The Periodic Table (23 page)

Our laboratory looked like a junk shop and the hold of a whaler. Apart from overflows that, as I said, invaded the kitchen, the hallway, and even the bathroom, the lab consisted of a single room and the terrace. On the terrace were scattered the parts of a DKW motorcycle which Emilio had bought dismantled and which, he said, he would put together again someday; the scarlet gas tank was perched on the railing, and the motor, inside a fly net, rusted away, corroded by our exhalations. There were also some tanks of ammonia left over from an epoch preceding my arrival, during which Emilio made ends meet by dissolving gaseous ammonia in demijohns of potable water, selling them, and befouling the neighborhood. Everywhere, on the terrace and inside the apartment, was scattered an incredible amount of junk, so old and battered as to prove almost unrecognizable: only after a more attentive examination could you distinguish the professional objects from the domestic ones.

In the middle of the lab was a large ventilation hood of wood and glass, our pride and our only protection against death by gassing. It is not that hydrochloric acid is actually toxic: it is one of those frank enemies that come at you shouting from a distance, and from which it is therefore easy to protect yourself. It has such a penetrating odor that whoever can wastes no time in getting out of its way; and you cannot mistake it for anything else, because after having taken in one breath of it you expel from your nose two short plumes of white smoke, like the horses in Eisenstein’s movies, and you feel your teeth turn sour in your mouth, as when you have bitten into a lemon. Despite our quite willing hood, acid fumes invaded all the rooms: the wallpaper changed color, the doorknobs and metal fixtures became dim and rough, and every so often a sinister thump made us jump: a nail had been corroded through and a picture, in some corner of the apartment, had crashed to the floor. Emilio hammered in a new nail and hung the picture back in its place.

So we were dissolving tin in hydrochloric acid: then the solution had to be concentrated to a particular specific weight and left to crystallize by cooling. The stannous chloride separated in small, pretty prisms, colorless and transparent. Since the crystallization was slow, it required many receptacles, and since hydrochloric acid corrodes all metals, these receptacles had to be glass or ceramic. In the period when there were many orders, we had to mobilize reserve receptacles, in which for that matter Emilio’s house was rich: a soup tureen, an enameled iron pressure cooker, an Art Nouveau chandelier, and a chamber pot.

The morning after, the chloride is gathered and set to drain: and you must be very careful not to touch it with your hands or it saddles you with a truly disgusting smell. This salt, in itself, is odorless, but it reacts in some manner with the skin, perhaps reducing the keratin’s disulfide bridges and giving off a persistent metallic stench that for several days announces to all that you are a chemist. It is aggressive but also delicate, like certain unpleasant sports opponents who whine when they lose: you can’t force it, you have to let it dry out in the air in its own good time. If you try to warm it up, even in the mildest manner, for example, with a hair dryer or on the radiator, it loses its crystallization water, becomes opaque, and foolish customers no longer want it. Foolish because it would suit them fine: with less water there is more tin and therefore more of a yield; but that’s how it is, the customer is always right, especially when he knows little chemistry, as is precisely the case with mirror manufacturers.

Nothing of the generous good nature of tin, Jove’s metal, survives in its chloride (besides, chlorides in general are rabble, for the most part ignoble by-products, hygroscopic, not good for much: with the single exception of common salt, which is a completely different matter). This salt is an energetic reducing agent, that is to say, it is eager to free itself of two of its electrons and does so on the slightest pretext, sometimes with disastrous results: just a single splash of the concentrated solution, which dripped down my pants, was enough to cut them cleanly like the blow of a scimitar; and this was right after the war, and I had no other pants except my Sunday best, and there wasn’t much money in the house.

I would never have left the lakeshore factory, and I would have stayed there for all eternity correcting varnishes’ deformities, if Emilio had not insisted, praising adventure and the glories of a free profession. I had quit my job with absurd self-assurance, distributing to my colleagues and superiors a testament written in quatrains full of gay impudence: I was quite aware of the risk I was running, but I knew that the license to make mistakes becomes more limited with the passing of the years, so he who wants to take advantage of it must not wait too long. On the other hand, one must not wait too long to realize that a mistake is a mistake: at the end of each month we did our accounts, and it was becoming ever more obvious that man does not live by stannous chloride alone; or at least I did not, since I had just married and had no authoritative patriarch behind me.

