Naples '44

by Norman Lewis

  We strolled back together into the main street, and in fact there had been no advance that I could detect within the last hour. The café had gone, but the cinema next door was still there, protected now by a dozen young men who had formed a line and had advanced, brandishing crosses, to within a few yards of the lava. Not a single clinker tumbled down the black slope as we watched. Flakes of ash, softer than snow, were still drifting down, but the day seemed to have lightened, and for a moment the sunlit cone of the volcano came into sight ahead, as if through a tear in a curtain. Childish voices somewhere in the rear had begun to sing a Te Deum. It seemed likely that half the town would be saved.

  March 24

  It was clear today that the eruption had lost its force, and the news was that roughly half San Sebastiano had in fact been spared.

  I visited Lattarullo who introduced me to a friend, Carlo Del Giudice, another non-practising lawyer who made an incredibly precarious living by writing newspaper articles on folklore and astronomy. He got an article published once or twice a month and, taking devaluation into account, received about the equivalent of one pound for each contribution. Like Lattarullo, he lived on cups of coffee substitute, pumpkin seeds and an occasional pizza, and smoked cigarettes made up by real craftsmen from ends collected in the street. These some people even prefer to straightforward Camels, Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes, as having more flavour. Unlike Lattarullo, starvation had not made him stringy and emaciated, but produced a kind of puffy inflation. He looked hollow.

  Del Giudice was an expert on the subject of San Gennaro, and therefore Vesuvius, as the two were linked together, and had privately published a little book dealing with the scientific and natural explanations of miracles. Neither he nor any of his friends, all of them connoisseurs of eruptions, had been allowed to get anywhere near Vesuvius, so he was delighted to be able to talk to someone who had viewed the eruption at close quarters and enquired into every detail of my experiences at San Sebastiano. Above all, he was most interested to hear of an image of San Gennaro being kept round a corner out of sight, ready to go into action in a final emergency.

  According to the opinion of most Neapolitans, Del Giudice said, it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference if it had. San Gennaro had confined his miracle-working to Naples for fourteen centuries since his martyrdom at Pozzuoli and it was believed of him that he wouldn’t lift a finger to save the rest of the world from destruction. San Gennaro’s job had been to keep the fires of Vesuvius at bay, but only on behalf of Naples. During this period Resina and Torre Del Greco, only five and seven miles respectively down the coast, had been overwhelmed by lava and rebuilt seven times.

  He personally was a sceptic and a rationalist, Del Giudice said, and Lattarullo nodded approval; he was too. However, three people out of four – and he included the educated classes – were openly or secretly of the belief that Naples could only be protected from Vesuvius with San Gennaro on its side. He cited the one period in history when Naples had tried to change saints, and what the consequences had been. In 1799 Napoleon’s troops took Naples, and the Saint was involved in the resistance to the occupation. It was made clear through the priests of his cult that the miraculous liquefaction of his congealed blood kept in an ampulla in the Cathedral would not take place on the first Saturday in May, as it had always done. As the prosperity of Naples was always believed to depend on this recurrent miracle, riots began, and French soldiers were assassinated. At eight in the evening of the day when the miracle was due to take place, and the crowds were howling and rampaging in the streets, a French staff-officer went to the officiating priest and gave him ten minutes to produce the miracle, or be shot. The blood promptly liquefied but San Gennaro, charged by the Neapolitans with collaboration, was dismissed and his image thrown into the sea. He was replaced by San Antonio Abate, chosen as the heaven-appointed guardian against fire, but it turned out that the only fires he could prevent or suppress – and according to Del Giudice he was immensely successful in this way during his tenure of office – were those of man-made origin. From historical evidence, he said, private houses practically ceased to burn down with San Antonio in control, but in dealing with the first eruption of the volcano he proved to be out of his depth, and with the lava rolling towards the city fishermen were sent to drag the sea-bed and recover the image of San Gennaro. There was a moment of crisis while the fisherman searched unsuccessfully for the image, which by then had been in the water for several years, but in the nick of time a statue of the saint which had been erected on the Maddaloni Bridge and had somehow been forgotten came to the rescue, raising and spreading its marble arms to halt the passage of the lava. With this miraculous happening, reported to have been witnessed by thousands, the day of San Antonio was at an end, and San Gennaro was back again.

  People, Del Giudice said, will believe anything.

  March 25

  Fear is expressed that the blood of San Gennaro may refuse to liquefy this year, and that such a failure might be exploited by secret anti-Allied factions and troublemakers to set off large-scale rioting of the kind that has frequently happened in Neapolitan history when the miracle has failed. Everywhere there is a craving for miracles and cures. The war has pushed the Neapolitans back into the Middle Ages. Churches are suddenly full of images that talk, bleed, sweat, nod their heads and exude health-giving liquors to be mopped up by handkerchiefs, or even collected in bottles, and anxious, ecstatic crowds gather waiting for these marvels to happen. Every day the newspapers report new miracles. In the church of Santo Agnello, a speaking crucifix carries on a regular conversation with the image of Santa Maria d’Intercessione – a fact confirmed by reporters on the spot. The image of Santa Maria del Carmine, first recorded as having bowed its head to avoid a cannot-shot during the siege of Naples by Alfonso of Aragon, now does this as a matter of daily routine. This church used to be visited annually by the King and his court to watch the royal barber shave the hair that had miraculously grown on an ivory Christ during the preceding twelve months. The custom is likely to be renewed. And even if San Gennaro’s blood doesn’t liquefy they have a phial of the blood of St John in San Giovanni a Carbonara, which – say the papers – bubbles away every time the gospel is read to it.

