Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  At that moment a woman was taken with labor pains. She screamed, prayed, moaned and howled like a dog at night. Instantly, a hundred volunteer midwives, wooly-haired grandmothers, their eyes glistening with joy, made their way through the crowd and closed in around the woman in labor, who suddenly sent forth a piercing scream. The midwives fought for the infant and one of them, a fat and shapeless old hag with touseled hair, quicker and more daring than the others, clutched it, fingered it, lifted it high to protect it from the crowd, dried it with her skirt, and washed it by licking it and spitting in its face, just as a priest came up to christen it. "A little water!" he called. Everybody offered bottles, coffeepots and jars. The crowd shouted, "Name him Benedetto! Name him Benvenuto! Name him Gennaro! Gennaro! Gennaro!" These cries, these names faded into the vast subterranean noise, into songs, the laughter and the long melodious cries of cooks and peddlers; they blended like separate parts of one song, of one life, with the neighing of horses that the cabmen had led into the safety of the shelter. The huge cavern seemed like a great square on the night of Piedigrotta, when the noise of the feast is dying down in the city, and the crowd, returning from Fuorigrotta, alights from carriages and lingers in the square to breathe a little fresh air before going to bed and drinks another lemonade, eats another pastry while everywhere people are saying good night and bidding farewells and loud good-bys to godfathers, godmothers, friends and relatives.

  Crowds of boys at the entrance to the cavern were already announcing that the danger was over and shouting news about houses that had been hit, about the dead, the wounded, the buried and the damage. The crowd was stirring and getting ready to leave, when from above, from a kind of castle of furniture erected in a deep niche, as though from a high balcony, a tall old lout with a thick black beard raised his arms and towering with his imposing build above the crowd, began to shout in a fierce, terrible, rousing voice: Ih bone femmene, ih figli 'e bone femmene, ih che bordello! jatevenne! jatavenne! jatavenne!—Hi, good women, hi, sons of good women, what an uproar! Away! Away! Away!" and he gestured with his hands as if he were driving intruders from his castle. He yawned and rubbed his eyes, not as if he merely had been roused from his bed and slumber, but as if the great crowd of strangers were annoying him, as if it were a threat to his prerogatives, as if it had invaded the subterranean kingdom of which he was king and master.

  So complete was the illusion that I was in the neighborhood of Rua Catalana, of Dogana del Sale, of Spezieria Vecchia, near the harbor, that I lifted my eyes to the ceiling of black tufa and expected to see Vesuvius looking down from the horizon with its short clay pipe between its teeth, and a pink scarf of clouds around its neck like an old sailor looking out of a window at the sea. Gradually the crowd laughing and chattering, calling out names, as if leaving a show, flowed out of the mouth of the cavern. As the people took the first steps in the open air they stumbled and lifted their eyes in anguish to the dense cloud of dust and smoke enveloping the entire city.

  The sky was dull blue and the sea a glistening green. I walked hemmed in by a crowd, climbed toward Toledo, and in the meanwhile looked around in the hope to find a face I knew, a friend who would take me in for the night, until the little steamer that was to take me home arrived in the harbor from Capri. For two days the Capri steamer had avoided the landing at Santa Lucia; nobody knew how much longer I would have to wait before being able to reach home. Little by little, as the sunset approached, the heat became damp and heavy; I seemed to be walking wrapped in a woolen blanket. Here and there the streets were flanked with huge mounds of debris that under the delicious sky of blue silk seemed to me more cruel and funereal than the debris of Warsaw, Belgrade, Kiev, Hamburg and Berlin under their own misty, cold, uneasy skies. A feeling of loneliness froze my heart and I searched around me hoping to recognize the face of a friend among the crowds of ragged people who had a wonderful light of dignity and courage in their eyes, white with hunger, lack of sleep and anguish.

