by Primo Levi
What, after all, was that chemistry over which the lieutenant and I racked our brains? Water and fire, nothing else, like in the kitchen. A less appetizing kitchen, that’s all: with penetrating or disgusting smells instead of the domestic kind; for the rest, there too aprons, mixing, burned hands, and washing up at the end of the day. No escape for Alida. She listened with devout compunction and at the same time Italian skepticism to my tales of life in Turin: these were heavily censored because in fact both she and I had to play the game of my anonymity. Nevertheless something did emerge: if nothing else, from my reticences themselves. After some weeks I realized that I was no longer a nameless person: I was a certain Doctor Levi who must not be called Levi, neither in the second nor the third person, due to good manners, and in order to avoid a mess. In the mine’s gossipy and easygoing atmosphere, a disparity between my indeterminate state as an outcast and my visible mildness of manner leaped to the eye, and—Alida admitted this to me—was lengthily discussed and variously interpreted: I was everything from an agent of the OVRA, the Fascist secret police, to someone with high-class connections.
Going down into the valley was uncomfortable, and for me not very prudent; since I could not visit anyone, my evenings at the mine were interminable. Sometimes I stayed in the lab past quitting time or went back there after dinner to study, or to meditate on the problem of nickel. At other times I shut myself in to read Mann’s Joseph stories in my monastic cell in the submarine. On nights when the moon was up I often took long solitary walks through the wild countryside around the mine, all the way up to the brim of the crater, or halfway up on the back of the gray, craggy dump chute, shaken by mysterious creaks and shivers as if some busy gnomes really nested there: the darkness was punctuated by the distant howls of dogs in the invisible valley bottom.
These roamings granted me a truce from the grim awareness of my father dying in Turin, of the American defeats at Bataan, the German victories in the Crimea, in short, of the open trap which was about to spring shut: it gave birth in me to a new bond, more sincere than the rhetoric about nature learned at school, with those brambles and stones which were my island and my freedom, a freedom I would perhaps soon lose.
For that rock without peace I felt a fragile and precarious affection: with it I had contracted a double bond, first in the exploits with Sandro, then here, trying as a chemist to wrest away its treasure. From this rocky love and these asbestos-filled solitudes, on some other of those long nights were born two stories of islands and freedom, the first I felt inclined to write after the torments of compositions in liceo: one story fantasized about a remote precursor of mine, a hunter of lead instead of nickel; the other, ambiguous and mercurial, I had taken from a reference to the island of Tristan da Cunha that I happened to see during that period.
The lieutenant, who was doing his military service in Turin, came up to the mine only one day a week. He would check my work and give me instructions and advice for the coming week, and proved to be an excellent chemist and a tenacious and acute researcher. After a short period of orientation, alongside the routine of daily analyses, a project with much higher aims began to take shape.
In the mine’s rock there was indeed nickel, but very little: from our analyses it showed an average content of 0.2 percent. Ridiculous, in comparison to the minerals mined by my antipodal colleague-rivals in Canada and New Caledonia. But perhaps the raw material could be enriched? Under the lieutenant’s guidance I tried all possible methods: by magnetic separation, by flotation, by levigation, by sifting, with heavy liquids, with the shaking plate. I did not get anywhere: nothing concentrated; in all the fractions the percentage of nickel remained obstinately the same as the first. Nature was not helping us: we concluded that the nickel accompanying the bivalent iron took its place vicariously, followed it like an evanescent shadow, a minuscule brother: 0.2 percent of nickel, 8 percent of iron. All the reagents imaginable for nickel should have been employed in doses forty times greater, even without taking into account the magnesium. An economically desperate enterprise. At moments of weariness I perceived the rock that encircled me, the green serpentine of the Alpine foothills, in all its sidereal, hostile, extraneous hardness: in comparison, the trees of the valley, by now already dressed for spring, were like us, also people who do not speak but feel the heat and the frost, enjoy and suffer, are born and die, fling out pollen with the wind, obscurely follow the sun in its travels. Not the rock: it does not house any energy, it is extinguished since primordial times, pure hostile passivity; a massive fortress that I had to pull down bastion by bastion to get my hands on the hidden sprite, the capricious kupfernickel which jumps out now here, now there, elusive and malign, with long perked ears, always ready to flee from the blows of the investigating pickax, leaving you with nothing to show for it.
