Читать книгу Skin - Sergio del Molino - Страница 10

The story of Stalin in his Sochi swimming pool gives the lie to any hope we might have for the goodness of monsters. In humanity’s efforts to become more civilised, people with deformities have been integrated into society. Monsters have gone from being demons to being creatures in need of more than mere affection. They are to be admired, they’re heroes, the Achilleses of these times of reduced sugar and reduced saturated fats. Poor Frankenstein’s monster, poor Quasimodo, the poor Phantom of the Opera, even poor Freddy Krueger. Misunderstood, marginalised, and nursing wounds, they show us that it’s society that is actually evil and they only act in self-defence, bound to commit the crime like a wild animal at the zoo turning on the children taunting it from beyond the bars. If we’d left them in peace, they wouldn’t have been forced to come and kill us.

Not all of these monsters want for lovers. One of my favourite films is a love story between a female nurse and a lycanthrope. In An American Werewolf in London, David and Jack, two backpackers from the US, are attacked by a werewolf on the English moors. Jack dies, but David survives, and takes on the curse. At the next full moon, he transforms into a bestial creature and begins attacking and devouring people on the streets of London. In the interim, he has fallen in love with Nurse Price (played by the unforgettable Jenny Agutter – also the love of my life), who gradually has to yield to the evidence that her boyfriend is a lycanthrope and not just slightly traumatised by his friend’s death. What makes the film modern, and elucidates the interaction between monsters and my world, is depicted in the final sequence. After a failed suicide attempt, David takes refuge in a porno cinema in Piccadilly Circus, where he turns into the wolf. After a brief killing spree, the police manage to corner him in an alleyway but, before they riddle him with bullets, Nurse Price has a chance to try and save him. She climbs over the police cordon and puts herself between the marksmen and the creature, into whose eyes she looks. For an instant, the wolf seems to recognise her, and hesitates. It’s possible that Nurse Price has penetrated the beast-like exterior and reached into David’s human core. Fortunately, the director of this gem of a film, John Landis, is clever enough to leave the mystery unsolved. The beast dies in the alleyway without our finding out if love could have redeemed it.

Landis, an old soul like me, believes monsters ought to die because they are monsters, and not as some version of the final stage in the hero’s quest, when the clouds part and all humanity’s sins are absolved. Nurse Price’s infatuation is neither lucid nor virginal, but depraved – like all good infatuations – and David is a cowardly egoist who knows full well that the only way to put an end to his homicidal tendencies is to slit his own wrists, and yet he doesn’t dare; he is incapable of sacrificing himself for the common good. There is nothing admirable about him; the wolf dies, and good riddance. And yet, those looking on can’t avoid the thought that the beast is the only true victim of the piece. All those mauled and killed by him deserve it, in some way; they are pathetic types, caught out at unfortunate moments in their lives. The lycanthrope almost does them a favour by rubbing them out of a picture in which they don’t fit, and there is something of the comic skit about their murders. The death of the wolf, however, is tragic, perhaps the only tragic moment in the film. And this is because Landis knows very well that, in order for us to live, we need these critters. We can’t kill them without feeling that we are killing ourselves and that all this evil is actually our own fault.

This is what makes Stalin’s story so dazzling: he is one monster beyond redemption. No Nurse Price is there to look into his eyes during his dying moments, her tears stirring the gentlest parts of his humanity. Stalin reminds us that monsters exist whose evil nature isn’t down to social ills. Teratology – the study of congenital abnormalities – has for centuries been trying to separate physical ugliness from questions of morality, and this has ended up soaking through into literature: monsters with their curses and afflictions have gradually been relegated to pulp and outré forms of fiction, but they have disappeared from the films young lovers go to see at the cinema. There are still the deformed baddies of the Batman franchise, but these are so stylised and metaphorical that we don’t associate them with people who suffer actual deformities. It’s no longer allowed for a dwarf, giant, hunchback, lycanthrope or elephant man to feature in any story, without their being assigned a good or even heroic part.

