by Primo Levi
SEAGULL: That’s a sore point. Obviously Lancia doesn’t produce fish—on the contrary, it causes many of them to die—but it produces trash. It hires people who produce an incredible quantity of trash, three or four hundred tons a year. And it has a company cafeteria, it produces garbage dumps, and in the garbage dumps, well . . . in the dumps there are mice. There, you made me say it.
JOURNALIST: You mean that you’ve gone from being a fisherman to being a mouse hunter? Well, look, these things happen to us, too. To humans in general and to us journalists in particular. It’s not as if every day or every year there is a war to talk about, or a dam that breaks, or an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, or a nuclear catastrophe, or a trip to the moon. We, too, have to content ourselves with chasing mice. And if there are none, we have to make them up.
SEAGULL: . . . or you go and interview seagulls, right? It’s all grist for the mill.
JOURNALIST: No, believe me, I am fully aware of your uneasiness. It can be seen, so to speak, with the naked eye: you don’t fly as high in the sky and it’s rare to hear you screech. I saw two of your colleagues nesting at the mouth of a sewer, others under a bridge. And still others—a lot of them—hang out near the Turin zoo and steal the fish from the seals and the polar bear.
SEAGULL: I know. It’s embarrassing, but I went there, too. We need fish, otherwise our eggs have weak shells, so transparent that you can see the chick inside, and when you sit on them they break. And in the Po there’s not much fish. Let’s hope that now, with the new drainage basin, the situation will improve.
JOURNALIST: Nevertheless, prestige aside, I imagine that a nice rat, the kind that visits a garbage dump, is not to be despised as prey.
SEAGULL: You think it’s easy to catch a rat? At first, the hunt was successful: you’d see something moving in the trash, swoop down, give it a good blow on the nape of the neck with your beak, and the rat was done for. But they are a terribly intelligent species, and they’ve learned to defend themselves. First of all, they only go out at night, and we can’t see that well at night. Then one of them stays on lookout and if one of us cruises over the dump the guard gives the alarm and they all hide. And, finally, they scare cats, but they scare us, too, the few times we’ve happened to confront one unexpectedly, on open ground. They have such teeth, and such quick reflexes, that many of us lost our feathers, and not just feathers.
JOURNALIST: So that leaves nothing but the trash.
SEAGULL: You really want to rub salt in the wound. Trash, yes. It’s not very dignified, but it’s profitable. I’ll end up stealing the crows’ job and get used to eating carrion and poorly picked bones, or I’ll even become a vegetarian. In this world, those who don’t adapt succumb. In this, I must say, my wife has fewer scruples than I. When it’s my turn to sit on the eggs, she goes around on foot in the dump and brings me a little bit of everything, so much so that I had to give her a talking-to and explain that polyethylene should be left where it is, it can’t even be used to line a nest, because it’s impermeable. You should see what she brings me—dead kittens, cabbage stalks, fruit peels, and watermelon rinds. I’m still rather disgusted, but the little ones eat everything. The next generation scares me; there’s no restraint anymore.
JOURNALIST: Sir, you seem to me too pessimistic. Just as in England, where they cleaned up the Thames, they will clean up our rivers, and then even the sea will go back to the way it was. After all, console yourself: even among us men there are those who could fly and swim but who instead, because of bad luck or lack of courage, wander around garbage dumps and pick up filth. We must give them, and you, the opportunity to regain their dignity. I beseech you, do not forget the sea.
“Imaginary Zoo: Natural Histories by Primo Levi,”
Airone, March 1987
1. A town near Turin, on the Po.
2. A town at the southern tip of the Venetian lagoon.
The Giraffe in the Zoo
GIRAFFE: What are you looking for down there? You’ve been buzzing around with your camera and your movie camera for a while now. I’ll tell you right away, I am not in a good mood—I don’t mean today, I mean never. With this fence and this metal barrier that keeps me from head-butting all the pests who come here to ooh and aah. Once, though, I got some satisfaction. One of the visitors was very tall and was wearing a straw hat; I took it away from him with a flick of my tongue and chewed it thoroughly. It wasn’t good—it tasted like glue—but at least it was revenge.
JOURNALIST: I’m sorry to disturb you. It’s not just a whim of mine or my director. There’s talk now of closing down the zoo, and who knows where you’ll end up and certain problems that concern you might remain unresolved.
