The Day Before Happiness

by Erri De Luca

  Don Gaetano noticed my curiosity about stories that had taken place around the time of my birth. He forgave the inhabitants, war brought out the worst in people, but not the informers, anyone who had sold a Jew to the police. “È ’na carogna”—He’s a dirty rat. “The Jews, aren’t they the same as us? They don’t believe in Jesus Christ, and I don’t either. They’re people like us, born and raised here, they speak dialect. With the Germans however we had nothing in common. They wanted to boss us around, in the end they put people up against the wall and shot them, looted the stores. But when the time came and the city went after them, they ran like us, they lost all their bluster. What did the Jews ever do to the Germans? We never did figure it out. Our people didn’t even know there was such a thing as Jews, a people from antiquity. But when the chance to make some money was involved, everyone knew who was Jewish. If a reward had been offered for phoenixes, some of us would have found them, even secondhand. Because there were rats who were informers.

  • • •

  Our card games were interrupted by people who passed by the doorman’s loge, asked for something, dropped off, picked up. Nothing escaped Don Gaetano. It was an old building complex with various apartment blocks, he knew everyone’s business. People would come by to ask his advice. Don Gaetano would tell me to watch the door and then go. When he came back he would pick up his cards and the conversation where he had left off.

  “He stayed down there until the Americans arrived and until the last day he thought I might sell him to the Germans. That’s what his old doorman had done. He had managed to escape by the roof, with just enough time to slip on a pair of pants and a shirt, no shoes. He had a parcel of books within reach and brought them along. Jews are taught to run at an early age, like us, with the earthquake always beneath our feet and the volcano ready to blow. But we don’t run away from the house carrying books.”

  “I would, Don Gaetano, I’ll bring along my schoolbooks if I have to run from an earthquake.”

  “He came to me at night under an air raid. I kept the main door open and he slipped in. He had torn from his chest the star he was supposed to keep sewn on, threads were hanging from his lapel. I took him down there, he stayed for a month, the worst month of the war. At the point of the uprising I brought him a pair of shoes I’d stolen from a German soldier. With them on he came out to meet the liberated city. He asked me why I hadn’t sold him out.”

  “And what did you answer?”

  “What could I answer? He had spent a month down there counting the minutes wondering if he’d be saved or not. Every thank-you he uttered to me was laced with suspicion. The war was about to end, the Americans had arrived in Capri. Angrier still was the thought of being arrested a few days before freedom. That September was a furnace. The Germans planted mines up and down the seashore to prevent an American landing, they blew up whole chunks of the city, and the air raids went on and on. The sea suddenly filled with hundreds of American ships. Fire coming at us from every side. For us it was about stealing freedom, for him it was about his life. And his life was hanging from someone who could betray him or be arrested, murdered, and not come back to him with something to eat. When he heard me descending the stairs he didn’t know whether it was me or the end.”

  “What did you answer him, why didn’t you sell him out?”

  “Because I don’t sell human flesh. Because war brings out the worst in people but also the best. Because he had come shoeless, who knows why? I don’t remember what I answered him, maybe I didn’t. History had ended and the whys didn’t matter. I heard his thoughts and I answered, but he couldn’t hear mine. You can’t speak with other people’s thoughts, they’re deaf.”

  “So it’s true what they say about you, Don Gaetano, that you hear the thoughts in people’s heads?”

  “It is and it isn’t, sometimes yes and sometimes no. Better this way because people have evil thoughts.”

  “If I think of something can you guess it?”

  “No, guaglio’, I get the thoughts off the top of someone’s head, the ones someone doesn’t even know he has. If you set about studying your own business, it stays with you. But thoughts are like sneezes, they escape all of a sudden and I hear them.”

  That’s how he knew everyone’s business, that’s why he had a sadness ready for the worst and a crooked smile to throw it away. From the corners of his eyes the wrinkles opened and the melancholy drained out.

  “Was the Jewish guy thinking a lot?”

