Read Online A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi - Free Book Online Page A

for. As always happens once you’ve made a finding and confirmed it, the presence of tantalum, and its specific function, began to seem gradually less strange, and, finally, natural, just as no one is surprised anymore by X rays. Molino pointed out that the most acid-resistant reaction vessels are made with tantalum; Palazzoni recalled that tantalum is used to make surgical prostheses that absolutely can’t be rejected; and so we concluded that it is an obviously beneficial metal, and that we had been foolish to waste so much time on analyses. With a little common sense we should have been able to think of it right off.
    In a few days we got a soap of tantalum, put it in some paint, and tried it on the
E. coli
: it worked, the goal was achieved.
    We, in turn, sent a large sample of paint to Di Prima, so that he could distribute it to his customers and give us anopinion. The opinion arrived two months later, and was highly favorable: he, Di Prima, had painted himself from head to foot, and then had spent four hours under a ladder, on a Friday, in the company of thirteen black cats, without coming to any harm. Chiovatero also tried it, albeit reluctantly (not because he was superstitious; rather because he was skeptical), and he had to admit that a certain effect was undeniable: in the two or three days after the treatment, all the traffic lights he came to were green, he never got a busy signal on the telephone, his girlfriend made up with him, and he even won a modest prize in the lottery. Naturally it all came to an end after he took a bath.
    As for me, I thought of Michele Fassio. Fassio is an old schoolmate of mine to whom mysterious powers had been attributed since adolescence. He was blamed for endless disasters, from failed exams to a bridge collapse, an avalanche, even a shipwreck: all due, in the stupid opinion of, first, his fellow-students and, later, his colleagues, to the penetrating power of his evil eye. I, of course, didn’t believe this nonsense, but I confess that I often tried to avoid running into him. Fassio, poor fellow, ended up believing it himself, in a way; he never married and he led an unhappy life, of privation and solitude. I wrote to him, with all the delicacy I was capable of, that I didn’t believe in this type of foolishness, but that he might; that, as a result, I couldn’t believe in the remedy I was proposing, but it seemed to me that I owed it to him to mention it just the same, if only to help him recover his self-confidence. Fassio answered that he would come as soon aspossible: he was willing to submit to a trial. Before proceeding with the treatment, and at the urging of Chiovatero, we tried to understand in some degree Fassio’s powers. We managed to ascertain that in fact his gaze (and only his gaze) possessed a specific effect, noticeable under certain conditions even in the case of inanimate objects. We asked him to stare for several minutes at a particular point on a steel plate, which we then placed in the salt-spray chamber; after a few hours we noted that the point Fassio had stared at was clearly more corroded than the rest of the surface. A polyethylene thread, stretched tight, consistently broke at the point where Fassio’s gaze hit it. To our satisfaction, both results disappeared when we coated the plate and the thread with our paint, or when we interposed between subject and object a glass screen previously coated with it. We were further able to ascertain that only Fassio’s right eye was active: the left, like both of my eyes, and like Chiovatero’s, exercised no measurable action. With the means at our disposal, we were unable to carry out a spectral analysis of the Fassio effect except in a crude way; it is probable, however, that the radiation under examination has a maximum in the blue, with a wavelength of around 425 Nm. Our exhaustive paper on the subject will be out in a few months. Now, it is known that many of those who wish