The Periodic Table

by Primo Levi

  He looked like a man who has awakened from a dream, and he spoke out right away. He confessed that the story of the murdered quartermaster was a lie, but not that of the gallows that awaited him in Holland: he had proposed to the States General to transform the sand of the dunes into gold, had obtained a fund of one hundred thousand florins, and had spent a few of them in experiments and the rest in riotous living, then he had been asked to execute before the judges what he called the experimentum cruris; but from a thousand pounds of sand he had succeeded in obtaining only two flakes of gold, so he had jumped from the window, had hidden in his girlfriend’s house, and then had embarked secretly on the first ship leaving for the Cape. He had in his trunk his alchemist’s paraphernalia. As for the beast, he said it was not something that could be explained in a few words. Mercury, for their work, would be indispensable, because it is a fixed volatile spirit, that is, the female principle, and combined with sulfur, which is hot male earth, permits you to obtain the philosophic Egg, which is precisely the Beast with Two Backs, for in it are united and commingled male and female. Quite a tale this was, clear, straight talk, truly that of an alchemist, of which I didn’t believe a word. The two of them, he and Maggie, were the beast with two backs: he gray and hairy, she white and smooth, inside the cave or God knows where, or perhaps in our very own bed while I was taking care of the pigs; they were preparing to do it, drunk with the mercury as they were, if they hadn’t done it already.

  Perhaps the mercury was already coursing through my veins too, for at that moment I was really seeing red. After twenty years of marriage, Maggie didn’t mean all that much to me, but at that moment I was burning with desire for her and would have murdered for her. But I managed to control myself; indeed, I was still holding Hendrik tightly pressed against the wall when I got an idea, and I asked him how much mercury was worth: he, with his craft, ought to know that.

  “Twelve English guineas a pound,” he replied in a whisper.

  “Swear!”

  “I swear,” he replied, lifting up his two thumbs and spitting on the ground between them; perhaps it was their way of swearing, these transmuters of metals: but he had my knife so close to his throat that certainly he was telling the truth. I let him go, and he, still completely terrified, explained to me that raw mercury like ours is not worth much, but that it can be purified by distilling it, like whiskey, in cast-iron or terracotta retorts; then the retort is broken and in the residue you find lead, often silver, and sometimes gold; that this was their secret; but he would do it for me if I promised to spare his life.

  I promised absolutely nothing and instead told him that with the mercury I wanted to pay for the four wives. Making clay retorts and jars must surely be easier than changing the sand of Holland into gold: so get cracking, since Easter was approaching and so also Burton’s visit. I wanted to have ready for Easter forty pint jars of purified mercury, all the same, each with a fine cover, smooth and round, since the eye wants its share too. He should get help also from the other three, and I too would give him a hand. He needn’t worry about the baking of retorts and jars: there already was the furnace in which Andrea baked his saints.

  I learned how to distill immediately, and in ten days the jars were ready: they were for a single pint, but each pint of mercury weighed seventeen abundant pounds, so heavy that it was hard to lift one with your outstretched arms, and when you shook one it seemed that inside writhed a living animal. As for finding the crude mercury, that was a cinch: in the cave you wallowed in mercury, it dripped on your head and shoulders, and when you went home you found it in your pockets, your boots, even in the bed, and it went a bit to everyone’s head, so much so that it began to seem natural to us that we should exchange it for some women, It is truly a bizarre substance: it is cold and elusive, always restless, but when it is quite still you can see yourself in it better than in a mirror. If you stir it around in a bowl it continues to twirl for almost half an hour. Not only does Hendrik’s sacrilegious crucifix float on it but also stones, even lead. Not gold: Maggie tried it with her ring, but it immediately sank to the bottom, and when we fished it up again it had turned into tin. In short, it is a material I do not like, and I was in a hurry to close the deal and get rid of it.

