Voyage By Dhow

by Norman Lewis

  Valenzi is as Neapolitan as Brezhnev is Muscovite, lively of expression and gesture, a distinguished painter and a first-rate oratorical performer in a country in which no politician can survive without the knack of rhetoric and a powerful voice. His appearance recalls the views on matters of dress held by Togliatti, party leader for so many years: ‘What pleases me is to see a comrade dressed in a good double-breasted suit—if possible, dark blue.’ Valenzi is wholly congruous in the rococo furnishings, the marble and the glitter of the Naples Town Hall. He is fired by local patriotism, impatient of criticism of his city, and particularly saddened by those contained in a book by a communist author, Maria Antoinetta Macciocchi, who had been a parliamentary candidate for one of the poor quarters of the city. ‘She wasn’t much liked here,’ the mayor said.

  Macciocchi had mentioned that the rat population of central Naples was 7 million. Many of these, she said, were shared out in the bassi, those claustrophobic dwellings consisting of a single room that line the streets of the old town, in which as many as fifteen members of a family may live as best they can with no windows, the street doors shut at night, no running water and a closet behind a curtain. The mayor, who showed a partiality for euphemism, shied away from the word bassi, but agreed that 69,000 families lived in ‘unhygienic houses’. ‘The municipality,’ he said, ‘has plans to do something.’

  ‘Our submerged economy’ was Valenzi’s description for the child labour existing in Naples to an extent found nowhere else in the Western world. There is no way of calculating the number of children from the age of eight upwards employed in cafés, bars, or the innumerable sweat-shops tucked away in the narrow streets; but there are certainly tens of thousands of them. It would appear to be another ‘illegal solution’. Naples has the highest birth-rate in Italy—twice the national average—and it is an everyday accomplishment for a woman to have borne ten children by the age of thirty-five and to have completed a brood of fifteen or sixteen by the time she ceases to reproduce. Such families are a source of complacency rather than despair. One is assured that they testify to a woman’s sexual attraction and her husband’s virility. More importantly, perhaps, they represent an insurance policy against economic disaster. When up to five or six children contribute small regular sums to the budget a family is not only more affluent but securer than a less numerous one in the trap of chronic unemployment.

  These are the facts of Neapolitan life against which Mayor Valenzi struggles like Canute against the waves. If the child in proletarian Naples is an economic weapon in the family armoury it follows as a consequence that such central areas of the city as the Vicaria district have the highest population density in Europe—possibly in the world—with up to three people occupying every two square metres. But if overcrowding, and its damaging effect on public health, is the most pressing problem that face the mayor and his council, it is the terrific anachronism of child labour with its whiff of early-Victorian England that gives the city a bad name. Therefore gestures have to be made, and from time to time the police are ordered into action to close down all establishments employing child labour and to punish their owners with exemplary fines. What follows is economic disaster for all involved—sometimes desperate impoverishment for the families thrown back on the providing power of the father who, statistically speaking, can expect to spend a third of his life unemployed. At this point the exploiters and the exploited only too often join forces in protest, and their votes are lost to whatever party is held responsible for their plight.

  How is this situation to be tackled? How can any political party hope to put an end to the Neapolitan tradition of the large family which engenders the poverty which is to be fought by even larger families? Schooling in Italy is compulsory up to fourteen years of age, but the school inspectors are as helpless as the politicians. The little courtyards tucked away everywhere in Naples are full of small boys aged upwards of eight years who work ten or twelve hours a day, for as little as £2 a week, stitching and glueing shoes. A happier-looking, more intelligent collection of children it would be hard to find in the family atmosphere that pervades even the workshop. None of them will ever read or write.

