Neapolitan Chronicles

by Anna Maria Ortese

  Everything was so vivid, and those various characters, in a scene that might have been described as serene, were so somber in their precariousness, their melancholy, their solitary remarks, their sighs—so perfect—that for a moment I was tempted to look for the director of this exquisite work; and though I didn’t see him, and told myself that he didn’t exist, and that this was not a set but one of the many hallucinatory moments of Naples, I felt uneasy at the thought of going in. It was as if the normal air of the world did not circulate in that alley, and those crumbling walls, that gray, and the strange pinks and the greens could, if touched, vanish. I said to Franco that if he preferred we could get a coffee at the Caffè Gambrinus.

  “The coffee’s the same,” he said, “or maybe a little darker.”

  This café is at the intersection of Piazza Trieste e Trento and the tortuous Via Chiaia. I had spent many hours there during my Neapolitan nights and I remembered it as very large and smoky and full of mirrors. Now even the windows seemed smaller to me.

  Just as when you are coming out of a dream you often fall into another one, and the barely wakened brain darkens again, and, inside, an invisible hand turns on myriad lights, I saw people who had filled the pages of postwar Naples, I saw them again but without the joyous postwar halo, in the mists of a summer evening.

  * La Capria’s first novel, Un giorno d’impazienza (A Day of Impatience) was published by Bompiani in 1952.

  THE BOY FROM MONTE DI DIO

  The head of the group was the son of Colonel Prunas. He wore a cotton shirt and blue linen trousers. His shoes were black and small as a girl’s, as were his dark hands, and in fact everything about this minute person suggested an adolescent rather than a man. An unfashionable watch, held on by a faded strap, gleamed on his wrist. Pale eyeglasses cast a shadow on his downward-tilting face, which was thin and quiet, of a brownish yellow. Only his lips were animated by an imperceptible smile, full of hostility; the rest of his face remained impassive. He was so still he seemed dead, dead on his feet. Instead he was listening.

  Next to him, taller and thinner, slightly hunched, and leafing through some pages, stood the man I believed I’d glimpsed at a window on Via Giacinto Gigante. He must have left Milan some time ago. He was no longer dressed in yellow, as he was when I knew him, which was the style of those intellectuals who, coming from an impoverished bourgeoisie, in the first years after the war renewed their wardrobes at the market stalls selling secondhand Allied goods. Those years hadn’t been wasted. Black, tight-fitting trousers hugged his long, thin legs; a white silk shirt covered his arms and his hollow chest. On his chin he had grown a blond goatee, which accentuated the expression on his face and in his eyes, at once ecstatic, discouraged, and greedy. His head moved this way and that, resembling in particular two things: a dying eagle and a flower. He had the same bloodless ferocity, and the grace. In one hand he held a very neat pile of papers covered with large, confused handwriting, in the other a cigarette. A coffee cup, empty, sat on the counter in front of him.

  A short distance away from these two young men, and staring at them vaguely, with a sharp yet melancholy eye, was a man still young, tall, with a narrow, wan face, who was talking affably, breaking off every so often for a brief yawn. This was Nino Sansone, the editor of the Neapolitan edition of Unità. He didn’t seem to want to be there, in that company, but he wasn’t disgusted, either; rather, he seemed calmly resigned. All around, American sailors were coming and going, like wild white birds in their close-fitting shirts. The glass doors opened and closed continually to let these young people through as they came up from the port, full that day of pale steel ships.

  The first to notice me was Gaedkens, who stopped reading and said slowly, “Oh!” Prunas reflexively took note and turned toward me with an expression of both surprise and fear. His faint smile grew, then suddenly vanished from his silent face.

  Franco had walked in ahead of me saying these simple words:

  “She has come back and she says hello.”

  “Good, how are you?” Gaedkens said. “We’re very well.”

  In this frankness, which was exaggerated, more like impudence, and in the extreme calm and the smile of one who will never be surprised by anything again, or suffer or rejoice, except mechanically, I recognized him. And I recognized him also in something strong, like a burst of anger, a dream, or weariness, which was ignited somewhere deep in his eyes as he looked at me.

  I shook this and that hand, and I had to notice that all of them were dry and a little cold, not sweating like Luigi’s, or burning like Rea’s. Right afterward, Prunas took off his glasses and cleaned them with his shirt, a habitual gesture especially when he was anxious. His eyes seemed huge, black, intent, slightly reddened by fatigue, and without light.

  “Two coffees,” Franco ordered, leaning heavily, wearily, on the counter. And turning to Nino he said, “A woman threw herself off a balcony half an hour ago, and I have to run and write it up.”

  “Yeah, I heard about it,” the young man responded with a small yawn, “while I was passing by Santa Brigida. She died instantly.”

  “Here they’re always killing themselves the same way,” Gaedkens said ironically. “The balcony. The balconies and the windows of our city don’t seem to have any other function.”