GIRAFFE: So you’re just a journalist looking for odd things?
JOURNALIST: As far as oddity goes, take it as a compliment, but you have your fair share.
GIRAFFE: All right then, out with the questions, but they had better be simple and clear, no tricks.
JOURNALIST: Let’s put it this way, then: in brief, sex, height, weight.
GIRAFFE: Not to be vain; but I think you can tell from a distance that I am a male.
JOURNALIST: Yes, I only asked for the sake of being thorough. With a neck that long, how many cervical vertebrae do you have?
GIRAFFE: I have seven vertebrae, just like you and just like a mouse. I weigh seven hundred kilos and I’m 6.2 meters tall.
JOURNALIST: Good. This means that when your head is up you’re putting spectacular pressure on your legs [he takes notebook and pencil from his pocket]: if you do the math, something like 450 millimeters of mercury, plus at least another 140 from the heart. A total of, let’s say, 600, and when our blood pressure is only 200 we don’t feel well—yet we are both mammals, and we’re made more or less of the same materials. Don’t you suffer from hypertension, especially when you run? Or from varicose veins, or from internal hemorrhages?
GIRAFFE: You have to understand that, ever since we decided to lengthen our necks and legs to reach the highest leaves, we’ve studied hydrostatics, physiology, and histology with intelligence and passion. We immediately realized that some innovations cause problems—for example, the act of drinking is not a simple feat for us. In the first place, even if we lower our neck all the way, we still can’t reach the ground. So as soon as our little ones are weaned, we have to teach them that in order to drink from a river they have to spread their front legs wide. It’s not elegant, but it’s necessary. And then each sip needs to reach a height of about three meters. We understood immediately that the glottis pump was not enough. Well, our sages solved the problem by giving us a series of small peristaltic pumps, positioned along the esophagus. That said, I can’t claim that drinking is the easiest thing in the world for us, and as a matter of fact I am personally grateful to the director of the zoo who had that curious trough installed for me over there—you wouldn’t be able to reach it even if you stood on tiptoe. So, given the complications involved, we drink rarely and for as long as possible.
JOURNALIST: Thank you. But the question of your feet remains: I mean the difference in pressure when you’re lying down and when you’re standing.
GIRAFFE: We never lie down: that’s a luxury we leave to cows and to you. We sleep standing up, always ready to flee, because we have many enemies.
JOURNALIST: But the hypertension, really . . .
GIRAFFE: Your insistence makes me think you must have some sort of personal problem.
JOURNALIST: Yes, it’s true. Hypotensive drugs, diuretics, no salt. . . . It’s not a simple life.
GIRAFFE: That’s all because you didn’t know to equip yourselves in time. Yes, we are hypertensive, but we don’t suffer from it. Have you ever worn elastic hose? Well, our four legs have natural, built-in elastic hose. I must tell you, they are extremely comfortable. Veins and arteries don’t get exhausted, even if the pressure is what you’ve calculated, and they are made of an excellent material that doesn’t wear out; in fact, it renews itself over time. Then we fo
und a way to reduce the blood pressure. In you humans, the blood in the arteries is viscous, but so is the blood in your veins, which has to flow back to your heart. Well, we perfected a series of small valves that are positioned in all the large arteries. They open with every contraction and close again, which keeps the blood pressure normal. It’s as if every vein were subdivided into independent segments. Please excuse my primitive language—I am not a physiologist, I am just a male giraffe, proud of his height and humiliated by his captivity. Enough now, please; I have to get some exercise, not that the veterinarian prescribed it—it’s my instinct and nature. I must run, even if only in the miserable space where you have confined me.
The Journalist takes his notebook and writes: “In spite of their structure, which is so different from that of all other quadrupeds, when giraffes run they are extraordinarily elegant. Their pace is between a gallop and a dance. The four legs leave the ground almost simultaneously while the neck balances the majestic rhythm of their gait. It appears slow but is very fast: it recalls the sailing of a ship, and betrays not the least effort. The vast body sways naturally, tipping inward when the animal changes course. Observing it, I realized how great is their need for the freedom of large spaces, and how cruel to confine them within the meshes of a fence. And yet the specimen that I interviewed was born here, in captivity, ignorant of the unspoiled splendor of the savanna; but he carries its primeval nobility within himself.” (He reads the text aloud.)
Grunt!
