The Periodic Table

by Primo Levi

  That evening I brought into camp the small rods and Alberto a metal plate with a round hole: it was the prescribed caliber to which we had to thin down the rods in order to transform them into flints and therefore bread.

  What then occurred should be judged with caution. Alberto said that the rods must be reduced by scraping them with a knife, on the sly, so that no competitor could steal our secret. When? At night. Where? In the wooden hut, under the blankets and on top of the pallet full of shavings—thus running the risk of starting a fire and, more realistically, of being hanged: for this was the punishment meted out, among other transgressions, to all those who lit a match in the hut.

  One always hesitates to judge foolhardy actions, whether one’s own or those of others, after they have proven to be successful: perhaps therefore they were not foolhardy enough? Or perhaps it is true that there exists a God who protects children, fools, and drunks? Or perhaps again these actions have more weight and more warmth than those innumerable other actions that have ended badly, and one tells them more willingly? But we did not ask ourselves such questions: the Lager had given us a crazy familiarity with danger and death, and risking the noose to eat more seemed to us a logical, indeed an obvious choice.

  While our companions slept, we worked with the knife, night after night. The scene was so sad you could weep: a single electric light bulb weakly lit the large wooden hut, and in the shadows, as in a vast cave, the faces of other men were visible, wracked by sleep and dreams: tinged with death, they worked their jaws furiously, dreaming of eating. Many of them had an arm or a naked, skeletal foot hanging over the side of the bunk, others moaned or talked in their sleep.

  But we two were alive and did not give way to sleep. We kept the blanket raised with our knees and beneath that improvised tent scraped away at the small rods, blindly and by touch: at each stroke you heard a slight crackle and saw a spray of yellow sparks spurt up. At intervals we tested to see if the rod passed through the sample hole: if it didn’t, we continued to scrape; if it did, we broke off the thinned-down stub and set it carefully aside.

  We worked for three nights: nothing happened, nobody noticed our activity, nor did the blanket or pallet catch fire, and this is how we won the bread which kept us alive until the arrival of the Russians and how we comforted each other in the trust and friendship which united us. What happened to me is described elsewhere. Alberto left on foot with the majority of the prisoners when the front drew near: the Germans made them walk for days and nights in the snow and freezing cold, slaughtering all those who could not go on: then they loaded them on open freight cars, which transported the few survivors to a new chapter of slavery, Buchenwald and Mauthausen. No more than a fourth of those who left survived the march.

  Alberto did not return, and not a trace remains of him; after the end of the war a man from his town, half visionary and half crook, lived for a number of years on the money he made telling his mother false consolatory tales about him.

  CHROMIUM

  The entree was fish, but the wine was red. Versino, head of maintenance, said that it was all a lot of nonsense, provided the wine and fish were good; he was certain that the majority of those who upheld the orthodox view could not, blindfolded, have distinguished a glass of white wine from a glass of red. Bruni, from the Nitro Department, asked whether somebody knew why fish goes with white wine: various joking remarks were made but nobody was able to answer properly. Old man Cometto added that life is full of customs whose roots can no longer be traced: the color of sugar paper, the buttoning from different sides for men and women, the shape of a gondola’s prow, and the innumerable alimentary compatibilities and incompatibilities, of which in fact the one in question was a particular case: but in any event, why were pig’s feet obligatory with lentils, and cheese on macaroni.

  I made a rapid mental review to be sure that none of those present had as yet heard it, then I started to tell the story of the onion in the boiled linseed oil. This, in fact, was a dining room for a company of varnish manufacturers, and it is well known that boiled linseed oil has for many centuries constituted the fundamental raw material of our art. It is an ancient art and therefore noble: its most remote testimony is in Genesis 6:14, where it is told how, in conformity with a precise specification of the Almighty, Noah coated (probably with a brush) the Ark’s interior and exterior with melted pitch. But it is also a subtly fraudulent art, like that which aims at concealing the substratum by conferring on it the color and appearance of what it is not: from this point of view it is related to cosmetics and adornment, which are equally ambiguous and almost equally ancient arts (Isaiah 3:16). Given therefore its pluri-millenial origins, it is not so strange that the trade of manufacturing varnishes retains in its crannies (despite the innumerable solicitations it modernly receives from kindred techniques) rudiments of customs and procedures abandoned for a long time now.

