Don Arnaldo went on:
“The root of the matter is education. Education to produce an enlightened clergy who can speak with authority to the rich as well as to the poor. Education to produce educators, and apostles of reform and social justice.”
I pointed out that the Church itself had control of clerical education. Bishops and archbishops directed their own seminaries and the training of their diocesan clergy.
“True,” said Don Arnaldo, “but many bishops are old. Many more are conservative and afraid of sudden change. They admit the need of reform but fear the consequences of indiscretion in an explosive social situation.”
“Then why not change the bishops?”
Don Arnaldo threw back his head and laughed.
“Come, come, my friend! You are not so naive as all that! You know that there is a bureaucracy in the Church, older and more complex than the bureaucracy of this unhappy Italy. We have a Pope who is very near to being a saint—a great man and a wise one. Even he can only work with the instruments at his hand. To destroy an edifice is a simple matter. You can do it with a charge of dynamite. To replace it with a new building is the work of years.”
I nodded and sipped my drink. To this, as to so many other problems, there was no easy answer. It was springtime in the South and the people were smiling because the tourists were coming and the canning factories were working and there would be more work and more money, and the sun would warm their pinched bodies and the damp would dry off the walls of the bassi.
They are a patient folk. They have suffered much and they will suffer more. They have learned to be grateful for the smallest mercies. But I asked myself, as I had asked a hundred times before: the children—what of the children?
CHAPTER THREE
MY ITALIAN friends used to smile whenever they heard me discussing this book.
“Naples is too big,” they said, “too big, too old, too complex for you to understand.”
I didn’t agree with them. I still don’t. Most of them had never been into the bassi. None of them had ever spent half as much time there as I had. Otherwise they would have known that life there is very simple, simple as birth and death and the act of love.
There are no mysteries in the bassi, only the mystery of how so many people stay alive on so little. Walk the streets by day and night and you will realise that it is physically possible to assist at every moment of the life cycle from conception to the dying breath.
Peppino and I did just that. It was my project to chart the life of a girl and a boy from infancy to maturity, to see what Naples made of them, and why and how.
Most of them, I am convinced, are begotten in love in the big brass letto di matrimonio, under the picture of the Madonna or the placid gaze of a plaster saint. The passion of the act tends to be inhibited by the proximity of so many people and displays of affection between married couples are rare. But there is much love in the bassi, and a strong respect for the marriage bond.
For the mother, the conception of a child is a joy. Later it will turn to grief, but in the months of her gestation, she is an object of interest and care and the centre of all the gossip of the street. Obstetric details are a constant delight to Neapolitan women and they are embellished with legendary details older than Pompeii.
The expectant mother will not normally go to a doctor. A single visit would cost her at least 1000 lire, and besides, gestation and birth are very normal functions, so why bother? It is a primitive state of mind which has some appalling results in later life, but many Neapolitan women seem to survive it without too much damage.
If there is an emergency which requires medical attention, no woman of the South would dream of going to a consultation without company. To undergo an intimate examination without an older woman present would be to compromise herself and the doctor. Even women of breeding and education follow the same practice.
Since no doctor will commit himself too far in front of a witness—especially a feminine witness—private practitioners are apt to deliver a Sybilline verdict, and the spread of gynaecological education becomes almost impossible. Rumour and gossip spread like forest fires in the crowded streets of the bassi and any doctor who set himself up as educator of his patients would find himself starving, or reduced to the shabby trades of the casino and the house of appointment.
Here, too, is the reason for the high percentage of messy abortions in Naples. An unmarried girl is apt to be complaisant with her fidanzato, because she is afraid of losing him. If she falls pregnant she faces family disgrace, possibly accompanied by a beating from her father or her brothers. If she is hunted from the house, she will end up on the streets. So, quite often, she addresses herself to the unscrupulous midwife, sometimes with horrifying results. By the time the doctor is called, it is too late for anything but drastic surgery.
When a child is born in wedlock, the mother is attended at home by the local midwife and half a dozen voluble, if unskilled, assistants. Her pain is public and her triumph is a matter of common rejoicing. Crowds of women gather outside the door and the men and the children are hustled away to a respectful distance, but the labour cries are strident and dramatic and even the children know what is going on.
Asepsis is primitive and always difficult. Mortality is high, but on this, as on so many matters of public welfare, accurate figures are hard to come by.
When the child is born and the mother washed and settled back in the big brass bed, the doors are opened and the procession of admirers begins. There is a strange and touching beauty about this primitive worship. The mother grey-faced and tired, with the child at her breast, the father twitching rough hands and grinning with nervous pride at the compliments of the neighbours, the children giggling and clambering on the bed to look at the new arrival, the midwife in the centre of gossiping women, the unmarried girls whispering in the corner all the esoteric details of the birth.
No matter that in a few years the child will be sprawling and scrabbling among the fishtails and the rotten fruit. No matter that the mother, worn out with parturition and poverty, will find herself barren of love for her large, unruly brood. In this moment she has the dignity of a queen and the homage of all the humble of the bassi.
