Naples '44

by Norman Lewis

  ‘Ah well, Luisa, I suppose if it can’t be, it can’t be.’ They thanked us with polite calm, and departed.

  Last week a section member was invited by a female contact to visit the Naples cemetery with her on the coming Sunday afternoon. Informants have to be cultivated in small ways whenever possible, and he was quite prepared to indulge a whim of this kind, in the belief that he would be escorting his friend on a visit to a family tomb, expecting to buy a bunch of chrysanthemums from the stall at the gate. However, hardly were they inside when the lady dragged him behind a tombstone, and then – despite the cold – lay down and pulled up her skirts. He noticed that the cemetery contained a number of other couples in vigorous activity in broad daylight. ‘There were more people above ground than under it,’ he said. It turned out that the cemetery is the lovers’ lane of Naples, and custom is such that one becomes invisible as soon as one passes through the gates. If a visitor runs into anyone he knows neither a sign nor a glance can be exchanged, nor does one recognise any friend encountered on the 133 bus which goes to the cemetery. I have learned that to suggest to a lady a Sunday-afternoon ride on a 133 bus is tantamount to solicitation for immoral purposes.

  In recognition of his medical interests in civilian life, Parkinson deals with the doctors of Naples. One of his most valuable contacts is Professore Placella, whose speciality is the restoration of virginity. He boasts that his replacement hymen is much better than the original, and that – costing only 10,000 lire – it takes the most vigorous husband up to three nights to demolish it.

  November 15

  Lattarullo invited me to lunch. I told him he couldn’t afford it, and in any case where was the food to come from? He smiled mysteriously and said, ‘You’ll see.’ He seemed so very eager for me to accept this invitation that I did so. Before going to his flat in the Via San Felice I ordered a couple of marsalas in our bar, and pocketed the eggs to take with me. I got to the flat and I found that another guest had arrived, introduced as Cavaliere Visco, a small man with enormously thick eyebrows, bad breath, and hands covered with hair. There was a faint, thin smell of cooking about the flat, as out of place as church incense in a brothel, and a neighbourhood girl who had obviously been called in to clean up was dragging herself about in the background with a mop. In Neapolitan fashion, Lattarullo had borrowed a chair here and crockery and cutlery there, and for this occasion his one remaining possession of value came into its own. This was a silver salver, stated to have been given to one of his ancestors by Vittorio Emanuele, which he had managed to hang on to through thick and thin.

  The neighbourhood girl put her mop away, wiped her hands on her dress, went off, and came back shortly carrying the salver. I had seen this magnificent object with its embossed decoration of cupids and vineleaves before, but only through the rents in the brown paper wrapper in which it was normally kept. Now, polished up and put to its proper use, I was dazzled by its splendour. As the girl carried the salver in, it seemed to draw all the light out of its surroundings, and Lattarullo and the Cavaliere became paler than ever, and Visco spread his hairy palms in delight.

  The meal we were about to eat formed a tiny wet mound in the centre of the enormous dish, and I recognised it instantly from its odour, apart from its appearance, as ‘Meat and Vegetables’, the most disgusting of all Army rations. This little glutinous pile of age-old mutton was encircled by cubes of the dirty-grey bread of the kind sold on the black market. Visco whinnied with delight, and understanding the planning, the effort and the sacrifice that had gone into this offering, I managed a show of damp enthusiasm.

  After the meal Lattarullo explained the reason for this meeting. He told me that he had become a member of a Separatist organisation dedicated to the restoration of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and that Visco was one of the leaders. Visco then set forth the philosophy and the aims of his movement. The South of Italy and Sicily, he argued, formed a cultural and economic unity, prosperous only when in political combination. Ruled from the North, these had always been written off as naturally backward areas, of value only as a source of cheap labour and cheap foodstuffs. I had to agree with this. The facts are, as every Italian will admit, that the South is virtually a colony of the industrialised North.

