The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  “Enough of what?”

  “Of everything. Of school. Of being fifteen. Of this town. Of mathematics: what’s the use for me? Since I’m going to be a lawyer; rather, a judge.”

  “Why a judge?”

  “To . . . so, to do justice. So that people pay; each one pays his bills.”

  We were sitting on a wall and Piero was fiddling with one hand in his pants pocket, which bulged oddly. Gradually, mechanically, he took out a Ping-Pong ball, then a piece of candy, a crumpled photograph, two twisted cigarettes, a red-and-black badge I couldn’t identify, a clothespin, a handkerchief with two knots, a hair clip. Silently he arranged the objects on the wall, between me and him: he pretended to be distracted, but I understood that it was a scene, a performance directed at me. Finally he said, “And she dumped me.” He took the clip and with an angry gesture threw it into the river that ran deep at the base of the wall, among weeds and broken packing crates.

  It didn’t seem to me fitting to push the inquiry further. Piero, looking into the void, bit his fingernails; then he threw into the stream, one by one, the other symbols, to me indecipherable, with the exception of the handkerchief, which he put back in his pocket. I thought that, if it depended on him, the Chinese would be able to survive a long time. I thought also of the essential ambiguity of the messages that each of us leaves behind, from birth to death, and of our profound incapacity to reconstruct a person out of them, the man who lives out of the man who writes. Those who write, even if only on walls, write in a code that is theirs alone, and that others do not know; likewise those who speak. Few are able to transmit clearly, to express, to express themselves, to be explicit: some could and don’t want to, others would like to and cannot, the majority neither want to nor can.

  But I thought also of the misunderstood power of the weak, the unfit: in our unstable world, a failure, even a silly failure like that of the fifteen-year-old Piero, having to retake his exam in October and dumped by the girl, can provoke others, in a chain reaction, one frustration, other frustrations. I thought of how disagreeable it is to help disagreeable men, who are most in need of help. And finally I thought of the thousands of other writings on Italian walls, faded by forty years of rain and sun, often riddled with bullet holes from the war they helped unleash, and yet still legible, thanks to the vicious obstinacy of paints and corpses, which break down in a short time but whose macabre remains endure into eternity: writings that are tragically ironic, and yet perhaps still capable of inciting errors from their error, and failures from their failure.

  * Here, and throughout Lilith and Other Stories, an asterisk indicates that the word is in English in the original.

  1. “Long Live SAM”: SAM is Squadre d’Azione Mussolini (Mussolini’s Action Squad).

  2. The period from October 30, 1922, when Mussolini took power, to July 25, 1943, when he was deposed.

  Weekend

  In July of 1942, Silvio and I talked a lot about Monte Disgrazia. For those who, like us, lived and worked in the city, talking about the mountains—making meticulous plans, consulting guides and maps—was a tolerable substitute, and was, besides, not very arduous or costly; it was, in other words, a form of voyeurism that we considered permissible, given the circumstances. The fact that on half the planet a pitiless war was raging, that bombs were raining down on Milan, and that the chains of the racial laws were tightening around us worried us without distressing us, and didn’t keep us from taking advantage of being twenty-five. The mountains allowed us to find pleasures that compensated for the many that were forbidden, and to feel equal to our contemporaries with less culpable blood.

  A sunny Saturday arrived: we took the laborious local train to Colico, jammed with evacuees, who looked malevolently at our knapsacks, and then we got on the bus that was to take us from Sondrio to Chiesa, in Val Malenco. We had rope, also picks; as for crampons, a lack of funds meant we had only one pair, intended for the lead climber. We had left it vague whether, this time, the prestige and proportionate responsibilities would fall to Silvio or to me: we would decide on the spot. On the spot, but not that time: we later decided, Solomon-style, to put on one crampon each, because there was a long icy traverse across the mountainside. Although heretical, it’s a solution that offers practical advantages, but that is another story.

  When we got off at Chiesa, it was already almost night. We entered the most modest inn in the place, handed over our documents, and had dinner. Around ten we went to our room and prepared to go to bed, since we were to rise very early, but we heard a nervous knocking at the door. It was the servant, or maybe the daughter of the owners, a thin, olive-skinned girl, with a Gypsy look, who whispered to us, in terror: “The carabinieri are waiting for you downstairs.”

  We went down, more curious than alarmed. In the hallway there was a marshal, and at first sight he seemed to us drunk: more precisely, the type of whom it is said that they are cheerful drunks. He had a pamphlet in his hand and was speaking animatedly to the innkeeper. He greeted us courteously, directed at us a luminous smile, and told us that we were in violation of the law. Then we realized that he wasn’t drunk, I mean not on wine but, rather, on the “exercise of his duties”; it’s well-known that this is an agent at least as exhilarating and intoxicating as alcohol. The pamphlet that he was holding was an issue of the Official Gazette, dated some months earlier; he showed it to us with professional enthusiasm, indeed, with tones of gratitude that astonished us, and that we understood only as his speech proceeded. Thanks to us, thanks to our identity cards, which were provided with the stamp “Of Jewish race,” and which the innkeeper had given him, he had been granted the unaccustomed joy of translating into action a rare and precious provision of the aforementioned Gazette, a connoisseur’s pleasure. Look here, Italian citizens of the Jewish race are not allowed to stay in border towns; and Chiesa, yes sir, is a border town, the Swiss border is in fact less than ten kilometers away. Very slightly less than ten, we can agree: nine kilometers and nine hundred meters as the crow flies, from the Town Hall to the closest salient, he had checked it himself on the 1:25000 scale maps of the Military Geographic Institute—so less than ten. Now, wasn’t he a conscientious bureaucrat?

