by Primo Levi
Dizzying Heat
Of one thing he was certain: he would not let himself get trapped a second time. All true: we live in a democracy, and democracy means participation, participation from the bottom up. But let’s be serious, is this participation? To be nailed to a bench, as hard and uncomfortable as a school bench, in fact it is a school bench; to be in Rome in the humid heat of July, listening to a crazy woman who endlessly repeats the same things that she has already said yesterday, last month, and six months ago, and which, besides, have been printed, illustrated, and televised hundreds of times? Signora Di Pietro is sick, it’s undeniable; she’s neurotic, and it’s plain that at home her husband and children don’t let her speak, so she lets it all out here.
Ettore had lost the thread some time ago. If only he were allowed to light a cigarette! But if we’re the ones to set the bad example . . . He opened the plastic folder in front of him, and began to draw stick figures on a piece of paper, just to keep himself awake. Then he wrote Ettore in italics and, below, in capital letters and in gothic letters. Backward it read “e rotte.” He wrote “e rotte” at the end of the line and saw his hand, as if guided by an automatic device, finish the sentence: Ettore evitava le madame lavative e rotte. Ettore avoided shiftless and fallen ladies.
Ettore was a civilized person, and in a waking state he would not have allowed himself to describe Signora Di Pietro that way: boring yes, but shiftless and fallen never ever; yet it was true that he would happily have avoided her. He checked again, reading from right to left: yes, it was correct. But correct doesn’t mean true; it would be terrible if all reversible sentences were true—they would be oracular pronouncements. And yet . . . and yet, when you read them backward, and they make sense, there is something about them, something magical, revelatory. Even the Latins knew them, and wrote them on sundials: Sator Arepo tenet opera rotas. / In gyrum imus nocte et consumimur igni. (The sower Arepo has as his work the wheels. / We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire.) They’re like horn amulets, or finding a four-leaf clover. You don’t believe in it, but you pick it and hesitate to throw it away. You aren’t sure why, but you never know. It’s a vice; well, yes indeed, I, too, have my vice. I don’t drink, I don’t gamble, I don’t smoke much, but I, too, have my vice, which is less destructive than a lot of others: reading backward. I don’t take heroin. I write reversible sentences—do you have any objections? Eroina motore in Italia—Ai latini erotomani or è (For Latin erotomanes, heroin now is the motor in Italy). Excellent, two sonorous decasyllables, and not completely meaningless.
Signora Di Pietro went on: now she was talking about the fruit and vegetable markets. Ettore, too, went on. In short, amid the doodles and sketches of his neighbors, other maxims flourished: Oimè Roma amore mio (Alas, Rome, my love); and right next to it A Roma fottuta tutto fa mora (In fucking Rome, everything goes bad), which seemed to him appropriate. And then, Ad orbi, broda (For the blind, dishwater), with an obscure meaning, probably sapiential: a peremptory order, like a commandment. E lì varrete terra vile (And there you will be worth vile earth). Remember, man, that you are dust, and to vile dust you will return. Soon, too. But as long as you are on this earth you must gird your loins with determination, and fight like a good soldier: Accavalla denari, tirane dalla vacca (Pile up money, squeeze it from the cow). If you know how to live, the world isn’t bad: you leave on Friday, join Elena in Sperlonga, eat freshly caught fish, forget the office and the subcommittee, and feel like a new man.
It would be terrible if Elena weren’t there. He didn’t feel like marrying her, nor had she ever insisted: they were fine as they were. When you pass forty and are still a bachelor, you have to be careful; maybe you don’t realize it, but certain of your habits could be annoying. For example, what if Elena had been right there, reading what he was writing? Elena, Anele: Essa è leggera, ma regge le asse (She is light, but she holds her ground). È lo senno delle novità, genere negativo nelle donne sole (It is the wisdom of novelties, a negative type in lonely women), although Elena had never been lonely; in fact, wherever she was, she had a talent for soon being the center of a small troop of admirers. But nothing to be said, the agreement between them was clear, no jealousy, two sensible people in mutual good faith, all out in the light of the sun.
