The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  He didn’t get much. They were neither callused nor too well cared for, neither reddened by detergents nor ennobled by cosmetics. They were quite strong and short, with pale, slightly peeling nail polish; maybe the woman came from far away, certainly she was not the type who devotes a lot of time to personal appearance. She wore a windbreaker, and underneath a black polo-neck sweater; her pants were of brown corduroy, fairly worn, with two leather patches on the inside of the thighs. An incongruous place: what purpose could they serve? To ride a broomstick? But she didn’t look like a witch; she seemed a rather domestic type. The rest of the girl was also strong and short; Riccardo calculated that if they both stood up she would barely reach his shoulder. In fact, a little while later she stood up, but it was impossible to check because he stayed sitting.

  Anyway, the girl stood up, rummaged in her purse, which was on the luggage rack, and took out a book, at which Riccardo became all eyes, like Argus. It wasn’t a mystery or a science fiction novel or a Mondadori classic; it was an old, shabby volume, with a soft faded cover, on which Riccardo read bit by bit, in English, “Catalogue of the Petrarch Collection, bequeathed by . . .” he couldn’t decipher by whom the collection had been “bequeathed,” and that “bequeathed” intrigued him, but the rest of the title took away any trace of sleepiness. He, too, had a book in his suitcase, but it didn’t lend itself to exchanging a message: it was a sex and horror paperback; better to leave it where it was. There came to mind the proofs that he was to deliver to Naples; he took them out and began to correct them ostentatiously, although they were already corrected, but he soon stopped maneuvering, because the girl had fallen asleep. Little by little, as she slept, her hold on the book weakened; the volume closed, slid between her knees, and ended up on the floor. Riccardo didn’t dare to pick it up.

  She was calm and composed in sleep, and Riccardo took advantage of that for a more extensive and thorough inventory. From her heavy shapeless shoes, it seemed that the girl was English: American no, she seemed too homey. Her face, however, didn’t go with that, there was nothing English about it—it was round and olive-skinned, and her hair was brown, with a clean, old-fashioned part. A sleeping face, or anyway a face that isn’t speaking, doesn’t express much; it can be indifferently coarse or delicate, intelligent or stupid; you can distinguish only when it is animated in speech. Seen thus, one could say only that it was youthful and intelligent; the nose was short and turned up, the mouth wide but well shaped, the cheekbones and eyes of a vaguely oriental shape.

  A little later Riccardo, too, fell asleep, and was immediately aware of being a great poet, pious, cultivated, and restless; he was returning from his crowning in Rome, where he had won the Strega Prize, and was traveling to Valchiusa in a special, incredibly sumptuous car, whose upholstery was dotted with bees and the lilies of France. The mattress he was lying on, however, rustled annoyingly, because it was full of dried laurel leaves, and his suitcase, too, was full of laurel branches. Still, the girl opposite—who, although she didn’t at all resemble Laura, generally corresponded to her—didn’t care about his triumphs or about him; rather, it seemed that she wasn’t even aware of his presence. He felt in some way obliged to speak to her, or at least to offer his hand, but he was prevented by a singular impediment.

  It was a material impediment, and almost comic: in other words, to put it plainly, he felt pasted to that mattress, completely pasted, from head to toe, like a fly on flypaper. Things being as they were, he didn’t even really want to speak to her. Of all the splendid verses he had in his time written for her, not one came to mind, and, besides, he wasn’t completely unhappy to be pasted, because that girl was the wife of a knight with a sinister name (this name, however, he couldn’t remember), famous for his jealousy and his cruelty.

  There were other reasons to feel glued to his berth: in competition with the young foreigner there existed another young woman of ambiguous identity, in fact, definitely of a dual nature, since she lived in Turin on Via Gioberti in 1966 and simultaneously somewhere in Provence in 1366. He should be able to overlook inconsistencies of this sort, but she was a type who did not admit compromises, and would not have accepted rivals, even in 1366. What to do? Riccardo thrust her into his subconscious: for the moment she was better there.

