Children of The Sun

by Jonathan Green

  At the present time, the Italian quota is heavily over-subscribed. This presents the principal impediment to emigration to the United States on a larger scale. The quota could be increased only by an Act of Congress.

  It would not be appropriate for me to express an opinion regarding the desirability of establishing an agricultural-technical school in the United States for the purpose of training young Italian immigrants. The Federal Government of the United States does not control education in the United States, since education is a matter that falls within the jurisdiction of each of the forty-eight states.

  I have no comment to make, no criticism. I am aware of the provisions of the McCarran Act. I pay no American taxes, therefore I do not presume to comment on American legislation or diplomatic practice.

  I put it to the American people, as I put it to the rest of the world: These are children. What can you do for them?

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS my last day in Naples, my last in the House of the Urchins. I had a sheaf of photographs in my suitcase and a pile of notes and figures. Tomorrow I would go back to Sorrento to put them in order and begin work on my book. Later, when the sirocco stopped blowing and the sea was calm, I would cross to the garish little island of Capri where the first guests of the season were already installed and where the dollar princess would come for her honeymoon with a musical-comedy prince.

  I would turn my back on the bassi and on the grubby, hopeless children and sit under the wistaria and the fresh vine leaves and drink red wine and watch the girls go by in the bright little square of Capri. When the moon came up, I would climb to the Salto di Timberio and look out across the lucent water to the bobbing lights of the fishing boats.

  I would hear music and laughter, and the voices of the urchins would fade to a tenuous puling cry, half-lost in the murmur of the Siren song.

  I felt a little ashamed of myself. But a writer, too, is a sort of urchin, wandering the cities of the world, making his little mimes for the laughter or the tears of his readers.

  So, when I sat for the last time in the dusty cluttered room of Don Borrelli, drinking my last cup of coffee, smoking my last cigarette, I was touched with the sadness of inevitable farewell.

  Borrelli looked worn. He had had a big day. Tomorrow would be another, and the day after, and all the days of all the years ahead of him. He ran his fingers through his hair in the familiar gesture and gave me a tired grin.

  “Do you think your book will help us, my friend?”

  I shrugged vaguely. I told him I didn’t know. I told him that a book was rather like a child. You begot it in love, matured it with care and gave birth to it in considerable pain. Its fate depended on many things outside your control: the good judgment of your agent, the demands of magazine editors, the shape of your publisher’s spring list, the mood of the critics and the reading public. I told him that I would write it with care, more than that, with love and compassion and all the talent I could muster. After that, chi sa? I hoped it would touch many hearts. I could not guarantee it would reach even one.

  Borrelli flung out his hands in a passionate gesture.

  “But they must read it, Mauro! They must understand what goes on here. They must know what happens to the children, not only to my children, but to all the others. The boys who are still on the streets, the girls who will end up there in due time. If they do not stretch out their hands to help us, we are lost.”

  I nodded wearily. I knew that as well as he did. I tried to explain that, often when people did not help, it was because they had their own problems—living costs, taxes, marital disputes, mortgages falling due, illness in the family.

  He caught at the tag of my speech and worried it like a terrier.

  “The family! That is the thing they must understand. We are all one family, all of us! We are sons and daughters of one Father—Arabs, Greeks, Indians, Chinese, even Neapolitans! If one of us is ill, the infection touches all the rest. An injustice done to one is an injustice to the whole family. What is the old proverb? ‘A bear coughs at the North Pole and a man dies in Peking!’ Look, Mauro…!” He planted the palms of his hands firmly on the desk and leaned across to me. “Twenty years ago in Europe we began to hear rumours of concentration camps and men killed in dark cellars and children beaten into betrayal. We shut our eyes and our ears. We shut our hearts, too. So there was a war. And after the war came the new terror of the atomic bomb, a terror that grows darker every day. Now it is not one nation but the whole human family that is threatened. And the threat is here—in Naples! The threat is wherever people are hungry, workless, without hope for themselves or their children.”

  I sat silent. What was there to say? I believed in the human family as Borrelli did. The book I hoped to write would be an affirmation of it. Borrelli’s work was a stronger affirmation than mine would ever be. But, between the affirmation and the change stood a thousand obstacles, ten thousand men. Not all the obstacles were evil, not all the men were rogues. You couldn’t throw open the frontiers and pack three million workless into ships and dump them, homeless and helpless, to disrupt another economy. You couldn’t wave a wand and see a hundred factories spring up in Naples.

  “No,” said Borrelli, grimly. “But one day, soon, if we are not careful, someone will wave a wand, and there will spring up a hundred thousand armed men. It happened in China. It happened in Indo-China. It is happening now in Egypt and Morocco. Workless men become desperate men, and if we do not put tools in their hands, they may well arm themselves with guns. And what then happens to your good people with their living costs and their mortgages and their children with a toothache? They are committed now, as part of this human family. They are committed to its future as to its present. Look at this!”

  He scrabbled under a pile of papers and found the day’s copy of the Rome Daily American. He marked a page with a stub of blue pencil and thrust it under my nose.

