The Complete Works of Primo Levi
Page 210
Come to that, while it may be a bad habit common to certain revolutionaries to speak to their fellow man in a language that he cannot understand, it is by no means a tool of revolution: it is in fact an age-old instrument of repression, well-known to all churches, a typical defect of our political class, and the foundation of all colonial empires. It is a subtle way to establish rank: when Fra Cristoforo says, in Latin, “Omnia munda mundis,” to Fra Fazio, who doesn’t know Latin, here is the result: “At the sound of those weighty words of a mysterious signification, and so resolutely uttered, it seemed to him that in them must be contained the solution of all his doubts. He acquiesced, saying: ‘Very well; you know more about it than I do.’”1
Nor is it true that only through verbal obscurity can we express that other obscurity, of which we are the children, and which subsists deep within us. It is not true that disorder is needed to depict disorder; it is not true that a chaotic written page is the best symbol of the ultimate chaos to which we are vowed: to believe so is a typical error of our insecure age. As long as we live, whatever the fate that has befallen us or that we have chosen for ourselves, there is no question that we will be all the more useful (and welcome) to others and to ourselves, and that we will be remembered that much longer, the better we are able to communicate. Those who don’t know how to communicate, or who communicate poorly, in some code that only they, or a chosen few, can understand, are destined to unhappiness, and to spread unhappiness around them. If they communicate poorly by intention, they are wicked, or at the least rude, because they have forced upon their readers hard work, despair, or boredom.
Of course, if the message is to be effective, clarity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition: one can be clear and boring, clear and pointless, clear and dishonest, or clear and vulgar, but that is a separate issue. Unless one is clear, there is no message at all. An animal howl is acceptable from animals, the dying, the insane, and the desperate: a whole and healthy man who employs an animal howl is either a hypocrite or a fool, and he deserves to go without readers entirely. Conversation among human beings, in a human language, is preferable to an animal howl, and I can see no reason that it should be any less poetic than that howl.
But, I repeat, these are my personal preferences, not objective rules. Anyone who writes is free to choose the language or non-language that suits him best, and anything can happen: writing that is obscure to its own author may be luminous and open to the reader; a text misunderstood by its contemporaries may become clear and illustrious decades and centuries later.
1. From The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.
“Leggere la Vita”
There are languages whose grammar and vocabulary have evolved differently according to the social standing of those who speak them; languages, that is, in which there is a learned and courtly version alongside a variant that is uneducated and rooted in the vernacular, without the latter necessarily being a simplification of the former. Then, there are languages in which the decisive factor is the gender of the speaker: constructions and vocabulary that are commonly used by men are unseemly, uncommon, or even religiously forbidden to women, and vice versa. Some traces of this differentiation can be found (or could until a few years ago) in Western languages as well, where many crude words, and most curse words, are still restricted to male use.
There is, however, an odd expression that sounds distinctly feminine and whose use, limited to northern Italy though not strictly to dialect, is slowly dying out. Leggere la vita (“to read the life”) of someone means to speak ill of him, to talk about him behind his back, to gossip about him, and to spread stories about his misdeeds, whether real or imaginary. The term is used only in the second and third person: I never read anyone his life. I’ve never heard a man utter this expression, and if someone were to oblige me to do so, I confess that I would feel an inhibition, unmistakably ancestral in character. Of course, I’m not trying to say that only women “read the life”; men do it and always have, but they don’t use the term to describe it.
You might think that the phrase alludes to “reading someone’s life on his hand,” the way palm readers do, but that is quite unlikely: all they read on the palm of your hand is positive and pleasant traits and predictions. All the same, it’s possible that this interpretation had something to do with the popularity of the locution, as if, by spreading word of someone’s misdeeds, one truly were “reading,” in depth and, as it were, against the light, the nature and purpose of his life, recognizing his intrinsic wickedness; it has long been noted that the soul of language is pessimistic.
The true origin of the phrase is different. While reading a fine German novel by Luise Rinser (Der schwarze Esel, The Black Donkey), I found an expression I’d never heard before, “die Leviten zu lesen,” that is, “to read the Levites,” in an episode that had nothing to do with the Levites or Leviticus, and in a context that instead suggested “to scold, to remonstrate.” It stirred my curiosity, perhaps in part because it involved in some sense my own name, and I tried to clarify the matter. It promised to be a modest but enjoyable effort, like all projects that one undertakes not because one’s job requires it or to acquire merit or prestige but out of the gratuitous curiosity of an inexpert dilettante—out of a sense of fun and playfulness, a wish to “play at being a philologist,” the way children “play at being a doctor,” or “play at being ladies.” I started leafing through dictionaries and vocabularies.
