View of the World

by Norman Lewis

  Fonseca now claimed exemption from officiating on the grounds that he was lawyer to the firm of Arruda and Junqueira. A second public prosecutor refused to be saddled with this embarrassing obligation, and the judge of the Cuiabá assize agreed with him and turned down Fonseca’s application. Fonseca then applied to the supreme court again for an annulment of the local decision. The application was refused. By now nine months had been used up in manoeuvres of this kind, and it was April 1967.

  At this point an attempt was made to settle these difficulties, to the satisfaction of all concerned, by the appointment of a substitute public prosecutor – who immediately claimed exemption on the grounds of his wife’s somewhat remote relationship with Sebastião Arruda. The plea was accepted and another public prosecutor found, who declined to officiate, basing his refusal on the legal invalidity of Fonseca’s objection. All papers were therefore returned to Fonseca.

  In September 1967 a fourth substitute public prosecutor was appointed who, instead of taking action, sent the papers to the Attorney General who confirmed the original decision that Fonseca, who had moved away, was competent to act. This was followed by an endless bandying of legal quibbles and the appearance and departure of a succession of substitute prosecutors until March 1968 when the Attorney General was goaded to a protest: ‘Since August 1966 the papers relating to this case have been shuffled about in an endless game of farcical excuses and pretexts, to the grave detriment of the prestige of justice.’ Thus encouraged, the eighth or ninth substitute public prosecutor took action, and made a formal charge against the murderers of the Cintas Largas nearly all of whom were by now, after five years, either dead or not to be found. The names of Antonio Junqueira and Sebastião Arruda were omitted from the denuncia ‘as their assent to the massacre of the Indians has never been established’. At this, the police attempted to take the law into their own hands by ordering the two men’s preventive arrest. This could not be carried out, because they had gone into hiding.

  One reads the history of the four years’ legal battle against the firm of Arruda and Junqueira, and the imagination reels at the thought of what lies in store for the champions of justice for the Indians – the practised and methodical wasting of time, the pleas for exemption, the demands for re-trials, the appeals and the counter-appeals, while the months run into years, and the years into decades, and the Indian slowly vanishes from the earth.

  And when, if ever, after all the lawsuits are settled, a little land is wrested back from the great banks, the corporations, the fazendeiros, the timber and mining concessionaires that now hold it – still what is to be done? Can the mission hanger-on, miraculously refurbished in body and spirit, return once again to the free life of the isolado? Does any remedy exist for the Indian, who, when the great day comes for the repossession of his land, finds the forest gone, and in its place a ruined plain, choked with scrub? Can a happy, viable, self-sufficient people be reassembled from those few broken human parts?

  The new protective body, the National Foundation for the Indian finds some cause for hope in the Xingu National Park. This is the magnificent and almost single-handed creation of two dedicated Indian fundamentalists, the Vilas Boas brothers, who believe that it will remain for all eternity an unchanging redoubt of the old Indian way of life – a view it is hard to discover anyone who shares. It was founded a generation ago when the ranches and fazendas were still busily digesting frontier territories hundreds of miles away, but now their appetites have sharpened again.

  The park shelters perhaps a dozen tribes, and there they live cheerfully obsessed with their Stone Age rituals, absorbed in perfectionist handicrafts, body-painting, keeping precious fires alight. The Vilas Boas brothers believe that even aspirin is detrimental to the Indian’s self-sufficiency, they exclude missionaries, and do not particularly welcome visitors of any kind. There are dotted lines on the map of the park in the Foundation’s office, showing the extensions they propose to make, which will allegedly double its present area; and, remembering the fate of President Goulart when idealism and commercial interests were in collision, one can only wonder.

  At best, and should this growth in the park’s area ever take place, a total of 4,000 isolados will have been salvaged, plus a few hundred in a new reserve just created in the Tumucumac mountains in the far north, and these will be guarded like rare birds of prey in the Highlands of Scotland. The future of the 50,000 or 100,000 Indians – whatever the figure is – left outside these reserves seems obscure indeed. At the moment they are to some slight extent protected by a national mood of self-recrimination, which is almost certain to calm once again to indifference. There are only 100,000 pure Indians at most out of a total population of 80 millions and it is unrealistic to believe that their welfare can ever become an obsession in a country in which such multitudes are thrown together in the pit of destitution.

