The Skin (20 page)

From him, far more than from men, with their culture and their vanity, I learned that virtue is its own reward, that it is an end in itself, and that it does not even aspire to save the world (not even that!), but only to invent ever new justifications for its disinterestedness and its liberty of action. The relationship of a man and a dog is always a relationship of two free spirits, of two forms of dignity, of two types of virtue each of which is its own reward. It is the most disinterested and the most romantic of relationships, one of those relationships which death illuminates with its own wan radiance— a radiance tinged with the colour of the pale moon that hangs above the sea at dawn, when the sky is green.

I saw reproduced in him my most mysterious impulses, my secret instincts, my doubts, my fears, my hopes. The dignity of his attitude towards mankind was mine, the courage and pride of his attitude to life were mine, his contempt for the fickle passions of men was mine. But he was more sensitive than I to the obscure portents of nature and to the invisible presence of death, which ever lurks about us, silent and suspicious. He sensed the approach of the sad spirits that haunt our dreams as they come from afar through the night air, like dead insects that are borne on the wind, none knows whence. And on some nights, as he lay curled up at my feet in my bare room on Lipari, he followed with his eyes an invisible phantasm as it hovered around me, advancing and receding, and lingering long hours watching me through the window-pane. Every so often, if the mysterious presence came so close to me that it brushed my forehead, Febo would snarl menacingly, the hair on his back would bristle; and I would hear a mournful cry receding into the night, and gradually dying away.

He was the dearest of brothers to me, a true brother, one who betrays not, nor humiliates. He was a loving, a helping, an understanding, a forgiving brother..Only the man who has suffered long years of exile on a desert island, and who, on his return to the haunts of men, finds himself shunned and avoided as if he were a leper by all those who one day, when the tyrant is dead, will pose as heroes of freedom—only he knows what a dog can mean to a human being. Often Febo would gaze at me with a sad, noble expression of reproach in his loving eyes. At such times my sadness made me feel strangely ashamed, almost remorseful, and I was conscious as I faced him of a kind of heightened moral susceptibility, I felt that at those moments Febo despised me. True, he grieved for me, he was tender and loving; yet his eyes certainly held a suggestion of pity and, simultaneously, of contempt. He was not only my brother, but my judge. He was the guardian of my dignity, and at the same time, to use the expression of the old Greeks, he was my
δορνφόρημα
.
[(on the stage) a person who represents a prince without speaking.]

He was a sad dog, with grave eyes. Every evening we used to spend long hours on the high windswept threshold of my house, looking at the sea. Ah! the Grecian sea of Sicily, ah! the red crags of Scylla, yonder, facing Charybdis, and the snow-capped peak of Aspromonte, and the white shoulder of Etna, the Olympus of Sicily! Truly, as Theocritus sings, life offers no more beautiful experience than to contemplate the Sicilian sea from a vantage-point on the shore. We used to see the shepherds' fires flaring up on the mountains, and the boats sailing forth into the deep to meet the moon; we used to hear the mournful wail of the sea-shells, through which the fishermen call to one another over the water, receding into the silvery, moonlit haze. We used to see the moon rising over the crags of Scylla, and Stromboli, the high, inaccessible volcano that stands in the middle of the sea, blazing like a solitary pyre within the deep blue forest of the night. We used to look at the sea, inhaling the pungent salt air, and the strong, intoxicating perfume of the orange-groves, and the smell of goats' milk and of juniper branches burning in the hearths, and that warm, heavy scent of women which pervades the Sicilian night when the first stars climb wanly above the horizon.

Then one day I was taken with handcuffs on my wrists from Lipari to another island, and from there, after long months, to Tuscany. Febo followed me at a distance, hiding among the casks of anchovies and the coils of rope on the deck of the
Sante Marina,
the little steamer which crosses every so often from Lipari to Naples, and among the hampers of fish and tomatoes on the motor-boat that plies between Naples, Ischia and Ponza. With the courage that is peculiar to cowards—it is the only positive claim that slaves have to share the privileges of the free—the people stopped to look at me with reproving, contemptuous expressions, hurling insults at me through clenched teeth. Only the lepers who lay in the sun on the benches in Naples harbour smiled at me surreptitiously, spitting on the ground between the shoes of the
carabinieri.
I looked back now and again to see if Febo was following me, and I saw him walking with his tail between his legs, hugging the walls, through the streets of Naples, from the Immacolatella to the Molo Beverello, a wonderfully sad look in his bright eyes.

