Neapolitan Chronicles

by Anna Maria Ortese

  The wan smile beside me became slightly more attenuated before disappearing. The young man blew his nose indifferently.

  In that abrupt blowing of his nose into a very clean handkerchief, there was some childish embarrassment, and some stubbornness. And I said again:

  “Are you hoping for something?”

  It was as if I were talking to a wall standing in a plain inhabited only by the wind.

  So I was certain that he was truly dead, finished. He was stubborn and lost, although at first glance he didn’t seem to be. None of those whom I had met so far had hidden from me his death. I had seen the declaration of the end, of failure written in fairly clear characters on each face, like an eviction notice on a shabby door: behind it one could glimpse a fire that was about to go out, a bent back, terrified eyes; or even a fire that is wildly blazing but will go out. Here on this stony face nothing was written. Even the ironic quips, the flashes of brilliance, the restless smiles didn’t reveal his internal reasoning, said nothing of what was happening inside him. They were intended more to deflect attention than to attract it. My conviction of a little earlier, that the energy of our companion was inexhaustible and his hope indomitable, was due to the agitating effect of the coffee and had vanished. The person I saw at my side among the other silent youths was a little man with a withered face and a dull stare. He was someone who no longer had the courage to raise his eyes, to resume a conversation, to think clear and logical thoughts. The city had destroyed him. And why shouldn’t it have destroyed him? They had all fallen here, those who had wanted to think or act, all talk had become confused and only augmented the painful human vegetation. This nature could no longer tolerate human reason, and, confronted with man, it rallied its armies of clouds, of enchantments, so that he would be dazed and overwhelmed. And this young man, too, had fallen.

  This was what I was thinking, irritated and sad, and now, behind me, Gaedkens seemed to confirm my doubts, with his vague and monotonous accent, even vaguer from moment to moment, as if his imagination were torn. Speaking of Naples as a phenomenal terrain, he delighted in the transience of the land, which was continuously changing shape, where nothing was stable and everything generated deception and fear. “In place of this fakir,” he said, explaining urbanely to the young Grassi, “it’s very likely that tomorrow we’ll see a castle. Here where we see the putrid Chiaia, this very night the sea may take its place, and there where you see Vesuvius, tomorrow the Greeks may reappear, with their families and their games. The laurel, like nothing, could be transformed into a pine tree.” Hadn’t we seen the purest of the Marxists look around with their eyes wide open, and others mutter their desire for fog? And all the young writers I had known, were they not singing the praises of their ancient mother? Was there even one who would cast the light of human reason on nature? All, all of them were sleeping now near the sea, they were sleeping from Torre del Greco to Cuma.

  “And so?” Prunas asked abruptly, but calmly.

  “And so, nothing,” Gaedkens said, smiling. “You can call out for centuries and no one will answer.”

  A lively and incredulous smile once again lit up Prunas’s face, a totally inadequate response to Gaedkens’s words, something that still surprises me to think of. But he said not a word more.

  We left the gates in front of Sant’Orsola and started walking again until we reached Via Filangieri, where the previous evening I had watched Guido cool himself with a woman’s fan, and speak with such anguish about Luigi. Luigi was suddenly in front of us, lame, but still tall and handsome, his delicate head obscured by a mask, through which his blue eyes were visible. We saw him right there, under the clock tower, with his wife and son. He was walking slowly, slightly hunched, his face forward as if he were looking for something. We all saw him, but it was pure imagination. At that hour Luigi, in his lonely apartment, was staring at the glass door to see who went by in the street, or greeting a friend with a smirk.

  We also saw La Capria: he was leaning lazily on a friend, turning his graceful profile, his eyes incredibly bitter. He greeted us with a gesture, but we knew that this was pure imagination. Maybe in Rome at this hour he was bent over a desk at the radio.

  A little later, we saw others: Vasco was walking with Incoronato, while Rea, dragging along the bewildered Cora, searched for Luigi in the crowd. Michele Prisco, who had no suspicion of wonder or terror, was engaged in a pleasant conversation with some women.