  At Easter, Burton arrived, carried off the forty jars carefully sealed with wax and clay, and left without making any promises. One evening toward the end of autumn we saw his sail loom up in the rain, grow larger, and then disappear in the murky air and darkness. We thought he was waiting for the light to enter the small anchorage, as he usually did, but in the morning there was no trace of Burton or his whaling ship. There were instead, standing on the beach, drenched and stiff with the cold, four women plus two children, all clustered tightly together in a heap due to cold and shyness; one of them silently delivered a letter from Burton. A few lines—that to find four women for four unknowns on a desolate island, he had had to hand over all the mercury and nothing had been left for the brokerage; that he would claim it, in mercury and smoked pork, to the tune of 10 percent on his next visit; that they weren’t first-choice women, but he had not found anything better; that he preferred to land them quickly and return to his whaler to avoid witnessing disgusting brawls and because he was neither a go-between nor a pimp, nor even a priest to officiate at a wedding; that nevertheless he advised us to perform the weddings ourselves, as best we could, for the health of our souls, which at any rate he already considered somewhat ailing.

  I called out the four men and wanted to propose that we draw lots, but I immediately saw that there was no need for that. There was a middle-aged mulatto, plumpish, with a scar on her forehead, who stared insistently at Willem, and Willem looked at her with curiosity: the woman could have been his mother. I said to Willem: “Do you want her? Take her!”—he took her and I married them as best I could; that is, I asked her if she wanted him and him if he wanted her, but the little speech about “for rich or poor, in sickness or in health” I could not recall exactly and so I invented it there and then, winding up with “until death overtakes you,” which seemed to me to have a good sound. I was just finishing up with these two when I saw that Gaetano had chosen a young, one-eyed girl, or perhaps she had chosen him, and they were running away together in the rain, holding hands, so much so that I had to pursue them and marry them from a distance as I too was running. Of the two who remained, Andrea took a black woman about thirty, pretty and even elegant, with a plumed hat and a boa of ostrich feathers that was dripping wet, but with a rather equivocal manner, and I married them too, although I was still gasping for breath because of the race I had just run.

  Hendrik was left and a small, thin girl who was in fact the mother of the two children. She had gray eyes and looked around her as though the scene did not concern her but amused her. She was not looking at Hendrik but was looking at me; Hendrik was looking at Maggie, who had just come out of the hut and had not taken out her curlers, and Maggie was looking at Hendrik. Then it popped into my head that the two children could help me take care of the pigs; Maggie would certainly not give me children; that Hendrik and Maggie would get along very well together, making the beast with two backs and their distillations; and that the girl with the gray eyes did not displease me, even if she was much younger than I; on the contrary, she made me feel gay and light-hearted, like a tickle, and brought to mind the idea of catching her on the wing like a butterfly. So I asked her her name and then I asked myself in a loud voice, in the presence of witnesses: “Do you wish, Corporal Daniel K. Abrahams, to take as wife the here present Rebecca Johnson?” and I answered myself yes, and since the girl too was agreed, we got married.

  PHOSPHORUS

  In June 1942 I spoke frankly to the lieutenant and the director: I realized that my work was becoming useless, and they too realized this and advised me to look for another job, in one of the not too many niches the law still granted me.

  I was futilely looking when one morning, a very rare event, I was called to the mine’s t
elephone: from the other end of the line a Milanese voice, which seemed to me crude and energetic, and which said that it belonged to a Dr. Martini, summoned me to an appointment on the following Sunday at the Hotel Suisse in Turin, without vouchsafing me the luxury of any details. But he had said “Hotel Suisse” and not “Albergo Svizzera” as a loyal citizen would be obliged to say: at that time, which was the time of Starace,{3} one was very attentive to such piddling details, and one’s ears were expert at intercepting certain nuances.

