The Periodic Table (14 page)

I could eat lunch where I wished; it was not his intention to sequester the clerks in the factory during the midday break. However, he told me (and here his mouth twisted more than usual and became even thinner) there were no good cheap
trattorie
thereabouts, and his advice was to equip myself for lunching in the lab; if I brought the raw materials from home, a worker there would see to cooking it for me.

As for the library, the regulations that had to be followed were singularly severe. Books could not be taken out of the factory under any circumstances; they could be consulted only with the consent of the librarian, Signorina Paglietta. Underlining a word, or just making a mark with pen or pencil, was a very serious offense: Paglietta was expected to check every book, page by page, when returned, and if she found a mark, the book had to be destroyed and replaced at the expense of the culprit. It was forbidden even to leave between the sheets a bookmark, or turn down the corner of a page: “someone” could have drawn clues from this about the factory’s interests and activities—in short, violate its secret. Within this system, it is logical that keys were fundamental: in the evening, everything had to be locked up, even the analytical balance, and the keys then deposited with the custodian. The
commendatore
had a key that opened all the locks.

This viaticum of precepts and prohibitions would have made me permanently unhappy if on entering the lab I had not found Giulia Vineis, quite calm, seated beside her workbench. She was not working—instead she was darning her stockings, and seemed to be waiting for me. She greeted me with affectionate familiarity and a meaningful grimace.

We had been classmates at the university for four years, and had attended together all the lab courses, which are wonderful matchmakers, without ever becoming particular friends. Giulia was a dark girl, minute and quick; she had eyebrows with an elegant arc, a smooth, pointed face, a lively but precise way of moving. She was more open to practice than to theory, full of human warmth, Catholic without rigidity, generous and slap-dash; she spoke in a veiled, distracted voice, as if she were definitely tired of living, which she was not at all. She had been there for nearly a year—yes, she was the person who mentioned my name to the
commendatore:
she knew vaguely about my precarious situation at the mine, thought that I would be well suited for that research work, and besides, why not admit it, she was fed up with being alone. But I shouldn’t get any ideas: she was engaged, very much engaged, a complicated and tumultuous business that she would explain to me later. And what about me? No? No girls? That’s bad: she would try to help me out there, forget the racial laws; a lot of nonsense anyway, what importance could they have?

She advised me not to take the
commendatore
’s strange ideas too seriously. Giulia was one of those people who, apparently without asking questions or going to any trouble, immediately knew everything about everybody, which to me, God knows why, never happens; so she was for me a tourist guide and a first-class interpreter. In a single session she taught me the essentials, the pulley-lines hidden behind the factory’s scenery and the roles of the main characters. The
commendatore
was the boss, although subjected to obscure other bosses in Basel; however, the person who gave the orders was Loredana (and she pointed her out to me from the window on the courtyard: tall, brunette, shapely, rather vulgar, a bit faded), who was his secretary and mistress. They had a villa on the lake, and he—“who was old but horny”—took her sailing. There were photos of this in the main office, hadn’t I seen them? Also Signor Grasso, in the Personnel Office, was after Loredana, but for the moment she, Giulia, had not yet been able to ascertain whether he’d already been to bed with her or not: she would keep me posted. Living in that factory was not difficult; it was difficult to work there because of all those entanglements. The solution was simple—just don’t work: she had realized this immediately, and in a year, modesty aside, she had done hardly anything—all that she did was set up the apparatus in the morning, just enough to satisfy the eye, and dismount it in the evening in accordance with regulations. The daily report she created out of her imagination. Apart from that, she prepared her trousseau, slept a great deal, wrote torrential letters to her fiance, and, against regulations, started conversations with everyone who came within earshot: with Ambrogio, half dazed, who took care of the rabbits for the experiments; with Michela, who watched over the keys and probably was a Fascist spy; with Varisco, the woman worker who, according to the
commendatore,
was supposed to prepare my lunch; with Maiocchi, a fighter on Franco’s side in Spain, pomaded and a womanizer; and, impartially, with Moioli, pallid and gelatinous, who had nine children, had been a member of the People’s Party, and whose back the Fascists had broken with their clubs.

