by Primo Levi
Emilio accepted the common defeat and my desertion with sorrow but like a man. For him it was different: in his veins ran the paternal blood, rich in remote piratic ferments, mercantile initiatives, and a restless frenzy for the new. He was not afraid of making mistakes, nor of changing his trade, the place, and the style of his life every six months, nor of becoming poor; nor did he have any caste hang-ups, nor did he feel ill at ease about going around on his tricycle and in gray overalls to deliver our laborious chloride to customers. He accepted, and the next day he already had in mind other ideas, other deals with people more experienced than I, and immediately set about dismantling the laboratory, and he wasn’t even all that sad, whereas I was and felt like crying, or of howling at the moon as dogs do when they see the suitcases being closed. We proceeded to carry out the melancholy task helped (or, better, distracted and impeded) by Signor Samuele and Signora Ester. There came to light family utensils, sought in vain for years, and other exotic objects, buried geologically in the apartment’s recesses: the breechblock of a Beretta 38 tommy gun (from the days when Emilio had been a partisan and roamed the mountain valleys, distributing spare parts to the bands), an illuminated Koran, a very long porcelain pipe, a damascened sword with a hilt inlaid with silver, and an avalanche of yellowed papers. Among these rose to the surface—and I appropriated it greedily—a proclamation decree of 1785 in which F. Tom. Lorenzo Matteucci, General Inquisitor of the Ancona District, especially delegated against the heretical depravity, with much complacency and little clarity, “orders, prohibits, and severely commands, that no Jew shall have the temerity to take Lessons from Christians for any kind of Instrument, and much less that of Dancing.” We put off until the next day the most anguishing job, the dismantling of the ventilation hood.
Despite Emilio’s opinion, it was immediately clear that our efforts would not be sufficient. It was painful to draft a couple of carpenters, whom Emilio ordered to build a contraption fit to uproot the hood from its anchorage without dismembering it: in sum, this hood was a symbol, the sign of a profession and condition, indeed an art, and should have been deposited in the courtyard intact and in its integrity, so as to find a new life and use in a still undefined future.
A scaffolding was built, a block and tackle were set up, and guide ropes were strung. While Emilio and I watched the funereal ceremony from the courtyard, the hood issued solemnly from the window, hovered ponderously, outlined sharply against the gray sky of Via Massena, was skillfully hooked onto the chain of the block and tackle, and the chain groaned once and broke. The hood plunged four floors to our feet and was reduced to shards of wood and glass; it still smelled of eugenol and pyruvic acid, and with it our will and daring for enterprise was also reduced to shards.
In the brief instants of the flight the instinct of self-preservation made us take a leap backward. Emilio said, “I thought it would make more noise.”
URANIUM
One cannot employ just anyone to do the work of Customers’ Service. It is a delicate and complex job, not much different from that of diplomats: to perform it with success you must infuse faith in the customers, and therefore it is indispensable to have faith in yourself and in the products you sell; it is therefore a salutary activity, which helps you to know yourself and strengthens your character. It is perhaps the most hygienic of the specialities that constitute the decathlon of the factory chemist: the speciality that best trains him in eloquence and improvisation, prompt reflexes, and the ability to understand and make yourself understood; besides, you get a chance to travel about Italy and the world, and it brings you into contact with all sorts of people. I must also mention another peculiar and beneficent consequence of CS: by pretending to esteem and like your fellow men, after a few years in this trade you wind up really doing so, just as someone who feigns madness for a long time actually becomes crazy.
