The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Perhaps matters are not quite so simple. Since then, the science of ethology has come into being and rapidly attained maturity, showing us that animals are different one from another and from us, that every animal species follows laws of its own, and that these laws, to the extent that we are able to understand them, are in close accord with evolutionary theories—which is to say, they favor the preservation of the species, though not always that of the individual. Ethologists and Pavlovians have sternly warned us not to attribute human mental mechanisms to animals, not to describe them in anthropomorphic language. For the most part, their demands have been accepted and, if anything, the opposite tendency has taken root—that is, the tendency to describe humans in zoological terms, to seek and find at all costs the animal inside the man (just as Desmond Morris has done, somewhat summarily, in The Naked Ape). I think that not all human actions can be interpreted in these terms, and that the method doesn’t take us very far. Socrates, Newton, Bach, and Leopardi were not naked apes.

  That said, I should add that Huxley might have had his explanation wrong, but he was triumphantly correct in offering this advice to his pupil. There’s more: if you look closely at his best known works, you can hardly fail to see that he himself must have been a careful and brilliant observer of animals, in whose behavior he had trained himself to discern hypostases and symbols of the virtues, vices, and passions of man. No doubt his closeness to his brother Julian, a famous biologist and a scientific popularizer with real flair, must have helped him in this direction.

  If I could, I would eagerly obey Huxley’s recommendation and fill my house with all the animals available. I’d make every effort not only to observe them but also to communicate with them. I would have no scientific objective in mind for so doing (I have neither the culture nor the training); my reason would be an instinctive affinity, and because I’m sure it would bring me an extraordinary spiritual enrichment and a more complete view of the world. For lack of something better, I read with constantly renewed enjoyment and astonishment any number of books both old and new about animals, and they seem to give me vital nourishment, entirely apart from their literary or scientific worth. They can even be riddled with lies, like Pliny the Elder: it makes no difference; their value lies in the inspiration they provide.

  It is an age-old observation, ancient even in the time of Aesop (who must have been quite familiar with these matters), that it is possible to find all extremes in animals. There are animals both enormous and minuscule, extremely powerful and extremely weak, audacious and elusive, fast and slow, clever and dull, magnificent and horrible. A writer need only choose, he can overlook the truths set forth by scientists—it is enough for him to draw liberally on this universe of metaphors. It is precisely by leaving the human island that he will find every human trait multiplied a hundredfold, a forest of prefabricated hyperboles.

  Of those, many are tired, worn out by use in all languages: the too well known qualities of the lion, the fox, and the bull can no longer be employed. But the discoveries of modern naturalists, so abundant and wonderful in recent years, have opened to writers a treasury of ideas whose exploitation is merely at its timid beginnings. In the archives of Nature and Scientific American, in books by Konrad Lorenz and his followers, lurk the seeds of a new style of writing, which is still to be discovered, and awaits its demiurge.

  We’ve all listened to crickets singing duets on summer evenings. There are various species of crickets, and each one sings at its own rhythm and on its own note; the male calls and the female, who may be as far as two hundred meters away, and completely invisible, responds “in tune.” The duet, patient and chaste, goes on for hours and hours, as the two partners come slowly closer until, finally, they meet and mate. But it is essential that the female respond accurately: a response that is out of tune, even by as little as a quarter tone, will break off the dialogue, and the male will go in search of another companion more in keeping with his innate model. Apparently this requirement of an exact acoustic match is a way of preventing couplings between different species, which would be sterile and therefore would not serve the aims of “increase and multiply.” The same purpose is thought to be served by the complicated, graceful, or grotesque rituals of courtship that are observed among a diverse array of animals, such as spiders, fish, and birds (we might point out here that the ethologists were forced to incorporate the term “courtship” into their language, though it’s a human metaphor).

  Now, one clever experimenter has observed that there is a way of altering to a predictable and reproducible degree the tonality of the cricket’s song: its frequency (which is to say, the tone of the note emitted) depends to a very great extent on the environmental temperature.

