The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

  I remember the passion and the understanding of Italian love. There’s no barrier between the lovers. Everything is oxidized at the moment, without rancor or reservation.

  — Fammi male, amore mio. . . . Fammi godere da movire . . .

  And I remember the storms and quarrels of Italian love, mostly rhetorical. The going to bed is all the sweeter for the reconciliation

  For I thought that to this people, broken and saddened and dismayed, there yet remained much of that something which had made Italy flower — though not as a nation of warriors. To this day I’m convinced of Italy’s greatness in the world of the spirit. In war she’s a tragic farce. In love and sunlight and music and humanity she has something that humanity sorely needs. It’s still there. Something of this distillation of noble and gentle grandeur seeps down through most of Italy’s population, from contessa to contadina. I don’t think I’m romanticizing or kidding myself. In the middle of the war, in August, 1944, with my heart broken for an ideal, I touched the beach of heaven in Naples. At moments.

  I remember how the children of Naples pointed my dim conception of American waste. They’d stand about our mess hall quiet or noisy, watching the glutted riches from our mess kits being dumped into the garbage cans. I remember the surprise and terror in their faces. We were forbidden to feed them, though I heard that combat soldiers, gentler and more determined than we, took the law into their hands and were much kinder to Italian children than we were allowed to be. When I watched the bitten steaks, the nibbled lettuce, the half-eaten bread go sliding into the swill cans in a spectrum of waste and bad planning, I realized at last the problem of the modern world, simple yet huge. I saw then what was behind the war. I’ll never forget those Neapolitan children whom we were forbidden to feed. After a while many of us couldn’t stand it any longer. We’d brush past the guard with our mess kit full of supper and share it with Adalgisa and Sergio and Pasqualino. They were only the scugnizz’ of Napoli, but they had mouths and stomachs just like us. I remember the wild hungry faces of those kids diving into cold Spam. But our orders were that since America was in no position to feed all the Italians, we were not to feed any. Just dump your waste in the GI cans, men.

  But I remember even then thinking and fearing that we’d come to a day when we too, we rich rich rich Americans, would pay for this mortal sin of waste. We’ve always thought that there was no end to our plenty, that the horn would never dry up. Already I seem to hear the menacing rumblings, like a long-starved stomach. But in Naples in August, 1944, we were on the crest of the wave. We? We were Americans, from the best little old country on God’s green earth. And if you don’t believe me, mister, I’ll knock your teeth in. . . .

  And I remember well our first facing of the problem that we couldn’t live in Naples as though there were a wall between us and the Neapolitans. There were American clubs and American movies, but only a blind man can carry his life around with him quite that much. Perhaps in Washington the generals had their doubts about the perfect probity of the American way of life and wished to make sure that overseas we wouldn’t come in contact with any other. Consequently we were flooded with American movies and with Coca-Cola to distract our wandering attention and to insure that we shouldn’t fall into dangerous furren ways of thinking. But some of us wondered none the less.

  The main leak, I remember, was in sex. It just isn’t possible to take millions of American men and shut them off from love for years on end — no, not with a thousand other American distractions. Sooner or later every man’s thoughts start centering around his middle. The cold and scientific solution would have been to have brothels attached to all our armies overseas, as other nations of the world have always done. But the American people wouldn’t have stood for that. I mean the American people back home. Too many purity lobbies from old ladies who have nothing else to do but form pressure groups to guard other people’s morals. And there were few women in our army as compared to our own percentage. There were WAC’s, to be sure, but in such a tiny ratio to us. And with the nurses we couldn’t go out because they were officers. Thus our perfect chastity was theoretically assured. From the hygienic point of view there were pro stations on every corner of Naples. This was a nice paradox in that every interesting alley was off limits. The army took the point of view: You absolutely must not But if by chance you do. . . . Finally they had a restriction on marrying overseas.

  Then we started casting our eyes on the Neapolitan girls.

  — These Gook wimmin, the mess sergeant said. It’s so easy with em. You just walk down Via Roma an some signorina does all the rest.