  14

  Surviving with Spirit

  OF ALL THE GREAT CITIES Naples has suffered least at the hands of that destroyer of human monuments, the dark angel of Development. Pliny himself, who once stood on a headland there to watch the great eruption of Vesuvius ‘shaped like a many-branching tree’ in the moment of the obliteration of Pompeii, would have little difficulty in picking out the landmarks of our times. Nor would Nelson and his Emma, who chose roughly the same viewpoint to watch the eruption of their day – nor, certainly, Casanova looking down from his gambling house over the layered roofs and the soft-yellow walls of volcanic tufa which hoard and dispense the special Naples sunshine. Hardly a stone of Santa Lucia has been disturbed (except by air-bombardment) since its celebration in the ballad of the nineties. When the traveller of the last century was adjured to ‘See Naples and Die’, it was notwithstanding the competition offered by so many glittering rivals. How much more valid and enticing is the invitation now that so many of them have withdrawn into their shells of concrete.

  Naples is a once-capital city, glutted with the palaces and churches of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Seen from the heights above it, it is a golden honeycomb of buildings curved into a sea which, beyond a bordering of intense pollution, is as brilliant and translucent as any in the world. It is built on ancient lava fields, and has been threatened by numerous eruptions – only one of which, in 1855, came near to engulfing it: it was saved by the miraculous intervention of a statue of its patron saint, San Gennaro, on the Maddaloni Bridge, spreading its marble arms to halt the passage of the lava. Its history abounds with similar marvels, all of them attested to and recorded by responsible citizens of the day: a plague of mermaids, figures in Giotto’s frescoes in the Castel dell’Ovo, so marvellously drawn that they were actually seen to move and, more recently, the prodigies performed by Padre Pio, the flying monk, who flew from an outer suburb to the rescue of Italian pilots shot down in combat with Allied planes, bearing them safely to earth in his arms. Dependably in March of every year the dried blood of San Gennaro liquefies in its ampoule in the Cathedral – the most hallucinatory of spectacles surviving from the Middle Ages.

  It is characteristic of Naples, described by Scarfoglio as ‘the only oriental city having no resident European quarter’, that one of its kings, Ferdinand I, should not only have delighted to play the hurdy-gurdy but have commissioned Haydn to compose six nocturnes for performance on the instrument. He was the ruler of a people infatuated with music, and there is music still, everywhere in the Neapolitan air. There can be few more poetic experiences in the local manner than to visit the Parco della Rimembranza, where the young of the city go to make love in their cars, and to clamber down the cliff to a point where, the passing fishing boats still out of sight, they can be tracked by the trail of their mandolin music on their way out to sea.

  Naples has been taken by a long succession of foreign conquerors, the cruellest of them being Lord Nelson, who collaborated in the fearsome slaughter of the city’s liberals; and possibly the most corrupt being the Allies in the last war, who virtually handed over civic control to the Ame
rican gangster Vito Genovese, in the guise of adviser to the Allied Military Government – an experience from which the city has never wholly recovered. A continuing resistance to so many alien conquerors has sharpened the native capacity for self-defence, and, since few of the laws Neapolitans are subjected to are of their own making, they have a tendency to mistrust law in general. They are gregarious and gay with a frank devotion to the pleasures of the table and bed. In the last war, Naples was almost certainly the only city in a theatre of warlike operations where civilian employees of our armed forces could apply for transport facilities to their homes at noon, to enable them to fulfil their marital obligations.

  Those cities, such as Naples, which remain wonderfully unchanged, have usually survived not because developers have recognised their charms, but because, for one reason or another, the developers see no hope of a return on their money.

  The economy of Naples is chronically ailing and slides from one crisis to another. It is generally accepted that an expanded tourist industry could be its salvation, but the tourists do not come. Some of the reasons why it fails to entice foreigners to break their journey on their way to Sorrento or Amalfi and spend a night or two in its half-empty hotels were listed in Il Mattino last year.

