“Signora, excuse me,” a kind of maîtresse in a dressing gown was saying, standing in front of the door of one of these homes, with a cup in her hand and a smile in her bluish eyes. “I need some salt. I just put in the pasta, and I realized we don’t have any.”
Two twenty-year-old youths went back into their home, discussing the soccer game.
An old pensioner, sitting on a chair in front of his door, was reading Il Mattino.
Clear voices of children could be heard shouting over their soup.
In another apartment, two girls, as tall as horses, in blue sweaters, their faces powdered, were intently reading an illustrated weekly in front of the radio. Più forte ’e ’na catena—Stronger than a chain, cried the radio, as in all the neighborhoods of monarchic, scheming Naples, on Sundays, around one o’clock, when the ancient, familiar odor of ragù spreads through the orderly, bright rooms, full of relatives and youths returning from Mass.
We were, or at least I was, in that state of mind between anguish and relief of someone who, coming out of a prison, returns to light, air, and, in some sense, a kind of sweet human freedom, a certain standard of life, when a confused and sorrowful sound, whose meaning couldn’t be clearly perceived, and which wavered between suffering and a sort of tortured relief, attracted our attention. That sound, a combination of footsteps and sobbing, rose from one of the lower floors, through the deep stairwell, which in the meantime we had again approached. The cheerful voice of the Radio Roma announcer wasn’t enough to muffle it, nor was the almost serene atmosphere of the third floor. Signora Lo Savio, after a moment of reflection, had begun to go rapidly down the stairs, without paying any attention to me, and I followed. At the second floor, with night returning, those sounds and voices were clearer: footsteps of men and women, not many, but certainly a good number, who were walking, carrying something, and tranquil voices that mourned or consoled. The woman whose face was covered by a fungus passed in front of us, speaking softly to a fat woman, and saying, “Now it’s day, for that creature, now he’ll see God!” to which the other assented placidly, drying her eyes with a rag. Other people looked out, motionless, from the doors on the corridor, commenting on the event in their dialect: “Pazzianno è fernuto—while he was playing he died.” On the ground floor, finally, we saw what was going on. They were carrying away a certain Antonio Esposito, seven years old, nicknamed Scarpetella, who had died half an hour earlier, of unknown causes, while he was playing with some boys of his own age. Suddenly he had brought his hand to his heart and sat down in a corner. Now they were carrying him to the morgue for verification, and parents and friends were taking advantage of this to improvise a funeral. And it was, understandably, the simplest funeral I’d ever seen. The dead boy wasn’t even in a coffin but in the arms of his mother, who was a yellow thing, somewhere between a fox and a trash bin. The child was half wrapped in a blanket, from which the edges hung down here and there, along with his slender arms. He was fair-haired, with a delicate face, his lips half parted in an expression of wonder, which not even the bandage around his jaws could contain. His calm and his joy, characteristic of those who have left life, were somehow emphasized by a glob of snot under his right nostril which made one think of an abandon and a silence that no one would any longer disturb. Behind them came the father, who, probably owing to some confusion in his mind at this sudden misfortune, was carrying the boy’s shoes. He spoke with the priest, who was near him; he was an obese, apathetic man, making an effort to appear calm, to judge from the way he pulled the lapels of his jacket over his bare chest toward his neck. God had punished them—the year before, too, one had died like that. After the misfortune of Vincenzina they had had no peace. This one seemed sound, in good health. Behind the parents, five or six youths followed, with half-witted looks, all children of the fox and siblings of the dead child, flanked by a group of women who were praying aloud, and this, along with the false sobs of one of the brothers, was the absurd noise that had struck me. How absurd was the composure of the man and the woman, in a city like Naples, where people are constantly performing. All the doors, as on the first floor, now were open, without, however, a word spoken, not a pitiful comment, as would be customary among the lower classes. We also saw Maestro Cutolo, with his children close by his side, wearing an ecstatic expression. “A beautiful creature,” he exclaimed, seeing us, “God, in His infinite goodness, wanted to take him away from all occasions for evil in this life, calling him to Himself. Let us praise His infinite wisdom. Now that little scamp Scarpetella is climbing the trees in Heaven.”
He hadn’t finished speaking when under those black vaults a choked, tortured, horrible cry sounded, as if the person who had produced it couldn’t get free of it. At the same time, a glossy young woman of perhaps twenty, adorned with baubles, came running from the entrance to the corridor, where some light appeared. Tearing herself away from two men who accompanied her and who appeared hesitant, she ran toward the group, and for a moment mingled with it. The funeral paused, like a procession when one of the devout wants to pin an offering of money to the Madonna’s robe. “What’s this! You’re making fun! You’re heartless!” We heard no more.
“Get out!” cried a harsh voice after a moment. It was the mother, who, after the first moment of bewilderment, was trying to tear the dead child from the girl’s embrace. But she, like one demented, held tight to him; practically falling to her knees, out of weakness or for some other reason, she tried to pull him to herself, and since she couldn’t reach his face, as the mother tried to cover it, she embraced his bare, dirty legs, his bare feet.
