The Skin

by Curzio Malaparte

  CHAPTER XI - THE DEAD GOD

  EVERY evening Jimmy and I used to go down to the harbour to read the list posted up on the gates outside the harbour-master's office, giving the order of embarkation of the American units and the date of departure of the ships which sailed from Naples carrying the troops of the Fifth Army back to America.

  "It isn't my turn yet," Jimmy would say, spitting on the ground. And we would go and sit on a small bench beneath the trees of the vast square situated in front of the harbour, and overlooked by the towering mass of the Maschio Angioino.

  I had been eager to accompany Jimmy to Naples so that I might remain with him until the last moment and bid him farewell on the gangway of the ship that would take him back to America. Of all those American friends of mine with whom I had for two years shared the dangers of war and the melancholy joy of liberation only Jimmy was now left to me—Jimmy Wren, of Cleveland, Ohio, an officer in the Signal Corps. All the others were scattered about Europe—in Germany, France and Austria—or had gone back home to America, or had died for me, for us, for my country, like Jack and Campbell. For me, the day on which I said goodbye to him for ever on the ship's gangway would be like those other days on which I had said goodbye for ever to poor Jack and poor Campbell. I should be left alone, among my own people, in my own country. For the first time in my life I should be left alone, truly alone.

  As soon as the shadows of evening crept along the walls, and the vast black breath of the sea darkened the green leaves of the trees and the red facades of the houses, a dingy, sluggish, silent mob would emerge from the thousand alleys of Toledo and invade the square. It was the Neapolitan mob—legendary, primaeval, pitiable. But something within it had died: its joy in the knowledge of its hunger, and even its wretchedness, were sad, pale, dead. Gradually the evening would climb out of the sea, and the mob would lift its tear-reddened eyes and watch Vesuvius loom up, white, cold and spectral against the black sky. Not a wisp of smoke ascended from the mouth of the crater, not the palest glimmer of fire illuminated the volcano's lofty brow. The mob would linger mutely for hour after hour, deep into the night, then silently disperse.

  Left alone in the vast square, with the black expanse of the sea before us, Jimmy and I would move off, turning round every so often to watch the great white corpse on the rim of the horizon slowly dissolving into the night.

  In April, 1944, having rocked the earth and spewed up torrents of fire for many days, Vesuvius had spent its fury. It had not subsided gradually, but abruptly. Its brow enveloped in a pall of icy clouds, it had suddenly uttered a great cry, and the chill of death had turned its veins of burning lava to stone. The God of Naples, the totem of the Neapolitan populace, was dead. An immense shroud of black crape had descended upon the city, and the bay, and the hill of Possillipo. The people walked about the streets on tip-toe, conversing in low voices, as if every house sheltered a corpse.

  A doleful silence brooded over the mourning city. The voice of Naples, the ancient, noble voice of hunger, pity, grief, joy and love, the loud, hoarse, resonant, gay, triumphant voice of Naples was stilled. And whenever the fires of sunset, or the silvery radiance of the moon, or the rays of the rising sun appeared to inflame the white spectre of the volcano, a cry, a piercing cry, as of a woman in travail, went up from the city. All the people appeared at the windows, rushed into the streets and embraced one another, shedding tears of joy, intoxicated by the hope that by some miracle warmth had returned to the lifeless veins of the volcano, and that the crimson touch of the setting sun, or the radiance of the moon, or the shy glimmer of dawn, presaged the resurrection of Vesuvius, the dead God whose immense, naked corpse filled the sombre sky of Naples.

  But soon this hope gave way to rage and disillusionment. Eyes were dried, and the mob, unclasping hands which they had joined in an attitude of prayer, raised threatening fists or cocked a snook at the volcano, mingling entreaties and laments with their imprecations and insults, crying: "Have pity on us, curse you! Son of a harlot, have mercy on us!"

  Then came the days of the new moon; and when the moon slowly rose above the chill slopes of Vesuvius an oppressive melancholy descended upon Naples. The lunar dawn lit up the lifeless deserts of purple ashes and the livid rocks of cold lava, which looked like boulders of black ice. Sporadic groans and wails arose from the depths of the dark alleys, and the fishermen who lay along the beaches of Santa Lucia, Mergellina and Posillipo, sleeping on the warm sand beneath the keels of their boats, emerged from slumber, raised themselves on to their elbows and turned their heads towards the spectre of the volcano, listening in trepidation to the moaning of the waves and the sporadic sobbing of the seagulls. The shells glistened on the sand, and at the edge of the sky, which was covered with silvery fishes' scales, Vesuvius lay rotting like a dead shark that has been cast ashore by the waves.

