The Skin (43 page)

Sometimes, as I dozed in front of the fireplace, I heard them, or seemed to hear them, talking among themselves.. The words of that mysterious, incomprehensible language floated in the alcohol and dissolved like bubbles of air. And I said to myself as I listened to them: "Perhaps this is the ancient language of men, the language men speak before they are born into life, the language they speak when they are born into death. Perhaps it is the ancient, mysterious language of our conscience." And sometimes, as I looked at them, I said to myself: "These are our witnesses and our judges. It is they who, from the threshold of life, watch us live, and, hidden in the shadows of the primaeval cavern, watch us rejoice, suffer and die. They are the witnesses of the immortality that precedes life, the guarantors of the immortality that follows death, It is they who judge the dead!" And I would say to myself with a shudder: "Dead men are the foeti of death."

I had come out of hospital in a state of extreme weakness, and I used to spend a great part of my days stretched out on the bed. One night I was seized with a violent fever. It seemed to me that that community of foeti had emerged from their jars, and that they were moving about the room, climbing on the writing-desks and the chairs, up the window-curtains, and even on to my bed. Gradually they all assembled on the floor, in the middle of the room, arranging themselves in a semi-circle like judges in session; and they inclined their heads now to the right, now to the left, in order to whisper in one another's ears, looking at me with their round batrachian eyes, staring and sightless. Their bald heads glistened horribly in the dim light of the moon.

The Tricephalus sat in the middle of the council, and on either side of him were the two twin-faced Dyprosopi. To escape the obscure feeling of horror with which I was filled by the sight of that areopagus of monsters I raised my eyes to the window and gazed at the green celestial fields, in which the cold, untarnished silver of the moon glistened like dew.

Suddenly the sound of a voice caused me to lower my eyes. It was the voice of the Tricephalus: "Let the accused be brought in," he said, turning to a group of little monsters that stood apart, looking somewhat like hired ruffians.

I gazed into a corner of the room, towards which all had turned, and was stricken with horror.

I saw, slowly advancing between two of the ruffians, an enormous foetus. It had a flabby stomach, and its legs were covered with glossy whitish hairs, like the down on a thistle. Its arms were folded across its chest, its hands were bound with its umbilical cord. As it walked it swayed its plump flanks in time with its steps, which were slow, grave and silent, as if its feet were made of a softish substance.

It had a bloated, white, enormous head, in which there gleamed two huge, yellow, watery eyes, like the eyes of a blind dog. The expression on its face was proud and at the same time timid, as if ancient pride and a new foreboding of extraordinary events there contended and—with neither ever prevailing—mingled in such a way as to create an expression at once abject and heroic.

It was a face of flesh—the flesh of a foetus and at the same time the flesh of an old man, the flesh of a foetus created in the likeness of an old man. It was a mirror that reflected, in all their senseless glory, the grandeur and wretchedness, the pride and degradation of human flesh. What amazed me above all else in that face was the odd mixture of ambition and disappointment, insolence and sadness, typical of the countenance of man. And for the first time I saw the ugliness of the human countenance, the loathsomeness of the substance of which we are made. How squalid, I thought, is the glory of the flesh of man! How miserable is the triumph expressed in human flesh, even in the fleeting season of youth and love!

Just then the enormous foetus looked at me, and its livid lips, which hung like eyelids, parted in a smile. Its countenance, lit by that timid smile, gradually changed, and became like the face of a woman, an old woman, in which the traces of the rouge that had contributed to her ancient glory emphasized the wrinkles of time, disappointment and betrayal. I surveyed the fleshy chest, the flabby stomach, which seemed weakened by childbirth, and the soft, swollen flanks, and at the thought that this man, once so proud and glorious, was now merely a kind of horrible old woman, I began to laugh. But suddenly I felt ashamed of my laughter; for if, in my cell in the Regina Coeli prison, or on the lonely shore of Lipari, I had sometimes in moments of sadness and despair, delighted to revile him, humiliate him, lower him in my eyes, as the lover does to the women who has betrayed him, now that he stood there before me, a naked, loathsome foetus, I blushed to think that I was laughing at him.

