The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Renzo’s Fist

  I confess, and not in boast but, in fact, with shame: I have only a dwindling appetite for new books, and I tend to reread books I already know. In much the same way, over the years the desire (or is it the ability?) for new friendships wanes, and one prefers to delve deeper into old ones: perhaps noticing an extra wrinkle or two, or even a few previously overlooked virtues.

  The successive readings of a book that is already familiar can take place, as it were, with enhanced powers of enlargement, like certain wonderful sequences of photographs in which you see a fly, then its head, with the delicate antennae and the compound eyes, then a single eye, resembling a crystal dome, and finally the complicated yet necessary inner structure of that eye; or the same readings can be undertaken, if we may once again draw upon the language of photography, with different lighting, or from a different angle. To tell the truth, not all books lend themselves to reading with a magnifying glass: in other words, they don’t all feature a “fine structure”; but, for those which do, the effort is rewarding, and they are the books I love best.

  I have just finished rereading, in The Betrothed, the famous scene in which Renzo, recovered from the plague, goes back to Milan in search of Lucia. They are magnificent pages, confident, rich in a strong, sad human wisdom that enriches you, and that you sense is true in all eras: not only in the time in which the story is set but also in Manzoni’s time and in our own. After much fruitless inquiry, Renzo finally learns the address of the house where Lucia is said to be staying, but he feels no relief; indeed, he’s deeply disturbed. At that final moment, confronted with the crude and immediate alternative, Lucia dead or Lucia alive, “he would have preferred to be still in the dark about everything, and to be at the beginning of the journey whose end instead was near.” Who has not felt such anxiety, perhaps at the door of a doctor’s office? But only a perceptive student of the human soul can condense it into a few words, re-create the truth at the heart of it.

  Immediately afterward, in the famous and concise episode (just over a page) of the mother who refuses to hand over to the monatti1 her daughter who is dead “but lovingly dressed . . . as if . . . out for a long-promised party,” and instead places the body on the cart herself, we see the looming shadow of the greatest doubt that can afflict a religious soul, the problem of all problems, the source of all evil. It is the puzzle that tormented both Job and Ivan Karamazov, and the darkest stain on Hitler’s Germany: why the innocent? why the children? why does Providence stop when confronted with the wickedness of human beings and the pain of the world? This meditation, hinted at but left unspoken, this moment of profound compassion stands out against the grim backdrop of the streets of Milan emptied by the slaughter; here the only sign of life is the insolent and sinister presence of the monatti, “some wore the red uniform, others . . . multicolored plumes and bows, which the brutes wore in a show of good cheer in the midst of so much public grief.”

  Like the devils of Malebolge, the monatti are a group. They have developed a group philosophy and a group ethics. After Renzo escapes on their wagon, where they mistook him for a plague-sower, they have a memorable conversation with him: “You’ve come to place yourself under the protection of the monatti: consider yourself in church”; “You’re right to infect these dogs . . . who as a reward for the life we lead . . . go around saying that, once death has taken its toll, they want to hang the lot of us”; shortly before, to a plague-infected Don Rodrigo, who had rebelled against arrest, a monatto had shouted angrily and scornfully, “You rascal! You would defy the monatti! The officers of the court! The very ones who are performing acts of mercy!” They seek justification in their own eyes and the eyes of others: they are “officers of the board,” their work indispensable, their decisions unappealable.

  It is remarkable to note how Manzoni, so adept at creating images and metaphors, so spare and effective in the depiction of landscapes and states of mind (indeed, states of mind set within landscapes), is instead hesitant and clumsy when he comes to the human gesture. I can’t say whether this observation is new, much less whether it’s fair, but within the context of the same episode mentioned above, and on the same page, I find two “gestures” at the limit of the credible, or even of the possible. Renzo, surrounded by a mob of menacing passersby, shoves his way out and takes to his heels “at a gallop, with his hand in the air, squeezed into a tight fist, ready for anyone who might get in his way.” Now, it’s completely unnatural to run with a fist held high in the air. It’s uneconomical, even for a short distance: you waste much more time than would be needed to clench and raise your fist a second time. I’m reminded of a lovely Tuscan joke. A mother, leaning over her balcony, says to her neighbor: “Signora, as long as your mouth is open, would you mind calling my Gianni, who’s down in the courtyard, too?”

