When he’d revived his small friend, he took his chamois bag and went down to the latrines. Here Italian prisoners of war were swabbing the wooden frames and the corrugated urinal with chlorine. He rejoiced in its clean acridity. Before he seated himself, he reverted to his old fastidiousness of placing clots of toilet paper all around the wooden hole. It was a practice he’d dropped during his treatment here. Now he was beginning it all over again. Cleanliness was no longer a mockery. One Italian P/W called to the other as they mopped:
— Sa che cos’è la sifilide? Un’ora con Venere e dopo sei mesi con Mercurio.
Shortly he arose in great satisfaction, brushed his teeth, and shaved. He’d observed that the brown skin along his thighs was paler for the eight days he’d spent out of the sun. Then he took a shower, soaping himself with gusto and dodging the Italians as they turned on the other sprays to damp down the floor planking. And his body was once again immaculate. He passed both hands along his loins in a wringing motion to force off the tire of soap.
He dressed himself for the last time in the tight green fatigues and walked up among the pyramidal tents. The gonorrhea patients were still making their beds. They had no floor to sweep, for it was of clay pounded down hard. They were rolling up the flaps of their tents to let in the Neapolitan sunlight: Ayrab soldiers under the red fezzes they insisted on coupling with their ignominious fatigues, French soldiers and officers from Alger and Oran, Italian sergenti maggiori who worked for the Allies, and that greater percentage of Americans. Occasionally one would run out to the Lyster Bag and swallow his sulfa tablets.
In the great clearing girdled with barbed wire he paused to look at the bulletin board. On typewritten sheets were thumbtacked the list of dispositions for that day. He found his own name in alphabetical order under American Personnel. At first he had a feeling that perhaps they might never let him out of this place, that he’d stay here till the end of the war in Italy, being jabbed with millions of units of penicillin. But there was his name. He was getting out today. After each patient to be discharged was the rank and serial number, followed in the last column by the diagnosis. These read: Syphilis. Old, Secondary, Relapse; or Gonorrhea, New, Acute. He noticed also that some people he’d met (he’d never guessed from their fatigues) were first lieutenants or majors. But most were GI’s of all the Allied armies.
He returned with his toilet kit into the shed. They were lining up for inspection by the nauseated-looking medical captain. He unbuttoned his own green fatigues and waited his turn in the queue.
— You’re going out today, the captain said, looking at his revealed middle and sounding his lymph glands. Take a blood test every month. And come back for your spinal in from three to six months. Come even if we don’t send for you. . . . And behave yourself, understand?
Yessir, he said slowly, then swallowed. An I wanna thank ya for all ya’ve done for me.
The rubbery face contorted into another knot.
— Don’t thank me. Thank penicillin. Thank Dr. Fleming.
The medical captain then wrote out in an acid hand a discharge slip from the Twenty-third General Hospital. Then he consigned to him the little bound Syphilis Register with his name on the cover, like a diary, and two copies of a letter to his commanding officer making it quite clear why he’d been in the hospital — not in the line of duty.
— And don’t try to tear up that letter, the doctor told him. Because we mail a carbon to your CO anyway.
Then he went out into the sunlight among the pyramidal tents where the men in their green fatigues were milling and talking and waiting for the next electric bell. He went first to the supply sergeant to draw his own clothes. It was the first time in eight days he’d had them on; they were rumpled and a little mildewed from lying in the barracks bag. Then he had an inspiration. He took his razor from his toilet kit and sliced both sets of sergeant’s stripes from his sleeves. His chevrons fell to the floor, trailing thread, twisting like crinkled tin foil.
— Might just as well bust myself right now, he said to the supply sergeant, handing across the counter the green fatigues with those huge letters painted across the back of jacket and trousers.
Next he went into the large office with the typists and the vials and the chairs with armrests. He sat down against the wall and let a tech five leech more blood from his arm.
— Of course this proves nothing, the technician said, emptying the dark blood into a test tube taped with his name. Penicillin turns ya blood negative anyhow.
Lastly he went to the barrier in the barbed wire and presented his pass to the MP.
