The Magic Paint
Page 1
‘He was blamed for endless disasters, from failed exams to a bridge collapse, an avalanche, even a shipwreck: all due, in the stupid opinion of, first, his fellow-students and, later, his colleagues, to the penetrating power of his evil eye …’
PRIMO LEVI
Born 31 July 1919, Turin
Died 11 April 1987, Turin
‘The Death of Marinese’ (1949), ‘Censorship in Bitinia’ (1961), ‘Knall’ (1968–70), ‘The Magic Paint’ (1973), ‘Gladiators’ (1976), ‘The Fugitive’ (1979), ‘Bureau of Vital Statistics’ (1981) and ‘Buffet Dinner’ (1977) first published in English in book form in A Tranquil Star, 2007.
ALSO PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN BOOKS
The Periodic Table • Moments of Reprieve • If Not Now, When? • A Tranquil Star
PRIMO LEVI
The Magic Paint
TRANSLATED BY ANN GOLDSTEIN,
ALESSANDRA BASTAGLI AND
JENNY MCPHEE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Selected from A Tranquil Star published in Penguin Classics 2007
This selection published in Penguin Classics 2011
Copyright © W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007
Translation copyright © Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli, 2007
‘Censorship in Bitinia’ translation copyright © Jenny McPhee, 2007
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-197108-7
Contents
The Magic Paint
The Death of Marinese
Censorship in Bitinia
Knall
Gladiators
The Fugitive
Bureau of Vital Statistics
Buffet Dinner
The Magic Paint
For many years now I have been engaged in the manufacture of paints and, more precisely, their formulation: from this art I earn my sustenance and support my family. It’s an ancient and noble art: the earliest reference appears in Genesis 6:14, where it is related how, in obedience to an exact specification on the part of the Almighty, Noah (probably using a brush) covered the Ark, inside and out, with pitch. But it’s also a subtly fraudulent art, which tends to hide the substratum, endowing it with the color and the appearance of what it is not: in this it is related to the arts of makeup and costume, which are equally equivocal and equally ancient (Isaiah 3:16 ff).
The most varied demands are constantly being made on those who practice this profession of ours: paints that do not conduct electricity and paints that do, paints that transmit heat or reflect it, that keep mollusks from adhering to hulls, that absorb sound, or that can be removed from a surface like a peel from a banana. People require paints that keep feet from slipping, as for airport steps, and others as slippery as possible, as for the bottoms of skis. We are therefore a versatile people, with vast experience, who are accustomed to both success and the lack of it, and are difficult to surprise.
Nonetheless, we were surprised by a request that came from our agent in Naples, Signor Amato Di Prima: he was pleased to inform us that an important client in his area had experimented with a paint that provided protection from misfortune, and would profitably replace horn amulets, hunchbacks, four-leaf clovers, and charms in general. It had not been possible to glean other information, except for the price, which was very high; he had, however, managed to obtain a sample, which he had already sent by mail. Given the exceptional interest of the product, he urgently beseeched us to devote the greatest attention to the problem, declared his faith in a quick response, and extended his most sincere greetings.
This business, of the miraculous sample that arrives in the mail, along with an urgent prayer to devote et cetera (that is, without resorting to euphemism, to copy it), is part of our work, and constitutes perhaps its most obscure aspect. We would like to do things our own way: make our own choice, of a refined and elegant problem, take off on the hunt, sight the solution, pursue it, corner it, spear it, strip it of everything inessential, make it in the laboratory, then manufacture it on a small scale, and finally go into full production and get money and glory from it. But that almost never happens. There are many of our kind in this world, and our colleagues and rivals in Italy, in America, in Australia, in Japan are not exactly dozing. We are awash in samples, and we would happily yield to the temptation to throw them away or return them to the sender, were it not for the consideration that our own products suffer the same fate, becoming, in their turn, marvelous, being shrewdly seized and smuggled out by the agents of our competitors, scrutinized, analyzed, and copied: some badly, others well – by the addition, that is, of a particle of originality and genius. Thus begins an endless network of espionage and cross-fertilization, which, illuminated by solitary creative flashes, constitutes the foundation of technological progress. In short, the samples of the competition cannot be thrown out with the dregs: one must see what’s there, even if the professional conscience puts up a struggle.
The paint that came from Naples, at first glance, did not display any special property: appearance, odor, drying time were those of a common clear acrylic enamel, and the whole business stank of a hoax. I telephoned Di Prima, who was indignant: he was not the type to send samples around just for fun, and that one in particular had cost him time and trouble – the product was extremely interesting and in his market he was having incredible success. Technical documentation? It didn’t exist, there was no need for it, the effectiveness of the product spoke for itself. A fishing boat had been coming back with empty nets for three months – they had painted its hull and ever since it had been netting spectacular catches. A typographer had mixed the paint with printing ink: the ink didn’t go as far, but the typographical errors had disappeared. If somehow we were unable to use it, we should tell him immediately; otherwise, we should get busy with it. The price was 7000 lire a kilo, which seemed to him a good profit margin, and he would undertake to sell at least twenty tons a month.
