The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

  —Born in the States, sir? I said feebly after a pause.

  —Born there, corporal, but probably sha’n’t die there. I had ideas of aristocracy without class, of brotherhood without familiarity and sentimentality. And I studied and I read and I admired nature and art. And I said what a piece of work is man, and I believed it. But it looks as though individuality is going out forever. Yet the propaganda assures me that a new age is at hand.

  —It’s the turning point in history, sir, for the little man. . . .

  I murmured this, for it was something I’d read that morning in Stars and Stripes, Mediterranean.

  —The fallacy of the machine and the mob, corporal. If the murder gets over, everything will then be geared to the lowest common denominator, as it is in the American public schools. The queer, the beautiful, the gentle, and the wondering will all go down before a race of healthy baboons with football letters on their sweaters. . . . I was a letter man at Yale. . . . And the end of the world will come as a tittering anticlimax, because we’re going to shut ourselves out from the stream of truth, and drown in pettiness and small talk.

  —You fear the little man, sir?

  —The term little man is a phrase of self-pity. Faugh, corporal. . . .

  I remember that I excused myself from the second lieutenant of the engineers and went out of the Aletti into the streets of Algiers. I looked back at him as I turned out the door, bumping into a colonel. I remember thinking with an ache of pity and laughter that this was the last time the young lieutenant would speak. For no one man can put his hands up to stop a locomotive. . . .

  FIFTH PORTRAIT

  Momma

  MOMMA ALWAYS LAY A WHILE IN HER BED WHEN SHE AWOKE. Poppa was up four hours earlier and went out into the streets of Naples for a walk, to buy Risorgimento and to drink his caffè espresso. He said it made him nervous to lie beside her because she cooed to herself as she slept.

  That love which Poppa no longer desired of her Momma showered on the clientele of her bar. One reason she cooed in her sleep was that she was one of the richest women in Naples. She could afford to buy black market food at two thousand lire a day. She ate better than the Americans. She had furs and lovely dresses and patent leather pumps which even the countesses in the Vomero couldn’t afford. Momma had come from a poor family in Milan, but she’d made herself into one of the great ladies of Naples. And the merchants of Naples, when they sent her monthly bills, instead of writing signora before her name, wrote N.D., standing for nobil donna.

  As the churches of Naples struck noon, Momma got out of her bed. She was wearing a lace nightie brought her from Cairo by an American flier. Momma knew that the flier had made money on the deal, but no other woman in Naples had one like it. In the old days she’d have driven Poppa mad with this lace nightie. But now he simply crawled in beside her, felt the sheer stuff, and clucked his tongue in disapproval. Poppa was first and last a Neapolitan. Even in the early days of their marriage he’d never grasped the fineness of Momma’s grain. But she was beyond such bitterness now. She loved the world, and the world returned her love in her bar in the Galleria Umberto.

  Beneath a colored picture of the Madonna of Pompei, flanked by two tapers and a pot of pinks, Momma said her morning prayers. She thanked the Virgin for saving her during the bombardments of Naples. But the Virgin hadn’t spared that lovely appartamento in Piazza Garibaldi. And Momma prayed for all the sweet boys who came to her bar, that they might soon be returned to their families—but not too soon, for Momma loved their company. And she prayed also for the future of poor Italy, that the line up by Florence might soon be smashed by the American Fifth Army. And she prayed that Il Duce and his mistress Claretta Petacci might see the error of their ways. Finally Momma prayed that all the world might be as prosperous and happy as she herself was.

  With the bombing of her apartment in Piazza Garibaldi in March, 1943, Momma’d been able to salvage only her frigidaire. Everything else had been destroyed—the lovely linens she’d brought Poppa with her dowry from Milan, her fragile plate, her genteel furniture. Only the frigidaire was to be found among the rubble, pert and smiling as a bomb shelter. Momma’d wept the whole day; then she and Poppa had moved into a dreary set of rooms on the third floor of the Galleria Umberto. Momma’d got the rooms cleaned, set the frigidaire in the kitchen, and bought secondhand furniture by cautious shopping in Piazza Dante. But her heart as a homemaker had died in the ruins of that appartamento to which Poppa had brought her as a bride.

