Soon after the father’s suicide, the mother and her lover were married. It wasn’t a very happy household. The mother was a harpy who harried both the boys and her new husband, goading them because they didn’t earn enough and mocking them because they were living ‘on the shoulders of a woman’. She herself peddled contraband cigarettes and was therefore a woman of some means!
Finally, the second husband committed suicide and Enzo and his brother were left as the sole providers.
The brother began to sell contraband. When the police picked him up and confiscated his stock, he went to work in the market. There he established contact with a small gang who stole cases of fruit from the loading lines and sold it later around Baiae and the Porta di Capua. Finally, the police picked him up again and sent him to the grim house of correction on the little island of Procida.
Enzo was now alone with his mother. He had not yet reached his eleventh birthday.
His mother put him to work as an apprentice to a local woodworker. He swept the floor and mixed the glue and carted the timber from eight in the morning till eight at night. In the evenings, his mother would fill his pockets with contraband cigarettes and send him peddling, until well after midnight.
One day Enzo ran away from home and never came back.
Every story I ever heard about the scugnizzi of Naples—and I collected well over a hundred dossiers during my investigations—came quickly to this first climax: he ran away and never came back.
You should understand that it was not hunger that drove them out. It was not always cruelty, as in the case of Enzo Malinconico. Sometimes it was overcrowding and the impossibility of living in a room full of squalling babies and drooling elders and quarrelling parents. More often it was the intolerable burden of work and family responsibility laid on the shoulders of very young children.
Just as the girls were made housewives when they should have been playing with dolls, the boys were made breadwinners before they had known what it was to be children. “At ten,” as Padre Borrelli once put it to me, “they are too much men to be boys and too much boys to be men.” Their bodies are stunted by this explosive psychological development and their minds are scarred irreparably by the early impact of adult life.
When, finally, they leave home, it is because they have come to the conclusion: ‘I am the breadwinner. This family lives on my shoulders. It gives me nothing and takes everything. I am a man. I am better off if I live as a man—alone—and enjoy the fruits of my own labour.’
Enzo Malinconico left home with a pocketful of cigarettes and a few hundred lire. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough to fill his belly and buy the toleration of a small bunch of boys who were touting for a casino. That night he slept with them on a stack of timber down by the Via Maritima. The next day he quarrelled with the gang and had his cigarettes stolen. He was alone and penniless and he was still child enough to weep.
A prostitute named Filomena took pity on him and brought him to sleep in her room. Her name, in Neapolitan, was Zizzachiona (the big-breasted) and her trade was among the dock workers and the sailors from the foreign ships. Enzo Malinconico lived with her for two years. He beat up trade for her and she paid him the regular percentage and when the last of the customers had gone, he crawled into bed and slept with her. With her he ran the gamut of sexual experience and learnt once again the venality of women and the corruptibility of men. He also learnt that the shrewd fellow is one who profits from both.
When he left Zizzachiona, he was thirteen years of age.
In the last three years he had graduated from laundry stealing and pick-pocketing to the more open and profitable commerce of the Sala Roma. Through the pederasta he hoped to be introduced to a man who needed couriers to make regular trips to Rome and Milan and Florence. The work was simple and well paid. You were given a package and an address. You delivered the package and came back.
When I asked him what was in the packages, Enzo put his finger on his nose and looked cunning.
“Chi sa? In this business the man who says least is the man who makes most profit. Non è vero?”
I grinned and said, “Sicuro!” and let the subject drop. The vices of wealthy Romans were no concern of mine. I was more interested in Enzo Malinconico and where he thought he was going. I asked him:
“Now, clearly, you are doing well. You have a head for business. But later? Where do you end? On Procida like your brother?”
Enzo’s eyes darkened. His fists knotted. For all his huckster’s confidence, in the bottom of his withered little heart he was afraid. Who could blame him? He was only sixteen. He said to me:
“My brother was unlucky. He was betrayed by a fool. Me, I am not going to end like that.”
“How then?”
“In one year, two at most, I am going to have enough money to lease an apartment on the Vomero. One of the big new ones, with four bedrooms and a telephone. Then, I shall get some girls—not the putane of the streets, you understand, but girls of class and distinction, who dress well and talk well. We shall set ourselves up in business for the tourists, make contact with the best hotels, only the best. Capisce?”
“You mean a casa d’appuntamento?”
“Senz’altro! Certainly. In six months the casini will be closed under the new law which is going through the Chamber. Then will be the opportunity for the luxury trade.”
“What about the police?”
“The police!” Enzo spat contemptuously on the floor. “How do you think the others function now? If you are prepared to pay, you can arrange anything in Naples. With four girls in a house of luxury, I can afford to pay even the police. Don’t you believe that?”
I shrugged and spread my hands in the fashion of the South. It didn’t matter a tinker’s curse whether I believed it or not. If Enzo Malinconico didn’t know his own market, who was I to tell him? If he made a mistake, there was always Procida, the grey stone island at the end of the long causeway. He would not be alone there. He would find his brother, and with him many another boy from the bassi of this doomed, dark city.
