The Skin

by Curzio Malaparte

  * * * *

  I stifled a cry of horror. They were crucified men. They were men, nailed to the trunks of the trees, their arms outspread in the form of a cross, their feet bound together and fixed to the trunks with long nails or with pieces of steel wire that had been twisted round their ankles. The heads of some of them were lolling on their shoulders or chests; others, with upturned faces, were gazing at the rising moon. Many were clad in the black caftan that Jews wear. Many were naked, and their flesh shone chastely in the cool, mild light of the moon. Like the teeming egg which the corpses in the cemeteries of Tarquinia, in Etruria, hold up between two fingers as a symbol of fruitfulness and eternity, the moon was emerging from beneath the ground and poising itself in the sky. White and cold as an egg, it lit up the bearded faces, the black eye-sockets, the gaping mouths and twisted limbs of the crucified men.

  I rose on the stirrups and stretched out my hands towards one of them. With my fingers I tried to tear out the nails that pierced his feet. But the sound of angry voices arose on all sides, and the crucified man yelled: "Don't touch me, curse you!"

  "I don't intend to hurt you!" I shouted. "For God's sake, let me help you!"

  A horrible laugh ran from tree to tree, from cross to cross. Here and there I saw heads moving, beards wagging, mouths opening and closing; and I heard a gnashing of teeth.

  "Help us?" shouted the voice from above. "And why? Can it be because you pity us—because you are a Christian? Come on— answer: is it because you are a Christian? Do you think that's a good reason? Do you pity us because you are a Christian?" I was silent, and the voice went on more loudly: "Aren't the men who crucified us Christians like yourself? Are they dogs, or horses, or mice—the men who nailed us to these trees? Ha! ha! ha! A Christian!"

  I bent my head over my horse's neck and was silent.

  "Come on—answer! What right have you to presume to help us? What right have you to presume to pity us?"

  "1 didn't do it!" I shouted. "I didn't nail you to the trees! I didn't do it!"

  "I know," said the voice, and its tone was ineffably gentle and malignant. "I know. It was the others, it was all the others like you."

  Just then a groan was heard in the distance, a loud, wild lament. It was the cry of a young man, a cry cut short by a dying sob. A murmur reached our ears, a murmur that passed from tree to tree. Forlorn voices shouted: "Who is it? Who is it? Who is that who's dying?" And in succession down the line of crosses came other plaintive voices, answering: "It's David, it's Samuel's boy David, it's David, Samuel's son, it's David, it's David . . ." As the name echoed from tree to tree we heard a stifled sob, a hoarse, faint lament, and groans and curses, and howls of pain and fury.

  "He was still a boy," said the voice.

  Then I raised my eyes, and in the light of the moon, which was now high in the heavens, in the chill white radiance of that egg, poised in the dark sky, I saw the man who was addressing me. He was naked, and his thin, bearded face had a silver sheen. His arms were outspread in the form of a cross, his hands were nailed to two thick branches which grew out of the tree-trunk. He was staring at me with glittering eyes, and suddenly he shouted: "What sort of pity is yours? What do you expect us to do with your pity? We spit on your pity—ya naplivayu! ya naplivayu!" And from all sides there came the sound of furious voices repeating his words: " Ya naplivayu! ya naplivayu! I spit on it! I spit on it!"

  "For God's sake," I cried, "don't drive me away! Let me unnail you from your crosses! Don't reject my helping hand: it is the hand of a human being."

  The air around us filled with maligant laughter. I heard the branches groaning above my head, and a horrible rustling sound spread among the leaves.

  The crucified man roared with laughter. "Did you hear?" he said. "He wants to take us down from our crosses! And he isn't ashamed! You filthy Christians—you torture us, you nail us to trees, and then you come and offer us your pity! You want to save your souls, eh? You're afraid of hell! Ha! ha! ha!"

  "Don't drive me away!" I cried. "Don't reject my helping hand, for God's sake!"

  "You want to take us down from our crosses?" said the crucified man in a grave, sad voice, "And then? The Germans will kill us like dogs. And you too—they'll kill you as they would a mad dog."

