The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  The Courtyard of the Beast was vast, and covered by a vault that was still almost undamaged; the only light that penetrated was what filtered through the gaps in the roof. It took some time for our eyes to get accustomed to the semi-darkness. We then saw that we were at the edge of an arena, more or less elliptical in shape; around it, in place of tiers of seats, innumerable boxes were arranged, in four or five rows, supported and separated by a forest of columns of stone or gilded wood. The columns were only approximately vertical, and the rows did not extend along horizontal lines, so the boxes weren’t all the same; some were tall and narrow, others wide and low (some so low that a man would have been able to enter only by crawling on his belly). Opposite us, an entire area was sharply tilted, like a geological fault, or a fragment of a bee’s hive that has been removed and reinserted at an angle.

  We lingered for a long time trying to understand how a structure like that could not only remain standing for so many centuries but even exist. As we got used to the half-light, we perceived that some of the columns closest to us exhibited an irritating phenomenon, difficult to express here in words—and in fact at the moment itself we had observed to one another how impossible it was to describe what our eyes were seeing. It would certainly be easier to show in a drawing. We felt this phenomenon as an insolence, a challenge to our reason—something that had no right to exist, yet existed. In their lower part, the columns let you glimpse, through the gaps between them, the rear of the boxes, painted in festoons of black and ochre; but as your gaze moved upward, their outlines changed function, so that the gaps became columns and the columns became gaps, and through these gaps you could see the opaque sky of the lagoon. We tried in vain, the Torreses and ourselves, to get to the bottom of this absurd illusion, which vanished if we approached but imposed itself with the heavy evidence of concrete things if observed from a distance of a few dozen meters. Claudia took some photographs, but without confidence; the light was too dim.

  The pit of the arena appeared overgrown by thick, low vegetation. Agustín kept us on the sides, and had us climb to the top of a pile of ruins; then, without speaking, he pointed out a dark form that was rustling amid the bushes. It was a massive brown animal, somewhat taller and larger than a water buffalo; in the silence we could hear its deep, harsh breathing, and the tearing and crushing of the bushes that it ripped up as it fed. One of us, perhaps I myself, asked in bewilderment, “What is that?” Immediately Agustín made a sign to be quiet, but the beast must have heard, because it raised its head and gave a loud snort, at which a flight of birds rose in agitation from the boxes. The beast bellowed, shook itself, and took off at a run, straight ahead, as if it were charging an invisible enemy—perhaps the senselessness, the impossibility of the scene in which it was confined. We looked around: the pit had several openings, but they were narrow and obstructed. The beast would not be able to get through any of them.

  It galloped more and more violently, smashing bushes and branches in its path; the ground echoed to the triple rhythm of its hooves, and we could hear fragments of capitals break off the columns and fall. The beast headed for one of the openings, the widest and least obstructed by debris. It butted against the doorposts, as if, blinded with rage, it hadn’t seen them; it got caught for a moment, and, emitting a roar of pain, drew back; the crash sent the stone architrave tumbling down, and the opening appeared narrower than before, half blocked by fallen stones. Claudia clutched my arm tensely: “It’s a prisoner of itself. It’s closing off all the ways out.”

  We emerged into the afternoon light, which seemed to us dazzling. Signora Torres pointed out scaly gray-brown lizards nesting in the cracks in the stone; others lay motionless in the veiled sun, like tiny bronzes. If disturbed, they fled rapidly to their dens, or curled up like armadillos, and in that form, reduced to small, compact discs, fell into emptiness.

  Outside the temple a crowd of gaunt beggars had gathered, men and women, with a threatening aspect. A short distance away, some had erected low black tents, and were squatting there, sheltered from the sun. They stared at us with an insolent and insistent curiosity, but did not say a word.

  “They’re waiting for the beast,” said Agustín. “They’re waiting for it to come out. They’ve been coming every evening, forever; they spend the night here, and in the tents they have knives. They’ve been waiting for as long as the temple has existed. When the beast comes out, they will kill it and eat it, and then the world will be restored. But the beast will never come out.”

