The Periodic Table

by Primo Levi

  A-issà is the Madonna (simply, that is, “the woman”). Completely cryptic and indecipherable—and that was to be foreseen—is the term Odo, with which, when it was absolutely unavoidable, one alluded to Christ, lowering one’s voice and looking around with circumspection; it is best to speak of Christ as little as possible because the myth of the God-killing people dies hard.

  Many other terms were drawn exactly as is from the ritual and the holy books, which Jews born in the last century read more or less fluently in the original Hebrew, and more often than not understood, at least partially; but, in jargon usage, they tended to deform or arbitrarily enlarge the semantic area. From the root shafòkh, which is equivalent to “pour” and appears in Psalm 79 (“Pour out Thy wrath upon the heathen that have not recognized Thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not invoked Thy name”), our ancient mothers have taken the homely expression fé sefkh, that is, “to make sejokh,” with which one described with delicacy the vomit of infants. From rúakh, plural rukhòd, which means “breath,” illustrious term that can be read in the dark and admirable second verse of Genesis (“The wind of the Lord breathed upon the face of the waters”) was taken tire ’n rúakh, “make a wind,” in its diverse physiological significances, where one catches a glimpse of the Biblical intimacy of the Chosen People with its Creator. As an example of practical application, there has been handed down the saying of Aunt Regina, seated with Uncle David in the Cafe Florio on Via Po: “Davidin, bat la carta, c’as sento nen le rukhòd!” (“David, thump your cane, so they don’t hear your winds!”), which attests to a conjugal relationship of affectionate intimacy. As for the cane, it was at that time a symbol of social status, just as traveling first class on the railroad can be today. My father, for example, owned two canes, a bamboo cane for weekdays, and another of malacca with a silver-plated handle for Sunday. He did not use the cane to lean on (he had no need for that), but rather to twirl jovially in the air and to shoo insolent dogs from his path: in short, as a scepter to distinguish him from the vulgar crowd.

  Barakhà is the benediction a pious Jew is expected to pronounce more than a hundred times a day, and he does so with profound joy, since by doing so he carries on a thousand-year-old dialogue with the Eternal, who in every barakhà is praised and thanked for His gifts. Grandfather Leonin was my great-grandfather. He lived at Casale Monferrato and had flat feet; the alley in front of his house was paved with cobblestones, and he suffered when he walked on it. One morning he came out of his house and found the alley paved with flagstones, and he exclaimed from the depths of his heart, “’N abrakha a coi goyim c’a I’an fait i losi!” (“A blessing on those unbelievers who made these paving stones!”). As a curse, however, there was the curious linkage medà meshônà, which literally means “strange death” but actually is an imitation of the Piedmontese assident, that is, in plain Italian, “may he drop dead.” To the same Grandpa Leonin is attributed the inexplicable imprecation “C’ai takeissa ’na medà meshônà faita a paraqua” (“May he have an accident shaped like an umbrella”).

  Nor could I forget Barbarico, close in space and time, so much so that he just missed (only by a single generation) being my uncle in the strict sense of the word. Of him I preserve a personal and thus articulated and complex memory. Not figé dans une attitude, like that of the mythical characters I have mentioned up until now. The comparison to inert gases with which these pages start fits Barbarico like a glove.

  He had studied medicine and had become a good doctor, but he did not like the world. That is, he liked men, and especially women, the meadows, the sky; but not hard work, the racket made by wagons, the intrigues for the sake of a career, the hustling for one’s daily bread, commitments, schedules, and due dates; nothing in short of all that characterized the feverish life of the town of Casale Monferrato in 1890. He would have liked to escape, but he was too lazy to do so. His friends and a woman who loved him, and whom he tolerated with distracted benevolence, persuaded him to take the test for the position of ship’s doctor aboard a transatlantic steamer. He won the competition easily, made a single voyage from Genoa to New York, and on his return to Genoa handed in his resignation because in America “there was too much noise.”

