The Skin (35 page)

Suddenly Vesuvius uttered a terrible cry. The group of American soldiers standing near the vehicles parked in the roadway drew back in terror. They scattered, and many of them, seized with panic, rushed pell-mell towards the sea-shore. Jack too withdrew a few steps, and turned his back. I seized him by the arm. "Don't be afraid," I said to him. "Look at those men, Jack."

Jack turned his head and looked at the men who lay sleeping, at the girl who stood combing her hair and gazing at herself in the mirror of the sea, at the woman suckling her child. I would have liked to say to him: "God has just made them, yet they are the oldest human beings on earth. That is Adam, and that is Eve. They have been born out of chaos, they have just returned from hell, they have just risen from the grave. Look at them—they are newly-born, and they have already taken upon themselves all the sins of the world. All the men and women in Naples, in Italy, in Europe are like these. They are immortal. They are born in sorrow, they die in sorrow, and they rise again, purified. They are the Lambs of God, they carry on their shoulders all the sins and all the sorrows of the world."

But I said nothing; and Jack looked at me, and smiled.

It was evening when we returned to Naples. As we drove back the tempest roared, and fire rained down from heaven. Near Portici we beheld once more green grass and green leaves, the buds on the trees, the play of the light on the window-panes—things that had been from time immemorial. I thought of the gentleness of those foreign soldiers as they bent over the injured and the dead, of their warm compassion, heightened by fear. I thought of those men who had lain sleeping on the shore of chaos, and of their immortality. Jack was pale, and he was smiling. I turned to look at Vesuvius, that dreadful monster with the dog-like head, barking on the horizon amid the smoke and flame.

"Pity, pity. Even you are deserving of pity," I said in a low voice.

CHAPTER
IX -
THE FLAG

T
HREATENED
in its rear by the wrath of Vesuvius, the American Army, which had been held up for so many months outside Cassino, at last made a move. It hurled itself forward, smashed the Cassino defence-line and, pouring into Latium, advanced within striking-distance of Rome.

*       *       *       *

Steretched out on the grass at the edge of the Lake of Albano, which in ancient times was the crater of a volcano, and resembles a copper bowl filled with black water, we looked down on Rome, situated on the far side of the plain, where the sluggish river,
flavus Tiber,
lay sleeping in the sun. Occasionally the staccato sound of rifle-fire floated towards us on the warm wind. The cupola of St. Peter's shimmered on the horizon, suspended beneath a huge castle of white clouds at which the sun was aiming its golden shafts. I thought of the golden shafts of Apollo, and blushed. In the distance one could see snow-clad Soracte rising out of a blue haze. The verse from Horace sprang to my lips, and I blushed. "Dear Rome," I said in a low voice. Jack looked at me, and smiled.

In the morning Jack and I had left General Cork's column and joined General Guillaume's Moroccan Division in the upper part of the woods of Castel Gandolfo. Seen from here Rome, in the dazzling sunlight reflected from the fleecy clouds, had the livid whiteness of chalk. It resembled one of those cities of shining stone which rise from the sky-line in pictures representing scenes from the
Iliad.

The cupolas, the towers, the steeples, and the severely geometrical houses in the new districts which stretch down from St. John Lateran into the green valley of the Nymph Aegeria, in the direction of the tombs of the Barberini, looked as if they were made of a hard white substance with shadowy blue veins. Black crows flew up from the red tombs beside the Via Appia. I thought of the eagles of the Caesars, and was stirred. I tried hard not to think of the Goddess Rome, seated in the Capitol, of the pillars of the Forum and the purple of the Caesars. "The glory that was Rome," I said to myself musingly. On that day, at that moment, in that place I did not want to think of the eternity of Rome. I liked to think of Rome as a mortal city, inhabited by mortal men.

In the unwavering, dazzling light nothing seemed to move or breathe. The sun was already high, it was beginning to get hot, and a white, transparent mist veiled the vast red and yellow plain of Latium, where the Tiber and the Anio were intertwined like two snakes locked in an amorous embrace. In the meadows that flank the Via Appia riderless horses could be seen galloping about as in a canvas of Poussin or Claude Lorrain, and ever and anon, far away on the horizon, the green lid of the sea sparkled in the sunshine.

