Children of The Sun

by Jonathan Green

  I nodded and grunted and let the subject drop. I was busy with other thoughts and I was still not sure enough of Peppino to trust them to him. Later, when I came to know him better, when I myself was calmer and more dispassionate, we were able to talk freely, without rancour. At this moment, we were new to each other and I was tired and of uncertain temper.

  * * *

  Our brief contact with the cigarette salesman had brought me face to face with two facts that plagued me constantly during my investigations in Naples. First was the incredible venality of the Italians of the Mezzogiorno.

  You see it at its lowest level in the back-street commerce of sex and contraband. Every tourist is affronted by it when his guide offers—for a consideration—to have the ladies shown the forbidden pornography of Pompeii, or when the attendants in the Naples Museum shuffle him into a quiet corner to take flash photographs of works of art.

  It follows you down the Sorrentine Peninsula where the tourist shops charge double prices for intarsio work made at sweatshop rates in the back alleys. The simplest transaction, like letting a holiday villa, involves kick-backs and false declarations so that the owner doesn’t have to pay taxes on the tenancy. For this reason one may find oneself, with some surprise, listed as a relative of one of the major families in the district. What the family saves on the deal I don’t know, but there is no diminution of rent or in the cost of living.

  On the upper levels of politics, diplomacy and finance, this venality flourishes like a rank growth poisoning the land, making it fruitless of reform or honest dealing. I was to learn more, much more about this as the days went on: payments for good marks at competitive examinations, payment for promotion, diversion of foreign aid to private pockets, all the shoddy machinations that keep the people of southern Italy in a state of marginal existence without hope of betterment.

  Poverty is at the root of it. Poverty and the fear that springs from poverty, and the long history of oppression and speculation by the conquerors.

  The servant is corrupted by the corruption of the masters—and the Spaniards and the Bourbons and the Allied armies were no paragons of social virtue. Neither are the men who rule Italy today. The people of the bassi live so close to hunger and death that they cannot spare a thought for the morals of an act that puts bread in their mouths.

  The second fact, the ever-present fact, was the staggeringly high birthrate of Southern Italy. The city of Naples crawls with children, from bare-bottomed infants to youths of eighteen.

  The reasons for it are many: natural fertility, overcrowding, unemployment, lack of work, ignorance, the reactionary attitude of the southern clergy who refuse to preach the authorised version of birth-control by periodic abstinence.

  The remedies are not as simple as they seem to the theorist living in a highly evolved country with full employment for both sexes.

  In the breadline statistics of the bassi, a contraceptive costs the same as half a loaf of bread. Female appliances and solutions are correspondingly higher—even if there were doctors to advise on their use. In the Mezzogiorno there are none such—as I was to find out later. More than this, even the simplest methods require a minimum of privacy for their application. When you sleep ten in a bed, without bathroom or toilet, the situation becomes impossible.

  The more I thought about it, the more I was touched with pity for these people clinging with such desperate hands to a life that offered them nothing but work and fear, spawning their children into the manifold corruption of the streets.

  * * *

  Finally, we came to the Piazza Mercato and threaded our way through the vendors’ stalls to the open door of the kitchen. As we stepped inside, I saw an old woman, filthy and in rags, sitting propped against the wall and holding out her hands for alms. One of her eyes was completely covered by cataracts, and both legs were amputated below the knee. Beside her was a little pile of five and ten lire pieces, the alms of the poor.

  Peppino dug into his pockets for loose change and I did the same. The old one made no gesture of thanks, only continued her monotonous whining plea. A group of boys from five to ten were playing ball between the barrows. One of them stumbled over her legs and she cursed him in mumbling dialect.

  Inside the kitchen the light was brighter and the air was warmed by the glowing oven where the pizza was browning and the red sauce bubbled and heaved on the big pastry platters. The cook propped himself against the wall and mopped his face with a grimy apron. The tired-looking waiter leaned on the cash desk and talked to the padrona, a mountainous matriarch bursting out of her black dress.

