by Primo Levi
But I don’t want to make you sad, dear Mama, and instead I’ll cheer you up by telling you how I met Isidora. It was three years ago, the day of the summer solstice, which here is a holiday. We had all gone to the theater, all of us in the garrison and also the people from the town, I mean the important ones: herdsmen, wool and cheese wholesalers, wood merchants, contractors, mediators, bureaucrats, and priests. You should know that the circus—that is, the theater—was built more than a hundred years ago, at the time when being stationed here may have been less comfortable than now but made more sense, because there was war with the Velauni here beyond Hadrian’s Wall. The actors and mimes came from Rome in those days; they danced, sang, and performed plays, and the organizers arranged games with animals. It was fun and felt like home. Then they stopped coming, because naturally while there’s a war on a soldier’s important, then he doesn’t count much anymore. Now the local people do the theater, in their own way: they dance barefoot amid unsheathed swords, and have caber-tossing contests, which is a spectacle for bears. (I the scribe write this but I must protest. Tossing the caber is an ancient and noble art, which an untrained person cannot understand.)
Caber tossing means lifting off the ground a stake that weighs a hundred pounds and is taller than the person: you run toward the goal with the stake held upright, as if pursuing it as it falls; then you stop clear of the goal and throw the stake as far as you can. To me it looked like a boring, stupid game, an activity for morons, which would seem ridiculous even to us in Val Susa, not just at the Colosseum; but Isidora, who was sitting next to me, clapped her hands, urged on the champions, calling them by name, and was having a great time, and so I immediately fell in love with her. She’s a girl from a good family; her father has four hundred sheep and forty cows. So far, she hasn’t given me any children, but she’s a good wife, even if on wet days she tends to hypochondria, and then drinks a lot of beer.
As I’ve told you, she hasn’t learned Latin, and doesn’t want to, because she says that in a few years no one will speak it; so I’ve been obliged to learn her language, which is also an advantage in business and in getting supplies. You have to imagine that everything is different here from Italy: the grass, the sheep, the sea, the clothes, the houses, the dogs, the fish, the shoes; and so it becomes natural even for us to call things not by their Latin names but by the names they have here. Don’t laugh if I tell you about the shoes: in a land of rain and mud like this, shoes are more important than bread, so that here in Vindolanda there are more tanners and shoemakers than soldiers. For three-quarters of the year, we wear nailed boots that weigh a good two pounds each—everyone, even women and children.
Besides the language, I’ve also learned from Isidora their games of patience, which are played with colored stones on a table painted in squares. I taught her to play dice, and then I got mad because she was always winning. After a while, I realized that the dice were loaded: I cut one open and inside was a core of lead that was off-center, so that it tended to fall on the one and the two. It was she who gave them to me, for my birthday. It was only a joke, but you can see that she’s a sharp girl. Isidora seems to have a little too much sympathy for the Christians, although as far as I know she hasn’t been baptized; she comes with me to the Mithraeum, I mean to the Cave of Mithras, and when they kill the bull for the sprinkling of the blood she stays to watch, and it seems to me that she doesn’t dislike it, in fact I think she’ll soon agree to be initiated.
Don’t be frightened by the news coming from the borders. There are terrible rumors going around here about what’s happening in the lands of the Dacians and the Parthians, and I’m sure that down there they’ll tell you that all the rest of us have been slaughtered. On the contrary, there is no land more peaceful than this: the sentinels almost never raise the alarm, and, when they do, it’s almost always a buck or a boar, which ends up roasted the next day. Imagine, last week one of my sentinels, a veteran with no less than ten years’ service at the frontier, woke up the camp for a wild goose, and so I had to have him flogged.
All we older men, married or not, are fairly well settled. Each of us has a small room, and all the rooms are in a row and connected by a corridor. In every room there’s a brazier, on which you can do your own cooking, and a porch; we use the brazier a lot and the porch very little. We also have a laundry and an infirmary for the sick. The wives are all Britons, so they don’t quarrel with one another; the children on the other hand do nothing but fight and roll in the mud, but the local people say that the mud is good for them; in fact, illnesses are rare.
Dear Mama, write and send me news of the village. The mail service is fairly good: your letters arrive in sixty days, and in a little more than sixty days your package arrived, too. This is the land of wool, but it’s not soft and clean like the wool you spin. I thank you with a son’s affection: every time I put on these socks, my thoughts will fly to you.
