Naples '44

by Norman Lewis

  In so far as anyone rules here at all, it is the Camorra. The Brigadiere gave the usual account of it as a secret and permanent resistance that had evolved over the centuries as a system of self-protection against the bullies and the tax-collectors of a succession of foreign governments who had installed themselves in Naples. The people of the Zona di Camorra lived by their own secret laws, recognised only their own secret courts, which imposed only one sentence on the enemy from without or the betrayer from within – death. In the old days, said the Brigadiere, there had been some sort of moral authority, some sort of justice, but now nothing but outright criminality remained. If there was plunder to be taken the Camorrista took it, and shared it out among his friends. The Camorristi were in big-scale organised crime, and they tolerated the police because they kept the small-time criminals in their place. The only man who had ever stood up to them had been Mussolini, who had sent thousands of troops into this area and thrown the Camorristi into gaol after farcical trials, or had simply sent them away for resettlement in other parts of Italy.

  The police, here as elsewhere, are corrupt, and how can they be otherwise on the salaries they are expected to live on? The chief of police of every town – usually a strutting peacock of a man, uniformed like a general, although only an NCO, gets the equivalent, through the devaluation of the lira, of £3 a week. The Italian State has always encouraged its police force, by grossly underpaying them, to resort to the spoils system, and now with galloping inflation they are in effect receiving pay that buys between one-fifth and one-tenth of what it did before our arrival. My only incorruptible marshal is the old widower Lo Scalzo of Caivano, who is as grey and as starved-looking as my old friend Lattarullo, and whose appearance is a disgrace to the force. Having no family to worry about, he says, he can get by, or as he puts it – ‘keep enough soup flowing’.

  Discussing with Major Pecorella, CO of the Naples Carabinieri, this problem of corruption in the force, he put forward the rueful viewpoint that even a corrupt police force was better than no police at all. The main thing was to keep police rapacity within acceptable bounds. This interview was the result of many complaints from Resina, where it would appear that the Carabinieri have settled down to batten on the huge numbers of black-marketeers in the area. Last week they rounded up a band of contrabandisti and then freed them on payment of 15,000 lire per head. Another less affluent band got off with a total payment of 30,000 lire. The crunch came when they ‘requisitioned’ a lorry-load of leather belonging to the Consiglio di Economia, and held it at their barracks until a ransom of 20,000 lire was paid. Pecorella agreed that this was scandalous. Yet what was to be done? If he sacked the men they couldn’t be replaced, and his force is only one-quarter of its regular strength.

  The fact is that with all their shortcomings, the police manage to keep the walking corpse of law and order alive and on its feet, and some get themselves killed doing so. They tolerate the big racketeers of the Camorra because there is nothing they can do about them, and they gratefully accept whatever they are given in the way of protection money, but they are relentless in the war they wage on petty thieves, and for this, at least, the public is grateful.

  January 7

  Today I made my first contact in the Zona di Camorra, outside the police, when Lo Scalzo took me up to see Donna Maria Fidora, otherwise known as La Pitonessa (the Pythoness), who lives on her estate near Caivano, and is the richest landowner in this locality. Donna Maria was originally a circus performer who specialised in wrestling with a python, and in this way attracted the fascinated attention of Don Francisco Fidora, an intellectual who was writing a book on the circus, and who immediately proposed marriage and was accepted. A man twenty years her senior, and of delicate constitution, he was said by Lo Scalzo to have died of a heart attack either in the act of the marriage’s consummation, or shortly after.

  All this happened a decade ago, since which time the Marshal said Donna Maria had run the estate with professional efficiency. I found her a soft, well-rounded woman with a dreaming smile, no longer showing any signs of what must have been the impressive musculature of her youth. We drank fizzy wine from the estate, chewed on hard biscuits, and complained of the times we lived in. Later Lo Scalzo mentioned that Donna Maria employed her own private army to keep order on her land, for which reason it was an oasis of discipline and calm in the general anarchy of its environment. No one could pull the wool over her eyes, he said. She knew just as much about what went on behind the scenes as did the Sindaco himself, but – as the Camorra did not admit women to its membership – she was a far more dependable source of information from my point of view.

  January 12

  The epidemic of wire-cutting continues with the General’s threats rumbling in the background and a great drive by the MPs. As usual the small people who cut the wire bear the brunt of the offensive, but no attempt is made to track down the traders who buy and sell the copper.

  There is plenty of muddle and tragedy in this tiny corner of our war effort. Yesterday Antonio Priore, scrap-merchant, age unknown but thought to be about seventy, was pushing his hand-cart through the streets of Afragola when he was stopped by an MP patrol who went through his load of scrap and found severed lengths of wire. Priore seemed at first to be under the impression that they were interested in buying the wire, and explained through the interpreter that there was plenty more where that came from. He was astonished to be arrested, contending that the wire was German; he claimed that Italians had been urged in Allied broadcasts during the German occupation to do just what he had done.