  So, returning to boiled linseed oil, I told my companions at table that in a prescription book published about 1942 I had found the advice to introduce into the oil, toward the end of the boiling, two slices of onion, without any comment on the purpose of this curious additive. I had spoken about it in 1949 with Signor Giacomasso Olindo, my predecessor and teacher, who was then more than seventy and had been making varnishes for fifty years, and he, smiling benevolently behind his thick white mustache, had explained to me that in actual fact, when he was young and boiled the oil personally, thermometers had not yet come into use: one judged the temperature of the batch by observing the smoke, or spitting into it, or, more efficiently, immersing a slice of onion in the oil on the point of a skewer; when the onion began to fry, the boiling was finished. Evidently, with the passing of the years, what had been a crude measuring operation had lost its significance and was transformed into a mysterious and magical practice.

  Old Cometto told of an analogous episode. Not without nostalgia he recalled his good old times, the times of copal gum: he told how once boiled linseed oil was combined with these legendary resins to make fabulously durable and gleaming varnishes. Their fame and name survive now only in the locution “copal shoes,” which alludes precisely to a varnish for leather at one time very widespread that has been out of fashion for at least the last half century. Today the locution itself is almost extinct. Copals were imported by the British from the most distant and savage countries, and bore their names, which in fact distinguished one kind from another: copal of Madagascar or Sierra Leone or Kauri (whose deposits, let it be said parenthetically, were exhausted along about 1967), and the very well known and noble Congo copal. They are fossil resins of vegetable origin, with a rather high melting point, and in the state in which they are found and sold in commerce are insoluble in oil: to render them soluble and compatible they were subjected to a violent, semi-destructive boiling, in the course of which their acidity diminished (they decarboxylated) and also the melting point was lowered. The operation was carried out in a semi-industrial manner by direct fire in modest, mobile kettles of four or six hundred pounds; during the boiling they were weighed at intervals, and when the resin had lost 16 percent of its weight in smoke, water vapor, and carbon dioxide, the solubility in oil was judged to have been reached. Along about 1940, the archaic copals, expensive and difficult to supply during the war, were supplanted by phenolic and maleic resins, both suitably modified, which, besides costing less, were directly compatible with the oils. Very well: Cometto told us how, in a factory whose name shall not be uttered, until 1953 a phenolic resin, which look the place of the Congo copal in a formula, was treated exactly like copal itself—that is, by consuming 16 percent of it on the fire, amid pestilential phenolic exhalations—until it had leached that solubility in oil which the resin already possessed.

  Here at this point I remembered that all languages are full of images and metaphors whose origin is being lost, together with the art from which they were drawn: horsemanship having declined to the level of an expensive sport, such expressions as “belly to the ground”
and “taking the bit in one’s teeth” are unintelligible and sound odd; since mills with superimposed stones have disappeared, which were also called millstones, and in which for centuries wheat (and varnishes) were ground, such a phrase as “to eat like four millstones” sounds odd and even mysterious today. In the same way, since Nature too is conservative, we carry in our coccyx what remains of a vanished tail.