  There were half a dozen others sitting at the greasy tables, shovelling pasta, gurgling broth or sipping the raw purple wine that was tapped from the casks next door.

  All of them were watching us with that sidelong speculative look which is peculiarly Neapolitan. Once again, I had been marked as a foreigner. I kept my eyes on my plate and made low-voiced conversation with Peppino.

  One of the diners interested me. He was about thirty-five, with fine, well-chiselled, Roman features. His hair and his hands were well-kept. His clothes were new and his shoes were brightly polished. Yet he was eating here in a grimy kitchen patronised by barrow men and street girls.

  I pointed him out to Peppino. He grinned at me, his mouth full of pizza.

  “There are many like him in Naples today, Mauro. He is a little functionary—a clerk, perhaps, in a hotel or in a tourist office, or a salesman for one of the big industries in the North. He earns, if he is lucky, forty thousand lire a month, yet he must dress as if he were earning a hundred and forty thousand. That suit is possibly the only one he has and every Sunday he will sponge it and press it as if it were the most important thing in the world—which it is, for him. But to stay alive, to have enough money for fares and to buy a cup of coffee for his clients, he must eat here with the poor.”

  I had some idea of the cost of clothing in Italy, since shipboard accidents had ruined a pair of slacks and a hacking jacket. More from curiosity than from any desire to possess a skin-tight coat and a pair of cuffless trousers, I went to an emporium to enquire.

  A cheap jacket, off the peg, would have cost me 13,000 lire; a pair of slacks, 7000; a pair of shoes of modest quality, 6000. Add the rest of the items—socks, shirt, underwear, a pocket handkerchief, a tie—and you have more than a month’s income. A shoddy overcoat and another change of linen will eat up another month’s income for my little functionary, and he still has only one suit to see him through three hundred odd working days.

  “It can’t be done,” you say. It’s true that it can’t be done. But it is done, by hundreds of thousands of white-collar workers in Italy, today. It is done by means of a beneficent institution called the cambiale. The cambiale is, in fact, a promissory note. Every time I went to a small branch of the Banco di Napoli to cash a traveller’s cheque or draw on my letter of credit, I saw dozens of people, men and women, signing or redeeming these insidious little documents.

  The little functionary needs a new suit. He signs a promissory note which falls due in two months. The penalty for default being sequestration of property and a visit to the questura, he scrimps and saves and lives in daily torment to be able to meet the payment on the due date. If there is sickness in the house, or if a child needs school clothes or new text books, he signs more and more cambiali. Between the interest and the aggregation of responsibilities, he piles up debts that he can never hope to repay.

  His rise in the world brings him no betterment. He is, in fact, worse off than the workers in the bassi, who at least manage to eat and who have nothing to lose from the whim of a senior official or the malice of an office rival.

  Peppino’s voice cut across the line of my thoughts.

  “You’re not eating, Mauro.”

  His own plate was empty and he was lingering on the last of his wine. My own meal was scarcely touched. The pasta was cold and doughy and the sight of it revolted me. I shrugged and pushed the plate away and drank my
wine at a gulp.

  “I’m not hungry, Peppino. I’ve had enough for one night. Let’s go.”

  We stood up, walked to the cash desk, and, while Peppino paid the bill, I stood in the doorway and looked out into the crowded alley. The vendors were still crying their wares, although it was eleven o’clock. The beggar woman was still whining for alms and the boys were still kicking the ball around the barrows.

  Suddenly, as if at a signal, they stopped and moved quickly down to the end of the alley. Only one remained. I watched him work his way back till he was level with the beggar woman. Then, with a single movement, he bent to the ground, scooped up the pitiful pile of alms and went racing away like the wind, between the barrows and into the warren of lanes at the end of the street.

  The old woman wailed and the vendors screamed, while I stood there in the doorway, sick with indignation and disgust. The bassi of Naples are a jungle where only the strong or the cunning or the fleet of foot can survive.

