So, during the nights and days of his masquerade, he set himself to study the nature and character of the street boys—their needs, their hopes, their fears, and their reactions to normal existence. His findings were passed on to me in hours of earnest explanation.
Most of the time I had with him was at day’s end, before I went on my nightly rounds with Peppino. Often it wrenched my heart to see him haggard and tired after a day’s hawking and begging, badgered and bedevilled by accounts that wouldn’t balance and bills he couldn’t pay. Yet, when he spoke of the scugnizzi, his eyes would light up and his voice, too, and he would stride about the room, gesturing in impassioned exposition.
“To understand these children, my friend, you must understand first what it means to be a Neapolitan. We are not Italians. We are a different people. We are a mixture of many, and yet we are one. Look at our faces! This one is swarthy and narrow like an Arab. That one is pure Roman. This girl looks as though she has stepped from a Greek vase of the time of Pericles. We have the red hair of the Lombards and the blonde hair of the Germans.” He grinned, boyishly. “Some of us now have the black skin of the American Negro. Yet we are all Neapolitans. We are boastful like the Spaniards, subtle like the Etruscans, greedy like the Bourbons. Like the Arabs, we have need of God. Too often we say our Aves like the Arabs say ‘Inshallah/’, then squat on our haunches and wait for a miracle. Listen to our songs! They will tell you what we are. We are arrogant, we are humble. We are grasping, we are generous. We are simple, yet devious. We are languid and we are passionate. We are changeable as the sea, yet we have endured like the sea and like the sea we are always the same. But…!” He stopped his pacing and swung round to me with a dramatic gesture. “There is one thing about us that never changes. We have need of love as a fish has need of water, as a bird has need of air. We are not like the cold people of the North, who can dispense with love because they love themselves so much. We need the security of the family, the warmth of a wife, the passion of a lover. Without it, we become warped and twisted, like tropical trees transplanted to the snow fields. In the child, this need is doubled. He is born of an act of love. He is nursed at the breasts of love. If he is to grow, he must feed on love as a plant feeds on the soft spring rains.”
He pulled a chair towards him and straddled it, leaning his arms and his chin on the frame of the back.
“Now, my friend, let me tell you the first thing I learned about the scugnizzi. Every one of them had left home because there was no longer any love for him. Does that seem strange to you?”
Yes, it did seem strange. It was too simple, too pat, to explain the complicated end product which is the scugnizzo. I said as much to Borrelli. He shook his head, vigorously.
“It is true, believe me. The circumstances vary but the essential fact remains. Consider a moment how it happens. In this family there are too many children and too little bread. The father is absent all day and the mother has so many cares that her love dries up as her milk does. In the next house there is jealousy and dissension. The mother has a lover, or the father has. There are quarrels and angry scenes, unendurable to the child, who is again cheated of love. Here there is misery so great that the child must work to bring in a few hundred lire. To his employer he is cheap labour. To his family, he is a breadwinner. None spares a thought for his starved little heart which dries out and withers like a walnut. Look again and you will see a house in which the family life is poisoned by the guilt of incest and promiscuity. A girl has children by her father or her brother; love cannot last in such a climate. So, one day, the child leaves home where there is no love and joins the other loveless in the streets of the city.”
“And does he find love there?”
Don Borrelli nodded, soberly.
“Sometimes, yes. The scugnizzi know how to be kind to one another, at least to members of their own band. The older ones protect the younger. When one is sick, the others will find extra food for him. They will steal medicines and give him clothes from their own backs. They are loyal to each other and will suffer much before they will betray one another. Sometimes there is even an element of love when a street woman takes a scugnizzo into her house and comforts him with her own body.” He paused a moment and, when he spoke again, his voice was heavy with sadness. “But, you see, it is never enough. The human heart is a bottomless well and these are cupfuls poured into it only to be soaked up by the arid earth.”
He stood up, suddenly, and thrust the chair away from him. His finger stabbed at me like a scalpel.
“Now! Now, I will show you how a scugnizzo is made. The foundation of his normal life is destroyed. He must build another for himself. He becomes vain and boastful, because there is no love to affirm his real value as a son of a family, as a son of God. He becomes cunning, because there is no love to protect him from the malice of others. There is only himself, the animal. He cheats and lies because honesty would make him the prey of those who have no love in their heart. He becomes nervous, raucous, unstable, because his child’s body cannot keep pace with this explosive psychological development. His body becomes stunted as you have seen, while his mind spreads itself in rank and twisted growth like a weed on a dunghill. Sometimes he is a little mad. Sometimes…” Borrelli’s face darkened. “Sometimes the burden of life becomes too much for him and he commits suicide.”
He put his hands up to his face and pressed the palms into his eyeballs as if to blot out a terrifying vision. Then he calmed a little and went on:
“When I went on the streets, I was a man. More than this, I was a priest with years of discipline and study behind me. But I tell you, truly, even I was affected by this naked, loveless existence. When I stood outside the tourist hotels and pleaded to carry a bag, I hated the well-fed smiling men and the women whose clothes would feed a scugnizzo for more than a year. When I saw the police with their truncheons and their little black pistols, I wanted to spit on them and hammer their faces with my fists. Could they not see our wretchedness? Were we not human as they were? What right had they to thrust us out of their way as if we were animals and they a special creation of the Almighty? I knew my hatred was wrong. I knew I had to control it or fall into grievous sin. But the children? How could they understand? Cheated of love and faith, what was left to them but the luxury of hate?”
