I said as much to Don Borrelli. He agreed, wholeheartedly. I told him I wanted freedom to investigate for myself. He told me I could ask any questions I wanted. Both he and Spada would answer them frankly. I told him this wasn’t enough. The clerical point of view might not convey the whole truth. This book must be an honest one, else it were better left unwritten. I, myself, had been a teacher in elementary and high schools for nearly ten years. I wanted to move among the boys. I wanted to question them freely. I wanted to associate with the elder ones, go out with them into the city, revisit the scenes of their old activities, study their reactions, make my own summing-up of the success or failure of the Casa.
Borrelli grinned cheerfully and told me I could do as I pleased. He gave me a bed in the infirmary and the freedom of the house. What I tell you here is my own finding. I assure you I have not written it lightly.
* * *
The first thing I noticed was an odd one.
Every boy who came to the House of the Urchins—whether the police brought him, or Borrelli, or whether he drifted in himself—left it again within three or four days. The new life was so strange, the call of the streets was so strong, that his puzzled, restless little mind couldn’t support the strain. He ran away. The porter would see him go, some of the boys, perhaps, but nobody made any move to stop him. It is the rule of the house—the door opens both ways. The Casa exists for the boys, not the boys for the Casa. It is their home: if they don’t want to stay there, if the love it offers is not enough, they are free to go.
But they always come back. Three days, four days, a week later, a small tousled head and a grubby face pokes uncertainly round the door. Can he have a meal or watch the television? Sure! The porter or the monitor jerks a thumb upstairs. He knows where to go. It’s all open! The thin urchin figure scuttles past the door and heads uncertainly towards the kitchen or the playground or the classroom. If Padre Spada meets him in the corridor, he rumples the tousled head and smiles cheerfully.
“Don’t forget to wash yourself before you go to bed.”
It’s as easy as that. Nobody asks questions. It is enough that the boy is home again.
Some of them have left the Casa two or three times. These, too, have come back, generally escorted by a policeman. The reason is a curious one, and it has its own peculiar pathos. The boy has lived in the Casa. He has dropped his guard. He has not the same need of cunning and hard-headed cynicism. When he returns to the streets, he is out of practice. He cannot survive like the others.
Back in the Casa, he begins to change, little by little. The fear goes out of his eyes. He loses the furtive, uneasy look of the hunted. He is no longer strident and assertive. He grins when you talk to him. He starts to play in the courtyard. His body starts to grow visibly, he fills out and shoots up like a bamboo stalk in the tropics. I’ve seen it with my own eyes and it is a moving experience.
It took me a little time to understand the true nature of the phenomenon. The scugnizzo is returning to his natural state—an untroubled childhood, free of the scarifying responsibilities of survival. He does not have to worry about food or money or a place to sleep. He is not troubled by the guilt of his actions or by the fearful presence of the law. The people about him are friendly. The love that is offered has the cheerful indifference of family affection. So the spirit becomes tranquil and his stunted body starts to grow. But it will never grow like the body of your child or mine, because the love and the care have come too late.
* * *
“What about the past? Does the child forget?”
I put the question to Padre Spada as we stood one evening in a corner of the small playground, watching the youngsters booting a soccer ball. They looked like any bunch of healthy, grubby kids in any vacant lot. Spada rubbed his chin and peered at me through his thick spectacles. His voice was gentle and reflective.
“We try to make them forget. I think we succeed in part with the young ones. When they come to us first they have nightmares. They grind their teeth and mutter in their sleep. Sometimes they wake screaming. Later they sleep quietly. They forget because they want to forget. Though we all know that, even when we forget, we do not destroy a memory.”
“Do they forget their vices, too? Those who have had contact with street women by the time they are ten? Those who have been taken by the pederasti? Do they bring their vices into the Casa?”
His answer to that one was frank and interesting.
“In general, the answer is no. I think we have less trouble here with sexual aberrations than you would find in any fashionable boarding school for boys of good family. There is a reason for it. The early contacts with women of the street are unsatisfactory to an unformed boy. They take place in circumstances which damage his self-respect. The desire which they arouse in him consumes his frail strength. In a curious fashion he understands that. When he is removed from the occasion, he is unconsciously glad of it. His interests here—the games, the school, the life of the Casa—are much more satisfactory to him than to a boy who has had them all his life. Therefore he is not, for the present at least, interested to renew his contacts with women.”
“And the other thing—homosexual contact?”
“We have found occasional offenders, but not many.”
“Any reason? The normal experience is that pederasty is a difficult habit to eradicate.”
Spada nodded:
“As a normal experience, yes. But again you must understand the scugnizzo is not a normal delinquent. When he comes here for the first time, he is likely to do anything. He will lie, cheat, fight. He will try to find somebody with whom to share his vice. It is his form of revolt, you see. But when he comes back, after his first flight, it is because he has realised that here he is more a man, more his own man, than he is on the streets. So he develops a sharp reaction against pederasty.”
“A moral reaction?”
