by Norman Lewis
When I reported all these facts and these dispiriting probabilities to the FSO and asked if I should go ahead, he said, ‘I simply don’t see how you can spare the time,’ and that just about summed the matter up.
May 28
The French colonial troops are on the rampage again. Whenever they take a town or a village, a wholesale rape of the population takes place. Recently all females in the villages of Patricia, Pofi, Isoletta, Supino, and Morolo were violated. In Lenola, which fell to the Allies on May 21, fifty women were raped, but – as these were not enough to go round – children and even old men were violated. It is reported to be normal for two Moroccans to assault a woman simultaneously, one having normal intercourse while the other commits sodomy. In many cases severe damage to the genitals, rectum and uterus has been caused. In Castro di Volsci doctors treated three hundred victims of rape, and at Ceccano the British have been forced to build a guarded camp to protect the Italian women. Many Moors have deserted, and are attacking villages far behind the lines, and now they are reported to have appeared in the vicinity of Afragola to add a new dimension of terror to that already produced by the presence of so many marauders.
Today I went to Santa Maria a Vico to see a girl said to have been driven insane as the result of an attack by a large party of Moors. I found her living alone with her mother (who had also been raped a number of times), and in total poverty. Her condition had improved, and she behaved rationally and with a good deal of charm, although she was unable to walk as the result of physical injuries. The Carabinieri and the PS said that she had been certified as insane, and would have been committed to an asylum had a bed been available. She would be unlikely in the circumstances ever to find a husband.
At last one had faced the flesh-and-blood reality of the kind of horror that drove the whole female population of Macedonian villages to throw themselves from cliffs rather than fall into the hands of the advancing Turks. A fate worse than death: it was in fact just that.
Back at the Municipio I was confronted by a group of sindacos from neighbouring towns, and an ultimatum was presented: ‘Either clear the Moroccans out, or we will deal with them in our own way.’ All these men looked like the toughest of movie gangsters, and I was convinced they would carry out their threat.
What is it that turns an ordinary decent Moroccan peasant boy into the most terrible of sexual psychopaths as soon as he becomes a soldier? From further enquiries among the communities that have suffered from them I learned that the attackers of the Santa Maria a Vico family were roaming the countryside in several jeeps, led by a sergeant-chef who fancied himself as a dancer, and dressed up as a female when not in action.
May 31
The fragmentation of Italian politics in reaction to the long stagnant acquiescence under Fascism continues. There are now some sixty officially recognised political parties having memberships ranging from a hundred or so to nearly two million. Many of these offer bizarre recipes for national salvation, including a small band of fanatics in the Salerno area who claim to have discovered the solution of the problem of perpetual motion, and to be ready to exploit this in the national interest. In addition to the legally constituted parties there are clandestine Neo-Fascists, and Separatists. To the latter group I believe we have given secret support. The Separatists’ latest plan for Italy’s regeneration includes the immediate demolition of all factories, the abolition of the motorcar, and the renaming of the months of the calendar after the Roman gods. This is the season and situation when insanity has become almost respectable.
Of all the emergent political forces the most numerous, powerful and rational – outside Naples, in which the urban sub-proletariat is Royalist to a man – are the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, and the orthodox Communists; the last being somewhat sapped in strength by the existence of some thirty factional groups, each with its own newssheet, all mutually hostile, and in agreement only in calling on the workers of the world to unite.
The odds are that when the elections come the Christian Democrats will take over power. This is the party of the Church as well as that of the great landlords, and it is supported by all the energy, the political finesse, and the devotion of the religious Establishment. Both the bosses and the Church are already putting on the pressure. Armies of nuns go from house to house in the working-class districts, explaining to wives what political democracy is all about, and why it will be sinful to vote for any party other than that of God and His angels. To support these spiritual pressures, there are other inducements. An unemployed man who is inscribed with the CD has more chance of finding a job than one who isn’t, and the canvassing nuns often make small handouts of pasta or flour that necessitous families find it very hard to refuse.
In the absence abroad of Togliatti, the head of the orthodox Communist Party is Eugenio Reale. The party shows every sign, as soon as the liberation is complete, of being the strongest CP outside the Soviet Union. Unlike Communist Parties elsewhere, its membership contains a high proportion of middle-class intellectuals; some of them wealthy, and many with legal training. A powerful and dangerous political force.
I have known Reale for two months, and have visited him a half-dozen times in his flat in the Via Gravina. He is calm and softly-spoken, impressive in his analysis of the Italian political situation, and endowed with a belief hardly distinguishable from religious faith of the eventual takeover of power by the Communist Party. This he sees as happening after the Christian Democrats have held office and have provoked national disillusionment by a public display of corruption. Reale talks happily and confidently of these things to come. We are the best of friends, but there are the usual currents of self-interest in the friendship. Certain of our high-level strategists are obsessed with the importance of undercover Neo-Fascist groups, believing that should we ever suffer a military setback these people would come out of their holes and go into action as partisans for the Germans. As these people see it, nobody should be better placed than the leader of the Communists to know who these secret plotters are. Perhaps they are right, but all my visits to the Via Gravina have produced less useful information than a single meeting with, say, Lattarullo.