In Due Time
The streetlights were on, the evening traffic was getting more and more intense, but the lady gave no sign of leaving. She had made him pull out half the store, she wanted a length of a fabric that didn’t exist in a color that didn’t exist. Giuseppe was tired, by every measurement of every instrument on the panel. Tired of being on his feet, tired in his feet, tired of saying Yes, Ma’am, tired of selling fabric, tired of being Giuseppe, tired of being tired. On every dial he felt the needle incline toward the bottom of the scale, tired itself. Giuseppe was fifty, had been selling fabric since he was thirty, and had calculated that with the fabric he had sold you could make a suit for the Statue of Liberty and an outfit for the colossal statue of San Carlo in Arona.
The lady wanted to take another look at the bottom bolt in a pile of bolts, and Giuseppe was doing his best to get it out, when he was called to the telephone. This almost never happened, and Giuseppe was curious rather than worried: it was a male voice asking for an appointment. What for? On a matter that concerned him: yes, it concerned him, Giuseppe N., born in Pavia, October 9, 1930. It seemed that the unknown person knew not only his vital statistics but also several things about him. Was it urgent? It wasn’t urgent; yes, Monday morning would be fine. Giuseppe patiently finished up with the client and helped close the shop.
Monday morning the shop was closed, and Giuseppe got up late. The stranger arrived at ten thirty: he was of average height, about fifty; his hair was black on top but white at the nape and the temples, and he wasn’t very well educated or polite, and in fact he sat down before Giuseppe asked him to. He wore a dark-blue suit of a vaguely military cut, narrow at the waist, with shoulder pads, and large pockets everywhere: two, long and narrow, were in his pants below the knees, two more were under the lapels of the jacket, and onto one of these was sewed another, smaller pocket, perhaps for tram or train tickets. To Giuseppe, who knew about such things, the material seemed to be of good quality, but he couldn’t identify its nature; maybe it was synthetic, these days you never know, wool is made of acrylic and steaks are made of petroleum.
The visitor remained seated; he didn’t speak or show any impatience, and he didn’t even seem to be waiting for Giuseppe to say or do something. For a few minutes Giuseppe didn’t dare ask any questions, and he took the time to observe the man more carefully. He wasn’t very good-looking: he had a low, shapeless forehead, small, dull eyes, with hardly any lashes, and a short, broad nose. His jaw, too, was broad and strong, and so were his teeth, but they were small and seemed worn, so that the cheeks were wrinkled and sunken, and didn’t correspond to the age that the rest of his person showed. Giuseppe felt increasingly embarrassed and irritated: he had asked for an appointment, said he had to talk to him; why didn’t he talk?
After a few minutes the visitor sighed, then said:
“Really, these times! Even the seasons have gone crazy—it’s winter till May, then suddenly it’s summer.” He was silent again, looked out the window, and then resumed: “And the young people, too . . . all they think about is having fun; they don’
t think about studying at all, much less about working. If things go on like this, we’ll be in trouble—oh no, they can’t go on like this. It used to be different, everyone did his duty, maybe there was a little less to eat, but there was more certainty than there is now, even if you got around on a bicycle instead of in a car.”
“But you,” Giuseppe interrupted, “you said on the phone that you had to speak to me . . .”
“That’s not exactly what I said, if you recall: I said only that I am informed about a matter that concerns you, or something of the sort. Yes, in fact I don’t remember exactly what I might have said, but anyway . . . Yes, well, I know quite a few things about you. I don’t remember what I told you Friday evening, and yet I remember what happened when you were five. Strange, isn’t it? But it happens to an extent with all of us when we get old. The time you slipped on a frozen puddle, and the ice broke, and you injured your ankle on a splinter of ice. You don’t remember? Strange. And yet you still have the scar, over on the right.” Giuseppe looked at his ankle: yes, the scar was there, but he’d forgotten years ago how and when he had got it.
“Just so you know that I’m well informed. And the time you went into your mother’s room without asking permission, and saw her putting on her stockings? And then, many years later, when you stole your colleague’s girlfriend, there in the shop? But you soon got tired of her and left her, and she came to a bad end.”
All these things were true, but the visitor was recounting them with a vague, distracted air, as if he were doing his best to waste time. Giuseppe grew impatient, and asked abruptly, “Well, what do you want from me?”
