by Primo Levi
I did not identify myself to Flora, through charity towards her and towards myself. Faced with these phantasms, of my Buna self, of the woman of my memories and of this reincarnation, I felt changed, intensely ‘different’, like a butterfly before a caterpillar. In the limbo of Starye Dorogi I felt dirty, ragged, tired, burdened, exhausted by expectation, yet young and full of vigour, looking towards the future; but Flora had not changed. Now she lived with a cobbler from Bergamo, not as a wife, but as a slave. She washed and cooked for him, and followed him with humble subdued eyes; the man, bull-like and apish, watched every step of hers, and beat her savagely at every trace of suspicion. Hence the bruises all over her, she had come to the surgery stealthily, and was now afraid to go out to meet her master’s anger.
At Starye Dorogi no one demanded anything of us, no one importuned us, no pressure was placed on us, we did not have to defend ourselves from anything; we felt as inert and settled as an alluvial sediment. In this sluggish uneventful life of ours, the arrival of a Soviet military film truck marked a memorable date. It must have been a travelling unit, formerly in service with the troops at the front or in the supply lines, and now itself on its way home; it included a projector, a generating plant, a supply of films and the personnel to run it. It stopped at Starye Dorogi for three days, and gave a performance each evening.
The shows took place in the theatre hall; it was very spacious, and the seats carried off by the Germans had been replaced by rustic benches of unstable equilibrium on the floor which rose from the screen towards the gallery. The gallery, which also sloped, had been reduced to a narrow strip; the highest part had been divided in a moment of caprice by the mysterious and whimsical architects of the Red House into a series of small rooms without air or light, whose doors opened towards the stage. The unattached women of our colony lived there.
On the first evening an old Austrian film was shown, in itself mediocre, and of little interest to the Russians, but full of emotional charge for us Italians. It was a silent film about war and spying, with sub-titles in German: more exactly, it was about an episode of the First World War on the Italian front. The same candour and rhetorical equipment appeared as in analogous films of Allied production: military honour, sacred frontiers, soldiers of great heroism who nevertheless burst into tears as easily as virgins, bayonet attacks carried out with improbable enthusiasm. Only it was all turned upside down: the Austro-Hungarians, officers and soldiers, were noble and sturdy characters, valiant and chivalrous, with the spiritual sensitive faces of stoic warriors, the rough and honest faces of peasants, inspiring sympathy at the first glance. The Italians, all of them, were a crowd of vulgar numbskulls, all marked by striking and laughable physical defects: they were cross-eyed, obese, with narrow shoulders, bandy legs and low sloping foreheads. They were cowardly and ferocious, brutal and dimwitted; the officers had faces like effete dandies, crushed under the incongruous weight of kettle-like hats familiar to us from portraits of the generals Cadorna and Diaz; the soldiers had porcine or apish faces, accentuated by the helmets of our fathers, worn aslant or pulled down over their eyes treacherously to hide their looks.
The arch-villain, an Italian spy at Vienna, was a strange chimera, half D’Annunzio and half Victor Emmanuel, of such absurdly small stature that he was forced to look up at everybody; he wore a monocle and a bow-tie, and paced up and down the screen with arrogant strides like a cockerel. When he returned to the Italian lines, he coldly superintended the shooting of ten innocent Tyrolean civilians.
We Italians, so little accustomed to seeing ourselves cast as the ‘enemy’, odious by definition, and so dismayed at being hated by anybody, derived a complex pleasure from watching the film – a pleasure not without disquiet, a source of salutary meditations.
On the second evening a Soviet film was announced, and the audience began to warm up; the Italians, because it was the first one they saw; the Russians, because the title promised a war film, full of movement and shooting. The word got round; Russian soldiers arrived unexpectedly from nearby and distant garrisons, and thronged outside the doors of the theatre. When the doors opened, they burst inside like a river in flood, climbing noisily over the benches and jostling against each other with much pushing and shoving.
