by Primo Levi
There were no volcanoes in Bertrando’s country, but there was one in the adjacent country, Gunduwia. For centuries Lantania had been openly at war with its neighbor, or in any case relations had been hostile. In fact, the Lantanian national epic, in a passage whose interpretation is controversial, referred to the volcano as the “Lantanian altar of fire” or the “fire of the Lantanian altar.”
In all the schools of Lantania it was taught that the annexation of the volcano by the Gunduwi had been a criminal undertaking, and that the first duty of every Lantano was to have military training, to despise Gunduwia with all his might, and to prepare for an inevitable, desirable war that would check Gunduwia’s arrogance and win back the volcano. The fact that every three or four years this volcano devastated dozens of villages, and every year caused disastrous earthquakes, had no importance: it was Lantanian and must return to Lantania.
Moreover, how could a country like Gunduwia not be despised? The name itself, so sinister, so sepulchral, inspired aversion. The Lantani were a rowdy, argumentative people, they would come to blows or knife one another over the slightest difference of opinion, but when it came to Gunduwia they were all agreed that it was a country of scoundrels and bullies.
As for their flag, it represented them perfectly: it could not have been uglier. It was dull and insipid, its colors and design clumsy. Merely a brown disk on a yellow background: no image, no symbol. A primitive, vulgar, dung-like flag. The Gunduwi must really be imbeciles, and must always have been so, to have chosen such a flag, and to soak it with their blood when they died in battles, which occurred three or four times a century. Moreover, they were notorious for being miserly and spendthrift, lustful and sanctimonious, reckless and cowardly.
Bertrando was a decent young man, respectful of laws and traditions, and the mere sight of his country’s flag caused a wave of pride and gratification to flow through his veins. The combination of those three noble colors—green, orange, and purple—when, at times, he spied them together in a spring meadow, made him feel strong and joyful, happy to be a Lantano, happy to be in the world, but also ready to die for his flag, preferably wrapped in it.
By contrast, the Gunduwian yellow-and-brown had been disagreeable to him since earliest childhood, as far back as he could remember: irritating colors when separate, loathsome to the point of nausea when side by side. Bertrando was a sensitive, emotional boy, and the sight of the enemy flag, mockingly reproduced on wall posters or in satirical cartoons, put him in a bad mood, made his neck and elbows itch, and caused him to salivate intensely and suffer spells of vertigo.
Once, at a concert, he found himself sitting next to a pretty girl who, surely out of carelessness, was wearing a yellow blouse and a brown skirt. Bertrando had to get up and move away, and since there were no other seats, he had to stand through the entire concert. If he had not been rather timid, he would have told off that girl as she deserved. Bertrando liked apricots and medlars, but he ate them with his eyes closed to avoid the disgust of the brown pit poking out of the yellowish pulp.
The sound of the Gunduwian language, which was harsh, guttural, and nearly inarticulate, had similar effects on Bertrando. It seemed outrageous to him that the enemy language was taught in some schools in Lantania, and that there were actually academics who studied its history and origins, its grammar and syntax, and who translated its literature. What kind of literature could it be? What good could come from that brown-and-yellow land of perverts and degenerates?
And yet there was a university professor who claimed to have demonstrated that Lantanian and Gunduwian were descended from the same language, extinct for three thousand years but documented by some tomb inscriptions. Absurd, or, rather, intolerable. There are things that cannot be true, that must be ignored, unspoken, buried. If it were up to Bertrando, all the philogunduwi would be buried three meters underground, along with those who, out of snobbishness, secretly listened to Gunduwian radio and repeated its filthy lies (unfortunately, nearly all the young people!).
Not that the border between the two countries was watertight. It was well guarded, on both sides, by sentinels who were happy to shoot, but there was a gap in it, and from time to time trade delegations crossed it in both directions, since the two economies were complementary. Weapons smugglers also crossed it, to everyone’s surprise, with enormous cargoes that the border guards appeared not to notice.