To my surprise, the German dictionary contained the phrase. Under “Levit,” or Levite, it added, laconically, “jemandem die Leviten lesen” (that is, “to read the Levites to someone”): to scold someone. Enchanting, but less than helpful, were the indications offered by the venerable Gran Dizionario Piemontese-Italiano, by V. di Sant’Albino, which I transcribe here verbatim:
—Lese la vita a un: To reprimand someone, the same as giving someone a rebuke or reproof, that is, to chastise, deliver a resounding lecture; and also simply to tell someone off, loud and clear.
And a little further down:
—Apeña chità un, lesie la vita apress: Fare le scale di sant’Ambrogio. Provincial manner of speech, meaning, to censure someone, criticize him, speak ill of him immediately after parting company.
Terse, but definitive, was the Dizionario etimologico del dialetto piemontese, by A. Levi, published by Paravia and recently reprinted by the Bottega di Erasmo. Under the entry Vita (leze la) we find:
“To reproach.” From the monastic custom of reading Leviticus at matins: A. XVI.367.
By following this last bibliographic indication, I learned that at the turn of the twentieth century several linguists had delved into this manner of reading the life, and in their opinion as well the two expressions, Italian and German, have the same origin: at matins, which is usually in the dark of night, it was customary in many monasteries and convents—after the psalms and hymns had been sung, and following the reading of the Holy Scriptures and especially of Leviticus—for the prior to address the individual monks, praising them for their achievements or, more frequently, criticizing them for their shortcomings; in other words, once “the Levites were read,” the scoldings were about to begin. Now, to Italian ears, it is only a short step from “leggere i Leviti” to “leggere la vita.”
We may well suppose that, in some monastic order with especially strict rules, this reading, unfailingly repeated in the chill of the night, harbinger of the bitter medicine of reproofs, roused an intense anguish among the younger brothers, and that its reverberations, however distorted and now almost indecipherable, have come down to us on the age-old stream of everyday language. In the same way, at the mouth of a river, we may see fragments of ordinary objects floating, no longer recognizable, which have been torn away and dragged downstream by the current from some remote, unknown valley.
Signs on Stone
“Adhaesit pavimento anima mea,” “My soul hath cleaved to the pavement”: thus runs Psalm 119, which Dante quotes in Purgatory, though it has been
translated in different ways. The soul cleaved to the pavement for various reasons and for a brief time, and this contact proved to be not entirely useless; it was, in fact, an exploration. Sidewalks are a highly civilized institution: present-day Romans know this, because they lack sidewalks entirely, and when they want to walk somewhere are forced to make their way through unnerving labyrinths of cars parked too close to the walls. The Romans of long ago knew it, too, and they built the sidewalks good and high in Pompeii; and Fra Cristoforo in The Betrothed was well aware of the issue, since he had in fact become a friar because a certain sidewalk was lacking entirely, or it was muddy, or too narrow, and in any case he was as a result forced into an unfortunate clash that caused him to change both name and destiny.
The sidewalks of my city (and, I have no doubt, those of any other city) are filled with surprises. The most recent sidewalks are of asphalt, and this seems like sheer folly: the deeper we move into an era of austerity, the more foolish it seems to use petroleum-based compounds to build surfaces to walk on. Perhaps, not long in the future, the urban asphalt will be exhumed with all the tender care that is used in detaching a fresco; the asphalt will be collected, classified, hydrogenated, and redistilled, in order to extract the valuable components that it potentially contains. Or perhaps the asphalt sidewalks will be buried under new strata of some unknown other material, though it is to be hoped less wasteful, and so the archeologists of the future will find embedded in it, like insects from the Pliocene in amber, Coca-Cola bottle caps and the rings of pull tabs from beer cans, deducing from these qualitative and quantitative data our nutritional preferences. They will thus become a latter-day version of the phenomenon that we now see as interesting, and therefore noble: the Kökkenmöddingen, or kitchen middens, small man-made hills of clam and mollusk shells, fish bones, and seagull skeletons that modern archeologists excavate along the coasts of Denmark; they were small piles of rubbish that grew up slowly around miserable fishing villages, beginning some seven thousand years ago, but now they are illustrious fossils.
The oldest and most characteristic sidewalks, on the other hand, are made of slabs of hard stone, patiently hewn and chiseled by hand. The degree to which they are worn allows us to date them roughly: the oldest stone slabs are smooth and shiny, shaped by the footsteps of generations of pedestrians, and they’ve taken on the appearance and warm patina of alpine boulders worn smooth by the monstrous friction of glaciers. Where the slab of schist is veined with quartz, much harder than its rocky matrix, the vein sticks up, sometimes forming an annoyance to tender-footed pedestrians. On the other hand, if the wear has been less or nonexistent, it is still possible to make out the original rough stone surface, and often even individual chisel marks. You can see this clearly along walls, and it is particularly evident on the sidewalk in front of Palazzo Carignano; the straight pedestrian path running perpendicular to the front entrance has eroded normally, while the recesses in the baroque façade contain rough stone slabs, because for more than three centuries practically no one has set foot there.
