The Periodic Table

by Primo Levi

  Varisco, she explained, was her creature: she was attached and devoted and did everything she was ordered to do, including certain expeditions into the department for the production of organo-therapeutics (forbidden to those not working there), from which she returned with livers, brains, suprarenal capsules, and other rare innards. Varisco was also engaged, and between the two of them there was profound solidarity and an intense exchange of intimate confidences. From Varisco, who, since she was in charge of cleaning, had access to all departments, she had found out that production too was enveloped in closely meshed anti-spy trappings: all pipes for water, vapor, vacuum, gas, naphtha, etc., ran in underground passages or were sheathed in cement, and only the valves were accessible; the machines were covered with complicated gear-cases and locked. The dials of the thermometers and manometers were not graduated; they bore only conventional colored marks.

  Of course, if I wanted to work and the research into diabetes interested me, go right ahead and do it, we would be friends anyway; but I shouldn’t count on her collaboration because she had other things to think about. I could, however, count on her and Varisco when it came to cooking. They, both of them, had to start training, in view of their coming marriages, and so they would offer me some feeds which would make me forget all about ration cards and rationing. It did not seem to me rule-abiding that complicated feats of cuisine should take place in the lab, but Giulia told me that in that laboratory, outside of a certain mysterious consultant from Basel who seemed mummified, came once a month (in any case, abundantly preannounced), looked around as though he were in a museum, and left without breathing a word, no living being ever entered, and you could do whatever you liked, so long as you left no traces behind. In the memory of man, the commendatore had never set foot there.

  A few days after I was hired, the commendatore summoned me to the main office, and on that occasion I noticed that the photos of the sailboat—actually very chaste—were really there. He told me that the moment had come to begin the real work. The first thing I had to do was go to the library, ask Paglietta for the Kerrn, a treatise on diabetes. I knew German, didn’t I? Good, so I could read it in the original text and not in a very poor French translation which the people in Basel had commissioned. He, he admitted, had read only the latter, without understanding much of it, but nevertheless gaining from it the conviction that Dr. Kerrn was a fellow who knew plenty and that it would be wonderful to be the first to translate his ideas into practice: certainly, he wrote in a rather involuted manner, but the people in Basel were very keen on this business of an oral anti-diabetic, especially the mummified consultant, so I should get Kerrn, read him attentively, and then we would discuss it. But meanwhile, so as not to waste time, I could begin work. His many preoccupations had not allowed him to devote to the text the attention it deserved, but he had nonetheless gotten from it two fundamental ideas, and we should try to test them in practice.

  The first idea concerned anthocyanins. Anthocyanins, as you know very well, are the pigments of red and blue flowers: they are substances easy to oxidize and deoxidize, as is also glucose, and diabetes is an anomaly in the oxidizing of glucose: “hence,” with the anthocyanins one could try to reestablish a normal oxidizing of glucose. The petals of the cornflower are very rich in anthocyanins; in view of the problem, he had put a whole field under cultivation with cornflowers and had the petals harvested and dried in the sun: I should try to make extracts from them, administer them to rabbits, and check their glycemia.

  The second idea was just as vague, and at once simplistic and complicated. Still according to Dr. Kerrn, in the commendatore’s Lombardian interpretation, phosphoric acid had a fundamental importance in the metabolism of carbohydrates: and up to this point there was nothing to object to; less convincing was the hypothesis elaborated by the commendatore himself on Kerrn’s rather misty fundamentals, namely, that it would suffice to administer to the diabetic a little phosphorus of vegetal origin to correct his subverted metabolism. At that time I was so young as to think that it might be possible to change a superior’s ideas; therefore I put forth two or three objections, but I saw immediately that under their blows the commendatore hardened like a sheet of copper under a hammer. He cut me short and, with a certain peremptory tone of his that transformed his suggestions into commands, advised me to analyze a good number of plants, select the richest in organic phosphorus, make from them the usual extracts, and stick them into the usual rabbits. Enjoy your work and good afternoon.

