by Primo Levi
These days, we rightly fear the extinction of certain animal species, such as the panda and the tiger. The extinction of a culture, as prodigiously fertile and creative as the culture that was the subject of the conference, is a disaster of much greater scope. The verses, saved by happenstance, of Yitzhak Katzenelson, the Warsaw poet who was murdered with his whole family and his people at Auschwitz, should echo ominously in all souls: “Rising over the Lithuanian and Polish towns the sun will never find / A radiant old Jew at the window reciting psalms.”
Fossil Words
Many years ago, when I first read Mario Rigoni Stern’s The Sergeant in the Snow, I was startled to encounter the epic question, repeated obsessively in the night and the frozen chill of the river Don, “Sergentmagiu, ghe rivarem a baita?” (Sergeant-major, will we ever get home?). Baita, shelter, refuge, salvation, home.
It is odd that the word baita, used widely throughout the arc of the Alps, is quite similar to the Hebrew word bait, which in fact means “house.” This coincidence first stirred my curiosity when I was eleven years old and struggling to read a little Hebrew, which, sadly, was later completely forgotten. It seemed clear to me that the alpine term must have come from Hebrew, which was the “oldest language on earth,” and this supposed derivation gave me a childish pride: the Romans might have conquered my Judaean ancestors and destroyed Jerusalem, but at least one Hebrew word had taken the place of a corresponding Latin word.
In short, it was a small vindication. I hardly suspected I’d stumbled on a confirmation of the theory of areas that is so dear to linguists, and according to which the presence of a given word in outlying areas is evidence of its antiquity: it’s a resurfacing of a language that in intermediate regions was buried by more innovative manners of speech.
For decades I clung to this curiosity, jumbled in with countless others in the great storage tank of unanswered questions, until I finally read in a dictionary that it was in fact an “alpine word dating back to the Paleo-European substratum ranging from the Basque area to the Aegean area”: whereupon I felt an equally childish glee.
I had therefore chanced upon an illustrious fossil, a very rare relic of a linguistic past that predates history, perhaps an artifact of the golden age, when the entire Mediterranean basin spoke the same language, before the tower of Babel, before the fierce hordes of the Dorians, the Gauls, and the Illyrians swept down from the north, bringing war and the confusion of languages; when a Basque could say “andiamo a baita” to an Aegean and be understood.
As if there were still any need for it, I should confess that here I’m talking about an old weakness of mine, that of dabbling in my spare time in fields I know nothing about, not to construct a single coherent culture for myself but strictly for fun: the pure pleasure of the dilettante. I prefer eavesdropping to listening, peering through keyholes to taking in vast and solemn panoramas; I prefer to turn a single tile over in my fingers rather than contemplate the mosaic in its entirety. That is why members of my family laugh lovingly at me whenever they see me with a dictionary or a glossary in my hands rather than a novel or a treatise (and it’s a common occurrence). It’s true, I prefer the particular to the general, casual and fragmentary readings to systematic studies.
It’s certainly a bad habit, but among the least harmful; reading aside, it manifests itself in the tendency to do things one doesn’t really know how to do. In this way, it may even happen that you learn how to do them, but that’s an accident, a by-product: the chief objective is the attempt itself, vagabondage, exploration.
I remember reading, some time ago, a wonderful essay on this topic, dilettantish, of course, by poor Paolo Monelli: the title was Elogio dello schiappino (In Praise of Duffers), and it praised those who try to struggle along in other people’s professions, autodidacts, skiers who venture out onto the snow without having taken lessons or read the handbooks, those who strive to learn a foreign language not with a grammar book but by poring over a newspaper or engaging freely in conversation with the first foreigner they encounter, Sunday painters—in other words those who try to learn from their own raw experience, rather than from treatises or teachers, that is, from the boundless sea of other people’s experience. This praise, of course, is paradoxical: one learns better and faster by following more traditional paths, but the spontaneous approaches are more fun and hold more surprises.
