The Periodic Table

by Primo Levi

  “I only wanted to pay you a compliment; besides, that’s what I think.”

  “This is not the moment. If you’re trying to court me now, I’ll knock you down.”

  “You’ll fall, too.”

  “You’re a fool. Go on, keep pedaling, it’s getting late.”

  By the time we reached Largo Cairoli I already knew everything: or better, I possessed all the factual elements, but so confused and jumbled in their temporal sequence that it was not easy for me to make sense of them.

  Above all, I could not understand how his will was not enough to overcome the problem—it was inconceivable, scandalous. There was this man, whom Giulia had at other times described to me as generous, solid, enamored, and serious; he possessed that girl, disheveled and splendid in her anger, who was writhing between my forearms intent on steering; and, instead of rushing to Milan to present his arguments, he was holed up in some border barracks to defend the nation. Because, being a goy, he was of course doing his military service: and as I was thinking like this and as Giulia continued to fight with me as if I were her Don Rodrigo,{5} I felt myself overcome by an absurd hatred for this never encountered rival. A goy, and she was a goyà, according to my atavistic terminology: and they could have gotten married. I felt growing within me, perhaps for the first time, a nauseating sensation of emptiness: so this is what it meant to be different: this was the price for being the salt of the earth. To carry on your crossbar a girl you desire and be so far from her as not to be able even to fall in love with her, carry her on your crossbar along Viale Gorizia to help her belong to someone else, and vanish from my life.

  In front of No. 40 Viale Gorizia there was a bench: Giulia told me to wait for her there and flew through the street door like a gust of wind. I sat down and waited, battered and sorrowful. I thought that I ought to be less of a gentleman, indeed less inhibited and foolish, and that for the rest of my life I would regret that between myself and her there had been nothing but a few school and company memories; and that maybe it was not too late, that maybe the no of those two musical comedy parents would be adamant, that Giulia would come down in tears and I then could console her; and that these were infamous hopes, a wicked taking advantage of the misfortunes of others. And finally, the way a shipwrecked person tired of struggling lets himself sink straight to the bottom, I fell back on what was my dominant thought during those years: that the existing fiance and the laws of racial separation were only stupid alibis, and that my inability to approach a woman was a condemnation without appeal which would accompany me to my death, confining me to a life poisoned by envy and by abstract, sterile, and aimless desires.

  Giulia came out after two hours, in fact burst through the street door like a shell from a mortar. It was not necessary to question her to find out how things had gone: “I made them look that high,” she said, all red in the face and still gasping. I made an effort to congratulate her in a believable fashion. But it’s impossible to make Giulia believe things you don’t really think, or hide things you do think. Now that she had thrown off that weight, and was shining with victory, she looked me straight in the eye, saw the shadow there, and asked, “What were you thinking about?”

  “Phosphorus,” I replied.

  Giulia got married a few months later and said goodbye to me, snuffing tears up her nose and giving Varisco detailed alimentary instructions. She has had many hardships and many children; we have remained friends, we see each other every so often in Milan and talk about chemistry and other reasonable matters. We are not dissatisfied with our choices and with what life has given us, but when we meet we both have a curious and not unpleasant impression (which we have both described to each other several times) that a veil, a breath, a throw of the dice deflected us onto two divergent paths, which were not ours.

  GOLD

  It is well known that people from Turin transplanted to Milan do not strike root, or at least do it badly. In the fall of 1942 there were seven of us friends from Turin, boys and girls, living in Milan, having arrived for different reasons in the large city which the war had rendered inhospitable; our parents—those of us who still had them—had moved to the country to avoid the bombings, and we were living an amply communal life. Euge was an architect, he wanted to do Milan over, and declared that the best city planner had been Frederick Barbarossa. Silvio had a law degree, but he was writing a philosophical treatise on minuscule sheets of onionskin and had a job with a shipping company. Ettore was an engineer at Olivetti’s. Lina was sleeping with Euge and had some vague involvement with art galleries. Vanda was a chemist like me but could not find a job, and was permanently irritated by this because she was a feminist. Ada was my cousin and worked at the Corbaccio Publishing House; Silvio called her the bi-doctor because she had two degrees, and Euge called her cousimo, which meant cousin of Primo, which Ada rather resented. After Giulia’s marriage, I had remained alone with my rabbits; I felt a widower and an orphan and fantasized about writing the saga of an atom of carbon, to make the people understand the solemn poetry, known only to chemists, of chlorophyll photosynthesis: and in fact I did eventually write it, but many years later, and it is the story with which this book concludes.