Once Bertrando had seen a Gunduwi delegation pass along the main street of the capital. Those bastards were not much different from the Lantani after all: apart from their ridiculous way of dressing, it would have been difficult to distinguish them if not for their furtive glances and typically shifty expressions. Bertrando had moved closer to see if it was true that they smelled bad, but the police held him back. Of course they must smell bad. In the subconscious mind of the Lantani, an etymological connection had for centuries been established between Gunduwia and “stench” (kumt, in Lantanian). Then again, it was known to everyone that in Gunduwian latnen are “boils”; to the Lantani, this seemed like a malicious travesty, to be cleansed with blood.
Now it happened that, after lengthy, secret negotiations, the presidents of the two countries made it known that they would meet in the spring. After an awkward silence, the Lantanian daily paper began to let unusual material filter out: photographs of the Gunduwian capital with its imposing cathedral and beautiful gardens; images of Gunduwian children with neatly combed hair and laughing eyes. A book was published in which it was demonstrated how, in remote times, a Lantanian-Gunduwian fleet had routed a motley group of pirate vessels, ten times as powerful in number. And finally it was announced that a soccer match would be held between the two champion teams in the stadium of the Lantanian capital.
Bertrando was among the first to rush to buy a ticket, but it was already too late; he had to resign himself to spending five times as much at the scalpers. The day was splendid and the stadium was packed; there wasn’t a breath of wind, and the two flags hung limply from the gigantic flagpoles. At the appointed time, the referee blew the starting whistle, and at that very moment a steady breeze arose. The two flags, for the first time side by side, waved gloriously: the purple-orange-and-green of the Lantani alongside the yellow-and-brown one of the Gunduwi.
Bertrando felt an icy, searing shiver run down his spine, as if a rapier had been thrust between his vertebrae. His eyes must be lying, they could not be transmitting that double message to him: that impossible, lacerating yes-no. He felt loathing and love at the same time, in a toxic combination. Around him he saw the crowd explode, divided as he was. He felt all his muscles—the smooth muscles and the striated ones and the tireless heart muscles—contract painfully, the adductors and the abductors now enemies; he felt the tumultuous secretions of all his glands, inundating him with conflicting hormones. His jaws locked as if from tetanus, and he fell over like a block of wood.
May 17, 1984
An Erector Set Made with Love
One can fall in love at any age, with emotions that, while intense in all cases, encompass a broad spectrum, ranging from the edenic idyll to overwhelming passion, from bliss to desperation, from hard-won peace to devastating humiliation, and from shared interests (even business interests: why not?) to competitive squabbling. At the age of eleven, during an interminable summer vacation, I fell in love with a Lidia who was nine years old, gentle, homely, sickly, and not too bright. I gave her stamps for her collection, which I myself had encouraged her to start; I felt shivers of disgust hearing the often repeated story of her tonsillectomy and I helped her do her vacation assignments.
Most of all I was enchanted by her rapport with animals, which seemed magical to me, like a divine gift. There was a German shepherd who snarled at everybody, punctured all the rubber balls with his teeth, and chewed the cyclists’ tires, yet he let Lidia pet him, closing his eyes and wagging his tail, and in the morning he would whimper outside her door, impatient for her to come out. Even the hens and chicks in the barnyard ca
me running when she called and pecked the feed from the palm of her hand. She reminded me of Circe in the Odyssey, which we had just read in school.
• • •
It would have been a sublime, tranquil love had I not become aware that the girl, though affectionate with me and grateful for my chivalrous services, nevertheless preferred another: Carlo, my best friend during those months, who was more robust than I. It was no use deluding myself: that was the factor which determined Lidia’s preference, and it was an enormous, quantitative factor that could not be eliminated by propitiatory rites. On the other hand, Carlo seemed completely indifferent to Lidia’s timid advances; he preferred playing ball, scuffling with the local boys, and pretending to drive an old truck without a motor that was rusting away in the middle of a field.
