The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  January 28, 1986

  Gossip

  I read with interest that the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, of New York, has published a book by Patricia Meyer Spacks entitled Gossip. I immediately ordered it and am eagerly awaiting its arrival. At the same time I feel vaguely frustrated, since for some time I have been flirting with the idea of writing something on this subject. Apparently Spacks’s book is nothing less than a historical and sociological treatise, while I would settle for doing a kind of taxonomy of gossip, that is, a classification, of the kind that has always been done for plants and animals.

  In the hope of not falling involuntarily into plagiarism—given the fact that I have not yet read Spacks’s book—I will describe here the annotated table of contents of the book that I have not written and probably never will write. Incidentally, writing just a general table of contents, or an index, or a foreword or afterword, or, better yet, putative reviews, for books that you have in mind would be an educational exercise, besides being extremely economical for the reader, or, rather, the non-reader. Rodolfo Wilcock practiced it for a long time, honestly and successfully.

  In the Introduction, I would not settle for the standard Zingarelli dictionary definition, “indiscreet and malicious talk about someone.” It seems to me essential to point out that the malice must be confined to a low level: in common parlance, attributing to someone a murder or a rape is not gossip. In short, a well-defined boundary exists between gossip and slander, and between slander and calumny (or accusation, if the crime exists). Moreover, it seems to me that in the concept of gossip an element of secrecy is implicit. Gossip occurs tête-à-tête or, at most, in a situation with just a few people; between close friends, in other words. It would not seem appropriate to speak of gossip published in the press or broadcast on TV. Gossip is a liqueur to be poured in small doses into a single ear, or maybe more than one, but not too many, otherwise its name changes. That said, I would announce the following chapters:

  1.Why we gossip. I know something that you don’t know; I take comfort in transmitting it to you, because I have the agreeable impression of moving up a rung. I have become a teacher, an instructor, even if just for a few minutes and in only a minor subject. Naturally, you the recipient have every right (and feel compelled) to become a teacher in turn, by retransmitting my message or any other one, consoling yourself for your troubles with this small pleasure.

  2.Plain gossip. This consists in simply reporting the message to the recipient without imposing any restrictions or limitations on the person. It is the most widespread type. Since there is more than one recipient, this gossip spreads in a branching pattern, and so, in essence, exponentially; that is, it tends to invade the inhabited world, the way chain letters do. Generally speaking, it does not amount to much, in the first place because it competes with other more recent, and therefore more appealing, messages, and even tends to die out; in the second place, because the news is degraded with each transmission, becoming vaguer and, at the same time, richer in spurious or suspect details. From news, it becomes rumor, hearsay, perhaps even rising to the status of legend. Rarely does gossip, like calumny, actually go from being a “gentle breeze” to a “cannon blast.”

  3.Restricted gossip: “I’m telling only you; don’t say a word to anyone.” In chapter 11 of The Betrothed, Manzoni, referring to the unkept secret of Lucia’s refuge in the monastery of Monza, observes: “If this condition were to be strictly observed, it would immediately cut off the flow of comfort. But general practice has dictated only that the secret not be confided except to another equally trusted friend and under the same conditions. And so, from trusted friend to trusted friend, the secret travels up and down that immense chain until it reaches the ear of the very person or persons who were never supposed to hear it.”

  4.The exclusion of the de quo, aimed precisely at avoiding such an outcome. “Tell anyone you want, but not X,” where X is generally the subject of the gossip, or is in any case implicated in it. This variation is acknowledged by the popular saying that “the (betrayed) husband is the last to know.” It can be observed experimentally that in general this is exactly how things go, perhaps because gossip is spiritually akin to the unfaithful spouse (she, too, in fact, is committing an illicit act: yet sympathy for the unfaithful spouse is common to all cultures and literatures, regardless of laws and morality); or because, if the fact were revealed to the natural recipient, it would bring the game to an end much too soon; or, on the other hand, because we fear the consequences of the revelation, as in the case of Macbeth’s brutal assault on the messenger who brings him the news of Birnam Wood climbing toward the fortress of Dunsinane. If things go smoothly—that is, if the gossip’s subject does not find out about it—the graph of this type assumes a characteristic form: a dense tangle of nerves that surrounds a small blank area without penetrating it.

