The Skin

by Curzio Malaparte

  By now the sun was high in the heavens. Little by little the atmosphere was becoming thicker, a grey pall of ashes obscured the sky, and green lightning rent the blood-red cloud that was forming on the brow of Vesuvius. Streaks of yellow zigzagged across the black wall of the horizon, from behind which came the rumble of distant thunder.

  In the streets surrounding the Allied General Headquarters, the congestion was such that we had to use force to get through. The crowd, massed in front of the G.H.Q. building, mutely awaited a sign of hope. But the news from the districts stricken by the scourge was growing graver from hour to hour. The houses in the villages situated near Salerno were collapsing beneath the hail of lava. A blizzard of ashes had been raging for some hours over the island of Capri, and was threatening to bury the villages that lie between Pompeii and Castellammare.

  During the afternoon General Cork asked Jack to go to the Pompeii area, where the danger was greatest. The ribbon-like main road was covered with a thick carpet of ashes, on which the wheels of our jeep revolved with a soft, silky, rustling sound. A strange silence was in the air, broken at intervals by the hollow rumbling of Vesuvius. I was surprised at the contrast between the movement and shouting of the people and the mute immobility of the animals, which stood firm beneath the hail of ashes and looked about them with eyes that were full of melancholy bewilderment.

  Now and again we passed through yellow clouds of sulphurous vapour. Columns of American vehicles were slowly going back up the road, carrying help in the shape of food, medical supplies and clothes to the unfortunate people who lived on the slopes of Vesuvius. The sombre countryside was shrouded in a green murk. Just after we had passed Herculaneum our faces were lashed by a shower of warm mud, which persisted for a considerable time. Directly above us Vesuvius snarled menacingly, spewing up lofty jets of red-hot stones, which fell to earth with a roar. Shortly before we reached Torre del Greco we were taken unawares by a sudden shower of lava. We sheltered behind the wall of a house near the sea-front. The sea was a wonderful green colour; it looked like a turtle made of ancient copper. A sailing-vessel was slowly ploughing its way through the hard sea-crust, from which the descending fragments of lava rebounded with a resonant crackling sound.

  We were now in the vicinity of a small meadow, dotted with clumps of rosemary and flowering brooms, and backed by a high rock which sheltered it from the wind. The grass was of a very harsh green colour, a crude, bright green so vivid, so unexpected and so fresh in its brilliance that it looked as if it had only that moment been created—a green still virginal, glimpsed without warning at the instant of its creation, in the first moments of the creation of the world. This grass descended almost to the edge of the water, whose greenness seemed in contrast already faded, as if this sea belonged to a world already old, a world created long, long ago.

  The countryside about us lay buried beneath the ashes. It had been scorched in places and turned topsy-turvy by the mad violence of nature, by the return of chaos. Groups of American soldiers, their faces concealed behind masks of rubber and copper like the helmets of ancient warriors, were roaming about the countryside, carrying stretchers, assembling the injured, and directing groups of women and children to a column of vehicles parked in the roadway. A number of dead were lying on the roadside near the ruins of a house. Their faces were encased in shells of hard white ash, so that it looked as if they had eggs in place of heads. Their bodies were those of men still without form, men only partly created. They were the first dead in creation.

  The cries of the injured came to us from a world that lay beyond the reach of love and pity, beyond the frontier erewhile set between chaos and nature in the divine order of creation. They expressed a feeling not yet known to men, a grief not experienced by the living beings hitherto created. They were a presage of suffering, coming to us from a world still in the process of gestation, a world still plunged in chaos.

  And here, in this little world of green grass, that had but lately emerged from chaos, and was still fresh from the travail of its creation, still virginal, a group of men who had escaped the scourge lay on their backs asleep, their faces turned to heaven. They had very handsome faces, with skin that was not begrimed with mud and ashes, but clear, as though washed by the light: faces that looked new, as if they had just been modelled, with lofty, noble brows and bright lips. They lay sleeping on the green grass like survivors of the Flood on the summit of the first mountain to appear above the waters.