  This was clearly the MP’s pigeon, but for some reason I was dragged in and sent to see Priore in Poggio Reale, where I found him shivering and shaking in his cell. He was very old and decrepit, and if not positively halfwitted, certainly far from bright. The old man was clearly bewildered to be in Poggio Reale. He had always understood, he said, that the Allies had promised to reward Italians like himself who worked for their cause, and what better proof was there of the patriotic work he had undertaken than the possession of quantities of German wire? So far there had been no talk of rewarding him in any way, and all the thanks he had received was to be hauled off and thrown into prison. ‘So the Allies won, eh? And good luck to them,’ he said. ‘I certainly did what little I could.’ He clearly thought I had come to take him out. ‘Be nice to get back home to the old woman,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like to think of her in that house all on her own last night. Can’t get about too well any more.’ He had old, red, runny eyes that looked as though they were full of tears when I arrived, so it was difficult to decide whether or not he was weeping when I left.

  In the afternoon I drove out to Afragola through cold, pitiless rain, and had great difficulty in finding the Priore shack in the waterlogged fields. Inside, hideous, stinking poverty; an old lady shrivelled as a mummy lying fully dressed under a pile of rags in a bed. Starving cats, rats, leaking roof, a suffocating smell of excrement. Not the slightest sign of food anywhere. Nearest house two hundred yards away.

  At the Carabinieri Station I found the Brigadiere in a state of shock, sitting at his desk staring into space. He was suffering from daily gunfights between rival gangs, bandits, pillaging army deserters, vendettas, kidnappings, mysterious disappearances, reported cases of typhus, the non-arrival of his pay and the shortage of supplies of every kind, including ammunition, and it flabbergasted him that it was possible for anyone to be concerned about the fate of one abandoned old woman. ‘If it worries you so much,’ he said, ‘why not just let the old man go?’

  From Afragola I went to the MP’s HQ to take away samples of wire, and then on to Signals for expert examination. ‘Of course it’s German wire,’ the Captain said, ‘but half the wire we use is. It’s our wire now. Surely it all depends when the cutting took place?’ He studied the copper where it had been chopped into. ‘Looks quite bright, doesn’t it?’

  Back at HQ I recommended Priore’s release, and was told that the recommendation
was out of order. Priore was held in Poggio Reale at the disposition of the Military Police, noted for their stubborn defence of their territorial rights. So Priore would be brought to trial in a week’s time – or maybe two weeks, or even three weeks, depending on pressure of business in the courts. Meanwhile the wife would die alone in their shack. There was nothing whatever to be done.

  January 14

  Rumours are the standby – the bread and butter – of any security section, and in a section like this where a daily report is insisted upon, and material has to be raked up to fill it from one source or another, they are avidly snatched up for use as space-fillers. It is said that in some sections, less worthy than ours, they are unscrupulously manufactured by section members themselves. At all events, whether true or – as in most cases – false, they are rarely of the slightest importance.

  This morning’s rumour, picked from my report by the FSO, proved to be the rare exception, and in reading it he fairly bounded from his chair and within minutes was on his way to Army Headquarters. The rumour was that an invasion was planned at Anzio, just south of Rome, and would take place next week. An hour or two later the FSO was back, frothing with excitement. In this case the rumour was fact. The invasion was on, and I was ordered forthwith to track down the source of the leak which might necessitate having to call the whole operation off.

  A ticklish business indeed, because the information came from the Gemellis with whom I dined last night. Since the time of the arrest of their next-door neighbour Signora Esposito-Lau, I had struck up a friendship with both Norah and her husband Alberto, and it was a friendship of the kind that I hoped would outlast the war. Whenever I found myself at a loose end of an evening it had become my habit to run up to the Via Filippo Palizzi and spend it with my friends chatting about life in general, or listening to readings of poetry by Norah, usually from Dante or Leopardi. Through the Gemellis I had made a network of friendships, and now being told that I was obliged to go back to these people and browbeat them if necessary, to obtain further information, meant the certain loss of their confidence and their affection.

  I saw Norah and did the best I could to explain the predicament I was in. The fact that she was only half Italian and had either inherited or believed she had inherited emotional attitudes from her Irish mother, clearly helped. She clung to a sentimental fictional view of our basic rectitude as a nation. I was Welsh, too, which was half way to being Irish. We were all Celts together, united in our little Camorra against the big Camorra of Naples, the Americans and other foreigners in general. The upshot was I got the name of an Ingeniere Crespi, at whose house at a dinner-party attended by the Gemellis the thing had started, and Norah went off to see Signora Crespi and prepare her for my visit.

  Fortunately the honoured and terrible tradition of Omertà is gradually dying out in the Neapolitan upper classes. Had the sweet and smiling little Signora Crespi and her family inhabited a basso in Sant’ Antonio Abate, stronghold in Naples of all the ancient and mysterious traditions, one of which raises the guest to the dignity and sanctity of a member of a family, she would not have talked. She would have ducked and dodged, and in the end produced the inevitable trump card: ‘I made it all up, I was lying to impress my friends, so do what you like about it.’ But Signora Crespi lived in a Via dei Mille block of flats with a uniformed porter, and a lift that would work again one day, and her husband was a successful man and her son went to the university, and all these things had had their civilising and their taming effect. The Signora talked, describing the occasion at another dinner-party when a British civilian technician employed by the Navy had become a little tipsy and boastful, reacting to the general contention that the war had reached a state of stalemate by brandishing the news of the impending invasion.

