The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  The Invisible World

  One day, my father, who was an expert habitué of all the used bookstalls along Via Cernaia, brought home a slim, elegantly bound volume for me; it had been printed in London in 1846, and the title, at once modest and pretentious, was Thoughts on Animalcules; or, a Glimpse of the Invisible World Revealed by the Microscope, by Gideon Algernon Mantell, Esq., LL.D., F.R.S. (Gentleman, Doctor of Laws, and Fellow of the Royal Society). Following the title page was a high-flown dedication, “To the most noble Marquess of Northampton,” that went on for twelve lines, some of which were set in gothic type.

  I was fifteen years old, and I was immediately dazzled: primarily by the illustrations, since I didn’t know a word of English. But I bought a dictionary, and I discovered to my happy astonishment that, unlike with Latin, this aid was sufficient to understand everything or almost everything; that is, I very clearly understood the text proper, which described with candid precision the appearances and habits of the “animalcules.” I understood much less of the prolix preface, which cited Herschel, Shelley, Hobbes and Byron, Milton and Locke, along with many other elect spirits who had in one way or another concerned themselves with the invisible things that are suspended between the Earth and the sky.

  I had the impression that the author might be confusing things that can’t be seen because they’re too small with other things that can’t be seen because they don’t exist, such as gnomes, fairies, ghosts, and the spirits of the dead; but the topic was so interesting, so different from the lessons I was being given at school, at the Regio Ginnasio, and so perfectly suited to the curiosities I was experiencing at the time that I buried myself in the slim volume for several weeks, to the detriment of my progress as a scholar but with the side benefit that I picked up a little English.

  The book’s epigraph was electrifying, lying midway between the scientific and the visionary: “In the leaves of every forest—in the flowers of every garden—in the waters of every rivulet—there are worlds teeming with life, and numberless as are the glories of the firmament.” Could that be true? Literally true, in the waters of every rivulet? Inside me there grew, as sudden and painful as a stomach cramp, an urgent need for a microscope, and I told my father so.

  My father eyed me with a slightly alarmed expression. It wasn’t that he disapproved of my interest in natural history. He was an engineer, he’d worked as an industrial designer in a major factory in Hungary; at the time of which I write, he sold and installed electric motors, but as a young man he’d frequented the positivist milieu of the Turin of his day: Cesare Lombroso, Amedeo Herlitzka, Angelo Mosso, scientists who were at once skeptics and easily led astray, and who seemed to take turns hypnotizing one another, reading Fontenelle, Flammarion, and Annie Besant, and levitating tables.

  My father felt for science a love tinged with regret, and he would have been pleased to have me follow a path that the vicissitudes of life had forced him to abandon; still, it struck him as somewhat unnatural that his adolescent son should wish for a microscope instead of the many other blithe and straightforward pleasures that the world offers. I believe that he turned to someone else for advice: the fact remains that a few months later the microscope was delivered to our home.

  In hindsight, that instrument wasn’t much to speak of: it offered only a 200 power magnification, the illumination was dim, and it produced chromatic aberrations that would make your head spin, but I fell in love with it instantly, even more than with the bicycle I’d managed to obtain after two years of entreaties and cautious diplomacy. For that matter, the bicycle and the microscope were in a certain sense complementary: without a bicycle, and setting out from the center of town, how else could I have reached the gardens, the forests, and the rivulets mentioned by my text? In any case, before planning an expedition, I devoted myself to a microscopic inventory of everything I could find on my person and in my surroundings.

  The hairs that I yanked out of my scalp had a completely unexpected appearance: they looked like the trunks of palm trees, and by looking closely it was possible to make out, on their surface, those tiny scales that made a hair feel smoother if one ran one’s finger from the root to the extremity rather than in the opposite direction: here was a first question that the microscope was capable of answering. The root of the hair, on the other hand, was quite repugnant; it looked like a flabby tuber covered with warts.

  The skin of my fingertips was very difficult to observe, because it was practically impossible to hold my finger still in front of the lens; but when I managed it for a few seconds I saw a weird landscape, reminiscent of the terracings of the Ligurian hills and of tilled farmland: large pink translucent furrows, running parallel, but with sudden curves and bifurcations. A palm reader equipped with a microscope would have been able to predict the future in much greater detail than by examining the palm of the hand with the naked eye. It would have been interesting—indeed, to some extent basic—to examine blood and see the reddish globules described in the book, but I lacked the courage to puncture my finger, and my sister (who for that matter seemed singularly deaf to my enthusiasm) firmly refused to either puncture mine or allow hers to be punctured.

  Flies, poor creatures, were a gold mine of observations: the wings, a delicate labyrinth of veins inset in the transparent and iridescent membrane; the eyes, a purplish mosaic of admirable regularity; the legs, an arsenal of claws, stiff hairs, and rubbery padding, slippers, Vibram soles, and crampons all condensed into one. Another gold mine was to be found in flowers, beautiful or ugly, it mattered little; not much was to be obtained from the petals (my magnification was not sufficient to reveal their structure), but every species deposited its pollen on the glass slide, and each pollen was exquisite and specific: it was possible to distinguish the individual granules, delicate and elegant structures, tiny spheres, ovoids, polyhedrons, some smooth and gleaming, others bristling with ridges or pinnacles, snow-white, dark-brown, or golden.

