The Skin

by Curzio Malaparte

  The suspicion, which later became a conviction, that the plague had been brought to Europe by the liberators themselves had filled the people with profound and heart-felt grief. Although it is an ancient tradition that the vanquished hate their conquerors, the people of Naples did not hate the Allies. They had awaited them with longing, they had welcomed them with joy. Their thousand-year-long experience of wars and foreign invasions had taught them that it is the habit of conquerors to reduce those whom they have vanquished to slavery. Instead of slavery, the Allies had brought them freedom. And the people had immediately loved these magnificent soldiers—so young, so handsome, so well groomed—whose teeth were so white and whose lips were so red. In all those centuries of invasions, of wars won and lost, Europe had never seen such elegant, clean, courteous soldiers. Always they were newly shaven; their uniforms were impeccable; their ties were tied with meticulous care; their shirts were always spotless; their shoes were eternally new and shining; they had never a tear in their trousers or at their elbows, never a button missing. Such were these wonderful armies, born, like Venus, of the sea foam. They contained not a soldier who had a boil, a decayed tooth, even a pimple on his face. Never had Europe seen soldiers who were so free from infection, without the smallest microbe either in the folds of their skin or in the recesses of their consciences. And what hands they had—white, well looked after, always protected by immaculate chamois-leather gloves! But what touched the people of Naples most of all was the kindliness of their liberators, especially the Americans: their urbane nonchalance, their humanity, their innocent, cordial smiles—the smiles of honest, good-hearted, ingenuous, over-grown boys. If ever it was an honour to lose a war, it was certaintly a great honour for the people of Naples, and for all the other conquered peoples of Europe, to have lost this one to soldiers who were so courteous, elegant and neatly dressed, so good-hearted and generous.

  And yet everything that these magnificent soldiers touched was at once corrupted. No sooner did the luckless inhabitants of the liberated countries grasp the hands of their liberators than they began to fester and to stink. It was enough that an Allied soldier should lean out of his jeep to smile at a woman, to give her face a fleeting caress, and the same woman, who until that moment had preserved her dignity and purity, would change into a prostitute. It was enough that a child should put into its mouth a caramel offered to it by an American soldier, and its innocent soul would be corrupted.

  The liberators themselves were terrified and deeply affected by this dire scourge. "It is human to feel compassion for the afflicted," writes Boccaccio in his introduction to the Decameron, with reference to the terrible plague which swept Florence in 1348. But the Allied soldiers, especially the Americans, faced with the pitiable spectacle of the plague of Naples, did not only feel compassion for the unhappy people of that city: they felt compassion for themselves as well. The reason was that for some time past the suspicion had been growing in their ingenuous and honest minds that the source of the terrible contagion was in their frank, timid smiles, in their eyes, so full of human sympathy, in their affectionate caresses. The source of the plague was in their compassion, in their very desire to help these unfortunate people, to alleviate their miseries, to succour them in the tremendous disaster that had overtaken them. The source of the disease was in the very hand which they stretched out in brotherhood to this conquered people.

  Perhaps it was written that the freedom of Europe must be born not of liberation, but of the plague. Perhaps it was written that, just as liberation had been born of the sufferings of war and slavery, so freedom must be born of the new and terrible sufferings caused by the plague which liberation had brought with it. The price of freedom is high—far higher than that of slavery. And it is not paid in gold, nor in blood, nor in the most noble sacrifices, but in cowardice, in prostitution, in treachery, and in everything that is rotten in the human soul.

  * * * *

  On that day too we crossed the threshold of the Foyer de soldat, and Jack, going up to the French sergeant, asked him timidly, almost in confidence, "si on avait vu par la le lieutenant Lyautey."

  "Oui, mon colonel, je l'ai vu tout a l'heure," replied the sergeant with a smile. "Attendez un instant, mon colonel, je vais voir s'il est toujours là."

  "Voilà un sergent bien aimable," said Jack to me, flushing with pleasure. "Les sergents francais sont les plus aimables sergents du monde."

  "Je regrette, mon colonel," said the sergeant, coming back after a few moments, "le lieutenant Lyautey vient justement de partir."

  "Merci, vous etes bien aimable," said Jack. "Au revoir, mon ami."

  "Au revoir, mon colonel," replied the sergeant.

