Neapolitan Chronicles

by Anna Maria Ortese

  “Are you not writing anymore?”

  “For now, no,” he said quickly, as if just waking.

  He got up and went to the front door, where he stood for a moment looking through the window at Via Galiani, then he came back. I regretted my question, and looked at him in confusion.

  “You need information ... I mean precise information ... facts for your article,” he said graciously.

  “Yes,” I mumbled, “information ... facts.”

  His expression was kind, generous.

  “Well, you are mistaken,” he said smiling. “I don’t have any.”

  He sat down again, at the far end of the sofa, and crossed his legs. He was behaving just like a child who sees a tiger in his room, or a huge spider on his rocking horse, but, for some deep reason (an even greater terror, perhaps), he can’t reveal that he has seen the object of his fear. First of all, he continuously avoided looking at me, and then he was upset and then anxious. It was as if, seeing in me something hostile, he were hearing the sound of bells coming up from the floor. And yet complete silence reigned in the room.

  “Luigi,” I said, a few minutes later, looking at the notebook he had on his lap, looking at it very attentively, even if it was just an old notebook, “might you at least give me some information about your life? I confess that I’ve forgotten most of it. And yet it’s important. I’d like to write about you, too, in this article.”

  “Ah!” he said.

  Then added:

  “Why?”

  And when I didn’t respond:

  “Whatever for?”

  Just then the door opened and in came the radio bureaucrat’s young wife, dressed in yellow. She didn’t seem at all surprised to see me. Perhaps she had heard me from the kitchen and hadn’t come right away because she was busy cleaning up or feeding the child. In her yellow dress, her face smooth and even, like a face in a modern painting, she had about her a look of calm that revealed neither mirth nor thought. Her hair was so thin you could see her scalp, but this softened her high forehead. She had come in to say something to Luigi, but seeing me she forgot what it was, and, quickly drying her wet hands on her apron, she came toward me. “How well you look,” she began, “it’s been forever since I’ve seen you around here, but just yesterday I was thinking of you.” She stared at me with her extremely tranquil, pale eyes. At her appearance, Luigi had huddled in a corner of the room and stopped talking while painfully cracking first one hand and then the other.

  “Perhaps I’ve interrupted you,” the young woman said, noticing our strange silence. She looked at us slowly while reflecting. “Luigi, don’t do that with your hands,” she added after a moment, “you know I can’t stand those affectations.”

  “Sorry,” the bureaucrat said swiftly, and let his hands fall. Then he raised them again and stared at them in his usual obsessive way. “Sorry.”

  “I interrupted you while you were talking ... Was it something important?” his wife repeated quietly.

  “Absolutely,” responded Luigi, “absolutely. She,” and he pointed at me, “has to write an article on the intellectuals of Naples and has come to ask me for suggestions ... information.”

  “Do you have anything to tell her?” his wife asked with interest.

  “Of course I do ... of course I can tell her things,” the bureaucrat responded, smiling.

  She stopped paying attention to him.

  “And will you write about Luigi?” she said, turning to me, with a stare that was more transparent but cold. She was mentally calculating what I could do for him. In her low voice there was an imperceptible quiver, a question. “He doesn’t know how to promote himself,” she continued, somewhat agitated. “He cares nothing for money, as if he didn’t have a family. And he writes no worse than others. You weren’t here, but the other night he began reading to us the first chapter of a novel he began in ’44 … Lecaldano … Barra ... they were here. They found it entertaining. He could finish it now.”

  From the kitchen, we heard the child cry out: “Mamma! Mamma!”

  “I’m coming ... Tell him to finish it, won’t you?” the young woman urged me, as she left.

  When the two of us were alone again, I saw that Luigi had lowered his head.

  He didn’t seem to remember his desperate “Why? ... Whatever for?” which for a moment had brought him back to life. Something had shattered inside him, the anxiety of a moment before had fractured, and silence had returned to dominate his memory. Even my presence had ceased to disturb him; he had become perfectly indifferent. Suddenly he stood up and, walking like a weary bird, made his way to the old table, rummaged through some papers for a moment, then took out a page on which he must have written something. His hand, like an old man’s, was trembling almost imperceptibly, and, clutching the paper, he asked if I had a notebook and pencil.

