Free A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi Page B

from head to foot.
    In a few moments the whistle and the shiver disappeared, and he found himself clear-headed, with the core of the poem lucidand distinct; he had only to write it down, and, lo and behold, the other lines hastened to crowd around it, obedient and strong. In a quarter of an hour the work was done: but this flash, this instantaneous process in which conception and birth succeeded one another almost like lightning and thunder, had been granted to Pasquale only five or six times in his life. Luckily, he wasn’t a poet by profession: he had a dull, boring office job.
    He felt the symptoms described above after two years of silence, as he was sitting at his desk, examining an insurance policy. In fact, he felt them with an unusual intensity: the whistle was penetrating and the shiver was a nearly convulsive tremor, which disappeared immediately, leaving him with a sensation of vertigo. The key verse was there before him, as if written on the wall, or, rather, inside his skull. His colleagues at the neighboring desks didn’t notice anything. Pasquale concentrated fiercely on the sheet of paper in front of him: from the core the poem radiated out through all his senses like a growing organism, and soon it was before him; it seemed to be throbbing, just like a living thing.
    It was the most beautiful poem that Pasquale had ever written. There it was, right before his eyes, without a correction, the handwriting tall, elegant, and smooth: it was almost as if the sheet of copy paper on which it was written had difficulty bearing its weight, like a column too slender beneath the burden of a giant statue. It was six o’clock: Pasquale locked the poem in his drawer and went home. It seemed to him that he deserved a reward, and on the way he bought himself an ice cream.
    The next morning he rushed to the office. He was impatient to reread the poem, because he was well aware how hard it is to judge a newly written work: the value and the meaning, or the lack of value and meaning, become clear only the morning after. He opened the drawer and didn’t see the page: and yet he was sure that he had left it on top of all the other papers. He dug around among them, frantically at first, then methodically, but he had to admit that the poem had disappeared. He searched the other drawers, and then he realized that the poem was right there in front of him, on the in-box tray. What tricks distraction plays! But how could he not be distracted, in the face of the ultimate work of his life?
    P ASQUALE WAS certain that his future biographers would remember him for nothing else: only for that “Annunciation.” He reread it and was enthusiastic, almost in love. He was about to take it to the photocopying machine when the boss called him in; he kept him for an hour and a half, and when Pasquale returned to his desk the copier was broken. By four o’clock the electrician had repaired it, but the photocopying paper was all used up. For that day there was nothing to be done: recalling the incident of the previous evening, Pasquale placed the sheet of paper in the drawer with great care. He closed it, then changed his mind and opened it, and finally he closed it again and left. The next day the piece of paper wasn’t there.
    This business was becoming annoying. Pasquale turned allhis drawers upside down, bringing to light papers that had been forgotten for decades: as he searched, he tried to retrieve in memory if not the whole composition at least that first line, that nucleus which had enlightened him, but he couldn’t: in fact, he had the precise sensation that he never would. He was different, different from that moment on: he was no longer the same Pasquale, and he never would be again, just as a dead man does not return to life, and you never put your foot in the same river twice. There was a nauseating metallic taste in his mouth: the taste of frustration, of nevermore. Disconsolate, he sat down in his