by Primo Levi
Automation is a young art, and naturally its practitioners are young men. But the older men, too, have often proved invaluable, and not only in the more traditional professions, working as mariners and stewards: their experience, attained in the course of the years in a wide variety of jobs, has shown itself to be extremely useful in dealing with unforeseen circumstances; indeed, it would be naïve to expect that in such a complex system, necessarily working in such unusual conditions, everything should function according to plan and without accidents. I was told about two episodes, two unforeseen circumstances, in fact, that prove the importance even now of experience and inventive imagination when it becomes necessary to solve a new problem quickly, and “with the resources on board.”
The foundation of the Castoro’s work is welding. It is basically a welding shop some hundred and fifty meters (five hundred feet) long; distributed along the length of the pipe, as it gradually advances, are eight welding stations, and the joints of the sections of pipe are welded, in part automatically and in part by hand, according to extremely sophisticated welding techniques. Prior to the “launch,” and once the welding is complete, a radiographic quality check must be performed: if the weld is flawless the pipe continues to advance; if any defects are found, they are quickly repaired. The X-ray generator is housed in a device that runs on a wheeled undercarriage inside the pipe, or perhaps it is more accurate to say: that remains stationary with respect to the ship, while the pipe moves around it; this device is held in place by a cable, and because of its elongated shape it has been dubbed “the piglet.” At one point during pipe laying, for reasons that remain mysterious, the piglet suddenly disappeared: the cable must have broken, the wheeled undercarriage rolled down the slope of the pipe, and the very costly piece of equipment was now three hundred meters away. This was very bad news: aside from the necessary cessation of pipe laying (I was informed that one minute of work on the Castoro 6 costs 280,000 lire!), the piglet was almost entirely blocking the pipe, and it had to be removed as quickly as possible, at all costs.
The top technicians gathered, and various suggestions were put forth, the most beguiling of which was this: make a phone call to Tunisia, have the Tunisians insert a sphere made of rubber or some other pliable material into the pipe, and then pump compressed air into the pipe behind it, the way that a pneumatic postal system works. The ball would reach the piglet on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea and shoot it out. They were still talking this over when a crew member stepped forward; he was a former fisherman, and it struck him as obvious that the piglet ought to be fished out. His suggestion didn’t seem all that straightforward to implement, but it was simple, quick, and wouldn’t cost more than a few thousand lire; the man was accompanied to the welding shop, where he had a large hook made and ballasted it with a weight. He inserted hook and weight into the mouth of the pipe, and after a few minutes of patient and expert attempts, he hooked the piglet and hauled it out of the pipe.
The second episode was on a cyclopean scale. As mentioned above, the positioning and the forward motion of the Castoro 6 rely upon a complex system of anchorage. The twelve gigantic anchors are deployed in a radial arrangement around the ship, and normally the ship “walks” on its twelve anchors: as it moves, dragging itself along the cables, it eventually reaches a point that is too close to the cables nearest Sicily, and, when it does, those anchors are raised and then dropped again farther forward, while the anchors on the Tunisian side are moved closer to the ship. The timing, angles, and distances of the repositioning of the anchors are all dictated by the on-board computer, and the operation is performed by tugboats that follow and circle the Castoro like dutiful butlers. The mooring cables (steel, three-inch diameter) are 2700 meters long. Ultimately, the Castoro, along with its anchors marked by the corresponding buoys, the tugboats, and the supply boats* that run back and forth from dry land, bringing the vessel pipes, fuel, and other provisions, covers many square kilometers of water.
On a night of intense bad weather, one of the buoys just mentioned disappeared: it thus became impossible to locate with any precision the anchor that was beneath it, and hence to move it when its turn came. Apparently, the buoy had been damaged in some way: it was an unsinkable type of buoy, but its buoyancy had clearly been compromised, and the weight of the cable connecting it to the anchor held it somewhere in the middle of the water column, at a point unknown in terms of both location and depth. This, too, was a fishing problem, but a problem of blind fishing; also, the anchor down on the seabed weighed twenty-five metric tons, plus at least another ten metric tons of chain. The problem was solved the way a blind man would have solved it—that is, by groping. One of the tugboats rigged a large hook and fastened it under the heavy steel cable, still visible for a few meters, running from the Castoro all the way down to the anchor; then the tugboat started moving through terrifying seas, letting the hook slide along the cable, keeping the hook cable under pressure. The hook descended on a slant, following the catenary of the cable for almost two kilometers, until it reached the massive links of the chain connecting the cable to the anchor: it hooked into the first link, and the powerful gantry winch of the tugboat hoisted anchor and chain just high enough to bring the damaged buoy back to the surface.