Il livido sole, poeta ossesso, ateo, peloso di villi (The livid sun, obsessed atheist poet, shaggy with hairs). He could see it through the half-closed skylight, and it really was livid, obscured by the haze. Shaggy with hairs is, so to speak, hairy, which is a bold image, but poetic. Next to the sentence Ettore drew a sinister black sun, bristling with severed rays, like a sea urchin; then the sea, and himself in it: Ogni marito unico ci nuoti ramingo (May every single husband swim to us, roving).
After Signora Di Pietro, Moretti took the floor, on the subject of the local transportation services. Ettore wrote Ero erto tre ore (I was erect three hours), then erased it. No bragging; on the contrary, that evening he was feeling a little peculiar. Maybe it was because of the heat and humidity. The local transportation services were completely outside his area of expertise; he rose and slipped out, trying not to be noticed, but the president waved to him with ostentatious irony. È mala sorte, ti carbonizzino braci, tetro salame (It’s bad luck, let the coals carbonize you, somber salami). They elected you president? Well, you can stay there, whereas I, on the other hand, am leaving. The president was a bigot and a hypocrite; he had never liked him.
He went down the stairs and out to the parking lot; he gave the usual two hundred lire to the unauthorized attendant, and started the car. There was no one in front of him: yet, who knows why, maybe because he was tired and distracted, he put the car in reverse, and badly scratched the Renault parked next to him, which was really a little too much on an angle. The attendant made a calming motion with his hand and stuck out his lower lip as if to say, “See nothing, know nothing.” He drove home amid the traffic of the Lungotevere, pondering ovisuba, ivisuba (abusivo, abusivi, unauthorized), but without pencil and paper he couldn’t make anything of it. In Sperlonga it was never hot; if only Friday would arrive quickly. O morbidi nei pieni di bromo! (O soft moles full of bromine!) Elena had a mole on her right knee. If a man, or a woman, breathes organic chlorine, he gets chloracne, as at Seveso; does bromacne also exist? Elena had better be careful.
He didn’t feel like eating at the trattoria; he would run into the usual clientele and he had had enough words for that evening. He went home, opened all the windows in the vain hope of creating a little breeze, and dined on two hard-boiled eggs and a salad. He turned on the TV, but immediately turned it off, he didn’t care at all about Games Without Frontiers. He felt a vague unease, as if his brain were frying—maybe he had a slight fever. If not, that business of backing up couldn’t be explained; modesty aside, he was a skillful and attentive driver. It was silly and sad to spend evenings like this, lonely as a dog; and then why a dog? Dogs are never alone; they sniff in corners, and find their companion, male or female, in a moment, by scent. His beard was rough, but he didn’t feel like shaving. In four days, Friday would arrive, and he would leave and no longer be alone.
He had a bad night, populated by unhinged and anguished dreams. The next morning he rose, washed, and picked up the electric razor, but then he touched his cheeks and found them smooth. He felt a wave of distress swelling inside: yesterday the backing up and now the beard . . . Had he shaved the night before? He stood, perplexed, before the mirror, in his undershirt, with his fingers on his cheeks: in the mirror he saw the reflection of the thermos of hot coffee, he turned, grabbed it like a life preserver, and fiddled for some moments with the top, which he wanted to unscrew and instead was screwing tighter. He left it, went to the night table, and looked fearfully at the wristwatch lying on it: if he saw the second hand turning backward, then it would be all over. But no, everything was in order. There was nothing objective, no concrete symptom, it must have been the fault of the heat and humidity. O soci, troverò la causa, la sua: calore vo
rticoso (O companions, I will find the cause, his: dizzying heat). In any case he would be more cautious from now on; he wouldn’t overdo it. It couldn’t be said that even that vice did not present some danger, but, for that matter, In arts it is repose to life: è filo teso per siti strani (It’s a thread stretched through strange sites).
Bridge Builders
Boris had sometimes thought of the old ballad about the giant’s daughter who finds a man in the wood and, surprised and pleased, takes him home to play with. The giant orders her to let him go, telling her that she will only break him.