  Naples sharpens the stranger’s wits and teaches him to look after himself. The lesson is not a difficult one to learn, and in a matter of hours, days at most, amusement is apt to take over from indignation. One exchanges laughter with the agreeable young man who offers a perfect imitation of a Seiko watch that only ticks for a minute or two when it is wound up; or points without severity, on taking a taxi, to the meter inevitably still registering the fare clocked up by the last passenger. There are basic precautions to be taken: passports and valuables are automatically committed to the hotel’s safe, and only enough money carried to meet immediate requirements. When parking a car it is not a bad idea to secure the steering wheel with a chain and padlock. These things attended to, one can relax and join in the local games.

  Our own arrival in Naples was on the second day of the ancient and popular feast of Santa Maria del Carmine, held in the streets adjacent to the old church at the far end of the port. Del Carmine is the parish church of one of a number of districts, once virtually separate villages. Each has its history, traditions, customs—and often the enfeebled remnant of a once-powerful ruling family. And such was the spirit of rivalry between one district and another that fifty years ago intermarriage between districts was rare.

  The church possesses a picture of a ‘black’ Virgin, held responsible for many cures, in particular of epileptics and lepers and of those afflicted with all kinds of pox. The most unusual and attractive feature of the festa is the ‘burning’ of the church tower, by the setting alight of bales of straw fastened to its walls, with the intention of cleansing it, and thus the district itself, of evil spirits during the forthcoming year. It was a disappointment to learn that the tower was not to be ‘burned’ on this occasion: repairs to its structure had been found necessary, and the scaffolding was already in place. The cancellation of the ceremony had cast a certain gloom over the neighbourhood, which depends largely on fishing and feared that catches might be affected.

  The Corso Garibaldi, a wide if dishevelled street running past the church, was filled by early evening with a holiday crowd. Here all the familiar ingredients of a Neapolitan festa were assembled: the stalls with tooth-cracking nougat, solid cakes and cheroots; the shooting booths; the intimidating display of strange shellfish; balloons and holy pictures—and black-market cigarettes.

  In Naples the cult of the enormous Japanese motorcycle has arrived and they were here in fearsome concentration, roaring through whatever space they found among the press of human bodies. We saw one elfin girl mounted on a Kawasaki ‘King Kong’ hyper-bike. Children are not over-protected in Naples. The minimum age for a Vespa rider seemed to be twelve or thirteen; and crash helmets were absolutely out.

  These are the occasions when, in holiday mood, Neapolitans resolutely suspend belief. A professional ‘uncle from Rome’ was pointed out to us, aloof and immaculate in his dark suit, ready to hire himself to any family wishing to impress its guests on an occasion such as a christening, wedding or funeral. Magliari—confidence tricksters who flock to all such festas—were there in numbers, instantly recognizable even to an outsider by the apparatus of their trade.

  The grade-A hoax operator presents himself as a rejected suitor offering the ‘silver’ service bought for the wedding that will no longer take place. Magliari in truck-drivers’ overalls and with oil on their fingers flog trashy radios and defective tape-recorders ‘off the back of the van’. A local boy in burnous and headcloths, skin yellowed by several layers of instant-tan, hawks vile carpets which, he claims, have been brought over from Tunisia with the cigarettes. How do Neapolitans—those masters of guile—allow themselves to be taken in?

  Until two years ago the seller of Acqua Ferrata would have been here. This most esteemed and expensive of curative waters, nauseatingly flavoured with iron, was drawn from a hole in
the ground somewhere in Santa Lucia and offered—exactly as illustrated in the Pompeii frescos—in containers shaped like a woman’s breast. Since then, following a typhoid scare, the health department has stepped in and Acqua Ferrata is at an end—temporarily, perhaps—to be replaced with a poorish substitute: fresh lemonade animated with bicarbonate of soda.

  One figure alone from the remote past had survived at del Carmine: the pazzariello, the joker of antiquity, also shown in the Pompeii frescos. Once he drove out devils, and as recently as the time of the last war no new business could be opened before a pazzariello had been called in to lash out with his stick at every corner of a building where a devil might have concealed himself. The office was an honoured one, hereditary and indispensable, too, in a city where even now people cross the road in the Via Carducci to avoid passing too close to a building notoriously under the influence of the evil eye. But now the magic power of the pazzariello has drained away; the one we saw, doing his best to dodge the motorcyclists as he capered about in the Corso Garibaldi, was there to advertise a fish restaurant.