  Equally specific were the shapes of the crystals that could be obtained by allowing solutions of various salts to evaporate on the slide: table salt, copper sulfate, potassium dichromate, and others that I wheedled out of the pharmacist. But here I found something new; it was possible to see the crystals come into being and grow, visibly—something was finally moving. The microscope was no longer confined to the immobility of plants and dead flies. It was a curious thing that the first moving objects were precisely those which were least alive, crystals belonging to the inorganic world. Perhaps the term wasn’t all that accurate after all.

  In the water from vases of flowers I found movement, too, and this movement was not solemn and orderly like the growth of crystals. Instead, it was turbulent and dizzying, breathtakingly so: a teeming activity that was all the more frantic the more stagnant the water in the vase. There they were, at last, the animalcules promised by my book: I could identify them from the delicate, minute, slightly idealized illustrations, which had been patiently hand-tinted with watercolors (I realized it when I touched one with a tiny drop of water). Some of the animalcules were large, others were tiny: some shot across the microscope’s field of view in an instant, as if they were rushing off to who knows where, others loitered lazily as if grazing, while still others spun around stupidly in place.

  The loveliest of them all were the vorticellae: minuscule transparent chalices that waved like flowers in the breeze, attached to a straw by a long stalk so slender it was barely visible. All it took was the slightest jolt, a fingernail grazing the barrel of the microscope, and in an instant the stalk contracted into a spiral and the mouth of the chalice closed. A few moments later, as if the fear had passed, the tiny creature recovered, the stalk extended again, and if you looked closely you could make out the little vortex that gives the vorticellae their name: indistinct little particles swirled around the chalice, and it looked as if some of them were trapped inside it. Every so often, as if bored with staying in one place, a vorticella would hoist anchor, pull up its stalk, and set off in se
arch of adventure. It was an animal just like us, and it moved from place to place, it reacted, driven by hunger, fear, or boredom.

  Or by love? The suspicion, at once soothing and unsettling, dawned the day I rode my bicycle to the banks of the Sangone for the first time and brought home a sample of stagnant water and sand from the river, which back then was unpolluted. Here monsters could be seen: enormous worms nearly a millimeter long, which contorted as if being tortured; other transparent little beasts, visible to the naked eye as tiny scarlet dots, which under the microscope proved to bristle with antennae and tufts, moving jerkily, like shipwrecked fleas.

  But the landscape was overrun by paramecia: streamlined, nimble, twisted like old slippers, they darted to and fro so fast that if I wanted to watch them I had to reduce the enlargement. They navigated the ocean of their drop of water by gyrating on their axis, slamming against obstacles only to turn and shoot off again, like deranged speedboats. They seemed to be hunting for light and air, solitary and busy: but I saw two suddenly come to a halt as if each had noticed the other, as if they liked each other; I saw them approach, cling together, and continue on their way at a slower pace. As if in this blind coupling they’d exchanged something, drawing from it a mysterious and infinitesimal pleasure.

  “The Most Joyous Creatures in the World”

  Recently, Ceronetti, like the Semitic scholar that he is, “reread” the Song of the Great Wild Rooster; by curious coincidence, almost simultaneously I chanced to reread, like the zoologist that I am not, In Praise of Birds, by Giacomo Leopardi.1 After decades of intensive and widely popularized studies of animal behavior, the impression one comes away with is singular and vaguely alienating, not unlike the feeling one might have when contemplating the morning star Venus (it is precisely during these clear dawns that it reaches its greatest splendor) after reading that its luminous brightness, hailed by countless poets, is the result of the sun’s light being reflected through an atmosphere out of Dante’s Inferno, stifling, scorching, supercompressed, and, further, saturated with clouds of sulfuric acid. In both the former and the latter case, the poetic discourse that we perceive in the nature around us persists intact, but it has changed in tone and content.

  Not that the desolate message of In Praise of Birds has diminished in value. For us, too, if we restrict ourselves to the songbirds that we know best, the ones that populate our gardens, hills, and yards, birds remain “the most joyous creatures in the world.” They strike us as happy because fate endowed them with song and flight, and Leopardi saw them in the same way, in part because nature, which so sharpened their senses, also gave them “most vivid powers of imagination”: not “profound, fervid, and stormy” but, rather, varied and nimble like that of children, whom they also resemble in their continuous and apparently pointless liveliness.

  According to Leopardi, it is possible for them to be happy because they are free of any awareness of life’s vanity. And so they are unacquainted with boredom, an affliction specific to conscious humans, and the more dolorous the further human beings have distanced themselves from nature. Moreover, birds are protected against extremes of cold and heat, and if the environment turns hostile they can migrate until they find better living conditions. Yet even though they’re independent, and free by definition, they’re still sensitive to human presence, and their voices are loveliest where the customs of humanity are loveliest.

