The Day Before Happiness

by Erri De Luca

  • • •

  “What did you use to say to each other down there?”

  “We would play scopa. I taught him, he was a fast learner. He didn’t want to lose, unlike you, who don’t care. I liked his tenacity. A guy who had lost everything, whose life was hanging from a nail, from a stranger, would dig in his heels so he wouldn’t lose at scopa. He was a guy who took everything seriously.

  “ ‘You’re too serious for a Neapolitan,’ I used to tell him. He would reply, ‘Since when? Down here I laugh my head off. Outside is the war, the massacre of my people, the collapse of the city in which I was born, and I’m down here as if I was waiting under a doorway for a storm to pass. And you’re here, too, coming to keep me company. I read the holy book, our prophets, and I start to laugh. Down here, the year of grace 1943 for you and the year 5704 for us, it makes for comic reading. I’m not serious, Don Gaetano, I’m tragic, a reject from comedy. Let me at least take seriously the game of scopa, which is almost a religious art. Yes, religious: the most important card is the seven, which is the number of our novelty as Jews. It was the Jews who invented the seven-day week. Before the calendars used to go according to the moon and sun. Then our divinity let us know that the days were six plus one. We sanctified the number before scopa did. There are forty cards in a deck, like the years spent in the desert, between the exodus from Egypt and the entrance to the promised land. And then there’s the spariglio, a variant on taking a card with a card of equal value. You can take it with a combination of cards that add up to the same number. This is an invention that doesn’t exist in nature. Nature goes in pairs, scopa goes by spariglio. It’s in the dealer’s interest, not the player’s, to keep everything even, apparigliato. It’s a fight between order and chaos. Let me at least take scopa seriously.’ ”

  • • •

  “When he spoke to me like this, it shut me up and gave me the shivers.”

  “I’m getting them too just from hearing you remember his words. I have to write them down the same day so I don’t lose them. You can still remember them almost twenty years later.”

  “It has to do with the game. If you can remember carte sparigliate you can do the same thing with your thoughts. I would come back upstairs from these visits in a daze. Outside it was September 1943, and down there it was a month from the Jewish calendar in the year 5704. Down there was a man who came from an ancient time, a contemporary of Moses and the pharaohs, and the lot had fallen on him to be a contemporary of the Nazis. It’s a good thing I didn’t hear him laughing down there. ‘Don Gaetano, let me know when you see the stars in broad daylight.’ Outside the youths stole guns from the barracks and hid them. A group that had one guy in a military police uniform had emptied the armory of the Sant’Elmo fortress. In the meantime the Germans ransacked the churches and blew up the San Rocco bridge in Capodimonte. The Sanità bridge we managed to save by disconnecting the explosive charges, we did the same with the aqueduct. They wanted to leave behind a city in ruins. The uprising was its salvation.

  “The bad came with the good. A good person might start loan-sharking, a girl from a good family start to prostitute herself to the Germans. A guy reputed to be a gangster would be the first to run for the shelter. The Germans were even more craven because the war was going badly. The landing in Salerno had succeeded. They blew up the factories, looted the warehouses to leave them empty. In the last days of September the hunger and exhaustion in people’s faces made the city frightening. Those who still had something ate in secret. The Germans put on a show: they would break down the door to a shop, then invite the people in to ransack it. When the crowd lunged forward they would shoot into the air and film the scene. It was for their propaganda: the German soldier intervenes to prevent looting. These are things that happened, guaglio’, on one of these same beautiful September days.”

  • • •

  Sitting on two chairs in the courtyard we were looking up to where the city ended and who knows what began, maybe the universe. It was close by, a piazza enclosed by a circle of railings. Don Gaetano stared with his hands entwined and breathed deeply. I twisted my neck back, too: the field beyond the balconies moved in a circle, very slowly, but it still made your head spin.

  Eyes that on the ground didn’t go beyond a ray of the horizon were able to see the planets. No wonder the sky went to your head, it made you believe you could go there.

