The Periodic Table (19 page)

Since one can’t live on poetry and stories, I looked feverishly for work and found it in the big lakeshore factory, still damaged from the war, and during those months besieged by mud and ice. Nobody was much concerned with me: colleagues, the director, and workers had other things to think about—the son who wasn’t returning from Russia, the stove without wood, the shoes without soles, the warehouses without supplies, the windows without panes, the freezing cold which split the pipes, inflation, famine, and the virulent local feuds. I had been benignly granted a lame-legged desk in the lab, in a corner full of crashing noise, drafts, and people coming and going carrying rags and large cans, and I had not been assigned a specific task. I, unoccupied as a chemist and in a state of utter alienation (but then it wasn’t called that), was writing in a haphazard fashion page after page of the memories which were poisoning me, and my colleagues watched me stealthily as a harmless nut. The book grew under my hands, almost spontaneously, without plan or system, as intricate and crowded as an anthill. Every so often, impelled by a feeling of professional conscience, I would ask to see the director and request some work, but he was much too busy to worry about my scruples. I should read and study; when it came to paints and varnishes I was still, if I didn’t mind his saying so, an illiterate. I didn’t have anything to do? Well, I should praise God and sit in the library; if I really had the itch to do something useful, well, look, there were articles to translate from German.

One day he sent for me and with an oblique glint in his eyes announced that he had a little job for me. He took me to a corner of the factory’s yard, near a retaining wall: piled up at random, the lowest crushed by the highest, were thousands of square blocks of a bright orange color. He told me to touch them: they were gelatinous and softish; they had the disagreeable consistency of slaughtered tripes. I told the director that, apart from the color, they seemed to me to be livers, and he praised me: that’s just how it was described in the paint manuals! He explained that the phenomenon which had produced them was called just that in English, “livering”; under certain conditions certain paints turned from liquids into solids, with the consistency precisely of the liver or lungs, and must be thrown out. These parallelepiped shapes had been cans of paint: the paint had livered, the cans had been cut away, and the contents had been thrown on the garbage dump.

That paint, he told me, had been produced during the war and immediately after; it contained a basic chromate and alkyd resin. Perhaps the chromate was too basic or the resin too acidic: these were exactly the conditions under which a “livering” can take place. All right, he made me the gift of that pile of old sins; I should think about it, make tests and examinations, and try to say with precision why the trouble had occurred, what should be done so that it was not repeated, and if it were possible to reclaim the damaged goods.

Thus set forth, half chemistry and half police work, the problem attracted me: I was reconsidering it that evening (it was Saturday evening) as one of the sooty, freezing freight trains of that period lugged me to Turin. Now it happened that the next day destiny reserved for me a different and unique gift: the encounter with a woman, young and made of flesh and blood, warm against my side through our overcoats, gay in the humid mist of the avenues, patient, wise and sure as we were walking down streets still bordered with ruins. In a few hours we knew that we belonged to each other, not for one meeting but for life, as in fact has been the case. In a few hours I felt reborn and replete with new powers, washed clean and cured of a long sickness, finally ready to enter life with joy and vigor; equally cured was suddenly the world around me, and exorcized the name and face of the woman who had gone down into the lower depths with me and had not returned. My very writing became a different adventure, no longer the dolorous itinerary of a convalescent, no longer a begging for compassion and friendly faces, but a lucid building, which now was no longer solitary: the work of a chemist who weighs and divides, measures and judges on the basis of assured proofs, and strives to answer questions. Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differential calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter. Paradoxically, my baggage of atrocious memories became a wealth, a seed; it seemed to me that, by writing, I was growing like a plant.

In the freight train of the following Monday, squeezed in a sleepy crowd bundled in scarfs, I felt full of joy and alert as never before or after. I was ready to challenge everything and everyone, in the same way that I had challenged and defeated Auschwitz and loneliness: disposed, especially, to engage in joyous battle with the clumsy pyramid of orange livers that awaited me on the lakeshore.