In the majority of cases, at the first contact you have to acquire or conquer a position superior to that of your interlocutor: but conquer it quietly, graciously, without frightening him or pulling rank. He must feel you are superior, but just a little: reachable, comprehensible. Never, but never, for instance, talk chemistry with a non-chemist: this is the ABC of the trade. But the opposite danger is much more serious, that the customer outranks you: and this can easily happen, because he plays at home, that is, he puts the products you’re selling him to practical use, and so he knows their virtues and defects as a wife knows her husband’s, while usually you have only a painless, disinterested, often optimistic knowledge of them, acquired in the lab or during their production. The most favorable constellation is that in which you can present yourself as a benefactor, in whatever way: by convincing him that your product satisfies an old need or desire of his, perhaps overlooked; that, having taken everything into account, at the end of the year it would prove to cost less than the competition’s product, which more-over, as is known, works well at first but, well, I don’t really want to go into it. You can, however, assist him also in different ways (and here the imagination of the CS candidate is revealed): by solving a technical problem for him that has little or nothing to do with your business: furnishing him with an address; inviting him to dinner in a typical restaurant; showing him your city and helping him or advising him on the purchase of souvenirs for his wife or girlfriend; finding him at the last moment a ticket in the stadium for the local soccer match (that’s right, we do this too). My Bologna colleague has a collection of dirty stories continually brought up to date, and reviews them diligently together with the technical bulletins before setting out on his sales trip in the cities and provinces; since he has a faulty memory, he keeps a record of which he has told to whom, because to administer the same joke twice to the same person would be a serious mistake.
All these things are learned through experience, but there are technical salesmen who seem born to it, born CS like Athena. This is not my case, and I am sadly conscious of it: when it falls to me to work in CS, at the office or traveling, I do it unwillingly, with hesitation, compunction, and little human warmth. Worse: I tend to be brusque and impatient with customers who are impatient and brusque, and to be mild and yielding with suppliers who, being in their turn CSs, prove to be just that, yielding and mild. In short, I am not a good CS, and I fear that by now it is too late for me to become one.
Tabasso had said to me, “Go to ____ and ask for Bonino, who is the head of the department. He’s a fine man, already knows our products, everything has always gone well, he’s no genius, we haven’t called on him for three months. You will see that you won’t have any technical difficulties; and if he begins to talk prices, just keep to generalities: tell him that you’ll report to us and it’s not your job...”
I had myself announced; they gave me a form to fill out and handed me a badge to stick to my lapel, which characterized you as an outsider and immunized you against reactions of rejection on the part of the guards. They had me sit down in a waiting room; after not more than five minutes Bonino appeared and led me to his office. This is an excellent sign, and it doesn’t always go like this: there are people who, coldly, make a CS wait for thirty or forty minutes even if there is an appointment, with the deliberate aim of putting him down and imposing their superior rank; it is the same goal aimed at, with more ingenious and more obscene techniques, by the baboons in the big ditch in the zoo. But the analogy is more general: all of a CS’s strategies and tactics can be described in terms of sexual courtship. In both cases it’s a one-to-one relationship; a courtship or negotiation among three persons would be unthinkable. In both cases one notes at the beginning a kind of dance or ritualized opening in which the buyer accepts the seller only if the latter adheres rigidly to the traditional ceremonial; if this takes place, the buyer joins the dance, and if the enjoyment is mutual, mating is attained, that is, the purchase, to the visible satisfaction of the two partners. The cases of unilateral violence are rare; not by chance are they often described in terms borrowed from the sexual sphere.
“It’s really a fine novel,” Bonino continued. “I read it during my vacation, and I also got my wife to read it; but not the children, because it might frighten them.” These opinions usually irritate me, but when one is in the CS role one must not be too discriminating: I thanked him urbanely and tried to bring the conversation back on the proper tracks, that is, our varnishes. Bonino put up some resistance.
“Just as you see me, I also risked finishing up like you did. They had already shut me up in the barrack’s courtyard, on Corso Orbassano: but at a certain point I saw him come in, you know very well who I mean, and then, while nobody saw me, I climbed the wall, threw myself down on the other side, which was a good five meters, and took off. Then I went to Val Susa with the Badogliani.”{11}
I had never heard a Badogliano call the Badogliani Badogliani, I set up my defenses and, in fact, caught myself taking a deep breath, as someone does when preparing for a long immersion. It was clear that Bonino’s story would be far from brief: but I remembered how many long stories I myself had inflicted on people, on those who wanted to listen and those who didn’t. I remembered that it is written (Deuteronomy 10:19): “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt,” and I settled back comfortably in my chair.
