by Primo Levi
Guests
The war wasn’t over yet, but Sante’s heart was at peace. He descended to the town, and went home to see his father: he wanted to reassure him, the Germans were no longer around, only a few of the rearguard on the plateau and on the Grappa, in the valley almost none, and even the handful who remained had lost their pride; they were more eager to go home than to fight. There was a rumor that the Americans had already reached Padua and Vicenza. He put his gun in the drawer of the credenza; he was just going to the tavern and surely wouldn’t need it.
It was a while since he had gone to the tavern without worrying, because to arrive, down a glass, and run out is like not going at all. He stayed for an hour or so, chatting with the usual customers, those who never fail: as in peacetime. When he went out it was dark, the thick, obscuring darkness of moonless nights. He wasn’t drunk, only a little happy, in fact only in a good mood, not so much because of the wine as because of the thought that in three or four nights he, too, would be sleeping in his own bed again. Ettore, his younger brother, was already in his, for the first time in more than a year; if he was any later getting home he would find him asleep.
When he arrived in the square he heard a footstep and stopped. Sante had the sharp ear of the smuggler and the poacher, and he realized it was not the footstep of someone from the village: it was heavy and hard, the footstep of legs in boots, and in fact the voice that said, “Alt, who goes there?” was a German voice. Sante thought of his gun and called himself a blockhead for having left it at home; in that darkness, and knowing every corner of the town, he would have been able to take care of a single German. In any case he stopped, and it was a good thing, because a moment afterward another came out, and in the starlight he could see that both had submachine guns over their shoulders.
They asked who he was, if he was from the town, and Sante answered with some nonsense he had prepared a while ago. Then they asked if there were any partisans around, and Sante, thanks to his sharp ear, understood from the tone of voice that that question didn’t mean “If there are we’ll take care of them” but “If there are, keep quiet and we’ll run for it”; he said yes, there were, armed to the teeth, with deadly machine guns. The Germans consulted each other and then one said they were hungry. Sante told them to follow him, to his house: there wasn’t much, but he would find some bread and cheese for them.
The house was twenty minutes outside the town, up a winding mule track; Sante went ahead, stopping every so often to wait for the two. Their breath was short and they stopped often; they were not so young, then, he could hear it in their voices as well. Maybe they were from the Territorial Army, and this, given the plan that Sante was elaborating in his head, was a good thing, better not to be dealing with people who were too clever. On the way Sante sought to calm them by every means—that he was afraid of everyone, Germans, partisans, and Fascists, that he had a family, that he was disabled in one arm, that he worked in a factory and was on furlough because of illness, yes, he was convalescent, still rather weak. The Germans understood Italian well enough, and they, too, began to complain; one had asthma but had been declared able-bodied anyway, and the other had been wounded in the Balkans and then sent off to Italy, as if it were a hospital, and instead . . .
The house was dark: the family were all sleeping, and for the moment it was better not to wake them. Sante, in a low voice, invited the Germans to sit down, make themselves comfortable, take off their knapsacks: to take off their knapsacks they would necessarily have to remove their guns. He saw with satisfaction that the two (they really must be not too sharp) had laid their weapons on the floor under the bench, and hadn’t removed the safety catches. Sante found bread, cheese, and milk, sat down opposite them, and ate a little himself: to keep them from becoming suspicious, to be polite, and also because he was hungry. He spoke quietly, but the Germans didn’t understand that that was an invitation to do likewise, and answered in loud voices, like people who speak to a foreigner as if he were a deaf mute. What would happen if Ettore and his father woke up? Sante heard some shuffling in the room above and decided it was best to get to work.
He turned, opened the drawer of the credenza, took out the gun and a tricolor flag, and showed the Germans the flag, keeping the gun hidden beneath it. He recounted two or three made-up tales about the flag: they didn’t understand very well and stared like a pair of oxen. Suddenly he let go of the flag and had them put their hands up, and immediately took away the guns and carried them to a safe place in a corner of the hearth. Just then he heard the creak of the wooden stairway; first Ettore appeared, rubbing his eyes, and then his father, tall and lean, in his nightshirt, with his mustache disheveled. Sante, calmly and without turning, said that he had taken two prisoners and there was nothing to fear, because he had disarmed them. He told Ettore to carry the knapsacks a little farther away and have a look inside; and to the Germans, who on seeing his father had got up and were standing at attention, but still with their hands raised, he said this was all, they had only to try not to do anything foolish, but if they wanted to finish the bread and cheese they should go ahead, and at this point they could lower their hands.
