Naples '44

by Norman Lewis

  I was reminded by this display of audacity and resourcefulness of the first days of our arrival in Naples, and my amazement at the spectacle of a damaged tank abandoned at the Porta Capuana, which, although one never saw a finger laid on it, shrank away day by day, as if its armour-plating had been made of ice, until nothing whatever remained. Things have come a long way since then. There have been newspaper accounts of urban buses seen careering away into the remote fastness of the Apennines, there to be reduced in comfort to their component parts. Trams, left where they had come to a standstill when the departing Germans wrecked the generating station, have been spirited away in the night. A railway engine, stranded in open country owing to the looting of rails and sleepers, was driven off when these rails and sleepers were quite incredibly relaid, to a place more discreetly located for its demolition.

  No feat, according to the newspapers and to public rumour, both of which dwell with great delight on such flamboyant acts of piracy, is too outrageous for this new breed of robber. In the region of Agropoli small ships left unguarded have been lifted out of the water and mysteriously transported away, and portions of their superstructures have later been discovered miles inland, hidden in orchards as if they had been carried there and left high and dry by some tidal wave. In revenge, said the newspaper reporting this case, a party of fishermen raided an isolated castle in the area and went off with tapestries which they used to repair their sails.

  Nothing has been too large or too small – from telegraph poles to phials of penicillin – to escape the Neapolitan kleptomania. A week or two ago an orchestra playing at the San Carlo to an audience largely clothed in Allied hospital blankets, returned from a five-minute interval to find all its instruments missing. A theoretically priceless collection of Roman cameos was abstracted from the museum and replaced by modern imitations, the thief only learning – so the reports go – when he came to dispose of his booty that the originals themselves were counterfeit. Now the statues are disappearing from the public squares, and one cemetery has lost most of its tombstones. Even the manhole covers have been found to have a marketable value, so that suddenly these too have all gone, and everywhere there are holes in the road.

  February 12

  I have come to the conclusion that the people of Naples know nothing – and care nothing – for the life of the countryside around them. They have crowded together in their human rookeries to live the affable, rootless life of the soft city, having shed, probably with gratitude and relief, the uncomfortable traditions of the Italian South. When, for example, I talked to Lattarullo about such things as vendettas he replied intelligently and after some thought, but all he had to say might have been taken from a book dealing with primitive tribal customs. He had no first-hand knowledge at all of such things – nor had any of my Italian friends. Ten miles from the cafés of the Piazza Dante finds one deep in vendetta country – but Afragola with its Bronze-Age rituals might, for the Neapolitans, be a thousand miles away. The main road to Caserta, which everybody visited for its palace, passed through the outskirts of Afragola, but Lattarullo had never bothered to turn aside and drive a hundred yards or so into the town which gave both Al Capone and the Neapolitan clowns to the world – although he and all my other contacts had been to Rome many times. Afragola, which belonged to another age, and another world, was just as alien and incomprehensible to them as it was to me.

  The numerous newspapers, too, are bored with rural topics, and the only time when these forgotten areas get a mention is when they are visited by some politician. Marshal Greco of Afragola mentioned some time ago that a thirteen-year-old boy recently waited in ambush and shot the man who had killed his father several months before he was born. An episode such as this, which seemed dramatic enough to me, was considered not worthy of mention in a local newspaper. When a man is killed here in the course of a vendetta (normally by a blast from a sawn-off shotgun), his mother if still alive will kiss and suck at his wounds in the presence of those invited to the funeral as a demonstration of her insatiable desire for vengeance. Greco or Lo Scalzo told me things like this, otherwise I would not know.

  These reflections on the bloody dramas of the countryside that receive no publicity were provoked as a result of another visit to Poggio Reale to deliver a prisoner. I seemed to be treated by the grey little, scuttling, giggling men who run the administrative side of the prison as a member of the family, and they made every effort to keep me hanging about in the blue twilight of the office where I could be subjected to their macabre jokes while they pretended to look for lost documents or forms that had to be signed.