  "They'll kill us like dogs," I repeated to myself, bowing my head.

  "If you want to help us, if you want to shorten our agony . . . shoot us through the head, one by one. Come on—why don't you shoot us? Why don't you finish us off? If you really pity us shoot us, put us out of our misery. Come on—why don't you shoot us? Are you afraid the Germans will kill you for taking pity on us?" As he spoke he looked hard at me, and I felt those dark, glittering eyes boring into me.

  "No, no!" I cried. "Have pity on me, don't ask me to do that, for God's sake! Don't ask me to do such a thing—I've never shot a man, I'm not a murderer! I don't want to become a murderer!" And I beat my head against my horse's neck, weeping and crying out.

  The crucified men were silent. I heard them breathing, I heard them whistling hoarsely through their teeth, I felt their eyes resting on me, I felt their flaming eyes burning my tear-stained face, piercing my breast.

  "If you pity me, kill me!" shouted the crucified man. "Oh, put a bullet through my head! Oh, shoot me through the head, have pity on me! For God's sake kill me—oh, kill me, for God's sake!"

  Then, grief-stricken and weeping bitterly, I put my hand to my side and seized the butt of my pistol, moving my arms painfully and laboriously, for they felt as if an enormous weight were pressing on them. Slowly I raised my elbow and drew the pistol from its holster. Standing up on the stirrups, and with my left hand grasping the horse's mane lest I should slip from the saddle, so weak and dizzy was I, so overcome by horror, I raised the pistol and pointed it at the face of the man on the cross; and at that instant I looked at him. I saw his dark, cavernous, toothless mouth, his hooked nose, the nostrils full of clotted blood, his dishevelled beard, and his dark, glittering eyes.

  "Ah, damn you!" shouted the crucified man. "Is this what you call pity? Can't you do anything else, you cowards? You nail us to trees and then kill us by shooting us through the head? Is this what you call pity, you cowards?" And twice, three times, he spat in my face.

  I fell back on the saddle, while a horrible laugh echoed from tree to tree. Jolted by the spurs, the horse stirred, and moved off at a trot. My head down, I clung with both hands to the pommel of the saddle, and as I passed beneath those crucified men every one of them spat upon me, crying, "You coward! You damned Christian!" I felt their spittle lashing my face and hands, and I gritted my teeth as, bending low over my horse's neck, I passed beneath that shower of spittle.

  Having in this way reached Dorogo, I fell from the saddle into the arms of some Italian soldiers who were on garrison duty in that forgotten village of the steppe. They were light cavalry of the Lodi Regiment, commanded by a very young Lombard subaltern—he was almost a child. During the night I had a bout of fever and was delirious until dawn, the young officer meanwhile watching over me. I do not know what I shouted in my delirium, but when I regained consciousness the officer told me that I was in no way to blame for the horrible fate that had befallen those unhappy men. On that very morning, he said, a German patrol had shot a peasant who had been caught giving the crucified men something to drink. I began to shout. "I don't want to be a Christian any more!" I shouted. "I'm sick of being a Christian, a damned Christian!" And I fought to be allowed to go and take those wretches something to drink, but the officer and two of his men held me fast in bed. For a long while I fought, until at last I fainted. When I came to my senses I fell a victim to a fresh bout of fever, and I was delirious all that day and the following night.

  Next day I stayed in bed, too weak to get up. I looked through the window-panes at the white sky above the yellow steppe, and at the green clouds on the horizon. I listened to the voices of the peasants and the soldiers as they went past the fence that surrounded the orchard. Th
at evening the young officer told me that as we could not help seeing those horrible things we ought to try and forget them, so as to avoid the risk of going mad. He added that if I felt better next day he would accompany me on my visit to the kolkhoz and the famous stud-farm at Dorogo. However, I thanked him for his kindness, saying that I wanted to return to Constantinovka at the earliest possible moment. On the third day I got up and said good-bye to the young officer. (I remember that I embraced him, and that as I embraced him I was trembling.) Although I felt desperately weak I got into the saddle and, accompanied by two soldiers of the light cavalry regiment, set out for Constantinovka early in the afternoon.