We can agree that people with skin conditions form a minor chapter in the history of teratology, and that we are able to make our particular monstrousness go unnoticed, but we at the same time comprise one of the most common kinds of monstrousness, and few storytellers have been able to resist adorning their villains with some cutaneous mark, whether it be a scar, a blotch, or some discoloration. Darth Vader is perhaps the last great evil figure with completely obliterated skin, forced to hide it beneath helmet and black cape, but even he redeems himself by saving his son, Luke Skywalker. Not Stalin. Stalin liquidates people in their millions while paddling about in his private pool.

Not only do I find it impossible to separate Stalin’s skin condition from his amoral wickedness; his story forces me to consider my own monstrous condition. What if there is a correlation between the patches of psoriasis on my skin and the way I am in the world? If I believe that Stalin set about slaughtering healthy people after losing the only healthy person he allowed to see him in all his monstrousness – his beloved Kirov – could I not also be an avenger? Of course, I’m no killer, but there are forms of evil that are less crude, subtle and painful, and that don’t lead to a criminal record. Those of us with psoriasis have mastered the art of camouflaging ourselves to ward off unwelcome interest in our plaques. I don’t do it so much out of shame as in order to save others the discomfort and to force them to look me in the eye. Put like this, it almost makes it seem a kind gesture, but what I’m looking for when making others feel comfortable is also a way to make them keep their distance. Very few people are able to penetrate the monster’s carapace and give me the kind of look Nurse Price gives at the end of American Werewolf. Politeness is almost never a building block for trust, and over time I notice myself beginning to comfort myself with a kind of soft misanthropy that could end up becoming cruelty. As I add layers of cotton and fibres over my skin to hide it, my sensitivity to the world is muffled and other people’s problems sound ridiculous to me, strange and minuscule. Anyone wrapped up in their own problems is always a potential mass murderer: if the fate of the world is of no interest to you, you can sign off on its extinction without the slightest quiver, completely guilt-free.

But there’s something even more perturbing in this image of Stalin in the Sochi swimming pool. The broken surface of the water, knocking against the edges with every movement. This irresistible amniotic attraction. The torsion of the passing minutes, refracting when a person is submerged. When we bathe, we are all innocent. Whatever we may be out of the water we leave suspended, there beside our t-shirt, towel, sun cream and half-read novel. That was why Artyom didn’t see a tyrant. It wasn’t to do with the fact that Stalin was his father – ultimately every father is a tyrant to his children – but with the water and its way of making the bodies we see fused beneath the surface soft and shiny.

I know this in the way that such things are known, by having experienced them. When I think of Stalin in Sochi, I am really thinking of myself in another spa town, one we often spend a few days at in the summertime. Alhama de Aragón is one of these towns that became bourgeois in the nineteenth century, when it was newly fashionable among Madrid’s upper classes to go and take the waters. The result of that geothermal craze was a very beautiful grouping of buildings distributed across a park that gradually fell into disrepair over the course of the following century, until the socialist government sent all of Spain’s OAPs there for a price so ridiculous that it turned out to be more economical for them than staying at home. In the twenty-first century, the old ruins were restored and the dancehalls reopened, along with the restaurants with their sommeliers and the top-floor suites, but geo-thermalism’s social curse remained in the air like the formaldehyde that impregnates an autopsy room.

The spa has three hotels: the lower-class one, the middle-class one and the upper-class one. Although we’ve occasionally thought about staying in the upper-class one, we’ve always made do with the middle-class one. Out of stinginess. The lower-class one, where you have to go to fill out medical forms and sign up for treatments, has a smell about it of long waits and of nappies. Its hallways are populated by recipients of discount vouchers from the branch of Spanish social services that deals with the elderly; they shuffle about improbably on legs almost completely incapable of locomotion. You need to get in and out quickly, before one of them dies in front of you and ruins your weekend by making you spend it at the local magistrate’s, giving statements.

