by Primo Levi
SILVER
A mimeographed circular is generally tossed into the wastebasket without even being read, but I realized immediately that this one did not deserve the common fate: it was an invitation to a dinner celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of our graduation from college. Its language got me to thinking: the addresser was treated to the intimate tu, and the amanuensis paraded a series of outdated student expressions, as if those twenty-live years had not passed. With involuntary comedy, the text concluded by saying, “... in an atmosphere of renewed comradeship, we will celebrate our silver wedding with Chemistry by telling each other the chemical events of our everyday life.” What chemical events? The precipitation of sterols in our fifty year-old arteries? The equilibrium of membrane in our membranes?
Who could the author be? I mentally passed in review my surviving twenty-five or thirty classmates: I mean to say not only those alive but those who have not disappeared behind the headland of other professional activities. First of all, cross off all the women: all mothers of families, all demobilized, none of them any longer in possession of “events” to be narrated. Cross off the climbers, the climbing, the protégés, the ex-protégés turned protectors: these are people who do not like comparisons. Cross off the frustrated, too, who do not like comparisons either: at a meeting of this kind a shipwrecked man might even show up, but only to solicit sympathy or help; it is unlikely that he would take the initiative to organize it. From the meager list that was left a probable name popped up: Cerrato—the honest, clumsy, eager Cerrato, to whom life had given so little and who had given so little to life. I had met him at intervals and fleetingly after the war, and he was an inert man, not shipwrecked: a shipwrecked man is he who departs and sinks, who sets himself a goal, does not reach it, and suffers because of it; Cerrato had never set himself anything, he had not exposed himself to anything, he had remained safely shut up in his house, and certainly must have clung to the “golden” years of his studies since all his other years had been years of lead.
Faced by the prospect of that dinner I had a two-sided reaction: it was not a neutral event, it attracted and repelled me at the same time, like a magnet brought close to a compass. I wanted to go and I didn’t want to: but the motivations for both decisions, closely examined, were not very noble. I wanted to go because it flattered me to compare myself to and feel myself more available than the others, less tied to money and the common idols, less duped, less worn out. I did not want to go because I did not want to be the same age as the others, that is, my age: I didn’t want to see wrinkles, white hair, didn’t want to count how many we were, nor count the absent, nor go in for calculations.
And yet Cerrato aroused my curiosity. At times we had studied together: he was serious and had no indulgence for himself, he studied without inspiration and without joy (he did not seem to know joy), successively boring through the chapters of the texts like a miner in a tunnel. He had not been compromised by Fascism, and he had reacted well to the reagent of the racial laws. He had been an opaque but reliable boy in whom one could trust: and experience teaches us that just this, trust-worthiness, is the most constant virtue, which is not acquired or lost with the years. One is born worthy of trust, with an open face and steady eyes, and remains such for life. He who is born contorted and lax remains that way: he who lies to you at six, lies to you at sixteen and sixty. The phenomenon is striking and explains how certain friendships and marriages survive for several decades, despite habit, boredom, and the wearing out of subjects of discussion: I was interested in verifying this through Cerrato. I paid my contribution and wrote to the anonymous committee that I would be at the dinner.
His appearance hadn’t changed very much: he was tall, bony, with an olive complexion; his hair was still thick, his face well shaven, his forehead, nose, and chin heavy, as if roughly molded. Now as then he moved awkwardly, with those abrupt and at the same time uncertain gestures which in the lab had made him the proverbial smasher of glassware.