  After that he settled in Turin. He had several women, all of whom wanted to redeem and marry him, but he regarded both matrimony and an equipped office and the regular exercise of his profession as too much of a commitment. Around about 1930 he was a timid little old man, shriveled and neglected, frightfully nearsighted; he lived with a big, vulgar goyà, from whom he tried at intervals and feebly to free himself, and whom he described from time to time as ’na sotià (“a nut”), ’na hamortà (“a donkey”), and ’na gran beemà (“a great beast”), but without acrimony and indeed with a vein of inexplicable tenderness. This goyà even wanted to have him samdà “baptized” (literally, “destroyed”): a thing he had always refused to do, not out of religious conviction but out of indifference and a lack of initiative.

  Barbaricô had no less than twelve brothers and sisters, who described his companion with the ironic and cruel name of Magna Morfina (Aunt Morphine): ironic because the woman, poor thing, being a goyà and childless could not be a magna except in an extremely limited sense, and indeed the term magna was to be understood as its exact opposite, a non-magna, someone excluded and cut off from the family; and cruel because it contained a probably false and at any rate pitiless allusion to a certain exploitation on her part of Barbaricô’s prescription blanks.

  The two of them lived in a filthy and chaotic attic room on Borgo Vanchiglia. My uncle was a fine doctor, full of human wisdom and diagnostic intuition, but he spent the entire day stretched out on his cot reading books and old newspapers: he was an attentive reader, eclectic and untiring, with a long memory, although myopia forced him to hold the print three inches from his eyeglasses, which were as thick as the bottom of a beer glass. He only got up when a patient sent for him, which often happened because he almost never asked to be paid; his patients were the poor people on the outskirts of town, from whom he would accept as recompense a half-dozen eggs, or some lettuce from the garden, or even a pair of worn-out shoes. He visited his patients on foot because he did not have the money for the streetcar; when on the street he caught a dim view, through the mist of his myopia, of a girl, he went straight up to her and to her surprise examined her carefully, circling from a foot away. He ate almost nothing, and in a general way he had no needs; he died at over ninety, with discretion and dignity.

  Like Barbarico in her rejection of the world was Grandmother Fina, one of the four sisters whom everyone called Fina: this first name singularity was owed to the fact that the four girls had been sent successively to the same wet nurse in Bra whose name was Delfina and who called all her “nurslings” by that name. Grandmother Fina lived at Carmagnola, in an apartment on the second floor, and did splendid crochet work. At eighty-six she had a slight indisposition, a caodana, as ladies used to have in those days and today mysteriously no longer do: from then on, for twenty years—that is, until her death—she never left her room; on the Sabbath, from her little terrace overflowing with geraniums, fragile and pale, she waved her hand to the people who came out of the scola (“synagogue”). But she must have been quite different in her youth, if what is told about her is true: namely, that her husband having brought to the house as a guest the Rabbi of Moncalvo, an erudite and illustrious man, she had served him, without his knowing, a pork cutlet, since there was nothing else in the pantry. Her brother Barbaraflín (Raphael), who before his promotion to Barba was known as I fieul d’ Moise ’d Celin (“the son of the Moses of Celin”), now at a mature age and very rich because of the money earned from army supplies had fallen in love with the very beautiful Dolce Valabrega from Gassino; he did not dare declare himself, wrote her love letters that he never mailed, and then wrote impassioned replies to himself.

  Marchin, too, an ex-uncle, had an unhappy love. He became enamored of Susanna (which means “lily�
� in Hebrew), a brisk, pious woman, the depository of a century-old recipe for the confection of goose sausage; these sausages are made by using the neck of the bird itself as a casing, and as a result in the Lassôn Acodesh (the “holy tongue,” that is, in the jargon we are discussing), more than three synonyms for “neck” have survived. The first, mahané, is neuter and has a technical, generic use; the second, savar, is used only in metaphors, as “at breakneck speed”; and the third, khanèc, extremely allusive and suggestive, refers to the neck as a vital passage, which can be obstructed, occluded, or severed; and it is used in imprecations, such as “may it stick in your neck”; khanichésse means “to hang oneself.” In any event, Marchin was Susanna’s clerk and assistant; both in the mysterious kitchen-workshop and in the store, on whose shelves were promiscuously placed sausages, holy furnishings, amulets, and prayer books. Susanna turned him down and Marchin got his abominable revenge by selling the recipe for the sausage to a goy. One must think that this goy did not appreciate its value, since after Susanna’s death (which took place in a legendary past) it has no longer been possible to find in commerce goose sausage worthy of the name and tradition. Because of this contemptible retaliation, Uncle Marchin lost his right to be called an uncle.

