Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  Liisi Leppo rose, slowly crossed the room, took a position by the gramophone, threw back her head, raised her arms and keeping her eyes on the ceiling, recited Lamartine's "Le Lac"—all of Lamartine's "Le Lac"—with the same enunciation, in the same nasal voice as the Linguaphone Institute teacher.

  "It's wonderful, isn't it?" said Jaakko Leppo in a voice filled with emotion.

  It was five in the morning. I cannot remember what else happened before de Foxá and I found ourselves in the street. It was deathly cold. The night was clear, the snow shone gently with a delicate silver glitter. When we reached my hotel, de Foxá shook my hand and said, "Maljanne."

  I replied, "Maljanne."

  The Swedish Minister, Westmann, was waiting for us in his library, sitting in front of the window. The silvery reflection of snow in the night melted into the dimness of the library—a warm dimness the color of leather, through which the book-bindings sent slight golden ripples. The light was turned on suddenly, outlining the tall, slim figure of Minister Westmann, clean and sharp as an engraved design on old Swedish silver. His movements that had been frozen in the air by the silent outburst of light, slowly melted and faded away, and his small head, his straight, lean shoulders for a moment struck my eyes with the cold immobility of the marble busts of Swedish sovereigns that were ranged along the high oaken bookshelves. His silver hair warmed the dead glow of the marble, and an ironical smile—the restless shadow of a smile, crept over his grave and gentle face.

  In the warm dining room the light of two large, silver candelabra standing in the center of the table, delicate and warm, melted into the reflection of the ice-bound sea and of the snow-covered square, breaking on the frosty windowpanes with a harsh violence. Although the pink glow of the candles tinged the white Flemish linen of the tablecloth with a flesh color, and, by veiling the cold bareness of Marieberg and Rörstrand china, warmed the icy splendor of Orefors glass and the glitter of old Copenhagen silver, something ghostly lingered in the air and something ironical as well, if one can speak of irony in connection with ghosts and ghostly things. As if the subtle witchcraft of the northern night, penetrating the room with the gloomy reflection of the nocturnal snow, held us tied in its charm, something ghostly appeared in our faces, in the restless, wandering glances, in the very words we were uttering.

  De Foxá sat by the window mirroring in his face the maze of blue veins that streaks the white flesh of nocturnal snow. Perhaps to overcome in himself the spell of the northern night, he spoke about the sun in Spain, about the colors, the smells, the sounds, the flavoring of Spain, about Andalusian sunlit days and starry nights, about the clean thin wind of the Castilian highlands, about the blue sky falling like a stone after the death of the bull. Westmann, his eyes half closed, listened to him as if he could sniff the scents of the Spanish soil through the glitter of the snow, as if he could hear the sounds and fleshy voices of Spanish streets and Spanish houses coming from beyond the ice-bound sea, as if he could gaze on the landscapes, the portraits, the still-life pictures flooded with warm deep color, the street scenes, the arena and family scenes, the dances, the processions, the idyls, the funerals, the triumphs that de Foxá was re-creating in his resonant voice.

  Westmann spent several years in Madrid as the Swedish Minister, and had been appointed Minister in Helsinki only a few months before to conduct important diplomatic negotiations. He was to go back to Madrid and resume his post as Swedish Minister to Spain as soon as he had completed his temporary mission in Finland. He loved Spain with a repressed violence that was sensuous as well as romantic. He listened that evening to de Foxá with a mixture of modesty, jealousy and rancor, as an unhappy lover listens to a lucky rival talking about the woman he loves. "I am the husband, I am not your rival. Spain is my wife and you are her lover," said de Foxá to him. "Alas!" sighed Westmann in reply. But in his feeling for Spain there was that indefinite tinge of sensuous passion and hidden repugnance that always goes with the Northerner's love for Mediterranean lands—the same sensuous repugnance that is portrayed in the faces of the onlookers in the old Triumphs of Death, where the sight of the green corpses, exhumed and lying in the sun like dead lizards amid fleshy, strongly scented flowers, has aroused in them a reverent horror and a sensuous enjoyment that at the same time attracts and repulses them.

