CONQUERING HEROES AT TABLE
In these days of much junketing among VIPs at summit conferences, readers might be amused to read what one writer thought about such a gathering taking place in the early months of 1944. The Italian novelist Curzio Malaparte, (born Kurt Suchert), narrates how, as liaison officer operating between the Italian Liberation Corp and the Allied Supreme Command, he was invited to dine with a group of American Generals and senior officers. Malaparte in his early days supported the fascist regime in Italy, then went to live and write in Paris and was confined in prison for five years by the regime on his return home. Here, a meal is prepared at the old palace in Naples once occupied by the Duke of Toledo and is given in honour of the lady commander of the WACs, recently arrived from the USA. One has to bear in mind that this meal was taking place while American soldiers were fighting and dying on Monte Cassino. It might be considered bad taste for Malaparte to sound so snobbish at such a time.
Our conversation was interrupted by the sudden presence of waiters dressed in full livery and carrying huge, solid silver trays. First we ate creamy carrot soup, with chlorine tablets and Vitamin D added. The main course arrived, a disgusting dish of slices of purple pig meat called SPAM, the pride of Chicago slaughterhouses, which had been piled on top of a heap of boiled polenta. I recognised the breeding of the waiters, old hands at this kind of work, more by the look of disgust on their faces than by the way they displayed themselves in blue livery with red lapels. I have never seen such distinct signs of disdain quite like theirs. They conveyed the highest, oldest, most obsequious and freely bestowed expressions of scorn by Neapolitan servants long accustomed to kow-towing to uncultivated foreign potentates.
A people that has an old and noble tradition of service, and much experience of hunger, cannot respect masters who lack refined taste and civilised manners. There’s nothing more humiliating for a servant class than to be governed by those who have scant discernment for the fine things of life and whose appetites are gross and crude. Of the many foreigners who have come to rule in Naples, the most acute memories are preserved for the Frenchmen, Robert d’Anjou and Joachim Murat. The first knew what fine wines went with choice sauces and the second could mount and dismount from a horse elegantly, and not just because it had an English saddle. What is the point of crossing the seas to win a war, place the laurel on the victor’s brow, and not know how to dine at table? What kind of heroes were these Americans who ate food only fit for chickens in the farmyard?
Fried spam and boiled polenta, displayed on the finest chinaware and delivered on solid silver trays, were brought in by waiters with noses in the air as if they’d been ordered to serve up Medusa’s head. The reddish, violet look of the fried spam had all the signs of rotting meat left out in the sun. The wan, yellow appearance of the polenta, cooked to a mushy heap, resembled the swollen goitre of a chicken whose neck had just been rung. Around the walls of the hall hung gilded Murano mirrors and ancient Sicilian tapestries. This noble dining room of the Duke of Toledo, with its antique furniture and golden-framed portraits of Spanish monarchs, Luca Giordano’s “Triumph of Venus” painted on the ceiling, now celebrated a meal in honour of Mrs Flat, commander-in-chief of the Fifth Army’s WACs. Strangely, the atmosphere in the palace had become completely coloured by the violet light suffused from the spam and polenta, like the dead reflections given off by the moon. The old honour and glory of the House of Toledo had never known such mortification.
In this room others had celebrated the “triumphs” of the noble families of Aragon and Angevin, feasting in honour of Charles VIII of France and Frederick of Aragon. It had been customary for there to be much junketing, dancing and tournaments of courtly love before the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was to fade away sweetly in the opaque light of a bleak dawn. Now, as the waiters served the honoured guests from silver trays and the awful royal feast began, I fixed my eyes on them, fascinated by the utter look of disgust and disdain in their faces. These servers, attired in the livery of the House of Toledo, knew me and gave me a special, knowing smile. I was the only Italian sitting at table and I was the only one who could fully understand and divine the humiliation of the lackeys having to serve fried spam and boiled polenta! Their disgust was displayed in the manner by which their white-gloved hands moved in placing the plates on the table.
Translated by Jack Dale from the novel, La Pelle (The Skin) by Curzio Malaparte.
