The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  The atoúla—the males—are up to half a meter long and weigh from five to eight kilos. They have gray or brown fur, a very short tail, a pointed nose equipped with black vibrissae, and short triangular ears; their stomach is bare, rosy, lightly covered by a sparse down, which, as we will see, is not without evolutionary significance. The females are somewhat heavier, and longer and more robust than the males; their movements are quicker and more confident, and, according to the reports of Malay hunters, their senses are more developed—above all, the olfactory. Their coat is entirely different: the nacunu, in all seasons, wear a flamboyant livery of glossy black, marked by four tawny stripes, two on each side, which run from the snout along the sides and join near the tail, which is long and thick and shades from tawny to orange, bright red, or purple according to the animal’s age. While the males are almost invisible against the background of the stony ground where they spend their time, the females can be seen from a distance; this is also because their custom is to wag their tail like dogs. The males are dull and lazy, the women agile and active. Both are silent.

  Coupling does not exist among the atoúla. In the season of love, which lasts from September to November, and thus coincides with the driest period, the males climb at sunrise to the top of the plateaus, and sometimes even the highest trees, competing to gain the most elevated positions. There they stay, without eating or drinking, for the whole day: they turn their backs to the wind and into the wind discharge their semen. This consists of a thin liquid, which in the warm, dry air evaporates quickly, and is spread by the wind in the form of a cloud of fine dust: every grain of this dust is sperm. We managed to collect some on glass plates smeared with oil; the sperm of the atoúla are different from those of all other animal species, and resemble, rather, the grains of pollen of anemophilous plants. They don’t have a caudal filament; they are covered instead by tiny branching, tangled hairs, so that they can be carried by the wind for remarkable distances. On the return trip, we gathered some a hundred and thirty miles from the islands, and, to all appearances, they were vital and fertile. During the discharge of the sperm the atoúla don’t move; sitting upright on their haunches, their front paws folded, they are shaken by a slight tremor whose function may be to accelerate the evaporation of the seminal fluid from the hairless surface of the stomach. When the wind changes suddenly (a frequent occurrence in those latitudes), you get the singular spectacle of innumerable atoúla, each one erect on its elevation, all simultaneously orienting themselves in the new direction, like the weathervanes that used to be placed on rooftops. They appear intent and tense, and do not react to stimuli: such behavior is explicable only if one recalls that these animals are not threatened by any predator, which otherwise would easily get the better of them. Even the Malay hunters respect them. Some say it’s because an ancient tradition considers them sacred to Hatola, the god of the wind, from whom, in fact, they got their name; according to others, it’s simply because their flesh in this period would cause an unspecified intestinal illness.

  During the season of dissemination, the extreme activity of the females contrasts with the stillness of the males. Guided by sight and by smell, they roam swiftly and restlessly over the open land; they don’t attempt to get close to the males or travel, like them, to the higher places. They seem to be searching for the positions where the invisible rain of semen can best envelop them, and when they think they have found one they stop and voluptuously turn in circles, but only for a few minutes: immediately, with an agile leap, they tear off and resume their dance, up and down over the rocky places and the plain. During this time, the entire island swarms with the orange and violet flames of their tails, and the wind has a sharp, musky odor, stimulating and intoxicating, which throws all the animals of the island into an aimless tumult. The birds rise up screeching, fly around in circles, head madly toward the sky, and then drop like stones; the leaping mice, which normally can be glimpsed only on moonlit nights as tiny elusive shadows, come out into the open, dazzled and clumsy in the sun’s brightness, and can be caught with your hands; even the snakes creep out of their dens as if hallucinating, rise on their coils and their tails, and wriggle their heads as if they were following a rhythm. We, too, in the brief nights that interrupted those days, experienced a restless sleep, full of bright-colored and indecipherable dreams. We could never establish whether the odor that pervades the island comes directly from the males, or if, rather, it is secreted by the inguinal glands of the nacunu.

  Their pregnancy lasts around thirty-five days. Birth and lactation have no notable features; the nests, constructed from brush in the shelter of the rocks, are prepared by the males, and lined inside with moss, leaves, sometimes sand. Every male prepares more than one. When the females are close to giving birth, they choose a nest, examining several with care and hesitation, but without disputes. The “children of the wind” that are born, from five to eight per litter, are tiny but precocious. A few hours after birth, they go out into the sun; the young males immediately learn to offer their backs to the wind, like the fathers, and the females, although still without their livery, perform a comic parody of the mothers’ dance. After just five months, the atoúla and the nacunu are sexually mature, and already living in separate packs, waiting for the next season of wind to prepare their remote aerial marriages.

  The Fugitive

  To compose a poem that is worth reading and remembering is a gift of destiny; it happens to only a few people, without regard for rules or intentions, and to them it happens only a few times in their lives. Perhaps this is a good thing; if the phenomenon were more frequent, we would be drowning in poetic messages, our own and those of others, to the detriment of us all. To Pasquale, too, it had happened only a few times, and the awareness of having a poem in his mind, ready to be caught in flight and fixed on a page like a butterfly, had always been accompanied by a curious sensation, by an aura like that which precedes epileptic fits: each time, he had heard a faint whistle in his ears, and a ticklish shiver ran through him from head to foot.

