The Skin (2 page)

Parties of dishevelled, painted women, followed by crowds of negro soldiers with pale hands, were parading up and down Via Toledo, cleaving the air above the thronged streets with shrill cries of "Hi, Joe! Hi, Joe!" At the entrances to the alleys loitered the public hairdressers, the
capere.
They formed long lines, and each stood behind a seat. On the seat, their eyes closed and their heads lolling against the backs or sunk upon their breasts, sat athletic negroes with small round skulls and yellow shoes that shone like the feet of the gilded statutes of the Angels in the church of Santa Chiara. Yelling and calling to one another with strange guttural cries, singing, or arguing at the top of their voices with their neighbours, who looked down from the windows and balconies as though from boxes at the theatre, the
capere
sank their combs into the negroes' curly, woolly hair, drew them towards them with both hands, spat on the teeth to reduce the friction, poured rivers of brilliantine into the palms of their hands, and rubbed and smoothed the patients' wild locks like
masseuses.

Bands of ragged boys knelt before their little wooden boxes, which were plastered with flakes of mother of pearl, sea-shells and fragments of mirrors, and beat the lids with the backs of their brushes, crying "Shoeshine! Shoeshine!" Meanwhile, with bony, eager hands, they grabbed the negro soldiers by the edge of the trousers as they went past, swaying their hips. Groups of Moroccan soldiers squatted along the walls, enveloped in their dark robes, their faces riddled with pock-marks, their yellow deep-set eyes shining from dark, wrinkled sockets, inhaling through quivering nostrils the dry odour that permeated the dusty air.

Faded women, with livid faces and painted lips, their emaciated cheeks plastered with rouge—a dreadful and piteous sight—loitered at the corners of the alleys, offering to the passers-by their sorry merchandise. This consisted of boys and girls of eight or ten, whom the soldiers—Moroccans, Indians, Algerians, Madagascans— caressed with their fingers, slipping their hands between the buttons of their short trousers or lifting their dresses. "Two dollars the boys, three dollars the girls!" shouted the women.

"Tell me frankly—would you like a little girl at three dollars?" I said to Jack.

"Shut up, Malaparte."

"After all, it's not much, three dollars for a little girl. Two pounds of lamb cost far more. I'm sure a little girl costs more in London or New York than here—isn't that so, Jack?"

"Tu me dégoutes," said Jack.

"Three dollars is barely three hundred lire. How much can a little girl of eight or ten weigh? Fifty pounds? Remember that on the black market two pounds of lamb cost five hundred and fifty lire, in other words five dollars and fifty cents."

"Shut up!" cried Jack.

During the last few days the prices of girls and boys had dropped, and they were still falling. Whereas the prices of sugar, oil, flour, meat and bread had risen and were still on the increase, the price of human flesh was slumping from day to day. A girl between twenty and twenty-five years of age, who a week before was worth up to ten dollars, was now worth barely four dollars, bones included. This fall in the price of human flesh on the Neapolitan market may have been due to the fact that women were flocking to Naples from all parts of Southern Italy. During recent weeks the wholesalers had thrown on to the market a large consignment of Sicilian women. It was not all fresh meat, but the speculators knew that negro soldiers have refined tastes, and prefer meat not to be too fresh. Yet Sicilian meat was not in great demand, and even the negroes refused it in the end: negroes don't like white women to be too dark. Every day there arrived in Naples, on carts drawn by wretched little donkeys or in Allied vehicles, but mostly on foot, parties of sturdily-built, robust girls, nearly all of them peasants, attracted by the mirage of gold. They came from the Calabrias, the Apulias, the Basilicata and Molise. And so the price of human flesh on the Neopolitan market had been crashing, and it was feared that this might have a serious effect on the whole economy of the city. (Nothing of the kind had ever been seen in Naples before. It was certainly a disgrace, and the vast majority of the good people of Naples blushed with shame because of it. But why did it not bring a blush to the cheeks of the Allied authorities, who were the masters of Naples?) In compensation, negroes' flesh had risen in price, and this, luckily, was helping to re-establish a certain equilibrium on the market.

"What does negroes' flesh cost today?" I asked Jack.

"Shut up," he answered.

"Is it true that the flesh of a black American costs more than that of a white American?"

"Tu m'agaces," answered Jack.