  Disphylaxis

  Amelia knew that not all hours of the day lend themselves equally well to studying. For her it was the early morning and late afternoon until dinner; then no more, she felt she could absorb no more. But the exam was important, the most important of this two-year period, and she couldn’t waste the evening before; she would try to use it in the best possible way, combining some review with a small good deed.

  Grandmother Letizia hardly ever went out now; she had few occasions to talk, and yet she needed to talk, and her contacts were limited to the neighborhood shopkeepers, uncultured people, of suspect origins. At home, she seldom opened her mouth because she was afraid of repeating herself, and in fact she did repeat herself, always returning to the same subjects, to the world of her youth, so tranquil, reasonable, and orderly. Well, these were just the subjects that interested Amelia: certain things were not found in textbooks.

  Her grandmother, then, would be happy to talk about them. All old people are like that; the world around them holds little interest, it disturbs them, they don’t understand it, it feels hostile, and so their memory doesn’t record it. That’s why they remember long-ago events and not recent ones; it’s not that they’ve grown rigid—it’s self-defense. Their true world is the world of their youth, and it’s good by definition, “the good old days,” even if it did give mankind two world wars.

  Amelia was essentially human in terms of her race, and she had no trouble communicating with Grandma Letizia. Not so with her paternal grandmother, who had died many years earlier. Amelia recalled her as a nightmare. During a trip to the Val di Lanzo in the early years of the disphylaxis, when the controls were still rudimentary, Grandma Gianna’s mother had been imprudent and had been inseminated by pollen from a larch: that was how Grandma Gianna was born. Poor woman, it wasn’t her fault, but as Amelia remembered her she wasn’t very likable.

  It was luck that human heredity had dominated—it’s generally the rule, in any case—yet anyone would have realized that she was a disphylactic: she had rough, scaly dark skin, and greenish hair, which in autumn turned yellow-gold and in winter fell out, leaving her bald; fortunately it grew back quickly in the spring. She talked in a faint voice, almost a whisper, and with irritating slowness. It was incredible that she had found a husband, maybe it was simply because of her legendary domestic virtues.

  “Ah yes, the disphylaxis. You, child, may think what you like about it. I myself have always said that when one has to die, it’s because God has decided, and one mustn’t oppose His will. That business of transplants I never understood well, from the beginning: eyes, then kidneys, then the liver . . . and, at the first sign of rejection, down goes that thingamajig, what’s it called, I’ve never been good at names, but that I don’t remember because I don’t want to remember.”

  “Hypostenone,” Amelia suggested.

  “Hypostenone, yes, and so all the transplants succeeded. At all the pharmacists’, a thousand lire a bottle. They dispensed it like nothing, even to people who had false teeth and ladies who had had their noses fixed. They had tried it on mice, and it was harmless. Safe, harmless—just like defoliants, the ones in that country . . . Harmless, but those know-it-alls didn’t know what the farmers know, that nature is like a short blanket, if you pull it in one direction . . .”

  This wasn’t what interested Amelia: she would have liked to know other things, about how people lived before, when there were no surprises in the obstetric wards and all the cats had four legs
; she found it difficult to imagine that time. Orderly, yes, but perhaps a little insipid; it was almost impossible to make comparisons. As for the story of hypostenone, even children knew that: it was indestructible, but no one had realized that until it was too late. It passed from excrement to the sewers and then the sea, from the sea to the fish and the birds; it flew through the air, fell with the rain, seeped into milk, bread, and wine. Now the world was full of it, and all immune defenses had broken down. It was as if living nature had lost its distrust: no transplant was rejected, but at the same time all vaccines and serums had lost their power, and the old scourges—smallpox, rabies, cholera—had returned.