  Bruni told us about an episode in which he himself had been involved, and as he told the story, I felt myself invaded by sweet and tenuous sensations which later I will try to explain. I must say first of all that Bruni worked from 1955 to 1965 in a large factory on the shores of a lake, the same one in which I had learned the rudiments of the varnish-making trade during the years 1946—47. So he told us that, when he was down there in charge of the Synthetic Varnishes Department, there fell into his hands a formula of a chromate-based anti-rust paint that contained an absurd component: nothing less than ammonium chloride, the old, alchemical sal ammoniac of the temple of Ammon, much more apt to corrode iron than preserve it from rust. He had asked his superiors and the veterans in the department about it: surprised and a bit shocked, they had replied that in that formulation, which corresponded to at least twenty or thirty tons of the product a month and had been in force for at least ten years, that salt “had always been in it,” and that he had his nerve, so young in years and new on the job, criticizing the factory’s experience, and looking for trouble by asking silly hows and whys. If ammonium chloride was in the formula, it was evident that it had some sort of use. What use it had nobody any longer knew, but one should be very careful about taking it out because “one never knows.” Bruni is a rationalist, and he took all this very badly, but he is a prudent man, and so he accepted the advice, according to which in that formulation and in that lakeshore factory, unless there have been further developments, ammonium chloride is still being put in; and yet today it is completely useless, as I can state from firsthand experience because it was I who introduced it into the formula.

  The episode cited by Bruni, the rustproof formula with chromates and ammonium chloride, flung me back in time, all the way to the freezing cold January of 1946, when meat and coal were still rationed, nobody had a car, and never in Italy had people breathed so much hope and so much freedom.

  But I had returned from captivity three months before and was living badly. The things I had seen and suffered were burning inside of me; I felt closer to the dead than the living, and felt guilty at being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had gulped down millions of human beings, and many of my friends, and a woman who was dear to my heart. It seemed to me that I would be purified if I told its story, and I felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who waylays on the street the wedding guests going to the feast, inflicting on them the story of his misfortune. I was writing concise and bloody poems, telling the story at breakneck speed, either by talking to people or by writing it down, so much so that gradually a book was later born: by writing I found peace for a while and felt myself become a man again, a person like everyone else, neither a martyr nor debased nor a saint: one of those people who form a family and look to the future rather than the past.

  Since one can’t live on poetry and stories, I looked feverishly for work and found it in the big lakeshore factory, still damaged from the war, and during those months besieged by mud and ice. Nobody was much concerned with me: colleagues, the director, and workers had other things to think about—the son who wasn’t returning from Russia, the stove without wood, the shoes without soles, the warehouses without supplies, the windows without panes, the freezing cold which split the pipes, inflation, famine, and the virulent local feuds. I had been benignly granted a lame-legged desk in the lab, in a corner full of crashing noise, drafts, and people coming and going carrying rags and large cans, and I had not been assigned a specific task. I, unoccupied as a chemist and in a state of utter alienation (but then it wasn’t called that), was writing in a haphazard fashion page after page of the memories which were poisoning me, and my colleagues watched me stealthily as a harmless nut. The book grew under my hands, almost spontaneously, without plan or system, as intricate and crowded as an anthill. Every so often, impelled by a feeling of professional conscience, I would ask to see the director and request some work, but he was much too busy to worry about my scruples. I should read and study; when it came to paints and varnishes I was still, if I didn’t mind his saying so, an illiterate. I didn’t have anything to do? Well, I should praise God and sit in the library; if I really had the itch to do something useful, well, look, there were articles to translate from German.

  One day he sent for me and with an oblique glint in his eyes announced that he had a little job for me. He took me to a corner of the factory’s yard, near a retaining wall: piled up at random, the lowest crushed by the highest, were thousands of square blocks of a bright orange color. He told me to touch them: they were gelatinous and softish; they had the disagreeable consistency of slaughtered tripes. I told the director that, apart from the color, they seemed to me to be livers, and he praised me: that’s just how it was described in the paint manuals! He explained that the phenomenon which had produced them was called just that in English, “livering”; under certain conditions certain paints turned from liquids into solids, with the consistency precisely of the liver or lungs, and must be thrown out. These parallelepiped shapes had been cans of paint: the paint had livered, the cans had been cut away, and the contents had been thrown on the garbage dump.