I certainly had no intention of offending him, nor of poking fun at him, nor even of being disrespectful to the American Army—the loveliest, the kindest, the most respectable Army in the world. What did it matter to me if the flesh of a black American cost more than that of a white American? I like Americans, whatever the colour of their skin, and I proved it a hundred times during the war. White or black, their souls are pure, much purer than ours. I like the Americans because they are good and sincere Christians; because they believe that Christ is always on the side of those who are in the right; because they believe that it is a sin to be in the wrong, that it is immoral to be in the wrong; because they believe that they alone are honourable men, and that all the nations of Europe are more or less dishonest; because they believe that a conquered nation is a nation of criminals, that defeat is a moral stigma, an expression of divine justice.

I like Americans for these reasons, and for many others that I have not mentioned. In that terrible autumn of 1943, which brought so much humiliation and grief to my fellow-countrymen, the Americans' humanity and generosity, the pure and honest simplicity of their ideas and sentiments, and the genuineness of their behaviour, instilled in me the illusion that men hate evil, the hope that humanity would mend its ways, and the conviction that only goodness—the goodness and innocence of those splendid boys from across the Atlantic, who had landed in Europe to punish the wicked and reward the good—could redeem nations and individuals from their sins.

But of all my American friends the dearest was Staff Colonel Jack Hamilton. Jack was a man of thirty-eight—tall, thin, pale and elegant, with gentlemanly, almost European manners. On first acquaintance, perhaps, he seemed more European than American, but this was not the reason why I loved him: and I loved him like a brother. For gradually, as I got to know him intimately, he showed himself to be intensely and indisputably American. He had been born in South Carolina ("My nurse," he used to say, "was
une negresse par un demon secouée"),
but he was not merely what is known in America as a Southerner. Intellectually he was a man of culture and refinement, and at the same time there was about him an almost childlike simplicity and innocence. What I mean is that he was an American in the noblest sense of the word—one of the most admirable men I have ever met. He was a "Christian gentleman". How hard it is for me to express what I mean by the term "Christian gentleman"! All who know and love the Americans will understand what I mean when I say that the American nation is a Christian nation, and that Jack was a Christian gentleman.

Educated at Woodberry Forest School and at Virginia University, Jack had devoted himself with equal enthusiasm to Latin, Greek and sport, putting himself with equal confidence in the hands of Horace, Virgil, Simonides and Xenophon and in those of the
masseurs
of the University gymnasiums. In 1928 he had been a sprinter in the American Olympic Track Team at Amsterdam, and he was prouder of his Olympic victories than of his academic honours. After 1929 he had spent some years in Paris as a representative of the United Press, and he was proud of his well-nigh perfect French. "I learned French from the classics," he used to say. "My French tutors were La Fontaine and Madame Bonnet, the caretaker of the house in which I lived in rue Vaugirard. Tu ne trouves pas que je parle comme les animaux de La Fontaine? It was he who taught me
qu'un chien peut bien regarder un Evêque."

"And you came to Europe," I would say to him, "to learn that?
Un chien peut bien regarder un Evêque
in America as well."

"Oh non," Jack would reply, "en Amerique ce sont les Eveques qui peuvent regarder les chiens."

Jack was also well acquainted with what he called
la banlieue de Paris,
in other words Europe. He had journeyed through Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and Sweden in the same spirit of humanism and with the same thirst for knowledge as the English undergraduates who, before Dr. Arnold's reform, used to journey across Europe during their summer Grand Tour. After his travels Jack had returned to America with the manuscripts of an essay on the spirit of European civilization and of a thesis on Descartes, which had earned him an appointment as Professor of Literature in a great American university. But academic laurels do not flourish on an athlete's brow as Olympic laurels do; and Jack could not get over the fact that a muscular strain in the knee prevented him from running again in the international contests for the honour of the Stars and Stripes. In an attempt to forget his misfortune Jack would repair to the changing-room of the University gymnasium and read his adored Virgil or his beloved Xenophon, surrounded by that odour of rubber, soaking towels, soap and linoleum which is peculiarly associated with classical culture in the universities of the Anglo-Saxon countries.

