He suddenly remembered that some time had passed since he had last seen me, and some kind of process of identification took place in him.
“But you’ve changed,” he said, somewhat disturbed. “I almost didn’t recognize you. Isn’t it true, Paolo?” he said, slowly turning toward someone hidden in the shadow of the doorway. And looking where he was looking, I saw Paolo Ricci, one of the most notable painters of communist Naples, a tall, red-haired man with a sensitive look about him, who at one point could always be found in Voce’s editorial offices but who had disappeared some time ago, and was living quietly in his rooms in the beautiful Villa Lucia.
I don’t know why, but I seemed to detect on that face a secret fury, the suspicion that he was pitied, and the pain of having to spend his time with the good Guido, because in Naples conversation was no longer possible. He looked at me and said nothing; rather, he turned his face toward the wall.
“But good, very good, I’m pleased,” Guido, smiling his sweet smiles, went on in his dreamy tone, in the terribly distracted manner of one who suffers but no longer understands why. “You’ll stay for a while, I hope. How do you find Naples? And Luigi, have you seen him?”
“I saw him,” I said.
“He’s well, I imagine?”
And when I didn’t respond, he said, “He seems much lighter in spirit.”
And he continued to stare at me with a look that was even sweeter than the rose he had mentioned earlier, but at the same time perfectly sad, even dead: “His wit, his style, his serenity ... C’est vraiment éclatant. C’est Naples même.”—“It’s really exciting. It’s Naples itself.”
He closed the fan and very thoughtfully, full of an anguish he couldn’t hide, went back into his boutique.
WORKER’S IDENTIFICATION CARD NO. 200774
The next day was overcast, yet full of dazzling reflections from a confused and troubled light. The sharp sad cries of street vendors rose from all directions. The light that filtered through the immovable clouds was so intense that I had to lower my eyes to go forward. In that painful splendor, the buildings on Via Roma, once Via Toledo, where I got the #115 bus to Rea’s house, on Via Arenella, seemed like a mountain of tufa about to collapse. The ten thousand balconies and windows shimmered, as did the shop windows, the café and restaurant signs, and newspaper stands. But it was a lonely shimmer, as if in an abandoned city. It was strange but in many ways the people I saw didn’t seem human. I saw them walking slowly, talking slowly, saying goodbye to one another ten times before they actually parted, and then they started talking to one another again. Something seemed to have been broken or never to have been at all: a secret motor that substitutes action for speaking, thinking for imagination, self-doubt for smiling, and restrains color so that everything becomes a line. But I saw no line; I saw a color whirling so fast that it became a white or black point. The greens and reds, because of the rapidity of the whirling, had become rotten; the blues and yellows appeared exhausted. Only the sky, at times, was alive, the light from it such that I had to shield my eyes.
The bus took me to Piazza Medaglie d’Oro, and from there, in order to get to Via Arenella, I had to retrace my steps. Very near the Vomero, the most modern neighborhood in Naples, was dark and enduring countryside; vegetable patches, a few low houses, walled gardens, the yellow and red of carnations sprouting here and there, of women’s garments. The eyes of the women and girls were full of furious life without the least bit of harmony. From a balcony, a woman called out to a younger woman dressed in yellow and red who was hanging out laundry in the garden. She responded, almost singing, “I’ll be right up.” After a moment, from the balcony, the woman shouted back unexpectedly and in dialect: “Here’s hoping you spit blood.” I looked at the woman who had tossed off this omen and she was calm and collected.
Rea’s house was at the far end of a string of vegetable patches, in a recently constructed building marked with the number 77. He had bought it not long before, with some prize money, and spoke enthusiastically about it. Looking up, I saw a row of white balconies with clotheslines strung between them, as I’d seen at Luigi’s, and hanging from them were socks and underwear. A drop of water, which was not rain, fell on my hand. It was noon and not a shout, a voice, could be heard. More drops fell. It was the laundry.
I had the feeling that the family was having lunch and that my visit would be awkward. I even wondered if I should come back later. I looked up again at the socks, and at the tainted light that spread through the dwarf trees, at those gardens, and at the landscape that was simultaneously sensual and gloomy. I went in.
The door I knocked at was on the top floor. I waited not even a second before it opened suddenly, with a nervous jolt, and right away I saw Rea’s wife, Annamaria, who was identical to Cora in his story “A Neapolitan Scene”: “beautiful, thin, small, covered in pale and silky flesh.” Her large black eyes had in them a sliver of white light, a veil almost, as if the young woman were lonely, or had been traveling for a long time and, exhausted, was desirous of quiet and sleep. Even before speaking to me, she turned back and it was then that I saw Rea.
The young man was leaning against the wall in the small hallway staring at me. I had never seen anything with a nature so real, precise, immobile, immutable, and cold, except perhaps a nail. He had one of those terrible, small faces—pale, slightly contorted, and pockmarked, a condition far worse among the working classes. Behind his glasses, his piercing dark eyes appeared to be all pupil. What struck me most was their strange expression, somewhere between the extreme seriousness of animals and a human anxiety and circumspection. He was well-dressed in new clothes: striped gray-blue trousers, an ivory-white shirt, a light-brown wool vest, and pale suede shoes.
“You’re here,” he said, with the same coldness as Compagnone, concealing his alarm. And he continued to stare at me without smiling.
All of this lasted no longer than a lightning flash, and if I’d been paying less attention I might not have noticed it. He pulled himself away from the wall and, smiling, came to greet me. His wife, whom I prefer to call Cora rather than Annamaria, also smiled, and invited me in.
“You must forgive me,” I said, embarrassed, “for coming at lunchtime. But you don’t have a telephone and I wasn’t sure what to do. Luigi sends you his best.” I said the first thing that came to mind, in order to dissipate my embarrassment, and to my surprise Rea didn’t seem to notice the mention of Luigi’s name.
“Come in, come in. We’re just having lunch. Pratolini is here, too.”
I was led into a tiny, whitewashed kitchen, typical of low-income housing. The Tuscan writer, in his shirtsleeves, was sitting at the head of a small table placed against a wall, with a vague, melancholic smile on his face amid a cloud of steam rising from a large tureen full of pasta. Cora placed a bottle of red wine on the table and a plate of yellow pears, which considerably brightened the setting. Pratolini’s jacket was hanging on a nail behind him, and I could read the headlines of the communist newspaper L’Unità, which was sticking out of a pocket. Farther behind him, the glass panes of a French door reflected part of a terrace between two white walls under a muggy sky. I looked around, smiling, not because I was at ease but because I still felt Rea staring at me with a strange anxiety, perhaps an effect of the glint of his spectacles, behind which were those hard, piercing eyes that had observed me in the hallway. Like all those who come from nothing to sudden fame and fortune, Rea was never serene and continually asked others for reassurance, which they sometimes couldn’t offer, or, if it was forced, seemed tentative. In that tentativeness he saw ill will, and he would furiously defend himself, ending up less certain and more unhappy than ever. The sight of me must have provoked in him a whole new wave of stress. Still watching me, he sat down and began to break up a piece of bread with his small hands, apparently distracted yet quietly alert.
While Cora pulled another chair up to the table and added a plate for me, I turned to Pratolini, whose slightly melancholic smi
le made me think that he wasn’t feeling entirely at ease that morning, either, and I asked him a few questions to which he responded that what I had heard about a move to Rome was indeed correct, that he had left Naples for a place on the Via Appia. He’d finished the much anticipated novel about Naples, but—and here I thought a certain adolescent shame darkened his brow—he felt that so many years of living on Piazzetta Mondragone hadn’t ultimately revealed the city to him, and he believed now that his work would always remain that of a desolate and remote outsider. It was an enormous city, the largest and most impressive in the world, because of its pagan seed, and was Christian only in the marks of its wounds; and, strangely, he still couldn’t understand what sort of tree had grown from that seed, nor could he say to what species its smooth leaves, its soft fruit belonged. He stopped at this image, and while I wholeheartedly approved of it, I noticed that Rea, elbows on the table, was staring at me, intent on a single thought, and in his stare was that look of anxious suffering that I recognized, to seize someone else’s judgment of him, whatever it might be, in order to strangle it at birth, even if afterward his agitation would not subside. I was mistaken, however, in believing that I was the object of that anxiety.
“And what did Luigi say to you?” he asked suddenly, and I was stunned by the passion with which he had absorbed that name and my initial words—“Luigi sends you his best”—working them up into such a stark and anguished preoccupation. He had always appeared to share with the rest of the city a mild contempt for the old Marxist, even if they saw each other frequently and their wives were friends. Luigi refused to recognize in Rea any other quality than that of being amusing. I realized at that moment how much, instead, Rea respected Luigi. I didn’t answer right away. Cora was serving the spaghetti and he said, “Enough,” after two forkfuls. He didn’t eat much, like all those who are ambitious. He knew that eating put one to sleep.
“So what did Luigi say to you?” he asked softly.
And when I pretended to be distracted, he said: “I’d really like to know.”
And before I could answer, he said: “He detests me? Tell me the truth. He detests me, doesn’t he?”
I heard the sound of his fork flung down angrily on the table. It was as if all of a sudden the ceiling had opened and from that stagnant sky snakes rained down among the dishes. We continued to eat, heads down, until Pratolini ventured: “Why should he detest you?”
“He doesn’t detest you in the least,” I said.
“You want to make me lose Anita’s friendship, too!” Cora complained. “As if my life mattered anyway!” and she burst into bitter tears, with her head on the table.
“Idiot,” Rea said. “Any minute now I’m going to slap you.”
But he made no move, and, lost in thought, he overturned a glass of water.
“Maybe he doesn’t detest me, but I certainly annoy him. I’m the most famous writer in Naples, but that’s not my fault. I’ve always been nice to him. I don’t think he amounts to much, it’s true, and actually I despise him, but he knows that. The truth is that I’m healthy and he’s sick. Healthy as a writer, I mean. I love the people. I, in fact, am the people. My mother was a vammana, a midwife, that’s for sure, the truest truth. As for me, I was a worker, then a peddler in Brazil, and finally a writer. Down there, for example, I wrote articles for Fôlha da Mana, an important newspaper. I’ve had many jobs, now I’m a writer. But not a writer like so many others. I studied the classics. Boccaccio, Manzoni are my gods. I have a library and the books are nothing to laugh at. I don’t laugh. I grow, live, expand. I’m ambitious, of course. This house is only the beginning. But I also think of others. I want everyone to have a house like this, and a bathroom, and a telephone. That’s why I follow closely what happens with the Party, and the Party follows me. We understand each other. We are against leprosy and cancer. We are for science applied to nature, yes, we are. This is the secret. Luigi, on the other hand, what does he want? He wants to laugh, all he does is laugh. I spit on a man like that.”
“Yes, all he does is laugh,” Pratolini said guardedly. And then, after some hesitation, he added, “He’s finished.”
“Don’t you think so?” Rea asked.
“You don’t just leave the Party without an explanation,” Pratolini said. “Something about that man is evidently no longer functional. I understand someone who never joined (though I think it’s a limitation), but I condemn someone who leaves.”
“So you agree?” Rea asked.
“I think we shouldn’t talk about it anymore,” Pratolini said, and he turned to look at the fish that Cora was placing before us. “This is one of the most wonderful things about Naples. In Rome you can’t get it.”
Rea, instead, refused the fish and began to eat an apple, but soon threw it away.
“It’s rotten!” he said, turning to Cora. “Bring the coffee to the study.”
The room appeared to be the smallest but also the most beautiful in the whole apartment. The entire wall on the right was taken up by ceiling-high bookshelves made of a pale wood and packed with vividly colored books, almost all of them brand-new. In front of the bookshelves, and made of the same wood, was a large desk, more suited to a draftsman than to a writer. Between the bookshelves and the desk was a chair. On the desk, which had practically nothing on it, was a huge lamp. Another lamp, painted yellow, in the shape of an elongated funnel, hung from a nearby beam. The wastepaper basket was made of brightly colored straw and also seemed brand-new. On the floor in a corner was the typewriter, along with a lot of books that had not yet found a place. On the opposite side of the room there was a small couch, two wicker chairs, and a low table. Through the window in the central wall I could see reinforced-concrete apartment blocks under a shrouded and blinding sky.
Rea stopped on the threshold and cast an attentive and passionate eye over all those things, then went to sit at his desk. Pratolini and I sat in the chairs, while Cora remained in the doorway, regarding her husband rancorously, with her usual tormented expression of a beloved and wounded pet, as if she were about to burst into tears. Then, almost without our noticing, she slipped out of the room.
I felt that Rea was still upset by our conversation at the table, and I wanted to distract him by revealing to him the real reason for my visit—the interview for the illustrated weekly magazine. I had thought he would be pleased by the prospect, but instead he heard the news with indifference. Perhaps he had no faith in my abilities as a journalist, or it annoyed him, as often happens with men from the South, to see a woman involved in such things. Whatever the case, he demonstrated not the slightest interest.
“Oh, yes?” he said distractedly, and turned to Pratolini. “You should see it when it’s done,” he said, indicating the room with a sweep of his hand, “not now. Here there will be a rug. That couch and those chairs will be replaced. I already have in mind certain paintings for the walls. Tell me the truth, do you think Crisconio* is any good?”
“I don’t know his work ... or very little,” Pratolini said vaguely.
“They’ve promised to give me one as a present.”
“In that case, you have nothing to lose,” the writer responded.
I had been staring at Pratolini for a few moments, and I don’t know why, but it seemed to me that in spite of his smile he was vaguely disillusioned, unhappy. He had come to Naples, perhaps on business, but above all out of the need to return felt by those who have once been on these streets, feeling themselves exiles in any other place, under the illusion that they would hear or see something extraordinary, the air of Olympus, in this wretched city. But instead he found nothing here, no one was waiting for him, his friend was paying him little attention, and many other such things must have been weighing on his heart. Perhaps, without his even noticing, the bullying humanity, the sorrows of the people bothered him, and, forced by his beliefs to seek out some friends and not others, he was asking himself if he hadn’t made a mistake in asking Rea to have a friendly chat.
&
nbsp; “My book is being translated everywhere, including America and England,” he said, turning to me with that meek, slightly sad smile of a neglected child, and hoping that Rea would pay attention to him, but Rea was once again lost in thought. “But who knows how well it will do in any case.”
“Why shouldn’t it?” I asked.
Pratolini was about to respond when Rea interrupted him. And as if he had been thinking of nothing else, he asked me, in an almost threatening tone, “And will you also write about Luigi?”
I tried to ignore the question by pretending not to have heard it.
“I’m speaking to you!” Rea shouted, hitting the desk with a pencil in irritation.
“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t think so.”
“But it’s important. Negative, of course, but important. Naples of yesterday. You can certainly compare him to me.”
Cora reappeared with the coffee, and suddenly the young man became wildly cheerful. His small pockmarked face lit up like the stones of Naples, when, in the night sky, fireworks explode, first in silence, and then with whistles and loud bangs.
He stood up and ran to embrace Cora, nearly knocking over the coffee cups the surprised and unhappy girl had just managed to place on the low table. He spun her around rapidly, pressing her to him, while from his lips came a torrent of words, at once fervent, daring, vain, foolish, and infantile, and even the dullest of them sparkled. Cora squirmed and finally got free of him.
“Go and change your shirt,” she said forlornly, “because at three we’re going to see Anita.”
“I love her very much,” he said, once the girl had gone. “She’s a fiery woman. Her problem is that she’s always crying. Sometimes I tell her: You should have had a bourgeois husband, the kind that makes love only on Sunday.” And he laughed some more in his arrogant, happy fashion.
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