I try to pretend that the lower-class hotel and its inhabitants don’t exist. I already over-identify with illness and death in my day-to-day life; when I go on holiday, I want to feel more alive. This is the same reason I use the thermal baths, with their imitation-Roman vaults, hydro jets, plunge pools, and saunas. I also get a little tipsy after supper on the terrace, sometimes with jazz bands as entertainment, but above all make sure to don my dressing gown, walk through the park, and have a dip in the thermal lake, which surrounds an island with a grassy lawn on which the changing rooms and toilets stand, along with a bar that must actually have been a bar in Alfonso XII’s day but that is now used to store the deckchairs. Getting down there early, reserving two deckchairs near the water’s edge by placing a couple of towels on them, and plunging into the medicinal water which trickles out of the mountain at close to 30°C, is without a doubt one of the best things I have done in all my life.

In the time before we started going to Alhama, I spent a number of years not bathing in public places at all. I would refuse to go to the beach, and found a way to get out of anything involving swimming pools, rivers, lakes, or waterholes. At Alhama, the shame that had formerly forced me to watch from the shore, swaddled in trousers and long sleeves, went away. Perhaps because nobody at Alhama is beautiful and there aren’t any teenage boys around with Herculean torsos to intimidate me. Alhama, like all nineteenth-century spa towns, is an asexual scene where all monsters go unnoticed. Even so, the first time I went for a dip, it was a huge challenge to take off my t-shirt.

Come on, bashful, go for it, Cris said, always pushing me on, always forcing me to get past this fear of myself, which she sees as exaggerated and unjustified.

I’m going to read a little, I’ll go in afterwards, I said.

But she wasn’t having it. She virtually threw me in the water, or yanked me in, and I took my t-shirt off and dived in, more to avoid a scene – the old people from the lower-class hotel, like rheumatic sunflowers, were starting to turn and stare – than out of any conviction.

The moment I was in the water, I felt like Proust’s madeleine. Not Proust eating the madeleine, but the madeleine itself when it gets dropped in the tea and comes apart like a piece of origami thousands of pages long and filled with whole paragraphs of subordinate clause after subordinate clause. I, taking the form of cake crumbs, transformed into my own personal temps perdu, but, before I could arrive at the epiphany, dozens of fish arrived and started nibbling at me. Just like a madeleine, my psoriasis came away in little pieces, which they then devoured, fighting over the little flakes, as is the way with fish.

To begin with it felt nice being tickled like this, but the fish were in predatory mode, they weren’t spa attractions, and their attacks grew more and more violent. The largest fish, who took a little while to arrive because they lived out in the middle of the lake, did actual damage. I soon got tired of letting them do as they pleased, and swam around a little to drive them away. They were pretty dauntless, however, and it took more than a couple of swipes to deter them: they’d spent their entire lives sharing their living space with decrepit, harmless human beings. They weren’t like fish in the rivers or sea who have seen their friends pierced by fishing hooks and getting grilled for somebody’s supper a couple of hours later. The fish in the Alhama lake knew they are invulnerable, and kept up their pursuit of me. The moment I stopped moving, they assaulted me once more. I had to move my arms and legs constantly to keep them at bay.

This battery made the epiphany harder to come by, but not impossible; a little laboured, without the psychedelic fluidity of the truly epiphanic, and yet it arrived with a certain rhythm and pulse. My conversion into a madeleine culminated in a brief illustration of my bathing history, which was projected on my mind like the film with which people are presented in the moments before they die. My childhood on the beach, before and after the red dot on the sole of my foot. The lover’s sea off Biarritz, a number of landlocked ones too, vague hints of the north, high tides, low tides, a couple of rivers whose location I can’t recall and two or three Mexican sinkholes that were dark and exotic and smelled of shrimp.

You always step in the same stream. Every time we go underwater, we pick up on the pleasure where we left off. The decades or kilometres between one diving-in and the next are immaterial. Heraclitus must have been a very dry sort not to understand this. How are man and river going to change the second time around? In fact, it’s the exact opposite: no more emphatic proof exists of immutability than a list of the times a person has bathed or swum. There’s a group of gentlemen in San Sebastián who go for a dip at the La Concha beach every morning, whatever the weather. They do it as a way of mocking the weather, mocking their own old age, even mocking death. Every time they get in the water, they return to the first immersion. Past, present and future? Nothing but inventions on the part of people with all their clothes on – and not a splash of water. The same holds true for distances. Going swimming in Patagonia and going swimming in Norway means the same swim in the very same water. This is why explorers used to go off in search of the fountain of youth: they went looking for it in the water, the only place it can be found.

