MY GOVERNESS ESCAPED Nazi Germany in the early forties and, after a difficult voyage with her family, arrived in Paraguay to be greeted by swastika banners waving on the dock at Asunción. (This was during Alfredo Stroessner’s military regime.) Eventually she came to Argentina, and there was engaged by my father to accompany us as my governess on his diplomatic mission to Israel. She seldom spoke of her years in Germany.
A melancholy, quiet person, in Tel Aviv she didn’t make many friends. Among the few she had was a Swiss woman with whom she would go from time to time to the movies, who bore on her forearm a tattooed number, somewhat blurred. “Never ask Maria what that is,” she warned me, but added no explanation. I never asked.
Maria didn’t hide her tattoo, but she avoided looking at it or touching it. I tried to keep my eyes away, but it was irresistible, like a line of writing seen under water, taunting me to decipher its meaning. It was not until I was much older that I learned about the system used by the Nazis to identify their victims, mainly at Auschwitz. An old Polish librarian in Buenos Aires, also an Auschwitz survivor and also the bearer of such a tattoo, said to me once that it reminded him of the call numbers in the books he used to sort out in the Lublin Municipal Library, where he had worked as a helper in his distant adolescence.
I believe I’m in Hell, therefore I am.
—ARTHUR RIMBAUD, Nuit de l’enfer
There are places on this earth from which those who return, return to die.
On 13 December 1943, the twenty-four-year-old Primo Levi was arrested by the Fascist Militia and detained at a camp in Fossoli, near Modena. Nine weeks later, having admitted to being an “Italian citizen of Jewish race,” he was sent to Auschwitz along with all the other Jewish prisoners. All, he says, “even the children, even the old, even the ill.”1
In Auschwitz, one of the tasks assigned to Levi and five others in his Kommando was to scrape out the inside of an underground petrol tank. The work was exhausting, brutal, and dangerous. The youngest of the group was an Alsatian student called Jean, a twenty-four-year-old who was given the job of Pikolo, or messenger-clerk, in the mad bureaucracy of the camp. During one of the assignments, Jean and Levi were obliged to spend an hour together, and Jean asked Levi to teach him Italian. Levi agreed. As he remembers the scene years later in his memoir Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man, retitled for the U.S. edition Survival in Auschwitz), suddenly the Ulysses canto of the Commedia comes to his mind, how or why he does not know. As the two men walk towards the kitchens, Levi tries to explain to the Alsatian, in his bad French, who Dante was and what the Commedia consists of, and why Ulysses and his friend Diomedes burn eternally in a double flame for having deceived the Trojans. Levi intones for Jean the admirable verses:
The greater horn of the ancient flame
Began to shake itself, murmuring,
Just like a flame that struggles with the wind;
Then carrying to and fro the top
As if it were the tongue that spoke
Threw forth a voice, and said: “When . . . ”
After that, nothing. Memory, which at the best of times betrays us, at the worst of times serves us no better. Fragments, tatters of the text return to him, but it is not enough. Then Levi remembers another line, “ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto . . .”:
I launched forth on the deep open sea . . .2
Jean has traveled by sea, and Levi believes that the experience will allow him to understand the force of “misi me,” so much stronger than “je me mis” in Levi’s rough French translation; “misi me,” the act of throwing oneself on the other side of the barrier, towards “sweet things, ferociously far away.” Hurried by the approaching end of their brief respite, Levi remembers a little more:
Consider your origins:
You were not made to live like brutes,
But to follow virtue and knowledge.3
Suddenly, Levi hears the verses in his head as if he were hearing them for the first time, “like the blast of a trumpet,” he says, “like the voice of God.” For a moment, he forgets what he is and where he is. He tries to explain the lines to Jean. Then he recalls:
when there appeared to us a mountain,
Dark because so far away, and to me it seemed higher
Than any I had ever seen before.4
More lines go missing. “I would give today’s soup,” Levi says, “to know how to connect ‘than any I had ever seen before,’ with the final lines.” He closes his eyes, he bites his fingers. It is late, the two men have reached the kitchen. And then memory throws him the lines, like coins to a beggar:
Three times it made her whirl with all the waters;
At the fourth it made the poop rise up
And the prow go down, as pleased Another.5
Levi holds Jean back from the soup line: he feels that it is vitally necessary for the young man to listen, to understand the words “as pleased Another” before it is too late; tomorrow one of them might be dead, or they might never meet again. He must explain to him, says Levi, “about the Middle Ages, about the so human and so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism, but still more, something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a flash of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today.”
