The Skin by Curzio Malaparte Page B

people, who are as poor as they are generous. Stray dogs, attracted by the pungent odour of sleep, that familiar odour of dirty hair and coagulated sweat, went about sniffing the sleepers, nibbling their gaping shoes and tattered uniforms and licking the shadows thrown flat against the walls by their bodies as they lay huddled in sleep.
    Not a voice was to be heard, not even the crying of a child. A strange silence brooded over the starving city, moist with the pungent sweat of hunger. It was like that wonderful silence which pervades the poetry of the Greeks, when the moon climbs slowly from the sea. And indeed the moon, pale and transparent as a rose, was even now climbing above the line of the distant horizon, and the sky was fragrant as a garden. From the doorsteps of their hovels the people lifted their heads to watch the rose as it climbed slowly from the sea, embroidered upon the blue silk quilt of the sky. On one side of the quilt, a little way down to the left, was embroidered a likeness of Vesuvius in yellow and red, and high up, a little to the right, above the vague shadow of the island of Capri, were embroidered in letters of gold the words of the prayer Ave Maria maris stella. When the sky resembles his own beautiful quilt of blue silk, covered with embroidery like the mantle of the Madonna, every Neapolitan is happy; it would be so lovely to die on so clear and calm an evening.
    Suddenly we saw a black cart pull up at the entrance to an alley. It was drawn by two horses covered with silver saddle-cloths and plumed like the steeds of the Paladins of France. Two men were sitting on the box. The one holding the reins cracked his whip, the other rose to his feet, blew into a curved bugle, which gave forth a harsh, piercing lament, then in a hoarse voice cried "Poggioreale! Poggioreale!"—the name of the cemetery and also of the prison of Naples. I had many times been confined in Poggioreale Gaol, and the name struck a chill into my heart. The man repeated his cry several times, until a vague murmur, which gradually swelled into a deafening uproar, arose from the alley, and an ear-splitting wail spread from hovel to hovel.
    It was death's hour—the hour when the carts of the Municipal Cleansing Department, the few carts spared by the terrible, ceaseless air-raids of those years, went from alley to alley, from hovel to hovel, to collect the dead, just as, before the war, they used to go to collect the garbage. The misery of the times, the public disorder, the high death-rate, the greed of the speculators, the negligence of the authorities and the universal corruption were such that to accord the dead Christian burial had become almost an impossibility, the privilege of the few. To take a dead man to Poggioreale on a cart drawn by a little donkey cost ten or fifteen thousand lire. And since we were still in the early months of the Allied occupation, and the populace had not yet had time to scrape together a few soldi by illicit dealings on the black market, they could not afford the luxury of giving their dead that Christian burial of which, though poor, they were worthy. For five, ten and even fifteen days the corpses remained in the houses waiting for the garbage-cart. Slowly they decomposed on the beds, in the warm, smoky light of the wax candles, listening to the familiar voices, to the bubbling of the coffee-urn and the pot of kidney beans on the glowing range which stood in the middle of the room, to the cries of the children as they played, naked, on the floor, to the groans of the old men crouched on the chamber-pots amid the warm, sticky odour of excrement, an odour like that which emanates from corpses that are already in a state of dissolution.
    At the cry of the monatto, at the sound of his bugle, there arose from the alleys a murmuring, a frantic shouting, a raucous hymn of woe and supplication. A crowd of men and women emerged from their den bearing on their shoulders a rough box (there was a dearth of