— Se io andassi o se tu potessi.
I remember that Italian used to amuse me till it caught me in its silken web. I remember how kind the Neapolitans were to me when I was learning it, the sweetness of their grammatical corrections, the look of joy on an Italian’s face when you address him in his tongue, however poorly. Italian is the most sociable and Christian language in this world. It’s full of a bubble like laughter. Yet it’s capable of power and bitterness. It has nouns that tick off a personality as neatly as a wisecrack. It’s a language in which the voice runs to all levels. You all but sing, and you work off your passion with your hands.
— Io andare a casa tua per mangiare e per fare amore . . . finito capito amato andato venduto. . . . Capeeesh? . . . Molto buono, no buono, acqua fresca. . . .
I remember that sometimes I used to wonder if so tender and human a language might disappear from the world because of the pattern of conquest. Italian is an atavistic language. All the rest have been visited by some torture or trickery or introspection. Italian alone is the language of the moment, cunning yet unpremeditated. I learned Italian in order to make love. And I found Italian feminine and secret and grave and puzzled and laughing, like a woman. Perhaps it came from the tit of Signora Eve in the Garden. For Italian is like milk and butter, sauced with some pepper lest it cloy you with its sweetness. Once Italian got into my palate, I remember, it never again left me. So I learned Italian in Naples.
I remember also the dialect of the city of Naples, which is Italian chewed to shreds in the mouth of a hungry man. It varies even within the city. The fishermen in the bay talk differently from the rich in the Vomero. Every six blocks in the squashed-together city there’s a new dialect. But the dialect is Naples and Naples is the dialect. It’s as raw as tenement living, as mercurial as a thief to your face, as tender as the flesh on the breast. Sometimes in one sentence it’s all three. The stateliness of Tuscan Italian is missing in Neapolitan. But there’s no false stateliness in Naples either, except in some alien fountain presented by a Duchess of Lombardy. Neapolitan dialect isn’t ornamental. Its endings have been amputated just as Neapolitan living pares to the heart and hardness of life. Wild sandwiches occur in the middle of words, doublings of z’s, cramming of m’s and n’s. When they say something, the Neapolitans scream and moan and stab and hug and vituperate. All at once. And O God, their gestures! The hand before the groin, the finger under the chin, the cluckings, the head-shakings. In each sentence they seem to recapitulate all the emotions that human beings know. They die and live and faint and desire and despair. I remember the dialect of Naples. It was the most moving language I ever listened to. It came out of the fierce sun over the bleached and smelly roofs, the heavy night, childbirth, starvation, and death. I remember too the tongues that spoke Neapolitan to me: the humorous, the sly, the gentle, the anguished, the merciful, and the murderous. Those tongues that spoke it were like lizards warm in the sun, jiggling their tails because they were alive.
— I have hoid, said the mess sergeant, teasing a Neapolitan child with a chocolate bar, that da wimmin are purtier in Nort Italy. But ya can’t trump da build on da Neapolitan goils. Nuttin but rear ends bouncin like Jello and milk factories under dere dresses. I’m goin crazy for it.
I remember how the women and girls of Naples stood for all the women and girls of the world. There were girls like the Kresge and Woolworth pigs of Joisey City, with their hair not quite combed and dark and too long. Under this fluffy frowzy rat’s-nest they had earrings too heavy for their ears, with some cabalistic design or jewel. And there were the girls of the Vomero, of the strangling middle class, who were rushed along Via Roma on their mothers’ arms, girls who were locked up after nightfall when they’d come in from their classes at the university. Now they were studentesse, but soon they’d be dottoresse:
Un libro di latino
Per un giovinottino . . .
They were like pretty mice in cotton dresses as they whisked by me with their chaperones. Sometimes I caught their eyes on the oblique when Mamma was looking the other way, eyes demure and hypocritical, eyes shooting feudal disdain for the poorer Italian women, eyes masking jealousy and curiosity of those lower Neapolitan women who went with gli alleati. And there were also a few, very few Neapolitan women who reminded me of the blaring independence of American girls, who promenaded slowly through the street, well made up, their hair a little lighter, their legs a little daintier, their dresses fresh and trim. And once in a while I saw a marchesa or a contessa who’d played ball with the fascists and was now doing likewise with gli alleati. These were slim and forty and chic. They could be seen all over Europe, not just in Naples. And there were also the widows of Naples with their canes and sober bags. But most ubiquitous on Via Roma were those signurrine who chewed gum and had forgotten how to speak Italian. These walked always in pairs, and they screeched American obscenities at one another, taught them by some armored force sergeant in heat. They called every American Joe, and they knew “Stardust” and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” They knew the words better than I did.
