Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  They were fleeing from war, hunger and plague, from the wreckage, the terror and death; they were running toward war, hunger and plague, toward the wreckage, the terror and death. They were fleeing from the Germans, bombardments, want and fear. They were running toward Naples, toward war, the Germans, bombardments, want and fear; toward filthy air shelters polluted with the dung of famished, worn-out and stupefied people. They were fleeing from despair, from the miserable and wondrous despair of a lost war; they were running toward the hope of an end to their hunger, an end to their fear, an end to the war—toward the miserable and wondrous hope of a lost war. They were fleeing from Italy and running toward Italy.

  The heat was stifling. I had not as yet had a chance to wash. I was just as I had been in my cell, number 462 in the fourth block of Regina Coeli. I still had the sweet, greasy smell of bugs about me. I was unshaven, my hair was disheveled, nails cracked. We were twenty, thirty, forty, no one knows how many, in the compartment; we were pressed against each other, piled on each other; our lips were swollen with thirst. Our faces were purple and we stood on tiptoe, our necks stretched upward, our mouths wide open so we could breathe. We looked like people who had been hung and were swinging horribly with each jolt of the train. Every now and then a "toc, toc, toe" came from the sky, the train stopped with a jerk. Everybody leaped to the ground, crouched in the ditches and hollows along the railway embankment and gazed upward until that "toc, toc, toe" came to an end. At every station we met long German trains that were moving or waiting on sidings—trains loaded with soldiers and weapons. The Germans looked at us with their cruel, gray eyes. What weariness, what contempt, what hatred were in those eyes! My companions said, "Where are they going?" One of them asked me whether I was returning from the front. "What front?" a soldier asked. "There is no front any more. No war any more. No more unfailing victory. No more long live the Duce! No more anything. What front?"

  I answered, "I am returning from Regina Coeli." The soldier looked at me with suspicion, "What is Regina Coeli? A convent?" he asked. "It is a prison," I replied. "What prison?" the soldier challenged. "There is no longer any prison. No more policemen, no more jailers, no more jail. No more anything. There is no longer any prison in Italy. Prison is ended, Italy is ended. No more anything! "

  Everybody laughed as they listened to the soldier. It was a coarse, evil, painful laughter, a despairing laughter. They laughed in his face, and I also laughed, "There is no longer any prison in Italy!" they said. "No longer any prison! Ha, ha, ha!" Everybody laughed in our compartment, in the corridor, in the other compartments, in the other corridors, in the other coaches, everybody laughed. The train itself laughed, from one end to the other, as it jolted and twisted on the rails, and laughing coarsely the train whistled, slowed down and came to a stop before a huge pile of debris and bloody rags. This was Naples.

  Through a black, glistening cloud of flies the sun beat down on the roofs and asphalt paving; gusts of heat rose from the debris piled around the disemboweled buildings, a mist of dry dust rose like a cloud of sand from beneath the feet of pedestrians. At first, the city looked deserted. Then, little by little, one distinguished a hum coming from the lanes and courtyards, a stifled chatter of voices, a faint and distant noise. Penetrating the secret of the bassi—the windowless ground-floors, probing the depth of the narrow clefts between the towering houses that are the noble streets of ancient Naples, one saw a restless swarm of people who stood, moved about and gesticulated; groups of people were squatting on their haunches and around little fires that burned between two stones, watching the water boil in old gasoline cans, kettles, pans or coffeepots; men, women and children slept piled upon each other, on mattresses, straw beds and bedding of any and all kinds, stretched out before the gates, in the courtyards, among the debris, in the shade of crumbling walls or by the entrances to the caves hewn in the damp, brackish tufa, a limestone that penetrates to the bowels of the earth in every part of Naples. Inside the bassi people were standing, sitting or resting on the high, baroque, iron or brass beds decorated with landscapes, saints and Madonnas. Many crouched silently on the thresholds with that melancholy air of the Neapolitans who, not knowing what to do, simply wait. At first the city seemed silent as well as deserted, but little by little, it seemed to me a confused rumble came into being in the dusty air. It acquired form and consistency in my ears until it resounded all around me with the steady, continuous, solid roar of a raging river.

