The Periodic Table (10 page)

These nightly battles of the sad couple had become the talk of the mine, and one of its few attractions. On one of the first mild evenings, a group of aficionados invited me to come along with them to hear what happened. I refused and they returned disappointed soon after: they had heard only a trombone playing “Faccetta Nera.”
{2}
They explained to me that sometimes this happened: he was a musical simpleton and would blow off steam in that way.

I fell in love with my work from the very first day, although it entailed nothing more at that stage than quantitative analysis of rock samples: attack with hydrofluoric acid, down comes iron with ammonia, down comes nickel (how little! a pinch of red sediment) with dimethylglyoxime, down comes magnesium with phosphate, always the same, every blessed day—in itself, it was not very stimulating. But stimulating and new was another sensation: the sample to be analyzed was no longer an anonymous, manufactured powder, a materialized quiz: it was a piece of rock, the earth’s entrail, torn from the earth by the explosive’s force; and on the basis of the daily data of the analysis little by little was born a map, the portrait of the subterranean veins. For the first time after seventeen years of school work, of Greek verbs and the history of the Peloponnesian War, the things I had learned were beginning to be useful to me. Quantitative analysis, so devoid of emotion, heavy as granite, came alive, true, useful, when part of serious and concrete work. It was useful: it was part of a plan, a tessera in a mosaic. The analytical method I followed was no longer a bookish dogma, it was put to the test every day, it could be refined, made to conform with our aims, by a subtle play of reason, of trial and error. To make a mistake was no longer a vaguely comic accident that spoils an exam for you or affects your marks: to make a mistake was similar to when you go climbing—a contest, an act of attention, a step up that makes you more worthy and fit.

The girl in the lab was called Alida. She watched my neophyte’s enthusiasms without sharing them; she was in fact surprised and somewhat annoyed. Her presence was not unpleasant. She was a
liceo
graduate, quoted Pindar and Sappho, the daughter of a completely innocuous small local Fascist official, was cunning and slothful, and didn’t give a damn about anything, least of all the analysis of rock, which she had learned to perform mechanically from the lieutenant. She too, like all the people up there, had interacted with several persons and did not make a mystery of it with me, thanks to that curious gift for garnering confessions which I mentioned before. She had fought with many women because of vague rivalries, had fallen in love a little with many men, a great deal with one, and was engaged to still another, a gray, unpretentious fellow, an employee in the Technical Office who came from her town and whom her family had picked for her. About this, too, she didn’t give a damn. What could she do about it? Rebel? Leave? No, she was a girl from a good family, her future was children and the kitchen stove, Sappho and Pindar were things of the past and nickel an abstruse stopgap. She worked listlessly in the lab while waiting for that so little longed-for marriage, negligently washing the precipitates, weighing the nickel dimethylglyoxime, and I had hard work convincing her that it was not quite the thing to pad the results of the analyses: something she tended to do, in fact she confessed to having done often, since, she said, it didn’t cost anybody anything, and pleased the director, the lieutenant, and myself.

What, after all, was that chemistry over which the lieutenant and I racked our brains? Water and fire, nothing else, like in the kitchen. A less appetizing kitchen, that’s all: with penetrating or disgusting smells instead of the domestic kind; for the rest, there too aprons, mixing, burned hands, and washing up at the end of the day. No escape for Alida. She listened with devout compunction and at the same time Italian skepticism to my tales of life in Turin: these were heavily censored because in fact both she and I had to play the game of my anonymity. Nevertheless something did emerge: if nothing else, from my reticences themselves. After some weeks I realized that I was no longer a nameless person: I was a certain Doctor Levi who must not be called Levi, neither in the second nor the third person, due to good manners, and in order to avoid a mess. In the mine’s gossipy and easygoing atmosphere, a disparity between my indeterminate state as an outcast and my visible mildness of manner leaped to the eye, and—Alida admitted this to me—was lengthily discussed and variously interpreted: I was everything from an agent of the OVRA, the Fascist secret police, to someone with high-class connections.