Now, these are the “poems” to which Pavese alluded when speaking of Melville. They were told to me not on the forecastle (I don’t believe the Castoro 6 even has one) but, rather, at a cafeteria table, over glasses of good wine; and not by unlettered sailors but by Captain Costanzo and the other men of the crew, some young, some less so, cybernetic engineers just entering the working world, machinists proud of every single bolt on their equipment, blue-collar seamen who have rediscovered the age-old virtues of competence put to the test and work well done in this colossal and uncommon undertaking. I hope none of them will be astonished or dismayed at the idea that their stories struck me as poetic. In fact, in their words, restrained, courteous, precise, and unemphatic, I heard an echo of the voice of another navigator and storyteller whose long-ago adventures have since become deathless poetry: a sailor who plied strange seas for ten years, and whose prime virtues, far greater than courage, which he certainly never lacked, were patience and resourceful ingenuity.
To Invent an Animal
To invent out of nothing an animal that could exist (by which I mean that it could exist physiologically, grow, feed itself, survive in the environment and withstand predators, reproduce) is virtually an impossible task. It is a design challenge that far outstrips our mental capacities, and even the capacities of our most powerful computers: we still know too little about existing living mechanisms to dare create ones of our own, even if only on paper. In other words, evolution has always shown itself to be much more intelligent than the brightest evolutionists. Every passing year confirms that the mechanisms of life are no exception to the laws of chemistry and physics, but the gap that separates us from ultimate comprehension of these vital phenomena also keeps widening. It’s not that problems are never solved, questions never answered; it’s that each problem solved only spawns dozens of new ones, and the process gives no sign of coming to an end.
Nonetheless, our experience of three thousand years of literature, painting, and sculpture shows us that even to invent an animal out of nothing on a whim, an animal whose possible existence is of no interest to us whatsoever, but whose image can in some way tickle our sensibility, is no easy task. All the animals invented by mythology, in every land and in every age, are potpourris, rhapsodies of traits and limbs of well-known animals. The most famous and most composite creation was the chimera, a hybrid of a goat, a serpent, and a lion, so fanciful that its name is equivalent today to a “vain dream”; but it has also been adopted by biologists to describe the monsters that they create, or dream of creating, in their laboratories by means of transplants among different animals.
Centaurs are fascinating creatures, bearers of manifold and archaic symbols, but Lucretius had already realized that they were ph
ysical impossibilities, and had attempted to prove it with a peculiar argument: at the age of three, a horse is in the prime of its strength and vigor, while man is a child, and “oft even then he gropes in sleep / After the milky nipples of the breasts, An infant still,” only just weaned from mother’s milk; how could two natures coexist that “non florescunt pariter” (“ne’er / At one same time they reach their flower of age”), and for that matter “never burn with one same lust of love”?
In more recent times, Philip José Farmer, in a fine science fiction novel, pointed out the respiratory problems of classical centaurs, and solved the difficulty by providing them with “in place of the human lungs a bellowslike organ which drove the air through a throatlike opening.” Others have insisted on the problem of their nourishment, pointing out that a small human mouth would be inadequate to allow the passage of the quantity of forage needed to feed the equine part.
In other words, we might think that the human imagination, even when not confronted with issues of verisimilitude and biological feasibility, still hesitates to strike out in new directions, and prefers to reassemble familiar constituent elements. If we reread the wonderful Book of Imaginary Beings, by Borges, we fail to find a single animal that is truly original in terms of design; there isn’t one that comes even close to the incredibly innovative solutions that can be found in certain parasites, such as the tick, the flea, and the tapeworm.
In a middle school not far from Turin, an experiment was attempted: the children were asked to describe an invented animal, and the results confirmed this limit to our imagination. They basically described mythological animals, that is, composites: conglomerations of different limbs, such as Pegasus and the Minotaur, or excursions into the colossal and the supernumerary reminiscent of the Leviathan from the book of Job, Rabelais’s giants, both human and beastly, hundred-eyed Argus, eight-armed Shiva, three-headed Cerberus, and the ENI oil company symbol, the six-legged dog. But within those limitations audacious, cheerful, and alarming inspirations bloomed.
The Executioner lives underground because it is afraid of the horrible animals described by the other children, and it sleeps twenty-two hours out of every twenty-four. It lives on nothing but human flesh and fruit trees, and when it runs it can reach a speed of 200 kilometers per hour. The female is extremely fertile: “She has babies eight or nine times a month, and she always gives birth to fifty or sixty little executioners,” but she gives birth in her underground den for the safety reasons mentioned above.
The Lymphodinosaur also lives in the cellar, in a box filled with paper and straw. The author doesn’t state its dimensions, which must not be particularly large, but her description of an encounter with the animal stirs a subtle shiver of horror: the little girl went down into the cellar a number of times to fetch wine, and she heard strange noises, but upstairs she said nothing, “as usual.” And so she’s alone, in the darkness and filth of the cellar, a place of ancestral fears, an urban and modern version of the Underworld; and, behold, the beast emerges into the open, and the little girl screams, “because of how ugly it was.” The conclusion hints at a genuine sense of horror: “I don’t ever want to see that animal again.”