  I was walking toward the harbor, along a straight, long road, walking as in a dream, stunned by that infernal din, blinded by the dust swept up by the sea breeze from the debris of the wrecked houses. The sun struck with its large, golden hammer the terraces and fronts of houses, stirring up swarms of buzzing black flies; when I lifted my eyes, I saw the wide-open windows, balconies and the women combing their hair and looking from the windows at the sky as if it were a mirror. Singing voices fell from somewhere above and were taken up at once by a thousand lips that sent them humming from mouth to mouth, from window to window, from street to street, as if they were bounced by jugglers. Groups of sweaty, barefoot boys dressed in rags and tattered shirts—the youngest ones stark naked—chased screaming up and down the streets,- yet there was something distant, cautious, and wily about them; they were not playing any adventurous and fanciful game. Watching them carefully, one soon discovered that they were busy trading: one was carrying a basket of lettuce, another a handful of charcoal, another a can of nondescript dish-water, another an armful of wood, while others, like little ants hauling a grain of wheat, were struggling with a charred beam or a cask or old ramshackle pieces of furniture unearthed from the piles of debris. The stench of corpses rose from under the mountains of stones and plaster. Entire families of lazy fat flies with gold wings buzzed over the debris. At last I came to the sea.

  The sight of the sea moved me and I began to weep. A river, a plain, a mountain, not even a tree or a cloud—nothing has in it the feeling of freedom like the sea. A prisoner in jail stares hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year at the walls of his cell. They are always the same white smooth walls, and when he gazes at those walls, at the sea, he cannot imagine it blue,- he can only imagine the sea's being white, smooth, bare, without waves, without storms—a squalid sea illuminated by the flat light penetrating through the bars of his window. That is his sea, that is his freedom—a white, smooth bare sea, a squalid and cold freedom.

  But there, before me, was the warm and delicate sea, the Neapolitan sea, the free blue sea of Naples—all crumpled into little waves that rippled after one another with a gentle sound under the caress of a wind scented with brine and rosemary. There, before me, was the blue sea, the free and limitless sea rippling in the wind; not the white, cold, smooth bare sea of the prison but the warm, deep blue sea. There, before me, was the sea, there was freedom, and I wept gazing at it from a distance, from the road that descended to the sea across a large square. I did not dare to come any closer. I even did not dare to stretch out my hand toward it lest it flee, lest it disappear beyond the skyline, lest it retreat in disgust from my dirty, greasy hand with its cracked nails.

  Gazing at the distant sea, I stood motionless in the middle of the street and wept. And I did not even hear the humming of bees high up in the remote sky. I did not notice the people fleeing to the caves hewn into the hill. Finally a boy approached me, touched my arm and said in a gentle voice: "Signo' stanno venenno—Sir, they are coming!" Then I realized that I was surrounded by a mob that ran screaming down the wide road sloping toward the shimmering sea. I was not sure where I was, but seeing the columns of a church, I thought I recognized Santa Lucia Street. The mob rushed through a large gate and disappeared as though it had been swallowed into some secret cave. I was about to follow them and seek shelter within the dark bowels of the earth when I raised my eyes and became paralyzed with fear.

  A silent crowd was moving toward me along the lanes and down the steps that lead from Santa Lucia Str
eet to Pizzofalcone and Monte di Dio. It was a mysterious crowd of ghosts and monsters that have their lairs in the grottos in the courtyards and in the bassi of that quarter of Naples that lies at the far end of the hundred dark alleys and constitutes the maze of the Pallonetto. They moved toward me in a body, like an army about to attack a fortified castle. They walked slowly and silently, in that lonely silence that comes before the crash of the first bombs, in that terrified loneliness draped around them by the sacred character of their horrible deformities. They were the cripples: the halt, the twisted, the lame, the hunch-backed, the maimed, the legless— those "monsters" who, in Turin, are sheltered from human sight within the merciful solitude of the Cottolengo. The war had driven them out of the religious seclusion in the innermost part of the houses, where pity, horror, superstition and family shame, had hidden them all their lives and kept them in darkness and silence. The "monsters" moved slowly, helping each other, half-naked, clothed in rags, their faces distorted, not by fear, but by hatred and glory. Maybe because of the dazzling light and the ghostly glow of that moment, or because of the terror of the impending downpour of steel and fire, the expression on those faces was satanic—an evil leer with nothing but spite for all creation— a strange light shone in their eyes that burned with fever or were flooded with tears. A horrible grin twisted their drooling mouths. They all had in common: fear, a helpless rage, and foaming saliva at their mouths.

