by Primo Levi
He drank and silently busied himself with the complex rituals of a pipe smoker.
“I, TOO, started with an extremely foolish act,” a voice interjected at this point, and then we noticed that there were no longer four of us but five at the table. The voice had come from a man who, in the dim light, appeared to be thin, balding at the temples, with a sharp face furrowed by shifting wrinkles. He told his story at an uneven pace, swallowing his words and leaving sentences incomplete, as if his tongue had difficulty following the thread of his thoughts; at other times he struggled to find the words and would stop as if under a spell.
“There were three of us, too, but not so young—in our twenties. One was Antonio, and I wouldn’t want to say much about him, nor would I know how to. He was a fine, handsome youth, smart, sensitive, tenacious, and bold, but with something in him that was elusive, dark, wild. We were at that age when you have the need and the instinct and the immodesty to inflict on others everything that is seething in your head and elsewhere; it’s an age that can last a long time, but ends at the first compromise. Yet with him, even at that age, nothing had slipped out of his wrapping of restraint; nothing escaped from his inner world—though we sensed it to be rich and dense—except some rare allusion dramatically cut short. He was like a cat, if I may put it this way, whom you live with for years but who never allows you to get under his sacred skin.
“The third was Carlo, our leader. He is dead; it’s best to say it right away, because one can’t help speaking in a different way of the dead than of the living. He died in a way that suited him, not in the mountains, but the way one dies in the mountains. Doing what he had to do: not the kind of duty imposed by someone else, or by the state, but the kind that one chooses for oneself. He would have put it differently, called it ‘reaching the end of the line,’ for example, because he didn’t like big words, or, for that matter, words.
“He was the kind of boy who doesn’t study for seven months, who is known as a rebel and a dunce, and then in the eighth month he absorbs all the courses as if they were water and comes through with straight A’s. He spent the summer as a shepherd—not a shepherd of souls, no, a shepherd of sheep, and not to show off or to be eccentric but happily, for love of the earth and the grass. And in the winter, whenever he got restless, he would tie his skis to his bicycle and ‘go up’ alone, with no money, only an artichoke in one pocket and the other full of salad. He would come back in the evening or maybe the following day, having slept who knows where, and the more storms and hunger he had endured, the happier and healthier he was. When I met him, he already had a considerable mountaineering career behind him, while I was still a novice. But he was reluctant to talk about it: he wasn’t the type—which I respect, because I’m like that, too—who goes into the mountains to be able to tell a story. On the other hand, it was as if no one had taught him how to speak, just as no one had taught him how to ski: because he spoke the way nobody speaks, he voiced only the essence of things.
“He seemed to be made of steel. If necessary, he could carry a backpack that weighed thirty kilos as if it were nothing, but usually he traveled without a pack: his pockets were enough. Besides the vegetables, they held a piece of bread, a pocketknife, sometimes the Alpine Club guidebook, and always a spool of wire for emergency repairs. He could walk for two days without eating, or eat three meals in one sitting and then be off. Once, I saw him at three thousand meters in February, in the sleet, bare-chested, eating calmly, a spectacle so upsetting to two men nearby that it turned their stomachs. I have a picture at home of the whole scene.”
He paused, as if to catch his breath. People from the other tables had gone to bed: in the sudden silence we distinctly heard the deep roar of a serac, like the bones of a giant trying in vain to turn over in his bed of rock.
“I beg your pardon. I’m no longer young, and I know that it’s a desperate endeavor to clothe a man in words. This one in particular. A man like this, when he’s dead, is dead forever. He’s not the kind you tell stories about or build monuments to; he’s all in his actions, and, once those are over, nothing remains—nothing but, precisely, words. So, every time I try to talk about him, to bring him back to life, as I’m doing now, I feel a great sadness, an emptiness, as if I were on a cliff, and I have to be silent, or else drink.”
He was silent, drank, and continued.
“So one Saturday morning in February Carlo came to us. ‘Tomorrow, eh?’ he said. In his language, what he meant was that, since the weather was good, we could leave the next day for the winter ascent of the Tooth of M., which we had been planning for a while.
“I won’t give you all the technical details. I’ll tell you, briefly, that we left the following morning, not too early (Carlo didn’t like watches—he felt their tacit, continuous warning as an arbitrary intrusion); that we plunged boldly into the fog; that we came out the other side at around one in the afternoon, the sun was shining, and we were on the ridge of the wrong mountain.
“Antonio said that we could go down a hundred meters or so, cross along the mountainside, and climb back up the next mountain. I, who was the most cautious and the least able, said that, while we were at it, we could just as well continue along the ridge and arrive at a different peak—it was only forty meters lower than the other one anyway—and be satisfied with that. Carlo, in perfect bad faith, said with a few harsh, cackling syllables that my proposal was fine but, then again, ‘by the easy northwest ridge’ we could reach the Tooth of M. in half an hour; and that it wasn’t worth being twenty-one if you didn’t allow yourself the luxury of taking the wrong path.
