By trips to Caserta and crying on colonel’s desks and pleading with section chiefs, Major Motes got Stuki and Lieutenant Mayberry promoted to captaincies. Mayberry said his own cap would get too small if the major didn’t stop being so kind. And Stuki in his shining double bars presided over rooms of gray brooding Italians reading P/W mail. One examination room opened into the next. From his high rostrum Stuki looked like a master in study hall tyrannizing over the bowed heads, the thick lenses of the spectacles, the shabby dandruffed shoulders. He sat all day long on this dais screaming exhortations at his slaves, lecturing on Italy’s political perfidy, or tapping with the eraser of his pencil while he scribbled V-mails to his Mom informing her that he’d at last got to be a pezzo grosso in the city they kicked Pop out of. Stuki loved to fire Neapolitans for the slightest laxness in their duties. If they asked for half an hour off to go to the questura to bail out their sisters on charges of prostitution, he fired them for goldbricking. If they fainted from hunger at their work, he gave them the sack for shirking their duty to the United States, which had liberated them.
— Perchè avete buttato fuori mio Papa, eh? he would cry.
Considering the huge office force under his control, Major Motes rejoiced that there were so few incidents. One afternoon on the second floor some Austrian refugees beat up an Italian Jew who was reading P/W mail in German. Major Motes arrived on the scene with his interpreter, the sergeant major, and two MP’s from the questura. All the offenders were fired and jailed for investigation and trial by AMG in the Provincia Building.
— More screening, that’s the answer, Major Motes told higher headquarters at AFHQ in Caserta.
— What a comedy, Captain Mayberry said, looking up from his charts and reports. A year ago the Italians were at war with us. Now they’re reading the mail of their own prisoners of war. . . . What an obscene comedy.
— The whole war is obscene, goddam it, Major Motes said. All Europe and its parasitic population are obscene . . . like the nigras. . . .
On the ground floor of the palazzo Major Motes established a mess hall for the American personnel, a barbershop, and a glassed-in booth where an armed guard sat and frisked all the furren help when they came to work in the morning and left in the evening. At noon the Neapolitans pressed their noses against the screen door of the mess and watched everything the Americans lifted to their mouths. Some of them wept when they saw half-eaten dishes dumped into GI cans.
— Set up garbage pails in the cortile! Stuki railed. Let em dive for the food we waste! That oughta nourish the bastards!
When he wasn’t necking the panties off the signorina in his office, Captain Frank amused himself with a game against the Neapolitans on the sidewalk below his window. He’d stand smoking his cigar and holding a pail of water. Every Neapolitan who relieved himself against the wall below this window got a bucket of water dumped on his head. Major Motes wrote Lucinda that ha-ha, they were teaching the Neapolitans a little practical sanitation.
Major Motes was the first at the door of the palazzo in the morning. Some evenings he stayed till midnight. There wasn’t a place in the palazzo where his quick step mightn’t be heard at any moment. He’d peer with pride at his jeeps and trucks in their rows in the inner cortile, at the mailbags ferried in and out of the great double-gated portone. And he observed the stream of Italians and American officers swarming up and down the staircase, which he called Jacob’s Ladder in a V-mail to Lucinda. In the daylight hours there was always in his palazzo a combination hum and silence, a clatter of typewriters and that air of concentration and mystery befitting the intelligence service of the United States. He pardoned himself his pride. All this had been his dream. He alone had realized it.
As one of the leading censorship officers in the Mediterranean theater he was invited to visit the front, attached to the 34th Division. It would mean a month’s absence from Naples and his clockwork command, but he left Stuki and Captain Frank in charge. He spent a week rubbing dubbin into his combat boots and having officers’ calls in which he told them how lucky they were to be in the security of Naples. But at the last moment his orders were canceled because Caserta said that the Arno front was far too risky and his own life too precious for a German bullet.
Captain Mayberry said one morning:
— My work here is almost done.
