The Skin

by Curzio Malaparte

  "There's something wrong with you. What's the matter?" said Jack, looking at me hard.

  "Nothing, Jack."

  From the dishes rose the steam of the usual tomato soup, the usual fried spam, the usual boiled maize. The glasses were brimming over with the usual coffee, the usual tea, the usual pineapple juice. I felt a lump in my throat, and I did not touch the food.

  "That poor King," said Major Morris, of Savannah, Georgia, "certainly didn't expect a welcome like that. Naples has always been very devoted to the Monarchy."

  "Were you in Via Toledo today when the King was hooted?" Jack asked me.

  "What King?" I said.

  "The King of Italy," said Jack.

  "Ah, the King of Italy."

  "They hooted him today in Via Toledo," said Jack.

  "Who did? The Americans? If it was the Americans, they shouldn't have done it."

  "He was hooted by the Neapolitans," said Jack.

  "They did quite right," I said. "What did he expect—to be pelted with flowers?"

  "What can a King expect from his people today?" said Jack. "Flowers yesterday, hoots today, flowers again tomorrow. I wonder if the Italian people know the difference between flowers and hoots."

  "I'm glad it was the Italians that hooted him," I said. "The Americans have no right to hoot the King of Italy. They have no right to photograph a negro soldier sitting on the throne of the King of Italy in the Palazzo Reale at Naples, and to publish the photograph in their papers."

  "I can't deny the justice of what you say," said Jack.

  "The Americans have no right to urinate in the corners of the throne-room of the Palazzo Reale. They have done so. I was with you when I saw them do it. Even we Italians have no right to do such a thing. We have a right to hoot our King—to put him against the wall, even. But not to urinate in the corners of the throne-room."

  "And have you never thrown flowers at the King of Italy?" said Jack with friendly irony.

  "No, Jack, my conscience is clear, so far as the King is concerned. I have never thrown a single flower at him."

  "Would you have hooted him today if you had been in Via Toledo?" said Jack.

  "No, Jack, I should not have hooted him. It is a shame to hoot a defeated King, even if he is one's own King. All of us—not only the King—have lost the war, here in Italy. All of us—especially those who were throwing flowers at him yesterday and are hooting him today. I have never thrown a single flower at him. For that reason, if I have been in Via Toledo today I should not have hooted him."

  "Tu as raison, a peu près," said Jack.

  "Your poor King," said Colonel Brand. "I am very sorry for him." And he added, smiling at me kindly: "And for you too."

  "Thanks a lot for him," I answered.

  But somehow my words must have rung false, because Jack looked at me strangely and said to me in a low voice: "Tu me caches quelque chose. Ca ne va pas, ce soir, avec toi."

  "No, Jack, I'm all right," I said, and I began to laugh.

  "Why are you laughing?" said Jack.

  "It does one good to laugh now and again," I said.

  "I like laughing too, now and again," said Jack.

  "Americans," I said, "never cry." "What? Les Americains ne pleurent jamais?" said Jack in amazement.

  "Americans never cry," I repeated.

  "I had never thought about it," said Jack. "Do you really find that Americans never cry?"

  "They never cry," I said.

  "Who never cries?" asked Colonel Brand.

  "Americans," said Jack laughing. "Malaparte says that Americans never cry."

  They all looked at me in amazement, and Colonel Brand said: "What a funny idea!"

  "Malaparte is always having funny ideas," said Jack, as if apologizing for me, while everyone laughed.

  "It isn't a funny idea," I said. "It's a very sad idea. Americans never cry."

  "Strong men don't cry," said Major Morris.

  "The Americans are strong men," I said, and laughed.

  "Have you never been in the States?" Colonel Brand asked me.

  "No, never. I have never been to America," I answered.

  "That's why you think Americans never cry," said Colonel Brand.

  "Good Gosh!" exclaimed Major Thomas, of Kalamazoo, Michigan. "Good Gosh! Tears are fashionable in America. The celebrated American optimism would be absurd without tears."

  "Without tears," said Colonel Eliot, of Nantucket, Massachusetts, "American optimism would be absurd, it would be monstrous."

  "I think its monstrous even with tears," said Colonel Brand. "I've thought that ever since I came to Europe."

  "I thought it was against the law to cry in America," I said.