— See ya back here in about another week, the MP said, looking down at his sleeve, at the light triangular patch where his stripes had been.
— Not me, boy, he answered.
He walked slowly down the macadam drive of the Medical Center at Bagnoli. Once he turned in his tracks and looked back at the barbed wire behind which the hundreds of marionettes in green fatigues paced like lifers. He saw also the kiosks, the glittering façades, the nude muscled statues under their helmets, and the swimming pools that Mussolini had laid out for his world’s fair. He couldn’t forget that here he’d passed eight days of his life in three-hour intervals with a hypodermic needle waiting to prick him at the end of each period.
On the Bagnoli-Naples road a pfc in a weapons carrier picked him up. They rumpled through the Bagnoli Tunnel. In the August morning the town of Naples stretched golden on its hillside. Ischia and Capri stuck like honey-colored thumbs out of the Mediterranean. He had an urge to talk.
— Say, that penicillin sure is marvelous stuff, he confided. I was nearly dead from pneumonia an it pulled me out of it.
— Ah, it may have worked for you, the pfc said, biting on his cigar. Me, I always say that penicillin is still to be put to the test. It’s probably the latest racket of the medical profession. They say it cures VD too. Me, I think it just conceals the symptoms and arrests the disease for a while. But we don’t know nothin about its future reactions on the human body. Ten years from now you’ll probably find cripples and people dropping dead all over the United States. Victims of the great penicillin swindle.
— Nah, it works, he answered in a dreamy sort of happiness. It’s great stuff, boy. . . . Cured my pneumonia. . . .
In Naples he dismounted from the weapons carrier at the end of Via Rome. He entered the Galleria Umberto, where the girls were walking and the children screaming and bargaining in the August sunlight. He walked to that corner of the Galleria that he remembered best. Though it was noon he seemed to see Marisa standing there with her arms out to him. So he took the ampoule of penicillin out of his pocket and hurled it against the wall where her ghost flickered. The glass smashed; the yellow liquid ran like bright molasses to the pavement.
EIGHTH PROMENADE
(Naples)
I REMEMBER THAT IN NAPLES OF AUGUST, 1944, I CAME AGAIN TO realities I’d all but forgotten. There are three of them: tears, art, and love. Most people in the world live their lives with at least two of these realities. But between Casablanca and Naples I’d lost all three by watching what was going on around me. So when they came back to me, I felt like one whose heart begins to beat again when he was despaired of.
Naples, I remember, is a good city for relearning the reality of tears. Americans assume that tears are wet and that life should be dry. Consequently crying in America is done usually by women and babies. Life as we Americans have made it is presumed to be a gay affair. Even when it wasn’t gay, a man mustn’t cry. But the old maxims tell me to take the bitter with the sweet. So I reasoned that life isn’t so gay as the advertisements pretend it can be — if I’ll only use their product. And where is the place of tears in the scheme? When may even a man cry?
— Ah, the mess sergeant said. They spend half a their time bawlin. It’s all part of the act. But I see through these Eyeties.
— Once every hour, the corporal said, twisting his GI handkerchief, the Neapolitans cry. They cry when the
y’re happy an they cry when they’re sad. Don’t make sense.
— But it does, the pfc with the spectacles said under his mosquito netting. Look at a face laughing. Then look at the same face crying. . . . Which do you think is the truer mask?
I remember thinking of this point. In tears there’s something very old and very young. In between is the vacuum that laughs or smiles. I decided that Americans cried less because they lived mostly in that vacuum. They weren’t close enough to birth or close enough to death. After some time in Naples I saw that by the Mediterranean it’s more human to weep than to laugh. More reasons to. I got to love the Italians because they were still able to do some of both.
I wasn’t satisfied with the easy song and dance that Italians are just volatile. If people cry easily, perhaps they’re gentler. Perhaps they acknowledge the truth of life more honestly. Crocodile tears aside, of course. So often when I was alone in Naples at midnight and saw the moon on the bay, and Capri like hope turned to stone, I saw that too much laughter was a mockery of our own precarious state, a spiting of God, as though to show Him that He couldn’t pull these incongruities over our eyes.
