The Skin

by Curzio Malaparte

  I like Americans for these reasons, and for many others that I have not mentioned. In that terrible autumn of 1943, which brought so much humiliation and grief to my fellow-countrymen, the Americans' humanity and generosity, the pure and honest simplicity of their ideas and sentiments, and the genuineness of their behaviour, instilled in me the illusion that men hate evil, the hope that humanity would mend its ways, and the conviction that only goodness—the goodness and innocence of those splendid boys from across the Atlantic, who had landed in Europe to punish the wicked and reward the good—could redeem nations and individuals from their sins.

  But of all my American friends the dearest was Staff Colonel Jack Hamilton. Jack was a man of thirty-eight—tall, thin, pale and elegant, with gentlemanly, almost European manners. On first acquaintance, perhaps, he seemed more European than American, but this was not the reason why I loved him: and I loved him like a brother. For gradually, as I got to know him intimately, he showed himself to be intensely and indisputably American. He had been born in South Carolina ("My nurse," he used to say, "was une negresse par un demon secouée"), but he was not merely what is known in America as a Southerner. Intellectually he was a man of culture and refinement, and at the same time there was about him an almost childlike simplicity and innocence. What I mean is that he was an American in the noblest sense of the word—one of the most admirable men I have ever met. He was a "Christian gentleman". How hard it is for me to express what I mean by the term "Christian gentleman"! All who know and love the Americans will understand what I mean when I say that the American nation is a Christian nation, and that Jack was a Christian gentleman.

  Educated at Woodberry Forest School and at Virginia University, Jack had devoted himself with equal enthusiasm to Latin, Greek and sport, putting himself with equal confidence in the hands of Horace, Virgil, Simonides and Xenophon and in those of the masseurs of the University gymnasiums. In 1928 he had been a sprinter in the American Olympic Track Team at Amsterdam, and he was prouder of his Olympic victories than of his academic honours. After 1929 he had spent some years in Paris as a representative of the United Press, and he was proud of his well-nigh perfect French. "I learned French from the classics," he used to say. "My French tutors were La Fontaine and Madame Bonnet, the caretaker of the house in which I lived in rue Vaugirard. Tu ne trouves pas que je parle comme les animaux de La Fontaine? It was he who taught me qu'un chien peut bien regarder un Evêque."

  "And you came to Europe," I would say to him, "to learn that? Un chien peut bien regarder un Evêque in America as well."

  "Oh non," Jack would reply, "en Amerique ce sont les Eveques qui peuvent regarder les chiens."

  Jack was also well acquainted with what he called la banlieue de Paris, in other words Europe. He had journeyed through Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and Sweden in the same spirit of humanism and with the same thirst for knowledge as the English undergraduates who, before Dr. Arnold's reform, used to journey across Europe during their summer Grand Tour. After his travels Jack had returned to America with the manuscripts of an essay on the spirit of European civilization and of a thesis on Descartes, which had earned him an appointment as Professor of Literature in a great American university. But academic laurels do not flourish on an athlete's brow as Olympic laurels do; and Jack could not get over the fact that a muscular strain in the knee prevented him from running again in the international contests for the honour of the Stars and Stripes. In an attempt to forget his misfortune Jack would repair to the changing-room of the University gymnasium and read his adored Virgil or his beloved Xenophon, surrounded by that odour of rubber, soaking towels, soap and linoleum which is peculiarly associated with classical culture in the universities of the Anglo-Saxon countries.

  One morning I came upon him unawares in the changing-room —deserted at that hour—of the Peninsular Base Section's gymnasium, deeply engrossed in Pindar. He looked at me and smiled, colouring slightly. He asked me if I liked Pindar's poetry, adding that the Pindaric odes written in honour of the athletes who had triumphed at Olympia do not convey any idea of the long, hard drudgery of training, that those divine verses resound with the yells of the crowd and the triumphal applause, not with the hoarse whistling and the rasping sound that comes from the mouths of athletes when they make their last terrible effort. "I know all about it," he said, "I know what the last twenty yards are. Pindar is not a modern poet. He is an English poet of the Victorian era."

