The Skin

by Curzio Malaparte

  I went with the partisan from Camaiore to see Magi. In a meadow near the village the partisan indicated something that protruded from the earth. "There's Magi," he said. I scented the odour of death, and Jack said to me: "Let's go." But I wanted to see from close at hand what it was that was sticking out of the ground, and on approaching I saw that it was a foot, still encased in a shoe. The woollen sock covered a fragment of black flesh, and the mouldy shoe looked as if it were impaled on a stick.

  "Why don't you bury that foot?" I said to the partisan.

  "No," replied the partisan, "it's got to stay like that. His wife came, then his daughter. They wanted the corpse. Oh, no—that corpse is ours. Then they came back with a spade, and wanted to bury the foot. Oh, no—that foot is ours. And it's got to stay like that."

  "It's horrible," I said.

  "Horrible? The other day there were two little sparrows on that foot, making love. It was comical to see those two little sparrows making love on Magi's foot."

  "Go and fetch a spade," I said.

  "No," replied the partisan obstinately. "It's got to stay like that."

  I thought of Magi, wedged in the ground with that foot sticking out. Why couldn't he curl up in his grave and sleep? It was as though he were suspended by that foot above an abyss. Why couldn't he tumble headlong into hell? I thought of that foot, suspended between heaven and hell, exposed to the air, sun, rain and wind, and of the chirruping birds that came and settled on it.

  "Go and fetch a spade," I said. "I ask you to do it as a favour. He wronged me greatly when he was alive, but now that he's dead I should like to do him a good turn. He was a Christian too."

  "No," replied the partisan, "he wasn't a Christian. If Magi was a Christian, what am I? We can't both be Christians, Magi and I."

  "There are many ways of being a Christian," I said. "Even a scoundrel can be a Christian."

  "No," replied the partisan, "there's only one way of being a Christian. In any case—what does it mean to be a Christian today?"

  "If you want to do me a favour," I said, "go and fetch a spade."

  "A spade?" said the partisan. "If you like I'll go and fetch a saw. Rather than bury his leg I'll saw it off and give it to the pigs."

  That evening, as we sat in front of the fire-place in my home at Forte dei Marmi, we listened in silence to the bullets from the German machine-guns pinging against the wall of the house and the trunks of the pines. I thought of Magi, wedged in the ground with his foot sticking out, and I began to realize what those corpses wanted of us—all those corpses that lay in the streets, fields and woods.

  Now I was beginning to realize why the odour of death was like a singing voice, a summoning voice. I was beginning to realize why all those corpses were calling us. They wanted something of us, only we could give them what they asked for. No, it was not pity. It was something else—something deeper and more mysterious. It was not peace—the peace of the grave, of forgiveness, of remembrance, of affection. It was something more remote from man, more remote from life.

  Then spring came, and when we moved forward for the final assault I was sent to act as guide to the Japanese Division during the attack on Massa. From Massa we penetrated as far as Carrara, and from there, crossing the Apennines, we went down to Modena.

  It was when I saw poor Campbell lying on the dusty road in a pool of blood that I realized what the dead wanted of us. They wanted something that is foreign to man, something that is foreign to life itself. Two days later we crossed the Po and, repelling the German rearguards, approached Milan. Now the war was coming to an end and the massacre was beginning—that terrible massacre of Italians by Italians in houses, streets, fields and woods. But it was on the day when I saw Jack die that I understood at last what it was that was dying around me and within me. There was a smile on Jack's face as he died, and he was looking at me. When the light went from his eyes I felt, for the first time in my life, that a human being had died for me.

  On the day on which we entered Milan we ran into a yelling crowd which was rioting in a square. I stood up in the jeep and saw Mussolini hanging by his feet from a hook. He was bloated, white, enormous. I started to be sick on the seat of the jeep: the war was over now, and I could do nothing more for others, nothing more for my country—nothing except be sick.