  Our visit to del Carmine provided a mild adventure. Among the exhibition of holy pictures, most of them crude versions of the celebrated ikon on display in the church, we noted one of a strikingly different kind; a portrait of a somewhat stolid-looking middle-aged man, stiff in a formal suit: Il Santo Dottore Moscati. It turned out that the holy doctor was a GP of the district, recently deceased and newly canonized by popular acclamation, without reference to Vatican or Church, as a result of a number of miraculous cures he had effected.

  The display with its new, popular saint seemed to call for a photograph, but the elderly lady in charge fought shy of the camera and retreated in haste, shielding her face with one of the ikons and leaving her husband to conduct any further negotiations. The old man made no objection to being photographed when we agreed to buy a picture of Dr Moscati. Since the light was already failing, the camera was set up on a tripod and the preparations put in hand. Immediately a crowd began to collect, drawn by the powerful magnet of this performance from the competing attractions of a shooting booth and the church just across the road. A Neapolitan friend who had guided us to the festa became concerned, feeling that we were attracting too much attention and were too vulnerable, surrounded by photographic gear, to a passing scippatore. But the crowd was co-operative and affable; working Neapolitans, as gregarious as pigeons, love nothing better than a new face and an excuse to exchange a smile with a foreigner. People were actually jostling each other and manoeuvring to be included in the photograph, so that, realizing that we were among friends, all warnings were ignored and the photography went ahead.

  A moment later there was a sudden chill in the atmosphere and the smiles faded. A grim-faced, gesturing man had pushed himself to the front to demand payment of 50,000 lire—about £30. His story was that he was acting for the owner of the pictures; but it was to be supposed that he was an enforcer of one of the protection gangs said to levy a toll on most Neapolitan business enterprises. We decided to resist the extortion: there were four of us, and we were certain that we had the crowd on our side. The situation was saved when the old man had the courage to admit that he had never seen the presumed gangster before in his life. With this, the unwelcome stranger went off, and the emergency was at an end.

  In 1943–44 I spent a year in Naples, arriving a day or so after its capture from the Germans in October 1943, when the city lay devastated by the hurricane of war. The scene was apocalyptic. Ruins were piled high in every street and in these people camped out like Bedouin in a wilderness of brick, on the verge of starvation and close to dying of thirst: there had been no water supply since the great Allied air-bombardment a month before. Families experimented with seawater to cook herbs and edible roots grubbed up in gardens and parks. Some squatted by the shore with weird contraptions with which they hoped to distil seawater to drink. At the same time an absurd and disastrous ban on fishing kept the boats from going out, and children by the hundred were to be seen scrambling about the rocks, prizing off limpets to sell at a few lire a pint, supplies of winkles and sea-snails having been long exhausted. All the rare and extraordinary fish from all parts of the world in the famous aquarium had been eaten by the populace, and a manatee, the aquarium’s most prized possession, preserved for a while only by its ugliness, had finally been slaughtered and disguised in the cooking to be served at a banquet in honour of General Mark Clark.

  Men and women who had lost all their possessions in the bombardments went about dressed in sacking or in garments confected from curtains and bed-covers. But at the many funerals, professional mourners still tore at their clothes as well as their cheeks. A problem had risen over the shortage of funeral horses, many of which had gone into the stewpot; and the most extraordinary sight of all was of two old men harnessed up with a pair of enfeebled donkeys in the shafts of a hearse. It was at a time when Naples was threatened with outbreaks of smallpox and typhoid; armed deserters from the Allied forces were attacking and looting private houses; and Moorish troops committed atrocities against men, women and children on the outskirts of the city.