  The paragraph was a report of Attorney-General Herbert Brownell’s recommendation to liberalise the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act. It contained a quotation from Richard Arens, Counsel of the Immigration sub-committee. Arens’s contention was that Brownell’s proposal ‘would change the cultural pattern of our immigration from northern and western Europe to southern and eastern Europe’.

  I read it and handed it back without comment.

  Borrelli said, quietly:

  “Cultural pattern! You see? The old fabulous monster. The old, old heresy. What century do these men live in? Do they understand what they are talking about? This is what made ghettoes and concentration camps and destroyed freedom. This is what makes war today. Does a child have a culture pattern?”

  I pointed out, as carefully as I could, that I was not an American citizen and therefore could not on the strength of a newspaper paragraph commit myself to a sweeping criticism of American legislation. I pointed out that newspaper quotations were apt to misplace the emphasis and distort the argument. Borrelli admitted it, grudgingly. But he was not to be turned so easily from his thesis.

  “Ebbene! Let us admit for a moment this culture pattern. Let us admit that there must be a cost or a condition before you can put bread into a child’s mouth or offer hope to a youth. In this country of America—in your country of Australia—migrants from this culture pattern of the South have made contributions to the prosperity of your countries. They have helped to develop them to the prosperity they enjoy today. By what right do you say ‘Basta! Enough! Now we want no more of you. Let us enjoy the fruits of your labour, but do not bother us with talk of children in the streets and men without work in the bassi of Naples!’”

  Now it was my turn to be angry, not because I disagreed with his argument but because my mind and my heart were full of all the things I had seen and learned about the sins of Italy itself. I rounded on him. I told him facts and figures. I gave him names and circumstances, many of which I have had, for obvious reasons, to omit from this published document. I told him that Americans and Australians had don
e much more than many of the signori of Naples, the industrialists and the absentee landlords. I pointed out that even our indifference was a virtue compared with the active opposition of his own Italians to any hint of social reform.

  He took it well. He nodded soberly when I laid out the damning facts and the frightening figures. He did not challenge the argument. He agreed that the prime responsibility lay with those who were the closest relatives of the family, the Italians themselves. He refused to depart from his first premise that we were all of a kinship, and that if some failed in their duty the others must supply the default.

  The anger was gone from him now and he grinned at me across the desk—a crooked urchin grin from the father and brother of the scugnizzi. He held out his hand.

  “Write a good book, Mauro. Tell them who we are and what we are, not only the scugnizzi, but all of us here in Naples. Tell them we are not all rogues and touts and venal tourist guides. If we are shabby, it is because we are poor. If we hang our washing on the balconies it is because we have no other place to put it. If some of us are a little dirty, it is because we must walk down six flights of stairs to draw a bucket of water. We are an old people and a tired one; but we have endured a long time because we are not without courage. We are vain, like children, and like children we are easily moved to tears and to laughter and to anger. Like children we have our own innocence, that not even Naples can totally destroy. Explain us a little. Explain my boys, too. If you cannot find them a welcome in the good countries, ask your people at least to help them make a good life here. God keep you, Mauro. God keep all of us in the dark times!”

  I wrung his hand and left him—a tired, faithful man, sitting alone in the pool of yellow light that flowed over his littered desk. Little Antonino was waiting to kiss me goodnight and Peppino would be coming to take me on my last tour of the city.

  * * *

  I climbed the narrow stairs to the little dispensary at the top of the building and found Antonino waiting for me. He perched himself on the bed and watched me solemnly while I shaved and put on a clean shirt and packed my clothes and changed the film in my camera. He didn’t say very much. He just sat there, sucking a lollipop I had given him and following every movement with his wide, rolling eyes.

  Only when I had stowed the last of my laundry and laid out my pyjamas on the bed, did he give any hint of his thoughts.

  “T’n’ vai via stasera, Mauro? Are you going away tonight?”

  “No, Nino. Not tonight. Tonight I am going to dinner with Peppino. I am coming back here to sleep. In the morning I am going away.”

  “Will I see you then?”

  I shook my head.

  “Probably not, Nino. I’ll be leaving before you are even awake.”

  His eyes filled up with tears. With the lollipop stuck in his jaws and the chocolate all over his face, he looked almost comically sad. But it wasn’t comic to me. This weedy little urchin had come to symbolise for me all the miseries of Naples, all the injustice heaped on the unsuspecting shoulders of the children. I had come to love him. I wanted to take him away with me. I had even made enquiries to see whether it could be done, but ten minutes’ acquaintance with the problems involved had convinced me that it was impossible.

  “You’ll come back, Mauro?”

  “Probably, Nino.”

  How could I tell him that I might never be back? How could I explain that the lines of a writer’s life are cast in odd places and that he can never be sure from one year’s end to another where they are likely to lead him? I sat down on the bed and took him on my knee. He put his arms round my neck and kissed me, smearing chocolate all over my freshly shaven face.

  “Tell me a story, Mauro—just one before you go.”

  “Which story?”

  “L’Orso e l’Albero. The Bear and the Tree.”

