The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Along with my grandfather and the clerks, two of my uncles also sold cloth. They probably would have preferred some other line of work, but my grandfather’s authority, never expressed with harsh words or even with orders, remained unquestioned and unquestionable. Among themselves, the sales staff spoke in Piedmontese dialect, inserting, however, twenty or so technical terms that the customers (and those customers were almost exclusively women) would never in theory be able to decipher, and which constituted a skeletal micro-parlance, an elementary but essential code, whose vocabulary was uttered rapidly and in a whisper.

  Numbers played a primary role in this jargon: reduced for simplicity’s sake to a series of digits, which were of course coded, my grandfather used them to inform the sales clerk of the price to be offered (discounted, or, on the contrary, inflated) to this or that customer; in fact, there were no fixed prices, and they varied according to a customer’s personality, solvency, family ties, and other elusive factors. “Missià” referred to an annoying customer; “tërdes-un” (“thirteen-one”) was the most feared kind of customer, one who would make you pull forty different items down off the shelves, argue price and quality for two hours, and then leave without buying a thing. In recent times, the term had been deciphered, and by none other than a tërdes-un, who caused a scene; after that, the term was replaced by the equivalent “Savoy,” which also soon fell out of use. Other terms stood simply for “yes,” “no,” “hold out,” and “give in.”

  My grandfather maintained cordial, but diplomatically complicated, relations with a number of his competitors, some of whom were also distant relatives. They would pay calls on one another’s shops that were at the same time spying missions, on Sunday afternoons they’d arrange Homeric banquets, and they called each other Signor Thief and Signor Fraudster. Relations with the shop clerks were also ambivalent. In the shop, the clerks were completely subjugated; occasionally, however, on Sundays when the weather was fine, my grandfather might invite them out on excursions to the Boringhieri beer hall (in what is now Piazza Adriano). Once, but only once, he even took them on the local train all the way to Beinasco.

  Relations were unclouded, on the other hand, with the shopkeepers along Via Roma and neighboring areas who sold shoes, linen, jewelry, furniture, wedding dresses. My grandfather used to send the youngest and sharpest shop clerk over to the Porta Nuova station to greet trains coming in from the provinces: his job was to scout couples engaged to be married who had come to Turin to do their shopping, and steer them to the shop. But, once they’d bought the fabrics they needed, the young man’s mission continued: he had to tow the couple to the shops of the other, affiliated merchants, who were ready to return the favor, of course.

  At Carnival, my grandfather invited all the grandchildren to watch the parade of allegorical floats from the shop’s balcony. In those days, Via Roma was paved with wonderful wooden tiles, providing a surface upon which the iron-shod hooves of the draft horses wouldn’t slip; electric tram tracks also ran up and down the street. My grandfather provided us with an abundant supply of confetti, but forbade us to throw streamers, especially when the weather was damp: a legend circulated in which a little boy had tossed a wet streamer over the tram wire and had been electrocuted.

  At Carnival, my grandmother also came out onto the shop’s balcony, a rare event: she was a small, fragile woman, but her face bore the regal air of a mother of many children, and even in person she had the timeless, rapt expression that emanates from the portraits of our forebears in their massive frames. She herself came from an immense family, of twenty-one children, who had been scattered like dandelion seeds in the wind: one was an anarchist who had fled to France, another had been killed in the Great War, yet another was a renowned sculler and a neuropath, while one (the story was told in whispers and in tones of horror), when still in the care of a wet nurse, had been eaten in his crib by a pig.

  A Long Duel

  “Some folk delight to raise the dust of Olympia with speeding chariot, and graze the turning post with their scorching wheels”: thus, or something close to it, said Horace, and the tiny clan to which I belonged was jolted by a slight and delightful shock of electricity. Ours was a monstrous high school freshman class made up of forty-one students, all males and virtually all louts, savagely impermeable to the knowledge that was being administered to us. Some students rejected it or ridiculed it with arrogance, while others (the majority) let it dribble over them like a tedious rain.