Ettore began to rummage, but meanwhile he looked at the Germans’ boots the way a child looks at cotton candy. At the bottom of one of the knapsacks, amid laundry clean and dirty, he found a beautiful box of compasses. Sante opened it and recognized that they were made in Italy: Ettore should take them, they would be very useful at school, certainly in a few months the schools would reopen, but his father strode barefoot into the middle of the kitchen and said emphatically no.
Sante tried timidly to insist: it was stuff that had been stolen here in the town, he might even know when and from whom, and, besides, what had the Germans done but steal—wholesale and retail—everything, animals, grain, tobacco, even firewood in the forest? But his father would have none of it: “Others can do what they like, but here we are in my house, and you touch nothing; if others are thieves, we are respectable people. They have eaten under this roof: they are our guests, even if they are prisoners. I fought in the Great War, and I know better than you how prisoners are to be treated. Seize their guns, return their knapsacks, and take them to your command; but first give them a little more bread and that salami that’s under the stove, because it’s a long journey.”
The Germans, who hadn’t understood, were trembling. Sante, keeping them covered, told his father that it was all right, he could be calm, and he and Ettore could go back to bed; but first Ettore should run out and get Angelo. Ettore was only seventeen, and for a job like this it was better to have a more practical companion. The command was two hours’ walk away, and during the journey Sante had time to regret his choice: Angelo was a brisk type, and Sante had to sweat blood to keep him under control. He had to sweat blood again, maybe more, at headquarters, because everyone, starting with the commander, had accounts to settle with the Germans, and a great desire to shoot the two on the spot. In other words Sante had to make an issue of it, and luckily at headquarters he was respected, and even a little feared, because of certain solo undertakings on the high plateau; and maybe to some degree the Germans saved their own skins, because throughout the negotiations they stood fixed at attention, with such a hangdog look that they didn’t even seem like Germans. Finally, it was agreed that they should chop wood for a few days, and not be harmed, until it was possible to deliver them to the Allies. Sante returned home satisfied: not that he considered them his friends, but, first of all, because it didn’t seem to him a clean business to shoot people with their hands up, even if they had done it, goodness knows they had done it! And, second, he had captured them, by himself, they were his game, his affair, and it wasn’t right that others should decide their fate.
Eight days later the war was over, and Sante, Ettore, and several other villagers were swimming naked in a pool in the Brenta, when they saw passing by on the road a group of partisans escorting five or six prisoners toward Asiago. One was a Fascist—h
e wore handcuffs and his face was bruised and swollen; behind him were the two Germans, hands free and with an appearance of well-being. Sante jumped out onto the bank, naked as he was, and the Germans recognized him, greeted him, and thanked him. Sante dived back into the clear cold water, feeling pleased to have ended his war that way.
Decoding
On the basis of my conscience and my sensibility as a paint maker, I would prohibit the sale of those fantastic aerosols that spray nitrocellulose enamel and are used for touching up damaged auto bodies. If they were used for that purpose alone, fine; if they were also used (as in fact they were at least once) to paint an arrogant public official yellow, that’s fine, too—it may even be defamation, but you have only to wash it off with ethyl acetate and everything goes back to the way it was. But it seems to me unacceptable to allow them to be used to write on walls.
Our grandfathers said, “Walls are the writing paper of the rabble,” and perhaps that generalization is too harsh. States of mind, individual or collective, can be imagined—indeed, unquestionably, they exist—in the light of which every judgment on the licit and the illicit has to be suspended, but this is true for, precisely, extreme, tempestuous, extraordinary situations: then all the rules are swept aside, and not only do we write on walls but we build barricades.
