Primo Levi says, “Remember the time before the wax set, when everyone was a seal. Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; in each the trace of each.” Every one of Primo’s books explores this idea, the effect we have on each other as humans, the story whispered in a train, the apple halved and shared in a drainage pipe at Auschwitz, the moment of arriving home unrecognized.
When the Russian army liberated the camp and sent him to the Soviet Union, he became a kind of Ulysses to find his way south and westwards again to Turin, Italy, on foot, hitching rides, relying on the kindness of strangers and his own nascent cunning as he crossed postwar Europe. Each encounter shifted the course of his journey, recorded in his book The Truce, and inflamed and then distilled his curiosity and warmth to the wisdom: “Remember the time before the wax set." When he did finally ring the bell at 75 Corso Re Umberto, his face uncharacteristically bearded, swollen and reddened by malnutrition, his mother and sister wept. They hadn’t known he was alive. The Nazis took even the joy of homecoming, because to look at Primo then was to see their violence, to see the number tattoo 174517 stamped on his arm.
I found 75 Corso Re Umberto where his children still live and rang the bell with my heart in my mouth. “Buongiorno,” a feeble male voice answered. “Buongiorno,” I said in my rehearsed Italian. “Sono qui solo per dire che amo i libri di Primo Levi. Vengo per dire grazie.” The voice continued under me repeating, “Grazie, grazie, grazie.” Then there was a pause in which I hoped improbably they might invite me to share wine and let me study their faces and see in mine my gratitude, the glow of another pilgrim touched by their author father. After one more grazie, the voice concluded, “Arrivederci.” I bowed my head and said, “Arrivederci,” and left. “Remember the time before the wax set.” Also wax melts.