— You belong to this outfit, Major Motes replied tenderly. You helped build it up. . . . Surely you don’t want to leave me?
— It’s not that, sir, Captain Mayberry said, stroking his thin blond hair. But I thought I might ask for a transfer to Caserta. . . . I am very weary. . . . I thought perhaps they might hide me away out there in some obscure little job in documents.
— Goddam it, what are you up to? Major Motes cried like a stricken mother. Don’t think you’ll get your majority any easier out at Caserta. Besides, they haven’t even made me a lieutenant colonel yet.
— You know I don’t think in terms of promotion, Captain Mayberry said. But my ancestors were pioneers. I want something new.
— Well, just don’t try to pull any fine Italian deals to get out of this outfit.
In the next few days Captain Mayberry drove often to Caserta in his jeep. He said AFHQ was no longer satisfied with the reports over which he slaved. Would Major Motes please transfer him to a quieter and easier job? He was terribly weary, he said.
— You’re up to something, Major Motes said accusingly.
— Besides, sir, have you looked at your hair? It’s almost white. When I knew you, it was still brown . . . you have a terrible twitch too, sir . . . you’re eligible for rotation to the United States . . . your wife . . .
Major Motes felt his scalp prickle:
— Goddam it, how can anyone think of going home when this frightful war is still on?
— We must all be selfish, even in our unselfishnesses, Captain Mayberry replied.
That very week Major Motes’s heart broke. An order came down from Caserta returning him to the United States for rotation. He was relieved of all his command in Italy. Captain Mayberry and Captain Frank were transferred to Caserta. Stuki was to take over Major Motes’s own duties.
— Sorry to see ya go, chief, Stuki said, taking his arm carelessly.
— Sure you can keep things running here? Major Motes begged, stuttering more than ever.
— Oh boy, can I! . . . Let me say now that ya’ve been just a little too easy around here. I got a few new policies I’m gonna try on those Ginsoes after ya leave us. . . . After all, chief, ya didn’t know the languages ya was workin with . . . maybe that’s why they gave ya the air.
He wrote Lucinda that he was coming home to her for a little rest. Nervous exhaustion. He spoke of the perfidies of Stuki, of Captains Frank and Mayberry, to all of whom he’d given their start, out of pure benevolence. But then the army was full of opportunists and fingermen.
On his last night in Naples before sailing, Major Motes walked alone in the Galleria Umberto. It was after sunset, the first time he’d been alone with himself since that hotel room in Casa almost two years ago. The Galleria was full of Neapolitans, of Americans on leave from the hospitals at Bagnoli. The bars were full, even to the chairs on the pavements. Everywhere there were girls and old women screeching and selling and sweeping. Little boys tore around making deals with GI’s, buying their cigarettes and selling them phallic charms and silver horseshoes. Major Motes saw himself in a mirror in one of the bars — white-haired, quite stooped, his walk unsteady, a tic under his left eye. On his left shoulder was the red bull of the 34th Division he’d sewed on when he thought he was going to inspect the front. He kept telling himself that men all over the world had died in this war, whereas he himself was only older and wiser and full of a bottomless grief.
Goddam it, he said, fraternally clapping a lounging GI on the shoulder, who started this war anyway?
— Sir, if I was a major like you, I wouldn’t even care.
Major Motes walked and walked in the Ga
lleria Umberto till the moon rose over Vesuvius and a pale light rippled through the glassless frames of the domed roof. People came and went, drunks flopped against the archways, girls were chased into black alcoves. But for all the heat that remained over Naples in the dark, he felt icy and empty and alone. He lit a cigarette. His hand trembled and the nervousness under his left eye set up a crackling along the socket. His heart was broken.
— Guess I’m out of my time, he said to himself. I’m a gentleman from Virginia. Such must suffer in Naples of August, 1944.
This thought comforted Major Motes. When he got home, he’d go to the Pentagon and sell them the idea of setting up censorship among civilians in the United States. Americans couldn’t trust even one another in wartime.