  “Yes, he was. Not when he was reading, but the rest of the time, yes, about the Holy Land, about a ship to get there. Europe is lost to us, here there is no life. He gave the example of a belt. We Jews, he thought, are a belt around the waist of the world. With the holy book we are the leather strip that has been holding up the trousers ever since Adam realized he was naked. Many times the world has wanted to take the belt off and throw it away. It feels too tight.

  “I remember that thought clearly, he often had it. When he came out into the open air he could barely stand on his own two feet. He went to his home but it had been occupied. A family had settled there, they’d even changed the lock. I went there to put in a word and they moved out, but first they emptied the house, they even tore the electric wires from the walls.”

  “How did you persuade them?”

  “We had guns, we had fought the Germans. I went at night, fired at the lock, went in and told them I would be back at noon and wanted to find the house empty. That’s how it went. He moved back into his house, sold it a few months later, and went abroad, to Israel. He came by the loge to say good-bye. The city was still a pile of rubble. ‘I’m bringing a stone from Naples with me. I’m going to put it in the wall of the house I’ll have in Israel. There we will build with the stones they’ve thrown at us.’ ”

  • • •

  I would listen, play scopa, lose. In the evenings I jotted down Don Gaetano’s stories. The city was school, too. I was sorry when the summer lessons ended. The students were happy, not me. I found consolation in Don Raimondo’s books, yellowed paper he would rescue when someone wanted to get rid of some books.

  “A person takes a lifetime to fill up the shelves and a child can’t wait to empty them and throw everything away. What do they put on the empty shelves, provolone? All I want is for you to get them out of here, they tell me. And there lies a person’s life, his impulses, expenses, sacrifices, satisfaction at seeing his learning grow by inches, like a plant.”

  “Don Raimondo, how will I ever repay you, you let me read without buying.”

  “Think nothing of it. You bring them back to me dusted off. When you’re a man you’ll come to me to buy them.”

  • • •

  The city in the summer feels lighter, at night it goes out to the alleyways to breathe. With Don Gaetano I played scopa in the courtyard without winning a hand.

  “T’aggia ‘impara’ e t’aggia perdere.” This was his sentence at the end of the game. “Once I’ve taught you I’ll have to lose you.” It was a fact, that’s how things had to go. The same would happen with the city, it too had to teach me and then let me go. At game’s end I would go back to my little room to hold on to the things I’d learned. Odd, the Jew’s thought about the belt. I checked my own, it wasn’t tight, I let it out one notch anyway. Even if the world believed the belt was too tight, it couldn’t get rid of it. Backward, to before the holy book, it could not go. I had read that the world was jealous of the Jews because they had been chosen. In the war they had been chosen as the target. The man confined below the city sent news even from there. When he left his hiding place, why hadn’t he taken his books, not even the Bible?

  “I told him that he was forgetting his package. He replied that it might be useful to someone else. Even the Bible? He told me a verse that was written inside: Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. As if to say that for him the hideout was the place of his second birth. He had to leave without baggage.”

 
“Don Gaetano, were you hiding a saint?”

  “He was no saint, I overheard him quarreling with the heavenly father, telling him that his faith was a prison sentence. We are marked by circumcision, we bear the condemnation inscribed on our bodies. Our creator took away his breath and left us as mud. That’s what he called the heavenly father, our creator. He wasn’t a saint. He was someone who quarreled with that creator of his.”

  “So then you are the saint, risking your life to save a stranger.”

  “Do you have to go looking for saints? There are neither saints nor devils. There are some people who perform some good deeds and many evil ones. Any moment is right to do something good, but to do something evil takes opportunity, convenience. War is the best opportunity to do rotten things. It grants permission. To do a good deed requires no permission.”

  • • •

  A peddler came into the courtyard, Don Gaetano stuck his head out, showed his face, said hello. There were frequent visits from ’o sapunaro, the used-goods man, with a cart he pulled himself. Greater in girth than height, he wasn’t happy until heads were sticking out of every apartment. He had a voice that could raise the dead. Don Gaetano had a nickname for him: Judgment Day. He would bring him a bottle of water and between one holler and the next the man would empty it.

  “Don Gaeta’, v’arricurdate ncopp’ e barricade ’e via Foria?”—Do you remember being on the Via Foria barricades?