Neapolitan children are breast-fed. Cows’ milk is expensive and often of doubtful purity. The necessary additives are more expensive still. If the mother lacks milk, the child is fed by a wet-nurse, and since babies are born every hour in the bassi, these are not hard to find.
For the child this age of infancy is the best of his life. He is petted and coddled and the life of the household revolves around him. The unfortunate thing is that it doesn’t last, and that the child can never remember it. Perhaps it is just as well. To remember the Lost Paradise in the slums of Naples would be an intolerable grief.
However, happiness, like misery, is a relative word and the infant in Naples has a rough time of it. He is warm and he is fed and he is loved. But his diet is unbalanced, and he is apt to fall an early victim to rickets or other deficiency diseases.
Late one afternoon Peppino and I stopped to talk to a youngish woman who was nursing a babe outside one of the half-doors in the Vico S Agnello. The child’s face was covered with blotched and crusted sores of pellagra. I stopped to look at it.
“Ask her,” I told Peppino, “does she know what that is?”
Peppino and the woman talked for a moment in dialect, then Peppino translated for me.
“Malattia di pelle—skin complaint. Lots of children have it”
I told him to explain to her that the condition was caused by dietary deficiency and could be cleared up quickly with vitamin complexes. Peppino shook his head.
“She would not understand, Mauro. You are wasting your time.”
“Very well then, this is what we’ll do. We’ll go down to the farmacia and buy a bottle of vitamin tablets. We’ll bring them back here and you’ll explain to her what has to be done for the child.”
Peppino grinned patiently, a
nd again refused.
“You know what would happen, Mauro? She would take the bottle and hide it for fear of some evil influence. When her husband came home she would give it to him. He would take it to the black market and sell it for a sixth of its value. You would be wasting your money.”
I was appalled at such ignorance. Peppino bent down and lifted a small ornament hung round the baby’s neck. It was made of red coral and it looked for all the world like a miniature animal horn.
“You know what this is, Mauro?”
“Just an ornament. I’ve seen lots of them in the tourist shops and the jewellers.”
“No, Mauro. It is not just an ornament. It is a charm against the evil eye. Who knows, one day this child may be out walking—it may even be sitting here as it is now, in its mother’s arms—when along comes a man, like you, for instance, who has the evil eye—Malocchio. The baby could be struck blind, its stomach could turn sour, its hands or its legs might be twisted.”
“Superstition! The same superstition that turns their honouring of the saints into a kind of idolatry.”
Peppino smiled and spread his hands in deprecation.
“Sure, Mauro, sure! But superstition is a disease which you cannot cure with a bottle of vitamin pills. You need education for that.”
Education! We were back to it again. Enlightenment, personal and social. But there were 50,000 children in Naples who would not be able to go to school, and hundreds more were born every day. Now it was my turn to shrug. I took out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Peppino, and we stood watching the young mother while she changed the child.
I needed the cigarette. The child had not been changed for a long time. The cotton napkin was filthy, and when it was removed the child screamed with pain. Its bottom was scalded and blistered raw. As a family man I have some experience in such matters. I was about to say something more, explain to the woman that——
“Come, Mauro!” Peppino took my sleeve and dragged me away. “If you are going to finish this work you cannot afford to break your heart in the first month. The child will live to scream again. And if not, you will not be able to change its fate even a little.”
“But it’s such an elementary thing—just common cleanliness. A child can’t be left in its own filth any more than an adult.”
“I know, Mauro. I know and so do you. But these people don’t. And until there are people to teach them, they will never know. Would you like to come here and set up a school in the bassi?”
It was a fair question and I had to answer it honestly. No, I wouldn’t like to come here. I knew it would break my heart in a twelve-month. I wouldn’t have the courage. But unless someone had the courage, there would never be a hope for the mediaeval ignorance of the Mezzogiorno. In Naples it is bad, but when you go south into Puglia or into the mountains of Calabria, it becomes a destructive and an evil thing.
The land reform programme has been set back ten years by the primitive stupidity of the peasantry, and by the short-sightedness of the reformers.
When the first big estates were cut up and the sharecroppers settled each on his own plot of ground, the local economy suffered a sudden collapse. Instead of the steward of the absentee landlord, who came eight or ten times a year to advise what to plant and where and what patch was to be fallowed and what cows were to be served, the peasant now had only himself to depend on. He had smaller grounds and he had to farm economically to earn a living. There was nobody to tell him how to spray the fruit trees or how to use the new modern fertilisers from America. He had land but no plough. He had to buy stock, and grain to feed them with. And in twelve months he had a new landlord—the local shopkeeper who rubbed his hands as he gave a little more credit and pocketed another document entailing the new properties.
The whole of the South needs education. It is a poor country, bone-poor. But if education and modern methods can open up marginal areas in America and India and Iraq, they can do the same here. The trouble is to find the educators. In a country where success at an examination depends in great part on the teacher’s recommendation—often paid—there is little hope of building a trained nucleus of instructors. At present rates of pay the teacher is reduced to the status of a hedge-school dominie, and the heart is crushed out of him before he can get to grips with his work.
