by Primo Levi
Gladiators
Nicola would happily have stayed home, and even in bed until ten, but Stefania wouldn’t hear of it. At eight, she was already on the phone: she reminded him that he had been making excuses for far too long. Sometimes it was the rain, sometimes it was the contestants, who were mediocre, sometimes he had to go to a meeting, and sometimes there were his silly humanitarian excuses. Noticing in his voice a shadow of reluctance, or, perhaps, only of a bad mood, she ended by telling him outright that promises are made to be kept. She was a girl with many virtues, but when she got an idea in her head there was no way around it. Nicola didn’t recall having made her an actual promise. He had said, vaguely, that yes, someday they would go to the stadium—all his colleagues went, and also (alas!) all her colleagues. Every Friday they filled in betting forms for the gladiator contest, and he had agreed with her that one shouldn’t set oneself apart, give oneself the airs of an intellectual; and then it was an experience, a curiosity that, once in your life, you needed to satisfy, otherwise you don’t know the world you’re living in. Yet now that it had come to the point, he realized that he had made all those speeches with some mental reservation—he had no desire to actually see the gladiators and never would. On the other hand, how to say no to Stefania? He would pay dearly, he knew: with insults, sulks, rebuffs. Maybe even worse—there was that fair-haired cousin of his…
He shaved, washed, dressed, went out. The streets were deserted, but there was already a line at the store on Via San Secondo. He hated lines, but he got on the end of it just the same. The advertisement was hanging on the wall, in the usual garish colors. There were six entrants; the names of the gladiators meant nothing to him, except that of Turi Lorusso. Not that he knew much about Lorusso’s technique; he knew that he was good, that he was paid an enormous sum, that he slept with a countess, and perhaps also with the relevant count, that he gave a lot to charity and paid no taxes. While Nicola waited his turn, he listened in on the conversations of his neighbors.
“If you ask me, after thirty years they shouldn’t allow it anymore…”
“Of course, the acceleration, the eye aren’t what they used to be, but, on the other hand, he has experience of the arena that…”
“But did you see him, in ’91, against that madman who drove the Mercedes? When he threw the hammer from twenty meters and hit him straighton? And remember the time they ejected him for…?”
He bought two tickets for the grandstand: it wasn’t the moment to worry about cost. He went home and telephoned Stefania: he would pick her up at two.
By three the stadium was full. The first entry was scheduled for three, but still at three-thirty nothing had happened. Near them sat a white-haired old man with a deep tan. Nicola asked him if the delay was normal.
“They always make you wait. It’s incredible—they act like prima donnas. In my time it was different. Instead of foam-rubber bumpers there were beaks—no nonsense. It was hard to escape without injury. Only the top players managed it, the ones who were born with combat in their blood. You’re young, you don’t remember the champions who came out of Pinerolo’s stable, and, even better, Alpignano’s. Now, can you believe it? They’re all from reformatories or from the New Prisons, or even from the prison for the criminally insane: if they accept, their sentence is commuted. It’s laughable now, they have insurance, disability, paid holidays, and after fifty fights they even get a pension. Oh, yes, there are some who retire at forty.”
A murmur rose from the bleachers, and the first man entered. He was very young: he appeared confident but you could see he was afraid. Immediately afterward a flame-red Fiat 127 came into the ring; the three ritual honks of the horn sounded, and Nicola felt the nervous grip of Stefania’s hand on his biceps; the car aimed straight at the boy, who waited in a slight crouch, tense, legs wide, gripping the hammer convulsively in his fist. Suddenly the auto accelerated, its tractor wheels spewing two jets of sand in its wake. The boy dodged and struck a blow, but too late: the hammer just grazed the side, denting it slightly. The driver must not have had much imagination; there were several more such charges, extremely monotonous, then the gong sounded and the round concluded with no decision.
The second gladiator (Nicola glanced at the program) was called Blitz, and he was stocky and smooth-skinned. There were several skirmishes with the Alfasud compact car that he had drawn as an adversary; the man was skillful enough and managed to keep wide of it for two or three minutes, then the car hit him, in first gear but hard, and he was thrown a dozen meters. His head was bleeding; the doctor came, declared him incapacitated, and the stretcher-bearers carried him off amid the catcalls of the spectators. Nicola’s neighbor was outraged. He said that Blitz, whose real name, by the way, was Craveri, was an impostor, that he got himself injured on purpose, that he should change careers—in fact, the Federation should change careers for him: take away his license and put him back in the ranks of the unemployed.
In the case of the third, who was also up against an economy car, a Renault 4, he pointed out that these cars were more dangerous than the big heavy cars. “If it was up to me, I would make them all Mini Morrises. They have acceleration, and they handle well. With those monsters of 1600 and up, nothing ever happens. They’re fine for newcomers—just smoke in their eyes.” At the third charge, the gladiator waited for the auto without moving: at the last instant he threw himself flat on the ground and the car drove over him without touching him. The spectators shouted with enthusiasm; many of the women threw flowers and purses into the arena, and even a shoe, but Nicola learned that that move, though it looked impressive, wasn’t really dangerous. It was called “the Rudolf,” because a gladiator named Rudolf had invented it: he had later become famous, had had a political career, and was now a big shot on the Olympic Committee.
