Naples '44

by Norman Lewis

  San Pasquale is a community of its own, with its own fiestas and folklore, and even a surviving feudal chieftain, the Prince of Rocella, who raised a force of partisans in these streets and led them against the Germans in the celebrated four days of the uprising. Here I found myself immersed in the popular life of Naples which has been resurrected among the ruins. A hand-operated roundabout for children had been set up, and an old man with a concertina was squeaking out ‘O Sole Mio’ and selling printed fortunes for a lira apiece. Fishing has at last been legally resumed and in the street market an excited crowd had gathered to watch the cutting-up of a tremendous swordfish, rarely caught at this time of the year. The head had been cut off and stood up in the street for separate display, the sword pointing upwards and the huge flat blue eyes staring into the sky. This is a lucky sight, with phallic associations, and the onlookers circled the head reverently as if about to break into a dance.

  Luck, and even more so bad luck, plays a powerful part in the lives of Neapolitans. There is not a jeweller’s shop in the city that does not sell amulets in the form of a little coral horn to be worn on a necklace or a bracelet, and here in the Via Carducci something was pointed out to me which I did not imagine could exist – a house considered to suffer from the evil eye, which is carefully avoided by passers-by. There was nothing particularly sinister in the appearance of Number 15, which was just a small modern block of flats in which several tenants had put an end to their lives. The eventual remedy would be for a number of the neighbours to get together and put up the money to build a shrine in the street wall of the malefic building, placing it under the special protection of some powerful exorcist such as San Gaetano.

  December 18

  Again the vendetta. Not only are we subjected to a flood of accusations and denunciations that come direct from the Italian citizenry, but to a further, and usually even more senseless and baseless outpouring, from the static military units in the area. These – road and railway construction companies, petrol supply companies, signal units, base depots, and so on – are thick on the ground in the Naples area, and their commanding officers soon fall victims to the Italian interpreters they employ who tell them what the interpreters think fit that they should know, and ply them with wild legends of spies and Fascist saboteurs. They also do what they can to involve these gullible and innocent men – just as they do us – in the local feuds.

  The chiefs of police, being for the most part villains, figure very largely in these indignant reports from the units and recently a number of charges have been made against Marshal Benvenuto, who rules with a rod of iron in the village of Torrito, near Aversa. An Italian police marshal is only the equivalent in rank of a sergeant-major, but he wields huge and often tyrannical power in small Italian towns, where he is in command of the forces of law and order. Benvenuto is said to use the unsatisfactory food situation to spread propaganda against the Allies, and in the words of one anonymous accusation ‘to promise with open malice in a few days’ time to arrest anybody who doesn’t please him’. More seriously, he is charged with carrying on a personal vendetta against a famous partisan, Giovanni Albano, whom he arrested on an allegedly trumped-up charge soon after the Allies’ arrival, and whom he has since been doing his best to have interned.

  We really have too much on our plates to have to bother with this kind of thing, but the story of how we rewarded those who shed their blood for us in the ‘heroic four days’ of the partisan uprising at the end of September has to be prevented from becoming a legend, so today, with extreme reluctance, I took myself off to Torrito to see Albano and hear from him his story of what had happened.

  Torrito seems to have had some pretensions to grandeur before falling into its present misery. All the houses in the main street had balconies. There was a small garden with a few palms in the little square, a school, a club, and three or four once-imposing mansions – now largely ruined. At the crossroads of the main street and the Aversa highway, on September 30, there took place a massacre conducted by the Germans. Twenty-four persons including a woman, a monk, and three boys in their teens, all the human beings the SS, who were in a hurry, could discover in the neighbouring houses, were lined up against the wall and shot. The massacre was a reprisal for the action of the partisans under Albano’s leadership in the nearby village of Palo di Orta. I found the whole population of Torrito to be in mourning.

  I was admitted with some caution to Albano’s presence by a woman of his household, and found him a haggard, haunted man who spoke very quietly, as if in fear of being overheard. His story of September 30 was that on that day the Germans were beginning their withdrawal from the area when a message reached Torrito that the Germans were at Palo di Orta, whereupon Albano and the twenty partisans he commanded had gone there to engage them. In the fighting which ensued, he and his partisans had captured two prisoners, six cars and a motorcycle, and taken them back to Torrito. Here he sent for Marshal Benvenuto to demand his support in case of reprisals. But the Marshal ignored the summons. Albano then turned over the two German prisoners to the Marshal’s safekeeping, but Benvenuto, washing his hands of the whole enterprise, not only released the two men but provided them with civilian clothes to lessen the likelihood of their recapture. Unfortunately, as it turned out, they were unable to find their way back to their unit. When the German tanks reached Torrito the two uniforms were discovered and, under the assumption the wearers had been killed, the massacre was ordered. Two days later, when the Allies arrived, Benvenuto arrested Albano on what sounded to me like the extraordinary charge of criminal collaboration with the Germans, and produced several witnesses in support of these charges. He was sent to prison, and had been released on bail to await trial.

