Children of The Sun

by Jonathan Green

Peppino shrugged.

  “That is why it is so hard to find a good girl. If I wished to get married, which I cannot do, I should take a long time and search carefully before I could be sure.” He broke off, tugged at my sleeve and slewed me round to look at the opposite side of the square. “Look, Mauro! This is another thing you must see.”

  The wall of the little piazza was broken by a narrow lane, at the mouth of which stood a trio of American sailors on shore leave from the aircraft carrier anchored in the bay. They were young, tall, blond and good humoured, and if they were drunk they showed no signs of it. One of them carried brown paper parcels and the other two had small cameras slung around their necks.

  Around them danced three small boys who looked only five or six but were probably nearer to ten. Their voices were shrill and piping and they carried clearly across the tiny space. In a mixture of dockside English, Neapolitan and Italian, they were crying the charms of the girls in the casino. Their gestures were the timeless obscenities of the trade and the words they used sounded a blasphemy from their childish lips. The three sailor-boys laughed uneasily and looked at each other. They were young and a little scared but curious and interested in the old proposition. They stood irresolutely for a moment, then tried to move away.

  The boys danced round them and shouted more loudly. They were like dogs herding unruly sheep. Their performance was as cunning as if it had been scored for them. Dancing, piping, tugging at sleeves and arms, they edged the sailors slowly round the square until they stood almost opposite the door of the casino.

  Then, as they stood undecided, the Levantine took over. He smiled and pointed inside and made what seemed to be an encouraging speech in English. Two minutes later the boys filed through under the neon light and were lost to view. Only the urchins were left and the sleek-haired Levantine. They talked quietly, with gestures that indicated a financial calculation; then the boys moved away, apparently satisfied, while the Levantine leaned against the door jamb and picked his teeth with a match.

  I reached for a cigarette. When I came to light it, my hands were trembling. The performance had sickened me. I wanted to leave the place for ever and go back to my own country where the air was clean and the children were sleeping in their beds untouched by the dirt of the old world.

  Peppino looked at me. His dark eyes were sombre.

  “Did it please you, Mauro?”

  “It made me sick.”

  He shrugged.

  “I used to do that once, Mauro. Every night. Sometimes I used to sell the sailors to another who would bring them here. Sometimes I would sell them to older men who would rob them and steal their cameras and their clothes. It paid well. Tomorrow…” He pointed at the lighted doorway. “Tomorrow the children will come back and they will be paid a percentage of the price the sailors paid to the house. They will not be cheated. There is a fiducia—trust—between them.”

  “The trust of the gutter.”

  Peppino nodded soberly. His voice was sad and gentle.

  “Sure, Mauro! Sure! The trust of the gutter. Except that here, in the bassi, we have no gutters. The filth runs down the centre of the streets where the children play. How can they fail to be touched by it? You asked me to show you this city. I tell you now, you have not yet begun to see it or to understand it. Before you judge us—any of us—wait! Wait and see!”

  I looked up at him and saw that his eyes were wet with tears and his face was twisted with all the miseries he himself had endured before a hand reached out and plucked him out of the filth into a semblance of security. I was ashamed of my outburst. I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder. I said:

  “Forgive me, Peppino. I’ll wait. I’ll try to understand.”

  He stood up and drew his jacket tighter about his thin shoulders.

  “Come then, Mauro. Come and I will show you.”

  * * *

  It was late and I was hungry. I had eaten breakfast and a midday lunch of fruit and fish, but now the night was half gone and I was irritable and faint with hunger. I suggested to Peppino that we turn into one of the kitchens and eat before we continued our promenade. He brushed the suggestion aside with a curt “Later! Later!” I knew that he had done twelve hours work on a cup of coffee and a hunk of dry bread, so I was ashamed to press the point and I followed him deeper and deeper into the maze of alleys behind the Via Roma.

  They were paved with rough stone blocks, slippery with mud and foul with slops from the tenements. Refuse was piled in little heaps outside the doors and in the reeking angles behind the arches. Scraggy brown cats padded silently from one heap to the other and spat at us as we passed.

  The blank walls hemmed us in and when I looked up I could see the black ribs of the balconies and the filter of light through the closed shutters. Far above us I could see a thin strip of sky and the twinkle of a few cold stars. High on the leprous walls were the outlines of ancient escutcheons, pitted and cracked and defaced, and here and there the shape of ancient wreaths and cherubs in broken stucco. I remembered that not one of these buildings was less than a hundred years old and that some of them dated back to the time of the Spaniards.

  In the shadow of a crumbling arch Peppino stopped and drew me back into the shadows. We lit cigarettes and stood smoking them furtively, talking in low tones.

  Across the alley were three doorways. They were open, in spite of the cold, and yellow bulbs were burning so that we could see inside the rooms. The first was a small cobbler’s shop where a man and his two sons were working over their lasts, while a woman with a blonde girl on her lap sat talking to them. Behind them I caught a glimpse of another smaller room with a brass bedstead and a votive lamp burning in front of a coloured plaster statue of the Madonna.

  The next door opened into a dwelling. There was a very old woman, grey, gap-toothed and shapeless under a huddle of shawls, a middle-aged couple and six children, boys and girls, whose ages ranged from five to about eighteen. Nine people in all! They sat round a table eating the evening meal. The rest of the room was cluttered with a huge matrimonial bed, a sideboard and a large wardrobe, with a tiny Agipigas stove over which was hung an array of cooking vessels.

  The third door opened into a narrow room with two single beds and a tiny table at which a mother and three teenage daughters were working on what looked like a wedding gown of white net. They had the grey, pinched look of people who work too long and eat too little and see too little sunlight.

  “These,” said Peppino, quietly, “these are the lucky ones. They have work to do and a house to live in. They are seldom hungry and their children are cared for.”

  I looked out at the festering alley and back again at the pitiful crowded rooms where these fortunate folk lived and worked their sweatshop hours. I looked at Peppino, wondering if he were laughing at me. He was quite serious.

  “I show you this so that you will not think all of Naples is bad and hopeless. These are good people and they do not live badly. If only there were more like them, we should not be as unhappy as we are now.”

  “Nine people in a room? Where do they sleep?”

  “In the bed. It is big, as you see.”

  “All of them?”

  “Where else?”

  “Is that good? The old, the young, men and women, the married, the unmarried, all in one bed?”

  “No, it is not good. But it is better than the baracche—the shacks—where they sleep fifteen in a room. It is better than the ruins where there is no light, no warmth, nothing, and they sleep on the floor like animals. It is a thousand times better than the street, where the scugnizzi sleep, in the doorways and over the gratings and under the fruit barrows. Believe me, it is much, much better.”

  I believed him. Put that way, even a child could see it.

  Misery is a relative word. If you have work in a city where there are two hundred thousand workless, you are fortunate indeed. If nine of you sleep in a bed instead of on a cold stone floor, then you should thank God for the mercy of it. If
your children come home at night to eat and rest instead of scrabbling with the cats and sleeping on the baker’s grating, then you are a lucky parent.

  Privacy and ventilation and a bath and running water and a tub to wash your clothes in—these are unbelievable luxuries not to be thought on without presumption.

  I remembered my pleasant villa at Sorrento, which has three bedrooms and two bathrooms and a room for the maid, who earns as much as the father of six children. I thought of the tourists who come to Naples and Pompeii and Amalfi and Capri, who sleep at the Excelsior and eat at Le Lucciole. I was ashamed and I was afraid.

  Peppino was still waiting for me to speak. I asked him:

  “Peppino, why do Neapolitans have such big families?”

  He looked at me in surprise, then stuck out his chest with simple pride.

  “Why not, Mauro? We are a people with warm blood. Our women are good breeders. We like children. Why should we not have them?”

  It was too early in our acquaintance to press this point. I was interested in another line of thought.

  “This man here.” I pointed across to the family of six. “All these are his children?”

  “Of course. All made in the same bed. He is a brave one that.”

  I was prepared to believe he was brave, though not in the Neapolitan sense. I said:

  “But is it good, Peppino, that the act of love should be made here where the children can see it, and the young girls and their brothers who are growing up and feeling that they too are ready to be men and women?”

  Peppino frowned. He flicked his cigarette butt on the ground and stamped on it. Then he turned to me.

  “No, Mauro, it is not good. But that is the way it happens because we have no houses and no room and people must live this way or perish on the streets. The young ones know too early—and the ones who are ready sometimes do what should not be done with their own brothers or sisters. Often that is what drives them on to the streets, girls and boys. That is what prepares them for the streets—for things like you saw at the casino tonight. But how do you change it? We are a poor people. We have no work to do and no place to go to find it. Cosa fare? What’s to do about it?”

  Cosa fare?

  I didn’t know. I was tired and hungry and my feet were aching in the broken shoes. I wanted to be quit of the whole business. I wanted to forget this ancient misery of the people of Naples and go home to my own country or back to the bright islands where the tourists came and laughed and drank and tousled the well-fed girls.

  I trod my cigarette into the mud and stepped out into the alley.

  “Come on, Peppino. Let’s eat!”

  * * *

  We would eat, said Peppino, in the Piazza Mercato. There was a kitchen there where the food was cheap and the wine was good and the proprietor was a friend of his.

  The Piazza Mercato is at the far end of the city, just off the Strada della Marina. The most direct route from where we were was to cross the Via Roma, walk down the Via Sanfelice and work our way to the southern end of the Corso Umberto. But this did not suit Peppino’s book at all. There were things to show me on the way; besides, we needed cigarettes.

  I was prepared to suffer a necessary minimum of discomfort on this back-street pilgrimage, but I still clung stubbornly to the luxury of English cigarettes. The cheapest place to buy them was from the smugglers. Tobacco is a state monopoly in Italy and the range of products is poor. Besides, Italian cigarettes have a habit of coming apart at the seams before they are half smoked. So, to the smugglers we would go, the police and private conscience notwithstanding.

  We crossed the Via Roma with its bright lights and screaming traffic and its well-dressed men and women making the ritual passeggiata, gaping at the shop windows, chatting in little groups, drinking tiny cups of espresso coffee in the bars where the windows were full of brightly-coloured Easter eggs. I was acutely aware of my shabby clothes and my grubby hands and my unshaven face, but no one took the slightest notice of me, and for once I was spared the attentions of the beggars and pedlars of sunglasses and picture postcards.

  In a few moments we were back in the familiar setting of dark alleys and towering tenements and wineshops where shabby men sat among the barrels and the baskets and drank sparingly of the rich, raw wine. A litre of common wine costs 150 lire, and if you’re earning only 500 a day you drink sparingly and smoke little. If you’re single and free of family responsibilities you do a little better, but if you’re a family man you can’t afford the minor vices.

  It was another sidelight on the self-evident problem of an impoverished land with a staggering birthrate.

  The need for catharsis, for the periodic purging of grief and pain and fear is fundamental to human nature. In lands more prosperous and more evolved there are twenty ways in which a man may divert himself and forget the daily crucifixions of living. But here, in the bassi of Naples, there are only two—the commerce of the bed, and the rituals of the Church. The letto di matrimonio is as characteristic of Neapolitan life as the baroque churches with their dusty saints and their grotesque arrays of votive offerings, which puzzle even Catholics from other parts of the world.

  I was still chewing the cud of this problem when Peppino drew me aside from the main concourse into a narrow lane and towards a small gathering of men and women sitting on cane-bottomed chairs outside the tenement doors.

  “Contrabbandieri,” said Peppino, cheerfully. “Cigarettes!”