Next, there was the usual comic interlude: a duel between two forklifts. They were the same model and color but one had a red stripe painted on it and the other a green stripe. Because they were so heavy, they were difficult to maneuver, sinking into the sand almost up to their hubs. In vain they tried to push each other back, with their forks entwined like battling stags; then the green stripe disentangled itself, backed up rapidly, and, making a tight turn, butted the side of red with its rear. Red yielded but then quickly went into reverse and managed to lodge its fork under the belly of green. The fork rose, and green swayed and then fell on one side, indecently exposing its differential and muffler. The audience laughed and applauded.
The fourth gladiator had to go against a banged-up Peugeot. The crowd immediately began to shout “Rigged!” The driver even had the audacity to switch on his turn signal before swerving.
The fifth entry was a real spectacle. The gladiator was gutsy and was obviously aiming not just at the windshield but at the head of the driver, and he missed by a hair. He dodged three charges, with precision and lazy grace, not even raising the hammer; at the fourth, he bounced up in front of the car like a spring, came down on the hood, and with two brutal hammer blows shattered the windshield. Nicola heard a brief, strangled cry that stood out from the roar of the crowd: it was Stefania, who was pressed tight against him. The driver seemed to be blinded: instead of braking, he accelerated and hit the wooden barrier sideways; the car rebounded and came to rest on its side, trapping one of the gladiator’s feet in the sand. He was mad with rage, and continued, through the empty frame of the windshield, to pound the head of the driver, who was trying to get out of the car by the door facing up. Finally he emerged, his face bleeding; he tore the hammer away from the gladiator, and began wringing his neck. The crowd yelled a word that Nicola couldn’t understand, but his neighbor calmly explained to him that they were asking the director of the competition to spare his life, which in fact was what happened. A tow truck from the automobile club entered the arena, and in a flash the car was turned rightside up and towed away. The driver and the gladiator shook hands amid the applause, and then walked toward the locker rooms waving, but after a few st
eps the gladiator staggered and fell. It wasn’t clear if he was dead or had only fainted. They loaded him, too, onto the tow truck.
As the great Lorusso entered the arena, Nicola realized that Stefania had turned very pale. He felt a vague rancor toward her, and he would have liked to stay longer, if only to make her pay—he couldn’t care less about Lorusso. On principle he would have preferred Stefania to ask him if they could leave, but he knew her, and knew that she would never stoop to that, so he told her that he had had enough, and they left. Stefania didn’t feel well, she felt like throwing up, but when he questioned her she said curtly that it was the sausage she had eaten at dinner. She refused to have a glass of bitters at the bar, refused to spend the evening with him, rebuffed every topic of conversation that he suggested: she really must be ill. Nicola took her home, and realized that he, too, had little appetite, and didn’t even feel like playing the usual game of pool with Renato. He drank two cognacs and went to bed.
The Fugitive
To compose a poem that is worth reading and remembering is a gift of destiny: it happens to only a few people, without regard for rules or intentions, and to them it happens only a few times in their lives. Perhaps this is a good thing; if the phenomenon were more frequent, we would be drowning in poetic messages, our own and those of others, to the detriment of us all. To Pasquale, too, it had happened only a few times, and the awareness of having a poem in his mind, ready to be caught in flight and fixed on a page like a butterfly, had always been accompanied by a curious sensation, by an aura like that which precedes epileptic fits: each time, he had heard a faint whistle in his ears, and a ticklish shiver ran through him from head to foot.
In a few moments the whistle and the shiver disappeared, and he found himself clear-headed, with the core of the poem lucid and distinct; he had only to write it down, and, lo and behold, the other lines hastened to crowd around it, obedient and strong. In a quarter of an hour the work was done: but this flash, this instantaneous process in which conception and birth succeeded one another almost like lightning and thunder, had been granted to Pasquale only five or six times in his life. Luckily, he wasn’t a poet by profession: he had a dull, boring office job.
He felt the symptoms described above after two years of silence, as he was sitting at his desk, examining an insurance policy. In fact, he felt them with an unusual intensity: the whistle was penetrating and the shiver was a nearly convulsive tremor, which disappeared immediately, leaving him with a sensation of vertigo. The key verse was there before him, as if written on the wall, or, rather, inside his skull. His colleagues at the neighboring desks didn’t notice anything. Pasquale concentrated fiercely on the sheet of paper in front of him: from the core the poem radiated out through all his senses like a growing organism, and soon it was before him; it seemed to be throbbing, just like a living thing.
It was the most beautiful poem that Pasquale had ever written. There it was, right before his eyes, without a correction, the handwriting tall, elegant, and smooth: it was almost as if the sheet of copy paper on which it was written had difficulty bearing its weight, like a column too slender beneath the burden of a giant statue. It was six o’clock: Pasquale locked the poem in his drawer and went home. It seemed to him that he deserved a reward, and on the way he bought himself an ice cream.