  That paint, he told me, had been produced during the war and immediately after; it contained a basic chromate and alkyd resin. Perhaps the chromate was too basic or the resin too acidic: these were exactly the conditions under which a “livering” can take place. All right, he made me the gift of that pile of old sins; I should think about it, make tests and examinations, and try to say with precision why the trouble had occurred, what should be done so that it was not repeated, and if it were possible to reclaim the damaged goods.

  Thus set forth, half chemistry and half police work, the problem attracted me: I was reconsidering it that evening (it was Saturday evening) as one of the sooty, freezing freight trains of that period lugged me to Turin. Now it happened that the next day destiny reserved for me a different and unique gift: the encounter with a woman, young and made of flesh and blood, warm against my side through our overcoats, gay in the humid mist of the avenues, patient, wise and sure as we were walking down streets still bordered with ruins. In a few hours we knew that we belonged to each other, not for one meeting but for life, as in fact has been the case. In a few hours I felt reborn and replete with new powers, washed clean and cured of a long sickness, finally ready to enter life with joy and vigor; equally cured was suddenly the world around me, and exorcized the name and face of the woman who had gone down into the lower depths with me and had not returned. My very writing became a different adventure, no longer the dolorous itinerary of a convalescent, no longer a begging for compassion and friendly faces, but a lucid building, which now was no longer solitary: the work of a chemist who weighs and divides, measures and judges on the basis of assured proofs, and strives to answer questions. Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differential calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter. Paradoxically, my baggage of atrocious memories became a wealth, a seed; it seemed to me that, by writing, I was growing like a plant.

  In the freight train of the following Monday, squeezed in a sleepy crowd bundled in scarfs, I felt full of joy and alert as never before or after. I was ready to challenge everything and everyone, in the same way that I had challenged and defeated Auschwitz and loneliness: disposed, especially, to engage in joyous batt
le with the clumsy pyramid of orange livers that awaited me on the lakeshore.

  It is the spirit that dominates matter, is that not so? Was it not this that they had hammered into my head in the Fascist and Gentile liceo? I threw myself into the work with the same intensity that, at not so distant a period, we had attacked a rock wall; and the adversary was still the same, the not-I, the Button Molder,{8} the hyle: stupid matter, slothfully hostile as human stupidity is hostile, and like it strong because of its obtuse passivity. Our trade is to conduct and win this interminable battle: a livered paint is much more rebellious, more refractory to your will than a lion in its mad pounce; but, let’s admit it, it’s also less dangerous.

  The first skirmish took place in the archives. The two partners, the two fornicators from whose embrace had sprung our orange-colored monsters, were the chromate and the resin. The resin was fabricated on the spot: I found the birth certificate of all the batches, and they did not offer anything suspicious; the acidity was variable, but always inferior to 6, as prescribed. One batch that was found to have a pH of 6.2 had been dutifully discarded by an inspector with a flowery signature. In the first instance the resin could not be faulted.

  The chromate had been purchased from different suppliers, and it too had been duly inspected batch by batch. According to Purchase Specification 480/0 it should have contained not less than 28 percent of chromium oxide in all; and now here, right before my eyes I had the interminable list of tests from January 1942 until today (one of the least exciting forms of reading imaginable), and all the values satisfied the specification, indeed were equal among themselves: 29.5 percent, not one percent more, not one less. I felt my inner being as a chemist writhe, confronted by that abomination; in fact, one should know that the natural oscillations in the method of preparation of such a chromate, added to the inevitable analytical errors, make it extremely improbable that the many values found in different batches and on different days could coincide so exactly. How come nobody had gotten suspicious? But in fact at that time I did not yet know the frightening anesthetic power of company papers, their capacity to hobble, douse, and dull every leap of intuition and every spark of talent. It is well known to the scholarly that all secretions can be harmful or toxic: now under pathological conditions it is not rare that the paper, a company secretion, is reabsorbed to an excessive degree, and puts to sleep, paralyzes, or actually kills the organism from which it has been exuded.