by Primo Levi
Just as we followed models, we followed human beings, who, like us, were made of the same clay as Adam, but we idealized them, blew them out of proportion, hailed them as godlike: they were all-knowing and all-powerful, they were always right, they were free to contradict themselves and to erase their pasts. Now the delirious handover of responsibility seems to be finished, both in the West and in the East: we no longer have the Fortunate Isles or charismatic leaders (perhaps the last deplorable instance of this is Khomeini, and he won’t last long). We’re orphans, and we live with the malaise of orphans. Many of us, nearly all of us, had found it convenient and easy to place our faith in a prepackaged truth: it was a human choice, but a mistake, and now we’re paying for that failure. Our future isn’t written, it’s not certain: we’ve awakened from a long slumber, and we’ve seen that the human condition is incompatible with certainty. No prophet now dares to reveal our tomorrows to us, and this—the eclipse of the prophets—is a bitter pill to swallow, but a necessary one. We must build our own tomorrow, fumbling blindly; build it from the roots up, without succumbing to the temptation to reassemble the shards of shattered idols, and without constructing new ones.
Translator’s Afterword
A story attaches to the title “Other People’s Trades,” one that Primo Levi almost certainly enjoyed concealing in plain view. The title describes the book’s ostensible subject, the work that people other than the author do. If we look carefully, though, half a dozen of these essays are about his original profession, that of chemist, and a dozen more are about writing, which was his second line of work. So he does write about other people’s trades here, but not exclusively.
It is also perplexing that the first essay in the collection is about the Turin apartment where Levi lived his entire life. If there is a trade depicted in this essay, it is not that of an absentminded chemist but that of a barnacle or limpet that, having gone briefly out into the world, in the larval stage, to swim freely, in the end affixes itself to a rock and remains there for the rest of its life. What does this have to do with other people’s trades? A strong indication comes in the author’s preface. These essays, Levi confides, “are the product of a decade and more of vagabond and dilettantish curiosity . . . ‘field invasions,’ incursions into other people’s professions,” prompted, ultimately, by the impulses of “a voyeur and a busybody”—other people’s business, in short.
The title, it turns out, comes from a venerable piece of Italian folk wisdom: stick to your knitting, or mind your own business. An old book renders it as: “Every man to his trade.” The full proverb goes: “Chi fa l’altrui mestiere, fa la zuppa nel paniere.” He who meddles in other people’s business (or tries to practice a trade other than his own) might as well make soup in a breadbasket. And by breadbasket, the proverb means one made of wicker. Hardly a suitable stockpot.
But Levi defiantly hacks off the rest of the expression, clearly showing his contempt for the tidy picket fences separating fields of knowledge.
In the Preface, Levi writes: “I have frequently set foot on bridges that join (or ought to join) scientific culture with literary culture, crossing a crevasse that has always struck me as absurd. . . . It is an unnatural, needless, toxic schism, the product of long-ago taboos and the Counter-Reformation, and in some cases it can even be traced back to a small-minded interpretation of the Biblical prohibition against partaking of a certain fruit.”
Indeed, Levi seems to argue that we should eagerly devour as much of that forbidden fruit—knowledge—as we can get our hands on. Once this is understood to be the theme of the book, the way in which Levi ordered the fifty-one essays written over nearly twenty years for the Turin daily La Stampa, takes on a new meaning, pointing to knowledge, however unseemly or arcane, as a good in and of itself.
The first essay is, as noted, about the apartment where Levi was born and lived almost his entire life. The second is about Aldous Huxley, and how singularly wooden Huxley’s depictions of those outside his social class seem. The third is how all that Levi has learned as a chemist can be used in looking at things outside the realm of chemistry: how being a chemist justifies his work as a writer. The fourth—an appreciation of Rabelais’s masterwork, Gargantua and Pantagruel—is a panegyric to the getting and enjoying of knowledge, a ceaseless and vital pursuit free of any false piety. The fifth (written just before the Moon landing in July 1969) explores the human impulse to look beyond and to inquire within. The sixth is a subtle critique of Alphonse Daudet’s book Tartarin of Tarascon, which plumbs the author’s attitude of dislike toward his own character and a deep strain of hidden racism. It is as if Levi had written a series of preambles setting forth his right to stick his nose into other people’s knowledge.
There are various leitmotivs: the importance of language, the relatively puny status of man in the universe, the pointlessness of arbitrary barriers. One essay decries the practice of writing impenetrable prose, another explores a book of “odd facts,” and delights in the surprising perspectives its author provides; yet another proudly describes Levi’s youthful intuition of a linguistic link between the Alpine dialect word baita and the Hebrew word bait—both meaning “house” or “home.”
Throughout the book, common sense is the refrain—whether tinged with humor, learned references, or personal experience. After all, when we stop listening to common sense, we ignore the most intuitive lesson of all, the one that Martin Niemöller, the anti-Hitler Lutheran minister imprisoned by the Nazis from 1937 to 1945, learned at his own expense: after they’ve come for the Socialists, the trade unionists, and the Jews, they’ll eventually come for you.
