The Witch of Napoli

by Michael Schmicker

  As I’m hurrying to fold up my camera, I overhear these two withered English biddies who attended the séance gushing over the miracle they just witnessed.

  “She’s the spirit medium we’ve been looking for,” gushes the first.

  “I agree,” sniffs the second, “but why would God use such an uneducated, immoral woman for His divine work? Besides, she smells like a goat.” And they laughed.

  They were damn lucky Alessandra didn’t hear them. She would have thrashed them.

  When I developed the plate in the darkroom that night, I immediately knew I had the photograph which would make my name. The next morning, Venzano summoned me into his office, and handed me a copy of the paper. My photo was splashed across the front page. Right below it, in tiny, six-point type, was my name. Photo by Tommaso Labella. It was my first byline in the business, and it appeared in the newspaper on March 26, 1899.

  • • •

  Almost 20 years ago, now. It’s hard to believe.

  This morning, before Antonio started assembling the big Sunday special on Alessandra, I called him into my office, closed the door, reached into a drawer, and pulled out my private file on her – copies of Huxley’s reports, Lombardi’s correspondence with other scientists, hundreds of newspaper clippings.

  “Look through this,” I said. You’ll find a lot of good stuff. But check with me before you use anything.”

  I explained to Antonio how I chronicled Alessandra’s rise to fame every step of the way, crouching in corners of séance rooms, eavesdropping on conversations, scooping up tidbits of information to share with Venzano. I was never a pest. I keep secrets when necessary, and I always made sure my photos flattered her, right to the end. She was vain, like all women, and had a scar on her forehead which she did her best to hide with her hair. I never showed it in my photos. She told me she fell off a donkey cart as a child, but I know Pigotti gave it to her.

  “We understood each other,” I told Antonio.

  She knew where I came from, and how far I had to climb to get to the top, just like she had to. People see me now, editor of the powerful and influential Messaggero, showing up at The Barber of Seville with a beautiful contessa on my arm, dining with Roman nobility, dressed in Castangia suits and drinking Veuve Clicquot. They don’t know I started at the bottom. But I had ambition. I wanted to sit in the editor’s seat, to “earn my bread by the sweat of my pen,” as Aretino famously put it. So I educated myself, shooting photos for the Mattino then sneaking into the Biblioteca Nazionale on Saturday afternoons to read Manzoni and Leopardi, learning how to pen an elegant sentence, and memorizing lines from Dante and Boccaccio and Petrarca to impress my superiors.

  “You’ve probably never heard of Petrarca,” I teased.

  Antonio looked up from the file he was thumbing through and laughed. “Let me hear you spout a few verses.”

  I struck a pose, my hands outstretched, reaching for the stars.

  Era il giorno ch'al sol si scoloraro

  per la pietà del suo factore i rai…

  Antonio recognized it right away. He had spent a year at the university. “Petrarca’s love sonnet for his unattainable Laura, no?”

  “Bravo, Antonio,” I replied. “I’ve used his poetry to coax more than one lady into bed.”

  He grinned. “Including Alessandra?”

  I shook my head. “I tried a few lines on her when we first met, but it sailed right over her head. She never heard of Petrarca. We always laughed about that. We were two bricconi from Naples who fooled the world. But we never forgot where we came from.”

  What I didn’t share with Antonio, or anyone else at the newspaper, was that I also ended up with her private diaries – 38 notebooks, written in her childish, semi-illiterate scrawl, in a dialect only we Neapolitans understand, describing what she saw and did and felt in her extraordinary life, who she slept with, her feelings and desires, her memories and secrets. She trusted me to tell her story.

  I tell you this in confidence: Hachette in Paris has approached me to write her biography – for 1,000 francs – but I turned them down, and I’ll tell you why. It’s a new century. The cinema is the rage now. I will give it to Pathé Frères and let them tell her story. The magic of film for a woman who produced magic right in front of our eyes.

  The lower classes will flock to the theatres to see her story because she was one of them, their Cinderella, the poor girl who escapes poverty and humiliation and ends up wearing the glass slipper – she led the life they dream about, but will never taste. They’ll also come because they’re dying to know like the rest of Europe – was their heroine a fraud? Did she do it with tricks and wires and sleight of hand, or did she really have supernatural powers?