  Not us. There were five or six of us, and in our hearts we proclaimed ourselves the chosen élite of our class. We had elaborated our own private moral code, outrageously tendentious: to study was a necessary evil, which we would accept with the patience of the strong, given the fact that we needed to be promoted successfully; but there was a precise hierarchy assigned to subjects of study. Philosophy and the natural sciences were the best; ancient Greek, Latin, mathematics, and physics were acceptable, as tools to understand the first two subjects; Italian and history were indifferent; art history and physical education were sheer afflictions. Those who failed to accept this ranking (which, little did we know, had been engendered primarily by the talent and the human warmth of the respective teachers) were automatically excluded from our clan.

  There were other dogmas: it was necessary to talk about girls, and to girls, without sentimentalism—indeed, in the crudest sort of barracks language. We accepted the athletic activities of swimming and fencing; we gave skiing a grudging pass, “something strictly for the rich”; we dismissed soccer, “because it toughens your knees”; and ruled out tennis entirely, as effeminate, good for high-born young ladies. I, who played tennis every summer in Bardonecchia, at times even in mixed doubles, never confessed the fact: but, for that matter, I was permanently at the clan’s margins, accepted because I was good at Latin and willing to hand around copies of my classwork, envied because I possessed a microscope of my own, but considered a dissident because, in spite of my efforts, my vocabulary was not vulgar enough. But the prince of sports was track and field: anyone who competed in track and field was ipso facto among the elect, while those who ignored it were outcasts. Two years earlier, in 1932 at Los Angeles, Beccali had triumphed in the 1500 meters, and we all dreamed of emulating him, or at least of placing first in some other event. Our little Olympic games were held in the afternoon, in the stadium that stood where the Polytechnic is now.

  It was a magnificent structure, one of the first reinforced-concrete buildings erected in Turin: completed around 1915, by 1934 it was already abandoned and decrepit, a stunning example of the waste of tax money. The oval of the track, 800 meters in length, was by now bare earth, punctuated with potholes ineptly filled in with gravel; weeds and scrawny saplings grew in the gigantic tiers of seats. Officially, entrance was forbidden, but we made our way in through the café, wheeling our bicycles.

  Some of us threw the shot put (a chunk of cement) or a homemade javelin, others did the high jump or the long jump to the best of their abilities: but Guido and I stuck strictly to the pulverem Olympicum declaimed by Horace. We’d found a vocation as middle-distance runners, but Beccali’s 1500-meter race was too much for us; the very dusty 800 meters of the track was plenty and more than enough. Those three lines reconciled us with Latinity; the ancient Romans weren’t pure fossils after all—they knew the fever of competition, they were people like us. Too bad the Latin they wrote was so hard.

  Guido was a young barbarian with a sculpted body. He was intelligent and ambitious, and he envied me my scholastic success; I, symmetrically, envied him his muscles, his height, his handsomeness, and his precocious lusts. This intersecting competition had created between us an odd, rough-hewn friendship, exclusive, contentious, never affectionate, not always loyal, entailing relentless competition, an all-out contest, and in fact making us inseparable. We were fifteen or sixteen years old, and this competitive tension would have been more or less normal if we’d been on an even footing, but such was not the case. I enjoyed a cer
tain starting advantage, culturally speaking, because I had lots of books at home, and my father, an engineer, would instantly bring me more if I so much as hinted at a specific wish (with the exception of Salgari,1 whom he detested and forbade me to read), while my rival had been born into a humble family; but Guido was neither stupid nor lazy, and he asked me to lend him all the books I mentioned, read them voraciously, discussed them with me (we were almost invariably of opposing views), and then refused to return them; his cultural handicap thus shrank month by month.