  "No, it isn't against the law to cry in America," said Major Morris.

  "Not even on Sundays," said Jack, laughing.

  "If it were against the law to cry in America," I said, "America would be a wonderful country."

  "No, it isn't against the law to cry in America," repeated Major Morris, looking at me severely, "and perhaps America is a wonderful country for that very reason."

  "Have a drink, Malaparte," said Colonel Brand, taking a small silver flask from his pocket and pouring a little whisky into my glass. Then he poured a little whisky into the others' glasses and into his own and, turning to me with a friendly smile, said: "Don't worry, Malaparte. Here you are among friends. We like you. You are a good chap. A very good one." He raised his glass, and with a friendly wink pronounced the toast of American drinkers: "Mud in your eye!"

  "Mud in your eye!" they all repeated, raising their glasses.

  "Mud in your eye!" I said, while the tears rose to my eyes.

  We drank, and looked at one another, smiling.

  "You are strange people, you Neapolitans," said Colonel Eliot.

  "I am not a Neapolitan, and I regret it," I said. "The people of Naples are wonderful people."

  "Very strange people," repeated Colonel Eliot.

  "In Europe," I said, "we are all more or less Neapolitans."

  "You get yourself in a mess, and then you cry," said Colonel Eliot.

  "One must be strong," said Colonel Brand. "God helps . . ."— and he certainly intended to say that God helps the strong, but he broke off and, turning his head in the direction of the radio set which stood in the corner of the room, said: "Listen."

  The Radio Station of the P.B.S. was broadcasting a melody that sounded like one of Chopin's. But it was not Chopin.

  "I like Chopin," said Colonel Brand.

  "Do you think it is Chopin?" I asked him.

  "Of course it's Chopin!" exclaimed Colonel Brand in a tone of profound amazement.

  "What do you suppose it is?" said Colonel Eliot with slight impatience in his voice. "Chopin is Chopin."

  "I hope it isn't Chopin," I said.

  "On the contrary, I hope it is Chopin," said Colonel Eliot. "It would be very strange if it wasn't Chopin."

  "Chopin is very popular in America," said Major Thomas. "Some of his blues are magnificent."

  "Hear, hear!" cried Colonel Brand. "Of course it's Chopin!"

  "Yes, it's Chopin," said the others, looking at me with a reproving air. Jack was laughing, his eyes half-closed.

  It was a kind of Chopin, but it was not Chopin. It was a concerto for piano and orchestra, as it would have been written by a Chopin who was not Chopin, or a Chopin who had not been born in Poland, but in Chicago or in Cleveland, Ohio, or perhaps as a cousin, or brother-in-law, or an uncle of Chopin would have written it—but not Chopin.

  The music stopped, and the voice of the P.B.S. Station announcer said: "You have been listening to Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto, played by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Alfred Wallenstein."

  "I like Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto," said Colonel Brand, flushing with pleasure and pride. "Addinsell is our Chopin. He's our American Chopin."

  "Perhaps you don't like Addinsell either? said Colonel Eliot to me with a note of scorn in his
voice.

  "Addinsell is Addinsell," I replied.

  "Addinsell is our Chopin," repeated Colonel Brand in a boyishly triumphant tone.

  I was silent, my eyes fixed on Jack. Then I said humbly: "Please forgive me."

  "Don't worry, don't worry, Malaparte," said Colonel Brand, clapping me on the shoulder. "Have a drink." But his silver flask was empty, and with a laugh he suggested that we should go and have something to drink in the bar. So saying he left the table, and we all followed him into the bar.

  Jimmy was sitting at a table near the window surrounded by a group of young Air Force officers, and he was showing something to his friends—something which was light in colour and which I at once recognized. Jimmy, red in the face, was laughing loudly; the Air Force officers were also red in the face, and were laughing and clapping one another on the shoulder.

  "What is it?" asked Major Morris, going up to Jimmy's table, and looking at the "wig" curiously.

  "It's artificial," said Jimmy, laughing, "It's for negroes."

  "What's it for?" exclaimed Colonel Brand, bending over Jimmy's shoulder and looking at it.

  "It's for negroes," said Jimmy, while all around him laughed.

  "For negroes?" said Colonel Brand.

  "Yes," I said, "for American negroes," snatching the "wig" from Jimmy's hands. "Look," I said, "that's a woman, an Italian woman, a girl for negroes."

