Skin. Sergio del Molino

place where we carry our dead friends with us. The drunken nights we’ve shared remain forever in our pores and hair, which develop wrinkles in accordance with the hardening of collagen. They transform as we ourselves transform. If a restorer were to examine us with x-rays, they would discover a thousand layers of sketches and touch-ups, illegible artists’ signatures that we have forgotten, and even the hazy outlines of unborn children.

      Growing old consists of giving an account of oneself, but my monstrous skin tells of the future, not the past. It gradually dies, showing me what I will be; it has no interest in what I have been. It anticipates biological degradation, the return to an embryonic, amorphous, bloody form that closes life’s circle and shows that there never was nor ever will be any soul to sublimate me: only cells, flakes, dust, dried blood. The body at its purest.

Why go on digressing and feeling sorry for myself? We monsters are such a drag, forever whimpering away in our towers and dungeons, egoists to a one, feeling the pain of the world’s disgust – when in fact the world doesn’t give us a second thought. The Beauty and the Beast have something in common, in that both feel they are being watched. The narcissism of the beautiful and the ugly is one and the same.

      I want to tell my son about my life line, about the death that hasn’t come but surely will, about my real witches and the red dots on the soles of my feet. I want to create a bestiary of monsters for him, of my fellow beings, individuals devoured by the same psoriasis that leaves me so broken. All of this I will write, so that he may read about it when I’m not there to tell him, or it doesn’t make sense for me to do so, because I’m no longer tucking him in, saying sleep tight, or leaving the door ajar and the kitchen light on.

A Swimming Pool in Sochi

      Once there was a man with a moustache who ruled from the plains of Europe to the Sea of Japan, from the North Pole to the deserts of Persia. These had been the dominions of the tsars, until the friends of the man with a moustache, who called themselves the Bolsheviks, killed the last tsar and all his relatives and founded another empire. To begin with they plundered the palaces, but later they decided to keep them for themselves, and little by little took a liking to noble living. They were hard, uncompromising types, accustomed to conversing at the tops of their voices, carrying guns and sleeping unsheltered on the ground. They went by nicknames, as warriors do. Lenin – that is, the Lena-ian, or he who comes from the River Lena – was boss. The man with a moustache called himself Stalin, that is, Man of Steel. To his Bolshevik friends he was the vozhd, the guide. Or Koba. Only those closest to him were allowed to address him as Iosif Vissarionovich.

The Bolsheviks had dedicated half their lives to fighting the tsars, and they had been acquainted with cold Siberian prisons and exile, just as cold, in every European capital. There was no reason, having assumed control in the country and dispatched their enemies, for them to go on lying down at night in camp beds and eating gruel. Stalin was from Georgia, but he didn’t like to be spoken to in Georgian. He preferred Russian, the imperial, common tongue, the language of equality and of the state. Occasionally one of his compatriots, trying to save their own lives or that of a loved one, would try to soften him up by speaking in Georgian, but they only succeeded in making him angrier still, perhaps because it was a reminder of his elderly mother in Tbilisi whom he never visited, or of those winters in his childhood with neither pheasants nor caviar on the table. Stalin was more a fan of the here and now, and the here and now sounded Russian and were both delicious and plentiful, like the lavish socialism that cascaded over the country, thanks to his infinite goodness.

      The hunger could be sated and, with firewood and leather jackets specially cut by Parisian tailors, the cold alleviated, but there were aftereffects from the former struggles for which no palace, porcelain, Rubens painting, or bottles of champagne could provide consolation. In Siberia, in the years when they were detained at the pleasure of the tsarist judges, he got frostbite in one of his arms, and from then on suffered from terrible rheumatism. He had also been diagnosed with chronic tonsillitis and an incurable skin condition (psoriasis, of course). Which of these ailments was a result of the revolutionary war and which purely genetics was beyond medical science to answer in those days. The terrible part was the impotence: Stalin could change the world, but he could not stop himself from scratching. What’s the point of being all-powerful and feared from the plains of Europe to the Sea of Japan, from the North Pole to the deserts of Persia, if night after night your bones ache and your skin itches like crazy?

      It was Mikoyan, loyal, Armenian Anastas Mikoyan, a comrade from their heroic days, who told him about Sochi.

      There’s a small town on the Black Sea, he said, near the border with Georgia; a trip will do you the world of good. We’ve just built a railway that goes all the way there. The climate, the forests, the tranquillity there – you’ll see. The water is miraculous. Come on, I’ll find you a nice little place, it’ll be no-frills but ideal for recharging the batteries.

Stalin summered in Sochi, and since Stalin was the USSR, all of the USSR went and summered there too. That small town, which until the mid 1800s didn’t even appear on the maps of Russia, began to grow and grow. On the seafront, until then no more than a dirt track at the foot of the mountains, big buildings started to be thrown up. Sanatoria of the utmost healthfulness; hotels with liveried bellboys and concierges who spoke French; and on the streets black Packards with thick glass in the windows, chauffeurs who opened the door for you and knew to stand very erect and very silent as the ladies got in or out of the vehicle.

      Like the town, the dacha grew and grew until the small, no-frills place of Mikoyan’s promises was more like a mini mansion, comprising several buildings and extensive wooded gardens. Wicker armchairs and a large marble table were set up between the trees; the table was never without piles of documents and papers, because comrade Stalin never stopped.

      Though it can be sweltering in Sochi during the summer, with temperatures touching thirty degrees and extreme humidity, Iosif Vissarionovich would sit on his wicker throne in long trousers and a shirt buttoned all the way to the top. Sometimes, a white shirt with pockets. At others, a green military shirt. Cool and roomy, and made, like his trousers, of lightweight fabrics, but never a button undone. There are no photos of him either in shirt sleeves or bare-chested, unlike the fierce Bolsheviks at his side, sometimes stripped to the waist and bathed in sweat, playing one sport or another.

Those Caucasus-reared Bolsheviks, country folk through and through, got into the habit of bathing naked, but Stalin skipped these manly get-togethers. If you wanted his ear, the best thing was to take a seat at his marble table in one of the wicker armchairs, or go walking in the woods with him, or, better still, join him for one of his never-ending dinners. This is not to say that the vozhd did not feel the heat like any other Caucasian Bolshevik, or that he did not enjoy the feeling of cold water on his skin. This was why he had a private pool built, quite shallow and conveniently tucked away behind a fence, with nobody permitted to enter.

      Artyom, my boy, come and bathe with your old man, tell me what you’ve done today.

      The early adolescence of Artyom Fyodoryvich Sergeyev coincided with the early 1930s. His father was Fyodor Sergeyev, one of the Bolshevik revolution’s most intrepid characters, an intimate of Stalin’s from the savage days of agitation and a comrade-in-arms in the civil war. Much more than a brother. Dauntless Fyodor died, unfortunately, in the stupidest, least honourable way possible for a warrior of his mettle: during the testing of the Aerowagon, a Soviet invention that aimed to make high-speed trains by fitting them with aircraft engines. Naturally, the Aerowagon derailed almost as soon as it set off, killing everyone on board.

      Artyom was barely three months old when he was orphaned, and it was Lenin himself who told Stalin that he ought to adopt him. Stalin thereby became his father, and did truly love him as much as his own sons. Or possibly even more, because, as Artyom grew up, the impassioned features of Fyodor, whom Stalin missed so sorely, began to appear in his face.

      Artyom, my boy, stop what you’re doing and come and bathe with your old man.

      Behind the screen, the vozhd took off his large shirt and pale summer trousers, and then everything