The Periodic Table (4 page)

It seemed to us an
embarras de richesses,
and it was instead a different embarrassment, deeper and more essential: an embarrassment tied to an ancient atrophy of ours, of our family, of our caste. What were we able to do with our hands? Nothing, or almost nothing. The women, yes—our mothers and grandmothers had lively, agile hands, they knew how to sew and cook, some even played the piano, painted with watercolors, embroidered, braided their hair. But we, and our fathers?

Our hands were at once coarse and weak, regressive, insensitive: the least trained part of our bodies. Having gone through the first fundamental experiences of play, they had learned to write, and that was all. They knew the convulsive grip around the branches of a tree, which we loved to climb out of a natural desire and also (Enrico and I) out of a groping homage and return to the origins of the species; but they were unfamiliar with the solemn, balanced weight of the hammer, the concentrated power of a blade, too cautiously forbidden us, the wise texture of wood, the similar and diverse pliability of iron, lead, and copper. If man is a maker, we were not men: we knew this and suffered from it.

The glass in the laboratory enchanted and intimidated us. Glass for us was that which one must not touch because it breaks, and yet, at a more intimate contact, revealed itself to be a substance different from all others, sui generis, full of mystery and caprice. It is similar in this to water, which also has no kindred forms: but water is bound to man, indeed to life, by a long-lasting familiarity, by a relationship of multifarious necessity, due to which its uniqueness is hidden beneath the crust of habit. Glass, however, is the work of man and has a more recent history. It was our first victim, or, better, our first adversary. In the Crocetta laboratory there was the usual lab glass, in various diameters and long and short sections, all covered with dust: we lit the Bunsen burner and set to work.

To bend the tube was easy. All you had to do was hold the section of tube steady over the flame: after a certain time the flame turned yellow and simultaneously the glass became weakly luminous. At this point the tube could be bent: the curve obtained was far from perfect, but in substance something took place, you could create a new, arbitrary shape; a potentiality became act. Wasn’t this what Aristotle meant?

Now, a tube of copper or lead can also be bent, but we soon found out that the red-hot tube of glass possessed a unique virtue: when it had become pliable, you could, by quickly pulling on the two cold ends, pull it into very thin filaments, indeed unimaginably thin, so thin that it was drawn upwards by the current of hot air that rose from the flame. Thin and flexible, like silk. So then silk and cotton too, if obtainable in a massive form, could be as inflexible as glass? Enrico told me that in his grandfather’s town the fishermen take silkworms, when they are already big and ready to form the pupa and, blind and clumsy, try to crawl up on the branches; they grab them, break them in two with their fingers, and pulling on the two stumps obtain a thread of silk, thick and coarse, which they then use as a fishing line. This fact, which I had no hesitation in believing, seemed to me both abominable and fascinating: abominable because of the cruel manner of that death, and the futile use of a natural portent; fascinating because of the straightforward and audacious act of ingenuity it presupposed on the part of its mythical inventor.

The glass tube could also be blown up; but this was much more difficult. You could close one end of a small tube: then blowing hard from the other end a bubble formed, very beautiful to look at and almost perfectly spherical but with absurdly thin walls. Even the slightest puff of breath in excess and the walls took on the iridescence of a soap bubble, and this was a certain sign of death: the bubble burst with a sharp little snap and its fragments were scattered over the floor with the tenuous rustle of eggshells. In some sense it was a just punishment; glass is glass, and it should not be expected to simulate the behavior of soapy water. If one forced the terms a bit, one could even see an Aesopian lesson in the event.

After an hour’s struggle with the glass, we were tired and humiliated. We both had inflamed, dry eyes from looking too long at the red-hot glass, frozen feet, and fingers covered with burns. Besides, working with glass is not chemistry: we were in the laboratory with another goal. Our goal was to see with our eyes, to provoke with our hands, at least one of the phenomena which were described so offhandedly in our chemistry textbook. One could, for example, prepare nitrous oxide, which in Sestini and Funaro was still described with the not very proper and unserious term of laughing gas. Would it really be productive of laughter?