  Groups of boys were encamped among the debris of the houses; they had furnished their caves, dug in the mountains of plaster and their miserable huts built between crumbling walls with pitiful furniture, mattresses, straw bottomed chairs, pots and broken crockery of all sorts which they had unearthed from under the piles of stones, beams and twisted iron. The girls busied themselves around the exposed fireplaces and cooked supper in tin pots for the boys, the youngest of whom played naked amid the refuse, thinking only about glass marbles, little colored stones and fragments of mirrors, while the older ones roamed about from morning till night, looking for something to eat, for any kind of work, carrying bags and parcels from one end of town to the other and helping the homeless to drag their belongings to the station or to the docks. They belonged to that wild family of forsaken children, the besprizornii, whom I had already seen in Kiev, Moscow, Leningrad and in Nizhnii Novgorod during the years following the civil war and the great famine in Russia. Beneath the debris, in which they had dug their caves and built their miserable huts of tin cans and charred boards, some number of people were buried alive, perhaps, still breathing—beneath the debris on which during three years of war destruction and slaughter, the foundations of a new Naples were being laid—of a more ragged, hungrier and bloodier, but of a purer, more noble and truer Naples. The aristocracy, the wealthy and the powerful had fled from the wrecked city. Only an immense army of ragged people remained, their eyes filled with an age-long, insatiable hope, and of besprizornii with hard mouths and brows on which the loneliness of hunger had chiseled lines of awful and mysterious words. I tread on a carpet of splintered glass, piles of plaster, the last wreckage of a terrible havoc, and an age-old hope welled up within me.

  Now and again I was stopped by a dismal cry: "Mo' vene! mo' vene! mo' vene!—It's coming! It's coming! It's coming!" I saw flocks of boys and dogs backing away with faces turned upward or else fleeing for shelter, while others remained seated on the ground as they looked upward at the unsteady wall of a house that suddenly crumbled, raising a huge cloud of dust. The dull crash was followed by joyful shouts,- the boys and the dogs again were running amid the debris, repairing the damage which the falling wall had caused to their hovels. As I walked toward Market Square I saw more ruins. Some houses were still blazing. Crowds of ragged men and women tried to put out the fires by various means; some shoveled the debris and threw it on the flames in an attempt to smother them,- some passed from hand to hand pails of sea water which the last links of the human chain drew from the harbor; others dragged beams, pieces of wood and furniture from the debris so they would not feed the flames. Everywhere in town people were running back and forth, helping one another and hauling furniture from the wrecked houses to the entrances of the caves hewn in the tufa, while grocery wagons were constantly driven to the places where the people sought shelter and safety. Above the shouting and noise rose the simple, indifferent, melodious cry of the water vendors: "Acqua fresca!—Fresh water!"

  In the central section of town, squads of policemen were covering Mussolini's portraits and the words, "Long live the Duce!" with posters bearing portraits of the King and of Badoglio with the words, "Long live the King! Long live Badoglio!" Other policemen went about writing on walls, with brushes they dipped into pails of black paint, "Long live loyal Naples! Long live royal Naples!" That was all the assistance the new government, following in the footsteps of the old one, gave to the tortured city. Lines of carts traveled along Via Chiaia and the Piazza dei Martiri, carrying to the sea the debris that hampered the movements of the German military columns. They dumped them on the rock dike in Caracciolo Street, in the small opening by the Dogali Column. Mixed with the debris were already decomposing arms, heads, fragments of human bodies. The stench was so overwhelming that the people blanched as the carts went by. The cart drivers, livid with lack of sleep, fatigue, fear and disgust—pitiable makeshift undertakers—were mostly draymen from the Vesuvian villages who used the same carts in the mornings to bring vegetables and fruit to the marke
t in the thickly settled quarters.

  Everybody was intent on helping others; pale, worn faces roamed among the ruins with bottles and jars full of water or with pots full of soup, distributing their meager sustenance among the poorest, the oldest and the sick who were stretched out amid the wreckage in the shadow of unsteady walls. The streets were studded with cars, trucks, streetcars abandoned on the twisted rails, carriages, and horses that lay dead between the shafts. Clouds of flies were buzzing in the dusty air. A silent crowd that had gathered in the square near the San Carlo Theater, as if just awakened from a deep slumber by livid, cold flashes dazzling their eyes, with fear and amazement imprinted on the faces, lingered before the closed shops and the shutters riddled by fragments of bombs; now and then carts drawn by exhausted, small donkeys and laden with pitiable furniture, appeared in the square and were followed by groups of miserable, ghastly-looking people, who ambled along, dragging their feet through dust and plaster, and looking upward, scrutinized the sky and wailed in a continuous chorus: "Mo' veneno! mo' veneno! 'e bi'! 'e bi'! 'e bi' 'lloco!—There they are! there they are! see them! see them! see them down there!" The monotonous wail made the ecstatic crowd raise their eyes, the cry "Mo' veneno! 'e bi'! 'e bi'!" traveled from one group to another, from street to street, but no one moved or fled, as if the now familiar cry, the customary terror and danger no longer frightened anyone now, or as if utter weariness deprived the people of the strength and the will to flee and seek safety. Only when a distant humming of bees from the lofty sky was heard, did the crowd retreat into the courtyards and disappear as if by magic into the caverns. A few old men remained roaming about the deserted streets along with a few boys and a wretched woman dazed by hunger, but even they were grasped by friendly hands and dragged into the shelter by people crawling out of caves hidden under the debris.

  Something triumphant hovered over the wrecked houses, the buildings still miraculously untouched; something, the nature of which I was at first unable to grasp: the clearness, the most beautiful, cruel clearness of the Neapolitan sky which, contrasted with the dazzling whiteness of the debris in the summer sunlight, of the piles of chalk-white plaster, of the clean and clear-cut outline of the immaculate walls, seemed black—that dark-blue color of the sky on a moonless, starry night. There were moments when the sky seemed to be made of something hard, like black stone. The city with its white-washed walls and burned-out pyres stretched gloomy and funereal beneath that thick, dark, most cruel and wonderful blueness.

  The royal princes, the noblemen, the wealthy, the middle class, the powerful—everybody had fled from Naples,- only the poor remained in the city, the countless masses of the poor—only the vast, unexplored, mysterious "Neapolitan continent" remained. I spent the night in the house of a friend on Calascione,- it was an old house standing high above the roofs of Chiatamone and the Riviera di Chiaia, and next morning, from the edge of Pizzofalcone, I saw the little Capri steamer moored to the Santa Lucia dock. My heart leaped and I rushed down the hill toward the port.

  But as soon as I left Monte di Dio and entered the maze of the Pallonetto, I heard a word whispered all around me, whispered in secret voice and mysterious tones. It came down from the windows and balconies, it emerged from the black caves, the squalid bassi and the far end of courtyards and the alleys. At first it seemed to me like a new word that I had never heard before or that had remained forgotten in the depths of my consciousness for no one knows how long. I did not understand its meaning. I was unable to grasp it. To me, who was returning from a four-year journey through war, slaughter, hunger, burned villages, and wrecked towns, it was an incomprehensible word; to my ear it sounded like a word in a foreign tongue.

  Suddenly I heard it distinctly, clean and transparent like a piece of glass, as it came out of the door of a basso. I went to the threshold and looked inside. It was a poor room, almost completely occupied by a large iron bed and a chest of drawers on which I saw one of those glass bells under which are kept the wax images of the Holy Family. In a corner, a pot was steaming on a lighted stove. An old woman grasping a corner of her skirt in her two hands was poised over the stove as if she were fanning the burning charcoal, but she was motionless,- she turned her face toward the door to listen. The raised skirt revealed her yellow, bony shins and her pointed, shiny knees. A cat was curled up on the red silken coverlet on the bed. A baby was asleep on a cot in front of the chest of drawers. Two young women were kneeling on the floor, their hands clasped, their eyes turned upward in an ecstatic attitude of prayer. Between the bed and the wall an old man sat wrapped in a green shawl decorated with red and yellow flowers, his eyes were open and staring, his right hand dangled by his side, his index and little fingers outstretched in an exorcising symbol which resembled an image on an Etruscan sarcophagus. The old man looked at me intently. Suddenly his lips moved and a word came clearly out of his toothless mouth: "'O sangue—The blood!"

