The Skin (42 page)

I recognized it: it was Tani Masier. But I did not know whether he was already dead or whether he was still alive, and was turning round to call me by name from the threshold of the night. And I scented the odour of death, that odour which is like a singing voice, a summoning voice.

"Poor Tani—he doesn't know that he must die," said Giacomo Lombroso in a low voice. He for his part already knew that Death was standing on the threshold of his house, leaning against his door, waiting for him to come.

Brunelleschi's cupola was shimmering high above the roofs of Florence. The moon shed its pale beams upon Giotto's white steeple. I thought of little Giorgio, my sister's son—I thought of that boy, of thirteen, asleep in a pool of blood behind the laurel hedge in my sister's garden, yonder on the heights of Arcetri. What did they want of me, all those corpses that lay beneath the moon in the paved streets, on the tiles of the roofs, in the gardens beside the Arno— what did they want of us?

From the vast maze of Oltrarno's alleys an odour of death ascended, like a singing voice, a summoning voice. But why? Could it really be that the dead hoped to persuade us that it was better to die?

One morning we crossed the river and occupied Florence. From sewers, cellars, attics and cupboards, from under beds and from cracks in the walls, where for a month they had been living "clandestinely," there emerged, like rats, the latter-day heroes, the tyrants of tomorrow—those heroic rats of freedom who one day would overrun Europe in order to build on the ruins of foreign tyranny the kingdom of domestic oppression.

We passed through Florence in silence, with downcast eyes, feeling like intruders and spoil-sports beneath the scornful gaze of the clowns of freedom, with their rosettes, armlets, braid and ostrich-feathers, and their red, white and green faces. We pursued the Germans into the valleys of the Apennines and up the mountains. Upon the still lukewarm ashes of summer descended the chill rain of autumn, and we passed long months in front of the Gothic Line listening to the murmur of the rain as it fell on Montepiano's forests of oaks and chestnut-trees, the firs of the Abetone, and the white marble rocks of the Apaun Alps.

Then came winter, and every three days we used to leave Leghorn, where the Allied Command had its headquarters, and go up the line into the Versilia-Garfagnana sector. Sometimes at night we were caught unawares and took refuge near the American Ninety-second Negro Division in my house at Forte dei Marmi, which the German sculptor Hildebrand, helped by the painter Boeklin, had built at the end of the last century on the barren slope between the pine-forest and the sea.

We used to spend our nights sitting round the fireplace in the great hall, which was adorned with frescoes by Hildebrand and Boeklin. Bullets from the German machine-gun nests on the banks of the Cinquale pinged against the walls of the house, the wind in its fury shook the pines, the sea roared beneath the cloudless sky, across which sped Orion of the beautiful sandals with his gleaming bow and sword.

One night Jack said to me in a low voice: "Look at Campbell."

I looked at Campbell. He was sitting in front of the fireplace among the officers of the Ninety-second Negro Division, and he was smiling. At first I did not understand. But in Jack's eyes, which were fixed on Campbell's face, I read a timid valediction, an affectionate farewell; and when Campbell lifted his head and looked at Jack his eyes, too, expressed a timid valediction, an affectionate farewell. I saw them smile at each other, and I was conscious of a very mild sense of envy, a tender jealousy. In that moment I understood that Jack and Campbell shared a secret, that Tani Masier, Giacomo Lombroso and my little Giorgio, my sister's son, shared a secret, which they jealously, smilingly kept from me.

One morning a partisan from Camaiore came to ask me if I wanted to see Magi. When, a few months before, our pursuit of the Germans had brought us to Forte dei Marmi, I had immediately, without telling Jack, gone to look Magi up. The house was deserted. Some partisans told me that Magi had fled on the very day on which our advanced guards had entered Viareggio. If I had found him at home, if, when I knocked at his door, he had appeared at the window, I might have shot him—not because of the wrong he had done me, not because of the persecution I had suffered following his denunciations, but because of the wrong he had done others. He was a kind of local Fouché. He was tall, pale and thin, with bleary eyes. His house was the one in which Boeklin had lived for many years at the time when' he was painting his Centaurs and Nymphs and his famous
Island of the Dead.
I knocked at the door and looked up, expecting him to appear at the window. In the wall beneath the window is the tablet commemorating the years which Boeklin spent at Forte dei Marmi. I read the words on the tablet and waited for the window to open, my automatic rifle in my hand. If he had appeared at that moment I might have shot him.