Varisco, she explained, was her creature: she was attached and devoted and did everything she was ordered to do, including certain expeditions into the department for the production of organo-therapeutics (forbidden to those not working there), from which she returned with livers, brains, suprarenal capsules, and other rare innards. Varisco was also engaged, and between the two of them there was profound solidarity and an intense exchange of intimate confidences. From Varisco, who, since she was in charge of cleaning, had access to all departments, she had found out that production too was enveloped in closely meshed anti-spy trappings: all pipes for water, vapor, vacuum, gas, naphtha, etc., ran in underground passages or were sheathed in cement, and only the valves were accessible; the machines were covered with complicated gear-cases and locked. The dials of the thermometers and manometers were not graduated; they bore only conventional colored marks.

Of course, if I wanted to work and the research into diabetes interested me, go right ahead and do it, we would be friends anyway; but I shouldn’t count on her collaboration because she had other things to think about. I could, however, count on her and Varisco when it came to cooking. They, both of them, had to start training, in view of their coming marriages, and so they would offer me some feeds which would make me forget all about ration cards and rationing. It did not seem to me rule-abiding that complicated feats of cuisine should take place in the lab, but Giulia told me that in that laboratory, outside of a certain mysterious consultant from Basel who seemed mummified, came once a month (in any case, abundantly preannounced), looked around as though he were in a museum, and left without breathing a word, no living being ever entered, and you could do whatever you liked, so long as you left no traces behind. In the memory of man, the
commendatore
had never set foot there.

A few days after I was hired, the
commendatore
summoned me to the main office, and on that occasion I noticed that the photos of the sailboat—actually very chaste—were really there. He told me that the moment had come to begin the real work. The first thing I had to do was go to the library, ask Paglietta for the Kerrn, a treatise on diabetes. I knew German, didn’t I? Good, so I could read it in the original text and not in a very poor French translation which the people in Basel had commissioned. He, he admitted, had read only the latter, without understanding much of it, but nevertheless gaining from it the conviction that Dr. Kerrn was a fellow who knew plenty and that it would be wonderful to be the first to translate his ideas into practice: certainly, he wrote in a rather involuted manner, but the people in Basel were very keen on this business of an oral anti-diabetic, especially the mummified consultant, so I should get Kerrn, read him attentively, and then we would discuss it. But meanwhile, so as not to waste time, I could begin work. His many preoccupations had not allowed him to devote to the text the attention it deserved, but he had nonetheless gotten from it two fundamental ideas, and we should try to test them in practice.

The first idea concerned anthocyanins. Anthocyanins, as you know very well, are the pigments of red and blue flowers: they are substances easy to oxidize and deoxidize, as is also glucose, and diabetes is an anomaly in the oxidizing of glucose: “hence,” with the anthocyanins one could try to reestablish a normal oxidizing of glucose. The petals of the cornflower are very rich in anthocyanins; in view of the problem, he had put a whole field under cultivation with cornflowers and had the petals harvested and dried in the sun: I should try to make extracts from them, administer them to rabbits, and check their glycemia.

The second idea was just as vague, and at once simplistic and complicated. Still according to Dr. Kerrn, in the
commendatore’s
Lombardian interpretation, phosphoric acid had a fundamental importance in the metabolism of carbohydrates: and up to this point there was nothing to object to; less convincing was the hypothesis elaborated by the
commendatore
himself on Kerrn’s rather misty fundamentals, namely, that it would suffice to administer to the diabetic a little phosphorus of vegetal origin to correct his subverted metabolism. At that time I was so young as to think that it might be possible to change a superior’s ideas; therefore I put forth two or three objections, but I saw immediately that under their blows the
commendatore
hardened like a sheet of copper under a hammer. He cut me short and, with a certain peremptory tone of his that transformed his suggestions into commands, advised me to analyze a good number of plants, select the richest in organic phosphorus, make from them the usual extracts, and stick them into the usual rabbits. Enjoy your work and good afternoon.