  The printing of occupation money, plus the devaluation of the lira from 100:£1 to 400:£1, spelled instant ruin to those dependent upon fixed salaries. An American corporal then received about ten times the pay of an Italian major, and the Questore, the Chief of Police of Naples, the highest paid civil servant, with a salary of 5,496 lire a month, was earning the equivalent of £14. This man was incorruptible, and I was present in his office when he fainted from hunger.

  Men of lesser calibre turned to the black market, organized and presided over by Vito Genovese—and nourished by one third of all the supplies shipped through the Port of Naples for the provisioning of the Allied forces in Italy.

  Children orphaned or abandoned in the anarchy of the times, the notorious scugnizzi (numbering perhaps 20,000), lived like little foxes in their holes in the ruins. They were outstandingly good-humoured, intelligent and beautiful, but they could only survive by pimping and petty theft. Sometimes they were driven to risk a raid on Allied food-lorries that happened to be slowed in the traffic; but this came to an end when guards were concealed in the backs of the vehicles and a number of small boys lost their fingers, hacked off by a bayonet, in the moment of grabbing a tailboard.

  In families deprived of their menfolk the women frequently supported themselves and their children by prostitution. A bulletin issued by the Bureau of Psychological Warfare gave a figure for women in Naples who had become regular or occasional prostitutes of no less than 42,000. That this could have happened when there were possibly 150,000 girls of marriageable age in Naples seems incredible: there is no more convincing illustration of the extremity of their agony.

  It was Naples’ calvary of fire and destitution; the days of reproach through which it came at long last so astonishingly unmarred. The Neapolitans’ salvation was their fortitude; their incapacity for despair. Perhaps too, there was a kind of austerity in their make-up unsuspected in Southerners—a readiness to make do with little and a lack of affinity with the acquisitiveness already beginning to dominate Western European society.

  Revisiting Naples I saw it as a city that has achieved its own kind of emotional stability, is content to drift with no eye to the future, has rejected change and is unchangeable. In this way, as Scarfoglio had observed, it is Oriental rather than European. Economically it has stagnated, where the industrial North with its separate identity and ideals has pushed further and further ahead. Nearly half the Neapolitan workforce is unemployed or under-employed, but Neapolitans help each other. The income per capita is only a third of that in Milan; but, for me, Naples will always be the better place to live in.

  In Naples there is a human solidarity hard to find elsewhere. If one lives there long enough one has the sensation almost of belonging to the world’s most enormous family. The labour statistics may reveal situations reminiscent of Dickensian England, but there was litt
le in the England of Charles Dickens of the laughter of Naples.

  The sensation of continuity—that here in Naples one was recapturing the vanished past—was reinforced by a visit to a famous shore-side restaurant, unaltered in any way in its furnishings and atmosphere from the days in 1944 when it had been full of Allied officers and the barons of the black market. The house troubadours, facsimiles of their fathers, attended the guests as ever to strum the everlasting Torn’ a Sorrento on their mandolins. The same algae-spotted showcase with its display of octopus and crabs was there still and so, too, was the old man hunched behind the antique cash register with its bell chiming like the Cathedral’s angelus.

  All the rituals had been preserved. Fish were still presented with hooks hanging from their mouths to suggest that they had been cut in that very instant from the line; and what used to be known as the ‘show-fish’, a majestic bass or merou, passed on a lordly salver from table to table to cries of admiration from diners who should have known that, whatever they ordered, it would not be this that they would eat. At the proper moment the visitors’ book was produced—but here, at least, there had been changes. All the great, blustering Fascist names had been weeded out thirty-five years before, but now the pages dealing with the years 1944–45 had gone too, and with them Mark Clark, and the rest of the Allied generals. Enduring fame now belonged only to such as Axel Munthe and Sophia Loren, the local girl (surely well on her way to popular canonization) from Pozzuoli, just round the corner of the bay. Neapolitans had thrust the politicians and the soldiers out of memory.