In the cold brightness of Naples in December Giulia and Gennaro and Elvira walked through the Galleria Umberto. It was nine o’clock in the morning. The night had brought the usual air raid. There were American ambulances in the streets, and Neapolitan plumed hearses were carrying those who’d died earlier. The winter of Naples has its own peculiar sting like the cursing in Neapolitan dialect. Giulia shivered and drew her fur about her neck. Since she had to wear it in the house too to keep warm, it mocked her out of doors. But she was soon distracted from her own discomfort by seeing the seat of Gennaro’s trousers. He was wearing a gray pencil-striped business suit. A year ago it had been a quiet vessel for his beauty. Now the seat was shiny and the elbows the same.
For herself and her brother, however, Elvira more than compensated. The Brazzis were now rich. Elvira was getting a double chin from eating so opulently. She did her nails in various colors and painted her face till it was a mixed vegetable plate. She’d developed a mince in her walk that once was clumsy and nervous. Into her conversation, which had always been dreary, full of hot flashes and tremors and palpitations, Elvira now injected American words of whose meaning she wasn’t precisely sure. Gennaro, who in his dealings knew a practical and earthy English, would correct her hastily and beg her not to use such expressions. Then Elvira would titter furiously and say, My stars, she was getting as wicked as Countess Ciano, wasn’t she?
Elvira wanted to see society, especially American. She’d developed a thirst for night life. And no matter how rich Papa Brazzi got from the black market, he’d still lock Elvira in every night at curfew time unless she got a respectable job. Elvira was attempting to get this job to get away from her family. With a job in the officers’ club at the Bank of Naples, she hoped to snare herself a handsome American officer. All this Giulia guessed.
Neapolitans said that the gray modern slate-colored Bank of Naples had escaped bombing because North Italian bankers had bought off the pilots of American and British bombers. It was the only clean and solid building on Via Roma. Its whole front was bricked and buttressed off from the street, against having its brass and glass doors shattered from detonations. The rear entrance was through a crypt with a subterranean car park. Inside this cave were many Neapolitans, wearing a suitable manner to be hired as waitress or cashier. They were all murmuring to one another, but they became demure and formal when they expected the officer in charge of the club to appear at the head of the stairs.
Would they be fed three times a day by the Americans? What were the wages? The Americans could afford anything. They ought to get together like a trade union and force the Americans to accede to their demands. Giulia noticed among the feminine applicants girls who swaggered on Via Roma. The males were nearly all Neapolitans with spectacles and greased hair and a classic air of exasperation as though they’d been whipped by their families out of the library of the University of Naples in the middle of their doctor’s dissertation. Gennaro and Giulia and Elvira took their place in the queue and waited in silent listening. A queue is an unnatural formation for Neapolitans, who like to swarm and catch as catch can.
Late, very late, perhaps to show the Neapolitans that they were a conquered people and not patients at a charity dispensary, a glass door opened in the wall of gray granite. The hundreds of petitioners fell into reverent silence and arranged their clothes and hair. There appeared two American officers in short monkey jackets of green cloth. Their breasts were barred with colored ribbons. There was a major built like a duck, his beard like gravel along the jowls resting on his collar. A cheery stomach butted the high waist of his jacket. With him was a sad young lieutenant carrying a clipboard. The lieutenant’s glasses drooped over his nose. To Giulia he seemed an unhappy grandmother commissioned by mistake in the United States Army. Beside these two an interpreter looking like an osprey took up his position. The major made a pass in the air past his paunch with his jeweled hand. There sounded in the half-cellar a voice as rich and persuasive as a pio bursting with suet. The major stopped after every sentence, which the interpreter then translated to the crowd. Giulia had never heard anything quite like the English that the major used. She listened only to him, paying no attention to the sentence by sentence rendition of the interpreter:
— Mah deah Neahpolitan friends . . . for you ah mah friends, each an every one of yo. . . . We ah openin this here little club to give ouah pooah American officers a place to relax in. . . . But this heah club is also a friendly gesture to you, ouah Neapolitan friends. . . . Those of yo whom we find competent we ah goin to hiah as waiters or cashiers. . . . For when ouah Uncle Sam liberates Italy, he also takes thought of her suffrin people. . . . Theah’ll be no partiality shown in the hirin or in the firin. . . . We know yoah reputation for bein lazy, my deah friends, an we ain’t standin for none of yoah nonsense heah. . . . But ah just want to ask yo to play the game with me, and ah’ll play ball with yo. . . . Ah come from a state in the Union that is as bighearted as she is big. . . . Now yoah wages will be ninety lire a day, an you can take home what sandwiches and pastry they is left at the close of the workin day . . . if they’s any. . . . All’t ah’ll say heah is, if theah is inybody heah who won’t work for ninety lire, why they is just plain ingrates to Uncle Sam, that’s all. . . . They can go to theah homes right now. . . . We don’t want no truck with them. . . . Now my deah friends, just form an orderly line and wait yoah turn for interview.
