A Dead Man in Naples

by Michael Pearce

  Giuseppi was, for the moment, nonplussed.

  ‘And their kit is better,’said Francesca, pressing home her advantage.

  ‘What’s wrong with red shirts?’ demanded Giuseppi.

  ‘They’re so out of date.’

  ‘Out of date?’

  ‘In the eyes of today’s youth.’

  ‘In the eyes of –? Have you been reading the newspapers again? Look, when Garibaldi marched his men through Italy to free Italy – a free Italy, does that mean nothing to you? – free Italy, from the grip of the aristocrats, the Church, –’

  ‘Now, Giuseppi!’ said Maria warningly.

  ‘– the capitalists, and reactionary governments that had us by the throat, they wore red shirts. Does that mean nothing to you? Have you no sense of patriotism? What’s come over you, my girl? What’s come over Italy?’

  ‘The colour’s all right,’ conceded Francesca, ‘although I prefer yellow. And perhaps green. Like the Racing Club’s colours. It’s the cut.’

  ‘Cut?’

  ‘Of the shirts. They look like sacks.’

  ‘They are sacks. That is all that poor people can afford.’

  ‘The material could certainly do with improvement. But it’s not so much the material, it’s the cut. The style.’

  ‘Ah, we’re back to that, are we? Fashion.’

  ‘The club people wear vests.’

  ‘Well, I wear a vest, don’t I? Only I keep it under my shirt.’

  ‘But, really, it’s the cut of the trousers. And, yes, Grandfather, I have noticed: you wear trousers too. But these are racing trousers.’

  ‘My trousers are honest trousers. They’re the trousers of an honest working man.’

  ‘But shorts are coming in. I prefer shorts.’

  ‘And I know why,’ retorted Giuseppi. ‘It’s because you like to see the men’s big, hairy thighs.’

  ‘Giuseppi!’ said Maria, shocked. ‘You shouldn’t go putting ideas into her head!’

  ‘I’m not putting ideas into her head,’ said Giuseppi. ‘I’m just recognizing that they’re there.’

  ‘Francesca, will you go inside? There is something I want to say to your grandfather.’

  ‘I like the socks, too,’ said Francesca, over her shoulder, as she retreated.

  ‘Giuseppi –’

  ‘I know, I know. I shouldn’t go on at her. Well, I wouldn’t, only – only it worries me. Not the clothes. What do I know about clothes? One shirt is pretty much like another as far as I am concerned. Nor the bicycles. Bicycles are all right in the right hands, the hands of those Reds, for example, when they’re being put to a good purpose. No, it’s not that. It’s just that I don’t like her hanging around the army.’

  ‘Well, you know why she does that, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course, I know!’

  ‘It’s her father. She’s missing him.’

  ‘I know that, too. Don’t forget, I’m the one who told him not to.’

  ‘Yes, but you told him in such a way as to put his back up. You only made him more determined.’

  ‘Julia should have talked him out of it.’

  ‘She tried to.’

  ‘That a daughter of mine should be so stupid as to marry a man going into the army!’

  ‘What else was there for him to do? You said yourself that there were not the jobs to be found here.’

  ‘Well, he could have gone to Milan, couldn’t he?’

  ‘No. There aren’t jobs there, either. What he did made sense. He would sign on for three years and then he would be able to come out with a gratuity. He would come back here and start up a bicycle shop. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing. Provided you don’t get a bullet through your head meanwhile.’

  ‘At least he was doing something. He wasn’t just hanging around, like Gianni or Ronaldo. You wouldn’t have liked that, would you?’

  ‘It’s all wrong. That these boys should have no work to go to when they leave school. It’s the system that’s wrong.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the system! With you it’s always the system that’s wrong.’

  ‘Well, it is!’

  ‘And while we’re waiting for that to change, we’ll all die of old age. At least Marcello had the guts to do something.’

  Francesca came out again.

  ‘Jalila is here,’ she informed her grandfather.

  ‘And that’s another thing,’ said Giuseppi.

  Chapter Three

  An Arab woman came through the door from the kitchen holding two small children by the hands.

