The Skin

by Curzio Malaparte

  One day, when I had gone to see Marshal Badoglio at Ban, which was then the capital of Italy, I had been presented to His Majesty the King, who had graciously asked me if I was satisfied with my mission to the Allied Command. In reply I told His Majesty that I was satisfied, but that in the early days my position had been a very difficult one. At the beginning I was merely "the bastard Italian liaison officer," then gradually I had become "this fellow," and now I was "the charming Malaparte."

  "The Italian people," said His Majesty the King with a sad smile, "have undergone a similar transformation. At the beginning they were 'the bastard Italian people': now, thank God, they have be come 'the charming Italian people.' As for me … " he added, and he stopped. Perhaps he intended to say that to the Americans he was still "the little King."

  "The hardest thing," I said, "is to make those fine American boys understand that not all Europeans are scoundrels."

  "If you succeed in convincing them that there are some honest people even in this country," said His Majesty the King with a mysterious smile, "you will have proved your worth, and you will have deserved well of Italy and Europe."

  But it was not easy to convince those fine American boys of some things. General Cork asked me what Germany, France and Sweden were really like. "The Comte de Gobineau," I replied, "has described Germany as les Indes de l'Europe." "France," I replied, "is an island surrounded by land." "Sweden," I replied, "is a forest of fir-trees in dinner-jackets." "That's funny!" they all exclaimed, looking at me in amazement. Then, blushing, he asked me whether it was true that in Rome there was a bro . . . hm ... I mean ... a maison de tolérance for the priests. "They say there's a very smart one in Via Giulia," I replied. "That's funny!" they all exclaimed, looking at me in amazement. Then he asked me what a totalitarian State was. "It's a State in which everything that isn't forbidden is compulsory," I replied. "That's funny!" they all exclaimed, looking at me in amazement.

  I was Europe. I was the history of Europe, the civilization of Europe, the poetry, the art, all the glories and all the mysteries of Europe. And simultaneously I felt that I had been oppressed, destroyed, shot, invaded and liberated. I felt a coward and a hero, a "bastard" and "charming," a friend and an enemy, victorious and vanquished. And I also felt that I was a really good fellow. But it was hard to make those honest Americans understand that there are honest people even in Europe.

  "Do tell Mrs. Flat about your meeting with Marshal Rommel," said General Cork to me with a smile.

  One day when I was at my house on Capri my faithful housekeeper, Maria, came to tell me that a German general, accompanied by his aide-de-camp, was in the hall, and wished to look over the house. It was the spring of 1942, not long before the Battle of El Alamein. My leave was over; the following day I was due to set out for Finland. Axel Munthe, who had decided to return to Sweden, had asked me to accompany him as far as Stockholm. "I am old, Malaparte, I am blind," he had said, to arouse my pity, "please come with me, we'll travel in the same plane." Although I knew that Axel Munthe, in spite of his dark glasses, was not blind (his blindness was an ingenious invention designed to excite the compassion of romantic readers of The Story of San Michele. When it suited him he could see very well), I could not refuse to accompany him; and I had promised to leave with him next day.

  I went to meet the German general and took him into my library. The general, noticing my uniform, which was that of a member of the Alpine Regiment, asked me on which front I was serving. "On the Finnish front," I replied. "I envy you," he said. "I suffer from the heat. And in Africa's it's too hot." He smiled a little sadly, took off his cap and passed his hand across his brow. I saw to my amazement that his skull was of an extraordinary shape. It was abnormally elevated, or rather it was prolonged in an upward direction, like an enormous yellow pear. I accompanied him all over the house, going from room to room, from the library to the cellar, and when we returned to the vast hall with its great windows, which look out on to the most beautiful scenery in the world, I offered him a glass of Vesuvian wine from the vineyards of Pompeii. "Prosit!" he said, raising his glass, and he drained it at a single draught. Then, before leaving, he asked me whether I had bought my house as it stood or whether I had designed and built it myself. I replied—and it was not true—that I had bought the house as it stood. And with a sweeping gesture, indicating the sheer cliff of Matromania, the three gigantic rocks of the Faraglioni, the peninsula of Sorrento, the islands of the Sirens, the far-away blue coastline of Amalfie, and the golden sands of Paestum, shimmering in the distance, I said to him: "I designed the scenery."