They arrive at the queue, among the sordid, ragged soup carriers of other Kommandos. An official announcement is made that that day’s soup will be of cabbages and turnips. The last line of the canto comes back to Levi:
Till the sea was closed over us.6
Under Ulysses’ engulfing wave, what is that “something gigantic” that Levi realizes and wants to communicate?
Primo Levi’s experience is perhaps the ultimate experience a reader can have. I hesitate to qualify it in any way, even as ultimate, because there are things that lie beyond language’s capacities to name. Nevertheless, without ever being able to convey the entirety of any experience, language can, in certain moments of grace, touch upon the unnamable. Many times throughout his journey Dante says that words fail him; that lack is precisely what allows Levi to seize in Dante’s words something of his own incomprehensible condition. Dante’s experience is in the words of his poem; Levi’s in the words made flesh, or dissolved into flesh, or lost in flesh. The inmates of the camps were stripped and shorn, their bodies and faces emaciated, their names replaced by a number tattooed on their skin; the words briefly restored something of what had been torn away.
If the inmates of Auschwitz wished to keep their names, that is, if they wished to still be human, they have to find in themselves (says Levi) the strength to do so, “to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.” This conversation with Jean was the first time (Levi says) that he became aware that language lacks words to express the offence of demolishing a man. The term “extermination camp” acquires here a double meaning, but even that is not enough to name what is taking place. This is the reason why Virgil cannot open for Dante the doors of the City of Dis in the ninth canto of the Inferno: because Hell, absolute Hell, cannot be known by reason, as most things are known through language—not even through the silver words of the master poet Virgil. The experience of Hell escapes language because it can only be submitted to the ineffable, to what Ulysses means when he says “as pleased Another.”
But there is one essential, all-important difference between Auschwitz and Dante’s Hell. Beyond the innocent first circle where the only suffering is expectation without hope, Hell is a place of retribution, where each sinner is responsible for the punishment that he or she bears. Auschwitz, instead, is a place of punishment without fault or, if there is a fault (as there is in every one of us), it is not the fault for which the punishment is meted out. In Dante’s Hell, all the sinners know why they are punished. When Dante asks them to tell their stories, they can put into words the reason for their suffering; even if they don’t agree that they have earned it (as in the case of Bocca degli Abati), that is only due to their pride or anger, or the desire to forget. The need of man, says Dante in De vulgari eloquentia, is to be heard rather than to hear, “out of the joy we feel in translating into an orderly act our natural affections.”7 That is why the sinners speak to Dante, so that he may hear them out; that is why the dead are left language, against the opinion of the Psalmist. It is the living Dante who, over and over, lacks the words to describe the horrors and later the glories, not the condemned, who, stripped of all comfort and peace, are miraculously in possession of a tongue to speak of what they have done in order to continue to be. Language, even in Hell, grants us existence.
In Auschwitz, however, language was useless either to explain the nonexistent fault or to describe the senseless punishments, and words took on other, perverted and terrible meanings. There was a joke told in Auschwitz (because even in the place of agony there is humor): “How does one say ‘never’ in camp slang?” “Morgen früh, ‘Tomorrow morning.’”
