Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  The sky was clear, the green sea shone on the skyline like a vast meadow. The honey of the sun dripped down the fronts of houses bedecked with clotheslines strung between balconies, down the gutters of roofs, down the ragged edges of gaps cut in the walls by bombs and the wounds gaping in the sides of the houses, and as it did so the sky embroidered a gentle blue design. The north-west wind carried with it a smell and taste of the sea, a youthful sound of waves beating against the rocks, a lonely, mournful call of sailors. The sky flowed like a blue river over that city of ruins full of unburied dead, over the holy city of Europe in which blood was still sacred, over a good and merciful people who still felt respect, shame, love and reverence for the blood of men, over a people for whom the word "blood" was still a word of hope and security. When the crowd reached the closed gates of the Duomo, the people dropped to their knees, begged loudly for the gates to open, and raised the cry "'O sangue! 'O sangue! 'O sangue!" that shook the walls of the houses and was full of sacred wrath and merciful rage.

  I asked a man beside me what had happened. A rumor had spread through town that a bomb had hit the Duomo and wrecked the crypt in which the two caskets containing the miraculous blood of San Gennaro are preserved. It was only a rumor, but it had spread like a fire through the town and reached the darkest alleys and the deepest caves. Until that moment during the four years of war, it seemed as if not a single drop of blood had been shed. Despite the millions of dead scattered over all of Europe, it seemed as if not a single drop of blood had moistened the earth. But as soon as the news spread that those two precious caskets had been shattered, that those few drops of clotted blood had been lost, it seemed as if the entire world were soaked in blood, as if the veins of humanity were severed to quench the unsatiable earth. Then a priest came out on the steps of the Duomo, raised his arms asking for silence and announced that the precious blood was safe. 'O sangue! 'O sangue! 'O sangue! The kneeling people wept invoking the blood, and everybody was smiling; tears of joy ran down the faces hollowed by hunger; high hope filled everyone's heart, as if no single drop of blood would ever drip again on the thirsting earth.

  To get down to the dock, I had to walk through debris-filled alleys behind Piazza Francese. The stench of unburied corpses polluted the air. Black swarms of flies buzzed between the walls. A thick cloud of smoke rose above the harbor. I was atrociously thirsty, my lips were swollen and black with flies. All the fountains were dry,- there was not a drop of water in the entire town. I turned at the Two Lions and went back toward the Mercadante Theater. A dead boy was lying on the sidewalk. He seemed asleep. A halo of flies swarmed around his forehead furrowed with horrible wrinkles. I turned into Medina Street. A house behind the Mercadante statue was ablaze. Boys were chasing each other, playing and screaming in shrill voices. My footsteps aroused swarms of flies that rose buzzing, settled on my face stained with sweat and dust and filled the hollows of my eyes. A fearful stench rose from the piles of debris. The acid smell of the sea was penetrating. At the end of Medina Street I saw a small bar. I ran and stopped, panting at the door.

  The counter with a marble top strewn with fragments of glass was empty. A fat, flabby man, wearing a cotton undershirt with short sleeves was sitting at an iron table. His hairy, drooping breasts protruded from his undershirt that was glued to his skin with sweat. The man was fanning himself with a folded newspaper, and now and then he wiped his brow with a dirty handkerchief. A cloud of flies wheeled in the air. Thousands and thousands of flies were clinging to the ceiling, the walls and the broken mirrors. On the wall behind the counter black with flies hung portraits of the King and Queen, and the Prince and Princess of Piedmont.

  "Can you give me a glass of water?" I asked.

  The man looked at me, continued fanning himself and said, "A glass of water?"

  "I am terribly thirsty. I can't stand it any longer."

  "You are thirsty, and you want a glass of water?"

  "Yes," I said. "A glass of water. The thirst is killing me!"

  "A glass of water!" said the man raising his eyebrows. "Don't you know that water is rare? There is not a drop of water in Naples. First we shall die of hunger, then we shall die of thirst, and if we still are alive, we shall die of fear. A glass of water, indeed!"

  "All right," I said and sat down at another table. "I will wait until the war is over before I have a drink."

  "There is nothing to do but be patient," the man said. "Do you know that I have not budged from Naples? For three years I have been waiting here for the end of the war. When bombs are dropping, I close my eyes. I will not budge even if they wreck this house. It is only a matter of patience. We shall see who is more patient: the war or Naples. Do you really want a glass of water? You will find a bottle behind the counter. There should still be a little water in it. The glasses are over there."

  "Thanks," I said.

  Behind the counter I found a bottle with a little water. The shelves were lined with fragments of glasses. Not a single whole glass was there. I drank out of the bottle, driving away the flies from my face with my hand.

  "Damn the flies!" I said.

  "Quite so,- damn the flies!" the man said fanning himself with the newspaper. "Damn the flies!"

  "Why don't you fight the flies in Naples? At home, in northern Italy—in Milan, Turin, Florence, even in Rome—the city governments have organized campaigns against the flies. You never see a fly in our towns."

  "There isn't a single fly left in Milan?"

  "No, not a one. We have killed them all. It is a preventive measure to avoid epidemics and diseases."