A particular instance of this “casual” libertinage is, for me, the heedless perusal of etymological dictionaries: a pursuit that is all the more rewarding inasmuch as it is done entirely for its own sake, without any practical purpose, and without critical intent, which I would be incapable of, in any case, and without any serious language training. I own five of them, Italian, French, German, English, and Piedmontese: the one I cherish most is the last, because it conceals in its folds unsuspected certificates of nobility for this dialect of ours, a dialect that I speak poorly, but which I love with the “proper love” that binds us to the place where we were born and grew up, a love that becomes homesickness when we are far away.
The certificates in question are the words in Piedmontese that derive from Latin without the mediation of Italian. They are considerable in number, and nearly all belong to the language of the countryside: an area where the spoken language passed from rustic Latin (often tainted with local Celtic or Ligurian dialects) straight to a dialect fairly similar to present-day Piedmontese, and where Italian has been spoken only for the past few decades, as required by the administration and spread by domestic migration, by the radio, then by the movies, and finally, triumphantly, by television.
It stands to reason, but at the same time it’s surprising and moving, that the weasel should still be called musteila in Piedmontese (mustela in Latin): in the Italianized city of Turin, weasels have never been seen, and there has been no need to hand down the name from one generation to the next. Our bulé is the Latin boletus: where mushrooms are concerned, no other neo-Latin dialect1—neither the national language of Italian, nor the neighboring French—has proved to be as faithful to Latin as the language spoken by us Allobroges. Besides, no fritto misto pays such homage to mushrooms as does the fritto alla piemontese; and I wouldn’t be surprised—in fact, I’d feel a chauvinistic pride—if someone were to show me that the relationship is reversed, in other words, that the ancient Romans first learned to call the boletus mushroom boletus from some long forgotten Transpadane people, that is to say, from us.
I experienced a similar feeling of joy when, perusing Andrea Zanzotto’s recent translation of Virgil’s Copa, published by Vanni Scheiwiller, I found, in the Latin text provided on the facing page, no less than our Piedmontese term topia, unknown in Italian, and used by both Romans and Greeks with a definition only slightly different from that found in Piedmontese (flower bed, rather than pergola or bower). Also Piedmontese and Latin without any Italian intrusion are tisoire (scissors, or ferramenta tonsoria), pàu (fear, pavor), arsenté (rinse, recentare), ancheui (today, hanc hodie), aram (the Italian is rame, copper, but the dialect word is much closer to the Latin aeramen), the word stibi, still widely used by masons (a low partition wall, stipes; the Italian stipite has a different meaning), pré (a chicken gizzard, called petrarius because it often contained pebbles), malavi, which corresponds not to the Italian malato, or sick, but to the Latin male habitus, in poor condition.
The jewel in this crown is, to come back to where we started, the very adjective latin or ladin itself, which in Piedmontese means “easy,” “quick,” “smooth-flowing.” Present-day Italian no longer perceives Latin as the “easy” language par excellence, but even Ariosto still considered it as such, when he tells us that Count Orlando spoke the Saracen tongue “as if it were Latin.” Well, not so many years ago I heard a local boy singing the praises of his bicycle (in Piedmontese), saying that it was more “latina” than his older brother’s.
These are minor discoveries, already made countless times by experts in the field, but one still feels a lovely pleasure at redi
scovering them. Much the same is the pleasure we feel when, in the midst of the forest of ski lifts, we climb all the way up to the Banchetta with just our skis and sealskins.
1. Author’s note: After the first publication of this article, I was informed that in Catalan as well the word for mushroom is bolet.
The Skull and the Orchid
Many years ago, shortly after the end of the war, I was subjected (or, rather, I subjected myself: almost voluntarily) to a battery of psychological tests. Without much conviction, if not in fact reluctantly, I’d applied for a job with a large manufacturing company. I needed a job, but I didn’t care for large companies; I felt quite ambivalent, and I both feared and hoped that my application would be rejected. I received an invitation to undergo “a number of exams,” accompanied by the proviso that the result of these exams would have no effect on the decision whether or not to hire me, but would prevent “a round man from being put into a square hole.” This vivid image had astonished me and stimulated my curiosity: I was younger than I am now, and I liked new things. Let’s try, and see how it goes.