  He then felt a deeper and more serious uneasiness. Was it legitimate, was it decent for a good Christian, to invent a woman, distilling her from his dreams, for the purpose of loving her image for a lifetime, and using this love to become a famous poet, and to become a poet in order not to completely die, and at the same time to see that other woman of Via Gioberti? Wasn’t it hypocritical?

  Already he felt weighing on him the hypocrite’s cap, gilded outside, lead inside, when the train slowed down and stopped at a station. A mechanical female voice, but certainly Tuscan, announced in the shadows that it was the Station of Pisa, Station of Pisa, change for Florence and Volterra. Riccardo woke up; the girl (completely put back into perspective) woke, too: she stretched, yawned politely, gave a hint of a timid smile, and said, “Pisa. Vituperio de le genti—.” She had a strong English accent. Riccardo, still confused by sleep and by his dream, gasped for a moment, and then replied, correctly, “del bel paese là dove il sí suona,”1 but he couldn’t remember the next line.

  He remained astonished by the girl’s overture; yet he intended to show her the Capraia and the Gorgona, as soon as the train moved, and if the moon came out from behind the clouds. But the moon didn’t come out, and he had to be content with the theoretical explanation: of how, that is, the two harmless islands, seen from Pisa in perspective, could in fact bring to mind, for a slightly angry poet, the elaborate and vicious image of a dam at the mouth of the Arno, so that every person in Pisa would drown. To all appearances the girl, too, was contented by it; she seemed fairly familiar with the business of Count Ugolino but was overcome by sleep. She yawned again, looked at her watch (Riccardo also looked; it was one forty), asked perfunctorily, “May I stretch my limbs?” and, without waiting for an answer, took off her shoes and lay down on the seat, occupying all three places. She wasn’t wearing socks; her feet were solid but graceful and young, almost childish.

  Riccardo had trouble getting back to sleep. “. . . dove le belle membra / pose colei che sola a me par donna.”2 No Italian would ever say membra, or “limb”—it’s one of those words which can be written but not uttered, because of some mysterious national taboo. There are many of these; who, in speaking, would ever say poiché (since), or alcuni (some) or ascoltare (listen)? No one; he, for example, would be flayed alive before he did so, just as, for that matter, any Piedmontese or Lombard would be flayed alive before using the remote past tense. Out of every five words in the dictionary, at least one is unspeakable, like a dirty word.

  At dawn, a little beyond Rome, the girl woke up, or, rather, she reawakened. Riccardo offered her a cigarette, and she lit one for herself and for him. Starting a conversation wasn’t difficult; in a few minutes Riccardo had learned the essential facts: that she was studying modern literature; that she was in Italy for the first time, and hadn’t much money, but an aunt married to an Italian expected her in Salerno. She had studied Italian pronunciation on records, and the rest in the fourteenth-century writers, especially the Canzoniere of Petrarch, which was the subject of her thesis.

  Riccardo prepared to recount the griefs and struggles, the disappointments and victories of his life, his recurrent discouragement, and at the same time his deep certainty that someday he would become a famous and respected writer, and the exhausting boredom of his daily job (but he wouldn’t say that he worked in an advertising agency: that no), but the girl didn’t even let him begin. When she had finished the cigarette, she took out a small mirror, grimaced with a little laugh, and said, “I’m really a fright!” She left the compartment, announcing that she was going to comb her hair and wash her face.

  Riccardo, left alone, began to calculate. He, too, could continue on to Salerno: he could act as a guide
, he knew the area well, he had some money; but there were the proofs to deliver to Naples, which the client had to approve. Or he could propose to the girl that she, too, get out at Naples. In Naples he would have the home-field advantage; he didn’t remember much more of Petrarch (he regretted it sincerely, for the first time in his life, and they say that a classical education is useless!), but anyway he hoped that he would be more amusing than the aunt in Salerno. Or let her go to Salerno, and propose a meeting in Naples the following day: he would return to Turin a day (or maybe two, why not?) late, but he would find a pretext. A strike: there is always a strike.

