Primo Levi
La tregua

I doubt that I will ever find words for “If This Is a Man”. A unique work in the literature of all ages, an immense monolith that engraves the skin like the precise tool of the tattoo artist, a final gate through which one cannot pass unscathed unless blinded by Nazi-fascist ideology or an irreparable coarsening of the soul.

Reading "The Truce" is like smiling, vilely embarrassed, just after the passage of an amputee, of a deformed body, of a congregation of madmen accompanied by nuns; a representative of an earthly hell has just passed, a proof of the distorted love of a grotesque imaginary god towards man: but to us who look on indifferently, what does it matter? We were lucky to receive a moderately harmonious body, the sky shines, with stars or sun, we are not starving; is this enough to drive away images of past suffering destined for others?

Reading "The Truce" is observing the distant events of Odysseus/Nobody transported in 1945. To escape the terrifying Cyclops, Odysseus becomes Nobody: cunning mixed with brilliant wickedness that allows the hero to blind the monocle, save himself and his companions, and return to a world in which, apart from the slaughter of the suitors, violence is banished and love and justice reign.

Primo Levi and those who physically escaped extermination changed their millions of names to Nobody; and here too, millions of beams were sharpened in the form of brutality, professional specializations, physical strength, luck, extreme intelligence, or extreme abjection: but this time not to blind the Cyclops, but to divert the eye of fate from the direction of one's existence for a day, a few months, too many years. And, in extreme contrast to the Homeric myth’s epilogue, there was no return to a better world.

“The Truce” is the return to life of a limb too long paralyzed: the blood that flows is extreme pain and cautious joy at the same time; and each reacts to the contradiction as they know how.

Primo Levi never abandons his perspective as a literary chemist; without ever being overshadowed by past suffering, he maintains intact his immense intelligence, his ability to make the extreme opacity of the human-matter translucent, to study humanity rushing by him and the historical events overwhelming him with the philosophy of the Spoon River chemist. But, unlike the latter's obtuseness, Primo Levi sifts his observations through the narrow mesh of an extremely acute sensitivity, thus coming to fully understand the illogic and strangeness of human actions.

Friends Cesare, Leonardo, Daniele, the tragic, immense, and miserable images of the “dreamers,” the brilliant Dr. Gottlieb, the epic mad Moro of Verona, the inept Ferrari, the darkened thief-actor Trovati, the thief Cravero; and again, the Greek Virgil Mordo Nahum (there is always war), the forest’s prostitutes, the enigmatic Russian Lieutenant, the wild hermits Velletrano and Cantarella; Marja Fjodorovna, the beautiful Galina, and the Russian soldiers, epic and gigantic figures in their humility: perhaps “defective, abnormal, scalene” people but certainly full of their own life, run on strange furrows, marked but not corrupted by the camp or the civilization that was slowly reforming in the direction of an aseptic and surreptitiously brutal future.

“The months now passed, though hard, of wandering on the margins of civilization, appeared to us now as a truce, a parenthesis of unlimited availability, a providential but unrepeatable gift of fate.”

Primo Levi

Turin, July 31, 1919 - Turin, April 11, 1987