The Skin (13 page)

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During those days a crowd of young men of miserable appearance used to assemble each morning on the pavements of the Piazza San Ferdinando. They would hang about all day outside the Caffè Van Bol e Feste, only dispersing in the evening, at curfew-time.

They were thin, pale young men, clad in rags or in uniforms which they had begged. For the most part they were officers and men of the disbanded and humiliated Italian Army who had escaped from the massacres and the shame of the German or Allied prisoners-of-war camps and had sought refuge in Naples in the hope of finding work, or of being enlisted by Marshal Badoglio and thus joining in the fight at the side of the Allies. Consisting almost entirely of natives of the provinces of Central and Northern Italy still under the German heel, and prevented in consequence from reaching their homes, they had done all they could to escape from that humiliating and precarious situation. But having had their services refused at the barracks at which they presented themselves for enrolment, and being unable to find work, their one remaining hope now was that they would not be overwhelmed by their sufferings and humiliations. And meanwhile they were dying of hunger. Dressed in lurid rags— one in a pair of German or American trousers, another in a threadbare civilian jacket or a faded disintegrating woollen jersey, another in a British combat-jacket—they tried to cheat cold and hunger by walking up and down the pavements of San Ferdinando, waiting for some Allied sergeant to engage their services for work in the docks or for some other arduous labour.

These young men aroused the pity not of the passers-by, who were also miserable and starving, nor of the Allied soldiers, who did not conceal their resentful embarrassment at the sight of such vexatious evidence of the hollowness of their victory, but of the prostitutes who cluttered up the archways of the Teatro San Carlo and the Galleria Umberto and congregated around the pick-up points. Every so often one of those unfortunates would approach the group of starving young men, offering them cigarettes or biscuits or a few slices of bread, which on most occasions were refused with a disdainful or shamefaced courtesy.

Among those unhappy men moved the noble apostles of Narcissus, seeking to enrol a few fresh recruits in their fairy band, looking upon it all as a great lark, an incredibly smart and subtle manoeuvre, to try to corrupt those young men who had no roof, no food, and were stunned by despair. Perhaps it was their wild appearance, their shaggy beards, their eyes, bright from fever and lack of sleep, and their tattered garments that awoke in the breasts of those noble apostles of Narcissus strange desires and refined longings. Or did the anguish and misery of those unhappy men perhaps furnish that very element of "suffering" which their Marxist aestheticism lacked? The suffering of others must surely serve some purpose.

It was actually in the midst of that unhappy crowd that one day, as I was passing the Caffè Van Bol e Feste, I thought I espied Jeanlouis, whom I had not seen for some months, and whom I recognized not so much by his appearance as by his voice, which was very soft and slightly hoarse. Jeanlouis recognized me too, and he ran to meet me. I asked him what he was doing in Naples and where he was staying. He replied that he had fled from Rome about a month previously to evade the inquiries of the German police, and began to describe to me in a charming voice the vicissitudes and perils of his flight across the Abruzzi mountains.

"What did the German police want with you?" I asked him abruptly.

"Ah, you've no idea!" he replied, adding that life in Rome had become hell, that everyone was going into hiding or fleeing through fear of the Germans, that the people were awaiting the arrival of the Allies with longing, that he had found many old friends in Naples, and that he had made many new acquaintances among the officers and men of the British and American armies—"des garcons exquis," he called them. And suddenly he began to talk to me about his mother, the old Contessa B— (Jeanlouis belonged to one of the oldest and most illustrious branches of the Milanese nobility), telling me that she had taken refuge in her villa on Lake Como, that she had forbidden any reference to be made in her presence to the extraordinary events that were unfolding in Italy and in Europe, and that she continued to receive her friends as if the war were simply a piece of society scandal, at the mention of which visitors to her dressing-room were at the most allowed to smile discreetly, with polite indulgence. "Simonetta," he said (Simonetta was his sister), "has asked me to remember her kindly to you." And all of a sudden he fell silent.

I looked him in the eye, and he blushed.

"Leave those poor boys alone," I said. "Aren't you ashamed?"

Jeanlouis fluttered his eyelids, feigning ingenuous surprise.

"Which boys?" he answered.

"You ought to leave them alone," I said. "It's shameful to trifle with other people's hunger."