  "Oh, shame!" exclaimed Colonel Brand, rolling his eyes in disgust. His face was red with mortification and outraged modesty.

  "See what our women have come to," I said, while the tears ran down my cheeks. "That's what women have come to, Italian women."

  "I'm sorry," said Colonel Brand, while they all gazed at me in silence.

  "It isn't our fault," said Major Thomas.

  "It isn't your fault, I know," I said. "It isn't your fault."

  "Don't worry, Malaparte," said Colonel Brand in a friendly voice, offering me a glass. "Have a drink."

  "Have a drink," said Major Morris, clapping me on the shoulder.

  "Mud in your eye!" said Colonel Brand, raising his glass. His eyes were moist with tears, and he was looking at me and smiling.

  "Mud in your eye, Malaparte," said the others, raising their glasses.

  I wept silently, with that horrible thing clutched in my palm.

  "Mud in your eye!" I said, while the tears flowed down my cheeks.

  CHAPTER IV - THE GREEN CARNATION

  AT the first news of the liberation of Naples, as if summoned by a mysterious voice, as if guided by the sweet smell of new leather and Virginian tobacco, that smell of blonde women which is the smell of the American Army, the languid hosts of the homosexuals, not of Rome and of Italy only, but of all Europe, had crossed the German lines on foot, advancing over the snow-clad mountains of the Abruzzi and through the mine-fields, braving the fire of the patrols of the Fallschirmjager, and had flocked to Naples to meet the armies of liberation.

  The international community of inverts, tragically disrupted by the war, was reconstituting itself in that first strip of Europe to be liberated by the handsome Allied soldiers. A month had not yet passed since its liberation, and already Naples, that noble and illustrious capital of the ancient Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, had become the capital of European homosexuality, the most important world-centre of the forbidden vice, the great Sodom to which all the inverts of the world were flocking—from Paris, London, New York, Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, Venice and Rome. The homosexuals who had disembarked from the British and American troopships and those who were arriving in droves, by way of the mountams of the Abruzzi, from all the countries of Europe still under the German heel, recognized one another by their smell, by a tone of voice, by a look; and with loud cries of joy they threw themselves into one another's arms, like Virgil and Sordello in Dante's Inferno, making the streets of Naples ring with their mincing, slightly hoarse feminine voices: "Oh, my dear! Oh, my sweet! Oh, my darling!" The battle of Cassino was raging; long lines of wounded men on stretchers were passing down in the direction of the Via Appia; day and night battalions of negro sappers were digging graves in the war-cemeteries; and meanwhile the dainty apostles of Narcissus promenaded in the streets of Naples, swaying their hips and turning to gaze with hungry eyes at the handsome, broad-shouldered, pink-faced American and British soldiers as they forced their way through the crowds, moving with the freedom of athletes who have just left the hands of the masseur.

  The inverts who had flocked to Naples by way of the German lines represented the flower of European refinement, the aristocracy of forbidden love, the "upper ten" of the sexual beau monde; and they testified, with a dignity beyond compare, to all that was choicest and most exquisite in the world whose passing was symbolical of the tragic decline of European civilization. They were the gods of an Olympus that was situated outside nature, but not outside history.

  They were, indeed, the remote descendants of those splendid apostles of Narcissus who had flourished in the time of Queen Victoria, and who, with their angelic faces, white arms and deep thighs, had formed an ideal link between the pre-Raphaelitism of Rossetti and Burnes Jones and the new aesthetic theories of Ruskin and Walter Pater, between the ethic of Jane Austen and that of Oscar Wilde. Many of them were included among the strange progeny abandoned on the pavements of Paris by the noble American roturiers who had invaded the Rive Gauche in 1920 and whose faces, bleared by drink and drugs, appear in the portrait-gallery of the early novels of Hemingway and in the pages of the review Transition, indistinguishable one from another, as in a Byzantine picture. Their emblem was no longer the lily of the lovers of "poor Lelian" but the rose of Gertrude Stein ("A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose").