This, which will be so evident to so many swimmers accustomed to letting themselves be cradled by the motion of the waves, was only revealed to me that morning in Alhama de Aragón as I tried to flee the nibbling fish, though at intervals I let them have their way, partly out of tiredness and partly because I believed they were actually going to eat my psoriasis off me, and that I would emerge from the water in perfect health.

I wasn’t as wrong as that might make it sound. The minerals in that water, allied with the summer sun filtering through the high branches of the trees planted a century and a half before, put the illness on the back foot after just a single day. I made such a miraculous improvement that I was surprised not to see a convoy of disabled people at the gate buying little bottles of medicinal water, as though it were another Lourdes. There were neither saints nor apparitions of the Virgin Mary, neither basilicas nor pilgrims, but there were nineteenth-century buildings just as ingenuous as any cathedral – built by someone who believed they were living in a civilised world – and as for the sacred, historical part, that was covered by Roman historians talking about going there to cure aching bones in the times of Christ. The town is also much prettier than Lourdes, and the food is better. I don’t know the reason for the Catholic disdain for Alhama’s miraculous powers, but nothing good has ever happened to me in Lourdes, whereas I climb out of the water in Alhama feeling strong and smooth-skinned, and with a great urge to have sex: a pretty jarring thing in a place so strongly associated with Thanatos and not Eros.

How about a shower before lunch, get the smell of the lake off us, I said to Cris, who noticed my erection though I tried to conceal it under my towel.

We crossed the park in our dressing gowns, pretending we couldn’t see the moribund people filing out of the lower-class hotel after applying poultices and leeches, and almost as soon as we closed our bedroom door – in the middle-class hotel, populated, instead of by zombies, by couples from Majadahonda and Torrelodones with no erotic appetite – we surrendered to a rough and noisy session of lovemaking, the way we don’t do it at home. Her skin, always smooth, takes on an almost supernatural lustre at the spa, and I feel myself possessed by a vigour that frightens me and that is down to having left the psoriasis behind in the lake, as though along with it I’ve forgotten all the courtesies of the nicely brought-up boy who paid exemplary attention during sex ed in school. Missing Cro-Magnon man, I could spend the whole afternoon and evening playing the porno superhero. My bones don’t even ache.

How great the sex is in Alhama, how blessed the sleep that overcomes me while Cris takes a pre-lunch shower and I ask for a few minutes’ grace, just to stay dirty, smelling her juices and my own, and the mud of the lake on our bodies, hair plastered against the pillow, and I stare out of the window at the loose bits of slate scattered across the mountainside, the valley’s secret hidden beneath them, the power of the water, which, for a number of hours, gives me back my humanity. For a few days, at most. I feel drowsy, and resist getting in the shower, not wanting the effect to fade, knowing it to be as ephemeral as cologne. If only I could live in Alhama, like a Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and die quietly one winter’s night! But the fantasy of the cure only functions, like all good spells, within the bounds of the sacred precinct. As soon as we’re back in the car, it starts to dwindle. Before we hit the motorway, I can already feel the itching start up again, and by the time we get to Calatayud I can’t stop myself from scratching. Before we’ve covered fifty kilometres, my monstrousness will have emerged once more and the days at Alhama will be nothing but a parenthesis that, like all good memories, I will mistake for a dream.

This only happens when the two of us go alone. Other years our son comes too, and Alhama unfolds like an event horizon engulfing any possible erotic interpretation. Then we get to revel in that other sensuality, far removed from sex, and far more perverse and complex; the one that exists between parents and children. Sex, however much we dress it up as a mystery, never ceases to be a simple, predictable and mechanical mise-en-scène. This is the reason behind couples’ divorcing: they think they’re tired of having sex with the same person, when actually they’re just tired of having sex. Or, what’s worse, they’re tired of needing to have sex, the greatest nuisance of all, far harder to endure than hunger or thirst, the pleasure of sating which is varied and rich and something that also evolves over the years.

