THOUGH GREECE HAD BEEN A RELIEF after Italy, it also worked a little the other way. It was pleasant, after those arid hills, to see trees and plowed fields below one, and to find, on the road to Caserta, hay-ricks and orchards and gardens, an earth that could be cultivated, again; to speed along a high eucalyptus drive; to smell sulphur and swamp and manure. It was gratifying at first glimpse, after the neutral colors of Athens, to see the ridiculous big pink buildings with their green blinds and their plastery statues three times life-size; the yellow-haired or dark-haired women with their red or white clogs; the queer ornaments on the collars of the horses that the Neapolitans seem to love: silver rosettes, silver bells, silver madonnas, saints and birds. I like to look even at the Bay of Naples, which resembles a colored picture postcard.
But since I was here at the end of April, the Americans have set their mark on the scene. A campaign for improvement is in progress. All along the road from Caserta one is admonished by signs in English which make great play with the letter F: “FLIES FOUL FOOD,” “FLIES FEED ON FAECES AND FOOD,” “FLIES SPREAD DIARRHOEA,” etc. And there are warnings all over Naples, thought up no doubt by some advertizing man: “DRIVE CAREFULLY. DEATH IS SO PERMANENT.” In the middle of the Via Roma—for no reason that one can see except that of simple refreshment—a free lemonade stand for Americans has been set up by the Red Cross.
Last spring I saw the bombed-out section that extends a good way in from the docks: shapeless fragments of buildings rising like sand-castle stumps out of mounds of pulverized plaster, filthy children playing in the garbage of the pavementless, lightless, policeless streets, the butcher-shops with gruesome cuts of meat, the half-obliterated shrines. I have had enough of ruins now, and I give this a wide berth. But the misery is all through the city. No matter how late one walks out, the ragged little boys are still in the streets. When they get too tired to beg or pimp, they go to sleep on the curbs along buildings or on the running-boards of parked cars. And everybody who has passed the age of puberty seems to be busy making more children: the town is full of pregnant women and of women with wretched little babies that have sores all over their faces or are covered with the pink mottlings of disease. The Neapolitans seem to me sometimes to have as little relation to people as small octopi, crabs and molluscs brought in by the marine tide.
But the life here is rank and flamboyant, and even in death it exults in the flesh. I have never seen a city in which funerals seem to figure in so important a way. Where so many human creatures are begotten many must be constantly dying, and they like to make a fête of death. The streets are always full of hearses. There are cheap black ones loaded down with flowers, cheap white ones that look like pastry, more costly ones studded with crowns that give the impression of Christmas-tree ornaments. And I saw one magnificent black one, drawn by eight black horses. With its crown-shaped lamps on the corners, its quantities of spiralled columns and its elaborate jet carvings, it looked like a luxurious Renaissance bed.
Yet Count Morra told me in Rome that, when he came here at the time of the invasion, the people had shown great cleverness and courage. It had been “1848 over again.” When the Germans had posted an order that all the young men were to report to help defend the city against the Allies, these young men all immediately disappeared, and the Germans could never locate them. Barricades were thrown up in the streets, and little boys went about with hand-grenades strung around their waists. This was not the result of organization, but mainly a spontaneous movement. It was, he said, as if the spirit of a common purpose had run through the city like an electric current.
I liked Morra. He is not one of the Roman nobility, but something more like a country squire. He had, I was told, never left his estate through the whole of the Fascist regime, though he had refused to pay homage to Fascism and had been penalized and ostracized. He is now, though so severely crippled that it is difficult for him to get around, extremely active as one of the editors of the liberal Nuova Europa and in various other ways. Though cultivated and cosmopolitan like the more detached people in Rome, I thought him a thorough patriot of the old-fashioned disinterested kind. He obviously took deep pride in this demonstration of Neapolitan solidarity.