  Prunas didn’t breathe a word.

  “I see you’ve returned to Naples,” I said to Gaedkens. “I thought you were in Milan.”

  I threw out these words in the hope that they might stir things up. For some moments I had been feeling the same chilling sensation as when I stopped to contemplate Vico Rotto: that everything was thought, imagined, dreamed, and even realized artistically, but not true—a disturbing performance.

  “Not exactly to Naples but to the South. I live in Ostia, and on Saturdays I come back to see Vesuvius.” Laughing, he explained, “As you might imagine, Vesuvius is just an expression. I mean I stay in touch with old friends.”

  Who these friends were, there was no doubt: one of them was there, his pale face alert.

  I felt that I was being examined with a terrible intensity, and I discovered behind his eyeglasses, which Prunas had put on again, sorrow and infinite curiosity. “You must have pity,” said those dull eyes. “You must try not to look. Is it true that we are dead?” he asked. “Is it true that we’ve been absorbed by the city and now are at peace?” Perhaps I was wrong, because the young man then contradicted that lament by saying in a hard and rapid voice: “We seem provincial to you, I imagine.”

  “Absolutely,” I was about to respond, but I was upset. The leftist young man yawned again. It was only a tic, but it gave his thin face an expression of detachment and boredom, while instead his entire brain was hard at work.

  “I won’t go to Milan because my work is here,” he said, “but I don’t understand those who find work in Milan, then leave that city to come back to the South. Oh, and I’m not referring to the economic advantages, but Milan is enchanting, especially in the winter, with all that fog. A real Stendhalian city.”

  “We can agree on that,” Gaedkens admitted.

  Franco handed me my coffee, whose dark liquid had by then dripped into the two cups.

  “When I’m tired,” Nino continued, “I often dream of spending the winter in Milan. I’d hole up in a cheap hotel on the outskirts and for entire days I’d sit and watch the fog from my window. I was once in Normandy: peaceful, and the sound of the sea as if only imagined. Fog, for me, renews these sensations of stillness and life at the same time.”

  As he spoke, his eyes became blacker and gentler, his face lowered, another small yawn twisted his mouth, and without saying more the editor of the leftist daily paper went off.

  “Amusing,” Gaedkens said as we were leaving.

  His lips were smiling, but his eyes had become thoughtful.

  We set off as a group, without speaking, on Via Chiaia, embedded between Monte di Dio, which is reached by an elevator, and the sloping terraces of the Vomero. We didn�
��t know where we were headed and had no intention of going anywhere in particular. But once on the streets of Naples, you can’t help moving in this direction and then that, without any purpose. Usually, when you reach Naples, the earth loses a fair measure of gravitational force and you no longer have weight or direction. You walk aimlessly, you talk for no reason, you’re silent without motive, etc. You come, you go. You’re here or there, it doesn’t matter where. It’s as if everyone had lost the capacity for logic, and were navigating in the profound and complete abstraction of pure imagination. I did notice one thing on my left, where the young Prunas was walking: and this thing was a sorrow so concrete, so enormous in its silence, as to constitute the only counterweight possible to the sweet anarchy of the earth. For only a few minutes, since the brief conversation at Gambrinus, that sorrow had become conscience, lucidity, violence. Reason’s friend hated me, because of the memories I brought back in him, because of the mirror I held up to him, a concave mirror, in which his youth was deformed. And it was also strange that, beneath that kind of death, that vague decadence of skin, glances, words, I could still feel the steady beat of life. The young man of another time, alive in that death, was thinking.

  And here is the dialogue that unfolded while we were walking, including Franco, who had forgotten about the urgency of his article:

  PRUNAS: We, too, are amusing, I imagine.

  ME: No, not really.

  PRUNAS: That’s even worse, naturally.

  GAEDKENS: Luckily, nothing offends us. That’s the only advantage of Naples.

  FRANCO: And then, anything you think, we’ve already thought it.

  PRUNAS: So, tell us the truth.

  I remembered the many times Rea had besieged me with this curious sort of interrogation and I said to Prunas that I was struck at that moment to find that he had the same peculiar obsession as Rea. I knew that this observation would wound him. In fact, I saw him lower his face and smile one of his brief, sad smiles. But a moment later he had raised his head again. And I noticed something I had observed before, something that had always surprised me: there was in that mind the power of a wild beast, of unbroken generations, incapable of conceiving the word death. In Naples, the Sardinian youth had immersed himself in misery, but he hadn’t died; he was old but not yet dead, because he was unable to conceive of the word death. He was incapable of emotion, of being sad, except at moments, and they were soon forgotten. His thirst for life, his capacity to build a life, were both suffocated and immense. And still in my imagination appeared the figure of a harsh and indomitable beast. With a hard smile, he asked:

  “And how is Rea? I imagine you’ve seen him.”