SIXTH PROMENADE
(Naples)
I REMEMBER THAT ITALY IN AUGUST, 1944, LAY OFF OUR PORT like a golden porpoise lapped in dawn. She had eggs and lumps on her outline which the sun and the light mist grossened into wens. From nearer I made them out to be the island of Capri and the volcano Vesuvius. I peered with more interest than I had at Africa, for I had precise and confused ideas of what Italy’d be like.
I remember how in my head and in my heart the city of Naples had always nestled like a sleeping question mark, as an entity gay and sad and full of what they call Life. I knew it would be a port town, but a port town over which lay a color and a weight peculiarly Naples’ own, a short girl with dark eyes and rich skin and body hair. Motherhood. Huge and inscrutable as the feminine Idea.
In August, 1944, the port of Naples was a flytrap of bustle and efficiency and robbery in the midst of ruin and panic. Images of disaster lay about the harbor: ships sunk at their berths, shattered unloading machinery, pumiced tenements along the docks. And back of this lunette the island of Capri sheered out of the bay, a sunny yellow bulkhead. Vesuvius smoked softly and solemnly, the way a philosophic plumber does at a wake. The Bay of Naples was crammed with Liberty ships and boats with red crosses on their sides and decks. Out Bagnoli way among the laurels and the myrtles landing craft infantry thumped up and down in the water.
— I don’t like to look at bombed buildings, the pfc said, putting polaroid lenses over his spectacles. Not that this will shut out the view.
— Ten months ago, the mess sergeant said, these greasy bastards were still hearin sirens and gettin pasted.
I remember how the blue of the Mediterranean shaded into gray or rainbowed oil around the berths. Everything floated near the piers: watermelons, condoms, chunks of fissured wood, strips of faded cloth.
— Europe drains into the Bay of Naples, the pfc said.
And I remember the jeeps along Via Caracciolo near the section of Santa Lucia, and how Zi’ Teresa’s restaurant jutting on a small float was then a French officers’ mess, and the tunnel to Bagnoli. I remember whizzing past the statues of the aquarium, the war monuments (Napoli ai suoi caduti) that stared out to sea in the sunlight as stiff and superannuated as warriors on the porch of an old-soldiers’ home. The sunlight gives Naples a hardness and a mercilessness. It pokes its realistic fingers into the bombed buildings by Navy House. In the half shot houses what plaster yet remains in the eaves is as living and suppurating as human skin. And just over Naples stand the hills where the Vomero sits on its snaky terraces and flights of stairs like an old lady precarious on a trapeze. The houses of Naples as they swarm up the hillside are yellow or creamy or brown; they get lost in the verdure that mustaches the lips of Castel Sant’Elmo. I couldn’t place Naples in any century because it had a taste at once modern and medieval, all grown together in weariness and urgency and disgust. Yet even in her half-death Naples is alive and furious with herself and with life. The hillside on which she lies, legs open like a drunken trollop, trembles when she turns on her fan bed. I remember too that at midday, when she was sleepiest of all in the lurid heat, she was a symbol of life itself, resentful and spiteful and cursing, yet very tender in her ruin.
— I don’t care what anybody says, the corporal said, this is a terrific town. Absolutely terrific. There’s something here that makes me restless and drowsy at the same time. Naples ain’t just a city, like St. Louis or Omaha. There’s something moving in the air above Naples. . . . Poison gas? Perfume?
— Ah, blow it, the mess sergeant said. Look at them skirts jigglin over them rears.
I remember that along Via Caracciolo thousands of people strolled in the late afternoon. There came a hot wind off the bay that ruffled the buttocks and the marvelous breasts of the Italian women. It mussed their black thick hair. Everyone walked arm in arm, talking, laughing, crying, shouting, gesticulating. I remember the shabbiness of Neapolitan suits, different from the shine on the seats of American pants. I remember the mourning bands on the lapels of the Neapolitan men. I remember Neapolitan shoes — when there were any — cracked or sprouting or leaking, of sick flashy leather like the cheeks of the feverish. I remember the lipstick and powder that the women used — when they could get any — of the tint of fevered blood. I remember the dark pallidity of those girls who could get none. I remember the glistening damp underarm hair when the Neapolitan women put up a hand to their heads, and their legs, which seemed often to be skinned in dewy feathers.
