A Tranquil Star (2 page)

“In the Park,” on the other hand, creates an entire fantasy world, a National Park of literary characters. Like Dante and Virgil in Purgatory, and Aeneas guided by the Sybil through the Underworld, Antonio, a new arrival, and James, his guide, tour the park and its inhabitants, who include the creations of many of Levi's favorite authors: François Villon, Conrad, Melville, Rabelais, the Milanese dialogue poet Carlo Porta, and, of course, Dante. It is an eclectic crowd, reflecting the broad range of Levi's interests. As a child he was often ill and had to be tutored at home; with that, and his father's vast library, he was able to read far beyond the narrow classical curriculum followed by the schools. (In school, in fact, he was
less interested in literature than in science.) Levi's descriptions of the various characters of “In the Park” (“all cordial people, or at least varied and interesting”) give him an opportunity for brief, often oblique, and humorous commentaries on literature and on human behavior in general.

I
N CONTRAST
to
Part I
, most of the stories in
Part II
were written in the late seventies and the eighties, after Levi had retired as director of the SIVA paint factory to become a full time writer; before that, he had been able to write only at night and on weekends. As he told Philip Roth in an interview in 1986, “I worked in a factory for nearly thirty years and I must admit that there is no incompatibility between being a chemist and being a writer: in fact, there is a mutual reinforcement. But factory life, and particularly factory managing—to direct a factory involves many other matters, far from chemistry.… Consequently I truly felt that I had been ‘born again' when I reached retirement age and could resign.” That was in 1975, the year
The Periodic Table
came out, cementing Levi's reputation in Italy. In the next decade, he published
The Wrench
(1978),
If Not Now, When?
(1982),
Other People's Trades
(1985), and
The Drowned and the Saved
(1986), and became a regular contributor to the Turin newspaper
La Stampa
, for which he had written sporadically since 1959. It was not until 1984, when
The Periodic Table
appeared in English, that Levi gained recognition, and acclaim, in America.

Seven of the twelve stories in this section are from
Lilith
, a three-part collection published in Italy in 1981. The first part
of
Lilith
—which appeared in English as
Moments of Reprieve
—is entitled
Passato Prossimo
(
Simple Past
), and the stories take up the theme of the Holocaust. The two other parts, which have not appeared before in English, are entitled
Futuro Anteriore
(
Future Perfect
) and
Presente Indicativo
(
Present Indicative
). The stories taken from
Future Perfect
—“A Tranquil Star,” “The Gladiators,” “The Fugitive,” and “The Magic Paint”—are in the gentle fantasy vein. Those from
Present Indicative
—“The Sorcerers,” “The Molecule's Defiance,” and “The Girl in the Book”—are, as the rubric indicates, closer to everyday life, and, Levi wrote, “indicative of our time.”

In “The Gladiators,” published in the magazine
L'Automobile
, modern-day gladiator-athletes enter the stadium to go up against cars. “The Magic Paint,” which appeared in
Il Mondo
in 1973, is about the search for a paint that wards off evil. In just a few pages we learn how a paint sample is analyzed, and the dangers of trying to escape our fate, moving from the practical analysis to the scientific explication of the properties of the element tantalum and finally to the disastrous experiment with the glasses of the narrator's old friend. “The Molecule's Defiance,” like “The Magic Paint,” takes place in a paint factory, but, unlike “The Magic Paint,” with its layer of the supernatural, sticks to real life, to the science of making a varnish and what can go wrong in the process.

Of the five other stories in
Part II
, four—“One Night,” “Bureau of Vital Statistics,”“Buffet Dinner,” and “Fra Diavolo on the Po”—were first published in
La Stampa
and were not
collected in Levi's lifetime, while the fifth, “The TV Fans from Delta Cep.,” was first published in
L'Astronomia
. “One Night” is perhaps the eeriest of the stories here, the only one that lacks an underlying humor and seems to speak of pure destruction. It's not specifically about the Holocaust, yet one can almost not help but think of the death camps as the story opens with a train in a landscape that may seem beautiful but that turns out to harbor devastation.

Levi often wrote about animals. He was interested in biology before he decided to become a chemist; when he was fifteen, his father gave him a microscope and his first explorations were of the insect and animal world. This passion for detail can be seen in his writing about animals, and he is a close observer of both physical characteristics and behavior. In “Buffet Dinner” the reader is not told right away that the protagonist is a kangaroo; in fact, although a tail is mentioned on the first page, and other facts accumulate, the species isn't named until more than halfway through the story. In “The TV Fans from Delta Cep.” is also a creature, of a sort, but an invented one. (The story is presented as a transmission from the inhabitants of a distant planet to Piero Bianucci, the editor of
La Stampa
and the host of a popular science show on TV; this transmission has been “translated by Primo Levi.”)

