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Rating: I have seen many skies, but none like this one.
Clear and serene, very far from what happens on the earth it covers; diligent and constant, the opposite of the people it overlooks. Curzio Malaparte observes the sky between the battlements of an old building used as a French Command in Naples. He lowers his gaze to the people, to the masses of skin, and what he sees are North African soldiers buying children to abuse for the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes. Everything is normal, there is a war. We are at war, with whom is unknown. The how is also missing.
Curzio Malaparte is an Italian liaison officer with the Allied troops who, upon receiving the news of the deposition of the Grand Council of Fascism, returned to Italy where he was arrested for his fascist past, first by the Badoglio government and then by the Allies themselves. Curzio Malaparte is dressed in the uniform of a British soldier who died in North Africa. This uniform has a bullet hole surrounded by a bloodstain, right over the heart, and a nail in the shoe. Malaparte sweats, under this sun, in an attempt to remove this nail; Malaparte sweats, under this sun, wandering through the alleys of Naples - the first free city in Europe and the only one that had the decency to free itself - which twist into themselves ending up becoming Dantean circles of this hell made of misery, of skin, of humanity which has nothing human.
Malaparte is an eccentric, one who knows the world, someone who excited and embarrassed the fascist salons by being only himself; one who has respect only for the dead and their misfortune.
In Naples, children are sacred. They are the only sacred thing there is in Naples. The Neapolitan people are a generous people, the most human of all the peoples of the earth, they are the only people in the world where even the poorest family, among its children, among its ten, among its twelve children, raises an orphan taken from the Hospital of the Innocents: and of all, he is the most sacred, the best dressed, the best fed, because he is the "Son of the Madonna" and brings luck to the other children... in the Naples of the Allies, the same Allies who after bringing the plague into the sick alleys wrote "off limits", the children were sold in the little square of the Cappella Vecchia. The Goumiers felt them, lifted their garments, stuck their long, expert black fingers between the buttons of their shorts, haggled over the price with the fingers of their hand.
Curzio Malaparte observes, sees.
The virgin of Naples, a few dollars to see the only virgin that exists in this destroyed world. The virgin lies on the bed, a bored look on her face and her hand holding her chin has a cigarette between her fingers. She lifts her skirt, the virgin does, a soldier, a black American, sticks his finger in and surprised admits that it is "like a baby". Then he wipes his finger on the purple curtain and leaves. Black men have a preference for blondes and there are no blondes in Naples. The hair is blond, but the hairs are anything but blond. They come from everywhere to ruin their business: blondes from Abruzzo, from still occupied territories. Here people manage, they make wigs for vaginas. For ten dollars you buy your wig, put it on the black hairs of hope and business goes back up. The wig, the hairs that can no longer be themselves, that can no longer be themselves are a flag.
When he finally managed to get the nail out of his shoe, the company he was supposed to lead had been gathered for some time. Colonel Palese began to speak, said: "I present to you your new captain..." and as he spoke Malaparte looked at those Italian soldiers dressed in uniforms taken from English corpses, those bloodless hands, those pale lips. "Your new captain will speak to you briefly" and Malaparte spoke: "We are the volunteers of Liberty, the soldiers of the new Italy. We must fight the Germans, drive them out of the house. We must raise the flag fallen in the mud." Palese with his finger ordered: "You, repeat what the captain said". The soldier looked at Malaparte, he was pale, had the thin, bloodless lips of the dead and said slowly: "We must make ourselves worthy of the shames of Italy."
Curzio Malaparte, Kurt Erich Suckert, is from Prato and if he hadn't been born in Prato, he would have preferred not to be born. Fascist, reactionary, bourgeois, eccentric, hungry for success, irreverent, populist... categorized in all possible ways he forged, halfway between novel, diary, and chronicle, "The Skin", the only reason to die, the only reason to survive. The skin, indeed. A body that ends up under the tanks while shouting "Viva l'Italia." The puddle, the flatbread of skin and bones that comes out of it is the flag of Italy, the only one to which Malaparte will pledge allegiance. The only one he feels is his and represents him.
The soul? Eh!?!
In the book, in this simple book that demands stomach and patience, episodes far worse and shocking than those reported here are narrated, which I had the decency not to include. For the same decency, I do not reread what has been written. A bit of decency is always useful.
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