  5.Denying the source: “Go ahead and tell, but don’t say I told you”; or a variation, “Don’t say who told you.” This denotes extreme pusillanimity on the part of the gossiper. If it turns up in the gossip chain even a single time, it interrupts it irremediably, frustrating any attempt at repair, or refutation, or even reprisal, on the part of the injured party.

  I would devote the Conclusion to the relationship between the credibility of the message and its circulation. The two are not proportional, nor do they increase at the same rate; indeed, the vitality of absurd news may be readily observed. It is part of the extraordinary vitality intrinsic to the phenomenon itself. Gossip flourishes on idle ground, whether forced or voluntary: in prisons, in institutions, in barracks, on “Saturdays in the village”;1 and similarly on vacations, on cruises, and in drawing rooms. It is irrepressible, a force of human nature. A person who has obeyed nature by transmitting gossip feels the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfaction of a primal need. The final tercet, ingeniously ambivalent, of a sonnet by Belli comes to mind, explicitly entitled “Na ssciacquata de bbocca” (“Gossip”):

  Well, they may be two “good” girls.

  I’m not saying this to gossip: I mean to say

  that they are two piggish sluts.

  June 24, 1986

  1. A reference to Giacomo Leopardi’s 1829 poem “Il sabato del villaggio” (“Saturday in the Village”).

  “Fair as a Flower”

  A friend of mine, in a paradoxical vein, perhaps recalling the division into three parts of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, once proposed dividing the inhabited world into only three regions: Terronia, which would extend south from the Po as far as Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, and east as far as the Ganges; Plufonia (from Plufer, which in Piedmontese means “German”), defined as the area south of the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Himalayas, west of the Atlantic, north of the polar ice pack, and east of the Pacific; and Piedmont, connected to the British Isles by means of a long isthmus of uncertain contours, that in any case would leave out Paris. The placement of the United States remained undefined, probably a mixed zone, or one including a point with three boundaries.

  The close association between the Piedmontese and the British was based on historical and anthropological data. The traditional friendship between the Savoyard and British monarchies. A common spirit of enterprise. Military efficiency. Love for a job well done, and for law and order. A rejection of display, of the abstract, of the monumental, of rhetoric, and of show. A limited taste for music, particularly bel canto. Respect for human rights. The persistence of the class struggle.

  Out of love for my birthplace, I will refrain from examining how many of these qualities survive and how many have been swept away by time and vast internal migrations. Owing to a lack of expertise, I will likewise refrain from entering into the curious controversy surrounding the Mass in Piedmontese. I will simply note that liturgical language is highly specific, and that, for the same reason, writing an anatomy treatise in dialect would seem to be a hopelessly absurd endeavor. I would rather see, in my Piedmontese, a text on the cultivation of peppers
or a manual on the thermal treatment of metals.

  “My Piedmontese,” I said. Indeed, I love this dialect, even though it does not contain the verb “to love.” It pains me to see it decline. I admire those who still use it naturally and elegantly, but I am so unsure of my pronunciation, and of my vocabulary, which is full of Italianisms, that I don’t dare speak it in public, especially after my disgraceful failure at La Famija Turineisa, the cultural association where dialect is required. I know very well that it is neither more nor less noble than the other Italian dialects, all of which are destined for rapid extinction in the face of television’s colorless Italian. But it is mine, the dialect of my childhood, the language that my father used with my mother and that my mother spoke with the shopkeepers; even my virginal elementary schoolteacher, who died a few years ago at the age of a hundred, spoke it, in defiance of Fascist educational programs.

