JOURNALIST: Good evening, Mr. Spider, or, rather, Mrs. Spider.
SPIDER (shrill): Are you edible?
JOURNALIST: Well, I think so, but it’s not an issue I’ve ever really thought about.
SPIDER: You know, we have many eyes but we are very nearsighted and we’re always hungry. For us the world is divided in two: things you can eat and everything else.
JOURNALIST: I’m here not as a potential victim but to interview you.
SPIDER: An interview? Can interviews be eaten? Are they nutritious? If so, hand it over. I’m curious—I’ve eaten many things in my life but never an interview. How many legs do they have? Do they have wings?
JOURNALIST: Actually no, you can’t really eat them; they are consumed differently. How can I put it? They have readers, and sometimes they can be nourishing.
SPIDER: Then I’m not interested, but if you promise to repay me with some flies or mosquitoes . . . you see, with the hygiene today, they’ve become scarce. Are you good at catching flies? You’re so big, it can’t be that hard: your web must be huge.
JOURNALIST: Really, we have different methods, and catching flies isn’t an occupation that takes up much of our time. We don’t like to eat flies, and when we do it’s by accident. In any case, I’ll do my best. So, can we begin? Tell me, why are you upside down?
SPIDER: In order to concentrate: I have few thoughts, and this way they all flow to the brain and I can see things more clearly. But don’t come too close, and be careful with that thing in your hand; I wouldn’t want it to tear my web. It’s new; I made it this morning. It only had a little hole—you know, beetles aren’t very respectful—but for us it’s perfection or nothing. With the first flaw I eat the web again and digest it, and thus I have material ready for a new one. It’s a question of principle. Our mind is limited but our patience has no bounds. Once I even had to remake my web three times in one day, but it was an immense effort. After the third web, which luckily no one ruined, I had to rest for three or four days. Everything takes time, even replenishing our spinneret glands, but, as I was saying, we have a lot of patience, and waiting causes us no discomfort. When one waits one doesn’t consume energy.
JOURNALIST: Your webs are masterpieces, but do you make them all the same? Never an improvement, never an innovation?
SPIDER: One mustn’t ask too much of us. Look, it’s already an effort to answer your questions; we have no imagination, we’re not inventors, our cycle is simplified. Hunger, web, flies, digestion, hunger, new web. Why rack one’s brains, I beg your pardon, one’s nerve ganglia, to study new webs? Better rely on the memory that we carry imprinted within us, on the model we’ve always used, at most trying to adapt it to the surroundings at our disposal. That’s almost too much already for our brains. If I recall correctly, I had been hatched from the egg only a few days when I made my first web: it was the size of a stamp, but, aside from the scale, it was identical to this one in front of your nose.
JOURNALIST: I understand. Now tell me; there are rumors about your, let’s say, conjugal behavior . . . just rumors, let’s make that clear, I personally have never seen anything indecent, but, as you know, people talk . . .
SPIDER: You’re alluding to the fact that we eat our males? Is that it? Yes, of course. It’s a kind of ballet; our males are thin, shy, and weak, not even that good at making themselves a decent web. When they feel desire increasing, they venture into our webs, step by step, uncertain, hesitant, because they also know how it might end up. We wait for them; we don’t take the initiative, the game is clear on both sides. We females like males as much as we like flies, if not more. We like them in every sense of the word, as husbands (but only for the briefest time necessary) and as food. Once they have fulfilled their function for us, they lose all attraction except as fresh meat, and so, in one fell swoop, they fill our stomachs and our wombs.
JOURNALIST: Do marriages always end up like that?
SPIDER: Not always. There are some farsighted males who know about our permanent hunger and bring us a wedding gift. Not out of affection or as a compliment, but only to satisfy us: a daddy longlegs, a gnat, at times even something more substantial, and then everything runs smoothly and they get by with just anxiety. You should see them, those wretches, as they watch to see if their gift was enough to sate us; and occasionally, if they think it wasn’t, they run to their webs to get another mouthful.
JOURNALIST: It sounds like an ingenious system, and, all told, it has a certain logic. I, too, in their place, would behave like that, but, you see, my wife has less appetite and a milder character; and then our marriages last longer, and we would feel it a shame to be content with only one copulation.
SPIDER: To each his own, of course. But I wanted to tell you that this isn’t the only system the males invented to avoid being devoured. We have some distant cousins who pretend to dance in triumph around the female they have chosen, all the while tying her up a little at a time, carefully crossing the threads. Then they inseminate her and leave. Others are afraid of our strength; they kidnap females as soon as they hatch, while they are still adolescents and not very dangerous, keeping them segregated in some recess until puberty, yes, feeding them, but just enough to keep them alive without getting too strong. Then, they, too, do their job, free the girls, and run away.
JOURNALIST: Thank you, the interview is over.
SPIDER: Thank goodness, I was getting tired—intellectual work has never been my strong point. But don’t forget the flies: a man’s word is his bond.
La Stampa, April 26, 1987; then, under the rubric “Imaginary Zoo:
Natural Histories by Primo Levi,” Airone, May 1987