(Naples)
I REMEMBER THAT ITALY IN AUGUST, 1944, LAY OFF OUR PORT like a golden porpoise lapped in dawn. She had eggs and lumps on her outline which the sun and the light mist grossened into wens. From nearer I made them out to be the island of Capri and the volcano Vesuvius. I peered with more interest than I had at Africa, for I had precise and confused ideas of what Italy’d be like.
I remember how in my head and in my heart the city of Naples had always nestled like a sleeping question mark, as an entity gay and sad and full of what they call Life. I knew it would be a port town, but a port town over which lay a color and a weight peculiarly Naples’ own, a short girl with dark eyes and rich skin and body hair. Motherhood. Huge and inscrutable as the feminine Idea.
In August, 1944, the port of Naples was a flytrap of bustle and efficiency and robbery in the midst of ruin and panic. Images of disaster lay about the harbor: ships sunk at their berths, shattered unloading machinery, pumiced tenements along the docks. And back of this lunette the island of Capri sheered out of the bay, a sunny yellow bulkhead. Vesuvius smoked softly and solemnly, the way a philosophic plumber does at a wake. The Bay of Naples was crammed with Liberty ships and boats with red crosses on their sides and decks. Out Bagnoli way among the laurels and the myrtles landing craft infantry thumped up and down in the water.
— I don’t like to look at bombed buildings, the pfc said, putting polaroid lenses over his spectacles. Not that this will shut out the view.
— Ten months ago, the mess sergeant said, these greasy bastards were still hearin sirens and gettin pasted.
I remember how the blue of the Mediterranean shaded into gray or rainbowed oil around the berths. Everything floated near the piers: watermelons, condoms, chunks of fissured wood, strips of faded cloth.
— Europe drains into the Bay of Naples, the pfc said.
And I remember the jeeps along Via Caracciolo near the section of Santa Lucia, and how Zi’ Teresa’s restaurant jutting on a small float was then a French officers’ mess, and the tunnel to Bagnoli. I remember whizzing past the statues of the aquarium, the war monuments (Napoli ai suoi caduti) that stared out to sea in the sunlight as stiff and superannuated as warriors on the porch of an old-soldiers’ home. The sunlight gives Naples a hardness and a mercilessness. It pokes its realistic fingers into the bombed buildings by Navy House. In the half shot houses what plaster yet remains in the eaves is as living and suppurating as human skin. And just over Naples stand the hills where the Vomero sits on its snaky terraces and flights of stairs like an old lady precarious on a trapeze. The houses of Naples as they swarm up the hillside are yellow or creamy or brown; they get lost in the verdure that mustaches the lips of Castel Sant’Elmo. I couldn’t place Naples in any century because it had a taste at once modern and medieval, all grown together in weariness and urgency and disgust. Yet even in her half-death Naples is alive and furious with herself and with life. The hillside on which she lies, legs open like a drunken trollop, trembles when she turns on her fan bed. I remember too that at midday, when she was sleepiest of all in the lurid heat, she was a symbol of life itself, resentful and spiteful and cursing, yet very tender in her ruin.
— I don’t care what anybody says, the corporal said, this is a terrific town. Absolutely terrific. There’s something here that makes me restless and drowsy at the same time. Naples ain’t just a city, like St. Louis or Omaha. There’s something moving in the air above Naples. . . . Poison gas? Perfume?
— Ah, blow it, the mess sergeant said. Look at them skirts jigglin over them rears.
I remember that along Via Caracciolo thousands of people strolled in the late afternoon. There came a hot wind off the bay that ruffled the buttocks and the marvelous breasts of the Italian women. It mussed their black thick hair. Everyone walked arm in arm, talking, laughing, crying, shouting, gesticulating. I remember the shabbiness of Neapolitan suits, different from the shine on the seats of American pants. I remember the mourning bands on the lapels of the Neapolitan men. I remember Neapolitan shoes — when there were any — cracked or sprouting or leaking, of sick flashy leather like the cheeks of the feverish. I remember the lipstick and powder that the women used — when they could get any — of the tint of fevered blood. I remember the dark pallidity of those girls who could get none. I remember the glistening damp underarm hair when the Neapolitan women put up a hand to their heads, and their legs, which seemed often to be skinned in dewy feathers.