  There were women covered all over with hair and clothed in filthy rags, their breasts dangling from under tattered slips. One woman, covered with stiff bristles, led a young man of about thirty, who could have been her husband or her brother; his eyes were wide open and staring, his legs were shrunk and twisted by some disease of the bones,- she walked with her breasts bare—one small and withered, eaten away by decay or gnawed by cancer, a black, almost carbonized breast, while the other one, flabby and shriveled, hung down to her belly. Some were skeletons clothed in rags, their heads covered with yellow skin stretched tightly over their skulls, their teeth bared by an atrocious grin; some were old men, bald and toothless, with dog faces. There were young girls with monstrously large and swollen heads attached to tiny, fleshless bodies,- there were old hags huge, fat, swollen, with enormous bellies and small shriveled birdlike heads on which the hair stood hard and bristly, like feathers. There were crippled children with ape-like faces; some of them dragged themselves on all fours; others limped, leaning on makeshift crutches,- still others huddled in small, primitive carts that were pushed along by their companions. They were the "monsters" preserved with a sacred timidity in the inner bosom of the Neapolitan alleys, the objects of religious idolatry as intercessors in that worship of magic that is the secret cult of the people. For the first time in their consecrated existence the war had driven them from their lairs into the sunlight; their silent march toward the caves hewn in the hill was like a procession of sacred idols, like an array of Plutonic deities who, having emerged to the surface because of some subterranean cataclysm, were again seeking shelter within the mysterious bowels of the earth.

  Suddenly I saw the god among them. I saw the secret god on whom the worship of the "monsters" centered. I saw the king of that "court of miracles." It moved forward slowly, assisted by a mob of horrible dwarfs. I did not know whether the creature was a man or a beast; It was hidden from head to foot by a large cloth covering and looked thin and small in stature. Thrown over Its head, as if to shelter It from profane eyes, was one of those silken coverlets that in Naples adorn even the poorest beds; it was yellow and very large,- the coverlet hung from the shoulders, reached the feet and dragged along the ground as it fluttered in the breeze that blew from the sea. Some of the dwarfs, who formed a circle around It, supported It, because It was blinded by the coverlet and could not walk without assistance. Others with stifled shrieks that sounded like grunts, made way for It by shoving the crippled, the lame and the blind who had straggled on the dusty way. With their Angers they quickly cleared a path of pebbles, bricks and plaster so It would not stumble. Others grasped the edges of the coverlet so the god would not slip or so the wind, by lifting the coverlet, would not reveal Its horrible secret to profane eyes. Their efforts did not prevent me from catching, beneath an edge lifted by the wind, a glimpse of a leg that seemed to be as hairy as a beast's.

  It walked slowly, with Its hands beneath the coverlet outstretched in the attitude of the blind; Its knees seemed burdened and weighted down by a mysterious load It carried on Its head. Beneath the coverlet, where the head should have been, was something shapeless and huge that swayed slowly and hung first on one shoulder, and then on the other; what made me shudder was that the monster made no effort to keep the load from dropping. It made none of those instinctive gestures that help to balance a large, heavy object on the head. With a chill I thought that the horrible monster, the secret god of Naples could be a man or a woman with an animal's head; a goat's, or a dog's, or judging by its size, most likely a calf's head; or maybe there were two heads. This seemed even nearer to the truth, judging by the strange movements beneath the coverlet, as if both heads moved independently of each other. The lane along which It descended was piled with debris and filth; almost every house had been bombed and wrecked. Against that background of ruin and death the god proceeded as if across a desert. It had fled from Its secret temple; now It was on the way to descend into the bowels of the earth, into the subterranean kingdom of Plutonic Naples. I do not know whether I screamed, or whether I merely drew back with fear; the god surrounded by Its court of dwarfs was approaching me, and Its two monstrous heads were swaying beneath the yellow coverlet. Brought back from my horror by the guttural shouts of the dwarfs who were very near, I turned in search of an escape and found myself at the mouth of a cavern toward which, in a sinister silence broken only by the solitary scream of a child or by a woman's prayer, the consecrated mob of monsters was moving, followed by their terrible god. They walked dragging their feet through the dust and plaster; their arms were held to their breasts, their hooked hands twisted outward, their lips protruding; they were ready to scratch, bite, tear and rend flesh to open for themselves a path into the stinking darkness of the cavern. The silence was charged with wrath and menace.

  Driven by that mob of monsters, I entered the cavern; it was a dark and deep grotto, one of those subterranean galleries through which pass the Angevin aqueducts that form a huge unexplored maze underneath Naples. Here and there a shaft of light penetrated through a pit that opened on a street above; some of those pits were mentioned by Boccaccio in the story of Andreuccio da Perugia. In those gloomy dens, in those thousands of caverns cut in the tufa had lived for three years this queer, ragged population that had found shelter and safety from the bombs in that subterranean maze. They lived in frightful promiscuity, wallowing in their own excrement, sleeping on bedding brought from the ruined houses, trafficking, trading, celebrating weddings and funerals, going on with their small tasks, their commerce and their sinister activities. As soon as I had taken a few steps through that subterranean city, I turned my head and through the mouth of the cavern I saw the shimmering sea. Thick clouds of smoke and dust were rising above the harbor. The crash of bombs seemed faint in that Plutonic country; the walls of the cavern shook and rivulets of dust cascaded through the cracks in the tufa. Instead of weeping, of teeth-grinding or sobs, I was met by a din of shouts, songs and voices hailing and answering above the noise of the crowd. I recognized the age-long, joyous real voice of Naples. I felt as if I were looking on a marketplace, on a square filled with a festive crowd aroused by the tunes of Piedigrotta or by the liturgical chants of a procession. It was the real, the living Naples that had survived three years of bombardment, hunger and plague,- it was the Naples of people, of the alleys, of bassi, of hovels, of the quarters without light, sun or bread. The electric lights hanging from the vault of the cavern showed many thousands of faces, and the constant motion that kept the crowd on the go produced an illusion of a large square in a crow
ded quarter of Naples on the night of a great and popular festival.