Half of the Neapolitans broke away from the mass and went out of the rear of the Bank of Naples. Under their breaths they mewed and spat and cursed. Those who’d decided to stay pushed up the little stairway past the custode and turned left along the cool dark walls, cloudy with the veins and strata of the stone. Then they milled through another corridor where the doors were tall and bronzy. Then they mounted a stairway with sweep and curve where once Fascist bankers climbed with their briefcases. On the second floor more brass doors gave into a room where a faun played over a lighted fountain. Then came the vastest room Giulia’d ever seen outside of the movies, and lastly a narrower apartment where benches had been linked on a trestle to make a long bar. The windows were all arched and hung with valances of cream and green. This led through a small reception room with a pink piano to a door that said Office — Off Limits.
They were oddly silent for Neapolitans as they sat down in the deep green leather divans and looked at one another with that mutual suspicion of outer offices. Giulia and Gennaro and Elvira found a seat close to the office door on a long sofa, in which they seemed to drop into a well of cushions.
Then a girl ran in with a shriek and collapsed beside them. She was pursued by a brilliant-eyed man in the belted jacket and the loud trousers of Italian racing drivers. They introduced themselves as Wilma and Gino. Giulia measured Wilma with interest and sympathy. Wilma wasn’t young any more, but she balanced the equation by a mockery of everything, herself included. She began at once talking to Giulia. She told Giulia that Gino wasn’t so rich as lovers she’d had in Trieste and Tripoli, but that he was shrewder. Wilma chain-smoked, thieving cigarette after cigarette from Gino’s waistcoat and stabbing at her lipsticked charred butts with violet fingernails. Her laughter was low and one inch this side of spiteful. And Gino talked over her voice, saying that Wilma was a vecchia strega, how he’d been an interpreter for the Americans since Salerno, how they were really quite nice to work for; and when they saw that you did a little feathering of your own nest, they took it all in the spirit of business competition. In the affection between Wilma and Gino Giulia noticed something as bitter and close as mint under grass.
Wilma kept grabbing Giulia’s hands and caressing them as she reminisced of high life in Trieste and Tripoli. Gino got into a conversation with Gennaro on fencing and swimming and calcio. In track, alas, Gino had hardened his arteries before his time. Wilma’s mouth, except when she laughed, was a long generous sphincter of carmine. During all this badinage Elvira just sat leaning her chins on her bosom and gasping with delight that she was at last
getting a taste of high society. But Wilma, whatever she was or had been, was a wise woman. Love and tricks and shrewdness and irony dropped from her lips into Giulia’s ear as most women burble platitudes. She told Giulia that no woman need ever condescend in this life; no, not even if she worked in a casino. Giulia never forgot what Wilma told her that morning.
The Officers’ Club of the Peninsular Base Section opened on an afternoon in late December, 1943. The light of winter Naples crossed Via Roma, cut the standards on the balconies, and grazed the parquet of the dance floor. Wilma and Elvira sat behind high enclosed cash desks and sold books of chits for drinks. Giulia’s post was a small throne behind a long directorial table with a silver salver of Spamwiches and chocolate éclairs. For seven hours it was her function and her duty to lift up these refreshments on a silver spatula and put them into the wax paper in the hand of the purchaser. She could look across the dance floor and watch Wilma at her cash desk. Wilma’s pose was to lean Sapphically on her hand and lazily to accept cigarettes from officers.
