Children of The Sun

by Jonathan Green

  Our investor nodded unhappily. It seemed to him that it was impossible to do business anyway. He decided to play for time. Mr X was quite happy about that. The weather was fine. He would stay another day, even two. He would divert himself by a visit to Capri. Which he did.

  While he was away, my friend sought counsel of his friends—bankers, lawyers, functionaries of the district. All of them advised him not to pay the money. Not, you will note, on moral grounds, but because of the danger of losing it. When I asked why he had not, for instance, agreed to make the payment and then have Mr X arrested by police witnesses, he shrugged. I didn’t understand the way things were done in Italy. The chances were Mr X was a genuine contact man and that if he were arrested, it might be suddenly impossible to get cement and stone and building fitments. Capisce?

  I understood. It was only another aspect of the corruption of commercial and political life in Italy today. Besides, I wanted to hear the rest of the story. It was interesting.

  When my friend refused the payment, Mr X smiled complacently, paid his bill and left After he had gone, our investor got busy again making the rounds of the money market. He could raise the money, surely, but under the prevailing system of discounts it would cost him up to seventeen per cent even from the Banco di Napoli. He was stymied.

  Three months later, Mr X was back again, with the same big car and the same big smile.

  His opening question had a Neapolitan flavour, in spite of the Roman accent.

  “Are you cooked yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, why not pay like a sensible fellow and be done with it? I assure you, you’ll get your money within a month.”

  “No!”

  Even a provincial restaurateur can have his fill of gerry-mandering.

  Mr X smiled and took his leave. My friend wrote again on the matter of the loan.

  He never got it.

  When he built his restaurant, it was with private funds from an elderly friend at Salerno. The Agency was, no doubt, devoting the money to worthier causes—like the 7000 families rotting in the baracche, or the 50,000 children who cannot go to school.

  I want to be fair on this point. Go to any country in the world and you pick up stories like this one. You check your informant and his veracity. Try to follow them through the departments concerned and you find yourself bogged down in a morass of conflicting statements and equivocal documentation. In Italy, however, they spawn like bar-room jokes. They are a symptom of the social climate. They reflect a profound mistrust of public administration. They breed cynicism and open the way for corrupt practice in high and low places. The paid lobbyist and the ten-per-cent contact man become stock characters in the political comedy and their smut brushes off onto the hands of honest administrators.

  In case this sounds like a biased observation, here is a postscript from an ex-minister of Italy on the operations of a Government body whose official title is the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno—literally the fund for the South. He delivered it at a congress of the Rotary Club in Rome on April 8th, 1956.

  ‘After a minute study of what happens to these hundreds of millions of funds, there is only one possible conclusion: the Cassa del Mezzogiorno is really the Cassa del Settentrione.’

  The flavour of the pun is lost in English, but the meaning is blunt enough. The Cassa was set up to finance the depressed South. Its funds are being diverted to finance the industrialists of the North.

  How much of them? According to Minister Corbino—who ought to know—nearly 70 per cent.

  Sitting there in the dusty bustle of the Galleria Umberto, drinking my bitter coffee, watching the girls go by and the shabby little business men, looking at the shop windows filled with objects of art that nobody wanted to buy, I was oppressed by a despairing anger. I was angry at the injustice and the corruption. I was angry with my friend. I was angry with myself for becoming embroiled in the affairs of this ancient, worm-eaten, hopeless country, where men were bought and women were sold and the children were damned the moment they were begotten.

  The children? They weren’t my children. They weren’t my country’s children. They weren’t America’s children. They belonged to these same midday Italians who cheated and squeezed and oppressed one another and shut their hearts and their pockets against the cry that drifted up from the dark abysses of the bassi.

  They are a Catholic people, as I am a Catholic, yet their social ethics areas pagan as those of Pompeii and the Rome of Tiberius. The slaves were manumitted centuries ago. But a man is still a slave if he is forced to live on the edge of starvation, to live in fear of the whim of an employer or an underling, with no possible hope of sharing in the fruits of his labour or improving the lot of his children.

  Then a frightening truth began to dawn on me.

  This poverty, this hopelessness, this corrupting fear, is in part a relic of history, in part an economic condition, and, in greater part, a thing calculated and organised.

  The wealth of Italy—and there is wealth in Italy, make no mistake—is concentrated in too few hands: in the hands of the black aristocracy in Rome, in the hands of the great industrial families of the North, in the hands of people like the Lauro family in Naples.

  The first aim of these people is to preserve their wealth, to augment it and then to divert as much of it as possible into safe investments abroad. The Kefauver inquiry revealed large Italian funds in American banks. My inquiries in Naples revealed at least one way in which these funds are sent out of the country in defiance of the law and every principle of social justice.

  A permanent pool of unemployment is of advantage to such people. It keeps labour costs down and prevents agitation for better conditions. A permanently depressed area is a constant bargaining card with the Western powers, especially with America, whose fear of European Communism makes her specially vulnerable to these yearly assaults on her pocket. American funds poured yearly into Italy provide cheap working capital for Italian financiers; but, in the South at least, little of this money reaches the people whom it is intended to help—the poor, the workless, the children. There is a saying in the South that American money makes only a round trip—into Italy and out again, back to funkhole funds in American banks.