  Obviously, in a natural setting, the male and the female are at the same temperature; but if we heat the female (or the male), even by as little as two or three degrees Celsius, the song rises in pitch by a semitone, and the other cricket stops responding: he no longer recognizes in her (or she in him) a potential sexual partner. One tiny shift in an environmental factor results in an incompatibility. Isn’t that the seed of a novel?

  Spiders, in particular, are an inexhaustible source of wonder, meditations, ideas, and chills. They (though not all of them) are methodical and fanatically conservative engineers: the common garden spider, the diadem spider, has been building its radial, symmetrical web for tens of millions of years in accordance with a rigid model. It will not tolerate imperfections. If the web is damaged, it won’t fix it; it destroys it and spins a new one. During a research project on the effects of drugs, a biologist administered a tiny dose of LSD to a spider. The drugged spider did not remain idle and, following the customs of its species, immediately set about making a web, but it wove a monstrous, distorted, deformed web, much like the visions of human beings on drugs: dense and tangled in some areas, broken by gaps in others. When the work was completed, the tripping spider took up its position in a corner of the web, waiting for an unlikely prey.

  It is well-known that many female spiders devour the male, immediately following or, in some cases, even during the sex act; for that matter, so do female praying mantises, and bees massacre with meticulous ferocity all the drones in the hive after one of them sets out for the nuptial flight with the future queen bee. These are all ideas filled with a shadowy significance of their own, and they stir muffled echoes deep in our civilized conscience.

  The murder of one’s mate is practically normal among spiders. The female is generally bigger and stronger than the male, and as soon as fertilization is complete, she tends to treat him as she would any other prey. The male does not always try to defend himself or get away: in various species, it almost seems that he accedes to nature’s cynical evolutionary plan, according to which, once the task of reproduction has been performed, his reason for existence ceases and the instinct for self-preservation is therefore extinguished. But when the male spider instead tries to defend himself, we enter a dramatic and contorted world, which finds its human counterpart only in the criminal or psychopathic fringes of society; or perhaps there is no counterpart, but one is tempted to invent one, to describe situations never imagined even by our tragedians.

  There are spiders that begin their courtship by offering the female a gift: a living prey, paralyzed by their venom, and bound and gagged by a wrapping of threads. It’s not a selfless gift. The female accepts it, eating her fill while the male waits patiently, and, once her hunger is sated, their coupling will not end in murder. Other males, dancing around the female in a ritual courtship, gradually trap her in a net of strong threads, and fertilize her only when this violent partner, ambivalently desired and feared, has been immobilized. There are still others (and here who could resist the temptation of a no doubt unfair and baroque human interpretation?) that behave with uncanny farsightedness and despicable duplicity.

  During the season when the eggs hatch, they set out on raids to capture immature, and therefore still weak, females; each male abducts a
nd imprisons one. He binds her with his prodigious thread, good for a thousand uses, and holds her captive, feeding her only grudgingly (to keep her from becoming too strong) and defending her against all possible aggressors, until she attains sexual maturity; then he fertilizes her and abandons her. Once she has attained the fullness of strength, the female has no difficulty escaping her bonds. Here we are on the vague boundary between crime reporting and opera buffa. It is hard not to be reminded of the ambiguous and stereotypical relationship between guardian and ward, tutor and student, between the scheming jailer Don Bartolo, swollen with late-life lusts, and the tender young Rosina, enclosed between four walls but a future “viper”: “tutti e due son da legar” (“both of them need restraining”).1

  Many animals, structurally quite diverse, are bright colored, and yet their flesh is disgusting to the taste, or they are poisonous; for example, goldfish and ladybugs, or, respectively, wasps and certain snakes. The bright colors serve as a signal and a warning, to ensure that predators recognize them from a distance and, trained by previous experience, refrain from attacking them. Are there parallels in human behavior? In general, dangerous men tend to blend in with the crowd, in order to elude identification, but they behave otherwise when they are or believe themselves to be above the law.