  We rode out of the village at a jog-trot. When we entered the tree-flanked avenue I shut my eyes and, spurring on my horse, went forward at a gallop between the two terrible lines of crucified men. I crouched low on the saddle as I rode, shutting my eyes and gritting my teeth. Suddenly I reined in my horse. "What does this silence mean?" I cried. "Why this silence?"

  I had recognized that silence. I opened my eyes and looked. Those horrible Christs were hanging limply from their crosses. Their eyes were wide open, their mouths gaping, and they were staring at me. The black wind scurried hither and thither over the steppe like a blind horse. It stirred the rags that covered those poor mangled, twisted bodies, it shook the foliage of the trees—and not the faintest murmur passed through the leafy branches. Black crows were perched on the shoulders of the corpses, motionless, staring at me.

  The silence was horrible. The light was dead, the smell of the grass, the colour of the leaves, of the stones, of the clouds that drifted through the grey sky—everything was dead, everything was plunged in a vast, empty, frozen silence. I spurred on my horse: it reared, and flew off at a gallop. And I fled, shouting and weeping, over the steppe, while the black wind, like a blind horse, scurried hither and thither, under a cloudless sky.

  * * * *

  I had recognized that silence. During the winter of 1940 I had sought refuge in a deserted house, situated at the end of one of the most beautiful and most deserted streets in the exquisitely beautiful, deserted city of Pisa. I had done so in order to escape from the war and from men, and to cure myself of that loathsome malady to which war exposes the human heart. With me was Febo, my dog Febo, whom I had picked up, dying of hunger, on the beach at Marina Corta, on the island of Lipari. I had tended him, reared him, brought him up in my lonely house on Lipari, and he had been my sole companion during my lonely years of exile on that sad island, which is so dear to my heart.

  I have never loved a woman, a brother, a friend, so much as I loved Febo. There was an affinity between us. It was in his honour that I wrote the tender pages of Un cane come me. He was a noble creature, the noblest I have ever come across in my life. He belonged to that breed of greyhounds—a rare and delicate breed today— which came long ago from the shores of Asia with the first Ionic immigrants, and which are known to the shepherds of Lipari as cerneghi. These are the dogs which Greek sculptors used to represent on the bas-reliefs of sepulchres. The shepherds of Lipari say that they drive away death.

  His coat was the colour of the moon, between pink and gold; it was the colour of moonlight on the sea, the colour of moonlight on the dark leaves of lemon and orange trees, on the scales of the dead fish which the sea used to throw up on the shore outside the door of my house after a storm. He was the colour of the moonlight on the Grecian sea that laps the shores of Lipari, the colour of moonlight in the poetry of the Odyssey, the colour of the moonlight on that wild Liparian sea which Ulysses sailed in the course of his voyage to the lonely shore of the realm of Aeolus, ruler of the winds. He was of a pale colour, like the moon just before dawn. I used to call him Caneluna.

  He never strayed so much as a yard from my side. He followed me like a dog. He followed me, I say, like a dog. There was something wonderful about his presence in my wretched house on Lipari, a house lashed without respite by the wind and the sea. At night the darkness of my bare room was lit by the bright warmth of his moon-eyes. His eyes were pale blue, the colour of the sea when the moon sets. I was conscious of his presence as one is conscious of the presence of a shadow, of one's own shadow. He was, as it were, the mirror of my soul. His mere presence helped me to acquire that contempt for mankind on which the serenity and wisdom of a human being primarily depend. I felt that he resembled me, that he was in very truth the image of my conscience, of my secret life— a portrait of myself, of all that is deepest, most intimate and most characteristic in me. I felt that he was my subconscious and, so to say, my ghost.

  From him, far more than from men, with their culture and their vanity, I learned that virtue is its own reward, that it is an end in itself, and that it does not even aspire to save the world (not even that!), but only to invent ever new justifications for its disinterestedness and its liberty of action. The relationship of a man and a dog is always a relationship of two free spirits, of two forms of dignity, of two types of virtue each of which is its own reward. It is the most disinterested and the most romantic of relationships, one of those relationships which death illuminates with its own wan radiance— a radiance tinged with the colour of the pale moon that hangs above the sea at dawn, when the sky is green.