  In this case, the prisoner had offered himself for employment by an Allied Military unit, and his name had been found to be on the Black List, hence his arrest. He claimed – quite possibly rightly, as this kind of thing often happened – that he had been arrested after being mistaken for a dangerous Fascist of the same name, that this was the third time it had happened, and that he’d just been released after serving three months before the mistake was discovered. It could happen, I agreed with him. People’s names got on the Black List for all sorts of reasons, most of them absurd, and once a name was on the list it seemed impossible to remove it. I could only sympathise with him and promise to report his complaint. My own view was that half the prison population should never have been inside, and were there through the breakdown of justice.

  As usual there was a long wait in the Ufficio Matricola, where prisoners go through all the ceremonies of admission or discharge. A man ahead of us, brought in by the American Counter-Intelligence Corps, was being fingerprinted, and one realised, even in such a small detail as this, how barbarous the system is, and how clear was the intention that the prisoner must be made to realise that everything civilised has been left behind. One of the office staff simply grabbed the man’s hand, pressed the splayed-out fingers on to the inked pad, then on a form, and then gestured to him to go and wipe his fingers on the wall. Thousands of others had done this before him, so that coming into the office for the first time one had the impression that it had actually been painted in dark greens and blacks to represent the undergrowth and the trailing lianas of a tropical forest.

  While my man was waiting his turn, four tiny men in prison uniform were led into the office chained together. I went over to them, and as their hands were manacled, stuck a cigarette in each mouth, lighted it, and asked them what they were doing there.

  They explained that they were ergastolani – lifers, and that having completed their first year in solitary confinement, they were being taken to the island of Procida to complete their sentences.

  ‘What are you in for?’ I asked the first little man.

  ‘Multiple homicide.’

  ‘You don’t look capable of it,’ I said. The man in fact seemed the embodiment of harmlessness, with a face devoid of any of the obsessions that drive to murder. ‘How many did you kill?’

  ‘Three. My friend here killed five.’

  The friend, jangling his chains, was pushed forward – a prize exhibit. He was the smallest of the four, and the meekest-looking. He was so ordinary, so mild, so free of any obvious psychopathic taint.

  ‘How could you?’ I asked him, but he took the question to mean ‘how did you?’ and gave me the gory details with great simplicity.

  ‘I wiped out a whole family with a hatchet. It took five minutes. It was a quick, clean job. Nobody suffered. I did it for honour.’

  The others agreed, they’d all killed for the same reason.

  ‘Would you do it again?’ I asked them.

  ‘In the same circumstances we’d have to. It stands to reason. Don’t imagine anybody enjoys having to do a thing like this. The fact is it was a mistake to get ourselves born.’

  I gave them the rest of my cigarettes, and a few minutes later they were led away.

  Antonio Priore was tried today and sentenced to three years in prison. The full story of this appalling miscarriage of justice is that had he been sent to the
court on the first day for which his trial was fixed, he would have been fined – as all wire-cutters were at that time. As he couldn’t be found in the prison, the case was adjourned for seven days, by which time fines had been given up, and prison sentences of up to six months were the rule. Once again Priore was overlooked in the prison, and the case was further adjourned until today, when three years has become the minimum sentence for wire-cutting offences.

  The MPs remained unmoved when I approached them to ask whether nothing could be done. I was told to mind my own business.

  To Pomigliano today to arrest Cesare Rossi, once Mussolini’s Press Secretary, accused of having been involved in the murder of Matteotti, the Socialist deputy who did all he could to prevent Mussolini from coming to power. This seems to be another case where we are being used as the catspaws of Italian political vendettas that have nothing whatever to do with us or the war effort.