  Their language, the language which they spoke with such wonderful sweetness of voice, with such delicate inflections, was no longer the English of Oxford, which during the years between 1930 and 1939 had already been going out of fashion; nor was it that distinctive idiom which echoes like ancient music through the verses of Walter de la Mare and Rupert Brooke—the English of the last humanistic tradition of Edwardian England. It was, on the contrary, the Elizabethan English of the Sonnets, that same English which is spoken by certain characters in the comedies of Shakespeare: by Theseus at the beginning of A Midsummer Night's Dream, when he laments the belated passing of the old moon and calls upon the new moon to rise ("O, methinks, how slow this old moon wanes!"); or by Hippolyta when she abandons to the river of dreams the four nights that still separate her from nuptial felicity ("Four nights will quickly dream away the time" — ; or by Orsino in Twelfth Night, when he divines the femininity of Viola beneath her male attire. It was that winged, abstracted, ethereal language, lighter than the wind, more fragrant than the wind that breathes on a meadow in spring, that dreamy language, that sort of rhymed speech, which is characteristic of happy lovers in Shakespeare's comedies—of those wonderful lovers whose "swan-like end, fading in music" arouses the envy of Portia, in The Merchant of Venice.

  Or else it was that same winged language which flies from the lips of Réné to those of Jean Giraudoux, and is the language of Baudelaire himself as we read it in the Stravinskian transcription of Proust—full of those cadences, both tender and sinister, which recall the tepid atmosphere of certain Proustian "interiors," of certain morbid landscapes, the whole of that autumn of which the tired sensibility of modern homosexuals is redolent. Their voices jarred when they spoke in French, not, indeed, like the voices of those who sing out of tune, but like the voices of men who talk in their sleep: they placed their stress between one word and the next, between one note and the next, as do Proust, Giraudoux and Valéry. In their shrill, mincing voices one discerned that kind of jealous hunger which is aroused by the stale smell of withered roses or the taste of over-ripe fruit. But sometimes there was a certain harshness in their tone, an element of pride, if it be true that the peculiar pride which inverts feel is merely the obverse of humility. Proudly they defy the meekness and submissiveness of their frai
l feminine natures. They have the cruelty of women, the cruel excess of loyalty which characterizes the heroines of Tasso, that element of pathos and sentimentality, of softness and perfidy, which women contrive surreptitiously to introduce into human nature. They are not content with being, in their natural state, heroes who have rebelled against the divine laws: they aspire to be something more—heroes disguised as heroes. They are like Amazons deguisées en femmes.

  The clothes they wore, faded by exposure to wind and weather, torn in the course of their weary journey through the mountain-forests of Abruzzo, were in perfect harmony with their deliberately careless elegance—with the way they had of wearing trousers without a belt, shoes without laces, stockings without garters, of disdaining to put on a tie, hat or gloves, of going about with their jackets unbuttoned, their hands in their pockets, their shoulders swaying. They harmonized, too, with their uninhibited movements —uninhibited, it seemed, not by the discipline of conventional dress, but by any moral discipline.

  The libertarian ideas which at that time were prevalent throughout Europe, especially in the countries still under the German heel, appeared not to have exalted, but to have humbled them. The flagrancy of their vice had been dimmed. In the midst of the open and universal corruption those young apostles of Narcissus seemed, by contrast, not, perhaps, virtuous, but chaste. A certain characteristic refinement which was in them assumed, amid the brazen unchastity that was the general rule, an appearance of elegant modesty.

  If there was something that cast an impure shadow over the gentle, chaste femininity of their conduct, over their languor, and still more over their abject and confused ideas of liberty, peace and brotherly love among men and nations, it was the blatant presence in their midst of youths seemingly of the labouring class—those proletarian ephebes with jet-black, curly hair, red lips and dark, shining eyes who until some time before the war would never have dared to associate in public with these noble apostles of Narcissus. The presence among them of those young labouring men laid bare for the first time the social promiscuity of the vice, which, as being the most secret element of vice itself, generally chooses to blush unseen, and showed that the roots of the evil are deeply buried deep down in the lowest stratum of society, at the very rock-bottom of the proletariat. The contacts, hitherto discreet, that existed between the homosexual haute noblesse and proletarian inverts stood shamelessly revealed. And by their very nakedness they assumed the aspect of a blatant challenge to the decency, the prejudices, the rules, the moral code which inverts of the upper classes, in their relations with Philistines, especially those of humble origin, usually, with jealous hypocrisy, pretend to respect.