The Gigantic-Neck is a composite creature, as were, for that matter, the two preceding creatures (“It has the head of a swordfish . . . and it’s as heavy as a bulldozer dog”), but it differs from them in one surprising feature: “Woodcutters use it to saw firewood.” Even though this is not clearly stated, it must be the product of a technological contamination, because in fact “it has six parts of the neck” (visible in the cursory but precise sketch provided by the author: these are basically six vertebrae) “which break every now and then and so when it goes to the mechanic it spends a lot of money and now it’s poor.”
Then, there’s an animal with an unpronounceable eighteen-syllable name that “has the distinctive characteristic of using its tail to eat, so that the head can ward off danger.” An even more rigorous quest for rationality is shown by the author of the Leptorontibus, which is described with uncommon concern for verisimilitude. It has three eyes, stands 1.80 meters, and “is afraid of everyone.” It has no bones, “and stands erect, with a complicated nervous system.” In this eccentric zoo, it is perhaps the only “economical” species, whose author has done more than merely arouse wonder or horror. “It has just one lung and breathes with a hole that it has in line with its stomach,” but this is no ordinary stomach; as soon as the animal “has finished chewing, it swallows its food, which doesn’t slide down a tube but falls directly into a sort of sack, and that would be its stomach.” The author is also concerned with the embarrassing issue of excretion: “To expel everything it doesn’t need, it uses a hole on the bottom of each foot (it has ten feet in all).” Who, at least once in his life, has not envied the modesty and discretion of the Leptorontibus?
The Mostrumgaricos, on the other hand, is completely overblown. It devours buffalos and elephants: it swoops down to attack them, hurtling headfirst from the trees and “sinking its sharp teeth into the brain of its prey”; it can also breathe underwater; it weighs four thousand tons; the female gives birth to sixty pups every month; its bones are tougher than steel, and “when it falls off a mountain even five thousand meters high, it doesn’t get hurt at all”; it has twelve hearts and sixty ribs, and we might fear it as an invincible and immortal being, except that “it’s afraid of just one sickness, glomatitis, which kills it.” In this final detail, we see the survival of an archetype: there is no ill without a remedy, there is no invulnerability without an Achilles’ heel.
Another animal is described, rather summarily, to tell the truth; it’s not named, but it is quite intelligent and strong. “When it looks and looks again and finds nothing it is capable of rending even a small and innocent animal limb from limb. . . . It has a lovely pelt and ladies buy its fur.” Its death is pervaded by a tragic and solemn dignity: “It can live for a certain number of years and when it knows that it will die that day it starts eating as much as it can, lest it forget the meals it once enjoyed.”
Cocò is surreal, mild, and modest (it has only three eyes and is only twenty centimeters tall). I envy the fun its author must have had describing it. “It eats stones, branches, blossoms, and cats”; it comes from China, but “lives at No. 2 Via Archimede,” and plays with the neighborhood children; on the other hand, “it often lives everywhere in the country, because it changes address every day. . . . Now it’s forty years old and smokes a pipe every five minutes,” but a tragic death lies in wait for it, too: in fact, Cocò “lives to the age of a hundred and then dies running, which is a tradition among these odd animals,” and at this point I cannot resist the temptation to requote Tennyson, translated and cited by Borges, that great painter of strange deaths. The subject is the Kraken, another invented animal, a gigantic squid a mile and a half in length: “Below the thunders of the upper deep; . . . His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep the Kraken sleepeth. . . . There hath he lain for ages and will lie / Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep, / Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; / Then once by man and angels to be seen, / In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die” (Borges, Book of Imaginary Beings).
This array of creatures would be incomplete if we overlooked the Cybercus. Its description starts out in dull tones. It has the usual six legs, though they are as “slender as blades of grass,” the usual square ears, one eye triangular and red, the other eye square and black, but then comes a shock: “It has a two-meter-long tail made of vanilla-cream filling.” From this point, the text takes off, following the inspiration to its extreme logical consequences. The Cybercus “lives in a chilly forest, otherwise, if it stayed out in the sun, it would melt”; “it’s feeble and if it’s hit by an arrow, it springs leaks like anything, plus there’s a legend . . . a herd of these animals ventured out into broad daylight to attack men once, but as soon as they came out they melted.” With a fine conscious comic touch, the author tells us that the Cybercus
lives on mice and chocolate, and closes with a sword thrust: “This animal runs very slowly.”
The Squirrel
Some years back, I happened to introduce a gentleman by the name of Perrone to two rather elderly aunts of mine, who lived in a small provincial town. My aunts instantly translated his surname into Prùn, and for the duration of the conversation they continued to address him, in dialect, as Munssü Prùn; the gentleman in question, as it happens, seemed to accept the thing as natural.