The basis of my friendship with Carlo was the Erector set: we had nothing else in common, but this model-construction play-work kept us together for many hours of the day. I had only set No. 4, while Carlo, who was from a wealthier family, had No. 5 plus quite a few extra pieces, in all, practically the fabulous No. 6. Both jealous of our possessions, we had stipulated a precise agreement as to the exchange, loan, and common use of the pieces: taking into account the two sets, we had a fairly large assortment. We balanced each other. Carlo had good manual dexterity, I was better at planning and design. When we worked separately, his models were simple, solid, and pedestrian. Mine were imaginative and complex but not very sturdy, because I would neglect to tighten the bolts, so as not to lose time—something that my engineer father never stopped scolding me about. When we worked together, our skills were complementary.
In this situation, my dual love for Lidia and for the Erector set led to an obvious conclusion: I would seduce Lidia by means of the Erector set. I was careful not to disclose my real objective to Carlo, and revealed merely the more mundane aspect of my project to him: for Lidia’s name day we would together construct something unprecedented, something unique, never proposed, not even in the rather unreliable illustrated manuals of the Erector company. I thought that Lidia would not be fooled: she would know that Carlo, that Carlo of hers, was only the physical laborer, the one who tightened the bolts, while I, her devoted servant, was the inventor, the creator, and that the machine we would launch in her presence was my personal, secret homage, a declaration in code.
What sort of machine to construct? We discussed it: Carlo had no idea of the message I intended to entrust to the work. Moreover, he had a spring-operated motor and his ideas were obvious and ordinary; it had to be something that moved by itself, a car or an excavator or a crane. I didn’t want one of the usual toys; indeed, I didn’t want a toy—I wanted a gift, an offering. Symbolic, of course, to be taken back after the ceremony. I was in love, true, but I would certainly be careful not to materially give Lidia even a single perforated strip; besides, you don’t give a girl pieces of an Erector set. I pondered it at length, then I suggested to Carlo that we construct a clock. Thinking back on it today, I wouldn’t know how to explain my choice: maybe I confusedly thought that a clock beats like a heart, or that it’s faithful and constant, or maybe I connected it to the recurrence of the name day.
Carlo looked at me, perplexed; up until then we had been satisfied with simpler models. My audacity as a planner aroused his respect and, at the same time, his mistrust. But a clock works with a spring mechanism, and therefore the motor, his pride and my envy, would find a worthy use. “Use it for the clock,” he said to me, in a challenging tone. And I, in the same tone, replied that there was no need for his motor: clocks used to work by means of weights, and ours would, too. It would run even better, I explained to him, because a compressed spring has less force as it slackens, while a weight that descends exerts a constant force.
We set to work, I with enthusiasm, Carlo somewhat irritably; perhaps he had intuited the subservient role that in my heart I had in store for him. The clock that took shape in our hands was quite hideous and did not at all resemble a clock. At first I meant to give it the form of a pendulum clock with a base, but I soon saw that our supply of parts would not allow us to construct a tall, slender structure; the available vertical supports were too weak. And yet it had to be tall, because the weight needed room to descend. I got around the difficulty by affixing the shapeless gadget to the wall: the pendulum swung freely in the air, and the weight had an arc of about a meter and a half. The escapement—that is, the device that transmits the rhythm of the pendulum to the spool around which the weight’s cord is wrapped, thus regulating and controlling its descent—cost me quite a bit of effort. I think I did it with two ratchet wheels, one mine and one Carlo’s.
August 3 arrived, St. Lidia’s Day. I pulled up the weight and set the pendulum going: the gadget started up, with a clattering tick-tock. I should explain that I had not proposed constructing a clock that kept time; the mere fact that the weight descended at a constant speed seemed a triumph, since we did not have gears capable of transforming the uniform motion of the spool into a cycle that would last exactly an hour. Though our clock had a cardboard face and a hand (only one), the hand marked an arbitrary time: it made one sweep in twenty or twenty-one minutes, and stopped soon afterward, because the pendulum had reached the end of its run.
