The Skin (12 page)

"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

A
T
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 frail 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.

From these overt contacts with the secret and mysterious perversions of the proletariat they caught an infection that was social in character, not only as it affected their conduct, but also and above all as it affected their ideas, or rather their intellectual points of view. Those same noble apostles of Narcissus who had hitherto posed as decadent aesthetes, as the last representatives of a weary civilization, sated with pleasures and sensations, and who had looked to such as Novalis, the Comte de Lautreamont and Oscar Wilde, to Diaghilev, Rainer Maria Rilke, D'Annunzio, Gide, Cocteau, Marcel Proust, Jacques Maritain, Stravinsky and even Barrés to furnish the motifs of their played-out
"bourgeois"
aestheticism, now posed as Marxist aesthetes; and they preached Marxism just as hitherto they had preached the most effete narcissism, borrowing the motifs of their new aestheticism from Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Shostakovich, and referring contemptuously to
bourgeois
sexual conventionalism as a debased form of Trotskyism. They deluded themselves that they had found in Communism a point of contact with the ephebes of the proletariat—a secret conspiracy, a new covenant, moral and social as well as sexual in character. From
"ennemis de la nature,"
as Mathurin Regnier called them, they had changed into
"ennemis du capitalisme."
Who would ever have thought that among other things the war would have bred a race of Marxist pederasts?

The majority of these proletarian ephebes had replaced their working-clothes with Allied uniforms, among which they preferred, because of their distinctive cut, the elegant American uniforms, which were tight round the thighs and even tighter round the waist. But many of them, too, wore dungarees, and derived satisfaction from exhibiting their oil-stained hands. These were the most corrupt and shameless of all; for there undoubtedly was an element of diabolical hypocrisy or subtle perversion in their attachment to their' working-clothes, which they degraded to the status of a livery or mask. These noble apostles of Narcissus, who posed as Communists, wore their silk shirts open at the neck with the collars turned down over the collars of their tweed jackets, were shod with pigskin moccasins by Franceschini or Hermes, and caressed their painted lips with enormous silk handkerchiefs bearing their initials embroidered in the Venetian style, had filled their hearts not only with a sad, insolent contempt but with a sort of feminine jealousy, an angry, evil resentment. Not a trace remained in their make-up of that robust sentiment which impels proletarian youth to hate and at the same time to despise the wealth, graces and privileges of others. That virile social consciousness had been replaced by a womanish envy and ambition. They too proclaimed themselves to be Communists, they too sought in Marxism a social justification for their sexual
affranchissement.
But they did not realize that their vaunted Marxism was merely an unconscious proletarian Bovary-ism which had degenerated into homosexuality.

During this same period an obscure Neapolitan printing works had issued, under the editorship of a publisher of rare and valuable books, a collection of war-poems written by a group of young English poets, exiles in the trenches and fox-holes of Cassino. The "fairy band" of inverts who had flocked to Naples, by way of the German lines, from all parts of Europe, and the sprinkling of homosexuals in the Allied armies
{3}
, had pounced on those poems with an eagerness which revealed that their traditional
"bourgeois"
aesthetic-ism was not yet dead; and they used to meet to read them, or rather to declaim them, in those few drawing-rooms of the Neapolitan aristocracy which one by one were re-opening in the ancient mansions that had been shattered by explosions and despoiled by looters, or in the hall of the Ristorante Baghetti in Via Chiaia, which they had turned into their private club. These poems were not calculated to help them reconcile their still active narcissism with their new Marxist aestheticism. They were lyrics of a cold, glassy simplicity, reflecting that sad indifference in face of war which characterizes young men in all armies, even young German soldiers. The terse, frigid melancholy of these verses was not obscured nor warmed by hopeful anticipations of victory, its serenity was not disturbed by the feverish pulse of revolt. After the first wave of their enthusiasm had passed the noble apostles of Narcissus and their young proletarian ephebes forsook those poems in favour of the latest writings of Andre Gide (whom they called "our Goethe"), Paul Eluard, Andre Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pierre-Jean Jouve, published sporadically in the reviews of the French Resistance which were already beginning to arrive from Algeria. In those writings they vainly sought the mysterious sign, the secret word of command that would throw open to them the gates of that New Jerusalem which was undoubtedly arising in some parts of Europe and which, they hoped, would unite within its walls all the young men who were anxious to work with the people, and on behalf of the people, for the salvation of Western civilization and for the victory of Communism. ("Communism" was the name they gave to their homosexual Marxism.) But after a time the need, of which they became suddenly and powerfully aware, to associate more intimately with the proletariat, to seek new means of allaying their insatiable hunger for novelty and "suffering," new justifications for their Marxist postures, prompted them to undertake new quests, to seek new experiences, as an antidote to the ennui to which, in consequence of the prolonged halt of the Allied armies before Cassino, their noble spirits were giving way.