JOURNALIST: Mr. Seagull, what are you doing here?
SEAGULL: Herring gull, if you please. We are sedentary, the others, the ridibundi, or black-headed gulls, are vagabonds, opportunists without scruples.
JOURNALIST: Mr. Herring Gull, I feel I’ve met you before, but in a different setting: soaring over the surf—I don’t remember if it was at Cinque Terre or at Caprazoppa. But I do remember your fantastic glide, as you drifted in the wind, and then a sudden swoop down and right back up with a fish in your beak. I followed it all with my binoculars: I regretted not having a movie camera.
SEAGULL: You remember correctly—it was a mullet for my little ones. I had seen it from the air and I dove two meters under water to catch it. It was a good dive; I remember it, too. Eh, those were the days, but already by then mullets were becoming scarce. My wife and I had made ourselves an inaccessible nest, invisible, actually, right above the sea. It was a safe life: every foray meant a fish, some so big that I had trouble bringing them back to the nest, or even swallowing them. It was a worthy, noble profession for those who had good wings and a keen eye. Heavy seas couldn’t scare me; as a matter of fact, the bigger the storm, the more I felt that I owned the sky. I flew amid the lightning, when even your helicopters stayed on the ground, and I felt happy—“fulfilled,” as you would say.
JOURNALIST: Exactly: it was the right setting for a flier like you. But what led you to settle in Chivasso?1
SEAGULL: You know, rumors travel fast. A distant relative of mine lived in Chioggia,2 which wasn’t half bad; but then the water became scummy and stank of naphtha, and the fish became scarce. He and his wife flew up the Po River, in stages, all the way to Chivasso. As they went along, the water became less polluted. Well, years ago he came down to Liguria to tell me that Lancia is in Chivasso and is hiring lots of people.
JOURNALIST: There’s no doubt about that. But you can’t mean that Lancia also hires seagulls? Or is generous enough to provide for them?
SEAGULL: That’s a sore point. Obviously Lancia doesn’t produce fish—on the contrary, it causes many of them to die—but it produces trash. It hires people who produce an incredible quantity of trash, three or four hundred tons a year. And it has a company cafeteria, it produces garbage dumps, and in the garbage dumps, well . . . in the dumps there are mice. There, you made me say it.
JOURNALIST: You mean that you’ve gone from being a fisherman to being a mouse hunter? Well, look, these things happen to us, too. To humans in general and to us journalists in particular. It’s not as if every day or every year there is a war to talk about, or a dam that breaks, or an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, or a nuclear catastrophe, or a trip to the moon. We, too, have to content ourselves with chasing mice. And if there are none, we have to make them up.
SEAGULL: . . . or you go and interview seagulls, right? It’s all grist for the mill.
JOURNALIST: No, believe me, I am fully aware of your uneasiness. It can be seen, so to speak, with the naked eye: you don’t fly as high in the sky and it’s rare to hear you screech. I saw two of your colleagues nesting at the mouth of a sewer, others under a bridge. And still others—a lot of them—hang out near the Turin zoo and steal the fish from the seals and the polar bear.
SEAGULL: I know. It’s embarrassing, but I went there, too. We need fish, otherwise our eggs have weak shells, so transparent that you can see the chick inside, and when you sit on them they break. And in the Po there’s not much fish. Let’s hope that now, with the new drainage basin, the situation will improve.
JOURNALIST: Nevertheless, prestige aside, I imagine that a nice rat, the kind that visits a garbage dump, is not to be despised as prey.
SEAGULL: You think it’s easy to catch a rat? At first, the hunt was successful: you’d see something moving in the trash, swoop down, give it a good blow on the nape of the neck with your beak, and the rat was done for. But they are a terribly intelligent species, and they’ve learned to defend themselves. First of all, they only go out at night, and we can’t see that well at night. Then one of them stays on lookout and if one of us cruises over the dump the guard gives the alarm and they all hide. And, finally, they scare cats, but they scare us, too, the few times we’ve happened to confront one unexpectedly, on open ground. They have such teeth, and such quick reflexes, that many of us lost our feathers, and not just feathers.
JOURNALIST: So that leaves nothing but the trash.
SEAGULL: You really want to rub salt in the wound. Trash, yes. It’s not very dignified, but it’s profitable. I’ll end up stealing the crows’ job and get used to eating carrion and poorly picked bones, or I’ll even become a vegetarian. In this world, those who don’t adapt succumb. In this, I must say, my wife has fewer scruples than I. When it’s my turn to sit on the eggs, she goes around on foot in the dump and brings me a little bit of everything, so much so that I had to give her a talking-to and explain that polyethylene should be left where it is, it can’t even be used to line a nest, because it’s impermeable. You should see what she brings me—dead kittens, cabbage stalks, fruit peels, and watermelon rinds. I’m still rather disgusted, but the little ones eat everything. The next generation scares me; there’s no restraint anymore.
JOURNALIST: Sir, you seem to me too pessimistic. Just as in England, where they cleaned up the Thames, they will clean up our rivers, and then even the sea will go back to the way it was. After all, console yourself: even among us men there are those who could fly and swim but who instead, because of bad luck or lack of courage, wander around garbage dumps and pick up filth. We must give them, and you, the opportunity to regain their dignity. I beseech you, do not forget the sea.
“Imaginary Zoo: Natural Histories by Primo Levi,”
Airone, March 1987
1. A town near Turin, on the Po.
2. A town at the southern tip of the Venetian lagoon.