  At this moment, Visco said, the South was faced with a new danger. With the collapse of Fascism, a political swing to the Left was certain. A high percentage of soldiers returning from the war were known to have been influenced by Communist ideas, and Visco and his friends believed that the North – traditionally the stronghold of Socialist sentiment – was destined to go Red. This being the case, he argued, the best hope for the South was to protect itself by cutting adrift from the rest of Italy, and reforming the old political combination of Naples and Sicily either as a Christian anti-Socialist Monarchy leaning heavily for support on the West, or even as a colony of Great Britain, or as a new American State.

  The way of life suggested for this new kingdom, colony or state seemed extraordinary. As industrialisation lay, according to Visco, at the root of all social evil, it was to be rigorously suppressed, and the few factories already in existence in the South would be demolished. Southerners were to be returned to virtue on the soil. Field workers would be housed in barracks, clothed in knee-length homespun tunics in the style of the Roman peasants of old (the Patricians would wear togas), and fed on a low diet of maize gruel. They would be encouraged to early rising, early marriage, to regular prayer and the procreation of large families. Even the few existing tractors would be scrapped and replaced by the ‘nail plough’ in use in Roman times. Visco believed, too, in keeping women fully occupied. Whatever spare time was left over from their spinning was to be absorbed in profitable fieldwork, and they would labour at the side of the men, carrying their young babies as Indian squaws do, bound to their backs.

  I listened gravely to these flights of fancy. Visco said that the Separatists had secret supporters everywhere, and that they would soon begin recruiting and drilling. Naturally they needed funds and arms. He hoped that the Allies would realise that any support they felt prepared to give to assist in the establishment of an anti-Communist state in an area of such vital strategic importance would be a wonderful investment.

  Finally, he said, the Separatists would need experienced officers. He believed that the war with Germany would be over by Christmas, and with its ending the Separatists expected to open their offensive. Visco was prepared to offer me or any of my friends a commission in the Separatist army as soon as we were free from our present commitments. ‘You could stay here when the war is over,’ he said. ‘Settle down and become a landowner … Here you would enjoy many privileges. You would live like a barone. Why go back to England and the fog?’

  I listened with all the gravity I could manage, but found it hard to keep a straight face.

  November 25

  Food, for the Neapolitans, comes even before love, and its pursuit is equally insatiable and ingenious. They are almost as adaptable, too, as the Chinese in the matter of the foodstuffs they are prepared to consume. A contact from Nola mentioned that the villages in his area had lost all their breeding storks because last year the villagers eked out shortages by eating their nestlings. This is regarded as a calamity by those who did not benefit directly, as there is a widespread and superstitious aversion in Italy, as elsewhere, to molesting storks in any way.

  Another example of culinary enterprise was provided by the consumption of all the tropical fish in Naples’s celebrated aquarium in the days preceding the liberation, no fish being spared however strange and specialised in its appearance and habits. All Neapolitans believe that at the banquet offered to welcome General Mark Clark – who had expressed a preference for fish – the principal course was a baby manatee – the most prized item of the aquarium’s collection – which was boiled and served with a garlic sauce. These two instances demonstrate a genius for improvisation. But some of the traditional local cooking is weird enough in its own right. On Vesuvius
they make a soft cheese to which lamb’s intestine is added. Shrove Tuesday’s speciality is sanguinaccio – pig’s blood cooked with chocolate and herbs.

  My experience of Neapolitan gastronomy was expanded by an invitation to a dinner, the main feature of which was a spaghetti-eating competition. Such contests have been a normal feature of social life, latterly revived and raised almost to the level of a cult as a result of the reappearance on the black market of the necessary raw materials.