For the Jews, however, language—specifically the letter beth—was the instrument with which God effected his Creation and therefore could not be debased, however much it was ill-used.8 The intellect, the seat of language, was humankind’s driving force, not the body, its vessel. Accordingly, Orthodox Jews believed that the concept of heroism was inextricably linked to that of spiritual courage, and the notion of “bravery with holiness” or, in Hebrew, Kiddush ha-Shem (the sanctification of God’s name) was at the root of their resistance to the Nazis. They believed that evil should not be fought physically by mortals because evil cannot be defeated through physical action: only Divine Providence can decide whether evil is to triumph or not. The true weapons of resistance were, for most Orthodox Jews, conscience, prayer, meditation, and devotion. “They believed that the reciting of a chapter of the Psalms would do more to affect the course of events than would the killing of a German—not necessarily immediately but at some point in the infinite course of relations between the Creator and His creatures.”9
Ulysses, like the other souls in Dante’s Hell, suffers a punishment that he himself has fashioned during his own limited course of his relations with his Maker. In Dante’s imagination, we, not God, are responsible for our actions and for their consequences. Dante’s world is not the world of Homer, where whimsical gods play with our human destinies for their entertainment or private purpose. God, Dante believes, has given each of us certain abilities and possibilities, but also the gift of free will, which allows us to make our own choices and assume the consequences of those choices. Even the quality of the punishment itself is, according to Dante, determined by our transgression. Ulysses is condemned to burn invisibly in the forked flame because his sin, counseling others to practice fraud, is furtive, and since he has committed it through speech, through the tongue, it is in tongues of flame that he is eternally tortured. In Dante’s Hell, every punishment has a reason.
But Auschwitz is a very different kind of hell. Soon after Levi’s arrival in the midst of a terrible winter, sick with thirst, locked up in a vast, unheated shed, he sees an icicle hanging outside the window. He sticks out a hand and breaks the icicle off, but a guard snatches it from him, throws it away, and pushes Levi back into his place. “Warum?” asks Levi in his poor German, “Why?” “Hier ist kein warum,” the guard replies, “Here is no why.”10 This infamous response is the essence of the Auschwitz hell: in Auschwitz, unlike in Dante’s realm, there is no “Why.”
In the seventeenth century, the German poet Angelus Silesius, trying to speak of the beauty of a rose, wrote, “Die Rose ist ohne warum,” “The rose is without why.”11 This, of course, is a different “why”: the “why” of the rose lies merely beyond the descriptive capabilities of language, but not beyond language’s epistemological scope. Auschwitz’s “why” is beyond both. To understand this, we must, like Levi and like Dante, remain stubbornly curious because our relationship to language is always a dissatisfying one. To put our experience into words again and again falls short of our aim: language is too poor to conjure up experience fully: it disappoints us when the events are happy and pains us when they are not. For Dante, “to tell it as it was is hard,” and yet he says he must attempt to do so, “to address the good I found there.” But, as Beatrice tells him, “will and instrument among mortals . . . are unequally feathered in their wings.”12 Try as Dante might and try as we, so much less gifted, might to assert our will, the instrument of language creates its own semantic field.
That semantic field is always a multilayered one because our relationship to language is always a relationship with the past as well as with the present and the future. When we use words, we are making use of the experience accumulated before our time in words; we are making use of the multiplicity of meanings stored in the syllables we employ to render our reading of the world comprehensible to ourselves and others. The uses that have preceded our own nourish and alter, sustain and undermine our present use: whenever we speak, we speak in voices, and even the first-person singular is in fact plural. And when we speak with tongues of fire, many of those tongues are ancient flames.