  “They were dropping bombs every night, the city was always on the run, it didn’t scream, it ran and saved its breath. The explosions of German bombs were confounded with the American bombings, the sirens sounded after the antiaircraft artillery had started firing.”

  Then he would remember some odd event and a smile would come to his face. “A young guy was strolling arm in arm with a girl when the siren went off. He couldn’t run off by himself and leave her behind, and she couldn’t run in high heels, so there was a scene of him pulling her and her behind him screaming at the top of her lungs: let me go, let me go. But with him nothing doing, he was forced to drag her. The girls were braver. Later the guys redeemed themselves with the days in late September. It takes special moments for men to show their valor. Women are more valiant on a normal basis, if you could call anything about 1943 normal.”

  • • •

  “People came out of the shelters after the air raids and found their houses gone. The faces of those who from one hour to the next had lost everything: an old man was sitting atop the ruins of his building staring at the sky. He came to me and said, ‘Sto gradanno ’ncielo pe vvede’ addo’ me pozzo sistema’. Ccà ’nterra nun tengo cchiù niente’—I’m looking at the sky to see where I can settle. Because on the earth I have nothing left. People searched through the rubble of their homes for something to salvage. They rummaged from one room to the next going through the doorways, even if the walls were gone, entering the kitchen to see if they had turned the gas off, then they would look up and see the sky coming through the ceiling. The insolent sky of September 1943: a tablecloth with embroidered borders, fresh and clean without a speck of dust, a stain. An unblinking turquoise: come down to earth for a while, sky, let’s trade places, why don’t you take up there all the filth and spread your tablecloth down here on earth. A vicious, distant sky—not like today—that started from the rooftops. The uprising began when it started to rain. It’s as if the city was waiting for an agreed sign or the sky was closing. And the Americans stopped bombing.”

  • • •

  “The Jewish guy asked me what was going on with the weather. I answered that nothing was going on, it wasn’t changing and it wasn’t letting a drop fall on the dust. There wasn’t enough water and the women went to the sea with buckets so they could at least do the laundry. Not even the Jewish guy liked the weather settling into a nice unchanging pattern. He used to ask me whether you could see any stars by day, he was waiting for a sign.

  “ ‘People like sunny days, to me they’re frightening. The worst things happen under sunny skies. When the weather is bad a person prefers to postpone an evil deed. With the sun anything can happen. If I make it to autumn, I want to start dancing under a cloudburst.

  “ ‘By autumn the war will have passed, the Americans are in Salerno.’

  “I didn’t tell him they were in sight, he might have done something crazy like going out. I could hear his thoughts. ‘So close to freedom and unable to see it, cooped up down here wondering whether it’s salvation or a trap. The door opens and down they come to take me.’ Not even in his thoughts did he want to imagine I could betray him. If not me, then someone from the building who had caught on. He wondered whether anyone knew of the hiding place. My assurances could not be enough for him.

  “ ‘These are not good times for trust and I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m telling you not to let bad ideas get the better of you, don’t come out looking for a safe place, there isn’t one. If you do come out they’ll shoot you on sight. Commander Scholl has issued a bulletin, all men between the ages of eightee
n and thirty-three have to report to the barracks or they’ll be shot. Of the three thousand expected, one hundred twenty showed up.’

  “Do you see what kind of a war it was, guaglio’? More unarmed people were dying than soldiers. On the streets I started to hear people’s thoughts: why are they remaining in the city and not going off to fight? Why are they beating up on the poor rather than going to the front? The thoughts began from a single head. When persons become a people it’s shocking. So a morning came, a late September Sunday, when it finally rained and on everyone’s lips I heard the same words, spat out by the same thought: mo’ basta—enough already. It was a wind coming not from the sea but from inside the city: mo’ basta, mo’ basta. If I closed my ears I could hear it louder. The city was sticking its head out of the bag. Mo’ basta, mo’ basta. A drumbeat called and out came the guaglioni with guns. The center of the uprising was the Liceo Sannazzaro, the students were the first. Then out came the men hidden beneath the city. They climbed up from underground like a resurrection. ‘Dalle ’n cuollo, ’dagli addosso’—Jump ’em, let ’em have it—the streets were blocked by the barricades. In the Vomero district they cut down the sycamores and used them to make roadblocks against the tanks. We made a barricade on Via Foria, fitting together about thirty streetcars. The city sprang like a trap. Four days and three nights, it was like today, the end of September.”

  • • •

  “The German tanks managed to pass the Via Foria blockade, make it down to Piazza Dante, and head toward Via Roma. There they were stopped. Giuseppe Capano, age fifteen, slipped between the tracks of a tank, set off a hand grenade, and managed to escape out the back before the explosion. Assunta Amitrano, age seventeen, dropped from the fourth floor a marble slab taken from a bureau and smashed the machine gun on a tank. Luigi Mottola, age fifty-one, sewer repairman, set off a gas canister while popping out of a manhole cover under the belly of a tank. A student at the conservatory, Ruggero Semeraro, age seventeen, opened the balcony and started playing on the piano the Marseillaise, music that instills even more courage. Antonio La Spina, priest, age sixty-seven, from the barricade in front of the bank of Naples, shouted out Psalm 94, the psalm of revenge. Santo Scapece, barber, age thirty-seven, threw a bucket of soapsuds through the peephole of a tank that ended up crashing into the gates of a flower shop. Our fellow citizens developed infallible aim in the space of three days. The burning bottles wreaked havoc on the tanks, blinding them with flames. I became an expert at making them, I would put soap flakes inside to make the fire stick better. The diesel fuel was donated by the Mergellina fishermen, who couldn’t go out to sea because of the blockading and mining of the harbor.

  “Six persons in the midst of the ready crowd came up with the right moves to create trouble for an armored division of the powerful army that had single-handedly conquered half of Europe. It wasn’t the first time six persons had carried off such a feat. Already in 1799 the French army, the most powerful of that era, had been stopped at the entrance to the city by a popular insurrection after the dissolution of the Bourbon army. Six persons endowed with first name, last name, age, and profession, were stopping the Germans from retaking the city. Six persons whose names had been drawn at random by necessity decided the situation, while all around them others made many generous but inexact moves. When six persons appear, all at once, then you win.”

  • • •

  “And where is that populace today, Don Gaetano?”

  “Back in its place, it hasn’t moved and it hasn’t forgotten. The populace makes its move, then immediately it breaks up, it goes back to being a crowd of persons who rush back to their own affairs, but with more energy, because uprisings fire up the spirits of those caught up in them. The fighting on the third day was fiercer. We also had to drive out the Fascists, who were shooting down at us from the rooftops. In the midst of those battles I was able to go down to the hiding place to bring him something to eat. The third day I dropped by to see him at dawn. I told him if I wasn’t back in twenty-four hours, he could go out. He asked me to do him a favor that day.

  “ ‘Go to the seashore and cast a stone in the water for me.’ I thought he’d gone soft in the head from being down there. I answered that I didn’t know if I would be going to the seaside, that the city was in revolt. ‘It’s one of our rituals, tomorrow for us is the New Year. We celebrate in September. By casting the stone in the water we make the gesture to be delivered from sin. The year for us begins tomorrow. Ours would have it that today is the day before happiness.’

  “He hadn’t gone soft. Before stopping by the uprising’s command center to take my orders, I went down to Santa Lucia where the women were fetching water. I climbed over the rocks and I cast a nice heavy stone into the sea. It was New Year for the Jews and it should be New Year for us, too. On that day the city shot off its best fireworks, the shots of freedom. The Germans retreated, pursued and targeted from every rooftop and street corner. They shot the last cannon shots from Capodimonte. One landed in front of the entry to our building and exploded downward. In the hiding place the Jewish guy was thrown from his cot and got a head wound. To dress it he tore up his shirt. I found him there that night when I brought him the news that the Germans were gone.