  One August evening, as we were returning from Amain, we saw a long line of reddish flames moving up the volcano's slopes towards the mouth of the crater. We asked a fisherman what these lights were. They came from a procession which was carrying votive offerings to Vesuvius in the hope of allaying its wrath and persuading it not to abandon its people. Following a day of prayer in the Sanctuary of Pompeii a long column of women, boys and old men, headed by a band of priests clad in sacred vestments and by young men carrying the banners and standards of the Brotherhoods and great black crucifixes, was advancing up the highway which leads from Bosco Treccase to the crater. Some were weeping, others were praying. Some were waving olive-sprays, pine-branches, and vine-shoots rich with clusters of grapes. Some carried jars of wine and hampers filled with goat's cheese, fruit and bread, others copper trays laden with buns and whey-tarts, others yet lambs, fowls, rabbits and baskets filled with fish. Having reached the crest of Vesuvius the barefooted, tattered multitude, whose faces and hair were begrimed with ashes, silently followed the chanting priests into the vast amphitheatre of the old crater.

  The russet moon climbed above the distant mountains of Cilento, which appeared blue and silver in the green mirror of the sky. The night was deep and warm. Here and there the sound of weeping arose from the mob, and stifled groans, loud, harsh cries, and voices hoarse with fear and grief. Every so often one would sink to his knees and poke his fingers into the cracks in the cold lava-crust as if probing the fissures in the marble flagstones of a tomb, in order to feel whether the ancient fire still burned in the veins of the volcano; then, withdrawing his hand, he would cry in a voice broken with anguish and horror: "He's dead! He's dead!"

  At the words a great wail would go up from the mob, accompanied by the thumping of fists on breasts and bellies and the shrill groans of the faithful as they mortified their flesh with their nails and teeth.

  The old crater is in the form of a shell almost a mile across. Its jagged rim is black with lava and yellow with sulphur. Here and there the deposits of lava, after cooling off, have taken on human shapes, the aspect of gigantic men, intertwined like wrestlers in a dark, silent affray. These are the lava statues which the inhabitants of the Vesuvian villages call "the slaves," perhaps in memory of the hordes of slaves who had followed Spartacus and, while they awaited the signal to revolt, had lived in hiding for many months among the vineyards which covered the slopes and summit of peaceful Vesuvius before the sudden eruption that destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii. The moon awoke that army of slaves, who slowly loosed themselves from sleep and, raising their arms, moved through the red mist of the moon towards the crowd of the faithful.

  In the middle of the vast amphitheatre of the old crater rises the cone of the new, which, now mute and cold, had continued for nearly two thousand years to spew up flames, ashes, stones, and rivers of lava. Clambering up the rugged slopes of the cone the mob had collected around the mouth of the extinct volcano and, weeping and shouting, were flinging their votive offerings—bread, fruit and whey-tarts—into the monster's black jaws, while over the lava rocks they sprinkled wine and the blood of the lambs, fowls and rabbits whose th
roats they had cut and which they afterwards threw, still quivering with life, into the depths of the abyss.

  Jimmy and I had reached the summit of Vesuvius just as the mob, having performed that most ancient propitiatory rite, had thrown themselves to their knees and, tearing their hair and clawing their faces and breasts, were mingling liturgical chants and lamentations with prayers to the miraculous Virgin of Pompeii and invocations of their cruel and unfeeling god Vesuvius. As the moon, like a blood-soaked sponge, climbed into the sky, so the tone of the wails and litanies was raised and the voices became shriller and more heart-rending, until the mob, seized with a wild, despairing fury and hurling imprecations and insults, began to fling pieces of lava and handfuls of ashes into the mouth of the volcano.

  Meanwhile a great wind had arisen, and a dense mass of clouds, accompanied by flashes of lightning, was emerging from the sea, propelled by the sirocco. Very soon it enveloped the crest of Vesuvius. Amid those yellow clouds, riven by the thunderbolts, the great black crucifixes and the banners, which the gusts of wind buffeted unmercifully, appeared enormous, and the men looked like giants. The litanies, the imprecations and the wails of the mob seemed to well up from the smoke and flames of an inferno which had suddenly opened up beneath it. At length, first the band of priests, then the standard-bearers of the Brotherhoods, and finally the crowd of the faithful rushed headlong down the sides of the cone, beneath the rain that was already hissing down through the rents in the clouds, and disappeared into the sulphurous darkness which had meanwhile invaded the vast shell of the old crater.

  Left alone, Jimmy and I set off for the spot where we had parked our jeep. It seemed to me that I was walking on the cold crust of a dead planet. We, perhaps, were the last two men in creation, the only two human beings to have survived the destruction of the world. When we reached the crater's edge the storm had passed, and a pale moon was shining out of a deep green sky.

