and yet he doesn’t dare; he is incapable of sacrificing himself for the common good. There is nothing admirable about him; the wolf dies, and good riddance. And yet, those looking on can’t avoid the thought that the beast is the only true victim of the piece. All those mauled and killed by him deserve it, in some way; they are pathetic types, caught out at unfortunate moments in their lives. The lycanthrope almost does them a favour by rubbing them out of a picture in which they don’t fit, and there is something of the comic skit about their murders. The death of the 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.
Not only do I find it impossible to separate Stalin’s skin condition from his amoral wickedness; his story forces me to consider my own monstrous condition. What if there is a correlation between the patches of psoriasis on my skin and the way I am in the world? If I believe that Stalin set about slaughtering healthy people after losing the only healthy person he allowed to see him in all his monstrousness – his beloved Kirov – could I not also be an avenger? Of course, I’m no killer, but there are forms of evil that are less crude, subtle and painful, and that don’t lead to a criminal record. Those of us with psoriasis have mastered the art of camouflaging ourselves to ward off unwelcome interest in our plaques. I don’t do it so much out of shame as in order to save others the discomfort and to force them to look me in the eye. Put like this, it almost makes it seem a kind gesture, but what I’m looking for when making others feel comfortable is also a way to make them keep their distance. Very few people are able to penetrate the monster’s carapace and give me the kind of look Nurse Price gives at the end of American Werewolf. Politeness is almost never a building block for trust, and over time I notice myself beginning to comfort myself with a kind of soft misanthropy that could end up becoming cruelty. As I add layers of cotton and fibres over my skin to hide it, my sensitivity to the world is muffled and other people’s problems sound ridiculous to me, strange and minuscule. Anyone wrapped up in their own problems is always a potential mass murderer: if the fate of the world is of no interest to you, you can sign off on its extinction without the slightest quiver, completely guilt-free.
But there’s something even more perturbing in this image of Stalin in the Sochi swimming pool. The broken surface of the water, knocking against the edges with every movement. This irresistible amniotic attraction. The torsion of the passing minutes, refracting when a person is submerged. When we bathe, we are all innocent. Whatever we may be out of the water we leave suspended, there beside our t-shirt, towel, sun cream and half-read novel. That was why Artyom didn’t see a tyrant. It wasn’t to do with the fact that Stalin was his father – ultimately every father is a tyrant to his children – but with the water and its way of making the bodies we see fused beneath the surface soft and shiny.
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.
I try to pretend that the lower-class hotel and its inhabitants don’t exist. I already over-identify with illness and death in my day-to-day life; when I go on holiday, I want to feel more alive. This is the same reason I use the thermal baths, with their imitation-Roman vaults, hydro jets, plunge pools, and saunas. I also get a little tipsy after supper on the terrace, sometimes with jazz bands as entertainment, but above all make sure to don my dressing gown, walk through the park, and have a dip in the thermal lake, which surrounds an island with a grassy lawn on which the changing rooms and toilets stand, along with a bar that must actually have been a bar in Alfonso XII’s day but that is now used to store the deckchairs. Getting down there early, reserving two deckchairs near the water’s edge by placing a couple of towels on them, and plunging into the medicinal water which trickles out of the mountain at close to 30°C, is without a doubt one of the best things I have done in all my life.
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.
But she wasn’t having it. She virtually threw me in the water, or yanked me in, and I took my t-shirt off and dived in, more to avoid a scene – the old people from the lower-class hotel, like rheumatic sunflowers, were starting to turn and stare – than out of any conviction.
The moment I was in the water, I felt like Proust’s madeleine. Not Proust eating
