by Primo Levi
In none of my books does there appear a malevolent representation of religious zeal; however, the way in which quotations taken from my books are used does seem inexplicably malevolent.
4. Even the characters in If Not Now, When? are not very religious. This fact should not surprise or scandalize anyone: most of them were born and raised in the Soviet Union, where all religions, and the Jewish religion in particular, were openly discouraged.
5. I am implicitly criticized for being assimilated. I am. There do not exist Jews in the Diaspora who are not, to a greater or lesser degree, if for nothing else than for the fact that they speak the language of the country in which they live. I reassert, for myself and for everyone, the right to choose the level of assimilation that best suits their culture and their environment.
I would finally like to say to Miss Eberstadt that likening me to Ausonius is inappropriate. I have not retired, like that late Roman gentleman, to cultivate roses and compose anagrams, nor have I ever eaten oysters; on the contrary, my civic involvement has been daily and constant, a fact well-known not only in Italy. But I must thank Miss Eberstadt nevertheless for the praise she has bestowed on me, despite her manifest distaste.
PRIMO LEVI
Commentary, February 1986, written in response
to the article “Reading Primo Levi,” by Fernanda Eberstadt
published in the issue of October 1985
When They Drank Methanol in the Lager
The unfortunate affair regarding methanol (methyl alcohol) found in wine is teaching us many sad lessons.1 First of all, our regulations about wine are like a sieve with areas where the mesh is ridiculously tight, and others strewn with huge holes. Italy, and Italy alone, notoriously forbids enriching wine with sugar. Yet, a few days ago, a “turncoat” admitted that much of the wine being sold is the product of an “assemblage” of several dozen components that are available on a vast black market. In itself, there is nothing wrong with this, provided that the liquid so produced is not harmful, tastes good, and is not called wine, but it points out a suspicious confusion that lends itself to innumerable frauds. Most important, it has revealed that alcohol is added to wine. Again, there is nothing wrong with that. The tax authorities, however, who are so sharp-eyed when it comes to alcohol, apparently don’t realize that there are truckloads of bootlegged alcohol around that doesn’t evade just manufacturing or import duties but escapes all analysis and can contain anything.
Since it’s absurd to think that even the most fiendish adulterator would deliberately add poison to his wine, it’s logical to think that batches of ethyl alcohol available on the black market may be “enriched” with methyl alcohol. The latter was exempted from taxation in 1984; since then, its cost has been a tenth that of ethyl alcohol. It has become very good business to sell, for example as a solvent, a product labeled ethyl that in reality contains methyl. Someone probably started adulterating wine with one such mixture immediately. As long as this was done in small percentages, with limited illicit gains, nothing particularly striking happened; but then, little by little. . . .
Second lesson. The old adage “what we like is good for us” is utterly false. Our senses serve us reasonably well with natural substances; no poisonous plant smells nice and no plant that smells nice is poisonous. But our senses work very poorly with the millions of substances that are chemically produced; one of them is methanol, whose smell is definitely pleasant and is not easily distinguishable from that of ethyl alcohol. It makes no difference whether methanol is synthetic (which by now is almost always the case) or comes from the distillation of wood: if pure, it always smells the same. The plant where I worked as a prisoner also produced methanol; the Russians would drink it, and die. The management had put up multilingual placards warning: “Those who drink methanol go blind and die.” This wasn’t enough; there were people who would steal the methanol, make it into something drinkable and sell it (not just to the Russians). Neither our nose nor our palate can defend us from the poisons of chemistry: only chemists can do that.
