Neapolitan Chronicles

by Anna Maria Ortese

  To look for their mothers would be insanity. Every so often one would dash out from behind the wheel of a carriage and, screaming at the top of her lungs, grab a child by the wrist and drag him into a lair from which emanated shouts and cries. There you might see a comb brandished, or an iron washbasin on a chair into which the unfortunate lad was forced to plunge his pitiful face.

  In contrast to the savage cruelty of the alleys was the sweetness on the faces of the Madonnas with their infant Christs, of the Virgins and Martyrs, who appeared in almost every shop in San Biagio dei Librai, bent over a gilded cradle decorated with flowers and veiled with lace, not a hint of which existed in reality. It didn’t take much to understand that passions here were cultish in nature and precisely for this reason had deteriorated into vice and folly; in the end, a race devoid of all logic and reason had latched on to this shapeless tumult of feelings, and humankind was now a shadow of itself, weak, neurotic, resigned to fear and impudent joy. Amorphous poverty, silent as a spider, unraveling and then reweaving in its fashion those wretched fabrics, entangling the lowest levels of the populace, which here reigned supreme. It was extraordinary to think how, instead of declining or stagnating, the population grew and, increasing, became ever more lifeless, causing drastic confusion for the local government’s convictions, while the hearts of the clergy were swollen with a strange pride and even stranger hope. Here Naples was not bathed by the sea. I was sure that no one had ever seen this place or remembered it. In this dark pit only the fire of sexuality burned bright under an eerie black sky.

  It was noon, and on each of the past few days it had rained precisely at that hour; accordingly, I watched the sky cover over with a layer of gauze that immediately caused the shadows of the buildings to fade, along with the already tenuous shadows of the people. Some women were walking ahead of me, preceded by a pair of very tall priests, their waxen hands grasping red leather books, who soon disappeared down an arcade with a rustle of cassocks. The women held in their hands small white packages, and every so often glanced inside them, sighing and chatting. When they arrived in front of the Church of Sant’Angelo a Nilo, they crossed themselves, then entered a courtyard opposite.

  O Magnum Pietatis Opus was written across the pediment of the building at the far end of the courtyard. The lifeless gray façade resembled those of the hospitals and nursing homes in the neighborhoods of Naples. But behind this one, instead of hospital beds, there was the long line of windows of the Monte dei Pegni pawnshop, a “great charity operation” run by the Bank of Naples.

  When I arrived on the third floor of the building, before one of the most majestic doors I have ever seen, groups of poor people were already there, sitting on the stairs or on their packages: pregnant women, old women, sick women, those who could no longer stand and who had begged a relative or a friend to hold their place in line. Making my way cautiously amid those bodies, I pushed open the door and found myself in an immense room with a very high ceiling, lit by two large sets of windows, like wings, on either side, and above each of those windows was another large, square, hermetically sealed window. Long spider-webs, like thin rags, were suspended in midair.

  It was the room designated for dealing in precious objects.

  A vast crowd, only nominally in a line, was clamoring in front of the windows for “New Pledges.” The commotion was due to the fact that on that very morning an order had come down to give as little as possible as a loan against each pawn. Some people, their faces pale as lemons and framed by frightful permanents, turned the gray pawn tickets over and over in their hands with an air of disappointment. A very large old woman, all stomach, with bloodshot eyes, wept ostentatiously as she kissed and rekissed a chain before parting with it. Other women, and a few thin-faced men, waited calmly on a black bench set against the wall. Children wearing only shirts sat on the floor and played.

  “Nunzia Apicella!” a clerk shouted from a distance, toward the small crowd redeeming their pledges. “Aspasia De Fonzo!”

  Names were called by the minute but were drowned out by the fervent chatter of people commenting on the new proviso, unable to resign themselves to it. A guard with a black mustache and big, languid eyes, who wore his uniform as if it were a bathrobe, paced up and down, indifferent and bored, every so often making a show of pushing people back into orderly lines. He was speaking to someone or other when the grand door to the hall opened abruptly, and in walked a red-haired woman of around forty, dressed in black, dragging two extraordinarily pale children behind her. That unhappy woman, who was later revealed to be one Antonietta De Liguoro, zagrellara, or haberdasher, had learned on the street that the bank where she was heading to pawn a chain was closing early that day and wouldn’t let her in. With her flushed red face and her blue eyes nearly out of their sockets, she begged everyone to do her a favor since she needed to pawn her chain before closing so that her husband could depart for Turin where their oldest son was gravely ill. Nothing could calm her. Even when she had been assured that she could certainly get in line, she continued to sob and cry:

  “Mamma del Carmine, Mother of God, help me.”

  Many of the women, forgetting their own great sorrow of moments earlier, took up her cause. Those farther away called out heartfelt messages of encouragement and blessings. Those nearer touched her shoulders and hands, used their own hairpins to fix her hair, not to mention the attention showered on the two children, the prolonged and theatrical cries of “Mamma’s darlings.” The two creatures, who were perhaps three and four, skinny and pale as worms, wore on their waxen faces little smiles so wizened and cynical that it was a marvel to see, and every once in a while they gave their frenzied mother the once-over with a mischievous and questioning air. A kind of uprising immediately transported the woman, whose trials and tribulations everyone now knew, up to the window, leapfrogging the ferocious bureaucracy of waiting one’s turn. And here is the mesmerizing conversation I overheard:

  Clerk (after having examined the chain, dryly): Three thousand eight hundred lire.