“Shameless! That girl is shameless,” the father now said to the priest, “she left home without a thought for us. We asked her for help in our need, and she answered that she no longer had parents. Now she’s in a state because of her poor brother.”
“Scarpatella!” the girl called out, with a cry in which tenderness and fear were a single thing, “Don’t fool around, wake up. You called me morning and night, even in sleep. I don’t have anyone, dear heart.” And then out came a great wail.
Now the fox looked at her oldest daughter, with a flash, an indefinable smile, between foolish and bitter, in her shining eyes. “He was always running after her,” she explained, “tap tap, in his little shoes. Now where is she? he asked when she went away.”
“Have mercy,” said the priest, indifferently, “God will have mercy on your poor Antonio, who at this hour stands before Him, with his little sins.” He leaned over to murmur something in the ear of the young woman, who immediately looked up, with a spellbound expression, while she continued to hug to her breast the rigid bundle. She laid this down, with a kiss, in the arms of the woman, and, red in the face but with no more tears, searched in her shiny leather purse, which had slid to the ground, for a large pink bill, and handed it to the mother. She smiled, and the father, too, softened, lowering his head. The child’s mouth had fallen open, and someone adjusted the bandage. Then, with the sad prayers that had made such an impression on us, the procession resumed its tranquil and apparently sorrowful journey, toward the gray arc of light that announced the way out.
After that, I didn’t understand or see anything precise. Signora Lo Savio led me from door to door throughout the whole first floor, and again on the ground floor, where we had forgotten some families. Of the mournful event no one spoke, and I realized that down there no possibility of emotion survived. There was darkness, and nothing else. Silence, swift memories of another life, a sweeter life, nothing else. Not even Signora Lo Savio spoke. She would push on a door politely: “May we?” Some answered, “Come in.” Some didn’t answer at all; then she went in, looking around with her penetrating eyes. Immediately eight, ten, fifteen people came out of the shadows, one rising from a bed, like a dead person who is dreaming, another holding his savage head above a wooden partition for a moment. Women, whose femininity was revealed only by a skirt and hair—more like a crust of dust than a hair style—approached in silence, p
ushing their children in front of them, as if that cursed childhood could protect or give them heart. The men, instead, stayed behind, as if ashamed. Some looked at my shoes, my hands, not daring to raise their eyes to my face. In many families, as in that of Maria De Angelis, there was one who was introduced as mentally ill: “What work do you do?” I asked and he, after a hesitation, trying to smile: “Mentally ill.” “You see!” the women cried, with a kind of triumph, “Jesus Christ wants to test us. Christ will reward those who are good to us!” And they observed Signora Lo Savio and me, anxious to hear a mention of packages. I looked mainly at the children, and realized that they could die suddenly, running around, like Scarpetella. That childhood had nothing childish about it but the number of years. Otherwise, they were little men and women, already knowing everything, the beginning and the end of things, already consumed by vices, by idleness, by the most unendurable poverty, ill in body and twisted in mind, with corrupt or foolish smiles, sly and desolate at the same time. Ninety per cent of them, Signora Lo Savio said to me, already have tuberculosis or are susceptible to it, have rickets, or are infected with syphilis, like their fathers and mothers. They are normally present when their parents copulate, and they imitate it in games. There are no other games here, apart from throwing stones. “I want to show you a little creature,” she said.
She led me to the end of the hall, where, from a faint green light that was visible through a crack, one understood that evening had descended in Naples. There was a door from which came not a sound or a voice. Signora Lo Savio knocked lightly and entered without waiting for an answer, like someone who is at home.
It was a vast, clean, deserted room, somewhere between a cave and a temple. If not for the presence of a tiny lamp, whose light, placed high up, gave more irritation than joy, that place would have made you think of an ancient and forgotten ruin. There was an odor of dampness, stronger and grimmer than elsewhere, filtered by things in decay. A woman still young, and with an ecstatic look, came toward us.
“How is your Nunzia?” asked Signora Lo Savio.
“Come.”
She led us to a cradle made out of a Coca-Cola carton, which looked small and wretched against the background of one of the usual solemn, hermetically barred windows. In that little bed, without any underwear, on a very small pillow, under a hard, crusted man’s jacket, rested what seemed to be a newborn with a bizarrely gentle and adultlike face: a delicate, very white face, illuminated by eyes in which the blue of evening shone, intelligent and sweet, and which moved here and there, observing everything, with an attention greater than what a child of a few months can conceive. Seeing us, those eyes rested on us, on me, rose to the forehead, turned, sought the mother, as if questioning. The mother picked up the jacket with one hand, and we saw a tiny body, the length of a few handbreadths, perfectly skeletal: the bones were as thin as pencils, the feet all wrinkles, tiny as the claws of a bird. At the contact with the cold air, the child drew them to herself, slowly. The mother let the jacket-blanket fall back.
