The Complete Works of Primo Levi

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.