Going down into the valley was uncomfortable, and for me not very prudent; since I could not visit anyone, my evenings at the mine were interminable. Sometimes I stayed in the lab past quitting time or went back there after dinner to study, or to meditate on the problem of nickel. At other times I shut myself in to read Mann’s Joseph stories in my monastic cell in the submarine. On nights when the moon was up I often took long solitary walks through the wild countryside around the mine, all the way up to the brim of the crater, or halfway up on the back of the gray, craggy dump chute, shaken by mysterious creaks and shivers as if some busy gnomes really nested there: the darkness was punctuated by the distant howls of dogs in the invisible valley bottom.

These roamings granted me a truce from the grim awareness of my father dying in Turin, of the American defeats at Bataan, the German victories in the Crimea, in short, of the open trap which was about to spring shut: it gave birth in me to a new bond, more sincere than the rhetoric about nature learned at school, with those brambles and stones which were my island and my freedom, a freedom I would perhaps soon lose.

For that rock without peace I felt a fragile and precarious affection: with it I had contracted a double bond, first in the exploits with Sandro, then here, trying as a chemist to wrest away its treasure. From this rocky love and these asbestos-filled solitudes, on some other of those long nights were born two stories of islands and freedom, the first I felt inclined to write after the torments of compositions in
liceo:
one story fantasized about a remote precursor of mine, a hunter of lead instead of nickel; the other, ambiguous and mercurial, I had taken from a reference to the island of Tristan da Cunha that I happened to see during that period.

The lieutenant, who was doing his military service in Turin, came up to the mine only one day a week. He would check my work and give me instructions and advice for the coming week, and proved to be an excellent chemist and a tenacious and acute researcher. After a short period of orientation, alongside the routine of daily analyses, a project with much higher aims began to take shape.

In the mine’s rock there was indeed nickel, but very little: from our analyses it showed an average content of 0.2 percent. Ridiculous, in comparison to the minerals mined by my antipodal colleague-rivals in Canada and New Caledonia. But perhaps the raw material could be enriched? Under the lieutenant’s guidance I tried all possible methods: by magnetic separation, by flotation, by levigation, by sifting, with heavy liquids, with the shaking plate. I did not get anywhere: nothing concentrated; in all the fractions the percentage of nickel remained obstinately the same as the first. Nature was not helping us: we concluded that the nickel accompanying the bivalent iron took its place vicariously, followed it like an evanescent shadow, a minuscule brother: 0.2 percent of nickel, 8 percent of iron. All the reagents imaginable for nickel should have been employed in doses forty times greater, even without taking into account the magnesium. An economically desperate enterprise. At moments of weariness I perceived the rock that encircled me, the green serpentine of the Alpine foothills, in all its sidereal, hostile, extraneous hardness: in comparison, the trees of the valley, by now already dressed for spring, were like us, also people who do not speak but feel the heat and the frost, enjoy and suffer, are born and die, fling out pollen with the wind, obscurely follow the sun in its travels. Not the rock: it does not house any energy, it is extinguished since primordial times, pure hostile passivity; a massive fortress that I had to pull down bastion by bastion to get my hands on the hidden sprite, the capricious
kupfernickel
which jumps out now here, now there, elusive and malign, with long perked ears, always ready to flee from the blows of the investigating pickax, leaving you with nothing to show for it.

But this is no longer the time for sprites,
nickel,
and kobolds. We are chemists, that is, hunters: ours are “the two experiences of adult life” of which Pavese spoke, success and failure, to kill the white whale or wreck the ship; one should not surrender to incomprehensible matter, one must not just sit down. We are here for this—to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to stand the blows and hand them out. We must never feel disarmed: nature is immense and complex, but it is not impermeable to the intelligence; we must circle around it, pierce and probe it, look for the opening or make it. My weekly conversations with the lieutenant sounded like war plans.