I wasn’t wrong when, seeing her, I felt that Nunzia Faiella had already known life for some time, and saw and understood everything, without being able to speak.
“That child is two years old,” Signora Lo Savio whispered to me. “Because of her internal organs, she hasn’t grown … Nunzia, dear one …” she called her, sadly.
Hearing those words, that being smiled weakly.
“Once I took her out … to the doctor,” said the young woman, speaking in a rough, masculine voice, between exalted and resigned (and so I understood that only once in her existence had Nunzia Faiella seen the light of the sun, perhaps a pale winter sun), “she saw the air, the sun … she was stupefied.”
Even now, Nunzia Faiella was amazed: her sweet eyes examined from time to time the high ceiling, the greenish walls, they withdrew and returned continually to the glimmer of the lamp, which perhaps reminded her of something. There was no sadness or even suffering in those eyes, in that lonely life, but a sense of waiting, of a punishment served in silence, of a thing that could come from beyond those immense walls, from beyond that high blind window, that darkness, that stench, that scent of death.
“Nunzia,” Signora Lo Savio called again, bending over the carton and speaking affectionately to the creature, “what are you doing? Do you want to leave your mamma? Do you want to have Christmas with Baby Jesus?”
Then something happened that I would never have expected. The child turned to look at her mother, with an uncertain smile, which suddenly became a frown, then yielded to a weeping so weak, suffocated, and faint that it seemed to come from inside a cabinet; it was like someone crying to himself, with neither the strength nor the hope of being heard.
Coming out of that room, I collided violently with two women who had learned of the arrival of a group of journalists, and were rushing to make a complaint about an abomination that they had endured for some time. One of the two toilets on the ground floor had been closed on purpose, they said, and they, who were neighbors, had to go three hundred meters every day in order to empty the chamber pots into the toilet at the other end of the corridor, where the clinic was. From anger they moved on to complaint. They were tigers who had suffered too much in their life, so that human laments did not come out. They began to speak of their unemployed men, without underwear, shoes, anything, of children who tortured them with their disobedience. They wept and clung to us, they wished to show us their homes. It was impossible to decline.
In one of them, Dr. De Luca’s assistant, a youth with a cold and irritated demeanor, sloppily dressed, was examining an old man whose end appeared imminent, and who was the uncle of one of the two women, Assuntina. The room was full of people, shadows, who, it seemed, gave off a stench. I couldn’t see the dying man, hidden by the crowd and by the doctor, but my attention was drawn to another person; I couldn’t call him a man, who, standing behind the doctor, tapped him on the shoulder from time to time. He was a creature of an indefinable age, untidy, strange, with something meek and terrible about him at the same time. His eyes were protected by thick eyeglasses, and one of the lenses seemed twice as thick as the other. He had a fringe of gray hair over his forehead, which got under his glasses, giving his pupils a greater ambiguity. While with one hand he touched the doctor, with the other, the left, he was constantly scratching his chest, with a kind of tic, trying to open his shirt.
Finally the doctor turned.
“You, what do you want?” he said abruptly.
“Bi … bi … bi … bismuth.”
“Pass by the clinic later.”
“Yes … yes … yes …”
“Speak properly!” a woman said aggressively, coming out from behind a curtain. She was like one of those bitches with countless teats, who drag themselves with solemn sadness from one rejection to the next. Her hair was still golden, but her face was ashen, her eyes spent, her mouth toothless. Her narrow, childlike shoulders were in contrast with the large curve of her belly over the short legs. On her finger, she wore a wedding ring.
“The doc-tor un-der-stands,” said the sick man, humbly.
A minute later, the doctor had left, and the shadows had all gone back into their holes, in this case the four corners of the room, which was large, and was divided by means of boxes, old sheets drawn along two poles, and also pages of newspaper, all illuminated by an oil lamp. Assuntina was giving some medicine to her uncle, who smiled stiffly, absorbed, when from right behind that bed, where there was a partition, I heard the sound of anxious, choked, blessed breathing. I stuck my head out a bit, and saw, at the foot of another bed, the syphilitic and his wife. He was sitting on the edge, she was on her knees in front of him, and with her tongue out of her mouth was licking one of his hands. The unhappy man’s eyeglasses had fallen off, he was looking up, as if blind, and his whole body trembled.
At the Granili, night was beginning, and the involuntary city was preparing to consume its few goods, in a fever that would last until the following
morning, the hour when complaints, surprise, mourning, the moribund horror of living start again.
* Originally built as a granary in the 18th century, this vast seafront structure later became a barracks and was bombed in 1943. Despite heavy damage, huge numbers of Neapolitans left homeless in World War II took refuge in the complex. It was demolished soon after Ortese’s book first appeared in 1953 and its occupants were transferred to public housing on the outskirts of Naples.
Neapolitan Chronicles Page 9