“Imaginary Zoo: Natural Histories by Primo Levi,”
Airone, April 1987
Love on the Web
JOURNALIST: Good evening, Mr. Spider, or, rather, Mrs. Spider.
SPIDER (shrill): Are you edible?
JOURNALIST: Well, I think so, but it’s not an issue I’ve ever really thought about.
SPIDER: You know, we have many eyes but we are very nearsighted and we’re always hungry. For us the world is divided in two: things you can eat and everything else.
JOURNALIST: I’m here not as a potential victim but to interview you.
SPIDER: An interview? Can interviews be eaten? Are they nutritious? If so, hand it over. I’m curious—I’ve eaten many things in my life but never an interview. How many legs do they have? Do they have wings?
JOURNALIST: Actually no, you can’t really eat them; they are consumed differently. How can I put it? They have readers, and sometimes they can be nourishing.
SPIDER: Then I’m not interested, but if you promise to repay me with some flies or mosquitoes . . . you see, with the hygiene today, they’ve become scarce. Are you good at catching flies? You’re so big, it can’t be that hard: your web must be huge.
JOURNALIST: Really, we have different methods, and catching flies isn’t an occupation that takes up much of our time. We don’t like to eat flies, and when we do it’s by accident. In any case, I’ll do my best. So, can we begin? Tell me, why are you upside down?
SPIDER: In order to concentrate: I have few thoughts, and this way they all flow to the brain and I can see things more clearly. But don’t come too close, and be careful with that thing in your hand; I wouldn’t want it to tear my web. It’s new; I made it this morning. It only had a little hole—you know, beetles aren’t very respectful—but for us it’s perfection or nothing. With the first flaw I eat the web again and digest it, and thus I have material ready for a new one. It’s a question of principle. Our mind is limited but our patience has no bounds. Once I even had to remake my web three times in one day, but it was an immense effort. After the third web, which luckily no one ruined, I had to rest for three or four days. Everything takes time, even replenishing our spinneret glands, but, as I was saying, we have a lot of patience, and waiting causes us no discomfort. When one waits one doesn’t consume energy.
JOURNALIST: Your webs are masterpieces, but do you make them all the same? Never an improvement, never an innovation?
SPIDER: One mustn’t ask too much of us. Look, it’s already an effort to answer your questions; we have no imagination, we’re not inventors, our cycle is simplified. Hunger, web, flies, digestion, hunger, new web. Why rack one’s brains, I beg your pardon, one’s nerve ganglia, to study new webs? Better rely on the memory that we carry imprinted within us, on the model we’ve always used, at most trying to adapt it to the surroundings at our disposal. That’s almost too much already for our brains. If I recall correctly, I had been hatched from the egg only a few days when I made my first web: it was the size of a stamp, but, aside from the scale, it was identical to this one in front of your nose.
JOURNALIST: I understand. Now tell me; there are rumors about your, let’s say, conjugal behavior . . . just rumors, let’s make that clear, I personally have never seen anything indecent, but, as you know, people talk . . .
SPIDER: You’re alluding to the fact that we eat our males? Is that it? Yes, of course. It’s a kind of ballet; our males are thin, shy, and weak, not even that good at making themselves a decent web. When they feel desire increasing, they venture into our webs, step by step, uncertain, hesitant, because they also know how it might end up. We wait for them; we don’t take the initiative, the game is clear on both sides. We females like males as much as we like flies, if not more. We like them in every sense of the word, as husbands (but only for the briefest time necessary) and as food. Once they have fulfilled their function for us, they lose all attraction except as fresh meat, and so, in one fell swoop, they fill our stomachs and our wombs.
JOURNALIST: Do marriages always end up like that?
SPIDER: Not always. There are some farsighted males who know about our permanent hunger and bring us a wedding gift. Not out of affection or as a compliment, but only to satisfy us: a daddy longlegs, a gnat, at times even something more substantial, and then everything runs smoothly and they get by with just anxiety. You should see them, those wretches, as they watch to see if their gift was enough to sate us; and occasionally, if they think it wasn’t, they run to their webs to get another mouthful.
JOURNALIST: It sounds like an ingenious system, and, all told, it has a certain logic. I, too, in their place, would behave like that, but, you see, my wife has less appetite and a milder character; and then our marriages last longer, and we would feel it a shame to be content with only one copulation.