We didn’t surrender right away; we racked our brains for a good month in an effort to obtain vanillin from eugenol with an output that would permit us to live, and didn’t succeed; we secreted several hundred kilos of pyruvic acid, produced with equipment for troglodytes and a work schedule for slaves, after which I hoisted the white flag. I had to find a job, even if it meant going back to varnishes.

Emilio accepted the common defeat and my desertion with sorrow but like a man. For him it was different: in his veins ran the paternal blood, rich in remote piratic ferments, mercantile initiatives, and a restless frenzy for the new. He was not afraid of making mistakes, nor of changing his trade, the place, and the style of his life every six months, nor of becoming poor; nor did he have any caste hang-ups, nor did he feel ill at ease about going around on his tricycle and in gray overalls to deliver our laborious chloride to customers. He accepted, and the next day he already had in mind other ideas, other deals with people more experienced than I, and immediately set about dismantling the laboratory, and he wasn’t even all that sad, whereas I was and felt like crying, or of howling at the moon as dogs do when they see the suitcases being closed. We proceeded to carry out the melancholy task helped (or, better, distracted and impeded) by Signor Samuele and Signora Ester. There came to light family utensils, sought in vain for years, and other exotic objects, buried geologically in the apartment’s recesses: the breechblock of a Beretta 38 tommy gun (from the days when Emilio had been a partisan and roamed the mountain valleys, distributing spare parts to the bands), an illuminated Koran, a very long porcelain pipe, a damascened sword with a hilt inlaid with silver, and an avalanche of yellowed papers. Among these rose to the surface—and I appropriated it greedily—a proclamation decree of 1785 in which F. Tom. Lorenzo Matteucci, General Inquisitor of the Ancona District, especially delegated against the heretical depravity, with much complacency and little clarity, “orders, prohibits, and severely commands, that no Jew shall have the temerity to take Lessons from Christians for any kind of Instrument, and much less that of Dancing.” We put off until the next day the most anguishing job, the dismantling of the ventilation hood.

Despite Emilio’s opinion, it was immediately clear that our efforts would not be sufficient. It was painful to draft a couple of carpenters, whom Emilio ordered to build a contraption fit to uproot the hood from its anchorage without dismembering it: in sum, this hood was a symbol, the sign of a profession and condition, indeed an art, and should have been deposited in the courtyard intact and in its integrity, so as to find a new life and use in a still undefined future.

A scaffolding was built, a block and tackle were set up, and guide ropes were strung. While Emilio and I watched the funereal ceremony from the courtyard, the hood issued solemnly from the window, hovered ponderously, outlined sharply against the gray sky of Via Massena, was skillfully hooked onto the chain of the block and tackle, and the chain groaned once and broke. The hood plunged four floors to our feet and was reduced to shards of wood and glass; it still smelled of eugenol and pyruvic acid, and with it our will and daring for enterprise was also reduced to shards.

In the brief instants of the flight the instinct of self-preservation made us take a leap backward. Emilio said, “I thought it would make more noise.”

U
RANIUM

One cannot employ just anyone to do the work of Customers’ Service. It is a delicate and complex job, not much different from that of diplomats: to perform it with success you must infuse faith in the customers, and therefore it is indispensable to have faith in yourself and in the products you sell; it is therefore a salutary activity, which helps you to know yourself and strengthens your character. It is perhaps the most hygienic of the specialities that constitute the decathlon of the factory chemist: the speciality that best trains him in eloquence and improvisation, prompt reflexes, and the ability to understand and make yourself understood; besides, you get a chance to travel about Italy and the world, and it brings you into contact with all sorts of people. I must also mention another peculiar and beneficent consequence of CS: by pretending to esteem and like your fellow men, after a few years in this trade you wind up really doing so, just as someone who feigns madness for a long time actually becomes crazy.