  Immediately afterward, the fleeing Renzo decides to take refuge on one of the wagons belonging to the monatti: “He took aim, leaped and up he went, his right foot down on the ground, his left in the air, and his arms raised high.” This is truly a badly executed snapshot, or really, a completely invented one. In none of the phases of a leap could there exist a statue-like position such as the one described; but perhaps this is much more evident to us, accustomed since childhood to seeing sports photography, than it would have been to Manzoni’s contemporaries.

  There are in the novel other unreal, mannered images like this one; they suggest an indirect mental process, as if the author, in the presence of a posture of the human body, had made an effort to construct an illustration of it in the style of the period, and thereafter, in the written text, had attempted to illustrate the illustration itself instead of an immediate visual fact. Renzo, in the throes of a rage that is unusual for him, but fully justified by Don Abbondio’s reserved behavior, has kidnapped the cleric and confined him in his room, where he tries to learn the name of the powerful bully who is blocking his wedding, “while he was leaning over him, with his ear close to his mouth, his arms taut, and his fists squeezed tightly behind his back.”

  The rendering of the gesture is precise, but it is the gesture itself that is implausible, emphatic, excessive. It’s reminiscent of the code of expression of silent film, which is so bizarre and comical to us today, and yet was universally accepted in its time; it was, in fact, a code, the result of a convention, according to which a gesture was appointed to replace a word that the screen was still incapable of conveying to the spectator, and it could therefore be quite different from our everyday gestures.

  Renzo, on bad advice given him by Agnese, is going to see Professor Azzeccagarbugli, and, as a precautionary gift, he is taking him four capons, because you should never go empty-handed “to gentlemen like that.” In the economy of the page, those capons loom large and are treated with a discreet and masterly hand. They had been fattened up for the wedding banquet: “Take these four capons—poor things—whose necks I was supposed to wring for the Sunday banquet, and bring them to him.” That “poor things” bears the seal of literary and psychological genius: it is a compendium of that tangle of piety, tolerance, and cynicism that is so typically Italian. The words of commiseration are not expressed because the capons are about to have their necks wrung: this is their unquestioned fate as household victims. No: Agnese has performed a transference and has glimpsed in them a symbolic value, so that the capons are innocents who suffer for the sins of others. It is not them, but Lucia and Renzo, and Agnese herself, who are the “poor things.”

  It is no accident that just a few phrases further on they are explicitly humanized, in a comparison that has become justly famous and even passed into the realm of proverb: while Renzo carries them, he shakes them rudely, so that their dangling heads “in the meanwhile found a way to keep pecking at each other, as happens all too often with partners in misfortune.” But here, too, in this book that is so exemplary for its clear-eyed pessimism, the human gesture is contrived: even in a time of famine, four capons weigh at least eleven kilos, and only a
Hercules could have shaken them, lifted them, and tossed them from side to side with just one hand, as described here; and it would have taken a Herculean mime and actor, instead of a mild-mannered spinner of silk.

  In the introduction to the Einaudi edition of The Betrothed, Alberto Moravia proposes seeing in it a “Catholic realism” that runs parallel to the “socialist realism” of the Soviets, and that is to say, a distinguished literary profession conscripted for purposes of propaganda, even if that profession, by dint of its very excellence, transcends and obliterates those purposes. The thesis baffles me, but there are certainly some descriptions of gestures that could confirm it.

  In chapter 6, Fra Cristoforo grows indignant at Don Rodrigo’s insolence: when urged to desist from his schemes against Lucia, Rodrigo asks the friar to persuade her to place herself under his protection. “‘Your protection!’ he exclaimed, taking two steps back and positioning himself proudly on his right foot. With his right hand on his hip, he pointed his left index finger at Don Rodrigo and glared at him with two fiery eyes. ‘Your protection!’” Here we see not the friar but a baroque monument to the friar. Once again, we might venture to say that the author came up with this image via some transverse path: not passing directly from the depiction to the word but inserting between them a scene played by an actor—and, let’s admit it, a mediocre actor.