  Peppino laid a hand on my arm and drew me away.

  “Scugnizzi, Mauro. The urchins of Naples. They, too, have to live. Let’s go!”

  I fumbled in my pocket and found a 1000-lire note which I thrust into the hand of the weeping crone. She snatched it away and hid it inside the rags that covered her breast. Peppino and I walked away through the mud and slush and the rotting stalks of vegetables.

  The voice of the beggar woman followed us like a malediction.

  CHAPTER TWO

  EVERY MORNING, during my stay in Naples, I would walk to a tiny park at the top of the Via S Teresa. Here, sitting on a stone bench in the sun, I would sort out my notes and the facts and figures I had collected the previous day.

  Facts there were a-plenty. The figures were a different problem. Official Italian statistics are frequently false and always unreliable. This is a country which depends for its survival on the continuance of aid from America. The Government in Rome must make a regular reckoning with the State Department and the accounts are always cooked.

  Here, in the South, there are twenty additional reasons for the cookery. Some of them I hope to make plain in this chapter.

  Employment figures, for instance.

  Official statistics declare 151,000 unemployed in Naples alone. It is my view, after weeks of investigation, that the figure is well on the wrong side of 200,000. The reason? The official figures take no cognisance of casual workers, seasonal workers or youths under eighteen, most of whom have left school before the age of twelve and all of whom must contribute in some form or other to the family maintenance. More than this, if a man carries a work card entitling him to function as a barber or a street photographer or a carpenter’s labourer, he is, ipso facto, deemed to be employed. He has a profession. Why doesn’t he practise it? He can obtain unemployment benefit only after stringent proof of starvation conditions, and he certainly can’t be numbered among the unemployed.

  When a boy leaves school—if he goes to school—he begins work at ten or eleven years of age. He is paid from 300 to 400 lire per day as an unskilled junior and, before he reaches eighteen, he is dismissed and thrown back on the labour market, half-trained and with no possible hope for the future.

  Figures on education, too, make interesting reading. Italian law prescribes school attendance to the age of sixteen. Yet, there are 50,000 children in Naples who have no chance of getting any education at all, because there are not enough schools and not enough teachers.

  Fifty thousand illiterates a year in a European city of two million is a horrifying picture. But the real facts are worse still. There are so few schools in Naples that even those who attend the primary grades can only be accommodated for two or three hours a day. In some areas they attend three hours a day every alternate day.

  School attendance is, therefore, impossible to enforce, and in every street and lane of Naples you see children of school age running wild, ragged, dirty, uncared for, or pressed into service in shops or workrooms to augment the family income by a pittance every day.

  There are other statistics, too, fearful enough for what they tell, but utterly horrifying in what they conceal.

  There are, say the official figures, 7000 Neapolitan families living in hovels (baracche or tuguri). These hovels are built on the sites of bombed buildings or in the shells of wrecked apartments, or even in grottoes in the rocks. Average the hovel families on the conservative Neapolitan scale of eight apiece, and you get 56,000 people living in conditions identical with the worst Eastern cities.

  I was there. I saw them. For three nights I did nothing but walk round the baracche with Peppino. I saw fifteen people in one shanty sleeping under rags on an earthen floor. The men could not get work so they spent their days picking up tobacco butts for sale to the backyard factories at 1000 lire a kilo. Try working out how many trodden butts it takes to make a kilo of tobacco. The figure will surprise you!

  At night the women went out and sold themselves on the streets while the children scavenged in the Piazza Mercato for food. Fixty-six thousand people live like that, according to the statistics.

  But those who live ten in a room in the lanes of the bassi are not listed. They have homes with light and sometimes water. They are not qualified to join the ranks of the hovel-dwellers.

