A small woman, completely bloated, like a dying bird, her black hair cascading over a hunchback, and with a lemon-colored face, dominated by a large, pointed nose that hung over a harelip, was combing her hair in front of a fragment of mirror, holding some hairpins between her teeth. She smiled, seeing me, and said, “Nu minuto—just a minute.” My happiness at seeing such a smile in such a place led me to reflect for a moment whether it was fitting or not to address her as “signora.” She was only an enormous flea, but what grace and kindness animated her tiny eyes. “Signora,” I said, approaching rapidly, and I mentioned the name of Dr. De Luca, the director of the clinic for the poor of the Granili, who had sent me to her so that she could show me around a bit. “Nu minuto … if you will be so kind as to oblige me,” she repeated, continuing to smile and comb her hair, and I noticed then that, behind the rattle of catarrh, her voice was sweet. I think it was that sensation, unconsciously perceived, that somewhat restored my courage. I leaned against the door, waiting for that creature to finish combing her hair, and meanwhile I glanced at the coffee roasters. The smoke had thinned and in that sudden gray they appeared even paler. They murmured a few words, in which the name of Signora Lo Savio figured, with a silent laugh, full of disdain, and I was disturbed by what I thought were the reasons for that hostility. Signora Lo Savio, in the doorway of her home, was finishing with her hair, with a certain girlish delay, as if it were May and she were thinking of her love, when a child, hands in pockets, hair straight on his head, with a bold yet dark expression, approached. He proceeded, with an imperceptible hesitation, toward the center of the room, and went to sit on the bed platform (I never saw, in this great structure, a made bed, only mattresses spread out or piled up, at most with a covering thrown on top). Once seated, and swinging his thin legs, he began to sing softly: “E ce steva ’na vota ’na reggina, che teneva i capille anella anella—Once upon a time there was a queen who had curly curly hair,” in a toneless voice. He broke off suddenly to speak to Signora Lo Savio—“Signora, do you have a little bread?”—and from this I understood that she wasn’t his relative. While Signora Lo Savio, with the last hairpin in her mouth, answered something, I approached the child and asked him his name. He answered, “Luigino.” I asked other questions and he didn’t respond at all. On his whole face appeared an ambiguous, disdainful smile, which contrasted bizarrely with the dead, absent expression of his eyes. Feeling embarrassed, as if his smile, mysteriously mature, already the smile not of a child but of a man, and of a man accustomed to dealing only with prostitutes, contained a judgment, an atrocious evaluation of my person, I moved a few steps away. And here was Signora Lo Savio approaching with the bread, which the boy began to eat. “That poor child,” she now said, “has neither father nor mother. He’s been here since ’46, with a cousin of mine, next door. On top of that, he’s also blind.”
The boy was silent for a moment, and in that moment the hands that clutched the bread slid down to his knees. In some way he was observing me. “I see a little; and now I see a shadow lowering its head. Are you going, signora?”
I answered yes, after a few moments, and set off with Signora Lo Savio.
“I’d come with you but I’m waiting for a friend,” he continued, with a new intonation, in which the boldness of the lie, necessary to save him, died in a kind of stunned piety, a tender warmth. He had raised his head for a moment and, laying it back down on the straw, he began singing again, “E ’na barca arrivaie alla marina—and a boat arrived at the port” in a faint voice and with a steadiness that must have had the purpose, every morning, of cajoling him again to sleep.