"I don't understand what you mean," he replied, shrugging his shoulders. But he at once added that those poor boys were hungry, that he and his friends had determined to help them, that among his friends he numbered many Britishers and Americans, and that he hoped to be able to do something for those poor boys. "My duty as a Marxist," he concluded, "is to try to prevent those unhappy lads from becoming the tools of
bourgeois
reaction."

I looked at him hard. Jeanlouis fluttered his eyelids and asked me: "Why are you looking at me like that? What's the matter?"

"Did you know Count Karl Marx personally?" I said.

"Who?" said Jeanlouis.

"Count Karl Marx. A fine name, Marx. It's older than yours."

"Don't make fun of me. Stop it," said Jeanlouis.

"If Marx were not a count, you certainly wouldn't be a Marxist."

"You don't understand me," said Jeanlouis. "Marxism—one needn't be a working man, or a rotter, to be a Marxist."

"On the contrary," I said, "one needs to be a rotter to be your kind of Marxist. Leave those boys alone, Jeanlouis. They are hungry, but they would rather steal than go to bed with you."

Jeanlouis looked at me with an ironical smile. "Either with me or with someone else," he said.

"Neither with you nor with anyone else. Leave them alone. They are hungry."

"Either with me or with someone else," repeated Jeanlouis. "You don't know the power of hunger."

"You nauseate me," I said.

"Why should I nauseate you?" said Jeanlouis. "What fault is it of mine if they are hungry? Do
you
give those boys anything to eat? I help them—I do what I can. We regard it as our duty to help one another. Anyhow, what has all this got to do with you?"

"Hunger has no power," I said. "If you think you can count on other people's hunger you're mistaken. At twenty, men don't suffer because
they
are hungry, but because others are hungry. Ask Count Marx if it isn't true that a man doesn't prostitute himself just because he's hungry. To a young man of twenty hunger isn't a personal matter."

"You don't know the young men of today," said Jeanlouis. "I should like to help you get to know them personally. They are much better, and much worse, than you think." And he told me that he had an appointment with a few of his friends at a house on the Vomero, that he would be very pleased indeed if I would go there with him, that I should meet some most interesting boys there, that he was not sure if I would like them or not, but that in any case he advised me to get to know thein personally because an acquaintance with them would more or less enable me to pass judgment on all the rest, and because, in short, I had no right to pass judgment on young men if I didn't know them. "Come with me," he said, "and you will see that after all we are no worse than the men of your generation. We are, at all events, what you have made us."

And so we went to a house on the Vomero where a few young Communist intellectuals, friends of Jeanlouis, were in the habit of meeting. It was an ugly
bourgeois
house, furnished in the bad taste that is characteristic of the Neapolitan
bourgeoise.
The walls were hung with pictures, dripping with thick oil-paint and brightly varnished, representative of the Neapolitan school that flourished at the end of the last century. Framed in the window, down at the foot of Mount Echia and beyond the trees of the Parco Grifeo and Via Caracciolo, one saw in the distance the sea, the Castello dell'Ovo, and far away on the horizon the blue ghost of Capri. That seascape, viewed from this vulgar
bourgeois
interior, harmonized in some absurd way with the furniture, with the pictures and photographs that adorned the walls, with the gramophone, the radio set, and the chandelier of false Murano crystal that swung from the ceiling, directly above the table in the centre of the room.

It was a
bourgeois
scene, too, whose outline was framed in the window—a
bourgeois
interior rooted in nature and peopled, in the foreground, by young men who sat on the divan and on the easy-chairs with their red satin covers, smoking American cigarettes and sipping small cups of coffee. They were talking of Marx, Gide, Eluard and Sartre, their eyes fixed on Jeanlouis in ecstatic admiration. I had found a seat in a corner of the room and was watching their faces, hands and gestures outlined against the background of those distant prospects of sea and sky. They were all youths of about eighteen or twenty, seemingly students, and the poverty of the families from which they came was visible not only in their garments, which were threadbare, grease-stained and mended in parts with hasty care, but in their personal slovenliness—in their unshaved beards, their dirty nails, the long, unkempt hair which covered their ears and hung down over their necks and inside the collars of their shirts. And I wondered how far such slovenliness, which was then, and is to this day, fashionable among young Communist intellectuals of
bourgeoise
origin, could be attributed to indigence, and how far to coquetry.