With unwitting cruelty Lidia asked me, “What’s it for?” She devoted no more than half a minute to our masterpiece; she was more interested in the cake and the real gifts. I felt my mouth fill with the bitter taste of betrayal when I saw that the most welcome present, the one that Lidia was proudly showing her friends, was a small cellophane envelope: it had been given to her publicly, brazenly, by Carlo, and contained a series of stamps from Nicaragua.
January 20, 1985
A Wartime Pipette
A few days ago, a group of friends and I were talking about the influence of small events on the course of history. This is a classic controversy and, in classic fashion, lacks a definitive, absolute resolution. One can safely declare with impunity that the history of the world (all right, let’s be modest: let’s say of the Mediterranean basin) would have been totally different if Cleopatra’s nose had been longer, as Pascal claimed, and one can declare with equal impunity that it would have been exactly the same, as Marxist orthodoxy and the historiography proposed by Tolstoy in War and Peace claim. Since it’s not possible to reconstruct a Cleopatra with a different nose, but only with an entourage exactly equal to that of the historical Cleopatra, there is no possibility of proving or refuting one or the other thesis through experimentation, and the problem remains a pseudo-problem.
On the other hand we were all in agreement regarding the observation that small events can have a determining effect on individual histories, in the same way that a railway switch tongue, shifted just a few centimeters, can send a train with thousands of passengers to Madrid rather than to Hamburg.
At this point, each of us wanted to tell about the small event that had radically altered his existence, and, once the confusion had calmed down, I, too, told about mine; or, rather, I described its details, because I had already recounted it a number of times, both verbally and in writing.
A little over forty years ago I was a prisoner in Auschwitz and I worked in a chemical laboratory. I was hungry, and tried to steal small, unusual objects (and therefore of high trade value) that I could swap for bread. After various attempts, successful and failed, which I’ve described elsewhere, I found a drawer full of pipettes. Pipettes are slender, precisely graduated glass tubes used to transfer precise quantities of liquid from one receptacle to another; with your lips you suck up the liquid from one end (nowadays, actually, more hygienic systems are used) so that it rises exactly to the highest graduation, and then let it descend by its own weight. There were a great many pipettes: I slipped a dozen into a hidden pocket that I had sewn inside my jacket and brought them to the Lager. As soon as roll call was over, I ran to the infirmary; I intended to offer them to a Polish nurse I knew, a man who worked in the Infectious Diseases Ward. I explai
ned to him that they could be used for chemical analyses.
The Pole looked at the stolen goods with little interest, then told me that it was too late for that day, he had no more bread: all he could offer me was a little soup.
I accepted the proposed compensation; the Pole disappeared among the patients in his ward and returned soon afterward with a half-full bowl of soup. It was half-full in a curious way, that is, vertically: because of the extreme cold, the soup had congealed, and someone had scooped out half of it with a spoon, as if eating half a cake. Who would have left half a bowl of soup in that realm of hunger? Almost certainly someone who was gravely ill, and, given the setting, also contagious: in recent weeks, in the camp, diphtheria and scarlet fever had broken out in epidemic proportions.
But in Auschwitz precautions of this kind did not exist; first came hunger and then all the rest. Leaving something edible uneaten was not what is commonly called “a sin”; it was unthinkable, indeed, physically impossible. That same evening my friend and alter ego Alberto and I shared that suspect soup. Alberto was the same age and height as me; he had the same temperament, the same occupation, and we slept in the same bunk. We even looked a little alike. Our foreign companions and the Kapo considered it superfluous to distinguish between us, and expected that when they called “Alberto!” or “Primo!” whoever was closest would answer.
We were therefore interchangeable, so to speak, and anyone would have predicted the same fate for both of us: both drowned or both saved. But it was just at this point that the switch tongue came into play, the small cause with decisive effects. Alberto had had scarlet fever as a child, and was immune; I, on the other hand, had not.