  It was his calling card. He and two women had turned over a streetcar in the middle of a big road to stop the German tanks.

  “Nuie siamo robba bona”—We’re made of good stuff.

  Don Gaetano could tell how the economy was doing by looking at the used-goods man’s cart, the things that people threw away.

  “Everyone is rich nowadays, throwing away bathtubs, no less, they even throw away wool mattresses, they buy the kind with springs. They throw away pedal-operated sewing machines. They believe in electricity like eternal life, and if it runs out?”

  • • •

  It was an angry summer, almost cold. In July the top of the volcano turned white. People played its numbers in the lottery and up they came, promptly. There were big wins. The year before a cobbler had nailed four out of five. I asked Don Gaetano whether thoughts with numbers ever came to him. He made a gesture as if to brush away a fly. But was there an art to it? Could you learn to hear people’s thoughts?

  “First of all, don’t call them people, they’re persons, each and every one. If you call them people you lose sight of the person. You can’t hear the thoughts of people, but of persons, one at a time.”

  He was right, until that age I hadn’t noticed persons, it was all one people. At the loge that summer I learned to recognize the tenants. As a child the only one who mattered to me was on the third floor behind the window, I didn’t even know what her parents looked like. She had disappeared, and after that getting to know the building’s other tenants didn’t much matter to me.

  • • •

  “So there’s no way of learning to be like you, Don Gaetano? There isn’t an art to it?”

  “Even if there was, I wouldn’t tell you. It’s not nice to know what crosses the minds of persons. So many bad intentions come and go that are not acted on. If I say what one person thinks of another, all hell will break loose.”

  “So you hear and don’t intervene?”

  “Sometimes I get in the middle. You’ve heard about the time it snowed and so many people played the snow’s numbers in the lotto it almost broke the bank: a guy that lived in a basso at the bottom of the alley picked the right numbers and said nothing to his wife. I called him out and said: this isn’t right. ‘What?’ he says. You don’t just bring debts home: you also bring good news.”

  “And what did he do?”

  “He went to buy goat, wine, and he showed up with his winnings.”

  “But something you could have used, an overheard thought that might come in handy?”

  Don Gaetano gave me a dark look. “If you found a wallet would you give it back to the person who lost it?”

  “It’s never happened to me, I don’t know. To give you an answer with no experience to back it up, I would have to say yes. But I’ll only know if it happens to me. I can’t know beforehand how I would act.”

  “You’re honest. When I find a useful thought belonging to someone else, I don’t pocket it. I leave it there. I can’t give it back saying: do you realize you’ve lost a thought, and then act like I hadn’t heard it.”

  “I wish I knew other people’s thoughts.”

  “You? You can’t even guess the three unplayed cards from the last hand of scopa. First learn to play.”

  • • •

  Don Gaetano was familyless, too. Raised in an orphanage, then a seminary, he was supposed to become a priest. But they say he fell in love with a streetwalker and decided to defrock. For twenty years he was far away, in Argentina. He came back in 1940, just in time for the war. This is what I knew about him before the summer of our familiarity.

  “You used to have a crush on the little girl on the third floor. You were always looking in that direction.”

  “I was trying to get her to notice me, the way children do. But one day she suddenly disappeared. Do you know where she and her family went?”

  “I know where she is now. She’s come back to Naples and she’s going out with a young guy, a gangster who’s locked up. She’s not for you.”

  The return of that lonely age, the thought of myself as a child searching for her face behind the glass, climbing the stairs in the hope of running into her: I moved my fingers to the bridge of my nose to catch the two rebel tears escaping. In childhood bonds get forged that never break apart. That night I wrote Don Gaetano’s sentence: First learn to play. Then what? If I learned to play scopa, would I then be able to hear thoughts? I couldn’t ask, that one sentence had to be enough.

  • • •

  When it was Don Gaetano’s turn to be a child, no one in the orphanage told stories, so it was up to him. Around the little stove in the dormitory, he made up lives of animals, kings, wanderers. The children were warmed and nourished through their ears. He would tell the stories in dialect.