But this is no longer the time for sprites, nickel, and kobolds. We are chemists, that is, hunters: ours are “the two experiences of adult life” of which Pavese spoke, success and failure, to kill the white whale or wreck the ship; one should not surrender to incomprehensible matter, one must not just sit down. We are here for this—to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to stand the blows and hand them out. We must never feel disarmed: nature is immense and complex, but it is not impermeable to the intelligence; we must circle around it, pierce and probe it, look for the opening or make it. My weekly conversations with the lieutenant sounded like war plans.
Among the many attempts we had made there also was that of reducing the rock with hydrogen. We had placed the mineral, finely ground, in a porcelain boat; had placed this in turn in a quartz tube; and through the tube, heated from the outside, we had pushed a current of hydrogen in the hope that this would strip the oxygen bound to the nickel and leave it reduced, that is, naked, in its metallic state. Metallic nickel, like iron, is magnetic, and therefore, according to this hypothesis, it would have been easy to separate it from the rest, alone or with the iron, simply by means of a small magnet. But, after the treatment, we had vainly agitated a powerful magnet in the watery suspension of our powder: we had only gotten a trace of iron. Clear and sad: hydrogen, under these conditions, did not reduce anything; the nickel, together with the iron, must be firmly lodged in the serpentine’s structure, combined with the silicate and water, satisfied (so to speak) with its state and averse to assuming another.
But say one tried to pull that structure apart. The idea came to me as one switches on a light, one day when by chance there fell into my hands an old dusty diagram, the work of some unknown predecessor of mine; it showed the loss of weight in the mine’s asbestos as a function of temperature. The asbestos lost a little water at 150° centigrade, then remained apparently unaltered until about 800° centigrade; here one noted an abrupt step down with a fall in weight of 12 percent, and the author had remarked: “becomes fragile.” Now serpentine is the father of asbestos: if asbestos decomposes at 800° centigrade, serpentine should do so also; and, since a chemist does not think, indeed does not live, without models, I idly went about representing them for myself, drawing on paper long chains of silicon, oxygen, iron, and magnesium, with a little nickel caught between their links, and then the same chains after the smash reduced to short stubs, with the nickel flushed out of its den and exposed to attack; and I did not feel much different from the remote hunter of Altamira who painted an antelope on the rock wall so that the next day’s hunt would be lucky.
The propitiatory ceremonies did not last long: the lieutenant was not there, but he could arrive from one hour to the next, and I was afraid that he would not accept, or would not readily accept, my very unorthodox hypothesis of work. But I felt it itch all over my skin: what’s done is done, best get to work immediately.
There is nothing more vivifying than a hypothesis. Watched with an amused and skeptical expression by Alida, who, since it was now late in the afternoon, kept looking ostentatiously at her wristwatch, I set to work like a whirlwind. In a moment the apparatus was mounted, the thermostat set at
800° centigrade, the pressure regulator on the tank set, the fluxmeter put in order. I heated the material for half an hour, then reduced the temperature and passed the hydrogen through for another hour: by now it was dark, the girl had gone, all was silence against the backdrop of the grim hum of the Grading Department, which also worked at night. I felt part conspirator, part alchemist.
