by Primo Levi
Without a squeal,
And tell my lovely heart,
That mediocre musician with no rhythm:
“After 2.6 billion heartbeats
You must be tired, too; thank you, it’s enough.”
If possible, as I was saying—
If it weren’t for those who stay behind,
For the work cut short
(Each life’s cut short),
For the world’s turns and wounds;
it wasn’t for the unfinished business,
The long-standing debts,
The old unavoidable commitments.
December 10, 1984
Song of Those Who Died in Vain
Sit and bargain
All you want, old silver foxes.
We’ll wall you up inside a splendid palace
With food and wine, good beds, and heat
So you can argue and negotiate
About our children’s lives and yours.
Let all the wisdom of creation
Converge to bless your minds
And guide you through the labyrinth.
But we’ll be waiting outside in the cold,
The army of the dead in vain,
We of the Marne and Montecassino,
Of Treblinka, Dresden, and Hiroshima:
And with us will be
The lepers and the victims of trachoma,
The disappeared of Buenos Aires,
The dead of Cambodia and the dying of Ethiopia,
The negotiated of Prague,
The bled of Calcutta,
The slaughtered innocents of Bologna.
Woe unto you if you emerge with no agreement:
We’ll strangle you in our bear hug.
We’re invincible because we’re the defeated.
We’re invulnerable because we’ve died:
We deride your missiles.
Sit and negotiate
Till your tongues go dry:
If the harm and shame go on
We’ll drown you in our putrefaction.
January 14, 1985
Samson
Son of a sterile mother
I too was announced
By a messenger with a terrifying face.
Child of the Sun, I was a sun myself;
I had the Sun’s power
Gathered in my bull’s loins.
I, sun and beast,
Killed my enemies by the thousand,
Splintered doors and shattered chains,
Took women and burned harvests,
Until a Philistine Delilah
Sheared my hair and strength
And put out the light of my eyes:
There’s no struggling against the shadows.
My hair grew back
Along with my brute force;
But not my will to live.
Delilah
Samson of Timnath, the rebel,
The Jewish mountain-splitter,
Was as malleable as potter’s clay
In my gentle hands.
It was a simple thing to take
The secret of his fabled strength:
I flattered him and babied him,
And put him to sleep in my lap
Still full of his foreign seed,
I blinded him and sheared his locks,
And took the power from his loins.
My rage and lust
Have never found such peace
As when I saw him in chains;
Not even when I felt him enter me.
Now let him meet his fate: what do I care?
April 5, 1985
Airport
It was a sampling of man in transit,
As if selected at random
For inspection by an alien buyer:
Rich and poor and fat and slim,
Indians, blacks, the sick, and children.
What does man in transit do?
Nothing of significance.
Chats and sleeps and smokes in his seat:
What will the buyer say? What will he offer
For that seventy-year-old woman in tights?
For that group of eight talking nonsense,
Grandparents, mothers, grand- and great-grandchildren?
For that family of fatties
Stuck in their chair?
For the two of us, fed up with foreign words?
We’re leaving. The great cavelike bird
Sucks up everyone indiscriminately:
We cross Acheron
Via a telescopic concourse.
It taxis, accelerates, gathers power,
Lifts off, and suddenly is raised into the sky
Body and soul: our bodies and souls.
Are we worthy of Assumption?
Now it flies into the purple twilight
Over the ice of nameless seas,
Or above a mantle of dark clouds,
As if this planet of ours
Had hidden its face in shame.
Now it’s flying with dull thuds
Almost as if someone were driving piles
Into the Stygian swamp;
Now along soft,
Smoothed tracks of air.
The night is without sleep, but brief,
Brief the way no night has ever been:
Light and carefree like a first night.
At Malpensa, Lisa with her bright,
alert expression was expecting us.
I don’t think it was a useless trip.
May 29, 1985
On Trial
—State your name—Alex Zink.—Where were you born?
—In Nuremberg, illustrious ancient city,
Erstens, because certain laws were promulgated there
That don’t concern us here;
Zweitens, for a questionable trial;
Drittens, because the best toys in the world
Are manufactured there.
—Tell me how you lived.
Don’t lie. It would be pointless here.
—I worked hard, Your Honor.
Stone on stone, label after label,
I built a model industry.
The best buckram, the best felt
Were made by the Zink Company.
I was a humane, hardworking boss:
Honest prices, generous pay,
Never a dispute with customers.
And above all, as I told you,
The best felt made in Europe.
—Did you use good wool?
—Extraordinary wool, Your Honor.
Loose or braided,
Wool for which we had the monopoly.
Black and chestnut, tawny and blond wool;
But gray or white more often.