“‘The easy northwest ridge’ was described rock by rock in the battered guidebook that Carlo carried in his pocket, along with the wire I mentioned. He took this guidebook along not because he believed in it but for the exact opposite reason. He rejected it because he perceived it, too, as a constraint, and not just any constraint but a bastard creature, a detestable hybrid of snow and rock and paper. He took it with him into the mountains to scorn it, delighted if he could catch it in error, even if that error was to his own detriment and that of his climbing companions.
“The easy northwest ridge was truly easy, in fact elementary, in the summer, but the conditions we found that day were difficult. The rocks were wet on the side that faced the sun and glazed with ice on the side in the shade; between one rock spike and the next were pockets of wet snow where we sank up to our shoulders. We arrived at the right peak at five, two of us dragging ourselves pitifully, while Carlo was seized by a sinister hilarity that I found slightly irritating.
“‘How will we get down?’
“‘We’ll figure it out,’ Carlo said, and added mysteriously, ‘The worst thing that happens is we taste bear meat.’
“Well, we tasted it, bear meat, in abundance, during the course of that night, the longest of my climbing career. It took us two hours to descend, feebly assisted by the rope. I’m sure you know what an infernal instrument a frozen rope is: ours had become a stiff, evil tangle that got caught on all the outcrops and clanged against the rock like a steel cable. At seven, we reached the shore of a small frozen lake. It was dark.
“We ate the little we had left, built a useless wall of stones to shelter us from the wind, and lay down on the ground to sleep, huddled side by side. We took turns—the man in the middle slept while the others acted as a buffer. For some reason I can’t explain, our watches had stopped—perhaps because we had forgotten to wind them—and without watches we felt as if time, too, had frozen. We stood up now and then to get our circulation going, and it was always the same: the wind was always blowing, there was always a semblance of moon, always in the same spot in the sky, and in front of the moon a fantastic cavalcade of ragged clouds, always the same. We had taken off our shoes, and put our feet in our backpacks. At the first ghostly light, which seemed to radiate not from the sky but from the snow, we got up, our limbs numb and our eyes glazed from sleeplessness, hunger, and darkness, and found our shoes so f
rozen that, when struck, they rang like bells. In order to put them on we had to sit on them for half an hour, as if we were hatching eggs.
“But we returned to the valley on our own: and when the innkeeper asked us, chuckling, how it had gone, all the while stealing glances at our two-day stubble, we answered without hesitation that it had been a great outing, paid the bill, and left without losing our composure.
“That was bear meat. Now, you must believe me, gentlemen, many years have passed, and I regret having eaten so little of it. I think and hope that each of you has gleaned from life what I have—a certain measure of ease, respect, love, and success. Well, I’ll tell you the truth, none of these things, not even remotely, has the taste of bear meat: the taste of being strong and free, which means free to make mistakes; the taste of feeling young in the mountains, of being your own master, which means master of the world.
“And, trust me, I am grateful to Carlo for having deliberately got us into trouble, for the night he made us spend, and for the various enterprises, senseless only on the surface, that he involved us in later on, and then for various others, not in the mountains, which I got into on my own, by following his doctrine. He was a young man full of earthly vigor who had a wisdom of his own, and may the earth in which he rests, not far from here, lie light on his bones, and bring the news, each year, of the return of the sun and of the frost.”
THE SECOND narrator fell silent, and he seemed to me to be looking with some embarrassment toward the two young men, as if afraid that he had disturbed or offended them; then he filled his glass but did not drink. His last words had roused in me a rare echo, as if I had heard them somewhere before. And, in fact, I found almost those exact words in a book that is dear to me, by the same sailor, cited by the first man, who had written of the gifts of the sea.
Censorship in Bitinia
I have already mentioned elsewhere the drab cultural life of this country, which is based, to this day, on a system of patronage and entrusted to the interests of the wealthy or even just to professionals and artists, specialists and technicians, who are quite well paid.
Of particular interest is the solution that was proposed for—or, to be more precise, that spontaneously imposed itself upon—the problem of censorship. For various reasons, toward the end of the last decade there was a lively increase in the “need” for censorship in Bitinia; in just a few years, the existing central offices had to double their staff and establish local branches in almost all the provincial capitals. Difficulties were encountered, however, in recruiting the necessary personnel: first, because the work of a censor is, as is well known, arduous and subtle, requiring specialized training that even otherwise highly qualified people lack; and, second, because, according to recent statistics, the actual practice of censorship can be dangerous.
I do not mean to allude here to the immediate risk of retaliation, which the efficient Bitinese police have reduced almost to nil. This is something different: careful medical studies conducted in the workplace have brought to light a specific type of professional hazard, irksome in nature and apparently irreversible, called by its discoverer “paroxysmal dysthymia,” or “Gowelius’s disease.” The initial clinical picture is vague and ill defined; then, as the years pass, various sensory-system troubles appear (diplopia, olfactory and auditory disorders, exaggerated reactions to, for example, certain colors or flavors), which regularly develop, after remissions and relapses, into serious psychological anomalies and perversions.