—ANTONY SHUGAAR
CONTENTS
PREFACE
“To My Friends”
Stories
“The Thaw”
The Interview
Made for Each Other
The Great Mutation
That Quiet Town of Auschwitz
Two Flags
An Erector Set Made with Love
A Wartime Pipette
Frogs on the Moon
The Mirror Maker
The Man Who Squeezed Through Walls
The Ant’s Wedding
Force Majeure
A “Mystery” in the Lager
Time Checkmated
The Machine Gun Under the Bed
Essays
“A Valley”
The Commander of Auschwitz
The Moon and Man
Sic!
Our Dreams
Struggle for Life
From Spears to Shields
Translating Kafka
Rhyme on the Counterattack
Dear Horace
Bacteria Roulette
Among Manhattan’s Skyscrapers
A Bottle of Sunshine
The Wine of the Borgias
Reproducing Miracles
The Hidden Player
Man in Flight
Peroxide Blonde
Gossip
“Fair as a Flower”
Hatching the Cobra
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
Preface
I hope that the reader will show some indulgence for the extreme range of topics, tone, and style that he will find in this collection. In my own defense: the “pieces” extend over a period of time spanning nearly a quarter of a century, the period of my almost absolute fidelity to La Stampa. And in twenty-five years many things change, within and around us. Moreover, the pieces reflect an intrinsic libertinism of mine, in part intentional, in part owing to the course that destiny had in store for me; I have drunk from various springs and breathed different types of air, at times salubrious, at other times quite polluted. I have no regrets, and no complaints: “The world is beautiful because of its variety,” the protagonist of one of my books recites, with his typical lack of originality.
I beg the reader not to go looking for messages. It is a term that I detest, because it puts me in a difficult situation and makes me put on cl
othes that aren’t mine, that, on the contrary, belong to a type of human being whom I distrust: the prophet, the oracle, the seer. I am not such a man; I am an ordinary man with a good memory who fell into a vortex, who came out of it more by good fortune than by virtue, and who since that time has had a certain curiosity about vortexes, large and small, metaphoric and material.
PRIMO LEVI
OCTOBER 1986
To My Friends1
Dear friends, and here I’m saying friends
in the broad sense of the term:
Wife, sister, fellow workers, relatives,
Schoolmates,
Persons I’ve seen once
Or known for all my life:
As long as between us, for at least a moment,
a line has been stretched,
a well-defined connection.
I speak for you, companions
On a crowded way, not free of trouble,
Also for you, who’ve lost
Your soul, your spirit, your will to live.
No one, a few or maybe only one,
Or you who read me: remember the time
Before the wax hardened,
When each of us was like a seal.
Each of us carries the imprint
Of the friend met along the way;
In each the trace of each.
For good or ill
In wisdom or in folly
Each stamped by each.
Now that time bears down,
Now the doing is over,
To all of you the quiet wish
That autumn be long and mild.
December 16, 1985 (TRANS. J. GALASSI)
1. Addressed to Levi’s writer friends Mario Rigoni Stern and Nuto Revelli, among others.
The Thaw
When all the snow has melted
We’ll seek out the old path,
The one that’s disappearing under brambles
Behind the monastery wall;
Everything will be the way it was.
Under the thick heather on either side
we’ll find a certain low-growing herb
whose name I can’t think of:
Every Friday I remember it
But every Saturday it slips my mind;
I’ve been told it’s rare,
And helps with melancholy.
The ferns that line the path
Are delicate, like little animals:
They’ve barely poked their spiral curls
Out of the ground, and yet
They’re ready for their changeable
Green loves, more intricate than ours.
Their tiny male and female seeds
Gnaw at the brakes
In rusty sacs of spore.
They’ll explode with the first rain,
Swimming in the first drops,
Eager and agile: long live the lovers!
We’re tired of winter. The bite
of frost has left its mark
On flesh, mind, mud, and wood.
Let the thaw come, and melt the memory
Of last year’s snow.
February 2, 1985 (TRANS. J. GALASSI)
The Interview
It was still pitch-dark and it was drizzling. Elio, returning from his night shift, was tired and sleepy. He got off the tram and set out toward home, first along a street with an uneven surface, then along an unlit lane. In the darkness he heard a voice ask: “Will you grant an interview?” It was a slightly tinny voice, devoid of any dialect inflections; strangely, it seemed to come from the ground, near his feet. He stopped, a bit surprised, and said all right, but that he was in a hurry to get home.
“I’m in a hurry, too, don’t worry,” the voice replied. “We’ll be done in a couple of minutes. Tell me: how many inhabitants are there on Earth?”
“Four billion, more or less. But why are you asking me?”
“Purely by chance, believe me. I had no way of choosing. Please listen: how do you digest?”
Elio was irritated. “What do you mean, how do we digest? Some people digest well and others poorly. Who are you, anyway? Don’t tell me you want to sell me medicine at this hour, here in the dark in the middle of the street?”
“No, it’s just for statistical purposes,” the voice said imperturbably. “I come from a nearby star, we’re compiling an inventory of the inhabited planets of the Galaxy, and we need some comparative data.”