  She lived now only for her bar and for the Allied soldiers who came there every night except Sunday. In fact Momma was only treading water all day long until 1630 hours, at which time the provost marshal of Naples allowed her to open her bar. At 1930 MP’s came to make sure it was closed. Three hours. Yet in those three hours Momma lived more than most folks do in twenty-four.

  She’d opened her bar the night after Naples fell to the Allies, in October, 1943. Some American of the 34th Division had christened her Momma, and the name stuck. And because Momma had an instinctive knack for entertaining people, her bar was the most celebrated in Naples. Indeed a Kiwi had once told her that it was famous all over the world, that everyone in the Allied armies told everyone else about it. Momma rejoiced. Her only selfish desire was to be renowned as a great hostess. She was happy that she made money in her bar, but that wasn’t her be-and-end-all. She knew that she was going down in history with Lili Marlene and the Mademoiselle of Armentières—though for a different reason.

  Momma brushed her teeth with American dentrifice while the water ran into her tub. She studied her hair in the mirror. For ten years she’d been hennaing it. But she was too honest to go on kidding the world. She was forty-six. In the face of that sacred title, Momma, it seemed to her sacrilegious to sit every night behind her cash register with crimson hair glowing in the lights. So she’d stopped using the rinse. Now her hair was in that transitional stage, with gray and white and henna streaked through it. But the momentary ugliness of her hair was worth her title. At closing time in her bar, some of her boys, a bit brilli, would cry on her shoulder and tell her that she looked just like some elderly lady in Arkansas or Lyon or North Wales or the Transvaal or Sydney. Then she’d pat their hands and say:

  —Ah, mio caro! Se fosse qui la Sua mamma! . . .

  She’d never been able to learn English, though she understood nearly everything that was said to her in it.

  Momma climbed into the tub after she’d sprinkled in some salts a merchant seaman had brought her from New York. Her body was getting a little chunky, but she tried her best to keep it trim, the way a Momma’s should be. At first she’d worn a pince-nez until Poppa had told her she looked like a Sicilian carthorse with blinders. So she had reverted to her gold-rimmed spectacles. She doted on American black market steaks, her pasta asciutta, her risotti, and her peperoni. She knew that a Momma mustn’t be skinny either.

  She dressed herself in black silk and laid out a quaint straw hat on which a stuffed bird sprawled eating cherries. She opened her drawerful of silk stockings. You could count on the fingers of one hand the women in Naples of August, 1944, who owned silk stockings—were they prostitutes on the Toledo or marchese in villas at Bagnoli. But Momma had em; she averaged a pair a week from her American admirers. Momma considered herself one of the luckiest ladies in the world. She knew that no woman gets presents for nothing.

  Finally dressed and fragrant and cool in spite of the furnace that was Naples in August, 1944, Momma took up her purse and looked around the apartment before locking it. She checked the ice in the frigidaire. Sometimes, after she was compelled to close her bar, she invited her favorite boys up for extra drinks. She didn’t charge for this hospitality.

  She walked through the Galleria Umberto. At this hour it was empty of Neapolitans because of the heat. But the Allied soldiery was already out in full force. The bars weren’t open, so they just loitered against the walls reading their Stars and Stripes or whistling at the signorine. A few
waved to Momma, and she bowed to them. Then she went onto the Toledo, which Il Duce had vulgarized into Via Roma. Here she clutched her bag more tightly. Like anybody else born in Milan, she had no use for Neapolitans or Sicilians. They thought the world owed them a living, so they preyed on one another with a malicious vitality, like monkeys removing one another’s fleas. And now that the Allies were in Naples, the Neapolitans were united in milking them. Momma knew that the Neapolitans hated her because she was rich and because she refused to speak their dialect. She walked through them all with her head in the air, clutching her purse. Some who knew her called out vulgar names in dialect and cracks about Napoli Milionaria, but she paid them no attention.

