Neapolitan Chronicles

by Anna Maria Ortese

  The tall young man with the small birdlike head and a profile that could be either a child’s or an old man’s is the lawyer Giuseppe Lecaldano, also employed at the radio, a devoted friend of Luigi’s and a fervent admirer of Marxist doctrine. The dark, modest-looking man sitting next to him is Alfredo Barra, a skilled laborer and communist, who joyfully witnessed Luigi’s first steps into Party life, and, even now that the young man has rejected it, still follows him, as a mourner does a hearse. That cross between the serenity of Phidias and Sartre’s depression, those gorgeous lips, those fine eyes, that cold stare, that perfect forehead shadowed by pale bronze curls, that euphoria and that anguish—all belong to the young trade unionist Aldo Cotronei, who once attempted suicide and is newly clinging to the Party for dear life. His melancholy—tender remembrance of a lost beauty, doubt about the grandeur of life—veils those pure features and opens in a sad smile lips accustomed to repeating harsh dogmas. To these people, too, Compagnone would read his radio sketches and then, disgusted, observe them.

  The Marxist figures now also dissolved and, with them, the somewhat monotone, rigid voices of people moving in a dream. The room became populated by the most exquisite Neapolitan personalities of the period from 1945 to 1950, among whom could be recognized the city’s well-known intellectuals, from Guido Mannaiuolo, the owner of Blu di Prussia, a small modern art gallery, to Gino Capriolo, of Radio Naples; from John Slingher, an Anglo-Neapolitan poet, to Signora Etta Comito, the editor of Corriere di Napoli’s literary section; from Samy Fayad, the young Venezuelan, to Franco, Gino, and Antonio Grassi, who were respectively the sons and brother of Ernesto, the dean of Neapolitan journalists. And all these figures also listened to the sketches read by Compagnone, without noticing the disgusted and insulting tone of his almost feminine voice. Then they, too, vanished, and a darkness fell, and in that obscurity the outlines of some near tragic figures were illuminated: the plump, delicate Prisco, with his immaculate manners, the restless La Capria, the pale and boisterous Rea, the communist writers Incoronato and Pratolini, their expressions cold and callow. Before this group, Compagnone was no longer reading. Seized by an intense but imperceptible tremor, he let the pages full of witty remarks slide from his hands and, overcome by a mysterious terror, he lowered his chin, sharp as an old man’s, onto his chest.

  * Luigi Compagnone (1915-1998) was a Neapolitan author who was an editor of the magazine Sud: giornale di cultura, published from 1945 to 1947.

  * MICHELE PRISCO (1920-2003) was a journalist, film critic, and novelist. His novels described the trials and tribulations of the Neapolitan middle class. In the 1960s, he collaborated with Compagnone, Domenico Rea, and Luigi Incoronato, among others, on the literary review Le ragioni narrative.

  DOMENICO REA (1921-1994), born in Nocera, was a journalist, novelist, and playwright. He collaborated on various projects with Leo Longanesi, Arnoldo Mondadori, Giorgio Strehler, Italo Calvino, and arranged for writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Giuseppe Ungaretti to visit Naples and give readings. His collection of short stories, Gesù, fate luce (Jesus, Shed Some Light), published in 1950, was a huge success, nominated for and winning many prizes, and was translated into several languages.

  LUIGI INCORONATO (1920-1967) was a journalist and novelist who met Compagnone, Prisco, and Rea at the University of Naples. He fought in the Italian resistance during the Second World War and received a bronze medal for bravery.

  RAFFAELE LA CAPRIA (1922- ) was a journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and translator. He wrote for Corriere Della Sera and was one of the editors of the literary journal Nuovi Argomenti. He cowrote several screenplays for the director Francesco Rosi.

  † VASCO PRATOLINI (1913-1991) was a novelist and screenplay writer who fought in the Italian resistance during the Second World War. His most famous novels were Cronache di povere amanti (A Tale of Poor Lovers), Cronaca familiare (Family Chronicle/Two Brothers), and Le ragazze di San Frediano (The Girls of San Frediano), the latter two of which were made into films. Among the screenplays he worked on were Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times.