Coming out with my guide, I sought in my confused mind reasons that would allow me to immediately abandon that place, and reach the square and the first bus or tram stop. It seemed to me that, as soon as I was out of there, I would shout and run to hug the first people I encountered. I looked at Signora Lo Savio, but my eyes kept moving away from her. I didn’t quite know where to place them. In the light of the few lamps, I saw her better: queen of the house of the dead, a crushed figure, bloated, horrendous, the fruit, in her turn, of profoundly defective creatures, and yet something regal remained in her: a confidence in the way she moved and spoke, and something else, as well—a vivid flash in the depths of her mouse-like eyes, in which one could surely perceive, along with the knowledge of evil and its extent, all the human pleasure needed to confront it. Behind that deplorable forehead, a measure of hope existed. Having realized that I was stumbling as I walked, she hurried to guide my elbow with her hand, but without touching it. This persistence of humility amid such unremitting courage, this dignity in keeping her distance from those whom she considered saved, imposed on me a certain calm, and I said to myself that I had no right to appear weak. We walked along the corridor of the first floor, toward the horse stairs, leading to the ground floor, which, according to my guide, was the most important thing. In a few words, she explained to me the reason for the aversion of a good part of the female population of the place. It had begun when Signora Lo Savio decided to devote herself to the clinic, and was then suspected of enjoying the partiality of the director, and of gaining immediate advantages from her activity, like medicines, that she would resell, food packages from the local welfare agency, and other things. “Six months ago I abandoned my home and everything,” she confessed simply. “I comb my hair and I come down. Because this is not a home, signora, you see, this is a place of afflictions. Wherever you pass, the walls groan.”
It wasn’t the walls, of course, it was the wind, which crept in between the great doors; the big structure really seemed to be shuddering continuously, almost imperceptibly, as if from an internal landslide, from an anguish and dissolution of all the quasi-human material that composed it. Now the walls appeared wet, corroded, all encrustations and dark drips. We met two children going up, chasing each other with obscene gestures. A woman came down from the second floor, carrying a green bottle wrapped in a handkerchief, as if it were a child, and with her other hand pressing her cheek, from which a kind of lump of reddish fungus protruded, perhaps caused by the dampness. Suddenly, we heard a breathless, very strange voice singing a sacred hymn in which the goodness of existence was praised. “That’s the maestro,” said Signora Lo Savio, “a holy man, a refined person. He’s had asthma for twenty-five years, and he can’t work anymore. But when he feels better, he always talks about God.”
I thought that the door she pushed was that of the asthmatic. We were on the ground floor, and the darkness and the silence were slightly more intense than before, broken only by the vague gray glow that appeared in the distance, three hundred meters away, where the corridor ended, and by the imperceptible lamps that followed one another like fireflies attached to the ceiling. Here and there, doors, doors, doors, but made of boards, or metal sheets, or sometimes even pieces of cardboard or faded curtains.
“May I?”
“Please.”
Strange room. A woman in the background, enormous and strong, dressed in black, upright behind a table, was smoking a butt. On the table stood an empty bottle and a wooden spoon. Behind the woman, like a curtain, was an immense window, with some boards nailed to it and crisscrossed by stakes, in such a way as to impede the passage of the slightest bit of light or air. In this room, that is, 258B, there was a persistent odor of feces, collected in hidden chamber pots, the same that we found in almost all these rooms. These chamber pots must have been placed behind partitions composed of packing paper or shreds of blankets, and no more than a meter high, which divided the space into two or three lodgings. The woman had immediately looked at my hands, with a dark eye, made shifty by a squint, and seeing that they were empty displayed an expression of disappointment. Because the ladies of the Neapolitan aristocracy from time to time send packages, the stranger who arrives here empty-handed can be considered only an enemy or a lunatic. I understood this slowly.
“This lady,” Signora Lo Savio said, “has come to see how you are. She can be
useful to you. Talk to her, talk, my dear.”
That mean, squinting gaze fell on me still, descending down my neck like a sticky liquid. Then, overcoming the weight and weariness of the enormous flesh that enfolded her, Maria De Angelis said, in a whining, unpleasant voice that was as if charged with disgust but also clouded by a deep sleep: “Help us.”
At the foot of a mattress on the floor, there were some crusts of bread, and amid these, barely moving, like dust balls, three long sewer rats were gnawing on the bread. The woman’s voice was so normal, in its weary disgust, and the scene so tranquil, and those three animals appeared so sure of being able to gnaw on those crusts of bread, that I had the impression that I was dreaming, or at least contemplating a drawing, of a horrendous truthfulness, that had mesmerized me to the point of making me confuse a representation with life itself. I knew that those animals would soon go back into their hole, as in fact, after a few moments, they did, but now the whole room was infected by them, along with the woman in black, and Signora Lo Savio and I myself: it seemed to me that we partook of their dark nature. Meanwhile from behind a curtain came a youth in evening dress, adjusting his tie, his face covered by pustules, and skin, under those brown spots, of a pale green. He had a violin in his hand, and just touched it with his old fingers.