General Guillaume's
goumiers
were encamped in the wood of ash-coloured olive trees and dark holm-oaks which stretches down the gentle slopes of Mount Cavo and dies away amid the bright green of the vineyards and the gold of the corn. Below us, on the high, steep bank of the Lake of Albano, stood the papal villa of Castel Gandolfo. Sitting in the shade of the holm-oaks and the olive trees, with their legs crossed and their rifles across their knees, the
goumiers
gazed with avid eyes at the crowd of women promenading among the trees in the park of the papal villa—many of them nuns and peasants from the Castelli Romani
{7}
destroyed in the war, whom the Holy Father had gathered under his protecting wing. A community of birds sang in the branches of the olive trees and holm-oaks. The air was sweet to the lips, like that name which I kept repeating in a low voice: "Rome, Rome, dear Rome."

A smile, faint but immense, passed like a scurry of wind across the Roman Campagna. It was the smile of the Apollo of Veii, the cruel, ironical, mysterious smile of the Etruscan Apollo. I would have liked to return to Rome, to my home, not with my mouth full of sonorous words but with that smile upon my lips. I was afraid that the liberation of Rome would not be an intimate, family occasion but one of the usual pretexts for triumphal marches, high-sounding speeches and songs of praise. I tried hard to think of Rome not as a vast communal grave, where the bones of Gods and men are strewn indiscriminately about the ruins of the temples and the Fora, but as a human city, a city peopled by simple mortal men, where everything is human, where the pettiness and degradation of the Gods do not diminish the greatness of man nor invest human freedom with the significance of a heritage that has been betrayed, a glory that has been usurped and tarnished.

My last memory of Rome was of a fetid cell in the Regina Coeli prison. And now, as I returned home on a day of victory (a foreign victory, gained over foreign arms in a Latium that had been overrun and laid waste by foreign armies), old thoughts and emotions, simple and sincere, surged up within me. But already my ears were filled with the din of the trumpets and the cymbals, with the Ciceronian orations and the songs of triumph. And I shuddered.

Such were my thoughts as I lay in the grass, gazing at distant Rome; and I wept. Jack, lying at my side, pressed a tender leaf to his lips and with its aid imitated the voices of the birds, which were singing in the branches of the trees. A breath of peace passed lightly through the air, rustling the grass and the leaves.

"Don't cry," said Jack in tones of affectionate reproof. "The birds are singing—and you are crying?"

The birds were singing, and I was crying. Jack's words, so simple, so human, moved me. This foreigner from beyond the seas, this American, this warm-hearted, generous, sensitive man had found in the depths of his heart the right words, the true words, the words that I had been vainly seeking within my mind and without, the only words that were appropriate to that day, to that moment, to that place. The birds were singing, and I was crying! Through my tears I looked at Rome, trembling in the depths of the limpid mirror of light; and I was happy.

*       *       *       *

As we lay in the grass we heard the sound of merry voices coming from the wood, and we looked round. It was General Guillaume, accompanied by a group of French officers. His hair was grey with dust, his face was tanned by the sun and bore the marks of his exertions, but his eyes were bright and his voice youthful.

"Voilà Rome!" he said, baring his head.

It was not the first time I had witnessed that gesture; it was not the first time I had seen a French general bare his head as he gazed at Rome from the woods of Castel Gandolfo. I had seen the same thing in the faded daguerrotypes belonging to the Primoli collection, which old Count Primoli had shown me one day in his library. In the pictures to which I refer Marshal Oudinot, surrounded by a party of French officers in red trousers, is seen saluting Rome from the very wood of holm-oaks and olive trees in which we were at that moment.

"J'aurais preferé voir la Tour Eiffel, à la place de la coupole de Saint Pierre," said Lieutenant Pierre Lyautey.

General Guillaume turned to him with a laugh. "Vous ne la voyez pas," he said, "car elle se cache juste derriere la coupole de Saint Pierre."

"C'est drôle, je suis ému comme si je voyais Paris," said Major Marchetti.

"Vous ne trouvez pas," said Pierre Lyautey, "qu'il y a quelque chose de francais, dans ce paysage?"

"Oui, sans doute," said Jack. "C'est l’air francais qu'y ont mis le Poussin et Claude Lorrain."

"Et Corot," said General Guillaume.

"Stendhal aussi a mis quelque chose de francais dans ce paysage," said Major Marchetti.

"Aujourd'hui, pour la premiere fois," said Pierre Lyautey, "je comprends pourquoi Corot, en peignant le Pont de Narni, a fait les ombres bleues."

"J'ai dans ma poche," said General Guillaume, taking a book from the pocket of his tunic, "les
Promenades dans Rome.
Le Général Juin, lui, se promène avec Chateaubriand dans sa poche. Pour comprendre Rome, Messieurs, je vous conseille de ne trop vous fier à Chateaubriand. Fiez-vous a Stendhal. II est le seul Francais qui ait compris Rome et l'ltalie. Si j'ai un reproche a lui faire, c'est de ne pas voir les couleurs du paysage. II ne dit pas un traître mot de vos ombres bleues."

"Si j'ai un reproche a lui faire," said Pierre Lyautey, "c'est d'aimer mieux Rome que Paris."

"Stendhal n'a jamais dit une chose pareille," said General Guillaume, frowning.

"En tout cas, il aime mieux Milan que Paris."

"Ce n'est qu'un dépit d'amour," said Major Marchetti. "Paris etait une maîtresse qui l'avait trompé bien des fois."

"Je n'aime pas, Messieurs," said General Guillaume, "vous entrendre parler ainsi de Stendhal. C'est un de mes plus chers amis."

"Si Stendhal était encore Consul de France à Civita Vecchia," said Major Marchetti, "il serait sans doute, en ce moment, parmi nous."

"Stendhal aurait fait un magnifique officier des
goums,"
said General Guillaume. And turning with a smile to Pierre Lyautey he added: "II vous ravirait toutes les jolies femmes qui vous attendent ce soir a Rome."

"Les jolies femmes qui m'attendent ce soir, ce sont les petites filles de celles qui attendaient Stendhal," said Pierre Lyautey, who had many women friends in Roman society, and was expecting to dine that same evening in the Palazzo Colonna.

I listened with emotion to the French voices and the French words as they floated softly through the green air, to the rapid, fluent articulation and the urbane, warmhearted laughter, so characteristic of the French. And I felt ashamed and abashed, as if it were my fault that the cupola of St. Peter's was not the Eiffel Tower. I would have liked to apologize to them, to try to convince them that it was not
my
fault. Just then I too would have preferred that that city down there on the horizon had been not Rome but Paris—for I knew how happy they would have been had this been so. And I said nothing, but listened to those French words floating gently among the branches of the trees. I pretended not to notice that those tough soldiers, those gallant Frenchmen were moved, that their eyes were bright with tears, and that their small talk and their laughter were a cloak behind which they were trying to conceal their emotions.

For a long while we remained silent, watching the cupola of St. Peter's gently quivering on the sky-line at the far end of the plain.

"Vous en avez de la veine!" General Guillaume said to me suddenly, clapping me on the shoulder; and I felt that he was thinking of Paris.

"I am sorry," said Jack, "to have to leave you. But it's already late, and General Cork is waiting for us."

"The American Fifth Army will conquer Rome even without your help . . . and without ours," said General Guillaume, and there was a plaintively ironical inflection in his voice. Then he altered his tone and added, with a smile at once sad and mocking: "You will lunch at our table, and then I will let you go. With the Holy Father's permission, General Cork's column won't move off again before two or three o'clock. Let us go, gentlemen—the
kouskous
awaits us."

In a small clearing stood a row of tables, which the
goumiers
had taken from some deserted farm-dwelling. Shelter was provided by a number of great holm-oaks, where myriads of birds had built their nests. We took our places, and General Guillaume indicated two dark-skinned monks, thin as lizards, who were-moving about among the Moroccans. He told us that when the news of the
goumiers''
arrival spread through the district all the peasants had fled, crossing themselves as if they already detected the smell of sulphur, and that a number of monks had immediately hurried forward from the neighbouring monasteries to convert the
goumiers
to the religion of Christ. General Guillaume had sent an officer to ask the monks not to annoy the
goumiers
but the monks had replied that they had orders to baptize all the Moroccans because the Pope did not want Turks in Rome. The Holy Father had in fact sent a radio message to the Allied Command in which he expressed his desire that the Moroccan Division should be halted at the gates of the Eternal City.

"The Pope is wrong," added General Guillaume with a laugh. "If he consents to be liberated by an army of Protestants I don't see why he should object if his liberators also include some Mussulmans."