by Primo Levi
Gorbachev was wrong to be silent and right to ask for help. Let’s give it to him, even we Italians (provided it is skilled help and not propagandistic), but afterward, when, we hope, things have ended in the best possible way, let him agree to sit at the table. If he is truly a new man, let him speak the language used by responsible people.
La Stampa, May 3, 1986
1. On April 25, 1986, the United States bombed Libya in response to the Libyan terrorist bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by American servicemen.
A Small Woman with a Regal Bearing
Finally some good news, in the endless stream of indifferent or bad news! Finally a moment of pure joy, not simple joy but many-faceted and complex. Joy because, after so many years, the world’s most highly desired prize in medicine has gone to a woman. Because it has gone to a Turinese. Because this Turinese honors me with her friendship. And finally, but most important, because the Nobel fits Rita like a glove.
Indeed, by custom and by statute, it rewards a life productively dedicated to science, but it comes this time into the hands of a small woman, with an indomitable will and regal bearing, who, on the path she chose many years ago, is still traveling with intelligent energy, and with that rare combination of patience and impatience which belongs to great innovators.
But Rita Levi-Montalcini is in no way in the sunset of her career: for her the Nobel comes not only to crown past achievements. Even today, amid endless difficulties of every sort, including domestic, her activity is intense and unceasing. Rita not only works in the laboratory but pursues colleagues, students, and worthy followers, writes her long awaited memoirs, travels around the world to expound to scientists and non-scientists alike the profound meaning of her discoveries.
It’s not for me to judge them, but I believe I have understood their groundbreaking quality: valuable in themselves, and recognized by friends and competitors, they are also creative, a barrier broken down, a passageway through which other light will shine, for the ultimate purpose of alleviating suffering and allowing us to approach, step by step, the most fleeting and enviable goal, that of the human mind that understands itself.
La Stampa, October 14, 1986
The Spider’s Secret
Many find it odd, and it’s starting to seem odd to me, too: for thirty years, namely for the entire middle part of my active life, I was occupied with the production of paints—that is, liquid substances that, spread in a thin layer, after a certain time become solid, spontaneously or when heated. I find it equally odd that, on my “lower level,” memories of paint are replacing those of Auschwitz. I notice it in my dreams, from which the Lager has disappeared by now, but in which more and more frequently I am confronted by a paint-related problem that I can’t solve.
Of course, I just gave a somewhat simplified definition of paint. Beer and seawater, too, if they evaporate as a thin layer, leave a solid residue, but nevertheless they can’t be called paints. In other words, paint has various other general and special characteristics that are known to all, and so there is no point in making an effort to define them here.
In the course of my career, I was confronted with many strange problems. For instance, I was asked once for a paint that could be applied to the insulators of high-tension power lines and that would change color in a way that was clear, irreversible, and visible from the ground whenever an insulator overheated, even just for a few minutes. Many years earlier a more frivolous problem was presented to me. A dandy who was purporting to be a cosmetics manufacturer asked me to study a colored paint, “for evening,” to be applied to the teeth the way you apply nail polish. At the end of the evening, it should be removable with a non-toxic solvent—in practice, ethyl alcohol. I was to come up with the product, and he would take care of a high-profile commercial launch.
I don’t think I devoted more than fifteen minutes to this question. I tested a green concoction that was presumably suited for the purpose on my own teeth; the outcome was so disgusting that I immediately called the dandy to tell him I was not available for his project. Another time, I was asked for a glossy black paint that would dry quickly and cost very little. It needn’t be weatherproof, insisted the customer—who was a coffin manufacturer.
Apart from these oddities, phenomena where liquids become solids continue to have a special appeal for me; you can’t expect a soldier to forget the battlefield. A paint factory is also a factory of stalactites, and this, too, is a passage from liquid to solid. But while natural stalactites take millennia to grow, ours take only weeks. Often the tanks are not watertight. Drops of paint that leak from them solidify before they fall, and turn into graceful short candles with a hornlike consistency that are mercilessly uprooted and thrown in the trash. They can be stocky or slender, transparent or colored; at times they are forked or in clusters. They grow slowly and silently like upside-down mushrooms.