  I saw reproduced in him my most mysterious impulses, my secret instincts, my doubts, my fears, my hopes. The dignity of his attitude towards mankind was mine, the courage and pride of his attitude to life were mine, his contempt for the fickle passions of men was mine. But he was more sensitive than I to the obscure portents of nature and to the invisible presence of death, which ever lurks about us, silent and suspicious. He sensed the approach of the sad spirits that haunt our dreams as they come from afar through the night air, like dead insects that are borne on the wind, none knows whence. And on some nights, as he lay curled up at my feet in my bare room on Lipari, he followed with his eyes an invisible phantasm as it hovered around me, advancing and receding, and lingering long hours watching me through the window-pane. Every so often, if the mysterious presence came so close to me that it brushed my forehead, Febo would snarl menacingly, the hair on his back would bristle; and I would hear a mournful cry receding into the night, and gradually dying away.

  He was the dearest of brothers to me, a true brother, one who betrays not, nor humiliates. He was a loving, a helping, an understanding, a forgiving brother..Only the man who has suffered long years of exile on a desert island, and who, on his return to the haunts of men, finds himself shunned and avoided as if he were a leper by all those who one day, when the tyrant is dead, will pose as heroes of freedom—only he knows what a dog can mean to a human being. Often Febo would gaze at me with a sad, noble expression of reproach in his loving eyes. At such times my sadness made me feel strangely ashamed, almost remorseful, and I was conscious as I faced him of a kind of heightened moral susceptibility, I felt that at those moments Febo despised me. True, he grieved for me, he was tender and loving; yet his eyes certainly held a suggestion of pity and, simultaneously, of contempt. He was not only my brother, but my judge. He was the guardian of my dignity, and at the same time, to use the expression of the old Greeks, he was my δορνφόρημα. [(on the stage) a person who represents a prince without speaking.]

  He was a sad dog, with grave eyes. Every evening we used to spend long hours on the high windswept threshold of my house, looking at the sea. Ah! the Grecian sea of Sicily, ah! the red crags of Scylla, yonder, facing Charybdis, and the snow-capped peak of Aspromonte, and the white shoulder of Etna, the Olympus of Sicily! Truly, as Theocritus sings, life offers no more beautiful experience than to contemplate the Sicilian sea from a vantage-point on the shore. We used to see the shepherds' fires flaring up on the mountains, and the boats sailing forth into the deep to meet the moon; we used to hear the mournful wail of the sea-shells, through which the fishermen call to one another over the water, receding into the silvery, moonlit haze. We used to see the moon rising over the crags of Scylla, and Stromboli, the high, inaccessib
le volcano that stands in the middle of the sea, blazing like a solitary pyre within the deep blue forest of the night. We used to look at the sea, inhaling the pungent salt air, and the strong, intoxicating perfume of the orange-groves, and the smell of goats' milk and of juniper branches burning in the hearths, and that warm, heavy scent of women which pervades the Sicilian night when the first stars climb wanly above the horizon.

  Then one day I was taken with handcuffs on my wrists from Lipari to another island, and from there, after long months, to Tuscany. Febo followed me at a distance, hiding among the casks of anchovies and the coils of rope on the deck of the Sante Marina, the little steamer which crosses every so often from Lipari to Naples, and among the hampers of fish and tomatoes on the motor-boat that plies between Naples, Ischia and Ponza. With the courage that is peculiar to cowards—it is the only positive claim that slaves have to share the privileges of the free—the people stopped to look at me with reproving, contemptuous expressions, hurling insults at me through clenched teeth. Only the lepers who lay in the sun on the benches in Naples harbour smiled at me surreptitiously, spitting on the ground between the shoes of the carabinieri. I looked back now and again to see if Febo was following me, and I saw him walking with his tail between his legs, hugging the walls, through the streets of Naples, from the Immacolatella to the Molo Beverello, a wonderfully sad look in his bright eyes.