* * *
Now it was lunch-time and Peppino and I stood by one of the fruit barrows munching apples and studying the price cards. The question of diet was important in this study of the children and the best way to study the diet was from the price lists of the local dealers.
Eggs, which are sold everywhere, even in some tobacconists, were 480 lire a dozen. Even by Australian or British standards, this was expensive—nearly six shillings sterling. Bananas, imported from Somaliland, were 480 a kilo. New potatoes were 100 lire a kilo and spinach—poor and bitter because of the bad winter—was 100 a kilo. Apples, floury and bruised, cost 180 a kilo and even the local Sorrentine oranges cost 150.
Watching the local women, I found that they bought mountains of broccoli and spinach, a few onions, artichokes and, occasionally, carrots. Fruit they bought sparingly and in single pieces.
Across the lane, at the salumeria, butter was being sold for 600 lire a half kilo, and a loaf of bread for 60 lire. Put the daily wage for a worker’s family at 500 lire and you’ll see that there is little scope for balancing a diet and strengthening the children against deficiency diseases.
Meat of any kind is beyond the pocket of the worker—a half kilo costs more than a full day’s wage. Pasta, the staple diet of these people, costs 300 lire a kilo. Salt is a Government monopoly and costs 120 lire a kilo. The cheapest drink is wine at 150 lire a litre—bring your own bottle!
Cooking presents another problem when you are providing for a community of ten in one room of the bassi. The poorest are reduced to cooking over a fire of charcoal or chips in a tiny dish, but most families have a tiny three-ring gas burner fed from a cylinder. The jets are small and the gas is of indifferent quality, so that any kind of varied cooking is an impossibility.
Small wonder that the harassed housewife falls back on pasta and tomato sauce and that children of six and seven could be mistaken for four in your country or mine.
I finished my apple and pitched the core on to a pile of papers in a dark archway. As I did so, I remembered that tonight, when darkness came, boys and girls would scrabble in that heap and probably eat the core that I had rejected. The thought turned me sick. Then my attention was diverted by another sight, common enough in the back streets. A tiny girl, five or six perhaps, was staggering along with a gunnysack over one shoulder. With her free hand she held a small, bare-bottomed toddler, with a filthy face and a running nose. Here, under our eyes, were the second and third ages of the children of the bassi.
The toddlers who have not yet learned to control their bodily functions trot about naked from the waist down, fair weather or foul. If it seems a barbarous custom to the mothers of our countries, let them ask themselves how they would cope with training a child—or even keeping him in clean diapers—in one room, without running water or a toilet. Of course the primitive hygiene also raises the death rate from pneumonia and tuberculosis—but what is one child more or less among the hundreds of thousands in Naples?
The little nursemaid herself was an interesting study. Her legs and arms were like matchsticks. Her hair was a tangled mop. She wore a torn dress of faded cotton under which hung a pair of pink knickers, filthy and ragged. Her feet were bare and her skin was blue with cold. I was clothed in long woollen combinations with an extra pullover under my seaman’s jersey, but even I was cold in the thin spring sunlight that filtered down through the lines of washing! This tattered mite must have been frozen to the bone.
As she staggered along, bent under the heavy load, dragging the squalling toddler, she looked like a little old woman. I nudged Peppino. He called-to her in Neapolitan, offering her an apple. She looked up immediately but her eyes were em
pty and there was no trace of a smile on her baby mouth. Peppino held out the apple in confirmation of his offer.
The child looked at him a moment in silent bitterness, then ducked her head and staggered away down the lane.
Now I began to understand what happened to the girls of the bassi. As more and more children began to be born, the older ones were pressed into service looking after the babes. While their sisters in other lands were playing with dolls or giving baby tea-parties on the lawn, these mites were washing the dishes and scrubbing the pans and sweeping the cluttered rooms with a twig broom. They were not sent to school, because there weren’t enough schools, and besides, what use is education to a woman whose sole function is to sew and cook and bear children? They rose early and went to bed at fantastically late hours. I have been in the back streets at midnight and still found children playing on the cobbles. I have looked into the ground-floor rooms and seen them, at three in the morning, still fully clothed, sitting asleep over the kitchen table where their elders were talking.
Part of it is ignorance, part of it is thoughtless habit, part is the impossibility of maintaining an orderly life in the crowded rooms of the tenements.
The centre of the family is the father. He is the breadwinner. He comes home from work—if he has work—at nine in the evening. Then he must be fed and coddled a little, because generally he has done twelve hours labour on coffee and a crust of bread. By the time he is fed, it is ten, eleven, and the lights are still on and it is impossible to settle down in the big communal bed, until father and mother are ready. So the children sit late. If one or two or three are missing, they are presumed to be playing with the others in a nearby courtyard or under the lights near the vendors’ stalls.
Their absence is a small mercy. After a while it becomes an unnoticed habit. By the time the corruption of the city has taken hold of the youngsters, it is a long, long way too late to mend it.
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