  "Ah, qu'il fait bon d'entendre parler francais," said Jack as we went out of the Caffè Caftisch. His face had lit up with childish joy, and at such moments I felt that I really liked him. I was glad to like a better man than myself. I had always despised or felt bitter towards better men than myself, and this was the first time I had ever been glad to like such a man.

  "Let's go and look at the sea, Malaparte."

  Crossing the Piazza Reale, we descended the Scesa del Gigante and leaned on the parapet at the bottom. "C'est un des plus ancien parapets de l'Europe," said Jack who knew the whole of Rimbaud by heart.

  The sun was setting, and little by little the sea was turning the colour of wine, which is the colour of the sea in Homer. But in the distance, between Sorrento and Capri, the water and the high rugged cliffs, the mountains and their shadows were slowly taking on a flame-bright coral hue, as if the coral-reefs which cover the bottom of the gulf were slowly emerging from the depths of the sea, tinging the sky blood-red with their reflected glory, as of old. Far away the barrier of Sorrento, thick with orchards, rose from the sea like a hard slab of green marble, which the sun, as it sank below the farther horizon, smote with its weary, oblique rays, bringing out the warm, golden glory of the oranges and the cold, bluish glitter of the lemons.

  Like an ancient bone, thin and worn smooth by wind and rain, Vesuvius rose, solitary and naked, into the vast cloudless sky. Little by little it began to glow with a pink, furtive light, as if the fires within its womb were showing through its hard, pallid lava crust, which shone like ivory: until the moon, like an egg-shell, crossed the edge of the crater, and rose clear and ecstatic, marvellously remote, into the blue abyss of the evening. From the furthermost horizon, as if borne on the wind, the first shadows of the night climbed into the sky. And whether on account of the magical limpidity of the moonlight, or of the cold cruelty of that unreal sadness, like a presage of a happy death.

  Ragged boys, seated on the stone parapet which rose sheer from the sea, sang with their eyes turned to the sky, their heads tilted slightly on to their shoulders. Their faces were pale and thin, their eyes blinded by hunger. They sang as the blind sing, their faces uplifted, their eyes fixed upon the heavens. Human hunger has a wonderfully sweet, pure voice. There is nothing human about the voice of hunger. It is a voice that arises from a mysterious level of man's nature, wherein lie the roots of that profound sense of life which is life itself, our most secret, most intense life. The air was clear and sweet to the lips. A light breeze, redolent of salt and seaweed, blew from the sea. The mournful cry of the gulls rippled the golden reflection of the moon upon the waves, and far away, low on the horizon, the pallid ghost of Vesuvius sank little by little into the silver mist of the night. That cruel, inhuman scene, so insensible to the hunger and despair of men, was made purer and less real by the singing of the boys.

  "There is no kindliness," said Jack, "no compassion in this marvellous Nature."

  "It is malignant," I said. "It hates us, it is our enemy. It hates men."

  "Elle aime nous voir souffrir," said Jack in a low voice.

  "It stares at us with cold eyes, full of frozen hatred and contempt."

  "Before it," said Jack, "I feel guilty, ashamed, miserable. It is not Christian. It hates men because they suffer."

  "
It is jealous of men's sufferings," I said.

  I liked Jack because he alone, among all my American friends, felt guilty, ashamed and miserable before the cruel, inhuman beauty of that sky, that sea, those islands far away on the horizon. He alone realized that this Nature is not Christian, that it lies outside the frontiers of Christianity, and that this scene was not the face of Christ, but the image of a world without God, in which men are left alone to suffer without hope. He alone realized how much mystery there is in the story and the lives of the people of Naples, and how their story and their lives are so little dependent on the will of man. There were, among my American friends, many intelligent, cultured and sensitive young men; but they despised Naples, Italy and Europe, they despised us because they believed that we alone were responsible for our miseries and misfortunes, our acts of cowardice, our crimes, our perfidies, our infamies. They did not understand what mystery and inhumanity there is behind our miseries and our misfortunes. Some said: "You are not Christians: you are pagans." And there was a hint of scorn in their voices as they uttered the word "pagans." I liked Jack because he alone realized that the word "pagan" does not in itself reveal the deep-seated, historic, mysterious causes of our suffering, and that our miseries, our misfortunes, or infamies, our way of being miserable and happy, the very reasons for our greatness and our degradation, are outside the realm of Christian ethics.