  In contrast, his advantage in physical terms was unshakable. Guido was sixty kilos of solid muscle, while I barely reached forty-five; any kind of hand-to-hand competition was out of the question, but competition was what we needed and yearned for (perhaps I yearned for it more than he did), and before competing openly on the track we had devised all sorts of indirect contests. For weeks we challenged each other to see who could hold his breath the longest, at first without any particular contrivances, then, over time, refining our weapons. I came up with the idea of oxygenating my blood in advance, by taking a series of long, deep breaths; Guido discovered that it was possible to gain a few seconds by competing flat on his back on the floor instead of sitting upright; I perfected the technique of internal respiration, contracting and expanding my chest with my glottis clamped shut. It worked, but Guido noticed what I was doing and immediately copied me. We both held out stubbornly until we were on the verge of fainting; we took turns competing, each holding the stopwatch out before the other’s progressively bulging eyes. There was no need to check on each other. It would never have occurred to us to cheat in terms of the actual blockage of our respiratory channels, because we were both out to test our own willpower rather than to vanquish the other. As I recall, the results were hardly dazzling; we held our breath for something approaching a hundred seconds, and then, in a break from tradition, we agreed to suspend the competition “because if we don’t, we’ll wind up stunting our growth.”

  There is no doubt that it was Guido who invented the slapping game. The rules, unstated and unwritten, developed on their own: the objective was to catch the adversary off guard, on the street, at his desk, if possible in class, and slap him square in the face, without warning, with all one’s strength, in the middle of a peaceful conversation. It was considered fair—in fact, excellent gamesmanship—to distract one’s opponent with idle conversation, and even to hit him from behind, but always and only on the cheek, never on the nose or in the eyes; it was forbidden to hit a second time, taking advantage of his dazed state; it was allowed, but practically impossible, to block a slap; it was dishonorable to protest, complain, or act offended; obligatory to slap back, not then and there but later, or the next day, when things were relaxed, suddenly and without warning. We’d become experts at reading in the other’s face the imperceptible contraction that came just before the slap: “Behold, your eyes roll eager for gore,” I quoted from Dante’s Inferno, and Guido praised me chivalrously. Against all odds, I emerged victorious from the savage tournament, on points: my reflexes were faster than Guido’s, possibly because my arms were shorter, but the slaps I landed, even though they were more numerous than his, were much less violent.

  Guido enjoyed an easy retaliatory win in a contest he’d invented himself at a time before the striptease existed, even in America; I was unable to overcome my own modesty, and so I competed just once, and I quit after taking off my shoes. As I said above, we were all males in that class; by no means were we all brutes, but the brutes among us were the real leaders, certainly not us “intellectuals.” Guido challenged them and beat them all. The ordeal consisted of undressing in class, and it could take place only during the natural science period because the teacher was shortsighted and never ventured out into the classroom. Some made it to bare-chested, four to their underpants, but Guido alone stripped naked from head to foot. The danger of being called to the blackboard was just part of the game and spiced it up: in fact, from time to time, we’d see the teacher call on someone, who would then frantically pull his trousers on underneath the desk.

  Guido, who possessed the instincts of a general, had taken his precautions. By some pretext he had arranged to have his seat moved from the second row to the last, he had practiced getting his clothes back on in a hurry, he had waited until the day after a quiz, and at last, as our teacher was explaining the parts of a skeleton with his pointer, not only did he strip completely but, naked, he climbed onto his chair, and then onto his desktop, as we all held our breath, hovering between admiration and scandal. There he remained for a good long moment.

  Loyal to our collective mythology, we finally dedicated ourselves to track and field, but it was soon obvious that Guido would triumph in all events but one, and that event was the 800-meter race. But he was determined to beat me in the 800 meters, so that his athletic supremacy would be unsullied.