  "Spain," said de Foxá, "is a sensuous and funereal land, but not a land of ghosts. The home of the ghosts is the North. In the streets of Spanish towns you meet corpses, but not ghosts." He talked about that odor of death that pervades all of Spanish art and literature, about certain deathlike landscapes of Goya, about El Greco's living corpses, about the putrefying countenances of Spanish kings and grandees that Velasquez painted in the background of his proud golden architecture, about the velvet and purple cloth in the green and gilded dimness of royal palaces, churches and convents.

  "Even in Spain," said Westmann, "it is not unusual to meet ghosts. I like Spanish ghosts very much. They are very nice and well behaved."

  "They are not ghosts," said de Foxá, "they are corpses. They are not bodiless figures, they are made of flesh and blood. They eat, drink, love, laugh as if they were alive. But they are dead bodies. They do not walk at night as ghosts do, but in the middle of the day, in full sunshine. Spain is so alive because of those corpses that can be met in the streets, that sit in cafés, that kneel down to pray in dark churches, that move slowly and silently with their black eyes shining in their green faces, through the merry bustle of the towns and villages on feast and market days, among the living people who laugh, love, drink and sing. The ones you call ghosts are not Spanish; they are alien. They come from afar, no one knows from where, and only if you summon them by name or call them forth with a magic word."

  "Do you believe in magic words?" asked Westmann smiling.

  "Every good Spaniard believes in magic words."

  "Do you know any?" asked Westmann.

  "I know many, but one above all others is endowed with the supernatural power of evoking ghosts."

  "Please say it, even if you only whisper it."

  "I dare not. I am afraid," said de Foxá becoming slightly pale. "It is the most frightful and dangerous word in the Castilian language. No true Spaniard dares to utter it. Let a corpse be brought here and placed on this table, and I will not bat an eye. But don't call a ghost; don't open a door to him. I would die of fright."

  "Tell us at least what the word means," said Westmann.

  "It is one of the many names given to snakes."

  "Snakes have gentle names," said Westmann. "In Shakespeare's play, Antony calls Cleopatra by the sweet name of a snake."

  "Ah!" shouted de Foxá growing white in the face.

  "What is the matter? Is that the word that you dare not utter? Yet it has the sweetness of honey on Antony's lips. Cleopatra never had a gentler name. Wait—" went on Westmann with complacent cruelty, "I think I can recall precisely the word that Shakespeare puts in Antony's mouth—"

  "Be silent, please!" shouted de Foxá.

  "If my memory does not fail me," pursued Westmann with a cruel smile, "Antony calls Cleopatra—"

  "For God's sake, be silent!" shouted de Foxá. "Don't speak that word aloud. It is a terrible word that must be spoken thus in a low voice..." and scarcely moving his lips, he whispered, "Culebra!"

  "Ah, 'adder!'" said Westmann laughing. "And that's enough to frighten you? It is a word like any other, and to me is nothing terrible or mysterious. If I am not wrong," he added raising his eyes to the ceiling as if searching his memory, "the word that Shakespeare used is 'snake,' and it does not sound so sweet as the Spanish word culebra. O mi culebra del antiquo Nilo.—O my snake of the ancient Nile."

  "Please, don't repeat it," said de Foxá. "It is an ill-omened word. One of us, or someone who is near to us will die tonight."

  At that moment the door flew open and a glorious salmon from Lake Inari was placed on the table; its rosy color, tender and lively, flashed through the deep cracks in its skin,
covered with silvery scales of delicate green and bluish hues, resembling as de Foxá said, the silks in which the statues of the Blessed Virgin are clothed in the churches of Spanish villages. The salmon's head rested on a pillow of herbs fine as women's hair—those transparent weeds that grow in the rivers and lakes of Finland. It looked like the head of a sleeping fish in a still-life painting by Braque. The taste of that salmon was like a faraway memory of waters, woods and clouds. To me it was like a memory of Lake Inari on a summer night lighted by the pale Arctic sun, tender and childish under a green sky. The rosy color shining through the silvery scales of the salmon was the very color of clouds when the evening sun rests on the edge of the horizon, like an orange on a windowsill, and a gentle wind rustles through the leaves of the trees, over the clear water and the grassy shores, as it glides lightly above the rivers, lakes and vast forests of Lapland. It was the same rosy color, tender and lively, that shines through the silvery scales covering Lake Inari when the sun, in the depths of the Arctic night, wanders over a green sky streaked with slender blue veins.