  I found Rossi at the barber’s in the process of being shaved, and told him that history had finally caught up with him. He got up from the chair instantly and without demur, the barber wiped the lather from his face, and Rossi paid and tipped him, and away we went. He appeared a sombre and taciturn man. I found that he lived alone with his wife, and it was evident from the seediness of the surroundings and an odour of respectable poverty, that although he had been a founder member of Mussolini’s Fascists, and at one point was even in the running for leadership, he had made very little out of it. I told him that he could have an hour to get his things together and say goodbye to his wife and neighbours, but he waved the offer away. The leave-taking occupied five minutes. He hugged his wife, kissed her on both cheeks, stuffed a few possessions into a small bag, and said, ‘Let’s go.’ As we got into the car he called back, ‘State boa,’ with a final wave. He was one of the most dignified men I had ever met, with inner reserves that enabled him to face calamity of this kind without the slightest outward sign of distress.

  The drive back to Naples took a good hour, and after an interval of silence we talked a little. Rossi had no hesitation in telling me about the Matteotti affair, the international scandal which first displayed the violence and the potential ruthlessness of the Fascists to the world. Rossi’s story was that the Sinclair Oil Company had paid a bribe of one million dollars to the deputy Finzi, a front for Mussolini, for the concession to carry out oil exploration, and that Matteotti had obtained proofs of this and had announced that he proposed to produce these proofs in the Chamber of Deputies. Cesare Rossi was then given the contract to do away with him. He organised the assassination, employing professional executioners, Filippelli and Dumini, to do the killing. A warrant against him was issued and Rossi was instructed by Mussolini to abscond. He took refuge in Naples with Piscitelli, one of the powerful men behind the scenes of the Fascist revolution, who later spirited him away to Switzerland, where it seems an attempt was made by Mussolini and Co. to drop him. Rossi was then accepted into the fold of anti-Fascist circles in exile. He disclosed to them the details of the Sinclair Oil deal and wrote an open letter to Mussolini on this and other embarrassing matters which was published in foreign newspapers. It was then decided to trap him. He was induced by Piscitelli to come to Italy for a secret meeting near the Swiss border, and here he was seized by the Italian police, tried for treason and sentenced to thirty years.

  My impression was that he was telling the truth in all this – there being no reason why he shouldn’t. I asked him why he had had Matteotti killed. He answered, with a shrug of the shoulders, to help Mussolini out, and keep in with him, as he was the boss. When I handed him over to the giggling, half-crazy prison screws in Poggio Reale, he remained imperturbable. I told them not to cut his hair off, or put him in their filthy prison pyjamas, as they do whenever they can, even when a prisoner is only being held on remand.

  February 28

  Already at the end of February, the winter is slipping away and the onset of the melancholy of spring is announced by the seller of broad beans, who passes under our windows, always at dusk, with the saddest of cries: ‘A fava fresca!’ The warmth of the sun comes through and seeps into the cold walls, and the town wakes to new life. On sale now – and only in this season – is a pagan springtime cake, pastiera Napolitana, made with soft grain of all kinds, removed from their husks months before ripe, and cooked with orange blossom. There is a description of it by one of the Latin authors. The Vico Satriano, the narrow street overlooked by one side of our building, hums with activity as a great, vociferous spring-cleaning begins and unwanted objects of all kinds, chipped crockery, broken vessels, irreparable articles of furniture, follow the slops into the street. Everyone shouts, gesticulates and sings snatches of mournful love songs such as ‘Ammore Busciardo’ (Love the traitor), and a boy has appeared at the street-corner beneath us selling for five lire a collection of twenty-five of the latest ballads, all of them dedicated to romantic frustration.

  In the Villa Nazionale, the long sash of municipal gardens separating us from the Bay, the storytellers have been drawn out by the sun to take up their positions. Circles of small boys gather while their canvas backgrounds depicting the barbarities of the wars between the Christians and Infidels are set up. In front of these the Cantastorie stand and begin their chanted recitations of the deeds of Charlemagne and the Paladins. For ten centuries the invading armies have come and gone. Foreign kings have ruled in Naples, and enslaved its people. Revolutions have been drowned in blood. But nothing of this has made the slightest impression on the imagination or memory of the common man, nor called for the addition of anything to the storyteller’s repertoire. This is all that the little audience that gathers as he begins to intone his narrative in the Villa Nazionale still wants to hear about. The Swabians, the Aragonese, the Bourbons and now the Germans have been instantly forgotten. Charlemagne and Roland live on – miraculously in spite of the cinema – which will nevertheless defeat them in the end.