  "In Naples we also have struggled against the flies. We have actually waged war against flies. We have been fighting the flies for the past three years."

  "Then why are there still so many flies in Naples?"

  "Well, you know how it is! The flies have won!"

  Afterword

  BATTLES, pogroms, mass murderers, a general dueling with a salmon, a war criminal spied in a sauna, a still life of human eyes—readers are likely to feel bewildered by the time they reach the end of the hair-raising narrative known as Kaputt. At times the book feels like an eyewitness reportage, at other times like a detached and rather waspish chronicle or even a work of historical fiction. Kaputt is actually all of these, but since Malaparte never acknowledges when he is switching from one genre to another the reportage has the imaginative texture of fiction, the fiction the reality of reportage. What is journalism here and what is historical fantasy? It's hard at any point to say, since the author is constantly eating any number of cakes and having them too.

  The result, of course, is hypnotic. But what is one to make of so many scenes and conversations that seem not only made up but also implausible, in the sense that fiction may be implausible? All sorts of amazing things happen, but not only are you never certain what's true, you also tend to question the poetic or mimetic accuracy of those of Malaparte's tales that appear invented or highly embellished. However such characters may have behaved, you find yourself thinking, they surely didn't behave like this. Malaparte's odd weakness for the implausible is early detectable in his fanciful Hebrew etymology for the German word kaputt, originally just a term for a cardplayer unable to play another trick (from the French capoté, "capsized"). Of course this is a minor point: but the waffling between genres, the implausibility, the scant regard for fact—all grow more and more troubling as they come to bear on the most terrible atrocities of the last century. Readers have a right to feel puzzled, and to wonder what merit a book may have that values the truth so lightly.

  Malaparte was born in 1898, in Tuscany, to a Lombard mother and a German father. His original name was Kurt Erich Suckert. He fought in World War I, earning a captaincy in the Fifth Alpine Regiment and several decorations for valor, and in 1922 took part in Mussolini's March on Rome. In 1925, he changed his named to Malaparte (meaning "he of the bad place," a pun on Buonaparte). As a member of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, he founded several periodicals and
contributed essays and articles to others, as well as writing numerous books and directing two metropolitan newspapers,- but his views, ideologically mercurial and even contradictory, departed from orthodoxy and incurred the displeasure of Mussolini. (Among other acts of lèse-majesté, he published a novel satirizing the Duce and a study of Lenin's thought.) In 1931 he was stripped of his party membership and in 1933 banished to the Aeolian isle of Lipari, where he served a year of solitary confinement. He was to spend four more years in preventive detention; yet his notable talent for currying favor secured his early transfer to the resort of Forte dei Marmi, on the Tuscan coast, where his friend Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and heir apparent, saw to it that he had a villa at his disposal, as well as an Alfa Romeo and a chauffeur.

  Slender, elegant, of toreador good looks, and given to dueling, Malaparte was a superb conversationalist and a cultivator of counts and princesses. His writing is haunted by the desire to have been Proust. He seems to have been very warmhearted, and many of his friendships with men of letters lasted his whole life. It is extraordinarily difficult, however, to place him on the spectrum of interwar social thought, and that was surely intentional. Italian Fascism, it should be recalled, had at the outset certain progressive qualities, such as an affinity for the French avant-garde, which it lost as it became a reactionary movement. Without ever forfeiting a certain Gallic aestheticism, Malaparte tried to fuse various essentially irreconcilable revolutionary theories. His ideology, as Adrian Lyttelton has written, was "convoluted and artificial, often studied rather than sincere." The most brilliant and vitriolic of the "Fascist pens," he offered verbal justification for the squadristi, the Fascist terror gangs, who made a practice of attacking left-wing workers and intellectuals in central and northern Italy. "In the same way as we have burnt the houses and dispersed the families of those who were, out of ignorance and cowardice, hostile to the living spirit of our nation," he wrote in 1923, "we will burn the houses and disperse the families of those who are hostile to it out of culture and intelligence." But Malaparte himself was never a squadrista; he came to despise Mussolini, and when called up to fight against France, in 1940, he managed to secure a noncombatant role and then to quit the army altogether. An intellectual harlequin and consummate arriviste, he found it hard to mask his scorn for those in power: hence his oscillation between strident sloganeering and a stylish, riddling equivocation.

  Malaparte's professional position at the outbreak of World War II was strangely ambiguous. Having been expelled from the PNF, he was forbidden to work as a war correspondent, but as a soldier he could technically be "commanded" to do the same, and this expedient is exactly what Aldo Borelli of Corriere della Sera, the Milanese daily, resorted to, with Ciano's help. Demobilized from the French front, but still wearing his picturesque uniform of captain in the Alpini with its plumed hat, he found himself in the summer of 1941 covering the German advance into the Soviet Union. Amiably serving as his driver, in a beat-up Ford, was Lino Pellegrini, the young correspondent of the Fascist Party journal Popolo d'Italia.

