The Periodic Table (15 page)

The adventure of the anthocyanins soon ended. It had begun with a picturesque invasion of cornflowers, sacks upon sacks of delicate pale blue petals, dry and fragile like tiny potato chips. They produced extracts of changeable colors, also picturesque, but extremely unstable: after a few days’ attempts, still before having recourse to the rabbits, I received from the
commendatore
the authorization to file the whole subject away. I continued to find it strange that this man, a Swiss with his feet on the ground, had let himself be convinced by that fanatical visionary, and when I got the chance, I cautiously hinted at my opinion, but he answered quite brutally that it was not for me to criticize the professors. He made it clear to me that I wasn’t paid to do nothing, and urged me not to waste time but begin immediately with the phosphorus: he was convinced that the phosphorus would certainly lead us to a brilliant solution. So on to the phosphorus.

I set to work, not at all convinced, though convinced that the
commendatore,
and most likely Kerrn himself, had given in to the cheap spell of names and cliches; in fact, phosphorus has a very beautiful name (it means “bringer of light”), it is phosphorescent, it’s in the brain, it’s also in fish, and
therefore
eating fish makes you intelligent; without phosphorus plants do not grow; Falieres developed phosphatine, glycerophosphates for anemic children one hundred years ago; it is in the tips of matches, and girls driven desperate by love ate them to commit suicide; it is in will-o’-the-wisps, putrid flames fleeing before the wayfarer. No, it is not an emotionally neutral element: it was understandable that a Professor Kerrn, half biochemist and half witch doctor, in the environment impregnated with black magic of the Nazi court, had designated it as a medicament.

Unknown hands left on my bench at night all sorts of plants, a species a day; they were all singularly domestic plants, and I do not know how they had been chosen: onion, garlic, carrot, burdock, blueberry, yarrow milfoil, willow, garden sage, rosemary, dog rose, juniper. I, day by day, determined their inorganic and total phosphorus content, and I felt like the donkey tied to a bucket pump. Just as much as the analysis of nickel in the rock had exalted me, elemental in my previous incarnation, so was I humiliated now by the daily dosage of phosphorus, because to do work in which one does not believe is a great affliction; the presence of Giulia in the next room barely did anything to cheer me up, singing in a muted voice “it’s spring, wake up,” and cooking away with the thermometer in the pretty little Pyrex beakers. Every so often she came to contemplate my work, provocative and mocking.

We had noticed, Giulia and I, that the same unknown hands left in the lab, in our absence, barely perceptible signs. A closet, locked in the evening, was open in the morning. A stand had changed places. The hood, left open, had been lowered. One rainy morning, like Robinson Crusoe, we found on the tile floor the print of a rubber sole: the
commendatore
wore shoes with rubber soles. “He comes at night to make love with Loredana,” Giulia decided; I thought instead that that lab, obsessively tidy, must be used for some other impalpable secret Swiss activity. Systematically we stuck toothpicks on the inside part of the doors, always locked by key, which led from the Production Department into the laboratory: every morning the toothpicks had fallen out.

After two months I had about forty analyses: the plants with a higher phosphorus content were sage, celandine, and parsley. I was thinking at this point that it would be a good idea to determine in what form the phosphorus was bound, and try to isolate the phosphoric component, but the
commendatore
called Basel and then declared that there wasn’t time for such subtleties: continue with the extracts, done without too much fuss, with hot water and the press, and then concentrated under vacuum: stick them into the rabbits’ esophaguses and measure their glycemia.