Abruptly the passion was quenched in him like a candle and I saw before me a weary young man with a pale face and sad eyes, and behind him a desk littered with documents and unpaid bills. He read my thoughts, and grinned, wryly.
“We get by, as the Americans say. But there is so much to do, and so little help to do it.”
I left him then, because I had an appointment in the Hotel Vesuvio with an American friend who wanted to sell me a car. As I mounted the steps a pair of grubby urchins tugged at my coat-tails.
“Dollar, Joe! Dollar! You got cigarettes?”
The doorman tried to hunt them away. He thought I was a fool when I gave them a fresh packet of cigarettes and a thousand-lire bill. I probably was. If a tourist wants any peace in Naples, he must harden his heart and button his pockets.
When I remembered what I had heard from Don Borrelli, I found I could do neither.
* * *
The longer Borrelli lived with the scugnizzi, the more he understood that the house he hoped to build for them would have to be of a very special kind.
These were a special kind of children—half men, half boys. To pen them in an institution would be an intolerable cruelty. They would stifle with fear or burst into a frenzy of revolt. To submit them to the discipline of a classroom and a timetable, would be to make another torment for their distraught little souls. To lecture them on religion and morals and citizenship would be like talking to them in a foreign language.
What then? Where to begin and how?
Watching them at night huddled over their little fire, their skinny bodies shivering with cold, their pinched faces intent on a card game or the tally of the day’s takings, he saw that the fi
rst things he must give them were food and shelter. He must cram their shrunken bellies with pasta and put a roof over their heads and give them a blanket to keep out the cold.
He must make a place to which they would return willingly, because it was better than anything they could find in the streets. He must give them security with freedom and food without a price ticket. On the street they had found friendship and a small store of love. This he must not destroy but preserve, adding to it his own love and the abundant gentleness of his friend Spada, who was tramping the streets every day looking for a vacant place to house them. In bombed-out Naples, it was like chasing a will o’ the wisp.
Later, he must get medical treatment for them—vitamin courses, anti-scorbutics, penicillin to treat the venereal diseases, which a few of them had caught from their contacts with the prostitutes.
Later still—much later—he must try to educate them and find places for them in the overcrowded, workless society of the Mezzogiorno. This education itself would present one of his most difficult problems.
How do you teach a child that the vices which have fed him and kept him alive are suddenly evil? How do you restore the ravaged innocence to which thieving and lying and prostitution and perversion have become a commonplace?
He looked at them again squatting over the dying warmth, and his heart was filled with pity for them and with anger against the injustice and selfishness which condemned them to this vagabond animal life. They were children, all of them, even those of sixteen and seventeen. The street had consumed their bodies, stunting them to the stature of the old Spanish dwarfs. The younger ones looked like nursling children. Even their names were diminutive—Carlucciello, Tonino, Peppino.
As he watched them, one of the little ones began to tremble violently. His teeth chattered and he tried to draw closer to the tin dish full of coals. Borrelli moved forward and bent over him.
“Cos’ è Nino? What’s the matter?”
The tiny simian face looked up at him. The dark eyes were full of tears, but Nino was too much of a man to cry.
“I’m cold, Mario. I’m cold.”
Borrelli lifted him in his arms and sat back in the angle of the wall, cradling the wasted body in his arms. Suddenly the child was wrenched with a spasm of coughing. His tiny chest caved in, his belly muscles knotted, then he vomited on the pavement. The priest wiped the boy’s mouth with his hand—a handkerchief is a unbelievable luxury among the urchins—then he looked down at the vomit. It was mucous, dark and clotted and stained with little gouts of blood. Nino was in an advanced stage of tuberculosis.
Blind rage took hold of the priest and he cursed this dark city that crucified its children or shouldered them off its sidewalks to cough their hearts out in a gutter. Then the rage left him and he prayed—prayed for the courage and the strength and the wisdom to lead these lost ones out of the desert into a place of rest and refreshment. And, as he prayed, he held the sick child against his breast, trying to warm him with his own body, while all the time the bleak wind stirred along the alleys and the thin brown cats prowled among the rubbish heaps.
All the time the others watched him, their wary eyes full of dumb admiration. They were glad to have this Mario in their band. He gave them courage and a sense of security. He was different from the others, though they had no words to describe the difference.
How could they? Mario Borrelli had brought love to the children of the streets, but the word itself was still a strangeness and a mockery.
* * *
The next day, Borrelli slipped away from the boys on the pretext of scrounging medicine for the sick Nino. He had contacts to make. First with Spada to tell him that he could wait no longer and that, willy-nilly, a house must be found for the boys, even if they had to camp them in the courtyard of the Cardinal’s palace; then with the journalist-photographer, whose help he needed to stage-manage the critical moment of his revelation as a priest.
Spada had good news for him. He had found a place—not much of a place to be sure, but it had a roof and stout walls and plenty of space. It had been damaged by bombs and it needed a lot of cleaning up. No matter! Eagerly Borrelli went off with his friend. The place was in a tiny square in the centre of a tangle of alleys at the back of the Via Teresa.
It was an abandoned church, dedicated in the old days to the Mother of God. That was its Latin name, Materdei. Like most Neapolitan churches it was in the baroque style with a high cupola and a circular apse and an ambulatory round the dome. It was filled with dirt and rubbish, but, as Spada said, it had a roof and stout walls. Cardinal Ascalesi was prepared to turn it over as shelter for the boys.
Ebbene! It was a beginning. The place was cold and empty as a tomb, but after the streets and the reeking lanes it was a paradise.
Borrelli’s eyes shone. Now Spada must go out and beg, borrow or steal jute sacking and straw to make mattresses. If he could come by a few blankets, all the better. Next a cook pot and a pan and whatever food he could lay his hands on. Mountains of pasta they would need, anything else he could squeeze or threaten out of the shopkeepers. Medicines, too, if he could lay his hands on them.
What sort of medicines? Anything—everything! The needs of the boys were so great that almost anything in the pharmacopoeia could be useful. What they didn’t need they could sell, and buy other things.
Spada grinned at his friend’s enthusiasm. Then he presented him with a sobering thought. Even today he does the same thing. Borrelli is an enthusiast, a thruster, a battler. He consumes his strength in the endless battle to keep his work and his boys alive. Spada is the counsellor, the calm one, the loving one, who looks after his friend as he looks after the boys, keeping the house running and the fires stoked. The question he put was of startling simplicity.
“We bring the boys here—good. We give them sleeping room, food and medicine—better still. But how do we keep them fed? How do we make a home for them? We have nothing, literally nothing, but four walls.”
Mario Borrelli bunched his small fist and rubbed it against Spada’s unshaven chin in an affectionate gesture. His wide mouth split into a grin. Not for nothing had he been a scugnizzo! There were more ways of killing a cat than by stuffing it with red peppers! There were a dozen flea markets in Naples where you could sell old clothes and scrap iron. He would organise a house to house collection for saleable rubbish. He would go to the Americans and point out that it was better to keep the boys off the street than have them pestering Allied troops and getting the Joes into bother. He would have his journalist friend publish some of the photographs and use them as a lever to prise money from the tight-fisted Neapolitans. Don’t worry! He had learnt a lot about the little ‘combinations’ by which the urchins lived. He would clean them up and turn them into honest traffic. Let Spada not worry too much about the future. That was God’s business. Their business was to get started.
Spada smiled affectionately. Even if he was only half-convinced he did not say so. Allora! He would start work at his end. When did Mario expect to bring the boys in?
Borrelli’s face clouded. That was a horse of a different colour. He was still afraid of that menacing moment of revelation. If he mistimed it, if he had overrated his influence with the scugnizzi, his work would be wrecked in less than a minute. He would have to stage it carefully. He had certain ideas, but he could not be sure. He was worried.
Now it was Spada’s turn to give encouragement and hope.
The work, he pointed out, was not their work but God’s. He cocked a quizzical eye at Mario Borrelli and quoted scripture: “Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.” It was necessary to be careful, to use tact and judgment and the Neapolitan sense of theatre—sicuro! But after that, it was up to the Almighty.
True enough! Borrelli chuckled ruefully and conceded the point. They talked a little longer, then, leaving Spada to his mountainous logistics, Borrelli took himself off to an appointment with his journalist friend in the Galleria Umberto.
; His problem was a curious one.
Italy is a Catholic country. The faith is deeply rooted in the hearts of its people, most deeply here in the South. Nonetheless, Italy is the most violently anti-clerical country in Europe. For a variety of reasons, some of them already noticed in this book, there is a deep cleavage between the body of believers and their pastors. There is a dichotomy of conscience which is strange and disturbing to a Catholic from abroad who, good or bad, accepts as an elementary truth the participation of the clergy in social activity and civic reform. The priest is accepted as a man. The man is accepted as a priest. Here in the Mezzogiorno it is not so.
This was Borrelli’s dilemma. When he informed the scugnizzi that he was a priest, they would not believe him. If he appeared among them in his soutane and his black platter hat, they would not believe he was the same man. He might look the same, but he would not be the same. It would be another trick, and they would edge away from him in fear and distrust.
Hence the need of the photographer. Borrelli would give him a list of the meeting places of his little band of scugnizzi. He would give him an approximate timetable. Then he must go round with his camera and flashbulb and take pictures of the boys, and of Borrelli too sharing their activities and their food and their sleeping places. He would develop the shots and give the prints to Borrelli who would use them as exhibits when he faced the critical court of the scugnizzi to establish his faith and his good will. Later, the same pictures could be used to publicise the work and bludgeon the Neapolitans out of their selfishness and their indifference.
So it was done. It took the best part of a week, because the scugnizzi were always on the move—away from the police, towards a new and more profitable stamping-ground. But, finally, the pictures were ready. Once more Borrelli slipped away from his band to prepare himself for the great moment of revelation.
Children of The Sun Page 9