But I remember best of all the children of Naples. The scugnizz’. Naples is the greatest baby plant in the world. Once they come off the assembly line, they lose no time getting onto the streets. They learn to walk and talk in the gutters. Many of them seem to live there. As the curfew was progressively lifted to a later and later hour, the children of Naples spent the evenings on the sidewalks. If I had to keep in my memory just one picture of the Neapolitan kaleidoscope, it would be of a brother and sister, never over ten years of age, sleeping on a curbstone in the sunlight with a piece of chewed dark bread beside them. Sometimes I thought that in Naples the order of bees and human beings was upside down, that the children supported and brought up their parents.
Once I remember attempting to count the number of shoeshine boys between Via Diaz and the Galleria Umberto. I never could, for new shoeshine stands opened behind my back by the time I’d walked ten feet. Those incredible scugnizz’! They weren’t children at all, the scugnizz’, but sorrowful wise mocking gremlins. They sold Yank and Stars and Stripes. They lurked outside the PX to buy my rations. They pimped for their sisters, who stood looking out at me from behind the balcony of a primo piano tenement. They sold charms and divisional insignia in the streets. They hawked dough that looked like doughnuts or fritters, but tasted like grilled papier-mâché. They stole everything with a brilliance and furtiveness and constancy that made me think of old Ayrab fairy tales. They shrilled and railed at me in perfect and scouring American, as though they’d learned it from some sailor lying in a gutter and hollering holy hell to ease his heart. The children of Naples were determined not to die, with the determination in which corpuscles mass to fight a virus that has invaded them. They owned the vitality of the damned. And they laughed at me, themselves, the whole world. Often I thought that we, the conquering army, were weaker and sillier than they. I loved the scugnizz’ because I had no illusions about them.
— Wanna eat, Joe?
— Wanna souvenir of Naples?
— Wanna drink, Joe?
— Wanna nice signorina? Wanna piecea arse?
— The kids are so dirty, the corporal said. But they have such fine teeth and eyes and skin . . . like coffee with a little milk in it. . . . An they’re smart as whips. Look at the way they’ve learned American just so they can buy an sell to us. . . . An, Christ, what can ya do when the poor little tykes stand outside ya mess and watch ya dumpin out GI food that somebody’s wasted? The MP’s won’t let ya feed em. Why? Why?
— I suppose, said the pfc, that these children are responsible for Mussolini? that the babies of Naples supported Farinacci and Badoglio and the house of Savoy and the vested interests of Turin and Milan?
— Ya go crazy if ya study on it too much, said the corporal.
— Las night, the mess sergeant said, I seen two marines come outa the docks. An they met up with two signorinas of about eleven or twelve. Ya can’t tell. They becom
e wimmin so young here. . . . Start em young, I always say.
— Well, I guess the good must suffer with the bad, the corporal said. That’s what the Bible says.
— If the Bible says that, said the pfc, Hitler should have burnt it too.
I remember the levels and terraces of Naples, slipping from the Vomero into the bay. I’d go from the bottom of the town to the top of the funiculars, which slide under the hillside on cables. Everybody fought their way into the cars in the stations. Then you skied along the wire. Sometimes you came into the light between two palazzi. Sometimes you scudded through a brief tunnel. Everyone’s shoulder was against everyone else’s gut. In the spells of darkness I’d reassure myself that my Ayrab wallet was still in my pocket. In the dark the storm of Neapolitan dialect went on:
— Di, Pino, hai portato tua moglie Pina?