  Although he called himself Cartesian, affecting to put his trust wholly and always in reason and to believe that reason can probe and explain everything, his attitude to Naples, Italy and Europe was one of affection tempered both with respect and with suspicion. To him, as to all Americans, Naples had been an unexpected and distressing revelation. He had believed he was setting foot in a world dominated by reason and ruled by the human conscience; and he had found himself without warning in a mysterious country, where men and the circumstances that make up their lives seemed to be governed not by reason and conscience, but by obscure subterranean forces.

  Jack had travelled all over Europe, but he had never been to Italy. He had landed at Salerno on September 9th, 1943, from the deck of an L.S.T.—a landing-barge—amid the din and smoke of the explosions and the hoarse cries of the soldiers as they hobbled rapidly across the sands of Paestum under the fire of German machine-guns. In his ideal Cartesian Europe, the alte Kontinent of Goethe, governed by mind and reason, Italy was still the land of his beloved Virgil and Horace. It suggested to his imagination the placid green and blue panorama of his own Virginia, where he had completed his studies and spent the better part of his life, and where he had his home, his family and his books. In the Italy of his heart the peristyles of the Georgian houses of Virginia and the marble columns of the Forum, Vermont Hill and the Palatine combined in his mind's eye to form a familiar scene, in which the brilliant green of the fields and woods blended with the brilliant white of the marble under a limpid blue sky like that which stretches in an arch above the Capitol.

  When, at dawn on September 9th, 1943, Jack had leapt from the deck of an L.S.T. on to the beach at Paestum, near Salerno, he had seen a wonderful vision rising before his eyes through the red cloud of dust thrown up by the caterpillars of the tanks, the explosions of the German grenades and the tumult of the men and machines hurrying up from the sea. On the edge of a plain thickly covered with myrtles and cypresses, to which the bare mountains of Cilento, so like the mountains of Latium, provide a background, he had seemed to see the columns of the Temple of Neptune. Ah, this was Italy, the Italy of Virgil, the Italy of Aeneas! And he had wept for joy, he had wept with religious emotion, throwing himself on his knees upon the sandy shores, as Aeneas had done when he landed from the Trojan trireme on the sandy beach at the mouth of the Tiber, opposite the mountains of Latium, with their sprinkling of castles and white temples set amid the deep green of the ancient Latin woods.

  But the classical setting of the Doric columns of the temples of Paestum concealed from his eyes a secret, mysterious Italy. It concealed Naples, that terrible, wonderful prototype of an unknown Europe, situated outside the realm of Cartesian logic—that other Europe of whose existence he had until that day had only a vague suspicion, and whose mysteries and secrets, now that he was gradually probing them, filled him with a wondrous terror.

  "Naples," I told him, "is the most mysterious city in Europe. It is the only city of the ancient world that has not perished like Ilium, Nineveh and Babylon. It is the only city in the world that did not founder in the colossal shipwreck of ancient civilization. Naples is a Pompeii which was never buried. It is not a city: it is a world— the ancient, pre-Christian world—that has survived intact on the surface of the modern world. You could not have chosen a more dangerous place than Naples for a landing in Europe. Your tanks run the risk of being swallowed up in the black slime of antiquity, as in a quicksand. If you had landed in Belgium, Holland, Denmark or even in France, your scientific spirit, your technical knowledge, your vast wealth of material resources might have given you victory not merely over the German Army, but over the very spirit of Europe —that other, secret Europe of which Naples is the mysterious image, the naked ghost. But here in Naples your tanks, your guns, your machines provoke a smile. They are scrap-iron. Jack, do you remember the words of the Neapolitan who, on the day you entered Naples, was watching your endless columns of tanks passing along Via Toledo? 'What beautiful rust!' Here, your particular American brand of humanity stands revealed in all its nakedness—defenceless, dangerously vulnerable. You are only big boys, Jack. You cannot understand Naples, you will never understand Naples."

  "Je crois," said Jack, "que Naples n'est pas impénétrable a la raison. Je suis cartesien, hélas!"

  "Do you think, then, that Cartesian logic can help you, for instance, to understand Hitler?"

  "Why particularly Hitler?"