  “These are notes about Rea ... I wrote them down for my own use. Unfortunately, only about Rea. But you’ll agree that Rea is very important—in fact, besides him other writers really don’t exist in Naples.”

  I didn’t respond right away, but then, seeing that he was waiting, I said, “Oh, yes, certainly.”

  He stared anxiously at me for a moment, then began pacing up and down the room, with his frantic, unsteady gait, while he dictated. He dictated in a voice that was incredibly cold, mechanical, monotonous, yet transparently still full of hate and pain, as if every word were hammering home an ancient death sentence that hung over him. And as he dictated he would sometimes look at the paper, sometimes cast profoundly sad and troubled glances at the ceiling. Here is what I find written in my notebook:

  “Notes on the writer Domenico Rea.

  “Rea was born in Nocera Inferiore on September 8, 1921. He has already written three books: Spaccanapoli, Le Formicole rosse, and Gesù, fate luce. In the autumn another book of his will be published, which was commissioned by Fabbri, a publishing house in Milan. This publisher specializes in pedagogical works and textbooks. Fabbri himself, the head of the publishing house, asked for a pedagogical type of book from Rea, because he had been particularly impressed by some stories of Rea’s that were set in the world of childhood. This is how Rea came to write Anticuore. The publisher, De Amicis, suggested this title, and Rea now has infinite respect for him.

  “However, if Rea had had to choose a title, it would have been called I 51, because it tells the story of the fifty-one boys who went to elementary school with him.”

  “To elementary school,” he repeated.

  His words continued on, fading little by little into a kind of murmur, in part because the tension was broken, in part because of the voices and figures that had for several minutes been animating the street outside and were vaguely visible in the dim square of the window.

  “Look ... look,” I heard him say all of a sudden, thoughtfully. He had lowered the hand that was clutching the piece of paper and moved with curiosity to the window. I stood up and joined him.

  Coming down Via Galiani was a group of kids, barefoot and bold, from the nearby neighborhood on the sea. At the front was a girl of about seven, her head closely cropped, and wearing a gray rag that, leaving her chest bare, came down to her feet in the manner of a queen. Evidently the leader of the band, she carried a stick at the top of which was a very small image of St. Anthony, all gilded, but now dulled. Since it was still the week in which the saint was celebrated, she and her companions were asking passersby for donations in his name. As they walked, and begged, they let out cries of laughter, their pleas at once clownish and desolate, as they paraphrased in dialect one of the many Christian hymns to the Virgin:

  Heavenly Virgin

  have pity on us ...

  and they emphasized the word pity by doubling over with laughter every time they said it.

  “Look ... look!” Luigi repeated.

  And then added: “Truly entertaining.”

  And a little later: “So colorful, so perfect.”

  While he was saying this, the girl, lik
e a capricious sideshow freak, swiftly left the group and, with a dirty hand outstretched, feigned begging, her toothless mouth open in a soundless laugh. Having glimpsed Luigi, she came skipping up the steps to the window and, holding up her skirt, curtsied. Then she spat.

  Luigi watched as her saliva rolled down the window. Together we listened to the sound of those bare feet on the pavement and the childish laughter, both depraved and sweet, as they grew distant.

  Anita came back into the room.

  “I was thinking,” she said, moving toward us, “that we could all go over to Rea’s place this evening. Annamaria”—Rea’s wife—“has been begging me to call her. It’s the perfect occasion.”

  She broke off, as she had before, in the face of our silence.

  “You can’t see a thing in here,” she said, and in fact it was very dark. She turned on the light and the first thing her eye landed upon, who knows why, was the spit on the window.

  “They were spitting,” Luigi said. “Some kids ... ”

  And he sat down again at the far end of the sofa.

  There was silence. Anita never wasted time on useless matters. And so, turning to Luigi, she said, “Aren’t you coming?”