  The answer may surprise you.

  Chapter 3

  Alessandra was a nobody.

  She came from this little goat-shit village in Bari.

  I’ve seen the dump with my own eyes. Shortly after I first met her, she returned home to visit her father’s grave and I jumped at the chance to tag along.

  It was a hot, sticky day, and I stood in the shade of a dusty cypress tree fanning myself with my hat as she searched around for his grave. She finally stumbled across it, overgrown with brush, the headstone knocked flat. She let out a loud curse, fell to her knees, and began ripping out the weeds, sweeping the earth, and propping the tombstone back up. She had brought some of his favorite Turkish cigarettes and a bottle of grappa and was arranging them in front of the stone when we heard a noise. I looked back and saw a gaggle of old crones marching up the dirt road, led by the parish priest, yelling and screaming for Alessandra to get out of town, calling her a witch and a whore. Alessandra let out a howl, jumped to her feet, grabbed a stick, and chased them all the way back to the village. Alessandra wasn’t afraid of anybody in this life but Pigotti and the Devil.

  Satan was still real to us back then, when she was born.

  As a child, she saw eyes glaring at her in the darkness, and was frightened one night when invisible hands stripped off her bedclothes – a tidbit I made sure Antonio included in his story. She was born left-handed, a sure sign, and always wore a corno on a silver chain around her neck to protect her from the malocchio, the evil eye, just like I do. This was despite Lombardi’s protestations that it made her look like some superstitious hick. The truth is, she was superstitious. She believed in omens and curses, and tried one on Huxley when things went sour for her in England.

  Alessandra’s mother was a strega who practiced the “old religion,” what some people call witchcraft. Fortunately, the newspapers never found out.

  When Alessandra was born, her mother refused to have her baptized.

  “The village priest showed up at our doorstep with his bucket of holy water, demanding to douse me, but my mother slammed the door in his face,” Alessandra told me. “After that, villagers looked at us strangely. One boy used to throw stones at me after school, and scream that I was going to hell. Old women sitting in the piazza would cross themselves whenever they saw my mother approaching.” I could see pain in her eyes as she spoke.

  “It must have been pretty tough,” I said.

  “I didn’t have a lot of friends, and the taunting never stopped. The summer I turned five, I came home one day and fell on my knees and begged my mother to let me be baptized. I just wanted it to stop, to be like everyone else. She told me she couldn’t, but that I would understand someday. I ran to my bedroom and flung myself on my bed and sobbed. My father came in to console me, but I drove him away.

  “Late that night my mother came into my room and woke me up. She told me we were going to the forest. I said, ‘Why, mama?’ and she just smiled at me. I dressed and followed her outside and we made our way through the village. The streets were dark and silent except for the murmur of crickets and the occasional half-hearted bark of a dog woken by our footsteps. Once we got outside the walls, my mother took off her sandals and told me to do the same. She put them in the small bag she carried a
nd we set off again. The night air was wonderful, filled with the fragrance of lemon flowers. And above my head – so close I felt I could reach up and touch it – was this full moon. It was so beautiful it made your heart ache.

  “My mother sang softly as we walked along – strange songs I never heard her sing at home, but which were sweet and filled my heart with happiness even though I couldn’t understand the words. But when we reached the forest, I began to be afraid. ‘Maybe a fox will eat us,’ I said, and I clung tighter to her. Once again my mother just smiled at me. She sat down, and she pulled me into her lap and held me in her arms and sang another song, and as we sat there a fox trotted out of the shadows and sat down at the edge of the trees and looked at us. I felt like my mother was singing to him, and he was listening to her. And when she finished and fell silent, he turned around and slipped back into the darkness, and I no longer felt afraid.