  There seemed to be little material for an epic of the Resistance in this. Since Albano made no claim at any time to have actually killed Germans, it was to be supposed that he had not, and the two captured prisoners had been promptly released. On the other hand the charge of criminal collaboration seemed a strange one, so my first move was to visit the senior police officer for the area at Afragola, for a second opinion as to the true facts of the case. The marshall at Afragola was contemptuous of Albano’s reputation as a folk-hero, describing him as a ‘foreigner’ from Sicily, and a member of the Sicilian Mafia. I then pressed for copies of statements made by witnesses in the case, and these were produced; one by a Luigi Pascarella, and another by a woman named Anna Consomata.

  December 20

  I checked Pascarella and Consomata in the dossier section of the Questura, and found that they both had records: Pascarella several times for pimping and petty theft, and Consomata for prostitution. After that both had to be visited. I found Pascarella at Fratta Maggiore, read his statement to him, and watched the changes in the small, mean, natural underdog’s face.

  ‘In August 1943 Giovanni Albano came to see me. He told me that two escaped Indian soldiers had taken shelter in his house. He said that he was worried because if they were found there he would be shot. I advised him to send them away but he said that he had heard that the Germans paid a reward for the recapture of escaped prisoners. He was very much against the Allies, and told me that if they won the war we should all be finished. I agreed to accompany him to the German Headquarters and there I heard him denounce the presence of the Indians in his house. Albano was known as an informer of the OVRA.’

  ‘What was the actual date when Albano came to see you?’ I asked him.

  ‘It was the beginning of the month.’

  ‘You were in prison until the 15th.’

  ‘It could have been after that.’

  ‘It wasn’t. This statement is false. How did Marshal Benvenuto compel you to sign it?’

  A moment of depressed silence, then a spread of hands as if to show the nail-marks in the palms. ‘He threatened to frame my wife for prostitution if I didn’t.’

  Anna Consomata, at Caivano, was a beautiful girl, marvellously fair, an angel by Botticelli with tapering lute-play
ing fingers and coifs of yellow hair in the black South. To save time I mentioned her fascicolo in the Questura, and the conversation became frank. Sadly I learned that this golden Venus had been the deplorable Pascarella’s mistress and he had obliged her to back up his testimony by agreeing that she had been present on the occasion of Albano’s visit. She had now established a relationship with the Commanding Officer of the local British Tipper Company.

  After that it was Marshal Benvenuto’s turn to be confronted with the evidence of his perfidy. We faced each other across his desk, the Marshal gaunt and grey, but defiant, seated under a padlocked showcase full of daggers taken from Torrito’s desperados. A sawn-off shotgun leaned against the wall ready to hand. It seemed pointless to preach or to harangue in this atmosphere of siege. ‘Why should you want to put Albano away?’ I asked him.

  ‘It had to be done,’ he said. ‘You’ve never lived here, so you don’t understand the way things are. This is Zona di Camorra – gangster territory. We don’t grow partisans in this particular soil. Albano wasn’t interested in killing Germans. All he was out for was loot. I want to show you something to give you an idea of the trouble we’re in after his famous action.’

  He went off into the back of his office, returning with a brown rag which, held up and stretched out, was with some difficulty recognisable as a bloodstained shirt pierced by several holes. This, he explained, was the shirt worn by one of the men killed in the German reprisal. Twenty-one more such shirts remained in the possession of the families of the victims – the woman and the monk didn’t come into this – and vendettas against Albano had been sworn on each of them. These bloody heirlooms would pass down to the family’s eldest son in due course. In the absence of a son they had already been entrusted to the nearest male relative of the dead man. Albano, therefore, had twenty-one blood feuds on his hands; the shirt the Marshal had succeeded in confiscating belonged to a man with no family.

  ‘This is the way things are done in Torrito,’ the Marshal said. ‘My personal inclination would have been to look in the other direction and let them get on with it, but the trouble is it wouldn’t stop there. As soon as somebody killed Albano his people would take his shirt and divide it up between them and swear to keep the vendetta going. There’d be no end to the thing. What do you expect me to do? I have two men here. Half the town’s starving. We have a dozen burglaries a night; hold-ups every day of the week; bandits all over the countryside. I haven’t got the time or the strength to deal with a vendetta on top of all this. Somehow or other this man has to be got rid of.’

  It was a problem one could sympathise with.

  1944

  January 1

  We have suffered from a plague of telephone-wire cutting, and there has been a case a day to deal with for the past week. Of all the miscellaneous jobs that are thrown at us, this is the most boring and frustrating. The most thankless, too, because we never produce results. In fact the only people so far to have caught wire-cutters are the Special Investigation Branch of the Military Police, and there have been bitter reflections at Army Headquarters on the subject of our comparative efficiency. The Army insists that these wire-cutting cases are deliberate acts of sabotage, whereas we know full well that lengths of cable are cut out purely for the commercial value of the copper, and that like any other article of Allied ownership the copper is offered openly for sale in the Via Forcella.

