by Norman Lewis
Liana was cheerful, fresh-faced (no make-up), and full of bustling, darting movement. She lived in two bare, scoured and whitewashed rooms over bassi occupied by families one rung lower down in the social scale, and had with her a sparkling black-eyed boy of four, almost as big as herself. The Commisario at the local stazione, visited in advance, confirmed that there was no record, and speaking of her the scheming, predatory features seemed to soften a little. She was ‘as good as bread’, he said, and suddenly I noticed for the first time that the Neapolitans show a reverence for bread greater even than for gold.
Her husband, Liana told me, had been killed in the war. She showed me a jaunty card sent from Cyrenaica the day before he had gone into a desert battle, to be seen no more. Africa, as she put it, had eaten him up. A photograph, the cell-like room’s only decoration, showed him buttoned into his tight uniform with his fine, young, up-swept moustache, and his feathered hat. He had been in the Wolves of Tuscany – once a crack unit before the hurricane of war had swept it away. Now she was in love with a REME sergeant, who sounded a sedate fellow and was virtually certain to survive. She needed a father for her boy, she said.
I asked her the key question – on what did she live? She showed me the doeskin gloves she made for sale in the shops in the Via Roma. Her income from this was the equivalent of about one pound a week. In the spring and the autumn, she said, she helped out on a cousin’s farm at Casoria, hoeing in spring and helping with the apple harvest in autumn. For this she received a little more – the equivalent of twenty-five shillings a week – but the work was hard, fourteen hours a day. October is the best month of the year in Southern Italy. We went out on to the balcony into the mild sunshine. All round us were white walls, gloriously sculpted and dimpled by light. Women were hanging out washing above and below, and snatches came from them of the sweet songs composed in the slum of Santa Lucia all round us. It was a moment of poetry. ‘Do what you can for me,’ she said, and I promised I would and went away to compose the kind of subdued and matter-of-fact report that was best calculated to further Liana’s cause.
Having read this, the FSO proceeded to put his plan into action by sending for my friend, that investigatory tiger, Robert Parkinson, and telling him to vet the girl. Parkinson was taken by surprise, knowing that I normally dealt with all marriage vettings, but was unable to confer with me, because I’d been found a job taking me out into the country, the idea possibly being to keep me out of the way.
The choice of Parkinson was probably deliberate, and reflected the fact that the FSO was in no doubt now as to the divergence in our attitudes towards Italy and Italians. A year among the Italians had converted me to such an admiration for their humanity and culture that I realise that were I given the chance to be born again and to choose the place of my birth, Italy would be the country of my choice.
Not so Parkinson. It was a curious fact that of all of us Robert might have achieved the deepest penetration of Italian life, and yet in his way remained aloof from it. All his free time was spent with his Italian friends. He spoke the language with a kind of grave rectitude, quoted Leopardi, sent cards and flowers on people’s saint’s day, and presents for their children on the Feast of Epiphany. Like Eric Williams, he could stand at a window in our first-floor headquarters and conduct a basic conversation with someone in the Via Calabritto below purely by movements of the head and hands. In other words, almost an Italian. Italy and Italians fascinated him. He enjoyed, as we all did, the intrigue – games we all played together. He was enchanted by the genial trickeries of our environment. His curiosity was endlessly stimulated, but I felt his love was never awakened. He would find it harder than I do to give an Italian the benefit of the doubt.
Robert, as instructed, went off to see Liana, who must have been surprised to receive two military visitors in one day. He would have sat on the same low hard chair on which I had sat, bleakly enduring the asceticism of his surroundings, immune to Liana’s gamine charm, noting that the whole equipment of living in the apartment, apart from a table, two chairs and a bed, was kept in a single battered tin trunk. This penury he would compare in his mind’s eye with the REME sergeant’s probable background of dinner services and matching suites. He might have glanced at the photo of the Wolf of Tuscany whose vanished arrogance would have seemed to him contemptible rather than pathetic. He would undoubtedly have registered the siting of the lavatory, as so often is the case, behind a sort of stable door in the tiny area of the living-room serving as a kitchen.
There is an inherent Mediterranean austerity much in evidence in the Naples area, in Sorrento and Capri, which seems to come from the sea, since it is hardly to be found inland. This expresses itself in a taste for unadorned spaces, and is the visual equivalent of intervals of silence. I suspected that Parkinson found this emptiness of design alien and repellent, and that there would have been no appeal in Liana’s spotless linen hanging on the balcony, her whitewashed walls and the scrubbed floor tiles where linoleum should have been. He would have questioned her in his slow, deliberate way, like a counsel for the prosecution, snapped his notebook with awful finality, bowed and gone away. When the FSO called me in and read out the two reports no one would have believed that they could have had to do with the same girl. So Liana will not get her British husband, and I will be doing no more marriage vettings. With the combined efforts of the GOC and Sergeant Parkinson, there will be few international marriages from now on in this area.
October 24
The thunderbolt has fallen. Today I was ordered to prepare to leave immediately for Taranto, to embark on the Reina del Pacifico for Port Said, where I am to pick up three thousand Russian soldiers who had been fighting with the Germans and gone over to the Partisans. These are to be repatriated, evidently with discretion, to the Soviet Union, via the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and Khorramshahr in Iran. Instructions are, as usual, vague to the point of cryptic. The AFHQ order reads, ‘You will be away as long as necessary,’ but does not define the duties to be performed.
