The Periodic Table (21 page)

So in excellent Piedmontese with witty Astian tones he told me he had some sugar he wanted “chemistried”: he wanted to know whether it was or was not sugar, or if perhaps there was some “filth” in it. What filth? I explained that if he was more specific about his suspicions it would facilitate my job, but he replied that he didn’t want to influence me, that I should make the analysis as best I could, he would tell me about his suspicions later. He left in my hands a paper parcel containing a good half kilo of sugar, told me that he would return the next day, said goodbye, and left: he did not take the elevator but walked calmly down the four flights of stairs. He appeared to be a man without anxieties and without haste.

We didn’t have many customers, we didn’t make many analyses, and we didn’t make much money: so we couldn’t buy modern and rapid instruments, our findings were slow, out analyses lasted much longer than normal; we didn’t even have a sign on the street, so the circle closed and there were fewer customers yet. The samples left us for analysis constituted a far from negligible contribution toward our sustenance: Emilio and I took care not to let them know that in general a few grams was enough and willingly accepted a litre of wine or milk, a kilo of spaghetti or soap, a packet of
agnolotti.

However, given the patient’s history, that is, the old man’s suspicions, it would have been imprudent to consume that sugar blindly, even just taste it. I dissolved a little in distilled water: the solution was turbid—there was certainly something wrong with it. I weighed a gram of sugar in the platinum crucible (the apple of our eyes) to incinerate it on the flame: there rose in the lab’s polluted air the domestic and childish smell of burnt sugar, but immediately afterward the flame turned livid and there was a much different smell, metallic, garlicky, inorganic, indeed contra-organic: a chemist without a nose is in for trouble. At this point it is hard to make a mistake: filter the solution, acidify it, take the Kipp, let hydrogen sulfide bubble through. And here is the yellow precipitate of sulfide, it is arsenious anhydride—in short, arsenic, the Masculinum, the arsenic of Mithridates and Madame Bovary.

I spent the rest of the day distilling pyruvic acid and speculating on the old man’s sugar. I do not know how pyruvic acid is prepared now with modern methods; at that time we melted sulfuric acid and soda in an enameled saucepan, obtaining bisulfate which to solidify we threw on the bare floor, and then ground it in a coffee grinder. Then we heated at 250 degrees centigrade a mixture of the aforementioned bisulfate and tartaric acid, so that the latter dehydrated into pyruvic acid and was distilled. First we attempted this operation in glass receptacles, bursting a prohibitive number; then we bought from a junk man ten metal cannisters, which came from the Allied Army Surplus, the kind which were used for gasoline before the advent of polyethylene, and which proved to be suited to this purpose; since the customer was satisfied with the quality of the product and promised further orders, we took the plunge and had the local blacksmith build a crude cylindrical reactor of sheet iron, equipped with a hand-powered mixer. We set it in a well of solid bricks, which had on the bottom and sides four resistors of 1,000 watts connected illegally upstream to the meter. If a fellow professional is reading this, he should not be too surprised by this pre-Columbian and junk-shop chemistry: during those years we weren’t the only ones, nor the only chemists, to live like this, and throughout the world six years of war and destruction had brought about a regression in many civil habits and attenuated many needs, first of all the need for decorum.

From the end of the condenser coil the acid fell into the collector in heavy golden drops, refracting like gems: drop by drop, every ten drops one lira of earnings. And meanwhile I kept thinking of the arsenic and the old man, who did not seem to me the type to plot poisonings or even undergo them, and I couldn’t figure it out.

The man returned the next day. He insisted on paying the fee, even before knowing the result of the analysis. When I told him his face lit up with a complicated, wrinkled smile, and he said to me, “I’m glad. I always said it would end up like this.” It was evident that he only waited for the slightest solicitation from me to tell the story. I did not disappoint him, and this is the story, a trifle faded due to the translation from Piedmontese, an essentially spoken language.