I remember the walls along Piazza Municipio, stuck with movie posters and the yellow playbills of the San Carlo and the Italian review Febbre Azzurra, or “Prossimamente Greer Garson in Prigionieri del Passato,” and Charlie Chaplin in Il Grande Dittatore, and Napoli Milionaria, and Soffia So’. And the shops with their windows half-empty, with their scant goods cutely spread out to fake a display:
— Prezzi sbalordativi. . . .
— Riduzioni del 20%. . . .
Or the bookstores where Louisa May Alcott became Piccole Donne, where paper-bound ocher books lay in carts like cheeses on their sides, where Benedetto Croce was bedfellow with old copies of Life and that bitching Roman periodical Marforio, with nude girls prancing on the cover. And in every street and vico the little rafts on wheels selling shoelaces, and combs that shattered when they touched my scalp. And how bottles were sawed down to make glasses and vases, and how chestnuts and oranges and tomatoes and spinaci stood wilting in the food stores.
— Oggi si vende. . . .
— Si distribuisce sale. . . .
— Non si riparano gomme per mancanza di materiale. . . .
— Lo spaccio, la tessera. . . .
I remember the San Carlo Opera House on the corner by the traffic island, across the street from a pro station — its 1743 A.D. arches, its lines sweating out opera and ballet at thirty-five lire. Near it the palazzo where the Limeys took their tea and the British officers got drunk on their roof terrace and poured gin on pedestrians passing into the Galleria Umberto. And I remember that every vico and salita had a different smell. Along Via Roma there was the color of movement: the OD’s of the combat troops, the rusty shorts of the UK, the melting splotches of the Neapolitan housewives’ house dresses, the patter of sandals, the click of hobnails, the squunch of children’s brown bare soles as they begged, pimped, screamed, tugged, cried, and offered. On Via Roma there was a smell, I remember, of fake coffee roasting, of ice cream with phony flavors and colors, of musty dry goods gloated over by the padrone behind his bars against thieves. Out of every alley in Naples the whiff of a thousand years of life and death and bed sheets and urination. The glass over the colored picture of the Madonna of Torre Annunziata. The clinking of the gratings on the balconies. And especially that small basket being hauled up and down many stories on its string, pulling up newspapers and groceries and the baby. Each alley had a different stench from many families with their own residua of body excretion, sweat, halitosis, and dandruff. And I remember alley after alley winding off Via Roma like a bowel, each with its off-limits sign. All I could see of them was the entrance, a flash of cobblestones, a turn of sunlight, and the scarred face of a wall shutting off all further exploration.
— I’m lost in Naples, said the pfc. Life has stru
ck me in the face like a flounder. Cold, hot, ghastly, and lovely.
I remember making acquaintance with Italian. At first all I heard in Naples was asssshpett and capeeesh and payyysannn. But after a few days it broke down into something more articulate. Italian (not Neapolitan dialect) can soon be understood because it sounds like what it’s saying. Italian is a language as natural as the human breath. Italian is a feminine and flowing tongue in which the endings fill up the pauses, covering those gaps and gaucheries of conversation that embarrass Americans and British. It’s a language whose inertia has remained on the plus side. It keeps in motion by its own inherent drive. The Italians are never silent with one another. It isn’t necessary even to think in this lovely language, for your breath comes and goes anyhow, and you might just as well use it to talk with. And good loving talk! If you’ve nothing to say, ehhh and senz’altro and per forza and per questo are always tumbling from your lips to prevent the flow from getting static. And then there were dico and dice, and the tumble of the Italian past subjunctive, like smoke turning on itself:
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