My intuition warns me that my stay in Naples has come to an end, a surmise reinforced by the FSO’s mention of the near-certainty that as soon as this mission is completed I shall be posted for liaison duties with the Russians on the Eastern Front.
So I am left with only hours to spare and no time to say goodbye to any of the friends scattered through so many towns. There will be no time for a last glass of marsala with any of the scheming sindacos or the Machiavellian chiefs of police, who have always, for all their innumerable shortcomings, shown hospitality to me as a stranger. There will be no time for a last coffee substitute in the Gran Caffè in the Galleria to say goodbye and good luck to several girls who are virtually fixtures of the place, and bear me no ill-will because I was unable to help them to marry Allied personnel. I realise that I have had my last meal at ‘Zi’ Teresa’s and will never again shake the gnarled paw of the old aunt herself, as she sits behind the showcase full of octopus and crabs, trying to pick out the sound of her cash-register bell from the music of the house troubadors. There won’t be even a half-hour to spare for a dash up to the Vomero for a last panoramic view across the gardens of the Villa Floridiana of the great grey and red city spread below, presenting at this distance a totally fallacious aspect of dignified calm; or for a final contemplation of the somnolent Vesuvius, so changed in outline since its reshaping by the eruption.
Instead, with a foretaste of the nostalgia to come, I have to make do with what is on the spot. I do my packing in the bedroom, trying as I do so to imprint on my memory all the details of the piazza, admiring for the last time the statuary: Proserpine – her bottom pocked by some tommy-gunner’s high-spirited fire – being carried off by Pluto; Hercules at grips with the Hydra. In the background I watch the sea charging up the anthracite beach.
Into the office to gather my papers together and write the day’s report, realising with sorrow how many projects have been started but will now never be completed. A movement at a window acro
ss the road distracts me and I look up to see a woman called Giulietta appear momentarily between the shutters naked from the waist up on the pretence of washing herself – a familiar sight which we have come to accept as no more than a tiny offering to the god of fertility. A seller of brooms passes below in the street with a cry like a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Evening meals are already being prepared, and the smell of the miracle of good cooking thrusts back for a moment that of drains. For the last time I look into the eyes of the enormous and enigmatic female statues flanking the entrance to the Calabritto Palace, and then into the courtyard itself, where a small child is pissing into the mouth of a stone lion.
Perhaps when everything is ready for the move off – at half past six tomorrow from the Stazione Centrale – there will at least be a moment left to call on Lattarullo, most faithful of my Neapolitan allies. I know in advance that, having staggered under the impact of the news and then recovered with proper fortitude, he will whisper, ‘I’ve got a treat for you.’ This he will describe as caccia – game – but it will be a muscled city pigeon netted on someone’s roof. He will dash out to find the neighbourhood girl, who will stew it in garlic and herbs and serve it up on the great ancestral salver. When it is time to go he will take my hand and say, ‘I’ll be at the station tomorrow, to see you off,’ and I know he will be there as promised, dressed in all the dignity of his ‘Zio di Roma’ suit for such an occasion.
* This man became the celebrated Padre Pio.
About the Author
Norman Lewis’s early childhood, as recalled in Jackdaw Cake (1985), was spent partly with his Welsh spiritualist parents in Enfield, North London, and partly with his eccentric aunts in Wales. Forgoing a place at university for lack of funds, he used the income from wedding photography and various petty trading to finance travels to Spain, Italy and the Balkans, before being approached by the Colonial Office to spy for them with his camera in Yemen.
He moved to Cuba in 1939, but was recalled for duty in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War. It was from this that Norman Lewis’s masterpiece, Naples ’44, emerged, a resurrection of his wartime diary only finally published in 1978.
Before that came a number of novels and travel books, notably A Dragon Apparent (1951) and Golden Earth (1952), both of which were best sellers in their day. His novel The Volcanoes Above Us, based on personal experiences in Central America, sold six million copies in paperback in Russia and The Honoured Society (1964), a non-fiction study of the Sicilian Mafia, was serialised in six instalments by the New Yorker.
Norman Lewis wrote thirteen novels and thirteen works of nonfiction, mostly travel books, but he regarded his life’s major achievement to be the reaction to an article written by him entitled Genocide in Brazil, published in the Sunday Times in 1968. This led to a change in the Brazilian law relating to the treatment of Indians, and to the formation of Survival International, the influential international organisation which campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples. He later published a very successful book called The Missionaries (1988) which is set amongst the Indians of Central and Latin America.
More recent books included Voices of the Old Sea (1984), Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India (1991), An Empire of the East: Travels in Indonesia (1993) and The World the World (1996), which concluded his autobiography, as well as collections of pieces in The Happy Ant Heap (1998) and Voyage by Dhow (2001). With In Sicily (2002) he returned to his much-loved Italy, and in 2003 his last book, A Tomb in Seville, was published.
Lewis travelled to off-beat parts of the world well into his nineties, returning to the calm of rural Essex where he lived with his second wife. He died in July 2003 at the age of ninety-five.
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Copyright
First published by William Collins in 1978
Published by Eland Publishing Limited
61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL in 1983
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved
Copyright © Norman Lewis 1978
The right of Norman Lewis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1–78060–014–7
Cover Image:
Neapolitan Girls – A Brothel 1945 © Archivio Carbone