  — But, the corporal said, dreamy in his shorts, I don’t wanna hafta pay for it. I just wanna little girl all my own to love.

  — There’s something very nice about Italian women, the pfc with spectacles said. No funny ideas about fur coats and higher income brackets and silk stockings, like American girls. And they don’t feel they have to discuss books with you that they haven’t read . . . not that women shouldn’t be emancipated . . . to a certain degree, as companion to man and as his helpmate. . . . But the Neapolitan women are so down to earth. First they cook you a spaghetti dinner. . . . Then . . .

  I remember that we GI’s were used to women in a different tradition. American women, with their emancipation, had imposed their own standards on us. In America most Nice Girls Would . . . if you knew them well enough. Nearly all college girls Would, and waitresses too, if they thought there was a reasonable chance of your eventually getting spliced. And as for the separate career women of America, with their apartments — well, they’d abrogated to themselves all the freedom of single men. A Career Girl would keep you, or you kept her, depending on the financial status of one or both. And in America there were lots of rich middle-aged ladies who liked their young chauffeurs or gardeners, but didn’t dare marry them for fear of what Cousin Hattie would say.

  But to us GI’s the girls of southern Italy fell into two tight classes only. That’s where we got stymied. There were the girls of Via Roma, whom the Neapolitans, mincing no words, called puttane. These girls asked fixed prices in either lire or PX rations. They satisfied for a while as long as we had money, but their fee was steep for a GI unless he were a big operator in the black market. And then too something in a man’s vanity craves something other than a girl who’s shacking with Tom, Dick, and Harry. American men are so sentimental that they refuse to have a whore for their girl — if they can help it. That’s the schizophrenia of our civilization, with its sharp distinction between the Good Girl and the Bad Girl.

  Consequently after a few tries, with the fear of VD always suspended over our heads, we began to look at the Good women of Naples. And here entered the problem of the GI Italian bride. I remember that Italian girls began to look sweet to us early. Perhaps because their virginity was put on such a pedestal. There were few of us who didn’t have access to some Neapolitan home, where we were welcomed, once our entree was definite and our purposes aboveboard. We usually got in through a Neapolitan brother. Then we discovered that there were girls in the family, carefully kept and cherished as novices in a nunnery. It was obvious that these girls were interested in us . . . if we proposed marriage to them.

  — I don’t get a minute alone with Rosetta, the corporal said. They treat me swell at her casa, but Mamma doesn’t trust Rosetta out her sight for one minnit. An after midnight Papa’s always remindin me what time it is . . . as if I didn’t have a wrist watch.

  — Ah, I keep to Via Roma, the mess sergeant said. Ya can’t lay a finger on the others.

  — But north of Rome, said the pfc with the spectacles, a girl once she’s engaged will do anything to satisfy her fiancé . . . short of the real McCoy. I don’t get these fine distinctions in tribal ethics.

  — These Ginso girls, the sergeant major said, never forget that they’re women. That’s their strongest and weakest point. They know how to get in ya hair and under ya skin with wantin em till ya have ta slide that gold ring on
their finger.

  — Onelia told me quite frankly, the corporal said, that she was interested in a passport to the States as my wife. . . . I liked that honesty in her. I guess she likes me too.

  — Us GI’s is so hot, the mess sergeant said, that once we leave Italy, these signorinas will never be satisfied with the Eytie men . . . never again. . . .

  I remember that we Americans brought heartbreak to Neapolitan girls in many instances. There were Negroes who told their shack-jobs that they weren’t really black, just stained that way for camouflage and night fighting. There were mess sergeants who told nice Neapolitan girls that they owned chains of restaurants back in the States. I’ve often wondered at the face of some of those girls of good faith, arriving in the States to discover they’d live in one cabbage-smelling room over the stairs.

  There were, I remember, American GI’s and officers who most cruelly betrayed and seduced Neapolitan girls, concealing from them and their families that back in the States they’d a wife and kids. These girls weren’t in the position of an American girl, who knows the language and can make her own investigations. For the heartless deceit of such as these I sometimes felt shame that I was an American because the life of a pure woman is like a mirror, and can be smashed but once.

  But I also remember instances of love and good faith on both sides. GI’s and officers met Neapolitan girls, fell in love with them, and married them. I see no reason why such marriages shouldn’t be happy and lasting, once the girls have learned English and made the not easy adjustment to American wifehood.

  I remember Lydia, the gay shy mouse who sang in the chorus of the Teatro Reale di San Carlo. She was courted and won by our medic. I remember their wedding at Sorrento and their honeymoon at Taormina in Sicilia. Unless the world falls apart, I think that little Lydia and her capitano medico will be as happy in their lives together as human beings ever are outside of fairy tales.

  I remember Laura, to whom a GI killed at Cassino made two presents. He gave her a baby and a white spirochete. When I see flowers lying crushed in a muddy street, I think of Laura.

  I remember plump and smiling Emilia, who thought she’d married an MP. The MP disappeared forever after the wedding, and Emilia just sat in the kitchen night after night and wept so bitterly that her heart would have broken if it hadn’t already been in tiny pieces. Her mother kept cursing her and asking where were all those allotment checks from America? And her brother yelled that he’d put a razor into the first americano he met on a dark night.

  And I remember Wanda, stately and blonde, who used to sit by the stove and feel the life stirring within her. We all said she was too big to be having just one. And sure enough she came out with twins whom she christened Mario and Maria. They were brilliant gay babies, the way Italian children know how to be. Wanda hoped they’d grow up strong in St. Louis. She got me to point out that city for her on the map of America.

  I remember that in Naples in August, 1944, for all the red tape and the army regulations and the blood tests and the warning talks by chaplains, there was still a great deal of human love. And this rejoiced me. For all the ruin and economic asphyxiation we’d brought the Neapolitans, we also in some cases gave them a new hope. They’d been like Jews standing against a wall and waiting to be shot for something they’d never done. And I began to think that perhaps something good might emerge or be salvaged from the abattoir of the world. Though in the main all national decency and sense of duty might be dead, I saw much individual goodness and loveliness that reassured me in my agony. I saw it in some Neapolitans. I saw it in some Americans. And I wondered if perhaps the world must eventually be governed by individuality consecrated and unselfish, rather than by any collectivism of the propagandists, the students, and the politicians. In Naples in August, 1944, I drowned in mass ideologies, but was fished out by separate thinking and will. I remember watching the mad hordes in the streets of Naples and wondering what it all meant. But there was a certain unity in the bay, in the August moon over Vesuvius. Then humanity fell away from me like the rind of an orange, and I was something much more and much less than myself. . . .

  EIGHTH PORTRAIT

  Queen Penicillin

  AWAKENING THESE MORNINGS IN NAPLES, HE’D TURN ON HIS canvas cot, shove aside his mosquito netting, light a cigarette, and look out at the bell tower of Maria Egiziaca. His consciousness was clear, the way he used to come to as a child and start thinking of what he’d do today.

  But the deliciousness of those awakenings had gone. Up till last week he’d known them with Marisa. But now she’d gone to Rome. And for days there’d been something in his mind, something crouching that he could escape only when he slept. All day long it sat on his shoulder whispering the red doubts and fears into his ear. He was free only in those first instants of awaking. But with the first few puffs on his cigarette the Idea came back. This morning It was especially pressing. Today he’d Know.

  He got up and groped down to the latrine. The sunlight hadn’t yet come into this corridor, but he knew the passageway drunk or sober. In the latrine he voided his bladder and stood looking at his naked body in the mirror. By the early August sunlight of Naples he looked like a Moor. Marisa’d loved this color of his skin. He examined his flesh, peering over himself with a wild hushed interest. He knew every inch of himself. Then the Idea broke over him more viciously than in the past four days. His dark skin globuled with sweat.

  Back in the room he dressed himself quickly. He was shaking. He heard his heart say yes yes yes. And from the other cot Roy was regarding him with sleepy compassion.

