The Periodic Table (24 page)

“It’s really a fine novel,” Bonino continued. “I read it during my vacation, and I also got my wife to read it; but not the children, because it might frighten them.” These opinions usually irritate me, but when one is in the CS role one must not be too discriminating: I thanked him urbanely and tried to bring the conversation back on the proper tracks, that is, our varnishes. Bonino put up some resistance.

“Just as you see me, I also risked finishing up like you did. They had already shut me up in the barrack’s courtyard, on Corso Orbassano: but at a certain point I saw him come in, you know very well who I mean, and then, while nobody saw me, I climbed the wall, threw myself down on the other side, which was a good five meters, and took off. Then I went to Val Susa with the Badogliani.”
{11}

I had never heard a Badogliano call the Badogliani Badogliani, I set up my defenses and, in fact, caught myself taking a deep breath, as someone does when preparing for a long immersion. It was clear that Bonino’s story would be far from brief: but I remembered how many long stories I myself had inflicted on people, on those who wanted to listen and those who didn’t. I remembered that it is written (Deuteronomy 10:19): “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt,” and I settled back comfortably in my chair.

Bonino was not a good storyteller: he roamed, repeated himself, made long digressions, and digressions inside digressions. Besides, he had the curious bad habit of omitting the subject of some sentences and replacing it with a personal pronoun, which rendered his discourse even more nebulous. As he was speaking, I distractedly examined the room where he had received me: evidently his office for many years, because it looked neglected and untidy like him. The windows were offensively dirty, the walls were grimy with soot, the gloomy smell of stale tobacco stagnated in the air. Rusty nails were driven into the walls: some apparently useless, others holding up yellowed sheets. One of these, which could be read from my observation post, began like this: “
SUBJECT:
Rags. With ever greater frequency....” Elsewhere you could see used razor blades, soccer pool slips, medical insurance forms, picture postcards.

“... so then he told me that I should walk behind him, no in fact ahead of him: it was he who was behind me, a pistol pointed at me. Then the other guy arrived, his crony, who was waiting for him around the corner; and between the two of them they took me to Via Asti, you know what I mean, where there was Aloisio Smit. He would send for me every so often and say talk talk because your pals have already talked and there’s no point playing the hero....”

On Bonino’s desk there was a horrible reproduction in a light alloy of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. There was also an ashtray made from a seashell, full of cigarette butts and cherry pits, and an alabaster penholder shaped like Vesuvius. It was a pathetic desk, not more than 0.6 square meters at a generous estimate. There is not a seasoned CS who does not know this sad science of the desk: perhaps not at a conscious level, but in the form of a conditioned reflex, a scanty desk inexorably proclaims a lowly occupant; as for that clerk who, within eight or ten days after being hired, has not been able to conquer a desk, well, he is a lost man: he cannot count on more than a few weeks’ survival, like a hermit crab without a shell. On the other hand, I have known people who at the end of their careers disposed of a surface of seven or eight square meters with a polyester gloss, obviously excessive but a proper expression in code of the extent of their power. What objects rest on the desk is not important quantitatively: there is the man who expresses his authority by maintaining on its surface the greatest disorder and the greatest accumulation of stationery; there is on the contrary the man who, more subtly, imposes his rank by a void and meticulous cleanliness: that’s what Mussolini did, so they say, at Palazzo Venezia.

“... but all these men were not aware that in my belt I had a pistol too. When they began to torture me, I pulled it out, made them all stand facing the wall, and I got out. But he...”

He who? I was perplexed; the story was getting more and more garbled, the clock was running, and though it is true that the customer is always right, there’s also a limit to selling one’s soul and to fidelity to the company’s orders: beyond this limit you make yourself ridiculous.

