Skin

Early in the story, art is associated with opulence and wealth. While Drioli looks through the shop windows at everything he cannot afford (silk ties, diamonds, perfume), he also sees the picture gallery, “the finest shop in Paris” (2). Art rests along the opulent walls in the warmth of the gallery and is appreciated and observed by a decadent audience, and the impoverished Drioli is an outsider who glimpses this luxury through glass but is unable to enter it, despite having a valuable work of art inscribed on his body.

Having had a prior friendship with Chaim Soutine, who was also ostracized from elite worlds but posthumously celebrated in them, Drioli parallels his friend’s experience in gaining access to this aesthetic realm only through death. When Drioli felt the richest, as a younger man prior to the war, he asked Soutine to tattoo a work of art on his back. As an emaciated, starving, and lonely man after World War II, Drioli represents realities that the elite prefer to forget. Although he cannot purchase a meal for himself, the stranger who claims to own a French hotel assures Drioli that people will refer to him as “the fellow with ten million francs upon his back” (19).