The Periodic Table by Primo Levi Read Free Book Online Page B

contrary, the difference in our origins made us rich in “exchangeable goods,” like two merchants who meet after coming from remote and mutually unknown regions. Nor was it the normal, portentous intimacy of twenty-year-olds: with Sandro I never reached this point. I soon realized that he was generous, subtle, tenacious, and brave, even with a touch of insolence, but he had an elusive, untamed quality; so that, although we were at the age when one always has the need, instinct, and immodesty of inflicting on one another everything that swarms in one’s head and elsewhere (and this is an age that can last long, but ends with the first compromise), nothing had gotten through his carapace of reserve, nothing of his inner world, which nevertheless one felt was dense and fertile—nothing save a few occasional, dramatically truncated hints. He had the nature of a cat with whom one can live for decades without ever being permitted to penetrate its sacred pelt.
    We had many concessions to make to each other. I told him we were like cation and anion, but Sandro did not seem to acknowledge the comparison. He was born in Serra d’Ivrea, a beautiful but niggardly region. He was the son of a mason and spent his summers working as a shepherd. Not a shepherd of souls: a shepherd of sheep, and not because of Arcadian rhetoric or eccentricity, but happily, out of love for the earth and grass and an abundance of heart. He had a curious mimetic talent, and when he talked about cows, chickens, sheep, and dogs he was transformed, imitating their way of looking, their movements and voices, becoming very gay and seeming to turn into an animal himself, like a shaman. He taught me about plants and animals, but said very little about his family. His father had died when he was a child; they were simple, poor people, and since the boy was bright, they had decided to make him study so that he would bring money home: he had accepted this with Piedmontese seriousness but without enthusiasm. He had traveled the long route of high school— liceo —aiming at the highest marks with the least effort. He was not interested in Catullus and Descartes, he was interested in being promoted, and spending Sunday on his skis and climbing the rocks. He had chosen chemistry because he had thought it better than other studies; it was a trade that dealt with things one can see and touch, a way to earn one’s bread less tiring than working as a carpenter or a peasant.
    We began studying physics together, and Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! That if one looked for the bridge, the missing link, between the world of words and the world of things, one did not have to look far: it was there, in our Autenrieth, in our smoke-filled labs, and in our future trade.
    And finally, and fundamentally, an honest and open boy, did he not smell the stench of Fascist truths which tainted the sky? Did he not perceive it as an ignominy that a thinking man should be asked to believe without thinking? Was he not filled with disgust at all the dogmas, all the unproved affirmations, all the imperatives? He did feel it; so then, how could he not feel a new dignity and majesty in our study, how could he ignore the fact that the chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves,