Here in the South the standard of technical workmanship is terribly poor. I have stood for hours watching men working on a new villa. The cement was half-mixed, the courses were crooked, there were no flashings for window or door frames, there were no ventilators. The electrical wiring was a death-trap and the plumbing a mechanical monstrosity. Southern mechanics will shine your car to diamond brightness, but they are apt to tie the innards up with string.
The reason for it was explained to me by two of Don Borrelli’s senior boys.
They were apprenticed at fifteen or sixteen. Their employers—a small cabinet-maker, a garage with six mechanics—taught them enough to do the odd jobs around the place. If they wanted to learn more, they were headed off to sweeping the floor or filtering sump oil. Why? First, if they learnt too much they could become potential rivals. Secondly, the employers had no intention of keeping them beyond their eighteenth year.
It is the old system, outlawed long since by sane business men in my country, of using up cheap labour and then tossing it back, half trained and helpless, in the unemployment pool.
Every one of the senior boys to whom I spoke, knew what was likely to happen to him. Every one of them was afraid. Doubly afraid, because he had no family to turn to when he lost his job.
Borrelli was afraid, too, afraid and angry, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He had talked to individual employers and had been met with the cocked head and the pitiful shrug. Cosa fare? Times were bad. It was a charity to take the boys in the first place, when there were tens of thousands of married men out of a job.
Biting back his anger, Borrelli would explain that to profit in this way from untrained youth, without assuming any obligation for their future welfare, was a grievous sin. It was sin of the same nature as profiting from the bodies of women in the closed houses. It destroyed human dignity. It…
Then he would break off, sickened by the bland indifference of these beggars on horseback. It angered him that he had to depend on these fellows to find work for his boys. But he had tried the big organisations and they could do little or nothing for him.
Top management was prepared to be co-operative, but the mechanics of the operation brought Borrelli finally to the door of the personnel manager. The answer was always the same. There were no vacancies. Naturally there can’t be any vacancies in a city of two hundred thousand unemployed. Moreover it was the company’s policy to give employment to married men. With that principle Borrelli could have no quarrel at all.
He might quarrel with the practice of certain personnel managers of collecting a small percentage from the men they hired. But where would it get him? Everybody in Naples plays the skin game!
And there he stands today, the man who has brought hope and love and human dignity to the homeless children of Naples. He has snatched them from the streets. He has given them a home, he has taught them to be honest, decent young men. He has educated them as best he can—and now? They must go back to the streets.
Why doesn’t he train the boys himself, you ask? Why doesn’t he set up a trade school and staff it with qualified teachers and make his own recommendations and feed Italian industry with the skilled technicians it so badly needs.
The answer is that he hasn’t got the money and he can’t get it. The funds of the Church are spread thinly over the many works of charity it has to support. Borrelli claims—I believe, honestly—that he is getting his fair share. From the State he gets nothing, yet these are the children of the State. From the Comune of Naples, nothing again, though these are the children of Naples, the lovable, romantic, sentimental city where the tourists come. From private charity he gets a small trickle of money, just enough to keep him in operation at his present standard.
He knows, as you and I know, that thousands of millions of American dollars have poured into this country to finance such works as this, to produce trained manpower to develop the resources of the depressed South. Italy is a poor country, they tell you. Its resources are meagre. True, but the resources could be tripled with honestly used money and trained personnel.
This year, the farmers of the South were crippled by the most rigorous winter in recent history. It was a disaster of the first magnitude. But I saw no fund created to assist the South. The Bank of Naples was still lending money at thirteen per cent and hoisting the rate to seventeen per cent by discounting bonds. I have heard many disquieting stories of industrialists and bankers paying insurance money to Communist Party funds; but I have heard little of bequests and grants for relief of the widespread distress.
And the American dollars locked up in the Cassa del Mezzogiorno? The distressed farmers say they haven’t seen any. They haven’t been used to keep the price of olive oil down for workless families.
And certainly none of them has reached Don Mario Borrelli!
PART THREE
WHAT’S TO DO ABOUT IT?
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE FIRST thing that needs to be done is to answer a question.
By what right does a foreigner, a citizen of a country with full employment and a high standard of living, come to Italy, and sit in judgment on its social conditions and its political and ecclesiastical administration?
The question is a fair one. I think the answer is a fair one, too. The observer is invited to come. More money is spent by the Italian State on tourist advertising than on any charitable enterprise or social reform. The visitor pays a sojourn tax, and his living costs him a great deal more than it costs him in his own country for better food and better social standards. That, of course, is only a small part of the answer. Tourist revenue keeps this country afloat. Emigration to Australia, Canada, America and Argentina drains off at least a part of its workless population. United States dollars bolster its shaky industrial enterprises and provide cheap profits for its financiers and businessmen.
The man who pays the piper has some right to discuss the music offered to him.
More than this, with a tight bureaucracy, both in the State and in the Church, with a divided and partisan Press, financed, all of it, by sectional interests, the real truth is hard to come by. Yet we must have it.
Italy is the pivot of European defence, economic and military. Political corruption is a termite nest, chewing at the props of that defence. Social indifference breeds revolt among the victims of it. Misery and unemployment make good Communists. Venality in business and public life breeds fear and uncertainty and holds back reform. Rogues flourish and the voices of honest men are stifled.
No man is an island. No nation either, in this twentieth-century world. The sins of one are visited on the heads of all. The visitation may well be catastrophic.
There is my first justification for the writing of this book.
This the second: the children of Naples have no voice. I have pledged myself to give them one. A child has no politics. A child has no nationality. He has only the right to live, the right to hope. If these rights are denied him, it is a crime against humanity, and every honest man must raise his voice against it.
Just over the hills that front me as I write these lines lie the orchards and the tomato plots of Salerno. The fruit trees are in flower and the flowers grow out of the bodies that lie buried under the grey volcanic earth. They are the bodies of men who died believing that they were fighting for freedom from want and freedom from fear. The hunger and the fear that fester in the back streets of Naples are a daily mockery of their death. They, too, are voiceless. I speak for them also.
These are my credentials. By them I must stand for my right to say what ails this unhappy country and what must be done to mend it.
What must be done?
The needs are legion, but they all boil down to one: the cleansing of this country from administrative and political corruption, the formation of a social conscience, the creation of public confidence, an atmosphere of mutual trust, without which reform is impossible.
Put it like that, and it sounds like a piece of well-turned rhetoric. Le
t me show you what it really means.
* * *
I had been in Sorrento a few weeks when I began to be aware of the plight of the orange growers, whose trees had been burned by the frosts and who stood to lose more than half their crops. The olive orchards were in worse plight. The whole crop had been ruined and there was fear that the trees themselves might be killed. I live in orange country. I know a little about cultivation and more about the co-operative organisations of the growers. I knew for instance that the fabled orange trees of Sorrento were decades old and would have been rooted out long since by growers in Australia. This, by the way.
I noticed that tens of thousands of oranges fell every day and were left to rot on the ground. I noticed that the growers were leaving the rest of the fruit on the trees instead of picking and packing it. It was their primitive and wasteful method of keeping the price up. It didn’t work, of course, because the daily losses outweighed the price rise. The fruit that was left was over-ripe and of poor quality. I looked in vain for nurseries of young trees to replace the ones which would die and never bear again. I saw none.
Then, for my own edification, I began to canvass the idea of a local co-operative to control marketing, to set up packing sheds and cool storage, to negotiate with the bank for loans at a reasonable rate, to finance new plantings and provide sinking funds against bad times like this one.
Everyone to whom I spoke agreed that it was a good idea. Many were well-informed on the operation of rural co-operatives in Denmark, in America and other countries. Not one gave the scheme half a chance of success in Sorrento.
Why?
Nobody trusted anybody else. The history of corporate enterprise in Italy in the last twenty years was a history of speculation and scandal. The honest men with organising ability wouldn’t commit themselves to a new effort. The farmers preferred to keep their funds under their own hands, stuffed in the mattress or behind the loose brick in the wall of the living room.
And there you have it—administrative corruption, the lack of social conscience. It was the story of my journalist friends all over again. The plot was the same, only the sets were different.
More than this, when I asked—more for a test exercise than from any hope of success—for permission to enter the orchards and pick up the fallen fruit, and cart it, at my own expense, to the House of the Urchins, I was refused. I might buy it at half the price of good fruit. If I wasn’t prepared to buy it, it would rot on the ground. Two days later I watched them digging it in. The real reason was not meanness, but a fear that I might take the fruit and sell it for my own profit!
Fiducia! Trust! Mutual confidence! Any business man will tell you that it is the only foundation of a prosperous and stable economy. Unless, of course, he’s an Italian of the Mezzogiorno!
How do you start reforms in an atmosphere like this? The obvious answer is that you must start with education. In Anglo-Saxon countries, it is still possible to start press campaigns on issues of public importance—road deaths, cancer research, the needs of the aged. Our own Press can be partisan enough, God knows, but there are certain matters on which opinion is united. In Italy, no. I proved this one, too, by personal experience.
Two papers in the South had asked me to write some material for them. I had refused. My reason was that I did not care to damage my credit as an independent observer by publishing in any paper whose political affiliations I could not check. However, after the episode of the orange growers I made contact with the editors concerned and offered to write the story as a public service, with emphasis on the value of such co-operatives to the rural economy of the South. Both declined. One of them was frank enough to tell me that he couldn’t get the story past his management.
With the channels of communication turned into party lines, how do you begin to spread the truth and preach reform? The most obvious answer is that reform must begin in Rome, that the public service must be purged and a campaign of re-education started from the top down.
The answer is obvious, but incomplete.
The fact is that Italy has been a nation for less than a hundred years. It is not a homogeneous country like Great Britain with a unified code of law and a tradition of public service. It is even less homogeneous than the United States which still has its own problems of State jurisdiction and is still divided on important issues like racial segregation.
The Italian administration is not a servant of the people, but its master, an instrument of control for the party in power. If you find this hard to believe, let me tell you another story. This one, too, is first-hand.
During our sojourn on the peninsula we employed a Sorrentine housemaid, a woman of thirty-nine. It was part of her contract of service that she should live in the house and, if she were given an evening off, she must return to the house before two in the morning. One evening she went to the pictures. She didn’t return till breakfast time the next morning. When I questioned her, she dissolved into tears and told me that she had been afraid to return because she had gone to Piano di Sorrento, three townships away, to see a film and had forgotten her documenti—identity and employment cards. She was afraid to come home and had spent the night in the house of a friend.
I didn’t see the point and I told her so with some heat. Then she explained. In Piano di Sorrento she was a stranger. If the police picked her up, as they were likely to do, and found she had no cards, she would have spent the night in the calaboose. No matter that they could check her identity by a telephone call to me. The point was that they wouldn’t do it. In Piano she had no rights. The absence of papers proved that. Even when she showed her papers the next morning, she would have no redress against the arrest and imprisonment
I checked this story with local residents. They grinned and told me it was true. It wouldn’t happen to a tourist? Oh, no! Or to the local gentry? No, again. But to an unknown peasant? Sure!
There is a sheaf of such little tales of the public administration and its treatment of the tax-payers who support it, but why retail them? The facts are self-evident to anyone who spends more than a month in Italy. The real point is that when the executive body is so deeply entrenched, protected moreover by ancient codices that date back to Justinian, reform from the top is a slow and heart-breaking process that must inevitably take decades.
With a divided, partisan Press, the most well-meaning movements can be quickly discredited for party purposes. When Gronchi left for America for his vital discussions with Eisenhower, the Italian Press was full of juicy pictures and juicy copy about the Montesi scandal. Most of the Press gave Gronchi and Eisenhower a contemptuous half column.
Again the question: where do you start, with any hope of foreseeable success?
I have one answer. I believe it to be the true one. Before I give it to you, let me explain something else. There are two Italies—the North and the South. The North begins at Rome and ends on the borders of France, Switzerland and Austria. The South begins at Terracina and ends where the heel of Calabria and the toe of Sicily dip into the sea.
They are two different countries. The people look different, they dress differently, they talk differently, they think differently. They have a different past and, I believe, a different future. What I have studied and written applies to the South; it has not necessarily the same application in the North. The South is deeply entrenched in the feudal tradition of lords and servants, of conquerors and conquered.
What shocks the visitor, therefore, is accepted as a commonplace by the gentry of the South. There have always been poor in Naples. There have always been scugnizzi. The peasants have always been sharecroppers. The functionaries have always been underpaid. When you tell them that these are anachronisms, dangerous, even explosive in the twentieth century, they shrug and turn away.
When a poor man becomes rich in Naples—and some of them did become rich during the war—he becomes a beggar on horseback, aping the vices of the signori, contemptuous of the misery from which he sprang.
If you
want an illustration of the difference between this country and Australia or America or even England, you have it here. In these countries it has become the ornament of riches to turn them to charitable purposes, to found schools and endow universities. The triumph of the hostess is to give a bigger charity ball than her rival. Here, when you make money, you invest most of it in America, build yourself a villa on Capri, and pay your servants a dollar a day!
Rome is 150 miles from Naples, but for political and social purposes it might well be 15,000. The reform of the South, therefore, must begin in the South.
I believe, very strongly, that it must begin with the Church of the South.
This is a strong statement, but I make it with measured conviction. Italian anti-clericals will smile when they read it. Catholics abroad may well look askance at its bluntness. If I were not a Catholic myself they might well accuse me of sectarian bias. But, because I am a Catholic, I understand my own Church. I know its strength and I know its human weaknesses. I understand how deeply it enters into the lives of this people, even into the lives of those who have turned away from it. I know that if it were taken away, with its pageantry and its pomp and its solid core of belief in the dignity of individual man, this people would sink into a far greater misery. I speak, therefore, with the frankness of one of the family.
The Church of the South shares the feudal origins of the people. Much of its possession in lands, in buildings, in accumulated treasures of gold and silver reliquaries, in jewelled statues and the rest, came from the succession of feudal rulers. In this respect it differs not at all from the Church in France, in England and Southern Germany.
Where it does differ is in the taint of nepotism that still clings to it. Nepotism is unavoidable where you have an established religion and the bulk of the population are believers. If you’re all Catholics, it’s unavoidable that somebody’s uncle must be a bishop and somebody else’s cousin a cardinal or an abbot. It is equally natural that family influence is going to be exercised to secure advantage or preferment either in the Church or through it.
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