  This song of theirs, which Leopardi identifies as the distinctive feature of birds and a marker of their happiness, is gratuitous, a laughter-song, an “expression of gladness,” capable of transmitting this gladness to those who hear it, “by bearing witness, delusive though it may be, to the gladness of the world.” Likewise, the agitation of birds, the fact that they are “seen never at rest,” is a pure manifestation of joy; it occurs “for no apparent reason,” while their flight is simply “a delight to them.” In conclusion, Leopardi, or, to be exact, the imaginary philosopher of antiquity to whom In Praise of Birds is attributed, would like (but “only for a time”) “to be converted into a bird, to taste the gladness of their life.”

  These pages are firm and lucid, still valid, and their power comes from the constant, but unstated, comparison with the misery of the human condition, with our essential lack of freedom, symbolized by our earthbound nature. All the same, we may ask ourselves what Leopardi would have written if, instead of relying on Buffon, and limiting his focus to the birds whose song he listened to during the long evenings in his village, he had, for example, read the books of Konrad Lorenz and had extended his observations to include other types of birds. I think that, first of all, he would have given up trying to compare birds to human beings. To attribute such feelings as gaiety, boredom, and happiness to animals (with the possible exception of dogs and certain monkeys) is acceptable only in the context of poetry—otherwise it’s arbitrary and greatly misleading.

  We might say the same of the interpretation of birdsong: animal behaviorists tell us that birdsong, especially when it is solitary and melodious (and therefore especially pleasing to us), has a very specific meaning, of defense of the bird’s territory and a warning to potential rivals or intruders. It would be more appropriate, then, to compare it not to human laughter but to less friendly human artifacts, such as the fences and gates with which landowners surround their property, or the intolerable electric alarms designed to scare burglars away from apartments.

  As for the liveliness of birds (of some birds: others, such as wading birds, are relatively calm), this is a necessary solution to a problem of survival. It is observed chiefly in birds that feed on seeds or insects, and which are therefore obliged to be frantically active in their search for food, which is scattered over vast areas and often hard to find; at the same time, their high body temperature and the hard work of flying make it necessary for them to eat a great deal. Clearly, it’s a vicious cycle: working hard to obtain food, eating a great deal to make up for the costs of that hard work—a continuous loop that is not unfamiliar to most of the human race.

  It was not my intent, with these rather simplistic considerations, to suggest that our admiration for birds is unjustified. It’s entirely justified, even if we accept the explanations that scientists (not without disagreements among themselves) provide: in fact, especially if we accept them, but then that admiration shifts its focus to different and more subtle virtues.

  How can we help but admire, for example, the adaptability of starlings? Intensely gregarious, they had always dwelt around farmland, where they sometimes ravaged vineyards and olive groves. In the past few decades, they’ve discovered the cities: apparently they first settled in London in 1914, and only in the past few years have they come to Turin. Here, for their winter quarters, they’ve selected a few large trees, on Piazza Carlo Felice, Corso Turati, and elsewhere, whose branches, bare of leaves in winter, seem at nightfall to hang loaded with strange blackish fruit.

  At dawn they set out in serried regiments “to go to work,” that is, to the fields outside the industrial belt; they come home at sunset, in gigantic flocks of thousands of individual birds, followed by scattered stragglers. Viewed from a distance, these flocks seem like clouds of smoke; then, suddenly, they display astonishing maneuvers, the cloud becomes a long ribbon, then a cone, then a sphere; at last, it spreads out again and, like an enormous arrow, points straight for its nightly shelter. Who commands that army? And how does he give his orders?

  Nocturnal birds of prey are extraordinary hunting machines. Their unusual appearance, somewhat awkward when they are at rest, has always aroused curiosity and occasionally aversion. They are silent in flight, and have powerful claws and large forward-facing eyes that confer a vaguely human appearance, but even the biggest and most sensitive eyes are blind in total darkness. Nonetheless, it has been observed in rigorous experimental conditions that an owl is capable of snatching up a mouse with lightning speed, even in total darkness, as long as the mouse makes even the slightest noise. There is no doubt that the bird loc
ates its prey through its sense of hearing, and the asymmetry of the bird’s ears, which has long been observed, probably plays a role; but just how the auditory signals are processed remains a mystery for now.

  Deeper is the mystery of how birds orient themselves. We know that not all migratory birds use the same methods of orientation, and that many birds employ various strategies at the same time, relying upon one or the other depending on weather conditions; certainly, geographic landmarks and the position of the sun play a part, as do, probably, the Earth’s magnetic field and birds’ sense of smell.

  But one is astonished, and struck by something approaching religious awe, to read that certain migratory birds who fly only on clear nights not only navigate by the stars but can determine their location with great precision from the configuration of the sky, even when they have been transported somewhere during an experiment. Moreover, it is not only birds that have previously flown with their flocks on migrations that are capable of this feat but even young birds on their first flight. In short, everything works as if they’d been born with a celestial map and an internal clock that is independent of local time, all stuffed into a brain that weighs under a gram.