I talked about it with Chiovatero, who is a serious and capable fellow. At first he turned up his nose, then he thought about it, and proposed starting simply; that is, trying the paint on cultures of E. coli bacteria. What did he expect? That the cultures would multiply more than the controls or less? Chiovatero was annoyed, and told me that it was not his habit to put the cart before the horse (implying, by this, that it was my habit, which, for
goodness’ sake, is absolutely not true), that it remained to be seen, that you had to start somewhere, and that ‘the load adjusts along the way.’ He obtained the cultures, painted the outside of the test tubes, and we waited. None of us were biologists, but no biologist was needed to interpret the results. After five days, the effect was obvious: the protected cultures had developed in size at three times the rate of the controls, which we had coated with an acrylic ostensibly similar to the one from Naples. We had to conclude that this paint ‘brought good luck’ even to microorganisms: an irritating conclusion, but, as has been authoritatively stated, facts are obstinate. A more thorough analysis was required, but everyone knows what a complex and uncertain enterprise the examination of a paint is: almost like that of a living organism. All those fantastic modern devices – the infrared spectrum, the gas chromatograph, NMR – are helpful to a point but leave many angles unexplored; and if you aren’t lucky enough to have a metal as the key component, all you can do is use your nose, like a dog. But in this case there was a metal: an unusual metal, so unusual that no one in the laboratory knew from experience how it reacted. We had to burn almost the entire sample to obtain a quantity sufficient for identification; but finally we did and it was duly confirmed, with all its characteristic reactions. It was tantalum, a very respectable metal, with a name full of meaning, never before seen in paint, and thus surely responsible for the property that we were looking for. As always happens once you’ve made a finding and confirmed it, the presence of tantalum, and its specific function, began to seem gradually less strange, and, finally, natural, just as no one is surprised anymore by X rays. Molino pointed out that the most acid-resistant reaction vessels are made with tantalum; Palazzoni recalled that tantalum is used to make surgical prostheses that absolutely can’t be rejected; and so we concluded that it is an obviously beneficial metal, and that we had been foolish to waste so much time on analyses. With a little common sense we should have been able to think of it right off.
In a few days we got a soap of tantalum, put it in some paint, and tried it on the E. coli: it worked, the goal was achieved.
We, in turn, sent a large sample of paint to Di Prima, so that he could distribute it to his customers and give us an opinion. The opinion arrived two months later, and was highly favorable: he, Di Prima, had painted himself from head to foot, and then had spent four hours under a ladder, on a Friday, in the company of thirteen black cats, without coming to any harm. Chiovatero also tried it, albeit reluctantly (not because he was superstitious; rather because he was skeptical), and he had to admit that a certain effect was undeniable: in the two or three days after the treatment, all the traffic lights he came to were green, he never got a busy signal on the telephone, his girlfriend made up with him, and he even won a modest prize in the lottery. Naturally it all came to an end after he took a bath.
As for me, I thought of Michele Fassio. Fassio is an old schoolmate of mine to whom mysterious powers had been attributed since adolescence. He was blamed for endless disasters, from failed exams to a bridge collapse, an avalanche, even a shipwreck: all due, in the stupid opinion of, first, his fellow-students and, later, his colleagues, to the penetrating power of his evil eye. I, of course, didn’t believe this nonsense, but I confess that I often tried to avoid running into him. Fassio, poor fellow, ended up believing it himself, in a way; he never married and he led an unhappy life, of privation and solitude. I wrote to him, with all the delicacy I was capable of, that I didn’t believe in this type of foolishness, but that he might; that, as a result, I couldn’t believe in the remedy I was proposing, but it seemed to me that I owed it to him to mention it just the same, if only to help him recover his self-confidence. Fassio answered that he would come as soon as possible: he was willing to submit to a trial. Before proceeding with the treatment, and at the urging of Chiovatero, we tried to understand in some degree Fassio’s powers. We managed to ascertain that in fact his gaze (and only his gaze) possessed a specific effect, noticeable under certain conditions even in the case of inanimate objects. We asked him to stare for several minutes at a particular point on a steel plate, which we then placed in the salt-spray chamber; after a few hours we noted that the point Fassio had stared at was clearly more corroded than the rest of the surface. A polyethylene thread, stretched tight, consistently broke at the point where Fassio’s gaze hit it. To our satisfaction, both results disappeared when we coated the plate and the thread with our paint, or when we interposed between subject and object a glass screen previously coated with it. We were further able to ascertain that only Fassio’s right eye was active: the left, like both of my eyes, and like Chiovatero’s, exercised no measurable action. With the means at our disposal, we were unable to carry out a spectral analysis of the Fassio effect except in a crude way; it is probable, however, that the radiation under examination has a maximum in the blue, with a wavelength of around 425 Nm. Our exhaustive paper on the subject will be out in a few months. Now, it is known that many of those who wish to cast the evil eye wear blue-tinted lenses, and not dark ones, and this can’t be a coincidence but must, rather, be the fruit of long experience absorbed perhaps unconsciously and then handed down from generation to generation, as in the case of certain folk remedies.