— I had a signorina las night, the mess sergeant said. She bust out bawlin after it was all over. But I know she oney did it to screw me for a hundred lire more. . . .
I saw the women of Naples cry. But I’d seen women cry before. The Neapolitan women wept for strong reasons. They couldn’t get food at black market prices. Their two rooms had been blasted by a bomb. Or their man would never come back to them, for the Germans had shot him in North Italy. I saw Neapolitan mothers pass me on the street and suddenly begin to cry. I saw a Neapolitan girl great with child rolling on a doorstep where till recently an American had been billeted. I saw a girl from the Vomero shoot a British captain on Via Roma and fall weeping on his body. Then I began to understand the reasons for tears.
I remember I wept once myself, in Algiers. Because I couldn’t figure out the mess I and other Americans were in. That crying of mine was like a boy kicking his bicycle or tearing up a crossword puzzle he’s too stupid to solve. Mine was selfish weeping because my pride was baffled. Thus I learned the difference between crying over a broken heart and crying over a principle. On this difference depends whether tears lift or debase. Tears can flow from the heart or merely from the eyes. In the first case they’re like blood. In the second, just so much salt water.
I remember the farmers out Caserta way standing in their fields and crying over the drought. In 1944 Italy needed food. But the war had dried up even the heavens; the fields even down to Bari and Puglie were scorched.
I remember a scugnizz’ on Via Roma crying in the August noon because the American major confiscated his can of shoe polish, saying that he stole it from the americani. When this kid cried, I thought his heart was spilling out of his dirty thin body.
I remember Aïda, arrested on the streets where she was walking and not bothering anybody. They jailed her in the questura till her blood test turned out negative. Today in Naples Aïda must still remember how the americani treated her. I saw her in her pink cotton dress and sandals, rolling up her sleeve for the needle. Her tears fell on her brown chest. We Americans stood around laughing and asking Aïda how much she charged.
I remember the family Russo: Papa and Mamma and Valerio and Salvatore, looking at the place where they and their blood had lived for two hundred years. In that palazzo Mercadante wrote his songs. After a bomb it looked like a pile of chalk. I remember how the mother put her face on the father’s shoulder, how both of them rocked together, how Valerio and Salvatore simply sat down on the dust of the place where they’d been born.
I remember Gerarda of the hair that never stayed in place, of the smell of lace and oranges, of the hands that were folded in front of her — but not in resignation.
— Una volta, Gerarda said, ero un’ ottima pianista, al Conservatorio. Anche la maestra me lo diceva. . . .
Gerarda wept sometimes out of fury and a refusal to accept her own destiny. Her tears taught me that the individual is never so responsible as the moralists hold, that by August, 1944, the Italian personality had long been stymied by collective hell.
And I remember an American USO actress weeping because the QM laundry hadn’t ironed the pleats into her skirt. Or myself moaning because our cigarette ration got cut from seven packs a week to five.
— These Ginsoes are softenin me up, the mess sergeant said. They do so much turnin on of the water works that I’m meltin away myself.
— When Rosetta left me to spend a week in Rome, the corporal said, she puts her arms around my neck and she busts out bawlin. . . . So I did too. Just dig that. . . . They better get us GI’s outa Italy before we all go to pieces.
And I remember seeing wounded soldiers in the 300th General cry when they thought no one was around. Except for them I don’t believe most of us Americans in Naples of August, 1944, had much real reason to cry. But we did when we’d got a skinful of vino. We were feeling sorry for ourselves. But we were doing all right, compared to the Neapolitans. Then I saw that those who weep honestly had simply come to a point where they must cease acting or break.