It was well after midnight when we left Enzo Malinconico and began working our way through the narrow lanes down towards the dock area to make the rounds of another collection of hovels.
We talked little. Peppino seemed strangely shocked by his meeting with Enzo Malinconico. It was as if he had heard once again the call of the streets and felt it whispering round his heartstrings, while all his reason and experience told him that to answer it would bring nothing but bitterness and disillusion. I was busy with my own problem: how to make people understand that what I would tell them about this city was the truth.
How could I convince them that the life of the bassi and the hovels was normal to hundreds of thousands of people? How could I prove to them that the story of Enzo Malinconico was repeated a thousand times over in this sprawling, maritime city where the Greeks had come and the Romans and the Spaniards and the French, the Americans, too, and the Spahis from Morocco, and where each had left a part of his country’s sins for the inheritance of the children? When I spoke of the casini and the houses of appointment, could they understand that I had seen twenty in as many nights, with the lights burning outside and the youths of the city rolling in for service?
This book would be read by gentlefolk in London and in Ohio and in Melbourne; whose children slept soundly between white sheets with teddy bear or a favourite doll clutched in their arms. Would they believe me when I told them that thousands of children played in the reeking lanes till midnight and that hundreds slept in doorways or over iron gratings?
How would they believe me in New York, when here, in Naples itself, there were tourists and resident families who smiled in polite disbelief when I told them what I had seen? I didn’t blame them. The tourists lived in the bright modern hotels along the Via Caracciolo. The residents lived in the villas of Posillipo or the post-war apartments of the Vomero. They saw the Via Roma and San Carlo and the broad square in front of the rai
lway. When the sun shone they went off to Capri and Ischia and the orange gardens of Sorrento. The tourists came for pleasure. The residents wanted a comfortable life for themselves and for their children. How could they sleep at night if they knew the festering existence that began twenty yards from the lights of the Via Roma and ended in the ugly ruins near San Giovanni?
One answer was photographs. A single picture, say the newsmen, tells more than a thousand words. I had commissioned a photographer to come with us and make pictures of the things I had seen—the rags, the poverty, the squalor, the children who slept roofless and homeless in the bleak alleys of the bassi.
Suddenly Peppino stopped and tugged at my sleeve. He pointed to a narrow archway, inside which was an old stone well from which the dwellers in the rooms above drew their water in a wooden bucket at the end of a rusty chain.
In the narrow space between the well and the mouth of the arch, a child was sleeping. A boy-child, six or seven years old. His only clothing was a ragged jumper and a pair of patched trousers that reached only half way to his knees. He lay on his side, his bony knees drawn up under his chin in a foetal attitude.
We moved closer. Peppino struck a match. In the weak yellow light, I saw the matted hair and the dirty face and the blue blotches of cold on the wasted limbs. I felt hot tears scalding my eyelids. Peppino looked up at me. I nodded, but I could not speak. The match guttered out. Peppino handed me the box and motioned me to strike another. Then he knelt down and wakened the boy.
He sat up with a start, a pitiful wide-eyed creature, tense as a cornered animal. If Peppino had not held him, he would have bolted away into the shadows. I could see his bony chest heaving under the tattered clothes. I struck one match after another, while Peppino talked to him in soothing tones.
Where had he come from?
“Rome.”
“Rome?” Even Peppino was startled. Rome was 150 miles away. But when he repeated the question, the boy nodded vigorously.
“Rome.”
“How did you get here?”
He had walked, it seemed.
“All the way?”
Most of it. Sometimes he had ridden on a cart. Then he tried to get on a train, but the men chased him off. Then he had gone into the tunnels, and come into the city that way.
The sotterraneo! Peppino shook his head. The horror of it was too much even for him, and he knew, none better, the harsh shifts of the urchin life. Again he talked to the boy, telling him that there was a place where he could sleep in a bed and eat good food and where people would be kind to him. Would he come? The boy refused. He began to struggle, wildly, like a trapped bird. Slowly, patiently, Peppino calmed him, coaxing him from panic to tears and from tears to doubtful wonder. Finally he agreed to come.
For once in Naples I was glad that I was a big man. I lifted the tiny body in my arms and carried him all the way back to the House of the Urchins.
And that was how I came to know Antonino, the child who has haunted my nightmares ever since.
PART TWO
LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS
CHAPTER FIVE
NOW I want to show you a man.
He is small like all Neapolitans. His height is a meagre five feet six inches; his body is tight, stringy and compact. His feet are small, his hands too; but these are horny and rough like a workman’s. He has jug ears and a mop of curly hair, unusually fair for a man of the South.
His face is lean, with a wide, thin mouth that opens betimes in an urchin grin, or shuts like a tight trap when he is angry. His beaked nose is broken and pushed to one side of his face, and this, with his bright, intelligent eyes, gives him a strangely birdlike look.