A music lover can refine their tastes to an extent that, if not infinite, may certainly be cosmic. And the same can happen to a gastronome, who can challenge their tastebuds with novel combinations and textures. Most of the sense pleasures are apt to undergo a very wide-ranging development, which makes them, in practice, inexhaustible. To exhaust the possibilities of sex, on the other hand, is within anyone’s reach. Not even the most bestial person, like the Marquis de Sade, can handle more than 100 pages without becoming repetitive and, as any fan knows, there’s nothing more monotonous than pornography. Within a matter of weeks, if going hell for leather, an adult in good health can experience all – absolutely all – of the sexual pleasures out there. You only have to witness the evolution of a rutting teenager, who in under a year goes from the immaculate awkwardness of the first-timer to the virtuosity of the professional juggler. It’s possible to reach lovemaking perfection before one hits twenty, and to spend the rest of one’s life emulating and evoking those feats without adding anything substantial to them, and without the variety and quantity of partners contributing any significant innovation (rather, the opposite is true). On the other hand, a music lover can spend ninety years exploring music with maniacal dedication and still have many surprises left in store. The same goes for someone with a refined palate. Between a Big Mac and the daily offerings at a top oyster restaurant there is a far greater conceptual, aesthetic, and anthropological distance than there is between a quick shag in the kitchen and an orgy of Versailles-esque proportions involving androgynes, clusters of Nubian slaves, and Tantric masseurs. Every culture and region expresses its history in its cuisine, making every village an archive of surprises but, as far as I know, sex is more or less the same across cultures and geography. Moral attitudes vary, with some societies being more open and others more repressed, but sex itself, mechanically speaking, is no different. And as for sexual tourism, this, unlike foody tourism, is more about flouting the laws and customs of the country the tourist hails from than sampling exotic flavours. If there are far fewer music lovers and gourmets in the world than sex-maniacs, this is a simple question of hormones, which, like everything bad in life, self-correct with age. If sex were an intellectual pleasure, we’d give it up at eighteen out of utter weariness.

The closeness between parents and children, when the children are small, is far more complex and poetic than any mythological account of rape and celestial coitus between Greek gods; the reticence that means a lot of parents fail to revel in it, in all its surging excess, is a mystery to me. Plus, it’s so short-lived that it melts away as quickly as childhood itself.

The child is slightly afraid of water. It doesn’t know how to swim, the world it inhabits is far from swimming pools and oceans. To go under water is a thrilling, terrifying prospect, one it will only go along with from the safety of its parents’ arms. The Alhama lake is deep for him, and I only dip my feet at the water’s edge, so we get a flotation noodle for him to use. To begin with he doesn’t trust the noodle as much as he trusts being held by us, but little by little he does relax. The water’s lovely, there aren’t any waves and the fish – in his case, yes – tickle. Once the preliminary minutes are over, the swim begins to take shape, rhythm and pitch, like it was a Mahler symphony building from a quiet, almost non-existent opening, and that bar by bar gradually awakens the orchestra. All that is hard, gloomy, and brown on the earth becomes harmonious and clear in the water. We parents and children understand one another better in the water than anywhere else.

We go in deeper, don’t worry, I’m right here, grab the noodle, I’m here, I haven’t gone anywhere, it’s okay, want to see how deep we are? A moment comes when I’ll go down. See that? I went right down and stuck my arms up, and my hands didn’t touch the surface; it’s over three metres here. That isn’t super deep for a lake, but it’s great for swimming. Shall we go and duck Mama? Grab onto my shoulders, I’ll pull you along like a speedboat.

There is no intimacy more sealed off or clear. In the water with your child, there’s a wonderful fusion of being and becoming. He is the child, we are the parents; any need for justification falls away. There’s no identity that needs defending, no story to construct (as a politician would say), no role to play or need to feel oneself part of a hierarchy or organisation. We just are. In an essential, simple way; no tragedy. This is what Stalin was looking for in Sochi with Artyom: the chance to truly be.

This metaphysic will be better understood with the story I’ll come onto now. A story about the things parents do when their children aren’t looking.