  All, all of them, were before our eyes: the scattered youths of Sud, the tired men of Voce, and with them returned the jumble of useless days, windy, with a mixture of sun and rain, perfectly useless, except for the fact that they had left the trace of this anxiety.

  At this point, Prunas left us and ran ahead along Via Filangieri, as if he had seen someone or something that interested him. I wanted to know who or what he had seen, and so I, too, pulled away from the others (and didn’t see them again later; they went home) and joined him. His old face remained pale and hard, just as in the best days of his adolescence. He didn’t speak to me, and I said nothing to him. We walked for a while together along Via dei Mille, which was strangely deserted, passing by the Caffè Moccia, where Cardillo, in the same position as the evening before, was watching Slingher and Capriolo, who continued to hold forth on Neapolitan dialect, and Vincenzo Montefusco was still sitting at a small empty table, turning his neck every so often, on account of his tic. We kept going, and I remembered that he was always like this, in the years of Sud, when he was on his way to the printer: taking these small rapid steps without seeing anything, cold, his thoughts intent on what needed to be done. I seemed to understand with immense wonder that he had neither imagination nor emotion, at least not in the normal sense, or if he did he considered them a kind of energy that had to be continuously controlled, and this allowed him not to be afraid of Naples. Like all monstrosities, Naples had no effect on people who were barely human, and its boundless charms could leave no trace on a cold heart.

  And so I took up the conversation of a little while ago. Perhaps, on his own, the young man would respond.

  “What do you think you’ll do now?” I asked him again politely, as if time had not passed.

  The curt response was:

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?” I persisted.

  “Nothing, unless I have money, I meant.”

  “And if you had money?”

  “Machines, a print shop.”

  “Anyone can get machines,” I said, “if they have the money.”

  “They wouldn’t be just any machines,” he said coldly.

  “What kind of machines would yours be?”

  “Free machines.”

  “Aren’t machines only machines?” I quietly objected.

  “There are machines and machines,” he answered. “Machines that are made by humans and machines that are given to humans. The ones that cure them are the former.”

  “You mean they must be made in Naples, not imported? Is that what you mean?”

  “Certainly.”

  “But you don’t have money for anything, it seems to me.”

  “Not a penny.”

  “And so?” “And so, nothing.”

  “Some years have already passed,” I said gravely, “many have grown old, maybe you’ve also noticed. A couple of wrinkles, a tic that’s become more pronounced, seems like nothing.”

  He winced at these words, then seemed to become indifferent again. “It’s not possible that nothing ever happens. One day, perhaps, something will happen. Then I’ll be happy I stayed here to wait for it.”

  “And if nothing happens?”

  He didn’t answer. Once again, like a stubborn child, he blew his nose, in order not to answer me.

  I didn’t know if I was sorry for him or if I admired him. He was so small and obstinate. Soon Naples would suffocate him as well in its vast embrace. He was like a red ant on the slope of the mountain: it couldn’t see or couldn’t tolerate that terrible ma
jesty; it sped along, lightly and insensitively, thinking that it would build its defenses here, its fortresses.

  “Are you going home now?” I asked, seeing that he had stopped.

  “Yes, I’m dog-tired.”

  He barely smiled as he shook my hand, then he turned back. I stood watching him for a bit, until I couldn’t see him anymore. Quick as he was, he must have already reached Monte di Dio.

  Then I went back to my hotel, and as I thought about the many fates of the many people the night passed, and dawn appeared, on the day I had to leave. I went to the window of that building that was as tall as a tower and looked over Naples: in the immense light, delicate as that of a seashell, from the green hills of the Vomero and Capodimonte to the dark promontory of Posillipo, all was united in sleep, a marvel without consciousness. I also looked toward the red walls of Monte di Dio, where the young man from Sardinia, so simple and cold, was perhaps at this hour still thinking, shut up in his dusty room, and I don’t know what I felt. Only the calm wash of the sea over the rocks could be heard, only the hills could be seen, increasingly vivid and victorious in the light, and, farther down, the buildings and gray alleys, the miserable, diseased alleys, where among the piles of garbage some lights still shone. But the day was rising ever higher and more brilliant, and gradually even those last lights went out.