The film was ingenuous and uncomplicated. A Soviet military plane was forced to land in an unspecified mountainous area near the frontier; it was a small two-seater plane, with only the pilot on board. Just as he had repaired the engine and was about to take off, a local notable advanced, a turbaned sheikh with an extraordinarily suspicious air, who, with flattering bows and oriental obeisances, begged to be taken on board. Even an idiot would have understood that he was a dangerous rogue, probably a smuggler, a dissident leader or a foreign agent; but as it was, the pilot, with thoughtless generosity, gave way to his prolix entreaties, and placed him in the back seat of the plane.
We were shown the take-off, and some magnificent panoramic views of mountain ranges sparkling with glaciers (I think it was the Caucasus); then the sheikh, with secret viperous movements, took a revolver from under his cloak, pushed it in the pilot’s back and ordered him to change course. The pilot, who did not even turn round, reacted with lightning decision; he reared the plane into a sharp loop. The sheikh collapsed in his seat, overwhelmed by fear and nausea; but instead of putting him out of action, the pilot tranquilly continued the flight towards his destination. After a few minutes, and more admirable mountain scenery, the bandit recovered; he dragged himself towards the pilot, once more raised his revolver and repeated the attempt. This time the plane went into a nose dive, and plunged down for some thousands of feet, towards an inferno of precipitous peaks and abysses; the sheikh fainted and the plane regained height. So the flight continued for more than an hour, with continually repeated aggressions by the Muslim, and ever new acrobatics by the pilot; until after a final attempt by the sheikh, who seemed to have nine lives like a cat, the plane went into a spin; clouds, mountains and glaciers whirled boldly round it, until finally it came down safely on its predetermined landing-field. The inanimate sheikh was handcuffed; the pilot, as fresh as a rose, was not subjected to an inquiry, but had his hand shaken by proud superiors, was promoted on the field and received a shy kiss from a girl who seemed to have been waiting for him for some time.
The Russian soldiers in the audience followed the clumsy plot with noisy passion, applauding the hero and insulting the traitor; but it was nothing compared to what happened on the third evening.
Hurricane was announced for the third evening, quite a good American film of the ’thirties. A Polynesian sailor, a modern version of the ‘noble savage’, a simple man, strong and mild, is vulgarly provoked in a bar by a group of drunken whites, and wounds one of them slightly. Reason is clearly on his side, but no one testifies in his favour; he is arrested, tried and, to his pathetic incomprehension, condemned to a month in prison. He holds out only for a few days; not only because of an almost animal-like need of liberty and intolerance of bondage, but above all because he feels, he knows, that not he but the whites have violated justice; if this is the law of the whites, then the law is unjust. He knocks down a guard and escapes amid a shower of bullets.
Now the mild sailor has become a real criminal. He is hunted all over the archipelago, but it is pointless searching so far; he has returned quietly to his village. He is taken again, and relegated to a distant island, condemned to hard labour, and endures toil and beatings. He escapes again, throws himself into the sea from a vertiginous cliff, steals a canoe and sails for days towards his homeland, without food or water; he reaches it exhausted, just as the hurricane promised by the title is threatening to break. The hurricane bursts out at once wildly, and the man, like a good American hero, fights alone against the elements, and saves not only his woman, but the church, the pastor and all the faithful who had thought they would find shelter in the church. Rehabilitated, with his girl at his side, he advances towards a happy future, under the sun which breaks thr
ough the disappearing clouds.
This story, typically individualistic, elementary and not badly told, aroused the Russians to seismic enthusiasm. An hour before the beginning, a tumultuous crowd (attracted by the poster, which portrayed a magnificent Polynesian girl, scantily dressed) was already pushing against the doors; they were almost all very young soldiers, armed. It was clear that there was not room for everybody in the large theatre, not even standing; for this very reason they fought doggedly with their elbows to gain entrance. One fell, was trampled on and came the next day to the surgery; we thought we should find him smashed up, but he only had a few bruises: a people of solid bones. Soon the doors were broken open, smashed to pieces and the pieces used as clubs; when the film started, the crowd which stood crushed inside the theatre was already highly excited and bellicose.
