by Norman Lewis
We gave up and went back. It was two days now since the last knocking had been reported, and strange that the strength of men, however close to starvation, should have ebbed so suddenly that we could hear not even a moan or cry. The general opinion was that the monk knew more than he was prepared to say. There was even the possibility, the Police Commissario suggested, that he had gone into the catacombs and rescued the Germans. Whether or not this was so, it was unlikely that we should ever know.
October 15
Among the civilian contacts of these first few days, my prize acquisition was Vincente Lattarullo, a man steeped in the knowledge of the ways of Naples.
When originally asked what was his business with us, he answered in a dry whisper, ‘I am motivated by a passion for justice,’ and, saying this, he appeared to vibrate. It turned out that this distinguished, fragile-looking man, who sometimes halted in mid-sentence and swayed a little, as if about to faint, wished to denounce the activities of an American requisitioning officer who was going round offering Italian car-owners a guarantee against their cars being requisitioned on payment of 100,000 lire. We told him that there was absolutely nothing we could do about it.
I took him to the Bar Vittoria next door for a marsala all’uovo, but when the barman brought the egg to be broken into his glass I saw the anguish in Lattarullo’s face, and stopped him in mid-action. Apologies streamed forth and then Lattarullo begged to be allowed to take the egg home. Moments later the impact of the alcohol on an empty stomach set him swaying again and I realised that the man was starving. Unfortunately there was no food of any kind anywhere within range, except the prized and precious eggs, rationed on a basis of one per day to favoured customers. However, Lattarullo was prevailed upon to accept my egg as well, which he beat up in a cup, and swallowed very slowly there and then.
He proved to be one of the four thousand lawyers of Naples, ninety per cent of whom – surplus to the needs of the courts – had never practised, and who for the most part lived in extreme penury. There are estimated to be at least as many medical doctors in a similar situation; these famished professionals being the end-product of the determination of every middle-class Neapolitan family to have a uselessly qualified son. The parents are prepared to go hungry so long as the son is entitled to be addressed with respect as avvocato, or dottore.
Lattarullo had succeeded in staying alive on a legacy originally worth about a pound a week, now reduced by devaluation to about five shillings, and in order to do this had worked out a scientific system of self-restraints. He stayed most of the day in bed, and when he got up walked short distances along a planned itinerary, stopping to rest every few hundred yards in a church. He ate an evening meal only, normally composed of a little bread dipped in olive oil, into which was rubbed a tomato. Sometimes he visited another professional man in similar circumstances and they exchanged gossip, sipped a cup of coffee made from roasted acorns, and starved socially for an hour or so. He gave the impression that he knew everything that was going on in Naples. I walked back to his flat with him, and found him living in two rooms containing three chairs, a bed, and a rickety table on which stood an embittered aspidistra plant. The lighting and the water had been cut off years ago, he said.
It appeared that Lattarullo had a secondary profession producing occasional windfalls of revenue. This had to be suspended in the present emergency. He admitted with a touch of pride to acting as a Zio di Roma – an ‘uncle from Rome’ – at funerals. Neapolitan funerals are obsessed with face. A man who may have been a near-pauper all his life is certain to be put away in a magnificent coffin, but apart from that no other little touch likely to honour the dead and increase the bereaved family’s prestige is overlooked.
The uncle from Rome is a popular character in this little farce. Why should people insist on Rome? Why not Bari or Taranto? But no, Rome it has to be. The uncle lets it be known that he has just arrived on the Rome express, or he shows up at the slum tenement or lowly basso in an Alfa-Romeo with a Roman numberplate and an SPQR badge, out of which he steps in his well-cut morning suit, on the jacket lapel of which he sports the ribbon of a Commendatore of the Crown of Italy, to temper with his restrained and dignified condolences the theatrical display of Neapolitan grief.