—ISAK DINESEN, “THE MONKEY,”
IN SEVEN GOTHIC TALES (1934)
Danuta was glad that she was made like the deer and the doe. She was a little sorry about the grass, the flowers, and the leaves she had to eat, but she was happy that she was able to live without extinguishing other lives, which is the fate of the lynx and the wolf. She was careful to go to a different place every day, so that new growth would quickly cover over the empty spaces; as she walked, she avoided trampling the willow, hazelnut, and alder shoots, and she gave a wide berth to the forest trees in order not to wound them. Her father, Brokne, had always behaved like that, too; of her mother she had no memory.
They had a regular place to drink, a deep pool in the stream, shaded at sunset by a row of old oaks that grew on the right bank; the left bank, however, opened onto a clearing where the two could easily lie down, either on their backs, to sleep, or facedown, to drink. Once there had been stumps that poked their backs, but Brokne had pulled them up one by one. Unicorns and minotaurs, shy as shadows, also came to that watering place, but only later, when twilight yields to night. Brokne and Danuta had no enemies, except for the thunder, and the cold in the frigid winters.
Danuta’s favorite meadow was a deep green valley, with thick grass and abundant water; a stream ran along the valley floor, and this was spanned by a stone bridge. Danuta spent long hours thinking about the bridge: in their entire territory, which encircled more than a hundred miles, there was nothing like it. The water couldn’t have excavated it, nor could it have fallen like that from the mountains. Something or someone must have constructed it, with patience, ingenuity, and slimmer hands than hers; she leaned over to see it close up, and never tired of admiring the precision with which the stones had been cut and placed, to form a graceful, regular arc that made Danuta think of a rainbow.
It must have been very old, because the parts exposed to the sun were covered with yellow and black lichen, the parts in the shade with thick moss. Danuta touched it delicately with her finger, but the bridge held up: it really seemed to be made of rock. Once she picked up some stones that seemed to her the right shape and tried to build a similar bridge, but of her size. There was no way; as soon as she put the third rock in place, and let go to grab the fourth, it fell down on her, and sometimes bruised her hands. She would have needed fifteen or twenty hands, one for each stone.
One day she asked Brokne how, when, and by whom the bridge had been built, but Brokne answered irritably that the world is full of mysteries, and if you wanted to solve them all you would no longer digest, you wouldn’t sleep, and you might even go mad. That bridge had always been there; it was beautiful and strange, and so? Stars and flowers are beautiful and strange as well, and if you ask too many questions you end up forgetting that they’re beautiful. He went to feed in another valley; grass was not enough for Brokne, and every so often, unbeknownst to Danuta, he quickly devoured a young poplar or a willow.
On a morning toward the end of summer, Danuta came upon a fallen beech: it couldn’t have been knocked down by lightning, because the sun had been shining for days, and Danuta was sure that she herself hadn’t inadvertently bumped into it. She approached, and saw that it had been cut cleanly: you could see on the ground the whitish disc of the stump, as wide as two of her fingers. As she gazed in astonishment, she heard a rustling, and saw, on the other side of the valley, another beech fall to the ground, disappearing among the neighboring trees. She descended and climbed up again, and saw a little animal fleeing at full speed toward the cliff where the caves were. It was upright and ran on two legs; it threw on the ground a shiny tool that was hindering its course, and ducked into the nearest cave.
Danuta sat beside the cave with her hands outstretched, but the little animal made no sign of coming out. It seemed to her graceful, and it must also be skillful if it had been able to cut down a beech by itself; suddenly Danuta was sure that it had built the bridge. She wanted to be friends, to speak to it, not drive it away. She stuck a finger in the opening of the cave, but she felt a prick and withdrew it immediately; there was a drop of blood on the tip. She waited until dark, then left, but she didn’t tell Brokne about it.
The little creature must have had a great hunger for wood, because in the following days Danuta saw traces of it in various places in the valley. It preferred to cut down the biggest beeches, and you couldn’t understand how it would manage to carry them away. On one of the first cold nights Danuta dreamed that the forest was in flames and she woke with a start; there was no fire but there was the smell of fire, and Danuta saw on the other slope a red glow that pulsed like a star. In the following days, when Danuta listened carefully, she could hear a minute, regular ticking, as when woodpeckers peck at bark, but slower. She tried to get closer to see, but as soon as she moved the noise stopped.