Hence, the third lesson. The extreme diffusion of wine in the marketplace multiplies to a frightening degree the number of regular inspections or spot checks that would be required. A single wholesaler has in stock tens or hundreds of tanks—large and small—all of which need to be checked, and at short intervals (assuming there is no false bottom, as this also can happen). The chemist must therefore possess several qualities. First of all, he must obviously abide by a deontological, or, rather, moral oath similar to the one Hippocrates prescribed for physicians. He has to be more knowledgeable than his adversary, the adulterator. So far, there should be no problems. But he also has to be more cunning than the adulterator, who is strongly motivated by profit; he needs the eyes of Sherlock Holmes and the nose of a bloodhound. Thus, he mustn’t be duped by sampling, which is often no more than an imaginative version of three-card monte. Finally, the way has to be smoothed for him. In the case under consideration, which is very serious for the Italian industry and for our image abroad, the chemist sent to inspect the wine has to be able to perform the analyses on the spot—maybe preliminary, but reliable and rapid. In his laboratory, there are marvelous tools, but they are few, expensive, and not portable. They provide a complete analysis in twenty or thirty minutes, but, given the thousands of samples submitted to him, this time period is unacceptable, nor, at this stage, is a complete analysis necessary.
We should have recourse to analytical tools that are simple, small, inexpensive, and fast; I believe that some already exist, though they have not been approved. If they don’t exist, it will not be difficult to invent them. They could be used for preliminary screening; in suspicious cases, a formal analysis would then be undertaken. At the same time, drawing on the pool of unemployed youths, in the current slump it should not be impossible to train teams of “barefoot chemists,” just as Mao did with doctors. No degree is necessary to learn how to find methanol in wine with the tools I have in mind; two or three days of practical training would suffice.
But there is more. In legal terms, it is pointless to define wine as “the product of the alcoholic fermentation of the must of fresh grapes”—that is to say, in historical terms. No army of inspectors will ever be able to check the paths followed by the innumerable small and medium-sized winemakers, and things done earlier in the process will surely escape any control. It would be better to elaborate a general specification, broad enough to encompass all wines, and without unnecessary restrictions. If the value and taste of wine improves with the addition of sugar and alcohol (ethyl!), why forbid it? Those who are eager for profit will have less of an incentive to cheat.
Finally, reporters and journalists should neither minimize nor dramatize. In recent weeks, the reader has been upset. He cannot understand whether the quantities of methanol that were found, those permitted by law and those considered toxic, are calculated as a percentage of the total wine, or in thousandths, or in parts per million, or in grams per bottle, or in grams per gram of ethyl alcohol. A little precision would clarify matters; only a few days ago, we read that “traces of pH9” were found in Michele Sindona’s coffee mug,2 as if pH were a well-defined toxic substance, rather than a measure of acidity.
La Stampa, April 5, 1986
1. In March 1986, several dozen Italians were poisoned by drinking wine that was adulterated with methanol; nineteen died. Producers added methanol as a cheap way of increasing the alcoholic content.
2. Sindona was a banker and convicted felon who was poisoned with cyanide in his coffee while in prison.
The TV Fans from Delta Cep.
Dear Piero Bianucci,1
You will be surprised to receive a letter from an admirer, so quickly and from so far away. We know your silly notions about the speed of light; where we are, a modest one-time supplement to the TV subscription fee is all it takes to be able to send and receive intergalactic messages in real time, or almost. As for me, I am a great admirer of your TV programs, and especiall
y of the ad for tomato puree. I wanted to tell you that I was very enthusiastic about your program last Tuesday, where you spoke about the Cepheids. In fact, I was pleased to learn that you call us that, because our sun is indeed a Cepheid; I mean, it’s a star much bigger than yours, and it pulsates regularly, with a period of five days and nine hours, Earth time. It is, to be precise, the Cepheid of Cepheus—what a coincidence! But before I embark on describing our way of life* I want to tell you that my girlfriends and I really like your beard. The men here don’t have beards—in fact, they don’t even have heads. Our men are ten or twelve centimeters long and look like your asparagus, and when we want to be inseminated we put them under our armpits for two or three minutes, as you do with thermometers when you take your temperature. We have ten armpits: we are all built with binary symmetry, so that our width is the golden section of our radius. This is unique in our galaxy, and we’re very proud of it. Males cost from twenty to fifty thousand lire depending on their age and condition, and they don’t bother us much.