  “We followed this winding path for a long time until we reached a small clearing in the forest where a tall, old tree stood. I waited there until my mother came back with these small mushrooms and we ate them, and then she took my hands in hers and we started to dance under the moon. As she twirled me around, my feet left the ground and I was flying through the stars spinning above my head and my heart was bursting with love for my mother, and the next thing I remember I awoke on the grass in the crook of her arm, her soft brown eyes smiling down at me. I looked up and asked her what happened and she said I was of the blood, like her, and her mother, and she would explain everything at the right time.”

  I stopped Alessandra. “Of the blood?”

  “The Old Religion. You’re born into it.”

  “So you’re a witch?” I laughed.

  Alessandra glared at me. “Don’t joke about things you know nothing about.”

  I held up my hands. “Sorry.”

  Alessandra was silent for a long time, then she sighed.

  “Shortly afterwards my mother fell sick. She sent me back to the forest to find a special herb she needed to get well, and I looked and looked but couldn’t find it, and she got sicker and sicker. Then one morning while I was sitting at her bedside she told me she had seen a peacock feather in her dream, and knew her time was short. I didn’t understand at first, but that evening she called me and my father to her and told him to take care of me. That scared me and I cried and begged her not to leave me, and she took my hand and drew me close, and looked at me for a long time, then whispered ‘We will see each other again.’”

  Alessandra looked away. I said nothing.

  “All these spirits I talk to,” she said bitterly. “I always hope to hear her voice. But I never do.”

  When she was only 13 years old life screwed her a second time. One evening when we got drunk together – she could drink me under the table – I asked her about her father and tears welled up in her eyes. I was surprised, because Alessandra wasn’t a woman who cried easily.

  “Fucking bastards!” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek. “Damn them all!” Then she told me what had happened.

  It was a hot, summer day and she was up in the hills, flirting with a boy named Giuseppe as they tended their goats. While they’re up there fooling around, the King of Naples’s soldiers ride into her village, looking for her father who made the stupid mistake of publicly supporting Garibaldi during the revolution. Father Angelo, the village priest, tells them where to find him, piously assuring them that the Church supports the monarchy. The soldiers chase down Alessandra’s father, beat the shit out of him, drag him back to town, and the captain of the horsemen, an English mercenary, orders the villagers to assemble in the village square to watch his execution.

  Alessandra shouldn’t have known what was happening to her father – she was way up on the mountain – but she had her mother’s “gift.”

  “I had just grabbed Giuseppe’s hat and put it on my head,” she told me, “and we were laughing, and then out of nowhere I suddenly felt this incredible rush of panic, and I screamed, ‘Something happened to my father!’ and I jumped up and started running for home. I didn’t know how I knew – I just knew. I ran as fast as I could, my heart pounding, running and stumbling and falling and crying as I ran because I knew he was in great danger.”

  When she got there, she found her father standing against the church wall, facing a firing squad.

  “I started scratching and clawing and biting the soldiers, screaming for someone to help me, before I finally realized they were all cowards – every one of them – and no one was going to help me. My father was going to die.”

  But not before the captain had some fun with her. He reached down, yanked her into the saddle by her hair, lifted her dress and pretended to hump her doggy style to roars of laughter, then twisted her head around, forcing her to look in her father’s eyes as he gave the order to fire. After the volley, the bastard dismounts, strolls over to the jerking body, pulls out his pistol, and gives Alessandra’s father the coup de grace, splattering his brains against the wall. Then Father Angelo sanctimoniously mumbles a prayer and tosses holy water on the bullet-riddled corpse.

  Christ, she was just thirteen years old.

  She’s lost her mother, and now her father’s a bloody pile of rags and buzzing flies. She’s an orphan, alone in this world. OK, that’s life, you have to get over it and move on, and she did, but she never fully trusted anyone after that. The heart turns to stone, as Dante says. You’ve got to look out for yourself because no one else is.

  After the soldiers left, and villagers dug a hole for her father, the prick Angelo arranges for his fat housekeeper to take Alessandra into their little love nest. That’s when spooky stuff starts to happen. A knife on the kitchen table levitates into the air and flies at the housekeeper. A wine bottle suddenly explodes in the priest’s hand as Alessandra glares at him. The housekeeper accuses her of being possessed by demons, and Father Angelo performs an exorcism on Alessandra before packing her off to an orphanage in Naples run by nuns.

