by Primo Levi
The elevator finally arrived, and it was already full of employees coming from the basement and the sub-basement. Arrigo made his way in energetically but without shoving. The elevator rose, stopping with a jerk at every floor, and people got on and off, greeting each other distractedly. On the ninth floor, Arrigo himself got off and punched his time card. For two years now there had been a time clock on every floor. It had been a sensible innovation. Previously, there had been only one, on the ground floor, which always caused a terrible bottleneck, partly because there was little discipline, and people tried to push in front of you. In the office, people were already at their desks. Arrigo sat at his post, pulled the color photograph of his wife and their little girl out of the top drawer, and from the second drawer took writing supplies and the index cards left over from the previous day. This was the result of one of the boss’s obsessions: at the end of the day, all the desks had to be cleared. Who knows why, certainly not for cleaning, because the desks were cleaned only two or three times a year: if you didn’t want dust on your desk, you had to clean it yourself.
Arrigo’s job was administrative in nature. Every day, he received a packet of index cards from the floor above. Each card contained the name of a human being and the date of his or her death; Arrigo had only to specify the cause. He would often get angry, for various reasons. The expiration date wasn’t always the same: it could be years ahead, or months or days, for no apparent reason, and he felt that this was an injustice. Nor did it seem reasonable that there were no rules regarding age: some days he was handed hundreds of cards for newborns. Then, the boss complained if Arrigo kept to generic formulas: the man must be a sadist or a fan of crime news. It wasn’t enough for Arrigo to write “accident.” He wanted all the details and was never satisfied. He always demanded a correlation between the data on the cards and the cause of death, and this often embarrassed Arrigo.
The first index card of the day wasn’t a problem. It bore the name of Yen Ch’ing-Hsu, fifty-eight years old, single, born in Han Tou, where he still resided, dockworker, no illnesses to speak of. Arrigo had no idea where Han Tou was: if he were to check the atlas every time, he’d never get anything done. Yen still had thirty-six days to live and Arrigo imagined him against the backdrop of an exotic sunset, sitting on a roll of cable before a turbid sea the color of a ripe banana; he was exhausted by his daily work, sad and alone. A man like this doesn’t fear death and doesn’t seek it, either, but he may act carelessly. Arrigo thought about it for a moment and then had him fall from a scaffold: he wouldn’t suffer much.
PEDRO GONZALES de Eslava didn’t give him much trouble, either. In spite of the pompous name, he must have been a poor devil—he drank, had been involved in many fights among illegal immigrants, was forty-six years old, and had worked on half a dozen farms in the far south. He had five more months and would leave behind four children, who, however, lived with his wife and not with him. The wife was Puerto Rican, like Pedro; she was young, and she also worked. Arrigo consulted the medical encyclopedia and came up with hepatitis.
He was studying the third index card when Fernanda called him on the phone. She had seen in the paper that Metropolis was playing at some art house cinema; why not go see it tonight? Arrigo didn’t like being interrupted at work and was noncommittal. The third index card was fairly obvious; everyone knows what happens to a man who races motorbikes. No one was forcing him to do it; he had only to choose a different profession—in cases like this, there’s no need to have scruples. But he felt obliged to provide the details of the fatal accident and the hospital record.
He had no sympathy for Pierre-Jean La Motte. He was born in Lyons, but at the age of thirty-two he was already a full professor of political science at the University of Rio: evidently he was a man with connections. He had only twenty days to live, though he was in excellent health and played tennis every morning. Arrigo was racking his brains for an appropriate cause of death for La Motte when Lorusso came by and invited him to go for coffee. Arrigo went down with him to the vending machines on the fourth floor. Lorusso was dull. He had a son who wasn’t doing well in math, and Arrigo thought that, with a father like that, it would be surprising if the son were a prodigy. Then Lorusso started to complain about his wife, who spent too much money, and about the heat that didn’t work.