Nitrous oxide is prepared by cautiously heating ammonium nitrate. The latter did not exist in the lab; instead there was ammonia and nitric acid. We mixed them, unable to make any preliminary calculations until we had a neutral litmus reaction, as a result of which the mixture heated up greatly and emitted an abundance of white smoke; then we decided to bring it to a boil to eliminate the water. In a short time the lab was filled with a choking fog, which was not at all laughable; we broke off our attempt, luckily for us, because we did not know what can happen when this explosive salt is heated less than cautiously.

It was neither simple nor very amusing. I looked around and saw in a corner an ordinary dry battery. Here is something we could do: the electrolysis of water. It was an experiment with a guaranteed result, which I had already executed several times at home. Enrico would not be disappointed.

I put some water in a beaker, dissolved a pinch of salt in it, turned two empty jam jars upside down in the beaker; then found two rubber-coated copper wires, attached them to the battery’s poles, and fitted the wire ends into the jam jars. A minuscule procession of air bubbles rose from the wire ends: indeed, observing them closely you could see that from the cathode about twice as much gas was being liberated as from the anode. I wrote the well-known equation on the blackboard, and explained to Enrico that what was written there was actually taking place. Enrico didn’t seem too convinced, but by now it was dark and we were half frozen; we washed our hands, bought some slices of chestnut pudding and went home, leaving the electrolysis to continue on its own.

The next day we still had access. In pliant obsequiousness to theory, the cathode jar was almost full of gas; the anode jar was half full: I brought this to Enrico’s attention, giving myself as much importance as I could, and trying to awaken the suspicion that, I won’t say electrolysis, but its application as the confirmation of the law of definite proportions, was my invention, the fruit of patient experiments conducted secretly in my room. But Enrico was in a bad mood and doubted everything. “Who says that it’s actually hydrogen and oxygen?” he said to me rudely. “And what if there’s chlorine? Didn’t you put in salt?”

The objection struck me as insulting: How did Enrico dare to doubt my statement? I was the theoretician, only I: he, although the proprietor of the lab (to a certain degree, and then only at second hand), indeed, precisely because he was in a position to boast of other qualities, should have abstained from criticism. “Now we shall see,” I said: I carefully lifted the cathode jar and, holding it with its open end down, lit a match and brought it close. There was an explosion, small but sharp and angry, the jar burst into splinters (luckily, I was holding it level with my chest and not higher), and there remained in my hand, as a sarcastic symbol, the glass ring of the bottom.

We left, discussing what had occurred. My legs were shaking a bit; I experienced retrospective fear and at the same time a kind of foolish pride, at having confirmed a hypothesis and having unleashed a force of nature. It was indeed hydrogen, therefore: the same element that burns in the sun and stars, and from whose condensation the universes are formed in eternal silence.

Z
INC

For five months we had attended, packed together like sardines and full of reverence, Professor P. ‘s classes in General and Inorganic Chemistry, carrying away from them varied sensations, but all of them exciting and new. No, P. ‘s chemistry was not the motor-force of the Universe, nor the key to the Truth: P. was a skeptical, ironic old man, the enemy of all forms of rhetoric (for this reason, and only for this, he was an anti-Fascist), intelligent, obstinate, and quick-witted with a sad sort of wit.

His students handed down stories of his examinations conducted with ferocious coldness and ostentatious prejudice: his favorite victims were women in general, and then nuns, priests, and all those who appeared before him “dressed like soldiers.” On his account were whispered murky legends of maniacal stinginess in running the Chemical Institute and his personal laboratory: that he conserved in the basements innumerable boxes of used matches, which he forbade the beadles to throw away; and that the mysterious minarets of the Institute itself, which even now confer on that section of the Corso Massimo d’Azeglio a jejune tone of fake exoticism, had been built at his bidding, in his remote youth, in order to celebrate there each year a foul and secret orgy of salvage. During it all the past year’s rags and filter papers were burnt, and he personally analyzed the ashes with beggarly patience to extract from them all the valuable elements (and perhaps even less valuable) in a kind of ritual palingenesis which only Caselli, his faithful technician-beadle, was authorized to attend. It was also said that he had spent his entire academic career demolishing a certain theory of stereo-chemistry, not with experiments but with publications. The experiments were performed by someone else, his great rival, in some unknown part of the world; as he proceeded, the reports appeared in the
Helvetica Chemica Acta,
and Professor P. tore them apart one by one.