  "Ach, so!" exclaimed General Rommel. And after shaking me by the hand he departed.

  I remained in the doorway, watching him as he climbed the steep steps, carved out of the rock, which lead from my house to the town of Capri. All of a sudden I saw him stop, wheel round abruptly, give me a long, hard look, then turn and go away.

  "Wonderful!" cried all the guests, and General Cork looked at me with eyes that were full of understanding.

  "In your place," said Mrs. Flat with an icy smile, "I should not have received a German general in my house."

  "Why not?" I asked in amazement.

  "The Germans," said General Cork, "were the Italians' allies then."

  "That may be," said Mrs. Flat with a contemptuous air, "but they were Germans."

  "They became Germans after you landed at Salerno," I said. "Then they were simply our allies."

  "You would have done better," said Mrs. Flat, raising her head proudly, "to receive American generals in your house."

  "At that time," I said, "it wasn't easy to get hold of American generals in Italy, even on the black market."

  "That's absolutely true," said General Cork, while everyone laughed.

  "Your reply is too glib," said Mrs. Flat.

  "You will never know," I said, "how hard it is to reply in such terms. At any rate, the first American officer to enter my house was called Siegried Rheinhardt. He was born in Germany, he had fought from 1914 to 1918 in the German Army, and he had emigrated to America in 1929."

  "Then he was an American officer," said Mrs. Flat.

  "Certainly he was an American officer," I said, and I began laughing.

  "I don't see what you have to laugh about," said Mrs. Flat.

  I turned towards Mrs. Flat and looked at her. I did not know why, but it gave me pleasure to look at her. She was wearing a magnificent purple silk evening gown, very décolleté, with yellow trimmings. The purple and the yellow invested her pale pink complexion, whose dullness was redeemed by a faint suggestion of rouge at the top of her cheeks, the somewhat glassy brilliance of her eyes, which were round and green, her high, narrow forehead and her violet-tinted, once lustrous hair with a somewhat ecclesiastical and at the same time funereal air. Years before her hair had undoubtedly been black, but she had recently dyed it a brownish yellow, the colour of the artificial locks with which wig-makers endeavour to conceal grey hair. But instead of cheating the years that vivid colour betrays them, making wrinkles look deeper, eyes duller, and the anaemic pink colouring of the face more lifeless.

  Like all the Red Cross nurses and Waacs attached to the American Army, who were arriving by air each day from the United States in the hope of triumphantly entering Rome or Paris in all their sartorial splendour and of making a not unfavourable impression on their European rivals, Mrs. Flat had included in her baggage an evening gown, the latest creation—"Summer, 1943"—of some famous New York dressmaker. She sat stiff and erect, her elbows close to her sides, her hands resting lightly on the edge of the table, in the favourite attitude of the Madonnas and Queens portrayed by Italian painters of the Quattocento. Her face was lustrous and smooth; it was like old porcelain, here and there cracked with age. She was no longer a young woman, but she was not more than fifty; and as happens to many American women when they grow older, the pink bloom on her cheeks, far from being faded or dulled, had grown brighter and, as it were, purer and more innocent
. As a result she resembled not so much a mature woman with a youthful appearance as a young girl made to look old by the magic power of cosmetics and the art of skilful wig-makers—a girl disguised as an old woman. Her face contained one absolutely natural feature, in which Youth and Age contended as in a ballad of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and that was the eyes. These were of a beautiful sea-green colour, and as their expression changed one was reminded of the undulations of green sea-weed as it comes to the surface of the waves.

  Her generous décolletage afforded a glimpse of a round, very white shoulder. White, too, were her arms, which were bare to the elbows and above. She had a long, sinuous neck, the swan-like neck which to Sandro Botticelli signified the acme of feminine beauty. I looked at Mrs. Flat, and it gave me pleasure to look at her, perhaps because of her weary and at the same time childlike expression, or because of the pride and disdain that were reflected in her eyes, in her small, thin-lipped mouth, and in her slightly frowning brow.