  This fear of Communism is used in other fashions too. When a voice is raised against political corruption and social injustice, the speaker is branded a Communist and he is in instant danger of dismissal. The enunciation of the simplest democratic principles, which are accepted as a part of everyday life in Australia and America, raises howls of ‘reaction’ and ‘Marxism’ from a controlled and partisan Press.

  Here in the South, it is not only the industrialists and the politicians, but the Church itself which is guilty. Ecclesiastical education is a century behind the times. Seminary teaching is unreal and reactionary and the constant proclamations of four popes have not yet penetrated into the dusty classrooms of the Mezzogiorno.

  Men like Don Gnocchi and Padre Borrelli are phenomena almost miraculous and their lives are a daily battle for funds, for encouragement and systematic aid from the hierarchy and the civil authorities. It is to these men, and to others like them, that help should be given, because only through them will it reach the people for whom it is intended.

  I said goodbye to my little restaurateur and left him, still wrestling with his own problems among the chafferers in the Galleria. The Via Roma was crowded and the traffic was a screaming horror. In this sprawling ant heap of a city I felt a little like Diogenes looking for an honest man. I felt sorry for the old philosopher. He had his work cut out.

  Dozens of stories of graft and corruption came my way in the weeks of my investigation for this book. The stories themselves are less important than the climate which begets them. There is graft in every country. It breaks out sporadically like spring pimples; but the health of the body politic is not gravely damaged.

  Here in Italy the case is different. The disease is widespread. The whole of society is sick with it. Everybody t
alks about it, but no one has yet found a specific to cure it. The social and commercial life of Italy is one gigantic skin game in which mutual trust and disinterested effort have become an impossibility for all but the heroes.

  * * *

  Among the good friends I made in Italy are two young journalists from Castellamare. Castellamare is an industrial town of some 60,000 inhabitants. It lies about half way between Naples and the tip of the Sorrentine peninsula, under the towering peak of Mount Faito. Eight thousand men are unemployed here because the shipyards are working at half speed and the canning factory provides only seasonal employment. Conditions in some quarters are as bad as any in the baracche of Naples. The boys had taken me round on tours of inspection. They had given me hours of their time, digging up facts, balancing my first impressions with explanations of the complex working of local government and local industry. Whenever I was in Sorrento, they would come to my house and talk till one in the morning. They were not only well-informed, but they gave me a useful check on my facts and conclusions.

  One thing I noticed: it was impossible to discuss with them or with any other Italian the simplest economic situation without constant reference to party factions and political cross-currents. It surprised them to hear that I had no intention of including in this book a discussion of multiparty politics in Italy. The only way to get anything at all done in Italy, they said, was to play the skin game, to use party influence. Even the best things had to be done that way. When I pointed out that the whole purpose of this book was to show what one man had done with faith, hope and charity and no politics, they shrugged and grinned uneasily. Like many young Italian intellectuals, they were violently anti-clerical and they could not see any good coming out of Nazareth.

  I tried another tack. I told them how, in my home city, the young men of the Junior Chamber of Commerce—men of all religions and parties—had built, with their own money and their own weekend labour, a home for fifty old people and had pledged themselves to keep it in operation.

  My friends agreed it was a good work, a work beyond the touch of politics. But here, in Italy, such a work would be impossible.

  This I was not prepared to accept. What would be needed first? Land. Was it possible to buy a suitable piece of land in Castellamare? It was. The price? Two million lire. Would it not be possible to find two hundred citizens of Castellamare to donate 10,000 lire each (less than twenty dollars)? Possibly, yes. There was so much unemployment in Castellamare, would it not be possible to enlist voluntary help to dig foundations and cut stone and all the rest?

  No. It would be quite impossible. The organisers would be branded revolutionaries and a dangerous influence. Their careers would be ruined and they themselves would be unemployed.

  This was too much to swallow. Voluntary labour for social betterment, self-help to provide a housing scheme for the old, the children. These were the most elementary steps in social reform.

  “D’accordo!” My two friends couldn’t agree more.

  Instead of pouring out millions of words in 142 dailies about what the Government or the parties had failed to do, why not make a practical demonstration of what could be done with goodwill and courage?

  Again we were wholeheartedly d’accordo.

  Except for the fact that my two friends would most certainly lose their jobs, one as a correspondent and the other as a staff writer for a local journal. Quite possibly they would be arrested and charged as Danilo Dolci was charged with disturbance of the peace. And the house would never be built.

  I was shaken, but I wasn’t beaten yet. I pointed out that five years ago in Naples Padre Borrelli had started—from nothing—an institution for the reception of waifs and strays from the streets. I pointed out that the whole purpose of this book was to describe the circumstances which created the need and one man’s heroic effort to meet it. If Borrelli had done it, why couldn’t they?