“My son, a street musician,” the mother introduced him.
“Do you earn something?”
“Depends.”
“Do you have other children?” I said to the mother.
“With this one, seven. Antonio, boot cleaner; Giuseppe, porter; this one who plays; one mentally ill; the others unemployed.”
“And your husband?”
She didn’t answer.
As we went out, a youth dressed almost like a woman, with a shawl over his shoulders and a delicate appearance, greeted me, bowing to the floor. “Oh, Ma,” I heard him say as he entered the house, turning to the woman, “today I saw a little house near the sea, there was lemon verbena growing, I’d like to rent it.” He said other confused words, then he returned to the doorway, making faces, with a thoughtful air.
Maestro Cutolo’s house was a few meters farther on, opposite that of the lunatic, and I realized why that good man sang. A benefactor who hadn’t wanted to give his name had made a gift to the teacher, providing some glass panes that had been installed in the high window. Thus flooded with the pale winter light, the big room appeared clean and in a certain way cheerful, an impression that wasn’t later refuted. Sitting on the floor in the sun, two lovely children were playing; they were almost naked, with black slanting eyes and serious smiles. Signor Cutolo, who opened the door, was in his underwear, and he apologized profusely for this detail. We had pleasantly surprised him with our visit, and he hadn’t had time to straighten himself. He was a man still young, around forty, of medium height, but so slender as to seem an adolescent. His hair was blond, his eyes blue, his face hollow and flooded by a smile whose depths, like the bottom of a shallow pool, were an inconsolable sadness. “I’m happy,” he declared to us immediately, “because my heart is full of holy obedience to God’s wishes.”
“Do you feel better today?” my guide asked. “We overheard you singing.”
“Thanks to the holy indulgence of God to his poor servant, yes,” he answered politely, breathless.
I looked at him, and that face seemed to remind me of another, like an old image veiled by a new one. Suddenly, I found again the man he had been twenty years earlier, when I lived in a building in the Naples port zone which at that time was full of commerce, flags, sails, cargoes, and the joy of money. He, Cutolo, was an office boy at the Compagnia di Navigazione Garibaldi, on the third floor. He hurried to church whenever he could; he was from a respectable family and had an accountant’s diploma.
“How ever did you get here?”
“During the war, my home was destroyed. My father died, God bless his soul, and it was left to me to support my mother and two sisters. The holy will of God decided that this sacrifice would not last long. God called my mother to him; one sister married a soldier, and now is in Avellino; another lives in Sezione Avvocata, with a widow. I, thank God, now I have my little home, my children, a good wife, I can’t complain. The clinic gives me medicines.”
“What does your wife do?”
“Maid, with a devout family.”
His eyes sunken by the effort to breathe, he looked at me and smiled.
“I eat medicine, I eat it. I’m ashamed of taking such great advantage of Dr. De Luca’s kindness.”
He called the children, who approached slowly, and held them close by his side, with a flash of inexpressible pride. They were naked, and their beautiful faces, their gazes, were healthy and yet sad. I imagined their mother, a strong peasant, a servant.
“For the Holy Year I would have liked another one, my wife didn’t obey,” he said with sweet vanity. “She refused the Creator Spirit who animates the world.”
The two brothers stared first at me, then at him, with thoughtful faces, biting their dirty nails.
“I love children so much, there would be so much to do here,” Cutolo continued, with anxious sadness, looking toward the door. “In this house there must be at least eight hundred of these kids, but they are unacquainted with holy obedience: unfortunately they haven’t been brought up well. Sometimes I call them, I’d like to teach them the principles of our holy religion, some inspirational songs, like this, to improve them. But they refuse, they always refuse.”
As he spoke, the heads of some individuals between seven and ten years of age peeked in through the door, which had been left open. A dozen attentive eyes, some red and half closed, some full of an animal greed, rolled in deep sockets. One of them, who had a particularly strong, intelligent face, clutched something in his hand. Suddenly, one of the little Cutolo brothers began to shout and jump up and down like a lunatic, holding one foot in his hand: “Oi ma,’ Oi ma.’” He had been hit with a stone, and, at the same time, as silently as they had appeared, those four or five figures disappeared.