Or I remember sometimes being stranded in the Vomero. For the funiculars stopped running at 2100 hours. The Neapolitans believed that the force of gravity ceased at sundown. Then it became a problem of descent down stairs that I couldn’t even see, for Naples was blacked out. There must have been forty flights and levels. God help me when I got caught at the top without a flashlight! It meant groping along the dank walls of the houses, of gauging my step on stairs set at a pitch I couldn’t walk or run: about one and a half times the normal stride. Each stairway had a different gauge, and each angle was different. It was like walking into a cellar of smells and secret life, for out of the houses over my head came the sound of GI’s haggling for vino after hours, of women slapped and cursed by their husbands, of children eating their pasta. Sometimes I remember how across the path of my uncertain descent a light would fall athwart the mossy chipped stairs from an ill-closed door. Or a woman and her child would appear in the spectrum. Even as I stumbled down, I wondered what they were thinking. A piece of their lives had fallen across my way in an ax of radiation.
Sometimes around midnight I remember that a peace would hit Naples. The heat shifted gears for the hour of dawn. Only then did any silence come to the wrestling odorous city. There were stars over Vesuvius. The LCI’s in the bay rocked and bubbled like ducks. The lights of the MP’s kiosks and the glow from the pro stations rode in the hot dark like beacons. Then I’d twist under my mosquito netting.
— Napoli? . . . I’ve had it . . . or it’s having me. . . .
SEVENTH PORTRAIT
Giulia
IN 1943 THE ALLIED BOMBERS HIT NAPLES INCESSANTLY. THEY came in the afternoons with a noise like mad cicadas. But Giulia and her brother Gennaro rarely took to the shelters. It smelled foul down there. And Giulia and Gennaro had had enough of the stench of families living night after night at lap’s length. They’d had enough of the screams of women giving birth to their babies in the ricoveri, those screams which could pierce the hum of the plane motors and the crunch of the bombs hitting the streets above their heads.
The English bombers made sorties almost daily from noon to fifteen hours. While families scurried screaming underground, Giulia and Gennaro would take to the top of their apartment house. In the sunlight on the roof they’d lean like connoisseurs on the parapet railing and watch the aircraft diving on the port.
— Se ci uccidono, Giulia said, clutching Gennaro’s cool hand, ci uccidono e basta, no?
They’d boo fine hits. Often the American planes dropped nothing but leaflets, telling the Neapolitans that the Allies were coming as friends. Giulia and Gennaro had long arrived at the conclusion that it mightn’t be such a bad thing to be liberated after all. They knew the score. Their Papa was a ragioniere, endlessly totting up figures in the employ of the state. He told them all the office gossip of the Questura. Hence they knew that fascism, at least in Naples, was as bloated as those balloons sold at the feast of Piedigrotta, which exploded when their rubber saw the sun.
After the pamphlet bombings Giulia and Gennaro would gather up handfuls of the leaflets that fell on their roof. These they’d bring to Papa. They’d all sit around the dining room table while the old man put on his spectacles and deciphered them. He read slowly and avidly under the stained-glass light. So Papa too came to the conclusion that it mightn’t be such a bad idea for the Allies to take Naples. He didn’t tell this to his children, but they read his thoughts.
Giulia was nineteen. She had a pale little face under brown ringlets that hung over her forehead like spun sugar. Everything about her was tiny: her mouth, her throat, her breasts, her waist, her ankles. Her expression was always of contented repose, even when she was talking most animatedly with her chum Elvira, whom she’d chosen as her foil because Elvira was a dowd. Giulia dressed in gay cotton or linen dresses, with a tiny belt about her minute waist, tiny white sport pumps with heels that were almost too high. After every bombing she’d pick her way with Elvira or Gennaro through the streets of Naples. She avoided the rubble and the corpses. The sun danced on a segment of her honeyed skin and made a halo on her small beribboned straw hat. She knew she didn’t look much like a Neapolitan girl. Possibly because her mother Rina had been a Florentine before Papa had induced her to settle with him in Naples. But Giulia was politician enough to speak Neapolitan dialect when she was with her chums. She’d had a better education than most girls of her class. She had almost as much book learning as Gennaro, who was in his second year at the University of Naples. When she was at the liceo, Guilia by some premonition had taken all the English courses she could get. Now she was teaching Gennaro English in the evenings after the dishes were done. From her maestra Giulia had an Oxford accent. She and her brother used to laugh over these lessons, his brown high brow crinkling over the difference between louse lice and spouse spouses.