  If I am not mistaken we were all writing poetry, except for Ettore, who said it was undignified for an engineer. Writing sad, crepuscular poems, and not all that beautiful, while the world was in flames, did not seem to us either strange or shameful: we proclaimed ourselves the enemies of Fascism, but actually Fascism had had its effect on us, as on almost all Italians, alienating us and making us superficial, passive, and cynical.

  We bore with spiteful gaiety the rationing and the freezing cold in houses without coal, and we accepted with irresponsibility the nightly bombings by the English; they were not for us, they were a brutal sign of force on the part of our very distant allies, they didn’t bother us. We thought what all humiliated Italians were then thinking: that the Germans and Japanese were invincible, but the Americans were too, and that the war would plod on like this for another twenty or thirty years, a bloody and interminable but remote stalemate, known only through doctored war bulletins, and sometimes, in certain of my contemporaries’ families, through funereal, bureaucratic letters which spoke such words as “heroically, in the fulfillment of his duty.” The danse macabre up and down the Libyan coast, back and forth on the steppes of the Ukraine, would never come to an end.

  Each of us did his or her work day by day, slackly, without believing in it, as happens to someone who knows he is not working for his own future. We went to the theater and concerts, which sometimes were interrupted halfway through because the air-raid siren would start shrieking: and this seemed to us a ridiculous and gratifying incident; the Allies were masters of the sky, perhaps in the end they would win and Fascism would end—but it was their business, they were rich and powerful, they had the airplane carriers and the Liberators. But not us, “they” had declared us “different,” and different we would be; we took sides but kept out of the stupid and cruel Aryan games, discussing the plays of O’Neill and Thornton Wilder, climbing the Grigne slopes, falling a bit in love with each other, inventing intellectual games, and singing the lovely songs Silvio had learned from some of his Waldensian friends. As to what was happening during those same months in all of Europe occupied by the Germans, in Ann Frank’s house in Amsterdam, in the pit of Babi Yar near Kiev, in the ghetto of Warsaw, in Salonika, Paris, and Lidice: as to this pestilence which was about to submerge us no precise information had reached us, only vague and sinister hints dropped by soldiers returning from Greece or from the rear areas of the Russian front, and which we tended to censor. Our ignorance allowed us to live, as when you are in the mountains and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don’t know it and feel safe.

  But in November came the Allied landing in North Africa, in December came the Russian resistance and finally victory at Stalingrad, and we realized that the war had drawn closer and that history had resumed its march. In the
space of a few weeks each of us matured, more so than during the previous twenty years. Out of the shadows came men whom Fascism had not crushed—lawyers, professors, and workers—and we recognized in them our teachers, those for whom we had futilely starched until then in the Bible’s doctrine, in chemistry, and on the mountains. Fascism had reduced them to silence for twenty years, and they explained to us that Fascism was not only a clownish and improvident misrule but the negator of justice; it had not only dragged Italy into an unjust and ill-omened war, but it had arisen and consolidated itself as the custodian of a detestable legality and order, based on the coercion of those who work, on the unchecked profits of those who exploit the labor of others, on the silence imposed on those who think and do not want to be slaves, and on systematic and calculated lies. They told us that our mocking, ironic intolerance was not enough; it should turn into anger, and the anger should be channeled into a well-organized and timely revolt, but they did not teach us how to make bombs or shoot a rifle.