  And so even the immune defenses that had once impeded cross-breeding between different species were weak or nonexistent; nothing prevented you from having the eyes of an eagle implanted or the stomach of an ostrich, or maybe a pair of tuna gills so you could go hunting underwater, but, in exchange, any seed—animal, vegetable, or human—that the wind or the water or some accident brought in contact with any ovum had a good possibility of causing the conception of a hybrid. All women of childbearing age had to be on their guard. It was an old story. Amelia was sleepy, she said good night to her grandmother, laid out her things for the next day, and went to bed. She was a good sleeper; she had often thought that her fondness for sleep was due to the fact that one-eighth of what flowed through her veins was vegetable lymph. She barely had time to say a mental good night to Fabio before her breathing became deep and regular.

  She had told Fabio over and over that when she was going to take an exam she preferred not to see him, and yet there he was, smiling, efficient, carefully shaved, protective.

  “Just to say good luck; then I’m off to the bank.”

  “Thanks. Now go, okay? I’m already nervous, and you know that even if you don’t mean . . .”

  “I know, I know. I just wanted to see you. Bye, you’ll see, it’ll all be fine.”

  Someone in the bank had spread the rumor that Fabio was one-quarter stickleback. Amelia, discreetly, had done some research at the Bureau of Vital Statistics, and everything had turned out to be normal; but the situation at the Bureau is well-known, and anyway Amelia had no prejudices—sticklebacks are faithful husbands, affectionate fathers, and stubborn defenders of their territory. Better a pinch of stickleback than of certain other beasts. You heard so many stories . . . there might be some truth to them: if a woman wasn’t very clean, and the flea was male, it could spring the trap. On these subjects the Restored Church didn’t joke around: the soul was sacred, and the soul was everywhere, even in month-old embryos, and certainly in individuals who were born, even if they didn’t have much that was human about them. And there were those who said that the condition of women had improved!

  She screwed up her courage and entered the Institute of Modern History. After the sun’s glare, the hall appeared dark: before she could make out the faces, she began to distinguish the masks of antiseptic gauze that everyone wore, the males white, the females bright colors. You went in alphabetical order; she made her way into the corridor to hear what people were saying. A porter came in and called Fissore. Amelia’s name was Forte: her turn would be next. Fissore emerged soon afterward, happy and satisfied: all okay, Mancuso was polite and sensitive; in five minutes he had come through with a 29, not bad. No, there was no trap, he had been questioned on the wars in Uganda, and the person before him on punitive approaches to education. The porter returned and called Amelia.

  Mancuso was in his forties. He was small and nervous, with black eyes and hair, and a sparse, stiff black mustache, too. He spoke so fast that it was hard to follow: you often had to ask him to repeat the questions. He had a sharp, strident little voice, which reminded Amelia of a tape recording played too fast. She sat down, and for some seconds the professor examined her from head to toe, with abrupt jerks of his head, his eyes, and his hands, which played with a pencil; even his nostrils quivered. Then he drew back, settled himself more comfortably in his chair with two flicks of his hips, gave Amelia a broad, cordial smile that, however, vanished in a flash, blinked his eyelids rapidly, and told Amelia to speak on whatever subject she liked. He’s taken with me, Amelia thought, without enthusiasm, and said that she would talk about the disphylaxis. She seemed to see a shadow of opposition pass quickly over Mancuso’s face, but she began her exposition anyway.

  The subject was important to her, and not only for personal reasons; it had always seemed to her unjust that in school, at all levels, it was so little discussed, as if the world before had never existed. How could the young people of today know themselves if they didn’t know their own roots? How could they close themselves to what appeared open to her? Usually at exams she was timid and awkward, but that day she didn’t recognize herself: excited and surprised, she heard her voice describing the fantastic universe of seeds, germs, and enzymes in which man lives without realizing it, the teeming pollen and spores in the air we breathe at every moment, of masculine and feminine powers in the waters of rivers and seas.

  She felt herself blush when she began to speak of the wind in the woods, saturated with countless fertilities, innumerable invisible seeds, of how every seed, inscribed with a fateful message, was cast into the void of sky and sea in search of its consort, bearer of the second mysterious message that would give meaning to the first. Thus for billions of years, from the horsetails of the Carboniferous up to today—no, not to today, to yesterday, to the moment when the iron barrier between species and species had shattered, and it still wasn’t known whether for good or for ill.