  Figures! Figures! Figures! How do you make figures out of the monotonous litany of the miseries of Naples? I sat on my little stone bench and smoked a contraband cigarette and read the report of Budget Minister Adone Zoli from Rome. The date of the report was March 23rd, 1956. Minister Zoli was encouraged. Minister Zoli saw significant advances in the Italian economy.

  Gross national income had risen 7.2 per cent. But in Naples 31,000 workers had been dismissed during the winter.

  Private enterprise boosted its income 8.5 per cent. But in Naples an unskilled worker was lucky to earn 500 lire a day.

  Agricultural production was 22.4 per cent above pre-war levels, and the cost of living had risen only 3 per cent. But olive oil, part of the staple diet of these people, cost 900 lire per litre, a rise of 50 per cent, and vegetables and fruit were nearly double last year’s prices.

  Figures! Figures! Figures! There were lies, damned lies and statistics, and they all told me less about the condition of this city than I could see with my own eyes.

  I stuffed the notes into my jacket pocket, left Minister Zoli on the stone bench and set off on my daily tour of the city.

  * * *

  This morning I had an appointment—to drink coffee in the Galleria with a man who had a story for me. I had checked on him through friends. He was honest and respected. He is even well-known to many visitors who come to Naples and the bright islands and the tourist spots round the Sorrentine peninsula. To tell more than this would be an indiscretion and a breach of faith.

  As we sat at a little cane table among the jostling, gossiping promoters in the Galleria, he gave me the story. It concerned the operations of an Italian Government Agency, through which American funds and Government grants are channelled to bolster the economy of the impoverished South. Its aim is to provide risk capital for Italian investors who are prepared to locate their projects here and provide work for the depressed thousands of the Mezzogiorno. So far, so good.

  My informant was an investor. He owned and operated a first-class pensione in a tourist spot. He wanted to build a restaurant which would employ more of the locals and trap more of the tourist funds into the area. Again, a reasonable proposition. The building would give employment to local artisans, the restaurant would employ more staff. More tourists meant more trade for the local shopkeepers and farmers.

  Before lodging a formal application for the loan, he went to Rome and discussed the project with officials of the Agency. Their reaction was encouraging. He should file an application. He could rest assured of a favourable reply.

  Ebbene! He filed the application. In due course there arrived a financial expert and a constructional engineer. They went over his plans with meticulous care. Good. They would pre
sent a favourable report. The rest was a matter of routine.

  One month later, Mr X arrived.

  Mr X was large, smooth and genial. He had a Roman accent and drove an Isotta of the latest model. He had come south for the sun. He would like a room looking over the bay. He got it. He stayed three days and, on the third day, he begged the favour of an interview with my investor friend.

  They sat together in the private office of the pensione and Mr X laid his cards on the table. He was, he said, associated with the Agency. Not, you will understand, officially, but in the sense of counsellor, financial adviser.

  My friend nodded cheerfully. His dealings with the Agency had been, to this point, more than cordial.

  Mr X nodded too. The Agency was anxious to do all it could for investors in these areas. That was its function. However—

  —However?

  —However, said Mr X, there were many calls on the funds. There were many conflicting interests. In order to expedite the application and have the funds available in time to have the building ready for the next season, there would be necessary a small…

  At this point, Mr X touched thumb and finger-tip together in the age-old gesture of the touting Neapolitan.

  “How much?” asked my friend, tightly.

  “Ten per cent of the amount of the loan, payable in advance in currency.”

  My friend was staggered. He was a Neapolitan, an hotelier to boot. He understood the refinements of squeeze and graft. But even he gagged on this one. He pointed out that at this rate the money would cost him seventeen per cent—a usual bank rate. The only point in getting a loan from the Agency was the low interest rate on risk capital.

  Mr X shrugged. If my friend didn’t get the money, he couldn’t build his restaurant. Naturally he must make up his own mind. My friend made another obvious objection. He might pay the ten per cent and never see the loan. Mr X shrugged again. The risk was there, truly, but in these matters there was need of fiducia—mutual trust. Impossible to do business without fiducia, non è vero?