by Norman Lewis
The distant bombs came with a whistle that started high up in the sky, but the last one arrived silently, then deafened us. I felt the rise and fall of the building, and the cracking of walls; then hearing returned, first with the tinkle of falling shrapnel all round, and then, after an absolute silence, with a long, slow, deliberate rumble as the house next door collapsed.
That was the end of the raid. The all-clear sounded and we went down into the street. I found we were all chattering loudly in a childish and pointless fashion. The house next door was flattened into a double-decker sandwich of compressed floors, but I believe that no one was living there. Farther along the road in a clearing in the smoke we saw a building tilted like a sinking ship, and farther on still, a jeep blown into the air, hung by its front wheels from a roof rampart. The sight made us laugh.
Normally I detest nightclubs, but this seemed to be one occasion when it was absolutely necessary to go somewhere and dance. We found a place in Piedigrotto where they had a barrel-organ that only played four tunes, but that was enough, and we spent the rest of the evening there.
May 1
Today the arrival of summer was announced by the cry of the seller of venetian blinds – sad to the point of anguish in our narrow street – s’e ’nfucato ’sole (the sun’s turned fiery). Immediately, as if in response to a signal all Naples had awaited, the tempo of life changed and slowed down. As the melancholy howl was heard, first in the distance, then coming closer, people seemed to move cautiously into the shade, and those who hadn’t already let down their blinds did so. Fans came out, girls walked about shading their eyes, and the seller of black-market cigarettes immediately under our window unfolded a Communist newspaper and held it over his head. We are told that after today stray dogs are liable to be picked up by the municipal catchers and knocked over the head.
Whitsun draws near – the Easter of the Roses, as they call it in Naples. On Saturday the general hope and expectation is that the blood of San Gennaro will liquefy in a satisfactory manner. It is believed by Neapolitans of all political creeds and degrees of religious conviction that the fortunes of the city depend on this phenomenon, and many advertisements have appeared in the newspapers paid for by commercial firms or political parties wishing the community ‘a good and prosperous miracle’. A good miracle is one in which the blood liquefies quickly. A slow liquefaction is considered an ill omen for the ensuing year, while the complete failure of the miracle, which has rarely happened, is taken as a sign of the Saint’s extreme displeasure, and regarded as a catastrophe.
It appears now that the Whitsun pilgrimage to Monte Vergine has definitely been vetoed, and this is a source of great public disappointment, and some criticism. This pilgrimage to the ancient shrine of Cybele, near Avellino, has been going on for six hundred years, since a miraculous picture of the Virgin was presented to the shrine by Catherine of Valois, and it is seen by the 50,000 or more devotees of this cult as dangerous to cancel an institution of this magnitude and spiritual value merely because there’s a war on. Normally in these days the pilgrims travel by car to Avellino, after which the most devoted among them trudge the remaining few miles barefoot, up to the shrine. They then crawl on hands and knees from the sanctuary door to the altar. Religious duties at an end, somewhat bacchanalian picnics take place, followed by the singing of improvised songs on topical subjects. These, in an atmosphere of religious and alcoholic frenzy, frequently provoke quarrels, and the offended parties traditionally go behind the church, to settle their grievances, knife in hand, on the spot.
The public frustration over the pilgrimage was made much of by Lattarullo, who said that, among others, his aunt was very upset. Never having seen this aunt, who is supposed to live with him, or noticed the slightest sign of her presence in his flat, I am beginning to suspect she doesn’t exist, and that he uses this fictitious personality as a showcase for all these Neapolitan prejudices of which he pretends to be ashamed.