“I’ve come to kill you,” the visitor answered.
Giuseppe, although he was tired of many things, was not ready to die. Someone who is tired of life, or who says he is, doesn’t necessarily want to die; in general, he wants only to have a better life. He said this to the stranger, but the man answered harshly:
“You know, what you want or don’t want counts only up to a certain point. Don’t think it’s my initiative; these things are decided elsewhere. I have nothing to do with it, and I can’t even say that I much like my job. I like it more or less the way you like yours, if you see what I mean. But it’s my job, I don’t have another one; at my age, which is yours, besides, it’s not so easy to change.”
“And . . . why me? And when? Now? In other words, since I’m the interested party, I’d like to know a little more.”
“My, you really are something! Why, when, how, where! Do you have connections? Are you the relative of somebody important? Do you have a bank account in Zurich? No? Well, then! Of course, we’d all like to know certain things, but we can’t: people like you (or like me, in fact; when we’re off duty we’re just doormats, too) have to accept it, settle down and wait, and live from day to day, hoping it’s not the last day. But look, one thing I can tell you, nothing’s going to happen today. See, I’m not even armed: this is only a warning, in case you want to take some measures. This doesn’t depend on us, either; we’re waiting, too, and when the deadline comes we go and arrange things.”
That mention of weapons had made Giuseppe a little uneasy, but the visitor reassured him: “I said ‘armed’ as a manner of speaking. No, no, look, I’m not carrying a gun or a knife, those are things of the past. These pockets? I keep pens, pencils, notebooks for remittances and receipts, you know, in our work we have to be precise. If you get a date or an address wrong, there’s trouble. It shouldn’t ever happen, with all the checking we have to do at the end of the day, yet sometimes it does happen, and then people make remarks like ‘So young, in his prime, in perfect health,’ and so on, and for us there’s a penalty. No, no—no weapons, we have other methods now.”
“Painless methods?” Giuseppe dared to ask. The stranger gave an odd little laugh, uncrossed his legs, and held out an envelope.
“There, that’s really the point: I was waiting for you to get it. You see, there are various methods, a year doesn’t pass when a new one doesn’t come out, and the more recent are practically painless. However . . . well, they are rather expensive.” Having said this, the stranger clenched his powerful jaws, so that his flabby cheeks sagged in a complicated network of lines, and was silent, staring Giuseppe in the face. It didn’t take much to understand what he meant, but Giuseppe wasn’t sure how much to offer; he couldn’t imagine even the order of magnitude. The other interrupted coolly: it was clear that it wasn’t the first time he’d been in this situation, and it was also clear that he had a good idea about how much capital Giuseppe had available. Smiling, he murmured that “shrouds don’t have pockets,” and that it was money well spent. He put the check in his pocket in a dignified manner, told Giuseppe that he would be back in due time, asked how far away Via Flavio De Rege was, had him call a taxi, and left.
Tantalum
For many years now I have been engaged in the manufacture of paints and, more precisely, their formulation: from this art I earn my sustenance and support my family. It’s an ancient and noble art; the earliest reference appears in Genesis 6:14, where it is related how, in obedience to an exact specification on the part of the Almighty, Noah (probably using a brush) covered the Ark, inside and out, with pitch. But it’s also a subtly fraudulent art, which tends to hide the substratum, endowing it with the color and the appearance of what it is not; in this it is related to the arts of makeup and costume, which are equally equivocal and equally ancient (Isaiah 3:16ff).
The most varied demands are constantly being made on those who practice this profession of ours: paints that do not conduct electricity and paints that do, paints that transmit heat or reflect it, that keep mollusks from adhering to hulls, that absorb sound, or that can be removed from a surface like the peel from a banana. People require paints that keep feet from slipping, as for airport steps, and others as slippery as possible, as for the bottoms of skis. We are therefore a versatile people, with vast experience, who are accustomed to both success and the lack of it, and are difficult to surprise.
Nonetheless, we were surprised by a request that came from our agent in Naples, Signor Amato Di Prima. He was pleased to inform us that an important client in his area had experimented with a paint that provided protection from misfortune, and would profitably replace horn amulets, hunchbacks, four-leaf clovers, and charms in general. It had not been possible to glean other information, except for the price, which was very high; he had, however, managed to obtain a sample, which he had already sent by mail. Given the exceptional interest of the product, he urgently beseeched us to devote the greatest attention to the problem, declared his faith in a quick response, and extended his most sincere greetings.