  A girl stood on the sandy shore, at a point where the green grass merged into the waves. She was combing her hair and looking at the sea—looking at the sea as a woman gazes at herself in a mirror. Standing on the young, newly-created grass, she who was herself young, she who had but lately been brought into the world, gazed at herself in the ancient mirror of creation with a smile of blissful wonder; and the faded green of the immemorial sea was reflected in her long, soft hair, her smooth white skin and her small, strong hands. Her movements as she slowly combed her hair were already those of a lover. A woman dressed in red sat beneath a tree suckling her child. Her snow-white breast protruded from her red blouse, splendid as the breast of the first woman in creation, or the first fruit from a tree that has but lately emerged from the earth. A dog lay curled up near the sleeping men, following the woman's slow, placid movements with its eyes. Some sheep were grazing, and every so often they would raise their heads and look at the green sea. Those men, those women, those animals were alive and safe. They had been purged of their sins. They were already immune from the degradation, misery and hunger, from the vices and criminal tendencies of men. They had already died the death, and descended into hell, and risen again.

  We too—Jack and I—were survivors from chaos. We too were living beings newly created, newly called into existence, newly risen from the dead. The menacing voice of Vesuvius, that loud, hoarse bark, came to us out of the blood-red cloud that enveloped the monster's brow. It came to us through the crimson darkness, through the storm of fire. It was a pitiless, implacable voice. It was in truth the voice of a tumultuous, malignant nature—the voice of chaos itself. We were on the borderland between chaos and creation, on the confines of "la bonté, ce continent énorme," on the outer fringe of the newly-created world. And the terrible voice that came to us through the storm of fire, that loud, hoarse bark, was the voice of Chaos, who was rebelling against the divine laws of creation, and biting the hand of the Creator.

  Suddenly Vesuvius uttered a terrible cry. The group of American soldiers standing near the vehicles parked in the roadway drew back in terror. They scattered, and many of them, seized with panic, rushed pell-mell towards the sea-shore. Jack too withdrew a few steps, and turned his back. I seized him by the arm. "Don't be afraid," I said to him. "Look at those men, Jack."

  Jack turned his head and looked at the men who lay sleeping, at the girl who stood combing her hair and gazing at herself in the mirror of the sea, at the woman suckling her child. I would have liked to say to him: "God has just made them, yet they are the oldest human beings on earth. That is Adam, and that is Eve. They have been born out of chaos, they have just returned from hell, they have just risen from the grave. Look at them—they are newly-born, and they have already taken upon themselves all the sins of the world. All the men and women in Naples, in Italy, in Europe are like these. They are immortal. They are born in sorrow, they die in sorrow, and they rise again, purified. They are the Lambs of God, they carry on their shoulders all the sins and all the sorrows of the world."

  But I said nothing; and Jack looked at me, and smiled.

  It was evening when we returned to Naples. As we drove back the tempest roared, and fire rained down from heaven. Near Portici we beheld once more green grass and green leaves, the buds on the trees, the play of the light on the window-panes—things that had been from time immemorial. I thought of the gentleness of those foreign soldiers as they bent over the injured and the dead, of their warm compassion, heightened by fear. I thought of those men who
had lain sleeping on the shore of chaos, and of their immortality. Jack was pale, and he was smiling. I turned to look at Vesuvius, that dreadful monster with the dog-like head, barking on the horizon amid the smoke and flame.

  "Pity, pity. Even you are deserving of pity," I said in a low voice.

  CHAPTER IX - THE FLAG

  THREATENED in its rear by the wrath of Vesuvius, the American Army, which had been held up for so many months outside Cassino, at last made a move. It hurled itself forward, smashed the Cassino defence-line and, pouring into Latium, advanced within striking-distance of Rome.

  * * * *

  Steretched out on the grass at the edge of the Lake of Albano, which in ancient times was the crater of a volcano, and resembles a copper bowl filled with black water, we looked down on Rome, situated on the far side of the plain, where the sluggish river, flavus Tiber, lay sleeping in the sun. Occasionally the staccato sound of rifle-fire floated towards us on the warm wind. The cupola of St. Peter's shimmered on the horizon, suspended beneath a huge castle of white clouds at which the sun was aiming its golden shafts. I thought of the golden shafts of Apollo, and blushed. In the distance one could see snow-clad Soracte rising out of a blue haze. The verse from Horace sprang to my lips, and I blushed. "Dear Rome," I said in a low voice. Jack looked at me, and smiled.

