The Periodic Table (7 page)

The easy ridge must really have been easy, indeed elementary in the summer; but we found it in a very discomforting state. The rock was wet on the side facing the sun and covered with a black layer of ice in the shade; between one large outcrop of rock and another lay pockets of melting snow into which we sank to our waists. We reached the top at five; I dragged myself along so pitifully that it was painful, while Sandro was seized by a sinister hilarity that I found very annoying.

“And how do we get down?”

“As for getting down, we shall see,” he replied, and added mysteriously: “The worst that can happen is to have to taste bear meat.” Well, we tasted bear meat in the course of that night, which seemed very, very long. We got down in two hours, helped badly by the rope, which was frozen; it had become a malignant, rigid tangle that snagged on each projection and rang against the rock face like the cable of a funicular. At seven we were on the bank of a frozen pond and it was dark. We ate the little that was left, built a useless dry stone wall facing the wind, and lay down on the ground to sleep, pressed to each other. It was as though time itself had frozen; every so often we got to our feet to reactivate our circulation, and it was always the same time: the wind never stopped blowing, there was always the same ghost of a moon, always at the same point in the sky, and in front of the moon passed a fantastic cavalcade of tattered clouds, always the same. We had taken off our shoes, as described in Lammer’s books, so dear to Sandro, and we kept our feet in our packs; at the first funereal light, which seemed to seep from the snow and not the sky, we rose with our limbs benumbed and our eyes glittering from lack of sleep, hunger, and the hardness of our bed. And we found our shoes so frozen that they rang like bells, and to get them on we had to hatch them out like brood hens.

But we went back down to the valley under our own steam; and to the innkeeper who asked us, with a snicker, how things had gone, and meanwhile was staring at our wild, exalted faces, we answered flippantly that we had had an excellent outing, then paid the bill and departed with dignity. This was it—the bear meat; and now that many years have passed, I regret that I ate so little of it, for nothing has had, even distantly, the taste of that meat, which is the taste of being strong and free, free also to make mistakes and be the master of one’s destiny. That is why I am grateful to Sandro for having led me consciously into trouble, on that trip and other undertakings which were only apparently foolish, and I am certain that they helped me later on.

They didn’t help Sandro, or not for long. Sandro was Sandro Delmastro, the first man to be killed fighting in the Resistance with the Action Party’s Piedmontese Military Command. After a few months of extreme tension, in April of 1944 he was captured by the Fascists, did not surrender, and tried to escape from the Fascist Party house in Cuneo. He was killed with a tommygun burst in the back of the neck by a monstrous child-executioner, one of those wretched murderers of fifteen whom Mussolini’s Republic of Salò recruited in the reformatories. His body was abandoned in the road for a long time, because the Fascists had forbidden the population to bury him.

Today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him live again on the printed page, especially a man like Sandro. He was not the sort of person you can tell stories about, nor to whom one erects monuments—he who laughed at all monuments: he lived completely in his deeds, and when they were over nothing of him remains—nothing but words, precisely.

P
OTASSIUM

In January 1941 the fate of Europe and the world seemed to be sealed. Only the deluded could still think that Germany would not win; the stolid English “had not noticed that they had lost the game,” and obstinately resisted under the bombings; but they were alone and suffered bloody losses on all fronts. Only a voluntarily deaf and blind man could have any doubts about the fate reserved for the Jews in a German Europe: we had read Feuchtwanger’s
Oppermanns,
smuggled secretly in from France, and a British White Book, which arrived from Palestine and described the “Nazi atrocities”; we had only believed half of it, but that was enough. Many refugees from Poland and France had reached Italy, and we had talked with them: they did not know the details of the slaughters that were taking place behind a monstrous curtain of silence, but each of them was a messenger, like those who run to Job to tell him, “I alone have escaped to tell you the story.”