  AFTERWORD

  The Gray Jackets of Monte di Dio

  The promoters of the “Gruppo Sud ” exhibition asked me some months ago to write this note.

  It seems right to me to end the new edition of my book with it, as evidence of how the young Naples of that long-ago postwar period, as represented by the Gruppo Sud, was at the origin of Chronicles—was impetus, inspiration, and a constant support in the realization of my project. Finally, the idea—that emerged in these pages—of the intolerability of reality, an idea I had never considered before, has made my vexation with describing humans and things more comprehensible. Now everything is peaceful in the south, but if the flag of utopia still waves, at least in my heart, it is because of the Gray Jackets of Monte di Dio.

  I’m afraid that I never actually saw Naples, or reality in general. I’m afraid that I never really knew Italy either before or after the war. What allowed me to juxtapose these things, and talk about them in some of my books, was the emotions, along with the sounds and the lights, and even the sense of cold and of nothingness, which came from those realities. In sum, I did not love the real; for me it was almost intolerable, even if I didn’t really know it. Where this intolerability came from I still am unable to say, or I would have to look into metaphysics. But it was with this lack of consciousness of the real that, in the thirties, I wrote my first stories, and after the war the others. In the first stories there were lights, sounds, emotions, and, in the background, the anguish of an inconceivable—because of his horror and grace—Edgar Allan Poe, whose uncanny pages I had first encountered. In my second book of stories, on the other hand, reality—the abnormal reality of Naples at the time—was there; but, to tell the truth, it wasn’t my reality, I hadn’t sought it out. Pasquale Prunas was there beside me to point things out and tell me about them actually and historically.

  What I still remember about the postwar period is not the Palazzo dei Granili, or Vicolo della Cupa, or the miracle-filled streets of Forcella; what I remember is the street, or neighborhood, called Monte di Dio and the Nunziatella Military Academy, and the house of the noble family from Cagliari who lived there, the family of Colonel Oliviero Prunas, the headmaster of the academy.

  So, the Nunziatella, its courtyards (or was there only one?), its severe buildings, the silence, the order in that military school, and, by contrast, the irrepressible energy and vitality of the young Prunas and his friends, and the generosity and warmth of his family and their friends—all remain part of my authentic memory of Naples. Emotions, lights, and sounds, then: not a measure of the grave reality of Naples and the world that was waiting outside.

  I couldn’t accept that reality: I had already glimpsed it and pushed it away elsewhere. But it so happened that Prunas’s journal, the bimonthly of commentary on current events conceived by him and longed for by him and his friends, that very modern and extreme Sud—extreme and in its way revolutionary—needed to document this “reality.” Pasquale Prunas was convinced that I, too, would be able to do that; and in order to stay longer, without too much compunction, in the enchanted shadow of the Nunziatella, I went in search of documentation. It was my testimony of the underbelly of Naples, where I had spent my adolescence; thus I recalled and compared it with the “historical” Naples that we now all have before us, and I wrote a good part, or at least made a complete outline, of my book on Naples. It was, therefore, a vision of the intolerable, and not a true measure of things (I was, and still am, incapable of taking the measure of things), and this choice was the result of a decision, which I remember with gratitude, made by the journal’s editor.

  I say “editor” in order to soften my tone of voice. In reality, he was the boss, the commander of a small band of ambitious, serious, educated, obviously poor young people who constantly gathered around him. They came from the working class as well as the middle class, and were distinguished by the religion of knowledge, of books, of information, and also by modesty of dress, the common habit of wearing the gray jacket—thus that small group, adopting as its uniform, which was also ideological, or perhaps revolutionary, the mild gray jacket, not the red or blue of the new Italian divisions, that group obeyed him to the letter. And so I, too, obeyed, choosing between measure and vision, I, too, preferring vision. And that was Neapolitan Chronicles.