Among the many attempts we had made there also was that of reducing the rock with hydrogen. We had placed the mineral, finely ground, in a porcelain boat; had placed this in turn in a quartz tube; and through the tube, heated from the outside, we had pushed a current of hydrogen in the hope that this would strip the oxygen bound to the nickel and leave it reduced, that is, naked, in its metallic state. Metallic nickel, like iron, is magnetic, and therefore, according to this hypothesis, it would have been easy to separate it from the rest, alone or with the iron, simply by means of a small magnet. But, after the treatment, we had vainly agitated a powerful magnet in the watery suspension of our powder: we had only gotten a trace of iron. Clear and sad: hydrogen, under these conditions, did not reduce anything; the nickel, together with the iron, must be firmly lodged in the serpentine’s structure, combined with the silicate and water, satisfied (so to speak) with its state and averse to assuming another.

But say one tried to pull that structure apart. The idea came to me as one switches on a light, one day when by chance there fell into my hands an old dusty diagram, the work of some unknown predecessor of mine; it showed the loss of weight in the mine’s asbestos as a function of temperature. The asbestos lost a little water at 150° centigrade, then remained apparently unaltered until about 800° centigrade; here one noted an abrupt step down with a fall in weight of 12 percent, and the author had remarked: “becomes fragile.” Now serpentine is the father of asbestos: if asbestos decomposes at 800° centigrade, serpentine should do so also; and, since a chemist does not think, indeed does not live, without models, I idly went about representing them for myself, drawing on paper long chains of silicon, oxygen, iron, and magnesium, with a little nickel caught between their links, and then the same chains after the smash reduced to short stubs, with the nickel flushed out of its den and exposed to attack; and I did not feel much different from the remote hunter of Altamira who painted an antelope on the rock wall so that the next day’s hunt would be lucky.

The propitiatory ceremonies did not last long: the lieutenant was not there, but he could arrive from one hour to the next, and I was afraid that he would not accept, or would not readily accept, my very unorthodox hypothesis of work. But I felt it itch all over my skin: what’s done is done, best get to work immediately.

There is nothing more vivifying than a hypothesis. Watched with an amused and skeptical expression by Alida, who, since it was now late in the afternoon, kept looking ostentatiously at her wristwatch, I set to work like a whirlwind. In a moment the apparatus was mounted, the thermostat set at 800° centigrade, the pressure regulator on the tank set, the fluxmeter put in order. I heated the material for half an hour, then reduced the temperature and passed the hydrogen through for another hour: by now it was dark, the girl had gone, all was silence against the backdrop of the grim hum of the Grading Department, which also worked at night. I felt part conspirator, part alchemist.

When the time came, I took the porcelain boat out of the quartz tube, let it cool off in the vacuum, then dispersed in water the powder, which had turned from greenish to a dirty yellow: a thing which seemed to me a good sign. I picked up the magnet and set to work. Each time I took the magnet out of the water, it brought with it a tuft of brown powder: I removed it delicately with filter paper and put it aside, perhaps a milligram each time; for the analysis to be well-founded at least a half gram of material was needed, that is, several hours of work. I decided to stop about midnight: to interrupt the separation, I mean to say, because at no cost would I have put off the beginning of the analysis. For this, since it involved a magnetic fraction (and therefore presumably poor in silicates), and yielding to my haste, I there and then tried a simplified variant. At three in the morning I had the result: no longer the usual pink little cloud of nickel-dimethylglyoxime but rather a visibly abundant precipitate. Filtered, washed, dried, and weighed. The final datum appeared to me written in letters of fire on the slide rule: 6 percent of nickel, the rest iron. A victory: even without a further separation, an alloy to be sent to the electric oven as is. I returned to the submarine when it was almost dawn with an acute desire to go immediately and wake the director, telephone the lieutenant, and roll around on the dark fields, which were dripping wet with dew. I was thinking many foolish things, and I was not thinking of anything sensible and sad.

I was thinking of having opened a door with a key, and of possessing the key to many doors, perhaps to all of them. I was thinking of having thought of something that nobody else had yet thought, not even in Canada or New Caledonia, and I felt invincible and untouchable even when faced by close enemies, closer each month. Finally, I was thinking of having had a far from ignoble revenge on those who had declared me biologically inferior.