  Interestingly enough, a few pages on, a very similar gesticulation is attributed to Renzo with quite a different purpose. In the presence of Lucia and Agnese, Renzo, swept away by fury, has threatened to take justice into his own hands, even at the risk of losing Lucia’s love; the two women try to calm him down. “For a while he stood there without moving, lost in thought, contemplating the pleading expression on Lucia’s face. All of a sudden he gave her an angry look, took a step back, pointed his arm and index finger at her, and cried, ‘That’s it! He’s asking for it. He has to die!’” This is probably the weakest line in the novel: one has the impression that the theatrical gesture has somehow infected the “soundtrack” and dragged it down.

  But here Manzoni justifies himself: it might have seemed useful to Renzo, at that point, to strike a little fear into Lucia’s heart, because she had firmly rejected until that point the more direct solution of a forcible wedding; Renzo might perhaps have “used a little trickery to increase it [Lucia’s fear], so he could take advantage of it.” Manzoni seems willing to allow certain recitative solutions only “when two strong passions clash in a man’s heart”; but in that “clash” we can clearly see the author’s stoic Catholic aversion for the emotions that enslave his character, however beloved.

  Clearly, reading under a magnifying glass is a pitiless exercise. Woe to the author who practices it on his own writing. If he does, he will feel that he is condemned to endlessly rewrite every page, and each of his books will become an open-ended work.

  1. During the plague of 1630, the monatti collected the corpses from houses, streets, and hospitals and buried them.

  Thirty Hours Aboard the Castoro 6

  The thirty hours that I spent aboard the Castoro 6 in April 1980 were a rare gift for a landlubber like me, a man to whom the sea is just something you experience during summer vacations in Liguria, or the transfigured entity that emerges from the pages of Coleridge, Conrad, Verne, and Melville. In particular, the latter two writers came to mind frequently during my all too short stay aboard: to be specific, I thought of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and especially of the “guided tour” that Captain Nemo gives Professor Aronnax through the mechanical bowels of the Nautilus, and a phrase (first impressed on my memory more than thirty years ago) by Cesare Pavese, in his translator’s foreword to Moby-Dick: “Melville . . . is a man whose acquaintance with life goes well beyond the ‘long Vaticans and street-stalls,’ and who knows that the greatest poems are those told by unlettered sailors on the forecastle.”

  The two quotes, or perhaps I should say the two literary hooks, should be taken at face value, like any quote. The sailors manning the Castoro are anything but illiterate: in fact, they’re marine engineers, a species of human that didn’t exist in Melville’s day, but which Verne foresaw and predicted with that mysterious sixth sense of a technological visionary, allowing him to anticipate, fifty or a hundred years ahead of his time, the use of helicopters in wartime, television, rockets hurtling to the Moon (and specifically from Cape Canaveral!) with their human crew, and a submarine that was, all things considered, quite plausible.

  I hope that Captain Pietro Costanzo will forgive me for likening him to the misanthropic, vindictive, Luciferian Captain Nemo; nor, for that matter, is the Castoro a submarine, though, like the Nautilus, it has a belly teeming with wonders. Like submarines (and in fact it is technically designated a “semi-submersible”), and, like the whalers of both yesterday and today, it is a non-ship ship, a ship for which sailing is an ancillary task, taken for granted, because it is basically designed for other, clearly defined purposes. The devices it contains, in fact, stir wonder because of the extreme refinement with which they have been adapted to a specific and unusual objective: to lay along the sea floor, from Tunisia to Sicily, at depths never previously attained, a rigid steel pipe sheathed in cement, manipulating it as if it were as light and flexible as a rubber tube.