“... as far as I could: a half hour, and I was already in the Rivoli section. I was walking along the road, and there what do I see landing in the fields nearby but a German plane, a Stork, the kind that can land in fifty meters. Two men get out, very polite, and ask me please which way to Switzerland. I happen to know these places and I answered right off: straight ahead, like that, to Milan and then turn left.
‘Danke,’
they answer, and get back in the plane; then one of them has a second thought, rummages under his seat, gets out, and comes over to me holding some thing like a rock in his hand; he hands it to me and says, ‘This is for your trouble: take good care of it, it’s uranium.’ You understand, it was the end of the war, by now they felt lost they no longer had the time to make the atomic bomb and they didn’t need uranium anymore. They thought only of saving their skins and escaping to Switzerland.”

There is also a limit to how much you can control your facial muscles: Bonino must have caught some sign on my face of incredulity, because he broke off in a slightly offended tone and said, “Don’t you believe me?”

“Of course I believe you,” I responded heroically. “But was it really uranium?”

“Absolutely: anyone could have seen that. It had an incredible weight, and when you touched it, it was hot. Besides, I still have it at home: I keep it on the terrace in a little shed, a secret, so the kids can’t touch it; every so often I show it to my friends, and it’s remained hot, it’s hot even now.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “You know what I’ll do? Tomorrow I’ll send you a piece so you’ll be convinced, and maybe, since you’re a writer, along with your stories one of these days you’ll also write this one.”

I thanked him, dutifully did my number, explained a certain new product, took a rather large order, said goodbye, and considered the case closed. But the next day, on my 1.2-square-meter desk, sat a small package addressed to my attention. I opened it, not without curiosity: it contained a small block of metal, about half a cigarette pack in size, actually quite heavy and with an exotic look about it. The surface was silvery white, with a light yellowish glaze: it did not seem hot, but it was not to be confused with any of the metals that a long everyday experience also outside chemistry had made familiar to me, such as copper, zinc, and aluminum. Perhaps an alloy? Or perhaps actually uranium? Metallic uranium in our parts has never been seen by anyone, and in the treatises it is described as silvery white; and a small block like that would not be permanently hot: perhaps only a mass as big as a house can remain hot at the expense of disintegrating energy.

As soon as it was decently possible I popped into the lab, which for a CS chemist is an unusual and vaguely improper thing to do. The lab is a place for the young, and returning there you feel young again: with the same longing for adventure, discovery, and the unexpected that you have at seventeen. Of course, you haven’t been seventeen for some time now, and besides, your long career as a para-chemist has mortified you, rendered you atrophied, handicapped, kept you ignorant as to where reagents and equipment are stored, forgetful of everything except the fundamental reactions: but precisely for these reasons the lab revisited is a source of joy and exerts an intense fascination, which is that of youth, of an indeterminate future pregnant with possibilities, that is, of freedom.

But the years of non-use don’t make you forget certain professional tics, a certain stereotyped behavior that marks you out as a chemist whatever the situation: probing the unknown material with your fingernail, a penknife, smelling it, feeling it with your lips whether it is “cold” or “hot,” testing whether it scratches the windowpane or not, observing it under reflected light, weighing it in the palm of your hand. It is not so easy to estimate the specific weight of a material without a scale, yet after all uranium has a specific weight of 19, much more than lead, twice as much as copper: the gift given to Bonino by the Nazi aeronaut-astronauts could not be uranium. I was beginning to discern, in the little man’s paranoic tale, the echo of a tenacious and recurrent local legend of UFOs in the Val Susa, of flying saucers, carriers of omens like the comets in the Middle Ages, erratic and devoid of results like the spirits of the spiritualists.

But if it wasn’t uranium, what was it? I cut off a slice of the metal with the handsaw (it was easy to saw) and offered it to the flame of the Bunsen burner: an unusual thing took place: a thread of brown smoke rose from the flame, a thread which curled into volutes. I felt, with an instant of voluptuous nostalgia, reawaken in me the reflexes of an analyst, withered by long inertia: I found a capsule of enameled porcelain, filled it with water, held it over the sooty flame, and saw form on the bottom a brown deposit which was an old acquaintance. I touched the deposit with a drop of silver nitrate solution and the black-blue color that developed confirmed for me that the metal was cadmium, the distant son of Cadmus, the sower of dragon’s teeth.