It seemed as if the people in the film were not shadows to them, but flesh and blood friends or enemies, near at hand. The sailor was acclaimed at every exploit, greeted by noisy cheers and sten-guns brandished perilously over their heads. The policemen and jailers were insulted with bloodthirsty cries, greeted with shouts of ‘leave him alone’, ‘go away’, ‘I’ll get you’, ‘kill them all’. After the first escape, when the exhausted and wounded fugitive was once more captured, and even worse, sneered at and derided by the sardonic asymmetrical mask of John Carradine, pandemonium broke out. The audience stood up shouting, in generous defence of the innocent man; a wave of avengers moved threateningly towards the screen, but were cursed at and checked in turn by less heated elements or by those who wanted to see the end. Stones, lumps of earth, splinters from the demolished doors, even a regulation boot flew against the screen, hurled with furious precision at the odious face of the great enemy, which shone forth oversize in the foreground.
When the long and vigorous scene of the hurricane was reached, a witches’ sabbath ensued. One could hear the sharp cries of the few women who had remained trapped in the crowd; a pole appeared, then another one, passed from hand to hand above our heads, amid deafening shouts. At first we could not understand what they were meant for, then the design became clear; it had probably been planned by the excluded Russians, who were creating an uproar outside. They were attempting an escalade of the gynaeceum-gallery.
The poles were raised and rested against the balcony, and various enthusiasts took off their boots and began to clamber up, as they do with greasy poles at a village fair. From this moment the spectacle of the escalade distracted all attention from the other spectacle which continued on the screen. As soon as one of the aspirants managed to climb above the tide of heads, he was pulled down by his feet and dragged back to the ground by ten or twenty hands. Groups of supporters and adversaries formed; one bold man managed to free himself from the crowd and pull himself up by his arms, followed by another one on the same pole. When they had almost reached the height of the balcony they fought among themselves for a few minutes, the lower one grabbing the other one’s heels, the latter defending himself by kicking out blindly. At the same time, on the balcony, one could see the heads of a group of Italians, who had hastily climbed up the tortuous stairs of the Red House to protect the besieged women; the pole, pushed back by the defenders, oscillated, balanced for a long moment in a vertical position, then crashed among the crowd like a pine tree cut down by woodsmen, with the two men clinging to it. At this point, whether by chance or through a wise intervention of the authorities, the projector lamp went out, everything plunged into darkness, the noise of the pit reached a fearful intensity and everybody poured out into the moonlit night amid shouts, oaths and acclamations.
To everyone’s regret, the cinema troupe left the next morning. The following evening a renewed and bold Russian attempt to invade the feminine quarters occurred, this time across the roofs and gutters; after this, a night patrol of Italian volunteers was set up. Furthermore, the women in the gallery decamped as an extra precaution, and joined the larger part of the feminine population, in a collective dormitory; a less intimate but securer arrangement.
14
The Theatre
About the middle of August a meeting ground with the Russians was found. Despite professional secrecy, the whole camp soon knew that the ‘Rumanians’ were organizing a revue, with the agreement and approval of the authorities; auditions took place in the theatre, whose doors had been restored as well as possible, and which was guarded by pickets who refused entry to all outsiders. Among the acts in the revue, there was a tap-dance: the specialist, an extremely conscientious sailor, practised every evening, among a small circle of experts and consultants. Now, tap-dancing is noisy by its very nature; the Lieutenant passed nearby, heard the rhythmic noise, forced the picket, in which he was clearly exceeding his authority, and entered. He watched two or three sessions, to the discomfort of the bystanders, without emerging from his habitual reserve and without relaxing his hermetic mask; then, unexpectedly, he informed the organizing committee that he was a passionate fan of tap-dancing in his spare time, and that he had long wanted to learn exactly how to tap-dance; so the dancer was invited, indeed ordered, to give him a series of lessons.
The spectacle of these lessons so interested me that I found a way of watching, slipping through the back ways of the Red House and hiding myself in a dark corner. The Lieutenant was the best pupil imaginable: very serious, willing, tenacious and physically gifted. He danced in his uniform, with boots, for exactly one hour a day, without allowing his teacher or himself a moment’s rest. He made very rapid progress.
