Free The Skin by Curzio Malaparte

ashamed that I was not hungry. I blushed because I was only an "Italian bastard," a "son of a bitch," and nothing worse. I felt ashamed that I too was not a poor starving Neapolitan; and elbowing my way along the street I escaped from the press of the crowd and set foot on the first step of the Gradoni di Chiaia.
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    The long flight of steps was cluttered up with women, seated one beside the other, as on the tiers of an amphitheatre, and it seemed that they were there to enjoy some wonderful spectacle. They laughed as they sat, talking among themselves in high-pitched voices, or eating fruit, or smoking, or sucking caramels, or chewing gum. Some were leaning forward, their elbows on their knees, their faces buried in their clasped hands; others lolled back with their arms on the step above them; others yet rested lightly on their sides; and all were shouting and calling one another by name, exchanging voices and formless oral sounds, rather than words, with their companions seated lower down or higher up, or with the shrieking attendant crowd of dishevelled, repulsive old women on the balconies and at the windows overhanging the alley, who, their toothless mouths agape with obscene laughter, were waving their arms and hurling gibes and insults. The women seated on the steps were straightening one another's locks, which in every case were gathered together and built up into a lofty edifice of hair and tow, reinforced and supported by hair-pins and tortoiseshell combs, and adorned with flowers and false tresses, in the style of the wax Madonnas in the little chapels at the corners of the alleys.
    This crowd of women sitting on the steps, which resembled the ladder of the Angels in Jacob's dream, seemed to have come together for some celebration, or for some play in which they were at once actresses and spectators. At intervals one of them would sing a song, one of those melancholy songs of the Neapolitan people. This would at once be drowned by outbursts of laughter, raucous voices, and guttural yells which sounded like appeals for help or cries of pain.
    But there was a certain dignity about those women, about their varied postures, now obscene, now comic, now solemn, about the very disorder of the tableau which they presented. A certain nobility even, revealed in some of their gestures, in the way they raised their arms to touch their temples with the tips of their fingers, to straighten their hair each with her two plump and dexterous hands, in the way they turned their heads and inclined them on their shoulders, as though the better to hear the voices and the obscene words which floated down from the balconies and windows above, and in the very way in which they spoke and smiled. Suddenly, when I set foot on the first step, all became mute, and a strange palpitating silence, like an immense variegated butterfly, settled lightly on the packed stairway.
    In front of me walked a number of negro soldiers in their close-fitting khaki uniforms, swaying on flat feet encased in thin shoes of yellow leather which shone as if they were made of gold. Slowly they climbed, in that sudden silence, with the lonely dignity of the negro; and as they advanced up the steps, through the narrow passage left free by that mute crowd of seated women, I saw the legs of those unfortunates slowly splay open. "Five dollars! Five dollars!" they suddenly began to cry all together, in hoarse, strident voices, but without gestures; and this absence of gestures added obscenity to their voices and their words. "Five dollars! Five dollars!" As the negroes ascended, so the clamour increased, the voices became shriller, hoarser and hoarser grew the cries of the termagants on the balconies and at the windows, as they goaded the negroes on and joined in the chorus of yells: "Five dollars! Five dollars! Go, Joe! Go, Joe! Go, go, Joe, go!"
    But no sooner had the negroes gone by, no sooner had their gilded feet moved from a