The Periodic Table Read Free Page A

short, as a scepter to distinguish him from the vulgar crowd.
    Barakhà is the benediction a pious Jew is expected to pronounce more than a hundred times a day, and he does so with profound joy, since by doing so he carries on a thousand-year-old dialogue with the Eternal, who in every barakhà is praised and thanked for His gifts. Grandfather Leonin was my great-grandfather. He lived at Casale Monferrato and had flat feet; the alley in front of his house was paved with cobblestones, and he suffered when he walked on it. One morning he came out of his house and found the alley paved with flagstones, and he exclaimed from the depths of his heart, “’N abrakha a coi goyim c’a I’an fait i losi!” (“A blessing on those unbelievers who made these paving stones!”). As a curse, however, there was the curious linkage medà meshônà, which literally means “strange death” but actually is an imitation of the Piedmontese assident, that is, in plain Italian, “may he drop dead.” To the same Grandpa Leonin is attributed the inexplicable imprecation “C’ai takeissa ’na medà meshônà faita a paraqua” (“May he have an accident shaped like an umbrella”).
    Nor could I forget Barbarico, close in space and time, so much so that he just missed (only by a single generation) being my uncle in the strict sense of the word. Of him I preserve a personal and thus articulated and complex memory. Not figé dans une attitude, like that of the mythical characters I have mentioned up until now. The comparison to inert gases with which these pages start fits Barbarico like a glove.
    He had studied medicine and had become a good doctor, but he did not like the world. That is, he liked men, and especially women, the meadows, the sky; but not hard work, the racket made by wagons, the intrigues for the sake of a career, the hustling for one’s daily bread, commitments, schedules, and due dates; nothing in short of all that characterized the feverish life of the town of Casale Monferrato in 1890. He would have liked to escape, but he was too lazy to do so. His friends and a woman who loved him, and whom he tolerated with distracted benevolence, persuaded him to take the test for the position of ship’s doctor aboard a transatlantic steamer. He won the competition easily, made a single voyage from Genoa to New York, and on his return to Genoa handed in his resignation because in America “there was too much noise.”
    After that he settled in Turin. He had several women, all of whom wanted to redeem and marry him, but he regarded both matrimony and an equipped office and the regular exercise of his profession as too much of a commitment. Around about 1930 he was a timid little old man, shriveled and neglected, frightfully nearsighted; he lived with a big, vulgar goyà, from whom he tried at intervals and feebly to free himself, and whom he described from time to time as ’na sotià (“a nut”), ’na hamortà (“a donkey”), and ’na gran beemà (“a great beast”), but without acrimony and indeed with a vein of inexplicable tenderness. This goyà even wanted to have him samdà “baptized” (literally, “destroyed”): a thing he had always refused to do, not out of religious conviction but out of indifference and a lack of initiative.
    Barbaricô had no less than twelve brothers and sisters, who described his companion with the ironic and cruel name of Magna Morfina (Aunt Morphine): ironic because the woman, poor thing, being a goyà and childless could not be a magna except in an extremely limited sense, and indeed the term magna was to be understood as its exact opposite, a non-magna, someone excluded and cut off from the family; and cruel because it contained a probably false and at any rate pitiless allusion to a certain exploitation on her part of Barbaricô’s prescription blanks.
    The two of them lived in a filthy and chaotic attic room on Borgo Vanchiglia. My uncle was a fine doctor, full of human wisdom and