  When I told Giulia about the outcome of this colloquy, her judgment was immediate and angry: the old man is crazy. But I had provoked him, descending to his level and showing him from the start that I took him seriously: I’d asked for it, and I should see now what I could do with those cornflowers, phosphorus, and rabbits. In her opinion, that mania of mine about work, which even went to the point of prostituting myself to the commendatore’s senile fairy tales, resulted from the fact that I didn’t have a girl friend: if I had one, I would have thought about her instead of anthocyanins. It was truly a pity that she, Giulia, was not available, because she realized the sort of person I was, one of those who do not take the initiative, indeed run away, and must be led by the hand, solving little by little all their complicated conflicts. Well, in Milan there was a cousin of hers, also rather shy; she would arrange for me to meet her. But what the deuce, I too, by heavens, should get busy; it hurt her heart to see someone like me throw away the best years of his youth on rabbits. This Giulia was a bit of a witch—she read palms, went to mediums, and had premonitory dreams—and sometimes I have dared to think that this haste of hers to free me of an old anguish and procure for me immediately a modest portion of joy came from a dark intuition of hers about what fate had in store for me, and was unconsciously aimed at deflecting it.

  We went together to see the movie Port of Shadows and thought it marvelous, and we confessed to each other that we’d identified with the main actors: slim, dark Giulia with the ethereal Michele Morgan and her ice-green eyes, and I, mild and recessive, with the deserter Jean Gabin, a fascinator and tough guy, killed dead—ridiculous, and besides, those two loved each other and we didn’t, right?

  When the movie was about to end, Giulia announced that I would have to take her home. I had to go to the dentist, but Giulia said: “If you don’t take me, I’ll yell, ‘Get your hands off me, you pig!’” I tried to object, but Giulia took a deep breath and in the darkness of the movie house began, “Get your... ”: so I phoned the dentist and took her home.

  Giulia was a lioness, capable of traveling for ten hours standing up in a train packed with people running away from the bombings to spend two hours with her man, happy and radiant if she could engage in a violent verbal duel with the commendatore or Loredana, but she was afraid of insects and thunder. She called me to evict a tiny spider from her workbench (I wasn’t allowed to kill it, but had to put it in a weighing bottle and carry it outside to the flowerbed), and this made me feel virtuous and strong like Hercules faced by the Hydra of Lerna, and at the same time tempted, since I perceived the intense feminine charge in the request. A furious storm broke, Giulia stood fast for two strokes of lightning and at the third ran to me for shelter. I felt the warmth of her body against mine, dizzying and new, familiar in dreams, but I did not return her embrace; if I had done so, perhaps her destiny and mine would have gone with a crash off the rails, toward a common, completely unpredictable future. The librarian, whom I had never seen before, presided over the library like a watchdog, one of those poor dogs who are deliberately made vicious by being chained up and given little to eat; or better, like the old, toothless cobra, pale because of centuries of darkness, who guards the king’s treasure in the Jungle Book. Paglietta, poor woman, was little less than a lusus naturae: she was small, without breasts or hips, waxen, wilted, and monstrously myopic: she wore glasses so thick and concave that, looking at her head-on, her eyes, light blue, almost white, seemed very far away, stuck at the back of her cranium.
She gave the impression of never having been young, although she was certainly not more than thirty, and of having been born there, in the shadows, in that vague odor of mildew and stale air. Nobody knew anything about her, the commendatore himself talked about her with irritated impatience, and Giulia admitted that she hated her instinctively, without knowing why, without pity, as a fox hates a dog. She said that she stank of mothballs and looked constipated. Paglietta asked me why I wanted the Kerrn in particular, insisted on seeing my identity card, inspected it with a malevolent air, made me sign a register, and reluctantly surrendered the book.