The final story in this volume, the highly lyrical “A Tranquil Star” (published not only in
La Stampa
but in the journal
L'Astronomia
), begins with a discussion of language and the difficulties, and the importance, of being rigorous,
scrupulous, and exacting with words (“how many times as high as a high tower is a very high tower?”). Levi's ability to do so is one of the harrowing strengths of his writing about the Holocaust, and the language of his stories, whatever the subject—the mountain landscape, the invented knall, the process of making a paint—is similarly compelling, if on a smaller scale. The description of how atoms bond in “The Molecule's Defiance” is a marvel of simple language and complex science. While Levi sometimes does use a technical or scientific term—the “adiabatic observatory” (“Delta Cep.”); “gelatinization” and “premature polymerization” (“The Molecule's Defiance”); “diplopia” (“Censorship in Bitinia”)—it is always as part of the careful construction of the moment that the particular story presents.

“I
HOPE
that each story properly fulfills its task, which is only that of condensing into a few pages, and conveying to the reader, a particular memory, a state of mind, or even just a thought. Some are happy and some sad, because our days are happy and sad.” Levi was here speaking of the stories in
Lilith
, but certainly what he says could apply to all his short pieces. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “a story has as many meanings as there are keys in which it can be read, and so all interpretations are true, in fact the more interpretations a story can give, the more ambiguous it is. I insist on this word,‘ambiguous': a story must be ambiguous or else it is a news story, therefore everything is valid, rationality is valid, the science-fiction world is valid, and even the sensation of dreams is
valid.” For the reader who knows Levi's other works, these stories are a treasure; for the reader who does not, or who knows only the Holocaust works, they are a revelation, a chance to spend time with a precise, imaginative, and surprising companion.

A
NN
G
OLDSTEIN
New York, September 2006

The following stories have been translated by Ann Goldstein:

Knall

In the Park

The Magic Paint

Gladiators

The Fugitive

The Sorcerers

The Girl in the Book

The Molecule's Defiance

A Tranquil Star

The following stories have been translated by Alessandra Bastagli:

The Death of Marinese

Bear Meat

One Night

Fra Diavolo on the Po

Bureau of Vital Statistics

Buffet Dinner

The TV Fans from Delta Cep.

The following story has been translated by Jenny McPhee:

Censorship in Bitinia

The stories that appear in this volume were published in Italian in 1997 in two volumes edited by Marco Belpoliti. We would like to thank both him and the entire editorial staff at Giulio Einaudi Editore for putting together Primo Levi's
Opere
, which is now being prepared for English publication. We would also like to thank Robert Weil, at Norton, for conceiving of this separate project and making it possible. Thanks also to Francesco Bastagli for his invaluable guidance and close reading of the translation against the original text and to Nunzia and Daniela Rondanini and Valentina Germani for assisting with the dialect.

Ann Goldstein

Alessandra Bastagli

No one was killed. Sante and Marinese were the only ones captured by the Germans. It made no sense, it was almost incredible, that, of us all, the two of them had been taken. But the older men in the group knew that it is always those who are captured of whom it is later said “Who would have guessed!” And they also knew why.

When the two were taken away, the sky was gray and the road was covered with snow that had hardened into ice. The truck barreled downhill with the engine off: the chains on the wheels rattled around the bends and clanked rhythmically along the straight stretches. About thirty Germans were standing in the back of the truck, packed shoulder to shoulder, some of them hanging onto the frame of the canvas roof. The tarp had come loose, so that a thin sleet struck their faces and came to rest on the fabric of their uniforms.

Sante was wounded; he sat mute and still on the rear bench of the truck, while Marinese was at the front, standing, with his back against the driver's cab. Trembling with fever, Marinese felt himself slowly overcome by a growing drowsiness, so that, taking advantage of a bump in the road, he slid to the wet floor and remained sitting there, an inanimate object amid the muddy boots, his bare head wedged between the bony hips of two soldiers.

The pursuit had been long and exhausting, and he wanted nothing more than this—for it all to be over, to remain sitting, to have no more decisions to make, to surrender to the heat of his fever and rest. He knew that he would be interrogated, probably beaten, and then almost certainly killed, and he knew, too, that soon all this would regain importance. But for now he felt strangely protected by a burning shield of fever and sleep, as if it were an insulation of cotton wool that separated him from the rest of the world, from the facts of the day and the things to come. Vacation, he thought, almost in a dream: how long had it been since he had had a vacation?