Bridges the Monkey's Wrench

By R.Z. Sheppard

What's in a name? For many, the indication that they are descendants of craftsmen: smiths, coopers, millers, weavers. Primo Levi, 67, is an Italian Jew whose surname suggests ties to those members of the Levite tribe who were entrusted with guarding the sacred tabernacle. Not ritual priests but deacons, Levites were workers with practical tasks to perform. Appropriately, Levi came to writing through chemistry. For 30 years he worked for a Turin paint manufacturer. Before that he was the unwilling employee of the Nazis, who recruited him at Auschwitz for his technical skills. While millions died for what they were, Levi lived because of what he could do. His books (Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, Moments of Reprieve) are other ways of doing: jobs of literature that transcend brutality with humane intelligence.

Not surprisingly, Levi the scientist is fascinated by work and variety, a curiosity he shares with Libertino Faussone, the main storyteller of The Monkey's Wrench. "The world is beautiful because it's all different," says ! Faussone, an itinerant rigger who has worked on construction jobs all over the world. He is a fiction, says Levi, but authentic, a composite of workmen the author has known. The rigger's tales too have the pitch of stretched truths. On an eight-story tower, a mystery man collects dust that he claims comes from the stars. Faussone tells of a job in the tropics where one of his helpers was an ape: "He wanted to play, but he didn't want to strain himself. But I tell you, those other three goons didn't do much more than he did, and at least he wasn't afraid of falling."

This down-to-earth Piedmontese, it is readily apparent, defines himself exclusively by his work. The projects he describes are all outsize and difficult. "They never find oil in great places, say at San Remo or on the Costa Brava," is the way he begins a yarn about an offshore drilling rig in Alaska. The 250-meter tower was constructed horizontally on land, then towed out through cold, leaden seas and righted on site by flooding chambers at the base. On paper the task seemed simple; in practice it required judgment, skill and luck that almost defy imagination. Some Third World jobs defy common sense. The designers of a bridge over an Indian river fail to account for winds that shake the structure apart. Faussone's description might be a passage from Joseph Conrad: "One after the other, we heard what sounded like shots from a cannon. I counted: there were six of them. It was the vertical suspensions snapping: they snapped neatly, at the level of the track, and the stumps, in the backlash, flew up toward the sky."

The simple pleasure of listening to a man talking about his work with accuracy and exuberance is not to be underestimated. But Levi has more on his mind. Faussone's is the visible, expansive world. Levi's is an illusive sphere circumscribed by the laboratory and the library. The relationship between rigger and writer becomes clear, is precipitated by a story about chemistry. Levi has to go to the Soviet Union to investigate an allegedly defective shipment of his company's paint. The problem turns out to be contamination by microscopic particles in cleaning rags. There is also a narrative problem: how to make his rather unheroic story interesting to Faussone. "We chemists," he explains, "try to imitate you, like that ape helper of yours. In our mind we construct a little mechanical model . . . but always with a nagging envy of you men with five senses, who fight between sky and earth against old enemies % and work in centimeters and meters instead of dealing with our invisible, tiny sausages and nets." Among other things, The Monkey's Wrench is a model of the interplay between storytellers and listeners. For their part, readers can envy Levi's sixth sense about building bridges between what can be seen and what must be imagined.