Finally one day Danuta was lucky. The little creature had become less timid, maybe he had got used to Danuta’s presence, and often appeared between one tree and another, but if Danuta made any move to approach he ran away and hid among the rocks or the forest underbrush. Thus Danuta saw him set off toward the clearing at the watering hole; she followed him at a distance, trying not to make too much noise, and when she saw him out in the open she was on him, in two long steps, and had trapped him in the hollow of her hands. He was small but fierce: he had that shiny tool of his with him, and he struck Danuta’s hands two or three times before she managed to pinch it between thumb and index finger and throw it far away.
Now that she had captured him, Danuta realized that she had absolutely no idea what to do with him. She picked him up, holding him between two fingers: he squealed, struggled, and tried to bite. Danuta, hesitant, laughed nervously and attempted to calm him by caressing his head with her finger. She looked around: in the stream there was a little island a couple of her steps away; she leaned over from the bank and set the little creature down there, but, as soon as he was free, he dashed into the current, and would certainly have drowned if Danuta hadn’t hurried to fish him out. Then she brought him to Brokne.
Brokne didn’t know what to do with him, either. He grumbled that she really was an odd girl; the little beast bit, pricked, and wasn’t good to eat, Danuta should let him go, there was nothing else to do. Besides, night was falling, and it was time to sleep. But Danuta wouldn’t listen to reason; she had captured him, he was hers, he was intelligent and cute, she wanted to keep him to play with, and then she was sure he would become tame. She tried to offer him a tuft of grass, but he turned his head in the other direction.
Brokne sneered that he wasn’t very tame and that in prison he would die, and he lay down on the ground, already half asleep, but Danuta threw a terrible tantrum, and in the end they spent the night taking turns holding the little creature. One held him and the other slept; toward dawn the creature fell asleep, too. Danuta took advantage of his sleep to observe him calmly and from close up: he was really very lovely. His face, hands, and feet were tiny but well shaped, and he must be a child, because he had a small head and a slender body. Danuta was dying to hug him to her breast.
As soon as he woke he tried to escape, but after a few days he began to get slow and lazy. “Naturally,” said Brokne. “He won’t eat.” In fact the little creature refused everything, grass, tender leaves, even acorns and beechnuts. It couldn’t be that he was wild, for he drank greedily from the hollow of Danuta’s hand, as she laughed and wept with tend
erness. Yet in a few days it became clear that Brokne was right: he was one of those animals who when they feel they are prisoners refuse food. On the other hand, Brokne and Danuta couldn’t go on like this, taking turns holding him in their hands day and night. Brokne had tried to make a cage, because Danuta wouldn’t agree to keep him in the cave; she wanted to have him before her eyes, and she was afraid that he might get sick in the dark.
Brokne had tried, but without success: he had pulled up some tall straight ashes, had replanted them in a circle, had put the little creature in the middle, and had tied the tops together with reeds, but his fingers were thick and awkward, and he had made a bad job of it. In a flash, the little creature, although weakened by hunger, had climbed up one of the trunks, found a gap, and jumped to the ground outside. Brokne said it was time to let him go where he wanted. Danuta burst into tears, and her tears softened the ground under her. The little creature looked up, as if he had understood, then he started running and disappeared among the trees. Brokne said, “It’s best that way. You would have loved him, but he was too small, and in some way your love would have killed him.”
A month went by, and already the leaves of the beeches were turning crimson, and at night the stream covered the rocks with a thin layer of ice. Again Danuta was wakened in anguish by the smell of fire, and she shook Brokne to rouse him, because this time there was a fire. All around, in the light of the moon, innumerable threads of smoke could be seen, rising toward the sky, straight up into the still and frigid air: yes, like the bars of a cage, but this time they were the ones inside. Along the whole crest of the mountains, on both sides of the valley, fires were burning, and other fires peeped out, much closer, between the trunks of the trees. Brokne stood up roaring like thunder—there they are at work, those small, industrious builders of bridges. He seized Danuta by the wrist and dragged her toward the head of the valley, where the fires seemed to be sparser, but soon they had to turn back, coughing and weeping; the air was poisoned, they couldn’t get through. In the meantime, the clearing had become populated by animals of all species, gasping and frightened. The ring of fire and smoke kept getting closer. Danuta and Brokne sat down on the ground to wait.