“But . . . how is it that you speak Italian so well?”
“I speak various other languages, too. You know, your TV transmissions don’t stop at the ionosphere—they continue on into space. It takes them well over eleven years, but they reach us quite clearly. That’s how I learned your language, for example. I find your commercials interesting: they’re very instructive, and I think I understand how you eat and what you eat, but none of us have any idea of how you digest. That’s why I’m asking you to please answer my question.”
“Well, you see, I’ve always had a good digestion, and I don’t know if I can give you many details. We have a . . . a pouch that’s called the stomach, with acids in it, and then a tube; we eat, two or three hours go by, and the food liquefies, in short, it becomes flesh and blood.”
“. . . flesh and blood,” the voice repeated, as if taking notes. Elio noticed that the voice was just like the ones you heard on TV: clear but bland and lifeless.
“Why do you spend so much time washing yourselves and washing the objects around you?”
Elio, with some embarrassment, explained that washing takes only a few minutes a day, that you wash so as not to be dirty, and that if you’re dirty there’s the danger of catching some disease.
“Right, that was one of our theories. You wash so you won’t die. How do you die? At what age? Does everyone die?”
Here, too, Elio’s answer was a little confused. He said there weren’t any rules, both young and old died, very few reached a hundred. “I see. Those who use white sheets and wax the floors live a long time.” Elio tried to correct him, but the interviewer was in a hurry, and went on, “How do you reproduce?”
Ever more embarrassed, Elio got tangled up in a muddled account about men and women, about chromosomes (which he had learned about just a few days earlier on TV), heredity, pregnancy, and childbirth, but the alien interrupted him: he wanted to know at what age clothing begins to grow. As Elio, exasperated by now, explained to him that clothing doesn’t grow on you, you buy it, he realized that dawn was breaking, and in the uncertain light he saw that the voice was coming from a kind of puddle at his feet; or rather, not really a puddle but a sort of big splotch of dark jam.
The alien, too, must have realized that some time had passed. The voice said, “Thanks so much, sorry to bother you.” Right after that, the splotch contracted and stretched upward, as if trying to lift off the ground. It seemed to Elio that it was unable to, and he heard the voice again, saying, “Please, you who are so kind, could you light a match? Sometimes if I don’t have some ionized air around, I can’t take off.” Elio lit a match, and the splotch rose, as if sucked up by a vacuum cleaner, and was lost in the hazy morning sky.
May 22, 1977
Made for Each Other
It was the first time that Plato had managed to make a real date with a girl. Plato lived with his parents in a pretty but rather small one-family house: everything was very simple, the doorway nothing more than a dark narrow rectangle revolving around a point. The girl’s name was Surfa and she lived nearby, that is to say, nearby as the crow flies, since a stream ran between the two dwellings, and Plato was unable to get to her house except by walking upstream and going around the stream’s source—a distance of almost thirty kilometers, however—or by wading or swimming (it didn’t make much difference to him).
There were no bridges, because in that village there was no above and below. Therefore a bridge couldn’t exist, or even be conceived. For the same reason, it was inconceivable to cross the stream by stepping or jumping over it, even though it
wasn’t very wide. In short, measured by our usual criteria, it was an inconvenient village: there was no way to cross the stream without getting wet, so Plato swam over and then dried off by turning around in the sun, which was moving slowly across the horizon.
Since he wanted to arrive before nightfall, he continued on eagerly, not letting himself be distracted by the landscape, which in fact wasn’t much to look at: a circular line around him, broken here and there by green segments of trees, behind which the intensely luminous segment of the sun appeared and disappeared.
After an hour’s walk, Plato began to make out, to the left of the sun, the blue-green hyphen that was Surfa’s house. He reached it quickly, and was glad to see the girl coming toward him, a thin dash that gradually lengthened as the distance diminished. Before long, he made out the red and yellow strokes of her favorite skirt, and soon afterward the two held out their hands. They did not clasp hands; they were content with spreading their fingers and fitting their hands together, yet they both felt a small shiver of pleasure.
They talked for a long time, looking into each other’s eyes, though doing so forced them into a slightly strained position; the hours passed and their desire grew. The sun was setting: Surfa managed to let Plato know that there was no one home, and that no one would return until late that night.
Timid and uncertain, Plato entered that pleasant house, which he wasn’t yet familiar with, although he had been there countless times in his dreams. They didn’t light the lamp; they withdrew to the most secluded corner, and as they went on talking Plato felt his profile being deliciously redrawn, so that one side of it ended up reproducing, in negative and with precision, the corresponding side of the girl: they were made for each other.
They came together at last, in the dusk and the solemn stillness of the plain, and were a single figure, delineated by a single contour. And in that magical moment—but only in a flash that quickly vanished—the intuition of a different world burst upon them both, a world infinitely richer and more complex, in which the prison of the horizon was shattered, vanquished by a radiant, concave sky, and in which their bodies, shadows without depth, were reborn, solid and full. But the vision exceeded their comprehension, and lasted but an instant. They separated, said goodbye, and Plato sadly started off on the path toward home, creeping along the now darkened plain.