  In a few moments the whistle and the shiver disappeared, and he found himself clearheaded, with the core of the poem lucid and distinct; he had only to write it down, and, lo and behold, the other lines hastened to crowd around it, obedient and strong. In a quarter of an hour the work was done; but this flash, this instantaneous process in which conception and birth succeeded each other almost like lightning and thunder, had been granted to Pasquale only five or six times in his life. Luckily, he wasn’t a poet by profession; he had a tranquil, boring office job.

  He felt the symptoms described above after two years of silence, as he was sitting at his desk, examining an insurance policy. In fact, he felt them with an unusual intensity: the whistle was penetrating and the shiver was a nearly convulsive tremor, which disappeared immediately, leaving him with a sensation of vertigo. The key verse was there before him, as if written on the wall, or, rather, inside his skull. His colleagues at the neighboring desks didn’t notice anything. Pasquale concentrated fiercely on the sheet of paper in front of him. From the core the poem radiated out through all his senses like a growing organism, and soon it was before him; it seemed to be throbbing, just like a living thing.

  It was the most beautiful poem that Pasquale had ever written. There it was, right before his eyes, without a correction, the handwriting tall, elegant, and smooth; it was almost as if the sheet of copy paper on which it was written had difficulty bearing its weight, like a column too slender beneath the burden of a giant statue. It was six o’clock. Pasquale locked the poem in his drawer and went home. It seemed to him that he deserved a reward, and on the way he bought himself an ice cream.

  The next morning he rushed to the office. He was impatient to reread the poem, because he was well aware how hard it is to judge a newly written work: the value and the meaning, or the lack of value and meaning, become clear only the morning after. He opened the drawer and couldn’t see the page; and yet he was sure that he had left it on
top of all the other papers. He dug around among them, frantically at first, then methodically, but he had to admit that the poem had disappeared. He searched the other drawers, and then he realized that the poem was right there in front of him, on the in-box tray. What tricks distraction plays! But how could he not be distracted, in the face of the essential work of his life?

  Pasquale was certain that his future biographers would remember him for nothing else—only for that “Annunciation.” He reread it and was enthusiastic, almost in love. He was about to take it to the photocopying machine when the boss called him in; he kept him for an hour and a half, and when Pasquale returned to his desk, the copier was broken. By four o’clock the electrician had repaired it, but the photocopying paper was all used up. For that day there was nothing to be done; recalling the incident of the previous evening, Pasquale placed the sheet of paper in the drawer with great care. He closed it, then changed his mind and opened it, and finally he closed it again and left. The next day the piece of paper wasn’t there.

  This business was becoming annoying. Pasquale turned all his drawers upside down, bringing to light papers that had been forgotten for decades; as he searched, he tried to retrieve in memory if not the whole composition at least that first line, that nucleus which had enlightened him, but he couldn’t; in fact, he had the precise sensation that he never would. He was different, different from that moment on: he was no longer the same Pasquale, and he never would be again, just as a dead man does not return to life, and you never put your foot in the same river twice. There was a nauseating metallic taste in his mouth, the taste of frustration, of nevermore. Disconsolate, he sat down in his office chair and saw the page stuck to the wall, to his left, a little distance from his head. It was obvious: some colleague had intended to play a tasteless trick. Perhaps someone had been spying on him and was on to his secret.

  He seized the sheet of paper by one edge and detached it from the wall, encountering almost no resistance; the author of the trick must have used a poor-quality paste, or not used very much. He noticed that the other side of the paper was slightly grainy. He put it under his desk pad, and for the entire morning made excuses not to leave his desk, but when the noon whistle sounded and everyone got up to go to lunch, Pasquale saw that the sheet of paper was sticking out from under the desk pad by a good inch. He took it out, folded it in fourths, and put it in his wallet; after all, there was no reason not to take it home. He would copy it by hand, or take it to the copy shop; that would solve the problem.

  He reread the poem in the evening as he was going home on the subway. Contrary to what he usually felt, it seemed perfect: not a line or a syllable had to be changed. Still, before showing it to Gloria, he would think about it. Everyone knows how a judgment can change even in a short time: Monday’s masterpiece becomes insipid on Thursday, or even vice versa. He locked the sheet of paper in his private drawer, in the bedroom; but the following morning, when he opened his eyes, he saw it above him, stuck to the ceiling. Two-thirds of it was adhering to the plaster; the other third was hanging down.

  Pasquale got the ladder and cautiously removed the piece of paper; again, when he felt it, the surface was rough, especially on the back. He touched it with his lips: there was no doubt, sticking out from the page were some tiny bumps, which seemed to be in rows. He took a magnifying glass and saw that it was so. Tiny hairs were sticking out from the page, corresponding to attributes of the letters on the other side. In particular, the extremities stuck out, the legs of the d’s and the p’s, and, above all, the little legs of the n’s and the m’s; for example, behind the title “Annunciation,” the eight legs of the four n’s could be clearly seen. They stuck out like the whiskers of a poorly shaved beard, and it seemed to Pasquale that they even vibrated slightly.