  She went into the thorny question of evaluation of the disphylaxis in its moral, religious, and utilitarian aspects, and was about to expound an observation of her own, a comparison between the Mosaic dictates against the abomination of mixing and the recent extremely oppressive laws intended to control the indiscriminate use of the antirejection agents, when she realized that Mancuso wasn’t listening to her. Nor was he looking at her. He was turning around with rapid jerks of his head, and scratching himself here and there with a speedy back-and-forth of his fingers, almost a vibration; at a certain point he dug a nut out of his pocket, crushed it quickly with his teeth, and began to gnaw on it with his incisors. Amelia, overcome by rage, was silent.

  Mancuso, still nibbling on the nut, stared at her questioningly. “Are you finished? Good. Quite good. Are you free tonight? No? A pity. Passed with a 19”—barely. “Come this way. Here’s the exam book. Goodbye.” In order to speak, he had shoved the nut between his cheek and his jaw.

  Amelia took the book and left without saying goodbye. That story about hamsters that was murmured in the corridors must be true. On the threshold she felt tempted to go back into the room and refuse the grade, but then she thought that if she had to take the exam again things could be even worse. She got on the bus, went to the end of the line, and took a path through the woods that she knew well: no one would expect her at home before evening. Mancuso was an ass, about this there was no question. Maybe he had some excuse, maybe the story of the hamster was true, but it’s pointless to go too far with justifications; if a railway worker causes a train to derail, he is brought to trial and not pardoned, even if his grandfather was a goat. We aren’t racists, but to call a donkey a donkey, and a boor a boor isn’t racist, right?

  The path was flat, shady, and solitary, and as she walked she grew calmer. There were flowers along the edges, modest but pretty—primula, forget-me-not, some tiny white strawberry flowers—and Amelia felt drawn to them. It’s not odd to feel attracted to flowers, but she felt attracted in a strange way. Amelia knew herself well, and knew that that way was strange, even though it was common to many men and many women, and not all with the blood of larches in their veins. She thought about it, as she went on walking: they must have been pretty gray, pretty boring, the good old days, when men were attracted only to women, and women only to men.

  Now many were like her; not all, certainly, but, when it came to flowers, plants,
some animals, many young people—at the sight of them, at their odor, hearing their voices or even only a rustling—felt a kindling of desire. Few satisfied it (come on, it wasn’t always easy to satisfy), but, even unsatisfied, that desire—so various, so vivid and subtle—enriched and ennobled them. It was stupid to stop at surfaces, at puritan morality, and count the disphylaxis among the catastrophes. For more than a century humanity had been intoxicated by catastrophic prophecies; nuclear death had not arrived, the energy crisis seemed to have passed, the population explosion was over, and, to the shame of all the prophets, the world was instead becoming another world on the verge of the disphylaxis, which no seer had foretold.

  And it was strange, strange and marvelous, that nature turned upside down had found a coherence. Along with fertility between different species desire had been born; sometimes grotesque and absurd, sometimes impossible, sometimes happy. Like hers: or like that of Graziella, lost with the seagulls. Of course, there was Mancuso with his gnawing (maybe he was only rude), but every year, every day, new species were born, more quickly than names could be found for them by an army of naturalists; some monstrous, others lovely, still others unexpectedly useful, like the milk oaks that grew in the Casentino. Why not hope for the best? Why not trust in a new millenarian selection, in a new man, swift and strong as the tiger, long-lived as the cedar, prudent as the ant?

  She stopped in front of a flowering cherry tree: she caressed its shiny trunk, feeling the sap rise, lightly touched its rubbery nodes, then, looking around, she embraced it tightly, and it seemed to her that the tree responded with a rain of flowers. She shook them off, laughing: “It might be beautiful if what happened to my great-grandmother happened to me!” Well, why not? Was Fabio better, or the cherry tree? Fabio was better, no doubt, one needn’t yield to the impulse of a moment; but at that moment Amelia was aware of a desire that in some way the cherry tree enter her, fructify in her. She reached the clearing and lay down among the ferns, a fern herself, alone, light, and supple in the wind.