  * * * *

  When I left the American military hospital I returned to Rome and went to stay with a friend of mine, Dr. Pietro Marziale, an obstetrician, at No. 9, Via Lambro. The house was situated at the end of the new suburb which extends, squalid and cold, beyond the Piazza Quanrata. It was a small house, comprising barely three rooms, and I had to sleep in the study, on a divan. The walls of the study were lined with bookshelves full of books on gynaecology, and on the edges of the bookshelves were rows of obstetrical instruments—forceps, spoons, large forks, knives, saws, decapitators, basiotribes, cranioclasts, trephines and various kinds of large pincers, as well as glass jugs filled with a yellowish liquid. In each of the jugs was a submerged human foetus.

  For many days I had been living in the midst of that community of foeti, and the horror of it oppressed me; for foeti are corpses, though of a monstrous species: they are corpses which have never been born and have never died. If I looked up from the pages of a book I found myself gazing into the half-closed eyes of those little monsters. Sometimes, when I awoke at dead of night, it seemed to me that those horrible foeti, some of them standing, some sitting on the bottom of their jugs, some crouching on their knees in the act of jumping, were slowly lifting their heads and looking at me with smiling faces.

  On the bedside table there lay, like a flower-vase, a large jug, in which floated the king of that strange community, a fearsome yet friendly Tricephalus, a foetus with three heads, of the female sex. Those three heads—small, round, wax-coloured—followed me with their eyes, smiling at me with sad and rather timid smiles, full of thamefaced modesty. Whenever I walked about the room the wooden floor trembled slightly, and the three heads bobbed up and down in a horrible yet graceful way. But the other foeti were more melancholy, more preoccupied, more malignant.

  Some had the pensive look of a drowned man, and if I happened to shake one of the jugs, teeming with their flottaison bleme et ravie, I would see the pensive foetus slowly sink to the bottom. Their mouths, which were half-closed, were wide, like the mouths of frogs, and their ears were short and wrinkled, their noses transparent, their brows furrowed with venerable wrinkles, with a senility still virginal in point of years, and not yet corrupted by age.

  Others amused themselves by skipping over the long white ribbons of their umbilical cords. Others yet were seated, squatting on their haunches, in a state of watchful, timorous immobility, as if they were expecting to emerge at any moment into life. Others were suspended in the yellowish liquid as if in mid-air, and seemed to be slowly descending from a lofty, frigid sky—the same sky, I thought, as forms an arch above the Capitol, above the cupola of St. Peter's: the sky of Rome. What a strange species of Angels is to be found in Italy, I thought, what a strange species of eagles! Others were sleeping, curled up in attitudes of extreme abandon. Others were laughing, opening wide their frog-like mouths, their arms folded across their chests, their legs apart, their eyes covered by heavy batrachian lids. Others strained their small ears of ancient ivory, listening to remote, mysterious voices. There were others, finally, that contemplated my every gesture, my pen as it slowly glided across the white page, my abstracted pacing about the room, my relaxed slumbers in front of the blazing fire. And all had the ancient aspect of men not yet born, men who never will be born. They were standing before the closed door of life, even as we stand before the closed door of death.

  And there was one that looked like Cupid in the act of shooting his arrow from an invisible bow, a wizened Cupid with the bald head of an old man and a toothless mouth. On him my eyes would rest whenever I was seized with melancholy at the sound of women's voices floating up from the street, calling out and answering fro
m window to window. To me at such moments the most real and most joyous personification of youth, of spring, of love was that fearsome Cupid, the little deformed monster which the obstetrician's forceps had wrenched from its mother's womb, that bald, toothless old man who had come to maturity in the belly of a young woman.

  But there were some which I could not look at without a secret terror. Among them were two embryonic Cyclopes, one like that described by Birnbaum, the other like that described by Sangalli. Each gazed at me with a single round eye, sightless and immobile in the centre of its great socket, like the eyes of a fish. There were some Dycephali, their two heads bobbing up and down above their scraggy shoulders. And there were two fearsome Dyprosopi, monsters with two faces, like the god Janus. The face in front was young and smooth, the one behind was smaller and more wizened, contracted into a malignant grimace like that of an old man.