Far more intense has been the wear and tear on marble, which is a much less durable material: the thresholds of many old shops are made of marble, and in the space of just a few decades a hollow has been worn in them. This erosion of the threshold is particularly noticeable in certain mountain churches and chapels, where generations of the faithful have entered wearing hobnailed boots. Frequently the wear is not limited to the threshold alone, and a second worn place can also be seen, half a meter inside the church: this marks the almost obligatory site of the second footfall.
One may note that the large stone slab in front of many porte cocheres bears a distinctive incision. From the two jambs run two grooves, straight or curved, and diverging; running between these two grooves, and parallel to the façade of the building, is a series of other grooves, every dozen centimeters, the entire width of the sidewalk. These grooves were designed to give traction to the horseshoes of the draft horses, those prehistoric animals: when the carriage was hauled up the ramp leading from the street level to the sidewalk, the horses’ rear hooves were subjected to the greatest possible strain, and they would slip if the pavement was smooth. The oldest of these grooved stone thresholds also bear the marks of the iron wheel rims and the iron-shod hooves.
At various points around the city, the paving stones bear the marks of air raids from the Second World War. The stone slabs that were shattered by fragmentation bombs have been replaced, but slabs that were pierced by incendiary bombs were left in place. These bombs were steel bars dropped blindly from the aircraft overhead, designed so that they would plummet vertically, and with enough momentum to penetrate roofs, attics, and ceilings; when some of these incendiary bombs hit sidewalks, they drilled neatly through the ten-centimeter-thick stone, like an industrial blanking punch. It is very likely that anyone who bothered to lift the perforated stone slabs would find the incendiary bomb underneath; two of these holes, just a few meters apart, can be found for instance outside of No. 9 bis on Corso Re Umberto. The sight of them is enough to bring back memories of macabre rumors that circulated in wartime, about pedestrians who hadn’t made it to shelter in time and were run through from head to foot.
Other marks are less sinister and more recent. Everywhere, but especially numerous in more popular stretches of street, you can spot round patches on the stone sidewalks, just a few centimeters in diameter, off-white, gray, or black. These are pieces of chewing gum, oafishly spat out on the ground, and they offer testimony to the outstanding mechanical properties of the material they are made of; indeed, unless they are scraped off (but that’s no easy task; it takes time and effort, and a strong stomach, as the few shopkeepers who take the trouble to clean the sidewalks in front of their shops are well aware), they’re practically indestructible. Their color turns increasingly dark as their surface absorbs grime and dust, but they never disappear.
They constitute an excellent example of a phenomenon that engineers encounter frequently: the effort to optimize the properties of durability and strength of a given material can result in serious problems when the time comes to eliminate that material after it has outlived its usefulness. For example, it was a considerable challenge to demolish the reinforced fortifications erected during the Second World War; it is practically impossible to destroy glass and ceramic, materials meant to last for centuries; the increasingly durable protective paints and coatings created for industrial use have brought in their wake a generation of terrifyingly aggressive solvents and paint removers. Likewise, the demand for a gum that will withstand the torment of extended mastication—deforming without being destroyed, suffering the combined forces of grinding pressure, humidity, heat, and enzymes—has resulted in the creation of a material that can all too well withstand being walked upon, rained on, frozen, and subjected to summer sunlight.
These wads of chewing gum, with their needlessly excellent mechanical properties, have found various ancillary uses, all of them more or less harmful; and this, too, is a recurring phenomenon. It is safe to say that none of the tools of peacetime invented by man have escaped the fate of being used in the most murderous of fashions, that is, as weapons: scissors, hammers, sickles, pitchforks, ice axes; even the short-handled trenching shovel, as Erich Maria Remarque tells us terrifyingly in All Quiet on the Western Front. Chewing gum has not been used as a weapon, but it was used to sabotage the ticket-punching machines used on public transportation in the fieriest months of the student protests.1
As I said, wads of used chewing gum can be found anywhere, but a closer examination shows that they reach maximum density in the vicinity of the most popular bars and cafés: in fact, the gum chewer about to enter one is obliged to spit it out in order to free his or her mouth. Therefore, a visitor unfamiliar with a city could guide himself to these places of public entertainment by following the chewing-gum gradient, in much the same way that sharks find their wounded prey by swimming toward higher concentrations of blood in the water.
1. Levi is referring specifically to demonstrations by university students and others in 1968.
Novels Dictated by Crickets
In an elegant essay of perhaps forty years ago, Aldous Huxley, responding to a young man who aspired to become a writer and had turned to him for advice, recommended that he purchase a pair of cats, observe them, and describe them. He told him, if I’m not mistaken, that animals, and especially mammals, and domestic animals in particular, are like us, but “with the lid off.” Their behavior is similar to what ours would be if we were free of inhibitions. Therefore, observing them can be invaluable for a novelist who is preparing to probe the deepest motivations of his characters.