Consequently, and despite offers of high wages, the number of applicants for these government jobs rapidly decreased, and the workload of the existing career functionaries increased accordingly, until it rose to unprecedented levels. In the censorship offices, work pending (screenplays, scores, manuscripts, illustrated works, advertising posters) accumulated in such huge proportions that not only were the assigned storage spaces chockablock with documents but so were lobbies, corridors, and bathrooms as well. One case was reported of a division manager who, after an avalanche of files fell on him, died of suffocation before help arrived.
At first, mechanization provided a solution. Each branch was equipped with modern electronic systems: since I have only a basic knowledge of such things I am unable to describe with any precision how they worked, but I was told that their magnetic memory contained three distinct lists of words, hints, plots, topics,* and frames of reference. Anything that corresponded to the first list was automatically deleted from the work under examination; anything on the second led to elimination of the entire work; anything on the third meant the immediate arrest and death by hanging of the author and the publisher.
The results were optimum with regard to processing the amount of work (in a few days the storage spaces in the offices were cleared), but in terms of quality they proved inadequate. There were outrageous cases of oversight: Diary of a Sparrow, by Claire Efrem, was “approved” and published, and it sold with incredible success, and yet the book was of dubious literary merit and patently immoral, the author having used blatantly transparent techniques to disguise through allusion and paraphrase all the most offensive aspects of today’s ethics. Conversely, witness the sad case of Tuttle: Colonel Tuttle, the acclaimed critic and military historian, was forced to climb the gallows because in one of his volumes on the Caucasus campaign, owing to a simple mistake, the word “brigadier” appeared in altered form as “brassiere” and was recognized by the office of mechanized censorship in Issarvan as an obscene reference. The author of a modest manual on animal husbandry miraculously escaped the same tragic fate because he had the means to flee abroad, whence he petitioned the Consulate before the court was able to pass sentence.
To these three episodes, which came to public attention, must be added numerous others, rumors of which spread by word of mouth but which were ignored by the officials because (as is obvious) any information about them fell, in its turn, under the censor’s knife. A crisis situation erupted, resulting in a near total defection of the country’s cultural forces: a situation that, despite a few feeble attempts at reversal, persists today.
There is, however, recent news that gives rise to some hope. A physiologist, whose name is being withheld, concluded one of his in-depth studies by revealing in a much discussed paper some new facets of the psychology of domestic animals. If pets are subjected to particular conditioning, they can not only learn simple jobs involving transport and organization but also make actual decisions.
Without a doubt, this is a vast and fascinating field, offering practically unlimited possibilities: to summarize what has been published in the Bitinese press up to the time of this writing, the work of censorship, which is damaging to the human brain, and is performed in far too rigid a manner by machines, could be profitably entrusted to animals trained for the purpose. Seriously considered, this disconcerting idea is not in itself absurd: in the last analysis, it is only a matter of decisions.
Curiously, the mammals closest to humans were found to be least useful for the task. Dogs, monkeys, and horses who underwent the conditioning proved to be poor judges precisely because they were too intelligent and sensitive. According to our anonymous scholar, they act far too passionately; they respond in unpredictable ways to the slightest foreign stimuli, which are inevitable in every workplace; they exhibit strange preferences, perhaps congenital but still inexplicable, for certain mental categories; and their own memories are uncontrollable and excessive. In sum, they reveal in these circumstances an esprit de finesse that would be detrimental to the goals of censorship.
Surprising results, on the other hand, were obtained with the common barnyard chicken: this animal’s success is such that, as is common knowledge, four experimental offices have already been entrusted to teams of hens, under the control and supervision of experienced functionaries, naturally. The hens, besides being easily procured and costing little, both as an initial investment and for their subsequent maintenance, are capable of making rapid and definitive decisions. They stick scrup
ulously to the prescribed mental programs, and, given their cold, calm nature and their evanescent memory, they are not subject to distractions.
The general opinion around here is that in a few years the method will be extended to all the censorship offices in the country.
Approved by the censor:
Knall
It’s not the first time something like this has happened here: a habit, or an object, or an idea becomes, within a few weeks, almost universally widespread, without the newspapers or the mass media having anything to do with it. There was the craze for the yo-yo, then for Chinese mushrooms, then Pop art, Zen Buddhism, the hula-hoop. Now it is time for the knall.
No one knows who invented it, but, to judge from the price (a four-inch knall costs the equivalent of 3,000 lire or a little more), it doesn’t contain much in the way of costly materials or inventive genius or software.* I bought one myself, down at the port, right in front of a cop, who didn’t bat an eyelash. Of course I have no intention of using it. I just wanted to see how it works and how it’s constructed: it seems a legitimate curiosity.
A knall is a small, smooth cylinder, as long and thick as a Tuscan cigar, and not much heavier: it is sold loose or in boxes of twenty. Some are solid-colored, gray or red, but the majority come in wrappers printed with revoltingly tasteless little scenes and comic figures, in the style of decorations on jukeboxes and pinball machines: a bare-breasted girl fires a knall at her suitor’s enormous rear end; a pair of tiny Max and Moritz* types with insolent expressions, chased by a furious farmer, turn at the last minute, knalls in hand, and the pursuer falls backward, kicking his long, booted legs in the air.