The Periodic Table (9 page)

The lieutenant acknowledged my consent and without wasting time gave me an appointment at the railroad station for the next day. Preparations? I didn’t need very much: certainly no documents (I would begin work incognito, without a name or with a false name—we’d see about that later on); a few heavy suits (my climbing outfits would go very well), a shirt, books if I wished. As for the rest, no problem: I would find a heated room, a lab, regular meals with a family of workers, and my colleagues were good people with whom, however, he advised me not to become too intimate for obvious reasons.

We left, got off the train, and reached the mine after a climb of five kilometers surrounded by a forest sparkling with hoar-frost. The lieutenant, who was briskly businesslike, introduced me summarily to the director, a young, tall, vigorous engineer who was even more businesslike and who evidently had already been told about me. I was taken into the lab, where a singular creature awaited me: a rather raw-boned girl of eighteen, with fiery red hair and green, slanting, mischievous, alert eyes. I learned that she would be my assistant.

During the meal which, exceptionally, was offered to me on the office’s premises, the radio broadcast the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Japan’s declaration of war on the United States. My fellow diners (a number of clerks, besides the lieutenant) greeted the announcement in various ways: some, and among these the lieutenant himself, with reserve and cautious glances at me; others, with worried comments; still others, belligerently insisting on the by now proven invincibility of the Japanese and German armies.

So the “some place” had become localized in space, without, however, losing any of its magic. Yes, all mines are magical
per se,
and always have been. The entrails of the earth swarm with gnomes, kobolds (cobalt!),
nickel,
German “little demon” or “sprite,” and from which we derive the word nickel, creatures who can be generous and let you find a treasure beneath the tip of your pickax, or deceive and bedazzle you, making modest pyrites glitter like gold, or disguising zinc in the garb of tin: and in fact, many are the minerals whose names have roots that signify “deception, fraud, bedazzlement.”

This mine too had its magic, its wild enchantment. On a squat, bleak hill, all jagged rocks and stumps, was sunk a cyclopean, cone-shaped gorge, an artificial crater, four hundred meters in diameter: it was in every way similar to the schematic representations of Hell in the synoptic tables of Dante’s
Divine Comedy.
Along the encircling tiers, day by day, were exploded dynamite charges: the slope of the cone’s walls was graded at the indispensable minimum so that the material shaken loose would roll down to the bottom but without gaining too much speed. At the bottom, in Lucifer’s place, stood a ponderous rolling shutter; beneath this was a shallow vertical pit which led into a long horizontal tunnel; this in turn debouched in the open air on the side of the hill, just above the mine’s main building. In the tunnel an armored train shuttled back and forth: a small but powerful locomotive positioned the cars one by one under the shutter so that they could be filled, then dragged them out to look again at the stars.

The plant was built in a tier along the slope of the hill and beneath the tunnel’s opening; in it the mineral was shattered in a huge crusher that the director described to me and demonstrated with almost childlike enthusiasm. It was a bell turned upside down, or, if one wished, the corolla of a bindweed, four meters in diameter and constructed of massive steel: at its center, suspended from above and guided from below, swung a gigantic clapper. The oscillation was slight, barely visible, but was enough to split in the blink of an eye the mass of rock which poured down from the train: the rocks were split, pressed together lower down, split again, and came out below in fragments as large as a man’s head. The operation proceeded in the midst of an apocalyptic uproar, a cloud of dust which could be seen down on the plain. The material was crushed again until it became gravel, then dried out and sifted; and it wasn’t difficult to figure out that the final purpose of that gigantic labor was to extract a miserable 2 percent of asbestos which was trapped in those rocks. All the rest, thousands of tons a day, was dumped at random into the valley.

Year after year, the valley was being filled by a slow avalanche of dust and gravel. The asbestos that still was in it made the mass of material slightly slippery, sluggishly sticky, like a glacier: the enormous gray tongue, dotted with blackish rocks, crept laboriously, ponderously downhill, about ten meters a year; it exerted so much pressure on the walls of the valley as to produce deep transverse fissures in the rock; yearly it moved a few inches several of the buildings erected too far down. I lived in one of them, called the “submarine” precisely because of its quiet downward drift.