  ‘It’s not come again,’ she said to Giuseppi, ‘although they swore it would be here by Tuesday. I’ll have to go to the office again.’

  ‘I’ll come with you this time,’ said Giuseppi.

  ‘Would you? They don’t listen to me.’

  ‘They’ll listen to me,’ said Giuseppi fiercely.

  Her eyes took in Chantale sitting at the table.

  ‘Buon giorno, Signora,’ she said politely.

  ‘Buon giorno!’

  Chantale put her hand out and touched the children gently on their cheeks.

  ‘Buon giorno, little ones!’ she said.

  ‘Buon giorno, Signora,’ said the little girl, and then came up to Chantale and stood beside her looking up at her with wide dark eyes.

  The mother hesitated. ‘And you, Signora, are not from Italy?’

  ‘From Morocco,’ said Chantale.

  The woman looked puzzled. ‘And your husband?’

  ‘My fiancé,’ said Chantale, who increasingly found herself liking the description.

  ‘English,’ said Seymour.

  ‘Ah, English,’ murmured the Arab woman. ‘You are visitors, then?’

  ‘On holiday,’ said Chantale.

  ‘On holiday? How nice! Tonio always said that when he got back to Naples, we would have a holiday. The four of us. But . . .’ She shrugged.

  ‘He was going to go back to his old job,’ said Giuseppi, ‘at the baker’s.’

  ‘But then he hoped to move on from there,’ said the Arab woman. ‘He wanted to start up on his own. With the gratuity.’

  ‘You’d think they’d give you that at least,’ said Giuseppi. ‘How do they think you’re going to manage?’

  The woman shrugged again. ‘Some of it may come, they say. But the pension’s the thing. When it’s gone through. And, meanwhile, people are kind. Giovanni’s kind. He gives me work to do cleaning.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Giuseppi. ‘But you’ve got entitlements. As the widow of an Italian soldier. A pension, for instance. It wouldn’t be a lot, but it would be enough to keep you going. You would have thought that they would have got that worked out by now. But they just sit on their backsides all day doing nothing. I’ll go down there and see if I can get them moving.’

  ‘Not too fierce, not too fierce, I beg of you,’ said the Arab woman, shrinking.

  ‘Get Rinaldo to go with you!’ called Maria from the kitchen. ‘He’s got some pull with the Mayor.’

  ‘That’s not a bad idea,’ conceded Giuseppi. ‘It will look more official that way. They won’t listen to a woman on her own, but if it’s a deputation –’

  ‘And Pietro,’ called Maria.

  ‘Pietro! Right! Don’t worry, my dear,’ he said to the Arab woman. ‘You’re not on your own. There are people here who’ll show some solidarity.’

  The little girl couldn’t take her eyes off Chantale.

  ‘You have pretty hair, Signora,’ she said shyly.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But you shouldn’t show it,’ she said.

  ‘In Italy you can show it,’ said Francesca.

  ‘Yes, you can,’ said Chantale. ‘It’s all right here. But I know what you mean. In my country, where I come from, a woman can’t show it, either.’

  ‘Do you come from Tripoli?’ asked the little girl.

  ‘Tripoli? No. Tangier.’

  ‘Tangier.’ The little girl tried it out.


  Giuseppi took her hand in his.

  ‘Let’s go into the kitchen, Atiya,’ he said, ‘and see if Maria can find you something. And after that I’ll go down to the market and talk to Rinaldo and Pietro.’

  ‘Don’t talk too long!’ called Maria. ‘Remember, you’re supposed to be going to the office with Jalila.’

  ‘I won’t talk too long.’

  ‘You will, if you get talking politics.’

  ‘Do I ever talk politics?’ Giuseppi appealed to the world at large.

  The Arab woman lingered.

  ‘And your family, Signora,’ she said to Chantale, ‘are they in England? Or in Morocco?’

  ‘Morocco.’

  ‘But you live in England?’

  ‘But you ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course, you have your husband’s family there. But it is not the same thing. My husband’s family have been kind to me, very kind. But it is not quite the same thing. I always feel, still feel, a stranger.’