The passage from liquid to solid is never a dull spectacle, as anyone knows who has witnessed a pig-iron casting cool or a flow of molten lava burn itself out. “Cooked” wax that solidifies in a cauldron takes, spontaneously, the elegant shape of a crater, while colophony, which retains some fluidity until it solidifies, sets in a glossy and smooth mirror, “Narcissus’ mirror.” And what about freezing water? Often a dirty city puddle, after a winter night, turns into a delicate mesh of jagged crystals tens of centimeters long; and the fact that no two snow crystals are exactly alike is proverbial.
We are at the edge of a forest of symbolic meanings, so that solidification is felt in turn as positive or negative, as reassuring or deadly. Blood coagulates, in most cases beneficially, at other times (inside its vessels) causing a fatal thrombus. It’s always a dramatic phenomenon, though, and fabulously complicated. And everyone has heard of rigor mortis.
The most wondrous solidification I’ve ever come across, however, is a completely different one. It’s the solidification of spider’s thread. Spiders are resourceful little creatures toward which—as I have already related—I have strongly ambivalent feelings. None of the patterns one normally encounters are applicable to the instantaneous solidification of a spider’s thread. Could it be simple freezing—just as water, cast iron, and wax solidify when they are cooled below a given temperature? Surely not: a spider always has the temperature of its environment and its tank can’t be warmer than the air. The spider’s spinneret, seen under the microscope, is very similar to the one through which nylon is extruded, but this analogy is illusory: before passing through the spinneret, nylon is molten, at over 250°C.
Could it be that a solvent evaporates, just as it does with paint? No: no solvent has ever been found in the tiny body of the spider, except water, which evaporates slowly, while the solidification of the spider’s thread is instantaneous; it turns from liquid to solid as soon as it comes out of the spinneret—otherwise the spider wouldn’t be able to hang from it. Moreover, if it were evaporation of a water solution, the thread should be soluble in water, which is not the case; even when just woven, the spiderweb withstands rain and dew very well.
Could polymerization occur: could, in other words, long, and therefore solid, molecules, develop from a “soup” of smaller molecules contained in the spider’s glands? Chemists don’t know any polymerization process that occurs in a fraction of a second, and, so to speak, “on command”—that is, following the mere passage from a closed environment to the open air. They do know processes whereby solids are formed by mixing two liquids, but the spider possesses only one raw material.
The solution to the problem has been known for a few years, and its simplicity is disarming. The liquid secreted by the spider’s glands, and stored above the spinnerets, becomes solid when subjected to traction. It is made of molecules long enough to be solid, but they are rolled up into a ball and therefore slide on one another: in other words, they are a liquid, although very viscous. But the spider secretes the thread always and only under traction: it “pulls out” its thread. Now, the nature of this liquid is so delicate an
d peculiar that a modest stretching is enough to cause an irreversible solidification: the knotted molecules stretch out and become parallel threads. All caterpillars that make cocoons use the same mechanism; this is how silk originates.
No chemist has yet succeeded in reproducing such an elegant, simple, and clean process. We have overtaken and violated nature in many fields, yet from nature we still have much to learn.
La Stampa, November 9, 1986
I Would Prohibit It
In principle, I have no objection to eugenics. It seems to me that if we really could obtain, without hurting people, a stronger humanity—more intelligent, gentler, better able to withstand diseases and temptations—there would be nothing wrong with it and no moralist could object. In the case of height, we have already, “unwittingly,” achieved results, thanks to better hygiene and diet.
But the so-called Naples experiment1 is not part of eugenics, the purpose of which is the improvement of progeny. Maybe the experiment would be of scientific interest if it could be demonstrated that it is reproducible, something that we are very far from. Let’s not forget that the likelihood of a female’s being born, as was desired in this case, was 50 percent; thus, the experiment proved little.