Lattarullo said that he had frequently played this part. His qualifications were his patrician appearance, and a studied Roman accent and manner. He never uses the third person singular personal pronoun lui, as all the people who surround him do, but says egli, as they do in textbooks, and he addresses all and sundry with old-fashioned politeness as lei. Where the Neapolitans tend to familiarity and ingratiation, Lattarullo shows a proper Roman aloofness and taciturnity. When Lattarullo meets a man he says buon giorno and leaves it at that, and he goes off with a curt goodbye. This, say the Neapolitans, who are fulsome and cloying in their greetings, is how a real Roman gentleman speaks. If anybody at the wake happens to have noticed Lattarullo about the streets of Naples on other occasions, he takes care to keep it to himself.
October 20
A narrow escape today while motorcycling along the Via Partenope. I was riding towards the Castel Nuovo, through an area badly damaged by bombing, with the sea on the right and semi-derelict buildings on the left, when I noticed a sudden change ahead from blue sky, sunshine and shadow, to a great opaque whiteness, shutting off the view of the port. The effect was one of a whole district blotted out by a pall of the white smoke sometimes spread from the chimneys of a factory producing lime. On turning a bend, I came upon an apocalyptic scene. A number of buildings including a bank had been pulverised by a terrific explosion that had clearly just taken place. Bodies were scattered all over the street, but here and there among them stood the living as motionless as statues, and all coated in thick white dust. What engraved this scene on the mind and the imagination was that nothing moved, and that the silence was total. Dust drifted down from the sky like a most delicate snowfall. A woman stood like Lot’s wife turned to salt beside a cart drawn by two mules. One mule lay apparently dead, the other stood quietly at its side, without so much as twitching an ear. Nearby two men lay in the positions of bodies overcome by the ash at Pompeii, and a third, who had probably been in their company, stood swaying very slightly, his eyes shut. I spoke to him, but he did not reply. There was no blood to be seen anywhere.
This turned out to be one of a series of explosions produced by delayed-action explosive devices constructed by the Germans shortly before their departure, in each case from several hundred mines buried under principal buildings. My friend White’s visit to the Central Post Office at about the time I was motorcycling along the Via Partenope nearly involved him in disaster. He had gone there to discuss the reorganisation of the postal services and – I suspect – methods of censorship, and about ten minutes after he left the building blew up, killing heaven knows how many passers-by. A senseless massacre perpetrated on the Italian civil population.
It now came out that several days before the Germans abandoned Naples, Colonel Scholl, the officer in command of the garrison, reported to have been unable to accept Italians as even honorary Aryans, had given an order that an area to a depth of three hundred metres from the seafront be evacuated by the civilian population. The Italians had been led to believe at that time that a naval bombardment, followed by an Allied landing, was expected in the city itself. The supposition now was that the real motive was to clear the area to enable this to be secretly mined, and that a large number of seafront buildings had been mined in this way, and might blow up at any time.
Our most urgent preoccupation is the fact that our palazzo may have been included, and this demoralising possibility strengthened to probability when our portiere told us that, returning after four days’ enforced absence with relations living near the Porta Capuana, he had found a number of lengths of wire strewn about the courtyard. The Engineers, who are running round in circles trying to deal with this situation, will go over the place as soon as they can, but their Captain
, contacted by the FSO, wasn’t hopeful. The foundations of an old palazzo like ours would be honeycombed, he said, with sewers, cellars, and disused well-shafts. Even if there were mines, the odds were ten to one they’d never be found. His advice was to get out of the place for a few days, and wait until buildings stopped blowing up.
This evening, after a day so full of alarms, the city was plunged into even deeper misery by the first German air-raid. Many bombs fell in the port area, and the nearest explosion caused our old palazzo to teeter hideously. As soon as the all-clear sounded I went out to inspect the damage, finding very little of consequence in the port itself but devastation in the narrow streets to the rear of it. Apocalyptic scenes as people clawed about in the ruins, some of them howling like dogs, in the hopeless attempt to rescue those trapped under the masonry. In Pizzo-Falcone a team of roadsweepers were working by lamplight clearing up what looked like a lake of spilled stew where a crowded shelter had received a direct hit.