  * A popular festival at the S. Maria di Piedigrotta Church. It dates back to the fifteenth century, or even earlier, but its present version began in the 1830s, as a celebration of Neapolitan song. It has since turned into an event that takes place over several days, with concerts, floats, and a songwriting contest.

  * GIOVANNI GAEDKENS is actually the poet and writer Gianni Scognamiglio. He is the only one of the Sud writers and editors whose name was changed by Ortese in The Silence of Reason. Gaedkens was his mother’s surname. He was notoriously “mad” and a “genius,” and it was rumored that he and Ortese were romantically involved for a brief period.

  THE STORY OF LUIGI THE BUREAUCRAT

  I remembered that Compagnone was also a writer, or at least imagined he was, and had only recently decided to dedicate himself to radio sketches. I remembered other things. The reason I had gone there—to obtain information and gossip about young Neapolitan writers—had vanished, making way for a deeper interest that was not without a certain undefined fear. In my mind, it was as if in a vast abandoned house someone had raced by, holding up a lantern. I had to admit that Luigi was not merely a bureaucrat, nor was he entirely a Neapolitan, just as those around him weren’t, either, in the same way that the grim route I’d taken a little earlier in the tram revealed more than a Naples of mere color and recklessness. Naples wasn’t just an onrush of antiquity, it was also the anguished concerns of youth flowing beneath that antiquity.

  Compagnone hadn’t been a youth like so many, even if like so many he wrote, and had produced the usual poems, articles, stories, and several pages of a novel. Now he wasn’t doing much of anything, but there was a time, right after ’45, in Naples, when he was very much in the public eye, because everyone had recognized in his agile and audacious prose, in his writing bristling with scorn and anger, the sign of a Naples different from the one that until then had been described in the classics, both ancient and modern, a Naples no longer smiling and enchanted, or drum-beating and grotesque, but as enraged as a whore surprised by the sudden appearance of reason. There was that terrible poem he published in Sud: A Journal of Culture, founded and edited by the young Prunas, entitled “This City of Mine is Merciless,” expressing something that no one had said since time immemorial about Naples, a city burdened by the myth of ecstatic happiness. There were also stories and articles published here and there that bore the mark of this new consciousness, a glimmer only, but sufficient to kindle hope. At the time, Compagnone was a communist, like for that matter all the tender youths of Naples, formed within the clandestine cells of the Fascist University Group. Once the Germans had left, Luigi hurried directly to that squalid headquarters on Via Galiani to join the Party, with the scrupulousness of a citizen who, having seen his city razed and the enemy artillery finally silenced, approaches the wells, hoping they haven’t been contaminated, to begin life anew. His enthusiasm could even at times be annoying, but one couldn’t help being touched by it; and as his reputation consolidated and spread—that superior intelligence, that desperate laugh, trembling as if the sky were falling—his apartment soon became a kind of garrison, in close communication with that of young Prunas, stationed in the stronghold of the Nunziatella, the ancient military academy where his father was the headmaster. Surrounding Naples, infamously, was a lava flow of pus and dollars, the Americans having replaced the Bourbons; just hearing a simple “O.K.” in English was enough to make all the hearts from Vicaria to Posillipo shudder, and in the homes of these two youths, which in reality were one, they took the opportunity, perhaps naively, but with obvious commitment, to lay the foundations for that school of reason which had already cleansed other towns, and whose absence here was due to the profound lethargy and dissipation of conscience. We wanted to know everything, understand everything about this monstrosity that
, in light of recent events, appeared to be Naples; we wanted to remove the finely carved tombstone that lay on its grave and find out if in that rot anything organic remained. For the first time, in the local tradition, words were used such as sex instead of heart, syphilis instead of sentiment, obsession instead of inspiration. We discovered that no population on earth was as unhappy as the Neapolitans, and they were unhappy because they were sick; we sought the causes of this sickness, defined the characteristics of this unhappiness, and above all dismantled the myth of happiness and recognized in those existences, and in those songs, an abject despair, the lament of men lost under the spell and indifference of nature, dominated and incessantly drained by a jealous mother. They had become incapable of organizing their thoughts, of controlling their nerves, of taking even a step without stumbling, of participating actively in human history instead of being continually oppressed and humiliated by it. They identified the consequences of this and studied the ways in which mankind could be liberated from such dire enslavement. Right from the beginning, it was clear that culture—understood as knowledge and therefore conscience, a mirror in which to capture one’s own image—was utterly indispensable. It was necessary to excise from public opinion the terrible myth of sentimentality, and elucidate all the alterations and distortions that had led Neapolitan society to its present state; and to remove from view, until the general situation improved, the painterly skies of Di Giacomo and Palizzi, proposing instead, and perhaps even imposing, displays of a barren, desperate art. On this, profoundly liberal spirits, such as Compagnone, Prunas, Gaedkens, La Capria, Giglio, Ghirelli,* and others, even if some were devoted to the Marxist faith (let’s not forget that in Naples in those years communism was a form of emergency liberalism), agreed with the die-hard militants, who were their intellectual inferiors, incapable of independent thought, and who clung to the idea of a universal state that would replace the reign of the Church over the people. But the militants’ anxiousness to recruit new members, along with the enthusiasm and generosity of men who have long endured solitude, led these Party officials to shake the insurgents’ hands with silence and a smile which was perceived as a genuinely deep fondness. Each group, from behind its respective barricades, the Party officials in the editorial office of their weekly, Voce, and the young rebels in the rooms of Sud, in Viale Elena and behind the courtyard of the Nunziatella, seemed for a while to be working toward the same goal, even if their methods and language were at odds.