Rabbits are not attractive animals. They are among the mammals most distant from man, perhaps because their qualities are those of humanity when humiliated and outcast: they are timid, silent, and evasive, and all they know is food and sex. Except for some country cat in my distant childhood, I never had touched an animal, and faced with the rabbits I felt a distinct revulsion: Giulia had the same reaction. Luckily, however, Varisco was on intimate terms both with the little beasts and with Ambrogio, who took care of them. She showed us that, in a drawer, there was a small assortment of appropriate instruments; there was a tall narrow box without a cover: she explained that rabbits like to hide in a den, a small space, and if one takes them by the ears (which are their natural handle) and sticks them in a box, they feel safer and stop moving. There was a rubber sound and a small wooden spindle with a transverse hole: you had to force the spindle between the animal’s teeth, and then, through the hole, slip the sound down the throat quite firmly, pushing it down until you could feel it touch the bottom of the stomach; if you don’t use the wood, the rabbit cuts the sound with his teeth, swallows it, and dies. Through the sound it was easy to inject the extracts into the stomach, using an ordinary syringe.

Then you have to measure the glycemia. What the tail is to mice, the ears are to rabbits, also in this instance: they have thick, prominent veins, which immediately become swollen if the ears are rubbed. From these veins, perforated by a needle, you take a drop of blood, and, without asking any questions about the various manipulations, you proceed according to Crecelius-Seifert. The rabbits either are stoic or not very sensitive to pain: none of these abuses seemed to make them suffer—as soon as they were freed and put back in the cage they calmly returned to munching on the hay, and the next time they did not show any fear. After a month I could have performed the glycemia test with my eyes closed, but it did not seem to me that our phosphorus had any effect; only one of the rabbits reacted to the extract of celandine with a lowering of its glycemia, but a few weeks later a big tumor grew on its neck. The
commendatore
told me to operate on it—I operated, with a bitter sense of guilt and vehement disgust, and it died.

Those rabbits, by order of the
commendatore,
lived each in its own cage, males and females, in strict celibacy. But there was a night bombing which, without causing many other damages bashed all the cages, and in the morning we found the rabbits intent on a meticulous and general campaign of copulation: the bombs had not frightened them at all. When set free they had immediately dug in the flowerbeds the tunnels from which they derive their names,
{4}
and at the slightest alarm broke off their nuptials halfway through and ran for shelter. Ambrogio had a hard time rounding them up and shutting them in new cages; the work of the glycemia tests had to be interrupted because only the cages were marked, not the animals, and after the dispersion it was impossible to identify them.

Giulia came between one rabbit and the next, and told me pointblank that she needed me. I had come to the factory on my bike, right? Well, that very afternoon she had to go immediately all the way to Porta Genova, and to get there you had to take three different trams, she was in a hurry, it was an important business: would I please carry her on the crossbar, agreed? I, who according to the
commendatore
’s maniacal staggered schedule quit twelve minutes before she did, waited for her around the corner, settled her on the bike’s crossbar, and we left.

Traveling around Milan on a bike was not at all daring in those days, and to carry a passenger on the crossbar at a time of bombings and with people leaving their homes to spend the night in a safer place was just about normal: sometimes, especially at night, it would happen that strangers would ask for this service, and for being transported from one end of the city to the other they would pay four or five lire. But Giulia, rather restless as a rule, that evening endangered our stability; she convulsively clutched the handlebar, making it hard to steer, suddenly changing her position with a jerk, illustrating her conversation with violent gestures of her hands and head, which shifted our common center of gravity in an unpredictable manner. Her conversation was at the start somewhat generic, but Giulia was not the type to bottle up her secrets and so harbor bile; halfway down Via Imbonati she had already left generalities behind, and at Porta Volta she spoke in quite explicit terms: she was furious because
his
parents had said no and she was flying to the counterattack. Why had they said it?—for them I am not pretty enough, understand?—she snarled, shaking the handlebar.

“What idiots! You look pretty enough to me,” I said seriously.

“Get smart. You don’t know what it’s all about.”

“I only wanted to pay you a compliment; besides, that’s what I think.”

“This is not the moment. If you’re trying to court me now, I’ll knock you down.”

“You’ll fall, too.”

“You’re a fool. Go on, keep pedaling, it’s getting late.”

By the time we reached Largo Cairoli I already knew everything: or better, I possessed all the factual elements, but so confused and jumbled in their temporal sequence that it was not easy for me to make sense of them.