It is the spirit that dominates matter, is that not so? Was it not this that they had hammered into my head in the Fascist and Gentile
liceo?
I threw myself into the work with the same intensity that, at not so distant a period, we had attacked a rock wall; and the adversary was still the same, the not-I, the Button Molder,
{8}
the
hyle:
stupid matter, slothfully hostile as human stupidity is hostile, and like it strong because of its obtuse passivity. Our trade is to conduct and win this interminable battle: a livered paint is much more rebellious, more refractory to your will than a lion in its mad pounce; but, let’s admit it, it’s also less dangerous.

The first skirmish took place in the archives. The two partners, the two fornicators from whose embrace had sprung our orange-colored monsters, were the chromate and the resin. The resin was fabricated on the spot: I found the birth certificate of all the batches, and they did not offer anything suspicious; the acidity was variable, but always inferior to 6, as prescribed. One batch that was found to have a pH of 6.2 had been dutifully discarded by an inspector with a flowery signature. In the first instance the resin could not be faulted.

The chromate had been purchased from different suppliers, and it too had been duly inspected batch by batch. According to Purchase Specification 480/0 it should have contained not less than 28 percent of chromium oxide in all; and now here, right before my eyes I had the interminable list of tests from January 1942 until today (one of the least exciting forms of reading imaginable), and all the values satisfied the specification, indeed were equal among themselves: 29.5 percent, not one percent more, not one less. I felt my inner being as a chemist writhe, confronted by that abomination; in fact, one should know that the natural oscillations in the method of preparation of such a chromate, added to the inevitable analytical errors, make it extremely improbable that the many values found in different batches and on different days could coincide so exactly. How come nobody had gotten suspicious? But in fact at that time I did not yet know the frightening anesthetic power of company papers, their capacity to hobble, douse, and dull every leap of intuition and every spark of talent. It is well known to the scholarly that all secretions can be harmful or toxic: now under pathological conditions it is not rare that the paper, a company secretion, is reabsorbed to an excessive degree, and puts to sleep, paralyzes, or actually kills the organism from which it has been exuded.

The story of what had happened began to take shape. For some reason, some analyst had been betrayed by a defective method, or an impure reagent, or an incorrect habit; he had diligently totted up those so obviously suspicious but formally blameless results; he had punctiliously signed each analysis, and his signature, swelling like an avalanche, had been consolidated by the signatures of the lab chief, the technical director, and the general director. I could see him, the poor wretch, against the background of those difficult years: no longer young, since all the young men were in the military services; perhaps chivied by the Fascists, perhaps himself a Fascist being looked for by the partisans; certainly frustrated, because being an analyst is a young man’s job; on guard in his lab within the fortress of his minuscule specialty, since the analyst is by definition infallible; and derided and regarded with a hostile eye outside the lab just because of his virtues as an incorruptible guardian, a severe, pedantic, unimaginative little judge, a stick poked in the wheels of production. To judge from the anonymous, neat handwriting, his trade must have exhausted him and at the same time brought him to a crude perfection, like a pebble in a mountain stream that has been twirled over and over all the way to the stream’s mouth. It was not surprising that, with time, he had developed a certain insensitivity to the real significance of the operations he was performing and the notes he was writing. I planned to look into his particular case but nobody knew anything more about him; my questions were met with discourteous or absentminded replies. Moreover, I was beginning to feel around me and my work a mocking and malevolent curiosity: who was this Johnny-come-lately, this pipsqueak earning 7,000 lire a month, this maniac scribbler who was disturbing the nights of the guest quarters typing away at God knows what, and sticking his nose into past mistakes and washing a generation’s dirty linen? I even had the suspicion that the job that had been assigned me had the secret purpose of getting me to bump into something or somebody; but by now this matter of the livering absorbed me body and soul,
tripes et boyaux
—in short, I was enamored of it almost as of that aforementioned girl, who in fact was a little jealous of it.