When the revue opened, a week later, the tap-dance number was a surprise to everybody; teacher and pupil danced, faultlessly, with impeccable parallelism and synchronism; the teacher, winking and smiling, dressed in an extravagant gypsy costume created by the women; the Lieutenant, funereal, with his nose in the air and his eyes fixed on the ground, as if he was performing a sacrificial dance. Naturally, he was in uniform with his medals on his chest and his holster on his belt dancing with him.
They were applauded; equally applauded were several other not very original numbers (a few Neapolitan songs from the classical repertory: I Pompieri di Viggiu,* a sketch in which a lover conquers his girl’s heart with a bunch not of flowers, but of ribba, our stinking daily fish; the Montanara* sung in chorus, with Mr Unverdorben leading the choir). But two rather unusual numbers gained an enthusiastic, and well-merited, success.
A large fat person came on the stage, with hesitant steps, and legs wide apart, masked, muffled and bundled up, like the famous Michelin man. He greeted the public like an athlete, with his hands clasped above his head; meantime, two assistants, with great effort, rolled alongside him an enormous piece of equipment consisting of a bar and two wheels, like those used by weight-lifters.
He bent down, gripped the bar, tensed all his muscles; nothing happened, the bar did not move. Then he took off his cloak, folded it meticulously, placed it on the ground and prepared for another attempt. When the weight again did not move from the ground, he took off a second cloak, placing it next to the first; and so on with various cloaks, civilian and military cloaks, raincoats, cassocks, greatcoats. The athlete diminished in volume visibly, the stage filled up with garments and the weight seemed to have grown roots in the ground.
When he had finished with the cloaks, he began to take off jackets of all kinds (among them a Häftling striped jacket, in honour of our minority), then shirts in abundance, always trying to lift the instrument with punctilious solemnity after each piece of clothing had been removed, and renouncing the attempt without the least sign of impatience or surprise. However, when he took off his fourth or fifth shirt, he suddenly stopped. He looked at the shirt with attention, first at arm’s length, then close up; he searched the collar and seams with agile monkey-like movements, and then with his thumb and forefinger pulled out an imaginary louse. He examined it, his eyes dilated with horror, placed it delicately on the ground, drew a circle around it with chalk, turned back, with a single hand snatched the bar from the
ground, which for the occasion had become as light as a feather, and crushed the louse with one clean blow.
After this rapid parenthesis, he continued taking off shirts, trousers, socks and body-belts with gravity and composure, trying in vain to lift the weight. In the end, he stood in his pants, in the middle of a mountain of clothing; he took off his mask, and the public recognized in him the sympathetic and popular cook Gridacucco, small, dry, hopping and bustling, aptly nicknamed ‘Scannagrillo’ (Cricket Butcher) by Cesare. Applause burst out: Scannagrillo looked around bewildered, then, as if seized by sudden stage-fright, picked up his weight, which was probably made of cardboard, put it under his arm and scampered off.
The other great success was the ‘Three-Cornered Hat’. It is a song totally lacking in sense, which consists of a single, continually repeated quatrain (‘My hat has got three corners – three corners has my hat – if it did not have three corners – it would not be my hat’), and is sung to a tune so trite and custom-worn that its origin is now unknown. However, its characteristic is that, at every repeat, one of the words of the quatrain is omitted, and replaced by a gesture: a concave hand on the head for ‘hat’, a fist touching the chest for ‘my’, fingers drawn together as they rise, to represent the surface of a cone, for ‘corners’; and so on, until, with the final elimination, the strophe is reduced to a stunted stuttering of articles and conjunctions which cannot be expressed by signs, or, according to another version, by total silence scanned by rhythmic gestures.
In the heterogeneous group of the ‘Rumanians’ there must have been someone who had the theatre in his blood; in their interpretation, this infantile whimsicality turned into a sinister, obscurely allegorical pantomime, full of symbolic and disquieting echoes.