“I am a cobbler by trade. If you start as a young man, it is not a bad trade: you sit, you don’t work hard, and you meet people you can talk to. Certainly you don’t make a fortune, you’re all day long with other people’s shoes in your hands: but you get used to this, even to the smell of old leather. My shop is on Via Gioberti at the corner of Via Pastrengo: I’ve been working as a cobbler there for thirty years. I am the cobbler of San Secondo; I know all the difficult feet, and to do my work all I need is my hammer and some twine. Well, a young man came, not even from hereabouts: tall, good-looking, and full of ambition; he set up a shop a stone’s throw away and filled it with machines. To lengthen, to enlarge, to sew, to hammer out soles, and who knows what else—I never went to look, they told me about it, He put cards with  his   address  and   telephone  number   in  all the letter boxes of the neighborhood: yes, sir, even a phone, as if he were a midwife.

“You’re sure to think that his business went well right away. It did the first months—a little out of curiosity, a little to give us some competition, some customers went to him; also because at the start he kept his prices low: but then he had to raise them when he saw he was losing money. Now, mind, I’m saying all this without wishing him ill, I’ve seen plenty like him, starting off at a gallop and breaking their heads, cobblers and not only cobblers. But he, they told me, wished me ill: they tell me everything, and do you know who? The little old ladies, whose feet hurt and who no longer enjoy walking and have only one pair of shoes; they come to me—sit down, waiting for me to take care of the problems, and meanwhile they keep me informed, tell me all the ins and outs.

“He wished me ill and was going around telling a lot of lies about me. That I resoled with cardboard. That I get drunk every night. That I made my wife die for the insurance. That a nail came through the shoe of one of my customers and then he died of tetanus. And so, with things at this point, you can understand that I wasn’t surprised too much when one morning, among the day’s shoes, I found this parcel. I immediately understood the scheme, but I wanted to make sure: so I gave a little of it to the cat, and after two hours he went in a corner and vomited. Then I put another bit of it in the sugar bowl and yesterday my daughter and I put it in the coffee, and two hours later we both vomited. And now I also have your confirmation and I’m satisfied.”

“Do you want to bring charges? Do you need a declaration?”

“No, no. I told you, he’s only a poor devil and I don’t want to ruin him. For this trade, too, the world is large and there’s a place for everyone: he doesn’t know it, but I do.”

“So?”

“So tomorrow I’ll send back the parcel by one of my little old ladies, together with a note. In fact, no—I think I’ll bring it back myself, so I can see the face he makes and I’ll explain two or three things.” He looked around, as one would in a museum, and then added, “Yours too is a fine trade: you need an eye and patience. And he who hasn’t got them, it’s best that he look for something else.”

He said goodbye, picked up the parcel, and walked down without taking the elevator, with the tranquil dignity that was his by nature.

N
ITROGEN

... and finally there came the customer we’d always dreamed of, who wanted us as consultants. To be a consultant is the ideal work, the sort from which you derive prestige and money without dirtying your hands, or breaking your backbone, or running the risk of ending up roasted or poisoned: all you have to do is take off your smock, put on your tie, listen in attentive silence to the problem, and then you’ll feel like the Delphic oracle. You must then weigh your reply very carefully and formulate it in convoluted, vague language so that the customer also considers you an oracle, worthy of his faith and the rates set by the Chemists’ Society.

The dream client was about forty, small, compact, and obese; he wore a thin mustache like Clark Gable and had tufts of black hairs everywhere—in his ears, inside his nostrils, on the backs of his hands, and on the ridge of his fingers almost down to his fingernails. He was perfumed and pomaded and had a vulgar aspect: he looked like a pimp or, better, a third-rate actor playing the part of a pimp; or a tough from the slummy outskirts. He explained to me that he was the owner of a cosmetics factory and had trouble with a certain kind of lipstick. Good, let him bring us a sample; but no, he said, it was a particular problem, which had to be examined on the spot; it was better for one of us to visit and see what the problem was. Tomorrow at ten? Tomorrow.