  “No, I’m tired.”

  “Then I’ll go to my mother’s.”

  “That would be best,” the bureaucrat said courteously.

  She appeared perplexed.

  “And what’s this?” she asked, bending down to pick up off the floor the piece of paper with the notes about Rea, which had somehow fallen to the ground.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a message from the milkman.”

  We heard the child yelling again: “Mamma! Mamma!”

  “O.K., goodbye,” she said, letting the piece of paper drop. “See you again soon,” she said to me.

  As soon as Anita left, Luigi asked, “Would you look at my head?” His voice was a combination of infinite patience and infinite terror, as he struggled to achieve a calm that was completely unnatural. “Is there something ... something wet?”

  “There’s nothing. I assure you.”

  “It seemed to me ... I felt ... ” he stammered. “Now go away, go away.”

  As soon as I was out of the house, I began to run.

  My tears were held back by something stronger than the desire to cry; an imprecise fear of that sweet air, that clear sky, those long hills like endless waves that contained within their serenity so much anxiety and horror. And yet everything seemed so gay and harmonious. Not only Via Galiani but, suddenly, even the interminable Riviera di Chiaia had changed. Where before I had seen only uniformity and petrified desolation, now everything was chaos and dark fascination. I didn’t take the tram but set off on foot and, to tell the truth, I no longer knew where I was, if I was coming or going, if it was dawn or dusk, if it was the time of the American invasion or a pristine Greek evening. Or if, rather than Neapolis, I was in Barcelona or Tunis, amid a tiny clamorous crowd of Arabs. It was the hour when Naples lights up and swells like a jellyfish, and the city’s wounds shine, and its rags are covered with flowers, and the people reel. In the streets there was a sensation of movement and excitement, which on closer examination was nothing. The crowd of workers and outcasts overflowed from the alleys and, on the more elegant streets, mingled with the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats, who displayed no irritation or disgust, because they didn’t even notice them. Many simply remained on the thresholds of those alleys, which are the veins of Naples; some fanned themselves with a piece of cardboard, others slept on the sidewalks with their mouths open, some ate, some sang sad lullabies. In the rooms, next to the beds, some were cooking, and some, at times even young men, lay on the beds thinking. The part of the population that, instead, was going toward the city center in an inexhaustible search for pure air and sweeping views didn’t speak or shout in the manner often attributed to Neapolitans. Silent and tired, they walked beside the walls, their faces contorted and pale, lit up by black-circled eyes that were too big, as in a cartoon, their bodies unwashed, their clothes faded by use and stiffened by dirt. You would not have said that they were awake, but rather that they were moving about restlessly in a bad dream.

  Who, then, or what, was creating that vague continuous sound that churned the air like the wind when it whips up the sea? It was the radios, the barrel organs, the street-corner violins, the carriage wheels on the cobblestones, the car horns, the useless howls of a dog hit by a shower of stones thrown by a boy. It was a boy rolling in the dirt, his mother telling her neighbor a dream, two girls talking about a man. The city suddenly drowned itself in noise, in order to stop thinking, like a despondent man getting drunk. But that noise dense with chatter, calls, laughter, or simply mechanical sounds was not happy or serene or good. A horrible silence lay beneath it, a paralyzed memory, and a frenzy of hope. It couldn’t last long and in fact it slowly faded away.