  “Neapolitan is deliberate, you say something and they believe you. In Italian there is doubt: did I understand correctly? Italian is good for writing, where you don’t need a voice, but to tell a story you need our language, which glues the story together and makes you visualize it. Neapolitan is for storytelling, it opens your ears and your eyes. I used to tell the children about life outside. No one used to come to see us, not even on Sundays. When a child grows up without a caress, its skin hardens, it feels nothing, not even a beating. The ears are all that’s left to learn the world. By us there was plenty of shouting, but no one cried. Outside the children cried, inside the orphanage no one knew how. Not even when one of us died, it was an everyday occurrence. The fever would come, burn, and extinguish. When it was cold we would pile up, ’o muntone, we called it. We would all huddle in a single embrace. We would take turns, those on the outside would move inside. We would create heat and have some laughs. All it took was for one person to shout ’O muntone and right away we would make a mound, everyone piled up.”

  • • •

  “The big windows at the orphanage looked inward to the courtyard, the streetside windows were walled up, some of us had jumped down to run away. I was the only one who could climb over the gate at night. I was as light as you, I wandered the city, mingling with the crowd that moves at night. I would go to the seashore, I liked the ships. When I was about thirteen I became friends with a prostitute who was my same age. I would do her favors, warn her if there was any police movement. When she was done and I had to go back, she paid me with a cup of milk and a brioche. We resembled each other, a brother and sister who were getting together. Then she met a guy who married her and she left for the North. The city is beautiful at night. There’s danger but also freedom. The sleepless wande
r about: artists, murderers, gamblers. The taverns, fry-shacks, and cafes stay open. Those who make their living at night say hello, get to know each other. People indulge their vices. The light of day accuses, the dark of night absolves. Out come the transformed, men dressed as women, because nature bids them to and no one harasses them. At night no one asks for explanations. Out come the crippled, the blind, the lame, who in the daylight are rejected. It’s a pocket pulled inside out, night in the city. Out come the dogs, too, the strays. They wait for the night to sift through the garbage, so many dogs manage to survive on their own. At night the city is a civil place.”

  • • •

  “I had quicksilver in my legs, I ran everywhere, satisfied my hunger. They say it’s the legs, not the teeth, that feed the wolf. By day I put the quicksilver into telling stories to children. No one in there had a name, we would make them up. One kid was Muorzo, Bite, because he had no teeth. A lame kid was called ’O Treno ’e Foggia, the Foggia Train, because he always arrived late, one was Suonno, Sleep, because he was always asleep on his feet, one was Sisco, Whistle, because he whistled like a peddler, I was ’O Nonno, Grandpa, the oldest. Many of them had never seen the sea, I would tell them about it: it was a seesaw of water, the ships played on top of it, passing from one wave to the next. I helped them visualize the waves with a bedsheet.

  “For those of us inside, the way to get an education was the seminary. So I entered one. I used to run away from there at night, too.”

  • • •

  On summer evenings people walked down the street to catch a breath by the seashore. It wasn’t the nocturnal city Don Gaetano knew, which began later, when the promenade was over. The two of us in the courtyard taking in the fresh air after a game of scopa, we were quiet for a while, spoke for a stretch. To counter the day he thought back to the violent summer of 1943. He had to lower his voice in the emptiness so it wouldn’t echo through the courtyard.

  “Before seeing him standing there shoeless and with books under his arm, I had no thought of hiding anyone. Down cellar I kept a little bit of contraband and lately the guns commandeered from the police. But when I saw him at the entry I pulled him inside. I would go to see him during the air raids, when the building emptied in the dash for the shelters. I stayed back to keep an eye on things, under the bombs the marauders were on the loose, burgling houses. They weren’t afraid of anything, and bombs were being dropped on the city like crazy. I would visit him during the alert, so he would have someone to talk to. Down cellar the war made a muffled sound, the bombs were the pounding of a person who knocks on the door, the tufo absorbed the noise and withstood the impact without vibrations. The bombs broke things up but didn’t make the walls shake. Tufo is antiaircraft material.”