  They talked to us about unknowns: Gramsci, Salvemini, Gobetti, the Rosselli brothers—who were they? So there actually existed a second history, a history parallel to the one which the liceo had administered to us from on high? In those few convulsed months we tried in vain to reconstruct, repopulate the historic blank of the last twenty years, but those new characters remained “heroes,” like Garibaldi and Nazario Sauro, they did not have thickness or human substance. The time to consolidate our education was not granted us: in March came the strikes in Turin, indicating that the crisis was near at hand: on July 25 came the internal collapse of Fascism, the piazzas jammed with happy, fraternal crowds, the spontaneous and precarious joy of a country to which liberty had been given by a palace intrigue; and then came the eighth of September, the gray-green serpent of Nazi divisions on the streets of Milan and Turin, the brutal reawakening: the comedy was over, Italy was an occupied country, like Poland, Yugoslavia, and Norway.

  In this way, after the long intoxication with words, certain of the rightness of our choice, extremely insecure about our means, our hearts filled with much more desperation than hope, and against the backdrop of a defeated, divided country, we went into battle to test our strength. We separated to follow our destinies, each in a different valley.

  We were cold and hungry, we were the most disarmed partisans in the Piedmont, and probably also the most unprepared. We thought we were safe because we had not yet moved out of our refuge buried under three feet of snow: but somebody betrayed us, and on the dawn of December 13, 1943, we woke surrounded by the Fascist Republic:{6} they were three hundred and we eleven, equipped with a tommy gun without bullets and a few pistols. Eight of us managed to escape and scattered among the mountains; three of us did not get away: the militiamen captured Aldo, Guido, and myself, still half asleep. As they came in I managed to hide in the stove’s ashes the revolver I kept under my pillow, and which in any case I was not sure I knew how to use: it was tiny, all inlaid with mother of pearl, the kind used in movies by ladies desperately intent on committing suicide. Aldo, who was a doctor, stood up, stoically lit a cigarette, and said: “Too bad for my chromosomes.”

  They beat us up a bit, warned us “not to do anything ill-advised,” promised to question us later in a certain very convincing manner of theirs and shoot us immediately afterward, ranged themselves with great pomp around us, and began walking us down toward the mountain pass. During the march, which lasted for several hours, I did two things that were very important to me: I ate bit by bit the much too false identity card I had in my wallet (the photograph was particularly disgusting), and, pretending to stumble, I slipped into the snow the notebook full of addresses I carried in my pocket. The militiamen were singing intrepid war songs, shooting at hares with their tommy guns, and flinging grenades into the streams to kill the trout. Down in the valley several buses were waiting for us. They made us get on and sit separately, and I had militiamen all around, seated and standing, who were not concerned about us and kept on singing. One of them, right in front of me, had his back to me and from his belt hung a hand grenade, one of those German hand grenades with a wooden handle. I could easily have lifted the safety pin, pulled the cord, and done away with myself and several of them, but I didn’t have the courage. They took us to the barracks, which were on the outskirts of Aosta. Their centurion was called Fossa, and it is strange, absurd, and sinisterly comic, given the situation at that time, that he lies now for decades in some out-of-the-way war cemetery and I am here, alive and substantially unharmed, writing this story. Fossa was a stickler for legality and set about rapidly organizing in our favor a prison regime which was in conformity with regulations. So he put us in the barracks’ basement, one man per cell, with a cot and a pail, rations at eleven, an hour of open-air exercise, and the prohibition of talking to each other. This prohibition was painful because among us, in each of our minds, weighed an ugly secret: the same secret that had exposed us to capture, extinguishing in us, a few days before, all will to resist, indeed to live. We had been forced by our consciences to carry out a sentence and had carried it out, but we had come out of it destroyed, destitute, waiting for everything to finish and to be finished ourselves; but also wanting to see each other, to talk, to help each other exorcize that so recent memory. Now we were finished, and we knew it: we were in the trap, each one in his own trap, and there was no way out except down. It did not take me long to be convinced of it, examining my cell inch by inch, since the novels on which for years I had fed were full of miraculous escapes; but here the walls were half a yard thick, the door was massive and guarded on the outside, the small window was furnished with iron bars. I had a nail file, I could have sawn through one bar, perhaps even all of them; I was so thin that perhaps I could have squeezed through: but up against the window I discovered a large cement block to protect against bomb fragments during the air raids.

