Live from Our Intestine: Escherichia Coli

JOURNALIST (knocking delicately on the intestine wall): May I?

ESCHERICHIA COLI: Please! Come on in.

JOURNALIST: No, not to be rude, but, you see, I wouldn’t want to damage your host, who after all is a friend of mine. No drastic interventions. If you don’t mind, we’ll conduct the interview like this, me on the outside, you on the inside. I’m taping and the microphone is very sensitive: just try to speak up. Is this the first time you’ve been interviewed?

E. COLI: Yes, but don’t worry, I’m not at all nervous. We’re not easily excitable, both because of our temperament and because we lack a nervous system.

JOURNALIST: Do you like it down here, in the dark, with all this half-digested stuff that your host dumps on your head three or four times a day?

E. COLI: It’s fine, except when they give him antibiotics. Then life gets a little tough, but some of us survive, and we almost always manage to perpetuate the species. Please bear with me now, I’m in mitosis, that is, I’m splitting in two: but it’s just a matter of a few minutes, then one of my halves will be at your service again. Done, carry on; I’ll stay here while my twin goes on her way. She won’t listen in and won’t disturb us; we know how to be discreet.

JOURNALIST: You must have heard that you are no longer just saprophytes, tolerated until you give us a stomachache. You are now on the front pages of the newspapers: we even know how to take a sample of your DNA and replace it with different DNA and thus teach you to produce proteins that are useful to us. On this subject opinions differ. Some say it’s a good thing, and that, indeed, using this method we could even teach you bacteria to fix atmospheric nitrogen; others are afraid that you’ll learn too much and end up taking over.

E. COLI: Yes, yes, I am aware of this. In fact, one of my cousins to the 397th degree was operated on in this way, and she didn’t even suffer much—apart from the trauma of finding herself in a glass tube instead of in the warmth of an intestine. Well, I am a member of the prokaryote workers’ committee and, from the union’s point of view, we have no objections. The time for claims of equality is past: we, too, understand now that specialization is necessary, and useful to both parties. In fact, it’s been a while now since we went on strike, and I, as the union representative, believe that the strike is a blunt weapon at this point: the opposition has tools too powerful at its disposal. Politics is the art of the possible—one of my ancestors said that five hundred million years ago—and we are possibilist by nature, or actually opportunist. That’s exactly why you mustn’t underestimate us. You should follow my advice and guard your glass tubes carefully. Personally, I am good-natured, but I can’t vouch for my colleagues whose switchboards you have changed. Be careful: if an epidemic should break out you’ll be the ones to suffer, but so will we, who live in peace in your precious bowels. There’s no doubt that in the long run we would learn to adapt and survive even in the intestine of a cockroach or an oyster, but it would take time and effort and a good number of victims.

JOURNALIST: Thank you, ma’am. If you have nothing to add, I’d conclude here.

E. COLI: Well, that’s a good one! And the invention of the wheel, and of the asynchronous engine, what about that? It took you two hundred years, after you set up the first microscopes, to notice, but now our precedence is clear, and you come to me with your microphone without mentioning it? Believe me, that’s nerve. It’s the arrogance of you multicellular types, as if you had discovered everything yourselves!

JOURNALIST: I must beg your pardon. You see, we journalists have to deal with so many things, Craxi’s relay team, the health tax, Lebanon, Reagan’s blunder. . . .

E. COLI: So you don’t know anything about it? Listen, I’ll explain it in two minutes, so you won’t get it wrong in your piece. We have six flagella, okay? But we don’t move them the way one would a rope or a whip: we rotate them the way the rotor of a small electric motor rotates. For each flagellum we have a motor and a stator, and when we smell food the flagella become elongated coils; they position themselves almost like a tail, and push us forward, like a propeller. It’s simple, right? Then the ciliates arrived, with their stupid alternative motion, the wheel was forgotten, and it took two billion years for you to rediscover it. In essence you are ciliates, too: all your mucous membranes are ciliated, isn’t that so?

JOURNALIST: Thank you, this information is extremely interesting. You mean that if the ciliates hadn’t appeared, we’d be able to turn our heads all the way around, maybe ten times, without having to turn back the other way? And what about blood vessels, nerves, and all the rest? They would get all tangled up.

E. COLI: That’s your business, or, rather, evolution’s business. But your cars work well, and that’s exactly how they’re made. I mean, the fact is that you wasted an idea that you shouldn’t have overlooked. What a shame it’s too late to patent it.

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