Considering the tragic conclusion of our tests, I have to explain that the idea of painting Fassio’s eyeglasses (they were ordinary reading glasses) was neither mine nor Chiovatero’s but came from Fassio himself, who insisted that the experiment be made right away, without even an hour’s delay: he was very impatient to be released from his grim power. We painted these glasses. After thirty minutes the paint was dry: Fassio put them on and immediately fell lifeless at our feet. The doctor, who arrived soon afterward, tried in vain to revive him, and spoke vaguely of embolism, heart attack, and thrombosis: he couldn’t have known that the lens over Fassio’s right eye, concave on the inside, must have instantaneously reflected that thing which he could no longer transmit, and must have concentrated it, as if with a burning glass, on a point situated in some unspecified but important corner of the right cerebral hemisphere of the unhappy and blameless victim of our experiments.
The Death of Marinese
No one was killed. Sante and Marinese were the only ones captured by the Germans. It made no sense, it was almost incredible, that, of us all, the two of them had been taken. But the older men in the group knew that it is always those who are captured of whom it is later said ‘Who would have guessed!’ And they also knew why.
When the two were taken away, the sky was gray and the road was covered with snow that had hardened into ice. The truck barreled downhill with the engine off: the chains on the wheels rattled around the bends and clanked rhythmically along the straight stretches. About thirty Germans were standing in the back of the truck, packed shoulder to shoulder, some of them hanging onto the frame of the canvas roof. The tarp had come loose, so that a thin sleet struck their faces and came to rest on the fabric of their uniforms.
Sante was wounded; he sat mute and still on the rear bench of the truck, while Marinese was at the front, standing, with his back against the driver’s cab. Trembling with fever, Marinese felt himself slowly overcome by a growing drowsiness, so that, taking advantage of a bump in the road, he slid to the wet floor and remained sitting there, an inanimate object amid the muddy boots, his bare head wedged between the bony hips of two soldiers.
The pursuit had been long and exhausting, and he wanted nothing more than this – for it all to be over, to remain sitting, to have no more decisions to make, to surrender to the heat of his fever and rest. He knew that he would be interrogated, probably beaten, and then almost certainly killed, and he knew, too, that soon all this would regain importance. But for now he felt strangely protected by a burning shield of fever and sleep, as if it were an insulation of cotton wool that separated him from the rest of the world, from the facts of the day and the things to come. Vacation, he thought, almost in a dream: how long had it been since he had had a v
acation?
With his eyes closed, he felt as if he were submerged in a long, narrow tunnel that had been dug into a soft, tepid substance, crimson like the light that penetrates closed eyelids. His feet and his head were cold, and he seemed to be moving with difficulty, as if pushed, toward the exit, which was far away, but which he would finally, inexorably, reach. The exit was barred by a swirl of snow and a tangle of hard, frozen metal.
For Marinese a long time passed in this way, during which he made no attempt to break out of his cradle of fever. The truck reached the plain, and the Germans stopped to take off the chains. Then the drive resumed – faster, the jolts more violent.
Perhaps nothing would have happened if the Germans hadn’t suddenly begun to sing. A voice, starting up in the cab, reached them muffled and indistinct. But once the first verse was over, a second burst forth like thunder from every chest, drowning out the rumble of the engine and the rush of the wind – even Marinese’s fever was overwhelmed. He found himself again able to act and therefore, in some way, obliged to take action – which was how it was for all of us at that time.
The song was long; every verse ended abruptly, in the German manner, and the soldiers stamped twice on the wooden floor with their hobnailed boots. Marinese had opened his eyes and raised his head again, and every time they stamped their feet he perceived a light touch on his shoulder: he soon realized that it was the handle of a grenade, tucked diagonally into the belt of the man on his left. In that moment the idea took hold.
It’s probable that, at least in the beginning, he hadn’t considered using the grenade to save himself, to open up a path with his own hands, even though, as we shall see, his final actions cannot be interpreted otherwise. It’s more likely that he was moved by hatred and rancor (feelings that had become habitual to us by then, almost an elementary reflex) toward those blond men in green, well nourished and well armed, who for many months had forced us to live in hiding. Perhaps more than that, he wanted to take revenge and yet at the same time cleanse himself of the shame of a final escape – the shame that weighed and still weighs on our souls. In fact, Marinese had a gentle soul, and none of us thought him capable of killing, except in self-defense, revenge, or anger.