Naples '44

by Norman Lewis

  Tonight I dined for the first time in a civilian house at the invitation of a Signora Gentile recently released by a member of the section from the Filangieri gaol, where with a number of other women she had been imprisoned by the partisans on vague charges of collaboration. Here the mood was one of escapism, even of nostalgic frivolity. Our friends had made a huge effort to cast out of mind the unpleasantness of the immediate past. Several beautiful women were present – one in a blouse made from a Union Jack; all the old-style airs and graces banished by Mussolini were back again. The men kissed the ladies’ hands, called each other ‘egregious sir’, and everybody used the polite form of address lei instead of the Fascists’ forthright Roman voi.

  We ate wurst, sipped schnapps, drank wine from glasses of the right shape and colour, somebody strummed a mandolin, and we talked about Naples and its traditions – the city that had ignored and finally overcome all its conquerors, dedicated entirely and everlastingly to the sweet things of life. Other wars were mentioned in passing, but this one was not. Neither were politics, Mussolini, food shortages or the rumoured outbreak of typhus.

  All too soon the pleasant unreality of the evening was over, brought to an end by the curfew. As we were about to leave our hostess drew me aside and, showing a little hesitancy, said she had a favour to ask. She had a German soldier, she said, buried in her garden, and wondered what could be done about it. The story was that about two days before our arrival, when the partisans and the Germans were fighting on the streets, a German chased by armed Italians had knocked on the door and asked her to shelter him in the house. This she had felt unable to do, and next day, finding the soldier’s body lying in the road outside, she had dragged it into the garden, taken a spade and buried it. What she was hoping now was that someone could be found to help in the task of digging this corpse up and smuggling it away, because it occurred to her that one day – perhaps even in years to come – she might want to sell the house, and she could imagine an embarrassing situation arising if the buyer happened to find a body in the garden. I told her that I could inform whatever authority it was that dealt with this kind of thing and leave it to them. She seemed disappointed, and said she wanted the thing done discreetly, and perhaps it would be better to leave things as they were. A mysterious business.

  October 28

  Neapolitans take their sex lives very seriously indeed. A woman called Lola, whom I met at the dinner-party given by Signora Gentile, arrived at HQ with some denunciation which went into the wastepaper basket as soon as her back was turned. She then asked if I could help her. It turned out she had taken a lover who is a captain in the RASC, but as he speaks no single word of Italian, communication can only be carried on by signs, and this gives rise to misunderstanding. Would I agree to interpret for them and settle certain basic matters?

  Captain Frazer turned out to be a tall and handsome man some years Lola’s junior. Having his hands on military supplies, he could keep her happy with unlimited quantities of our white bread, which for Neapolitans in general – who have been deprived of decent bread for two years – has come to symbolise all the luxury and the abundance of peace. She was also much impressed by his appearance. The Captain was a striking figure. His greatcoat had been specially made for him and it was the most handsome coat I had ever seen. His hat was pushed up in front and straightened with some kind of stiffener. This, although Frazer worked at a desk, made him look like an officer in a crack German SS formation. She wanted to know all about his marital status and he hers, and they lied to each other to their hearts’ content while I kept a straight face and interpreted.

  She asked me to mention to him in as tactful a way as possible that comment had been caused among her neighbours because he never called on her during the day. Conjugal visits at midday are de rigueur in Naples. This I explained, and Frazer promised to do better.

  When the meeting was over we went off for a drink, and he confided to me that something was worrying him too. On inspecting her buttocks he had found them covered with hundreds of pinpoint marks, some clearly very small scars. What could they be? I put his mind at rest. These were the marks left by iniezione reconstituenti: injections which are given in many of the pharmacies of Naples and which many middle-class women receive daily to keep their sexual powers at their peak. Frequently the needle is not too clean, hence the scars.

