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My Italian teacher assigned me several compiti, homework exercises including a short passage from Primo Levi’s memoir Survival in Auschwitz. In Italian the title is Se questo è un uomo, in English, “if this is a man.” Perhaps American publishers feared that without the mention of the notorious death camp, readers would never find the book—now regarded as one of the seminal personal accounts of the Holocaust. The original title captures the essence of Levi’s work: the struggle to retain his humanity in unspeakable circumstances, where the difference between life or death came down to a few extra scraps of food, luck, and in Levi’s case, more luck.
The excerpt described the trips Levi made with another prisoner to retrieve buckets of inedible soup from the camp kitchen. Even in the depths of a Polish winter, the long trek to the kitchen was a gift because they were carrying no heavy burden and could instead indulge in an hour of conversation about their lives and literature, Dante to be precise. The passage is a reminder of the benefits of learning pieces by heart. As in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Levi relied on his memory to offer comfort when books themselves were forbidden. During the return trip back to the camp, carrying the heavy bucket of slop was still a respite from daily horror. Levi survived to write his book because he contracted Scarlet Fever in the waning days of the war; the fleeing Germans left him and other occupants of the infirmary to die, forcing the remaining survivors on a death march.
After reading the passage from Survival in Auschwitz, I was inspired to tackle a longer work by Levi in the original Italian, a short story titled “Quaestio de Centauris.” The title is in Latin; “quaestio” translates to “inquiry” or “investigation.” So, “An Investigation about a Centaur.” The Latin does sound better. My Italian being way less than fluent, and the text complex, I decided to listen to the story read in English by Jhumpa Lahiri, who included the work in her collection Italian Stories (Racconti italiani). Then, I felt ready to tackle the story in its original form.
The story is told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator and concerns Trachi, a centaur—yes, the mythical half-man, half-horse creature, who comes to the narrator’s family as a gift, having been previously captured in the wild landscape of a Greek island and sold, like a horse or other farm animal. Primo Levi was a chemist, and as a scientist, he devotes half the story to an elaborate creation narrative, according to which most of Earth’s species came to exist after the time of Noah’s Ark, centaurs being just one of many cross-pollinations among animals, plants, birds, and insects. The centaur evolves as a solitary being, an outsider, and at the beginning of the story, he is isolated on the farm of the narrator’s family.
In this sense, the centaur is a stand-in for Levi himself, a Jew, who lived in a predominantly Catholic country that once isolated its Jewish population in enclosed ghettos (the origin of the word we use in English) and then succumbed to the lure of Fascism. Even after Mussolini came to power, and up until anti-Semitic laws were enacted in Italy in 1938, many urban and intellectual Jews like Levi considered themselves “assimilated” into Italian life. My Jewish grandparents in Vienna felt the same way: they were Austrians first, until they were not. Overnight, they and Levi and the Jews of Europe realized that they had been merely and barely tolerated. Their citizenship was rendered meaningless. They were now something less than human and closer to an animal.
“Quaestio de Centauris” describes the unusual friendship that grows between the narrator and Trachi, and the crisis that destroys that relationship. Trachi has lived over 200 centuries and possesses the intelligence of so many years in addition to special qualities unique to centaurs—the ability to sense the activity of life on earth at a cellular and emotional level. The narrator—first a boy, then a young man—and the centaur nevertheless find common ground. Unlike the narrator, the centaur is not a free agent. He is a possession, something like a family pet, though despite his evident superior intellect, he lives like a farm animal in a stable. He remains hidden, with only brief forays to have his hooves shoed by a blacksmith. Within this confined and secret existence, the centaur is content enough, until the arrival of Teresa, the daughter of the only neighbors who have actually seen the centaur. To his friend, the narrator, Trachi confesses his deep love for Teresa. Unfortunately for Trachi, she has other plans. Teresa invites the narrator for a walk in the forest where they have sex in a clearing. Full of regret, the narrator understands that given Trachi’s extraordinary sensory awareness, the centaur will know immediately what has happened, and will feel betrayed by his longtime companion. Trachi erupts, galloping away to mate violently with mares in neighboring farms. After racing down the length of the peninsula, Trachi finally hurls himself into the sea and swims east, in the direction of the Greek island from which he was originally taken. He is last spotted by fishermen who mistake him for a man riding a dolphin. It is unclear whether Tracchi will survive or drown. It is also unclear how we, as readers, are meant to think of the centaur in the aftermath of his violence: has he become an “animal,” his human half erased? Or are his actions all too human? In our present time of divisive politics and nationalism, women are routinely raped during war, not by animals, but by men.
After reading “Quaestio de Centauris,” I was reminded of the one and only time I met Primo Levi in person. Years ago, I had the honor of designing the book cover for the English language edition of Primo Levi’s Other Peoples’ Trades. The book was published by Simon and Schuster and my parents, who both worked at the company, invited me to the publication party at an editor’s swank apartment. By then, I had spent time in Italy, and thanks to six years of high school Latin and a college level grammar course, I’d managed to get around the country solo, order food, make friends. I did fine on location, where I was forced to speak and mangle the language with which I’d fallen in love.
I knew the author would be at the party but I didn’t see him in the crush of guests hovering near the open bar, and in any case, I am not great at parties, preferring to observe from the edges of rooms. That night was no exception. There was laughter and loud conversation among people I didn’t know. I nursed a glass of white wine. I looked around and that’s when I spotted him, a small bearded man standing in the corner across from me, sheltered by two bookshelves. I recognized him immediately from his author photo.
My first thought was how thoughtless the editor had been to leave the guest of honor alone, without companionship in a room where no one spoke Italian.
My second thought was that I wished desperately to say something intelligent and heartfelt to this author, in Italian, however cliché.
“Your books have meant so much to me,” or “I admire your writing and your bravery in sharing your life story.”
Instead, I remained mute, unable to form a sentence. We looked at each other and I recall that he smiled in a way that made me feel seen. I tried to interpret his expression, hoping that we were sharing a moment of camaraderie without words, that he understood that I was beaming my admiration his way, from one outsider to another.
If you’d like to learn more about Primo Levi’s “Quaestio de Centauris,” here is one article among many.
https://www.buffalo.edu/content/dam/www/nemla/nis/XXXII/v32a3_beneduce.pdf
Thank you for reading and as with all posts here, I’d love to hear from you! More to follow each Friday at noon. I hope you’ll subscribe and share with other readers. You can find out more about my memoirs Perfection and Eva and Eve here and purchase here. I work privately with writers on creative non-fiction projects. If you are interested, you can contact me through my website: juliemetz.com. A first consultation is free of charge.
So glad you enjoyed!
interesting ~ planning to read more, thank you for sharing!