  It seemed that he expected praise even from us, and he appeared disappointed when he read in our faces opposition rather than admiration. His gaze clouded, and even his face, until then shiny with sweat, seemed to slightly fog up, like a mirror below the dew point. He assured us that he had no personal resentment against us, but that the law—harsh, but the law—did not allow loopholes. We could not stay overnight in Chiesa, it was pointless to insist (in fact, we had not insisted at all), we had to return. And here the conversation became more complicated.

  Silvio said, “Return where? There’s no bus at this hour. We could go down on foot to Torre, which is outside the ten kilometers.”

  The marshal pondered, and then he said, “But who can assure me that you’ll take the road to the valley? I don’t have men to escort you, and in the dark of the blackout no one will see you. How shall we proceed?”

  I said that we, too, had the greatest respect for the law, but that authority was represented by him: it was up to him, not us, to decide what to do. Apart from everything else, we weren’t even acquainted with the wording of the law. As the matter became annoying for the marshal, it became entertaining for us; he found it irritating and strange that, instead of cooperating, we had gone in search of quibbles. He asked us about our plans for the following day, and we, wary of talking about the Disgrazia, declared that we had come up to Chiesa for the healthy mountain air; the marshal thought about it, and said that the only solution was to take us to the jail, but the innkeeper intervened in our behalf: we were his guests, race or no race, and it was immediately obvious that we were respectable people, since we had paid in advance for our stay. Here Silvio scowled at him so that he wouldn’t let slip that we had done so because we intended to leave for the mountain very early the next morning. The innkeeper was int
elligent and dropped the subject; instead he raised another objection, that there was a smuggler in the jail cell, the whole town knew it, and on the plank bed there was room only for two: it would be inhuman.

  The marshal made a conciliatory proposal: if we were confined to the inn? If the innkeeper declared himself willing to take the proper precautions so that we would not escape, the law would be safe, and in essence we, too, would achieve our goal of breathing good air, even if only through the window.

  Silvio objected that confinement to the inn was equivalent to imprisonment, and that the carabinieri should therefore reimburse us for the cost of the stay; and that in fact the question remained whether it wasn’t also their duty to pay for the dinner, because we had eaten it when the illegal act had already been committed, and if it hadn’t been discovered earlier it was their fault, not ours. The marshal was no longer amused: he said that perhaps, in certain respects, we were right, but that the reimbursement could be discussed a few months from now; he had to make a report to the Lieutenancy, or maybe even (it was a new situation) to the Division in Milan, to wait for the warrant, and so forth. The innkeeper went to the cash box, rummaged in it, and gave us back our money: he said that way it was simpler and more fitting. The marshal said that that was fine with him; we must forgive him, he would send one of his men to make sure that we in fact got on the first bus the next day, the one at eleven, and we all went to bed.

  We woke the following morning rested and refreshed, and further cheered by the fact that we had slept at the expense of the state. Of this adventure of ours in Val Malenco only two documentary photographs remain. In one you see Silvio in his pajamas, sitting on the windowsill, against a background of useless jagged peaks and the belltower clock, which says ten thirty; in the other there’s me washing my sleepy face: the time (the same) can be read on my wristwatch, pointed ostentatiously in the direction of our goal.

  The Soul and the Engineers

  “How long since I’ve seen you?” Guido asked. We had run into each other three years earlier, at a conference, and maybe also five years earlier, at the thirtieth anniversary graduation dinner; but I continued to see in him, under the encrustation of years and success, the fat, lazy, slow but not stupid boy who had been my deskmate for I don’t know how many years. I had shamelessly prompted him during quizzes, and had let him copy my Latin translations.

  Contrary to the rule, Guido improved over the years. The fat disappeared, and the laziness evolved, acquiring elegance and style: it became the noble indolence of a confident man, with tranquil nerves and measured reactions. Today, Guido is one of those happy hybrids one finds as much at ease in Torre Velasca as in Monte Carlo or on Fifth Avenue. He ordered two fritti misti and continued, “So I still haven’t told you what happened to me later? About the divorce from Henriette? My gallbladder? The soul of Miss MacLeish?”

  Divorces are all too similar to really interest me, and the gallbladder business couldn’t have been serious, or must have turned out all right, given that Guido was consuming the fritto with the slow concentration of the gourmet. So I tried to direct him to the story of the soul: his stories are always odd, and I was impatient to know what could have joined an Anglo-Saxon soul and Guido Bertone, mining engineer. Perhaps by digging ever deeper tunnels . . . ?

