The Birthday Buyer Read Online Free PDF Page B

mouth and whom they left for three days on the camp esplanade exposed to the snow and the gusts, until he died.
    After he’d gotten dressed, Primo Levi walked falteringly down the passageway in his house where he lived with his wife Lucia and his senile mother and blind mother-in-law, both in their nineties and paralytic. He was very depressed, more than ever perhaps, and was worried by his prostate cancer. He no longer loved living, and wondered where he would find new reasons to make him love life anew.
    He moved gracefully, accustomed to shadows and darkness. He was surprised that the decision to take his life, he, a man who had looked death in the face long ago and had never been able to drive its specter away, didn’t seem at all dramatic, but logical, even happy, or perhaps merely the product of inertia.
    He started thinking about how to do so in the old kitchen, employing the usual calculated intensity and methodical application he brought to the laboratory experiments he undertook in the course of his work.
    He left the house because after his death, life would have to continue just as normal and he didn’t want to leave any loose ends. He had an errand. He walked down several streets from Corso Re Umberto, in the Crocetta, and turned right into the fourth where he crossed and walked through a large entrance that led to a small courtyard, where Ugo Raboni, the photographer, had his shop.
    He stopped when he saw it was shut. It was early, but he had anticipated that nobody would be there, and pushed an envelope under the door which contained instructions and several ten thousand lira bills.
    The instructions referred to the fact that the photographer, his only friend from adolescence, should keep a large portait of his mother Esther that Raboni had taken on her fiftieth birthday and that a month before he had asked the same photographer to frame. What was that photo of his mother like, his beloved mother, who’d been in his mind at every moment in his life, who harrowed him now she’d become such a crazy old despot? What was his mother like before, his sweet, courageous and sensitive mother? In that dark alleyway, in the rain, on the last day of his life, Primo Levi could not recall his mother’s face when she was young. For him she was the premonition that preceeds real, definitive death.

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    On July 31, 1919, Ester Luzzati de Levi was in labor and gave birth to a son. They called him Primo.
    Primo’s childhood was always marked by ill health and his mother’s care, since the Levi family lived in fear of tuberculosis, pneumonia or whooping cough, illnesses that had led to the deaths of friends and relatives.
    Ester spent many nights at the foot of her son’s bed, reading books about science and zoology, her main interests. Primo Levi inherited her great curiosity about nature, particularly about fish.
    For his sixth birthday, his mother gave him a large aquarium, the bottom of which was made of shards of lapislazuli. The red and silvery fish glowed in the water thanks to an electric device his father Cesare had installed at the back of the tank.
    Years later he would remember how, on a whim, he’d called each fish after a mineral.

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    That present filled little Primo Levi with wonder and he always kept it near him like the lost treasure of innocence he would never again meet in the time he was forced to live.
    Included in the instructions he listed in the letter he slipped under the door of Ugo Raboni’s photography shop was one to the effect that the aquarium, now kept in his library—the same aquarium his mother gave him as a present on his sixth birthday—be given to Raboni himself on the day they got over the upset caused by their shock at his death, and executed the requisite legal measures.
    The photo of his mother and the aquarium were the obejcts he loved most. He wasn’t bothered about the fate of his other belongings and left no written wishes. They would remain with the family and his