Apart from Vittorio Emanuele’s salver, the only object in Lattarullo’s flat by which he sets any store is a large and dingy-looking piece of rock, which when first showing me he handled with the most reverent care. This was a souvenir from the cave-sanctuary of St Michael at Monte Santangelo, and of course, it belonged not to him, but to his mysterious aunt. Lattarullo is a highly educated man, with a cosmopolitan outlook and a wide grasp of world affairs, who reads everything he can lay his hands on including fifteen or twenty newspapers a day – three or four days out of date when he buys them – which can be picked up at the vegetable market for two or three lire a bundle. It is difficult for a man of his intellectual calibre to admit to me that he believes that San Gennaro can stop the flow of lava from Vesuvius, or that a monk in Pomigliano is flying about like a bird, so he gets round it by saying, ‘My dear old aunt believes in this kind of thing. I don’t want to argue with her. I only report these things to you to give you some idea of the mentality you’re dealing with. As in the case of this Monte Vergine affair, I feel you should know. Mass hypnosis? I agree with you. You may well be right. But you have to remember that more people in this town share my aunt’s point of view than mine.’
May 3
The Robin Hood tradition is strong in the Zona di Camorra, as it probably is in bandit country everywhere, an outstanding example of the breed being Domenico Lupo of Frattamaggiore, whose name, meaning wolf, has probably been an aid to his profession hitherto. Lupo, young, handsome and dashing, robber of the rich and a giver to the poor, was serving a stretch for banditry in a prison south of Rome. From this he was released by the advancing Allied troops, who as a matter of habit always loot the post offices and fling wide the prison gates in the territory they occupy. Lupo immediately headed south to reorganise his following. The officer who released him, greatly moved by his account of the political victimisation he had undergone during the Mussolini regime, gave him a pass allowing him to travel anywhere he liked and a letter of recommendation describing his valued support of the Allied cause. Lupo produced the letter at the Naples headquarters of AMG to obtain more solid accreditation plus an AMG sticker for the windscreen of his stolen car. In the Zona di Camorra, teeming with criminals of every description, he began the recruitment of his new band and, making full use of his AMG pass, journeys were made in convoys of stolen cars to the battle areas, where an assortment of abandoned small arms, machine-guns, mortars, etc., were collected from the battlefield. Somewhere near the front line on the occasion of his last visit, Lupo claimed to have been received by an American divisional general, who listened to the story of his struggle against Fascism, presented him with several bottles of whisky, a pearl-handled pistol, and a religious picture from a ruined church.
Back in the Zona, Lupo settled down to prey on the caravans of the black market that followed the liberating armies in search of such scarce and sought-after commodities as teats for babies’ bottles, cloth, nails and watches, which back in Naples fetched anything from ten to one hundred times their cost price. From this the Lupo band graduated to attacks on trains carrying military supplies northwards through Casoria to Caserta and to the battlefronts. In several cases, trains hijacked in this way, and usually defended by no more than a half-dozen guards, were completely emptied of their contents. In one instance, near Casoria, Lupo’s band fought a victorious battle in which machine-guns and hand-grenades were used against a rival team, for the right to loot a train which they had held up.
At this point something obviously had to be done. Lupo’s strength lay in the sympathy he had taken care to cultivate among the local peasantry; his well-publicised habit of descending on some poor family or deserving widow with a handful of thousand-lire notes or a sack of stolen food, and the romantic legend of his exploits as a womaniser. His weaknesses stemmed from the fact that he was brash, vain, and foolhardy, without connections in the Camorra, who despise bandits however much they use them; that his men had killed policemen; finally that he had overstepped the mark even with the Allies by his attacks on t
rains.
His downfall was organised by a temporary combination of all the police forces in the area, and for once the Carabinieri and the Pubblica Sicurezza came together to suspend their mutual detestation, pool their information, and work out a plan of attack. One of the Carabinieri marshals, it was explained to me by Marshal Lo Scalzo of Caivano, had put forward a scheme for exploiting the natural breach opened in Lupo’s defences by his pose of the lover of many women. The bandit made a great thing of having a girl in every town in the area, but he also had a regular mistress who was notoriously jealous. Whenever Lupo was in the Caivano district it was believed that this girl slipped away to spend the night with him, but nobody had been able to discover where the couple met. However, the girl had now been approached, and the softening-up process expected to lead to a final betrayal had been begun by showing her photographs taken of Lupo in the company of other females. As the bandit had a passion for being photographed, some of these were genuine enough. Others were clever fakes, and I was shown one which – through some dexterous photomontage – showed Lupo with his arms and legs twined round a naked prostitute. The Neapolitan police stopped at nothing. I saw a picture of the mistress involved, too, who looked like a glum version of Carmen Miranda, with a sour expression, and a turned-down, pouting mouth.