  We sat down under the lee of a lava rock, surrounded by the crowd of "slaves" who had by now resumed the likeness of cold black statues. For a long while we remained where we were, contemplating the squalid face of the earth and the sea, the scattered houses at the foot of the extinct volcano, the islands that drifted far away on the horizon and, down below, the heap of dead stones that was Naples.

  We were living men in a dead world. I was no longer ashamed of being a man. What did it matter to me whether men were innocent or guilty? The earth contained only living men and dead men. All the rest counted for nothing. All the rest was nothing but fear, despair, repentance, hatred, bitterness, forgiveness and hope. We were on the summit of an extinct volcano. The fire which for thousands of years had burned the veins of this mountain, of this soil, of the whole earth, had suddenly been quenched, and now little by little the ground was cooling beneath our feet. That city down below us, standing on the shore of a sea covered with a shining crust, beneath a sky heavy with storm-clouds, was inhabited not, indeed, by the innocent and the guilty, the victors and the vanquished, but by living men who were roaming about in search of the means to allay their hunger and dead men who lay buried beneath the ruins of the houses.

  Down below, as far as my eye could see, the earth was covered with thousands and thousands of corpses. Those dead men would have been nothing but putrid flesh had there not been among them someone who had sacrificed himself for the others in order to save the world, in order that all, innocent and guilty, victors and vanquished, who had survived those years of blood and sorrow should not have cause to feel ashamed of being men. Assuredly among those thousands and thousands of dead there lay the body of some Christ. What would have become of the world, and of us all, if among all those dead there had not been one Christ?

  "What need is there for another Christ?" said Jimmy. "Christ has saved the world already, once and for all."

  "Oh, Jimmy, why don't you understand that all those men would have died in vain if there were no Christ among them? Why won't you understand that there must be thousands and thousands of Christs among all those corpses? Even you know it isn't true that Christ saved the world once and for all. Christ died to teach us that every one of us can become Christ, that every man can save the world by his own sacrifice. Christ too would have died in vain if it were not possible for every man to become Christ and to save the world."

  "A man is only a man," said Jimmy.

  "Oh, Jimmy, why don't you understand that it isn't necessary for a man to be the Son of God, to rise again from the dead on the third day, and to sit on the right hand of the Father, in order to be Christ? It is those thousands and thousands of dead men who have saved the world, Jimmy."

  "You attach too much importance to the dead," said Jimmy. "A man counts only if he's alive. A dead man is merely a dead man."

  "Here in Europe," I said, "only the dead count."

  "I'm tired of living among the dead," said Jimmy. "I'm content to go back home to America, where I shall be surrounded by living men. Why don't you come to America as well? You're a living man. America is a rich and happy country."

  "I know America is a rich and happy country, Jimmy. But I shan't go—I must stay here. I'm not a coward, Jimmy. And then, even misery, hunger, fear and hope are wonderful things—more so than riches, more so than happiness."

  "Europe is a rubbish dump," said Jimmy, "a wretched, defeated continent. Come with us. America is a free country."

  "I can't desert my dead, Jimmy. You are taking your dead to America. Every day ships sail for America laden with dead—dead who are rich, happy and free. But my dead cannot pay their fare to America—they are too poor. They will never know the meaning of riches, happiness and freedom. They have always lived in slavery; they have always been victims of hunger and fear. They will always be slaves, they will always be victims of hunger and fear, even though they are dead. It's their destiny, Jimmy. If you knew that Christ was lying among them, among those wretched corpses, would you desert Him?"

  "You're not suggesting," said Jimmy, "that Christ has lost the war too!"

  "It is a shameful thing to win a war," I said in a low voice.

  THE END

  {1} An American review which used to be printed in Paris about 1925.

  {2} A car drawn by horses or oxen, on which the standards of the Communes were flown in time of war. {Translator's note.]

  {3} In the Allied armies, as in all armies worthy of the name, there was certainly no lack of homosexuals. They were of all kinds and drawn from every class of society—officers, men, labourers and students.

  {4} The Asiatic cult of Uranianism was introduced into Europe from Persia shortly before the birth of Christ, and during the reign of Tiberius the rite of the "confinement" was already being celebrated in Rome itself in many secret temples, of which the most ancient is in Suburra.

  {5} The "noble floors," i.e., the two floors immediately above the mezzanine. [Translator's note.]

  {6} One who has undergone a miraculous experience. [Translator's note.]

  {7} Walled villages situated on the Alban Hills. [Translator's note.]