I looked at him, and felt a sort of affectionate compassion growing within me, such as I had never experienced when he was alive. It was a new sentiment, and it filled me with terror and wonderment alike. I tried to lower my eyes, to evade his watery stare, but in vain. The quality of insolence, pride and vulgarity which his countenance possessed during his lifetime had transformed itself into a wondrous melancholy. And I felt profoundly disturbed, almost guilty, not, to be sure, because I thought that my new sentiment might humiliate him, but because I too, for many years before I had rebelled against his senseless tyranny, had bent my back like all the rest beneath the weight of his triumphant flesh.

At that point I heard the voice of the Tricephalus calling me by name and saying: "Why are you silent? Are you by chance still afraid of him? Look! See the substance of which his glory was made."

"What do you expect me to do?" I said, raising my eyes. "Laugh at him? Insult him? Do you think, perhaps, that the sight of his wretchedness offends me? What offends a man is not the sight of decayed human flesh, gnawed by the worms, but the sight of human flesh in its triumph."

"Are you so proud, then, to be a man?" said the Tricephalus.

"A man?" I replied with a laugh. "A man is something even sadder and more fearsome than this mass of decayed flesh. A man is pride, cruelty, betrayal, degradation, violence. Decayed flesh is sadness, shame, fear, remorse, hope. A man—a living man—is a puny thing compared to a mass of putrid flesh."

A malicious laugh went up from the horrible assembly.

"Why do you laugh?" said the Tricephalus, moving his three bald and wrinkled heads from side to side. "Man is in truth a puny thing."

"Man is an ignoble thing," I said. "There is no sadder or more sickening sight than a man or a nation in the hour of triumph. But what nobler or more beautiful thing is there in the world than a man or nation that has been conquered, humiliated, reduced to a heap of putrid flesh?"

While I was speaking the foeti had got up one by one and, moving their large whitish heads from side to side and reeling about on their gangrenous little legs, had grouped themselves in a corner of the room round the Tricephalus and the two Dyprosopi. I saw their eyes gleaming in the semi-darkness, I heard them laughing among themselves and uttering shrill wails. Then they fell silent.

The enormous foetus had remained standing before me and was looking at me with eyes that were like the eyes of a blind dog.

"You see now what they are really like," it said after a long silence. "No one took pity on me."

"Pity? What good would pity have done you?"

"They cut my throat, they hanged me by the feet from a hook, they covered me with spittle," said the foetus very softly.

"I was at Piazzle Loreto too," I said in a low voice. "I saw you hanging by the feet from a hook."

"Do you hate me too?" said the foetus.

"I am not worthy to hate," I replied. "Only a pure being may hate. What men call hatred is simply moral turpitude. Everything human is foul and base. Man is a fearsome thing."

"I
was
a fearsome thing too," said the foetus.

"There is no more loathsome thing in the world," I said, "than man in his glory, than human flesh enthroned on the Capitol."

"Only today do I realize how horrible I was then," said the foetus, and it fell silent. "If on the day when all deserted me, if on the day when they left me alone in the hands of my murderers I had asked you to take pity on me," it added after looking at me for a long while in silence, "would you have harmed me too?"

"Be silent!" I cried.

"Why don't you answer?" said the monster.

"I am not worthy to harm another man," I replied in a low voice. "The power to do harm is sacred. Only a pure being is worthy to harm another man."

"Do you know what I thought," said the monster after a long silence, "when the murderer pointed his weapon at me? I thought that what he was about to give me was a foul thing."

"Everything that man gives to man is a foul thing," I said. "Even love and hatred, good and evil—everything. The death which man gives to man is a foul thing too."

The monster lowered its head and was silent. Then it said: "And forgiveness?"

"Forgiveness is a foul thing too."

Just then two foeti of ruffianly aspect approached, and one of them, resting its hand on the monster's shoulder said: "Come on."

The enormous foetus raised its head, and looking at me began to weep softly.

"Goodbye," it said, and lowering its head it moved off between the two ruffians. As it walked away it turned and smiled at me.

CHAPTER
XI -
THE DEAD GOD

E
VERY
evening Jimmy and I used to go down to the harbour to read the list posted up on the gates outside the harbour-master's office, giving the order of embarkation of the American units and the date of departure of the ships which sailed from Naples carrying the troops of the Fifth Army back to America.