One morning I came upon him unawares in the changing-room —deserted at that hour—of the Peninsular Base Section's gymnasium, deeply engrossed in Pindar. He looked at me and smiled, colouring slightly. He asked me if I liked Pindar's poetry, adding that the Pindaric odes written in honour of the athletes who had triumphed at Olympia do not convey any idea of the long, hard drudgery of training, that those divine verses resound with the yells of the crowd and the triumphal applause, not with the hoarse whistling and the rasping sound that comes from the mouths of athletes when they make their last terrible effort. "I know all about it," he said, "I know what the last twenty yards are. Pindar is not a modern poet. He is an English poet of the Victorian era."

Although he preferred Horace and Virgil to all other poets because of their serene melancholy, Greek poetry and ancient Greece filled him with a sense of gratitude—not the gratitude of a scholar, but that of a son. He knew by heart whole books of the Iliad, and tears would come into his eyes when he declaimed, in Greek, the hexameters on the "funeral Games in honour of Patroclus." One day, as we sat on the bank of the Volturno, near the Bailey bridge at Capua, waiting for the sergeant guarding the bridge to give us the signal to cross, we discussed Winckelmann and the concept of beauty among the ancient Hellenes. I remember Jack's telling me that the gloomy, funereal, mysterious imagery of ancient Greece, so raw and barbaric, or, as he put it, Gothic, appealed to him less than the joyful, harmonious, clear imagery of Hellenistic Greece, which was so young, vivacious and modern, and which he described as a French Greece, a Greece of the eighteenth century. And when I asked him what, in his opinion, was the American Greece, he replied with a laugh: "The Greece of Xenophon"; and, still laughing, began to paint a remarkable and witty picture of Xenophon—"a Virginian gentleman"— which was a disguised satire, in the style of Dr. Johnson, of certain Hellenists of the Boston school.

Jack had an indulgent and mischievous contempt for the Hellenists of Boston. One morning I found him sitting under a tree, with a book on his knees, near a heavy battery facing Cassino. It was during the sad days of the Battle of Cassino. It was raining—for a fortnight it had been doing nothing but rain. Columns of lorries laden with American soldiers, sewn up in white sheets of coarse linen cloth, were going down in the direction of the little military cemeteries which were to be seen here and there beside the Via Appia and the Via Casilina. To keep the rain off the pages of his book—an eighteenth-century anthology of Greek poetry with a soft leather binding and gilt edges, presented to him by the worthy Gaspare Casella, the famous antiquarian bookseller of Naples and a friend of Anatole France—Jack was sitting with his body bent forward, covering the precious book with his mackintosh.

I remember his saying to me with a laugh that in Boston Simonides was not considered a great poet. And he added that Emerson, in his funeral panegyric of Thoreau, declared that "his classic poem on
Smoke
suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides." He laughed heartily. "Ah, ces gens de Boston! Tu vois ca? Thoreau, in the opinion of Boston, is greater than Simonides!" he said, and the rain entered his mouth, mingling with his words and his laughter.

His favourite American poet was Edgar Allan Poe. But sometimes, when he had drunk a whisky more than usual, he would confuse Horace's verses with Poe's, and be deeply astonished to find Annabel Lee and Lydia in the same alcaic. Or he would confuse Madame de Sévigné's "talking leaf "with one of LaFontaine's talking animals.

"It wasn't an animal," I would say to him. "It was a leaf—a leaf from a tree."

And I would quote the relevant passage from the letter in which Madame de Sévigné wrote that she wished there was a talking leaf in the park of her castle, Les Rochers, in Brittany.

"Mais cela c'est absurde," Jack would say. "Une feuille qui parle! Un animal, ca se comprend, mais une feuille!"

"For the understanding of Europe," I would say to him, "Cartesian logic is useless. Europe is a mysterious place, full of inviolable secrets."

"Ah, Europe! What an extraordinary place it is!" Jack would exclaim. "I need Europe, to make me conscious of being an American."

But Jack was not one of those
Americians de Paris
—they are found on every page of Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
—who round about 1925 used to frequent the Select in Montparnasse, who disdained Ford Maxon Ford's tea-parties and Sylvia Beach's bookshop, and who are said by Sinclair Lewis, alluding specifically to certain characters created by Eleanor Green, to have been like the intellectual fugitives who frequented the Rive Gauche roundabout 1925, or like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound or Isadora Duncan— "iridescent flies caught in the black web of an ancient and amoral European culture." Nor was Jack one of those decadent transatlantic youths who formed the
Transition
{1}
clique. No, Jack was neither a
déraciné
nor a decadent. He was an American in love with Europe.