When the time came, I took the porcelain boat out of the quartz tube, let it cool off in the vacuum, then dispersed in water the powder, which had turned from greenish to a dirty yellow: a thing which seemed to me a good sign. I picked up the magnet and set to work. Each time I took the magnet out of the water, it brought with it a tuft of brown powder: I removed it delicately with filter paper and put it aside, perhaps a milligram each time; for the analysis to be well-founded at least a half gram of material was needed, that is, several hours of work. I decided to stop about midnight: to interrupt the separation, I mean to say, because at no cost would I have put off the beginning of the analysis. For this, since it involved a magnetic fraction (and therefore presumably poor in silicates), and yielding to my haste, I there and then tried a simplified variant. At three in the morning I had the result: no longer the usual pink little cloud of nickel-dimethylglyoxime but rather a visibly abundant precipitate. Filtered, washed, dried, and weighed. The final datum appeared to me written in letters of fire on the slide rule: 6 percent of nickel, the rest iron. A victory: even without a further separation, an alloy to be sent to the electric oven as is. I returned to the submarine when it was almost dawn with an acute desire to go immediately and wake the director, telephone the lieutenant, and roll around on the dark fields, which were dripping wet with dew. I was thinking many foolish things, and I was not thinking of anything sensible and sad.
I was thinking of having opened a door with a key, and of possessing the key to many doors, perhaps to all of them. I was thinking of having thought of something that nobody else had yet thought, not even in Canada or New Caledonia, and I felt invincible and untouchable even when faced by close enemies, closer each month. Finally, I was thinking of having had a far from ignoble revenge on those who had declared me biologically inferior.
I was not thinking that if the method of extraction I had caught sight of could have found industrial application, the nickel produced would have entirely ended up in Fascist Italy’s and Hitler Germany’s armor plate and artillery shells. I was not thinking that during those very months there had been discovered in Albania deposits of nickel mineral before which ours could go and hide, and along with it every project of mine, the director’s, and the lieutenant’s. I did not foresee that my interpretation of the magnetic separability of nickel was substantially mistaken, as the lieutenant showed me a few days later, as soon as I told him of my results. Nor did I foresee that the director, after having shared my enthusiasm for a few days, threw a wet blanket on mine and his when he realized that there did not exist in commerce any magnetic selector capable of separating a material in the form of a fine powder, and that on cruder powders my method could not function.
And yet this story does not end here. Despite the many years that have passed, the liberalization of exchanges, and the fall in the international price of nickel, the news of the enormous wealth that lies in that valley in the form of rubble accessible to everyone still sets fire to the imagination. Not far from the mine, in cellars, stables, on the borderline between chemistry and white magic, there are still people who go at night to the rubble heaps and come back with bags of gray gravel, grind it, cook it, treat it with ever new reagents. The fascination of buried wealth, of two kilos of a noble silvery metal bound to a thousand kilos of sterile stone which is thrown away, has not yet died out.
Nor have the two mineral tales which I wrote then disappeared. They have had a troubled fate, almost as troubled as my own: they have suffered bombings and escapes, I had given them up for lost, and I found them recently while going through papers forgotten for decades. I did not want to abandon them: the reader will find them here in the succeeding pages, inserted, like a prisoner’s dream of escape, between these tales of militant chemistry.
LEAD
My name is Kodmund and I come from far away. My country is called Thiuda; at least we call it that, but our neighbors, that is, our enemies, use different names for us—Saksa, Nemet, Alaman. My country is different from this one; it has great forests and rivers, long winters, swamps, mists and rain. My people—I mean those who speak my language—are shepherds, hunters, and warriors: they do not like to cultivate the land, indeed they scorn those who do cultivate it, drive their flocks on their fields, sack their villages, and make slaves of their women. I am neither a shepherd nor a warrior; I am not even a hunter, although my trade is not very different from a hunter’s. It ties me to the land, but I am free: I am not a peasant.
My father and all of us Rodmunds in the paternal line have always plied this trade, which consists in knowing a certain heavy rock, finding it in distant countries, heating it in a certain way that we know, and extracting black lead from it. Near my village there was a large bed; it is said that it had been discovered by one of my ancestors whom they called Rodmund Blue Teeth. It is a village of lead-smiths; everyone there knows how to smelt and work it, but only we Rodmunds know how to find the rock and make sure it is the real lead rock, and not one of the many heavy rocks that the gods have strewn over the mountain so as to deceive man. It is the gods who make the veins of metals grow under the ground, but they keep them secret, hidden; he who finds them is almost their equal, and so the gods do not love him and try to bewilder him. They do not love us Rodmunds: but we don’t care.
