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authenticity of these rumors: but in fact, when he came into the laboratory for Preparations, no Bunsen burner was even low enough, so it was prudent to turn it off completely; actually, he made the students prepare silver nitrate from the five-lire coins taken from their own pockets, and chloride of nickel from the twenty-cent pieces with the flying naked lady; and in truth, the only time I was admitted to his study, I found written on the blackboard in a fine script: “Don’t give me a funeral, neither dead nor alive.”
    I liked P. I liked the sober rigor of his classes; I was amused by the disdainful ostentation with which at the exams he exhibited, instead of the prescribed Fascist shirt, a comic black bib no bigger than the palm of a hand, which at each of his brusque movements would pop out between his jacket’s lapels. I valued his two textbooks, clear to the point of obsession, concise, saturated with his surly contempt for humanity in general and for lazy and foolish students in particular: for all students were, by definition, lazy and foolish; anyone who by rare good luck managed to prove that he was not became his peer and was honored by a laconic and precious sentence of praise.
    Now the five months of anxious waiting had passed: from among us eighty freshmen had been selected the twenty least lazy and foolish—fourteen boys and six girls—and the Preparation laboratory opened its doors to us. None of us had a precise idea of what was at stake: I think that it was his invention, a modern and technical version of the initiation rituals of savages, in which each of his subjects was abruptly torn away from book and school bench and transplanted amid eye-smarting fumes, hand-scorching acids, and practical events that do not jibe with the theories. I certainly do not want to dispute the usefulness, indeed the necessity of this initiation: but in the brutality with which it was carried out it was easy to see P. ‘s spiteful talent, his vocation for hierarchical distances and the humiliation of us, his flock. In sum: not a word, spoken or written, was spent by him as viaticum, to encourage us along the road we had chosen, to point out the dangers and pitfalls, and to communicate to us the tricks of the trade. I have often thought that deep down P. was a savage, a hunter; someone who goes hunting simply has to take along a gun, in fact a bow and arrow, and go into the woods: success or failure are purely up to him. Pick up and go, when the time comes the haruspices and augurs no longer count, theory is useless and you learn along the way, the experiences of others are useless, the essential is to meet the challenge. He who is worthy wins; he who has weak eyes, arms, or instincts turns back and changes his trade: of the eighty students I mentioned, thirty changed their trade in their second year and another twenty later on.
    That laboratory was tidy and clean. We stayed in it five hours a day, from two o’clock to seven o’clock: at the entrance, an assistant assigned to each student a preparation, then each of us went to the supply room, where the hirsute Caselli handed out the raw material, foreign or domestic: a chunk of marble to this fellow, ten grams of bromine to the next, a bit of boric acid to another, a handful of clay to yet another. Caselli would entrust these reliquiae to us with an undisguised air of suspicion: this was the bread of science, P. ‘s bread, and finally it was also the stuff that he administered; who knows what improper use we profane and unskilled persons would make of it?
    Caselli loved P. with a bitter, polemical love. Apparently he had been faithful to him for forty years; he was his shadow, his earthbound incarnation, and, like all those who perform vicarial functions, he was an interesting human specimen: like those, I mean to say, who represent Authority without possessing any of their own, such as, for example, sacristans, museum guides, beadles, nurses, the “young men”