  She had made him understand by gestures one could only shudderingly imagine that her late husband – although half-starved, and even when in the early stages of tuberculosis from which he died – never failed to have intercourse with her less than six times a night. She also had a habit, which terrified Frazer, of keeping an eye on the bedside clock while he performed. I recommended him to drink – as the locals did – marsala with the yolks of eggs stirred into it, and to wear a medal of San Rocco, patron of coitus reservatus, which could be had in any religious-supplies shop.

  This seemed the moment, as Lola had offered her services as an informant, to check on her background in the dossiers section on the top floor of the Questura. It appeared from her fasciolo that since the death of her husband she had been the mistress of a Fascist hierarch, and there were sardonic references in typical police style to other episodes of her love-life. It seemed extraordinary to me that a Fascist leading light could do nothing to shield his private life from invasion by the police.

  November 1

  The miserable news is that Counter-Intelligence funds are to be reduced to 400 lire – £1 per week per section member. The meanness impelling this decision leaves us stunned. Most of us have up to a dozen contacts prepared to devote their time to our interests, and this wretched sum – paid in occupation money which costs nothing to print – is all that is available to compensate them. This announcement followed closely on the heels of the tidings that other ranks would be paid an extra nine shillings per head to spend on Christmas festivities. What a peasant army this is!

  Actually, although our paymasters have no way of knowing it, the money won’t make any difference. The most dedicated informant, like the most devoted lover, rises above thoughts of monetary inducement to give what he has to give. What would make our task easier and give us a better conscience would be to offer these people who work for us, not money, but a little food. In large units – particularly American ones – it seems easy enough to smuggle rations out, and most soldiers who are invited into Italian homes find some way of taking the occasional tin of provisions with them. In a unit like ours of only thirteen men, rationing is absolutely cut and dried, and there are no extras to go astray. If anything happens to be left over at the end of a meal, our two servants see to it that no trace of it remains after they clear away. In this way, wherever we go, we go empty-handed.

  Lattarullo called with a long whispered recital of new enormities on the part of the operators of the black market. He mentioned that the special Squadra Nucleo, organised by our vigilant Questore to act as a spearhead in the fight against corruption, had just been able to resolve a little problem for one of Naples’s leading surgeons – who was already well known to us. It seemed that the doctor had managed to acquire a Fiat Mille Cinque-Cento, which turned out to have been stolen. In the ordinary way the regular Pubblica Sicurezza would have dealt with this predicament at a cost to the doctor of about 50,000 lire. As it is, he had the new Squadra to deal with, and has had to pay heavily for their incorruptibility – in fact 200,000 lire.

  Lattarullo looked even weaker with hunger today than usual, and swayed from the waist, eyes closed, even when sitting down. After our chat I decided to take him for a meal to one of the side-street restaurants that have opened in the past few days.

  We walked out together and faced this city which is literally tumbling about our ears. Everywhere there were piles of masonry, brought down by the air-raids, to be negotiated. Every few yards Lattarullo had to stop to gather breath and strength. When we tried to take a short cut through a familiar vico we found it freshly blocked by the collapse of tenements and
filled with rubble to a depth of twenty feet. There was a terrible stench of shattered drains and possibly something worse, and the Middle Ages had returned to display all their deformities, their diseases, and their desperate trickeries. Hunchbacks are considered lucky, so they were everywhere, scuttling underfoot, and a buyer of the lottery tickets they offered for sale touched or stroked their humps as he made his purchase. A great collection of idiots and cretins included children propped against walls nodding their big heads. A legless little bundle had been balanced behind a saucer into which a few lire notes and a sweet had been thrown. In a matter of two hundred yards, I was approached three times by child-pimps, and Lattarullo, appropriately enough, was offered a cut-price coffin. The only food shops open were bakers, but they sold no bread – only sugary sweets: torrone and marzipan, all made with sugar stolen from the Allies, and fetching 30 lire for a tiny cube. We were stopped at a bottleneck caused by a collapsed building in the Vico Chiatamone where a sanitary post had been set up, and here every passer-by was sprayed with a white powder against the typhus.