  The history of technology shows us that, when it comes to dealing with new challenges, both scientific training and great precision are necessary but hardly enough. Two other traits are required, experience and inventive imagination, but in the profession of exploiting natural gas, quite a recent one, experience stretches back not over centuries or millennia; rather, it is compressed into decades, or even shorter spans. It is far shorter than a human lifetime, and fathers have nothing to teach their sons; it is impossible to rely upon the slow quasi-Darwinian evolution that has transformed firearms in the course of five centuries, or the automobile in the course of one. Experience demands trial and error, but here there is no time to make mistakes and correct them. What must prevail is imagination, which works by leaps, in short periods, through radical and rapid mutations. But no aspect of worthwhile experience should ever be wasted, even experience dating back to the earliest times; just as our body has inherited the genetic mechanism and the proteinaceous structure of single-cell organisms, and just as the automobile incorporated the design of the horse-drawn carriage, likewise on the Castoro 6 it is possible to discern the presence of curious and illustrious innovative ideas that date back to the dawn of our civilization: stilt houses, the double hull of the catamaran. This, too, is something to think about: like the great ideas and the deep problems of philosophy (whether matter is infinitely divisible; whether the universe is finite or infinite, eternal or perishable; whether we possess free will or are slaves), so, too, the great inventions of technology are transformed but never die. The lever, the wheel, and the roof have survived over the millennia; no metal has yet fallen into disuse and, if anything, countless new uses have been found for the most ancient metals. It would be difficult to think of a single obsolete plastic material, while the oldest among them—the phenolic resins and polystyrene—remain just as important as ever.

  Much the same thing can be said about the men aboard the Castoro. Just as the vessel is singular, unlike anything else on Earth, so is its crew entirely sui generis; or perhaps I should say its crews, because there are three squads of 150 men each, which rotate shifts, with two squads on board (for twenty-eight days, Sundays and holidays included, twelve hours on duty and twelve hours off every day) and one squad on dry land, with fourteen days off. It’s a composite crew, including welders, mechanics, electricians, electrical engineers, crane operators, mechanical engineers, fitters, and roustabouts, as well as stewards and seamen. Nonetheless, the separation (the “interface”) between sailors and industrial workers and, higher up the hierarchy, between ship’s officers and engineers is anything but distinct, because the Castoro’s method of navigation is a strange one.

  From a ship proper, what we expect is
that it sail quickly, along a straight line, and only rarely reverse engines. The Castoro, on the other hand, sails forward only when it is on its way to a worksite; to tell the truth, it really makes little sense even to use the terms “fore” and “aft,” “forward” and “reverse,” when speaking of the Castoro: it has no real bow, though the end from which the pipe is lowered into the water is conventionally referred to as the bow, and therefore the vessel travels backward when laying pipe. It can move in all directions, because it has four orientable propellers, one at each corner of the lower hulls. It does not normally travel faster than six or seven knots; for this ship, stability and position are far more important than speed, because it is in fact an exceedingly sophisticated floating workshop. In other words: it must be capable of remaining stationary with respect to the sea floor and, more specifically, with respect to the pipe, with tolerances of no more than a few tenths of a meter; it mustn’t oscillate with the swell; it must remain oblivious of wind and current; and when it moves in order to lay pipe it must do so at a precisely controlled speed. So that this will occur with the necessary reliability, a refined system of automation has been put in place, and it ensures that, every time a length of pipe is “launched,” the twelve winches of the twelve anchors (formidable anchors, weighing between twenty and twenty-five metric tons each) and the four propeller-engine groups work in concert to make certain that the pipe slides into the water without being exposed to shocks greater than those allowed by the specifications and strength of the materials. The moment of the “launch”—that is, the advancing of the pipe, which takes place (if everything is working properly) about every ten minutes—is an unforgettable spectacle: at a command given by the electronic brain that supervises the operation, the colossal winches all grind into motion simultaneously, winching in the stern cables and winching out the bow cables, and the forty-thousand-metric-ton bulk of the Castoro 6 begins to move ponderously toward the coast of Sicily, by exactly twelve meters, that is, the length of a section of pipe. But the motion is so smooth and gentle that those on board don’t even sense it. They only see the pipe slide forward, and believe that the pipe is moving while the ship stands still. This is a concrete illustration of Galilean relativity, and one is reminded of Dante’s description of the Garisenda Tower, which seems to lean toward the ground when wind-driven clouds move behind it.