  It was my own rough translation of the story of the little koala who lived on the leaves of a special kind of gum tree and was so greedy that he ate himself out of house and home. I had embellished it with sub-plots about the kangaroo and the bright-coloured grass-parrots and the big red galah and the wombat who burrowed in the ground like a monstrous mole. What kind of fantasies the child had woven out of my halting tale, I couldn’t guess. The Italian version was so full of circumlocutions and laborious descriptions, that he might have been dreaming of dinosaurs. All I know is that he enjoyed it mightily.

  So tonight I told it to him for the last time. He sat quietly, sucking his lollipop, his eyes dilated, lost in the fabulous legend of a land he might never see, a land where nobody was hungry.

  Some day, I hoped, the charity of private citizens and the wisdom of statesmen might make it possible for Nino to enter this land, to be educated there, to grow tall and strong and stand like a free man on good green land. But the hope was a long way off and to tell him of it would be to leave him cheated again.

  When I had finished my story, I kissed him quickly, shoved another lollipop into his hands and hustled him off to the dormitory. I could not bear to have him there and to feel so empty of hope for him. He was a child, like my child. He belonged to no party. He had no culture pattern. He was a child of the streets, standing with his face pressed against the iron bars of somebody else’s garden. I wondered if there were kindness enough in the house to open the gates and let him play awhile among the flowerbeds.

  * * *

  I was worried about my dinner date with Peppino. I had suggested it on an impulse, thinking to gratify him with an evening out in a good restaurant after all our nights of tramping the back streets and the hovels. He had hesitated a moment, then accepted with warmth and enthusiasm. Only later had I realised that he might not have clothes to wear to a well-dressed place. I feared he might have committed some extravagance to get them.

  He had. He had hunted all over Naples for a new jacket with a price tag to fit his pocket book. Finally, he had found it—a snappy blue model with brass buttons like an English reefer jacket. This, with a haircut and a shoeshine and a dry-cleaning for his trousers, had set him back 13,000 lire—half of his life’s savings. When he came to meet me in the gardens of the Villa Communale, he was as spruce as a tailor’s model.

  I whistled my approval and he strutted up to me with a broad grin.

  “You like it, Mauro?”

  “Bello!” I patted the shoulders. “Bellissimo!” I spun him round and admired the short, tight cut and the nipped-in waist.

  “The latest style, non è vero?”

  “Certainly the latest style!”

  “And the cloth?” He made me finger the lapel and feel the rayon lining of the sleeve. “The best quality?”

  “The very best. You have good taste, Peppino.”

  He was absurdly pleased at the compliment and he suggested that as this was the hour of the passeggiata, we should walk a little and show ourselves off before we went to dinner. Fine! We would walk awhile.

  The wind had dropped. The air was still and warm with the promise of the soft cleansing rain. After my long nights in the bassi, it seemed to me that the folk were brighter and better dressed and more animated. The girls giggled and swung their hips proudly and the swains were ardent and open in their flirtations.

  Spring was coming to Naples and the people of Naples were opening their hearts and arms to greet it.

  Peppino walked with head high and chest stuck out, acutely conscious of his new clothes and the fine figure he he was cutting in this fashionable promenade. He ogled the girls and criticised the looks and the dress of the males. I ribbed him about it.

  “That’s what you should be doing now, Peppino—looking for a girl to match your clothes.”

  He blushed and grinned.

  “That’s what I’d like to be doing, Mauro.”

  I gestured widely.

  “Come now. Why not? The city’s full of girls.”

  His face darkened.

  “For tonight, yes. But for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, to become fidanzato and to marry and have c
hildren? That is a long time away, Mauro. Sometimes I think it will never come.”

  Instantly I regretted my little joke. Our evening was getting off to a bad start. But I had opened the question. Now I was stuck to answer it. I patted his shoulder and said with more confidence than I felt:

  “It’ll come, Peppino. Probably sooner than you think. You’ll find yourself a good job. You’ll find yourself a good girl. You’ll make a life for yourselves.”

  “There—in the bassi?” He jerked his thumb back towards the city. “Never!”

  After his calm and compassionate expositions of the life of the scugnizzi, his vehemence surprised me. It should not have done. After all, spring was coming and the sap was running strongly in his wiry body. It was normal that he should feel the need of love, natural that he should resent its denial.

  To divert his attention, and for want of anything better to say, I caught his arm and turned him round to face the bay, where a big passenger liner was steaming out into the dusk. Her lights were blazing and the smoke was a grey banner streaming back from the twin stacks.

  She was a Britisher, homeward bound from Sydney and Colombo and Aden.

  We crossed the road and leaned on the sea wall, watching her go. As we watched, I talked to Peppino about her. I told him about Colombo and the gem dealers round the port and the green hinterland with the tea plantations and the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy. I told him about Bombay and the Towers of Silence and the snake-charmers round the Gateway to India. I talked of the ships that Sheba had built when Aden was the port for gold and frankincense and myrrh, the gifts of the Three Kings.

  It was a pitiful little travelogue, I confess, but he listened, enraptured as Antonino had been by my story of the koala in the gum tree. When I had finished, he turned to me, his face sombre in the dusk.

  “You see how it is, Mauro? For you all this is possible because of this land in which you were born.”