The coffee machine didn’t work well, either. Lorusso banged on it and at long last it spat out two cups of coffee, pale and insipid but boiling hot. As Arrigo forced himself to gulp down the coffee, scalding his throat, Lorusso talked on about the paycheck that always came late and the deductions that were always too high. Finally, back at his desk, Arrigo squashed Pierre-Jean like a worm: brain hemorrhage—that’ll teach him.
At around ten, Arrigo was finished with the cards left over from the previous day, but the office boy had already put the new cards on his desk. The first was all crumpled, maybe by the dating machine: he could make out only that it was for a person of the female sex, by the name of Adelia. Arrigo put the card aside, so much the better for Adelia: it’s always useful to gain time. At any rate, he might decide to write a report: more and more often it happens that the first card of each packet is damaged… a regrettable occurrence… will maintenance please take care of it… sincerely yours. Instead he paused over the next card. Karen Kvarna, aged eight, born in Slidre, a mountain village in the heart of Norway. Karen, only child, illnesses N. A. (not available), student, was to die the following day. Arrigo was stuck. He imagined her flaxen-haired, kind, cheerful, serene, against the backdrop of solemn, immaculate mountains: if she had to die, then it would be without him, he would not take part in this. He grabbed the card and knocked on the boss’s door: he heard a grumbled “Come in,” entered, and said that it was a disgrace. That the work was poorly organized, that the purchase of the randomizer had been an idiotic idea, that the cards were full of mistakes—for example, this one right here. That they were all sheep and careerists and no one dared protest and no one took the job seriously. That he had had enough, that he couldn’t care less about promotion, and that he wanted to be transferred.
The boss must have been expecting a scene from Arrigo for quite a while, because he gave no sign of surprise or indignation. Perhaps he was even glad to be rid of a programmer with such an unstable character. He told Arrigo to stop by again the next day. And the next day he gave him his transfer orders and made him sign two or three explanatory documents. Thus Arrigo found himself demoted from grade 7 to grade 6 and transferred to a small office in the attic of the building, in charge of determining the shape of the noses of newborns.
The Girl in the Book
Umberto was not so young anymore. He had some trouble with his lungs, and the doctor had sent him to the seaside for a month. It was the month of October, and Umberto hated the sea; he hated the in-between seasons, solitude, and, above all, illness. So he was in a vile mood, and it seemed to him that he would never get better, that in fact his illness would get worse, and he would die there, on sick leave, among people he didn’t know—die of dampness, of boredom, and of the sea air. But he was an obedient man, who stayed where he was put; if he had been sent to the seaside, it was a sign that he ought to be there. Every so often he took the train and returned to town to spend the night with Eva, but he left again the next morning, sadly, because it seemed to him that Eva was doing fine without him.
When one is used to working, it’s painful to waste time, and in order not to waste too much time, or not to feel that he was wasting it, Umberto took long walks beside the sea and through the hills. Taking a walk is not like taking a trip: on a trip you make grand discoveries; on a walk you may make many discoveries, but they are small. Tiny green crabs wandered about the cliffs, not walking backward, as they are said to, but, rather, sideways, in a comical manner: endearing, but Umberto would rather have cut off a finger than touch one. Abandoned mill wheels, around them still visible the circular track where the mule had walked, who knows how many years earlier and for how many
years. Two extraordinary inns, where you could get wine and homemade pasta that you wouldn’t dream of in Milan. But the most curious discovery was La Bomboniera.
La Bomboniera was a tiny white square two-story villa, perched on a rise. It did not have a front, or, rather, it had four, all identical, each with a door of polished wood and with intricate decorations and plasterwork in an Art Deco style. The four corners were topped by graceful little turrets that had the shape of tulips but in fact were bathrooms; this was indicated by four ceramic pipes that, crudely set into the walls, descended to the ground. The windows of the villa were always darkened by black-painted shutters, and the plate on the gate bore an impossible name: Harmonika Grinkiavicius. The plate itself was odd, too: the exotic name was surrounded by a triple ellipse, on which, from the outside in, were the colors yellow, green, and red in sequence. It was the only note of color against the white plaster of the villa.