  Although he preferred Horace and Virgil to all other poets because of their serene melancholy, Greek poetry and ancient Greece filled him with a sense of gratitude—not the gratitude of a scholar, but that of a son. He knew by heart whole books of the Iliad, and tears would come into his eyes when he declaimed, in Greek, the hexameters on the "funeral Games in honour of Patroclus." One day, as we sat on the bank of the Volturno, near the Bailey bridge at Capua, waiting for the sergeant guarding the bridge to give us the signal to cross, we discussed Winckelmann and the concept of beauty among the ancient Hellenes. I remember Jack's telling me that the gloomy, funereal, mysterious imagery of ancient Greece, so raw and barbaric, or, as he put it, Gothic, appealed to him less than the joyful, harmonious, clear imagery of Hellenistic Greece, which was so young, vivacious and modern, and which he described as a French Greece, a Greece of the eighteenth century. And when I asked him what, in his opinion, was the American Greece, he replied with a laugh: "The Greece of Xenophon"; and, still laughing, began to paint a remarkable and witty picture of Xenophon—"a Virginian gentleman"— which was a disguised satire, in the style of Dr. Johnson, of certain Hellenists of the Boston school.

  Jack had an indulgent and mischievous contempt for the Hellenists of Boston. One morning I found him sitting under a tree, with a book on his knees, near a heavy battery facing Cassino. It was during the sad days of the Battle of Cassino. It was raining—for a fortnight it had been doing nothing but rain. Columns of lorries laden with American soldiers, sewn up in white sheets of coarse linen cloth, were going down in the direction of the little military cemeteries which were to be seen here and there beside the Via Appia and the Via Casilina. To keep the rain off the pages of his book—an eighteenth-century anthology of Greek poetry with a soft leather binding and gilt edges, presented to him by the worthy Gaspare Casella, the famous antiquarian bookseller of Naples and a friend of Anatole France—Jack was sitting with his body bent forward, covering the precious book with his mackintosh.

  I remember his saying to me with a laugh that in Boston Simonides was not considered a great poet. And he added that Emerson, in his funeral panegyric of Thoreau, declared that "his classic poem on Smoke suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides." He laughed heartily. "Ah, ces gens de Boston! Tu vois ca? Thoreau, in the opinion of Boston, is greater than Simonides!" he said, and the rain entered his mouth, mingling with his words and his laughter.

  His favourite American poet was Edgar Allan Poe. But sometimes, when he had drunk a whisky more than usual, he would confuse Horace's verses with Poe's, and be deeply astonished to find Annabel Lee and Lydia in the same alcaic. Or he would confuse Madame de Sévigné's "talking leaf "with one of LaFontaine's talking animals.

  "It wasn't an animal," I would say to him. "It was a leaf—a leaf from a tree."

  And I would quote the relevant passage from the letter in which Madame de Sévigné wrote that she wished there was a talking leaf in the park of her castle, Les Rochers, in Brittany.

  "Mais cela c'est absurde," Jack would say. "Une feuille qui parle! Un animal, ca se comprend, mais une feuille!"

  "For the understanding of Europe," I would say to him, "Cartesian logic is useless. Europe is a mysterious place, full of inviolable secrets."

  "Ah, Europe! What an extraordinary place it is!" Jack would exclaim. "I need Europe, to make me conscious of being an American."

  But Jack was not one of those Americians de Paris—they are found on every page of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises—who round about 1925 used to frequent
the Select in Montparnasse, who disdained Ford Maxon Ford's tea-parties and Sylvia Beach's bookshop, and who are said by Sinclair Lewis, alluding specifically to certain characters created by Eleanor Green, to have been like the intellectual fugitives who frequented the Rive Gauche roundabout 1925, or like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound or Isadora Duncan— "iridescent flies caught in the black web of an ancient and amoral European culture." Nor was Jack one of those decadent transatlantic youths who formed the Transition{1} clique. No, Jack was neither a déraciné nor a decadent. He was an American in love with Europe.

