for the various enterprises, senseless only on the surface, that he involved us in later on, and then for various others, not in the mountains, which I got into on my own, by following his doctrine. He was a young man full of earthly vigor who had a wisdom of his own, and may the earth in which he rests, not far from here, lie light on his bones, and bring the news, each year, of the return of the sun and of the frost.”
The second narrator fell silent, and he seemed to me to be looking with some embarrassment toward the two young men, as if afraid that he had disturbed or offended them; then he filled his glass but did not drink. His last words had roused in me a rare echo, as if I had heard them somewhere before. And, in fact, I found almost those exact words in a book that is dear to me, by the same sailor, cited by the first man, who had written of the gifts of the sea.
Il Mondo, August 29, 1961
1. These three lines are from Purgatory Canto XVII; the verses quoted above and below are from Inferno Canto XXIV.
Preface to the German Edition of If This Is a Man
And thus we have finished. I am glad, and satisfied with the result, and grateful to you, and at the same time a little sad. You see, this is the only book I have written, and now that we have finished transplanting it into German I feel like a father whose son has come of age and leaves, and no longer needs his care.
But it’s not just this. You may have already noticed that the Lager, and writing about the Lager, was an ordeal that changed me deeply; it has given me maturity and a reason to live. Perhaps it is presumption, but here, today, I, 174517, can speak to the Germans through you, remind them of what they did, and tell them, “I am alive, and I would like to understand you so that I can judge you.”
I don’t think a man’s life necessarily has a specific purpose, but if I think of my own life and the purposes I have set
for myself, there is only one among them that I can identify consciously and precisely: to bear witness, to make my voice heard by the German people, to “talk back” to the SS of the truss, to the Kapo who wiped his hand on my shoulder, to Dr. Pannwitz, to the men who hanged the Last One, and to their heirs.
I am sure that you have not misinterpreted me. I have never harbored any hatred toward the German people, and, if I had, I would be cured of it now that I have come to know you. I cannot understand, I cannot bear to see a man judged not for who he is but for the group he happens to belong to. On the contrary, I am aware, since I got to know Thomas Mann, since I learned a little German (and I learned it in the Lager!), that in Germany there is something of value, that Germany, asleep today, is pregnant, is a nursery. It is, at the same time, a danger and a hope for Europe.
But I can’t say that I understand the Germans. Now, something that one does not understand becomes a sore point, a sharp pain, a permanent itch that asks to be satisfied. I hope that this book will have some kind of echo in Germany: not only because of my ambitions but also because the nature of this echo will perhaps allow me to understand the Germans better and to soothe this itch.
Preface to the German edition of If This Is a Man,
published by Fischer Verlag in 1961
Controversial Diary of a Young Pathologist
The presentation to the Turinese public of the diary of Renzo Tomatis, published by Einaudi under the title Il laboratorio (The Laboratory), has given rise to a controversial incident: members of university medical circles, wrongly or rightly, have recognized themselves or their teachers in the characters of the diary, and have protested Tomatis’s harsh verdict on the Italian academic environment.