  We should think a little more carefully about the appearance of the bravos, as Manzoni describes them; the use of aggressively colored military uniforms (widespread until 1900); and certain distinctive manners of dress and speech that make it easy to distinguish members of particular levels of organized crime (the “apache,” the mafioso). Aside from these examples, I’d like to invent and describe a ladybug character, identifiable perhaps in certain passages of Gogol: a hypochondriac, dissatisfied with himself, his neighbor, and the world around him, unpleasant and a whiner, who dons a livery that can be recognized from afar (or a catchphrase, or a speech defect), so that his fellow man, whom he reviles, becomes quickly aware of his presence and makes sure not to get underfoot.

  1. In Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville.

  Domum Servavit

  The “channel” is one of the most felicitous images yet taken from everyday language to satisfy the constantly renewed demands of specialized language. Everyone knows what a channel is: it obliges water to run from its source to an outlet, between two banks that are basically impossible to overflow, but the term also lends itself to other instances of flow, in which “some thing” (a fluid, a swarm of particles, the traffic of a highway, a crowd of human beings, but also a sum of money, a packet of energy, a piece of information) moves in a single dimension and direction, forced to do so by material or symbolic embankments. In this sense, there can be no doubt that a highway is a channel, as is a telephone communication; less properly, we speak of television channels, because in that case the point of origin is single, while the outlets (the television screens) number in the millions. A television channel, then, is a finely branched channel, and a channel only in the sense that the program being broadcast flows exclusively toward the intended users without spilling over to others.

  A separate discussion should be devoted to the postal “channel.” From its origins (in China, perhaps six thousand years ago), it was considered essential that a message should run between good strong banks, meaning that the information should reach the recipient without being intercepted by outsiders. In order to ensure the impermeability of the postal channel, a number of notorious contrivances were dreamed up, such as invisible inks and cryptographic codes, and other, even more imaginative ones, such as inscribing the message on the courier’s shaved head, waiting for the hair to grow back, and then sending him on his journey; the recipient then shaved the courier’s head and read the message. Still, the most practical way of ensuring secrecy was and remains the seal and its modern equivalents. The problem of formulating a material suitable for use as a seal is simple: it must be capable of receiving a clear impression, solidifying rapidly, preserving the impression over a significant temperature range, and not be excessively fragile. As you can see, this is a good description of plastic materials, and in fact the classic material used for seals throughout history has been the senior member of the family of plastic materials, sealing wax. Wax has almost nothing to do with its makeup: the fundamental component is lac, a strange and illustrious material that bears discussion here.

  Lac is the product of the encounter between two inventive imaginations, the ponderously slow imagination of evolution, which is to say, of nature, which created it, and the quick and flexible imagination of man, who found it to be suited to various uses. The true inventor of lac is an insect with lowly habits: its career, straightforward and unadorned, is a parody of the welfare-state utopia that is so much the subject of discussion nowadays. The male and the female of the creature in question begin their lives in the form of reddish larvae, barely visible to the naked eye; in countless swarms, they lazily explore the twigs of certain exotic trees until they find a break in the bark sufficient to allow them to insert their proboscises deep into the succulent wood beneath: at this point, they’re taken care of, set for life, without a care, but, by the same token, without an experience, an emotion, or a sensation. Their number is vast, millions of individuals on a single tree, and in fact the term “lac,” used in all languages to describe the substance that they secrete, comes from an ancient Sanskrit word that means “a hundred thousand.”

  The hundred thousand tiny parasites pump the life-giving sap and grow in silence, but even the most safely entitled creatures must have or learn an art that allows them to guard their backs. The art these have developed is a very estimable chemical art: they transform the plant sap into a resin possessing properties that are neither banal nor vile—specifically, lac. They exude it from their pores, covering not only their backs but their whole bodies; they are so densely packed that the shell covering one individual winds up merging and fusing with that of its neighbors, in such a way that the infested branches are ultimately sheathed in a compact and shiny crust that must have attracted the interest of human beings from earliest times. Beneath that shell lies, protected and imprisoned, the army of suckers. The males communicate with the outside world only through a tiny aperture that allows them to breathe; the females also keep open a second aperture, an extension of their genital orifice, and it is through this that fertilization will take place.

