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

to cast the evil eye wear blue-tinted lenses, and not dark ones, and this can’t be a coincidence but must, rather, be the fruit of long experience absorbed perhaps unconsciously and then handed down from generation to generation, as in the case of certain folk remedies.
    Considering the tragic conclusion of our tests, I have to explain that the idea of painting Fassio’s eyeglasses (they were ordinary reading glasses) was neither mine nor Chiovatero’s but came from Fassio himself, who insisted that the experiment be made right away, without even an hour’s delay: he was very impatient to be released from his grim power. We painted these glasses. After thirty minutes the paint was dry: Fassio put them on and immediately fell lifeless at our feet. The doctor, who arrived soon afterward, tried in vain to revive him, and spoke vaguely of embolism, heart attack, and thrombosis: he couldn’t have known that the lens over Fassio’s right eye, concave on the inside, must have instantaneously reflected that thing which he could no longer transmit, and must have concentrated it, as if with a burning glass, on a point situated in some unspecified but important corner of the right cerebral hemisphere of the unhappy and blameless victim of our experiments.

Gladiators

    Nicola would happily have stayed home, and even in bed until ten, but Stefania wouldn’t hear of it. At eight, she was already on the phone: she reminded him that he had been making excuses for far too long. Sometimes it was the rain, sometimes it was the contestants, who were mediocre, sometimes he had to go to a meeting, and sometimes there were his silly humanitarian excuses. Noticing in his voice a shadow of reluctance, or, perhaps, only of a bad mood, she ended by telling him outright that promises are made to be kept. She was a girl with many virtues, but when she got an idea in her head there was no way around it. Nicola didn’t recall having made her an actual promise. He had said, vaguely, that yes, someday they would go to the stadium—all his colleagues went, and also (alas!) all her colleagues. Every Friday they filled in betting forms for the gladiator contest,and he had agreed with her that one shouldn’t set oneself apart, give oneself the airs of an intellectual; and then it was an experience, a curiosity that, once in your life, you needed to satisfy, otherwise you don’t know the world you’re living in. Yet now that it had come to the point, he realized that he had made all those speeches with some mental reservation—he had no desire to actually see the gladiators and never would. On the other hand, how to say no to Stefania? He would pay dearly, he knew: with insults, sulks, rebuffs. Maybe even worse—there was that fair-haired cousin of his…
    He shaved, washed, dressed, went out. The streets were deserted, but there was already a line at the store on Via San Secondo. He hated lines, but he got on the end of it just the same. The advertisement was hanging on the wall, in the usual garish colors. There were six entrants; the names of the gladiators meant nothing to him, except that of Turi Lorusso. Not that he knew much about Lorusso’s technique; he knew that he was good, that he was paid an enormous sum, that he slept with a countess, and perhaps also with the relevant count, that he gave a lot to charity and paid no taxes. While Nicola waited his turn, he listened in on the conversations of his neighbors.
    â€œIf you ask me, after thirty years they shouldn’t allow it anymore…”
    â€œOf course, the acceleration, the eye aren’t what they used to be, but, on the other hand, he has experience of the arena that…”
    â€œBut did you see him, in ’91, against that madman who drove the Mercedes? When he threw the hammer fromtwenty meters and hit him straighton? And remember the time they ejected him for…?”
    He bought two tickets for the