As is the custom we dedicated the first minutes of our conversation to a reciprocal bringing up to date. I learned that he was married without children, and simultaneously understood that this was not an agreeable subject. I learned that he had always worked in photographic chemistry: ten years in Italy, four in Germany, then again in Italy. He had, yes, been the promoter of the dinner and the author of the letter of invitation. He was not ashamed to admit it; if I would allow him a professional metaphor, his years of study were his Technicolor, the remainder was black and white. As to the “events” (I kept myself from pointing out to him the clumsiness of this expression), they really interested him. His career had been rich in events, even if for the most part they had indeed only been in black and white: Was that true of mine too? Of course, I agreed: whether chemical or not, though in recent years the chemical events had prevailed, in frequency and intensity. They give you a sense of Nicht dazu gewachsen, of impotence, inadequacy, isn’t that so? They give you the impression of fighting an interminable war against an obtuse and slow-moving enemy, who, however, is fearful in terms of number and bulk; of losing all the battles, one after the other, year after year; and to salve your bruised pride you must be satisfied with the few occasions when you catch sight of a break in the enemy front and you pounce on it and administer a quick single blow.
Cerrato also knew this never-ending battle: he too had experienced the inadequacy of our preparation, and the need to make up for it with luck, intuition, stratagems, and a river of patience. I told him that I was in search of events, mine and those of others, which I wanted to put on display in a book, to see if I could convey to the layman the strong and bitter flavor of our trade, which is only a particular instance, a more strenuous version of the business of living. I told him that it did not seem fair to me that the world should know everything about how the doctor, prostitute, sailor, assassin, countess, ancient Roman, conspirator, and Polynesian lives and nothing about how we transformers of matter live: but that in this book I would deliberately neglect the grand chemistry, the triumphant chemistry of colossal plants and dizzying output, because this is collective work and therefore anonymous. I was more interested in the stories of the solitary chemistry, unarmed and on foot, at the measure of man, which with few exceptions has been mine: but it has also been the chemistry of the founders, who did not work in teams but alone, surrounded by the indifference of their time, generally without profit, and who confronted matter without aids, with their brains and hands, reason and imagination.
I asked him if he would like to contribute to this book. If he would, he should tell me a story and, if he would allow me to make a suggestion, it should be our kind of story, in which you thrash about in the dark for a week or a month, it seems that it will be dark forever, and you feel like throwing it all up and changing your trade; then in the dark you espy a glimmer, proceed groping in that direction, and the light grows, and finally order follows chaos. Cerrato said seriously that indeed sometimes things went like that, and that he would try to come up with something; but in general it was really dark all the time. You couldn’t see the glimmer, you beat your head again and again against an ever lower ceiling, and ended by coming out of the cave on your hands and knees and backward, a little older than when you went in. While he was interrogating his memory, his gaze fixed on the restaurant’s presumptuously frescoed ceiling, I took a quick glance at him and saw that he had aged well, without deformations, on the contrary growing and maturing: he had remained heavy, as in the past, incapable of the refreshment of malice and laughter, but this was no longer offensive, and more acceptable in a fifty-year-old than in a youth of twenty. He told me a story of silver.
“I’ll tell you the essentials: the trimmings you can put in yourself—for example, how an Italian lives in Germany; after all, you’ve been there yourself. I was in charge of the department where they manufactured the papers for X-rays. Do you know anything about that stuff? Never mind: it’s not very sensitive material, which doesn’t give you
trouble (sensitivity and trouble are proportional): so the department was also rather tranquil. But you must remember that if a film for amateurs functions badly, nine times out of ten the consumer thinks it’s his fault; or else, at the most, he sends you a few insults that don’t reach you because of insufficient address. On the other hand, if an X-ray goes bad, after all that barium pap or the retrograde urography; and then a second goes bad, and the whole package of sheets; well, then that’s not the end of it: trouble makes its own ascent, it grows as it climbs, and then drops on you like an affliction. All things which my predecessor had explained to me, with the typical didactic talent of the Germans, in order to justify in my eyes the fantastic ritual of cleanliness which must be observed in the department, from beginning to end of the work process. I don’t know if you’re interested; just think that...”