  ‘But your children won’t feel like that,’ said Chantale.

  ‘I hope not. I hope not. Tonio always said, if anything should happen to me, take them back to Italy. My family will look after them. They are not rich but in Italy everyone is more rich than they are in Libya. It will be better for them to grow up there. These things matter. So I brought them here. But sometimes I wonder if I have done right.’

  They had intended to go up on the heights above the town and look down on the full stretch of the bay, but already it was too hot and they decided to postpone it until the evening. Instead, they wandered through the dark, narrow but cool streets of the old town, where the women stood outside the bassi, the small open-fronted shops, which also served as living quarters, combing their hair. The men were at work at their various crafts inside: but occasionally as you went past you could see that the family bed was still occupied, often by five or six small children and sometimes an older grandmother or grandfather. You wondered how the husband and wife managed to squeeze in.

  There were often the remains of meals thrown casually into the streets where, later, they might be swept up by the dust carts. Or they might not, and a safer bet was that the still edible bits would be devoured by the starving cats and dogs with which the neighbourhood abounded.

  Or, possibly, by the goats. At this hour in the morning the streets were full of them. They would come through the Posillipo tunnel, leaving an incredible stink behind them, and then fan out in herds to their regular beats. They wound in and out of the cats and pedestrians and sometimes into the bassi. When they came to the abode of a customer a goat would walk in, followed by the goatherd, while her companions lay down in the street, walk up the stairs and stop outside the right door, where she would be milked by the goatherd. Then she would walk sedately down the stairs and out on to the street again. For a couple of hours in the morning they would be everywhere; and then, suddenly, they would be gone, back down the tunnel and out on to the slopes of the hills to browse on the sparse grass.

  Like so much else in Naples they were such an accustomed part of life as to become invisible.

  Like, for example, the cabalisti who were to be found in almost every street.

  Cabalisti? Magicians? It took Seymour a while to work it out. At last he got it. A magician who specialized in numbers. And in particular the numbers that came up in lotteries. Forecasting the winner was an industry in Naples. Every newspaper devoted several columns to advertisements from tipsters, offering for a few pence to supply winning numbers. Posters were plastered in every street directing you to the premises of the local cabbalists. Every café, every bar, had a Smorfia, the lottery dictionary he had come across earlier, giving a numbered value to any event that could happen.

  On an impulse Seymour went into one of the cabbalists.

  ‘Age?’ said the cabalista, before Seymour had even opened his mouth.

  ‘Thirty-one. But –’

  ‘Height?’

  ‘Look –’

  ‘Six feet, I would say. That’s good, that’s promising. But we need to be more precise than that. Six feet? Or six feet one? Or five eleven and a half?’

  ‘Never mind about that –’

  ‘But it does matter. It could make all the difference. There are lots of people who are six feet. Well, not many in Naples, in fact, and there you have an advantage. But there will be others. Cannot you be more precise?’

  ‘Listen, I don’t want to be precise. Or, at least, I do, but about something else.’

  ‘My system can take in anything,’ said the cabalista. ‘I am not like the others.’

  ‘Can it take in this?’ said Seymour, laying the ticket he had taken from Scampion’s pocket in front of him.

  ‘That’s no good!’ said the cabalista disgustedly. ‘You’ve already got one.’

  ‘What can you tell me about it?’

  ‘Tell you about it? There’s nothing worth telling you. It’s useless.’

  ‘Because the time has expired?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What else can you tell me?’

  ‘The numbers?’ The cabalista turned the ticket over.

  ‘Very dull,’ he said. ‘It’s just using the Smorfia. Now, if he had used my system –’

  ‘Have you got a Smorfia?’

  ‘Have you got ‘Of course.’

  ‘Can you decode these numbers for me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked in his book.

  ‘It’s an address. I think. That number is the street. And that will be the number of the house . . . Hello, that’s not much of a number . . . Oh, I know what this will be.’

  He looked triumphantly at Seymour.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s the Hospital.’

  ‘The Hospital?’