—From which sheep?
—I don’t know. I didn’t care:
I paid in cash.
—Tell me. Have your dreams been peaceful?
—Usually yes, Your Honor,
Although at times, in sleep,
I hear groans of grieving ghosts.
—Stand down, weaver.
July 19, 1985
Thieves
They come at night, like wisps of mist,
Often also by the light of day.
Unseen, they filter
Into cracks and keyholes
Noiselessly; and leave no trace,
No broken locks, no disruptions.
They are thieves of time,
Fluid and sleek, like leeches:
They drink your time and spit it out
The way you’d toss out garbage.
You’ve never looked them in the face. Do they have faces?
Lips and tongue for certain
and tiny, pointy teeth.
They suck and cause no pain,
Leaving just a livid scar.
October 14, 1985
Mandate
Don’t be afraid if there’s a lot of work.
They need you because you’re less exhausted.
Because your senses are fine-tuned, you hear
The hollow sound beneath your feet.
Reconsider our mistakes:
There’s been one among us
Who’s been searching blindly
The way a blindfolded man repeats an outline,
And one who has weighed anchor like a pirate
And one who’s done his level best.
Help, insecure one. Try,
Although you’re insecure,
Because you’re insecure. See
If you can repress the annoyance and the boredom
At our doubts and certainties.
We were never all that rich, and yet
We live among embalmed monsters,
Among other monsters who are obscenely alive.
Don’t be dismayed by the rubble
Or the stench of the dumps: we
Leveled them with our bare hands
In the years when we were your age.
Keep on course the best you can.
We’ve combed the comets’ manes,
Deciphered the secrets of genesis,
Tromped in the moon’s sand,
Built Auschwitz and destroyed Hiroshima.
You see that we weren’t lazy.
Take up the challenge, perplexed one;
Don’t call us teachers.
June 24, 1986
August
Who stays in town in August?
Only the poor and the insane,
Forgotten crones,
Retirees with their little dogs,
Thieves, a few gentlemen, and cats.
On the deserted streets
You hear a constant click of heels;
You see women with their plastic bags
In the line of shade along the walls.
Under the little fountain with its turret
In the pool that’s green with algae
Is a middle-aged naiad
Ten and a half centimeters tall:
Wearing nothing but a bra.
A few feet on,
Ignoring the familiar ban,
The pleading pigeons
Flock around
And steal bread from your hand.
You hear the noontime demon rustle,
Circling listless in the sky.
July 22, 1986
The Fly
I’m alone here: this
Is a sanitary hospital.
I’m the messenger.
No locked doors for me:
There’s always a window,
A crack, a keyhole.
I find lots of food
Left by the overfed
And by those who no longer eat.
I also feed
On discarded medicine,
Because nothing harms me,
Everything nourishes me, strengthens, helps me;
Noble and ignoble matter,
Blood, pus, kitchen scraps:
I turn it all into energy for flight,
My work is that urgent.
I’m the last to kiss the lips
Of the dying and the soon to die.
I’m important. My monotonous
Buzzing, irritating, meaningless,
Repeats the one message of the world
To those who cross this threshold.
I am mistress here:
The only one who’s free, unhampered, healthy.
August 31, 1986
The Dromedary
Why all these quarrels and disputes and wars?
All you have to do is be like me.
No water? I go without,
Careful only not to waste my breath.
No food? I take it from my hump:
When the time is right
Grow one yourselves.
And if my hump gets flabby
All I need’s a little brush and straw;
Green grass is lust and vanity.
My voice is ugly? I am mostly silent,
And when I bellow no one hears.
I’m ugly? My mate likes me.
Our females keep to the point
And produce the best milk there is;
Demand the same of yours.
Yes, I serve, but the desert’s mine:
There’s no servant who’s without his kingdom.
Mine is desolation;
It is boundless.
November 24, 1986
Almanac
The indifferent rivers
Will keep falling to the sea
Or ruinously overflow their banks,
Ancient works of persevering men.
The glaciers will keep screaming
Polishing what lies beneath
Or abruptly avalanche
Cutting short the lives of the evergreens.
The sea will keep on struggling
Caught between the continents
Ever more jealous of its wealth.
Sun stars planets comets
Will continue on their course.
Even Earth will fear the changeless
Laws of creation.
Not we. We, rebellious offspring
Of great intelligence and little wisdom,
Will keep destroying and corrupting
Ever more frenetically;
Quick, we spread the desert
Into the forests of the Amazon,
Into our cities’ very hearts,
Into our own.
January 2, 1987
CONTENTS
PREFACE
My House
Aldous Huxley
Ex-Chemist
François Rabelais
The Moon and Us
Tartarin of Tarascon
Going Back to School
Why Do We Write?