October 22
There is no relief in sight to the near-famine conditions in the city and surrounding country.
Friday, at least ten jobs came up, among which was the visit to a peasant house near Aversa where the people had been assaulted by deserters. Having found nothing lootable, they had molested all the womenfolk, subjecting them to every conceivable indignity, including attempted buggery. The women were evidently spared from outright rape by the fear many of our soldiers share of contracting syphilis. One of the girls involved in this nightmarish business was outstandingly pretty, although spoiled by a puffiness – a sogginess of the flesh showing particularly about the eyes. This I’ve noticed so often in people close to starvation. I did my best to pacify the sufferers with vague promises of redress. There was nothing else to do.
Today the same girl appeared at HQ, eyes downcast, and shaking. She brought a letter from her father, which, from its unusual literacy, I suspected might have been put together by the village priest.
Sir, I noticed when your honour was good enough to call that from the way you looked at my daughter she made a good impression on you.
This girl, as you know, has no mother, and she hasn’t eaten for days. Being out of work I can’t feed my family. If you could arrange to give her a good square meal once a day, I’d be quite happy for her to stay, and perhaps we could come to some mutually satisfactory understanding in due course.
Your humble servant.
October 23
A tremendous scare this morning following information given by a captured enemy agent that thousands of delayed-action mines would explode when the city’s electricity supply was switched on. This was timed for two o’clock today. An order was given for the whole of Naples to be evacuated, and within minutes army vehicles were tearing up and down the streets broadcasting instructions to the civilian population.
The scene as the great exodus started, and a million and a half people left their houses and crowded into the streets, was like some Biblical calamity. Everyone had to be got away to the safety of the heights of the Vomero, Fontanelle and the Observatory, overlooking the town. This meant that the bedridden, the dying, and all the women in labour had to be coped with in some way or other, not to mention the physically and mentally sick persons in clinics all over the town. The agent had specifically mentioned that five thousand mines had been laid under the enormous building housing the 92nd General Hospital, packed at this time with war casualties, all of whom had to be moved to a place of safety. Our own move took place shortly before midday when streets were beginning to clear of the last of the desperate crowds. I saw men carrying their old parents on their backs, and at one moment a single, small explosion set off a panic with women and children running screaming in all directions, leaving trails of urine.
At the Vomero we took up positions at a spot on the heights where the road had been intentionally widened to assist visitors to appreciate the view, which was splendid indeed. All Naples lay spread out beneath us like an antique map, on which the artist had drawn with almost exaggerated care the many gardens, the castles, the towers and the cupolas. For the first time, awaiting the cataclysm, I appreciated the magnificence of this city, seen at a distance which cleansed it of its wartime tegument of grime, and for the first time I realised how un-European, how oriental it was. Nothing moved but a distant floating confetti of doves. A great silence had fallen and we looked down and awaited the moment of devastation. At about four o’clock the order came for everyone to go home.
October 24
The FSO called me in this morning to say that yesterday’s great fiasco was the result of a carefully organised plot, designed to cause the maximum disruption to the life of the city. A young German soldier named Sauro had volunteered to stay behind when the troops pulled out and then, as soon as the mined buildings started to go up, to turn himself in with this story of the whole of the town having been mined. The General, exasperated, was of the opinion that this soldier should be treated as a spy, and shot. My instructions were to go to see him at the civilian prison at Poggio Reale and report on all the circumstances of the case, to help decide whether his execution could be legally justified.