Among those students were a few youths who seemingly belonged to the working class. There was also a girl, not more than sixteen years of age and extraordinarily fat. She had white skin with red freckles, and for some unknown reason she seemed to me to be pregnant. She was sitting in a small armchair beside the gramophone, her elbows resting on her knees and her broad face sunk in her hands; and she kept looking from face to face, gazing unblinkingly at each in turn. I do not remember her taking any part in the discussion during all the time we spent in that room, save at the end, when she told her companions that they were a lot of Trotskyites; and that remark sufficed to dispel the general gaiety and break up the meeting.

These youths knew me by repute, and they naturally affected to despise me, treating me as a contemptible being to whom not only the world of their ideas and feelings but even their idiom meant nothing. They talked among themselves, as if they were speaking a language unknown to me, and on the rare occasions when they addressed me they spoke slowly, as if struggling to find the right word in an idiom which was not theirs. They kept winking at one another as if there existed among them some kind of secret understanding, and I was not merely an outsider but an unfurtunate being, deserving of pity. They talked of Eluard, Gide, Aragon and Jouve as if they were dear friends, with whom they had long been intimate. And I was already on the point of reminding them that probably they had seen those names for the first time in the pages of my literary review
Prospettive,
in which during those three years of war I had been publishing the banned verses of the poets of the French
maquis,
and of which they now pretended that they no longer even remembered the title, when Jeanlouis began talking about Soviet music and literature.

Jeanlouis was on his feet, leaning against the table, and his pale face, resplendent with that delicate yet virile beauty which is peculiar to the scions of certain of the great Italian noble families, contrasted singularly with the mincing softness of his accent, with his affected grace of manner, with all the wondrous femininity that was perceptible in his demeanour, in his voice, in his very words, with their vagueness and ambiguity. Jeanlouis' was the romantic male beauty which delighted Stendhal, the beauty of Fabrizio del Dongo. He had the head of Antinous, carved in marble the colour of ivory, and the long ephebic body of an Alexandrine statue. His hands were short and white, his eyes proud yet soft, dark and lustrous in its regard, his lips red. His smile was evil: it was the bitter, sorrowful smile which Winckelmann sets as an extreme limit to his pure ideal of Greek beauty. And I asked myself in amazement how on earth my own robust, courageous, virile generation, a generation of men who had been moulded by war, by civil strife, by their resistance as individuals to the tyranny of dictators and of the mob, a masculine generation, not resigned to death and certainly not conquered, in spite of the humiliation and suffering of its defeat, had fathered a generation so corrupt, cynical and effeminate, so calmly and amiably despairing, a generation of which young men like Jeanlouis represented the flower, which bloomed on the extreme fringe of the consciousness of our time.

Jeanlouis had begun talking about Soviet art, and I, from my seat in the corner, smiled ironically as I heard on those lips the names of Prokofiev, Konstantin Simonov, Shostakovich, Essenin and Bulgakov, uttered in the same languid tones as those in which, until a few months before, I had been wont to hear him utter the names of Proust, Apollinaire, Cocteau and Valery. One of those boys said that the theme of Shostakovich's symphony
The Siege of Leningrad
repeated in an extraordinary way the motif of a warsong of the German S.S., the raucous sound of their cruel voices, the cadenced rhythm of their heavy feet as they marched over the sacred Russian soil. (The words "sacred Russian soil," uttered in a mincing, tired Neapolitan accent, sounded blatantly insincere in that smoke-filled room, in the presence of the pallid, ironical ghost of Vesuvius, outlined against the dull patch of sky that was visible through the window.) I observed that the theme of Shostakovich's symphony was the same as that of the Fifth Symphony of Tchaikovsky, and all with a single voice protested, saying that naturally I understood nothing of the proletarian music of Shostakovich, of his "musical romanticism," and of his deliberate echoes of Tchaikovsky. "Or rather," I said, "of the
bourgeois
music of Tchaikovsky." At my words a wave of distress and indignation swept over those youths, and they turned to me, talking all at once in confused tones, each trying to dominate the voices of the rest:
"Bourgeois?
What has Shostakovich to do with
bourgeois
music? Shostakovich is a proletarian—he is a true-blue. No one has any right today to have such ideas about Communism. It's scandalous."