These dingy professional secrets came to me in the hope that I would report back favourably on the police’s determination and zeal, as a result of which none of the General’s terrible threats of demotion or even prosecution could be carried out. Marshal Lo Scalzo said at the time the plot was disclosed, that it was no longer a question whether Lupo would be taken, but when. He was also particularly anxious that I should be in at the kill, and see that, after all, the Carabinieri were a match for the reputedly invincible Lupo. This evening a young policeman from Caivano turned up at the Riviera di Chiaia asking me to be at the police station there by dawn.
I left the HQ at about four this morning, taking the Matchless, and was in Caivano in half an hour, with the sun still not up. It was amazing to see the activity on the roads once outside the limits of the town: peasants in their hundreds, hooded in the half-light, kicking up the dust as they trudged along on the way to their fields. Some of them were singing African-sounding songs, very different from the soft, sugary melodies of the Neapolitans of the city.
At Caivano I found a gathering of both kinds of police, some of them with the faces of men, and some of devils. The Carabinieri station was full of gusty, sinister laughter, and jokes about death, while a distribution was made of obsolete guns, and the fearsome and fickle diavolo-rosso hand-grenades used by the Italian army. We then bundled into two crumpled old Fiats, and were on our way. To avoid the possibility of Lupo’s being warned by his spies that we were coming, we left Caivano heading for Afragola in the opposite direction, then swung in an arc through a landscape as flat as Holland towards the farmhouse off the Frattamaggiore road where the final treason had been prepared and the lovers, it was to be hoped, were still peacefully sleeping.
This was a landscape that favoured concealment. Every field was surrounded by tall fruit-trees, and these were linked together by the runners of the enormous and ancient vines to which each tree in local parlance was ‘married’; their branches carried along parallel wires, one above the other, to form a hedge, or enclosure, about fifteen feet in height.
The farmhouse that was our target was in the middle of such a vineen-closed field; a grey cube barely visible through the foliage, and here a police spy waited in hiding to assure us that all was well and no one had left the house. We left the cars under the screen of the vines, and set out to the attack. The maize was up to our chests but we were in view of the single window in the grey wall, and the Commissario in his city suit, panting and snorting at my side, held a grenade in his hand ready to deal with the window. Half the party had gone off to take the house from the rear. A wolfhound came out, and then ran off when somebody pointed a gun at it. A Carabiniere started to kick in the door, and we heard a single shot and a great shouting from the back of the house.
Here we found Lupo lying on the ground. He was dressed only in a shirt, and had jumped from the bedroom window at the back, breaking a leg, and – from the state of his face – had almost certainly received a swipe from a rifle butt. One eye was closing and the other looked up at us unblinkingly. Blood from mouth and nose had filled in the deep lines of his face, and his expression was impassive.
Moments later a woman was hustled into sight by one of the Carabinieri. She was barefoot, in rumpled clothes, dull and dazed-looking and plain to the point of ugliness.
‘The woman in the case,’ Lo Scalzo said.
‘They’re rather rough with her, aren’t they?’ I said.
‘She let her man down. They don’t like that kind of thing.’
‘But she’s been working for you.’
‘It doesn’t mean we have to like her.’
‘What will happen to them now?’
‘He’ll go down for life, and one of his brothers will kill her. They’ll soon find out she threw him in. A knife up through the vagina into the belly. Or a red-hot poker if they have time. She’ll be dead within the year.’