Bonino was not a good storyteller: he roamed, repeated himself, made long digressions, and digressions inside digressions. Besides, he had the curious bad habit of omitting the subject of some sentences and replacing it with a personal pronoun, which rendered his discourse even more nebulous. As he was speaking, I distractedly examined the room where he had received me: evidently his office for many years, because it looked neglected and untidy like him. The windows were offensively dirty, the walls were grimy with soot, the gloomy smell of stale tobacco stagnated in the air. Rusty nails were driven into the walls: some apparently useless, others holding up yellowed sheets. One of these, which could be read from my observation post, began like this: “SUBJECT: Rags. With ever greater frequency....” Elsewhere you could see used razor blades, soccer pool slips, medical insurance forms, picture postcards.
“... so then he told me that I should walk behind him, no in fact ahead of him: it was he who was behind me, a pistol pointed at me. Then the other guy arrived, his crony, who was waiting for him around the corner; and between the two of them they took me to Via Asti, you know what I mean, where there was Aloisio Smit. He would send for me every so often and say talk talk because your pals have already talked and there’s no point playing the hero....”
On Bonino’s desk there was a horrible reproduction in a light alloy of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. There was also an ashtray made from a seashell, full of cigarette butts and cherry pits, and an alabaster penholder shaped like Vesuvius. It was a pathetic desk, not more than 0.6 square meters at a generous estimate. There is not a seasoned CS who does not know this sad science of the desk: perhaps not at a conscious level, but in the form of a conditioned reflex, a scanty desk inexorably proclaims a lowly occupant; as for that clerk who, within eight or ten days after being hired, has not been able to conquer a desk, well, he is a lost man: he cannot count on more than a few weeks’ survival, like a hermit crab without a shell. On the other hand, I have known people who at the end of their careers disposed of a surface of seven or eight square meters with a polyester gloss, obviously excessive but a proper expression in code of the extent of their power. What objects rest on the desk is not important quantitatively: there is the man who expresses his authority by maintaining on its surface the greatest disorder and the greatest accumulation of stationery; there is on the contrary the man who, more subtly, imposes his rank by a void and meticulous cleanliness: that’s what Mussolini did, so they say, at Palazzo Venezia.
“... but all these men were not aware that in my belt I had a pistol too. When they began to torture me, I pulled it out, made them all stand facing the wall, and I got out. But he...”
He who? I was perplexed; the story was getting more and more garbled, the clock was running, and though it is true that the customer is always right, there’s also a limit to selling one’s soul and to fidelity to the company’s orders: beyond this limit you make yourself ridiculous.
“... as far as I could: a half hour, and I was already in the Rivoli section. I was walking along the road, and there what do I see landing in the fields nearby but a German plane, a Stork, the kind that can land in fifty meters. Two men get out, very polite, and ask me please which way to Switzerland. I happen to know these places and I answered right off: straight ahead, like that, to Milan and then turn left. ‘Danke,’ they answer, and get back in the plane; then one of them has a second thought, rummages under his seat, gets out, and comes over to me holding some thing like a rock in his hand; he hands it to me and says, ‘This is for your trouble: take good care of it, it’s uranium.’ You understand, it was the end of the war, by now they felt lost they no longer had the time to make the atomic bomb and they didn’t need uranium anymore. They thought only of saving their skins and escaping to Switzerland.”
There is also a limit to how much you can control your facial muscles: Bonino must have caught some sign on my face of incredulity, because he broke off in a slightly offended tone and said, “Don’t you believe me?”
“Of course I believe you,” I responded heroically. “But was it really uranium?”
