Subject: Spam in triumph in the palace of the Dukes of Toledo

From: [email-masked] (Jack Campin)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1993 20:54:12 GMT

[ From Curzio Malaparte's _The Skin_ (first published in English in 1952),
  which I've just written about in rec.arts.books.  It's 1943 and the
  officers of the American Army are dining in the palace of the Dukes of
  Toledo after the liberation of Naples: ]

But at this point the laughter of the guests was interrupted.  The door
opened, and in the entrance appeared a number of liveried waiters, each
holding aloft with both hands an immense tray of solid silver.

After the soup, which consisted of cream of carrots seasoned with vitamin D
and disinfected with a two per cent solution of chlorine, came spam - the
imitation pork that is the pride of Chicago.  It lay in purple slices on a
thick carpet of boiled maize.  I recognized the waiters as Neapolitans, not
so much by the blue livery with red _revers_ of the house of the Dukes of
Toledo as by the masklike expressions of horror and disgust that were
imprinted on their faces I have never seen faces in which contempt was
written larger.  It was the contempt - inscrutable, historic, deferential,
serene - of the Neapolitan servant for the uncouth foreign master in his
every shape and form.  Peoples that have an ancient and noble tradition of
servitude and hunger respect only those masters who have refined tastes and
lordly manners; there is nothing more humiliating to an enslaved people
than a master with uncouth manners and coarse tastes.  Of all their foreign
masters only the two Frenchmen, Robert of Anjou and Joachim Murat, the one
because he could choose a wine and appraise a sauce, the other because he
not only knew what an English saddle was, but could fall from a a horse
with supreme grace.  What is the use of crossing the sea, invading a
country, winning a war, and crowning one's brow with the victor's laurel,
if afterwards one cannot comport oneself properly at table?  What kind of
heroes were these Americans, who ate maize in the manner of hens?

Fried spam and boiled maize!  The waiters supported the trays with their
two hands; each averted his face as though he were serving up a Gorgon's
head.  The reddish violet hue of the spam, which frying had, as always,
made rather dark in colour, like meat that has gone bad through exposure to
the sun, and the pale yellow of the maize, which was covered with white
streaks - maize is softened by the process of cooking, and becomes like the
grain with which the crop of a drowned hen is sometimes found to be stuffed -
were dimly reflected in the tall, clouded Murano mirrors, which alternated
with ancient Sicilian tapestries on the walls of the hall.

The furniture, the gilded picture-frames, the portraits of Spanish Grandees,
the _Triumph of Venus_, depicted on the ceiling by Luca Giordano, the whole
vast hall of the Duke of Toledo's palace, in which General Cork was that
evening giving a dinner in honour of Mrs Flat, General-in-Chief of the Waacs
of the Fifth Army, little by little became tinged with the lurid violet of
the spam and the moonlight pallor of the maize.  The ancient and glorious
house of Toledo had never known such a humiliation.  This hall, which had
witnessed the many `triumphs' of Aragon and Anjou, feasts in honour of
Charles VIII of France and Ferrante of Aragon, the balls and love-pageants
of the brilliant nobility of the Two Sicilies, gradually became suffused
with a pale, auroral half-light.

The waiters lowered the trays and offered them to the guests, and the
frightful meal began.  I kept my eyes fixed on the waiters' faces: the
spectacle of their disgust and contempt absorbed my attention.  These
waiters were wearing the livery of the house of Toledo; they recognized me
and smiled at me.  I was the sole Italian present at that strange banquet;
only I could understand and share their humiliation.  Fried spam and boiled
maize!  And as I perceived the disgust which numbed their white-gloved hands
I suddenly noticed that the edge of each tray was embossed with a diadem.
But it was not the diadem of the Dukes of Toledo.

I was wondering from what house, and by virtue of what marriage, those
trays had found their way into the palace of the Dukes of Toledo, when,
looking down at my plate, I thought I recognized it.  It formed part of the
famous porcelain service of the Gerace family.  Sadly and affectionately I
thought of Jean Gerace, of his beautiful mansion on the Monte di Dio, which
had been wrecked by bombs, and of his art treasures, now scattered to the
four winds.  I looked along the edge of the table, and there in front of
the guests, in all its splendour, I saw the celebrated Pompeiian porcelain
of Capodimonte, on which Sir William Hamilton, His Britannic Majesty's
ambassador at the court of Naples, had bestowed the name of Emma Hamilton;
and - a last, pathetic tribute to the unhappy muse of Horatio Nelson -
`Emma' is the name given, in this same city of Naples, to those plates
which the craftsmen of Capodimonte have copied from the single specimen
discovered by Sir William Hamilton during the excavations at Pompeii.

I was moved and gladdened by the knowledge that the worthy General Cork's
table was graced by this porcelain, whose origin was so ancient and
illustrious, and whose name was held so dear.  And I smiled with pleasure
as I thought that Naples, conquered, humiliated, destroyed by the raids,
ravaged by suffering and hunger, could still offer its liberators such
delightful evidence of its former glories.  A gracious city, Naples!  A
noble country, Italy!  I was proud and moved as I saw the Graces, the Muses,
the Nymphs, the Venuses and the Cupids that chased one another round the
edge of each of those beautiful pieces of china mingling the delicate pink
of their flesh, the pale blue of their tunics, and the warm gold of their
hair with the lurid ruby red of that terrible spam...

-- 
-- Jack Campin -- Room 1.36, Department of Computing & Electrical Engineering,
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