  A nobody ends up a nobody.

  Chapter 4

  That should have been the end of her story, but it wasn’t.

  Instead, a rich, expatriate British couple, the Croppers, childless and bored with dressing up their dogs, visit the orphanage, discover her and decide to adopt her.

  Alessandra despised them. And why not? An Englishman had killed her father. But she was suspicious of all foreigners. Her father taught her how the Spanish and French and Austrian turds used our country like a cheap whore for centuries before Garibaldi tossed them out on their ass. Besides, she had lived all her short life in the country.

  “I was like a wild animal, a forest bird,” she told me later, “and these foolish stranieri foreigners wanted to make me into a prissy English girl. They dressed me in pinafores and starched blouses, demanded that I take a bath every day, and comb my hair, and use a fork at the table. When I refused, they scolded me and I cursed them back in Italian.”

  The Croppers dabbled in Spiritualism, and one evening Mrs. Cropper needed more sitters for her circle. Alessandra was pressed into service, sullenly took her chair, and phantom raps and spooky levitations dramatically increased. Not every night, but enough for the wife to suspect Alessandra might be the one attracting the spirits. She let Alessandra skip her hated piano lessons in return for spending evenings at the séance table. At this stage in her career as a spirit medium, Alessandra didn’t fall into mesmeric trances, and Savonarola hadn’t shown up yet – that stuff came later – but she did hear spirit voices inside her head and parroted their messages to the eager sitters crowded around the table. And when she didn’t hear them, she quickly learned to make things up.

  The English couple gushed in letters to their friends about their little “Sandra” and her most extraordinary and varied supernatural powers. But soon their tone changed, as Alessandra started experimenting on her own.

  “I got bored sitting for hours around the table,” she confessed, “so I started asking the spirits to play trick
s on the other sitters. I just closed my eyes and wished hard, and things happened.” How they happened, she didn’t know. Unlike Lombardi, Alessandra never tried to understand her psychic powers. Where they came from – God, the Devil, or her own mind like Lombardi believed – she didn’t care.

  One evening, Mrs. Cropper and her circle of friends begged the hovering spirits to produce an “apport.” An apport is a gift from the spirits – a flower, or coin, or ring that materializes out of thin air.

  After fifteen minutes of fervent singing and praying, they heard a loud thump, turned up the lamps, and discovered a dead rat lying on the table.

  “Two of the women fainted on the spot,” she laughed. “You would have loved it, Tommaso.”

  But the group eventually became suspicious of her and started leaving her out. The final time she was invited, the gas lights were turned up after the séance ended and a gentleman sitter discovered his wallet missing. The next morning, the maid found it hidden in a tin box under Alessandra’s bed. Alessandra brazenly blamed mischievous spirits for teleporting it there. After six months, the Croppers finally threw up their hands in despair. They locked Alessandra in her room, packed up her belongings, and sent the cook off to the convent to tell Mother Superior they were returning Alessandra in the morning.

  That night, Alessandra escaped the house.

  “I had a second key,” she admitted. “I was sneaking out every night when they were asleep to see this boy. The night I ran away, I broke into the kitchen and stuffed my dress pockets with their silverware. I sold a spoon whenever I got hungry.”

  She found work as a laundress, and got married at 15. Her first husband was only a year older than her. She was madly in love with him, but he didn’t put bread on the table. To keep them from starving, Alessandra started holding séances herself. There were a lot of dead for her to talk to. Cholera swept through Naples all the time, and every family had lost a child to yellow fever or typhoid fever and hoped to make contact one last time. Mothers besieged her seeking assurance that their little boy or girl was safe and happy on the Other Side. A few were simply looking for a supernatural thrill, hoping to hear a rap, or feel a phantom touch or watch a table levitate in the air. They paid Alessandra what they could – a cup of goat milk, a lemon, something stolen from a house they cleaned – and it helped keep them alive. But one day she came home and found her clothes in the street. Her husband had gambled the rent money, lost it, and had taken off, leaving her with nothing. Someone told her to talk to Pigotti. He could help her.