By the way, don’t get your hopes up: our temperature varies, around −20°C in winter, 110°C in summer—but we’ll become friends anyway. I heard that you are an astrophile, and this made me . . . [indecipherable] because my friends and I also spend many evenings in the posterior hemisphere contemplating the starry sky; we enjoyed locating your sun, which, seen from here, is a little shy of the seventh magnitude and lies in a constellation we call Jadikus (it’s a kitchen utensil). Almost all of us, except for a few who love solitude, live in the anterior hemisphere, because it has more light and a better view. After all, our planet isn’t big: changing hemispheres is a short trip of three or four kilometers that can be made on foot, or by swimming in the rivers when they’re not frozen or dry.
We are also far from our sun, so it’s rare for the rocks to melt, except for sulfur. When I spoke of summer and winter, I was referring to the pulsations of our sun. It wouldn’t be easy for you people to adapt. There is a law-enforcement agency for the distracted and for the habitually late; sirens blare in all the towns and villages, and we have to burrow underground within half an hour. Each of us takes along her males. They say it’s quite a spectacle, but only the girls from law enforcement can see it, with periscopes, from inside their adiabatic observatories: apparently the sun swells before your very eyes, and in a few minutes the sea starts to boil. It’s a sea of water and sulfur dioxide, with iron salts—aluminum, titanium, and manganese—dissolved in it. We also have an armor made of iron oxide and manganese, and we change it when it gets too tight. We never go into the sea, because we are alkaline and the water is acid and would dissolve us. That happens sometimes: those who are tired of life throw themselves deliberately into the sea. It’s not a very deep sea, and when the sun swells it evaporates in a few hours; it turns into an ugly expanse of gray and brown salt and all the water goes up into the sky to form a mist over the sun.
The summer lasts two of your days; we spend it sleeping and laying eggs. Our optimal temperature is around 46°C, so that if you and I were to meet during the pleasant season we could even touch; I’d like that, but it probably won’t happen because . . . [indecipherable] aren’t here yet. Then the heat gradually subsides, rain pours down, hot and then warm, and the grass starts to sprout again. It’s the season when we all go out to pasture and exchange news. Last fall one of my friends told me that she saw a supernova; there hadn’t been one in a while and she urged me to let you know about it. From your perspective, it should be in the neighborhood of Scorpio; if you pay the one-time tachyonic subscription you can see it in ten days, otherwise you’ll have to wait 3485 years.
At the end of autumn, everything freezes: the sea with all its salts, the grass trapped in the rain and the dew, as well as everyone who remains outside. Winter is pleasant: our caves are well heated, we eat canned food, we get inseminated three or four times by various males, to set ourselves apart a little, but also because it’s fashionable; we make music with our stridulating organs, watch all the TV in the universe, and organize literary prizes. Three years ago I even won a prize. It was for a very sexy short story, about a girl who had bought a male with her first paycheck and then she fell for him and didn’t want to exchange him or have him pulped. I wrote it in 2.36 seconds. We do everything pretty quickly.
Your TV show is one of the most popular, especially because of the purees, which are of great interest to us. If you are able to submit your one-time payment and respond in a reasonable time, please send me the formula for your most important: (a) anti-fermentatives; (b) anti-
parasitics; (c) anti-conceptions;* (d) anti-aesthetics; (e) anti-Semitics; (f) antipyretics; (g) antiquarians; (h) antihelminthics; (i) antiphons; (j) antitheses; (k) antelopes.
As a matter of fact, we of the eighth planet of Delta Cepheid are also exposed to many dangers and threats from which we need to protect ourselves. In particular, regarding points (c) and (h), there was much discussion in my den last winter, because the TV commercials weren’t clear. At any rate, my friends and I would like to get the local chemical industry to produce them so we can try them—we had the impression that they could provide relief for some of our ills.
