In short, the person for whom everyone waits, whether he knows it or not, and who brings the heavenly message that changes your life for good or ill, you don’t know which until he opens his mouth.

From The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. In the chapter, Nickel, page 67.

I had in a drawer an illuminated parchment on which was written in elegant characters that on Primo Levi, of the Jewish race, had been conferred a degree in Chemistry summa cum laude. It was therefore a dubious document, half glory and half derision, half absolution and half condemnation. It had remained in that drawer since July 1941, and now we were at the end of November. The world was racing to catastrophe, and around me nothing was happening. The Germans had spread like a flood in Poland, Norway, Holland, France, and Yugoslavia and had penetrated the Russian steppes like a knife cutting through butter. The United States did not move to help the English, who remained alone. I could not find work and was wearing myself out looking for any sort of paid occupation; in the next room my father, prostrated by a tumor, was living his last months.

The doorbell rang—it was a tall, thin young man wearing the uniform of the Italian army, and I immediately recognized in him the figure of the messenger, the Mercury who guides souls, or, if one wishes, the annunciatory angel. In short, the person for whom everyone waits, whether he knows it or not, and who brings the heavenly message that changes your life for good or ill, you don’t know which until he opens his mouth.

He opened his mouth, and he had a strong Tuscan accent and asked for Dr. Levi, who incredibly was myself (I still wasn’t accustomed to the title), introduced himself urbanely, and offered me a job. Who had sent him to me? Another Mercury, Caselli, the inflexible custodian of another man’s fame: that “laude” on my diploma had actually served for something.
That I was a Jew the lieutenant apparently knew (in any event, my last name left little room for doubt), but it didn’t seem to matter to him. Moreover, it seemed that the business somehow suited him, that he took a bitter and subtle pleasure in breaking the laws of racial separation—in short, he was secretly an ally and sought an ally in me.