In the waiting room, I found myself in the company of thirty or so other candidates, almost all male, almost all young, almost all anxious. We underwent a hasty medical examination and a careless clinical interview; it all brought back unpleasant memories of the ceremony, in truth far more brutal, that a few years earlier had marked my entrance into the concentration camp—as if a stranger were peering inside you to see what you contain and how much you’re worth, as one does with a box or a bag.
The first test consisted of drawing a tree. I hadn’t drawn a thing since elementary school. However, a tree has certain specific attributes; I included them all and handed in my drawing. It couldn’t have been more treelike.
The next test was more challenging: a young man with a dubious expression on his face handed each of us a booklet that contained 550 questions, each to be given a simple yes-or-no answer. Some of the questions were stupid, others were extraordinarily indiscreet, while still others seemed to have been badly translated from a poorly understood language. “Do you sometimes think that your problems can be solved by suicide?” Maybe they can, maybe they can’t, but I’m certainly not going to tell you about it. “In the morning, do you have a sensation of tenderness on the top of your head?” No, I really don’t. “Do you have, or have you ever had, problems with micturition?” The man at the neighboring desk was from Taranto, and he elbowed me and asked, “Friend, what is this mixturition?” When I explained, he brightened. “Do you believe that a revolution can improve the current political situation?” What kind of a fool do you take me for! I’m no revolutionary, but even if I were. . . .
The young man exited the room with his stack of booklets, and a girl came onstage, a brunette who was unmistakably younger than the youngest man there. She told us to come, one by one, into her office, which was nearby. When my turn came, she showed me four or five cards on which enigmatic scenes were printed, and she asked me to express freely the sensations that they prompted in me. One picture showed an empty rowboat, without oars, tipped on its side and abandoned in a patch of bushes and trees. I told her that our old housekeeper, whenever we asked her, “How’s it going?” would always reply disconsolately, “Like a boat in the woods,” and the young woman seemed satisfied.
Another card showed a few peasants fast asleep, stretched out on the ground amid haystacks, their hats pulled down over their faces; to me they suggested thirst, exhaustion, and well-earned if temporary rest. A third drawing featured a young woman crouching at the foot of a bed in a forced and unnatural position, her head tucked between her shoulders and her back curved, as if she were trying to use her back as a suit of armor against something or someone; on the floor was an indistinct object that could have been a gun. I can’t remember the subjects of the other drawings; I liked that work of interpretation, and it made me feel comfortable, and the girl told me that she had noticed it, but she said nothing else and ushered me into the adjoining room.
Here, seated at a desk, was a stylish and very beautiful young woman. She smiled at me as if she’d known me for years, and asked me to sit down across from her. She offered me a cigarette and then began asking me a series of technical, personal, and intimate questions, the kind that confessors ask during confession. She was especially interested in the feelings I had for my mother and father: she persisted with these to an annoying extent, but without ever relaxing her professional smile.
Now, at the time I’d already read my Freud and I didn’t feel completely unprepared. I acquitted myself with distinction; in fact, I even dared to tell the lovely woman that it was too bad we had so little time, otherwise we might be able to arrive at the transference and I could ask her out to dinner, but she cut me off, with a look of annoyance. At this point, I was really starting to enjoy myself: my anguish at feeling that I was being weighed and probed had vanished.
Then came another small room with another examiner: this woman was older than her colleagues and also more arrogant. She wouldn’t even look me in the eye as she spread out the ten figures of the Rorschach test before me. These are large shapeless but symmetrical blobs, obtained by folding in half a blank sheet of paper with black or colored splotches of ink in the middle: at first glance they might look like pairs of gnomes, or skeletons, or masks, or insects seen under the microscope, or birds of prey; at a second glance they no longer mean anything. Apparently, the way subjects interpret them provides clues to their overall personality. Now, it just so happened that a few days earlier a friend of mine had told me about these figures, and he’d also lent me the handbook that comes with them, and which explains with an abundance of curious details how to interpret their interpretation; that is, what is hidden inside someone who sees a skull in the blobs or, instead, an orchid. It struck me as ethical to inform my examiner that this test would be contaminated.
