The Periodic Table (3 page)

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.

H
YDROGEN

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.”

He had a slow, foot-slogging imagination: he lived on dreams like all of us, but his dreams were sensible; they were obtuse, possible, contiguous to reality, not romantic, not cosmic. He did not experience my tormented oscillation between the heaven (of a scholastic or sports success, a new friendship, a rudimentary and fleeting love) and the hell (of a failing grade, a remorse, a brutal revelation of an inferiority which each time seemed eternal, definitive). His goals were always attainable. He dreamed of promotion and studied with patience things that did not interest him. He wanted a microscope and sold his racing bike to get it. He wanted to be a pole vaulter and went to the gym every evening for a year without making a fuss about it, breaking any bones, or tearing a ligament, until he reached the mark of 3.5 meters he had set himself, and then stopped. Later he wanted a certain woman and he got her; he wanted the money to live quietly and obtained it after ten years of boring, prosaic work.

We had no doubts: we would be chemists, but our expectations and hopes were quite different. Enrico asked chemistry, quite reasonably, for the tools to earn his living and have a secure life. I asked for something entirely different; for me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I was fed up with books, which I still continued to gulp down with indiscreet voracity, and searched for another key to the highest truths: there must be a key, and I was certain that, owing to some monstrous conspiracy to my detriment and the world’s, I would not get it in school. In school they loaded me with tons of notions which I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything, but not the way
they
want me to. I will find a shortcut, I will make a lockpick, I will push open the doors.”

It was enervating, nauseating, to listen to lectures on the problem of being and knowing, when everything around us was a mystery pressing to be revealed: the old wood of the benches, the sun’s sphere beyond the windowpanes and the roofs, the vain flight of the pappus down in the June air. Would all the philosophers and all the armies of the world be able to construct this little fly? No, nor even understand it: this was a shame and an abomination, another road must be found.

We would be chemists, Enrico and I. We would dredge the bowels of the mystery with our strength, our talent: we would grab Proteus by the throat, cut short his inconclusive metamorphoses from Plato to Augustine, from Augustine to Thomas, from Thomas to Hegel, from Hegel to Croce. We would force him to speak.

This being our program, we could not afford to waste any opportunities. Enrico’s brother, a mysterious and choleric personage, about whom Enrico did not like to talk, was a chemistry student, and he had installed a laboratory at the rear of a courtyard, in a curious, narrow, twisting alleyway which branched off Piazza della Crocetta and stood out in the obsessive Turinese geometry like a rudimentary organ trapped in the evolved structure of a mammalian. The laboratory was also rudimentary: not in the sense of an atavistic vestige but in that of extreme poverty. There was a tiled workbench, very few glass receptacles, about twenty flasks with reagents, much dust and cobwebs, little light, and great cold. On our way we had discussed what we were going to do now that we had “gained access to the laboratory,” but our ideas were confused.