  “Yes, I saw him.”

  “And you must have seen Luigi, and Incoronato, and La Capria.”

  “Luigi, yes. But not Incoronato and La Capria, and not Michele. Only Pratolini.”

  “And Pratolini was content, I imagine.”

  “Yes ... but not entirely.”

  “Because of Rea, I imagine.”

  “Or because of Naples, which is the same thing,” I said, “and I can’t say he’s wrong.”

  “Why?” asked Prunas. “Naples isn’t good enough for you?”

  “No,” I replied, “this silence isn’t good enough for me.”

  “Why, isn’t everybody speaking?” Prunas said cheerfully. “Where is this silence that so impresses you? Have you ever seen a more loquacious city?”

  “No, I truly haven’t seen such a city, but I haven’t seen one so silent, either.”

  While we were walking, our configuration was this: Prunas and I were ahead, Gaedkens and Franco behind. Gaedkens was speaking, he was speaking yet his voice resembled silence. It was the voice of someone who loved form, exquisite and therefore remote, not the voice of a man but the echo. Franco responded in monosyllables, sometimes he didn’t even respond at all, and I heard behind those monosyllables, or silences, the full conversation. Prunas had not objected at all to my words, but had simply lowered his head again.

  I remembered that somewhere around where we were there had once been a cinema club. After Prunas closed the journal, he couldn’t rest until he found something else to do, and he had come to an agreement, yet again, with the sad men of Voce, now Unità. So, little by little, he took over the cinema club and brought to the theater on Via dei Mille, among many other films, The Battleship Potemkin. It had been an incredible morning, the theater packed with shocked faces, profoundly wounded by something. They didn’t speak, but they absorbed everything: the fierce nakedness, the courage, the music evoked by the scenes. Upon leaving, and for days afterward, they had all met at Sant’Orsola, a small room full of books, between Palazzo Cellamare and the Chiaia bridge, that had once been a library. It was springtime and the sky over Naples had the same color as any sky in Europe where men stroll. Many hopes were born that day, strange hopes between wakefulness and sleep, and I had seen Renzo Lapiccirella and the other men from Unità smile as they spoke congenially with the young writers from Sud. We had arrived at the same place between the noble palace and the bridge, in front of the gates of Sant’Orsola. The gates were open and the door to the room at the end of a small courtyard was also open.

  “Shall we go in?” I said, and while I said it, I asked myself if we had really stopped in front of Sant’Orsola, or if we weren’t mistaken and it was one or two doors away.

  Neither Prunas, nor Franco, nor Gaedkens responded. They seemed embarrassed, while the colonel’s son looked inside indifferently, unmoved.

  I looked, too, and this is what I saw:

  The little room where young people had once gathered was dimly lit, not as before when many lamps had cast a white light. In place of the table there was now a small counter, and seated behind a sort of cash register was a dark-haired, bearded woman with big, languid eyes under a surly brow, selling tickets. A few thin, mesmerized people were standing before the counter staring at a sign on which was written: “Entrance 150 Lire.” Some were looking at the sign, some at a dark curtain hiding a door to another room. From the other side of that door came a silence, and a particularly cold draft, as if there were snakes lying back there. Some went in, others came out, men and women, all poor, on their faces an abnormal excitement. At a certain point, behind the curtain, which remained open for an instant, something clear sparkled, and in that thing—a simple glass coffin—one could see a long form. It was a man in black, smiling, who looked around patiently, smoking a cigarette.

  I wasn’t sure if I was on Via Chiaia or in a distant, exotic city, or in Paris, perhaps. I wondered if I had had a drink of something strong while wandering anxiously around Naples. I heard and didn’t hear Franco’s words.

  “That’s a fakir,” the editor of Giornale said to me. “He’s been fasting for several weeks already.”

  “At the cinema club?” I asked.

  “It’s no longer the cinema club.”

  “Why not?”

  “We didn’t pay,” said Gaedkens ironically.

  “Neapolitans,” Franco said kindly, “rightly prefer these shows to others. They are more relaxing. They are, ultimately, contemplation and repentance, in other words, Naples.”

  I looked at Prunas, and he seemed even smaller than he had earlier—more than small, shrunken, like those Indian heads that some Brazilian tribes reduced to the size of an orange. He didn’t smile or move an eyelash, imperturbable. And I wondered if he was extremely alive or only extremely dead.

  I calculated the time that passed in this way: the sky was no longer pink, but purple, and evening had descended. We all remained immobile in front of that gate, looking across the lighted courtyard at the low building of Sant’Orsola. We looked at the sign just as the public did, as if considering the possibility of buying a ticket. In the end, I asked the young man whose wan smile I glimpsed beside me, asked him gently, what exactly he was doing in Naples.

  There was no answer to this question.

  “But do you work?” I repeated. “Or at least
are you thinking of working?”