  The race around the track was a grueling effort. We wore tennis shoes, and the gravel hurt our feet, and diminished the thrust of our stride. We had run the course together just once, and it was mutual massacre; neither of us was willing to allow the other to get ahead, even by a few feet: we didn’t know that the only rational way to run a race is to let your opponent push through the air ahead of you, saving your breath for the final sprint. Instead, we were both completely beat by midway through the distance; I slowed down, not out of generosity or calculation but out of total exhaustion; Guido, to his honor, ran another ten meters or so, then he left the track, too.

  After that, each aghast at the other’s obstinacy, we ran against the chronometer: one gasping down the track, the other following him on a bicycle and calling out the split times; but Guido was no sportsman, and instead of respecting my furious concentration he would tell dirty jokes to make me laugh. We went on like that for many weeks, filling our tracheas with the dust of Olympia, coexisting civilly at school, hating one another at the stadium with the unconfessed hatred of athletes. At every race, each of us would make use of all his ferocity to nibble a few seconds off the other’s time.

  At the end of the school year I stopped nibbling: Guido’s superiority was patent, thoroughly established; an abyss of no less than five seconds separated us. Chance, however, offered me a meager revenge: the stadium café had closed, and in order to get onto the track by now we were forced to climb to the top of the bleachers, where some entrance had been forgotten and left open. Now I noticed that the gates barring the entrance on the ground floor had sixteen-centimeter spaces between the bars: my cranium would just fit through, but back then I was so skinny that if my cranium fit through the rest of me passed through easily, too.

  I alone was capable of accomplishing this feat: well, wasn’t that also an event? A gift of nature, just like Guido’s quadriceps and deltoids? By forcing the term, like any good sophist, I could describe this as an athletic achievement, a sport that could be regulated by a proper set of rules. Perhaps, to the list of the untamed, the unsatisfied, first started by Horace, one could add an item, those who pass through gates. Guido didn’t seem to agree.

  I lost track of Guido, and so I cannot say which of us two won the laurels in the endurance race of life; but I’ve never forgotten that strange bond which perhaps was never friendship, but which both united and divided us. In my memory, his image remains fixed, as if in a snapshot: standing naked on an absurd high school desk, symmetrical to the obscene skeleton our teacher was inventorying for us; provocative, Dionysian, and obscene in a completely opposite way, a fleeting monument to earthly vigor and insolence.

  1. Emilio Salgari, an author of adventure stories that take place in exotic lands.

  The Language of Odors

  Recently, Lorenzo Mondo published in these pages a fine review of the poetry of Giorgio Caproni, published by Garzanti, and in it he pointed out a curious aspect of the work: how important odors are for Caproni and how often they appear in his work, both poetry and fiction. They are the odors of nature, but also and above all human odors; to
be even more specific, the odors of women, faint and vivid, sweet and harsh. They are messages, and explicit, even if they are uttered in a language that (for the moment) remains undeciphered, and they attest to the persistence of our ties with the land and with the “lovely family of herbs and animals.”

  This is a topic that has always fascinated me: I have often suspected that my youthful inclination for chemistry was dictated, at some deeper level, by reasons quite different from those I rationalized and frequently stated. I became a chemist not (or not merely) out of a need to understand the world around me; not as a reaction to the dogmatic and insubstantial claims of the Doctrine of Fascism; not in the hope of scientific glory or wealth, but to find or create an opportunity to make use of my nose.

  Let me inform non-chemists, in fact, that even now, in spite of the most sophisticated analytical instruments, the nose still provides outstanding service to the chemist it belongs to, in terms of simplicity, rapidity, and low investment—indeed, no investment. All one need—and must—do is keep that nose in practice. If I were in charge, I would require that all aspiring chemists take a course and a test in olfactory recognition; and I would ensure that the laboratory for that course (actually nothing more than an archive, a thousand or so vials with coded labels, and a few grams of the substance to be identified in each vial: this, too, would require only a trivial investment!) remain open to all those, young and old, who wish to introduce into their sensory universe an extra dimension, who wish to perceive the world in a different way. Isn’t the education of one’s senses also a form of “physical education”?