  After a few weeks, sexual maturity is attained, and here male and female fates diverge. The female continues to remain in one place, and in fact she loses her legs, since she will have no more use for them. Like the exemplary Roman matron of antiquity, domum servavit, lanam fecit: she lived at home, spinning wool, or, in our case, exuding resin. The male resolves to undertake a single fleeting enterprise: once he has attained maturity, he leaves his prison and fertilizes a number of females, without direct contact, by utilizing the aperture designed for the purpose; then he dies. The fertilized females, practically without exception, remain in their cells and continue to secrete resin; they lay their eggs inside the cell, and survive until they hatch, whereupon they, too, die, and the larvae that emerge from the eggs begin a new cycle. To try to draw a human moral from the behavior of the animals around us is an age-old and senseless bad habit; to indulge in it is dangerous but fun. One is tempted to say, with Aesop, “The fable teaches us” that the price of guaranteed prosperity can be high, and that early retirement can be fatal.

  Lac is a noble resin; it is transparent, it withstands impacts and sunlight, it has a pleasant odor, it’s shiny, and it presents, besides, a unique and curious virtue certainly useful to its insect inventor: when it’s exposed to moisture, its permeability to water diminishes, instead of increasing, as does that of nearly all other organic materials; in short, on a molecular scale, it behaves like an umbrella that spontaneously pops open at the start of a downpour.

  The human discoverer of lac remains unknown. He must have been one of the thousands of forgotten Darwins and Newtons who punctuated all the ag
es of the past and continue to punctuate our own, and who waste their talents in a society that doesn’t appreciate them, yoked to dull and repetitive jobs. Someone must have noticed that the protective properties of lac lent themselves to the protection of things other than the lazy and gluttonous parasite that secretes it. In particular, they could lend themselves to protecting the secrecy of the mails, that is, to plugging the holes in the channel traveled by written messages, which since time immemorial is exactly the purpose that sealing wax has served, but the resin has other uses as well. Since time equally immemorial the lac was heated, mixed with pigments of various hues, and then allowed to harden into blocks. These blocks were pressed hard against wooden parts as they were turned on a lathe: the heat of the resulting friction once again melted the colored lac or lacquer, which then flowed uniformly over the wood “to the thickness of a human fingernail,” embellishing its appearance and protecting it from humidity. This singular method of varnishing was still in use in India at the turn of the century, and is described by Kipling.

  Today lac is used primarily as a binding agent in spirit varnishes. It is evident that, with the system described above, only objects with a symmetrically cylindrical shape and a size suitable for turning on a lathe can be coated. If the resin were to be used as a paint or varnish, a solvent to dissolve it would have to be found, and technology to reduce it to an easily soluble form. The solvent was identified in the early nineteenth century, and is common rectified spirit; the technology, today obsolete, is surprising.

  The resin was melted and filtered through a cloth in order to eliminate the insects and fragments of wood. Then it was allowed to harden into flat blocks weighing five or six kilograms; these blocks were heated once again, until the resin became gooey. At this point, the “stretchers” began work, for the most part very young women or girls. From dawn to dusk they squatted on the ground, grabbing the flat block at five points, with both hands, their teeth, and both feet, and then stood up quickly, extending their arms; the block was thus stretched out into a sheet with a pentagonal silhouette, the height of the stretcher, as transparent and fragile as glass. This sheet was broken up into thin flakes that could be easily dissolved. In this action, repeated countless times, the little girl-machines rose from the tight, closed pose of the bud to the open pose of the flower. It must have been a comic, cruel, and graceful ballet, and in it we can detect a genius as cynical as that which stripped the female insects of their legs: a genius that would not hesitate to reduce man to a tool, making him regress to an animal act in which the mouth, once the workshop of the word, became again an instrument for biting.