The Periodic Table Read Free Page B

diagnostic intuition, but he spent the entire day stretched out on his cot reading books and old newspapers: he was an attentive reader, eclectic and untiring, with a long memory, although myopia forced him to hold the print three inches from his eyeglasses, which were as thick as the bottom of a beer glass. He only got up when a patient sent for him, which often happened because he almost never asked to be paid; his patients were the poor people on the outskirts of town, from whom he would accept as recompense a half-dozen eggs, or some lettuce from the garden, or even a pair of worn-out shoes. He visited his patients on foot because he did not have the money for the streetcar; when on the street he caught a dim view, through the mist of his myopia, of a girl, he went straight up to her and to her surprise examined her carefully, circling from a foot away. He ate almost nothing, and in a general way he had no needs; he died at over ninety, with discretion and dignity.
    Like Barbarico in her rejection of the world was Grandmother Fina, one of the four sisters whom everyone called Fina: this first name singularity was owed to the fact that the four girls had been sent successively to the same wet nurse in Bra whose name was Delfina and who called all her “nurslings” by that name. Grandmother Fina lived at Carmagnola, in an apartment on the second floor, and did splendid crochet work. At eighty-six she had a slight indisposition, a caodana, as ladies used to have in those days and today mysteriously no longer do: from then on, for twenty years—that is, until her death—she never left her room; on the Sabbath, from her little terrace overflowing with geraniums, fragile and pale, she waved her hand to the people who came out of the scola (“synagogue”). But she must have been quite different in her youth, if what is told about her is true: namely, that her husband having brought to the house as a guest the Rabbi of Moncalvo, an erudite and illustrious man, she had served him, without his knowing, a pork cutlet, since there was nothing else in the pantry. Her brother Barbaraflín (Raphael), who before his promotion to Barba was known as I fieul d’ Moise ’d Celin (“the son of the Moses of Celin”), now at a mature age and very rich because of the money earned from army supplies had fallen in love with the very beautiful Dolce Valabrega from Gassino; he did not dare declare himself, wrote her love letters that he never mailed, and then wrote impassioned replies to himself.
    Marchin, too, an ex-uncle, had an unhappy love. He became enamored of Susanna (which means “lily” in Hebrew), a brisk, pious woman, the depository of a century-old recipe for the confection of goose sausage; these sausages are made by using the neck of the bird itself as a casing, and as a result in the Lassôn Acodesh (the “holy tongue,” that is, in the jargon we are discussing), more than three synonyms for “neck” have survived. The first, mahané, is neuter and has a technical, generic use; the second, savar, is used only in metaphors, as “at breakneck speed”; and the third, khanèc, extremely allusive and suggestive, refers to the neck as a vital passage, which can be obstructed, occluded, or severed; and it is used in imprecations, such as “may it stick in your neck”; khanichésse means “to hang oneself.” In any event, Marchin was Susanna’s clerk and assistant; both in the mysterious kitchen-workshop and in the store, on whose shelves were promiscuously placed sausages, holy furnishings, amulets, and prayer books. Susanna turned him down and Marchin got his abominable revenge by selling the recipe for the sausage to a goy. One must think that this goy did not appreciate its value, since after Susanna’s death (which took place in a legendary past) it has no longer been possible to find in commerce goose sausage worthy of the name and tradition. Because of this contemptible retaliation, Uncle Marchin lost his right