  He had for Europe a respect compounded of love and admiration. But in spite of his culture and his affectionate familiarity with our virtues and our faults his attitude to Europe, like that of nearly all true Americans, was conditioned by a subtle species of "inferiority complex", which manifested itself not, to be sure, in an inability to understand and forgive our misery and shame, but in a fear of understanding, a reluctance to understand which was due to a certain delicacy of feeling. In Jack this inferiority complex, this ingenuousness and wonderful delicacy of feeling, were perhaps more apparent than in many other Americans. Whenever, in a Neapolitan street, in a village near Capua or Caserta, or on the Cassino road, he happened to witness some distressing incident which typified our misery, our physical and moral humiliation, and our despair (the misery, humiliation and despair not only of Naples and Italy, but of all Europe), Jack would blush crimson.

  Because of that way he had of blushing I loved Jack like a brother. Because of his wonderful delicacy of feeling, so profoundly and truly American, I was grateful to Jack, to all General Clark's G.I.s, and to all the men, women and children of America. (America—that luminous, remote horizon, that unattainable shore, that happy, forbidden country!) Sometimes, in an attempt to hide his delicacy of feeling, he would say, blushing crimson: "This bastard, dirty people." On such occasions I used to react to his wonderful sensitiveness with bitter and sarcastic words, accompanied by uneasy, malicious laughter, which I immediately regretted, and remembered with remorse all night long. He would perhaps have preferred it if I had started to cry: my tears would certainly have seemed to him more natural than my sarcasm, less cruel than my bitterness. But I too had something to hide. We too, in this miserable Europe of ours, are afraid and ashamed of our delicacy of feeling.

  It was not my fault, however, if the price of negroes' flesh was increasing every day. A dead negro cost nothing; he cost much less than a dead white man—even less than a live Italian! He cost pretty much the same as twenty Neapolitan children who had died of hunger. It was indeed strange that a dead negro should cost so little. A dead negro is very handsome. He is glossy, massive, immense, and when he is stretched out on the ground he occupies almost twice as much space as a dead white man. Even if a negro, when he was alive in America, was only a poor Harlem bootblack, or a navvy whose job was to unload coal in the docks, or a fireman on the railways, in death he took up almost as much space as the huge, magnificent corpses of the Homeric heroes. At heart I was pleased to think that the corpse of a negro took up almost as much ground as the corpse of Achilles, Hector or Ajax would have done. And I could not resign myself to the idea that a dead negro should cost so little.

  But a live negro cost a small fortune. Within the last few days the price of live negroes had risen in Naples from two hundred to a thousand dollars, and its tendency was to increase. It was only necessary to see the hungry expressions with which the poor people eyed a negro—a live negro—to appreciate that the price of live negroes was very high, and was still rising. The dream of all the poor people of Naples, especially the street arabs and the boys, was to be able to hire a "black", if only for a few hours. Hunting negro soldiers was the favourite sport of the boys. Naples, to them, was a vast equatorial forest, redolent with a warm, heavy odour of sweet fritters, where ecstatic negroes promenaded, swaying their hips, their eyes fixed upon the heavens. When a street arab managed to seize a negro by the sleeve of his tunic and drag him along behind him from bar to bar, from inn to inn, from brothel to brothel, all the windows, doorsteps and street corners in the maze of alleys that constitutes Toledo and Forcella would fill with eyes, hands and voices crying: "Sell me your black! I'll give you twenty dollars! Thirty dollars! Fifty dollars!" This was what was called the "flying market." Fifty dollars was the maximum price that was paid for the hire of a negro for a day, that is for a few hours—the time needed to make him drunk, to strip him of everything he had on, from his cap to his shoes, and then, after nightfall, to abandon him naked on the pavement of an alley.

  The negro suspects nothing. He is not conscious of being bought and resold every quarter of an hour, and he walks about innocently and happily, very proud of his shoes, which glitter as though made of gold, his smart uniform, his yellow gloves, his rings and gold teeth, his great white eyes, viscous and translucent like the eyes of an octopus. He walks along with a smile on his face, his head inclined on his shoulder and his eyes lost in contemplation of a green cloud drifting far away through the sea-blue sky, his sharp, dazzlingly white teeth seeming to cut like scissors the blue fringe of the roofs, the bare legs of the girls leaning against the railings of the balconies, the red carnations that protrude from the terra-cotta vases on the window sills. He walks like a somnambulist, savouring with delight all the smells, colours, tastes, sights and sounds that make life sweet: the smell of fritters, wine and fried fish, a pregnant woman sitting on her doorstep, a girl scratching her back, another girl looking for a flea in her bosom, the crying of a baby in its cradle, the laughter of a street arab, the flashing of the sunlight on a window-pane, the music of a gramophone, the flames of the papier maché Purgatories in which the damned burn at the feet of the Madonnas in the chapels at the corners of the alleys, a boy who, with knife-like teeth, snow-white and dazzling, produces from a curved slice of melon, as from a mouth-organ, a half-moon of green and red sounds that sparkle against the grey sky of a wall, a girl combing her hair at a window, singing Ohi Mari and gazing at her image reflected in the sky as in a mirror.