I remember the walls along Piazza Municipio, stuck with movie posters and the yellow playbills of the San Carlo and the Italian review Febbre Azzurra, or “Prossimamente Greer Garson in Prigionieri del Passato,” and Charlie Chaplin in Il Grande Dittatore, and Napoli Milionaria, and Soffia So’. And the shops with their windows half-empty, with their scant goods cutely spread out to fake a display:
— Prezzi sbalordativi. . . .
— Riduzioni del 20%. . . .
Or the bookstores where Louisa May Alcott became Piccole Donne, where paper-bound ocher books lay in carts like cheeses on their sides, where Benedetto Croce was bedfellow with old copies of Life and that bitching Roman periodical Marforio, with nude girls prancing on the cover. And in every street and vico the little rafts on wheels selling shoelaces, and combs that shattered when they touched my scalp. And how bottles were sawed down to make glasses and vases, and how chestnuts and oranges and tomatoes and spinaci stood wilting in the food stores.
— Oggi si vende. . . .
— Si distribuisce sale. . . .
— Non si riparano gomme per mancanza di materiale. . . .
— Lo spaccio, la tessera. . . .
I remember the San Carlo Opera House on the corner by the traffic island, across the street from a pro station — its 1743 A.D. arches, its lines sweating out opera and ballet at thirty-five lire. Near it the palazzo where the Limeys took their tea and the British officers got drunk on their roof terrace and poured gin on pedestrians passing into the Galleria Umberto. And I remember that every vico and salita had a different smell. Along Via Roma there was the color of movement: the OD’s of the combat troops, the rusty shorts of the UK, the melting splotches of the Neapolitan housewives’ house dresses, the patter of sandals, the click of hobnails, the squunch of children’s brown bare soles as they begged, pimped, screamed, tugged, cried, and offered. On Via Roma there was a smell, I remember, of fake coffee roasting, of ice cream with phony flavors and colors, of musty dry goods gloated over by the padrone behind his bars against thieves. Out of every alley in Naples the whiff of a thousand years of life and death and bed sheets and urination. The glass over the colored picture of the Madonna of Torre Annunziata. The clinking of the gratings on the balconies. And especially that small basket being hauled up and down many stories on its string, pulling up newspapers and groceries and the baby. Each alley had a different stench from many families with their own residua of body excretion, sweat, halitosis, and dandruff. And I remember alley after alley winding off Via Roma like a bowel, each with its off-limits sign. All I could see of them was the entrance, a flash of cobblestones, a turn of sunlight, and the scarred face of a wall shutting off all further exploration.
— I’m lost in Naples, said the pfc. Life has struck me in the face like a flounder. Cold, hot, ghastly, and lovely.
I remember making acquaintance with Italian. At first all I heard in Naples was asssshpett and capeeesh and payyysannn. But after a few days it broke down into something more articulate. Italian (not Neapolitan dialect) can soon be understood because it sounds like what it’s saying. Italian is a language as natural as the human breath. Italian is a feminine and flowing tongue in which the endings fill up the pauses, covering those gaps and gaucheries of conversation that embarrass Americans and British. It’s a language whose inertia has remained on the plus side. It keeps in motion by its own inherent drive. The Italians are never silent with one another. It isn’t necessary even to think in this lovely language, for your breath comes and goes anyhow, and you might just as well use it to talk with. And good loving talk! If you’ve nothing to say, ehhh and senz’altro and per forza and per questo are always tumbling from your lips to prevent the flow from getting static. And then there were dico and dice, and the tumble of the Italian past subjunctive, like smoke turning on itself:
— Se io andassi o se tu potessi.
I remember that Italian used to amuse me till it caught me in its silken web. I remember how kind the Neapolitans were to me when I was learning it, the sweetness of their grammatical corrections, the look of joy on an Italian’s face when you address him in his tongue, however poorly. Italian is the most sociable and Christian language in this world. It’s full of a bubble like laughter. Yet it’s capable of power and bitterness. It has nouns that tick off a personality as neatly as a wisecrack. It’s a language in which the voice runs to all levels. You all but sing, and you work off your passion with your hands.
— Io andare a casa tua per mangiare e per fare amore . . . finito capito amato andato venduto. . . . Capeeesh? . . . Molto buono, no buono, acqua fresca. . . .
I remember that sometimes I used to wonder if so tender and human a language might disappear from the world because of the pattern of conquest. Italian is an atavistic language. All the rest have been visited by some torture or trickery or introspection. Italian alone is the language of the moment, cunning yet unpremeditated. I learned Italian in order to make love. And I found Italian feminine and secret and grave and puzzled and laughing, like a woman. Perhaps it came from the tit of Signora Eve in the Garden. For Italian is like milk and butter, sauced with some pepper lest it cloy you with its sweetness. Once Italian got into my palate, I remember, it never again left me. So I learned Italian in Naples.
I remember also the dialect of the city of Naples, which is Italian chewed to shreds in the mouth of a hungry man. It varies even within the city. The fishermen in the bay talk differently from the rich in the Vomero. Every six blocks in the squashed-together city there’s a new dialect. But the dialect is Naples and Naples is the dialect. It’s as raw as tenement living, as mercurial as a thief to your face, as tender as the flesh on the breast. Sometimes in one sentence it’s all three. The stateliness of Tuscan Italian is missing in Neapolitan. But there’s no false stateliness in Naples either, except in some alien fountain presented by a Duchess of Lombardy. Neapolitan dialect isn’t ornamental. Its endings have been amputated just as Neapolitan living pares to the heart and hardness of life. Wild sandwiches occur in the middle of words, doublings of z’s, cramming of m’s and n’s. When they say something, the Neapolitans scream and moan and stab and hug and vituperate. All at once. And O God, their gestures! The hand before the groin, the finger under the chin, the cluckings, the head-shakings. In each sentence they seem to recapitulate all the emotions that human beings know. They die and live and faint and desire and despair. I remember the dialect of Naples. It was the most moving language I ever listened to. It came out of the fierce sun over the bleached and smelly roofs, the heavy night, childbirth, starvation, and death. I remember too the tongues that spoke Neapolitan to me: the humorous, the sly, the gentle, the anguished, the merciful, and the murderous. Those tongues that spoke it were like lizards warm in the sun, jiggling their tails because they were alive.
— I have hoid, said the mess sergeant, teasing a Neapolitan child with a chocolate bar, that da wimmin are purtier in Nort Italy. But ya can’t trump da build on da Neapolitan goils. Nuttin but rear ends bouncin like Jello and milk factories under dere dresses. I’m goin crazy for it.
I remember how the women and girls of Naples stood for all the women and girls of the world. There were girls like the Kresge and Woolworth pigs of Joisey City, with their hair not quite combed and dark and too long. Under this fluffy frowzy rat’s-nest they had earrings too heavy for their ears, with some cabalistic design or jewel. And there were the girls of the Vomero, of the strangling middle class, who were rushed along Via Roma on their mothers’ arms, girls who were locked up after nightfall when they’d come in from their classes at the university. Now they were studentesse, but soon they’d be dottoresse:
Un libro di latino
Per un giovinottino . . .
They were like pretty mice in cotton dresses as they whisked by me with their chaperones. Sometimes I caught their eyes on the oblique when Mamma was looking the other way, eyes demure and hypocritical, eyes shooting feudal disdain for the poorer Italian women, eyes masking jealousy and curiosity of those lower Neapolitan women who went with gli alleati. And there were also a few, very few Neapolitan women who reminded me of the blaring independence of American girls, who promenaded slowly through the street, well made up, their hair a little lighter, their legs a little daintier, their dresses fresh and trim. And once in a while I saw a marchesa or a contessa who’d played ball with the fascists and was now doing likewise with gli alleati. These were slim and forty and chic. They could be seen all over Europe, not just in Naples. And there were also the widows of Naples with their canes and sober bags. But most ubiquitous on Via Roma were those signurrine who chewed gum and had forgotten how to speak Italian. These walked always in pairs, and they screeched American obscenities at one another, taught them by some armored force sergeant in heat. They called every American Joe, and they knew “Stardust” and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” They knew the words better than I did.
But I remember best of all the children of Naples. The scugnizz’. Naples is the greatest baby plant in the world. Once they come off the assembly line, they lose no time getting onto the streets. They learn to walk and talk in the gutters. Many of them seem to live there. As the curfew was progressively lifted to a later and later hour, the children of Naples spent the evenings on the sidewalks. If I had to keep in my memory just one picture of the Neapolitan kaleidoscope, it would be of a brother and sister, never over ten years of age, sleeping on a curbstone in the sunlight with a piece of chewed dark bread beside them. Sometimes I thought that in Naples the order of bees and human beings was upside down, that the children supported and brought up their parents.
Once I remember attempting to count the number of shoeshine boys between Via Diaz and the Galleria Umberto. I never could, for new shoeshine stands opened behind my back by the time I’d walked ten feet. Those incredible scugnizz’! They weren’t children at all, the scugnizz’, but sorrowful wise mocking gremlins. They sold Yank and Stars and Stripes. They lurked outside the PX to buy my rations. They pimped for their sisters, who stood looking out at me from behind the balcony of a primo piano tenement. They sold charms and divisional insignia in the streets. They hawked dough that looked like doughnuts or fritters, but tasted like grilled papier-mâché. They stole everything with a brilliance and furtiveness and constancy that made me think of old Ayrab fairy tales. They shrilled and railed at me in perfect and scouring American, as though they’d learned it from some sailor lying in a gutter and hollering holy hell to ease his heart. The children of Naples were determined not to die, with the determination in which corpuscles mass to fight a virus that has invaded them. They owned the vitality of the damned. And they laughed at me, themselves, the whole world. Often I thought that we, the conquering army, were weaker and sillier than they. I loved the scugnizz’ because I had no illusions about them.
— Wanna eat, Joe?
— Wanna souvenir of Naples?
— Wanna drink, Joe?
— Wanna nice signorina? Wanna piecea arse?
— The kids are so dirty, the corporal said. But they have such fine teeth and eyes and skin . . . like coffee with a little milk in it. . . . An they’re smart as whips. Look at the way they’ve learned American just so they can buy an sell to us. . . . An, Christ, what can ya do when the poor little tykes stand outside ya mess and watch ya dumpin out GI food that somebody’s wasted? The MP’s won’t let ya feed em. Why? Why?
— I suppose, said the pfc, that these children are responsible for Mussolini? that the babies of Naples supported Farinacci and Badoglio and the house of Savoy and the vested interests of Turin and Milan?
— Ya go crazy if ya study on it too much, said the corporal.
— Las night, the mess sergeant said, I seen two marines come outa the docks. An they met up with two signorinas of about eleven or twelve. Ya can’t tell. They become wimmin so young here. . . . Start em young, I always say.
— Well, I guess the good must suffer with the bad, the corporal said. That’s what the Bible says.
— If the Bible says that, said the pfc, Hitler should have burnt it too.
I remember the levels and terraces of Naples, slipping from the Vomero into the bay. I’d go from the bottom of the town to the top of the funiculars, which slide under the hillside on cables. Everybody fought their way into the cars in the stations. Then you skied along the wire. Sometimes you came into the light between two palazzi. Sometimes you scudded through a brief tunnel. Everyone’s shoulder was against everyone else’s gut. In the spells of darkness I’d reassure myself that my Ayrab wallet was still in my pocket. In the dark the storm of Neapolitan dialect went on:
— Di, Pino, hai portato tua moglie Pina?
Or I remember sometimes being stranded in the Vomero. For the funiculars stopped running at 2100 hours. The Neapolitans believed that the force of gravity ceased at sundown. Then it became a problem of descent down stairs that I couldn’t even see, for Naples was blacked out. There must have been forty flights and levels. God help me when I got caught at the top without a flashlight! It meant groping along the dank walls of the houses, of gauging my step on stairs set at a pitch I couldn’t walk or run: about one and a half times the normal stride. Each stairway had a different gauge, and each angle was different. It was like walking into a cellar of smells and secret life, for out of the houses over my head came the sound of GI’s haggling for vino after hours, of women slapped and cursed by their husbands, of children eating their pasta. Sometimes I remember how across the path of my uncertain descent a light would fall athwart the mossy chipped stairs from an ill-closed door. Or a woman and her child would appear in the spectrum. Even as I stumbled down, I wondered what they were thinking. A piece of their lives had fallen across my way in an ax of radiation.
Sometimes around midnight I remember that a peace would hit Naples. The heat shifted gears for the hour of dawn. Only then did any silence come to the wrestling odorous city. There were stars over Vesuvius. The LCI’s in the bay rocked and bubbled like ducks. The lights of the MP’s kiosks and the glow from the pro stations rode in the hot dark like beacons. Then I’d twist under my mosquito netting.
— Napoli? . . . I’ve had it . . . or it’s having me. . . .