All the more reason that, in such a climate, the inconvenience and hard work that the painting involves should go unnoticed. Before the era of spray cans, writing on a wall was an undertaking that required a certain commitment. To walk the streets with a bucket of paint, a dripping brush, and solvent for washing the brush is tiring and uncomfortable, especially at night; the conspicuous and cumbersome equipment does not lend itself to an essentially clandestine operation, and hinders flight; it dirties hands and clothes, which, above all, makes the operator identifiable; finally, a minimum of manual dexterity is needed, if you don’t want the letters and marks to come out misshapen and hence self-destructive. In short, it’s an activity that one doesn’t undertake without a strong motivation, which is as it should be: it’s not right to reach the summit of the Cervino, or sculpt a statue, or cook a dinner without a certain amount of labor. Free fruit was not good, as is well-known, even in the Earthly Paradise; in our current earthly condition, which is no longer paradisiacal, it leads to a harmful leveling of values and judgments, and to a proliferation of handicrafts that, if not exactly harmful, is at least annoying. The arts and sciences should not be encouraged; they should, rather, be discouraged, in order to limit the eruption of soi-disant and untalented dilettantes. To store up the wild waters, that is, to store up energy and render it exploitable, dams are needed.
These peevish thoughts and observations came to mind on a late summer afternoon, as I was walking down a hill: their source was a signpost, with the St. Andrew’s cross that signals an intersection, to whose four arms four mustaches had been added, at right angles, in dark-green paint, thus transforming it into a swastika. The next sign had undergone the same touch-up; whereas the signs facing in the other direction, that is, visible to those going uphill, were unblemished. It was clear that the illicit painter had come from above. As I continued on down, I found another post with a swastika, and a wall on which the stylized two-headed ax of the far right Ordine Nuovo had been painted, and written next to it: “You Chinese, just a few more months.” A little beyond, on the side of a chapel, I read: “W the SS”—“Long Live the SS”—with the two S’s in their rigid, runic-chair-like form, the one that was preferred and prescribed by Hitler and Rosenberg, and that the linotype machines and typewriters of the Third Reich were equipped with. Farther on, and in the same dark-green paint, was written: “To Us!”
At this point I would like to clarify my feelings. All writing on walls, not just Fascist slogans, saddens me, because it’s pointless and stupid, and stupidity is damaging to human society. Apart from the revolutionary exceptions that I mentioned earlier, it’s acceptable only if it’s done by children, or by those who have the mental age of children: more generally, those who are unable to foresee the effects of their own actions. In fact, this cumbersome and untidy* vehicle of propaganda has never led anyone to change his mind, not even the most ingenuous reader, and not even about the excellence of a soccer team; or, if it has, has done so in the opposite sense of the writer’s intentions, as happens with the advertisements you’re forced to watch at the movies. I get even more irritated by the writing (though it’s rare) of those who think as I do, because they debase ideas that I consider to be serious.
In short, I dislike writing on walls, especially if it’s Fascist nonsense. I continued on my way, finding still more swastikas, all of them dextrorotatory, that is, obtained by crossing the initial N and S of National Socialism. Now, if someone draws swastikas at random, it’s likely that he’ll do half dextro- and half levorotatory: the fact that they were all to the right was therefore a sign, the symptom of a minimum of historical or ideological training. So much the worse. At the intersection with the state road there was the inscription W SAM,1 then the trail was lost, either to the right or to the left: maybe here the painter had got back in his car or on his motorcycle.
In town I took care of the business I had to take care of, and went back up the same road. The inscriptions still had a slight odor of solvent, so they couldn’t be very old, at most two days. The paint was still soft where it was thickest. As I slowly ascended, I tried to reconstruct from the signs the personality of the painter, which is always a fascinating exercise. Young, undoubtedly, for the reasons mentioned above. Tall, not very: the swastikas on the signposts had been sprayed from bottom to top, one could see from the dribbles. Robust, very likely: everyone knows what the Nazis think of the non-robust, and it can be presumed that among the non-robust (except for aberrations) the sentiment is returned. Intelligent no, certainly. And no expert in spraying paint, as was evident from the lack of uniformity in the strokes, and from the drips and spots corresponding to the change of direction in those strokes. Cultured and educated? Hard to say: there were no errors of spelling, the writing seemed fluent. Let’s say first year of high school. To summarize, the image (completely arbitrary) I had come up with was of a student of about fifteen, muscular and stocky, “of good family,” emotionally unstable, introverted, tending to bullying and violence. As for the family history, the information was scant: maybe the father, too, was a Fascist, because among the green inscriptions there was a “To Us!” universal during the Ventennio2 but discredited among the younger generations; and this father must own a greenish-brown car, because someone who buys a can of spray paint just for writing on walls is more likely to choose red or black. The more plausible hypothesis was that the father had bought the green spray paint to touch up the green car, and then given it to his son, or the son had appropriated it.