The major had ordered all his girls out of their pretty dresses and into Mother Hubbards of the hue of discolored wallpaper. He did this, he said, because he knew the desires of men in wartime. His aim was to make his girls as mouselike as possible. At first Wilma and Giulia raged because the faded Mother Hubbards made them look like graduates of the Pompei orphanage. But Giulia soon found out that at closing time at the bar it would have made no difference if she’d been wearing a washed-out pea pod. The officers came around anyway.
Of all the major’s employees only Elvira was sad. She moped and mulled behind her cash desk. Nobody came to her to buy chits. So at the end of two weeks the major fired her, advising her to go up to the Anzio beachhead, where it was darker and the men were less fussy about what they looked at. Elvira returned to her family, to be locked up every night at curfew time. She said she’d hated the whole vulgar job from the start, and had only been talked into taking it because she was too goodhearted.
More men than women worked at PBS Club. The major said that Giulia and Wilma were simply the dash of sugar in the staff. There was a corps of waiters, tricked out in white ties and tails. Two bars functioned simultaneously, for the major roared out that what American officers wanted for relaxation was a combination of Radio City Music Hall, Minsky’s, Jack Dempsey’s, and the Silver Dollar. What he meant by this Giulia never learned. And the major, his sleeves rolled up, personally schooled the Neapolitan bartenders till he said they could get a job anywhere in New York. They were Enrico, always melancholy and almost sweetly pock-marked; and Demetrio, that acute little rat who couldn’t stop having children; and Luigi, who rolled his eyes on either side of his huge nose and bragged of his friendships with German officers and sang “Firenze Stanotte”; and handsome Sergio, who’d somehow got trapped in Naples from Torino and never talked to anybody, but kept a diary and lived in the vibrant and closed sweetness of his own nostalgia.
Then there were the waiters who shot across the polished floor with their coattails clanging like gossips’ tongues, banging their trays on the bar and calling for Eight Jeeen e Jooos over the orchestra. Of these there was first of all Giulia’s brother Gennaro, who kept himself aloof from the rest. She never discovered where he got his tails. Gennaro had taken to brilliantining his hair, which glistened like phosphorus. He now spoke perfect American, bragged much with the American officers, called his sister keed or mouse or butch. Giulia watched the American nurses gasping for Gennaro. And there was Furio, the tiny Communist who was once a tenente di vascello in the Regia Marina and spent his Fridays off at party meetings in the Vomero. And there was Alfredo and his mustaches, who’d made what he hoped was his pile in a Brooklyn barbershop and had come back to Naples to die in peace. But a bomb had got the house and the family for which Alfredo’d slaved in the Brooklyn barbershop. Alfredo said grazie too many times for a tip of cigarettes. His bows to majors and colonels made his chin almost touch the floor and his coattails lash up his spine.
There was also a troop of Neapolitan ladies and gentlemen who did odd jobs about PBS Officers’ Club. They didn’t belong to the white-collar crowd. Giulia soon got bored with seven hours’ sitting behind her sandwiches and looking like a madonna, as the major had instructed her to do. So she watched everything. She observed Gaetano the electrician climb ladders in his sandals and replace burnt-out bulbs in the chandeliers. From her table she might also observe the sales talks and outraged nobility of Signora Anna Negri, who stood beside her showcase on her aching feet and sold miniatures of Capri or cameos especially tailored to the mothers of Americans.
The major’s retinue reported to work at 1630 hours each afternoon. They trailed chilled and peeved up the sharp noble stairs to the second floor of the Banco di Napoli, each carrying his or her supper: mozzarella and black bread and tomatoes and an egg wrapped in last night’s newspaper. Giulia used to listen to them talk as she held her own black market supper tight against her small sharp breasts and marched up the staircase. How they talked! They couldn’t live on the ninety lire a day the major was paying, nor on the leftover smelly old cheese sandwiches, nor on the old chocolate éclairs which they were allowed to carry out of the club when the cream became like pus. As Giulia mounted that staircase every afternoon, all of Naples in the winter of 1943-44 was around her ears: babies freezing because there wasn’t any firewood, American-issue pasta that turned to gray entrails when you put it in the pot, the sugar at wild prices, whose office boss (God love him!) was buried alive in last night’s bombing, what girl had finally given up her reputation and gone with the Allies, the rate of Negro children born to Sicilian women. Giulia knew only that she was numb from it all. Then she would put on her Mother Hubbard and sit down behind her sandwiches and play tittattoe with an American captain till her eyes sang with pain, or listen to an American colonel who resembled her Papa tell her why he hadn’t won the mayoralty of Sioux Falls, wherever that was.