And yet, if we wanted to live, if we wished in some way to take advantage of the youth coursing through our veins, there was indeed no other resource than self-imposed blindness; like the English, “we did not notice,” we pushed all dangers into the limbo of things not perceived or immediately forgotten. We could also, in the abstract, throw everything away and escape and be transplanted to some remote, mythical country, chosen from among the few that kept their frontiers open: Madagascar, British Honduras. But to do this one needed a lot of money and a fabulous capacity for initiative—and I, my family, and our friends had neither one nor the other. Besides, if looked at from close by and in detail, things did not after all seem so disastrous: the Italy around us, or, to put it more accurately (at a time when one traveled little), Piedmont and Turin were not hostile. Piedmont was our true country, the one in which we recognized ourselves; the mountains around Turin, visible on clear days, and within reach of a bicycle, were ours, irreplaceable, and had taught us fatigue, endurance, and a certain wisdom. In short, our roots were in Piedmont and Turin, not enormous but deep, extensive, and fantastically intertwined.

Neither in us nor, more generally, in our generation, whether “Aryan” or Jew, had the idea yet gained ground that one must and could resist Fascism. Our resistance at the time was passive and was limited to rejection, isolation, and avoiding contamination. The seed of active struggle had not survived down to us, it had been stifled a few years before with the final sweep of the scythe, which had relegated to prison, house arrest, exile, or silence the last Turinese protagonists and witnesses—Einaudi, Ginzburg, Monti, Vittorio Foa, Zini, Carlo Levi. These names said nothing to us, we knew hardly anything about them—the Fascism around us did not have opponents. We had to begin from scratch, “invent” our anti-Fascism, create it from the germ, from the roots, from our roots. We looked around us and traveled up roads that led not very far away. The Bible, Croce, geometry, and physics seemed to us sources of certainty.

We gathered in the gym of the Talmud Torah—in the School of the Law, as the very old Hebrew elementary school was proudly called—and taught each other to find again in the Bible justice and injustice and the strength that overcomes injustice; to recognize the new oppressors in Ahasuerus and Nebuchadnezzar. But where was Kadosh Barukhú, “the Holy One, Blessed be He”: he who breaks the slaves’ chains and submerges the Egyptians’ chariots? He who dictated the Law to Moses, and inspired the liberators Ezra and Nehemiah, no longer inspired anyone; the sky above us was silent and empty: he allowed the Polish ghettos to be exterminated, and slowly, confusedly, the idea was making headway in us that we were alone, that we had no allies we could count on, neither on earth nor in heaven, that we would have to find in ourselves the strength to resist. Therefore the impulse that drove us to explore our limits was not completely absurd: to travel hundreds of kilometers on our bikes, to climb with fury and patience up rock walls that we did not know very well, to subject ourselves voluntarily to hunger, cold, and fatigue, to train ourselves to endure and to make decisions. A piton goes in or it doesn’t; the rope holds or it doesn’t: these too were sources of certainty.

Chemistry, for me, had stopped being such a source. It led to the heart of Matter, and Matter was our ally precisely because the Spirit, dear to Fascism, was our enemy; but, having reached the fourth year of Pure Chemistry, I could no longer ignore the fact that chemistry itself, or at least that which we were being administered, did not answer my questions. To prepare phenyl bromide or methyl violet according to Gattermann was amusing, even exhilarating, but not very much different from following Artusi’s recipes. Why in that particular way and not in another? After having been force fed in
liceo
the truths revealed by Fascist Doctrine, all revealed, unproven truths either bored me stiff or aroused my suspicion. Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the
quia,
go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans or magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West—Archimedes and Euclid. I would become a physicist,
ruat coelum:
perhaps without a degree, since Hitler and Mussolini forbade it.