It would have been great to show up in a car, but of course if you were a chemist with a car, instead of a miserable returnee, a spare-time writer, and besides just married, you wouldn’t spend time here sweating pyruvic acid and chasing after dubious lipstick manufacturers. I put on the best of my (two) suits and thought that it was a good idea to leave my bike in some courtyard nearby and pretend I had arrived in a cab, but when I entered the factory I realized that my scruples about prestige were entirely inappropriate. The factory was a dirty, disorderly shed, full of drafts, in which a dozen impudent, indolent, filthy, and showily made up girls crept about. The owner gave me some explanations, exhibiting pride and trying to look important: he called the lipstick “rouge,” the aniline “anelline,” and the benzoic aldehyde “adelaide.” The work process was simple: a girl melted certain waxes and fats in an ordinary enameled pot, adding a little perfume and a little coloring, then poured the lot into a minuscule ingot mold. Another girl cooled off the molds under running water and extracted from each of the molds twenty small scarlet cylinders of lipstick; other girls took care of the assembly and packing. The owner rudely grabbed one of the girls, put his hand behind her neck to bring her mouth close to my eyes, and invited me to observe carefully the outline of her lips—there, you see, a few hours after application, especially when it’s hot, the lipstick runs, it filters up along the very thin lines that even young women have around their lips, and so it forms an ugly web of red threads that blurs the outline and ruins the whole effect.

I peered, not without embarrassment: the red threads were indeed there, but only on the right half of the girl’s mouth, as she stood there impassively undergoing the inspection and chewing American gum. Of course, the owner explained: her left side, and the left side of all the other girls, was made up with an excellent French product, in fact the product that he was vainly trying to imitate. A lipstick can be evaluated only in this way, through a practical comparison: every morning all the girls had to make up with the lipstick, on the right with his, and on the left with the other, and he kissed all the girls eight times a day to check whether the product was kiss-proof.

I asked the tough for his lipstick’s recipe, and a sample of both products. Reading the recipe, I immediately got the suspicion as to where the defect came from, but it seemed to me more advisable to make certain and let my reply fall a bit from on high, and I requested two days’ time “for the analyses.” I recovered my bike, and as I pedaled along I thought that, if this business went well, I could perhaps exchange it for a motorbike and quit pedaling.

Back at the lab, I took a sheet of filter paper, made two small red dots with the two samples, and put it in the stove at 80 degrees centigrade. After a quarter of an hour the small dot of the left lipstick was still a dot, although surrounded by a greasy aura, while the small dot of the right lipstick was faded and spread, had become a pinkish halo as large as a coin. In my man’s recipe there was a soluble dye; it was clear that, when the heat of the woman’s skin (or my stove) caused the fat to melt, the dye followed it as it spread. Instead, the other lipstick must contain a red pigment, well dispersed but insoluble and therefore not migrant: I ascertained this easily by diluting it with benzene and subjecting it to centrifugation, and there it was, deposited on the bottom of the test tube. Thanks to the experience I had accumulated at the lakeshore plant I was able to identify it: it was an expensive pigment and not easy to disperse, and besides, my tough did not have any equipment suited to dispersing pigments. Fine, it was his headache, let him figure it out, him with his harem of girl guinea pigs and his revolting metered kisses. For my part, I had performed my professional services; I made a report, attached an invoice with the necessary tax stamps and the picturesque specimen of filter paper, went back to the factory, handed it over, took my fee, and prepared to say goodbye.

But the tough detained me: he was satisfied with my work and wanted to offer me a business deal. Could I get him a few kilos of alloxan? He would pay a good price for it, provided I committed myself by contract to supply it only to him. He had read, I no longer remember in what magazine, that alloxan in contact with the mucous membrane confers on it an extremely permanent red color, because it is not a superimposition, in short a layer of varnish like lipstick, but a true and proper dye, as used on wool and cotton.

I gulped, and to stay on the safe side replied that we would have to see: alloxan is not a common compound nor very well known, I don’t think my old chemistry textbook devoted more than five lines to it, and at that moment I remembered only vaguely that it was a derivative of urea and had some connection with uric acid.

I dashed to the library at the first opportunity; I refer to the venerable library of the University of Turin’s Chemical Institute, at that time, like Mecca, impenetrable to infidels and even hard to penetrate for such faithful as I. One had to think that the administration followed the wise principle according to which it is good to discourage the arts and sciences: only someone impelled by absolute necessity, or by an overwhelming passion, would willingly subject himself to the trials of abnegation that were demanded of him in order to consult the volumes. The library’s schedule was brief and irrational, the lighting dim, the file cards in disorder; in the winter, no heat; no chairs but uncomfortable and noisy metal stools; and finally, the librarian was an incompetent, insolent boor of exceeding ugliness, stationed at the threshold to terrify with his appearance and his howl those aspiring to enter. Having been let in, I passed the tests, and right away I hastened to refresh my memory as to the composition and structure of alloxan. Here is its portrait: