The Skin Read Online Free PDF Page B

a lucky thing that you people have come from America to marry our dwarf women."
    "You will certainly be invited to the wedding breakfast," Jack would say, "Tu pourras prononcer un discours magnifique."
    "Oui, Jack, un discours magninque. But don't you think, Jimmy," I would say, "that the Allied military authorities ought to encourage marriages between those dwarf women and your handsome soldiers? It would be an excellent thing if your soldiers married those little dwarfs. As a race you are too tall. America needs to come down to our level, don't you think so, Jimmy?"
    "Yes, I think so," Jimmy would answer, giving me a sidelong glance.
    "You are too tall," I would say, "too handsome. It's immoral that the world should contain a race of men who are so tall, so handsome and so healthy. I should like all the American soldiers to get married to those little dwarfs. Those 'Italian brides' would score a tremendous hit in America. American civilization needs shorter legs."
    "To hell with you," Jimmy would say, spitting on the ground.
    "II va te caresser la figure, si tu insistes," Jack would say.
    "Yes, I know. Jimmy is a nice guy," I would say, laughing to myself.
    It made me feel sick at heart to laugh in that way. But I should have been happy, truly happy, if all the American soldiers had one day gone back to America arm in arm with all the little dwarf women of Naples, Italy and Europe.
    *       *       *       *
    The "plague" had broken out in Naples on October 1st, 1943— the very day on which the Allied armies had entered that ill-starred city as liberators. October 1st, 1943, is a memorable date in the history of Naples, both because it marks the beginning of the liberation of Italy and Europe from the anguish, shame and sufferings of war and slavery, and because it exactly coincided with the outbreak of the terrible plague which gradually spread from the unhappy city all over Italy and all over Europe.
    The appalling suspicion that the fearful disease had been brought to Naples by the liberators themselves was certainly unjust; but it became a certainty in the minds of the people when they perceived, with a mixture of amazement and superstitious terror, that the Allied soldiers remained strangely immune from the contagion. Pink-faced, calm and smiling, they moved about in the midst of the plague-stricken mob without contracting the loathsome disease, which gathered its harvest of victims solely from among the civilian population, not only in Naples itself, but even in the country districts, spreading like a patch of oil into the territory liberated by the Allied armies as they laboriously drove the Germans northwards.
    But it was strictly forbidden, under threat of the severest penalties, to insinuate in public that the plague had been brought to Italy by the liberators. And it was dangerous to repeat the allegation in private, even in an undertone, since among the many loathsome effects of the plague the most loathsome was that it engendered in its victims a mad passion, a voluptuous avidity for delation. No sooner were they stricken with the disease than one and all began to inform against fathers, mothers, brothers, sons, husbands, lovers, relations and dearest friends—but never against themselves. Indeed, one of the most surprising and repulsive characteristics of this extraordinary plague was that it transformed the human conscience into a horrible, noisome ulcer.
    The only remedy which the British and American military authorities had discovered for the disease was to forbid the Allied soldiers to enter the most seriously infected areas of the city. On every wall one read the legends "Off Limits" and "Out of Bounds," surmounted by the aulic emblem of the plague—a black circle within which were depicted two black bars in the form of a cross, similar to the pair of crossed shin-bones that appears beneath a skull on the saddle-cloth of a funeral carriage.
    Within a short space of time the whole of