  And afterward? Afterward, it was time to leave. We left (or died?), one by one, all of us. Pasquale Prunas stayed on. And it’s not difficult for me to hear the echo of those hesitant footsteps that led me, and then the others, along the peaceful sidewalks of Monte di Dio to stand before the large door of the Nunziatella, closed at that hour, on the last evening hosted by the First Gray Jacket.

  And I can see the small, dismissive, and sweet smile on his handsome face and imagine how he went on remembering the happy years of his and our eruption (of renewal and joy), not thinking that they would end; and how suddenly, not hearing our footsteps anymore, he looked around and understood that, yes, all was over. I can imagine the gentle shock of it. Perhaps he looked up for a moment; perhaps his pace slowed. Perhaps it was an evening no longer cold, and very calm. He thought of staying on. The courtyard was there, empty and silent. All the goodbyes had already been said. But why imagine so much? He had decided. So he turned his back on the courtyard and began to descend without sadness toward the city.

  ANNA MARIA ORTESE (1914-1998) is one of the most celebrated and original Italian writers of the 20th century. Neapolitan Chronicles brought her widespread acclaim in her native country when it was first published in 1953 and won the prestigious Premio Viareggio.

  ANN GOLDSTEIN has translated The Neapolitan Novels and other works by Elena Ferrante, as well as writings by Primo Levi, Giacomo Leopardi and Pier Paolo Pasolini. She is the former head of the copy department at The New Yorker.

  JENNY MCPHEE has translated works by Giacomo Leopardi, Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Paolo Maurensig and Pope John Paul II.

  THE ANIMAL GAZER BY EDGARDO FRANZOSINI

  A hypnotic novel inspired by the strange and fascinating life of sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti, brother of the fabled automaker. With World War I closing in and the Belle Epoque teetering to a close, Bugatti is increasingly obsessed with zoo animals. He closely observes the caged baboons, giraffes and panthers, finding empathy with their plight. Edgardo Franzosini recreates the young artist’s life with intense lyricism, passion, and sensitivity.

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/the-animal-gazer/

  THE MADELEINE PROJECT BY CLARA BEAUDOUX

  A young woman moves into a Paris apartment and discovers a storage room filled with the belongings of the previous owner, a certain Madeleine who died in her
late nineties, and whose treasured possessions nobody seems to want. In an audacious act of journalism driven by personal curiosity and humane tenderness, Clara Beaudoux embarks on The Madeleine Project, documenting what she finds on Twitter with text and photographs, introducing the world to an unsung 20th century figure.

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/the-madeleine-project/

  A VERY FRENCH CHRISTMAS

  A continuation of the very popular Very Christmas Series, this collection brings together the best French Christmas stories of all time in an elegant and vibrant collection featuring classics by Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet, plus stories by the esteemed twentieth century author Irène Némirovsky and contemporary writers Dominique Fabre and Jean-Philippe Blondel. With a holiday spirit conveyed through sparkling Paris streets, opulent feasts, wandering orphans, flickering desire, and more than a little wine, this collection proves that the French have mastered Christmas.

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/a-very-french-christmas/

  ADUA BY IGIABA SCEGO

  Adua, an immigrant from Somalia to Italy, has lived in Rome for nearly forty years. She came seeking freedom from a strict father and an oppressive regime, but her dreams of film stardom ended in shame. Now that the civil war in Somalia is over, her homeland calls her. She must decide whether to return and reclaim her inheritance, but also how to take charge of her own story and build a future.

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/adua/

  IF VENICE DIES BY SALVATORE SETTIS

  Internationally renowned art historian Salvatore Settis ignites a new debate about the Pearl of the Adriatic and cultural patrimony at large. In this fiery blend of history and cultural analysis, Settis argues that “hit-and-run” visitors are turning Venice and other landmark urban settings into shopping malls and theme parks. This is a passionate plea to secure the soul of Venice, written with consummate authority, wide-ranging erudition and élan.