  She and Poppa usually lunched together at a black market restaurant on Via Chiaia, patronized by Americans and those few Italians who could afford the price of a meal there. Today Poppa was out campaigning for public office at the Municipio, so Momma ate alone at her special table. Sometimes she suspected that Poppa had a mistress. But then he wouldn’t stand a chance at snapping up anything really good, what with all the Allies in Naples.

  The treatment Momma got at this restaurant was in a class by itself. Naturally the Americans got fawned on, but then they didn’t know what the waiters said about them in the kitchen. Whereas Momma, as an Italian who’d made a success in the hardiest times Naples had ever known, always got a welcome as though she were Queen Margherita. There were flowers on her table and special wines rustled up from the cellar, although the Allies got watered vino ordinario. And when Momma entered, the orchestra stopped playing American jazz, picked up their violins, and did her favorite tune, “Mazzolin di Fiori.” Momma tapped her chin with her white glove and hummed appreciatively.

  While she picked at her whitefish and sipped her white wine and peeped around the restaurant from under the shadow of the red bird that forever ate cherries on her hat, Momma observed an American sergeant wrestling with an American black market steak. He was quite drunk, and to Momma, who knew all the symptoms so well, he seemed ready to cry. She debated inviting him to her table and treating him to his lunch. But he gave her the I-hate-Italians scowl, so she thought better of it. He wasn’t the sort who came to her bar anyhow. Momma was basically shy, except with people she thought needed affection. Then she’d open up like all the great hostesses of the world. However, she did take out of her purse a little pasteboard card advertising her bar. She sent it by a waiter over to the sergeant, plus a bottle of Chianti. He scowled at her again, and Momma decided basta, she’d gone more than halfway. Then he tore up her card and began to guzzle her wine.

  She finished her lunch and smoked a cigarette. There seemed to be a rope about her neck pulled taut by all the evil fingers of the world. She wanted to go somewhere and have a good cry. She needed a friend. Poppa had never been close to her since, in the first year of their marriage, he discovered that she wasn’t going to be fertile, like all the other women of Italy. Momma had conceived just once. In her Fallopian tubes. After the medico had curetted her out and she’d all but died, he’d told her she could never have a child of her own. And Poppa in disgust had taken to politics and reading the papers. Momma’d only begun to love again since the night in October, 1943, when she’d opened her bar in the Galleria Umberto. . . .

  She arose from table and drew on her white gloves. As she walked to the door, she saw herself pass by in the gilded mirror, a dumpy figure holding in its chin, a scudding straw hat under a bird chewing cherries. She knew that if she didn’t get outside soon, she’d bawl right there in front of the waiters, and the drama she’d built up of a great lady would collapse forever. On Via Chiaia she debated what movie she’d go to. Since she went every afternoon, she’d seen them all. A few American films were beginning to dribble into Naples, and Momma’d enjoyed Greer Garson or Ginger Rogers with an Italian sound track. Yet movies bored her unless there was lots of music and color. The truth was that she went every afternoon because she’d nothing else to do; she was just killing time till the hour to open her bar. She decided on the Cinema Regina Elena off Via Santa Brigida.

  She found a seat three-quarters of the way back from the screen, put on her glasses, and watched the show. It was an Italian film made in Rome on a budget of a few thousand lire. Momma was used to the tempo of American movies, so she found herself nodding. There wasn’t even anything worth crying over. She eased her feet out of their patent leather pumps, cursed the pinching of her girdle, and settled down. Sometimes she drew a peppermint patty out of her bag and sucked it thoughtfully. Every half-hour the lights came up for an intervallo; the windows were opened, and people came in or out or changed their seats for various reasons. Momma’d have liked an Allied soldier to be sitting beside her. But to these the cinemas of Naples were off limits because of the danger of typhus and because of certain nuisances they’d committed in the dark just after the city fell. During the intervalli Momma stayed in her seat and smoked a cigarette. She wasn’t going to force her feet back into her pumps.

