SEVENTH PORTRAIT

Giulia

IN 1943 THE ALLIED BOMBERS HIT NAPLES INCESSANTLY. THEY came in the afternoons with a noise like mad cicadas. But Giulia and her brother Gennaro rarely took to the shelters. It smelled foul down there. And Giulia and Gennaro had had enough of the stench of families living night after night at lap’s length. They’d had enough of the screams of women giving birth to their babies in the ricoveri, those screams which could pierce the hum of the plane motors and the crunch of the bombs hitting the streets above their heads.

The English bombers made sorties almost daily from noon to fifteen hours. While families scurried screaming underground, Giulia and Gennaro would take to the top of their apartment house. In the sunlight on the roof they’d lean like connoisseurs on the parapet railing and watch the aircraft diving on the port.

— Se ci uccidono, Giulia said, clutching Gennaro’s cool hand, ci uccidono e basta, no?

They’d boo fine hits. Often the American planes dropped nothing but leaflets, telling the Neapolitans that the Allies were coming as friends. Giulia and Gennaro had long arrived at the conclusion that it mightn’t be such a bad thing to be liberated after all. They knew the score. Their Papa was a ragioniere, endlessly totting up figures in the employ of the state. He told them all the office gossip of the Questura. Hence they knew that fascism, at least in Naples, was as bloated as those balloons sold at the feast of Piedigrotta, which exploded when their rubber saw the sun.

After the pamphlet bombings Giulia and Gennaro would gather up handfuls of the leaflets that fell on their roof. These they’d bring to Papa. They’d all sit around the dining room table while the old man put on his spectacles and deciphered them. He read slowly and avidly under the stained-glass light. So Papa too came to the conclusion that it mightn’t be such a bad idea for the Allies to take Naples. He didn’t tell this to his children, but they read his thoughts.

Giulia was nineteen. She had a pale little face under brown ringlets that hung over her forehead like spun sugar. Everything about her was tiny: her mouth, her throat, her breasts, her waist, her ankles. Her expression was always of contented repose, even when she was talking most animatedly with her chum Elvira, whom she’d chosen as her foil because Elvira was a dowd. Giulia dressed in gay cotton or linen dresses, with a tiny belt about her minute waist, tiny white sport pumps with heels that were almost too high. After every bombing she’d pick her way with Elvira or Gennaro through the streets of Naples. She avoided the rubble and the corpses. The sun danced on a segment of her honeyed skin and made a halo on her small beribboned straw hat. She knew she didn’t look much like a Neapolitan girl. Possibly because her mother Rina had been a Florentine before Papa had induced her to settle with him in Naples. But Giulia was politician enough to speak Neapolitan dialect when she was with her chums. She’d had a better education than most girls of her class. She had almost as much book learning as Gennaro, who was in his second year at the University of Naples. When she was at the liceo, Guilia by some premonition had taken all the English courses she could get. Now she was teaching Gennaro English in the evenings after the dishes were done. From her maestra Giulia had an Oxford accent. She and her brother used to laugh over these lessons, his brown high brow crinkling over the difference between louse lice and spouse spouses.

Two years ago Giulia’d allowed her family to engage her hand for marriage. To a Neapolitan sottotenente with mustaches, spectacles, and serious intentions. But Pasquale became a prisoner of war. From his barbed-wire enclosure in Oran he wrote Giulia weekly a twenty-four line letter on green American stationery, with the return address in Italian, German, and Japanese. He told her of his loneliness, of the American Spam he was eating. He hoped that the war would soon end so that she and he could settle down with his family on Via Chiaia, and he could go on with his career as an engineer. In her mind Giulia had already written him off as a liability. She wrote Carissimo fidanzato to him once a week. And like all good Italian girls she led the life of a respectable fidanzata. She visited Pasquale’s family once a month and mourned for him as though he were dead. She passed her time as a ragazza per bene, shut up in the house with Mamma or going to the cinema with her brother Gennaro or her chum Elvira, that simpatica dowd. Giulia lived in that vacuum and parenthesis that was Naples from July to October, 1943. Yet in her small breast she nurtured a hope.

The only excitement in Giulia’s life (she’d never batted an eyelash at the bombings) was the periodic concealing of her brother every time the Germans came around to conscript him. In such moments coolness and resourcefulness shone forth all over Giulia. Gennaro would go white under his tan. Mamma would have a heart attack and lie moaning on the tasseled couch, praying that Papa wouldn’t show up from his office, lose his temper with the Tedeschi, and get shot. Gennaro was also in danger of a fucilazione if they ever caught him. Such crises happened every other week. Only Giulia was capable of holding the entire Wehrmacht at bay at the door of their apartment. The Tedeschi respected her as she stood in the doorway, shaking her brown ringlets at them. None ever laid a finger on her, from Gefreiter to Hauptmann. Elvira however licked her chops over frightful stories of Neapolitan girls (always unidentified) whose nude bodies were said to have bobbed up in the Bay of Naples or been stuffed up a culvert on the road to Bagnoli.

Giulia’s brother Gennaro was seventeen. She knew she had more influence on him than either Mamma or Papa. She doted on Gennaro. As she watched him comb his black hair over his white linen coat, she often told herself that Gennaro was bello: he wasn’t dark or greasy like many Neapolitans. She wished he was a little taller, but everything in Gennaro’s body was in fine harmony as he walked with her and Elvira, taking both their arms. Giulia loved him best when he was groaning over his English under the stained-glass lamp at the dinner table, his delicate face puckered into a cold passion, the rich undulations of his hair escaping down almost into his eyes. She noted that he’d a quick brain, though not so agile as her own. Gennaro kept his body to a whiplike temper by swimming, by fencing with other young Camicie Nere, and by dancing, which he loved dearly. And he was wise enough not to tie himself down by going steady with a Neapolitan girl. The times were too unstable. Occasionally he’d disappear with a friend. Giulia knew where they went those evenings. To the casino of Madam Sappho. But then Gennaro was seventeen, and the heart that beat under his short-sleeved shirts and crisp summer jacket was the heart of a Neapolitan, which must make love.

Mamma had gained many chili since Papa’d brought her in 1924 as a bride from Florence. Once she’d been as slim as Giulia, according to her photos. Now she sat huge and bloated in her dark deep chair, listening to forbidden English radio broadcasts. Her heart wasn’t good. Mamma was happiest when she heard jazz from London or when she ate a pizza prepared by Giulia to trick her appetite or when her cronies dropped up for coffee — a thing that didn’t happen too often in these days of constant air-raid sirens. Every evening after supper she lectured her children on the vices of the world and reminisced on their one trip back to Florence to visit her relatives. Mamma hated Naples. She told the same stories over and over, but the children gave her her allotted hour every evening, sitting at her feet and listening to the hoarse gasping voice coming out of her chins and the mole on her lip. Giulia sat with her small feet tucked up under her buttocks, and Gennaro in the dim apartment smoked a Nazionale and nodded his head dreamily, saying:

— Eh si, cara mamma. . . .

And Giulia, in the thousandth repetition of the warning that Naples would be dangerous for a ragazza after the Allies took it (as they eventually must) would study Gennaro’s nose in the moonlight and feel a compulsion to tweak it. She wondered if at Madam Sappho’s too the women loved and understood her brother.

Every afternoon at fifteen hours Papa banged up the five flights of stairs to the apartment. He came directly from his office in the Questura, where he spent the day playing poker and adding up columns of lire and centesimi. He was always furious and splenetic till he’d had three cups of scalding caffè espresso. Then his spirits would rise and he’d bawl and mime in dialect for the rest of the afternoon. His gray mustaches and gray hair and small paunch quivered with apprehension. This apprehension was founded on the insecurity of all employees of the Fascist state. Till now they were doing all right. They were the middle class with comfortable fixed stipends. But after the Allies came (as they surely would) the stipend would remain unchanged and the lira would go down down down. Papa could always awake Mamma from her doze by the radio by telling her that as soon as Naples fell, she’d lose all her avoirdupois because there wouldn’t be anything to eat in the house. He also described with gestures his daughter earning her living on the streets and his son withdrawing from the university to work as a truck driver for the Allies, and at a wage that wouldn’t keep him in shoelaces. At this point Mamma would awake with a jump, scream, say her rosary, caress her children, and say that Italia was rovinata and they would all be rovesciati. Giulia and Gennaro, hearing of these predicted horrors, would merely smile at each other. For they knew they’d get along somehow, even if the Russians took over Naples.

In his youth Papa had been more progressive and socially minded than most of the employees of the Fascist state, who simply pocketed their stipends and their bribes, did as they were told, and played mad politics with the questore at the questura. In 1919 Papa was returning from under arms, sad and confused for the future of Italy. Then he had met Benito Mussolini and had fallen under the spell. Until the Ethiopian War Papa had been a vigorous and intelligent Fascist. Papa knew so well the good and the evil of fascism. Why hadn’t the combines of Torino and Milano let well enough alone? Why hadn’t they built up Campania and Puglie instead of distracting the public’s attention with the Ethiopian War? Why a dream of empire when Italy had only begun to be unified? So from 1935 on Papa had been as tepid a Fascist as a ragioniere employed by the state dared to be.

— Ho smarrito la fede nel sognato destino, he said.

And with the outbreak of the Second World War Papa in despair ceased to go to Mass on Sundays. In his home he wept and railed against the farabutti who had brought this on Italy. He predicted a speedy end to Europe. He cursed the Italian middle class and the house of Savoy. His curses were in his throatiest Neapolitan. In their hearts his children agreed with him. Mamma wept continually. Her heart condition got worse.

On 3 October 1943, Naples fell to the Fifth Army. For a week Mamma kept her entire family about her in the house. She had a chain of cardiac attacks. The house was without light or gas. The sounds of the liberators in movement that came up from the streets were far more ominous than during the air raids or when the Tedeschi were in Naples. Mamma, with her feet in sheepskin slippers on the divan, was tended by all. She lamented that she’d ever lived to see this day. She said it was the end of the world for all of them. She lambasted Papa for not having consummated his plan of going to America twenty years ago. And every five minutes she made Giulia or Gennaro peer out of the apartment window into the swirling foggy streets to see if there were any New Zealanders coming. She remembered what Il Duce had said the Kiwis would do to all the women of Italy. She had Giulia fetch the carving knife from the cupboard. She promised that this knife would finish in Giulia’s heart if ever a New Zealand tread were heard on their stairs. Then Mamma would turn the knife, smoking from her daughter’s blood, on herself: for who knew that even a matron of her age would be safe from ravishing New Zealand soldiery? But peer and descry as they could, Giulia and Gennaro saw nothing but truck convoys tearing through the streets below. No New Zealanders came to their apartment to violate them. Over the nightly English lesson Giulia whispered to Gennaro that, while Mamma was keeping them all shut up like canaries, all the other Neapolitans were out hunting up choice jobs with the Allies.

A week later Mamma allowed Papa to return to his office in the Questura. She also allowed Giulia and Gennaro to go out and try to buy some food. In their week of immurement they’d eaten up everything in the house. So Giulia, Gennaro, and Elvira sallied out to buy food. Gennaro carried the carving knife under his armpit, also a little biretta that Papa kept in a secret place. Elvira had also been kept locked up by her family. Her mousy face was unwashed, her hair all mad and atwirl. Giulia in her neat frock and little cloth coat with the fur collar thought privately that her chum looked a fright. When a girl isn’t by nature attractive, she becomes a monster when she lets herself go.

