I grinned, wryly, and told him it wasn’t as easy as all that. I, too, had to work and save and plan. If my books didn’t sell well, I’d probably end up washing dishes in a London pub. He shook his head.
“It is not what I mean, Mauro, and you know it. The difference between you and me is that you can work and you can save and you can look forward to all these things. For us there is little work, no saving and no hope at all. The difference comes because you were born in one country and I in another. It is very simple.”
Simple indeed; yet how tragically complex when you tried to change the balance and give as much justice to Peppino from Naples as to Mauro from Sydney. I gave it up. Spring was coming and it was my last night in Naples. I took Peppino’s elbow and steered him towards the bright glass doors of a modern hotel on the Via Caracciolo.
It was his own choice that we should come here. When I had suggested our dinner date, he had asked awkwardly if we could come first to this hotel and drink an aperitif in the American bar. When I asked him why, he explained that when he was a scugnizzo, he used to stand outside the door and wait for the tourists to come in or out, to beg for cigarettes or earn 100 lire for carrying their bags to the bus stop. The idea of an American bar had fascinated him. He wanted to know what it looked like.
I warned him that he’d probably be disappointed. It was just a bar with rows of bottles in front of etched mirrors and chromium stools with red leather seats and a white-coated steward shaking cocktails. Fine! he told me. That was just what he wanted to see.
It was a bar like a thousand others. There was too much chromium and too much glass and too many tile pictures, and more liquor than a man could drink with a year’s income. The steward had the bored look of a man who has shaken too many cocktails, and the guests were as sad or as gay as their counterparts in twenty other cities.
We hoisted ourselves on to the high stools at the bar, and the steward came in his own time to take our orders. I asked for a whisky. Peppino thought a moment, then ordered the same. The steward gave him a sidelong grin, then asked him a question in dialect.
Peppino flushed and spat out an angry reply. The steward shrugged and sidled away to his shelves.
Peppino swung round to face me. His eyes were blazing.
“You know what he said to me, Mauro?”
“What?”
“He asked me where I had picked you up and whether I expected a good profit on the night!”
I stifled a grin.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that you were my friend and that he was a…”
The word he used was pure Neapolitan. It signified a very dirty fellow indeed.
“Good for you, Peppino. Now let’s forget him and enjoy the evening.”
The steward brought the drinks. I paid for them. He glared when I omitted the ritual tip. When he had left us, we toasted one another and sipped a moment or two in silence, savouring the good, golden liquor which had cost a week’s wages for Neapolitan workmen.
Then Peppino put it to me, so blandly that it took me unawares:
“We are different, aren’t we, Mauro?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He nodded soberly.
“I think you do, Mauro. And I ask you to tell me the truth, because it is important to me and to many others.”
I needed time to meditate on that one. To make time, I tossed the question back to Peppino.
“First, you must tell me. What makes you believe that you are different? How and in what particulars?”
Peppino jerked his thumb contemptuously at the barman.
“This, for one! You walk in here, or another from Rome or Venice—he bows and smiles and calls you Signore! For me, it is as you saw. I know I talk like a Neapolitan. I know I look like one. But that is a thing for pride, not for laughter or contempt. Perhaps it is something I do not know about? Something you can explain to me? We are friends. You need not be afraid of offending me.”
And there it was again, leaning its elbows on the bar and grinning at us—the old, cockeyed dragon: culture pattern, stage of evolution, racial characteristics. His names are legion, but he himself is a very familiar monster—fear!
I ordered two more whiskies and tried to explain him to Peppino.
“The first thing you must understand, Peppino, is that we are all different, one from another. This one is tall, that one is short and round like a barrel. This one is blonde, the other is dark. Our tongues are different and our tastes in women, wine and funerals. It solves nothing to say there are no differences. There are many.”
“But they are differences we cannot help or change. I cannot talk like you, nor dress like you, nor even wink at the same girls. Sure, but why insult one another about it?”