  In the morning Jack and I had left General Cork's column and joined General Guillaume's Moroccan Division in the upper part of the woods of Castel Gandolfo. Seen from here Rome, in the dazzling sunlight reflected from the fleecy clouds, had the livid whiteness of chalk. It resembled one of those cities of shining stone which rise from the sky-line in pictures representing scenes from the Iliad.

  The cupolas, the towers, the steeples, and the severely geometrical houses in the new districts which stretch down from St. John Lateran into the green valley of the Nymph Aegeria, in the direction of the tombs of the Barberini, looked as if they were made of a hard white substance with shadowy blue veins. Black crows flew up from the red tombs beside the Via Appia. I thought of the eagles of the Caesars, and was stirred. I tried hard not to think of the Goddess Rome, seated in the Capitol, of the pillars of the Forum and the purple of the Caesars. "The glory that was Rome," I said to myself musingly. On that day, at that moment, in that place I did not want to think of the eternity of Rome. I liked to think of Rome as a mortal city, inhabited by mortal men.

  In the unwavering, dazzling light nothing seemed to move or breathe. The sun was already high, it was beginning to get hot, and a white, transparent mist veiled the vast red and yellow plain of Latium, where the Tiber and the Anio were intertwined like two snakes locked in an amorous embrace. In the meadows that flank the Via Appia riderless horses could be seen galloping about as in a canvas of Poussin or Claude Lorrain, and ever and anon, far away on the horizon, the green lid of the sea sparkled in the sunshine.

  General Guillaume's goumiers were encamped in the wood of ash-coloured olive trees and dark holm-oaks which stretches down the gentle slopes of Mount Cavo and dies away amid the bright green of the vineyards and the gold of the corn. Below us, on the high, steep bank of the Lake of Albano, stood the papal villa of Castel Gandolfo. Sitting in the shade of the holm-oaks and the olive trees, with their legs crossed and their rifles across their knees, the goumiers gazed with avid eyes at the crowd of women promenading among the trees in the park of the papal villa—many of them nuns and peasants from the Castelli Romani{7} destroyed in the war, whom the Holy Father had gathered under his protecting wing. A community of birds sang in the branches of the olive trees and holm-oaks. The air was sweet to the lips, like that name which I kept repeating in a low voice: "Rome, Rome, dear Rome."

  A smile, faint but immense, passed like a scurry of wind across the Roman Campagna. It was the smile of the Apollo of Veii, the cruel, ironical, mysterious smile of the Etruscan Apollo. I would have liked to return to Rome, to my home, not with my mouth full of sonorous words but with that smile upon my lips. I was afraid that the liberation of Rome would not be an intimate, family occasion but one of the usual pretexts for triumphal marches, high-sounding speeches and songs of praise. I tried hard to think of Rome not as a vast communal grave, where the bones of Gods and men are strewn indiscriminately about the ruins of the temples and the Fora, but as a human city, a city peopled by simple mortal men, where everything is human, where the pettiness and degradation of the Gods do not diminish the greatness of man nor invest human freedom with the significance of a heritage that has been betrayed, a glory that has been usurped and tarnished.

  My last memory of Rome was of a fetid cell in the Regina Coeli prison. And now, as I returned home on a day of victory (a foreign victory, gained over foreign arms in a Latium that had been overrun and laid waste by foreign armies), old thoughts and emotions, simple and sincere, surged up within me. But already my ears were filled with the din of the trumpets and the cymbals, with the Ciceronian orations and the songs of triumph. And I shuddered.

  Such were my thoughts as I lay in the grass, gazing at distant Rome; and I wept. Jack, lying at my side, pressed a tender leaf to his lips and with its aid imitated the voices of the birds, which were singing in the branches of the trees. A breath of peace passed lightly through the air, rustling the grass and the leaves.

  "Don't cry," said Jack in tones of affectionate reproof. "The birds are singing—and you are crying?"

  The birds were singing, and I was crying. Jack's words, so simple, so human, moved me. This foreigner from beyond the seas, this American, this warm-hearted, generous, sensitive man had found in the depths of his heart the right words, the true words, the words that I had been vainly seeking within my mind and without, the only words that were appropriate to that day, to that moment, to that place. The birds were singing, and I was crying! Through my tears I looked at Rome, trembling in the depths of the limpid mirror of light; and I was happy.