  The woman who cooks for us mentioned today that she would be taking time off to visit the chapel of Sant’ Aspreno. She suffers from neuralgia and expects to obtain relief by pushing her head through a hole in the wall of the chapel. The Saint is patron of sufferers from headaches, and there are daily queues at the chapel waiting to be able to submit themselves to this treatment. Naples has reached a state of nervous exhaustion when mass hallucination has become a commonplace, and belief of any kind can be more real than reality.

  March 26

  The streets of Naples are full of people hawking personal possessions of all kinds: pieces of jewellery, old books, pictures, clothing, etc. Many of them are members of the middle class, and the approach is made in a shamefaced and surreptitious way. One and all, they are in a state of desperate need.

  Today at the top of the Via Roma near the Piazza Dante I was stopped by a pleasant-faced old lady, who had nothing for sale but who implored me to go with her to her house in a side-street nearby. She had something to show me, and was so insistent that I followed her to the typical basso in a side-street, where she lived. The single, windowless room was lit by a minute electric bulb over the usual shrine, and I saw a thin girl standing in a corner. The reason for the appeal now became clear. This, said the woman, was her child, aged thirteen, and she wished to prostitute her. Many soldiers, it seems, will pay for sexual activity less than full intercourse, and she had a revolting scale of fees for these services. For example, the girl would strip and display her pubescent organs for twenty lire.

  I told the woman that I would report her to the police, and she pretended to weep, but it was an empty threat, and she knew it. Nothing can be done. There are no police to deal with the thousands of squalid little crimes like
this committed every day in the city.

  On my way back I was stopped and drawn into a corner by a priest, white-lipped and smiling. He opened a bag full of umbrella handles, candlesticks and small ornaments of all kinds carved out of the bones of the saints, i.e. from bones filched from one of the catacombs. He, too, had to live.

  Apart from negative definitions by GHQ (FS personnel will in no circumstances be used as interpreters), nobody seems quite to know what we are and what we do. As a result any job that no other branch of the forces wants to tackle is automatically thrown in our direction. It is now announced that we will investigate and report on all applications by Italian females in the Naples area to marry British soldiers. This will entail collecting information from the competitive and mutually hostile Pubblica Sicurezza Police, and the Carabinieri, questioning the applicant herself, and appraising the circumstances and the environment in which she lives.

  This is a chore nobody in the section seems anxious to take on, so it falls to my lot.

  March 29

  Miracles galore in the past few days. At the weekend crowds flocked out to the Campi Flegrei to watch the performance of a twelve-year-old local Bernadette to whom the Virgin has appeared several times with comforting messages for the population. A band was in attendance, and in the absence of any more suitable form of transport, the Sindaco of Marano arrived in a motor-hearse.

  At Pomigliano we have a flying monk* who also demonstrates the stigmata. The monk claims that on an occasion last year when an aerial dog-fight was in progress, he soared up to the sky to catch in his arms the pilot of a stricken Italian plane, and bring him safely to earth. Most of the Neapolitans I know – some of them educated men – are convinced of the truth of this story.

  April 1

  An excursion with Frazer, the Signora Lola and friend in the naval launch carrying supplies to Capri. Frazer as stylish-looking and emaciated as ever in his well-cut battle blouse and Desert Rat polka-dotted scarf; Lola beautifully bloated through the return of pasta to the menus of Naples. Her friend, Susanna, was a frisky redhead of about twenty-five, the possessor of a mime so expressive that within minutes, and hardly a word passing between them, she was able to give Frazer a brief outline of her life history. Both ladies were absurdly dressed for the occasion in fox furs, with small straw hats decorated with glass fruit on top of their piled-up tresses.

  It was one of those golden mornings of Naples. Within minutes of chugging out of the harbour, the town behind us was afloat in layers of mist, and all its strong colours, its reds and its corals, faded to a pacific grey. After that a headland with pines showing like a pencil drawing, the tops of towers, the Castel Sant’ Elmo in suspension over the town, then utter dazzlement. Frazer produced a loaf and cut it up to cries of girlish delight. This party was as much about bread as it was about Capri – an excuse for the ladies to eat limitless white bread under picnic conditions. They munched the bread and laughed uproariously, and threw mangled crusts to the escorting seagulls. An unlicensed fishing-boat veered nervously away trailing a little mandolin music, and ahead Capri penetrated a quilt of mist like the tip of a volcano.