Two years ago Giulia’d allowed her family to engage her hand for marriage. To a Neapolitan sottotenente with mustaches, spectacles, and serious intentions. But Pasquale became a prisoner of war. From his barbed-wire enclosure in Oran he wrote Giulia weekly a twenty-four line letter on green American stationery, with the return address in Italian, German, and Japanese. He told her of his loneliness, of the American Spam he was eating. He hoped that the war would soon end so that she and he could settle down with his family on Via Chiaia, and he could go on with his career as an engineer. In her mind Giulia had already written him off as a liability. She wrote Carissimo fidanzato to him once a week. And like all good Italian girls she led the life of a respectable fidanzata. She visited Pasquale’s family once a month and mourned for him as though he were dead. She passed her time as a ragazza per bene, shut up in the house with Mamma or going to the cinema with her brother Gennaro or her chum Elvira, that simpatica dowd. Giulia lived in that vacuum and parenthesis that was Naples from July to October, 1943. Yet in her small breast she nurtured a hope.
The only excitement in Giulia’s life (she’d never batted an eyelash at the bombings) was the periodic concealing of her brother every time the Germans came around to conscript him. In such moments coolness and resourcefulness shone forth all over Giulia. Gennaro would go white under his tan. Mamma would have a heart attack and lie moaning on the tasseled couch, praying that Papa wouldn’t show up from his office, lose his temper with the Tedeschi, and get shot. Gennaro was also in danger of a fucilazione if they ever caught him. Such crises happened every other week. Only Giulia was capable of holding the entire Wehrmacht at bay at the door of their apartment. The Tedeschi respected her as she stood in the doorway, shaking her brown ringlets at them. None ever laid a finger on her, from Gefreiter to Hauptmann. Elvira however licked her chops over frightful stories of Neapolitan girls (always unidentified) whose nude bodies were said to have bobbed up in the Bay of Naples or been stuffed up a culvert on the road to Bagnoli.
Giulia’s brother Gennaro was seventeen. She knew she had more influence on him than either Mamma or Papa. She doted on Gennaro. As she watched him comb his black hair over his white linen coat, she often told herself that Gennaro was bello: he wasn’t dark or greasy like many Neapolitans. She wished he was a little taller, but everything
in Gennaro’s body was in fine harmony as he walked with her and Elvira, taking both their arms. Giulia loved him best when he was groaning over his English under the stained-glass lamp at the dinner table, his delicate face puckered into a cold passion, the rich undulations of his hair escaping down almost into his eyes. She noted that he’d a quick brain, though not so agile as her own. Gennaro kept his body to a whiplike temper by swimming, by fencing with other young Camicie Nere, and by dancing, which he loved dearly. And he was wise enough not to tie himself down by going steady with a Neapolitan girl. The times were too unstable. Occasionally he’d disappear with a friend. Giulia knew where they went those evenings. To the casino of Madam Sappho. But then Gennaro was seventeen, and the heart that beat under his short-sleeved shirts and crisp summer jacket was the heart of a Neapolitan, which must make love.
Mamma had gained many chili since Papa’d brought her in 1924 as a bride from Florence. Once she’d been as slim as Giulia, according to her photos. Now she sat huge and bloated in her dark deep chair, listening to forbidden English radio broadcasts. Her heart wasn’t good. Mamma was happiest when she heard jazz from London or when she ate a pizza prepared by Giulia to trick her appetite or when her cronies dropped up for coffee — a thing that didn’t happen too often in these days of constant air-raid sirens. Every evening after supper she lectured her children on the vices of the world and reminisced on their one trip back to Florence to visit her relatives. Mamma hated Naples. She told the same stories over and over, but the children gave her her allotted hour every evening, sitting at her feet and listening to the hoarse gasping voice coming out of her chins and the mole on her lip. Giulia sat with her small feet tucked up under her buttocks, and Gennaro in the dim apartment smoked a Nazionale and nodded his head dreamily, saying:
— Eh si, cara mamma. . . .
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