I told her, and she swelled up with fury. How dare I commit such a transgression? It was unheard of: these were confidential matters, private, and civilians had no right to pry into them. Their profession was a sensitive one, and no one else should try to poach on it. Most important, though: now what was she going to write in my file? She certainly couldn’t leave it blank. In other words, I’d put her in an impossible situation. I took my leave with some vague excuse, and filed the matter away; when the letter arrived offering me the position, I replied that I’d already taken another job, which was the truth.
A few months later, I happened to learn that the real candidates weren’t the thirty of us but them, the test givers: they were a team of psychologists on probation, and the tests they were administering constituted their first job, what apprentice craftsmen call their “masterpiece.”
Since then, I’ve never again been subjected to tests of this kind, and I’m glad. I mistrust them: it seems to me that they violate certain fundamental rights of ours, and that, moreover, they’re useless, because there is no longer such a thing as a virgin candidate. But I like them when they’re taken playfully: then they’re stripped of their presumptuousness, and they even stir the imagination, giving rise to new ideas, and can teach us something about ourselves.
My Grandfather’s Shop
My grandfather on my mother’s side had a fabric shop on the old Via Roma, before the ruthless gutting of that part of Turin in the 1930s. It was a long shadowy room, and it had only one window, facing perpendicular to Via Roma and set below street level. A few doors down there was another, parallel cave-like space, a café-bar that had been disguised as a grotto, with large brownish cement stalactites inset with small multicolored mirrors; in the back, a succession of vertical strips of mirror had been attached to the bar. These strips, I couldn’t say whether intentionally or by chance, were not level but attached at a slight angle to one another: that meant that when you walked past the front door of the bar, you saw your legs proliferate in the play of the mirrors, as if you had five or six instead of two, and the children of the time, us, that
is, found this so amusing that we asked to be taken to Via Roma just to see it.
My grandfather’s surname wasn’t Ugotti, but everyone called him Monsù Ugotti because he’d bought the shop from a merchant of that name. The merchant must have been a popular fellow, because the name stuck to my uncles as well, and for a few years after the war there were some on Via Roma who even called me Monsù Ugotti.
My grandfather was a solemn and corpulent patriarch; he was witty, but he never laughed; he spoke little, with rare and precisely calibrated phrases, laden with meanings both patent and hidden, frequently ironic, always full of calm authority. I don’t believe that he ever read a book in his life; his world was bounded by home and shop, which could not have been more than four hundred meters apart, a distance that he walked four times a day. He was a skillful businessman, and at home an equally talented chef, but he set foot in the kitchen only on special occasions, to concoct exquisite but indigestible dishes; in that case, he would spend the whole day there, and banish all women, wife, daughters, and household help.
The staff of his shop was an odd collection of anomalous specimens of humanity. Against a drab background of frequently changing shop clerks loomed the perennial and good-natured bulk of Tota Gina, the cashier. She was indistinguishable from the cash register, the counter, and the high dais upon which the whole mass stood. Glimpsed from below, her majestic bosom spread across the surface of the counter, spilling over the edges like homemade dough. She had gold and silver teeth, and she’d give us Leone candies.
Monsù Ghiandone mispronounced his r’s and wore a toupee. Monsù Gili wore garish ties, chased women, and drank too much. Francesco (no Monsù to his name: he was a menial worker) came from Monferrato, and he was known as Sciapalfàr, Iron-Breaker, because he had once been attacked and, tearing loose one of the long cranks used to raise the awning, shattered the skull of his attacker. He knew how to walk on his hands, he could turn cartwheels, and after the shop was closed he’d even do a somersault over the sales counter.