Skin. Sergio del Molino

Skin - Sergio del Molino


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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.

      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.

      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.

      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


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