  “ ‘You won?’ He didn’t believe me.

  “ ‘You won, too.’

  “ ‘It’s the first war we’ve won since the time of Judas Maccabaeus. And also your city, it’s the first time it’s won a war.’

  “ ‘It’s also the first time you’ve fractured your skull falling off the bed.’

  “He asked me whether I’d cast the stone into the sea. Yes, I replied, this way it’s New Year for the whole city. I treated his wound. I had a bottle of brandy to celebrate the end of the war, I used it to clean the cut. We drank a couple of glasses, our heads were spinning. I had to crawl up the stairs.

  “The next day the city was free. The Germans made an attempt to come back but they were stopped and gave up. He came out leaning against me with his eyes closed. With the bandages on his head he was a man emerging from the land of the dead. The city was in ruins, we went to the seashore. The American warships were like so many gray rocks jutting out in the middle of the bay. He leaned against me and stamped his feet on the ground in a pair of German shoes. ‘I don’t want to walk on tiptoe anymore.’ On Via Caracciolo the first jeeps drove by with the star painted on the hood. ‘The stars did battle, as is written in the Song of Deborah, here are the stars in broad daylight.’

  “ ‘Open your eyes now, just a little, a peek.’

  “He placed a hand over his forehead and saw the arrival of freedom passing by.

  “ ‘You’re free,’ I said, and we hugged each other. Everyone was hugging. The day before happiness, we almost missed it.”

  While Don Gaetano was talking I was gazing at the third-floor window. The day before happiness had not yet arrived for me. I wanted to know it. I didn’t want it to happen all of a sudden and not to notice it the day before. They knew it was supposed to happen the day after. I spent the rest of the night in my room, jotting down Don Gaetano’s story.

  • • •

  In summer I wake up early, I go down to the Santa Lucia rocks with a net to look for sea urchins and if I’m lucky maybe an octopus. I stay for a couple of hours, before the sun surmounts the shoulders of the volcano. On their way home from some all-night party, the rich are leaving the private clubs. In evening wear exposed to the early light, they rush for cover together with bats running late. Also on his way home is the count who lives in my building and gambles away his possessions at the tables of his club. He doesn’t see me. The eyesight of the rich is different from ours, we need to see everything. They only see what they want. I roll my pants up to my knees and climb down the rocks. I lower my net into the water and pull it up, letting it drag across the surface of the rocks. A stroke of luck and I find something to bring to the table. Before going home I stop by Don Raimondo’s to give him back the book. He helps me find a
nother, his choice. Don Raimondo is an adventurous bookseller, he rescues libraries, even from the trash heap. Most of the time he’s called to a house in mourning that is clearing out the space of the deceased.

  “More than clothes and shoes, books bear their imprint. The heirs get rid of them to exorcise the ghost, to get rid of it. The excuse is that space is needed, the books are suffocating. But what do they put in their place, to cover the walls marked by their outline?”

  Don Raimondo tells me what he can’t tell them. “The emptiness on the surface of a wall left by a sold bookshelf is the deepest I know. I take away with me the banished books, I give them a second life. Like the second coat in painting, used for finishing, a book’s second life is its best.” He’s rescued the library of a lover of American literature. “I’m reading great adventures from the place where so many Neapolitans went to live. But you can tell they don’t write books.”

  The names of American writers are always American names. They have a sporty way of life: a person has to pull himself up by his bootstraps. It seems that no one has family, the only relationship is marriage. Or else their books are all written by orphans.

  • • •

  With Don Gaetano one afternoon I went to see a wartime bomb being defused. A lot of them had dropped without exploding. The workers digging a new basin found one in the harbor. We weren’t allowed to go near but Don Gaetano knows the back alleys and we were able to watch from a good vantage point. All the while he kept telling his stories of the days of freedom.