"It isn't my turn yet," Jimmy would say, spitting on the ground. And we would go and sit on a small bench beneath the trees of the vast square situated in front of the harbour, and overlooked by the towering mass of the Maschio Angioino.

I had been eager to accompany Jimmy to Naples so that I might remain with him until the last moment and bid him farewell on the gangway of the ship that would take him back to America. Of all those American friends of mine with whom I had for two years shared the dangers of war and the melancholy joy of liberation only Jimmy was now left to me—Jimmy Wren, of Cleveland, Ohio, an officer in the Signal Corps. All the others were scattered about Europe—in Germany, France and Austria—or had gone back home to America, or had died for me, for us, for my country, like Jack and Campbell. For me, the day on which I said goodbye to him for ever on the ship's gangway would be like those other days on which I had said goodbye for ever to poor Jack and poor Campbell. I should be left alone, among my own people, in my own country. For the first time in my life I should be left alone, truly alone.

As soon as the shadows of evening crept along the walls, and the vast black breath of the sea darkened the green leaves of the trees and the red facades of the houses, a dingy, sluggish, silent mob would emerge from the thousand alleys of Toledo and invade the square. It was the Neapolitan mob—legendary, primaeval, pitiable. But something within it had died: its joy in the knowledge of its hunger, and even its wretchedness, were sad, pale, dead. Gradually the evening would climb out of the sea, and the mob would lift its tear-reddened eyes and watch Vesuvius loom up, white, cold and spectral against the black sky. Not a wisp of smoke ascended from the mouth of the crater, not the palest glimmer of fire illuminated the volcano's lofty brow. The mob would linger mutely for hour after hour, deep into the night, then silently disperse.

Left alone in the vast square, with the black expanse of the sea before us, Jimmy and I would move off, turning round every so often to watch the great white corpse on the rim of the horizon slowly dissolving into the night.

In April, 1944, having rocked the earth and spewed up torrents of fire for many days, Vesuvius had spent its fury. It had not subsided gradually, but abruptly. Its brow enveloped in a pall of icy clouds, it had suddenly uttered a great cry, and the chill of death had turned its veins of burning lava to stone. The God of Naples, the totem of the Neapolitan populace, was dead. An immense shroud of black crape had descended upon the city, and the bay, and the hill of Possillipo. The people walked about the streets on tip-toe, conversing in low voices, as if every house sheltered a corpse.

A doleful silence brooded over the mourning city. The voice of Naples, the ancient, noble voice of hunger, pity, grief, joy and love, the loud, hoarse, resonant, gay, triumphant voice of Naples was stilled. And whenever the fires of sunset, or the silvery radiance of the moon, or the rays of the rising sun appeared to inflame the white spectre of the volcano, a cry, a piercing cry, as of a woman in travail, went up from the city. All the people appeared at the windows, rushed into the streets and embraced one another, shedding tears of joy, intoxicated by the hope that by some miracle warmth had returned to the lifeless veins of the volcano, and that the crimson touch of the setting sun, or the radiance of the moon, or the shy glimmer of dawn, presaged the resurrection of Vesuvius, the dead God whose immense, naked corpse filled the sombre sky of Naples.

But soon this hope gave way to rage and disillusionment. Eyes were dried, and the mob, unclasping hands which they had joined in an attitude of prayer, raised threatening fists or cocked a snook at the volcano, mingling entreaties and laments with their imprecations and insults, crying: "Have pity on us, curse you! Son of a harlot, have mercy on us!"

Then came the days of the new moon; and when the moon slowly rose above the chill slopes of Vesuvius an oppressive melancholy descended upon Naples. The lunar dawn lit up the lifeless deserts of purple ashes and the livid rocks of cold lava, which looked like boulders of black ice. Sporadic groans and wails arose from the depths of the dark alleys, and the fishermen who lay along the beaches of Santa Lucia, Mergellina and Posillipo, sleeping on the warm sand beneath the keels of their boats, emerged from slumber, raised themselves on to their elbows and turned their heads towards the spectre of the volcano, listening in trepidation to the moaning of the waves and the sporadic sobbing of the seagulls. The shells glistened on the sand, and at the edge of the sky, which was covered with silvery fishes' scales, Vesuvius lay rotting like a dead shark that has been cast ashore by the waves.