‘We lived through it, more easily than most. When the occupation of Rome was completed, the painter came to Naples, came to see us again … on a bicycle. He stayed some time, he couldn’t get back. My father could not credit he would still keep outside of what was happening. The resistance in Italy had taken on enormous proportions by then. The countryside north of Rome was infiltrated with saboteurs, with soldiers who had deserted the Axis, with escaped Allied prisoners. My father could not believe in any scruple that would exempt a young man from taking part in this. Ultimately – they spoke bitterly to one another, and they parted.’
‘And you – what did you think?’
‘I was young, on those matters I only played at thinking. I had always thought what my parents thought. Now, it seems to me as if time, and other wars, and other wickedness, are on the painter’s side. But retrospect is not the same as the event, and that was not like other wars, except in some final, historical perspective; and there is something chilling in a historical perspective consistently applied to daily life.
‘So it was,’ Gioconda went on, as though apparently in continuation of what had gone before. ‘Just at the time when my father never wanted to see this man again, that his original wish was fulfilled, and I fell in love. These consequences, these fulfilments, Jenny, these hopes that turn back and terrify you with their consummation. We could hardly ever meet, we couldn’t correspond, yet by the end of the war we were lovers.’
‘And your father?’
‘My father came to hate him. For him it was passivity that had allowed Mussolini to have power, and this – premeditated – inaction was inexcusable to him. Perhaps he was right. One cannot live one’s own posterity.’ Her voice accelerated, as if there remained only one item to conclude the story. ‘I went there, to that place on the sea —I went there to live with him. I broke with my father. We lived there together for a year, just over a year, the whole year of ’46.’ She had made a cradle of her arms crossed on her breast, warming herself. ‘One day he took a boat, and went to Gaeta. For some errand. It was easiest to go there by boat, as I have said. The boat had a small engine, but half-way there it must have failed.’
‘Must have’ released a thrill of fear in me, like the prospect of physical pain.
‘There were oars in the boat. He had to row to shore. He found a sandy place among the rocks where he could land. He pulled the boat up the shore – and on to a mine.’
In the early darkness the room was contracting. On the window-ledge a pigeon was winding itself round and round and round like a top.
‘Gioconda,’ said 1. ‘Gioconda.’
She lifted her hand from her breast to make a show of her own acceptance; to make her history bearable to me.
At last she continued, ‘I think that killed my father, the war reaching back like that and taking him along with it. I believe it killed my father. It seemed, once more, intended, ordained, after the refusal to engage in it. How it lay in wait for him, that violence, the useless death he had shunned for others and for himself. Another terrible fulfilment. My father came there and took me away. I have never been back. He saw to everything. There were the paintings – some belonged to a dealer, others went to the family – for he still had his family in Rome, his father serving at an osteria in Trastevere. Some I kept. My father did everything. We went on, for a dreadful year, together, here in this house. Then he took sick. At first it was said to be an ulcer, but it was cancer, I suppose, from the beginning. In a few months he was dead. The war – in its way, it killed him too.’
She said, in another of these asides that were like a drawing of the breath she needed to finish her story, ‘When I talk of it this way, now, to you, it all comes out as if there were some sequence, some logic, instead of moods, contradictions, alternatives. The design imposes itself afterwards. And is false, must be false
‘Then I wrote that book, you know, Del Tempo Felice. During the last months of my father’s life. I only knew I must live as long as he was alive. So it was, in a way, as though we both were dying, my time running out along with his. In sleep I would tell myself all that had happened so I wouldn’t wake up thinking myself still there – at that place – because remembering happiness was the worst of all, just as the poets say. In suffering, everything is as the poets say … Memory was intolerable, I had to set it down, even though that engendered more memories, more and more memories. It was as if I had to get it all done before some great departure. I used to sit by my father’s bed at the hospital writing it on my knee, unwilling to stop even when he asked me to read a book or a newspaper to him …’ Tears at last flowed over her face and she inclined her cheek to her woollen shoulder to rub them off. ‘I would write it while I ate, while I was falling asleep, while I sat in the bus. It was finished just after my father’s death.’
She looked at me again. ‘It was then that Gianni came. And saved my life – as they say.’ Gioconda, in adding this last phrase, sought to detract from the drama, the melodrama, of what she said enough to allow of its yet being uttered. ‘What you see – is nothing. No more than a dress of mine is me. He understood entirely … entirely. It was a rescue. I had transmitted my message, like a castaway, without hope. Then I was sent for and brought back into the world. He did it all.’ She repeated, as she had of her father, ‘He did everything.’ She said, ‘He devoted himself to me, to that work of mine. How can one explain? – it did not happen in spite of my loving someone else, it was because of my experience that we loved each other.’
‘Like Othello,’ I said. ‘Only the other way round.
She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her, that she did pity them.’
Gioconda got up and crossed the room. She took an envelope out of a drawer of the desk and brought it back to me. There was no trace of her tears at all. She might have been an acquaintance casually showing me the snapshots of some holiday, so expertly had she controlled herself. In the envelope were three photographs of a cadaverous man in a heavy sweater leaning against a chalky wall. There was one picture of Gioconda, the Gioconda of my imaginings, with shoulder-length hair and a tightly belted waist, standing on a beach with her hands behind her back and her bare feet together: it was the stance of a prisoner, but the fresh young face was alight with laughter.
Gioconda replaced the photographs in the envelope, keeping back for an instant the clearest of them and holding it for me to see.
‘Gaetano,’ she said. ‘His name was Gaetano.’
She put the envelope back and closed the drawer. She switched on the lamp that stood on the desk, and we looked at each other anew in the light of her experience. I was convinced she had not spoken like this before, at least not at such length, or dispassionately. Words would have been as presumptuous as an embrace: yet the inadequacy of silence was painful. Trapped in our thoughts and our afterthoughts, we have no impulses left to serve us on such occasions.
She said, ‘When people say of their tragedies, “I don’t often think of it now”, what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colours everything. Because the idea of Gaetano is always with me, I’m less shocked now, when I suddenly come upon some reminder of him, than I was long ago when he still seemed a grief I must get over. Even a few years back it could still be terrible. In New York, one day, I went into a gallery – one of those dealer’s shops with lots of light and carpet. I had really gone in to get warm – it was a freezing day. And on the wall there was a picture of his, painted just after the war. La Ginestra – what’s that, in English?’
‘The gorse. No, the broom.’
‘I had been buying things – you know, presents from America. I was carrying all the packages in a big paper bag; The girl at the desk kept saying, “Check your shopping bag. Check your bag, Miss,” and I was staring at his yellow canvas across the room. They had a notice, Please do not touch the paintings; they should forbid the paintings to touch you.’ She turned her palm outward to me. ‘It was no
thing unpredictable, was it, after all? But then I felt it like violence done to me. Gianni and I had just become lovers. Oh God, now I’ve upset this ashtray – it’s all right, nothing’s alight. It’s all gone out by now. Well; I wanted to pay some tribute. I couldn’t leave without – - as it were – laying my wreath at this Madison Avenue shrine …’
‘What, then?’
She smiled. ‘I asked the price. Such are the gestures of modern love. It was a means of recognition – to have the girl take her eyes off my shopping bag for a moment and consult a list, stumble over Gaetano’s name, pronounced ‘Ginestra’ as if it were a hospital for women’s diseases … For a moment I made them defer, unknowingly, to my grief, made them take account of our connection. The owner of the gallery even swam out of the wings somewhere, on hearing my question, and came up to me as though I were a bride.’
She got to her feet, began to brush at her skirt with both hands. She said. ‘It’s all wrong, what I’ve told you,’ as she had said of her sister’s story. ‘But I can come no closer to it.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
I had begun by then to treat the city with a show of familiarity ; pretending, as people do with a celebrated acquaintance, to know it better than I did, inserting myself into its landscape, another figure in its vast presepio; acquiring habits of cafés and buses and hairdressers, uttering casual observations that sounded on my own ears exotic as examples from a phrasebook : ‘There is snow on the Apennines’, or ‘Capri is always clearer in bad weather’.
The assets of Naples are so secret, they give the impression of having been deliberately concealed; lodged away, for the most part, in malodorous side-streets, embedded in some squalid recess, they partake of the city’s poverty. Rarely do they give the sense, as do the historic sights of other cities, of having died and been resurrected: from that illustrious after-life their own vitality, their capacity for adaptation has excluded them; they are engulfed in their own continuity.
It is the people, not the monuments, of Naples who are blatantly featured, every face a subject for study – physiognomy evincing, like architecture, here the Spanish influence, there the Arab or the Greek. Civilization has come upon them like one of their own cataclysms, flowing with ungovernable impetus down channels of its own creation – in some respects total, all-permeating; in others leaving inexplicable areas of innocence, of rusticity. For there would occur, in that immensity of independent actions, incidents that might have taken place in a village, or in some small town cut off from any novelty or tide of history. I remember that one evening I was looking in a shop window in Piazza dei Martiri – at suede shoes of delicate colours, purses of indigo velvet, scarves of satin flowers, Parisian stuff at odds with its southern setting – and turned to find at my back a young couple, modestly though not poorly dressed, the girl in grey, the man wearing a broad black armband. Like a deputation they awaited me, timidly excusing themselves before coming out with their question ‘Are you Norwegian?’ And, when I was not, excused themselves once more — ‘Only we heard – you know – that Norwegian women were all fair, and with light eyes …’
It was inoffensive curiosity of the kind one might feel on finding a rare bird in one’s garden — merely the desire to fix its identity before it disappeared forever. Yet it was, mysteriously, this same simplicity that grandly, gracefully expressed itself in the hairdresser’s sturdy little shampoo girl when, sweeping my hair back into the washbasin with her plump arms, she praised its colour and abundance with the comment, ‘Come la Maddalena’ —this ‘like the Magdalen’ as easily uttered as if it had been a flattering comparison with some film star.
The history and geography of calamity had so worked on these people that the excitement attending any public disaster was fundamentally devoid of surprise – if anything, there was an element of relief in the rupturing of an apparently continual suspense. Once, walking in a narrow street (it was Via Carlo Poerio, that has since blossomed into a rank of boutiques but then was strung with greengrocers and salumerie, dealers in wrought iron and kapok, and any number of minor junkies) I had crossed to look into an antique shop, when the ground was shaken by a tremendous crash, and I spun round to find that the entire facade of an old palazzo had collapsed into the street, flattening a parked car. From premonition, or from some preliminary sound, I had turned at the very moment of the impact, in time to see the shower of fragments sparking upward in a cloud of plaster-dust. No one was hurt. The car – so instantly and totally crushed that it now appeared to have been like this always – bore on its hollowed roof a heap of mortar, gesso, and masonry, topped by one of the stone garlands that had decorated an upper window and now lay on the summit of the pyre like a wreath on a tomb.
There was an interval of complete, cautious silence before the street’s inhabitants came out to look. Far from causing indignation, the catastrophe produced any number of shrugs. ‘Che buò?’ they inquired of one another, ‘What do you expect? What might be expected, apparently, was just this – that the front of a building might fall off at one’s feet. Somebody at last went off to telephone the fire brigade, children started to scale the eminence of masonry and car. When interest had all but subsided, a placid-looking matron revived it by suddenly waving her arms and shrieking, ‘Danger, danger!’ – the word ‘pericolo’ uttered exactly as if it were spelt ‘breegolu’.
It was this sense of catastrophe, impending and actual, that heightened the Neapolitan attachment to life and made an alleviation out of every small diversion or absurdity. The background of adversity, against which all else was to be posed, manifested itself involuntarily in attitude and gesture, in figures of speech, or in the mannerism, habitual as a tic, of warding off the evil eye; in the endless invoking of a patience with which they had been over-endowed in the first place, and which they pronounced almost as if it were the word for madness; in an old woman crying after a boy who had jostled her, ‘A fine consolation you are’.
The city itself was marked by a volcanic extravagance. Its characteristics had not insinuated themselves but had arrived in inundations – in eruptions of taste and period, of churches and palaces, in a positive explosion of the baroque; in an outbreak of grotesque capitals, or double geometrical staircases; in a torrent of hanging gardens poured down over terraces and rooftops, spilt along ledges and doorsteps. The very streets were composed of blocks of lava, dark rivers that flowed through Naples and gave place, indoors, to a sea of ceramic tiles and marble intarsia: the word lava itself, in its volcanic sense, had originated at Naples. The Neapolitan painters had flashed through every considerable edifice of the town, leaving the place awash with Solimenas and Luca Giordanos and Lanfrancos, a flood-tide of decoration that rose over walls and across ceilings. Nothing in moderation might have been the motto of these people; who were yet, like their city, ultimately a secret.
Ordinariness, the affliction and backbone of other cities, was here non-existent. Phrases I had always thought universal – the common people, the average family, the typical reaction, ordinary life – had no meaning where people were all uncommon and life extraordinary; where untraceable convulsions of human experience had yielded up such extremes of destitution, of civilization.
Throughout the city there were inexhaustible sources of this or that – little fonts and geysers of commodity or personality: one street provided all the stringed instruments, another all the holy pictures, another all the funeral wreaths, or the coffins; the Hospital of the Pellegrini was the source of macabre jokes; the Albergo dei Poveri of the grimmest legends. And on New Year’s Eve, in a revolting ritual, every window flung forth its annual accumulation of major garbage, burying the city under tons of broken utensils, plastic ornaments, cracked bottles and empty tins, from which, each January, it was slowly re-excavated by the street-cleaners.
After I moved to the Posillipo I employed a girl called Serafina, who came to me each morning and stayed half the day, returning sometimes in the evening if I had guests. For this slender Serafina, the wo
rd was wiry. Her flat figure and reedy arms suggested tough fibres and filaments, her hair was tightly crinkled from the scalp into resilient spirals. Her handsome, semitic profile never smiled, but full-face she expressed a tenacious, embittered humour. There had been, still was, a husband to whom Serafina had been married at fifteen; who now lived and worked at Salerno. To the question as to whether she ever visited him, Serafina replied – with a friction of thumb and finger and ‘La grana’ – that the journey was too expensive; but she seldom spoke of him and I think that there was also lack of inclination.
In order to arrive before I left for work, she came very early, and many of our conversations took place through the bathroom door – or as I dressed, carrying my coffee about with me from room to room and searching for my earrings or my shoes. I would call out remarks and questions, and back would come her responses soft and deliberate as in church. She felt herself under an obligation to modify my opinions – as if, as a foreigner, I were not qualified to form definite views, even on the weather. If I commented on the cold, she would reprove me, ‘Not so bad’, or ‘It’s the season for it’, and a moment later I would hear her calling out the kitchen window to a workman or a neighbour, ‘Cold enough to split your nails’. If a group of boys played their radio full blast on the landing stage below, Serafina would counter my groans with ‘Si divertono, poverini’, at the very instant that she opened the terrace doors to bawl down at them ‘Tant’ammuina!’
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