His voice is well-pitched and vibrant with conviction. When he talks of Naples and the children of Naples, his speech is full of a terse and vigorous poetry. When he lapses into dialect, his accent is that of the bassi from which he sprang and whose horrors he has endured in his own thin body.
He is thirty-five years old and his name is Mario Borrelli. Of all the men I have ever met, this one is most a man.
He is also a priest; but the long soutane and big platter-like hat match oddly with his crooked larrikin face. Yet, he is a good priest, as he is a good man. When you come to know him better, you may even judge that he is a great one.
Mario Borrelli was the son of a labourer in the slums of Naples. He was one of ten children who lived, as I had seen the others living, in the crowded, insanitary conditions of the back-street tenements.
When the war began he was a clerical student, in no wise different, so far as I have been able to find, from any one of the pale pinched youths one sees today in the old-fashioned seminaries of the City of Naples.
When the war ended, he was a priest, one of the hundreds one sees every day walking the streets in dusty black, preaching his Sunday sermons to the pitiful congregations of the poor, sitting in the dark, smelly confessional for the weekly litany of sins, shuffling the dying through their grateful exit from the world, baptising the children who were born so hopelessly into it.
This was the bad time in Naples, when the city lay prostrate in the inertia of defeat, when the girls of the city prostituted themselves for the bread of the conquerors and the men of the city ate it with bitterness in their mouths. This was the time when the word of God was hideous mockery—to the humble who had been twice betrayed, to the mighty who were preparing themselves for a new betrayal.
How could you preach the Sermon on the Mount to the starving and disillusioned poor? ‘Blessed are the meek…’ when only the strong and ruthless could survive? ‘Blessed are the merciful…’ when the conquerors ate chocolate while your children cried for bread? ‘Blessed are the clean of heart…’ when fathers peddled their daughters to the Allied troops? ‘Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice…’ when all you knew was belly-hunger and the cold of the ruins eating into your bones?
Small wonder that young priests despaired and old ones settled themselves back into the apathy of formalism, which is the despair of the aged.
By 1950, the city was beginning to recover. There was the beginning of order, the beginning of work. But the relics of war were everywhere. I was here, I saw them. What existed in 1956 was bad enough, God knows, but then it was much worse. The demoralisation of the children, the homelessness, the despair, was evident even to the tourist. Now he sees less of it, and need not see any if he stays on the Via Caracciolo or lets the tourist guides steer him away from the bassi.
In 1950 Mario Borrelli began his work. When I asked him why and how, he shrugged eloquently.
“I was angry. I was bitter. I knew that I could not remain a priest, unless I did something worthy of a priest. I could not stand at the altar and hold the body of God in my hands while the bodies of his children slept in the alleys and under the barrows in the Mercato.”
“Why the children?” I asked him.
He stared at me in amazement.
“In God’s name, who else? For the men and women it is bad enough, but for the children it is a nightmare! How are we to begin, if not with the little ones?”
“How did you begin?”
He gave me a sidelong, Neapolitan grin and shrugged expressively.
“That, my friend, is a long, long story.”
Then he told me. But the story I give you here is not the narrative of Padre Borrelli. He is a discreet man and a loyal one. Also, I believe, he has to be careful. The helpers in Naples are few; he still depends on a minute trickle of charity and the sporadic support of wealthy people, with a small stipend from Rome. He cannot afford to be too outspoken. His boys need him still. He has made them a home and given them hope. But in 1956 they were only two steps away from the dark streets from which he snatched them.
* * *
One day, towards the beginning of 1950, Mario Borrelli presented himself for an interview with his ecclesiastical superior, Cardinal Ascalesi, Archbishop of Naples and Primate of the Mezzogiorno.
He was twenty-eight
, then, remember, a youngster from the bassi with the oil of his anointing hardly dry on his nervous fingers. Ascalesi was an old man, wise in the world and in the Church, burdened with the manifold distresses of his people, with political intrigues, trying desperately to buttress the crumbling Church of the South with his own aged shoulders.
He listened, patiently, while Borrelli made his request.
It was an odd one in any language. He wanted to take off his soutane. He wanted to go out and live in the streets with the scugnizzi. He wanted to understand their lives, their psychology, to make himself their friend, one day, perhaps, to bring them to live with him and teach them to live decently.
The old Cardinal pursed his thin lips and frowned. Was there perhaps a taint of heresy in this young priest? If not of heresy then of pride which would destroy the work and the priest with it? The life of the streets was a foul and evil thing, founded on venality and sensual sin. How could a young man expose himself to it and remain unstained? He put these things to Borrelli.
The young man’s answer was simple. He had thought about it a long time.
“Ever since I entered the seminary I have been taught that a priest must make himself alter Christus—another Christ. It is written in the gospels that Christ ate and drank with thieves and street women. How can a priest be wrong if he does the same? How can he be another Christ if he refuses to go down to those who have no shepherd?”
Ascalesi was moved. With more men like this one he might have succeeded in reforming the Church of the South, but now it was late in the day and he was growing old. He shook his head.
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