Free The Skin by Curzio Malaparte Page A

step, than the legs of the girls who were sitting on that step slowly closed again, and the girls turned round, gesticulating, shaking their fists and shouting obscene insults at the negro soldiers, beside themselves with intense, savage fury, until first one negro, then another, then yet another stopped, seized as he passed by ten or twenty hands. And I continued to climb the triumphal ladder of the Angels, which rose straight into the sky, into that festering sky from which the hoarse sirocco tore fragments of greenish skin, and scattered them over the sea.
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    I felt far more miserable and cowardly than I had done on September 8th, 1943, when we had had to throw our arms and our flags at the feet of the conquerors. They were old, rusty arms, it is true, but they were precious family mementoes, and all of us, officers and men, were attached to those precious family mementos. They consisted of old rifles, old sabres, old cannon of the period when women wore crinolines and men tall stove-pipe hats, dove-grey redingotes and high boots with buttons. With those shotguns, those rust-covered sabres, and those bronze cannon our grandfathers had fought alongside Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel and Napoleon III against the Austrians, for the freedom and independence of Italy. The flags too were old and démodé. Some were very old: they were the flags of the Republic of Venice, which had flown from the masts of the galleys at Lepanto and from the towers of Famagosta and Candia; the ensigns of the Republic of Genoa and those of the Communes of Milan, Crema and Bologna, which had flown from the Carrcccio {2} in the battles against the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa; the standards painted by Sandro Botticelli, which Lorenzo the Magnificent had given to the archers of Florence; the standards of Siena, painted by Luca Signorelli; and the Roman flags of the Capitol, painted by Michelangelo. In addition, there was the flag presented to Garibaldi by the Italians of Valparaiso, and the flag of the Roman Republic of 1849. There were also the flags of Vittorio Veneto, of Trieste, of Fiume, of Zara, of Ethiopia, of the Spanish War. They were glorious flags, among the most glorious of the earth and the sea. Why should only the British, American, Russian, French and Spanish flags be glorious? The Italian flags are glorious too. If they were not, what pleasure should we have derived from throwing them in the mud? There is not a nation in the world that has not once at least had the pleasure of throwing its flags at the feet of conquerors. It falls to the lot of even the most glorious flags to be thrown in the mud. Glory, what men call glory, is often thick with mud.
    It had been a wonderful day for us, September 8th, 1943—the day on which we had thrown our arms and our flags not only at the feet of the conquerors, but also at the feet of the conquered; not only at the feet of the British, the Americans, the French, the Russians, the Poles and all the rest, but also at the feet of the King, Badoglio, Mussolini and Hitler. We had thrown them at the feet of all, victors and vanquished—even at the feet of those with whom it had nothing whatever to do, and who sat back enjoying the spectacle. We had even thrown them at the feet of the passers-by, and of all those whom the spirit moved to assist at the unusual, diverting spectacle of an army throwing its arms and its flags at the feet of the first comer. Not, indeed, that our army was any worse or any better than countless others. In that glorious war—let us be fair—it had not fallen to the lot of the Italians alone to turn their backs on the enemy: that experience had been shared by all—by the British, the Americans, the Germans, the Russians, the French, the Jugoslavs—by all, victors and vanquished. There was not an army in the world which in that splendid war had not, on some fine day, had the pleasure of throwing its arms and its flags in the