In Naples, as I walked handcuffed between the
carabinieri
along Via Partenope, two ladies smilingly approached me. They were Benedetto Croce's wife and Minnie Casella, the wife of my dear friend Gaspare Casella. They greeted me in the motherly, kindly fashion that is characteristic of Italian women, thrusting flowers between the handcuffs and my wrists, and Signora Croce asked the
carabinieri
to take me to some place where I might get a drink and some refreshment. It was two days since I had eaten. "At least let him walk in the shade," said Signora Croce. It was June, and the sun beat down on one's head like a hammer. "Thank you, I don't need anything," I said. "I only ask you to give my dog something to drink."

Febo had stopped a few yards from us and was looking into Signora Croce's eyes with an intensity that was almost painful. This was his first experience of the human kindness, the pity and the consideration of women. He sniffed the water for a long time before drinking it. When, a few months' later, I was transferred to Lucca, I was shut up in the prison, where I remained for many weeks. And when I came out, escorted by my guards, to my new place of banishment, Febo was waiting for me outside the door of the gaol. He was thin and mud-stained, and there was a horribly gentle expression in his eyes, which shone brilliantly.

Two more years my exile lasted, and for two years we lived in a little house in the heart of a wood. One room was occupied by Febo and myself, the other by the
carabinieri
who were my warders. At last I regained my freedom, or what in those days passed for freedom, and to me it was like going from a room without windows into a narrow room without walls. We went to live in Rome; and Febo was sad—he seemed to be humiliated by the spectacle of my freedom. He knew that freedom is alien to humanity, that men cannot and perhaps do not know how to be free, and that in Italy and in Europe freedom is discredited no less than slavery.

*       *       *       *

Throughout our stay in Pisa we used to remain indoors nearly all day. Not until noon or thereabouts did we go out for our walk by the river, the fair river of Pisa, the silver Arno, strolling along the beautiful Lungarni, so light and cold. Then we would go to the Piazza dei Miracoli, where stands the leaning tower for which Pisa is world-famous. We used to climb the tower, and from the top look out over the Pisan plain as far as Leghorn and Massa, gazing at the pine forests, and the sea below, the shining lid of the sea, and the Apuan Alps, white with snow and marble. This was my own soil, my own Tuscan soil, here were my own woods and my own sea, here were my own mountains and fields and rivers.

Towards evening we would go and sit on the parapet overlooking the Arno (that narrow stone parapet along which Lord Byron, in the days when he was an exile in Pisa, used to gallop every morning on his beautiful alezan, amid the terrified shouts of the peaceful citizens). We used to watch the river as it flowed along, carrying with it in its bright career leaves blighted by the frosts of winter and mirroring the silver clouds that drift across the immemorial sky of Pisa.

Febo used to spend long hours curled up at my feet, and every so often he would get up, walk over to the door, and turn and look at me. I would go and open the door for him, and he would go out, coming back after an hour or two, breathless, his coat smoothed by the wind, his eyes bright from the cold winter sunshine. At night he used to lift his head and listen to the voice of the river, to the voice of the rain beating down on the river; and sometimes I would wake up, and feel his warm eyes resting gently upon me, feel his vital, affectionate presence there in the dark room, and his sadness, his desolate foreboding of death.

One day he went out and never came back. I waited for him until evening, and when night fell rushed through the streets, calling him by name. I returned home at dead of night and threw myself on my bed, facing the half-open door. Every so often I went to the window and called him again and again in a loud voice At daybreak I again rushed through the deserted streets, between the silent facades of the houses which, under the leaden sky, looked as though they were made of dirty paper.