  We found the restaurant and took our seats among the middle-class patrons, who kept their overcoats on against the cold. All the coats were made from our stolen blankets. A choking deodorant disinfectant burning in a brazier set everybody coughing, but failed to cloak the smell of sewers seeping up through the flagstones.

  The ritual in this restaurant is for a waiter to appear and pass through the tables carrying on a dish what Lattarullo calls ‘the show-fish’, for the customers to inspect with murmurs of admiration. This had a good-looking head, but the body had already been cut up in portions and was therefore unidentifiable. As usual, there was a trick in it. Lattarullo insisted on examining the fish and pointed out to me that the body didn’t match the head, and from its triangular backbone evidently belonged to the dogfish family, which most people avoided eating if they could. The other recommended item on the menu was veal, Milanese style, very white but dry-looking, which the waiter, under pressure, admitted to being horse. We settled for macaroni.

  No attempt was made to isolate the customers from the street. Ragged, hawk-eyed boys – the celebrated scugnizzi of Naples – wandered among the tables ready to dive on any crust that appeared to be overlooked, or to snatch up leftovers before they could be thrown to the cats. Once again I couldn’t help noticing the intelligence – almost the intellectuality – of their expressions. No attempt was made to chase them away. They were simply treated as nonexistent. The customers had withdrawn from the world while they communed with their food. An extraordinary cripple was dragged in, balancing face downwards on a trolley, only a few inches from the ground, arms and legs thrust out in spider fashion. Nobody took his eyes off his food for one second to glance down at him. This youth could not use his hands. One of the scugnizzi hunted down a piece of bread for him, turned his head sideways to stuff it between his teeth, and he was dragged out.

  Suddenly five or six little girls between the ages of nine and twelve appeared in the doorway. They wore hideous straight black uniforms buttoned under their chins, and black boots and stockings, and their hair had been shorn short, prison-style. They were all weeping, and as they clung to each other and groped their way towards us, bumping into chairs and tables, I realised they were all blind. Tragedy and despair had been thrust upon us, and would not be shut out. I expected the indifferent diners to push back their plates, to get up and hold out their arms, but nobody moved. Forkfuls of food were thrust into open mouths, the rattle of conversation continued, nobody saw the tears.

  Lattarullo explained that these little girls were from an orphanage on the Vomero, where he had heard – and he made a face – conditions were very bad. They had been brought down here, he found out, on a halfday’s outing by an attendant who seemed unable or unwilling to stop them from being lured away by the smell of food.

  The experience changed my outlook. Until now I had clung to the comforting belief that human beings eventually come to terms with pain and sorrow. Now I understood I was wrong, and like Paul I suffered a conversion – but to pessimism. These little girls, any one of whom could be my daughter, came into the restaurant weeping, and they were weeping when they were led away. I knew that, condemned to everlasting darkness, hunger and loss, they would weep on incessantly. They would never recover from their pain, and I would never recover from the memory of it.

  November 5

  Called for the first time on two new contacts, Ingeniere Losurdo and Avvocato Mosca, and found – no longer to my entire astonishment – that the circumstances of their lives bore an extreme resemblance to those of Lattarullo. Both lived in the Via Chiaia, once the resort of the town’s aristocracy, in vast, dark, bare palazzi of which they occupied a single floor. Both palazzi date from the early eighteenth century, and have much-defaced coats of arms over the doorway. Each of them has its dim little porter’s lodge, in which sits an identical old woman knitting in the semidarkness, and a courtyard behind heavy doors with its flagstones rutted with the passage of the carriages of two centuries. There was a trace of embarrassment, a hint of apology, in the manner of both these men as they invited me into rooms which appeared to be virtually unfurnished. In each case I was led through a bare corridor to the salotto, in which a few pieces of furniture had been placed, without any attempt at arrangement, as if in an auction saleroom. They represented, I suspected, the whole contents of the apartment, hastily concentrated in a single room. The wallpaper – which in Naples had once signified pretension and luxury – was in both instances under attack by mould, and the paintwork on the doors and window-frames was cracked and flaking. A faintly vegetable odour noticeable in both palazzi suggested dry-rot. The general impression was one of genteel but very real poverty.