  Sometimes, as I dozed in front of the fireplace, I heard them, or seemed to hear them, talking among themselves.. The words of that mysterious, incomprehensible language floated in the alcohol and dissolved like bubbles of air. And I said to myself as I listened to them: "Perhaps this is the ancient language of men, the language men speak before they are born into life, the language they speak when they are born into death. Perhaps it is the ancient, mysterious language of our conscience." And sometimes, as I looked at them, I said to myself: "These are our witnesses and our judges. It is they who, from the threshold of life, watch us live, and, hidden in the shadows of the primaeval cavern, watch us rejoice, suffer and die. They are the witnesses of the immortality that precedes life, the guarantors of the immortality that follows death, It is they who judge the dead!" And I would say to myself with a shudder: "Dead men are the foeti of death."

  I had come out of hospital in a state of extreme weakness, and I used to spend a great part of my days stretched out on the bed. One night I was seized with a violent fever. It seemed to me that that community of foeti had emerged from their jars, and that they were moving about the room, climbing on the writing-desks and the chairs, up the window-curtains, and even on to my bed. Gradually they all assembled on the floor, in the middle of the room, arranging themselves in a semi-circle like judges in session; and they inclined their heads now to the right, now to the left, in order to whisper in one another's ears, looking at me with their round batrachian eyes, staring and sightless. Their bald heads glistened horribly in the dim light of the moon.

  The Tricephalus sat in the middle of the council, and on either side of him were the two twin-faced Dyprosopi. To escape the obscure feeling of horror with which I was filled by the sight of that areopagus of monsters I raised my eyes to the window and gazed at the green celestial fields, in which the cold, untarnished silver of the moon glistened like dew.

  Suddenly the sound of a voice caused me to lower my eyes. It was the voice of the Tricephalus: "Let the accused be brought in," he said, turning to a group of little monsters that stood apart, looking somewhat like hired ruffians.

  I gazed into a corner of the room, towards which all had turned, and was stricken with horror.

  I saw, slowly advancing between two of the ruffians, an enormous foetus. It had a flabby stomach, and its legs were covered with glossy whitish hairs, like the down on a thistle. Its arms were folded across its chest, its hands were bound with its umbilical cord. As it walked it swayed its plump flanks in time with its steps, which were slow, grave and silent, as if its feet were made of a softish substance.

  It had a bloated, white, enormous head, in which there gleamed two huge, yellow, watery eyes, like the eyes of a blind dog. The expression on its face was proud and at the same time timid, as if ancient pride and a new foreboding of extraordinary events there contended and—with neither ever prevailing—mingled in such a way as to create an expression at once abject and heroic.

  It was a face of flesh—the flesh of a foetus and at the same time the flesh of an old man, the flesh of a foetus created in the likeness of an old man. It was a mirror that reflected, in all their senseless glory, the grandeur and wretchedness, the pride and degradation of human flesh. What amazed me above all else in that face was the odd mixture of ambition and disappointment, insolence and sadness, typical of the countenance of man. And for the first time I saw the ugliness of the human countenance, the loathsomeness of the substance of which we are made. How squalid, I thought, is the glory of the flesh of man! How miserable is the triumph expressed in human flesh, even in the fleeting season of youth and love!

  Just then the enormous foetus looked at me, and its livid lips, which hung like eyelids, parted in a smile. Its countenance, lit by that timid smile, gradually changed, and became like the face of a woman, an old woman, in which the traces of the rouge that had contributed to her ancient glory emphasized the wrinkles of time, disappointment and betrayal. I surveyed the fleshy chest, the flabby stomach, which seemed weakened by childbirth, and the soft, swollen flanks, and at the thought that this man, once so proud and glorious, was now merely a kind of horrible old woman, I began to laugh. But suddenly I felt ashamed of my laughter; for if, in my cell in the Regina Coeli prison, or on the lonely shore of Lipari, I had sometimes in moments of sadness and despair, delighted to revile him, humiliate him, lower him in my eyes, as the lover does to the women who has betrayed him, now that he stood there before me, a naked, loathsome foetus, I blushed to think that I was laughing at him.