The next morning he rushed to the office. He was impatient to reread the poem, because he was well aware how hard it is to judge a newly written work: the value and the meaning, or the lack of value and meaning, become clear only the morning after. He opened the drawer and didn’t see the page: and yet he was sure that he had left it on top of all the other papers. He dug around among them, frantically at first, then methodically, but he had to admit that the poem had disappeared. He searched the other drawers, and then he realized that the poem was right there in front of him, on the in-box tray. What tricks distraction plays! But how could he not be distracted, in the face of the ultimate work of his life?
PASQUALE WAS certain that his future biographers would remember him for nothing else: only for that “Annunciation.” He reread it and was enthusiastic, almost in love. He was about to take it to the photocopying machine when the boss called him in; he kept him for an hour and a half, and when Pasquale returned to his desk the copier was broken. By four o’clock the electrician had repaired it, but the photocopying paper was all used up. For that day there was nothing to be done: recalling the incident of the previous evening, Pasquale placed the sheet of paper in the drawer with great care. He closed it, then changed his mind and opened it, and finally he closed it again and left. The next day the piece of paper wasn’t there.
This business was becoming annoying. Pasquale turned all his drawers upside down, bringing to light papers that had been forgotten for decades: as he searched, he tried to retrieve in memory if not the whole composition at least that first line, that nucleus which had enlightened him, but he couldn’t: in fact, he had the precise sensation that he never would. He was different, different from that moment on: he was no longer the same Pasquale, and he never would be again, just as a dead man does not return to life, and you never put your foot in the same river twice. There was a nauseating metallic taste in his mouth: the taste of frustration, of nevermore. Disconsolate, he sat down in his office chair, and saw the page stuck to the wall, to his left, a little distance from his head. It was obvious: some colleague had intended to play a tasteless trick; perhaps someone had been spying on him and was on to his secret.
He seized the sheet of paper by one edge and detached it from the wall, encountering almost no resistance: the author of the trick must have used a poor-quality paste, or used very little. He noticed that the other side of the paper was slightly grainy. He put it under his desk pad, and for the entire morning made excuses not to leave his desk, but when the noon whistle sounded, and everyone got up to go to lunch, Pasquale saw that the sheet of paper was sticking out from under the desk pad by a good inch. He took it out, folded it in fourths, and put it in his wallet: after all, there was no reason not to take it home. He would copy it by hand, or take it to the copy shop; that would solve the problem.
He reread the poem in the evening as he was going home on the subway. Contrary to what he usually felt, it seemed perfect: not a line or a syllable had to be changed. Still, before showing it to Gloria he would think about it. Everyone knows how a judgment can change even in a short time: Monday’s masterpiece becomes insipid on Thursday, or even vice versa. He locked the sheet of paper in his private drawer, in the bedroom; but the following morning, when he opened his eyes, he saw it above him, stuck to the ceiling. Two-thirds of it was adhering to the plaster; the other third was hanging down.
Pasquale got the ladder and cautiously removed the piece of paper; again, when he felt it, the surface was rough, especially on the back. He touched it with his lips: there was no doubt, sticking out from the page were some tiny bumps, which seemed to be in rows. He took a magnifying glass and saw that it was so. Tiny hairs were sticking out from the page, corresponding to attributes of the letters on the other side. In particular, the extremities stuck out, the legs of the “d”s and the “p”s, and, above all, the little legs of the “n”s and of the “m”s; for example, behind the title, “Annunciation,” the eight legs of the four “n”s could be clearly seen. They stuck out like the whiskers of a badly shaved beard, and it seemed to Pasquale that they even vibrated slightly.
It was time to go to the office, and Pasquale was perplexed. He didn’t know where to put the poem. He realized that, for some reason, perhaps precisely because of its uniqueness, because of the life that openly animated it, the poem was trying to escape, to get away from him. He decided to observe it from close up: never mind the office—for once he would be late. Under the magnifying glass he could see that some of the attributes of the letters were surrounded by a thin, clear inlay, in the form of a narrow, elongated U, and were folded back, toward the other side of the paper, in such a way that, if you placed the pi
ece of paper on the surface of the desk, it remained elevated a millimeter or two: he bent down to look, and he could distinctly see the light between the page and the desktop.
And he saw something more: as he watched, the sheet of paper moved in the direction of the title, away from him. It advanced a few millimeters a second, with a slow but uniform and assured motion. He turned it around, so that the title faced away from him; after a few seconds the page took up its march, this time in reverse, that is, toward the opposite edge of the desk.
By now it was getting late; Pasquale had an important appointment at nine-thirty, and he could delay no longer. He went to the storage closet, found a strip of plywood, got the paste, and pasted the wood on top of the piece of paper: “Annunciation” was his work, in the end—his thing, his property. It remained to be seen who was stronger. He went to the office in a rage, and was unable to calm down even in the course of the delicate negotiations that he was in charge of, so that he conducted them in a rude and clumsy manner, and ended up with a deal that was decidedly mediocre, which, naturally, only increased his rage and ill humor. He felt like a race horse yoked to a mill wheel: after two days of walking in a circle are you still a race horse? Do you still have the desire to run, to be first at the finish line? No, you have a desire for silence, rest, and the stable. Luckily at home, at the stable, the poem awaited him. It would no longer escape: how could it?