  Sorrowfully the newspaper admitted that Naples had become the home-town of petty criminality. In the past twelve months, 77,290 minor crimes had been reported, but in only 1,300 cases had arrest been made or the criminals even been identified. During this period 29,000 cars had been stolen in the city – possibly a world record taking into account the number of vehicles registered. The Vespa-mounted scippatori, the Black Knights of the alleyways, buzzing in and out of the crowds in search of camera or handbag to snatch, had become so commonplace a sight as hardly to evoke interest or comment.

  From a glance at the newspaper’s statistics it seemed, too, that an evening meal out was to be recommended neither to the native citizen nor the visitor to Naples, since fourteen leading restaurants had been raided by bandits in the past twelve months. It was the kind of experience most of us would want to avoid, but a Neapolitan friend involved in a hold-up had been stimulated rather than alarmed. He had been invited to Da Pina’s for a christening celebration. A nice party, he said. The best of everything, with the wine flowing like water. But about halfway through the proceedings three hooded men carrying sawn-off shotguns had walked in and ordered the guest to lie face down on the floor. He was impressed with their courtesy, their correct use of the language, and by the way they addressed their victims using the polite lei rather than the familiar tu. All in all, it was a bit of an adventure, he said, and well worth the trifling four pounds or so he had been obliged to part with. His only fear had been that by some incredible mischance the police might show up and start a battle, as they had done at Lombardi’s Pizzeria last June, when fifteen customers were wounded.

  But most of the coups pulled off by the organised gangs, the Camorra, which imitate the Mafia of Sicily, are theatrical rather than violent. Three robbers who succeeded in sealing off Parker’s Hotel from the outside world, and who took two hours to ransack it from top to bottom, prepared and consumed a leisurely meal before departing.

  The recent capture of the Ischia ferry-boat was another episode that might have been modelled on a film; having despoiled the passengers with the now familiar show of civility and regret, the bandits leaped to the deck of a following motor launch waving farewells and blowing kisses to the girls before vanishing into the night.

  If one has an affection for such movies as The French Connection this is an environment not wholly without its own brand of attraction. What in its way can be more pleasant than to draw a chair out on to the balcony of a room in the Hotel Excelsior overlooking the exquisite small harbour of Santa Lucia, and there, glass in hand and without the slightest risk to one’s safety and comfort, play the part of an extra in such a film? The view is of the majestic fortress of the Castel dell’Ovo, dominating a port scene by a naïve painter: simple fishermen’s houses that have become restaurants, painted boats, tiny, foreshortened maritime figures, going nowhere in particular, a quayside stacked with the pleasant litter of the sea.

  There is less innocence in the prospect than at first meets the eye, because a corner of the port has been taken over by a fleet of some forty large motor launches, painted the darkest of marine blues, devoid of all trappings, and having about them an air of sinister functionalism. From time to time one starts up with a tremendous chuckle of twin 230 Mercury engines, is manoeuvred in swaggering fashion round the other boats and out of the port before, a moment later, trailing a wake like a destroyer, it heads for the horizon.

  This is the fleet of the best-organised and most successful contrabandisti in southern Italy, and in these launches (which give the impression of having been specially designed for the trade) are smuggled in the cigarettes and who knows what else picked up in incessant rendezvous with the ships steaming out from the ports of Tunisia. Smuggling is hardly the word to describe these operations, all stages of which, taking place in Italian waters, are on open display. The boats come and go throughout the day, unload their cargoes without concealment and cut a few jubilant capers in the harbour before tying up. There are no signs of the law in the harbour area, and motorcycle policemen passing through Santa Lucia do so hurriedly with eyes averted. Understandings have clearly been reached at high levels. Customs launches lack the speed to catch the contrabandisti at sea, and rarely dare to enter the port. Occasional disagreements among the smugglers themselves can, however, be explosive: hotel guests a week or so before our arrival had a ringside seat at a brief battle, followed by a spectacular incineration of boats.