When I told Giulia about the outcome of this colloquy, her judgment was immediate and angry: the old man is crazy. But I had provoked him, descending to his level and showing him from the start that I took him seriously: I’d asked for it, and I should see now what I could do with those cornflowers, phosphorus, and rabbits. In her opinion, that mania of mine about work, which even went to the point of prostituting myself to the
commendatore
’s senile fairy tales, resulted from the fact that I didn’t have a girl friend: if I had one, I would have thought about her instead of anthocyanins. It was truly a pity that she, Giulia, was not available, because she realized the sort of person I was, one of those who do not take the initiative, indeed run away, and must be led by the hand, solving little by little all their complicated conflicts. Well, in Milan there was a cousin of hers, also rather shy; she would arrange for me to meet her. But what the deuce, I too, by heavens, should get busy; it hurt her heart to see someone like me throw away the best years of his youth on rabbits. This Giulia was a bit of a witch—she read palms, went to mediums, and had premonitory dreams—and sometimes I have dared to think that this haste of hers to free me of an old anguish and procure for me immediately a modest portion of joy came from a dark intuition of hers about what fate had in store for me, and was unconsciously aimed at deflecting it.

We went together to see the movie
Port of Shadows
and thought it marvelous, and we confessed to each other that we’d identified with the main actors: slim, dark Giulia with the ethereal Michele Morgan and her ice-green eyes, and I, mild and recessive, with the deserter Jean Gabin, a fascinator and tough guy, killed dead—ridiculous, and besides, those two loved each other and we didn’t, right?

When the movie was about to end, Giulia announced that I would have to take her home. I had to go to the dentist, but Giulia said: “If you don’t take me, I’ll yell, ‘Get your hands off me, you pig!’” I tried to object, but Giulia took a deep breath and in the darkness of the movie house began, “Get your... ”: so I phoned the dentist and took her home.

Giulia was a lioness, capable of traveling for ten hours standing up in a train packed with people running away from the bombings to spend two hours with her man, happy and radiant if she could engage in a violent verbal duel with the
commendatore
or Loredana, but she was afraid of insects and thunder. She called me to evict a tiny spider from her workbench (I wasn’t allowed to kill it, but had to put it in a weighing bottle and carry it outside to the flowerbed), and this made me feel virtuous and strong like Hercules faced by the Hydra of Lerna, and at the same time tempted, since I perceived the intense feminine charge in the request. A furious storm broke, Giulia stood fast for two strokes of lightning and at the third ran to me for shelter. I felt the warmth of her body against mine, dizzying and new, familiar in dreams, but I did not return her embrace; if I had done so, perhaps her destiny and mine would have gone with a crash off the rails, toward a common, completely unpredictable future. The librarian, whom I had never seen before, presided over the library like a watchdog, one of those poor dogs who are deliberately made vicious by being chained up and given little to eat; or better, like the old, toothless cobra, pale because of centuries of darkness, who guards the king’s treasure in the
Jungle Book.
Paglietta, poor woman, was little less than a
lusus naturae:
she was small, without breasts or hips, waxen, wilted, and monstrously myopic: she wore glasses so thick and concave that, looking at her head-on, her eyes, light blue, almost white, seemed very far away, stuck at the back of her cranium. She gave the impression of never having been young, although she was certainly not more than thirty, and of having been born there, in the shadows, in that vague odor of mildew and stale air. Nobody knew anything about her, the
commendatore
himself talked about her with irritated impatience, and Giulia admitted that she hated her instinctively, without knowing why, without pity, as a fox hates a dog. She said that she stank of mothballs and looked constipated. Paglietta asked me why I wanted the Kerrn in particular, insisted on seeing my identity card, inspected it with a malevolent air, made me sign a register, and reluctantly surrendered the book.

It was a strange book: it would be hard to think of its being written and published in any other place than the Third Reich. The author was not without a certain ability, but every one of his pages gave off the arrogance of someone who knows that his statements will not be disputed. He wrote, indeed harangued, like a possessed prophet, as though the metabolism of glucose, in the diabetic and the healthy person, had been revealed to him by Jehovah on Sinai or, rather, by Wotan on Valhalla. Perhaps wrongly, I immediately conceived for Kerrn’s theories a resentful distrust; but I have not heard that the thirty years that have passed since then have led to their reevaluation.