The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Self-Control

  The doctor at the health service hadn’t taken him seriously. Not that he was stupid or in a hurry; he had examined him according to all the rules, had even had some tests done, and had told him that he was not sick. Of course, if you do a job that requires effort and responsibility, you feel tired at the end of your shift, it’s only natural. Gino should get on with it, he was still young, he could advance from driver to inspector, or even, with a little luck and a bit of a leg up, join the administration and sit behind a desk. Not that that solves all your problems, but anyway.

  It wasn’t that Gino really wanted to be sick, but the conversation had left him unsatisfied. The fact is that when he got off work he felt a sort of weight on the right side, just under the ribs. The doctor had felt it and said it was the liver; it was neither swollen nor inflamed, it was a healthy liver, but it was there, everyone has one, and it may very well happen that if you have been standing for many hours, or sitting uncomfortably, you may become aware of it and feel its weight. Did he smoke, drink? No? He ought to calm down, not eat fried foods and not take too many medications: yes, because the liver is precisely what manages medications, it lets them through or not, it breaks them down after they’ve done their job (assuming they’ve done it), in such a way that they don’t get into the bloodstream and cause trouble.

  The liver is also what administers fats, that is, it manufactures the bile that’s parked in the gallbladder and then, on demand, appears and passes into the intestine to cook the fats, so that the less fat one eats, the less bile is needed, and the less work the liver does. In essence, his liver was healthy, but he shouldn’t make it do overtime. Gino liked fried foods and rich ones—too bad. He would keep an eye on his liver as one does with a car if one wants it to last: regular washing and greasing, and a glance every so often at the electrical system, the fuel injectors, all the pumps, the battery, and the brakes.

  Gino was a bus driver, on the 81 and the 84, which are noisy and difficult routes, but on all the urban routes it’s more or less the same story. You’re bored but you have to pay attention, which is a contradiction, and then, ever since they put in the machines and took away the conductor, you don’t even have the diversion of exchanging a few words with him when you get to the end of the line and the bus is empty; plus you’ve got that annoyance of the pneumatic doors.

  He drove, one eye on the street and one on the rearview mirror, and meanwhile he thought how complicated we are. Besides the liver, there’s an infinity of contraptions. You get distracted, and you’ve had it; an organ stops, doesn’t work anymore or doesn’t work properly and starts doing things it shouldn’t. Like Ernesta, who had neglected herself, got thyroid trouble, and couldn’t sleep at night; instead she would sleep during the day, so he had made an application to move to the night shift, but with the head of personnel it was useless. So you had to pay attention to the thyroid as well.

  He went to a bookstore, and bought a book, which he found interesting but somewhat confusing. For example, merely what you’re supposed to eat is a problem, because, if you eat meat, your blood pressure rises and uric acid collects; if you eat bread and pasta, you become obese and live five years less than other people; and if you eat fats woe to the world. You can eat fruit, but at what cost; besides, Gino had tried it, and after three days he felt ill, and faint with hunger. But he couldn’t tear himself away from the illustrations. To have so many things inside your skin was marvelous but also worrying. They could be seen from the front, in profile, and in cross-section, set precisely one inside the other with not even the tiniest empty space.

  He thought of the engine compartment of his buses, and in comparison it was the work of a blockhead, so much space had been wasted, not to mention the heat, the noise, and the stink. But, upon closer inspection, he saw that the problem of symmetry had been resolved the same way there, that is, by a preoccupation with keeping up appearances: symmetrical from the outside, but inside not at all, just like us. The nice symmetrical stomach is a pleasure to look at, especially in women, but, inside, the liver is on the right, the heart on the left, on the right the appendix; and under the hood the alternator is on one side and the air filter on the other. Anyway, it was sensible not to have too many scruples about aesthetics, since you almost never look inside, except when you open the hood or when you have an operation.

  One great idea must have been the elimination of all the hinges and gears, that is, all the metallic material. We are made of soft stuff, except for our bones, and yet everything still functions. The stomach and the intestine, for example: they barely move, and yet food enters in one place, makes its round in silence, so that not even you are aware of it, and the waste comes out at the other end. Gino began to pay attention, especially at night, and gradually he realized that, yes, everything was moving, but smooth as clockwork.

  The book also had a chapter on hormones and vitamins, and Gino felt uneasy. As for vitamins, okay, basically you just had to remember to eat tomatoes and lemons, and you won’t get scurvy, but hormones? Not much to be done, you have to manufacture the hormones yourself. Who knows how and where, the book didn’t say, maybe in the intestine with salvaged material, or maybe in the bone marrow, where blood is also manufactured. And how? A mystery; the book provided figures and formulas, they weren’t simple structures, and yet even animals, children, and savages produce them.