  Remotest of all, portentously inert, wrapped in a thick shroud of legend and the incredible, fossilized in his quality as an uncle, was Barbabramín of Chieri, the uncle of my maternal grandmother. When still young he was already rich, having bought from the aristocrats of the place numerous farms between Chieri and the Asti region; relying on the inheritance they would receive from him, his relations squandered their wealth on banquets, balls, and trips to Paris. Now it happened that his mother, Aunt Milca (the Queen) fell sick, and after much argument with her husband was led to agree to hire a havertà, that is, a maid, which she had flatly refused to do until then: in fact, quite prescient, she did not want women around the house. Punctually, Barbabramín was overcome with love for this havertà, probably the first female less than saintly whom he had an opportunity to get close to.

  Her name has not been handed down, but instead a few attributes. She was opulent and beautiful and possessed splendid khlaviôd (“breasts”): the term is unknown in classic Hebrew, where, however, khalàv means “milk.”) She was of course a goyà, was insolent, and did not know how to read or write; but she was an excellent cook. She was a peasant, ’na ponaltà, and went barefoot in the house. But this is exactly what my uncle fell in love with: her ankles, her straightforward speech, and the dishes she cooked. He did not say anything to the girl but told his father and mother that he intended to marry her; his parents went wild with rage and my uncle took to his bed. He stayed there for twenty-two years.

  As to what Uncle Bramín did during those years, there are divergent accounts. There is no doubt that for a good part he slept and gambled them away; it is known for certain that he went to pot economically because “he did not clip the coupons” of the treasury bonds, and because he had entrusted the administration of the farms to a mamser (“bastard”), who had sold them for a song to a front man of his; in line with Aunt Milca’s premonition, my uncle thus dragged the whole family into ruin, and to this day they bewail the consequences.

  It is also said that he read and studied and that, considered at last knowledgeable and just, received at his bedside delegations of Chieri notables and settled disputes; it is also said that the path to that same bed was not unknown to that same havertà, and that at least during the first years my uncle’s voluntary seclusion was interrupted by nocturnal sorties to go and play billiards in the cafe below. But at any rate he stayed in bed for almost a quarter of a century, and when Aunt Milca and Uncle Solomon died he married a goyà and took her into his bed definitively, because he was by now so weak that his legs no longer held him up. He died poor but rich in years and fame and in the peace of the spirit in 1883.

  Susanna of the goose sausage was the cousin of Grandmother Malia, my paternal grandmother, who survives in the figure of an overdressed, tiny vamp in some studio poses execute d around 1870, and as a wrinkled, short-tempered, slovenly, and fabulously deaf old lady in my most distant childhood memories. Still today, inexplicably, the highest shelves of the closets give us back her precious relics, shawls of black lace embroidered with iridescent spangles, noble silk embroideries, a marten fur muff mangled by four generations of moths, massive silver tableware engraved with her initials: as though, after almost fifty years, her restless spirit still visited our house.

  In her youth she was known as “the heartbreaker”; she was left a widow very early and the rumor spread that my grandfather had killed himself in desperation over her infidelities. She raised alone three boys in a Spartan manner and made them study; but at an advanced age she gave in and married an old Christian doctor, a majestic, taciturn, bearded man, and from then on inclined to stinginess and oddity, although in youth she had been regally prodigal, as beautiful, much loved women usually are. With the passing of the years she cut herself off completely from any family affections (which in any case she must never have felt very deeply). She lived with the doctor on Via Po, in a gloomy, dark apartment, barely warmed in winter by just a small Franklin stove, and she no longer threw out anything, because everything might eventually come in handy: not even the cheese rinds or the foil on chocolates, with which she made silver balls to be sent to missions to “free a little black boy.” Perhaps out of a fear of making a mistake in her definitive choice, on alternate days she attended the scola on Via Pius the Fifth and the parish church of Sant’ Ottavio, and it appears that she would even go sacrilegiously to confession. She died past eighty in 1928, watched over by a chorus of unkempt neighbors, all dressed in black and, like her, half demented, led by a witch whose name was Madame Scilimberg. Even though tormented by her renal occlusion, my grandmother kept a sharp eye on Scilimberg until her last breath for fear she might find the maftekh (“key”) hidden under the mattress and carry off the manòd (“money”) and the hafassim (“jewels”), all of which turned out to be fake.