  Ingeniere Losurdo and Avvocato Mosca were exactly fitted to their environment, for which reason they bore a striking resemblance to each other, and also to Lattarullo – so much so that they could easily have been members of the same family. I got the impression that they had been too poor to marry, too poor to do anything but defend themselves with considerable tenacity in the struggle to keep up appearances. They all offered an occasional, diffident reference to the fact that they were well-connected. Lattarullo’s ancestor fought with Caracciolo in the war against Nelson and the Bourbons, and Mosca was entitled to put Conte on his visiting card, but no longer bothered. They had grand manners, and hearing them talk one sometimes seemed to be listening to Dr Johnson in an Italian translation. Each of these men had gracefully come to terms with a standard of living far lower than that of an average member of the Neapolitan working class.

  In Naples one tends to blame all these things on the calamity of war, but after further acquaintance with the city, it becomes clear that this is only half the story and that the phenomenon of my three friends’ near-destitution is an old and familiar one. The war has only aggravated their plight. In 1835 Alexander Dumas, who spent some weeks in Naples, wrote of its upper classes that only four families enjoyed great fortunes, that twenty were comfortably off, and the rest had to struggle to make ends meet. What mattered was to have a well-painted carriage harnessed up to a couple of old horses, a coachman in threadbare livery, and a private box at the San Carlo – where the social life of the town was largely conducted. People lived in their carriages or in the theatre, but their houses were barred to visitors, and hermetically sealed, as Dumas puts it, against foreigners like himself.

  He discovered that all but a tiny handful of the ancient families of Naples lived in straitened circumstances, and this is roughly the situation a century later. They talked in a matter-of-fact and quite convincing way of the golden days of their families under Imperial Rome, but they had not enough to eat. The Neapolitan upper-crust of those times consumed only one meal every twenty-four hours; at two in the afternoon in winter, and at midnight in summer. Their food was almost as poor in quality and as monotonous as that served to prisoners in gaol: invariably the equivalent of a few pence’ worth of macaro
ni flavoured with a little fish, and washed down with Asprino d’Aversa, tasting – according to Dumas – more like rough cider than wine. By way of an occasional extravagance one of these pauper-noblemen might force himself to go without bread or macaroni for a day, and spend what he had saved on an ice-cream to be eaten splendidly in public, at the fashionable Café Donzelli.

  In those days the only profession open to a young man of good family was the diplomatic service, and as there were only sixty such posts offered by the Kingdom of Naples, the ninety per cent of applicants who were unsuccessful had to endure aristocratic idleness. The twentieth-century version of this situation as reflected in the somewhat sterile existences of Lattarullo, Losurdo and Mosca seemed little changed in its essentials. Nowadays the learned professions have taken the place of diplomacy, but they are so overcrowded they only provide a living for less than one man in ten who enters them. Lattarullo and company have been brought up to the idea that they cannot enter trade, and they are debarred by the same rule from physical creation of any kind. Therefore while others go hungry, they virtually starve.

  November 10

  The sexual attitudes of Neapolitans never fail to produce new surprises. Today Prince A., now well known to us all and an enthusiastic informant from our first days at the Riviera di Chiaia, visited us with his sister, whom we met for the first time. The Prince is the absentee landlord of a vast estate somewhere in the South, and owns a nearby palace stacked with family portraits and Chinese antiques. He is the head of what is regarded as the second or third noble family of Southern Italy. The Prince is about thirty years of age, and his sister could be twenty-four. Both are remarkably alike in appearance: thin, with extremely pale skin and cold, patrician expressions bordering on severity. The purpose of the visit was to enquire if we could arrange for the sister to enter an army brothel. We explained that there was no such institution in the British Army. ‘A pity,’ the Prince said. Both of them speak excellent English, learned from an English governess.