May 7
Despite gloomy forecasts, the blood of San Gennaro liquefied successfully yesterday evening. The miracle took place in a slow and reluctant manner. By tradition this is seen as a poor omen for the coming year, with the result that the Neapolitans are left with a feeling hardly better than gloomy relief. It is fantastic to realise that outright failure could have produced a security crisis, and that we should certainly have had large-scale civil commotions on our hands.
Crowds had been beginning to form in the neighbourhood of the Duomo since Friday evening, and one immediately noticed their heavy silence. By Saturday afternoon some agitation and local pockets of hysteria were evident. The popular feeling was one of nervous listlessness coupled with apprehension. All the fishing-boats were in port and the shops and cafés were empty. People simply mooched about the streets, waiting. It was like a weird parody of a public holiday. The two women who work for us got through their chores as fast as they could and went off to light candles in our local shrine in the Vico Freddo. Lattarullo put the feelings of educated middle-class Neapolitans into words: ‘Much as I deplore the fact that living in the twentieth century we should be so obsessed by these relics of medievalism, I’m afraid that even I am not immune to mass suggestion.’
At about five o’clock a disturbance started in the narrow streets at the rear of the Duomo, a few shop-windows were broken, and MPs moved into the area in strength. An hour later I found it impossible to get through the Strada di Tribunali. People were running hither and thither, entranced and ecstatic, frothing at the mouth and prophesying doom. It was like being caught up in a wild football crowd, frenzied by the prospect of their side’s impending defeat. A hubbub was said to have started in the Cathedral because a number of British and American officers had been allotted seats close to the altar, and the crowd suspected that their presence might be holding up the miracle. There were cries of ‘Out with the heretics,’ which may not have been understood by the military guests, although some of them must have noticed the fists waved in their direction.
Soon after this the Parenti di San Gennaro were led in to take up their position round the altar. These aged women are popularly credited with being actual descendants of the Saint, and they form a mysterious and spiritually potent clique, who have inherited power and the responsibility of browbeating their ancestor into submission with threats and curses, when all else fails.
At about eight o’clock the Saint gave way to this new pressure and the miracle took place. Some public jubilation followed, but on a muted scale, and most people just went home to bed. A poorish liquefaction but better than none at all, was the general verdict. We shall have to go through this all over again in September.
May 7
A shameful example of the perfidiousness and injustices o
f this war we conduct behind the scenes. The General has not been able to get over the episode of the two rival bands fighting a battle for the right to pillage one of our trains, nor has he been mollified by the news of the capture of the bandit Lupo. One man is not enough. He wants mass arrests, and yesterday all the Italian chiefs of police were called before him and threatened with every kind of sanction including charges of sabotage if they failed to produce immediate results. The police chiefs are said to have replied that their forces were grossly under-manned, and their hands tied by excessive scruples shown by the Allies in the matter of repression. Only if given a free hand to solve this problem in their own way could results be guaranteed. Thus today I took part as an observer in one of the new-style operations: a raid on a bandit hideout carried out by a mixed force of Carabinieri and Pubblica Sicurezza, under orders to get results at all costs.
This time the combined force numbered about fifty men, but included the same Carabinieri as at Frattamaggiore and the same hyena-faced Pubblica Sicurezza Commissario, with his pin-striped suit, red-devil hand-grenades and squeaking shoes. The fields we moved into in a wide then gradually tightening circle were as before, fenced in by their enormous vines, with little grey cubes of houses, and occasional straw-shelters where the peasants kept their tools and took a nap in the shade in the worst of the noonday sun. In one of these four armed men were discovered. They immediately surrendered, were handcuffed, chained together and led away. But now a problem presented itself. Only four prisoners had been taken, and a man could be charged with banditry only if he was a member of a criminal association of not less than five persons. As it was, the four captured men, who by legal definition were not bandits, could have applied for bail, with the near-certainty of getting it. In this country there are fifty lawyers to every one policeman, and the lawyers expect to win. But a bandit gets no bail and faces a sentence of from five to thirty years.