Cordially yours, . . . [signature illegible] and friends
Delta Cep./8, d.3º a.3,576.1011
Translated by Primo Levi
L’Astronomia, no. 54, April 1986
1. Editor in chief of the newspaper La Stampa, author of numerous popular science books, and creator and director of a science program on Italian TV.
* Here, and throughout Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981–1987, an asterisk indicates that the word or phrase is in English in the original.
The Plague Has No Borders
We had just begun to recover from Sindona’s coffee, when the jolt of methanol in wine arrived, followed by the clash in Libya between two foolish arrogant powers: the mobilization of aircraft carriers, missiles, assassins, and avalanches of lies in a childish matter of prestige.1 We have scarcely had time to digest Libya, to trace the uncertain line between right and wrong, and we are abruptly overwhelmed by the disaster of Chernobyl.
It’s too soon to draw all the conclusions, but some reflections can be attempted. The Soviets, for whom the American undertaking in Libya was a gift, a free makeup job for their image, suffer a devastating reversal: first, because the disaster happened, second because of the way they managed the news of it. They have been (and still are) so vague and reticent that no one even knows the precise facts, starting with the number of victims and the extent of the damage, present and future. A veil of discretion drawn over their own troubles, and the magnification of those of others, is an old illness of centralized regimes. Many will recall that in Fascist times a Party directive forbade reporting cases of suicide; as a result, reporters, caught between the rock of the ban and the hard place of professional duty, had to keep repeating the story of the unfortunate citizen who, running through the house or the streets with (who knows why) a loaded gun in his hand, fell and was shot dead when the gun went off accidentally.
Soviet history is littered with unbelievable instances of censorship, impossible denials, ridiculous silences, which increase in proportion to the area involved and the time that has elapsed. Celebrated examples are the delay with which the population found out about the Nazi invasion, and the censoring of information about the Lagers and the extermination of the kulaks. In the present case, given the scarcity of official news, people will have to rely on hearsay, and the alarm will be greater. This obsession with secrecy attests to the Soviet government’s unwarranted disdain for its citizens; they are neither immature nor mentally handicapped.
Yet the conduct of the Western press has not been exemplary, either. It can barely conceal its malicious joy, as if such disasters could not happen among us, and yet we Italians have known that among our nuclear power plants “only” the one in Latina doesn’t have a waterproof dome of reinforced concrete; but, we add, it’s a small power plant. It’s like sayin
g that if there were a leak it would be necessary to evacuate “only” Rome. The two deaths announced by the Soviets are probably an understatement, but the more than two thousand announced by America are (let’s hope) overstatement; on our side information sins in the opposite direction—rather than late and sketchy it’s immediate and sensational. They are pathologically stingy, we are muddled and profligate.
Unfortunately, nuclear technology and biology are intrinsically difficult; for the layman it’s hard to calculate the risks and benefits. Now, we are all laymen; the few non-laymen are parties to the case, and so are not free from prejudice. As a layman, I venture to predict, or at least to hope, that Chernobyl will be a turning point in our choices when it comes to energy, in our methods of disseminating information, and perhaps even in the political relations between the two major blocs. Even from disasters (a pessimist would say: especially from disasters) we can learn many things.
The most important is this: nuclear pollution is subtle and imperceptible; against it there are no secure defenses. It laughs at our borders, rides wind and water, infiltrates the food chains; radioactive iodine can rain down from the sky thousands of kilometers from its source and settle in our thyroid, becoming thousands of times as concentrated, and attacking our health. The radiation emitted by the products of fission can alter the genetic inheritance of men, animals, and plants on the entire planet, damaging future generations. A nuclear accident spreads like the plague; it’s not an internal affair, belonging exclusively to the country where it happened. The waters of the Dnieper lick Chernobyl but end up in the Black Sea and bathe the Turkish coasts, which have no nuclear plants: why should the Turks pay for the mistakes of others?