Both Giulia and Wilma had their own following. Around her cash desk Wilma attracted young airplane drivers whose tongues began to drip after their eighth Martini. For Wilma’s benefit they fought all over again the bombing sorties out of Foggia. They gestured and goaded one another into new heights of theatrical enterprise in their tales, as little boys vie to entertain a little girl on the sidewalk. And Wilma also had a patronage that intrigued Giulia. These were bright and disillusioned parachute captains, majors from rich Baltimore families, lieutenants who wrote verses. With all these characters Wilma held court. She was magnificent, Giulia thought. Wilma knew what was in God’s mind when He created Woman. When Wilma entertained her boys at her cash desk, she leaned slightly back from them in tender hauteur, her eyes mocking and affectionate from inside their azure mascara shadows. Wilma’s mouth was too big, but it was in such constant motion of eloquence that Giulia was never sure how large it was. And sometimes Wilma’s laugh of protest came through the dance band, a trumpet all her own. Giulia saw that Wilma loved men. Therefore men loved Wilma. Or when no men were clustered about Wilma’s cash desk, Gino would visit her from his office. He was liaison between all the Neapolitans and the mournful lieutenant who was the major’s assistant. By privilege of his caste Gino wore only a turtle-necked sweater and tweed trousers. He’d talk long and low to Wilma, their faces scarcely apart. Often he’d make love to her with a speed and surety and intimacy which caused Giulia to turn her face away. The spectacle of this light bandit love made her sad for hours.
When Giulia first took her job at PBS Club, Mamma had all sorts of cautions to her daughter, reminding her that Italian girls were trained to handle men. Perhaps Giulia, to be on the safe side, ought always to carry a small dagger? Giulia laughed painedly and Wilma shrieked at the idea as they sat sipping coffee by Mamma’s couch. For indeed Giulia did carry about her an armor deceptive as a cobweb. Officers used to lean over her by the hour. They asked her what was the Italian word for love. They told her that she was as lovely as their sister Elaine. Sometimes at cl
osing time when they were tight Giulia noticed something painful and cruel in their eyes, but it faded when they looked at the down on her cheeks. She knew what they wanted of her, but no one ever framed it to her. And Giulia came to learn much of the world’s men simply by observing them. She doubted that she’d marry Pasquale when he came back from his imprisonment in Oran.
One evening in August, 1944, she was sitting on her small enclosed throne, the cash desk of the bar at PBS Officers’ Club. The boys were jammed four deep at the bar; the air was silky gray with cigarette smoke. The officers kept up a roaring and a laughing over their drinks, a curtain which was in its turn pierced by the public-address system piping in the orchestra from the dance floor. For the major was determined that in no place in the club should there be any silence. He told the sad lieutenant who was his office boy (and the lieutenant told Giulia) that they were endeavoring to avoid that stuffiness which always endangers a men’s club. By now Giulia was used to American noises and to the American idea of living loudly and in public.
The dais on which she sat was so walled that in her six-hour shift she could cross or uncross her legs without anybody’s seeing the results. At her right hand she had a stack of chit books and a lined roster to be signed by all who bought her tickets. At her left was an English dictionary and a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She’d make her sale with an automatic swift smile, then reimmerse herself in her novel. The tumult of the bar would die in her ears, and she could forget that she was the only woman in a vaulted roomful of drinking men. She was halfway through Uncle Tom. Next she’d lined up Gone With the Wind, which she possessed in both English and Italian. By collating both copies she figured that in another month her English would have arrived at perfection. Long ago she’d dropped the Oxford accent she’d learned from her maestra at the liceo.
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