  Capri, like hashish, is supposed to bring out the demon, whatever its nature, lurking at the bottom of the human personality, and people go ashore at the Marina Grande hypnotised in advance by its reputation. Frazer disposed of his supplies and we went up to the village and sat in a café in the Piazza Municipio. This was a different world from Naples; escapist, full of make-believe, and almost hysterically concerned to show its lack of interest in the war. Civilians find it difficult to get passes for the island, but all the old Capri-hands were there; the men dressed to go shooting and the women in sandals and streaming veils like Isadora Duncan just about to go off on the last fatal trip in the Bugatti.

  We ordered the inevitable marsala – the alternative being a local gin that smelt of turps – and the girls took the bread they had saved from their beaded handbags, and began to chew. The waiter counted in German, and went off, saying Danke for the tip, and we settled into our roles in the pageant of Capri. An American major at the next table sat with his arms round the waists of a couple of courtesans singing a blustering version of ‘Torna a Sorrento’, and when the municipal loudspeakers began to blast out a tarantella one of them was persuaded to hop about in what was supposed to be a dance on the table-top. A hanger-on I knew vaguely from Naples attached himself to point out Madame Four-Dollars, a foreign expatriate so-called from her fixed price paid to fisherman for sexual services, and to invite us to visit the Villa Tiberius, whose ancient scandals were part of the island’s stock-intrade. The haunted face of Curzio Malaparte whom I believed to be in the internment camp of Padula but from which he had clearly been released, appeared briefly, and among his courtiers I observed a British officer who, under the spell of his environment, grimaced and gesticulated in all directions.

  So far the trip had been a huge success. This was Life as far as both girls were concerned, and Frazer, from the cautious nonconformist background of Peebles, had to admit that he’d never imagined that such a place as Capri could exist. Then suddenly there were agitated whisperings, confusion broke out at our table, and both girls got up, flustered away into the café and disappeared. Frazer, who went after them, came back perplexed. They had both left the café by the back entrance, and disappeared. While we were discussing the strange behaviour we noticed a small grey-haired Italian sitting at a table across the street, who was staring malevolently at us, and I felt that his presence must have had something to do with the girls’ panic-stricken departure.

  We wandered about the village which is too small to be a hidingplace, and in the end we found the fugitives and listened with what polite pretence of belief we could to the story concocted by Lola to explain what had happened. The venomous-looking little Italian had been an old family friend who had conceived a passion for her, and continued to pursue her hopelessly, to follow her, to make her life miserable by turning up like this out of the blue, despite the fact that she had told him a hundred times she never wanted to see him again. The relationship, she assured Frazer, tears welling in her enormous innocent eyes, had never been anything other than platonic. It was my task to translate all these protestations followed by the crossfire of accusation and denial.

  Later, when the girls had been shipped back to Naples and delivered to their homes, Frazer wanted to know how much of Lola’s story I believed, and it seemed to me a disservice not to tell him what I knew. The angry little man was a director of the Banco di Napoli, I told him, and had been a high official of the Fascist government, although not quite high enough for him to qualify for internment. ‘Do you think he’s still her lover?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘How does she live? How does she eat? Where did the fox furs come from? You don’t keep her. Why live in a fool’s paradise?’

  ‘I’ve never met a beautiful woman like Lola before,’ Frazer said. ‘I thought she loved me.’

  ‘She does,’ I said. ‘But one day, sooner or later, you’ll be posted away, and she’ll have to go on living here. What do you expect her to do, starve? Work in a factory? Love’s all very well but she has to live.’

  ‘I suppose she does, but I don’t think I ought to see her again.’

  ‘That’s for you to decide,’ I told him.

  April 3

  Frazer came round to HQ today, obviously distraught, and we went to the Vittoria for a drink. He seemed to have come to terms with the knowledge that he had been sharing Lola’s sexual favours with the ex-Federale, and would continue to share them while the relationship persisted, but was very worried about an attack made upon her by the other man, which in his opinion amounted to attempted murder.

  His story was that, subsequent to our trip to Capri, Lola refused to see him for three days, and when in the end she finally appeared, her neck was terribly bruised.

  I reassured him. This was what is known locally as a strozzamento di amanti – a lovers’ semi-throttling. It wa
s a form – a convention almost – in such relationships, and was tolerated and even appreciated as a proof of passion by Neapolitan girls, whereas a schiaffeggiamento, or beating up, was not. Had the bank director beaten her up, the chances were that she might have left him there and then, which meant that she would have had to turn to him, Frazer, for her support. ‘Ask yourself,’ I said. ‘Do you think you could take on the exclusive rights on a basis of £10 a week?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. I think I’ll have to give her up.’

  April 5

  Twenty-eight investigations of prospective brides for Servicemen completed to date, of which twenty-two proved to be prostitutes. Of these, seven were officially described as such in the dossiers of the Pubblica Sicurezza or the Carabinieri. The rest were obviously living on immoral earnings because – in surroundings of total poverty and hunger – they and their houses were clean and well-kept, their children, if they had any, were shod, and there was food in the larder.

  Always the same question. ‘Where does the money come from?’ To this there is an almost standard reply. ‘My uncle sends me some.’ I ask for the uncle’s address, explaining that I am bound to check up, and this produces a sad smile, and a shrug of the shoulders. The game is up. There is no such uncle.