“People who insult one another, Peppino, are generally ill-bred and impolite.”
“No!” He was very definite about it. He laid his whisky carefully on the bar counter so that his hands would be free to expound the argument. “No, Mauro, if it were only that, it would not matter. It is not only the ill-bred and the impolite. It is all the others—the good folk, the Signori, the people who have their photographs in the papers.” He leaned forward and tapped my knee. “You know what happens when the men of Naples go to the American Consulate here to ask for information about immigration. They can’t get in. They crowd around outside and no one takes any notice of them. I know. I went there, myself. Is that good? Is that polite? Or does it mean that the man who sits inside is a Superior Being and we are just annoying animals.”
I tried to parry the question with a smile.
“It probably means he just can’t cope with so many applicants, Peppino.”
“Then why not say so? Why not be orderly and polite about it? Look, Mauro! You know when somebody doesn’t like you. You know when he laughs up his sleeve at your accent or your way of life. So do we.”
“Sure! Sure!” It was a tale that could go on all night. I tried to take up the thread of my own argument. To state it polemically was easy enough, but to make it intelligible and personal to this dark-eyed, troubled youth, was a different matter altogether. I told him:
“There is a word in English, Peppino, which is called snobbery. It is hard to translate exactly, but it means that a man who has a large house looks down his nose at the man who lives in a little one. It means that if you come from a signorial family, you must be better than the workman who lives in the bassi. It means that a woman who dresses finely and wears expensive clothes despises the maid who helps her make her toilette.”
Peppino nodded. This he could understand. It was a matter of daily experience with him.
“This snobbery is a folly, for it says that one man is better than another because of what he has, not because of what he is. It makes his merit consist in an accident of birth or of fortune, not in the warmth of his heart, the strength of his intellect, the skill of his hands. It is a folly, but a dangerous folly. Because it is based on fear!”
Peppino looked puzzled. The thought was new to him. The signori afraid of a scugnizzo! This he could not see.
“Nonetheless, it is true, Peppino. It is true of individuals, of classes and of nations. If I am rich, it does not please me to be reminded that there are children sleeping in gutters. It makes me uncomfortable. It turns my wine sour. It spoils my rest. If I have good manners and polite friends, it irks me to associate with those who tear bread apart with their hands and make gurgling noises with their soup. If I have two bathrooms, I had rather not know that there are thousands who have not running water. I am insecure in my possession, I am unsure of my right to it, I begin to be afraid. Because I am afraid, I am haughty, tyrannical, opposed to education and reform. Fear makes people selfish. Selfishness breeds jealousy and hate and suspicion. Wars are made by these things. Revolutions are made of them, too.”
Peppino’s next question was shrewdly barbed.
“Is that why it is difficult to enter another country—because we
make gurgling noises with our soup?”
“To a point, yes. There are those who are afraid that to bring in too many people from the South, will be to make a new Naples in their own country. It has happened before. It can happen again.”
“If we were better educated and had better manners and were better artisans, we would be more welcome?”
“Yes.”
“Allora!” He flung out his hands in a despairing gesture and his whisky glass shattered on the floor. The steward sneered and the other guests looked up in startled annoyance. “So, we are back to the beginning. We are different, so different that other folk are not happy to associate with us. To change, we need education. You know yourself, we cannot get it here. We cannot go abroad to get it. So, we stay, without hope!”
And there it was, the harsh dilemma of the South, the bitter tragedy of its simple, ignorant people.
Their own country offers them nothing. The doors of other countries open slowly or not at all.
They are children of the sun, yet they live in the darkness of the bassi. They have the fire of Vesuvius in their blood, but it smoulders dully and the smoke is scarcely seen. They are the inheritors of three thousand years of history, yet they live in the vacuum of Europe, in the place where progress stands still. They exist in a time which is no time, only a breathless syncope in the centuries.
* * *
We walked out of the American bar, struck back again to the Villa Comunale and then turned up-town to the Via Roma. Our destination was the restaurant called, ‘The Three Doves’.