  Present: men of gravity and substance, including an ex-Vice-Questore, a director of the Banco di Roma, and several leading lawyers – but no women. The portions of spaghetti were weighed out on a pair of scales before transfer to each plate. The method of attack was the classic one, said to have been introduced by Fernando IV, and demonstrated by him for the benefit of an ecstatic audience in his box at the Naples Opera. The forkful of spaghetti is lifted high into the air, and allowed to dangle and then drop into the open mouth, the head being held well back. I noticed that the most likely-looking contestants did not attempt to chew the spaghetti, but appeared to hold it in the throat which, when crammed, they emptied with a violent convulsion of the Adam’s apple – sometimes going red in the face as they did so. Winner: a sixty-five-year-old doctor who consumed four heaped platefuls weighing 1.4 kilograms, and was acclaimed by hand-clapping and cheers. These he cheerfully acknowledged and then left the room to vomit.

  November 26

  Most of the restaurants are open again, and these – though in theory out of bounds – are crowded with officers. Here the black market reigns supreme, and some of the prices asked, and obtained, are extraordinary. At Zi’ Teresa’s, a large lobster is said to cost up to the equivalent of a pound, and a good fish meal is priced at an exorbitant ten shillings. Wine is correspondingly expensive, with Chianti from a leading vineyard priced at five shillings a bottle. There is no need to pay these extravagant prices. All one has to do to have the restaurateur instantly and smilingly knock off half the charge is to ask him to sign the bill.

  At Zi’ Teresa’s I ran into Captain Frazer, whom I had not seen for a couple of months. The change in his appearance was startling. I found him sitting alone engaged in the moody consumption of the raw semiliquid custardy contents of a pile of bisected sea urchins, and it was clear he was not enjoying his meal. We had a confidential chat and he told me that he had been recommended to eat all the shellfish he could with a view to rectifying problems that had arisen in his relationship with the Signora Lola. In the shadows of the black market he could only afford sea urchins and found the whole business rather a chore. He appeared incredibly gaunt and wasted. His beautifully-cut uniform hung from his limbs, and when he got up and strode away, he looked more like a walking greatcoat than a living man.

  December 5

  The really unpleasant part about this job is having to make arrests. This is all the worse because we are convinced that these arrests are almost always unnecessary, and are the result of manipulation by which we are dragged into private vendettas. This being so, there is a tendency when action of this kind is in the offing to find some reason to stay away from headquarters. Today, having overheard some mention of a woman who would have to be picked up, I quietly slipped away to Casoria, where I attended the funeral of a Carabiniere murdered yesterday by the bandits there (several professional wailers in attendance). The funeral over, I drank a few marsalas with the Police Chief, went on to call on contacts in the stricken town of Afragola, questioned a girl of Madonna-like grace in Acerra who had most foolishly applied to marry a guardsman at present serving six months in the glasshouse, and then meandered back to Naples. By this time it was four in the afternoon, and I felt I was out of danger. I was hardly in my room, beginning on my notes, when Dashwood came in wearing his Buddhistic smile that warned of calamity. ‘Glad you’re back,’ he said. ‘You’re just the man …’

  The lady to be arrested and taken to the Filangieri prison was a Signora Esposito-Lau, a German married to an Italian, charged with nothing more serious than enthusiastic fraternisation with her countrymen in Naples, and with paying frequent visits home to her parents in Frankfurt. In view of the Psychological Warfare Bureau’s report (which I believe to be exaggerated) that 96 per cent of the Italian population collaborated wholeheartedly with the Germans, it seemed absurd that this woman, who had held no official position of any kind, and was not known to have been a Nazi or a Fascist, should be singled out for victimisation, and I could only suppose that she or her husband had made enemies who were avenging themselves in this way.

  My inexperience in these matters makes me awkward and inept. The army provided no course, no instruction or advice of any kind on how a woman should be arrested or how to cope with the tempest of hysteria and grief when, without warning of any kind, she is told that she is to be taken from her home and her family and put in prison for an unspecified period. A small, frightened little Signor Esposito-Lau himself answered the door, with his wife at his heels. I mumbled what I had to say, and the wife fell to the ground in a faint, damaging her head on a chair. The neighbours on both sides had to be fetched to help resuscitate her, to console her, to dress her suitably for incarceration, and the house was soon full of weeping. I kept in the background, and found myself answering in an undertaker’s whisper when anybody spoke to me.