  I drew back in amazement and fear. The word disgusted me. For four years—a terrible, cruel, disgusting word, the German word: Blut, Blut, Blut—had been hitting my ears like the gurgle of water dripping out of a pipe. The Italian word, sangue also aroused fear and disgust in me. It nauseated me. But something about that voice, about that intonation, seemed wonderful to me. "'O sangue!" sounded gentle on the lips of the old man. The word was wonderfully ancient, and at the same time new. It seemed to me that I heard it for the first time and yet it sounded familiar and indescribably sweet. But the sound of that voice terrified the two young women; they suddenly rose, screamed: " 'O sangue! 'O sangue!," rushed through the door, took a few uncertain steps down the alley, and screamed the word as they tore their hair and rent their cheeks with their nails. Then, screaming, " 'O sangue! 'O sangue!" they ran after a crowd of people who were walking toward Santa Maria Egiziaca.

  I, also followed that screaming crowd and near Chiaia bridge we came to Santa Teresella degli Spagnuoli. Down all the alleys that descend like rivulets to Toledo from the high hills, people were running, their faces convulsed by anguish, despair and inexpressible love. From the top of the hill I could see still another rumbling crowd, walking northward along the Toledo, raising a confused noise out of which I could distinguish only one cry, " 'O sangue! 'O sangue!"

  For the first time during the four years of war, for the first time in the course of my cruel journey through slaughter, hunger and devastated towns, I heard the word "blood" spoken with sacred and mysterious reverence. In every part of Europe—in Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Poland, Russia and Finland—that word had spelled hatred, fear, contempt, joy, horror, cruel barbarous complacency and sensuous pleasure; it had always filled me with horror and disgust. To me the word "blood" had become more horrible than blood itself. I was less shocked touching blood, bathing my hands in that poor blood that was shed in every country in Europe, than I was when I heard the word "blood." But in Naples, in commonplace Naples, in the unhappiest, hungriest, most humbled, forsaken and tortured city in Europe, I heard the word "blood" uttered with religious awe, with sacred respect, with a deep feeling of charity, in that high, pure, gentle, innocent tone in which Neapolitan people say: mother, child, Heaven, Madonna, bread, Jesus—with the same innocence, purity and gentle simplicity. Those toothless mouths, those pale, worn lips, cried " 'O Sangue! 'O sangue!" as if it were an appeal, a prayer, a sacred name. Long centuries of hunger and slavery, of robed, canonized, crowned and anointed barbarism, long centuries of want, cholera, corruption and shame had not succeeded in smothering the sacred reverence for blood in that miserable and noble people. Screaming, weeping, stretching their hands to Heaven, the crowd ran toward the Duomo; they invoked blood with stupendous rage. They wept for wasted blood, the blood shed in vain, the soil bathed in blood, the bloody rags, the precious blood of man mingled with the dust of the roads, the clots of blood on the walls of prisons. A pity, a kind of sacred fear was reflected in the feverish eyes of the crowd and in the hands lifted to Heaven and shaken by a violent tremor. " 'O sangue! 'O sangue! 'O
sangue!" For the first time during four years of a ferocious, merciless, cruel war, I heard that word spoken with religious awe, with sacred respect, and I heard it on the lips of a famished multitude—betrayed, forsaken without bread, without homes and without graves. After four long years, once again that word had a divine sound. A sense of hope, rest and peace came over me at the sound of that word, 'O sangue!" At last I had reached the end of my long journey, that word was my port, my last station, my platform, my dock, and I could touch once more the earth of men, the country of civilized people.