  The negro does not notice that the boy who holds his hand and strokes his wrist, talking to him softly and looking up at him with mild eyes, from time to time changes his identity. (When the boy sells his "black" to another street arab he slips the negro's hand into that of the buyer and loses himself in the crowd.) The price of a negro on the "flying market" is based on the lavishness and recklessness of his expenditure, on his avidity for food and drink, on the way in which he smiles, lights a cigarette or looks at a woman. A hundred expert eager eyes follow the negro's every gesture, count the coins that he draws from his pocket, observe his pink-and-black fingers with their pale cuticles. There are boys who are very expert at the precise and rapid calculation which the traffic entails. (In two months Pasquale Sole, a boy of ten, earned from the purchase and resale of negroes on the "flying market" about six thousand dollars, with which he acquired a house in the vicinity of the Piazza Olivella.) As he wanders from bar to bar, from inn to inn, from brothel to brothel, as he smiles, drinks and eats, as he caresses the arms of a girl, the negro is oblivious of the fact that he has become a medium of exchange, he does not even suspect that he has been bought and sold like a slave.

  It was certainly not dignified, the position of the negro soldiers in the American Army—so kind, so black, so respectable—who had won the war, landed at Naples as conquerors, and now found themselves being bought and sold like unfortunate slaves. But in Naples this kind of thing has been happening for a thousand years. Such was the experience of the Normans, the Angevins and the Aragonese, of Charles VIII of France, and of Garibaldi and Mussolini themselves. The people of Naples would have perished of hunger centuries ago if every so often they had not been lucky enough to be able to buy and resell all those, Italians and foreigners, who presumed to land at Naples as conquerors and overlords.

  If the cost of hiring a negro soldier on the "flying market" for a few hours was only twenty or thirty dollars, the cost of
hiring him for one or two months was high, ranging from three hundred to a thousand dollars or even more. An American negro was a goldmine. The owner of a negro slave possessed a sure income and a source of easy gain. He had solved the problem of making a living, and often grew rich. The risk, certainly, was great, since the M.P.s, who understood nothing about the affairs of Europe, nourished an inexplicable aversion to the traffic in negroes. But in spite of the M.P.s the negro-trade was held in high honour in Naples. There was not a family, however, poor, which did not possess its negro slave.

  A negro's master treated his slave as an honoured guest. He offered him food and drink, filled him with wine and fritters, let him dance with his own daughters to the strains of an old gramophone, made him sleep, along with all the members of his family, male and female, in his own bed—one of those vast beds which occupy a large part of every Neapolitan basso. And the negro would come home every evening with gifts of sugar, cigarettes, spam, bacon, bread, white flour, vests, stockings, shoes, uniforms, bedspreads, overcoats, and vast quantities of caramels. The "black" was delighted by the quiet family life, the decorousness and warmth of his welcome, the smiles of the women and children, the sight of the table laid for supper beneath the lamp, the wine, the pizza cheese, the sweet fritters. After a few days the fortunate negro, having become the slave of this poor, warm-hearted Neapolitan family, would become engaged to one of his master's daughters; and he would return home every evening laden with gifts for his fiancee—cases of corned beef, bags of sugar and flour, cartons of cigarettes, and treasures of every kind, which he filched from the military stores, and which the father and brothers of his fiancée sold to dealers on the black market. It was also possible to buy white slaves in the jungle that was Naples; but they showed little return, and so cost less. Still, a white soldier from the P.X. cost as much as a coloured driver.