Wasn’t it enough to limit ourselves to animals? Apart from any moral consideration, intervening in our species to modify the natural balance between the sexes is stupid and harmful. It’s easy to imagine what would happen if the sordid exploit of Naples were to be corroborated, made available to the wider population, and gain acceptance: according to tastes or fashion we would have an excess of males or females, adding an artificial demographic problem to the many spontaneous problems that already burden us. In my opinion, the law should prohibit sex predetermination right now.
La Stampa, December 2, 1986
1. The reference is to a baby whose sex was predetermined before birth, an experiment successfully carried out in Naples by Professor Raffaele Magli.
Fra Diavolo on the Po
Before the current confusion of reforms, obtaining a high school diploma was an undertaking that made one tremble—it was a decathlon. The candidate was required to complete four written exams and an oral exam in every subject covered in three years of high school: in practice, a summary of everything that is known to mankind. Thus, by the day of the first exam, one would be completely exhausted, in a state both frantic and fatalistic, since it was clear to everyone that luck played a major role in the final results.
In July of 1936, precisely two days before my first exam, the written exam in Italian, I received a menacing red postcard from the Ministry of War: the following day I was to report to the seaplane station (the one on the Po River, from which the seaplane leaves for Venice: how many Turinese remember it?) for an urgent message. I went there full of foreboding and found myself in the company of another teenager, who (I never discovered why) was also called Levi, before a giant in a Fascist uniform who assailed us with an avalanche of insults, accusations, and threats.
He was red in the face, in a fit of rage; he accused us of nothing less than attempted desertion. We were both cowards: according to him, we hadn’t responded to a previous call, clearly intending to avoid military service in the Royal Navy. Yes, because our two names, of all names, had been drawn in the Turin lottery for the Navy draft. No one could save us from twenty-four months of service.
I didn’t even know how to swim at the time, and though I had read Stevenson and Defoe, the prospect of becoming a sailor struck me as absurd and frightening. I went home terrified; the next day, I turned in an Italian exam that was insubstantial and incoherent, so much so that, in all fairness, I got a very low mark, was not allowed to take the oral exam, and was told to return in October. It was the first bad grade in my impeccable academic career, and it felt pretty much like a death sentence. I passed the other exams thanks only to an exhausting effort.
We held a family council; my father, poor man, already gravely ill, set about making the rounds of the relevant authorities, from the military recruiting office to the chief magistrate, from the Superintendent of Education to the Fascist Federation. What came of it was a paradoxical solution, a preemptive strike: I would avoid the Navy draft by enlisting as soon as possible in the pre-military course at the Voluntary Militia for National Security—in other words, the Fascist militia.
Thus, the following fall, once I had passed my Italian exam, I enrolled in the university and found myself in the position of university soldier. At the time I was neither Fascist nor anti-Fascist. Wearing a uniform gave me no sense of pride; rather, I found it somehow annoying (especially the boots). But I have to admit that I didn’t dislike marching in step, in close order, especially to band music. It was a dance, and it gave me the sensation of belonging to a human alliance, of merging with a unified group. I later learned that Einstein declared he could not understand the type of man who took pleasure in marching in step. Well, at the time I was that type, even if seven years later some other marching in step made me change my mind radically.
So there I was, a soldier, all decked out in alpine hat, eagle, fasces, gray-green jacket and pants, and black shirt. The routine of pre-military education should have enabled me to predict much of what was to come after Italy entered the war, in 1940: suffice it to say that throughout the entire course I neither fired a single shot nor saw even from a distance what the cartridge clips of the extremely heavy Model 91 rifle looked like.