I suspect that Eugenio Reale knows precisely what I am after, but is not in the slightest bit interested in supplying it. He is not afraid of Neo-Fascists. He is probably happy that they should exist, that the Separatists should exist, that the Party of Perpetual Motion should exist, and that the country should be politically divided and fissured in the way it is. I believe that it suits his book that his political enemies should tear themselves to pieces fighting each other, that the bosses should force their workers to join the Christian Democrats, that the nuns should go on handing out spaghetti, and that the professional clappers should be employed at 10 lire a head to applaud at meetings organised by the Christian Democrats, and howl down the speakers of their opponents. These people are sowing the wind and Reale is preparing the whirlwind they will reap. Political division and confusion are what his party thrives on, and more and more voters will eventually take refuge in the ironclad philosophy he provides.
In the meanwhile I press him for the names of secret Fascists, and to my astonishment at our meeting today he seemed to have given way. A piece of paper was put into my hand on which he had listed the names of the four most dangerous men in Naples, and that of a subversive newspaper to be suppressed. Alas, they turned out to be no more than Enrico Russo, leader of the Trotskyists, and his lieutenants Antonio Ceechi, Villone Libero and Luigi Balzano. Reale’s ‘Fascist News-sheet’ was the left-wing Communist organ, Il Proletario. So much wasted effort. I should have known.
June 4
The inevitable has happened with the murder of five Moors in a village near Cancello. They were enticed into a house with the offer of women, and then given food or wine containing some paralysing poison. While fully conscious they were castrated, and then beheaded. The decapitation was entrusted to pubescent boys to prove their worth, but the boys lac
ked both the skill and strength to carry the task out in a speedy and effective manner. The bodies were buried under cabbages, which were first dug up and then replanted over them in several village gardens, and there has been an undercurrent of sinister merriment in the Zona di Camorra about the prospects of fine vegetable crops in the coming year. These facts were passed to me by my reliable contact in Afragola.
The Psychological Warfare Bureau has been very energetic in its investigations into the crimes committed by the Moors. I wonder if any news of this episode will find its way into the bulletin.
June 7
Called on Lattarullo whose fortunes have taken a turn for the better as a result of the fall of Rome last week. He can now play his part again at funerals as ‘the uncle from Rome’, and his first engagement, fixed through the agency for which he has worked in the past, is for this afternoon. Ideally he should be met at the Stazione Centrale and be seen to descend from a first-class carriage, but as the trains are not yet running this is impossible. Instead, the agency will supply a car fitted with Roman numbers, and a driver in an American semi-uniform of the kind that can be bought for a few thousand lire with whatever stripes and ribbons one feels like sporting, in the Via Forcella. The car will pick him up in the Piazza Dante, and deliver him right to the door.
It seemed remarkable to me that Lattarullo could hope to avoid recognition by any of the mourners as the local figure he was, but he seemed confident that this was unlikely to happen. For my benefit he put on the sleek, new, black suit and the black hat supplied by the agency, seeming to have stiffened and straightened in doing so. His face, too, seemed to have changed as part of the disguise, transformed by a solemnity that had affected even the bone-structure. He mentioned that Neapolitans as a race tended to live out their lives in the district where they had been born, which in effect were enormous separate villages, for which reason he would never accept a commission of this kind in his native Chiaia. For the rest, he studied the information supplied by the agency about the family background, and in his grief-stricken patrician aloofness kept apart from the rest of the guests. This was a species of solemn pantomime, he said, and he was sure that the mourners saw it that way too and were not inclined to pry into the details of the stage-management. He came on the scene looking like a Roman, he could put on a presentable Roman accent, he kept his hands to his sides, and snapped an answer to a question in the way a Roman was supposed to, and he was of the belief that most people were happy to settle for that. The fee for his services would be 2000 lire – an enormous windfall which he would accept with dignity and no fulsome show of gratitude. He expected that he would be urged to take home with him small gifts of pasta, a mozzarella cheese, and perhaps a little oil, and this he would do.
Other trivial deceptions had been arranged for this funeral, which was to take place in the Rione San Antonio Abate, an area which is obsessed by Neapolitan working-class display and the putting on of what is known as una bella faccia. The magnificent silk-lined coffin in which the corpse would be displayed would eventually be substituted by one of plain deal; even the flowers were on hire and would be collected when the last of the mourners had gone and made to serve for three or four more funerals. Neapolitans, said Lattarullo, had come to realise that there was not much point in leaving flowers in cemeteries, where raiders paid daily visits, collecting them for resale, and transforming wreaths into bridal bouquets.
While on the subject of Neapolitan villainy, he had news of a spectacular case reported this week from the Monte Vergine section, featuring a notorious woman black marketeer who had amassed four million lire-worth of gold and jewels and hidden them in the furniture of her house. Here she was visited by three distressed strangers in clerical garb, two of them holding up the third - a bishop, they said – who had just suffered a heart attack in the street. The chaplain and the majordomo, as they described themselves, carried the ‘bishop’ in and laid him on the woman’s bed, while she stayed respectfully outside in the street waiting for him to recover. Half an hour or so later she decided to risk a peep through the door, and found that her visitors had left, having cleared out the house before their departure.