  It was a strange book: it would be hard to think of its being written and published in any other place than the Third Reich. The author was not without a certain ability, but every one of his pages gave off the arrogance of someone who knows that his statements will not be disputed. He wrote, indeed harangued, like a possessed prophet, as though the metabolism of glucose, in the diabetic and the healthy person, had been revealed to him by Jehovah on Sinai or, rather, by Wotan on Valhalla. Perhaps wrongly, I immediately conceived for Kerrn’s theories a resentful distrust; but I have not heard that the thirty years that have passed since then have led to their reevaluation.

  The adventure of the anthocyanins soon ended. It had begun with a picturesque invasion of cornflowers, sacks upon sacks of delicate pale blue petals, dry and fragile like tiny potato chips. They produced extracts of changeable colors, also picturesque, but extremely unstable: after a few days’ attempts, still before having recourse to the rabbits, I received from the commendatore the authorization to file the whole subject away. I continued to find it strange that this man, a Swiss with his feet on the ground, had let himself be convinced by that fanatical visionary, and when I got the chance, I cautiously hinted at my opinion, but he answered quite brutally that it was not for me to criticize the professors. He made it clear to me that I wasn’t paid to do nothing, and urged me not to waste time but begin immediately with the phosphorus: he was convinced that the phosphorus would certainly lead us to a brilliant solution. So on to the phosphorus.

  I set to work, not at all convinced, though convinced that the commendatore, and most likely Kerrn himself, had given in to the cheap spell of names and cliches; in fact, phosphorus has a very beautiful name (it means “bringer of light”), it is phosphorescent, it’s in the brain, it’s also in fish, and therefore eating fish makes you intelligent; without phosphorus plants do not grow; Falieres developed phosphatine, glycerophosphates for anemic children one hundred years ago; it is in the tips of matches, and girls driven desperate by love ate them to commit suicide; it is in will-o’-the-wisps, putrid flames fleeing before the wayfarer. No, it is not an emotionally neutral element: it was understandable that a Professor Kerrn, half biochemist and half witch doctor, in the environment impregnated with black magic of the Nazi court, had designated it as a medicament.

  Unknown hands left on my bench at night all sorts of plants, a species a day; they were all singularly domestic plants, and I do not know how they had been chosen: onion, garlic, carrot, burdock, blueberry, yarrow milfoil, willow, garden sage, rosemary, dog rose, juniper. I, day by day, determined their inorganic and total phosphorus content, and I felt like the donkey tied to a bucket pump. Just as much as the analysis of nickel in the rock had exalted me, elemental in my previous incarnation, so was I humiliated now by the daily dosage of phosphorus, because to do work in which one does not believe is a great affliction; the presence of Giulia in the next room barely did anything to cheer me up, singing in a muted voice “it’s spring, wake up,” and cooking away with the thermometer in the pretty little Pyrex beakers. Every so often she came to contemplate my work, provocative and mocking.

  We had noticed, Giulia and I, that the same unknown hands left in the lab, in our absence, barely perceptible signs. A closet, locked in the evening, was open in the morning. A stand had changed places. The hood, left open, had been lowered. One rainy morning, like Robinson Crusoe, we found on the tile floor the print of a rubber sole: the commendatore wore shoes with rubber soles. “He comes at night to make love with Loredana,” Giulia decided; I thought instead that that lab, obsessively tidy, must be used for some other impalpable secret Swiss activity. Systematically we stuck toothpicks on the inside part of the doors, always locked by key, which led from the Production Department into the laboratory: every morning the toothpicks had fallen out.

  After two months I had about forty analyses: the plants with a higher phosphorus content were sage, celandine, and parsley. I was thinking at this point that it would be a good idea to determine in what form the phosphorus was bound, and try to isolate the phosphoric component, but the commendatore called Basel and then declared that there wasn’t time for such subtleties: continue with the extracts, done without too much fuss, with hot water and the press, and then concentrated under vacuum: stick them into the rabbits’ esophaguses and measure their glycemia.