In the majority of cases, at the first contact you have to acquire or conquer a position superior to that of your interlocutor: but conquer it quietly, graciously, without frightening him or pulling rank. He must feel you are superior, but just a little: reachable, comprehensible. Never, but never, for instance, talk chemistry with a non-chemist: this is the ABC of the trade. But the opposite danger is much more serious, that the customer outranks you: and this can easily happen, because he plays at home, that is, he puts the products you’re selling him to practical use, and so he knows their virtues and defects as a wife knows her husband’s, while usually you have only a painless, disinterested, often optimistic knowledge of them, acquired in the lab or during their production. The most favorable constellation is that in which you can present yourself as a benefactor, in whatever way: by convincing him that your product satisfies an old need or desire of his, perhaps overlooked; that, having taken everything into account, at the end of the year it would prove to cost less than the competition’s product, which more-over, as is known, works well at first but, well, I don’t really want to go into it. You can, however, assist him also in different ways (and here the imagination of the CS candidate is revealed): by solving a technical problem for him that has little or nothing to do with your business: furnishing him with an address; inviting him to dinner in a typical restaurant; showing him your city and helping him or advising him on the purchase of souvenirs for his wife or girlfriend; finding him at the last moment a ticket in the stadium for the local soccer match (that’s right, we do this too). My Bologna colleague has a collection of dirty stories continually brought up to date, and reviews them diligently together with the technical bulletins before setting out on his sales trip in the cities and provinces; since he has a faulty memory, he keeps a record of which he has told to whom, because to administer the same joke twice to the same person would be a serious mistake.

All these things are learned through experience, but there are technical salesmen who seem born to it, born CS like Athena. This is not my case, and I am sadly conscious of it: when it falls to me to work in CS, at the office or traveling, I do it unwillingly, with hesitation, compunction, and little human warmth. Worse: I tend to be brusque and impatient with customers who are impatient and brusque, and to be mild and yielding with suppliers who, being in their turn CSs, prove to be just that, yielding and mild. In short, I am not a good CS, and I fear that by now it is too late for me to become one.

Tabasso had said to me, “Go to ____ and ask for Bonino, who is the head of the department. He’s a fine man, already knows our products, everything has always gone well, he’s no genius, we haven’t called on him for three months. You will see that you won’t have any technical difficulties; and if he begins to talk prices, just keep to generalities: tell him that you’ll report to us and it’s not your job...”

I had myself announced; they gave me a form to fill out and handed me a badge to stick to my lapel, which characterized you as an outsider and immunized you against reactions of rejection on the part of the guards. They had me sit down in a waiting room; after not more than five minutes Bonino appeared and led me to his office. This is an excellent sign, and it doesn’t always go like this: there are people who, coldly, make a CS wait for thirty or forty minutes even if there is an appointment, with the deliberate aim of putting him down and imposing their superior rank; it is the same goal aimed at, with more ingenious and more obscene techniques, by the baboons in the big ditch in the zoo. But the analogy is more general: all of a CS’s strategies and tactics can be described in terms of sexual courtship. In both cases it’s a one-to-one relationship; a courtship or negotiation among three persons would be unthinkable. In both cases one notes at the beginning a kind of dance or ritualized opening in which the buyer accepts the seller only if the latter adheres rigidly to the traditional ceremonial; if this takes place, the buyer joins the dance, and if the enjoyment is mutual, mating is attained, that is, the purchase, to the visible satisfaction of the two partners. The cases of unilateral violence are rare; not by chance are they often described in terms borrowed from the sexual sphere.

Bonino was a round little man, untidy, vaguely canine, carelessly shaved, and with a toothless smile. I introduced myself and initiated the propitiatory dance, but right off he said, “Ah yes, you’re the fellow who wrote a book.” I must confess my weakness: this irregular opening does not displease me, although it is not very useful to the company I represent; indeed, at this point the conversation tends to degenerate, or at least lose itself in anomalous considerations, which distract from the purpose of the visit and waste professional time.