  In the foyer (oh, pardon me, in the lobby, which isn’t a French word) of the Hotel Suisse, an anachronistic oasis of plush upholstery, velvets, shadows, and draperies, Dr. Martini, who was prevalently a commendatore, as I had learned just before from the doorman, was waiting for me. He was a thickset man of about sixty, of medium height, tanned, almost bald: his face had heavy features, but his eyes were small and astute, and his mouth, a trifle twisted to the left as in a grimace of contempt, was thin as a cut. This commendatore revealed himself from his first remarks to be also a no-nonsense, all-business type; and I understood at that point that this strange haste of “Aryan” Italians in dealing with Jews was not accidental. Whether intuition or calculation, it served a purpose: with a Jew, at a time of the Defense of the Race, one could be polite, one could even help him, and even boast (cautiously) about having helped him, but it was not advisable to have human relations with him, nor to compromise oneself too deeply, so as not to be forced later to offer understanding or compassion.

  The commendatore asked only a few questions, responded evasively to my many questions, and proved to be a very down-to-earth person on two fundamental points: the starting salary that he offered me came to a sum that I would never have dared ask for, and left me dumbfounded; his industry was Swiss, indeed he himself was a Swiss (he pronounced it “Sviss”), so for my possible hiring there was no difficulty. I found strange—in fact, frankly comic—his Swiss-ism expressed in such a virulent Milanese accent; I found, however, his many reticences quite justifiable.

  The factory of which he was the owner and director was on the outskirts of Milan, and I would have to move to Milan. It produced hormonal extracts: I, however, would have to deal with a very precise problem, that is, research into a new cure for diabetes which would be effective if taken orally. Did I know anything about diabetes? Not much, I replied, but my maternal grandfather had died of diabetes, and also on my paternal side several of my uncles, legendary devourers of pasta, had shown symptoms of the disease in their old age. Hearing this, the commendatore became more attentive and his eyes smaller: I realized later that, since the tendency to diabetes is hereditary, it would not have displeased him to have at his disposal an authentic diabetic, of a basically human race, on whom he could test certain of his ideas and preparations. He told me that the offered salary was subject to rapid raises; that the laboratory was modern, well equipped, and spacious; that in the factory there was a library with more than ten thousand volumes; and, finally, like a magician extracting a rabbit from his tall silk hat, he added that, perhaps I did not know it (and indeed I didn’t), but already working in his laboratory, and on the same problem, was a person I knew well, a classmate of mine and a friend, who in fact had spoken of me: Giulia Vineis. I should decide with calm: I would find him at the Hotel Suisse two Sundays from today.

  The very next day I quit the mine and moved to Milan with the few things I felt were indispensable: my bike, Rabelais, the Macaronaeae, Moby Dick translated by Pavese, a few other books, my pickax, climbing rope, logarithmic ruler, and recorder.

  The commendatore’s lab was not inferior to his description of it: a palace in comparison to the mine’s lab. I found already set out for my arrival a workbench, a ventilation hood, a desk, a closet filled with glassware, and an inhuman silence and orderliness. “My” glassware was countersigned with a small dot in blue enamel glaze, so that it would not be confused with glassware from other closets, and also because “here with us breakages have to be paid for.” This, at any event, was only one of the many regulations that the commendatore had transmitted to me on the day of my arrival: he passed them off to me as examples of “Swiss precision,” the soul of the laboratory and the entire factory, but to me they seemed a collection of witless impediments bordering on persecution mania.

  The commendatore explained to me that the factory’s work, particularly the problem he had entrusted to me, had to be attentively protected from possible industrial spies. These spies could be outsiders but also clerks and workers in the factory itself, despite all the precautions he used in hiring. Therefore I must not talk with anyone about the subject that had been proposed to me, nor of its possible developments: not even with my colleagues, in fact with them even less than with others. For this reason, every clerk had his particular schedule of hours, which coincided with a single pair of tram runs coming from the city: A had to come in at 8, B at 8:04, C at 8:08, and so on, and the same for quitting times, in such a manner that never would two colleagues have the opportunity to travel in the same tramcar. For people who came to work late and for those who left before quitting time there were heavy fines.

  The last hour of the day, even if the world came to an end, must be dedicated to dismantling, washing, and putting away the glassware, so that no one entering outside the lab hours could reconstruct what work had been done during the day. Every evening a daily report must be compiled and handed in in a sealed envelope to him personally or to Signora Loredana, who was his secretary.