Almost without realizing it, Umberto got in the habit of passing La Bomboniera every day. It wasn’t uninhabited: an old woman lived there, occasionally visible, who was neat and spare, with hair as white as the villa and a face slightly too red. Signora Grinkiavicius went out once a day, always at the same time, whatever the weather, but for just a few minutes. She had well-made but old-fashioned clothes, an umbrella, a wide-brimmed straw hat with a black velvet ribbon that tied under her chin. She walked with small, decisive steps, as if she were in a hurry to reach some destination, yet she always took the same route, returned home, and immediately closed the door behind her. She never appeared at the windows.
From the shopkeepers he couldn’t get much information. Yes, the woman was a foreigner, a widow for at least thirty years, educated, wealthy. She did many charitable deeds. She smiled at everyone but spoke to no one. She went to Mass on Sunday morning. She had never been to the doctor or even to the pharmacist. Her husband had bought the villa, but no one remembered anything about him anymore—maybe he hadn’t even really been her husband. Umberto was curious, and, besides, he suffered from his solitude; one day he got up his courage and stopped the woman, on the pretext of asking her where a certain street was. She answered in a few words, precisely and in good Italian. After that Umberto couldn’t think up any other ploys with which to start a conversation. He confined himself to plotting so as to run into her on his morning round and greet her; she responded with a smile. Umberto recovered and returned to Milan.
Umberto liked to read. He came across a book that appealed to him: it was the memoir of an English soldier who had fought against the Italians in Cyrenaica, had been taken prisoner and interned near Pavia, but then had escaped and joined the partisans. He hadn’t been a great partisan; he liked girls better than guns, and described several slight, happy love affairs, and a longer, stormier one, with a Lithuanian refugee. In this episode the Englishman’s story proceeded from a walk to a trot and then a gallop: against the tense, dark background of the German occupation and the Allied bombardments, he depicted wild bicycle flights on shadowy roads, in defiance of patrols and curfew, and daring adventures in the underground of smuggling and the black market. A memorable portrait of the Lithuanian emerged: tireless and indestructible, a good shot when necessary, extraordinarily vital: a Diana-Minerva grafted onto the opulent body (described in detail by the Englishman) of a Juno. The two possessed souls got lost and found in the valleys of the Apennines, impatient with discipline, today partisans, tomorrow deserters, then partisans again; they consumed dinners in huts and caves at dizzying heights, followed by heroic nights. The Lithuanian was depicted as a lover without equal, impetuous and refined, never distracted: polyglot and polyvalent, she knew how to love in her own language, in Italian, in English, in Russian, in German, and in at least two others, which the author skipped over. This torrential love affair rolled on for thirty pages before the Englishman troubled to reveal the name of his Amazon: on the thirty-first he remembered, and the name was Harmonika.
Umberto started and closed the book. The name could be a random coincidence, but that odd surname and the colored circles that surrounded it returned to the screen of his memory; the colors must have a meaning. In vain he looked through the house for some reference book. The next evening, he went to the library, and found what he wanted to know: the flag of the short-lived Lithuanian Republic, between the two world wars, was yellow, green, and red. Not only that: under “Lithuania” in the encyclopedia his eye fell on Basanavicius, the founder of the first newspaper in the Lithuanian language; on Slezavicius, Prime Minister in the twenties; on Stanevicius, an eighteenth-century poet* (where does one not find an eighteenth-century poet!); and on Neveravicius the novelist. Was it possible? Possible that the taciturn benefactress and the bacchant were the same person?
From that moment on Umberto could think only of finding a pretext for returning to the seaside, going so far as to hope for a mild recurrence of his pleurisy; he couldn’t come up with anything plausible, but he made up some nonsense for Eva and went off one Saturday, taking the book. He felt cheerful and intent, like a hound on the trail of a fox; he marched from the station to La Bomboniera at a military clip, rang the bell without hesitation, and immediately launched into his subject, with a half lie fabricated on the spot. He lived in Milan but was from Val Tidone: he had heard that the signora knew that area, he felt nostalgic, and would love to talk with her about it. Signora Grinkavicius looked better when viewed close up; her face was wrinkled but fresh and well modeled, and a laughing light shone in her eyes. Yes, she had been there, many years before; but he, where had he heard all that?