There was asbestos everywhere, like ashy snow. If you left a book for a few hours on the table and then picked it up, you found its profile in negative; the roofs were covered by a thick layer of dust, which on rainy days soaked through like a sponge, and then suddenly would slide and crash violently to the ground. The head foreman in the mine, called Antaeus, was an obese giant with a thick black beard who actually seemed to draw his strength from Mother Earth. He told me that, years before, a persistent rain had washed many tons of asbestos from the walls of the mine; the asbestos had accumulated at the bottom of the cone over the open valve, secretly setting like a plug. Nobody had attached much importance to the matter, but it had continued to rain, the cone acted as a funnel, a lake of twenty thousand cubic meters of water had formed over the plug, and still nobody had given the matter any thought. He, Antaeus, saw trouble coming and had insisted that the then director do something about it: being the good mine foreman that he was he favored a nice big dynamite charge exploded without ado on the bottom of the lake; but what with this and that, it might be dangerous, you could damage the valve, best to get the advice of the administrative council, nobody wanted to decide, and meanwhile the mine, with its malign genius, decided by itself.

While the wise men were deliberating, a dull roar was heard, the plug had given way, the water sank in the pit and tunnel, swept away the train with all its cars, and laid waste the plant. Antaeus showed me the marks left by the flood, a good two meters above the inclined plane.

The workers and miners (who in the local jargon were called “minors”) came from the neighboring villages, walking perhaps two hours over the mountain paths. The clerks lived on the spot. The plain was only five kilometers away, but for all purposes the mine was a small autonomous republic. At that time of rationing and black market there were no supply problems up there; nobody knew how this was, but everyone had everything. Many clerks had their own truck gardens, around the square villa that housed the offices; some of them even had chicken coops. Several times one clerk’s chickens would invade the truck garden of another, damaging it, and this produced tiresome disputes and feuds, which were ill-suited to the serenity of the place and the director’s curt, no-nonsense nature. He had cut through the tangle in a manner worthy of him: he had ordered a Flobert shotgun and hung it on a nail in his office. Anyone who from the window saw a foreign chicken scratching around in his truck garden had the right to take the shotgun and shoot it twice: but the chicken had to be caught in the act. If the chicken died on the field, the corpse belonged to the shooter; this was the law. During the first days after the ruling, there had been many dashes for the gun and shootings, while all those not involved bet on the outcome, but then the trespassing stopped.

Other marvelous stories were told to me, like the story about Signor Pistamiglio’s dog. This Signor Pistamiglio, when I got there, had been gone for years, but his memory was still alive and, as often happens, had acquired a gilded patina of legend. So then this Signor Pistamiglio was an excellent section chief, no longer young, a bachelor, full of common sense, esteemed by all, and his dog was a very beautiful German shepherd, equally upright and esteemed.

There came a certain Christmas and four of the fattest turkeys in the town down in the valley disappeared. Too bad: thieves had been suspected, a fox, and that was the end of it. But another winter came and this time seven turkeys disappeared between November and December. The thefts were reported to the local carabinieri, but nobody would have ever solved the mystery if Signor Pistamiglio himself had not let slip one word too many one evening when he’d drunk a bit. The turkey thieves were the two of them, he and his dog. On Sunday he took his dog to the town, roamed about among the farms, and showed him which were the most beautiful and least guarded turkeys; case by case he explained to him the best strategy; then they came back to the mine and at night he would set him free, and the dog arrived invisibly, slithering along the walls like a real wolf, jumped over the fence around the chicken coop or dug a passage under it, killed the turkey silently, and brought it back to his accomplice. It does not appear that Signor Pistamiglio sold the turkeys; according to the most accredited version, he gave them as gifts to his lovers, who were numerous, old, ugly, and scattered throughout the foothills of the Piedmontese Alps.