  Every so often they came to get me for the interrogations When Fossa was the interrogater, it wasn’t too bad: Fossa was the sort of man I had never met until then—a Fascist by the book, stupid and courageous, whom the trade of soldiering (He had fought in Africa and Spain and boasted about it to us) had sheathed in solid ignorance and folly but had not corrupted nor made inhumane. He had believed and obeyed all of his life and was naively convinced that the persons guilty for the catastrophe were just two: the King and Galeazzo Ciano, who during those very days had been shot by a firing squad at Verona: not Badoglio, he too was a soldier, he had sworn loyalty to the King and he had kept faith with his oath. If it had not been for the King and Ciano, who had sabotaged the Fascist war from the start, everything would have gone well and Italy would have won. He regarded me as scatterbrained, spoiled by bad company; deep down in his class-oriented soul he was convinced that a man with a university degree could not really be “a subversive.” He questioned me out of boredom, in order to indoctrinate me and give himself importance, but without any serious inquisitional intent: he was a soldier, not a cop. He never asked me embarrassing questions, nor did he ever ask me whether I was a Jew.

  On the other hand, Cagni’s interrogations were something to be afraid of. Cagni was the spy who had gotten us captured: a complete spy, in every ounce of his flesh, a spy by nature and tendency more than by Fascist conviction or for monetary gain; a spy to hurt, out of a kind of sporty sadism, as the hunter shoots free game. He was a skillful man: he had come with good credentials to a partisan formation next to ours, had passed himself off as the depository of important German military secrets, had revealed them, and later they proved artfully false and fabricated by the Gestapo. He organized the defense of the formation, put them through painstaking firefight exercises (in which he managed to get them to use up a good part of their ammunition), then fled to the valley and reappeared at the head of the Fascist platoons assigned to round up partisans. He was about thirty, with a pallid, flabby complexion; he began the interrogation by placing a Luger on his desk, prominently displayed, then hammered away for hours with
out a letup; he wanted to know everything. He continually threatened us with torture and the firing squad, but fortunately for me I knew almost nothing, and the few names I did know I kept to myself. He alternated moments of simulated cordiality with equally simulated explosions of rage; he told me (probably bluffing) that he knew I was a Jew, but that it was good for me: I was either a Jew or a partisan: if a partisan, he would put me against a wall; if a Jew, fine, there was a collection camp at Carpi, they were not bloody butchers, and I would remain there until the final victory. I admitted to being a Jew: partly because I was tired, partly out of an irrational digging in of pride, but I absolutely did not believe in his words. Had not he himself said that the control of that very barracks would within a few days be taken over by the SS?

  In my cell there was a single dim bulb, which remained lit also at night; it was barely enough to read by, but all the same I read a great deal, because I thought the time left me was short. The fourth day, during the hour of open-air exercise, on the sly I put in my pocket a large stone because I wanted to try to communicate with Guido and Aldo, who were in adjoining cells. I succeeded, but it was exhausting: it took an hour to transmit a sentence, tapping it out in code on the wall between us, like the miners in Germinal buried in the mine. Pressing my ear against the wall to catch the reply, I heard instead the joyous, robust songs of the militiamen seated in the mess hall over our heads: “the vision of... Aligheri” or “but I do not leave the tommy gun behind” or, tearful among all of them, “Come, there is a road in the woods.”

  In my cell there was also a mouse. He kept me company, but at night he chewed my bread. There were two cots: I dismantled one of them and removed its long, smooth bar; I set it up vertically, and at night stuck the loaf of bread on its point, but would leave some of the crumbs on the floor for the mouse. I felt more like a mouse than he; I was thinking of the road in the woods, the snow outside, the indifferent mountains, the hundred splendid things which if I could go free I would be able to do, and a lump rose in my throat.