Mulling over this line of reasoning in a random fashion, as one does while walking, I arrived at the square in B. I immediately discarded the idea of reporting the swastikas to the carabinieri: they are good enough at catching chicken thieves but certain other activities, large or small, do not rouse their reflexes for trapping, hunting, and capture. Instead, I went to the housewares shop, the only place in B. where paint is sold: of course the spray can could have come from far away, but why not try? The housewares lady was efficient (as she is in all her doings; I’ve known her for some time); without visibly straining to remember, she said yes, she had sold a single spray can, Alfa Green 12004, last Friday, to Signor Fissore, at ten in the morning. Perfect.
In B. we all know one another. Fissore is an insurance agent, a gourmet and a flashy dresser, something of a braggart, skeptical and credulous at the same time, gossipy more from thoughtlessness than from spite; a man out of his time, eighty years late, and in our day he moves uneasily, denies everything, doesn’t want to see things, barricades himself on weekends like the pioneers in their forts. He is not a man of swastikas. That’s why I hadn’t thought of him, or of his Alfa Giulia, which is in fact green. But his childre
n?
Other people’s children don’t interest me much. They might interest me if I could have contact with them, but that’s impossible. They are amoebas, clouds; they are indescribable—every year, every month they change clothes, habits, language, face, and, even more, opinions. To what purpose get friendly with Proteus? You will praise him for his whiteness, and find him before you black as pitch. You will pity his sufferings and he will strangle you.
Fissore has a son and a daughter, but the latter was out of the question: she had been in Scotland for a month. The son is called Piero, and doesn’t fit the tentative image I was forming, except in the fact of being fifteen years old. He is thin, timid, and nearsighted, and I don’t think he’s involved in politics: I can say that because last summer I gave him some algebra and geometry lessons, and those who have tried it know that private lessons are a wonderful tool for investigation, sensitive as seismographs. He isn’t even a typical introvert, because he speaks quite a lot; rather, he’s a complainer, one of those who tend to see the world as a vast network of conspiracies against them, and themselves at the center of the world, exposed to every sort of injustice. It’s hard to be cured of this tendency, which is debilitating, because injustices exist. I think it’s good to teach those who feel persecuted that they’re not the only ones exposed to injustice, and, above all, that complaining is no use; we must defend ourselves, individually or collectively, with tenacity and intelligence, and also with optimism. Without optimism the battles are lost, even against windmills.
I ran into Piero a few days later, by chance, because I didn’t think it was worth the trouble to follow him, or to stand outside his gate in ambush, like a leopard. I asked him how things had gone at school: first mistake. Badly: he had to retake the exams in October, even in mathematics. He said it with an air of rebuke, as if it had been my fault, not as a former instructor but as other, as not-Piero, and hence a member of the conspiracy against him. I deduced from this a vague distress, consisting of a superficial layer of vexation, and a deeper one that seemed to me remorse, an imprecise remorse, without direction, to analyze later; his evident unhappiness, and the act that I suspected him of, might really be my fault. Giving geometry lessons to an adolescent is not only a diagnostic tool; it is also, or can be, a drastic therapy. It can be the first revelation, in a school career, of the severe power of reason, of the intellectual courage that rejects myths, and of the healthy emotion of recognizing in one’s own mind a mirror of the universe. It can be an antidote to rhetoric, approximation, sloth; it can be, for the youth, a joyful verification of his mental muscularity, or the occasion to develop it. Perhaps I had made scant use of this therapy, or none, or it had been unsuitable for him. I looked at him carefully, close up. He is bony rather than thin, the eyes behind the glasses are hesitant, unsteady, as if uncertain what to focus on. I didn’t know where to begin my inquiry; in the end, thinking that the straight way was best, I asked him if he had seen the green inscriptions down the road. “I did them,” he said simply. “I’ve had enough, it’s got to stop.”