  — Goin to find out this mornin?

  — Yup.

  — Good luck, boy. Ya been sweatin this one out.

  His boots clattered on the stairs of the palazzo. Naples too was awakening in the August morning. By the windows the sandflies hung poised in their clouds. And he heard the clatter of the carts in the street and the prickly whispering of the women’s brooms as they swept the sidewalks.

  He walked through the screen door of the mess hall, taking more than his usual pains not to let it slam. The mess sergeant sat at a wooden table littered with lettuce. He looked up with an iron petulance.

  — Now what, Jo-Jo? Ya feelin hung over?

  — Nope. Got any black coffee?

  One of the Neapolitan kitchen help poured him a mess cup full of scalding java and passed it to him.

  — Grazie, Joe, he said.

  — Niente, Joe, the Neapolitan said.

  The metal lip of the canteen cup singed his lips and his tongue, but the coffee flooded down his throat. Again the sweat seeped out through his shirt. He felt the cup teetering against his teeth from the trembling of his wrist.

  — Ya ain’t feelin good, Jo-Jo? the mess sergeant said. Ya ain’t been on the beam since ya quit ya shackin . . .

  — Nope, he said, setting down his cup, I ain’t feelin well.

  — Knock her up or somethin?

  — Nope. Me an Marisa just broke up.

  — Well, they’s plenty more where she came from, the mess sergeant said, shoving a mound of lettuce wearily away from him. Plenty more.

  — I don’t want no more.

  Now in a lewd sweat from the steaming coffee and the reeking Neapolitan morning, he plowed along, his cap on the back of his head and his hands in his pockets. Seeing Vesuvius and the barbed wire round the port enclosures, he decided to smoke a cigarette. As he was lighting his butt with fingers that wobbled, an officer passed. He lowered his eyes.

  — Say, soldier, the lieutenant said, don’t ya salute officers any more?

  — This ain’t a salutin area, sir . . .

  — Shut up an salute me, the lieutenant said. I don’t know why I don’t take ya name an serial number. . . . Wearin ya dogtags?

  — Yessir.

  — Well, get on ya way. Next time watch ya step. Not all officers is as square as me.

  He saluted again and walked on, replacing his hands in his pockets. He put his cigarette in th
e farthest angle of his mouth. He felt that his shoulders were sagging. He didn’t care. He dragged along with his eyes on the ground. For he wished that he could pass out quietly some place, that the March eruption of Vesuvius had buried both Naples and himself under lava as stiff as molasses. He cussed and spat against a tree that grew from the sidewalk in his path.

  There was no one in the Galleria Umberto except some children asleep like sweaty kittens, and little old men who went over the pavement searching for cigarette butts. From the cornices the weather-eaten angels looked snottily down at him from behind their trumpets. He saw the canvases in the art shops as daubs of vermilion and ocher and cobalt. The bars were all shut behind their rolling corrugated blinds. The new sun filled every nook of the arcade, microscopically adumbrating the smears on the walls, the peeling posters, the chipped mosaics in the pavement. And above him the empty skylight crisscrossed the sky like veins in an eyeless socket. He remembered the Galleria in past evenings: blots of light leaking from under the bars till curfew time, the smell of bodies in movement, the shrill laughter, and the voices promising annihilation from the heat and the pain. And like a flashlight into his dark hot misery he saw the figure of Marisa swaying in the August darkness, the cleft of her breasts in her gray figured cotton frock, her tiny brown feet. He heard her voice:

  — Vieni, amor mio . . . fammi tua per sempre. . . .

  Thinking of the past, he walked across the Galleria into Via Roma. A Neapolitan kid asked him if he wanted to eat; so he told him what he could do with himself. On Via Roma there was the sparrowy life of Neapolitans hurrying to work, old ladies fanning themselves with their morning paper, the screams of the cameo dealers as they set up their displays in the porticos of abandoned shops and ruined tenements. British and American convoys rumbled in the pinched street. In the gutters lay squashed oranges and spent rubbers that had been hurled from the windows above.