I went with the partisan from Camaiore to see Magi. In a meadow near the village the partisan indicated something that protruded from the earth. "There's Magi," he said. I scented the odour of death, and Jack said to me: "Let's go." But I wanted to see from close at hand what it was that was sticking out of the ground, and on approaching I saw that it was a foot, still encased in a shoe. The woollen sock covered a fragment of black flesh, and the mouldy shoe looked as if it were impaled on a stick.

"Why don't you bury that foot?" I said to the partisan.

"No," replied the partisan, "it's got to stay like that. His wife came, then his daughter. They wanted the corpse. Oh, no—that corpse is ours. Then they came back with a spade, and wanted to bury the foot. Oh, no—that foot is ours. And it's got to stay like that."

"It's horrible," I said.

"Horrible? The other day there were two little sparrows on that foot, making love. It was comical to see those two little sparrows making love on Magi's foot."

"Go and fetch a spade," I said.

"No," replied the partisan obstinately. "It's got to stay like that."

I thought of Magi, wedged in the ground with that foot sticking out. Why couldn't he curl up in his grave and sleep? It was as though he were suspended by that foot above an abyss. Why couldn't he tumble headlong into hell? I thought of that foot, suspended between heaven and hell, exposed to the air, sun, rain and wind, and of the chirruping birds that came and settled on it.

"Go and fetch a spade," I said. "I ask you to do it as a favour. He wronged me greatly when he was alive, but now that he's dead I should like to do him a good turn.
He
was a Christian too."

"No," replied the partisan, "he wasn't a Christian. If Magi was a Christian, what am I? We can't both be Christians, Magi and I."

"There are many ways of being a Christian," I said. "Even a scoundrel can be a Christian."

"No," replied the partisan, "there's only one way of being a Christian. In any case—what does it mean to be a Christian today?"

"If you want to do me a favour," I said, "go and fetch a spade."

"A spade?" said the partisan. "If you like I'll go and fetch a saw. Rather than bury his leg I'll saw it off and give it to the pigs."

That evening, as we sat in front of the fire-place in my home at Forte dei Marmi, we listened in silence to the bullets from the German machine-guns pinging against the wall of the house and the trunks of the pines. I thought of Magi, wedged in the ground with his foot sticking out, and I began to realize what those corpses wanted of us—all those corpses that lay in the streets, fields and woods.

Now I was beginning to realize why the odour of death was like a singing voice, a summoning voice. I was beginning to realize why all those corpses were calling us. They wanted something of us, only we could give them what they asked for. No, it was not pity. It was something else—something deeper and more mysterious. It was not peace—the peace of the grave, of forgiveness, of remembrance, of affection. It was something more remote from man, more remote from life.

Then spring came, and when we moved forward for the final assault I was sent to act as guide to the Japanese Division during the attack on Massa. From Massa we penetrated as far as Carrara, and from there, crossing the Apennines, we went down to Modena.

It was when I saw poor Campbell lying on the dusty road in a pool of blood that I realized what the dead wanted of us. They wanted something that is foreign to man, something that is foreign to life itself. Two days later we crossed the Po and, repelling the German rearguards, approached Milan. Now the war was coming to an end and the massacre was beginning—that terrible massacre of Italians by Italians in houses, streets, fields and woods. But it was on the day when I saw Jack die that I understood at last what it was that was dying around me and within me. There was a smile on Jack's face as he died, and he was looking at me. When the light went from his eyes I felt, for the first time in my life, that a human being had died for me.

On the day on which we entered Milan we ran into a yelling crowd which was rioting in a square. I stood up in the jeep and saw Mussolini hanging by his feet from a hook. He was bloated, white, enormous. I started to be sick on the seat of the jeep: the war was over now, and I could do nothing more for others, nothing more for my country—nothing except be sick.