But many, many stories were told; from what could be gathered, all fifty of the mine’s inhabitants had reacted on each other, two by two, as in combinatorial analysis, that is to say, everyone with all the others, and especially every man with all the women, old maids or married, and every woman with all the men. All I had to do was select two names at random, better if of different sex, and ask a third person: “What happened with those two?” and lo and behold, a splendid story was unfolded for me, since everyone knew the story of everyone else. It is not clear why these events, often quite complicated and always intimate, were told so offhandedly, particularly to me of all people, who on the contrary could tell nothing to anyone, not even my real name. But it appears that this is my fate (and I’m definitely not complaining about it): I am one of those people to whom many things are told.

I recorded in various versions a remote saga going back to a period much before Signor Pistamiglio’s. There had been a time when, in the mine’s offices, they had had a real Gomorrah. During that legendary season, every evening, when the five-thirty siren sounded, none of the clerks went home. At that signal, liquor and mattresses suddenly popped up from among the desks, and an orgy erupted that embraced everything and everyone, young pubescent stenographers and balding accountants, starting with the then director all the way down to the disabled doormen: the sad round of mining paperwork gave way suddenly, every evening, to a boundless interclass fornication, public and variously intertwined. No survivors had lived down to our day to provide direct testimony: a series of disastrous balance sheets had forced the board of governors in Milan to carry out a drastic, purifying intervention. Nobody except for Signora Bortolasso, who, I was assured, knew everything, had seen everything, but was not talking because of her extreme shyness.

Signora Bortolasso, in any case, never talked with anyone, outside the strict necessities of work. Before she had her present name she was called Gina delle Benne: at nineteen, already a typist in the office, she had fallen in love with a young, slim, red-headed miner who, without really reciprocating, showed himself nevertheless ready to accept her love; but her “folks” had been adamant. They had spent money on her studies and she had to show her gratitude by making a good marriage and not hooking up with just anybody; and what’s more, since the girl refused to be reasonable, they would see to it: either drop that redhead or get out of the house and the mine.

Gina was willing to wait until her twenty-first birthday (which was only two years away): but the redhead didn’t wait for her. He showed up one Sunday with another woman, then with a third, and wound up marrying a fourth. Gina then made a cruel decision: if she couldn’t bind herself to the man she cared for, the only one, well then, there would not be any other. Not a nun; she had modern ideas: but she forbade herself marriage forever in a refined and merciless manner, that is, by getting married. She was by now almost an executive, needed by the management, endowed with an iron memory and proverbial diligence: and she let everyone know, her parents and her bosses, that she intended to marry Bortolasso, the mine’s simpleton.

This Bortolasso was a middle-aged laborer, strong as a mule and dirty as a pig. He most likely was not a real simpleton: it is more probable that he belonged to that species of human being of whom one says in Piedmont that they play the fool so as not to pay for the salt: sheltering behind the immunity granted the weak-minded, Bortolasso performed with extreme negligence the job of gardener—with a negligence that verged on rudimentary cunning. Very well, the world had declared him irresponsible and now it had to tolerate him as such, indeed give him a living and take care of him.

Asbestos drenched by rain is hard to extract, so the rain gauge at the mine was very important. It was placed in the middle of a flowerbed, and the director himself took the readings. Bortolasso, who every morning watered the flowerbed, got the habit of also watering the rain gauge, severely falsifying the data for the costs of extraction. The director (not immediately) realized this and gave him orders to stop. “So then he likes it dry,” Bortolasso reasoned; and after every rain he would go and open the valve under the instrument.

When I arrived at the mine the situation had been stabilized for some time. Gina, now Signora Bortolasso, was about thirty-five: the modest beauty of her face had grown stiff and fixed in a tense, alert mask and bore the manifest stigma of a protracted virginity. For a virgin she had remained, they all knew it because Bortolasso told it to everyone. This had been the agreement at the time of the marriage; he had accepted it, even if later, almost every night, he tried to violate the woman’s bed. But she had defended herself furiously and still defended herself—never, never would a man, and most of all that one, be permitted to touch her.