  How is one supposed to begin to put a stop to this? All we can do is to visit the spot where the cutting has taken place and make enquiries – which are always pointless and profitless – from any Italians who happen to live in the neighbourhood. Last week my first on-the-spot investigation of this kind proved to be a perfect introduction to the conspiratorial silence of the South. About fifty yards of thick main cable had been cut, and at about seven in the evening right in the middle of the busy main street of Casoria. I went from house to house and shop to shop questioning people who in three cases out of four claimed to have had business compelling them to be in other parts of the town on the previous evening. Those who remained had seen or heard nothing. The brigadiere (sergeant) in charge of the Carabinieri station was not in the slightest surprised at this lack of success. Omertà – manliness, he explained. ‘They side against us, and they always will do. It’s a tradition.’ I detected pride in his manner.

  I reminded him that the Germans shot wire-cutters on the spot. ‘Of course they did,’ he agreed. ‘Thank God, you’re a civilised and humanitarian people, and you liberated us from those barbarians. You’ve taught us what democratic justice is all about and we can’t thank you enough.’ Not a muscle moved in his face to show that he was laughing at me.

  Next day there was another case – at Cicciano. This time the man was actually caught red-handed by some British soldiers belonging to a local unit who happened to be passing, and who locked him up in their guardroom. The General, as generals do, wanted an execution. It looked an opportunity to instil terror into the hearts of those damned wogs who were tricking us right left and centre. I saw the prisoner, who looked sincere and produced his plausible story. Of course he had heard the noise of someone using a hatchet to chop into the wire, and naturally he had run out of his house to do what he could, whereupon the thieves had dropped the wire and dashed off. Our friend had felt it his duty as a responsible citizen to pick up the wire and throw it into his garden, where it would be out of harm’s way, while he went off to report the incident to the police. At this point he was picked up.

  Although this story was probably a typically Neapolitan cover-up, there was also a chance that it had happened in just this way, so I decided to give the man the benefit of the doubt and to do what I could to save his life. Once again there was a visit to the Carabinieri, and for a moment it was hard to believe that this wasn’t the same brigadiere I’d seen the day before at Casoria. This man called me ‘your honour’ and within minutes found some excuse to congratulate me as the other had done for being the representative of a justice-loving country.

  ‘Has the man a criminal record?’ I asked.

  ‘Your honour, his sheet’s as clear as the soul of one of the innocents murdered by Herod.’

  ‘I’m going to the Pubblica Sicurezza after I’ve done with you. If they give me a different story you’re for it.’

  ‘Your honour, I swear to you on the mourning worn for my sister who died a virgin – ’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Omertà?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it, but surely you can’t imagine it applies in my case? After all, we’re both coppers. God knows, I’d sooner lie to my own father.’

  The face remained a bland Neapolitan mask. I wrote, ‘Carabinieri report no convictions,’ and decided not even to bother to visit the PS, whose report was certain to be the same. What was one to expect? Why should these people sacrifice their countrymen to us any more than they had to the Germans? The verdict, so far as I was concerned, had to be insufficient evidence. If the General still wanted to go ahead with his firing squad, that was his responsibility.

  January 5

  I have been placed in charge of the security of a number of small towns to the north of Naples and within approximately twenty-five miles of the city; of these the largest are Casoria, Afragola, Acerra and Aversa. Although the Army certainly doesn’t realise this, they are all located in the notorious Zona di Camorra. The task is a hopeless one, and it would be demoralising to take it too seriously, but most of the last week has been spent in reconnoitring the area, and finding out what I can about these dismal places.

  Seen from the outside through the orchards that surround them, all these towns look attractive enough: tiny versions of Naples itself, clustered round their blue-domed churches. On the inside they are the showcases of poverty and misery. There are signs of a vanished prosperity. A few great houses have been built with arcaded fronts and a tower added here and there as an excuse for the rich landlords of the past to use up spare money, but they are falling into ruins, and squatters ha
ve built their shacks in the courtyards. The area is one of great natural fertility. It is from these orchards, fields and vineyards that the wealth was extracted to build the ducal palaces of Naples. A handful of families own all the land, and the peasants who work it have always done so in conditions that come very close to slavery. Nowadays the normal, accepted misery of their condition has been aggravated by the war and the loss of manpower. In some of these towns the whole population is said to be out of work. The new sindacos, the mayors who have been appointed by AMG, the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory, to replace the old Fascist podestàs, are stated in the main to be members of the criminal Camorra. It is common knowledge that these have been appointed through the influence of Vito Genovese, the American gangster who, having obtained employment as an interpreter, has now manoeuvred himself into a position of unassailable power in the military government. Law and order depend on badly equipped and badly armed Carabinieri and Pubblica Sicurezza, who have two or three men apiece in each town – all of them under constant threat of attack by well-armed criminals. When I called yesterday on the Carabinieri at Acerra, I was shown round the town by a brigadiere who walked at my side with pistol drawn and cocked. Last week bandits raided the police station here, killing the NCO on duty, wounding another policeman and taking the few poor obsolete weapons they had. This leaves only two Carabinieri to carry on.