  The hall in which Mrs. Flat was sitting formed part of an ancient and noble Neapolitan palace. It was a solemn, ornate structure, belonging to one of the most illustrious noble families in Naples and in Europe; for the Dukes of Toledo do not yield pride of place to the Colonna, nor to the Orsini, nor to the Polignacs, nor to the Westminsters. Only on certain occasions are they eclipsed by the Dukes of Alba. Seated at that richly laden board, amid the splendour of the Murano mirrors and the Capodimonte porcelain, under a ceiling painted by Luca Giordano, between walls hung with the loveliest and most priceless Arabo-Norman tapestries from Sicily, Mrs. Flat was deliriously out of place. She realized to perfection the fanciful concept of an American woman of the Quattrocento, who had been brought up in Florence at the Court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, or in Ferrara at the Court of the Estensi, or in Urbino at the Court of the Della Rovere, and whose livre de chevet was not the Blue Book but the Courtier of Messrs. Baldassar Castiglione.

  For some reason—it may have been her purple gown or its yellow trimmings (purple and yellow are the dominant colours in the chromatic scheme of the Renaissance), or her high, narrow forehead, or the dazzling pink and white of her complexion—everything, even her lacquered nails, her hair-style and the gold clips at her bosom, combined to make of her an American contemporary of the women of Bronzino, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli. Even the grace which in the exquisite and mysterious women portrayed by those famous painters appears to have in it a deeply-ingrained streak of cruelty assumed in Mrs. Flat a fresh and innocent character, so that she seemed a monster of purity and virginity. And she would undoubtedly have appeared to belong to an earlier age even than the Venuses and nymphs of Botticelli except that something in her face, in the brilliance of her skin, which resembled a porcelain mask, and in her round, green eyes, wide and unwavering, recalled those coloured portraits, advertising some "Institut de Beaute" or somebody's preserves, which are a feature of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar; or rather, I would say—lest I wound Mrs. Flat's amour propre too deeply—a modern copy of an old picture, with its excessively shiny and new appearance, due to the varnish. She was, I venture to say, an "original," but spurious. If I were not afraid of displeasing Mrs. Flat I would add that she conformed to the Renaissance style— wherein the corrupting influence of the baroque was already evident —of the famous "white hall" of the palace of the Dukes of Toledo in which we were that evening enjoying the hospitality of General Cork. She was rather like Tushkevich, that character in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina who conformed to the Louis XV style of the Princess Betsy Tverskaya's drawing-room.

  But what betrayed the presence beneath Mrs. Flat's Renaissance facade of a modern woman, in tune with the times—a typical American woman—was her voice, her gestures, and the pride that was reflected in her every word, in her eyes and in her smile. Her voice was thin and incisive, her gestures were at once imperious and sophisticated. She had an intolerant pride, a pride quickened by that distinctive Park Avenue brand of snobbery which holds that the only beings worthy of respect are Princes and Princesses, Dukes and Duchesses—in a word the "nobility"—and a false rather than a genuine "nobility" at that. Mrs. Flat was there at our table, seated beside General Cork. Yet how remote she was from us! In spirit she was floating through the sublime realms in which the Princesses, Duchesses and Marchionesses of old Europe scintillate like golden stars. She sat erect, her head slightly tilted back, her eyes fixed on an invisible cloud, drifting across an invisible blue sky. And as I followed the direction of Mrs. Flat's gaze I suddenly became aware that her eyes were riveted on a canvas that hung from the wall opposite her. It was a portrait of the young Princess of Teano, maternal grandmother of the Duke of Toledo, who in 1860 or thereabouts had illumined with her grace and beauty the last sad days of the Court of the Bourbons in Naples. And I could not suppress a smile when I observed that the Princess of Teano was also sitting erect, her head slightly tilted back and her eyes turned heavenwards, in an attitude identical with Mrs. Flat's.

  General Cork caught me smiling; he followed the direction of my gaze and smiled in his turn.

  "Our friend Malaparte," said General Cork, "knows all the Princesses in Europe."