  "It is a pity," said de Foxá laughing, "that the U.S.S.R. flags are not salmon pink in color!"

  "Thank God," I replied, "that the U.S.S.R. flags are red and not salmon pink. Who knows what would happen to poor Europe if the U.S.S.R. flags had the same pink color as that of a salmon and of the dessous de femme."

  "Everything fades in Europe," remarked Westmann. "Very likely, we are moving toward a Middle Age, salmon pink in color."

  "I often ask myself," said de Foxá, "what the function of the intellectuals will be in a new medieval period. I bet they would take advantage of the opportunity to try again to save European civilization."

  "Intellectuals are incorrigible," said Westmann.

  "Even the old Monte Cassino abbot," I said, "sometimes asks himself the same question." I told them that Count Gavronski, the Polish diplomat who is married to Luciana Frassati, the daughter of Senator Frassati, formerly Italian Ambassador in Berlin, a refugee in Rome since Poland had been occupied by the Germans, from time to time spends a few weeks in the guest house of the Monte Cassino Abbey. Old Archbishop Dom Gregory Diamare, the abbot, talking one day to Gavronski about the barbarism into which Europe was in danger of sinking through war, said that during the darkest Middle Ages the monks of Monte Cassino had saved Western civilization by copying the ancient and precious Greek and Latin manuscripts by hand. "What should we do today to save European culture?" concluded the venerable abbot. "Have the same manuscripts copied on typewriters by your monks," replied Gavronski.

  After the clear Moselle wine that smelled of hay in the rain— the Moselle's delicate, clear rosy hue, glistening among the silvery scales of the salmon, imparted a taste of the Lake Inari countryside under the nocturnal sun—the red wine of Burgundy with its bloodlike reflections sparkled in our glasses. A side of Karelian pork on a large silver tray in the center of the table filled the room with the warm smell of the oven. After the transparent glitter of the Moselle wine and of the rose-tinted salmon bringing thoughts of the silvery current of the Juutuanjoki and of the pink clouds in the green sky of Lapland, the red Burgundy and the pork of Karelia, just taken from the oven and scented with pine wood, brought to us the memory of a land warmed by the sun.

  No wine is so earthy as the red wine of Burgundy that in the warm glow of the candlelight and in the white reflection of the snow was the color of soil, the crimson and gold hue of the Côte d'Or hills at sunset. The bouquet was strong, scented with grass and leaves like a summer evening in Burgundy. No wine is so congenial with the evening dusk or so partial to the night as the wine of Nuits Saint Georges. Even its name, deep and flashing like a summer evening, belongs to the night. It shines bloodlike on the threshold of the night as the glow of sunset on the crystal edge of the horizon. It kindles glints of red and blue in the crimson-colored earth, in the grass and in the leaves still warm with the taste and the aroma of the dying day. Wild beasts, when night steals on them, burrow deep into the earth; the wild boar crashes into the thicket amid a hurried crackling of twigs; the short-flighted pheasant swims silently into the shadows that are already floating above the woods and the glades; the nimble hare glides along the first moonbeam as if drawn by a taut silver string. That is the hour for Burgundy wine. At that hour, during the winter nights, in that room alight with the ebony reflection of snow, the deep odor of the Nuits Saint Georges brought forth memories of summer evenings in Burgundy, of nights asleep on the soil still warm with the sun.

  De Foxá and I looked at each other smiling as a warm flush rose in our faces. We looked smiling at one another as if those unexpected memories of the soil were freeing us from the sad spell of the northern night. We were lost in that desert of snow and ice, in that watery land of a hundred thousand lakes, in that sweet stern Finland where the smell of the sea penetrates the inmost depths of the most remote forests of Karelia and Lapland, where the glitter of water may be traced in the blue and gray eyes of man and beast and in the slow and distracted manner, not unlike the movements of swimmers, with which people walk along streets ablaze with the white fire of the snow, or wander in the summer night through parks, raising their eyes to the blue-green, watery glow over the roofs in the endless day without dawn or sunset of the white northern summer. The unexpected memories of the soil made us feel earthy deep down within our bones, and we looked at one another smiling, as if we had escaped from a shipwreck.