As soon as it was daylight I rushed to the municipal dog-prison. I went into a grey room where I found a number of whining dogs, shut up in stinking cages, their throats still bearing the marks of the noose. The caretaker told me that my dog might have been run over by a car, or stolen, or thrown into the river by a gang of young hooligans. He advised me to go the round of the dog-shops: who could say that Febo was not in some dog-shop?

All the morning I rushed about from one dog-shop to another, and at last a canine barber in a dirty little shop near the Piazza dei Cavalieri asked me if I had been to the University Veterinary Clinic, to which dog-thieves were in the habit of selling cheaply the animals that were subsequently used for clinical experiments. I rushed to the University, but it was already past midday and the Veterinary Clinic was closed. I returned home. I felt as if there were something cold, hard and smooth in my eye-sockets: my eyes seemed to be made of glass.

In the afternoon I returned to the University and went into the Veterinary Clinic. My heart was thumping, I was so weak and in such an agony of mind that I could hardly walk. I asked for the doctor on duty and told him my name. The doctor, a fair-haired, short-sighted young man with a tired smile received me courteously and gazed at me for a long time before replying that he would do everything possible to help me.

He opened a door and we entered a large, clean, bright room, the floor of which was covered with blue linoleum. Along the walls, one beside the other, like beds in a children's clinic, were rows of strange cradles, shaped like 'cellos. In each of the cradles was a dog, lying on its back, with its stomach exposed, or its skull split, or its chest gaping open.

The edges of those dreadful wounds were held apart by thin steel wires, wound round wooden pegs of the kind that in musical instruments serves to keep the strings taut. One could see the naked heart beating; the lungs, with the veins of the bronchial tubes looking like the branches of a tree, swelling exactly as the foliage of a tree does when the wind blows; the red, shining liver very slowly contracting; slight tremors running through the pink and white substance of the brain as in a steamy mirror; the coils of the intestines sluggishly disentangling themselves like a heap of snakes waking from their deep slumber. And not a moan came from the half-open mouths of the tortured dogs.

As we entered all the dogs turned their eyes upon us. They gazed at us imploringly, and at the same time their expressions were full of a dread foreboding. They followed our every gesture with their eyes, watching us with trembling lips. Standing motionless in the middle of the room, I felt a chill spreading through my limbs; little by little I became as if turned to stone. I could not open my lips, I could not move a step. The doctor laid his hand on my arm. "Courage," he said. The word dispelled the chill that was in my bones; slowly I moved, and bent over the first cradle. As I proceeded from cradle to cradle the colour returned to my face, and my heart dared to hope. And suddenly I saw Febo.

He was lying on his back, his stomach exposed and a sound buried in his liver. He was staring at me; his eyes were full of tears, and they had in them a wonderful tenderness. He was breathing gently, his mouth half-open, and his body was trembling horribly. He was staring at me, and an agonizing pain stabbed my heart. "Febo," I said in a low voice; and Febo looked at me with a wonderfully tender expression. In him I saw Christ, in him I saw Christ crucified, I saw Christ looking at me with eyes that were full of a wonderful tenderness. "Febo," I said in a low voice, bending over him and stroking his forehead. Febo kissed my hand, and not a moan escaped him.

The doctor came up to me and touched my arm. "I can't interrupt the experiment," he said. "It's not allowed. But for your sake . . . I'll give him an injection. He won't suffer."

I took the doctor's hand in mine. "Swear to me that he won't suffer," I said, while the tears rolled down my cheeks.

"He'll fall asleep for ever," said the doctor. "I would like my death to be as peaceful as his."

I said: "I'll close my eyes. I don't want to see him die. But be quick—be quick!"

"It will only take a moment," said the doctor, and he moved noiselessly away, gliding over the soft carpet of linoleum. He went to the end of the room and opened a cupboard.

I remained standing before Febo. I was trembling horribly, the tears were running down my face. Febo was staring at me, and not the faintest moan escaped him. He was staring at me with a wonderfully tender expression. The other dogs, lying on their backs in their cradles, were also staring at me. They all had a wonderfully tender expression in their eyes, and not the faintest moan escaped them.

Suddenly I uttered a cry of terror. "Why this silence?" I shouted. "What does this silence mean?"