Now, in five or six generations the bed has been exhausted: someone has suggested following it below the ground, digging tunnels, and even tried to do it and lost by it; finally the opinion of the more prudent prevailed. All the men have resumed their former trades, but not I: just as the lead, without us, does not see the light, so we cannot live without lead. Ours is an art that makes us rich, but it also makes us die young. Some say that this happens because the metal enters our blood and slowly impoverishes it; others think instead that it is a revenge of the gods, but in any case it matters little to us Rodmunds that our lives are short, because we are rich, respected, and see the world. In fact the case of my ancestor with the blue teeth is exceptional, because the deposit he had discovered was exceptionally rich: in general, we prospectors are also travelers. He himself, they told me, came from far away, from a country where the sun is cold and never sets, the people live in houses made of ice, and in the sea swim monsters a thousand strides long.
So, after six generations in one place, I began traveling again, in search of rock to smelt or to be smelted by other people; teaching them the art in exchange for gold. We Rodmunds are wizards, that’s what we are: we change lead into gold.
I left by myself, heading southward, when I was still young. I traveled for four years, from region to region, avoiding the plains, climbing up the mountain valleys, tapping with my hammer, finding little or nothing: in the summer I worked in the fields; in the winter I wove baskets or spent the gold I had brought with me. By myself, I have said: for us, women serve to provide a male child, so that the race does not die out, but we don’t take them along. What use would they serve? They don’t learn how to find the rock, and in fact, if they touch it when they have their period it crumbles into dead sand and ashes. Better the girls you meet along the way, good for a night or a month, with whom you can make merry without thinking of tomorrow, as instead wives do. It is better to live our tomorrows alone: when the flesh begins to become loose and pale, the belly pains, hair and teeth fall out, gums turn gray, then it is better to be alone.
I arrived at a place from which, on clear days, you could see a chain of mountains to the south. In the spring I began walking again, determined to reach them: I was completely fed up with that sticky, soft earth, good for nothing, good for making clay ocarinas, lacking both secrets and virtue. In the mountains
it is different: the rocks, which are the bones of the earth, can be seen uncovered, they ring out under your hobnailed boots, and it is easy to distinguish the different qualities: the plain is not for us. I would ask around where the easiest mountain pass was. I also asked if they had lead, where they bought it, and how much they paid for it: the more money they paid, the more I searched in the vicinity. Sometimes they didn’t even know what lead was; when I showed them the chunk of it that I always carry in my bag they laughed at feeling it so soft, and derisively asked me if in my country lead is also used to make ploughs and swords. Most times, however, I could not understand them or make them understand me: bread, milk, a cot, a girl, the direction to take the next day, and that’s all.
I got through a broad pass at the height of the summer, with a sun that at midday was almost perpendicular over my head, and yet there were still splotches of snow on the upland meadows. Just a bit lower down were flocks, shepherds, and paths: you could see the bottom of the valley, so deep that it still seemed immersed in the night. I descended, found villages, one rather large village on a stream, where the mountain folk came down to barter livestock, horses, cheese, pelts, and a red liquid they called wine. I almost burst out laughing whenever I heard them speak: their language was a crude and indistinct gurgle, an animal-like gur-gur, so much so that it was surprising to see that they nevertheless actually had weapons and tools like ours, some of them even more ingenious and elaborate. The women spun, as they did back home. They build houses of rock, not so pretty but solid; some houses, though, were made of wood, suspended a few feet above the ground since they rested on four or six wooden blocks topped by disks of smooth stone; I believe these stones served to prevent the invasion of mice, and this seemed to me an intelligent invention. The roofs were not made of straw hut of broad, flat stones. They did not know beer.