  They grinned. One of them pointed out that Borrelli was a priest which made it somewhat simpler. He couldn’t lose his job. He might be disciplined but he would always eat. The other waved that argument aside. Mauro was right. Borrelli had started from nothing and had established this work. He had done much for the scugnizzi. He was an exceptional man and an exceptional priest. But even now, after five years, with Church approval and sporadic gifts from Government authorities, he was still selling scrap iron and old clothes to feed his boys!

  There was no answer to that. I knew it. I had seen it with my own eyes.

  Ten minutes later they went home and I went to bed. And a house for the poor at Castellamare seemed as remote and fantastic as Hy Brasil or the Golden Isles of the Hesperides.

  * * *

  I had another visitor, one sunny day, when I had come back to Sorrento to collate my mountains of notes and to wash the dirt of Naples out of my skin. His name was Don Arnaldo. He was a priest of the diocese of Naples. He, too, was a writer—a historian and a political philosopher. His latest work on the influence of Macchiavelli in Italian politics had caused quite a stir in learned circles in Europe.

  Don Arnaldo had been a teacher as well—in one of the seminary schools which cater for a limited number of pupils in addition to the trainees for the priesthood. Several years in damp, unheated classrooms had left him crippled with asthma and periodic attacks of bronchitis. He was fifty-five years of age, he told me, but he looked older.

  We sat in the sun on the terrace outside my study, looking eastward along the mountains, to the wooded shoulder of Capo di Sorrento. We drank German beer and smoked English cigarettes. We talked of the excavations at Castellamare and the Greek temples at Paestum and the early glories of the Republic of Amalfi.

  Then we talked about the Church.

  “We distinguish,” said Don Arnaldo, in his careful, academic fashion. “We distinguish between the Church and its members: the Church, which is the mystical body of Christ, the repository of truth, the fountain of grace; and the members of the Church, priestly and lay, who use the truth and the grace well or ill.”

  I agreed to distinguish between the two. Philosophically the proposition was sound. Justice must not be confounded with the men who administer justice. Truth is always truth in spite of the perversion of those who preach it.

  The Catholic Church in Italy acknowledges the same head and the same body of doctrine as the Catholic Church in America, or Australia or Argentina. It gives the same latitude in cases of dubious definition both in belief and practice. That is the theory.

  In practice…?

  “In practice,” said Don Arnaldo, unhappily, “I admit that the situation is different. A hundred years ago the Italian Church committed itself to an expedient—a cleavage, total and complete, from the political and social life of this country. She left the schools and the forum and the legislature. She accepted a dichotomy which is in fact a heresy—that religious life is one thing and social life another. There is only one life—human life in all its aspects. Man is a creature of divine origin and destiny. Every circumstance of his life, therefore, comes within the ambience of the Church. This is the doctrine which has been stated and restated by every Pontiff since Leo XIII, but the practice of it only now begins to be accepted by the body of the Church in Italy. Here in the South, acceptance has been the slowest of all.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Church of the South became linked with the rulers of Naples—Spaniards, Bourbons, the House of Savoy, one after another. The bishoprics of the Mezzogiorno became political perquisites. The prelates were, by breeding, conservatives, accepting the social order as a thing fixed and immutable. Now, we still carry on our backs the burdens of those troubled times. The new spirit is stirring, believe me, but it is like a plant in old, unfriendly soil, thrusting itself up through the rubble of history. It will take years yet before it grows freely in the sunlight.”

  I was angry and I attacked him. I had no right to do it, because he is a good man and a wise man and a gentle one, and he is many years older than I and knows
a great deal more and is much closer to God.

  I asked him what the people were to do while their tardy shepherds reformed themselves. I told him of the dusty friars and patient sisters who begged in the streets for funds to keep their orphans and their sick while wealthy Catholics closed their hearts and their pockets without a word of censure from any pulpit.

  I asked him how Catholic employers could pay starvation wages to workmen and dismiss them at a moment’s notice without protest from the prelates of the South. I asked him how the Church of Naples could tolerate the promiscuity of the bassi while refusing to preach the Ogino method of birth-control which is authorised by the Church. I pointed to the sallow-faced boys who were being trained for the priesthood in the seminary of Sorrento, drilled in the dated humanities of the nineteenth century, stuffed with the clichés of piety, segregated from the world, which one day they would have to teach and reform.

  All this and more I thrust at him until my anger was spent and I began to feel ashamed of myself and was constrained to apologise. Then I poured him another drink and waited for his answers.

  To my surprise he agreed with me.

  “All that you have said, my friend, is true, though it does small justice to the active and enlightened men who are trying to change this state of affairs. It does less than justice to the many who, over the years, have built the orphanages and the homes and the refuges which are, even now, all that this poor city has of charity and relief. The Church in the South has committed many sins, but it has also done much good, and without it this people would be sunk in a misery far deeper than that which they now suffer.”

  I nodded agreement. This too was evident. The Church, for all its shortcomings, is all that is left to the dispossessed of Naples. They look to it for help, for entertainment, for solace in the barrenness of their lives. It has given much. If it has not given more, it is because its members are human, burdened with human frailties, oppressed like the people of Naples with the sins of their historic fathers.