  “Oh no,” Guido answered, shrugging his shoulders imperceptibly. “My tunnels, that time, were anything but deep, and the soul was quite far out of the ground. We were in Utah: my company had obtained a concession for locating and extracting fossil coal. We’d struck it rich, there was coal all over: wherever we drilled, fifty or a hundred meters down we’d reach a vein, and the coal was compact, clean, and soft, so you could practically dig it out with your bare hands; in other words, a mine like butter. The firm began to get an appetite: it bought land full speed ahead, paying very high prices. In a few months all the owners had sold, except one. Right in the middle of the concession there was a tiny plot, half an acre of uncultivated land and woods, a tiny doll’s house and a shed roof with an old Ford under it. This belonged to Miss MacLeish, and she had no intention of selling.”

  “It was her right: she must have had her reasons,” I said.

  “You take her side, don’t you?” Guido answered. “Of course it was her right, but for the firm it was a serious obstacle. Our boss had written to her asking her to name a price herself; she had answered politely, saying it wasn’t that she didn’t want to sell but that she couldn’t. She would happily have accepted the firm’s offer, because she was poor and alone, but there were deep—‘deep-seated’*—reasons that she couldn’t sell the land.

  “The boss read the letter, laughed harshly, and told me to go and see what the situation was. The situation was strange: the MacLeish property was reduced to an island, with bulldozers, din, and people busy working on all four sides, but the lady gave no sign of being annoyed by this; rather, she seemed not even to notice it. She was a tall, good-looking old woman, direct, dressed with a modest simplicity: she told me that she was eighty-five, that she had been born on that land, and that she couldn’t sell because in the tallest tree lived her mother’s soul. She pointed it out to me, and it was a splendid oak, forty meters high, with a leafy cupola—a cathedral of foliage. It made an extraordinary impression of youth and strength, and something like a bond between earth and sky.”

  “Robur, roboris,” I said, since I can’t resist the vice of quoting. “In Latin it means ‘oak,’ but also ‘strength.’”

  “Bravo, but your Latin is of no use to me anymore. And yet the tree wasn’t young, it was a hundred and ten years old, the proprietress told me proudly: it had been planted the day her mother was born. I made my report, and I expected another ogreish guffaw from the boss; instead he told me that, if that was how things stood, he would have to resort to the board of directors. He did so, and four months later a committee of experts arrived—a fiduciary accountant from the firm, a man with a degree in forest science, a psychologist, and two experts in the paranormal. Another month went by in inspections and surveys, and meanwhile the blockade of the mines around Miss MacLeish became tighter and tighter; but she continued to insist that it was morally impossible to abandon the soul of her mother, contained in the oak tree, to its fate.

  “I read the experts’ report. None of them doubted the legitimacy of the objections raised by the lady, and, as for the possibility that the soul was in the tree, they confined themselves to saying that they had no arguments either to prove the fact or to refute it. They proposed to dig up the oak, with all its roots, and transplant it to a place satisfactory to the owner. After some hesitation, the lady accepted, but only on the written guarantee that the tree wouldn’t suffer, and on the drawing up (at the company’s expense) of an insurance policy on the survival of the tree; she was helped by a good lawyer.

  “The oak was so big, and its roots so strong, that thirty laborers had to dig for a week just to expose them. I was there when the crane began pulling, and I can assure you . . . yes, well, those roots struggled like living things: they put up resistance, they groaned, and then, when they came out of ground, they seemed like hands from which you were tearing something beloved. It’s lucky that the company has broad shoulders and long experience in unusual transport; it had to build special machines for lifting the tree and carrying it, stop traffic on the main road, mobilize the police, cut and then reconnect several electrical lines. Now the oak stands on top of a hill: at its foot the firm had to construct a little house and a shed identical to the ones that the lady had to abandon.”

  “And is the lady satisfied?”

  “Her behavior was above reproach. After a few months she wrote us a letter of release, in which she declared that the oak had taken root well, and that in fact it produces more acorns than before. She gave up the land for an extremely modest price.”

  Brief Dream

  The compartment had been empty until Alessandria, and Riccardo got ready for the night: he liked to sleep sitting up in a train,
and had long been used to it. But as soon as he turned off the overhead light a girl came in; she was carrying both her coat and her traveling bag so she was coming from another compartment. Evidently from the one next door, from which a confused clamor of masculine voices could be heard. She said, “Good evening,” in a curious singsong, arranged her things, and sat down opposite him.

  Riccardo wasn’t sorry about the new situation. Immediately he remembered train episodes in tales by Tolstoy and Maupassant, at least twenty little grotesque or gallant train stories, a fine novel about a train ride by Italo Calvino, and finally a famous scene in which Sherlock Holmes demonstrates to Watson how by examining a pair of hands one can easily trace the past, present, and maybe even the future of their owner. At the same time, he felt conflicted and uncomfortable; a distant (and hopeless) code of behavior prescribed that he not waste that encounter and yet he was sleepy. He answered, “Good evening,” and became engrossed in the attempt to get information from the girl’s hands.