June 9
Into the 92nd General Hospital on Wednesday last, once again with malaria. Three days as usual of grinding headache and sickness, after which I felt reasonably well, and faced only the problem of persuading a highly sympathetic MO to let me out. Yesterday I explained to him the urgent nature of my duties and he agreed to allow contacts to visit me in hospital. Today Del Giudice and Lattarullo turned up in the morning, immediately followed by Lo Scalzo in the company of Donna Maria Fidora, the ex-python wrestler from Caivano, and a sincere but saturnine-looking member of the Camorra of Afragola. In the afternoon Lola and Susanna appeared, both in slave-jewellery and feathered headdresses. Whatever the MO might have said, the ward sister, tight-lipped and muttering, did not approve. Screens were put round my bed while the visitors were present, and as soon as Lola and Susanna had gone the sister went away and came back with a medical major carrying a spray with which he proceeded to disinfect about a quarter of the ward in the vicinity of my bed.
The news is that Frazer has been posted – or has got himself posted – so his great affair with Lola has come to an end. Both girls will now retire to Ischia for the summer season, in their own words ‘to deflate’. They explained to me that the part of the island facing Naples is radioactive, and iodine is wafted on the sea-breezes. The effect is slimming, and of special benefit, as well, to the kidneys, the bladder, and the complexion. As part of the cure they will feed on rabbits of a kind bred only on the island. These are reared in total darkness, and their pale, almost transparent, non-fattening flesh is a gastronomic feature of the regime.
Things having turned out this way, I imagine the ex-Federale will shortly be sending his wife into summer exile in a pension on Capri, to leave the field clear for visits to Ischia, and that as the noise of war recedes, he and Lola will achieve a cosy readjustment, assisted by iniezioni recostituenti. Unpleasant memories will be pushed into the background, and soon it will be as if nothing had ever come between them.
June 27
A week of fiestas, processions and miraculous happenings. Simmons of the Bari Section, spending a night with us, described a medieval spectacle he had watched at Guarda Sanframondi where an order of flagellants half-kill themselves every seven years in honour of their Virgin. This bloody display of fervour is frowned on by the Vatican and was suppressed under Fascism, when it was felt that such spectacles did little to support the image of Italy as a modern industrial nation. In the current atmosphere of disillusionment, escapism and hysteria, it has been resuscitated with enthusiasm. Several hundred hooded and white-robed penitents who had prepared themselves for the day by long periods of fasting and abstention from sexual intercourse practically took over the village and paraded through the streets, beating themselves on the bare chest with pieces of sharp rock. Simmons said their robes were soaked with blood. There was a dramatic moment when a man carrying one of the banners was publicly accused of being a cuckold – a crime by local standards. He was rescued from lynching by the police, and taken into protective custody.
Eric Williams has been telling us about his frustrations at Nola, where the whole life of the town came to a standstill last Sunday for the celebration of the Feast of the Lily, as a result of which the Military in general, and Signals in particular, are in something of a plight. For the festa eight enormously high wooden towers, the ‘lilies’, are built, and these, decorated with flowers, are carried through every street in honour of St Paulinus who in the fifth century invented church bells in this town. Unfortunately all the main army telephone connections between the North and the Far South, including Sicily, go through Nola, and wires and cables by the hundred were cut to allow the lilies to go through. The resulting chaos in communications, he said, was unimaginable.
On the selfsame day that Eric was suffering in Nola, Del Giudice, who has be
come a useful contact, asked me if I would take him to Amalfi. He obviously preferred not to say why. Totting up the balance of favours, I decided he was in credit and, having a free day, did my usual deal with the Counter-Intelligence Corps for the loan of a jeep, and we drove there together.
Del Giudice, a great amateur of local gastronomy, wanted me to taste the eels which at this time of the year are a speciality of the town. We visited what he said was the best restaurant along that part of the coast but I did not really enjoy the meal. Seafood restaurants always seem to me more prone to evident and visual cruelty than others. The eels were being skinned alive in full view of the customers, chopped up and thrown into a frying-pan where they continued to squirm, and on one occasion a cook pulled a live octopus out of a tank, sliced off a tentacle to add to some soup, and threw it back again. Del Giudice mentioned that the restaurant supplied short-time rooms for couples overcome by the aphrodisiac qualities of the food.
Thereafter the main object of the trip was tackled. This was a visit in the interests of folklore, Del Giudice said, to the crypt of the Cathedral in which one of the several sets of bones claimed to be those of St Andrew are kept. Three times a year, this day being one, the bones exude a miraculously rejuvenating fluid, which is collected on swabs of cotton wool and sold to the faithful. We waited for about an hour in a queue amid loud hisses of reverence and anticipation on all sides. At last Del Giudice was served, and he was lucky indeed for a few minutes later the supply ran out. The wad of cotton wool with its precious damp patch, for which he paid 200 lire, was handed to him by an attendant hunchback, which – hunchbacks being lucky – increased the efficacy of the holy substance. Del Giudice wrapped it up in a page from Il Proletario, and we went home.