  Between the summer of 1941 and that of 1943, Malaparte visited and reported on a number of countries occupied by the Axis, including Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Baltic states,- he also visited Romania and Finland, both allies of Germany, and neutral Sweden; and he stayed briefly in Berlin itself. The upshot was a string of articles for the Corriere, the reportage II Volga nasce in Europa, derived from those articles, and Kaputt. Though the last makes the case against war as effectively as any book ever written, Malaparte was actually mesmerized by the glamour of war, for him the primal male experience. "They can say what they want about me," he wrote, "but I love war— I love it as every well-bred man loves it, every healthy, courageous, strong man, and every man who is not satisfied with humanity and its misdeeds." In Kaputt we behold that love turning into something a little different: a fascination with violence and mass murder as potentially popular literary subjects.

  Of course the attentive reader detects a certain falsity at the heart of Kaputt. The conversations are often stilted and dominated by our hero, eager to impart his observations and superior wisdom. He tends to characterize his people through physiognomic description or national identification, so that they fail to come alive or do so only as monsters, whom we accept when we realize that they're broadbrush grotesques. He narcissistically takes center stage even in scenes of carnage, as if genocide were a stage set contrived to set off his own seductive appeal. Many of the episodes are overextended anecdotes, and there are numerous blatant failures of taste: the name-dropping, which somehow manages to encompass both the Bernadottes and the Hohenzollerns, never relents. And Malaparte's backbiting, vaguely Saint-Simonian court chronicle about his erstwhile patron Ciano is almost impossible to follow.

  Malaparte is least sure in his fictional treatment of the extermination of European Jewry. We sense this in the account of the Iasi Pogrom (spelled Jassy in this translation), when, after his valiant attempt to save as many fleeing people as possible from the assassins, he somehow forgets to go see what has happened to his "friend" the Jewish grocer Kane. None of this rings true, as how could it, since Malaparte did not witness the Iasi Pogrom, and in fact wrote an article on it for the Corriere in which he expressed no sympathy whatever for the victims. Nor did Malaparte investigate the ghettos of Poland; if he had, would he have portrayed himself as cheering up their starving denizens with an insouciant phrase in, of all languages, French? All this is absurd, of course; what makes it offensive is his placing himself at center stage as a moral witness and even a protagonist. Years later, Lino Pellegrini, who had liked Malaparte and remained fond of him, recalled that the first part of Kaputt was originally drafted with the conviction that Hitler would win the war - Reichsminister Frank, the Nazi governor of Poland, was praised to the skies - and the insult "God Shave the King" was directed not at Frank but at King George VI of England, who had a beard. Later, seeing how the wind was blowing, Malaparte rewrote the manuscript.

  Is one to conclude from Malaparte's position in 1941 that he was an anti-Semite? Too cultivated and opportunistic for that, he in fact published essays by his Jewish friends in his journal Prospettive for years after the promulgation of anti-Semitic legislation in Italy, in 1938. Yet, by the same token, he was not above racial invective—no doubt perfectly insincere—when the climate seemed to favor it. Sent on an undercover intelligence mission to Greece in mid-1940, he wrote back to Ciano, now Foreign Minister, that the Greeks were "mongrels" and "Levantine half-breeds," "bastardized by Turkish domination." Greece was ripe for invasion, he said, and would welcome Italian troops as liberators. By 1944, when he was finishing Kaputt, Malaparte had conveniently forgotten his own role as warmonger.

  If in Kaputt we often detect an absence of candor, of personal experience and understanding, it remains a remarkable book, in two senses. It is, first of all, an astonishing document, a signal act of journalistic imposture, in which a writer of singular gifts faked precisely the account of events in Eastern Europe that readers craved at the war's end (when in fact it became an international best-seller); indeed, Malaparte's is the account that one perennially craves. Stylishly skillful in its handling of descriptive detail, and clearly quite factual in its portrayal of secondary situations (embassy dinners, military bivouacs, Scandinavian summer evenings), it challenges us to question its veracity much as a con man defies us to doubt his good faith. Malaparte's voice—polished, urbane, a trifle louche—carries beautifully across the decades, summoning up a world of glittering salons peopled with chameleons, blowhards, charlatans, and ideological flimflam artists.

  That is not the whole story, however. Just as Malaparte himself had many friends of great worth, among them Eugenio Montale, Benedetto Croce, Alberto Moravia, Umberto Saba, Daniel Halévy, and Harold Nicolson, so this book has, I believe— almost despite its author—intrinsic literary qualities. A poet and novelist, a lover of painting, Malaparte was highly sensitive to metaphor, a
nd an extended trope, that of the beasts—horses, mice, dogs, birds, reindeer, and flies—governs this book. A basic intuition, that world war, the attempted suicide of mankind, can overwhelm and pervert the very order of nature, gives the story sinew and an underlying dignity. One is reminded of Goya's painting of the bewildered dog on the wall of the Quinta del Sordo, or of the truncated, twisted trees in the Desastres de la Guerra, betrayed into perverted use as torture instruments. Kaputt is heir to this vision: who can forget Malaparte's scene of the horses trapped like chess pieces in the ice of Lake Ladoga, or that of the war dogs of the Dnieper, loaded with high explosives?