The Skin

9 november

It is a horrible book. It is a great book. It is a great horrible book.

For us migrants the difference between home and the-home-where-you were-born is a thing. For some years my home was Argentina. For some years, and then for some more, I understood Argentina, at least as much as anybody else born in Argentina can understand her. Then I move to Venezuela, still young, and I grew up in Venezuela, and it was my home, and eventually I got to Venezuela. Few years more and I actually understood Venezuela better than Argentina, and I was happy about it. Venezuela was my home, and I understood her. And then I moved to The Netherlands, some twenty years ago. The Netherlands is definitively my home, no doubt. I have also lost some understanding of current Venezuela, let alone Argentina. But do I understand The Netherlands? I can’t say I do. With my head, perhaps. But with my bones? With my skin? I don’t think so. I don’t think I ever will.

Of course I have read and read and read, and eventually I understand better, at least some things. But leaving some exceptions appart (some russian and some french writers) all that understanding is fairly intellectual. It is not something that comes from my own experience, and perhaps more important, neither from my feelings. Not at all. Mostly is like understanding a plot, and eventually the historical/social context in which such plot happens, and then adding the last to my european puzzle. A fairly intellectual process, a rational process, if you prefer. But yes, there are exceptions. The Skin, by Curzio Malaparte, is one of those exceptions.

So far I have been eating tears and anger and frustration and love and hatred, all together, each four or five sentences.

Interesting thing is that this is not the first time I read it. It is the first time I realize that this book is about my home, though. My current home, obviously, but still my home. And that repels me. And fascinates me. And repels me again, and I want to vomit all the anger that I have been reading, and I almost get the heaves, the dry heaving, and I am grateful too. Can your home be your vile, and still be your home? Can your home have been so vile, to be more precise, and still be your home?  Of course it can. I hear my father, in his grave, laughing at me. He never wanted to go back to Argentina. I believe that he decided that a place that have been so vile could not be his home anymore. But me? I struggle. I am not going anywhere, this tainted Europe is my home indeed. I came here on my own accord, fully knowingly. I knew it before, and I never forgot it. Europeans have been capable of terrible things. Yet as much as a documental like Lanzmann’s Shoah is needed for many of us to start approaching what the holocaust actually was, I believe that The Skin is fundamental to start feeling from where is it that Europe comes from.

It is hard for me not to be deeply disgusted by the ground that I walk upon, when re-reading The Skin. And it is also impossible not to be optimist about humankind when seeing how long we have walked from the end of WWII to today.

Go and read Malaparte, I would say. Go and read The Skin.