  It is a situation viewed by Neapolitans with tacit approval, if not with enthusiasm, and the benefits of the direct trade with north Africa to the man in the street are immediately visible. There is hardly a street without a small boy seated at a table to offer Marlboro cigarettes, made in Tunis (only the government health-warning is missing), at less than 500 lire as opposed to the 800 lire charged in the shops. The authorities seem to regard the traffic as hardly more than an inevitable evil. ‘I refuse to admit that this is a crime,’ said Maurizio Valenzi the Communist Mayor of Naples. ‘For me it is an illegal solution.’ The Mayor shared the frequently voiced Neapolitan view that his city is the victim of a calumnious outside world. ‘If you are looking for crime on a big scale, go to Rome or Milan,’ he said. ‘The worst things that can happen to you here is to have your pocket picked. Nobody gets violently robbed in Naples and we treat women with respect. Whoever heard of a Neapolitan being pulled in for knocking a child about? Even the Red Brigade don’t operate here.’

  Valenzi is as Neapolitan as Brezhnev is Muscovite; he is lively of expression and gesture, a distinguished painter, and a first-rate oratorical performer in a country in which no politician can survive without the knack of rhetoric and a powerful voice. His appearance recalls the views on matters of dress held by Togliatti, party-leader for so many years: ‘What pleases me is to see a comrade dressed in a good double-breasted suit – if possible, dark-blue.’ Valenzi is wholly congruous in the rococo furnishings, the marble and the glitter of the Naples Town Hall. He is fired by local patriotism, impatient of criticisms of his city, and particularly saddened by those contained in a book by a Communist author, Maria Antoinetta Macciocchi, who had been a parliamentary candidate for one of the poor quarters of the city. ‘She wasn’t much liked here,’ the Mayor said.

  Macciocchi had mentioned that the rat population of central Naples was seven million. Many of these, she said, were shared out in the bassi, those claustrophobic dwellings consisting of a single room that line the streets of the old town, in which as many as fifteen members of a family may live as best they can with no windows, the street doors shut at night, no running water and a closet behind a curtain. The Mayor, who showed a partiality for euphemism, shied away from the word bassi, but agreed that 69,000 families lived in ‘unhygienic houses’. �
�The municipality,’ he said, ‘has plans to do something.’

  ‘Our submerged economy’ was Valenzi’s description for the child-labour which exists in Naples to an extent found nowhere else in the Western world. There is no way of calculating the number of children from the age of eight upwards employed in cafés, bars, or the innumerable sweatshops tucked away in the narrow streets; but there are certainly tens of thousands of them. It would appear to be another ‘illegal solution’. Naples has the highest birth-rate in Italy – twice the national average – and it is an everyday accomplishment for a woman to have borne ten children by the age of thirty-five and to have completed a brood of fifteen or sixteen by the time she ceases to reproduce. Such families are a source of complacency rather than despair. One is assured that they testify to a woman’s sexual attraction and her husband’s virility. More importantly, perhaps, they represent an insurance policy against economic disaster. When up to five or six children contribute small regular sums to the budget a family is not only more affluent but also securer than a less numerous one in the trap of chronic unemployment.

  These are the facts of Neapolitan life against which Mayor Valenzi struggles like Canute against the waves. If the child in proletarian Naples is an economic weapon in the family armoury, it follows as a consequence that such central areas of the city as the Vicaria district have the highest population density in Europe – possibly in the world – with up to three people occupying every two square metres. But if overcrowding, and its damaging effect on public health, are the most pressing problems that face the Mayor and his council, it is the terrific anachronism of child labour with its whiff of early Victorian England that gives the city a bad name. Therefore gestures have to be made, and from time to time the police are ordered into action to close down all establishments employing child labour, and to punish their owners with exemplary fines. What follows is economic disaster for all involved – sometimes desperate impoverishment for the families thrown back on the providing power of the father who, statistically speaking, can expect to spend a third of his life unemployed. At this point, the exploiters and the exploited only too often join forces in protest, and their votes are lost to whatever party is held responsible for their plight.