  Zagrellara: Facìte quattromila, sì—Come on, make it four thousand, won’t you?

  Clerk: Take it or leave it, my dear.

  Zagrellara: But my husband’s got to take the train, I swear it, we have a sick son as well as these two little rascals ... do it for love of the Madonna!

  Clerk (very calmly): Three thousand eight hundred ... up to you ... (and turning to another clerk): Amedeo, ask Salvatore, purtasse n’atu cafè—bring me another cup of coffee, will you? ... No sugar.

  Her eyes still bloodshot, but now perfectly dry, Antonietta De Liguoro retraced her steps of moments earlier, proudly ignoring, or perhaps truly not seeing because of her grief, those who had earlier rallied around her with their Christian pity. She seemed not even to notice the two children following behind her, their little hands gripping her dress.

  “That one there,” the guard said to a young man who looked like a student, a red briefcase under his arm with the edge of a towel sticking out, “has been talking about her husband taking a train to Turin for a year. Nun tene nisciuno—there’s no one in Turin, no husband, either. Nun vo’ ’a fila ... e i’ nun ’a dico niente—she don’t want to wait in line, and I won’t say anything.” His gaze followed the cunning zagrellara, who, after pausing briefly at the cashier’s desk, was now hurrying toward the door with the money and a gray pawn ticket pressed tightly to her chest. Miserable and compassionate, the crowd forgot itself in order to attend to the presumed victim with words of comfort and indignation in the face of an age-old injustice that had by now seeped into everyone. “Jesus Christ will console her ... Mamma del Carmine will help her ... God rubs salt in the wound,” and stares of deep hatred were aimed at the bank windows and at the ceiling, where all could see the local authorities and the government promenading among the spiderwebs.

  Meanwhile, a clerk’s indifferent voice had resumed calling out: “Di Vincenzo, Maria; Fusco, Addolorata ... ; Della Morte, Carmela ...”

 
All of a sudden, there was a great silence, then a murmur of astonishment, of childish surprise, ran through the three lines waiting in front of the New Pledges windows.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked the clerk, peering out his window, but no one paid any attention. Somehow or other, a brown butterfly with a profusion of tiny gold stripes on its wings and back had entered through the door leading to the stairs and was flying over that melee of heads, hunched shoulders, and anxious stares; now it fluttered ... rose up ... dove down ... happy ... careless, never making up its mind to land in one place.

  “Oh! ... Oh! ... Oh! ...” murmured the crowd.

  “O’ bbi lloco ’o ciardino!—There, look at the garden!” a woman said to her newborn, who was crying softly, his head on her shoulder. Near the door an old crippled woman, her mouth full of bread, was singing.

  THE INVOLUNTARY CITY

  One of the things to see in Naples—after the requisite visits to the excavations of Pompeii, to the dormant Solfatara volcano, and, if there is time, the Vesuvian crater—is the building known as Granili III and IV* in the coastal neighborhood that connects the port to the first suburbs on Vesuvius. It is around three hundred meters long, between fifteen and twenty meters wide, and a lot taller. To someone who sees it unexpectedly, getting off one of the small trams operating along the workers’ routes, it looks like a hill or a bald mountain, invaded by termites, which traverse it with no sound or sign that reveals a particular purpose. In the past, the walls were a dark red, which still emerges, here and there, amid vast patches of yellow and dabs of an equivocal green. I could count a hundred and seventy-four openings, the majority of them barred, on the single façade which is of an unprecedented width and height for modern taste; some terraces; and, at the back of the building, eight sewage pipes that, situated on the third floor, let their slow waters flow along the silent wall. There are three floors, plus a ground floor, half hidden in the earth and protected by a ditch, and they contain three hundred and forty-eight rooms, all equally high and large, distributed with perfect regularity to the right and left of four corridors, one per floor, whose total length is one kilometer two hundred meters. Every corridor is illuminated by no more than twenty-eight lamps, each with five candlepower. The width of each corridor is from seven to eight meters, and so the word “corridor” designates, more than anything else, four streets of an ordinary city neighborhood, elevated like the floors of a bus, and without any sky. Especially for the ground floor and the two floors above it, the light of the sun is represented by those twenty-eight electric lamps, which here shine weakly both day and night.

  On the two sides of each corridor eighty-six doors of private dwellings open, forty-three on the right, forty-three on the left (plus that of a bathroom), marked by a series of numbers that go from one to three hundred and forty-eight. In each of these spaces between one and five families live, with an average of three families per room. The total number of inhabitants of this dwelling is three thousand people, divided into five hundred and seventy families, with an average of six people per family. When three, four, or five families live in the same space, it reaches a density of twenty-five or thirty inhabitants per room.