  At her death, her sons and daughters-in-law spent weeks, filled with dismay and disgust, picking through the mountains of household debris with which the apartment overflowed. Grandmother Malia had indiscriminately saved exquisite objects and revolting garbage. From severe carved walnut closets issued armies of bedbugs dazzled by the light, and then linen sheets never used, and other sheets patched and threadbare, worn so thin as to be transparent, curtains, and reversible damask bedspreads; a collection of stuffed hummingbirds which as soon as touched fell into dust; in the cellar lay hundreds of bottles of precious wines which had turned into vinegar. They found eight overcoats belonging to the doctor, brand new, stuffed with mothballs, and the only one she had allowed him to use, all patches and darnings, its collar slick with grease and a Masonic emblem hidden in its pocket.

  I remember almost nothing about her, whom my father called Maman (also in the third person) and loved to describe, with his eager taste for the bizarre, slightly tempered by a veil of filial piety. Every Sunday morning my father took me on foot in a visit to Grandmother Malia: we walked slowly down Via Po, and he stopped to caress all the cats, sniff at all the truffles, and leaf through all the secondhand books. My father was l’ingegné (“the engineer”), with his pockets always bulging with books and known to all the pork butchers because he checked with his logarithmic ruler the multiplication for the prosciutto purchase. Not that he purchased this last item with a carefree heart: superstitious rather than religious, he felt ill at ease at breaking the kasherut rules, but he liked prosciutto so much that, faced by the temptation of a shop window, he yielded every time, sighing, cursing under his breath, and watching me out of the corner of his eye, as if he feared my judgment or hoped for my complicity.

  When we arrived at the tenebrous landing of the apartment on Via Po, my father rang the bell, and when my grandmother came to open the door he would shout in her ear: “He’s at the head of his class!” My grandmother
would let us in with visible reluctance and guide us through a string of dusty, uninhabited rooms, one of which, studded with sinister instruments, was the doctor’s semi-abandoned office. One hardly ever saw the doctor, nor did I certainly want to see him, ever since the day on which I had surprised my father telling my mother that, when they brought him stammering children to be treated, he would cut the fillet of skin under the tongue with his scissors. When we got to the good living room, my grandmother would dig out of some recess the box of chocolates, always the same box, and offer me one. The chocolate was worm-eaten, and with great embarrassment I would quickly hide it away in my pocket.

  HYDROGEN

  It was January. Enrico came to call for me right after dinner: his brother had gone up into the mountains and had left him the keys to the laboratory. I dressed in a flash and joined him on the street.

  During the walk I learned that his brother had not really left him the keys: this was simply a compendious formulation, a euphemism, the sort of thing you said to someone ready to understand. His brother, contrary to his habit, had not hidden the keys, nor had he taken them with him; what’s more, he had forgotten to repeat to Enrico the prohibition against appropriating these same keys, and the punishment threatened should Enrico disobey. To put it bluntly, there were the keys, after months of waiting; Enrico and I were determined not to pass up the opportunity.

  We were sixteen, and I was fascinated with Enrico. He was not very active, and his scholastic output was pretty meager, but he had virtues that distinguished him from all the other members of the class, and he did things that nobody else did. He possessed a calm, stubborn courage, a precocious capacity to sense his own future and to give it weight and shape. He turned his back (but without contempt) on our interminable discussions, now Platonic, now Darwinian, later still Bergsonian; he was not vulgar, he did not boast of his virile attributes or his skill at sports, he never lied. He knew his limitations, but we never heard him say (as we all told each other, with the idea of currying comfort, or blowing off steam): “You know, I really think I’m an idiot.”