  But meanwhile the girl had come back, and immediately afterward the train began to brake. Riccardo was not a man of rapid and easy decisions: he rose and took down his suitcase from the luggage rack, opened it, and rearranged the contents, but meanwhile, conscious of the girl’s look of curiosity, was feverishly racking his brains for a formula of farewell that would not commit him too deeply and yet not appear definitive.

  When the train stopped in the station at Naples, he turned and found himself confronting the girl’s gaze. It was a firm and gentle gaze, but with an edge of expectation: she seemed to read him clearly, as if in a book. Riccardo asked, “Why don’t you get out at Naples with me?” The girl shook her head no. He stared at her, smiled, and she, too, had the air of racking her brains, of searching for a response that she couldn’t grasp. She bit one finger, in a childish way; then, waving it solemnly, pronounced, “Quanto piacce al mondo è breve soghno.”3 “It’s pronounced son-yo,” said Riccardo, and headed into the corridor to get off the train.

  1. “Pisa, scandal of the people of the beautiful land where sì is heard”: Inferno Canto XXXIII:79.

  2. “where she, who alone appeared to me woman, rested her beautiful limbs”: Petrarch, Sonnet 126.

  3. “All worldly pleasure is a brief dream”: Petrarch, Sonnet 1.

  1

  July 1943

  “In my village, clocks were a rarity. There was a clock on the belltower, but it hadn’t told time in I don’t know how many years, maybe since the revolution. I never saw it run, and my father used to say that he hadn’t, either. Not even the bell ringer had a clock.”

  “So how did he know when it was time to ring the bells?”

  “He heard the hour on the radio, and then he reckoned by the sun and the moon. Anyway, he didn’t ring the bells every hour; he only rang the most important hours. Two years before the war broke out, the bell rope broke. It snapped high up, the wooden ladder was rotten, the bell ringer was old, and he was afraid to climb up and tie on a new rope. From then on, he marked the hours by firing his hunting rifle into the air: one, two, three, four shots. That went on until the Germans arrived. They took his rifle away, and the village was left without the time.”

  “Did your bell ringer fire his rifle at night, too?”

  “No, but he’d never rung the bells at night, either. We slept at night, and no one needed to know the time. The only one who really cared was the rabbi. He had to know the exact time so he could be sure when the Sabbath began and ended. But he didn’t need the bells. He had a pendulum clock and an alarm clock; when the clocks agreed, he was kind, but when they didn’t agree, you could tell right away, because he turned argumentative, and he’d smack the children’s fingers with his ruler. When I got older, he asked me to get the two clocks to agree. Yes, I was a clockmaker; a licensed one, too. That’s why the recruiting board assigned me to the artillery. My chest measurement was just adequate, with not a centimeter to spare. I had my own workshop; it was small but with everything I needed. I didn’t just repair clocks and watches, I was good at fixing everything, even radios and tractors, as long as they weren’t too badly broken. I was the mechanic for the kolkhoz, and I liked my work. I repaired clocks on my own, in my spare time. There wasn’t much call for that, but everyone had a rifle, and I fixed rifles, too. And if you’re wondering what the name of this village is, it’s called Strelka, just like who knows how many other villages; and if you want to know where it is, well I can tell you that it’s not far from here, or it used to be, because this Strelka no longer exists. Half the villagers fled into the countryside and the forest, and the other half are in a mass grave, and they’re not packed all that tight, because plenty of them had already died. That’s right, in a mass grave, a grave that the Jews of Strelka were forced to dig themselves; but in that grave are the Christians, too, and there’s not much difference between them now. And you should know that I who am speaking to you now, I, Mendel the clockmaker who repaired the tractors of the kolkhoz, had a wife, and she’s in that grave, too; and that I consider myself lucky never to have had children. You should know that many’s the time I cursed this village that no longer exists, because it was a village of ducks and nanny goats, and because there was a synagogue and a church but no movie house; and now when I think of it, it seems like the Garden of Eden to me, and I’d cut off a hand if that could make time run backward and everything return to the way it was.”