  Having stated in summary fashion some facts about the structure and population of this Neapolitan neighborhood, one realizes that one has expressed almost nothing. Every day, in a thousand expert offices in all the cities and countries of the globe, perfect machines line up numbers and sums of statistics, intended to precisely describe how and in what measure the economic, political, and moral life of every single community and nation originates, grows, and dissolves. Other data, of an almost astral depth, refer instead to the life and nature of ancient peoples, their system of rule, triumphs, civilization, and demise; or, skipping over every historical interest dear to our hearts, address themselves to life or the probability of life on the planets that shine in space. Granili III and IV, one of the most evocative phenomena in the world, and like Southern Italy, dead to the progress of time, should therefore be, rather than described with ingenuous figures by this or that obscure reporter, visited carefully, in all its deformities and absurd horror, by groups of economists, jurists, doctors. Special commissions could go and count the number of living and dead, and of the former and the latter examine the reasons that led them there or kept them there or carried them away, because Granili III and IV is not only what could be called a temporary settlement of homeless people but, rather, the demonstration, in clinical and legal terms, of the fall of a race. According to the most charitable judgment, only a profoundly diseased human system could tolerate, as Naples tolerates, without being disturbed, the putrefaction of one of its limbs, because this, and no other, is the sign under which the institution of the Granili lives and thrives. To seek in Naples the nadir of Naples no longer occurs to anyone after a visit to the Bourbon barracks. Here the barometers no longer display any measure; compasses go crazy. The men you meet can’t do you any harm: ghosts from a life in which wind and sun existed—these good things they no longer remember. They creep or climb or stagger: that is their way of moving. They speak very little; they are no longer Neapolitans, or anything else. A committee of priests and American scholars, which, days ago, boldly crossed the threshold of that melancholy dwelling, quickly turned back, with incoherent words and looks.

  I had marked on a box of matches, which was later useful for other reasons, the name of Signora Antonia Lo Savio. One morning in November, with no other direction, I crossed the threshold of the grand entrance that opens on the right side of Granili III and IV. The porter, sitting behind a large black caldron in which clothes were boiling, examined me coldly, and when she told me that she didn’t know who this Lo Savio was, and that I should go and ask on the first floor, I felt the temptation to put it all off to another day. It was a violent temptation, like nausea in the face of surgery. Behind me, in the area in front of the building, a dozen children were playing, almost without speaking, throwing stones. Some, seeing me, had stopped playing, and approached silently. In front of me, I saw the ground-floor corridor, extending for three hundred meters, but at that moment it seemed an incalculable distance. In the center and toward the end of this conduit some shadows moved, without any precision, like molecules in a beam of light; some small fires gleamed; from behind one of the doors came a persistent, harsh lullaby. Gusts of a bitter odor, mainly of toilets, continually reached the threshold, mixed with the darker smell of dampness. It seemed impossible to advance ten meters into that tunnel without fainting. Taking a few steps, I saw a dim light to my right, and discovered one of those stairways with very wide steps, no higher than a finger, which once allowed horses, kept on the ground floor, to reach the first floor with their burdens. Maybe it was less cold than I had feared, but the darkness was almost absolute. I risked stumbling, and I lighted a match, but immediately extinguished it: here were some very small lamps, inside which reddish wires quivered and writhed continuously. In this glimmer, the first-floor corridor took shape.

  Toward the end, someone was roasting coffee, adding burned beans to the smell of urine and dampness. The smoke, however, made one’s eyes tear, and put a pinker halo around the lights, tiny as pins. I passed a group of children, seeing them only when they were close to me; they were playing ring-around-the-rosy, holding one another by the hand but at a distance, and throwing back their disheveled heads, with a pleasure stronger than that of a normal game. I grazed locks of hard hair, as if pasted, and arms whose flesh was cold. Finally I saw the woman who was roasting the coffee, sitting in the doorway of her home. Inside there was a disorder and a savage glow, from an unexpected ray of sunlight that fell from the window (open at the back of the building), amid pots and rags, onto the mattresses. There was also some blood. The woman, dark and lean, was sitting on a chair that had lost its straw seat, and, with a kind of pride, kept turning the wooden handle of the iron cylinder, from whose little door rose a cloud of smoke, surrounding her head. Three or four other girls, in
black dresses open over white chests, stood near her, and followed with bright, serious eyes the dance of the beans in the cylinder. Seeing me, they moved aside, and the woman stopped bouncing the cylinder on the fire, which for a moment almost ceased to provide any light. The name Antonia Lo Savio left them silent. I realized later, during subsequent visits, that that silence, rather than indicating puzzlement or indecision, manifested curiosity and a more sinister, if weak, feeling: the desire to drag, for a moment, into the obscurity in which they dominated, the stranger who was obviously habituated to light. At least, during my visits, many of these people seemed to enjoy not answering me or directing me to places from which I would not easily have been able to get out. I was about to keep going, making an effort to appear calm, when one of the girls, turning toward a door, said slowly in dialect, without looking at me: “Vidite lloco—You’re looking at the place.”