In early October, 1943, Naples was a city of chaos, of movement with no purpose, of charnel smells, of rain, of army truck headlights coming out of the mist like eyes without lids. The shoe was on the other foot now: the Germans had taken over bombing the town as soon as they’d vacated the premises in favor of the Fifth Army. After the sun set through the fall rains, the few who dared go abroad stumbled their way over sidewalks in a close dreadful blackness. There wasn’t a light, except from the truck convoys. Corpses were let lie where they fell, creasing and bloating from the rain. Living Neapolitans stripped the clothing from them: the living needed the cloth. The city’s sewage had all backed up in a spasm of vomiting, like stomachs nauseated with war. What stench didn’t renege from the bay wafted through the ruptured mains in the streets. There were red whispers of typhus, and prayers that it was true that the Americans had a new disinfectant. And in the daytime the poor sun squeaking through the rains showed a spectacle more ghoulish than you imagined by darkness. Clots of returning Neapolitans trekked in from their hiding places outside the city. Household furniture was pushed through the streets. Wagons and carts swamped the roads through which the army trucks were trying to pass. Horses and van owners were clubbed and kicked and screamed at by American MP’s. They writhed and wrestled with the traffic like Laocoöns in a haze.

— La nostra città è morta, Gennaro said, his voice sickened and phlegmy.

— Non credo, Giulia said, but she too was ashgreen with terror as they felt their way through the vichi, where rubbish and foul moisture trembled on the walls like rotten emeralds.

Then she noticed that Elvira was chewing gum. Giulia whirled on her friend and demanded to know, her eyes narrowing into sparks, where that American gum came from. Elvira began to splutter and said that an American soldier had given it to her brother yesterday.

— Ebbene? Giulia said savagely, elbowing her bosom friend against an archway.

— No, no, no, no, Elvira said, bursting into tears. Non ci pensare. . . .

Giulia felt relieved, even though she despised herself for the thought that had popped into her head. . . . These were times. . . . She’d always sensed a weakness in Elvira, but not of that kind which would send her amica out onto the sidewalks to proposition the Allied soldiers.

By a series of leaps across streets, slinking along the narrowest and remotest alleys, they were approaching the Questura. They arrived at a church slit in two by bombs. There remained the blasted portico with its picture of the Madonna under shattered glass, its candelabra twisted like a frostbitten branch. Under the tempera of the walls lay a cadaver in overalls. Its dead eyes turned upward and outward like buttons fearful of a buttonhook. A little way off, on another pile of slag, was the hat that the head had worn when alive. Elvira let out one cluck and fainted. Gennaro laid his head against the shattered wall and vomited soundlessly. Giulia desired to hold his head, but instead she knelt down by Elvira and chafed her hands. After a time of murmuring incantations and encouragements, the way her mother had when they were babies, Giulia got her party restored and walking on again. She told Gennaro to use his silk handkerchief to wipe the corners of his mouth, from which dribbled a thread of slime.

— Vergogna, Giulia scolded.

She heard her small clear voice like a flute over the tympanum of sound that was Naples that morning. The pallor sank under Gennaro’s olive skin, he resumed his spry gentle gait. Elvira pulled her shapeless hat over her eyes and marched on in a blind stupor like a pig to the slaughter.

At the main entrance to the Questura, where her father worked, Giulia and her party came upon a long queue of screaming and buzzing Neapolitans, talking with hands and throats. At the side door cordons of MP’s were hustling others under arrest to cells. The American MP’s girdled the creamy stone walls of the entire Questura building. In the glassed vestibule hung the sign:

QUI GLI ALLEATI IMPIEGANO CIVILI COMPETENTI AL LAVORO

So Giulia told her brother and her friend to take heart; there were good jobs waiting for them inside with the Americans. She stood on Via Medina on the outskirts of the mob, trying to formulate some plan of action. But the yowling of the Neapolitans and the shouted orders of the MP’s drove everything out of her head. She felt again that long-ago sensation when, as a tiny girl with sparkling ringlets, she’d take refuge in her mother’s skirts if strangers spoke to her. But then she looked at her brother’s sad proud face, at Elvira, who was beginning to jitter again. So she pulled her furpiece about her, took both their arms, and prepared herself to rush the line in the best Neapolitan tradition on trolleys.

— Where’s this pretty baby goin so fast, huh?

An American MP blocked her path. His sudden appearance, almost out of the ground, stopped them dead in their tracks. It was the first American soldier the three had seen at close range. Elvira burst into silly sobbing. Gennaro came to attention and gave the Fascist salute. Giulia stood her ground and simply looked at the MP. She was as tall as to his chest. Under his helmet she saw his yellowish face, pitted with the craters of his adolescence. His eyes were like oranges in blood. His mouth was a line of purple. He was in a tight olive-drab uniform and leggins. Over one shoulder and by his waist hung a burnished leather holster and a pistol. The blue and white MP brassard on his arm was pinned below the single chevron. He looked at her and she returned his glare until his eyes softened and netted into wrinkles. All her English flew out of her brain, then seeped back in. And Giulia spoke with her Oxford accent:

— Please, sir, please . . .

— Ah, molto buono, said the MP, tu parlare americano?

— I know English discreetly well, Giulia said. And sir, we three desire a post with the liberating army. . . . We are good decent Italians. . . . My father is not an active Fascist. . . . We will do anything that good people ought to do to live . . .

— A sharp mouse, a sharp mouse, the MP said, clapping his holster in a dour delight.

He put out his gauntleted hand and with a finger lighter than she’d have imagined stroked the soft line below her ear to her chin. Giulia’s impulse was to step smartly back out of his reach, but she stayed herself. Back of her she heard Gennaro’s breath go into a snort. She hoped her brother would control himself.

— Please sir, Giulia said, I am an honest young Italian girl. This is my husband behind me. . . . We are recently married . . .

— O scusate, the American MP said, himself stepping back. I didn’t know ya was married. . . . Well, baby, come around in a few more days and ask for Gibson. I might be able to help ya. But don’t walk in that door now unless ya fixin to take a blood test an maybe end up in Poggioreale jail. . . . But if ya wanta come back in a day or so, there might be somethin cookin. . . . Frankly, I like ya, baby. . . . Ya the first Ginso girl I could imagine myself goin for. . . . Why don’t ya come to America? Ya smart enough to do all right for yaself.

— Thank you, sir, Giulia said.

She gathered her brood and hustled them around the corner of the Questura to Via Diaz. Yet once again she looked back at the MP. He was still standing with his hands on his Sam Browne belt and gazing after her.

— An stay off these streets, baby, he yelled at her.

Giulia didn’t tell her brother or her friend, but she liked the American MP for all his seamy looks. He had a brusqueness and a crudity that wouldn’t be acceptable in an Italian man. But Giulia also knew from some core of insight that he would be incapable of doing her any treachery.

They walked up Via Diaz. Gennaro was lost within himself, murmuring something about the soldiering in the Italian Army and the fine manners of their ex-carabinieri. Elvira was sunk in a stupid terror; she’d retracted her head like a tortoise into her coat and was trusting only to Giulia’s arm to guide her. From the rear of the Questura, where the cells were under the ground floor, they heard the screaming of incarcerated ladies calling out Neapolitan obscenities and protesting that they’d never heard of syphilis.

On the façade of the neo-something Provincia Building Giulia saw another advertisement for Italian help. At this portal were gathered petitioners of a different feather. She asked one of the hangers-on whose offices were here and was told that Allied Military Government was setting up its control of Naples. In the tense postulant faces Giulia saw most of the South Italian nobility. Contesse had risen early from their beds to get themselves a job as social secretary to a colonel; marchesi were ready to put their Ischia or Capri villas at the disposal of the Americans and the British. All the elite of Campania were waiting here to prove that they’d never been Fascist, but had been just biding their time till they could give cocktail parties for the Allies.

— Razza di cani, Gennaro said and spat on the ground.

Giulia led him and Elvira away. She saw that there was no hope from AMGOT. She couldn’t compete with really big operators — yet.

In a market of Naples where she’d always traded Giulia found reality of a closer sort. There was almost no food on the shelves and no meat in the windows except a few chines of red runny flesh looking like no beef or pork she’d ever seen before. And what little there was of anything was selling for from four to ten times its price of two weeks ago. Giulia felt herself going sick and frightened under her gay dress and trim coat. She heard her voice shake on the brink of a sob as she asked Mr. Gargiulo if this weren’t just a temporary shortage, if the Allies wouldn’t soon be rushing food into Naples.

Thereupon Mr. Gargiulo, who’d always been so kind to her, seemed to blow up under his bloody apron. He delivered himself of five minutes’ blistering Neapolitan rhetoric, of pleading and sobbing and suicide threats. He told Giulia that she was a cretin, then apologized to her; he called Elvira a ninny from Calabria, and he asked Gennaro in a burst of irony what good all that fine Latin and Greek were going to do him now. Then before Giulia’s eyes, which were beginning to seep the tears she’d been suppressing all morning, Mr. Gargiulo waved a freshly printed one-lira note. He told them that this was the new currency of the Allies, and that it wasn’t worth enough to buy a chicken with, no, not a whole bale of it. He told them that from now on Napoli was liberated — liberated from life itself, because henceforth money would mean nothing in the markets, nothing. He told them that the Allies had also liberated the lira of any value.

So all four of them cried there in the butcher shop with the rainy October air looking in on them. Then Mr. Gargiulo threw into Giulia’s shopping basket some suspicious pasta, a few old greens, and a chunk of wormy meat. He said that he didn’t want her money because it was the last time they’d see one another alive. They wept some more and cursed. Only Giulia stood a little apart from her own anguish and thought and puzzled inside her small studious head. When they got home and told Mamma what Naples was like, she had a really good heart attack. For a week it was thought that Mamma wouldn’t live.

From that time on Giulia and her family entered a desert of hopelessness. Since they’d kept alive all during the German occupation of Naples and the bombings, they looked back on those days as a rather gay paradise compared to their existence now after the city’s fall. Then they hadn’t minded living from day to day. But now it was a minute to minute struggle, in which any problem five minutes hence seemed a lifetime removed. Every evening they had bleak sessions under the stained-glass lamp on the dining room table. They admitted that they hadn’t been liberated from anything at all, that the war was just beginning for them. Giulia felt like the man who survives pneumonia only to discover that his heart has been weakened forever.

Worst of all she found that misery doesn’t necessarily make strange bedfellows — or any bedfellows at all. Those other ladies in the apartment to whom Mamma, when they were ill, lent coffee and fruit and fresh meat now withdrew into chilly hostility when they discovered that the bounty was ended. Hence Giulia began to doubt whether privation and suffering unite people so much as they divide them. Each family went into a sniping war against all others. Everyone in Naples agreed only in saying that the Allies were worse liars than the Fascists. Everyone was divided from everyone else. Whereas the Neapolitans had known a certain dreary camaraderie when they all faced the war together in the bomb shelters, they now became one another’s enemies, since each must go out and forage for food. And Giulia watched the comedy of her father’s weekly stipend. Each week he collected the same sum of lire that he’d been receiving for ten years. But with it he could buy a day’s ration of bread. It was like a child putting up his hands to stop a tidal wave.

The first weeks they managed only with the thought that this state of affairs couldn’t last. For Papa was known and loved in Naples. He worked every angle and every connection, pulled every wire so that his family could buy in secret shops. His only luxury was that he smoked much. For a while his cherished cigarettes continued to dribble in: three from the Vomero, two from Torregaveta, four from Caserta.

In the third week typhus burst out all over Naples the way a rash seeps through after presages of itching. Mamma said sta bene, it would carry her off quickly, then she wouldn’t have to bother about her heart any longer, and there’d be one less mouth to feed. She rose from her sofa more than she should and spent time in the kitchen beside Giulia, trying to cook something into or out of the gray heavy pasta and the vegetables that seemed to have lain in the Sahara. She howled for the white bread the Allies had promised in their propaganda leaflets.

Then began the foul rectification of a foul situation. Everyone knew that you could buy in Naples any amount of American meat and medical supplies. If you had the price. Papa knew where these things were sold, for most of his friends had gone into the black market. The only catch was that the prices were ten to twenty times the normal level. Two weeks after its fall there was anything you wanted to buy in Naples. For two thousand lire a day a small family could live quite well. But Giulia knew no small Neapolitan families with an income of two thousand lire a day. She didn’t know any millionaires.

One evening after a supper of dark bread, beans, and a potato soup Papa announced that they might as well bid farewell to honesty. He said that only two classes were destined to survive in Naples — the very rich and the very poor. The rich could afford to live through the parenthesis by selling all they had, to buy on the black market. And the poor stole more than they ever had because with the Allies here there was more to steal. Papa’s mustaches were as stiff as iron. He described himself as a man tied to a plank and ordered to stand on his feet. Giulia listened. She wished she had more of the Italian woman’s gift of tears. In her throat she felt only a pain as though there were a hot cauter there. After a while she went into the gabinetto. Her stomach wouldn’t keep down what she’d just eaten for it was as delicious as grass and as palatable as cardboard. She stood over the bowl holding her hot dry forehead and feeling her stomach twitch oysterlike and deathly. Then she put on her coat and went out to find Elvira for a walk.

Elvira’s family had already entered the bracket of the war rich. Papa Brazzi had closed his barbershop and had taken a position as head waiter in an American officers’ mess. From the kitchen door of this installation there streamed a small but precious rivulet of American meats, coffee, sugar, and white bread. Enough of this contraband appeared on Papa Brazzi’s table to keep his family as well nourished as they’d always been. The rest he sold or bartered. Actually Elvira and her family were living on a slightly higher level than the prewar one for their class, but in comparison to most other Neapolitans in October, 1943, they were princes. Elvira’s posture was better, her eyes prouder, her complexion almost radiant. She was now in a position to make a brilliant marriage, if she chose.

Elvira greeted Giulia with condescension. She led her friend into the Brazzi kitchen, remarking happily that poor Giulia looked pale and faint. She set before Giulia a plate of American spiced meat out of a can, two slices of white bread, and a cup of chocolate which she bragged came from American powder. Giulia ate every morsel, trying to conceal how hungry she was.

— Ah, poveretta, Elvira squealed, watching Giulia as though she were a canary breakfasting in a cage.

And Giulia, dizzy and enervated from her vomiting, knew coolly that this was the moment Elvira’d been waiting for all her suppressed days — the chance to play the queen at her own expense. Giulia tried not to listen to Elvira’s itemized boasting over Papa Brazzi’s commerce in the borsa nera, of the goods that lay in the Brazzi cellar.

Arm in arm she and her new patroness walked in the Galleria Umberto. The arcade was moist and dark after the rains. On the pavement still lay the splinters of glass that had been bombed out of the skylight. A few bars were open. There was no electricity in Naples, but lighted candles stood in their own wax on the marble bar tops. By this wan light Allied soldiers drank vermouth. And Giulia noticed that they were being whistled at in a casual savagery that made a pain press on her eyeballs. It was the first time in her life she’d been treated so. She tightened her grasp on Elvira’s arm and forced her into a swifter pace toward the Via Verdi end of the Galleria.

Suddenly there came to her mind in the midst of the murk and the candlelight and the slippery pavement those walks she’d taken here as a little girl with her Mamma and Papa on Sunday afternoons. There was glass then in the dome of the Galleria Umberto; the sun dropped like a gay flag, the murmur of the Neapolitans talking was bright and sure. In those days Giulia wore small green coats and green ankle socks and a small straw hat fastened to her chin with a green ribbon. In those same bars where the Allied soldiers were now drinking, she used to reach up her little hand for the Sunday ice-cream cone. She was picked up and kissed by all, though Mamma didn’t like compliments paid in her presence. Fifteen years ago! Out of the haze and the feeling of sleepwalking in a dank cellar, Giulia heard those voices praising her baby beauty:

— Ah, la piccina! Eh, che piccola regina! Com’è carina, signora, e ben educata pure.

But this memory broke off and mangled, for it was October, 1943, and Giulia and Elvira were walking through a changed Galleria. She observed — at first she thought it her imagination — that Elvira was gawking at the Allied soldiers, obviously turning her head as they passed concentrations of them chewing gum or passing around a cognac bottle. Giulia queried softly, Was it Elvira’s plan to marry an American? Elvira replied with a coy casting down of her eyes, Well, she’d considered the matter. Then Giulia said with the tinkle of an icicle that the Americans were different from us and might easily break the hearts of us Italian girls. And Elvira gave a too loud laugh and stated that sentimentality was out of date; it didn’t pay.

— Ah, ti prego, said Giulia, di non dirmi più simili sciocchezze.

To which Elvira replied with heavy scorn that it was all very well for Giulia to talk big ideals when she hadn’t enough to eat. For the first time in her tranquil life Giulia had the impulse to slap someone. But she merely tightened her hold on Elvira’s arm.

In the exact center of the Galleria Giulia saw a sight that was new. It scored her with the fascination of a pimple on the back of one’s neck. She saw many girls alone and in pairs, girls she’d never noticed on the streets of Naples before. Their attire, even in the dark, shone with a determined if shabby brilliance. They laughed constantly in a sound like crows jeering. They urged themselves boldly on the soldiers, who waited or pulled on their bottles. Through the night air tumbled estimates in lire such as one would hear on the stock exchange in Piazza della Borsa. Giulia’d never heard Italian women talking money so much before. The price of four thousand lire was much bandied between the soldiers and the girls. Then Elvira nudged her.

An American soldier was leaning against the slate-hued wall of the Galleria. He wore a fur-collared jacket and muddy leggins. In his hands were two tin cans which he pushed and retracted from the girl in front of him, who put out her tongue and wriggled the tip of her nose. Her dress was ragged. She was in a hysteria of several moods. She seemed hungry and frightened and lewd all at once. Finally she seized the soldier’s arm, pulled him along with a searing laugh, and they both ran out of the Galleria. Elvira tittered and revealed that in those tin cans was the food served to American troops at the front. Her Papa called it C-ration.

Giulia put two and two together. She began to quiver, standing still in the Galleria. Lightning raked across her eyes. There stormed up in her small breast a bitterness and a fury that frightened her and tore at her. She thought her heart was going to stop, that she was going blind with rage. And she heard her voice clang over her rigid lips like knives. She cried, not to Elvira or to anyone in particular, that a soldier who gave food to a hungry girl for love was outside the human race. Elvira tittered some more, said that this was war, and that Italian women could make riffraff of themselves if they chose. But then she stopped, for she saw that Giulia was crying.

Tears plopped down Giulia’s cheeks. Sobs came from her small body in a series of waves, dry waves like sheaves of paper ripped by a mad hand.

— Siamo vinti. . . . In questa guerra sono morti non soltanto i soldati . . . ma l’anima, le donne, e l’onore di tutti quanti. . . . Che Iddio ci aiuti. . . .

Still sobbing, she forced Elvira to quit the Galleria with her. She knew that if Elvira so much as giggled once more, she’d hurl her onto the wet sidewalk, though she was smaller than Elvira. Elvira suddenly took her leave and went into her own house. Giulia passed a church which the sacristan was just locking for the night. She told the sacristan that it was a gracious idea to lock Christ in and the people out of the churches when the sun set. The sacristan shrugged and stepped aside to let her pass in. Giulia took water from the holy-water font and made the sign of the cross on her forehead. She was glad that Elvira had gone on home. She was still trembling, as a leaf remembers the wind.

After the black rainy air of Naples the church was glowing with vigil lights. These streaked out the offerings in the glass showcases, the cups of gold, the jewels, the token offerings for miraculous cures. Because of these treasures the church was locked at sundown. At a side altar a plump old priest was saying his rosary. Because she made some noise in entering, he looked at her testily and clucked.

Giulia knelt before the statue of the Madonna, which every year was borne through the streets on August 15 covered with flowers and smoked over with torches and incense. And Giulia prayed to Our Lady. She’d never really prayed before in her life.

She told Holy Mary Mother of God that she was a Neapolitan girl of nineteen. That she had her selfishnesses. That perhaps she was a little too proud for her station in life. . . . But (Giulia begged Mary) what are women put into this world for? Aren’t they to make good wives to men . . . at least in Italy. . . . Every good Italian girl wishes to be a wife and mother. . . . A woman doesn’t fear suffering as much as a man does. . . . Having children isn’t pleasant . . . but at least it’s natural. . . . Mother of God, a woman can’t cope with unnatural things like war, because a woman was put here to bring life into this world . . . women aren’t interested in killing. . . . Giulia asked the Madonna to help her. Her lips formed most passionately around that word, help.

Then she left the church. It was only two minutes now to the door of the apartment. She rounded an alley and came upon a tableau. An American soldier was lying unconscious on a doorstep. In her reflex of flinching back Giulia saw that this drunk was being relieved of his lire and his packs of cigarettes. At her step the thief jumped up from bending over the unconscious figure. It was Giulia’s brother Gennaro, all pale and with a murderous grief in his eyes. Her brother Gennaro.

Giulia discovered the consequences of sharing a secret which must never again be referred to, even with its imparter. This weight forced her deeper into herself and removed her completely from this life. Hitherto her adjustment to living had been a sweet moderation: neither mad for society nor shunning it. She’d lived well in herself, but not with that intensity or misanthropy which marks the queer or the gifted. Now all was changed. The sight of her brother bending over the drunken American soldier and rifling his pockets had burnt Giulia’s eyes, as though she’d looked straight at the sun. Often at night she saw this vision, asleep or awake, as a light remains on our retina after we turn away into the dark. With this there came to her moral and ethical nature a rift which refused to heal, which caused her night after night to cry into her pillow.

She knew that Gennaro had done what she saw him doing not through meanness or tendency to burglary in himself. He’d done what he’d done not for himself but because his family had to eat and because he could sell a pack of American cigarettes for three hundred lire. He had only to steal a few packs a week, and his family would revert to their former tranquil prosperity. All this Giulia knew, but the explanation didn’t help any. And she knew too that in these times Neapolitans of the middle class could starve slowly, as effectively as if they’d willfully gone on a hunger strike. No, it wasn’t that Gennaro had stolen that brought agony to Giulia’s soul; it was that he had had to steal, that there was no way out of doing what he’d done. Thus the worshiped figure of her brother became a symbol of that scabrous destiny which was debasing them all. He was no more her Gennaro, but a marionete whipped on by a fury and a fate beyond him. It wasn’t fair. It was filthy. He was now much more and much less her brother. He’d become the projection of all that was diseased in Naples of 1943. To her dying day Giulia could never forget that figure crouched in the murky vico, that look of horror and fascination outstarting from her brother’s eyes, that brown hand she’d so often spanked in their English lessons going like a shuttle through the pockets of the American soldier. Both their hearts broke at that instant — Gennaro’s and Giulia’s. They’d understood one another perfectly from the days when the little sister used to take the baby brother’s hand There could never again be between them that ripeness and gentleness, never, never. It was as though in a moment of madness they’d committed incest together, and had arisen defiled from the act, resolving never to see one another again. For their love had been close. They’d collided and passed through and beyond one another, like shadows embracing in hell.

Mamma, noting that the family’s diet had returned to its old level of abundance and variety, nodded sagely from her couch. She said, See, they’d done wrong to curse the Allies, for they’d kept their promises. Italians were overhasty in praise and in blame. She praised the American Spam and found that American coffee did her angina good. She hoped Gennaro’d make the acquaintance of an American and bring him home for dinner. In this way they might repay some of their debt to the Allies for liberating Naples and bringing fine American rations into the house. Giulia, when these things were said at table, would feel a knife go through her brain. She’d excuse herself from the meal and go to her room, for she knew that remaining at table would mean screaming. Her brother, the sad bent tool of injustice, simply sat in his place and stared at his plate. His dark hair seemed to have turned into sleek snakes hissing along his forehead.

Gennaro’s own sorrow forced him into a kind of flagrance of bitterness, as those with skin diseases appear brazenly in public. In his room he kept cartons of American cigarettes. These Giulia would find as she did her morning dusting while Mamma chattered from the couch in the parlor. Then Giulia, in an ecstasy of horrid fascination, would pick up the shining cellophane packages with the red target in the center. She’d count them with loathing, letting each fall back into the drawer through her fingers. Each morning she would play with these American cigarettes till she had to sit on Gennaro’s bed and weep. Mamma in the salottino would get peevish and restless and call out that Giulia was getting lazy in her housekeeping, and would make no man a good wife.

Giulia knew that Papa, anything but stupid, guessed what his son was up to after a few days’ lying. So, living off the American food and the American cigarettes which he so passionately loved, Papa’s mustache grew white. Giulia watched a metaphysical corset twine round Papa’s plump chest that was strangling off his breath.

One evening in November Papa walked with Giulia to the door of her bedroom. All evening long he’d been ostensibly in high spirits, jesting of his Fascist youth, of Mussolini’s violin playing, of Edda Ciano’s legs. He was as gay as one coming out of an anesthetic. But Giulia, inured to agony, saw his mirth for what it was, the abandon of a clown with a dying son. At her door Giulia’s father kissed her good night so hard that she tasted the small onions he’d eaten with such bravura, the tart red wine he’d drunk with dinner, the stinging afterbreath of American cigarettes. And Papa’s chest shook as he drew her head over his heart.

— Ah, cara mia, che bellezza! Abbiamo un figlio ed un fratello ladro. . . .

And as she lay in her bed she sounded the depths of her father’s bitterness.

Or sometimes Giulia tried to exchange a few words with Gennaro, those teasing sisterly sallies she’d always made. But their hollowness was obvious to her and, she knew, to him. Any conversation on their old level was as intolerable to both as a house hit by an incendiary bomb: only walls stood in the void where once were lovely rooms.

In December, 1943, Giulia sat under the stained-glass lamp over the dining room table. She was reading Risorgimento, which she hadn’t had time to glance over all day. It was full of news of the countless Neapolitan political parties and their diatribes against one another. Giulia thought of the line of steel and death to the north of her. The Germans were making Italy a shambles by retreating slowly to the north, destroying as they went. She wondered what other girls of nineteen were thinking tonight in Rome, in Firenze, in Milano. Then her eye hit upon an ad. It said that shortly a club for American officers would open in the Bank of Naples. They were going to hire Neapolitan ladies and gentlemen as cashiers and waiters.

Giulia arose from her chair, smoothing her somber dress and her hair. She was wearing also her cloth coat with the fur collar because the house was damp and cold. Nowhere in Naples could you buy wood or coal, even on the mercato nero. Giulia considered again. Then she went to her brother’s room. She knew how she’d find him. And he was. Bent over their old English grammar. He lurched to his feet as she switched on the ceiling light. His passionate vitality at once wove an armor about him. She felt it opaque and dense as a wall, but she kept walking till she stood beside him and took his hand. She put her index finger on the advertisement and pushed it to him to read as though she were forcing an invalid to eat. For a minute they stood there looking at one another with a fierceness that gathered and stiffened them both. Because it was the first time she’d brought herself to look upon Gennaro in months, Giulia saw how beautiful was his face, like the face of one with a wasting disease, where all the life and reserve passion pounds into the cheeks and sits there in a wildness of decision and husbandry, saying, Kill me if you dare. For a second she thought she was going to die. But some cyclone blew them into one another’s arms, where they wept loudly for some while.

In the cold brightness of Naples in December Giulia and Gennaro and Elvira walked through the Galleria Umberto. It was nine o’clock in the morning. The night had brought the usual air raid. There were American ambulances in the streets, and Neapolitan plumed hearses were carrying those who’d died earlier. The winter of Naples has its own peculiar sting like the cursing in Neapolitan dialect. Giulia shivered and drew her fur about her neck. Since she had to wear it in the house too to keep warm, it mocked her out of doors. But she was soon distracted from her own discomfort by seeing the seat of Gennaro’s trousers. He was wearing a gray pencil-striped business suit. A year ago it had been a quiet vessel for his beauty. Now the seat was shiny and the elbows the same.

For herself and her brother, however, Elvira more than compensated. The Brazzis were now rich. Elvira was getting a double chin from eating so opulently. She did her nails in various colors and painted her face till it was a mixed vegetable plate. She’d developed a mince in her walk that once was clumsy and nervous. Into her conversation, which had always been dreary, full of hot flashes and tremors and palpitations, Elvira now injected American words of whose meaning she wasn’t precisely sure. Gennaro, who in his dealings knew a practical and earthy English, would correct her hastily and beg her not to use such expressions. Then Elvira would titter furiously and say, My stars, she was getting as wicked as Countess Ciano, wasn’t she?

Elvira wanted to see society, especially American. She’d developed a thirst for night life. And no matter how rich Papa Brazzi got from the black market, he’d still lock Elvira in every night at curfew time unless she got a respectable job. Elvira was attempting to get this job to get away from her family. With a job in the officers’ club at the Bank of Naples, she hoped to snare herself a handsome American officer. All this Giulia guessed.

Neapolitans said that the gray modern slate-colored Bank of Naples had escaped bombing because North Italian bankers had bought off the pilots of American and British bombers. It was the only clean and solid building on Via Roma. Its whole front was bricked and buttressed off from the street, against having its brass and glass doors shattered from detonations. The rear entrance was through a crypt with a subterranean car park. Inside this cave were many Neapolitans, wearing a suitable manner to be hired as waitress or cashier. They were all murmuring to one another, but they became demure and formal when they expected the officer in charge of the club to appear at the head of the stairs.

Would they be fed three times a day by the Americans? What were the wages? The Americans could afford anything. They ought to get together like a trade union and force the Americans to accede to their demands. Giulia noticed among the feminine applicants girls who swaggered on Via Roma. The males were nearly all Neapolitans with spectacles and greased hair and a classic air of exasperation as though they’d been whipped by their families out of the library of the University of Naples in the middle of their doctor’s dissertation. Gennaro and Giulia and Elvira took their place in the queue and waited in silent listening. A queue is an unnatural formation for Neapolitans, who like to swarm and catch as catch can.

Late, very late, perhaps to show the Neapolitans that they were a conquered people and not patients at a charity dispensary, a glass door opened in the wall of gray granite. The hundreds of petitioners fell into reverent silence and arranged their clothes and hair. There appeared two American officers in short monkey jackets of green cloth. Their breasts were barred with colored ribbons. There was a major built like a duck, his beard like gravel along the jowls resting on his collar. A cheery stomach butted the high waist of his jacket. With him was a sad young lieutenant carrying a clipboard. The lieutenant’s glasses drooped over his nose. To Giulia he seemed an unhappy grandmother commissioned by mistake in the United States Army. Beside these two an interpreter looking like an osprey took up his position. The major made a pass in the air past his paunch with his jeweled hand. There sounded in the half-cellar a voice as rich and persuasive as a pio bursting with suet. The major stopped after every sentence, which the interpreter then translated to the crowd. Giulia had never heard anything quite like the English that the major used. She listened only to him, paying no attention to the sentence by sentence rendition of the interpreter:

— Mah deah Neahpolitan friends . . . for you ah mah friends, each an every one of yo. . . . We ah openin this here little club to give ouah pooah American officers a place to relax in. . . . But this heah club is also a friendly gesture to you, ouah Neapolitan friends. . . . Those of yo whom we find competent we ah goin to hiah as waiters or cashiers. . . . For when ouah Uncle Sam liberates Italy, he also takes thought of her suffrin people. . . . Theah’ll be no partiality shown in the hirin or in the firin. . . . We know yoah reputation for bein lazy, my deah friends, an we ain’t standin for none of yoah nonsense heah. . . . But ah just want to ask yo to play the game with me, and ah’ll play ball with yo. . . . Ah come from a state in the Union that is as bighearted as she is big. . . . Now yoah wages will be ninety lire a day, an you can take home what sandwiches and pastry they is left at the close of the workin day . . . if they’s any. . . . All’t ah’ll say heah is, if theah is inybody heah who won’t work for ninety lire, why they is just plain ingrates to Uncle Sam, that’s all. . . . They can go to theah homes right now. . . . We don’t want no truck with them. . . . Now my deah friends, just form an orderly line and wait yoah turn for interview.

Half of the Neapolitans broke away from the mass and went out of the rear of the Bank of Naples. Under their breaths they mewed and spat and cursed. Those who’d decided to stay pushed up the little stairway past the custode and turned left along the cool dark walls, cloudy with the veins and strata of the stone. Then they milled through another corridor where the doors were tall and bronzy. Then they mounted a stairway with sweep and curve where once Fascist bankers climbed with their briefcases. On the second floor more brass doors gave into a room where a faun played over a lighted fountain. Then came the vastest room Giulia’d ever seen outside of the movies, and lastly a narrower apartment where benches had been linked on a trestle to make a long bar. The windows were all arched and hung with valances of cream and green. This led through a small reception room with a pink piano to a door that said Office — Off Limits.

They were oddly silent for Neapolitans as they sat down in the deep green leather divans and looked at one another with that mutual suspicion of outer offices. Giulia and Gennaro and Elvira found a seat close to the office door on a long sofa, in which they seemed to drop into a well of cushions.

Then a girl ran in with a shriek and collapsed beside them. She was pursued by a brilliant-eyed man in the belted jacket and the loud trousers of Italian racing drivers. They introduced themselves as Wilma and Gino. Giulia measured Wilma with interest and sympathy. Wilma wasn’t young any more, but she balanced the equation by a mockery of everything, herself included. She began at once talking to Giulia. She told Giulia that Gino wasn’t so rich as lovers she’d had in Trieste and Tripoli, but that he was shrewder. Wilma chain-smoked, thieving cigarette after cigarette from Gino’s waistcoat and stabbing at her lipsticked charred butts with violet fingernails. Her laughter was low and one inch this side of spiteful. And Gino talked over her voice, saying that Wilma was a vecchia strega, how he’d been an interpreter for the Americans since Salerno, how they were really quite nice to work for; and when they saw that you did a little feathering of your own nest, they took it all in the spirit of business competition. In the affection between Wilma and Gino Giulia noticed something as bitter and close as mint under grass.

Wilma kept grabbing Giulia’s hands and caressing them as she reminisced of high life in Trieste and Tripoli. Gino got into a conversation with Gennaro on fencing and swimming and calcio. In track, alas, Gino had hardened his arteries before his time. Wilma’s mouth, except when she laughed, was a long generous sphincter of carmine. During all this badinage Elvira just sat leaning her chins on her bosom and gasping with delight that she was at last getting a taste of high society. But Wilma, whatever she was or had been, was a wise woman. Love and tricks and shrewdness and irony dropped from her lips into Giulia’s ear as most women burble platitudes. She told Giulia that no woman need ever condescend in this life; no, not even if she worked in a casino. Giulia never forgot what Wilma told her that morning.

The Officers’ Club of the Peninsular Base Section opened on an afternoon in late December, 1943. The light of winter Naples crossed Via Roma, cut the standards on the balconies, and grazed the parquet of the dance floor. Wilma and Elvira sat behind high enclosed cash desks and sold books of chits for drinks. Giulia’s post was a small throne behind a long directorial table with a silver salver of Spamwiches and chocolate éclairs. For seven hours it was her function and her duty to lift up these refreshments on a silver spatula and put them into the wax paper in the hand of the purchaser. She could look across the dance floor and watch Wilma at her cash desk. Wilma’s pose was to lean Sapphically on her hand and lazily to accept cigarettes from officers.

The major had ordered all his girls out of their pretty dresses and into Mother Hubbards of the hue of discolored wallpaper. He did this, he said, because he knew the desires of men in wartime. His aim was to make his girls as mouselike as possible. At first Wilma and Giulia raged because the faded Mother Hubbards made them look like graduates of the Pompei orphanage. But Giulia soon found out that at closing time at the bar it would have made no difference if she’d been wearing a washed-out pea pod. The officers came around anyway.

Of all the major’s employees only Elvira was sad. She moped and mulled behind her cash desk. Nobody came to her to buy chits. So at the end of two weeks the major fired her, advising her to go up to the Anzio beachhead, where it was darker and the men were less fussy about what they looked at. Elvira returned to her family, to be locked up every night at curfew time. She said she’d hated the whole vulgar job from the start, and had only been talked into taking it because she was too goodhearted.

More men than women worked at PBS Club. The major said that Giulia and Wilma were simply the dash of sugar in the staff. There was a corps of waiters, tricked out in white ties and tails. Two bars functioned simultaneously, for the major roared out that what American officers wanted for relaxation was a combination of Radio City Music Hall, Minsky’s, Jack Dempsey’s, and the Silver Dollar. What he meant by this Giulia never learned. And the major, his sleeves rolled up, personally schooled the Neapolitan bartenders till he said they could get a job anywhere in New York. They were Enrico, always melancholy and almost sweetly pock-marked; and Demetrio, that acute little rat who couldn’t stop having children; and Luigi, who rolled his eyes on either side of his huge nose and bragged of his friendships with German officers and sang “Firenze Stanotte”; and handsome Sergio, who’d somehow got trapped in Naples from Torino and never talked to anybody, but kept a diary and lived in the vibrant and closed sweetness of his own nostalgia.

Then there were the waiters who shot across the polished floor with their coattails clanging like gossips’ tongues, banging their trays on the bar and calling for Eight Jeeen e Jooos over the orchestra. Of these there was first of all Giulia’s brother Gennaro, who kept himself aloof from the rest. She never discovered where he got his tails. Gennaro had taken to brilliantining his hair, which glistened like phosphorus. He now spoke perfect American, bragged much with the American officers, called his sister keed or mouse or butch. Giulia watched the American nurses gasping for Gennaro. And there was Furio, the tiny Communist who was once a tenente di vascello in the Regia Marina and spent his Fridays off at party meetings in the Vomero. And there was Alfredo and his mustaches, who’d made what he hoped was his pile in a Brooklyn barbershop and had come back to Naples to die in peace. But a bomb had got the house and the family for which Alfredo’d slaved in the Brooklyn barbershop. Alfredo said grazie too many times for a tip of cigarettes. His bows to majors and colonels made his chin almost touch the floor and his coattails lash up his spine.

There was also a troop of Neapolitan ladies and gentlemen who did odd jobs about PBS Officers’ Club. They didn’t belong to the white-collar crowd. Giulia soon got bored with seven hours’ sitting behind her sandwiches and looking like a madonna, as the major had instructed her to do. So she watched everything. She observed Gaetano the electrician climb ladders in his sandals and replace burnt-out bulbs in the chandeliers. From her table she might also observe the sales talks and outraged nobility of Signora Anna Negri, who stood beside her showcase on her aching feet and sold miniatures of Capri or cameos especially tailored to the mothers of Americans.

The major’s retinue reported to work at 1630 hours each afternoon. They trailed chilled and peeved up the sharp noble stairs to the second floor of the Banco di Napoli, each carrying his or her supper: mozzarella and black bread and tomatoes and an egg wrapped in last night’s newspaper. Giulia used to listen to them talk as she held her own black market supper tight against her small sharp breasts and marched up the staircase. How they talked! They couldn’t live on the ninety lire a day the major was paying, nor on the leftover smelly old cheese sandwiches, nor on the old chocolate éclairs which they were allowed to carry out of the club when the cream became like pus. As Giulia mounted that staircase every afternoon, all of Naples in the winter of 1943-44 was around her ears: babies freezing because there wasn’t any firewood, American-issue pasta that turned to gray entrails when you put it in the pot, the sugar at wild prices, whose office boss (God love him!) was buried alive in last night’s bombing, what girl had finally given up her reputation and gone with the Allies, the rate of Negro children born to Sicilian women. Giulia knew only that she was numb from it all. Then she would put on her Mother Hubbard and sit down behind her sandwiches and play tittattoe with an American captain till her eyes sang with pain, or listen to an American colonel who resembled her Papa tell her why he hadn’t won the mayoralty of Sioux Falls, wherever that was.

Both Giulia and Wilma had their own following. Around her cash desk Wilma attracted young airplane drivers whose tongues began to drip after their eighth Martini. For Wilma’s benefit they fought all over again the bombing sorties out of Foggia. They gestured and goaded one another into new heights of theatrical enterprise in their tales, as little boys vie to entertain a little girl on the sidewalk. And Wilma also had a patronage that intrigued Giulia. These were bright and disillusioned parachute captains, majors from rich Baltimore families, lieutenants who wrote verses. With all these characters Wilma held court. She was magnificent, Giulia thought. Wilma knew what was in God’s mind when He created Woman. When Wilma entertained her boys at her cash desk, she leaned slightly back from them in tender hauteur, her eyes mocking and affectionate from inside their azure mascara shadows. Wilma’s mouth was too big, but it was in such constant motion of eloquence that Giulia was never sure how large it was. And sometimes Wilma’s laugh of protest came through the dance band, a trumpet all her own. Giulia saw that Wilma loved men. Therefore men loved Wilma. Or when no men were clustered about Wilma’s cash desk, Gino would visit her from his office. He was liaison between all the Neapolitans and the mournful lieutenant who was the major’s assistant. By privilege of his caste Gino wore only a turtle-necked sweater and tweed trousers. He’d talk long and low to Wilma, their faces scarcely apart. Often he’d make love to her with a speed and surety and intimacy which caused Giulia to turn her face away. The spectacle of this light bandit love made her sad for hours.

When Giulia first took her job at PBS Club, Mamma had all sorts of cautions to her daughter, reminding her that Italian girls were trained to handle men. Perhaps Giulia, to be on the safe side, ought always to carry a small dagger? Giulia laughed painedly and Wilma shrieked at the idea as they sat sipping coffee by Mamma’s couch. For indeed Giulia did carry about her an armor deceptive as a cobweb. Officers used to lean over her by the hour. They asked her what was the Italian word for love. They told her that she was as lovely as their sister Elaine. Sometimes at closing time when they were tight Giulia noticed something painful and cruel in their eyes, but it faded when they looked at the down on her cheeks. She knew what they wanted of her, but no one ever framed it to her. And Giulia came to learn much of the world’s men simply by observing them. She doubted that she’d marry Pasquale when he came back from his imprisonment in Oran.

One evening in August, 1944, she was sitting on her small enclosed throne, the cash desk of the bar at PBS Officers’ Club. The boys were jammed four deep at the bar; the air was silky gray with cigarette smoke. The officers kept up a roaring and a laughing over their drinks, a curtain which was in its turn pierced by the public-address system piping in the orchestra from the dance floor. For the major was determined that in no place in the club should there be any silence. He told the sad lieutenant who was his office boy (and the lieutenant told Giulia) that they were endeavoring to avoid that stuffiness which always endangers a men’s club. By now Giulia was used to American noises and to the American idea of living loudly and in public.

The dais on which she sat was so walled that in her six-hour shift she could cross or uncross her legs without anybody’s seeing the results. At her right hand she had a stack of chit books and a lined roster to be signed by all who bought her tickets. At her left was an English dictionary and a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She’d make her sale with an automatic swift smile, then reimmerse herself in her novel. The tumult of the bar would die in her ears, and she could forget that she was the only woman in a vaulted roomful of drinking men. She was halfway through Uncle Tom. Next she’d lined up Gone With the Wind, which she possessed in both English and Italian. By collating both copies she figured that in another month her English would have arrived at perfection. Long ago she’d dropped the Oxford accent she’d learned from her maestra at the liceo.

On this August night the officers hadn’t bothered her. In eight months at PBS Club she’d polished up the brushoff tactics Wilma had taught her. But just now opposite her leaning on the bar was a most simpatico person. On one tab of his collar he had a silver cross. By a little questioning Giulia proved to herself what she’d guessed when she first saw him — that he was a priest. He was drinking gin and juice. He minded his own business, except that every so often he gave her a kind smile. He spoke to her in both English and Latin. When she got stuck on a word in her novel, he’d explain it to her, poising his brown finger on the pages of her book. This chaplain’s hair was cropped to the bone. His face had the glow of a child. To Giulia he was a contrast with all the other American officers at the bar, whose faces were angry or soiled or lined or predatory.

— Have you many Simon Legrees in America? Giulia asked, looking up from her book. Her forehead was resting on her hand.

— Oh lots, the priest said laughing. But we’ve taken their horsewhips away from them.

— I take this book home with me every night, said Giulia. Last night I read where Little Eva dies, and I cried myself to sleep.

The priest laughed again and rocked back and forth on his combat boots.

— Giulia, you’re great. I wish some of the bobby-soxers in my Boston parish could see you. They wouldn’t believe you existed. . . . Crying yourself to sleep over a book! . . . American women used to do that fifty years ago . . . but not now.

She laid her novel face down and searched his face. The bar was weighted with the stifling August air. She felt the tiny ringlets fan over her moist brow.

— Am I so different, Father? she asked earnestly.

— Well, frankly, Giulia, you’re out of this world. . . .

Then his face rushed a wild crimson, and he set down his glass and turned away.

— Good night, Giulia, and God bless you.

— Good night, Father, and thank you.

She watched him leave the bar through its lurid smoke. He was with the 3rd Division, which was crowding the streets of Naples. She d heard that soon there’d be an invasion of southern France. That was why in August, 1944, you couldn’t turn around in Naples for the americani. There were more of them here now than she remembered when the city fell in October of last year. Giulia sighed and resumed her novel. She found that her thoughts were still with the priest, not with Signora Harriet Beecher Stowe. So she shut her book and thrust it under her dictionary.

Then there came to the only open space at the bar a florid major clasping the waist of an American nurse. Giulia’d never got used to seeing women in officers’ greens and wearing lieutenant’s bars. Most of the American nurses had been gracious to her, saying that she was a dream. But this major and this nurse exuded an ugly reckless giddiness of alcohol. The nurse snuggled into the major and chuckled. She was a stout blonde, her cap set madly on her dyed hair. She had also a double chin. She began to size up Giulia, going all over her dreary Mother Hubbard with eyes like a parrot’s.

— Sell me some chits, baby, the major said. Don’t just sit there and look like a doll.

— Please sign the paper, Giulia said, pushing it and a pen toward him.

— Well, just who does she think she is? the nurse said, blowing cigarette smoke into Giulia’s face.

Giulia’s eyes watered, but she said nothing.

— A mighty pretty piece of quail, the major said to the nurse, indicating Giulia with a whistle.

— Herbert, the nurse said, don’t give me any of that crap that she reminds you of your daughter. I’ve heard that crap out of you before.

The nurse leaned her head on the major’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Her double chin bobbled while she swallowed her drink. Then she leaned close to Giulia.

— Why don’t you use lipstick, girlie?

— I have naturally good color, Giulia said. And lipstick is hard to get in Naples this year. And if I put too much on, my mother would have me wash it off . . .

— Well, listen to that now, said the nurse. Don’t get on your high horse with me, girlie. I have to take enough crap on the ward in the daytime. I didn’t come here to have the likes of you insult me. . . . I’m a commissioned officer in the American Army in case you don’t realize it, girlie. I’ve a good mind to report you to the military manager. . . . I could have you thrown out on Via Roma with the rest of them . . .

— Oh dry up, Mary, the major said. Why don’t you buy her some lipstick from your own PX?

— I’d croak first, the nurse said, her double chin jiggling. Let’s get the hell out of this flea joint. . . . Get the jeep and drive me back to Aversa. . . . I’m all sweaty. I can’t beat this damn heat.

— And just mind your p’s and q’s with me, girlie, she added to Giulia. I’d hate to tell you what I think of you Ginso women.

The nurse and her major went out of the bar nudging one another, the major protesting that he hadn’t made eyes at Giulia. Giulia watched their exit. Then she laid her head in her hands. Only for an instant, for the major insisted that his girls look sharp on duty.

Through the open windows of the Bank of Naples looking out on Via Rome the sultry music of the Neapolitan night came up to Giulia, an undertone discernible even through the rumble of the officer’s bar. She could all but distinguish the press of the women’s heels on the pavements beneath her, could almost see the Neapolitans lounging in doorways and the scugnizz’ peddling things till they must leave the streets at curfew hour. This murmur of her own town had a certain meaning for Giulia. The simulated gaiety of the Americans in their bar had none. She was weary. The very repose of sitting and selling chits or sandwiches for eight months was beginning to fatigue her. Wilma and the other girls could break the monotonly by ducking down behind the cassa for a quick cigarette. Lately she noticed that she’d a headache when she walked away from the club around midnight. Perhaps it was the war. Perhaps it was Naples in August, 1944. Perhaps she was what the americani called fed up. But it did seem to her that her life was assuming the quality of a grinning automaton who worked on the four-o’clock shift. She knew that she was giving nothing of herself, that she was turning into a slightly stale vase of flowers. . . .

— Buck up, Giulia, said an officer, buying some chits. Life is real, life is earnest.

— Yes, Giulia said, lowering her eyes.

— So ye won’t talk to me tonight? the officer said, waggling a finger. Okay, don’t. I’ll go and shoot the breeze with Wilma. She’s naughty. . . . I like em naughty. Why don’tcha wise up and get naughty too?

He left her in an irritation. Giulia sold more books of chits, but all the time her mind was running in its own groove. She thought of her fidanzato Pasquale. Every week his letters came from the P/W enclosure in Oran. They were flatulent and lamenting, living over the years 1940 and 1941. They were full of noble whining and quotations from Leopardi. He kept telling her that Italy and the Italians were done for.

And Giulia thought of the Neopolitan girls she’d grown up with. Either they’d gone giggling over to the Allies for what they could get, or else their mothers had locked them up for the duration. She knew that the lives of all Neapolitans had been cut in two. They might all be said to have died; yet she doubted if they’d had a rebirth, though their bodies went right on living. Only herself seemed unchanged, moving in some orbit of her own that had no relation to any reality.

On this night in August, 1944, Giulia was lonely. She was the only Neapolitan girl who was hewing to her own destiny, as though the war had never been. Thus now in her breast she felt a pulse of fierceness and resentment when she looked at the Naples of August, 1944. There was nothing here now that offered her any consolation or the old quiet delight she once took from life: the sip of a glass of new wine, the walks with her girl friends (she’d none now, though she visited many), and that old pleasure she used to get from combing out her hair before going to bed. All these simple processes and habits had become routine and zestless to her. She felt like a starving person who has lost the taste for food. She wondered if she were dying of staleness.

— O Dio mio, she said fiercely to herself, su, su! coraggio! . . .

She wondered to what a pretty pass she’d come that often now she carried on dialogues with herself. And it was all very simple, for she saw clean through the rhetoric of Italian. She wished to be loved. This craving had crystallized in Giulia during her eight months at PBS Club.

But she wished to be loved according to the old standards of honor passed down through generations of Italian mothers. She wasn’t interested in something mad and fragrant for a few nights, such as she saw all about her in Naples of August, 1944. Before the fall of Naples she’d been on the right path to be loved according to her lights. She saw the purpose of her training, to be an Italian girl of softness and dignity. Nearly all Italian women had these traits. But many had abandoned them in the catastrophe that was rending Italy. Giulia had abandoned nothing. Now as a result of still living as she’d been taught to live, she found herself like an island, off by herself. She wondered if she were mad. She feared she’d schooled her soul for something that could never again materialize in Italy. She was objective enough to know that in a normal time she’d have had a quietly happy life. She’d have been a good wife and a good mother. That was what women did best. But how were these things to be now? Sometimes she got such a perspective on herself that she seemed a quiet feast set on a table to which no man would ever come. Now the food was growing cold, and all the loving pains of the cook were wasted. . . .

Giulia couldn’t resist laying her face in her hands. She felt her tears squeezing through her tightly locked fingers.

— Why you’re crying, a voice spoke to her. Ma Lei non deve piangere cosi amaramente. . . . Perchè?

She looked up and made a grab for the handkerchief that an American captain whom she’d never seen was holding out to her. She peered swiftly up and down the bar. Everyone was drunk and talking wildly. No one had noticed her disgraceful giving-way. The tears in her eyes stopped quite suddenly. She turned away her head from the American captain and blew her nose. Reality returned to her in wave upon wave of mortification.

— Metterei volentieri mille fazzoletti Sua disposizione, the captain said.

Her joy at being addressed in formal Italian by an American made Giulia weak. She gripped both sides of her cash desk, smiled stupidly, and returned his handkerchief to him. She reached blindly for her green bag to take out her own.

— You mustn’t speak Italian to me, she said. Among my American friends I speak American.

— Now who taught you that pretty speech? the captain said. I know you’re too sharp a girl to think that the people who come to this club are your friends. So don’t begin with a hypocrisy . . . let’s be honest with one another from the start, shall we?

— Yes, said Giulia, I do so want someone to be honest with.

The brazen sound of this speech in English (she still thought in Italian) stunned her. She felt her color coming up over the shapeless collar of her Mother Hubbard.

— Yes, the captain said, setting down his glass, let us be completely honest with one another. . . . I’ll be honest with you. You’re the loveliest girl I’ve ever laid eyes on. And your loveliness comes . . . from being . . . just there. . . . I walked into this smelly strained room, expecting to find nothing. And I find you . . . just . . . there . . . how wonderful. . . . And I’m not drunk either.

This American captain was the ugliest man Giulia had ever looked upon. His face was square. In his combat boots he looked like a wooden robot. His hair was gray at the temples. Yet when he smiled or gestured with his long gentle hands, or when he spoke, it seemed to her that granite dissolved into music. He was so hideous that he made her want to laugh, as at a gnome in a fairy tale. Yet her laughter at him turned back on herself. In his first contact with her this captain had beckoned her into a peace in which he himself moved. This peace wasn’t specious. Giulia sensed it was a solid block which only his death could shatter. Within five minutes she thought that this captain had always been resident some place inside her, had chosen this moment to step out and introduce himself. For he had a way of allaying her doubts before she uttered them. He knew her, and she knew him, as though all their lives they’d instinctively been preparing for one another.

— You’re smiling now, the captain said. That’s better. Tell me that you never smiled at anyone that way before.

— No, said Giulia, hardly daring to look at him, I never have.

For the rest of the evening till the bar closed Giulia and the American captain talked together. Quietly, when the spirit moved them to say something; casually, without effort. He leaned opposite her on the bar. Never too near or too familiar, because the externals weren’t necessary. Something else in them was touching. And there was respect for each other’s privacy, like two civilized people bowing in a maelstrom. The bar ceased to exist for them. Giulia continued to sell chits. Even when she took her eyes from him to count chits or change or to speak to the officer purchasing, she knew that this captain was with her. From this moment on he wouldn’t leave her. Some force had come up under her and was buoying her up as she’d never swum before. And she’d look into that face with no redeeming trait of beauty to make a man desirable. Then a laugh of the wildest joy would seem to smother her. He responded to everything she thought or said as though, well, that was exactly what he’d expected her to think or say.

— We’re not mad, the captain said. Sanity is so marvelous.

Yet Giulia in her bed that night was sure she was mad. She laughed and cried till the sun came up over Naples. Looking at her sorry face in the morning, she laughed again and fell back on her bed.

— Sì, sono pazza, she said. Non potrei essere così felice. . . .

That afternoon Giulia knew she’d gone mad, but in a precise and scheming way. She put on and took off nearly all her dresses. She experimented with her hair, ending by doing it the old way with the delta of ringlets around her brow. Mamma from her couch kept calling out Whatever on earth was the matter with Giulia? And Giulia only smiled from before her mirror, her mouth full of hairpins. Finally she put on her green frock, her green shoes, her green Meravigliosa hat with the green bow. Then she tucked under her arm the copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the English dictionary. Mamma, inspecting her, pointed out that today was neither Sunday nor a giorno di festa. To which Giulia replied that, given the right frame of mind, every day was a giorno di festa.

She went down into the streets of Naples. In August, 1944, the city had a smell of baking stone shot through with the spicy tang of mandarini sold in the corner wagons. In that salita where Giulia lived the corrugated iron walls of the public urinal impregnated the air with an acrid fume poignant as history. She walked quickly along humming to herself that tune “Polvere di Stelle” by Hoagy Carmichael. She swung her green bag so gaily that shoeshine boys in the public garden of Piazza Municipio turned round at their stands and called out to her invitations that had an American tone of provocation. She had also to pass the palazzo where an American port battalion was quartered; the GI’s were hanging out of their balcony windows in their undershirts, chewing gum and swapping with one another observations on current events and Neapolitan girls with whom they were shacking. Giulia’s passage provoked a madrigal of whistles. The sentinel at the barbed wire, a GI of more feudal heritage, presented arms to her. Ordinarily she’d have cast down her eyes and felt her body go taut, but today she smiled and looked him straight in the face.

— Come stare? Tu molto buono, the sentinel said, shifting his carbine back to its shoulder sling.

— Grazie assai, Giulia said.

Wilma and Gino were living together in two rooms on Via Diaz. They were quite comfortable by pooling their salaries from PBS Club and by drawing American rations that Gino’d promoted from the quartermaster. They were easily the happiest unwed couple in all Naples. Their prosperity and their love were supported by the Americans, whom they both cherished with the cynical devotion of people below stairs.

This afternoon Giulia found them where she’d hoped she would, taking the sun from their second-story balcony, leaning on the railing and holding hands. They talked incessantly to each other, Gino’s mouth against Wilma’s hidden ear, whispering ironies and passions. Gino was wearing his turtle-necked sweater and a pair of white flannels. His brilliantined curls wriggled like garter snakes in the Neapolitan sunlight. Wilma had on a blue silk kimono. The white globes of her breasts twinkled in the sun. Her blue hair was low over her forehead; her rouged and mascaraed face made her features sharp and clear to Giulia, who was standing thirty feet below the doting couple. Wilma sent up her scream of welcome.

— Ho bisogno di te, Giulia called up to the balcony, beckoning urgently up to Wilma.

— Giulietta, aspetta un po’! Wilma cried and vanished from the balcony, roguishly tucking her kimono about her creamy shoulders.

— Ciao, Giulietta, Gino said, leaning out over Giulia.

— Ciao, Gino, said Giulia.

After a while Wilma appeared on the sidewalk and took Giulia’s arm. They waved good-by to Gino on his balcony and whisked off along Via Medina at a businesslike clip. Wilma’d put on a dramatic hat with a veil and had applied more paint so that her generous flamboyant face glistened like porcelain under the veil. With her breezy tact she didn’t even inquire what Giulia wanted of her. Obviously she remembered her ancient promise to be Giulia’s chaperone in any emergency.

— Come mai sei cosi cambiata in una notte? Wilma said chuckling.

By this one sentence Giulia knew that this wise girl was in on her secret. Wilma smoked a cigarette through the mesh of her veil, giving her the appearance of a network on fire. They turned up Via Diaz, arriving at the Intendenza di Finanza Building. In August, 1944, this was the headquarters of the Peninsular Base Section. Without any difficulty they got by the MP and into the cool foyer, for Wilma had a pass. As they seated themselves on the bench by the information booth, Giulia suddenly asked what would Wilma think if she married an American? Wilma gave out a jolly cackle, patted her hand, and said that Giulia for quite some time had been spoiling for an American.

They didn’t say much while they waited. Giulia’s body went into her usual meek relaxation. Inside however she felt like a faggot of dynamite. Wilma smoked two cigarettes. At all officers who passed by she gave a benign look. For by now Wilma and Giulia knew every American officer in Naples who drank at PBS Club. Some stopped and kissed Wilma’s hand and exchanged veiled obscenities with her. And they bowed and said Hi to Giulia. Wilma held a little salon in the cortile.

At seventeen hours the court filled up with officers and GI’s coming down from the offices above. The GI’s went shooting out into the streets of Naples for their mess and the long questing Neapolitan evening. The officers carried themselves more stuffily. They moved in tight groups, talking shop and vengeance and promotions. For the PBS officers were quite different from the combat officers who descended on Naples for their leaves from the front. Giulia watched them all go by from under her green bonnet. It was like counting sheep. She peered quickly at the faces of each, then lowered her eyes to the green bows of her tiny slippers.

— Dov’è, dov’è? Wilma whispered nervously.

She was taking it almost as hard as Giulia herself.

After a stretch of watching faces and confessing to a sinking feeling that maybe He wasn’t coming after all, and wondering whether she’d gone too far, Giulia suddenly planted her elbow against Wilma’s fruity flank.

— Eccolo che viene, Giulia said.

Wilma gave a sigh and gathered herself up in her noblest manner.

Her Captain came gravely toward them. He’d been planting his khaki cap over his right ear. Catching sight of them, he dropped his hands to his sides, then squared out in a gesture of surprise and welcome. His ugly face fired into a smile. Giulia heard Wilma sigh again, gustily.

— Ma! . . . said Wilma, and Giulia had no idea what she meant by this.

Giulia made Her Captain a curtsy of humility and joy. She introduced him to Wilma, who broke out into praise and effusions. It was one of those things that Wilma did gorgeously well, pretending that she was merely renewing the acquaintance of the person presented to her. But all the while (Giulia knew) from under the veil Wilma’s merciless witty eyes were giving Her Captain an appraisal like the last judgment. Nothing escaped Wilma. It was for this reason Giulia’d brought her along: to comply with South Italian standards of decorum, and also to check on her own perceptions.

— Ma parla cosi bene italiano! Wilma squealed graciously.

For a few minutes they all three spoke in Italian. Wilma and Giulia’s Captain outdid one another in gallantries and compliments. Giulia just watched and listened, her gray eyes going from one face to the other. Inside she felt proud and gay, for it was already clear that Wilma and Her Captain liked and respected each other. Buon indizio. Both excelled in a mellow worldly Italian chatter of the formalest sort. Both realized that conversation of this civilized order was a means to an end. Giulia herself was by no means so glib. She was accustomed to sit in a corner and reflect gravely to herself. Yet she derived a delight in watching Wilma and Her Captain hit it off.

Then Her Captain took Giulia’s arm ever so lightly, as though a feather had insinuated itself into the crook of her elbow. And he observed to Wilma in English:

— I’ve been thinking of my girl all day long.

— You are making no mistake, said Wilma, whose English was slow and stately.

There was a pause, seemingly contrived by Wilma, in which Giulia and Her Captain looked at each other. Their eyes interlaced in hunger and questioning, and Giulia’s small doubts were again put at rest. There came to her again that odd mad peace, that sense of being pulled out of the tempest and the dark, of flying upward into the sun. Giulia felt giddy, and she heard Wilma laugh at Her Captain:

— Carina la nostra bimba, eh?

— Ma si, said the captain. Ma si. Un tesoro. . . .

— Ciao, Giulia, the captain said.

— Ciao, capitano, Giulia answered. The words came from deep within her.

— I invite you both to tea, the captain said.

He placed himself in the middle, took both their arms, and they walked out into Naples. For Giulia the sun had never been so warm, the browns and grays of Napoli so rich. She looked at the thousands of Neapolitans scurrying on Via Roma, screaming and gesticulating and worrying; and she found herself blessing them all: the weary widows, the frenetic scugnizz’, the anxious studenti and studentesse burbling about their examinations and the spleen of their professori. All the while during their walk Her Captain and Wilma chattered of tiny nothings and amenities. Giulia didn’t feel as though she were left out of the conversation, but rather that with their words they were making a garland for her. They were both aware of her.

The three entered the Galleria Umberto and made for a café. The bars were just opening. In the center of the Galleria, the focus of the cross that was its floor plan, a Neapolitan in the middle of a crowd talked against Russia and Il Comunismo. A trio of Italian soldiers hissed and made scissors motions toward the hair of a girl in conference with American GI’s. Children scooted along the walls selling cameos and carrying trays of fried fish and dough. And through the Galleria ran a rumble as though they were all underground. For the first time in a year Giulia could look at all these human faces and feel that maybe there weren’t too many people in the world after all.

They sat down at the wicker table of a café on the pavement of the Galleria. Giulia had never appeared in public before without Mamma or Papa. Her Captain helped her shed her green coat over the back of her chair. For Wilma and herself he ordered a torta, a dish of ice cream, and an orangeade. Wilma lit into whatever was put in front of her, gossiping without pause. She and Giulia’s Captain discussed Badoglio, Hitler, and American movies. It wasn’t the sort of discussion in which Giulia was at home. But she listened and smiled and shifted her eyes from one to the other as though she were a spectator at a tennis match. In former times she’d have thought herself a nitwit not to be able to engage in their repartee, but now she knew it wasn’t really necessary. She felt like closing her eyes and just listening.

— This is a conversation piece, Her Captain told her.

— A what? Giulia asked, reaching for her dictionary.

— A way for ladies and gentlemen to pass their time when they’ve nothing better to do.

— Must I learn how to do it? Giulia asked worriedly.

— I wish you wouldn’t, the captain said gravely. — I don’t want you to be a bluestocking.

— Blue stockings? said Giulia, looking down at her own. Do American girls wear those?

She suddenly felt frightened. Both of them might be playing with her.

— You just be Giulia, the captain said. No American girl could do that, you see.

Then Wilma changed her rhythm and got off into a long Italianate speech of set pattern, in which she enumerated Giulia’s qualities, as though she were preaching a funeral sermon. She spoke feelingly of Giulia’s reserve, piety, industry, and frugality. Then she finished off with a conundrum twist, that she doubted whether Giulia would marry an American. They weren’t fine-grained enough for Giulia, Wilma thought.

— No? said the captain, lighting Wilma’s cigarette.

Giulia saw herself as a statue in green hat, green dress, and green shoes, perched on an auction block. She began to feel ill at ease and wished that Wilma would stop talking. She began almost to wish that Her Captain weren’t there either, that she could be alone in her room and brood for a little while. It seemed to her that an issue was being forced and shaped by conventions, when on the face of it it was so easy and so natural. Then she began to wonder if there weren’t something more than a little mad about herself, too secret and private and egoistic. But at this very moment Her Captain reached over, took the tips of her fingers, and squeezed them lightly.

— Giulietta is not of this world, Wilma said laughing.

— She’s not worldly, the captain corrected.

And they walked in their threesome back along Via Roma. It was time for Giulia and Wilma to climb the stairs of the Bank of Naples, slip into their chaste Mother Hubbards, and go on duty for the evening. But at the entrance to the club Wilma suddenly said grazie and arrivederLa to the captain and dashed upstairs, leaving them alone together. Giulia was dazed and embarrassed. She prepared to say arrivederLa to Her Captain and follow Wilma. But Her Captain laid his long hands on her shoulders. She saw a convulsion cross his dark hard features. Then he kissed her fingers.

— My darling, he said, it mustn’t frighten you that I love you.

Giulia turned slowly away in hot tears. She groped her way up the stairs like a blind girl.

Reversing the principles of Italian courtship, Giulia took the initiative because Her Captain was a straniero. She suddenly found herself so strong and resourceful that she feared she might be wearing the figurative pants, like those American women who appeared on the streets of Naples with slacks emphasizing their buttocks. In this period of Giulia’s love Wilma was her second, embodying all the traditional functions of duenna, cicisbeo, and arbiter. It was a role that Wilma loved because her nature gloried in all duplicities. At thirty-one Wilma had a heart as rich and scheming as a dowager or matriarch of eighty. If Giulia in her poised timidity made the balls, it was Wilma who aimed them and fired them to their mark.

The process was simply this: gradually to lead Her Captain by threads of silk into Giulia’s house, where his intentions would be sounded out. If he passed all the Neapolitan tests, he’d then be secured to the household with chains of steel. Her Captain, knowing Italian and the Italians, saw clearly what was going on behind the scenes and grinned within himself. He suffered himself to be led to the slaughter, as cheerful as a sacrificial heifer. He never made any of the breaks or gaucheries perpetrated by most Americans when they enter the European marital labyrinth.

Giulia’s brother Gennaro was the first hurdle to leap, a prickly one in his position as Younger Brother. Gennaro still worked evenings as a waiter at PBS Club. In one year Giulia’d seen him change from something adored and gilded into a bitter and handsome Neapolitan, out for Number One. He dealt in American cigarettes and food. He was now quite rich. Giulia believed that he was the lover of an American WAC captain. He kept his job at the club only to maintain some respectability in Mamma’s eyes. Giulia of course (and Papa to a lesser extent) had no illusions about Gennaro.

It was Wilma, the great fixer, who delivered the first coup and forestalled any nonsense from Gennaro. In the major’s office at the Bank of Naples she presented Giulia’s Captain to Giulia’s brother. Five minutes later she reported to Giulia that the encounter had been as economical and efficacious as lightning. The captain had offered Gennaro a cigarette and lit it. They’d looked at one another like boxers in their corners. Then, Wilma said, Gennaro had folded his hands on his breast in Neapolitan exhortation and had said in his brand-new business Americanese:

— Captain, you know my sister is strictly a ragazza per bene?

— That fact has always been uppermost in my mind, the captain said.

— And are you going to take her to America with you as your wife?

— I don’t look upon your sister as a week-end vacation, the captain had said, bristling at the directness, yet aware that it was necessary.

Two days later things got going like a clockwork juggernaut. Giulia’s Mamma invited Giulia’s Captain to coffee. The affair followed the rules for the first formal encounter of all parties to the imminent transaction. There were present Papa, Mamma, Gennaro, Giulia, Wilma, Gino, and Elvira the dowd. To mark the austerity of the occasion Giulia’s ninety-year-old paternal grandmother was brought in from Caserta. This old lady was there to play the role of devil’s advocate, lecturing on the risks of marriage and citing fearful examples of Neapolitan girls who’d been betrayed by Americans and Negroes. In honor to the occasion, angina or no, Mamma got out of her sheepskin slippers and rose from her couch. She forgot about her heart condition and rustled about the apartment in black silk, giving instructions on the disposition of the coffee service and reminiscing on how such matters were carried off in Firenze when she was a girl. Wilma brewed the coffee (American) strong and black. She’d also stolen from PBS Club several dozen éclairs and sandwiches made of Spam. These were all set formally on silver trays of Mamma’s dowry.

When Giulia’s Captain, precisely at sixteen hours, knocked on the apartment door, he was admitted by Gennaro to a scene as stylized as a Chinese play. On the couch sat Mamma, her double chin and moles propped over her black silk gown, her fingers queenly with rings. She didn’t look at the captain till he was presented to her. At Mamma’s right hunched the grandmother in mauve lace, muttering to herself the part she was to play and peering about with bleary Cassandra eyes. Papa paced up and down the salotto with a thick bitten cigar in his hand. He wore his gold watch chain. Giulia sat demurely by herself on a leather ottoman. She must pretend that she had nothing at all to do with the ceremonies, that she was a timid and nubile slave girl about to be sold to the highest bidder. She’d known this role since she was a tiny girl. But she’d never imagined that some day it would come her turn to play it.

The introductory sallies and pleasantries took five minutes. Papa in his excitement was lordly and dictatorial. Once he wept. The entire trope was conducted in Italian, everyone using the Lei form, which is sometimes thorny for Neapolitans of the middle class. The paternal grandmother kept lapsing into dialect. Gennaro occasionally lapsed into choice Americanese. Papa, as a kind of marital toastmaster, made his introductory remarks, keyed to Naples in August, 1944. He spoke of the collapse of fascism, of the liberating Allies. Then he became eloquent on prices and the black market. This second section of his prepared discourse was punctuated by comments and illustrative examples from Gennaro and Gino.

Next it was Mamma’s turn. She folded her delicate hands in her great lap. In her wheezy voice she confessed that Giulia had been engaged to a Neapolitan sottotenente called Pasquale. But that person was to be considered dead because he was an unrepentant Fascist and a prisoner of war at Oran. Pasquale’s family had released Giulia from her bond. Then Mamma launched into Giulia and Giulia’s upbringing. She gave a picture of Giulia’s faults and virtues. But since Giulia was a ragazza seria, her virtues outweighed her faults. The captain was invited to form the opinion that whoever wed Giulia was getting a treasure.

To all this Giulia’s Captain smiled and nodded whenever Mamma gasped for breath:

— Ehhhhh, sì, gentile signora. . . .

Then there was the third and grim act before the refreshments could be served. The paternal grandmother talked for twenty minutes, with gestures, on vice among young women. After its initial hoarseness her voice was as great as Duse’s, falling in periods and strophes through the dingy apartment. She sniffed at Neapolitan trash that walked Via Roma, but discounted these girls as having always been cattive. Then she mentioned a higher percentage of girls who had once been good, but now prostituted themselves to the Allies per qualche scopo. She whispered of a lurid marriage in which a Neapolitan girl had imagined herself legally joined to an American MP, only to discover that they’d been wed outside the church, and now had a child on the way without any legal proof of who was the father. But the paternal grandmother finished in radiance and optimism, picturing a tiny percentage of good Italian girls who’d shut themselves up in their houses waiting till the right man came along. And to all of this Giulia’s Captain made the proper comment:

— Ma si figuri un po’, che strazî, che sofferenze. . . .

Everybody relaxed after the speeches were over. Giulia from her ottoman smiled on Her Captain. The captain and Papa and Gino and Gennaro had some men’s talk, weighty and discerning. Giulia and Wilma withdrew to the kitchen and whisked out the coffee and the sweets. Mamma allowed the captain to kiss her cheek, under a mole. Everybody praised everybody else. The air twittered with Italian delight. The world was good after all. And the paternal grandmother, in reaching greedily for her ninth éclair, fell into the hammered silver tray and got chocolate icing all over her lavender lace.

Now that she’d complied with all the formalities, Giulia was free of certain restrictions, though she was bound by others. The worst machinations were over. She might now, for example, take walks with Her Captain if Wilma came along. Once even Mamma, angina and all, turned up as the captain’s guest in a box for Rigoletto at the San Carlo. But O Dio mio, Giulia could go neither alone nor in company to Her Captain’s apartment on Via Santa Brigida. In point of fact she shouldn’t be alone with him anywhere anytime. But Wilma was an indulgent and winking chaperone. Often she contrived to relieve Giulia of her cash desk at the club for one hour at a time. Then Giulia would slip out the back way and meet Her Captain in Piazza Municipio, in the public garden full of rustling figures aimlessly wandering, full of moonlight and queues before the urinals. Then Giulia had one full hour alone with Her Captain. They’d walk hand in hand along Via Caracciolo. The bay was cobalt under the August moonlight. He’d point out to her the shipping that teemed on the water, the landing craft for infantry, sharp metal wedges that rode low on the tide, the sulking hospital ships.

It was on Via Caracciolo that Giulia got her first kiss.

— I think often at night, she said, that I must lose you. I’m too happy. . . .

They were leaning by a little altar to Neptune in a niche with sculpted conch shells. Below them the fishermen had beached their boats on a mole, wooden-bellied crescents of tar piled along one another like dead whales. Sometimes the light of a motorboat slashed their faces. In an interlude of darkness he tilted up her chin and covered her mouth with his. He drew in her lower lip like a little fig. Giulia was inundated by a new sensation. Concentric circles flowed out from her heart till her whole small body shook. Her hand went around his neck, and they swayed together in the hot darkness. His fingers slipped up from her waist. She felt she was being invaded with a warmth terrible and sweet, a presentiment of dying with delight. Her breath choked up in her throat; she felt that she was being crushed. Something red and beaconlike flickered in her mind, crying Not Yet, Not Yet. With a violence, not of revulsion, but to keep her mind intact, she released herself.

— Puritan, he said. By God, you’ll be both wife and mistress, Giulia.

— We must be getting back, she said in joy and terror.

In the next days Her Captain seemed to have sloughed off most of his marvelous peace. He chafed at the politics and meanness of base section life. He said he hadn’t been happy since he left his tank outfit. Each day he told her of friends killed a few hundred kilometers to the north of them. Then he began to lecture her on her adjustment to American life. He told her sadly that to be happy as his wife in America she must convert her personality. He said she was too utterly dependent on him. That an American wife was something quite different from an Italian wife, shut up in the house with her children. His words hurt her, though she never told him so.

— And it’s this paradox that saddens me, he said. I fell in love with you, Giulia, because you’re something apart from all cheapness. You’re everything that women have always insisted that they were, yet rarely succeeded in being. I wonder if in America you could stay that way.

— You think I’m not real? she said hotly. You think me incapable of being myself anywhere?

— I know, I know . . . but the noblest Italian life doesn’t belong in the twentieth century at all. . . . There seems to be no more room for flowers in this world.

— I may be a flower, said Giulia, puzzled and piqued, but I think I have roots . . . and . . . what you call in American . . . guts.

— It’s the guts of woman, he said moodily, that ability to be proud without insulting, to stand childbirth and sacrifice. . . . But you scare me because I can’t find a trace of bitchiness in you.

— Do you want there to be?

— God no, my darling, he said, sighing and pulling her against him.

And Giulia saw with a comic relief that she was stronger than he. That was the way it was decreed to be. She looked detachedly at her superiority with an odd wistfulness. It might be something given her to serve her in the long years ahead.

One night he came to their meeting with an air restless and sheepish. It didn’t become him. Hand in hand they walked for fifteen minutes along Via Caracciolo. She waited, listening to him with a new ear that had been born in her. At last they stopped and looked out at the bay from the railing.

— Sei nervoso, she said reproachfully. Hai qualche segreto . . .

He took her hand and rubbed her fingers.

— Yes, Giulia, I have. . . . Tomorrow I’m leaving for the front. I put myself in for it. I thought it over for a long time. I’m going back to the tanks. . . . It’s not fair to you, but it’s the way I feel. I’m going up there with all the others. . . . For that’s where I belong. . . . I’m sick to death of all the Americans in Naples, with their villas and their jeeps and their mistresses.

Something snapped in Giulia’s heart. She gushed with a woe she hadn’t dreamed possible in this world. She felt that God had tricked her shabbily.

— You must do what you think is right, she said gently, controlling herself.

— Is that your heart or your brain talking?

— Don’t be cruel to me . . . it’s both.

They had a long silence. Vesuvius glowed weakly on both its peaks.

— Giulia . . . you must stay with me tonight. . . . Get Wilma to tell your mother you’re visiting your grandmother in Caserta.

She felt her nails gouge into her palms.

— I thought you were different from the rest, she said.

— I thought so too. But I’ve got to make love to you, Giulia, and tonight. . . . Suppose . . . up there . . . they got me . . . and I died without ever having had you?

— Then that’s the way it would have to be, she said.

— You must be made of ice, he said.

— I’m not made of ice, she answered, feeling her cheeks scalding. When you touch me I know I’m not made of ice. . . . I want your love . . . all your love . . . just as much as you want mine. I mean some day to give myself wholly to you . . . and not to any other man . . .

— You and your codes of respectability, he cried. In wartime they don’t mean a damn. . . . All that matters is that we love one another.

— I am what I am, Giulia said. I love you. Do you doubt that? This is the first and last time I’ll love. I’m made that way. . . . But I won’t stay with you tonight. Not . . . brutal as it sounds . . . if you were to be killed next week . . .

— Thank you, my dear, he said roughly.

— Oh I know it’s all a game, she said. But I’m so made that I must play that game . . . call it what you will . . . stuffiness . . . respectability . . .

— You’re a fool, he said.

— I’m anything but a fool, she said and began to cry. I know all the arguments and all the answers. All women do. . . . We have to hold you off till we get a ring on our fingers. . . . My mother and her mother before her played that game. . . . And I shall do so too. . . . Don’t you see, my darling? The world is built on such games. Most of those games are invented by women for their own protection . . . for their children’s protection. . . . In every woman there are two things all mixed up . . . her heart and her head . . . but that’s what makes her a woman. . . . And you, my darling, will never know me in love till I’m your wife.

He said nothing further. They walked back along Via Caracciolo by the statue of Pompey in the little garden with the white railing. Giulia was in agony, yet she smiled to herself. She’d gladly pass with him one night in which all their love was rolled up into one knot. But against this, something merciless and logical in her saw the possibility of a lifetime of bitterness and loneliness and aridity. It was a gamble she was willing to make. On such odds her whole life had been predicated.

They entered the Galleria Umberto, where the life and the motion had died. There remained only the black heat of Naples in August, 1944. Their loitering footfalls were prescient and austere.

— My God, Giulia, her Captain said, you’re a fiend.

— Why, every woman is, she answered.

For she knew he’d be coming back to her.