  They are manufactured by themselves: a fine explanation! And if the factory breaks down, or they come out defective? For example, the male hormone rather than the female, which, if you look at the formulas (strange but beautiful, all made of hexagons, like the beehive radiators that were once in use), are almost the same: well, my dear ladies and gentlemen, what if there is a mistake? A mere nothing would suffice, a moment of inattention, a detail neglected. In that little corner between the two hexagons you get a CO instead of a CHOH, as the plan shows, and, lo and behold, you find yourself a woman instead of a man, you become concave instead of convex, and maybe you even get a child. In short, you can never be attentive enough. You’ll be in trouble if you get distracted, as at a traffic signal.

  After a few weeks, Ernesta and his colleagues began to make fun of him, because he always had the book with him. He read it in all his free moments, at the end of the line, sometimes even at a stoplight when the passengers weren’t looking. He finished it and then he started again from the beginning, and he always found new, alarming, and interesting things. He also talked about it with everyone, but then he stopped, because people told him he was crazy, a lunatic, as if they were made of air, as if they, too, didn’t have that arsenal inside to keep an eye on.

  But it was laborious: more so every day. Every now and again Gino realized that he was forgetting to breathe; that is, he was drawing breath, but rapidly, without those refinements of oxygen and carbon dioxide, one toward the inside and the other toward the outside, and then he felt his hands and feet tingling, a sign that his blood was beginning to be polluted. In short, he had to remember where he was, and take a deep breath, twenty or thirty of them: one day it happened while he was on the job, and the passengers were looking at him but didn’t dare to say anything because the notice says, “Please do not speak to the driver.” Maybe the driver has dropped dead: but please don’t speak to him.

  His brain, too, preoccupied him, though somewhat less: in fact, if Gino was worrying about it that meant that he was reasoning, that is, that his brain was functioning, and if it was functioning there was no reason to be worried. But he was worried just the same; he was like that. He was worried, for example, about forgetting what he knew: even if one doesn’t have a degree, one knows, altogether, quite a number of things, and all of them must be written inside the skull; if they are so numerous they must be written very small, and so the slightest thing could erase them. Who knows, an emotion, a small scare, a surprise, and you forget the alphabet, or maybe the traffic laws, so you have to take your driver’s test again.

  The worst problem, of
course, was the heart. Here it’s no joke, here you can’t ever go on holiday, from when you’re born to when you die. The brain can take a vacation—for example, when you sleep or when you get drunk or even when you’re driving the bus, because, once you’ve got the hang of it, you don’t need the brain anymore, in fact it drives while thinking about something else. Even the lungs can go on vacation for a few minutes; if not, how would scuba divers manage? But the heart no, never: it doesn’t have substitutes, it doesn’t have days off, it doesn’t have an end of the line. Terrible. No overhaul, no maintenance. On permanent duty. And yet even it must surely need some repairs, after thirty or forty years of activity. Evidently they’re done while it’s running: can you imagine, changing a valve or a piston on a diesel engine while it’s running?

  In the end Gino really began to feel palpitations, as if his heart had stopped for a moment, and then started racing to catch up and get back on schedule. Even the doctor noticed, taking measurements with the tape on the electrocardiogram: there was an arrhythmia, undeniably. It wasn’t serious but it was there. Yes, he could continue to do his job, but he should take some medication and be a little more attentive. Definitely attentive. Gino now had trouble keeping up with the demands of the bus, how could one pay attention to the gas, the clutch, the steering wheel, the traffic signals, the lever for the doors, the bell for the stops, and at the same time monitor the heart and all the rest? One day, while he was slowing down for a stop, he felt the whole thing shake, he heard a clanking noise and people shouting. He had clipped a car parked along the sidewalk; luckily it was in a no parking area and no one was in it. But the company took him off driving and assigned him to office cleaning, which for someone with his seniority was a low blow.

  At the same time there was no way of getting Ernesta on the phone: her sister, like a parrot that has learned its lesson, always said that Ernesta had just gone out and she didn’t know when she would be back. Gino realized that he was alone, and he felt like running away; he got his severance pay, packed his bag, and took the first train out.

  Dialogue Between a Poet and a Doctor

  The young poet hesitated a long time before ringing the bell. Was this appointment really indispensable? Were his friends in Rome and Milan right, who had extolled the almost miraculous virtues of the doctor, or were his father and mother right instead, who had tried to restrain him, and had not hidden their contempt and their shame, as if a conversation with a wise and experienced man were a stain on the family name? But for some years he had been suffering too much; he felt that he couldn’t go on like this.

  The doctor opened the door himself: he was uncombed, wearing slippers, and bundled into a worn, shapeless dressing gown. He had him sit at the desk; no, there was no need to lie on the couch, not for the moment. The doctor intimidated him, but from the start made a good impression—he wasn’t self-important, he didn’t use difficult words, he had tact and good manners. Maybe his untidy appearance was deliberate, so that the patients wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. The poet felt embarrassed (but the doctor, too, seemed embarrassed) when the other asked cautiously for an account of his medical history: had he ever had X rays? ever had a corset prescribed? But then he had immediately changed the subject, or, rather, had let him come to the point.