  I looked at him, and felt a sort of affectionate compassion growing within me, such as I had never experienced when he was alive. It was a new sentiment, and it filled me with terror and wonderment alike. I tried to lower my eyes, to evade his watery stare, but in vain. The quality of insolence, pride and vulgarity which his countenance possessed during his lifetime had transformed itself into a wondrous melancholy. And I felt profoundly disturbed, almost guilty, not, to be sure, because I thought that my new sentiment might humiliate him, but because I too, for many years before I had rebelled against his senseless tyranny, had bent my back like all the rest beneath the weight of his triumphant flesh.

  At that point I heard the voice of the Tricephalus calling me by name and saying: "Why are you silent? Are you by chance still afraid of him? Look! See the substance of which his glory was made."

  "What do you expect me to do?" I said, raising my eyes. "Laugh at him? Insult him? Do you think, perhaps, that the sight of his wretchedness offends me? What offends a man is not the sight of decayed human flesh, gnawed by the worms, but the sight of human flesh in its triumph."

  "Are you so proud, then, to be a man?" said the Tricephalus.

  "A man?" I replied with a laugh. "A man is something even sadder and more fearsome than this mass of decayed flesh. A man is pride, cruelty, betrayal, degradation, violence. Decayed flesh is sadness, shame, fear, remorse, hope. A man—a living man—is a puny thing compared to a mass of putrid flesh."

  A malicious laugh went up from the horrible assembly.

  "Why do you laugh?" said the Tricephalus, moving his three bald and wrinkled heads from side to side. "Man is in truth a puny thing."

  "Man is an ignoble thing," I said. "There is no sadder or more sickening sight than a man or a nation in the hour of triumph. But what nobler or more beautiful thing is there in the world than a man or nation that has been conquered, humiliated, reduced to a heap of putrid flesh?"

  While I was speaking the foeti had got up one by one and, moving their large whitish heads from side to side and reeling about on their gangrenous little legs, had grouped themselves in a corner of the room round the Tricephalus and the two Dyprosopi. I saw their eyes gleaming in the semi-darkness, I heard them laughing among themselves and uttering shrill wails. Then they fell silent.

  The enormous foetus had remained standing before me and was looking at me with eyes that were like the eyes of a blind dog.

  "You see now what they are really like," it said after a long silence. "No one took pity on me."

  "Pity? What good would pity have done you?"

&n
bsp; "They cut my throat, they hanged me by the feet from a hook, they covered me with spittle," said the foetus very softly.

  "I was at Piazzle Loreto too," I said in a low voice. "I saw you hanging by the feet from a hook."

  "Do you hate me too?" said the foetus.

  "I am not worthy to hate," I replied. "Only a pure being may hate. What men call hatred is simply moral turpitude. Everything human is foul and base. Man is a fearsome thing."

  "I was a fearsome thing too," said the foetus.

  "There is no more loathsome thing in the world," I said, "than man in his glory, than human flesh enthroned on the Capitol."

  "Only today do I realize how horrible I was then," said the foetus, and it fell silent. "If on the day when all deserted me, if on the day when they left me alone in the hands of my murderers I had asked you to take pity on me," it added after looking at me for a long while in silence, "would you have harmed me too?"

  "Be silent!" I cried.

  "Why don't you answer?" said the monster.

  "I am not worthy to harm another man," I replied in a low voice. "The power to do harm is sacred. Only a pure being is worthy to harm another man."

  "Do you know what I thought," said the monster after a long silence, "when the murderer pointed his weapon at me? I thought that what he was about to give me was a foul thing."

  "Everything that man gives to man is a foul thing," I said. "Even love and hatred, good and evil—everything. The death which man gives to man is a foul thing too."

  The monster lowered its head and was silent. Then it said: "And forgiveness?"

  "Forgiveness is a foul thing too."

  Just then two foeti of ruffianly aspect approached, and one of them, resting its hand on the monster's shoulder said: "Come on."

  The enormous foetus raised its head, and looking at me began to weep softly.

  "Goodbye," it said, and lowering its head it moved off between the two ruffians. As it walked away it turned and smiled at me.