“Absolutely: anyone could have seen that. It had an incredible weight, and when you touched it, it was hot. Besides, I still have it at home: I keep it on the terrace in a little shed, a secret, so the kids can’t touch it; every so often I show it to my friends, and it’s remained hot, it’s hot even now.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “You know what I’ll do? Tomorrow I’ll send you a piece so you’ll be convinced, and maybe, since you’re a writer, along with your stories one of these days you’ll also write this one.”
I thanked him, dutifully did my number, explained a certain new product, took a rather large order, said goodbye, and considered the case closed. But the next day, on my 1.2-square-meter desk, sat a small package addressed to my attention. I opened it, not without curiosity: it contained a small block of metal, about half a cigarette pack in size, actually quite heavy and with an exotic look about it. The surface was silvery white, with a light yellowish glaze: it did not seem hot, but it was not to be confused with any of the metals that a long everyday experience also outside chemistry had made familiar to me, such as copper, zinc, and aluminum. Perhaps an alloy? Or perhaps actually uranium? Metallic uranium in our parts has never been seen by anyone, and in the treatises it is described as silvery white; and a small block like that would not be permanently hot: perhaps only a mass as big as a house can remain hot at the expense of disintegrating energy.
As soon as it was decently possible I popped into the lab, which for a CS chemist is an unusual and vaguely improper thing to do. The lab is a place for the young, and returning there you feel young again: with the same longing for adventure, discovery, and the unexpected that you have at seventeen. Of course, you haven’t been seventeen for some time now, and besides, your long career as a para-chemist has mortified you, rendered you atrophied, handicapped, kept you ignorant as to where reagents and equipment are stored, forgetful of everything except the fundamental reactions: but precisely for these reasons the lab revisited is a source of joy and exerts an intense fascination, which is that of youth, of an indeterminate future pregnant with possibilities, that is, of freedom.
But the years of
non-use don’t make you forget certain professional tics, a certain stereotyped behavior that marks you out as a chemist whatever the situation: probing the unknown material with your fingernail, a penknife, smelling it, feeling it with your lips whether it is “cold” or “hot,” testing whether it scratches the windowpane or not, observing it under reflected light, weighing it in the palm of your hand. It is not so easy to estimate the specific weight of a material without a scale, yet after all uranium has a specific weight of 19, much more than lead, twice as much as copper: the gift given to Bonino by the Nazi aeronaut-astronauts could not be uranium. I was beginning to discern, in the little man’s paranoic tale, the echo of a tenacious and recurrent local legend of UFOs in the Val Susa, of flying saucers, carriers of omens like the comets in the Middle Ages, erratic and devoid of results like the spirits of the spiritualists.
But if it wasn’t uranium, what was it? I cut off a slice of the metal with the handsaw (it was easy to saw) and offered it to the flame of the Bunsen burner: an unusual thing took place: a thread of brown smoke rose from the flame, a thread which curled into volutes. I felt, with an instant of voluptuous nostalgia, reawaken in me the reflexes of an analyst, withered by long inertia: I found a capsule of enameled porcelain, filled it with water, held it over the sooty flame, and saw form on the bottom a brown deposit which was an old acquaintance. I touched the deposit with a drop of silver nitrate solution and the black-blue color that developed confirmed for me that the metal was cadmium, the distant son of Cadmus, the sower of dragon’s teeth.
Where Bonino had found the cadmium was not very interesting: probably in the cadmium-plating department of his factory. More interesting but undecipherable was the origin of his story: profoundly his, his alone, since, as I found out later, he told it often and to everyone, but without substantiating it with the support of material, and with details that gradually became more colorful and less believable with the passing of the years. It was clearly impossible to get to the bottom of it: but I, tangled in the CS net of duties toward society, the company, and verisimilitude, envied in him the boundless freedom of invention of one who has broken through the barrier and is now free to build for himself the past that suits him best, to stitch around him the garments of a hero and fly like Superman across centuries, meridians, and parallels.