The early Christian fathers, keen on finding a strategy to bring the wisdom of the pagans into accord with the tenets of Jesus, decided, after reading in the Acts of the Apostles that “Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds” (7:22), that it was from Moses that the Greeks had learned their philosophy. Moses had been taught by the Egyptians, and it was through his words that the precursors of Plato and Aristotle received inklings of the truth. By a change of vowels, it was said, the name Moses had become Musaeus, a legendary pre-Homeric poet who had been a disciple of Orpheus.13 For this reason, in the twelfth century, the learned Richard of Saint-Victor, whom Dante placed next to Saint Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede in Paradise, declared that “Egypt is the mother of all arts.”14
In the late fourth century, Saint Jerome defended himself from the accusation of favoring the ancient flames of pagan poetry over the redeeming Christian fire by arguing that in order fully to explore the word of God, the best instruments must be used. Cicero and his brethren, though deaf to the true word, had perfected the instrument of language, which Christian writers could now use for their benefit. But there should be no doubt as to which was the better source of wisdom. Writing to the cloistered Héloise towards 1160, Peter the Venerable praised her for having entered the cloister after her tragic love affair with Peter Abelard. “You have changed your studies of various disciplines,” he wrote, “for others that are far better, and instead of Logic you have chosen the Gospel, instead of Physics, the Apostle, instead of Plato, Christ, instead of the academy, the cloister. You are now a wholly and truly philosophical woman.”15
A thousand years after Jerome, Dante argued that not only the language and early ideas but the entire pagan imaginaire could serve that higher purpose, and throughout the Commedia Christian saints and ancient gods, citizens of Florence and heroes of Greece and Rome share the long tripartite adventure in which anachronism has no place. In the first circle of Hell, Virgil is greeted by the poets who have preceded him, and Homer himself welcomes Virgil back to the Noble Castle with a solemn “Honor the very great poet.” Dante too is welcomed into this “fine school” by Homer’s companions, and even though Virgil smiles at this perhaps exaggerated estimation of the Florentine, Dante’s art now forms part of that same great ageless circle of poetry, and shares with the work of his masters the same verbal triumphs and defeats.16
It is a question of shared inheritance. The same “traces of the ancient flame” confessed by Dido in the Aeneid burn again in Dante’s address to Virgil in Purgatory upon finally seeing Beatrice: “I recognize the traces of the ancient flame,” says Dante in awe.17 And the identical image serves Dante to depict, in a very different context and no longer as a metaphor, the forked flame from which the soul of Ulysses speaks to him in Hell: a flame colored by its amorous antecedents. We should not forget, however, that the ancient flame that embraces the soul of Ulysses embraces that of Diomedes as well. The ancient flame is double-tongued, but only one tip, the greater one, is allowed to make itself heard. It is therefore licit, perhaps, to ask how Diomedes, the silent one, would have told the shared story.
Recalling the tongues of the ancient flame in Auschwitz, Primo Levi hears in the railing words “fatti non foste a viver come bruti” (you were not made to live like brutes) a reminder of his own abused humanity, a warning not to give up even now, a life-giving draft of words that not Virgil, not Dante, but the intrepid and over-ambitious Ulysses (dreamt up of course by Dante) addresses to his men in order to convince them to follow him “beyond the sun, to the world without people.” But Levi does not remember these last, precise words of Ulysses’ speech. The verses that dance in Levi’s head bring memories of another life: the mountain, “dark because so far away,” reminds him of other mountains seen in the dusk of evening as he returned by train from Milan to Turin, and the awful “as pleased Another,” compels him to make Jean understand, in a flash of intuition, why they are where they are.18 But the revelation goes no further. Memory, which dives into our sunken libraries and rescues from the long-past pages only a few seemingly random paragraphs, chooses better than we know, and perhaps selecting wisely prevented Levi from the realization that even though he might have followed Ulysses’ cry and refused to live like a brute, he has nevertheless reached, like Ulysses and his men, the world beyond the gentle sun, a condemned place inhabited by beings who have been incomprehensibly thrust below the human condition.
Diomedes in the Iliad is the reliable man, a courageous and bloodthirsty warrior, a disciplined strategist willing to fight to the end if he believes his cause to be just. “Not a word of retreat,” he says when alerted of the danger of an advancing Trojan chariot. “You’ll never persuade me. / It’s not my nature to shrink from battle, cringe in fear / with the fighting strength still steady in my chest.” Diomedes is more reasonable than Ulysses, more dependable than Achilles, a better soldier than Aeneas. Diomedes is driven by an almost unconscious curiosity to know whether our fate depends on ourselves or entirely on the will of apparently all-powerful gods; this drives him to attack even the gods themselves. The War of Troy is a war in which both men and gods take equal part. When Aphrodite sweeps down to rescue her son Aeneas from a huge boulder thrown at him by Diomedes, he slashes her wrist with his spear, then charges against Apollo, so that the god of the sun has to appeal to Ares, the god of war, to stop him. “That daredevil Diomedes, he’d fight Father Zeus!” Then Diomedes strikes against the god of war as well. “The gods are bloodless, so we call them deathless,” says Homer, but they can be wounded, and when they bleed, they bleed not human blood but an ethereal fluid known as ichor.19 By attacking the immortal gods, Diomedes discovers that they too suffer pain, and that they can therefore know and understand what humans suffer: this wounding of the ancient gods foreshadows another god’s torture and death, centuries later, on a cross on Mount Golgotha. A god that can suffer and who allows the suffering he himself understands: that is the paradox.