The muster was on Saturday afternoons in the courtyard of the university on Via Po, where, in one of the corridors, the armory of the University Militia was situated. We had to show up in uniform, and each of us was given a rifle; the bayonet—with its two lateral grooves “so that the blood can drain away”—was fixed to the muzzle, and the loop of the bayonet sheath was threaded through the belt, along with cartridge pouches meant to hold ammunition but naturally empty. Once our belts were on, we would fill the cartridge pouches with bread and salami for snack time; the smokers used them for cigarettes. Pre-military training consisted solely of the tedious close-order drills and long walks in the hills that would have been pleasant if it hadn’t been for the loathsome boots that chafed our ankles and feet raw.
If I am not mistaken, I was the only true university student in my squad. The others were studying geometry or accounting, and had all enrolled in the University Militia for the various worldly advantages that could be gained from it—not one had joined out of Fascist beliefs. Because they were the same height as me, four shrewd, friendly boys—all a little frisky—were always near me in the squad, and with the aid of their rifles they kept themselves entertained by playing the part of Fra Diavolo.1 They called one another Canù Vacché (Wizened Cowboy), Cravé (Cravero) Bastard,* Comi Schifús, and Simoncelli Struns2: as in Homeric texts, these were fixed attributes and were an integral part of their names—like honorary titles.
Comi Schifús in fact was an old acquaintance. He had been a classmate of mine in elementary school, and already then was trying his very best to be gross: he was the only one in our entire class who could lick the soles of his shoes—without taking them off, of course. It pleases me to mention the names of these faraway comrades in arms, in the event that any of them should recognize himself here. One had composed amiably obscene verses in which the surreal names of the parts of the above-mentioned rifle recurred: “dog collar sling,” “butt plate,” “nose cap,” and others I can’t recall because, as a matter of fact, we had never taken a rifle apart. The rifle was intended less as a weapon than as a dead weight, useful only in hampering our movements.
As a result of the racial laws, my military career didn’t last long: in September 1938, I was asked to turn in my uniform, and I did so without regrets. But when, in 1945, I returned from captivity in Germany, I discovered that the specter of military service in the Navy had not vanished: I appeared to be still registered for the naval draft. I was called to the recruiting office to restate my position, stripped naked, and subjected to the statutory m
edical exam with the recruits of ’27. I was in pretty bad shape, but the doctor wanted to declare me fit for service. A negotiation ensued: strange as it may seem, I did not possess any documents to attest to my year in Auschwitz, except for the number tattooed on my arm. After long explanations and pleading, the doctor agreed first to classify me as temporarily unfit for service, and then to let me out definitively. Thus ended my brief military career.
La Stampa, December 14, 1986
1. Fra Diavolo (literally, Brother Devil) was the popular name given to Michele Pezza, an Italian outlaw who resisted the French occupation of Naples and is remembered in folk legends and in the novels of Alexandre Dumas as a guerrilla leader.
2. “Schifús” is a distorted version of schifo, which means “disgusting”; “Struns” is a distortion of stronzo, which literally means “turd” and is used vulgarly to indicate someone who is mean.
Preface to Moments of Reprieve1
Writing and publishing If This Is a Man and The Truce marked a goal in my life as a writer. For many years afterward, I had the impression that I had fulfilled an obligation, in fact the only obligation I had that felt clearly defined. In Auschwitz, and on the long journey of return, I had suffered and seen things that not only seemed important for myself but demanded imperiously to be told. I had told them, I had borne witness; I was a chemist, I had a profession that gave me a living and occupied me thoroughly, and I did not feel the need to write anything else.
It didn’t turn out that way. As the years passed, the job of writing made room for itself beside my professional activity, and eventually replaced it; at the same time I realized that my experience of Auschwitz was far from being used up. I had described its fundamental features, which today fall within the realm of history, in my first two books, but a crowd of details continued to surface in my memory, and I didn’t want them to fade away. In particular, a large number of human figures stood out against that tragic background: friends, traveling companions, even adversaries, who, in their turn, asked to survive, to enjoy the ambiguous perpetuity of literary characters. It wasn’t the anonymous mass of the shipwrecked, without voice and without face, but the few, the different, those in whom (if only for a moment) I had perceived the will and capacity to react, that is, a rudiment of virtue.