I interrupted him: minute precautions, maniacal cleanliness, purity with eight zeroes, are things which make me suffer. I know very well that in some cases it is a matter of necessary measures, but I also know that, more often mania prevails over common sense, and alongside five sensible precepts or prohibitions lurk ten senseless, useless ones, which nobody dares rescind only out of mental laziness, superstition, or morbid fear of complications: even when it does not go so far as in military service, in which regulations serve to smuggle in a repressive discipline. Cerrato poured a drink for me: his big hand moved hesitantly to the neck of the bottle, as if the bottle was fluttering about the table to escape him; then he tilted it over my glass, banging against it several times. He agreed that things were often like that: for example, the women in the department of which he was telling me were forbidden to use face powder, but one time a compact had fallen out of a girl’s pocket and opened, and quite a bit of powder had been wafted into the air; that day’s production had been inspected with particular care, but it was perfect. Well, the prohibition against face powder still remained.
“... but I have to tell you one detail, otherwise you won’t understand the story. There is the religion of the hair (this is justified, I can assure you): the department is always slightly pressurized, and the air that is pumped in is carefully filtered. Over your clothes you wear a special overall and a cap over your hair: overalls and caps must be washed every day to remove lint or accidentally picked up hair. Shoes and stockings must be taken off at the entrance and are replaced by dustproof slippers. “So there, that’s the setting. I should add that for five or six years there had been no major accidents: an isolated complaint here and there from a few hospitals about altered sensitivity, but it was almost always a matter of products already past the expiration date. Troubles, I don’t have to tell you, don’t come at a gallop, like the Huns, but arrive quietly, stealthily, like epidemics. It began with a special-delivery letter from a diagnostic center in Vienna; it was couched in very civil terms. I would call it more a warning than a complaint, and attached as proof was an X ray: regular as regards grain and contrast but dotted with white, oblong spots the size of beans. We replied with a contrite letter in which we begged their pardon for the unintentional, etcetera, but after the first Landsknecht{12} had died of the plague it is best not to entertain illusions: the plague is the plague, there’s no point in playing the ostrich. The next week there were another two letters: one from Liege hinting at damages to be reimbursed, the other from the Soviet Union; I no longer remember (perhaps I have blocked it out) the complicated initials of the commercial agency that had sent it. When it was translated, everyone’s hair stood on end. The fault, of course, was always the same, those dots shaped like beans, and the letter was very, very heavy: it spoke of three operations which had had to be postponed, of shifts lost, of tons of disputed sensitive paper, of an expert examination and an international controversy at the court of God knows where; and it enjoined us to send a Spezialist immediately.
“In such cases you try at least to lock the stable door after some of the cattle have escaped, but you don’t always succeed. It being established that all the paper had passed the exit inspection, we therefore were dealing with a delayed defect that showed up while in the warehouse, ours or the customer’s, or during transportation. The director called me in, discussed the case with me, very courteously, for two hours, but to me it seemed that he skinned me alive, slowly, methodically, and enjoyed doing it.
“We accepted the results of the laboratory inspection, and checked all the paper in stock batch by batch. The paper less than two months old was all right. In the rest the defect was found, though not in all: there were hundreds of batches, and about one-sixth showed the bean problem. My assistant, who was a young chemist and not very sharp, made a curious observation: the defective batches followed each other with a certain regularity, five good and one bad. It seemed to me a clue, and I tried to get to the bottom of it; that’s how it was, exactly: almost all the spoiled paper was produced on Wednesday. “I don’t have to tell you that delayed troubles are by far the most pernicious. While you’re searching for the causes, you still have to continue producing: but how can you be sure that the cause or causes are not still at work and the material you’re producing is not the carrier of further disasters. Obviously you can keep it in quarantine for two months and inspect it again: But what are you going to tell the warehouses the world over that are not receiving the goods? And what about passive interests? And the name, the Good Name, the Unbestrittener Ruj, the unblemished reputation? And there’s another complication: any change you might make in composition or technology must wait for two months before you know whether it helps or doesn’t, whether it gets rid of the defect or accentuates it.