  This was a textbook case of a breach of security, of the kind described at the Matlock course. One had heard of this kind of thing, but never believed that it could really happen. The fateful news of the landing might as well have been shouted by heralds down from the heights of the Vomero. It would have spread by now in all directions. If I had picked it up it was hard to believe that one of the line-crossers would not have done so too. It was clear from the FSO’s alarm that all the terrific paraphernalia of preparation for an operation of this scale was well under way. The question was, dared we go ahead, with in all probability a fifty-fifty chance that the Germans would be dug in, waiting for us?

  January 19

  Another morning of terrible confusion in the Castel Capuano, with justice dispensed in the present eccentric, almost whimsical fashion. My interest was in the poor, halfwitted old Antonio Priore, who had been arrested for cutting a main telephone cable to sell the copper. He didn’t show up, so presumably – as is so often the case – he had got himself lost in the overcrowded gaol. While kicking my heels I looked in on a few other trials.

  Most of these were farcical. The court was in the centre of the Porta Capuana black-market district in which stolen army supplies of every kind were openly and abundantly displayed on every roadside stall, and yet there were men here in the dock laden with chains, to receive the current prison sentence of three months, plus a fine of 30,000 lire, for being found in possession of five or six cartons of American cigarettes. A case came up of a man charged with possession. An MP appeared and claimed to have arrested him, but the man, who had already been in prison six weeks, denied this. He told the judge he was arrested by a squad of MPs, not including this one, and had never been able to find out why. The MP gave his evidence in such a shaky manner that the judge repeatedly questioned him.

  JUDGE: But do you remember him or don’t you?

  MP: There’s something familiar about his face. That’s all I can say. I’ve had fifty other cases since this man was picked up.

  JUDGE: I wish to see your notes on this particular case.

  It turned out that the MP had no notes, and the case was dismissed.

  The man who had the good luck to be called immediately after this particular fiasco benefited from the young judge’s increasing demoralization and got off with a fine of only 200 lire for possession of Army boots. There followed two far more serious cases in which not only did the witness for the prosecution fail to appear, but all the statements, which should have been attached to the other documents, were missing. The judge ordered the witnesses to be fetched immediately, but it was then discovered that instead of their home addresses, the only addresses given had been c/o the Central Police Station.

  This might have been no more than another innocent example of chaos, or something more sinister – the bribery of prison or court officials in the hope that the judge would throw up his hands in despair and dismiss the case. If so, it could be a dangerous game for the defendants, because in this instance the judge ordered a postponement, and sentences were getting heavier every week.

  The next man in the dock, charged with the possession of articles of military clothing, was a typical old Neapolitan sweat of the kind that pretends to be halfwitted to be allowed to get away with his jokes. He was thoroughly enjoying himself, spoke in an exaggerated dialect hardly recognisable as Italian, and went in for a mime that sent up titters all over the court. The interpreter took care to leave out most of his asides, but the judge, bewildered and irritated by the laughter, wanted to know what it was all about.

  JUDGE: Didn’t he just say something about the Americans? What did he say?

  INTERPRETER: Just a stupid remark, your honour. Nothing to do with the case.

  JUDGE: Will you please leave it to me to decide what has to do with the case, and what has not. I insist on knowing what he said.

  INTERPRETER: He said, ‘When the Germans were here we ate once a day. Now the Americans have come we eat once a week.’

  JUDGE: Ask him if it means nothing to him that we have freed him and his kind from Fascism. How can he talk about us and the Germans in the same breath?

  The interpreter translated the judge’s remarks and the old man rolled
up his eyes, let out a derisive gabble, and then went through the gesture of displaying his sexual parts. A gale of laughter went up.

  JUDGE: I’m losing all patience with him. What does he say now?

  INTERPRETER: With respect, your honour, he says, Americans or Germans, it’s all the same to him. We’ve been screwed by both of them.

  JUDGE: He’s off his head. Get him out of my sight. Case dismissed.

  THE PRISONER: Best wishes, your lordship. May all your kids be males.

  January 22

  The Anzio landing took place yesterday, so far – miraculously – with every sign of success. It seems incredible the Germans should not have been ready and waiting. They must be asleep. On January 19, thirty-five maps of operational significance – presumably concerned with the landing – were found on the floor of a warehouse in Torre Annunziata. Civilians were taking them away to make a fire. They said that about five hundred more had already been burned.

  February 5

  Thieves have scaled the ramparts of Castellammare castle, which houses the Field Security Headquarters for Italy, removed the wheels from all the vehicles, and escaped back with them over the walls, which are thirty feet in height. Despite sentries at the gate and roving patrols within, Castellammare – source of all discipline and doctrine in matters of security – has been breached and ravished. As the Italians put it, we’ve been fottuti. They see us as only one degree better than cuckolds. The operation, carried out with contemptuous ease, took about five minutes to complete. This will provide splendid material for the ballad-singers of the area, whose audiences revel in colourful villainy.