  The first of the illicit vendors was a youngish matron with a tired face and sad eyes. Beside her squatted a tiny girl shivering in a thin cotton frock. Peppino walked up to her and pointed to the little tray she held in her lap. I saw a dozen packets of American cigarettes, all well-known brands. None of them carried the impost seal of the Italian Government. Peppino pointed again to the tray.

  “Americane. Ti piace?”

  I said they didn’t please me. I have no taste for American cigarettes. I prefer the light yellow Virginia of the British makers.

  Peppino asked her if she carried any English. She shook her head indifferently and jerked a thumb over her shoulder.

  “Giu—further down.”

  We walked on to the next pedlars. They were a pair, a man and a woman, and the trays they carried were bigger and better filled. She was a large and shapeless matron on the wrong side of fifty. Over her dirty black dress she wore three tattered pullovers, each of a different colour. The man was a small, wax-faced fellow with a turned eye. They looked up as we approached and exchanged suspicious glances. Once again my height and my complexion had betrayed me as a foreigner.

  “English cigarettes?” enquired Peppino.

  The woman nodded down at the tray but did not speak. I saw half a dozen good English brands, all with the cellophane seals intact. I chose two packets.

  “How much?” asked Peppino.

  “Two-fifty each.”

  It was a hundred lire below the regular market price for twenty cigarettes. Peppino nodded approval and I paid over 500 lire.

  “Who is he?”

  The man jerked his thumb at me, although one eye seemed to be peering away in the opposite direction.

  “Trentino,” said Peppino, curtly. “In trouble with the police.”

  This was a fiction we had agreed upon to explain my appearance and my taciturnity and my presence in the bassi of Naples.

  The man nodded approvingly. This was something he could understand. Then an idea seemed to strike him. He thrust his hand into his pocket and brought out a small packet. When he opened it I saw that it contained three rubber contraceptives, each in a plastic container.

  He offered them to me, but Peppino waved them aside curtly. I stepped forward and intercepted the gesture. I had reasons of my own for being interested in the proposition.

  “How much?” I asked. “How much for each one?”

  “Fifty lire.”

  “Each one?”

  “Each one. A hundred and fifty the three.”

  I sho
ok my head. He shrugged and thrust the packet back into his pocket. The price was his best offer. There was no room for bargaining. That gesture interested me, too. It gave me the statistic I wanted. But the trade wasn’t finished yet. He had other wares to offer.

  “Do you want a good girl? Clean, knowledgeable?”

  “Where?”

  “The girl?”

  “Yes.”

  He gestured towards the far end of the street.

  “Down there. I have only to call her and she will come.”

  “Where would we go?”

  This time the gesture was over his shoulder, towards the open doorway of the room at his back. I looked in and saw the usual clutter of furniture, the huge bed and the lamp burning in front of a crude oleo of Saint Gennaro. I asked him:

  “Whose?”

  He looked puzzled.

  “The girl?”

  “No, the room.”

  His face brightened again.

  “The room is ours. You can have it for an hour, two hours, as long as you like. It is clean and private.”

  Once again I told him no. Once again he shrugged and bent over his tray. The commerce was over. There was nothing more to talk about Peppino and I turned away and headed southward towards the Piazza Mercato.

  As we walked, Peppino talked about the smugglers and how they came by their wares. He had worked for them once and his information was accurate. The cigarettes came from the ships, he said. They were thrown overboard in rubber bags and picked up by fishermen who brought them into harbour where the contact men picked them up and carried them to storehouses in the back streets. Sometimes the dockside officials were bribed to turn a blind eye to seamen who came ashore with bulging kitbags. The vendors were simply percentage salesmen who distributed the packages.

  Didn’t the police know about the trade? Sicuro! The police knew about it, but so long as it was confined to this back-street peddling they were prepared to let it flourish. Now and again they made a big strike at one of the major traffickers, but the police after all were Neapolitans and they, too, understood that people must live. And if there is no margin in the law for earning a crust of bread, then the administrators of the law must provide the leeway themselves.