  Before it’s too late, I would like to sing its praises and recall some of its peculiarities, which in fact connect it to the much more illustrious English language. Of course, others have already done so, and with greater expertise; but few people have ever held a Piedmontese grammar in their hands, while this newspaper is read by many.

  We have never accepted the baroque ending -issimo (-est) of the Latin and Italian superlative. We don’t need it; we have so little need of it that we don’t even have a strict equivalent of the Italian molto, “very” (true, we have mutubín, but it’s awkward and obsolete). When we really can’t do without it, we resort to comparisons, some clichés, others coined on the spot. We cannot and do not want to say that a girl is the fairest: we say that she is as fair as a flower, that an old man is as old as Methuselah, and that a medicine is as bitter as poison. Speaking of flowers: I don’t know if any grammarian has noticed that this noun, along with a few others, changes from masculine to feminine in the few cases where emphasis is needed. We say il fiore (masculine) for a peach blossom, but “fair as una fiore” (feminine); the heat of the furnace is masculine (il caldo), but boiling hot is feminine (una caldo da morire); cold spring water is masculine (freddo), but a bitter, gallows cold is feminine (una freddo della forca).

  Nor do we like the rounded adverbial ending -mente (-ly), that to proper Italians seems as indispensable as the air they breathe. We do without it quite well, replacing it with graceful hyperboles or periphrasis: try translating “I love you passionately” into Piedmontese, and you will get a phrase more or less equivalent to “I’m crazy about you.” Perhaps it’s a latent aversion to endings and inflections, the same aversion that is so noticeable in English, and that emerges in the prevalence of compound word forms compared with simple ones. Our loathing for the historic or “remote” past tense, which nonetheless existed some centuries ago, is well-known. It’s easy to foresee that the future tense won’t have a long life, either (provided the dialect does not die before it). In Piedmont today people already prefer to say andiamo poi, “we go later,” rather than andremo, “we will go”; “tomorrow it rains” instead of “tomorrow it will rain.”

  Like the English, we tend toward simplification. We have accepted a plural indicator for the majority of feminine nouns, but we don’t feel it’s needed for the masculine ones (with the sole exception, if I am not mistaken, of those which end in “l,” like bindel, “tape”). The French, of course, do the same, though they have hypocritically preserved the ending -s in the written language. It’s a good thing that, in past centuries, Piedmontese was written so infrequently, otherwise who knows how many useless linguistic fossils would be preserved in its official spelling. In effect, the plural indicator is only one of the many mysterious redundancies that we inherited from the Indo-Europeans: the Italian phrase “i brutti cani rognosi abbaiano” (“the mean mangy dogs are barking”) repeats five times the information that there is more than one dog. If you can translate it into Piedmontese (or English), you’ll see that the repetitions are reduced to two.

  Speaking of concision, I would like to express my gratitude to Piedmontese for the term madamín. Besides being graceful, it is economical: as we know, it means “a wife whose mother-in-law is living.” Now, to condense six words into one is a commendable feat. My personal “fair-haired Maria” of Val Sangone, then five years old, condensed three into one. “Sgnacàla,” “I’ve crushed it,” she said to me with the ethereal smile of a fledgling angel, pointing to a dark streak on the dirt floor of the cellar that a few moments before had been a “filthy louse,” a harmless sow bug. And here I ask the reader to notice the agglutination of the enclitic personal pronoun with the past participle: among the hundred neo-Latin dialects, I think that ours is the only one that allows (indeed, prescribes) this deft peculiarity, along with the elision of the auxiliary verb. Incidentally, unlike Giosuè Carducci, I have no regrets.1 I did well not to marry that girl, as I ardently wished to at the time; I saw her thirty years later, already gray and bitter, perched behind the counter of her tiny notions shop.