Umberto counterattacked: “You are Lithuanian, right?”
“I was born there. It’s an unhappy land. But I studied elsewhere, in different places.”
“So you speak many languages?”
The woman was now visibly on the defensive, and she turned obstinate:“I asked you a question, and you answer me with another question. I want to know where you heard about my affairs. That’s legitimate, don’t you think?”
“From this book,” Umberto answered.
“Give it to me!”
Umberto attempted a parry and retreat, but with little conviction. He realized at that moment that the true purpose of his return to the coast was precisely that: to see Harmonika in the act of reading the adventures of Harmonika. The woman grabbed the volume, sat down beside the window, and became engrossed in her reading. Umberto, although he had not been asked, sat down, too. He saw on Harmonika’s face—still youthful but red because of all the burst capillaries—the movements of the soul pass like the shadows of clouds on a plain swept by the wind: regret, amusement, irritation, and other, less decipherable sensations. She read for half an hour, then without speaking held the book out to him.
“Is it true?” Umberto asked. The woman was silent for so long that Umberto feared she was offended; but she smiled and answered:
“Look at me. More than thirty years have passed, and I am different. Memory, too, is different. It’s not true that memories stay fixed in the mind, frozen: they, too, go astray, like the body. Yes, I remember a time when I was different. I would like to be the girl in the book: I would be happy also just to have been her, but I never was. It wasn’t I who attracted the Englishman. I remember that I was malleable, like clay in his hands. My love affairs… that’s what interests you, right? Well, they are fine where they are: in my memory, faded, withered, with a trace of perfume, like a collection of dried flowers. In yours they have become shiny and bright like plastic toys. I don’t know which are more beautiful. You choose. Come, take your book and go back to Milan.”
Buffet Dinner
Immediately upon entering through the front door, Innaminka felt uneasy and regretted having accepted the invitation. There was a butler of sorts, with a green sash around his belly, who took people’s coats. Innaminka, whose coat was part of his body, shivered and felt dizzy at the thought that someone might take it from him. But there was more: behind the butler rose a great spiral staircase of bea
utiful polished black wood, broad and majestic but unmanageable. Unmanageable for him, that is. The other guests mounted it with ease, while he didn’t dare even try. He kept turning in circles, embarrassed, waiting till no one was looking. On level ground he was good, but the length of his hindquarters alone was an obstacle—his feet were more or less twice as long as the stairs were deep. He waited a little more, sniffing at the walls and trying to appear indifferent, and once everyone else was upstairs he endeavored to go up as well.
He tried different methods: grabbing the banister with his front legs, or bending over and trying to climb on all fours, even employing his tail—but actually it was the tail, more than anything else, that got in the way. He ended up climbing clumsily sideways, placing his feet lengthwise on each step, his tail folded ignobly over his back. It took him a full ten minutes.
Upstairs was a long, narrow room, with a table placed crosswise; there were paintings on the walls, some depicting human or animal forms, others depicting nothing. Along the walls, and scattered around the floor, were bronze or marble figures that Innaminka found pleasing and vaguely familiar. The room was already crowded, but more people kept arriving: the men were in evening attire, the women wore long black dresses and were bedecked with jewels, their eyelids painted green or blue. Innaminka hesitated for a moment and then, sidling along the wall and avoiding abrupt movements, took refuge in a corner. The other guests looked at him with mild curiosity. In passing, he overheard a few casual comments: “He’s pretty, isn’t he?” “… no, he doesn’t have one, dear. Can’t you see he’s a male?” “I heard on TV that they are almost extinct.… No, not for the fur, which isn’t worth much anyway. It’s because they destroy the crops.”