  Prunas, in his little magazine, which had seven issues, each one an adventure, and each one published thanks to the secret sale of some family heirloom, a loan, a promissory note, or a collection taken up among the wealthier of his contributors, had printed, or would print, the first essay in Italy on contemporary English poetry, Sartre’s first essay on existentialism, the first pages of Vasco Pratolini’s Family Chronicle, Compagnone’s atrocious News of Naples, some of the astonishing modern poetry by the German-Italian Gaedkens. By highlighting this or that name, by digging up or having his colleagues dig up this or that story, trend, or milieu, he was pushing for a return of consciousness, an expansion of literature into the realm of journalism, where, according to him, true life had taken refuge. He wanted to destroy the myths, the superstructures, those gaseous halos which over time collect around a society and distort it. Naples was full of these distortions in the form of ghosts, who occupied the important public offices, keeping the most irresponsible strata of the population terrorized and grieving, and in a state of nebulous, secret corruption.

  It is important to note that Prunas was not Neapolitan. From a noble Sardinian family (he would inherit the title of count when his father died), he had developed an enormous fascination with Naples, the pure nature of which was demonstrated by his utter lack of personal or political ambition. At the heart of others’ passions (when they even existed), there was always at play the anxiety of a son who, at his mother’s deathbed, peers at his siblings and secretly wonders about her will, and then can’t help fantasizing about what he may inherit. Prunas, by contrast, with his air of somber passion, racked his brains and was consumed by thoughts of how he could help that great invalid even though he was an outsider. Dressed like a lowly clerk, with never a lira in his pocket (his parents didn’t know how to make him get a university degree and return to the fold of decent people), he never missed an occasion to declare his respect for the city, reduced as it was, and to insist that its liberation should not result in some new form of bondage; that cultural independence was essential; that there should be cultural supervision over the government, any government; that culture should control government and not vice versa. All these things he took for granted, perceiving them as obvious, and yet he couldn’t stop talking about them. Such ingenuousness (not that his friends didn’t agree with him—they certainly did! But they thought he was, generally, getting ahead of himself) began to irritate people and provoke derision. Not only at Voce did people start saying that the young man was in the best case another victim of the irresponsibility and frivolousness of an earlier era, that his axioms revealed the weakness of his education; even his own circle of friends, those who formed the editorial staff of Sud, began to pull away and, in the silence and ensuing reluctance, to manifest bewilderment, a kind of disillusioned disappointment. Discussions gave way to simple conversations; politics became an excuse for talking about a problem of employment; concerns about one’s career or even some minor personal problem became increasingly more important than the problems and future of the journal; and cultural independence, Prunas’s anxious credo, and his passionate arguments fell upon ever fewer and less sympathetic ears. The sight of a cheap cigarette still smoldering and reeking under a chair, a cruel reminder of the precariousness of their situation, could set off in their minds a silence profound enough to cause tears, an irrational desire for activity and different thoughts, where the sacrifices of thinking would be generously compensated. Whereas the young Sardinian was able to substitute disheartened passion for material comfort, the Neapolitans could only suffer terribly while formulating a farewell to their youth, which certainly cost them, but was nonetheless essential.