  "Skoll!" said de Foxá, deeply moved, and raised his glass, breaking the rigid Swedish convention that reserves for the host the right to invite his guests to drink with the traditional word of good health.

  "I never say skoll, when I raise my glass," remarked Westmann mischievously, as if to excuse the gauchery de Foxá had committed. "There is a character in one of Arthur Reid's plays who says: 'London is full of people, who have just come back from Sweden, drinking skoll and saying snap at each other.' I too drink skoll and say snap."

  "Snap it shall be!" said de Foxá whom the Burgundy wine had made gay and almost childishly intoxicated.

  "Snap!" said Westmann smiling, and I followed his example and said, "Snap!"

  "How comfortable it is to belong to a neutral country, isn't it? " said de Foxá turning to Westmann. "One may drink without wishing for victories or defeats. Snap for the peace of Europe."

  "Skoll!" said Westmann.

  "Why? Why do you say skoll!" asked de Foxá.

  "I like to make mistakes occasionally," replied Westmann with an ironical smile.

  "I enjoy saying snap," said de Foxá raising his glass—"Snap for Germany and snap for England!"

  "Snap for Germany," said Westmann with an amiable solemnity, "and skoll for England."

  "You are right," said de Foxá, "skoll for England!"

  I too raised my glass and said snap for Germany and skoll for England.

  "Instead of saying snap, you should say skoll for Germany," said de Foxá to me. "Germany is Italy's ally."

  "Personally," I replied, "I am not Germany's ally. The war Italy is waging is Mussolini's personal war and I am not Mussolini. No Italian is Mussolini. Snap for Mussolini and Hitler!"

  "Snap for Mussolini and Hitler!" repeated de Foxá.

  "And snap for France," I said.

  De Foxá hesitated for an instant then said, "Snap for France, too!" and burst into laughter. Turning to Westmann he went on, "Do you know the story of Malaparte's cricket match in Poland against Governor-General Frank?" He told him about my agreement with Frank and about my revelation to him that during Himmler's stay in Warsaw, I had distributed letters and money that Polish refugees in Italy had asked me to deliver to their relatives and friends in Poland.

  "And Frank did not betray you?" asked Westmann.

  "No," I replied, "he did not."

  "Your encounter with Frank is truly extraordinary," said Westmann. "He might have handed you over to the Gestapo. I must admit that he behaved surprisingly well toward you."

  "I was certain tha
t he would not betray me," I said. "What may appear reckless about my frankness was merely a wise precaution. By showing that I considered him a gentleman, I made Frank my accomplice. Nevertheless, later he tried to avenge himself for my frankness by making me pay dearly for his forced complicity. I told him that a few weeks after I had left Warsaw, Frank lodged violent protests with the Italian government about some articles of mine about Poland, charging me with adopting the Polish viewpoint. Frank not only demanded that I publicly refute what I had written, but that I also send him a written apology. By then I was safely in Finland, and of course, my answer to him was snap!"

  "In your place," said de Foxá, "I would have said merde"

  "That's a word that sometimes is very difficult to pronounce," remarked Westmann smiling.

  "Do you consider me incapable of answering a German in the way Cambronne answered an Englishman at Waterloo?" said de Foxá with dignity and, turning to me, added, "Would you invite me to supper at the Royal, if I reply merde to a German?"

  "For God's sake, Augustin, don't forget that you are the Minister of Spain."

  "Excellent! I shall reply merde, in the name of Spain."

  "For goodness' sake, Augustin, can't you see that this one word may drag the Spanish people into a war?"

  "The Spanish people have waged war for much less."

  "Wait at least until Hitler gets to Waterloo," said Westmann. "Unfortunately, so far he has only reached Austerlitz."

  "No, I cannot wait, I shall be the Cambronne of Austerlitz."

  Luckily just then there was placed on the table a tray laden with those soft pastries of a most delicate flavor, that even the Sisters of the Sacred Heart call by the Voltairian name, pets de nonne. {10}

  "Do these pets de nonne remind you of anything?" asked Westmann of de Foxá.