  "Really?" exclaimed Mrs. Flat, flushing with pleasure and slowly lowering her eyes until they rested upon me; and as her lips parted in a smile of admiration I saw the flashing of her teeth, the white splendour of those marvellous American teeth which are impervious to the years and which actually seem real, they are so white, so even and so perfect. That smile dazzled me; it made me lower my eyelids and shudder with fear. It was accompanied by that terrible flashing of teeth which in America is the first happy augury of old age, the last glittering gesture of farewell which every American makes to the world of the living as he descends smiling into the grave.

  "Not all of them, for heaven's sake!" I replied, opening my eyes.

  "Do you know Princess Esposito?" said Mrs. Flat. "She is the first lady of Rome—a real Princess."

  "Princess Esposito?" I replied. "There is no Princess with such a name."

  "Are you suggesting that Princess Carmela Esposito doesn't exist?" said Mrs. Flat, knitting her brows and eyeing me with cold contempt. "She is a dear friend of mine. A few months before the war she was my guest at Boston, together with her husband, Prince Gennaro Esposito. She is a cousin of your King, and, of course, she owns a magnificent palace in Rome, right next to the Palazzo Reale. I can hardly wait for Rome to be liberated so that I can hurry to bring her the greetings of the women of America."

  "I'm sorry, but no Princess Esposito exists or can exist," I replied. "Esposito is the name given by the Istituto degli Innocehti to foundlings—to the children of unknown parents."

  "I hope you aren't trying to make me believe," said Mrs. Flat, "that all the Princesses in Europe know their parents."

  "I don't claim that," I replied. "I meant that, in Europe, when Princesses are real Princesses their origin is known."

  "In the States," said Mrs. Flat, "we never ask anyone about their origin—not even a Princess. America is a democratic country."

  "Esposito," I said, "is a very democratic name. In the alleys of Naples everyone is called Esposito."

  "I don't care if everyone in Naples is called Esposito," said Mrs. Flat. "What I do know is that my friend Princess Carmela Esposito is a real Princess. It's very strange that you shouldn't know her. She is a cousin of your King, and that's enough for me. In Washington, at the State Department, they told me that she behaved very well during the war. It was she who persuaded your King to arrest Mussolini. She is a real heroine."

  "If she behaved well during the war," said Colonel Eliot, "it means she isn't a real Princess."

  "She is a Princess," said Mrs. Flat, "a real Princess."

  "In this war," I said, "all the women of Europe, whether Princesses or porteresses, have behaved very well."

  "That's true," said General Cork.

  "The women who have had dealings with the Germans," said Colonel Brand, "are relatively few."

  "
That means they have behaved much better than the men," said Mrs. Flat.

  "They have behaved as well as the men," I said, "although in a different way."

  "The women of Europe," said Mrs. Flat in an ironical tone, "have also behaved very well in the matter of their relations with the American soldiers—much better than the men. Isn't that true, General?"

  "Yes ... no ... I mean . . ." answered General Cork, blushing.

  "There is no difference," I said, "between a woman who prostitutes herself to a German and a woman who prostitutes herself to an American."

  "What?" exclaimed Mrs. Flat in a hoarse voice.

  "From the moral point of view," I said, "there is no difference."

  "There is a very important difference," said Mrs. Flat, while all were silent, their faces red. "The Germans are barbarians, and the American soldiers are fine boys."

  "Yes," said General Cork, "they are fine boys."

  "Oh, sure!" exclaimed Colonel Eliot.

  "If you had lost the war," I said, "not a woman in Europe would deem you worthy of a smile. Women prefer the victors to the vanquished."

  "You are immoral," said Mrs. Flat in an icy voice.

  "Our women," I said, "don't prostitute themselves to you because you are handsome and because you are fine boys, but because you have won the war."

  "Do you think that, General?" asked Mrs. Flat, turning abruptly to General Cork.

  "I think ... yes ... no ... I think . . ." replied General Cork, blinking his eyes.

  "You are a happy people," I said. "There are certain things that you can't understand."

  "We Americans," said Jack, looking at me with eyes that were full of sympathy, "are not happy: we are lucky."

  "I wish everyone in Europe," said Mrs. Flat slowly, "were as lucky as we are. Why don't you try to be lucky too?"