  * * * *

  As we lay in the grass we heard the sound of merry voices coming from the wood, and we looked round. It was General Guillaume, accompanied by a group of French officers. His hair was grey with dust, his face was tanned by the sun and bore the marks of his exertions, but his eyes were bright and his voice youthful.

  "Voilà Rome!" he said, baring his head.

  It was not the first time I had witnessed that gesture; it was not the first time I had seen a French general bare his head as he gazed at Rome from the woods of Castel Gandolfo. I had seen the same thing in the faded daguerrotypes belonging to the Primoli collection, which old Count Primoli had shown me one day in his library. In the pictures to which I refer Marshal Oudinot, surrounded by a party of French officers in red trousers, is seen saluting Rome from the very wood of holm-oaks and olive trees in which we were at that moment.

  "J'aurais preferé voir la Tour Eiffel, à la place de la coupole de Saint Pierre," said Lieutenant Pierre Lyautey.

  General Guillaume turned to him with a laugh. "Vous ne la voyez pas," he said, "car elle se cache juste derriere la coupole de Saint Pierre."

  "C'est drôle, je suis ému comme si je voyais Paris," said Major Marchetti.

  "Vous ne trouvez pas," said Pierre Lyautey, "qu'il y a quelque chose de francais, dans ce paysage?"

  "Oui, sans doute," said Jack. "C'est l’air francais qu'y ont mis le Poussin et Claude Lorrain."

  "Et Corot," said General Guillaume.

  "Stendhal aussi a mis quelque chose de francais dans ce paysage," said Major Marchetti.

  "Aujourd'hui, pour la premiere fois," said Pierre Lyautey, "je comprends pourquoi Corot, en peignant le Pont de Narni, a fait les ombres bleues."

  "J'ai dans ma poche," said General Guillaume, taking a book from the pocket of his tunic, "les Promenades dans Rome. Le Général Juin, lui, se promène avec Chateaubriand dans sa poche. Pour comprendre Rome, Messieurs, je vous conseille de ne trop vous fier à Chateaubriand. Fiez-vous a Stendhal. II est le seul Francais qui ait compris Rome et l'ltalie. Si j'ai un reproche a lui faire, c'est de ne pas voir les couleurs d
u paysage. II ne dit pas un traître mot de vos ombres bleues."

  "Si j'ai un reproche a lui faire," said Pierre Lyautey, "c'est d'aimer mieux Rome que Paris."

  "Stendhal n'a jamais dit une chose pareille," said General Guillaume, frowning.

  "En tout cas, il aime mieux Milan que Paris."

  "Ce n'est qu'un dépit d'amour," said Major Marchetti. "Paris etait une maîtresse qui l'avait trompé bien des fois."

  "Je n'aime pas, Messieurs," said General Guillaume, "vous entrendre parler ainsi de Stendhal. C'est un de mes plus chers amis."

  "Si Stendhal était encore Consul de France à Civita Vecchia," said Major Marchetti, "il serait sans doute, en ce moment, parmi nous."

  "Stendhal aurait fait un magnifique officier des goums," said General Guillaume. And turning with a smile to Pierre Lyautey he added: "II vous ravirait toutes les jolies femmes qui vous attendent ce soir a Rome."

  "Les jolies femmes qui m'attendent ce soir, ce sont les petites filles de celles qui attendaient Stendhal," said Pierre Lyautey, who had many women friends in Roman society, and was expecting to dine that same evening in the Palazzo Colonna.

  I listened with emotion to the French voices and the French words as they floated softly through the green air, to the rapid, fluent articulation and the urbane, warmhearted laughter, so characteristic of the French. And I felt ashamed and abashed, as if it were my fault that the cupola of St. Peter's was not the Eiffel Tower. I would have liked to apologize to them, to try to convince them that it was not my fault. Just then I too would have preferred that that city down there on the horizon had been not Rome but Paris—for I knew how happy they would have been had this been so. And I said nothing, but listened to those French words floating gently among the branches of the trees. I pretended not to notice that those tough soldiers, those gallant Frenchmen were moved, that their eyes were bright with tears, and that their small talk and their laughter were a cloak behind which they were trying to conceal their emotions.