The teacher, after a moment of hesitation, perhaps of shame, began to comfort his son, urging him to forgive those rascals who had not had the advantage of a Christian education. Coming out the door, I saw the boys, who had stopped in the darkness, twenty meters on, breathing hard, like the teacher, with the same expression of ineffable joy in their eyes.
Although I had seen only these few things, it was late. In the city and elsewhere, in the whole world, it was time for people to go home. Even here, in this land of night, some were returning, groping their way from the end of the corridor, tramps, beggars, musicians, faceless men and women. In a few homes someone was cooking: smoke, which had the density of a blue body, escaped from some doors, yellow flames could be glimpsed inside, the black faces of people squatting, holding a bowl on their knees. In other rooms, instead, everything was motionless, as if life had become petrified; men still in bed turned under gray blankets, women were absorbed in combing their hair, in the enchanted slow motion of those who do not know what will be, afterward, the other occupation of their day. The entire ground floor, and the first floor to which we were ascending, were in these conditions of depressed inertia. One expected nothing, and no one. On the second and third floors, Signora Lo Savio explained to me, life assumed instead a human aspect, resumed a rhythm that might in some way resemble that of a normal city. The women made the beds in the morning, they swept, dusted, tidied themselves and the children, many of whom were sent off, with real black smocks and blue ties, to a school run by the nuns. A number of the men had jobs. They’d acquired radios and had those sewage pipes constructed, which, set up on the third floor, afflicted the inhabitants on the lower floors with their stink and stained their windows.
While we went up, enjoying a certain light of day that began to pour down from the staircase, and breathing a less oppressive air, we were joined by a group of boys and girls in their black smocks, with bows and schoolbags, who were returning from scho
ol. Through an open door, a radio was broadcasting. We heard a clear male voice, the announcer of Radio Roma, utter: “And now, dear listeners,” and shortly afterward the voice of a singer modulated the first notes of Passion. As in all Naples, here, too, the volume was kept very high, partly out of eagerness for the sound, a characteristic of this population, but also out of the completely bourgeois pleasure of being able to demonstrate to the neighbors that one is well off and can afford the luxury of a powerful gadget.
We didn’t go into any of these homes: the families were fairly ordinary, the same you would meet on the top floors of old apartment buildings in the city. Many of the windows had been supplied with glass panes, but where they remained closed up, electric lights hung from the ceiling—lights that were definitely stronger than those on the first floors. Here one could see clearly, and, Signora Lo Savio told me, the third floor was ablaze with lights, even near the beds, which had their sheets; there were closets with regular hooks for clothes, you could see polished tables with doilies, artificial flowers, portraits, and occasionally under the wall clocks, couches. Some of the men in these families had well-paid jobs; they were white-collar employees, clerks in banks or salesclerks, good people, who were still dignified and calm, and, having lost their home after a collapse or an evacuation, and unable to find another right away, had adapted to living at the Granili, without giving up their decorum, the product of an honored tradition. They avoided any contact with the inhabitants of the first floors, demonstrating toward their degradation a severity not without compassion, and mixed with satisfaction for their own prosperity, which they attributed to a virtuous life, having no doubt with regard to its stability. At times, owing to an absolutely random circumstance, a chance event, which would soon, just as randomly, be over, like unemployment, or an illness, it happened that one of these good citizens was forced to give up his lodging, for a small sum, to a more fortunate family head, and adapt to settling with his family on a lower floor, though he was quite sure that in just a short time he would move back up to the third floor, or even leave the Granili. That man, that family, never returned to the surface, nor did they get out of there entirely, although in the first days it had seemed possible. The children, once tidy and serene, in that darkness became covered with insects and their faces grew graver and paler, the girls went with married men, the men got sick. No one rose again, from down there. It wasn’t easy to climb back up those stairs that appeared so flat and accessible. There was something that called, from down there, and those who began to descend were lost, but they didn’t realize it until the end.
Neapolitan Chronicles Page 8