Congested Air
Guncotton Stockings
Against Pain
About Obscure Writing
“Leggere la Vita”
Signs on Stone
Novels Dictated by Crickets
Domum Servavit
Renzo’s Fist
Thirty Hours Aboard the Castoro 6
To Invent an Animal
The Squirrel
The Book of Odd Data
The Leap of the Flea
To Translate and Be Translated
The Children’s International
The Language of Chemists I
The Language of Chemists II
Butterflies
Fear of Spiders
The Force of Amber
The Irritable Chess Players
Queneau’s Cosmogony
Inspector Silhouette
Writing a Novel
Stable/Unstable
Masters of Our Fate
News from the Sky
Beetles
Ritual and Laughter
The Invisible World
“The Most Joyous Creatures in the World”
The Mark of the Chemist
The Best Merchandise
Fossil Words
The Skull and the Orchid
My Grandfather’s Shop
A Long Duel
The Language of Odors
The Scribe
To a Young Reader
The Need for Fear
The Eclipse of the Prophets
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
Preface
If you remain in a compact group, the way bees and sheep do in winter, you have certain advantages: you’re better protected from the cold and from attack. But those who stay at the edge of the group, and even those who are isolated, possess other advantages. They can leave when they like, and have a better view of the landscape. My fate, aided by my own decisions, has kept me clear of crowds: too much of a chemist, and a chemist for too long, ever to feel myself a genuine man of letters; too caught up in the landscape, parti-colored, tragic, or strange, to feel like a chemist in every fiber of my being. In other words, I went my isolated way, and followed a serpentine path, nosing around here and there, and building myself a jumbled, gap-filled, know-it-all culture. My reward has been the fun
of seeing the world in an uncommon light, inverting the instrumentation, so to speak: revisiting technical matters with the writer’s eye, and things literary with the eye of a technician.
The essays that are collected in this book (previously published, for the most part, in La Stampa) are the product of a decade and more of vagabond and dilettantish curiosity. They are “field invasions,” incursions into other people’s professions, poaching in private hunting reserves, raids into the boundless territories of zoology, astronomy, and linguistics: sciences that I’ve never studied in any systematic manner, and which therefore cast upon me the enduring spell of an unrequited, unconsummated love, exciting my impulses to be a voyeur and a busybody. Elsewhere, I have ventured to take positions on current issues, or to reread ancient and modern classics, or to explore the transverse bonds that knit together the worlds of nature and culture; I have frequently set foot on bridges that join (or ought to join) scientific culture with literary culture, crossing a crevasse that has always struck me as absurd. Some people wring their hands and describe it as an abyss, but then do nothing to bridge it; there are even those who work to widen it, as if the scientist and the literary man belonged to two different subspecies of humanity, speaking different languages, fated to ignore each other and incapable of cross-pollinating. It is an unnatural, needless, toxic schism, the product of long-ago taboos and the Counter-Reformation, and in some cases it can even be traced back to a small-minded interpretation of the Biblical prohibition against partaking of a certain fruit. That division was unknown to Empedocles, Dante, Leonardo, Galileo, Descartes, Goethe, and Einstein, and to the nameless builders of the Gothic cathedrals, or Michelangelo; nor is it known to good craftsmen of the present day, or to physicists who hesitate on the brink of the unknowable.
At times I am asked, with curiosity or even with arrogance, why on earth I write in spite of the fact that I’m a chemist. I hope that these essays of mine, within their modest bounds of commitment and bulk, may show that there is no incompatibility between the “two cultures”: instead, at times, when there is goodwill on both sides, there can be a mutual attraction. I also hope to convey to the reader an impression I often have: that though we may be living in an era rife with problems and dangers, it is never dull.
PRIMO LEVI
JANUARY 16, 1985
My House
I have always lived (with involuntary interruptions) in the house where I was born: the way I live was not, therefore, the result of a choice. I believe that I exemplify an extreme case of sedentary life, comparable to that of some mollusks, such as limpets. After a brief larval stage, in which they swim freely, limpets fasten onto wave-pounded rocks, secrete a shell, and then never move again for the rest of their lives. This is something more likely to happen to a person born in the country; for a city dweller like me, it’s undoubtedly a rare fate, and it leads to unusual advantages and disadvantages. Perhaps it is this static destiny that explains the unsatisfied love that I feel for travel, as well as the frequency with which journeys appear as a topos in so many of my books. Of course, after sixty-six years in Corso Re Umberto, I have a hard time imagining what it might be like, I don’t even say to live in another country or another city, but just to live in another part of Turin.