  "Because Hitler too is an element in the mystery of Europe, because Hitler too belongs to that other Europe which Cartesian logic cannot penetrate. Do you think, then, that you can explain Hitler solely with the help of Descartes?"

  "Je l'explique parfaitement," replied Jack.

  Then I told him that Heidelberg witz which all the students in the German universities laughingly pass from one to the other. At a conference of German scientists held at Heidelberg, all present found themselves agreed after lengthy discussion in asserting that the world can be explained with the aid of reason alone. At the end of the discussion an old professor, who until that moment had remained silent, with a silk hat jammed down over his eyes, got up and said: "You who explain everything—could you tell me how on earth this thing has appeared on my head tonight?" And, slowly removing the silk hat, he revealed a cigar, a genuine Havana, which was projecting from his bald cranium.

  "Ah, ah, c'est merveilleux!" said Jack, laughing. "Do you mean, then, that Hitler is a Havana cigar?"

  "No, I mean that Hitler is like that Havana cigar."

  "C'est merveilleux! un cigare!" said Jack; and he added, as though seized by a sudden inspiration: "Have a drink, Malaparte." But he corrected himself, and said in French: "Allons boire queique chose."

  The bar of the P.B.S. was crowded with officers who already had many glasses' start on us. We sat down in a corner and began to drink. Jack looked into his glass, and laughed; he banged his fist on his knee, and laughed; and every so often he exclaimed: "C'est merveilleux! un cigare!"—until his eye grew dim and he said to me, laughing: "Tu crois vraiment qu'Hitler ..."

  "Mais oui, naturellement."

  Then we went in to supper, and sat down at the big table reserved for senior officers of the P.B.S. All the officers were in a merry mood, and they smiled at me sympathetically because I was "the bastard Italian liaison officer, that bastard son of a gun." At a certain point Jack began telling the story of the conference of German scientists at Heidelberg University, and all the senior officers of the P.B.S. looked at me in amazement, exclaiming: "What? A cigar? Do you mean that Hitler is a cigar?"

  "He means that Hitler is a Ha
vana cigar," said Jack, laughing.

  And Colonel Brand, offering me a cigar across the table, said to me with a sympathetic smile: "Do you like cigars? This is a genuine Havana."

  CHAPTER II - THE VIRGIN OF NAPLES

  "HAVE you ever seen a virgin?" Jimmy asked me one day as we came out of the baker's shop on the Pendino di Santa Barbara, crunching the lovely hot, crisp taralli between our teeth.

  "Yes, but only from a distance,"

  "No, I mean close up. Have you ever seen a virgin close up?"

  "No, never close up!"

  "Come on, Malaparte," said Jimmy.

  At first I was unwilling to follow him. I knew that he would show me something distressing and humiliating, some appalling evidence of the depths of physical and moral humiliation to which man can sink in his despair. I do not like to witness the spectacle of human baseness; it is repugnant to me to sit, as judge or as spectator, watching men as they descend the last rungs of the ladder of degradation. I am always afraid they will turn round and smile at me.

  "Come on, come on, don't be silly," said Jimmy walking ahead of me through the maze of alleys that is Forcella.

  I do not like to see how low man can stoop in order to live. I preferred the war to the "plague" which, after the liberation, had defiled, corrupted and humiliated us all—men, women and children. Before the liberation we had fought and suffered in order not to die. Now we were fighting and suffering in order to live. There is a profound difference between fighting to avoid death and fighting in order to live. Men who fight to avoid death preserve their dignity and one and all—men, women and children—defend it jealously, tenaciously, fiercely. The men did not bow the knee. They fled into the mountains and the woods, they lived in caves, they fought like wolves against the invaders. They were fighting to avoid death. It was a noble, dignified, honest fight. The women did not throw their bodies on to the black market in order to buy lipsticks, silk stockings, cigarettes or bread. They suffered the pangs of hunger, but they did not sell themselves. They did not sell their men to the enemy. They were willing to see their own children die of hunger rather than sell themselves or their men. Only the prostitutes sold themselves to the enemy. Before their liberation the peoples of Europe suffered with a wonderful dignity. They fought with their heads high. They were fighting to avoid death. And when men fight to avoid death they cling with a tenacity born of desperation to all that constitutes the living and eternal part of human life, the essence, the noblest and purest element of life: dignity, pride, freedom of conscience. They fight to save their souls.