Skin. Sergio del Molino

many questions.

      Yezhov the dwarf took his tasks as a personal, artistic challenge. Though Comrade Stalin put them to him in terms that were bureaucratic, demanding that certain quotas be hit in this or that district, and though he himself had designed a methodology for bloodletting on a massive scale, Yezhov never relinquished art or instinct because this was the type of monster he was, so necessary for the success of a good old purge or two, the kind who likes to get his hands dirty.

Those who are made into freaks by skin conditions have a desire to pass on their blemishes, eruptions and wounds to everyone else. Given that itchiness and shame do not disappear even at the best spas, these people console themselves by making the outer layers of the world unwell; spoiling it just as their own outer layer is spoiled. If they amass sufficient power, they spread parched, burning sensations, and the blood that comes from scratching, and the ugliness of flaky skin to the farthest reaches of the planet. Stalin, Vishinski and Yezhov complemented one another very well. The last, the worst affected, the only one who could not hide his condition with long sleeves, did the dirty work, like the foreman, the one at the coal face. Vishinski did the preliminaries: his tribunals provided Yezhov’s slaughterhouse with prisoners, but he was never there for the torture sessions or anywhere to be seen in the basements of the Lubyanka Building. Always impeccably turned out, he made sure to keep himself in the spotlight and represented the public humiliation of disgraced comrades, making them put their signatures to declarations of guilt. He was a fine raconteur, though he did get carried away at times. At the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev, he came up with the story of Kirov’s murder having been hatched by Trotsky’s son and the conspirators in the Hotel Bristol in Denmark, and made the prisoners confess as much. It turned out that the Hotel Bristol had been knocked down in 1917 (which was perhaps when Vishinski last visited), which didn’t do wonders for the credibility of the confession. Stalin was distinctly unamused when he found out.

      Idiots, couldn’t you have said that they conspired at a train station, given there are train stations everywhere?

      Poor Vishinski: a thriller writer trapped in the body of a Soviet public prosecutor.

      I sometimes imagine that all those millions of deaths, all that fear and cold, had its inception in a swimming pool: on 25 August 1936, while Kamenev and Zinoviev hoped for mercy in Moscow, the only person who could give it to them was smoking, in silence, alone, in a shallow swimming pool in Sochi. The historians talk of power and ideology, of huge forces colliding like cosmic, radioactive events, of extremely complex causes and effects, and of bibliographies that nobody could read even in ten lifetimes. Since I am not a historian, I can say without risking heresy that it was all down to a skin irritation, rheumatic pain, shame and, above all, the envy of another person’s tan and of their unblemished skin, perfect but for a single freckle at the base of the neck. Without Kirov and without Artyom, who, like all teenagers, would soon feel too old to spend the afternoon naked at his father’s side – preferring now to strip in the company of any communist girl in the world – Stalin’s psoriasis went back to being a state secret, a wall around it once more that no functionary was permitted to cross. And there, belly-deep in the curative water of Sochi, his eternal pipe in his mouth, with neither documents to sign nor the Politburo at hand to insult, the vozhd turned into the supreme and unsurpassed villain.

Cold water makes flaky skin turn red, and then when it dries, it goes white, and with a day of summer sun it will be camouflaged against the rest of the skin. Only by looking extremely closely when it’s dry can the decolouration be appreciated; but water lights up the blemishes, making the ailment stand out a mile off. It is a brief flash that, in reality, announces that you’re cured – or the pretence that you’re cured, and that is known to those of us with psoriasis as the summer break. The radiation from the sun, the iodine, the salt and minerals in the seawater all combine to set siege to and diminish the plaques, which return only after bathing, between the wrinkles that come from being in the water for a long time. The benefits to the skin of exposure to the sun disappear in the water. We suddenly remember the forgotten curse. In the pool, the monster remembers what it is.

      And it is this cardinal iridescence, this way the afflicted person’s skin will throb and importune, that pushes a person to wish for revenge. Only those who are also unwell in this way, like Vishinski, like Yezhov, can understand this unstoppable instinct to exterminate all those smooth-skins, all those who join the throngs in swimming pools and sunbathe without a care that people might stare, all of those who may run their fingers over their skin, from their feet to their faces, without lighting up any prohibited region, and of those small gulags where the most miserable embarrassment is concentrated. From the swimming pool in Sochi, the red throbbing of the wet blemishes transmitted a paranoic code, like the inner voices of the schizophrenic, which gave the order to do away with them all, not to leave a single one alive, until the whole world was crushed together in the already cooling water of that very shallow pool, with the sky above receiving the never-ending smoke from his pipe.

      I don’t want you to understand, son, and this is why I don’t dare tell you, that that brilliant red monster in the swimming pool in Sochi is also me.

The Magic Mountain

      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,