I felt innocent, naturally: I had observed all the rules, I had not been lax in any way. Above me and below me, all the others felt just as innocent: those who had passed the raw materials as good, who had prepared and tested the emulsion of silver bromide, those who had wrapped, packed, and stored the packages of paper. I felt innocent, but I wasn’t: I was guilty by definition, because the head of a department must answer for his department, and because where there’s damage there’s sin, and where there’s sin there’s a sinner. It’s something exactly like original sin: you haven’t done anything, but you’re guilty and you must pay. Not with money, but worse: you lose sleep, lose your appetite, get an ulcer or shingles, and take a huge step toward terminal managerial neurosis.
“While complaining letters and telephone calls kept coming in, I persisted in trying to puzzle out that business of the Wednesdays: it must surely have some significance. On Tuesday night a guard I didn’t like had his shift—he had a scar on his chin and the face of a Nazi. I did not know whether or not to mention it to the director: to try to unload the blame on others is always bad policy. Then I had them bring me the payroll and saw that the Nazi had been with us only three months, while the bean trouble had begun to manifest itself on the paper produced ten months before. What new thing had occurred ten months before?
“About ten months before there had been accepted, after rigorous checks, a new supplier of the black paper which is used to protect the sensitive papers from light: but the defective material was proved to have been packed promiscuously in black paper coming from both suppliers. Also ten months before (nine, to be exact) a group of Turkish women workers had been hired; I interviewed them one by one, to their great amazement: I wanted to establish whether on Wednesday or Tuesday evening they did something different from usual. Did they wash, or did they not wash? Did they use some special cosmetic? Did they go dancing, and as a result sweat more than usual? I did not dare ask whether on Tuesday night they made love; in any event, I didn’t get anywhere either directly or through the interpreter.
“Obviously, in the meanwhile the affair had become known throughout the factory, and people were looking at me in strange ways; also because I was the only Italian department head, and I could very well imagine the comments they must have exchanged behind my back. The decisive help came to me from one of the guards, who spoke a little Italian because he had fou
ght in Italy: in fact he had been taken prisoner by the partisans around Biella and then exchanged for someone. He held no grudge, was loquacious, and spoke at random about a little of everything without ever coming to a conclusion: well, it was precisely his silly gabble that acted as Ariadne’s thread. One day he told me that he was a fisherman, but that for almost a year now he no longer caught any fish in the small river nearby: ever since they had opened a tannery five or six kilometers upstream. He then told me that on certain days the water actually turned brown. There and then I didn’t pay attention to his remarks, but I thought about them a few days later when from the window of my room in the guest house I saw the small truck bringing back the overalls from the laundry. I asked about it: the tannery had begun operating ten months before, and in fact the laundry washed the overalls in the water of the stream where the fisherman could no longer catch fish. However, they filtered it and made it pass through an ion exchange purifier. The overalls were washed during the day, they were dried at night in a dryer, and sent back early in the morning before the plant opened.
“I went to the tannery: I wanted to know when, where, how often, and on what days they emptied their vats. They sent me packing, but I returned two days later with the doctor from the Sanitation Office. Well, the largest of the tanning vats was emptied every week, on the night between Monday and Tuesday. They refused to tell me what it contained, but you know very well, organic tans are polyphenols and there is no ion exchange resin that can trap them, and what a polyphenol can do to silver bromide even you who are not in the field can imagine. I got a sample of the tanning solution, went to the experimental lab, and atomized a 1:10,000 solution in the darkroom in which was exposed a specimen of X-ray paper. The effect could be seen a few days later: the paper’s sensitivity had disappeared, literally. The head of the lab did not believe his eyes. He told me that he had never seen so powerful an inhibitor. We tested it with increasingly diluted solutions, as homeopathic doctors do: with solutions of about one part to a million; we obtained bean-shaped spots, which, however, appeared only after two months of rest. The bean effect—Bohneffekt—had been reproduced in full: when all was said and done, it became obvious that a few thousand molecules of polyphenol absorbed by the fibers of the overalls during the wash and carried by an invisible piece of lint from the overall to the paper were enough to produce the spots.”