  Leonid listened, not daring to interrupt. He had removed his boots and his foot wrappings, and had laid them out in the sun to dry. He rolled two cigarettes, one for him and one for Mendel, then he reached into his pocket for matches. They were damp and he had to strike three before the fourth one burst into flame. Mendel watched him calmly. He was of medium height, limbs taut and sinewy rather than powerful; he had smooth dark hair, a tanned oval face, agreeable despite the bristly beard, a straight short nose, and intense, dark, bulging eyes. Mendel couldn’t tear his gaze away from them. They were restless, now staring, now evasive, filled with demand. The eyes of a creditor: or at least of someone who feels he is owed something. And who doesn’t feel he is owed something?

  Mendel asked him: “Why did you stop here of all places?”

  “By chance, really: I saw a barn. And then because of your face.”

  “What makes my face different from others?”

  “Well, that’s the point, it’s not different.” The young man ventured an awkward laugh. “It’s a face like many, it inspires trust. You’re not a Muscovite, but if you walked around Moscow out-of-towners would stop you to ask directions.”

  “They’d be out of luck if they did: if I was so good at finding my way around, I wouldn’t still be here. You should know that I don’t have much to offer you, for your stomach or your spirit. My name is Mendel, and Mendel stands for Menachem, which means ‘consoler,’ but I never consoled anyone.”

  They smoked for a few minutes in silence. Mendel had extracted a jackknife from his pocket, and picked up a small flat stone from the ground. He spat on it from time to time as he sharpened the blade against it; every so often he checked the sharpness of the edge against his thumbnail. Once he was satisfied, he began trimming the rest of his fingernails, manipulating the knife as if it were a saw. Once he had cut all ten nails, Leonid offered him another cigarette. Mendel refused.

  “No, thanks. Really, I shouldn’t smoke, but when I find tobacco, I smoke. What can a man do, when he’s reduced to living like a wolf?”

  “Why shouldn’t you smoke?”

  “Because of my lungs. Or my bronchi, I’m not sure which. As if it matters whether you smoke or not when the whole world is collapsing around you. Come on, give me that cigarette; I’ve been here since last fall, and this might be the third time I’ve had something to smoke. There’s a village about four kilometers away. It’s called Valuets, it’s surrounded by forest, and the peasants are good people, but they have no tobacco; they also have no salt. For a hundred grams of salt, they’ll give you a dozen eggs, or even a chicken.”

  Leonid remained silent for a few moments, as if he were undecided, then he stood up and, barefoot as he was, strode into the barn, emerged with his rucksack and began rummaging around in it. “Here,” he said, tersely, showing Mendel two packets of unrefined salt. “Twenty chickens, if your rate of exchange is accurate.”

  Mendel held out his hand, took the two packets, and he
fted them approvingly. “Where did you get them?”

  “From a long way away. Summer came, and I no longer needed my army utility belt, that’s where I got them. Trade never dies, even when the grass and the people die. There are places where they have salt, places where they have tobacco, and others still where they have nothing. I come from a long way away, too. I’ve been living day to day for six months now, walking without knowing where I’m headed; I’m walking just to keep walking, I walk because I walk.”

  “So you come from Moscow?” Mendel asked.

  “I come from Moscow and from a hundred other places. I come from a school, where I learned accounting, and I immediately forgot it. I come from the Lubyanka, because when I was sixteen I stole, and they put me in prison for eight months. In fact, I stole a watch, so in a way we’re practically colleagues. I come from Vladimir, from the paratrooper school, because when you’re an accountant they put you in the paratroopers. I come from Laptevo, near Smolensk, where I parachuted into the middle of the Germans. And I come from the concentration camp of Smolensk, because I escaped: I escaped in January, and since then I’ve done nothing but walk. Forgive me, brother, but I’m tired, my feet hurt, I’m hot, and I want to sleep. But first I want to know where we are.”

  “As I told you, we’re near Valuets: it’s a village three days’ hike from Bryansk. It’s a quiet place, the railroad is thirty kilometers away, the woods are dense and the roads are muddy, or dusty, or covered with snow, depending on the season. The Germans don’t like this sort of place, they only come around to confiscate livestock, and not that often. Come on, let’s take a bath.”