A brief course of exercises in physics formed part of the fourth-year chemistry program: simple measurements of viscosity, surface tension, rotatory power, and suchlike exercises. The course was conducted by a young assistant, thin, tall, a bit hunched over, polite, and extraordinarily shy, who behaved in a way that we were not used to. Our other teachers, almost without exception, showed themselves convinced of the importance and excellence of the subject they taught; some of them were in good faith, for others it was evidently a matter of personal supremacy, of their private hunting grounds. That assistant, however, almost had the air of apologizing to us, of ranging himself on our side: in his somewhat embarrassed and well-bred ironic smile, one seemed to read: “I too know that with this antiquated and worn-out equipment you’ll not be able to put together anything useful, and that furthermore these are all marginal futilities, and knowledge lives elsewhere; but this is a trade that you and I too must work at—so please try not to do much damage and to learn as much as you can.” In short, all the girls in the course fell in love with him.

During the span of those months I made desperate attempts to be taken on as a student assistant by this or that professor. Some of them snidely or even arrogantly told me that the racial laws prohibited it; others fell back on hazy or flimsy excuses. After having imperturbably collected the fourth or fifth rejection, I was going home one evening on my bike, with an almost palpable load of disheartenment and bitterness on my back. I was pedaling listlessly up Via Valperga Caluso, while from the Valentino Park gusts of freezing wind overtook and passed me; it was night by now, and the light of the street lamps, covered with purple for the blackout, did not prevail over the mist and darkness. The passersby were few and hurried; and then suddenly one among them caught my attention. He was going in my direction with a long, slow stride, he wore a long black overcoat, and his head was bare. He was walking a bit hunched over and looked like the assistant—it was the assistant. I passed him, uncertain as to what I should do; then I plucked up my courage, went back, and once again did not dare speak to him. What did I know about him? Nothing. He could be indifferent, a hypocrite, even an enemy. Then I thought that I risked nothing but another rejection, and without beating around the bush I asked him whether it would be possible to be accepted for experimental work in his school. The assistant looked at me with surprise; and instead of going into the long explanation I expected, he replied with two words from the Gospel: “Follow me.”

The inside of the Institute of Experimental Physics was full of dust and century-old ghosts. There were rows of glass-doored cupboards packed with slips of paper, yellowed and gnawed by mice and paper moths: these were the observations of eclipses, registrations of earthquakes, meteorological bulletins from well into the last century. Along the walls of one corridor I found an extraordinary trumpet, more than thirty feet long, whose origin, purpose, and use no one any longer knew—perhaps it was to announce the Day of Judgment, when all that which is hidden will appear. There was an Aeolipyle in Secession style, a Hero’s fountain, and a whole obsolete and prolix fauna of contraptions for generations destined for classroom demonstrations: a pathetic and ingenuous form of minor physics, in which stage setting counts for more than concept. It is neither illusionism nor conjuring trick but borders on them.

The assistant welcomed me in the tiny room on the ground floor where he himself lived, and which was bristling with a much different sort of equipment, unknown and exciting enthusiasm.

Some molecules are carriers of an electrical dipole; they behave in short in an electrical field like minuscule compass needles: they orient themselves, some more sluggishly, others less so. Depending on conditions, they obey certain laws with greater or less respect. Well, now, these devices served to clarify those conditions and that inadequate respect. They were waiting for someone to put them to use; he was busy with other matters (astrophysics, he specified, and the information shook me to the marrow: so I had an astrophysicist right in front of me, in flesh and blood!) and besides he had no experience with certain manipulations which were considered necessary to purify the products that had to be measured; for this a chemist was necessary, and I was the welcomed chemist. He willingly handed over the field to me and the instruments. The field was two square meters of a table and desk; the instruments, a small family, but the most important were the Westphal balance and the heterodyne. The first I already knew; with the second I soon established a friendship. In substance it was a radio-receiving apparatus, built to reveal the slightest differences in frequency; and in fact, it went howlingly out of tune and barked like a watchdog simply if the operator shifted in his chair or moved a hand, or if someone just came into the room. Besides, at certain hours of the day, it revealed a whole intricate universe of mysterious messages, Morse tickings, modulated hisses, and deformed, mangled human voices, which pronounced sentences in incomprehensible languages, or others in Italian, but they were senseless sentences, in code. It was the radiophonic Babel of the war, messages of death transmitted by ships or planes from God knows who to God knows whom, beyond the mountains and the sea.