  Rabbits are not attractive animals. They are among the mammals most distant from man, perhaps because their qualities are those of humanity when humiliated and outcast: they are timid, silent, and evasive, and all they know is food and sex. Except for some country cat in my distant childhood, I never had touched an animal, and faced with the rabbits I felt a distinct revulsion: Giulia had the same reaction. Luckily, however, Varisco was on intimate terms both with the little beasts and with Ambrogio, who took care of them. She showed us that, in a drawer, there was a small assortment of appropriate instruments; there was a tall narrow box without a cover: she explained that rabbits like to hide in a den, a small space, and if one takes them by the ears (which are their natural handle) and sticks them in a box, they feel safer and stop moving. There was a rubber sound and a small wooden spindle with a transverse hole: you had to force the spindle between the animal’s teeth, and then, through the hole, slip the sound down the throat quite firmly, pushing it down until you could feel it touch the bottom of the stomach; if you don’t use the wood, the rabbit cuts the sound with his teeth, swallows it, and dies. Through the sound it was easy to inject the extracts into the stomach, using an ordinary syringe.

  Then you have to measure the glycemia. What the tail is to mice, the ears are to rabbits, also in this instance: they have thick, prominent veins, which immediately become swollen if the ears are rubbed. From these veins, perforated by a needle, you take a drop of blood, and, without asking any questions about the various manipulations, you proceed according to Crecelius-Seifert. The rabbits either are stoic or not very sensitive to pain: none of these abuses seemed to make them suffer—as soon as they were freed and put back in the cage they calmly returned to munching on the hay, and the next time they did not show any fear. After a month I could have performed the glycemia test with my eyes closed, but it did not seem to me that our phosphorus had any effect; only one of the rabbits reacted to the extract of celandine with a lowering of its glycemia, but a few weeks later a big tumor grew on its neck. The commendatore told me to operate on it—I operated, with a bitter sense of guilt and vehement disgust, and it died.

  Those rabbits, by order of the commendatore, lived each in its own cage, males and females, in strict celibacy. But there was a night bombing which, without causing many other damages bashed all the cages, and in the morning we found the rabbits intent on a meticulous and general campaign of copulation: the bombs had not frightened them at all. When set free they had immediately dug in the flowerbeds the tunnels from which they derive their names,{4} and at the slightest alarm broke off their nuptials halfway through and ran for shelter. Ambrogio had a hard time rounding them up and shutting them in new cages; the work of the glycemia tests had to be interrupted because only the cages were marked, not the animals, and after the dispersion it was impossible to identify them.

  Giulia came between one rabbit and the next, and told me pointblank that she needed me. I had come to the factory on my bike, right? Well, that very afternoon she had to go immediately all the way to Porta Genova, and to ge
t there you had to take three different trams, she was in a hurry, it was an important business: would I please carry her on the crossbar, agreed? I, who according to the commendatore’s maniacal staggered schedule quit twelve minutes before she did, waited for her around the corner, settled her on the bike’s crossbar, and we left.

  Traveling around Milan on a bike was not at all daring in those days, and to carry a passenger on the crossbar at a time of bombings and with people leaving their homes to spend the night in a safer place was just about normal: sometimes, especially at night, it would happen that strangers would ask for this service, and for being transported from one end of the city to the other they would pay four or five lire. But Giulia, rather restless as a rule, that evening endangered our stability; she convulsively clutched the handlebar, making it hard to steer, suddenly changing her position with a jerk, illustrating her conversation with violent gestures of her hands and head, which shifted our common center of gravity in an unpredictable manner. Her conversation was at the start somewhat generic, but Giulia was not the type to bottle up her secrets and so harbor bile; halfway down Via Imbonati she had already left generalities behind, and at Porta Volta she spoke in quite explicit terms: she was furious because his parents had said no and she was flying to the counterattack. Why had they said it?—for them I am not pretty enough, understand?—she snarled, shaking the handlebar.

  “What idiots! You look pretty enough to me,” I said seriously.

  “Get smart. You don’t know what it’s all about.”