  I had never felt so close to the people—I—who until then had always felt like a stranger in Naples; I had never felt so close to that crowd which until that day had seemed so different and alien. I was covered with dust and sweat, my uniform was torn, my face unshaven, my hands and face greasy and soiled. I had come out of prison only a few hours before and found in that crowd a human warmth, a human affection, a human companionship, distress of the same kind as my own, suffering of the same human kind as my own, but only greater, deeper and perhaps more real and ancient than mine. A suffering rendered sacred by its age, its fatalism, its mysterious nature, compared with which my own suffering was only human, new and without any deep roots in my own age. A suffering bereft of despair and lighted by a great, beautiful hope, compared with which my own poor and small despair was merely a puny feeling that made me feel ashamed.

  Bright fires were burning along the walls of the cavern where the tufa, cut by the chisel, forms so many rustic niches and where the lateral conduits of the Angevin aqueduct branch off from the main stream of the subterranean rivers that run under the hill. Pots of soup were boiling over the fires. They seemed to me the very community kitchens which Mussolini had forbidden in Naples and which the people, left on their own by the flight of the princes and the wealthy, were organizing with their own means, by their own initiative, in an effort to avoid starvation, by mutual assistance. The smell of potato and bean soup rose from the pots along with the familiar cry "Doie lire! doie lire! 'na ministra 'e ver dur a, doie lire! doie lire!—Two liras! two liras for vegetable soup, two liras, two liras!" Earthenware dishes, cups, tins and containers of all sorts were hoisted by hundreds of hands,- they strode over the sea of heads, floated above the crowd and glistened white with the reflection of the electric lights. Through the red glow of the fires came the sucking of lips, the rude, brutal crackling of jaws and the tinkle of plates, miserable pewter and tinware. Now and then the chewing slowed down, the jaws stopped, the shouting and the voices died down, the cries of water vendors and cooks were stifled in their throats. Everybody stood and listened in fearful silence, broken only by the hiss of breathing that replaced the din and clamor of voices. The wave of the bomb crash ran through the cavern with the swish of an ebbing sea, it ran from niche to niche, deep into the gloomy bowels of the hill. The silence was devotional, a pause that came not from fear, but from pity and sorrow. "Those poor things!" somebody near me shouted, thinking of the anguish in the hit houses, of the people buried alive beneath the debris, in the cellars, in the puny shelters of the harbor district. Little by little a song rose from the end of the cavern as crowds of women joined the chanting litanies for the dead; queer, ragged priests, bearded, incredibly filthy, their black cassocks whitened by the plaster dust, blended their voices with the women's choir; they stopped from time to time to bless the crowd and to grant everybody absolution from their sins in a barbarous mixture of Latin and Neapolitan. The crowd shouted the names of their dead, of their relatives who were in danger, of their kinsmen living in the harbor districts hammered by the bombings, of those who were away at sea or at war. The people shouted "Micheee! Rafiliii! Carmiliiii! Guncittiii! Mariii! Gennariii! Pascaaa! Peppiii! Maculatiii!" and they stretched their hands toward the priests with fists closed, as if they were clutching relics of their dead in their fingers—a lock of hair, a piece of cloth or leather, a splinter of bone. For a few minutes the huge crowd wept, dropped on their knees and raised their arms toward Heaven and shouted pleas to the Carmine Madonna—to San Gennaro and to Santa Lucia, while the crashes of the bombs came closer, shook the earth, echoed through the hollow hill and penetrated the foul, gloomy dens with their hot blasts. Then, suddenly, as the explosions became more distant, the melodious cries of cooks and peddlers of potato fritters and of water, "Acqua fresca! Acqua fresca!" broke through the lamentations of women and the deep chanting of priests. Coins tinkled in the alms boxes that filthy lean monks and worn-out nuns shook among the crowds, and here and there laughter was heard, a shrill outburst of laughter, a song, a gay voice, the name of a woman echoing, rebounding and singing through the cavern. The ancient noise of Naples, the loud ancient voice of Naples rose and was heard again and again, like the voice of the sea.