  Esposito-Lau, the husband, was quiet and dignified. He told me he was being punished for his success in business, and I’m sure he was. Unfortunately these people knew only too well the hunger and the freezing cold the frail-looking little wife would face in the Filangieri prison. There was a wild rush round to find articles of warm clothing, and when these were not forthcoming I calmed the crisis by telling them that I would come back next day, collect any missing articles and deliver them in person to the prison.

  So I actually made some friends. One of the neighbours, a Signora Norah Gemelli, turned out to have an Irish mother and to speak perfect English. She made tea and we talked about Dante, and the unpleasantness of war, and gradually the sobs subsided and the tears were dried, and the fragile little prisoner hugged her husband and her friends for the last time, and made ready to go.

  December 9

  A day off on a remarkably fine Sunday for the season offered an opportunity for further acquaintance with the neighbourhood. Our surroundings provide a rare blend of grandeur and lower-class vivacity, the palaces among which we live having quite failed to keep the working man and his family at bay. From our front windows we look out over the formal gardens of the Villa Nazionale with their rare palms and their ranks of statues of the Greek heroes and gods, all of which have been contrived for the delight of the nobility of bygone generations, whereas the view from the office windows is straight into the fifteen-feet-high portone of the Calabritto Palace. Here, all the ground-floor rooms surrounding the vast courtyard, which is at once nursery, playground and market, have been taken over by small businesses: a clock-repairer, a maker of artificial flowers, a working cobbler, a tripe-boiler, a seamstress, and others. In this way the many families who share the palace have developed their enclosed little village whose inhabitants hardly ever bother to leave it, since most of their requirements can be dealt with on the spot.

  In my tour of the neighbourhood I found this social amalgam to be the normal thing; the poor and the rich in our rione live side by side, constantly rubbing elbows while appearing to be hardly conscious of each other’s presence. Fifty or sixty per cent of poor families occupy one windowless room, and have been bred to endure airless nights on the ground floors of the palazzi, or in gloomy, sunless back streets. The aristocrats who remain make do with about twenty rooms on one of the upper floors of their ancestral home, and for the most part, let off the rest. In the past everybody who could afford to do so lived on the Riviera di Chiaia, where the sun and the sea air and the palm-shaded gardens defended them from the plagues and the poxes that constantly ravaged the labyrinthine city itself. Carraciolo, the hero of the Neapolitan republican insurrec
tion, cold-bloodedly slaughtered by Nelson when our admiral intervened to put the effete Bourbon King back on the throne, lived a hundred yards away from our headquarters. I visited his family palace today, and found it the most charming of these great seafront buildings, with a small courtyard with a fountain flanked by Roman busts, marble cherubs and prancing horses, the total effect being almost playful in the gravity of the Neapolitan-Catalan architectural environment.

  Exactly opposite the Palazzo Carraciolo in the Villa Nazionale stands the now desolate aquarium in its grove of Judas trees and evergreen oaks, and I went there too. The Bay of Naples, said the sole remaining employee, was famous for its rare crustaceans and octopods, some of which were to be found nowhere else in the sea. They had had a unique collection of these, but they had all been fished out along with General Clark’s unhappy manatee, to go into the pot in the first days of the liberation. A few molluscs and sea-anemones had survived for a matter of days, and then they, too, had died through the failure of the filtration plant.

  The Via Carducci joins the Riviera at this point, and I followed it into the square containing the church of San Pasquale. This possesses the miraculously preserved body of the Blessed Egideo whom I found on view in the glass case in which he has lain for some two hundred years. The flesh, as proclaimed, showed no signs of decay, and the Blessed Egideo’s facial expression was serene to the point of indifference. He enjoys huge fame in the area of San Pasquale as the protector of women in pregnancy, and only requires to add two more miracles to his already impressive list to complete all the qualifications for full sainthood.