Martin Buber tells this story:
The emperor of Vienna issued an edict which was bound to make thoroughly miserable the already oppressed Jews in Galizia. At that time, an earnest and studious man by the name of Feivel lived in Rabbi Elimelekh’s House of Study. One night he rose, entered the zaddik’s room, and said to him: “Master, I have a suit against God.” And even as he spoke he was horrified at his own words.
But Rabbi Elimelekh answered him: “Very well, but the court is not in session by night.”
The next day, two zaddikim came to Lizhensk, Israel of Koznitz and Jacob Yithak of Lublin, and stayed in Rabbi Elimelekh’s house. After the midday meal, the rabbi had the man who had spoken to him called and said: “Now tell us about your lawsuit.”
“I have not the strength to do it now,” Feivel said falteringly.
“Then I give you the strength,” said Rabbi Elimelekh.
And Feivel began to speak. “Why are we held in bondage in this empire? Does not God say in the Torah: ‘For unto Me the children of Israel are servants.’ And even though he has sent us to alien lands, still, wherever we are, he must leave us full freedom to serve him.”
To this Rabbi Elimelekh replied: “We know God’s reply, for it also is written in the passage of reproof through Moses and the prophets. But now, both the plaintiff and the defendant shall leave the courtroom, as the rule prescribes, so that the judges may not be influenced by them. So go out, Rabbi Feivel. You, Lord of the world, we cannot send you out, because your glory fills the earth, and without your presence, not one of us could live for even a moment. But we herewith inform you that we shall not let ourselves be influenced by you either.”
Then the three sat in judgment, silently and with closed eyes. After an hour, they called in Feivel and gave him the verdict: that he was in the right. In the same hour, the edict in Vienna was cancelled.20
If Diomedes could speak from the forked flame, aware as he must have been that the gods are fallible, this is perhaps what he would have told Dante: that being human does not prevent us from suffering inhuman torture, that every human enterprise has its unspeakable shadow, that in this “brief vigil” of our life we may be made to capsize in sight of the longed-for mountain for no intelligible reason, merely because of the whim or the will of Something or Someone.21 Diomedes might have spoken to Dante with Ulysses’ same words, but if they came from the other fork of the flame, Dante might have heard them differently, not as proud ambition but as despair and rage, and Levi might have then recalled the speech not as a promise of redemption but as a sentence both unjust and incomprehensible. Perhaps Diomedes’ unspoken words are part of the “something gigantic” that Levi suddenly understands and wants to communicate to Jean.
Literature promises nothing except that however hard we may try to reach its farthest horizon we will fail. But even though no reading is ever complete, and no page is ever quite the last, coming back to a text we are familiar with, either reread or recalled, allows us a wider sailing, and our “mad flight,” as Dante describes Ulysses’ quest, will take us always a little farther into meaning.22 And as Ulysses discovers, whatever understanding we may reach at last, it will not be the expected one. Centuries of words transform Virgil’s ancient flame into a forest of meanings, none lost, none definitive, and it may be that when the words come back to us in our hour of need, they will indeed save us, but only for the time being. Words always hold yet another meaning which escapes us.
Franz Kafka imagined in “The Penal Colony” a machine that punishes prisoners by inscribing on their bodies a mysterious script.23 Only once the needle has dug deep into the flesh are the prisoners able to make out the nature of their fault and the reason for their punishment, in the instant before the last. Kafka died sixteen years before Auschwitz was built, and his machine, though implacable and deadly, delivers nevertheless some sort of answer to the question “Why?”—an answer however crabbed, however late. Auschwitz did not. After Levi’s liberation in January 1945, he lived on for a time as a writer among new readers. But no understanding came to him, however hard he tried to lead a normal life again, no understanding of the “why.” And yet, catching traces of the other voice hidden somewhere in the double flame, Levi must have reached a better understanding of why no “why” ever existed there.
Less than a year before his death, in a letter addressed to the Latin poet Horace, Levi wrote this: “Our life is longer than yours, but it is neither gayer nor more secure, nor do we have the certainty that the gods will grant a tomorrow to our yesterdays. We too shall join our father Aeneas, Tullus, Ancus, and you in the realm of shadows; we too, so insolent, so self-assured, will return to dust and shadows.”24 To dust and shadows Levi returned, like Dante and Virgil, and Horace too, and like theirs, Levi’s flame continues to speak to us. Perhaps that perseverance of a voice is poetry’s only true justification.
Poetry offers no answers, poetry cannot erase suffering, poetry will not bring the beloved dead back to life, poetry does not protect us from evil, poetry does not grant us ethical strength or moral courage, poetry does not avenge the victim or punish the victimizer. All poetry can do, and only when the stars are kind, is lend words to our questions, echo our suffering, assist us in recalling the dead, put a name to the works of evil, teach us to reflect on deeds of revenge and punishment, and also of goodness, even when goodness is no longer there. An ancient Jewish prayer humbly reminds us: “Lord, remove the stone from the middle of the road, that the thief may not stumble at night.”25
This power of poetry is something we know from old, or perhaps always knew since the beginnings of language, a knowledge made wonderfully evident in the first cantos of Purgatorio. Subtly overshadowing these cantos is the shadow of Ulysses’ failed attempt to reach the solitary mountain. Following the instructions of Cato, the guardian of Purgatory, Virgil girdles Dante with the reed “as pleased Another” (the same words Ulysses used in the tale of his adventure). Standing with Virgil on the beach, Dante sees, on either side of the approaching ship of souls, “an I-knew-not-what white” that proves to be the wings of the piloting angel; in Ulysses’ account, he and his men “made wings out of oars.” Ulysses’ powerful defense of his burning curiosity is countered by the angel’s cold and eloquent silence, admonishing all errant souls to return to the true path. And even before the arrival of the ship, Dante implicitly opposes his expectations to those of the intrepid Ulysses, who physically sailed forth but whose soul remained landlocked:
We stood still by the edge of the sea
Like those who think about the road they’ll take
And go with their heart, but with their body stay.26
And then an extraordinary scene takes place.
Among the souls descending from the ship, Dante recognizes his friend Casella, who in happier days had put to music some of Dante’s verses. Dante, to soothe his soul, “which, with its body / traveling to this place, is so very weary,” asks Casella to sing for him once again—that is unless “a new law has not deprived / your memory or skill in the art of love songs / that used to calm all my longings.” Casella consents, and begins to sing the words of a poem composed by Dante himself during the years of their friendship. The beauty of Casella’s voice in the pure air of Purgatory’s beach makes Virgil and the other newly arrived souls gather around to listen, enraptured. They stand there, “fixed and intent on his notes,” until ancient Cato rushes towards them, angrily calling them back to their sacred business, reminding them of the tremendous purpose of their journey with echoes of God’s admonition to Moses: “Neither let the flocks nor the herds feed before that mount.”27
The abashed souls disperse like a flock of startled doves, putting an end to Casella’s song, but not before Dante has shown us, so humanely, so delicately, so truly, that even in the all-important moments of our life’s journey, even when the very salvation of our soul is in question, art will still be of the essence. Even in Auschwitz, where nothing seemed any more to have had importance or meaning, poetry could still stir in inmates such as Levi the remnants of life, could offer the intuition of “something gigantic,” light in the ashes a spark of the old curiosity, and make it burst once more into everlasting flames.