  I could eat lunch where I wished; it was not his intention to sequester the clerks in the factory during the midday break. However, he told me (and here his mouth twisted more than usual and became even thinner) there were no good cheap trattorie thereabouts, and his advice was to equip myself for lunching in the lab; if I brought the raw materials from home, a worker there would see to cooking it for me.

  As for the library, the regulations that had to be followed were singularly severe. Books could not be taken out of the factory under any circumstances; they could be consulted only with the consent of the librarian, Signorina Paglietta. Underlining a word, or just making a mark with pen or pencil, was a very serious offense: Paglietta was expected to check every book, page by page, when returned, and if she found a mark, the book had to be destroyed and replaced at the expense of the culprit. It was forbidden even to leave between the sheets a bookmark, or turn down the corner of a page: “someone” could have drawn clues from this about the factory’s interests and activities—in short, violate its secret. Within this system, it is logical that keys were fundamental: in the evening, everything had to be locked up, even the analytical balance, and the keys then deposited with the custodian. The commendatore had a key that opened all the locks.

  This viaticum of precepts and prohibitions would have made me permanently unhappy if on entering the lab I had not found Giulia Vineis, quite calm, seated beside her workbench. She was not working—instead she was darning her stockings, and seemed to be waiting for me. She greeted me with affectionate familiarity and a meaningful grimace.

  We had been classmates at the university for four years, and had attended together all the lab courses, which are wonderful matchmakers, without ever becoming particular friends. Giulia was a dark girl, minute and quick; she had eyebrows with an elegant arc, a smooth, pointed face, a lively but precise way of moving. She was more open to practice than to theory, full of human warmth, Catholic without rigidity, generous and slap-dash; she spoke in a veiled, distracted voice, as if she were definitely tired of living, which she was not at all. She had been there for nearly a year—yes, she was the person who mentioned my name to the commendatore: she knew vaguely about my precarious situation at the mine, thought that I would be well suited for that research work, and besides, why not admit it, she was fed up with being alone. But I shouldn’t get any ideas: she was engaged, very much engaged, a complicated and tumultuous business that she would explain to me later. And what about me? No? No girls? That’s bad: she
would try to help me out there, forget the racial laws; a lot of nonsense anyway, what importance could they have?

  She advised me not to take the commendatore’s strange ideas too seriously. Giulia was one of those people who, apparently without asking questions or going to any trouble, immediately knew everything about everybody, which to me, God knows why, never happens; so she was for me a tourist guide and a first-class interpreter. In a single session she taught me the essentials, the pulley-lines hidden behind the factory’s scenery and the roles of the main characters. The commendatore was the boss, although subjected to obscure other bosses in Basel; however, the person who gave the orders was Loredana (and she pointed her out to me from the window on the courtyard: tall, brunette, shapely, rather vulgar, a bit faded), who was his secretary and mistress. They had a villa on the lake, and he—“who was old but horny”—took her sailing. There were photos of this in the main office, hadn’t I seen them? Also Signor Grasso, in the Personnel Office, was after Loredana, but for the moment she, Giulia, had not yet been able to ascertain whether he’d already been to bed with her or not: she would keep me posted. Living in that factory was not difficult; it was difficult to work there because of all those entanglements. The solution was simple—just don’t work: she had realized this immediately, and in a year, modesty aside, she had done hardly anything—all that she did was set up the apparatus in the morning, just enough to satisfy the eye, and dismount it in the evening in accordance with regulations. The daily report she created out of her imagination. Apart from that, she prepared her trousseau, slept a great deal, wrote torrential letters to her fiance, and, against regulations, started conversations with everyone who came within earshot: with Ambrogio, half dazed, who took care of the rabbits for the experiments; with Michela, who watched over the keys and probably was a Fascist spy; with Varisco, the woman worker who, according to the commendatore, was supposed to prepare my lunch; with Maiocchi, a fighter on Franco’s side in Spain, pomaded and a womanizer; and, impartially, with Moioli, pallid and gelatinous, who had nine children, had been a member of the People’s Party, and whose back the Fascists had broken with their clubs.