The Monkey's Wrench by Primo Levi & William Weaver

Author:Primo Levi & William Weaver [Levi, Primo & Weaver, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary, Fiction, Jewish, Storytelling, Humor
ISBN: 9781501167669
Google: ud0nDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 1978-06-20T19:59:07+00:00

The Bridge

‘…On the other hand, when they of­fered me a job in In­dia, I wasn’t all that in­clined. Not that I knew much about In­dia. You know how easy it is to get a mis­taken no­tion of a coun­try, and since the world is big, and it’s all made up of dif­fer­ent coun­tries, and prac­ti­cally speak­ing, you can’t visit all of them, you end up with a head full of crazy ideas about all coun­tries, maybe even in­clud­ing your own. All I knew about In­dia I can tell you in a few words: they have too many ba­bies; they starve to death be­cause it’s against their re­li­gion to eat cows; they killed Gandhi be­cause he was too good; the coun­try’s big­ger than Eu­rope and they speak God knows how many lan­guages, and so, for want of any­thing bet­ter, they set­tled on Eng­lish; and then there’s the story of Mowgli the Frog that, when I was a kid, I thought was real. Oh, I was for­get­ting the Ka­ma­su­tra busi­ness and the hun­dred and thirty-seven ways of mak­ing love, or maybe it’s two hun­dred and thirty-seven, I don’t re­mem­ber ex­actly any more, I read it once in a mag­a­zine while I was wait­ing to get my hair cut.

‘In other words, I would al­most rather have stayed in Turin. I was in Via La­grange in those days, liv­ing with those two aunts of mine; some­times in­stead of go­ing to a pen­sione I visit them, be­cause they make a fuss over me, cook spe­cial dishes, in the morn­ing they get up with­out a sound so as not to wake me, and they go to the early Mass and buy me fresh rolls still hot from the oven. They have only one fault: they want me to get mar­ried, and that in it­self wouldn’t be so bad, but they’re kind of heavy-handed about it, and they keep in­tro­duc­ing me to girls who aren’t ex­actly my type. I’ve never fig­ured out where the old ladies find them: maybe in con­vent schools. They’re all alike: they seem made of wax, when you talk to them they don’t dare even look you in the face, they make me ter­ri­bly em­bar­rassed, I don’t know where to be­gin, and I get as tongue-tied as they are. So it may hap­pen that, other times, when I come to Turin, I don’t even get in touch with my aunts, and I go straight to the pen­sione; also to keep from dis­turb­ing them.

‘Like I was say­ing, that was a time when I was kind of tired of rov­ing around, and in spite of this ma­nia of my aunts’, I would gladly have stayed put; but at the of­fice, they poured it on, they know my weak spot, and they know how to twist me around their fin­ger: it was such an im­por­tant job, and if I didn’t go they couldn’t think of any­one else to send. What with one thing and an­other, they tele­phoned me ev­ery day, and be­sides, like I said be­fore,

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