Never having been in a prison before except the famous hole in the ground in Philippeville, into which dissident Arabs were flung, to be kept in total darkness, Poggio Reale came as a surprise. I stated my business at an office sited between the outer and inner walls – this was surrounded by weeping women – and a man appeared carrying an enormous bunch of keys, to walk with me to the inner gate. The man made some comment in Neapolitan dialect which I did not understand, and then burst out laughing. He gave me the impression of being insane. When we got to the gate he turned his back to it, and then, still giggling and chatting incomprehensibly, with his hands behind his back, selected the right key on the bunch purely by touch, thrust it unerringly into the lock and turned it. This was evidently a macabre piece of expertise to which all visitors such as myself were treated.
The gate opened; the screw, grinning with pride, waved me ahead and I stepped forward into the blue twilight of the prison, took its wornout, fungus-smelling air into my lungs, and its resounding steel echoes into my ears. Next came the Ufficio Matricola, the records office, begrimed and gloomy – windows painted over against air-raid attacks – and staffed with unshaven, muttering clerks, looking hardly better off in their terrible version of freedom than the prisoners who dragged themselves about the place doing odd cleaning jobs. Here Sauro’s whereabouts was established, and a warder with a face the colour of a newly unwrapped mummy took me to his cell.
I had expected a gigantic pale-eyed Teuton, but what I found was a small, dark boy who gave me a limp Hitler salute, and asked whether I’d brought any food. He said he’d had nothing to eat for two days. I found this believable at a time when the whole civilian population of Naples was still on the brink of starvation, and to the afflictions prisoners of Poggio Reale must normally have expected to suffer had been added the burden of an American master sergeant, attached as adviser to the office of the Warden, and engaged in the private sale of prison equipment.
Sauro told me that he was not a German at all but had had an Italian father and a German mother. His father had been killed at Tobruk, after which he had been taken to Germany by his grandparents, and there the rules had been bent a little in his favour to allow him to enter the Hitler Jugend. Although he was now seventeen years of age, he looked fifteen, with emaciated boyish good looks and fine dark eyes fixed with evident complacency on the vision of martyrdom. He had committed himself to this fate, and was prepared, virtuously, to avoid any compromise, or any kind of a deal that would help us to find an excuse not to shoot him. He preferred his death to be on our consciences, and refused to consider anything by way of an excuse that might have mitigated the severity of retribution. ‘I did all the damage I could. I’m only sorry it couldn’t have been more. Whatever I did was for the Führer. You can shoot me whenever you like.’
This was a dilemma. Mu
ch as generals may like to be thought capable of ruthless action, they often seem eager in practice to pass on moral responsibility for decisions of this kind. A Major Davis had been put in charge of this case and I sensed in the Major a reluctance to give the order for Sauro to be shot. I felt, too, although no positive lead was given, that the Section would not hold it against me if I found a loophole by which the firing squad could be avoided. This entirely suited my book, as I had no intention of being responsible for the death of a seventeen-year-old fanatic. I therefore reported that Sauro was mentally unbalanced. This verdict was accepted without comment, but probably with secret relief.
October 25
It is astonishing to witness the struggles of this city so shattered, so starved, so deprived of all those things that justify a city’s existence, to adapt itself to a collapse into conditions which must resemble life in the Dark Ages. People camp out like Bedouins in deserts of brick. There is little food, little water, no salt, no soap. A lot of Neapolitans have lost their possessions, including most of their clothing, in the bombings, and I have seen some strange combinations of garments about the streets, including a man in an old dinner-jacket, knickerbockers and army boots, and several women in lacy confections that might have been made up from curtains. There are no cars but carts by the hundred, and a few antique coaches such as barouches and phaetons drawn by lean horses. Today at Posilippo I stopped to watch the methodical dismemberment of a stranded German half-track by a number of youths who were streaming away from it like leaf-cutter ants, carrying pieces of metal of all shapes and sizes. Fifty yards away a well-dressed lady with a feather in her hat squatted to milk a goat. At the water’s edge below, two fishermen had roped together several doors salvaged from the ruins, piled their gear on these and were about to go fishing. Inexplicably no boats are allowed out, but nothing is said in the proclamation about rafts. Everyone improvises and adapts.