This business, of the miraculous sample that arrives in the mail, along with an urgent prayer to devote, etc. (that is, without resorting to euphemism, to copy it), is part of our work, and constitutes perhaps its most obscure aspect. We would like to do things our own way: make our own choice, of a refined and elegant problem, take off on the hunt, sight the solution, pursue it, corner it, spear it, strip it of everything inessential, make it in the laboratory, then manufacture it on a small scale, and finally go into full production and get money and glory from it. But that almost never happens. There are many of our kind in this world, and our colleagues and rivals in Italy, in America, in Australia, in Japan are not exactly dozing. We are awash in samples, and would happily yield to the temptation to throw them away or return them to the sender, were it not for the consideration that our own products suffer the same fate, becoming, in their turn, marvelous, being shrewdly seized and smuggled out by the agents of our competitors, scrutinized, analyzed, and copied: some badly, others well—by the addition, that is, of a particle of originality and genius. Thus begins an endless network of espionage and cross-fertilization, which, illuminated by solitary creative flashes, constitutes the foundation of technological progress. In short, the samples of the competition cannot be thrown out with the dregs; one must see what’s there, even if the profes
sional conscience puts up a struggle.
The paint that came from Naples, at first glance, did not display any special property: appearance, odor, drying time were those of a common clear acrylic enamel, and the whole business stank of a hoax. I telephoned Di Prima, who was indignant: he was not the type to send samples around just for fun, and that one in particular had cost him time and trouble—the product was extremely interesting and in his market he was having incredible success. Technical documentation? It didn’t exist, there was no need for it, the effectiveness of the product spoke for itself. A fishing boat had been coming back with empty nets for three months—they had painted its hull and ever since it had been netting spectacular catches. A typographer had mixed the paint with printing ink: the ink didn’t go as far, but the typographical errors had disappeared. If somehow we were unable to use it, we should tell him immediately; otherwise, we should get busy with it. The price was 7000 lire a kilo, which seemed to him a good profit margin, and he would undertake to sell at least 20 tons a month.
I talked about it with Chiovatero, who is a serious and capable fellow. At first he turned up his nose, then he thought about it, and proposed starting simply; that is, trying the paint on cultures of E. coli bacteria. What did he expect? That the cultures would multiply more than the controls or less? Chiovatero was annoyed, and told me that it was not his habit to put the cart before the horse (implying by this that it was my habit, which, for goodness’ sake, is absolutely not true), that it remained to be seen, that you had to start somewhere, and that “the load adjusts along the way.” He obtained the cultures, painted the outside of the test tubes, and we waited. None of us were biologists, but no biologist was needed to interpret the results. After five days, the effect was obvious: the protected cultures had developed in size at three times the rate of the controls, which we had coated with an acrylic ostensibly similar to the one from Naples. We had to conclude that this paint “brought good luck” even to microorganisms; an irritating conclusion, but, as has been authoritatively stated, facts are obstinate. A more thorough analysis was required, but everyone knows what a complex and uncertain enterprise the examination of a paint is, almost like that of a living organism. All those fantastic modern devices—the infrared spectrum, the gas chromatograph, NMR—are helpful to a point but leave many angles unexplored; and if you aren’t lucky enough to have a metal as the key component, all you can do is use your nose, like a dog. But in this case there was a metal—an unusual metal, so unusual that no one in the laboratory knew from experience how it reacted. We had to burn almost the entire sample to obtain a quantity sufficient for identification; but finally we did so and the metal was duly confirmed, with all its characteristic reactions. It was tantalum, a very respectable metal, with a name full of meaning, never before seen in paint, and thus surely responsible for the property that we were looking for. As always happens once you’ve made a discovery and confirmed it, the presence of tantalum, and its specific function, began to seem gradually less strange, and, finally, natural, just as no one is surprised anymore by X rays. Molino pointed out that the most acid-resistant reaction vessels are made with tantalum; Palazzoni recalled that tantalum is used to make surgical prostheses that absolutely can’t be rejected; and so we concluded that it is an obviously beneficial metal, and that we had been foolish to waste so much time on analyses. With a little common sense we should have been able to think of it right off.