“No. A very natural one. He understands in his own way that to give oneself to another boy is to put himself in the power of that boy. He has had that experience. He wants it no longer. Even for the pleasure, he will not do it. It is the streets that have taught him this elementary wisdom. What we try to do is to confirm it with our own moral teaching.”
I liked the sound of that reasoning. It was simple, pragmatic and free from unctuous moralising. I thought it would appeal to any practising psychiatrist. Later I was to confirm its truth in long talks with Peppino and the senior boys of the Casa. For the present, I was content to leave it. There were other things I wanted to know.
“Cheating, for instance, lying, stealing? On your own showing the boys arrive as adepts in these things. Do they still practise them?”
Spada nodded.
“When they first come, yes. You must remember that the scugnizzo is an actor who has learned to wear the face he thinks will bring him most profit. The pleading face for the tourist. The knowing face for the sailors. The bargaining face for the fences and the pimps. When he comes here, he tries them all. It is often a long while before he understands that the only face we want to see is the real one—the face of the child.”
This was something I had learned from my own experience. When I first came to the Casa with my pockets full of sweets for the young ones and cigarettes for the elders, I had been subjected to the same little comedy of wheedling and phony affection. After I had lived with them a while, they dropped it and treated me with the frank casualness of normal children.
“What about stealing?”
“No,” said Spada, emphatically. “They are scugnizzi, they will not steal from their own. For the rest?” He shrugged comically. “We have so little here that is worth stealing, the question does not arise.”
I left him then and went back to my little white room at the top of the Materdei to record our conversation and to collate it with the other facts I had collected on the humanising of the urchins.
* * *
For their formal education, the young ones are sent to a public elementary sc
hool, not far from the Casa. Each morning they are dressed in the black smocks which all Neapolitan children wear to school. Their faces are scrubbed and the ribbons tied at their necks and, after an inspection by one of the elder boys, they trot off together. There are still only two priests to run the Casa, and the hired helpers are concerned with cooking and cleaning and the second-hand trade which keeps the Casa going. So most of the teaching must be done outside.
This means that like most Neapolitan children the urchins get about three hours’ schooling, three days a week. One relay goes from nine till eleven, the other from eleven to two, every second day. When they return to the Casa, the monitors help them with homework and conduct informal classes. It is an unsatisfactory situation, but it puts them on a par with the other children of Naples who are fortunate enough to have schools. In any case, they are much better off than those thousands who have none at all.
“How do they fare at school?”
I put the question to one of Borrelli’s paid staff, a bright, intelligent youth from Calabria. He is paid 500 lire a day to act as monitor and assistant teacher. In workless Naples, he is glad to get it. More than this, as he explained simply, he feels that he is doing something useful for himself and for the children. He answered my question carefully.
“At school the boys do as all the others do. There is no distinction between the other pupils and the scugnizzi. They dress the same. The poor of Naples respect each other. If there is any advantage it is on the side of our boys. They are bright. The streets have made them so. More than this, when they come home, they are able to study a little and prepare their homework. The others, who live six, eight, twelve in a room in the bassi—how can they possibly study, even if they want to do so? Capisce?”
“Capito.” It was elementary but significant. It appeared that Borrelli and Spada were doing better than most with the limited means at their disposal.
By Anglo-Saxon standards, the achievement isn’t great. The classrooms of the Casa are dusty and empty of teaching aids. There is a blackboard and a few tattered textbooks and a flyblown picture or two. And that’s the list. But, when you see these youngsters bending over their homework with the monitors at their shoulders, you sense an eagerness and a hunger for knowledge that would shame some of our own children.
The House of the Urchins cannot afford to train its own teachers and force them through the state qualifying examinations. Even if it could, there would be no hope of paying them the statutory minimum on the modest income of a dollar a day per person. So the boys must do the best they can with the public schools, where the methods are of ancient vintage and where the overcrowding and the relay system break the heart of even the stoutest teacher.
When you look down on the waterfront of Naples, you see a five new square, which the mayor is building for his beloved citizens. The mayor is Mr Lauro and the square is right next to the handsome business offices of the Flotta Lauro Company. Mr Lauro is a public-spirited man. He is the one who built a concrete wall in front of the hovels so they wouldn’t spoil the drive along the Via Marittima. He has also presented the city with a magnificent new fountain. His latest gesture is the gift of a television set to every local branch of the Monarchist Party. I wonder why he hasn’t thought of building a school or two for the children?
* * *
After the boy has been in the Casa awhile, a new problem presents itself—his parents or his relatives! Few of the boys are orphans. Most have some relative living in Naples. As Borrelli had explained to me often, as I have tried to explain in this book, it is not hunger or desertion or death that drives the boys out into the streets, it is the double burden of responsibility and a lack of love.
When the parent or the relative hears of the boy’s good fortune in finding a home, his first reaction is to make a personal profit out of the situation.
A father will come, begging Borrelli to give him back his son. He loves him dearly. He cannot bear to be parted from him. He needs the child to help him in his business. A mother, who has seen her boy’s photograph in the little broadsheet which Borrelli publishes, will present herself at the Casa asking payment The neighbours have told her that photographic models have a right to be paid. She is the boy’s mother, it is his duty to support her. When the boy goes home, as he sometimes does, to visit the family, they will work on him again, weeping, pleading, subjecting him, as they subject the tourist, to the contemptible little comedy of misery.
When, for instance, I suggested that we take a couple of the boys for a weekend in my house, Spada shook his head.
“Better not, my friend. It would be good for them, sure. But when their families got to hear of it, you would be plagued by a stream of them demanding charity. We know how to deal with them. You don’t.”
The method of dealing with them is a blunt brutality. If they plague the boys too much, Borrelli threatens them with police proceedings for neglect of their children and breaches of the education and labour laws. He has fought too hard for his boys to allow them to be exploited again.
In spite of this, there is often a division of loyalty, which creates problems for the child himself. In the streets he was not aware of it. He had made his choice. He had to preserve his independence to live. In the Casa he drops his defence and he is again vulnerable to the venality of his family.
The atmosphere of the Casa is a free and easy one. No bells are rung. The boys are not assembled and marched from place to place as they are even in a normal boarding school. The older ones are allowed to smoke, not, as Spada explains, because it is good for them, but because they have become accustomed to the habit on the streets and it is as strong in them as it is in any adult. Better to allow them the luxury and have them feel at home than have them smoking in corners in a kind of small rebellion.
This liberal attitude is deliberately cultivated in the Casa and is specially important to the boys themselves. The first and most important thing in the minds of Borrelli and Spada is to give the boys a home. All else is secondary. If they feel themselves secure and free at the same time, they will settle down and re-educate themselves. They will act on their own responsibility to preserve their home and the principles on which it is founded.
When I saw the gentle care which the older ones lavished on the youngsters, when I saw Peppino’s watchful eyes on the scugnizzi we met in our nightly wanderings in case any of the Casa boys had slipped back among them, I believed that Borrelli and Spada were right. Their methods were sound. Their success was obvious.
* * *
With the senior lads, those who have passed the five elementary grades and have reached say fifteen, sixteen or seventeen, a new problem presents itself. Rather, a series of problems, which even the rugged, combative genius of Borrelli cannot solve. To do so, he would have to topple down the whole political, economic and moral structure of the Mezzogiorno. Which mightn’t be a bad idea. The drains are beginning to smell badly.
When his boys reach high school age, Mario Borrelli is faced with a simple but brutal choice. Does he educate them, or give them a chance to eat for a few years?
If he sends them to high school—which again he can’t afford—they will be given a classical education in the old, old style. This education will open their minds to the best there is in literature, art, philosophy, history; and deny them for ever the means of enjoying it.
There are lawyers driving taxis in Naples. There are philosophers jerking espresso coffee. On every railway station you see notices advertising an examination for some minor civil service posts. The men who enter are Laureati in Arts, Law, Letters and Economics. One in a thousand has a chance of getting the job. For Borrelli’s boys, therefore, this sort of education is a costly waste of time.
There is, of course, technical education. There’s not much of it in Naples, but if you can enter one of the half a dozen colleges which offer it, you are lucky. Of course there are so few vacancies and so many parents ready to pay for the privilege, there’s little hope for the scugn
izzo. Naturally, if any Neapolitan gentleman were to found a scholarship or two for the poor children of his city, the position would be different. Leaving aside this remote miracle, however, let’s assume that Borrelli can get enough funds and enough influence to start a few of his boys on a technical course which will lead them with brains and hard work to, say, an agricultural diploma.
There is, in the South, an insidious system called la raccomandazione. To pass an examination and get class promotion and the final diploma, the student must not only get good marks, he must be raccomandato—recommended by his teacher. Since a technical diploma is one of the few passports to a job in Italy today, the teacher’s recommendation is vitally important. You might even say it has a capital value.
That’s what certain teachers say, too. They charge money for their recommendations. A friend of mine was asked, privately and discreetly, for 200,000 lire to recommend him for his engineering diploma. He didn’t have the money. He wouldn’t have paid it if he had. But it took him three more years to get the diploma—three years in which he might have been earning a technician’s salary. What chance does an ex-scugnizzo have against a system like that?
So Borrelli takes the third and only road left to him. He apprentices his boys to tradesmen in the city—electricians, cabinet-makers, welders, engineers. The boys take kindly to their jobs. The life of the streets has made them conscious of the dignity of work and the good fortune of being able to get it.
I used to see them coming in at night, grimy, grease-stained, tired, to the small hostel which Borrelli found for them over by the Duomo. I used to eat with them and talk with them. They liked their jobs. They liked the feel of tools in their hands. They scrimped and saved to buy dog-eared technical magazines and handbooks. They were hungry to learn. But there was nobody to teach them!
It sounds crazy but it is true. There was nobody to teach them, because their employers did not want them to learn.
It staggered me at first, then I realised that I had stumbled on the explanation of something that had bothered me a long time.
Children of The Sun Page 11