Where Bonino had found the cadmium was not very interesting: probably in the cadmium-plating department of his factory. More interesting but undecipherable was the origin of his story: profoundly his, his alone, since, as I found out later, he told it often and to everyone, but without substantiating it with the support of material, and with details that gradually became more colorful and less believable with the passing of the years. It was clearly impossible to get to the bottom of it: but I, tangled in the CS net of duties toward society, the company, and verisimilitude, envied in him the boundless freedom of invention of one who has broken through the barrier and is now free to build for himself the past that suits him best, to stitch around him the garments of a hero and fly like Superman across centuries, meridians, and parallels.

S
ILVER

A mimeographed circular is generally tossed into the wastebasket without even being read, but I realized immediately that this one did not deserve the common fate: it was an invitation to a dinner celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of our graduation from college. Its language got me to thinking: the addresser was treated to the intimate
tu,
and the amanuensis paraded a series of outdated student expressions, as if those twenty-live years had not passed. With involuntary comedy, the text concluded by saying, “... in an atmosphere of renewed comradeship, we will celebrate our silver wedding with Chemistry by telling each other the chemical events of our everyday life.” What chemical events? The precipitation of sterols in our fifty year-old arteries? The equilibrium of membrane in our membranes?

Who could the author be? I mentally passed in review my surviving twenty-five or thirty classmates: I mean to say not only those alive but those who have not disappeared behind the headland of other professional activities. First of all, cross off all the women: all mothers of families, all demobilized, none of them any longer in possession of “events” to be narrated. Cross off the climbers, the climbing, the protégés, the ex-protégés turned protectors: these are people who do not like comparisons. Cross off the frustrated, too, who do not like comparisons either: at a meeting of this kind a shipwrecked man might even show up, but only to solicit sympathy or help; it is unlikely that he would take the initiative to organize it. From the meager list that was left a probable name popped up: Cerrato—the honest, clumsy, eager Cerrato, to whom life had given so little and who had given so little to life. I had met him at intervals and fleetingly after the war, and he was an inert man, not shipwrecked: a shipwrecked man is he who departs and sinks, who sets himself a goal, does not reach it, and suffers because of it; Cerrato had never set himself anything, he had not exposed himself to anything, he had remained safely shut up in his house, and certainly must have clung to the “golden” years of his studies since all his other years had been years of lead.

Faced by the prospect of that dinner I had a two-sided reaction: it was not a neutral event, it attracted and repelled me at the same time, like a magnet brought close to a compass. I wanted to go and I didn’t want to: but the motivations for both decisions, closely examined, were not very noble. I wanted to go because it flattered me to compare myself to and feel myself more available than the others, less tied to money and the common idols, less duped, less worn out. I did not want to go because I did not want to be the same age as the others, that is, my age: I didn’t want to see wrinkles, white hair, didn’t want to count how many we were, nor count the absent, nor go in for calculations.

And yet Cerrato aroused my curiosity. At times we had studied together: he was serious and had no indulgence for himself, he studied without inspiration and without joy (he did not seem to know joy), successively boring through the chapters of the texts like a miner in a tunnel. He had not been compromised by Fascism, and he had reacted well to the reagent of the racial laws. He had been an opaque but reliable boy in whom one could trust: and experience teaches us that just this, trust-worthiness, is the most constant virtue, which is not acquired or lost with the years. One is born worthy of trust, with an open face and steady eyes, and remains such for life. He who is born contorted and lax remains that way: he who lies to you at six, lies to you at sixteen and sixty. The phenomenon is striking and explains how certain friendships and marriages survive for several decades, despite habit, boredom, and the wearing out of subjects of discussion: I was interested in verifying this through Cerrato. I paid my contribution and wrote to the anonymous committee that I would be at the dinner.

His appearance hadn’t changed very much: he was tall, bony, with an olive complexion; his hair was still thick, his face well shaven, his forehead, nose, and chin heavy, as if roughly molded. Now as then he moved awkwardly, with those abrupt and at the same time uncertain gestures which in the lab had made him the proverbial smasher of glassware.