Above all, I could not understand how his will was not enough to overcome the problem—it was inconceivable, scandalous. There was this man, whom Giulia had at other times described to me as generous, solid, enamored, and serious; he possessed that girl, disheveled and splendid in her anger, who was writhing between my forearms intent on steering; and, instead of rushing to Milan to present his arguments, he was holed up in some border barracks to defend the nation. Because, being a
goy,
he was of course doing his military service: and as I was thinking like this and as Giulia continued to fight with me as if I were her Don Rodrigo,
{5}
I felt myself overcome by an absurd hatred for this never encountered rival. A
goy,
and she was a
goyà,
according to my atavistic terminology: and they could have gotten married. I felt growing within me, perhaps for the first time, a nauseating sensation of emptiness: so this is what it meant to be different: this was the price for being the salt of the earth. To carry on your crossbar a girl you desire and be so far from her as not to be able even to fall in love with her, carry her on your crossbar along Viale Gorizia to help her belong to someone else, and vanish from my life.

In front of No. 40 Viale Gorizia there was a bench: Giulia told me to wait for her there and flew through the street door like a gust of wind. I sat down and waited, battered and sorrowful. I thought that I ought to be less of a gentleman, indeed less inhibited and foolish, and that for the rest of my life I would regret that between myself and her there had been nothing but a few school and company memories; and that maybe it was not too late, that maybe the no of those two musical comedy parents would be adamant, that Giulia would come down in tears and I then could console her; and that these were infamous hopes, a wicked taking advantage of the misfortunes of others. And finally, the way a shipwrecked person tired of struggling lets himself sink straight to the bottom, I fell back on what was my dominant thought during those years: that the existing fiance and the laws of racial separation were only stupid alibis, and that my inability to approach a woman was a condemnation without appeal which would accompany me to my death, confining me to a life poisoned by envy and by abstract, sterile, and aimless desires.

Giulia came out after two hours, in fact burst through the street door like a shell from a mortar. It was not necessary to question her to find out how things had gone: “I made them look
that
high,” she said, all red in the face and still gasping. I made an effort to congratulate her in a believable fashion. But it’s impossible to make Giulia believe things you don’t really think, or hide things you do think. Now that she had thrown off that weight, and was shining with victory, she looked me straight in the eye, saw the shadow there, and asked, “What were you thinking about?”

“Phosphorus,” I replied.

Giulia got married a few months later and said goodbye to me, snuffing tears up her nose and giving Varisco detailed alimentary instructions. She has had many hardships and many children; we have remained friends, we see each other every so often in Milan and talk about chemistry and other reasonable matters. We are not dissatisfied with our choices and with what life has given us, but when we meet we both have a curious and not unpleasant impression (which we have both described to each other several times) that a veil, a breath, a throw of the dice deflected us onto two divergent paths, which were not ours.

G
OLD

It is well known that people from Turin transplanted to Milan do not strike root, or at least do it badly. In the fall of 1942 there were seven of us friends from Turin, boys and girls, living in Milan, having arrived for different reasons in the large city which the war had rendered inhospitable; our parents—those of us who still had them—had moved to the country to avoid the bombings, and we were living an amply communal life. Euge was an architect, he wanted to do Milan over, and declared that the best city planner had been Frederick Barbarossa. Silvio had a law degree, but he was writing a philosophical treatise on minuscule sheets of onionskin and had a job with a shipping company. Ettore was an engineer at Olivetti’s. Lina was sleeping with Euge and had some vague involvement with art galleries. Vanda was a chemist like me but could not find a job, and was permanently irritated by this because she was a feminist. Ada was my cousin and worked at the Corbaccio Publishing House; Silvio called her the bi-doctor because she had two degrees, and Euge called her
cousimo,
which meant cousin of Primo, which Ada rather resented. After Giulia’s marriage, I had remained alone with my rabbits; I felt a widower and an orphan and fantasized about writing the saga of an atom of carbon, to make the people understand the solemn poetry, known only to chemists, of chlorophyll photosynthesis: and in fact I did eventually write it, but many years later, and it is the story with which this book concludes.