Skin. Sergio del Molino

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Название Skin
Автор произведения Sergio del Molino
Жанр Социология
Серия
Издательство Социология
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509547876



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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.

      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.

      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 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.

      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.

      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