It was not hard for me to procure, besides the Purchase Specification (the PS), also the equally inviolable CS, the Checking Specifications: in a drawer in the lab there was a packet of greasy file cards, typewritten and corrected several times by hand, each of which contained the way to carry out a check of a specific raw material. The file card on prussian blue was stained with blue, the file card on glycerine was sticky, and the file card on fish oil smelled like sardines. I took out the file card on chromate, which due to long use had become sunrise, and read it carefully. It was all rather sensible and in keeping with my not-so-far-off scholastic notions; only one point seemed strange to me. Having achieved the disintegration of the pigment, it prescribed adding twenty-three drops of a certain reagent. Now, a drop is not so definite a unit as to entail so definite a numerical coefficient; and besides, when all is said and done, the prescribed dose was absurdly high: it would have flooded the analysis, leading in any case to a result in keeping with the specification. I looked at the back of the file card; it bore the date of the last review, January 4, 1944; the birth certificate of the first livered batch was on the succeeding February 22.

At this point I began to see the light. In a dusty archive I found the CS collection no longer in use, and there, lo and behold, the preceding edition of the chromate file card bore the direction to add “2 or 3” drops, and not “23”: the fundamental “or” was half erased and in the next transcription had gotten lost. The events meshed perfectly: the revision of the file card had caused a mistake in transcription, and the mistake had falsified all succeeding analyses, concealing the results on the basis of a fictitious value due to the reagent’s enormous excess and thus bringing about the acceptance of shipments of pigment which should have been discarded; these, being too basic, had brought about the livering.

But there is trouble in store for anyone who surrenders to the temptation of mistaking an elegant hypothesis for a certainty: the readers of detective stories know this quite well. I got hold of the sleepy man in charge of the storeroom, requested from him all the samples of all the shipments of chromate from January 1944 on, and barricaded myself behind a workbench for three days in order to analyze them according to the incorrect and correct methods. Gradually, as the results lined up in a column on the register, the boredom of repetitious work was being transformed into nervous gaiety, as when as children you play hide and seek and discover your opponent clumsily squatting behind a hedge. With the mistaken method you constantly found the fateful 29.5 percent; with the correct method, the results were widely dispersed, and a good quarter, being inferior to the prescribed minimum, corresponded to the shipments which should have been rejected. The diagnosis was confirmed, the pathogenesis discovered: it was now a matter of defining the therapy.

This was found pretty soon, drawing on good inorganic chemistry, that distant Cartesian island, a lost paradise, for us organic chemists, bunglers, “students of gunks”: it was necessary to neutralize in some way, within the sick body of that varnish, the excess of basicity due to free lead oxide. The acids were shown to be noxious from other aspects: I thought of ammonium chloride, capable of combining stably with lead oxide, producing an insoluble and inert chloride and freeing the ammonia. Tests on a small scale gave promising results: now quick, find the chloride, come to an agreement with the head of the Milling Department, slip into a small ball mill two of the livers disgusting to see and touch, add a weighed quantity of the presumed medicine, start the mill under the skeptical eyes of the onlookers. The mill, usually so noisy, started almost grudgingly, in a silence of bad omen, impeded by the gelatinous mass which stuck to the balls. All that was left was to go back to Turin to wait for Monday, telling the patient girl in whirlwind style the hypotheses arrived at, the things understood at the lakeshore, the spasmodic waiting for the sentence that the facts would pronounce.

The following Monday the mill had regained its voice: it was in fact crunching away gaily with a full, continuous tone, without that rhythmic roaring that in a ball mill indicates bad maintenance or bad health. I stopped it and cautiously loosened the bolts on the manhole; there spurted out with a hiss an ammoniacal puff, as it should. Then I took off the cover. Angels and ministers of grace!—the paint was fluid and smooth, completely normal, born again from its ashes like the Phoenix. I wrote out a report in good company jargon and the management increased my salary. Besides, as a form of recognition, I received the assignment of two tires for my bike.