I remember that in Naples I began to observe a dreadful harmony among the sorrow, the hunger, and the filth. I heard how Neapolitan music was this common denominator. It was music, not to amuse or to distract, but to comment on the life of Naples. This music was more than sounds coming out of the air. It was a voice focused from the horror and squalor that I saw in the streets. It didn’t need program notes. I knew it for a consciousness of the Neapolitans. I found out where this awareness came from, for I saw poets and painters and musicians by themselves, watching the city of Naples from a distance. They weren’t followed by publicity agents who took down everything they said, for release to the world the following morning. They just stood and looked and thought. They were sponges sucking in whatever there was in the air in August, 1944. I was seeing the isolation of the artist. His mind runs along in its own time, and no one can tell him for sure whether he has anything to say. He can only watch and listen and himself become transparent. Everything he sets down is at the focus of the crosscurrents. He feels the fret and push of currents and forces, but he cannot express them except in his own medium. This negating and expanding of himself lets him know that he’s great and infinitesimal all at once. He’s so occupied with life that he’s incapable of living it himself, for that would ruin the barometer in him.
I remember that Italian artists are different from American ones. The Americans always announced that they’re artists. They were glib about their techniques and their souls. They told me also that they were making money — not that I should pay much attention to that. They told me a man could be either very rich or very poor from his art. Look at Shakespeare; look at Mozart. But I might as well know that in the twentieth century a good artist had a 90-percent chance of making scads of money. They told me so. And they assured me that the most successful artists neither wrote down to their publics nor retreated into meaninglessness. They often blithely referred to such phrases as It Sells, and Giving the Public What it Wants. So I decided that these American artists were craftsmen in the plumbing of the soul. Chromium and plastic.
But the Neapolitans never informed me that they were artists. Nor had they a press agent to tell me so. They looked like any other Italian when they came into a room. Only when I’d got to know them did I learn that they’d written or composed or painted. I saw no romantic hunger in their eyes. But I was aware in them of a reserve and a delicacy, as though they were playing with fire, and knew it. Often they were inaccessibly melancholy. And except in the cafés (where there was no coffee) they talked of many other things than the problems of the artist. They told me that they worked from their hearts, after they’d tested those hearts. They said that every human heart contained a key to other hearts. But the artist’s gaze must be within, after a long time of looking about outside. These Neapolitan artists told me that a man k
nows if he ever puts down the truth. It hurts as it’s being torn out of the heart. But once set down, undeformed and whole, it will lie on the paper forever — more or less. It should never be warped into what the artist thinks may or should be the truth. These Neapolitans told me that a bad artist cooks up what people want to believe. They told me that in August, 1944, I must listen hard to pick up the least murmur of truth.
I remember that the American artists had no such counsel to give me. They spoke of fitting oneself into movements. They talked of periods and tendencies and lucky shots and literary agents. They wouldn’t read anything I’d written, but they liked to have me around as audience:
— Got a minute? Here’s an amusing little thing I just dashed off. . . .
The Neapolitan artists taught me by knowing them. They said that the artist is also a teacher. The striving must be done with his material. And the highest and hardest striving of all with himself. No one, they said, could help him in this secret battle. No one but himself for that first carving and that last polishing. They told me that if the artist didn’t believe in some worth in life, there wasn’t any point in trying to be an artist. For art was an act of life and love, with some of the violence inherent in each. There was no excuse for titillating or frustrating. Just let pen and paper and brush alone for a better man. Good art had been accomplished before and probably would be again.
— These Italian buildins, the corporal said, like they grew from the ground without even tryin.
— Ah, said the mess sergeant, watching a signorina watch him, when these ole mousetraps was new, they looked as shiny as Rockefeller Center does now.
— I wonder, the pfc said.
— Yuh, Naples is too fulla monuments, the corporal said. Oughta tear em down. All slums.
— My boy, the pfc said over his spectacles, you must make the distinction between old lumber and old jewels. . . .
I remember wondering what there was in Italian music and Italian painting and Italian architecture different from anything we Americans had given to the world. And I decided that the best were complete projections of incomplete human life into a dead medium. In them all I found a regret, a sense of something transitory caught on the wing, a humility and a pride inextricably mixed. I saw that, the better succeeding ages had judged these pieces of art, the more fully did they partake of a discipline that man wishes he possessed, of a sweetness such as he rarely has the strength to sustain. But most of all these tunes, these statues, and these poems had an air as though everyone had felt them but had been too lazy to write them down.
The Gallery Page 40