  In truth, the high number of returned issues of Sud stacked under and around Prunas’s bed, in the small dark room to which his parents had relegated him; the shower of contested promissory notes, initially light and autumnal, that was soon a raging deluge of darkest winter; the gossip in Voce aimed at him; his family’s resentment, exacerbated by the gallant advice from their priest; the letters from a certain baron from Catanzaro, who, “having perused the ‘Soviet rag,’ expressed his disgust”—all these were, even for the most optimistic soul, unquestionable evidence of failure.

  Just as on the beach, at the end of a storm, the sea’s high, pounding waves retreat, and only shells, seaweed, and debris remain, and sparkle in the sand, so the most glittering names and personalities distanced themselves from the small rooms of the Nunziatella, leaving in their wake others, who did not shine as they had. Raffaele La Capria, who, for a moment, in his essay Cristo Sepolto* seemed to express a healthy concern about the bourgeoisie, shut himself up in the grottoes of Palazzo Donn’Anna, where his parents had a very comfortable apartment, and resumed his correspondence with certain Englishmen whom he much admired, while considering fleeing to Rome—which he did some years later—and reinvigorating his violent passion for Proust and Gide, which resulted finally in his first novel, Un giorno d’impazienza (A Day of Impatience). Giglio and Ghirelli, Marxists with pliable liberal tendencies, returned definitively to the quiet careers they had previously chosen, the former to Milan and the latter to Rome. Giovanni Gaedkens, who considered going to Milan but was chained to Naples by poverty (he worked as a substitute teacher), came every day to the Nunziatella to discuss with Prunas abstruse editorial projects. Giovanni, who had a more modest and cordial nature, like the three Grassi brothers and the journalist Mastrostefano, had no trouble finding very good assignments from the local press, and if he and
the others still came back to the old editorial office it was only to elicit from Prunas his anguished admiration. Some of the artists remained faithful in their way: Vincenzo Montefusco, a youth who barely owned a pair of shoes and was always solitary and taciturn, and Raffaele Lippi, the son of a carabiniere, who in his lodgings in Vasto (the grayest neighborhood in Naples) painted dead cats and ruins.

  As for Luigi Compagnone, his reaction was unique.

  In the region of the far South where the sun shines brightest, a secret ministry exists for the defense of nature from reason: a maternal genius of limitless power to whose perpetual and jealous care the sleeping populations of the place are entrusted. If this defense were to slacken for only a moment, if the cool, gentle voices of human reason were to get through to nature, it would be destroyed. The miserable conditions of this land are due to the incompatibility of two equally great forces—nature and reason—which are irreconcilable, no matter what the optimists say; and to the terrifying secret defense of the region—ambiguous nature, with its songs, its sorrows, its dumb innocence—and not to the pitilessness of history, which is here mostly “regulated”; these are also the causes of reason’s wretched failure whenever it organizes an expedition down here or sends its most ardent pioneers. Here thought is the servant of nature, every book or work of art is a contemplation of it. The smallest hint of a critique, or a slight tendency to correct the heavenly shape of this land—to see the ocean as only water, volcanoes as still other chemical compounds, or man as simply his guts—is killed.

  A good part of this nature, of this maternal and conservative genius, takes over the same kind of human and keeps him weighed down by sleep. Night and day she watches over that sleep in order to make sure that he doesn’t gain awareness; she is tortured by the laments that the son’s trapped consciousness emits from time to time, but she is ready to suffocate the sleeper if he shows signs of movement, or hints at gestures or words that are not precisely those of a sleepwalker. Other causes have been given for the stagnation of these regions, but they have nothing to do with the truth. It’s nature that rules over daily life and determines the people’s sorrows down here. The economic disaster has no other cause. The proliferation of kings and viceroys, the interminable stockade of priests, the sprouting up of churches as if they were amusement parks, along with the filthy hospitals and the brutal prisons, these things have no other cause. It is here, where the nature of antiquity, the mother of spiritual ecstasy, has taken refuge, that man’s reason, in so far as it is a threat to her reign, must die.