  Night had fallen by the time I returned along Via Filangieri and found myself on the celebrated Via dei Mille, a street that, I believe, owes its name to the fact that Garibaldi’s Thousand passed along it on a September morning in 1860. But no more noises, no more sounds, for a long time now, on this monumental, cold street. Only the methodical footsteps of some of the city’s notables now deprived of every function except the decorative. Caffè Moccia, one of the street’s greatest attractions, cast a gentle blue light across the sidewalk. The place, shaped like a horseshoe with the curved side facing the street, was deserted except on one side of the horseshoe, which had wrought-iron tables painted red. Two people were standing there engaged in friendly conversation. Looking through the front window more closely, I recognized John Slingher, whom in my memory I had caught a glimpse of once at the Via Galiani apartment. Now I saw him in flesh and blood, even if he was a man dedicated to dreams, impeccably dressed (wearing a gray suit and a pearl-colored tie), slowly sipping coffee. In front of him stood Gino Capriolo, a middle-aged man with a robust and melancholy appearance, who was famous for his humor program, Only in Naples, written in dialect. It aired every Sunday at lunchtime on Radio Naples, accompanied by a large number of “Letters from Listeners,” pleading for help for this or that charity case. There were cancer patients asking for medicine, the unemployed asking for mattresses for their beds, aging down-and-out thugs timidly asking for a couple of pounds of pasta for their tubercular grandchildren or for an old song to be played that reminded them of their youth, and so on. The Neapolitans called this program “human interest,” with the same satisfaction the corrupt use when pronouncing pure and elevated words. In the relative silence on the street and in the café, it wasn’t difficult for me to gather the gist of the conversation between these two old intellectuals. They were discussing a rather subtle question: how the Neapolitan dialect could become, if elaborated, a language. They cited Di Giacomo and Rea.

  The two men moved away and, sitting behind them at an empty table, I spied the young Vincenzo Montefusco, who once numbered among the Sud contributors. Tall and ugly as a bird, spectacles perched atop a large nose as if they had been formed as one, he had the strange, intense expression of a man who believes he is alone. He continually turned or raised his head as if someone were calling him, a tic he had had since his father, an honorable civil servant, was shot by the Germans. But no one was ever there. I remembered his bad paintings, the red of his nudes which made them look like damned souls, but instead they were women, women from Naples; and his Crucifixion, with the shadow of the three crosses transformed into gallows from which hang three modern Neapolitans. Of course, he wasn’t drinking coffee because he didn’t have the money, and Cardillo, the waiter, let him be.

  Cardillo, a little man with a worn, pathetic face that was perhaps a bit paler than necessary, stood in a corner. And, leaning against a wall with a napkin over his arm, he looked in turn at each of the two old men, and at the young man with the long neck whose head occasionally snapped up and around. I couldn’t say that a thought passed through his eyes, but certainly planted on his lips w
as a faint smile, unconsciously astonished and compassionate, like someone who from on high sees dead cities on vast open plains, glimpses the remains of necropolises, fallen statues, circling crows. Perhaps none of that was true, and he was thinking of his former life, of his kids, but nevertheless he appeared so to me. And in my doubt that he was thinking and seeing what I saw, I stared at him in fascination. The two men then stopped talking and started to walk toward the door. This fact pulled me out of my reverie, and, agitated by the idea of being recognized and greeted by them, I left the window and continued on my way.

  But I didn’t want to keep walking (I felt rather tired) as far as Piazza Amedeo, surrounded by buildings on three sides, the fourth a looming hillside with cliffs, strange vegetation, and flowers. There, with absolutely bourgeois decorum, Naples ended. I turned back down Via Filangieri, and since by now the few lights had been turned on, I could see clearly, in the doorway of one of the buildings, Guido Mannaiuolo, the owner of Blu di Prussia, the small modern art gallery that I mentioned early in these pages. A tall, handsome man who somehow reminded me of an English sea captain of the seventeenth century, with his blue eyes, at once affectionate and cold, he was holding in his white hand a black fan, riddled with holes, and with it he fanned himself now and again, never missing, as he sat idly and mused, the outfits and hairstyles of the ladies who passed before him on the sidewalk. Perhaps he was waiting for someone who had not yet showed up; or he had come out into the doorway simply to get some fresh air (his boutique was in the building’s inner courtyard). The day had been very hot, and I seemed to discern on that ivory skin, on those straight thin lips, in that slightly heavier figure, some signs of an exhaustion and perspiration that were not due to summer alone.

  “My dear,” he said with extreme kindness when I was close by, “I saw something superb just a little while ago, an exquisite black shawl with red sprigs of nettle and a single rose near the fringe. It was like a night without hope protected by bright memories. I’m sure you would love it. Buy it, oh, do buy it!”