  July 13, 1986

  1. A reference to Carducci’s “Idillio Maremmano” (“An Idyll of the Maremma”).

  Hatching the Cobra

  “Let no one praise Perillus, who was crueler than the tyrant Phalaris, for whom he constructed a brazen bull, promising that when a man was enclosed therein and a fire lit underneath, the man would roar like a bull, and who was the first to experience this torture himself as the fruit of a cruelty more just than his own. To such lengths had he distorted a most noble art, intended to represent gods and men, that his numerous workers had toiled only to construct an instrument of torture! Consequently, his works are preserved for one single reason: so that anyone who sees them may despise the hands that made them” (Pliny, Natural History, xxxiv, 19).

  Better translations than mine surely exist, but I have a deep personal bond with Pliny the Elder, and I felt that by translating him I was paying him homage. The episode is semilegendary: Pindar, Ovid, and Orosius refer to it, and, following in their footsteps, Dante, in Canto XXVII of the Inferno. Phalaris was the tyrant of Agrigento toward the mid-sixth century bc. Pliny’s phrase “anyone who sees them” seems to indicate that the bull, carried off by the Carthaginians in 403 bc, had been brought back to Agrigentum after the destruction of Carthage, and must have still been there in his time. Nothing is known about the reasons that led Phalaris to burn Perillus in his own bull.

  • • •

  The story, whether true or false, has a curiously modern flavor. For the purposes of a posthumous trial against the tyrant and the artisan, it would be essential to establish with which of the two the initiative and the idea for the horrendous machine originated. If the work was invented by Perillus, and proposed to Phalaris, there is no doubt that Perillus, already famous at the time, deserved to be punished (though not necessarily in that way, and not by Phalaris, who by accepting the object had become the inventor’s accomplice). He had indeed, as Pliny points out, prostituted his art and himself. He must truly have been perverse: it could not have been easy to make the air ducts of the simulacrum the right size such that the victim’s groans would issue from the bronze mouth amplified and modified in their harmonics so as to reproduce the roaring of a bull.

  If, on the other hand, Phalaris commissioned the work, the punishment of retaliation that he adopted seems excessive and illegitimate. Still, he was a professional tyrant, and while his actions outrage us, they do not surprise us. All tyrants are capricious. In this hypothesis, Perillus does not come out absolved, but some attenuating circumstances can be conceded; perhaps he had been coerced, or flattered, or threatened, or blackmailed. We don’t know. But his figure as an inventor closely foreshadows modern events and personalities.

  The figure of the scientist who is asked to lend his services for the defense of his country, or maybe for the offense against a neighboring country, is a current one. Everyone knows at least something about that prodigious assembly of brains that during the Second World War gave birth to the atomic bomb and, at the same time, to nuclear energy for
peaceful use. Some of these scientists went along more or less willingly, more or less convinced; others, after Hiroshima, withdrew to private life; still others, like Pontecorvo,1 changed sides for ideological reasons, or perhaps because they thought that nuclear weapons would be less dangerous if shared between the two superpowers.

  Happily current today is the figure of the scientist who, after having served power, repents. We read a few days ago that Peter Hagelstein, a student of the bellicose Teller, the young “father” of the space shield, and candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics, left a laboratory financed by the United States Department of Defense and moved to MIT, where he will deal exclusively with research into the medical applications of the laser. It seems to me that there is nothing to be said in response to this type of conscientious objection: if all the scientists in the world were to imitate Hagelstein, the manufacturers of new weapons would remain empty-handed and universal peace would be closer than it now appears.

  The position taken by Martin Ryle leaves me less convinced. Ryle, born in 1918 in England, was one of the greatest radar experts during the war, and made decisive contributions to the measures adopted by the British to “confuse” the German radar. After the war, sickened by the horrors of combat itself, he decided to continue his brilliant career as a physicist in a field that lent itself less to military applications, namely, radio astronomy. He was awarded the Nobel in 1974; but he must have realized soon enough that not even his astronomer colleagues had perfectly clean hands. For example, measuring the intensity of the gravitational field around the Earth with precision is unquestionably of theoretical interest, but it also serves to better guide intercontinental ballistic missiles. According to Ryle’s data, 40 percent of Britain’s engineers and physicists are engaged in research involving instruments of destruction.