The lights were bright and the food was good and we drank a rich, red Barolo from the vineyards of the North. Because Peppino was a Neapolitan, his sadness didn’t last long; so we were able to relax and laugh and sing when the fiddlers came in to make music for us.
By common consent, we talked no more of problems or politics or the blind alleys of economics. We were a pair of friends out on the town. Each of us offered his own store of anecdote and experience for the leisurely exchanges of the dinner table.
We ate slowly through antipasto, fish—the bright, red scorfano of the outer gulf, chicken alla cacciatora—the plumpest I had seen in weeks, new pears from Sicily and raisins wrapped in orange leaves. When the first bottle of Barolo was finished, we ordered another, as good friends should on big occasions like births and marriage eves.
By the time we had reached the coffee and the Stregas, the rest of the diners had gone and the waiters were clearing away the wreckage of the tables. The fiddlers had left long since, but we sat there in the hazy brightness, chewing the cud of our thoughts and remembering that this would be my last night in Naples, our last evening in one another’s company.
We were full of food and wine and agreeable sentiment. Peppino was sure my book would sell a million copies and I was sure the next twelve months would see him and the senior boys riding the boundaries in Queensland or steaming past the Statue of Liberty.
We didn’t believe it, either of us. We were building our little castle of illusions to take our minds off the realities that waited, twenty yards away from the glass doors of the restaurant of The Three Doves.
Suddenly Peppino looked up at me, half-smiling, half-shamefaced:
“You know what I should like to do now, Mauro?”
“What?”
“I should like to drink another Strega and another. Then I should like to use the telephone there and arrange for a girl to attend me in the big house of appointment on the Vomero.”
I knew how he felt. I felt it myself. But I had a home to go to and a love to welcome me back. Nonetheless I asked him:
“Why?”
“Why, Mauro? Because I am lonely and afraid. Because life is long and for me, as for so many others, there is so little hope in it. A man must forget sometimes. Do you blame me?”
I had too little faith in my own courage to blame him for anything. He was lonely. Naples is a lonely, brutal city. He was afraid—of the blank future and the loveless nights. Blame him? Not I.
I pointed at the rows of bottles round the wall and then at the telephone. I took the wallet out of my pocket and laid it on the table between us.
“There’s all the Strega you want. There’s the telephone. There is money in the wallet. What now?”
He looked at me oddly. Then he grinned and pushed the wallet back to me. He asked quizzically:
“And tomorrow, Mauro?”
I shrugged and grinned and refused the challenge.
“Tomorrow is your affair, not mine.”
He nodded soberly. He looked down at his hands, then back at me. After a moment, he spoke:
“Then, Mauro, let me tell you about my tomorrow. I will wake and feel ashamed of myself and know that I am less a man than I want to be, and that I am two steps nearer the street from which I came.”
“And so?”
The light was golden on the Strega bottles and the wallet still lay on the table between us. Peppino pushed back his chair.
“So, Mauro, you will walk back with me to the House of the Urchins and we will say goodnight and goodbye, and when you write your book, you will say that I was your friend, Va meglio così, non è vero?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
It was better this way, as he said. Better for him, better for me. Better for all the world to know how love could pluck a boy from the gutter and make him more a man than many who have slept in white sheets every night of their lives.
We stood up together. I paid the bill and together we walked into the moon-bright, moon-cold city, settling now to sleep in the stink of its ancient sins.
ENVOI
NOW I am come to the end of my book, which is the book of the Urchins of Naples.
I have written it with love, with indignation, and often with terror.
I have written it for the children who have no voice, for the dead who are voiceless, too.
Good, bad or indifferent, it is one man’s tilt at indifference, injustice and the evil done to the children. It is one man’s homage to the good he has found, and the men in whom it is personified.
If it dies unread, so be it. But let it die from lack of talent in the writer, not from lack of love in the human family, nor from want of belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of Man.
Children of The Sun Page 17