*       *       *       *

When I left the American military hospital I returned to Rome and went to stay with a friend of mine, Dr. Pietro Marziale, an obstetrician, at No. 9, Via Lambro. The house was situated at the end of the new suburb which extends, squalid and cold, beyond the Piazza Quanrata. It was a small house, comprising barely three rooms, and I had to sleep in the study, on a divan. The walls of the study were lined with bookshelves full of books on gynaecology, and on the edges of the bookshelves were rows of obstetrical instruments—forceps, spoons, large forks, knives, saws, decapitators, basiotribes, cranioclasts, trephines and various kinds of large pincers, as well as glass jugs filled with a yellowish liquid. In each of the jugs was a submerged human foetus.

For many days I had been living in the midst of that community of foeti, and the horror of it oppressed me; for foeti are corpses, though of a monstrous species: they are corpses which have never been born and have never died. If I looked up from the pages of a book I found myself gazing into the half-closed eyes of those little monsters. Sometimes, when I awoke at dead of night, it seemed to me that those horrible foeti, some of them standing, some sitting on the bottom of their jugs, some crouching on their knees in the act of jumping, were slowly lifting their heads and looking at me with smiling faces.

On the bedside table there lay, like a flower-vase, a large jug, in which floated the king of that strange community, a fearsome yet friendly Tricephalus, a foetus with three heads, of the female sex. Those three heads—small, round, wax-coloured—followed me with their eyes, smiling at me with sad and rather timid smiles, full of thamefaced modesty. Whenever I walked about the room the wooden floor trembled slightly, and the three heads bobbed up and down in a horrible yet graceful way. But the other foeti were more melancholy, more preoccupied, more malignant.

Some had the pensive look of a drowned man, and if I happened to shake one of the jugs, teeming with their
flottaison bleme et ravie,
I would see the pensive foetus slowly sink to the bottom. Their mouths, which were half-closed, were wide, like the mouths of frogs, and their ears were short and wrinkled, their noses transparent, their brows furrowed with venerable wrinkles, with a senility still virginal in point of years, and not yet corrupted by age.

Others amused themselves by skipping over the long white ribbons of their umbilical cords. Others yet were seated, squatting on their haunches, in a state of watchful, timorous immobility, as if they were expecting to emerge at any moment into life. Others were suspended in the yellowish liquid as if in mid-air, and seemed to be slowly descending from a lofty, frigid sky—the same sky, I thought, as forms an arch above the Capitol, above the cupola of St. Peter's: the sky of Rome. What a strange species of Angels is to be found in Italy, I thought, what a strange species of eagles! Others were sleeping, curled up in attitudes of extreme abandon. Others were laughing, opening wide their frog-like mouths, their arms folded across their chests, their legs apart, their eyes covered by heavy batrachian lids. Others strained their small ears of ancient ivory, listening to remote, mysterious voices. There were others, finally, that contemplated my every gesture, my pen as it slowly glided across the white page, my abstracted pacing about the room, my relaxed slumbers in front of the blazing fire. And all had the ancient aspect of men not yet born, men who never will be born. They were standing before the closed door of life, even as we stand before the closed door of death.

And there was one that looked like Cupid in the act of shooting his arrow from an invisible bow, a wizened Cupid with the bald head of an old man and a toothless mouth. On him my eyes would rest whenever I was seized with melancholy at the sound of women's voices floating up from the street, calling out and answering from window to window. To me at such moments the most real and most joyous personification of youth, of spring, of love was that fearsome Cupid, the little deformed monster which the obstetrician's forceps had wrenched from its mother's womb, that bald, toothless old man who had come to maturity in the belly of a young woman.

But there were some which I could not look at without a secret terror. Among them were two embryonic Cyclopes, one like that described by Birnbaum, the other like that described by Sangalli. Each gazed at me with a single round eye, sightless and immobile in the centre of its great socket, like the eyes of a fish. There were some Dycephali, their two heads bobbing up and down above their scraggy shoulders. And there were two fearsome Dyprosopi, monsters with two faces, like the god Janus. The face in front was young and smooth, the one behind was smaller and more wizened, contracted into a malignant grimace like that of an old man.