  Last Sunday the sun was so hot that the first of the water-sellers even came on the scene. These picturesque figures and the equipment they carry are hardly changed from representations of them in the frescoes of Pompeii. The water-seller sells acqua ferrata, which is powerfully flavoured with iron and drawn from a single hole in the ground somewhere in Santa Lucia. The water is contained as illustrated at Pompeii in rounded earthenware vessels (mmommere) shaped like a woman’s breast – an excellent example of marketing ingenuity on the part of the ancients – and a cup of it costs three or four times the equivalent amount of wine. The water-seller also sells lemon squash, made on the spot with fresh lemons and a great display of dexterity with his enormous iron lemon-squeezers. A teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda goes into the glass, causing a violent eruption of spume. Many of our soldiers – who regard all things foreign with suspicion – have found this an excellent remedy for hangovers.

  ’O spasso, they reject. This word, which embraces a huge variety of nuts and edible seeds of all kinds, many of them strange in appearance, enshrines a concept of leisurely festivity, the nearest one can get to it in translation being ‘pastime’. There are stalls at weekends in the gardens now selling baked chickpeas, pine-nuts, peanuts, and above all pumpkin seeds which are roasted in ovens of pure copper, the seller attracting custom by tugging at frequent intervals on the cord of a steam whistle. Nothing of this collection of edible trifles which constitute ’O spasso, can be said to have much taste, but chewing them promotes reflection. All these traditional attractions now face the competition of the black market, and its presence in the Villa is the one thing that brings this scene completely into our times. Side by side with the traditional stalls are the brazen displays of presumably looted American cigarettes: Camels (in Neapolitan ‘the humped donkey’), Raleighs (‘the bearded King’), Chesterfields (’O cesso fetta – the lavatory stinks).

  Today on the Via San Pasquale I saw my first pazzariello, the ‘joker’ of antiquity, who is on the scene again because at last new businesses are being opened, and although explai
ned away as a form of advertisement for the benefit of the illiterate, his real function is that of an exorcist. He is there to drive away evil spirits and cleanse the premises of the influence of the evil eye. Undoubtedly the pazzariello is there, too, in the Pompeii frescoes, but his costume these days dates from the Napoleonic wars and includes a cocked hat. He rushes into the shop or bar as soon as the doors are open for business lashing out in all directions with his stick and bounding about in time to the music of the two drummers and the piper who form his team. The office is hereditary; one is born a pazzariello, not made one.

  March 3

  A story has come to light of yet another almost incredible scheme dreamed up by A-Force – operating in enemy-occupied territory – which has ended in typical catastrophe. It seems likely that the germ of this macabre idea originated as a result of a circular sent to all units at about Christmas, worded in part as follows:

  From reports that have been received it is apparent that prostitution in occupied Italy, and Naples in particular, has reached a pitch greater than has ever been witnessed in Italy before. So much is this so that it has led to a suggestion that the encouragement of prostitution is part of a formulated plan arranged by pro-Axis elements, primarily to spread venereal disease among Allied troops.

  A-Force, mulling over this, would have known that the incidence of VD in German-occupied areas is very low indeed. This is partly because it is a criminal offence under Italian law, punishable by one year in prison, to communicate syphilis to a second person, and partly because the Germans have maintained the strictest of medical supervision over brothels. Thus, for one reason or another, the German-occupied North is virtually clear of streptococci and gonococci which to all intents and purposes were reintroduced into Italy with the arrival of the American troops. A-Force’s plan was to arrange for the spread of these infections, which have reached epidemic levels in the South, across the lines into the uninfected North, and thus diminish the fighting efficiency of the German Army, while turning their backs on all such considerations as the suffering likely to be endured by the civilian population, and the many babies doomed to be born blind.