  Certainly he had no lack of words to describe his illness: he felt the universe (which he had studied with diligence and love) as an immense useless machine, a mill that was eternally grinding nothing, and to no end; not mute, in fact eloquent, but blind and deaf and closed to the pain of the human seed. Every one of his waking moments was saturated with this pain, his only certainty. He felt no joys but negative ones, that is, the brief respites from his suffering. He saw with pitiless clarity that this, and nothing else, was the common fate of every thinking creature, so that he often envied the unconscious gaiety of birds and animals. He was sensitive to the splendor of nature, but in it he recognized a deception that every uncowardly mind was obliged to tolerate: no man endowed with reason could deny the knowledge that nature is to man neither mother nor teacher but a vast occult power that, objectively, rules to our common detriment.

  At a question from the doctor, he admitted that he had occasionally experienced some relief from his anguish: besides the moments of negative joy he had mentioned before, he felt some relief late in the evening, when the darkness and silence of the countryside allowed him to devote himself to his studies, or, rather, to barricade himself within them as if in a fortress. “Of course—a warm, soft, dark fortress,” said the doctor, shaking his head in sympathy. The poet added that he had recently had a moment of reprieve during a solitary walk that had led him up a modest hill. Beyond the hedge that bounded the horizon he had grasped for a moment the solemn and tremendous presence of an open universe, indifferent but not hostile: it was only a moment, yet it had been filled with an inexplicable sweetness, which originated in the thought of a dissolving and melting in the transparent bosom of the void. It had been an illumination, so intense and new that for several days he had been trying in vain to express it in verse.

  The doctor listened attentively; then, with professional courtesy, he asked for information about his relationships. The poet felt himself blushing: it was a subject he didn’t like to discuss with anyone, particularly with his parents, and not even with himself, except in the elevated language that he favored in his poems. To the doctor he said only that his human contacts were rare; none in the family, a few with some scholar friends, some timid and long-ago loves. He hesitated, then he added that his relationships with women were always painful. He fell in love often and intensely, but then he lacked the courage to reveal his feelings, because he was conscious of how unappealing his looks were. So his loves were solitary: in his working hours, or on long walks through the fields, he carried within himself a pure image, ideal, perfect, of the beloved woman, and he worshipped that instead of the woman of flesh and blood, whom he scarcely dared look at. From this division he suffered atrociously, so that sometimes he sought relief in a sort of irrational revenge. He wanted to punish the woman for the pain she had caused; in his thoughts, and sometimes in his poems, he accused her of being a deceiver, of trying to appear in his eyes better than she was; of wanting to conquer him, bring him down, out of her ambitions as a hunter; of being unable (she and every other woman) to measure the effects of her beauty, since these effects are so overwhelming that they exceed the capacity “of their narrow minds.”1 He had to admit it, love had always been for him a source of travail and not of joy; and without love what is the value of living?

  The doctor didn’t insist. He tried to encourage him, reminding him that he was still young, that physical good looks count less than one might think, and that certainly he would meet a woman worthy of him, who would dispel his anguish in an instant. He thought for a moment, then said that perhaps that was enough for this visit, and that the poet’s case did not appear serious; he was hypersensitive rather than ill. A treatment based on support, repeated at intervals of a few months, would certainly diminish his suffering. He picked up his prescription pad and wrote two or three lines. “For the time being, try these, if you want. They’ll give you some relief, but follow the dose I’ve indicated.”

  The poet went down the stairs and headed for the nearest pharmacy. As he walked, he stuck the hand holding the prescription in the pocket of his overcoat, and found some sheets of paper that he had forgotten. On them he had written some thoughts that had occurred to him a few days earlier, and that he had thought of expressing in verse. His hand, as if of its own accord, crumpled the prescription and threw it into the gutter that ran along the street.

  1. From Giacomo Leopardi’s “Aspasia.”

  Children of the Wind

  It is to be hoped that the Islands of the Wind (Mahui and Kaenunu) remain off the tourist routes for as long as possible. Besides, to fit them out wouldn’t be easy: the terrain is so uneven that it would be impossible to build an airport, and no vessel larger than a rowboa
t can land along the coast. Water is scarce; in fact, some years there’s none at all, so they have never held permanent human settlements. Yet Polynesian crews have often landed on them (perhaps also in remote times), and for some months during the last war a Japanese garrison stayed there. The only human traces that have been found on the islands go back to this ephemeral presence: on the highest point of Mahui, a low but steep rise of around a hundred meters, are the drywall ruins of an antiaircraft position. One could say that it never fired a shot: we have not found even a shell casing nearby. On Kaenunu, however, we did discover, wedged between two rocks, a whip, evidence of inexplicable violence.

  Kaenunu today is in effect deserted. On Mahui, on the other hand, it’s possible for someone armed with patience and endowed with good vision to spot some atoúla, or, more often, one of their females, a nacunu. Apart from the well-known cases of certain domestic animals, this is perhaps the only animal species in which the male and female are designated by different names, but that fact is explained by the clear sexual dimorphism which characterizes them, and is certainly unique among mammals. This singular species of rodent is found only on the two islands.