  It was time to go to the office, and Pasquale was perplexed. He didn’t know where to put the poem. He realized that, for some reason, perhaps precisely because of its uniqueness, because of the life that openly animated it, the poem was trying to escape, to get away from him. He decided to observe it from close up: never mind the office—for once he would be late. Under the magnifying glass he could see that some of the attributes of the letters were surrounded by a thin, clear inlay, in the form of a narrow, elongated U, and were folded back, toward the other side of the paper, in such a way that, if you placed the piece of paper on the surface of the desk, it remained elevated by a millimeter or two: he bent down to look, and could distinctly see the light between the page and the desktop.

  And he saw something more: as he watched, the sheet of paper moved in the direction of the title, away from him. It advanced a few millimeters a second, with a slow but uniform and assured motion. He turned it around, so that the title faced away from him; after a few seconds the page took up its march, this time in reverse, that is, toward the opposite edge of the desk.

  By now it was getting late. Pasquale had an important appointment at nine thirty, and he could delay no longer. He went to the storage closet, found a strip of plywood, got the paste, and pasted the wood on top of the piece of paper: “Annunciation” was his work, in the end—his thing, his property. It remained to be seen who was stronger. He went to the office in a rage, and was unable to calm down even in the course of delicate negotiations that he was in charge of, so that he conducted them in a rude and clumsy manner, and ended up with a deal that was decidedly mediocre, which, naturally, only increased his rage and ill humor. He felt like a racehorse yoked to a mill wheel: after two days of walking in a circle, are you still a racehorse? Do you still have the desire to run, to be first at the finish line? No, you have a desire for silence, rest, and the stable. Luckily at home, at the stable, the poem awaited him. It would no longer escape: how could it?

  It had not in fact escaped. He found the remains of it stuck to the piece of wood: twenty little fragments, each no bigger than a postage stamp, for a total area no more than a fifth of the original sheet of paper. The rest of “Annunciation” had departed, in the form of scraps, tiny crumpled, frayed shreds, which were scattered in all the corners of the house; he found only three or four, and though he smoothed them out carefully, they were illegible.

  Pasquale spent the following Sunday in less and less reliable efforts to reconstruct the poem. From that time on, there were neither whistles nor shivers. He tried many times, during the rest of his life, to call to memory the lost text; in fact, at increasingly rare intervals, he wrote other versions of it, but they were increasingly thin, bloodless, and weak.

  “Dear Mama”

  A frontier post in Roman Britain: Vindolanda, near Hadrian’s Wall, was a Roman garrison from the first to the fifth century. Interment in the absence of oxygen preserved numerous objects of wood and leather, fabric and notes written in ink, among them a letter accompanying a gift package, which was addressed to a soldier and contained a pair of woolen socks.

  —SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, FEBRUARY 1977

  Dear Mama,

  Please forgive me for not writing after the letter you sent in March of last year, which arrived just at the end of spring. In this country spring isn’t the way it is at home: here the seasons have no boundaries; it rains summer and winter, and when the sun does appear amid the clouds, it’s as tepid in summer as in winter. But it seldom appears.

  I’ve put off answering you because the previous scribe died. After many years, and the many letters he’d written for me, we had become friends, and there was no need to explain every time who I am, who you are and where you live, where our village is and what it’s like, and everything that has to be known for a letter to speak the way a messenger would. The scribe who’s writing my words to you today arrived a short while ago. He is a wise and learned man, but he isn’t Latin or even a Briton, and he still doesn’t know much about how we live here, so I have to help him more than he helps me. He isn’t Latin, I was saying: he comes from Cantium, that is, from the south, but he has always worked in administration, and speaks and writes Latin better than I
, who am forgetting it. He is also a skilled magus, and knows how to make the rain fall, but this is a job that even I would be able to do here, because it rains almost every day.

  Dear Mama, in four years my service will be up and I’ll be able to return to Italy, and then you can meet my wife. We were married last October. I hadn’t dared to write to you until now because I was afraid you wouldn’t be pleased. You should be, because Isidora is a good wife. Don’t be deceived by her Greek-sounding name. She is from here and speaks no language except her own, but here, too, Greek names are considered elegant; besides, the scribe who’s writing for me is explaining right now that “Isidora,” according to him, doesn’t mean anything in Greek, and I have asked him to put it in the letter, so you’ll feel reassured.

  It’s really because of Isidora that I’m forgetting my Latin: all of us here in the garrison are forgetting it, because, married or not, we end up speaking the language of the Britons every day. Of course it’s more practical, but the old men of the garrison say it’s scandalous. So we end up in this ridiculous situation, where the scribe who writes to you has to correct me as if I were the barbarian rather than him. His name is Mandubrivo, and apart from writing letters he also keeps the accounts, because we aren’t very good at that anymore, either. Every so often I think that this really is the land of forgetfulness, maybe even the very place Ulysses was when he forgot Ithaca and his wife, in the children’s story. But I haven’t forgotten our valley, our wine, the sheep among the patches of melting snow, everything so white and green, and the Arch of Cottius in the middle of town on holidays, when kissing girls in the street isn’t a sin.