I could not swear to the authenticity of these rumors: but in fact, when he came into the laboratory for Preparations, no Bunsen burner was even low enough, so it was prudent to turn it off completely; actually, he made the students prepare silver nitrate from the five-lire coins taken from their own pockets, and chloride of nickel from the twenty-cent pieces with the flying naked lady; and in truth, the only time I was admitted to his study, I found written on the blackboard in a fine script: “Don’t give me a funeral, neither dead nor alive.”

I liked P. I liked the sober rigor of his classes; I was amused by the disdainful ostentation with which at the exams he exhibited, instead of the prescribed Fascist shirt, a comic black bib no bigger than the palm of a hand, which at each of his brusque movements would pop out between his jacket’s lapels. I valued his two textbooks, clear to the point of obsession, concise, saturated with his surly contempt for humanity in general and for lazy and foolish students in particular: for all students were, by definition, lazy and foolish; anyone who by rare good luck managed to prove that he was not became his peer and was honored by a laconic and precious sentence of praise.

Now the five months of anxious waiting had passed: from among us eighty freshmen had been selected the twenty least lazy and foolish—fourteen boys and six girls—and the Preparation laboratory opened its doors to us. None of us had a precise idea of what was at stake: I think that it was his invention, a modern and technical version of the initiation rituals of savages, in which each of his subjects was abruptly torn away from book and school bench and transplanted amid eye-smarting fumes, hand-scorching acids, and practical events that do not jibe with the theories. I certainly do not want to dispute the usefulness, indeed the necessity of this initiation: but in the brutality with which it was carried out it was easy to see P. ‘s spiteful talent, his vocation for hierarchical distances and the humiliation of us, his flock. In sum: not a word, spoken or written, was spent by him as viaticum, to encourage us along the road we had chosen, to point out the dangers and pitfalls, and to communicate to us the tricks of the trade. I have often thought that deep down P. was a savage, a hunter; someone who goes hunting simply has to take along a gun, in fact a bow and arrow, and go into the woods: success or failure are purely up to him. Pick up and go, when the time comes the haruspices and augurs no longer count, theory is useless and you learn along the way, the experiences of others are useless, the essential is to meet the challenge. He who is worthy wins; he who has weak eyes, arms, or instincts turns back and changes his trade: of the eighty students I mentioned, thirty changed their trade in their second year and another twenty later on.

That laboratory was tidy and clean. We stayed in it five hours a day, from two o’clock to seven o’clock: at the entrance, an assistant assigned to each student a preparation, then each of us went to the supply room, where the hirsute Caselli handed out the raw material, foreign or domestic: a chunk of marble to this fellow, ten grams of bromine to the next, a bit of boric acid to another, a handful of clay to yet another. Caselli would entrust these reliquiae to us with an undisguised air of suspicion: this was the bread of science, P. ‘s bread, and finally it was also the stuff that he administered; who knows what improper use we profane and unskilled persons would make of it?

Caselli loved P. with a bitter, polemical love. Apparently he had been faithful to him for forty years; he was his shadow, his earthbound incarnation, and, like all those who perform vicarial functions, he was an interesting human specimen: like those, I mean to say, who represent Authority without possessing any of their own, such as, for example, sacristans, museum guides, beadles, nurses, the “young men” working for lawyers and notaries, and salesmen. These people, to a greater or lesser degree, tend to transfuse the human substance of their chief into their own mold, as occurs with pseudomorphic crystals: sometimes they suffer from it, often they enjoy it, and they possess two distinct patterns of behavior, depending on whether they act on their own or “in the exercise of their function.” It often happens that the personality of their chief invades them so completely as to disturb their normal human contacts and so they remain celibate: celibacy is in fact prescribed and accepted in the monastic state, which entails precisely the proximity and subjection to the highest authority. Caselli was a modest, taciturn man, in whose sad but proud eyes could be read: