Nose to Nose: A Date with Love in the Dark

JOURNALIST: Wait a minute, my goodness! It’s two full days, forty-eight hours, since I’ve been here waiting for you to show up, and you already want to go back inside. My director won’t hear of any excuses, you know: if I come back without an interview I risk losing my job, and he wants it right away, before the mating season is over.

MOLE: Go ahead, then, but hurry up. It’s not that I’m in a rush: it’s just that I don’t like the light. Some other time, if you warn me first, we can arrange to meet in the evening—at night everything is simpler, and calmer. Don’t you hear that buzzing sound? Tractors, motors, even planes in the sky: it’s unbearable. Once upon a time, it wasn’t like this, or so I’m told: in the fields there was peace. But in the meantime, bear with me, you know I can’t see well. Are you male or female?

JOURNALIST: Male, but I don’t see what difference that makes.

MOLE: Yes, it does make a difference. You can’t trust females. They interest me for just two weeks a year, then not at all—better off alone. The only thing females look at, even yours, is fur. Not that they’re wrong. Did you know that ours is the only fur that you can also stroke the wrong way? Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to back up in our tunnels.

JOURNALIST: Tell me: you made a radical choice. No sky, no sun or moon—in other words, perpetual darkness and silence. Isn’t it a little monotonous? Don’t you get bored?

MOLE: You are all the same. You measure everything according to your human standards. Yes, it was a choice, but a reasoned one. I preferred hearing, smell, and touch to sight. Don’t think that I don’t have ears, just because they can’t be seen from the outside. My sense of hearing is ten times as sharp as yours—on a logarithmic scale, of course. I can hear a root grow, the rustling of an earthworm. And to protect myself from your unbearable din all I have to do is descend fifty or sixty centimeters: there I am even protected from the frost. Monotonous? I can distinguish at least twenty different qualities of soil and I can sense humidity and wind before they arrive.

JOURNALIST: Would you mind showing me your front paws? I’d like to take a picture.

MOLE: No, what’s this—no pictures. And why don’t you call them hands? After all, they’re not that different from yours—just a lot more powerful. I bet that, big as you are, you wouldn’t withstand the traction force of one of my hands. After all, look, you should try to do what we do every day and every night. It’s been a while since it rained, the soil in my lawn is nice and crumbly—in other words, the conditions couldn’t be better. Go ahead, Mr. Man, abandon your erect posture for a moment, get down, prone, like us, and let’s start digging together, but without tools, okay? Well, you’ll see that I, a big old mole, super-slow, will be ten meters away while you’re still breaking your fingernails on the surface. And I will have dug myself a perfect tunnel, cylindrical, the soil well packed against the sides, because, ever since I was small, I’ve learned to advance by rotating, like a gimlet. We have our trade secrets, too.

JOURNALIST: You said you’re interested in females only a few days a year? Do you go and look for them?

MOLE: It’s consensual. Females have a particular scratching style that is more compact, and softer: we can hear them from afar, and they can hear us. When it’s time for love, the mutual search is a stimulating adventure. It’s also a choice. You hear digging above, below, to the east, to the west, this one is rougher, the other is smoother, until we decide for that one and off we go, digging vigorously, until the two tunnels meet. In fact, mostly we meet nose to nose, so that we can determine if our odors agree. If they do, the marriage is made.

JOURNALIST: Would you introduce me to your wife?

MOLE: I’d love to, because she’s a great girl. Beautiful, too: much younger than me. But it’s the end of March, and she’s gone off somewhere to prepare the wedding chamber. It meant a lot to me, and I made it clear. I wanted it to be spacious, comfortable, well carpeted with grass and moss—but that’s a female’s job.

JOURNALIST: And the job of a male, excuse me, what would that be?

MOLE: More or less like yours. You hunt for money and we hunt for earthworms. You invest in goods and real estate and we cut their heads off.

JOURNALIST: Whose? The earthworms’?

MOLE: Yes, it’s the best investment. You wouldn’t have thought so, would you? But a headless earthworm doesn’t escape and doesn’t rot. Do you know how many earthworms I have in the bank? More than eleven hundred, plus about forty assorted larvae. One has to think of the future, our own and our children’s. Once, digging, I even found a small viper, just hatched. I cut her head off, too, but after two days she had already started to age, and so, to keep her from going to waste, I devoured her immediately. You know, we pay for the strength in our arms: if we don’t eat the equivalent of our weight in fresh meat every day, we starve.

JOURNALIST: I understand. One moment while I write that down. Done. But now tell me: is it true that you never have the desire to explore the world above? Grass, flowers, running water? Or even the little animals that don’t go underground—crickets, snails, grasshoppers?

MOLE: Oh yes, I won’t deny it, but they are the adventures of youth. I, too, had them, on moonless nights with boys my age. There were a dozen of us. Imagine, once I found a nest of skylarks on the ground, with all the eggs in it—what a dinner that was! But the real entertainment was different: we would attract dogs by scratching loudly against a rock, let them come close, jump out for an instant with a scowl to frighten them, and then immediately burrow in again. You should have seen how they dug! But we went into reverse and in a second were already beyond their grasp. In other words, if we don’t deliberately go looking for trouble, no one bothers us. We have darkness, but we also have peace.

“Imaginary Zoo: Natural Histories by Primo Levi,”
Airone, January 1987