  The Italian film went on and on; Momma fell asleep and dreamed in the moldy dark. Her dreams were always the same, of the boys who came to her bar. There was a heterogeneous quality about them. They had an air of being tremendously wise, older than the human race. They understood one another, as though from France and New Zealand and America they all had membership cards in some occult freemasonry. And they had a refinement of manner, an intuitive appreciation of her as a woman. Their conversation was flashing, bitter, and lucid. More than other men they laughed much together, laughing at life itself perhaps. Momma’d never seen anything like her boys. Some were extraordinarily handsome, but not as other men were handsome. They had an acuteness in their eyes and a predatory richness of the mouth as though they’d bitten into a pomegranate. Momma dreamed that she was queen of some gay exclusive club.

  She awoke and glanced at her watch. It was time to go. She’d seen almost nothing of the film. But she didn’t care. She felt more rested than she did by Poppa’s side. A silver hammer in her heart kept tapping out that in fifteen minutes more her life for the day would begin. She had the yearning hectic panic of a child going to a show. She shot her feet into her pumps. As the lights came up for the secondo tempo Momma left the theater. She looked a little disdainfully at the audience, contrasting it with what she’d shortly be seeing. Peaked Neapolitan girls on the afternoon of their giorno di festa, holding tightly to the arms of their fidanzati wearing GI undershirts; sailors of the Regia Marina and the Squadra Navale in their patched blue and whites; housewives from the vichi and the off-limits areas who’d come in with a houseful of children to peer at the screen and lose themselves in its shadowy life.

  Her patent leather pumps hurt Momma’s feet, but she sprinted up Santa Brigida. She turned left at Via Giuseppe Verdi. Once in the Galleria Momma all but flew. She wondered if she looked spruce, if her hat was chic. The Galleria was milling and humming, for all the bars opened within a few seconds of one another, just as clocks stagger their striking the hour throughout a great city. Momma had a presentiment that today was going to be especially glamorous.

  The 1630 shift of troie were coming into the arcade with the promptness of factory girls. From now until curfew time the Galleria would be a concentrated fever of bargaining and merchandising peculiar to Naples in August, 1944.

  The rolling steel shutters of Momma’s bar were already up. Gaetano was polishing the mirrors. He greeted Momma and went back to thinking about his wife and thirteen children and how it wasn’t fair that a man who’d never signed the Fascist tessera should live like a dog under the Allies. Vincenzo was wearing a spotted apron, so Momma lashed him with her tongue and forced him into the gabinetto to put on a fresh one. She stitched them up herself out of American potato bags. Momma also inspected the glassware, the taps on the wine casks, the alignment of the bottles. She was kilometers ahead of the sanitation standards set by the PBS surgeon and the provost marshal.

  She seated herself behind the cassa, unlocked the cas
h drawer, and counted her soldi. At this moment the old feeling of ecstasy returned. For Momma loved her bar: the mirrors in which everyone could watch everyone else, the shining Carrara marble, the urns for making caffè espresso. Behind her on the mirror she’d fastened a price list. She offered excellent white wine, vermouth, and cherry brandy. She hoped soon to be licensed to sell gin and cognac, which were what the Allies really wanted. When stronger liquors were available, the tone of her place would go sky-high, along with the moods of her clientele.

  No one had yet turned up. Momma knew with racecourse certainty the exact order in which her habitués came. Her patrons were of three types: some came only to look, some with a thinly veiled purpose of meeting someone else, some just happened in.

  A shadow cut the fierce light of the Galleria bouncing around the mirrors. It was Poppa treading warily and carrying his straw hat. Momma flinched. She had no desire to see Poppa now. If he addressed her in dialect, she’d refuse to answer. He had rings under his eyes, and through his brown teeth came the perfume of onions. Momma told him that there was half a chicken waiting in the frigidaire. But he seemed to want to talk. Momma got as peeved as though someone tried to explain a movie to her. So Poppa, after a few more attempts to talk, put on his straw hat and went out. But he called back to her from the entrance: