In the meantime, neither Vasco nor I had dared to say a word. Far from forming any opinion, we were continually overwhelmed by astonishment, as if the young man before us were not a citizen but a force of nature, a nature that was epileptic and perpetually astonishing. More than Naples, where that force is by now weakness and hysteria, he was Campania, a product of those furious peasants and carters who press at the gates of Naples—the happy land where thought can’t escape from the confines of sex, from tumult and the weight of blood. In a flash he was someone else, out of control, blessed. And yet he wasn’t a fool. Even his violence and his vanity were terrifyingly serious. As he had indicated, he didn’t know how to laugh. His vision of life did not extend beyond the mechanical contortions of the people. He was able to describe these things perfectly, if with detachment, since he himself was a detached and ancient son of nature. If he had not been proud of this ancientness of his, he would have been simply ancient and inconceivable. But he was, of course, proud of it, he knew he was ancient, and this conscious pride was enough to strip his writing of all truth, thereby causing a split in his creative world. And so it was that the most active and truest side of himself lay in his gloom, his lust, his incessant suspicion and incessant fear of Luigi’s judgment, not in his capacity as a man of letters but as a man and a mirror, even if blurred, of that nugget of conscience that had taken hold in Naples just after the war.
He drained his cup in one gulp. “Tell the truth, you’re not a fan of the real people!” he said to me abruptly, sitting down next to me. He had resumed that calm demeanor that I was familiar with, wary and a bit tough.
Right then, I had no idea how to respond.
“You were scandalized a moment ago when I embraced my wife. Among your kind, these things aren’t done. You’re hypocrites.”
Again, Vasco and I didn’t breathe a word.
“Aren’t I right?” he asked, turning toward Vasco.
“You’re right, only we weren’t scandalized in the least,” Vasco said. “We simply watched.”
“And you found something to criticize, I suppose?”
“Nothing,” Vasco said.
“Nothing,” I said.
He smiled. Then some extraordinary thought occurred to him and, no longer attending to Vasco but looking at me furtively, he began to take off his shoes, peering at me to see if this act of his would disturb me. He wore cotton socks, of the same blue as his trousers, and yellow at the tips of the toes.
“Do you like these socks?”
I asked how much they cost and he became irritated again. “You said you wanted to interview me, and you still haven’t asked me a single question. Go on, write.”
He grabbed the lined notebook I had put on the table and quick as lightning placed it on my knees. In the meantime, he continued to peer at me to see if I was looking at his socks. And he swung his foot right under my nose so that I would see it. I didn’t know what to ask and sat there awkwardly, eyes lowered, confusion in my face. Seeing me thus and interpreting my situation as some kind of feminine dismay, he was overcome by pity as well as worried about the integrity of the interview, and tearing from my hands the notebook he had given me minutes earlier, he opened it and began to write himself with great and meticulous attention, and a kind of peasant’s calm. He had to put his feet back on the ground, of course, but he was already absorbed by his most profound passion, the cultivation of his own fame, and had forgotten about that little whim. When Cora reappeared, wearing a hat (a black derby with two shiny green feathers and a veil), he gave me back the notebook with a brilliant look that was full of professional understanding, and I softened toward him. I glanced at the notebook. Beneath a page full of notes on his work, along with the names of critics who had praised him, there was a number: 200774.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Don’t you see? It’s written underneath,” he said, looking at Vasco with a strange smile in his eyes. “It’s my worker identification number.”
Vasco didn’t say anything, nor did Cora, nor did I. And Rea, after a while, though he did not sigh, turned gloomy again.
A few moments later he left to get dressed to go out, and I saw that even the light in the clouds had dimmed.
* LUIGI CRISCONIO (1893-1946) is considered by some to be the most important Neapolitan painter of the 20th century and has been compared to Cézanne. He had limited success in his lifetime, often selling his paintings for little money to the middle class.
“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS NIGHT?”
“Prisco and La Capria,” I said to myself later, with my face pressed up against the window of the bus, as I watched the street in Arenella recede. And with those names I sought, almost mechanically, to distract myself, to emerge from the oppressive state of lucidity and fear provoked by the sight of uninhabited places, silent herds, a weakened sun over a static landscape.
It thundered for a long time, in a hidden place in the sky, but didn’t rain; in fact, the sky that had seemed turbulent and about to burst with water slowly cleared, and on the gray sea framed by the bus window, like a silver snake behind the dull green vegetable gardens, the islands reappeared.
Remembering Prisco and La Capria, whom I knew well, was like seeing them, and I already knew how they would receive me if I went to visit them and what they would say. The former had found himself a place on Via Crispi, one of the most aristocratic streets in Naples, after winning the Venice Prize, I believe. Once, I had been outside his house and I remembered very well that small, four-story white-and-orange building with large terraces, colorful shutters, and windowsills decorated with pots of flowers. He was a very calm young man, a little chubby, refined. The names of his characters—Reginaldo, Delfino, Radiana, Bernardo, Iris—were perfectly literary and had nothing to do with our region. They were a sign of his isolation and, even more, of the serene detachment of his imagination from the furious and ever grim reality of this land. He was lovely to see and listen to, but was of a time when truth was not what was sought. I couldn’t say the same of La Capria. By now everyone had heard of his book,* and I, too, had read it. Much as there is of the intricate and murky, the hybrid and fragile in that story full of references to Proust and Moravia, and so unable to be itself, it successfully portrayed the place on this earth—Naples—in which nature had confronted certain European experiences, but had been unable to suppress them, and remained stagnant, while her citizens half-heartedly protested and complained in the growing darkness. I saw again the young man’s home in Posillipo, in the grottoes of Palazzo Donn’Anna; I envisioned the light-blue-and-white sweaters he wore—until a few years back he’d been one of the neighborhood’s sought-after youths, always bored and barefoot on the shore. Despite all this, I wasn’t convinced that he could be identified with Naples, and, in fact, he was not Naples but the culture and vices and virtues of a southern bourgeoisie that always ends up settling in Rome. Instead, I was looking for something that was Naples, Vesuvius and the counter-Vesuvius, the mystery and the hatred of the mystery, the terrors of the child of these streets, of the devotee of these streets, who was suffocated by them, or stopped being suffocated by them, only to return to being suffocated by them.
As the bus teetered along Via Giacinto Gigante, threatening at any moment to tip over, as if it were drunk, I had the sensation that from the windows of one of those buildings I was being stared at by a fair-haired man with two proud and childish eyes, while his beautiful hand rested enchanted on the pages of a book. But this had to be a mistake, because Gianni Gaedkens, one of the most renowned members of the Sud group—the other being Luigi—had long since left Naples to try to find work in Milan. I couldn’t have seen him, and I told myself that I had been hallucinating.
“I’ll go find out,” I thought, “I’ll go ask Prunas about him.” And so I remembered him also, and thought about meeting him—I hadn’t seen him in a very long time—before I left Naples again.
Still wobbling and plunging, the bus had in the meantime rea
ched the great red walls of the National Museum. It crossed the piazza named for Dante at a pace that had become normal, even tired, and continued on Via Roma. It stopped three or four times. At one of these stops I got off.
I found myself in front of the Bank of Italy, a little before the Augusteo Theater, in the part of the street that goes from the huge building housing the bank to Piazza Trieste e Trento, passing the Galleria Umberto and Vico Rotto San Carlo on the way. Here ended (or began) the famous Via Roma, once called Via Toledo, named for the Viceroy Don Pedro who opened the road in 1536 over the western moat of the Aragonese wall. Almost completely straight, on a slow incline from south to north, two kilometers and two hundred and fifty meters long, as the guidebooks claim, it is the main artery of the city. Stendhal defined it as “the most cheerful and most populated street in the universe,” and I suppose its fame still resonates.
Much like the previous evening in Chiaia, although it wasn’t yet the same hour, here, too, there was a great commotion, a feeling of extraordinary excitement, as if something had happened—a murder, a wedding, a victory, two horses breaking loose, a vision—but then drawing nearer I saw it was nothing. The faceless throng filled up that marvelous street and poured in from the surrounding alleys and looked out all the windows, mingling with the bourgeois crowd the way a dark, fetid water, gushing out of a hole in the ground, would pour, swelling, over a terrace decorated with flowers. There was no acknowledgment of the presence of these lower classes on the faces of the bourgeoisie, but it was still a terrible thing. It wasn’t just two or three old mothers, the kind who scratch their heads, dragging a lame foot, their big eyes dulled by memories—there were a hundred, two hundred. There weren’t five or six men with concave chests and shifty eyes, their hands crossed over their chests, but at least a thousand. And if you had been looking for just one of those putrid girls who adorn the windows of the narrow streets with their yellow faces, grimly singing and laughing in hushed tones, you would have been abundantly satisfied. The promenade was full of them. If then you had a desire to find one of those boys between five and ten years old—who, when the U.S. Navy is in port, traffic in tobacco and their sisters with the Americans—because you wanted to ask him to do something or simply look him straight in the eye, you would have been terrified by the sheer numbers. In fact, the streets were paved with their gray flesh. And in the face of this, how wonderful and strange the serenity of the bourgeoisie appeared! I told myself that two things must have happened a long time ago: either the people had, like the volcano, opened up and vomited forth these more refined people, who, just like something natural, cannot see something else that is natural; or this category of humans, which was, by the way, rather limited, had, in order to save themselves, renounced the ability to see the common people as living beings who were a part of themselves. Perhaps neither of these forces, born of nature, ever considered the possibility of revolt against its holy laws.
When I reached Via Santa Brigida, I heard the sweetest voice calling my name, and, looking up at a five- or six-story building, I spied, in the distance, on a top-floor balcony, the ecstatic face of a young man who was awkwardly looking out: it was Franco Grassi, one of the two sons of the dean of Neapolitan journalists, Ernesto; Franco, too, was an editor at a local newspaper.
“Wait a minute, I’m coming down!” he called to me.
Looking around, I understood why Grassi had been looking out. Something had actually happened here. The front door of one of the buildings was only half closed and from one of those balconies came loud weeping. Many people, both working class and bourgeois, were silently forming a circle on the sidewalk beneath that balcony. They appeared to be attentively looking at something with quiet eagerness and, moving closer, I saw on the ground a bright red stain surrounded by other, smaller stains, like red leaves scattered around a red bush. Some, especially the children, stuck out a foot in order to touch it. I learned, almost without having to ask, that half an hour earlier an eighteen-year-old housemaid had thrown herself from the third floor after an argument with her employer. Word was going around that the woman had previously been arrested for maltreating her employees, but the building’s custodian, an enormous gray woman, who was coming toward us with a pail, denied that. The employer had nothing to do with the situation. Giovannina Alatri, the name of the deceased, had a few hours earlier given herself a cold-wave permanent, against the will of her fiancé, a certain Ciro Esposito, a swindler. Having learned what she had done, this fellow called her on the phone to break off their engagement. At first the young woman laughed, then she threw herself off the balcony. Almost certainly she didn’t want to die; she only wanted to make an impression on him, but she broke her neck: while she was dying she had yelled, “Help me!” A red-faced old woman on the second floor who had been listening to all this shouted that that wasn’t true, either: she knew Giovannina Alatri, and she was certain that she would never have done such a thing, because she was a pious girl. The guilty party was the government, which had exiled the royal family. Ever since then, Giovannina had changed; she no longer slept at night and was always invoking the king. Giovannina had recounted to her the dream she had had that very night: “The sea will turn upside down, the mountain will split apart and burst into flames, and the sky will turn into ashes above this ungrateful city.”
“Shame on you!” shouted a voice from a nearby balcony. “You still support the monarchy, even after it betrayed the Duce!”
There was the sound of glass breaking, then a great commotion, and laughter.
I turned and saw Franco Grassi, who was coming toward me from the opposite sidewalk. He was small and frail, just as I remembered him, and he rocked slightly as he walked, thinking of very sweet things. His eyes were green, and his forest-thick black hair swallowed up his thin face. He was very elegant and was sucking on a finger as he looked at me, like a child.
“I’ve almost finished the first part of my novel,” he said, extending his small, tired hand, “but I don’t like it much anymore. You, how are you? What are you looking at?” he added, in surprise.
I was looking at the main door: the crowd had parted to let two women come out of the building. The head of one was covered by a shawl, and a dark old hand clutching it was all that could be seen of her. She was shouting in a voice that didn’t seem to be her normal one, full of anger, as if somehow the horizon she was seeing were not the same clear, delicately colored one that we saw, as if, in fact, she weren’t seeing anything human anymore, but was dragging herself through some kind of crypt, as she screamed in dialect:
“Pecché nun fa juorno? Che vo’ di’ sta nuttata? Why isn’t it daytime? What is the meaning of this night?”
“Mamma, calm down, in his infinite bounty God wished to punish us,” the younger woman sobbed.
They got into a dilapidated taxi waiting at the street corner, perhaps for the first time in their lives. The young woman was, perhaps, showing off, while the older woman for a moment showed her face in the window, red, as if she were drunk and spellbound. In the pervasive light that was becoming tinged with azure and pink, the taxi pulled away and no one spoke anymore, and, little by little, with odd smiles, the crowd dispersed.
Near me, Franco had watched all of it, his eyes clear and alert.
“What no longer convinces me,” he said after a moment, “is talk that is too grandiose. Pride betrays us sometimes, especially when it comes to autobiography. May I offer you a coffee?”
Walking next to him, I knew that his indifference was a form of control. Everyone was indifferent here, everyone who wished to survive. To become emotional would be like falling asleep in the snow. Guided by its most delicate instinct, the bourgeoisie never stopped smiling, and, continually jostled by the common people, by their painful sorrows, by their madness, resisted patiently, like a wall lapped by the sea. It was impossible to know how long this resistance would last. Ultimately, even the bourgeoisie had its troubles, and these troubles were the impossibility of believin
g that humankind was different from nature, and they had to accept nature in all its amplitude; these troubles were the age-old habit of respecting nature’s orders, accepting from it the enlightenment as well as the horror. Whereas among the working class every so often a revolt would erupt and over the high prison walls would come curses and the sound of laments, here, among the bourgeoisie, reason kept an absolute silence, afraid of upsetting with even a minimal observation the equilibrium in which it still endured, of seeing its days melt away in the sun as never before. This fear, a fear stronger than all other sentiments, kept a stranglehold on all of them, and prevented them from voicing any simple truths, any human rights, and, in fact, from uttering in its true meaning the word man. Man was tolerated in these parts by invasive nature, but only on condition that he acknowledge himself, like the lava, the waves, as part of it. From Portici to Cuma, volcanoes are scattered about this area, they surround this city, and the islands themselves are ancient volcanoes. The clear, sweet beauty of the hills and sky was idyllic and pleasing only in appearance. Everything here smelled of death, everything was profoundly decayed and dead, and fear, only fear, accompanied the crowds from Posillipo to Chiaia.
Passing Vico Rotto San Carlo, now called Piazzetta Matilde Serao, we caught sight of two or three people in front of the Bar Leda. One of them was the old soul Orio Bordiga, the son of Amadeo, the former leader of the Italian communists. He’d gotten fat, but was still as adorable and absentminded as he’d been at the time of the Fascist University Group; his large head, with thinning hair, was bowed slightly over his chest, and he wasn’t really looking around. I knew that some time earlier he had founded the Society of Authors Without Publishers, and it was likely that things hadn’t moved forward at full throttle. Things of the past must every so often have come to mind, as his chin kept sinking farther toward his chest. The car and pedestrian traffic (it was the hour when many journalists were coming out of the building opposite, where several newspapers had their offices) did not distract him, and he didn’t even seem to notice what was happening directly under his nose. Almost in the middle of the piazzetta, with a coffee cup in one hand and a few pieces of paper in the other, Vittorio Viviani, with his innocent faun’s head, was cheerfully reading out loud the first part of his unpublished novel, which tells the story of a nun’s love affair. The person listening to him was not young Orio but the Leda waiter. Carrying a tray loaded with coffee cups that he was supposed to be taking to the various editorial offices of Mattino, Corriere di Napoli, and Unità, he was mesmerized, and the coffeepot was swaying. Seated on the sill of a Mattino window, one of the editors, with a brown, half-naked chest revealed by his open shirt, was slowly eating seeds, quiet and absorbed, and spitting the shells down onto the pavement. From the door to the offices of Il Mattino, directly beneath that window, emerged a pale, thin young man, wearing eyeglasses and a nice smile on his lips. He stopped, evidently distracted, to look at the time, and in that moment I recognized him. It was Renzo Lapiccirella, one of Naples’s purest Marxists. For some years, because of cold and hunger, he had scarcely spoken, but his eyes were clear and stared off into the distance, like those of a dying Christian. A large car stopped next to the sidewalk and a gigantic, well-dressed man got out. This was Giovanni Ansaldo, the editor of Il Mattino. He quickly headed for the door to the newspaper’s offices, while with one finger he brushed some ash off the lapel of his jacket, and, as he passed, Lapiccirella, silently, like the statue of an angel on a tomb, moved aside. The editor above continued to spit seeds.
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