  ‘The Foundling Hospital. One of the most important institutions in Naples. About half the population have some connection or other with it.’

  ‘Foundling?’

  ‘There are a lot of foundlings in Naples.’

  ‘I see.’

  The cabalista handed the ticket back to Seymour.

  ‘Does that help you?’

  ‘Perhaps it does. Up to a point.’

  ‘You were looking for a place?’

  ‘A person, rather.’

  ‘Ah, well, even there the numbers will help. Each child who is taken in is given a number. It is put on a label around the child’s neck. And, of course, they keep a record of it. Let me have a look at that ticket again.’

  He studied it.

  ‘I don’t understand this number,’ he said. ‘Perhaps that will be the personal number, the number on its label.’

  ‘Would – would a person keep it?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ said the cabalista, affronted. ‘It’s a good number. And it’s a personal one. It would be special to its owner. Very special. And there could be no confusion, you see. No one else would have it. If it was just a house number, other people could live in the house. Suppose it was a big block of apartments, say. There could be hundreds with the same number. But this number would be unique to you. So it’s your lucky number.’

  ‘One you would bet with?’

  ‘Certainly. I would always encourage a client to use that number if he had one.’

  * * *

  ‘A magician?’ said Chantale incredulously.

  ‘Yes. A particular sort of magician. One specializing in numbers.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Chantale, even more doubtfully.

  ‘The numbers that turn up in the lotteries. They forecast the winners. They’re very popular in Naples.’

  ‘Well, yes, they would be.’

  ‘There’s a book, too.’

  ‘A book?’

  ‘Yes. It gives a numbered value for anything that happens and then you can use that number in the lottery.’

  ‘I see. Yes. A magical Book of Numbers?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you’ve been . . . you’ve been studying this book?’
<
br />   ‘That’s right, yes.’

  ‘In your work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘I do say.’

  He explained about the ticket.

  ‘So, naturally, you went at once to this book for guidance?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Darling, are you sure you’re on top of this case?’

  ‘It sounds a bit potty, I know,’ said Seymour defensively.

  ‘It does, yes.’

  ‘But they’re all like this. Neapolitans, I mean. It’s to do with the betting. They’re obsessed with numbers. Crazy about them.’

  ‘And is there any need,’ said Chantale, ‘for you to join them?’

  ‘So it’s given you an address?’ said Chantale.

  ‘Yes. A hospital. A hospital for foundlings.’

  ‘And you want us to go there?’

  ‘Yes. It’s one of the great sights of Naples, apparently.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Chantale, ‘I was planning to see some of the other sights of Naples today. The Castel dell’Ovo, for example. Or perhaps San Martino. The Palazzo, maybe. Or the harbour. Or even – as I thought you were going to show me last night – the view of the bay from Posillipo. But not, actually, a hospital for foundlings.’

  ‘It’s a very important institution in Naples, apparently.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure.’

  ‘We needn’t spend hours there,’ said Seymour, placatorily.

  ‘We needn’t spend any time there at all,’ said Chantale.

  The huge iron gates of the Hospital were open because it was the feast of the Annunciation, one of the days on which the public was allowed to enter. As Seymour and Chantale approached the gates they saw a notice saying ‘Closed’; however this did not refer to the gates or the institution but to a small hole originally about eight inches square but now barred up. Through this hole foundlings were once passed, usually at night, by their mothers to a nun on duty inside. This constituted entry to the institution and guaranteed anonymity. The practice had to be abandoned, however, because attempts were continually being made to thrust large children through. Nowadays, they learned, the child was carried through the door and laid more tenderly in the nun’s arms.

  The admission was recorded in a large book of forms, each page being devoted to a separate child, and it was at this point that the child was given a number. Alongside it would be a note of the date and the circumstances – for example, ‘267: 3rd day of June, 1903’ – together with a short description, focusing on any distinguishing marks, and listing any items included with the child. Often the children came with a holy, protective amulet. Such property was always kept, together with the garments, if any, that the child had come in. It was a way, said the nun on duty, of establishing the identity later, if that should be required. The child was given new garments and taken at once into the chapel to be baptised.