SPIDER: To each his own, of course. But I wanted to tell you that this isn’t the only system the males invented to avoid being devoured. We have some distant cousins who pretend to dance in triumph around the female they have chosen, all the while tying her up a little at a time, carefully crossing the threads. Then they inseminate her and leave. Others are afraid of our strength; they kidnap females as soon as they hatch, while they are still adolescents and not very dangerous, keeping them segregated in some recess until puberty, yes, feeding them, but just enough to keep them alive without getting too strong. Then, they, too, do their job, free the girls, and run away.
JOURNALIST: Thank you, the interview is over.
SPIDER: Thank goodness, I was getting tired—intellectual work has never been my strong point. But don’t forget the flies: a man’s word is his bond.
La Stampa, April 26, 1987; then, under the rubric “Imaginary Zoo:
Natural Histories by Primo Levi,” Airone, May 1987
Calvino, Queneau, and the Sciences
My memories of Italo Calvino go back a long way. To be precise, they go back to our common baptism as writers, when, in 1947, Arrigo Cajumi simultaneously reviewed his first book, The Path to the Spiders’ Nest, and my first book, If This Is a Man, in La Stampa, wishing us youths, the youths of that time, a long career. There were long gaps in my association with Calvino, owing to his absence from Italy and to the fact that I was living basically in Turin while he was traveling a lot. His happiest hour, however, was the publication of the translation of Raymond Queneau’s Petite cosmogenie portative (A Pocket Cosmogony). The translation was done by Sergio Solmi, and Calvino wasn’t entirely satisfied with it; he had revised it himself,
but was dissatisfied with his revision, too, as this fantastic poem by Queneau, which begins with the creation of the universe and ends with computers, has a part about chemistry that contains—like the rest of the book—myriad tangles: there isn’t a line that doesn’t conceal a trap. Queneau was a fabulous master of manipulating words, squeezing a word, extracting from it, beyond its meaning, its sound as well: he was an acrobat. And Calvino was a friend, a disciple, and a devotee of Queneau in this dimension, too.
After sifting the Italian translation of A Pocket Cosmogony, we found a good number of knots left in the sieve, some of which Queneau himself was no longer able to untangle. When, some decades after writing the book, he was consulted, he said: “Forgive me, I can’t remember what I intended to say.” With joy, and, I must say, fun, Calvino and I worked on this in the mountains, at Rhêmes Notre Dame (in fact, there were three of us—a kitten sat on the table, on Solmi’s manuscript, doing its best to help, every now and then trying to turn the pages with its little paw). So this was a game, but it was a grand and wonderful game—the very game in which Calvino was a master, squeezing everything possible out of a word, turning it into an instrument of penetration.
In Calvino, this love of words went hand in hand with an equally deep love of nature that wasn’t at all idyllic, sentimental, or romantic. It was a naturalist’s love, which he had inherited from his parents, which he nurtured to the end, and which, to the careful reader, had already been apparent in his first book. Indeed, in the very title of his first book: that path, the only one in the world where spiders make a nest instead of weaving a web, is a discovery made by Calvino/Pin.
I would say that in the literary fabric of all Calvino’s books the meticulous precision of a scientist appears; although he never took academic classes, he was in fact a scientist. Anyone who has read Cosmicomics realizes that it isn’t just entertainment: it’s an extremely profound book, a book to meditate on, page by page. And this is a truly distinctive feature of Calvino, at least in his early writings: the capacity to make you laugh and to make you think at the same time. In Cosmicomics, in T Zero, in, to a lesser extent, the more famous triad—but again to a high degree in Mr. Palomar—the great wonder of the layman emerges: before the order of creation, before this clock whose maker is not known for sure, before the passing of time. The subject of time is almost an obsession for Calvino, as it is for anyone who has even the vaguest idea of what cosmogony is today. The theme of the labyrinth remains in suspense: whether or not there is a way out is debatable. In my view, however, Calvino’s labyrinth does have an exit, or at least it’s conceivable, we hope that it has: it is our labyrinth, the labyrinth where we live. This is a multifaceted symbol. To me, as a hybrid, half chemist and half writer, a concise definition of Calvino’s writing consists in its rejection of conventions along with a prodigious capacity to create new ones. For this reason I truly believe that if there is one writer—and not just an Italian writer—who will never be imitated, because he is inimitable, that writer is Italo Calvino.