My earlier visit to Naples is associated with Lili Marlene, which I heard being played at a great rate in the enlisted men’s Red Cross canteen, where, among all those dazed boys from home crowded together in their drab army clothes and breathing the bad air, it seemed to me, in its prettiness and pathos, its banality that was never too obvious, to carry the experience of war which must so largely remain unspoken but which may sometimes be picked up by a song: the hardships, the changes of scene, the blankness, the longing for home. Lili Marlene was originally German, but the Allies had taken it over and the street-singers had learned it in Italy, and everybody had been singing it at the same time. It had sounded through Europe—with no conscious intent on the part of those who sang it—as one of the few human utterances that had no nationalistic animus: it told simply of a soldier’s girl-friend who waited for him night after night in the rain by a lamp-post at the barracks gate. A martial step and the echo of trumpets seem to have faded in the wastes of the war-years. The lover may or may not come back: if he does, he will meet her at the lantern; if he fails to, who will wait there then? And this song was all that these soldiers had had to establish human fellowship between them while they were massacring one another and bombing one another’s sweethearts! This little memorial to a faith perhaps futile was all they had had to offset the tragedy of manhood destroyed and debased!
There were people I knew at Sorrento, but I kept putting off going out there, because my transportation might come any moment and I might have to leave at once; so I stayed on from day to day visiting Pompeii and the Naples Museum and wandering around the city, where I knew nobody.
The Via Roma at night, in the smell-thickened hot August air, was the channel for a dense traffic of women and soldiers looking for women. I spoke one evening to a very pretty girl, almost the only really pretty one I had seen, who seemed, in fact, so well-dressed and fresh-faced that she might have been taken for respectable if she had not been walking alone at that hour in the Via Roma. She was conspicuous among the Neapolitans by her type, which was unusual there: she had yellow hair, brown eyes and fair skin; and I learned later that she was not Italian, but half-Polish and half-German. She took me straight to her place of business, which was in the forbidden zone up the hill from the Via Roma. Every cross-street on this side of the main artery had a sign barring out the troops; and, exploring this quarter for the first time, it was easy for me to understand why. The little girl—who said her name was Giannetta—piloted me by the arm through the squalidest and most sinister-looking streets that I have ever seen anywhere. By a maze of stone steps and blind alleys, a whole world that, besides being closed to the troops, seemed self-contained in its degradation and partly shut off from the rest of the town, we arrived at an old dark and stinking house, where the dank and cavernous stairwell was dripping from thrown-out slops or a permanent leak in the plumbing.
Here Giannetta and three or four other girls hired the use of two disgusting rooms from an old woman who rented a small flat there. When I entered, not without misgivings, I was somewhat reassured to find a taciturn American M.P. sitting solidly in a little waiting room which was also dining room and kitchen. The impression that I got then and later was that the M.P.’s, instead of keeping out the G.I.’s, were giving the girls in the barred zone protection and getting repaid in kind or by a cut out of their professional earnings; and this conclusion has been confirmed since my return by an American airtransport man who spent a good deal of time in Naples and saw how the system worked. Giannetta told me that if a customer made trouble or become obnoxious in any way, she called the M.P. at once and had the man thrown out. He could always be threatened with arrest for having been found in that quarter at all.
Giannetta first said she was seventeen, and she did not look any older; but, forgetting this, she later made it nineteen; and when one day she showed me her passport, I saw that she was down as twenty-two. She had been married and had separated from her husband. She had been unfaithful to him, she confessed—but then he had been unfaithful to her. She had recently come to Naples from Rome, giving her status—she smiled slyly when I remarked on it—as that of casalinga; because Naples was apparently now where the biggest money was made. She charged three hundred lire, so she was earning anywhere from sixty to a hundred and fifty dollars a day. She and the other girls were frantically working overtime to rake in as much as possible before the Americans went away; and when I called on her one afternoon to ask her to dine with me and go to the theater, she told me that she could not do anything except for a flat rate. An evening of mere amusement would mean a loss of hundreds of lire, and I should have to pay her by the hour, if I wanted her to do things outside with me, just as if I were going to bed with her. While I was talking to her in the little anteroom, I could see, in the room beyond, a soldier, fully dressed, lying full-length on the bed. But Giannetta had still another distraction and, in the course of the conversation, would keep running out on a little balcony to watch a street-fight in progress outside. It made the whole thing seem rather childlike. She had none of the marks yet of the professional whore, but a girlish candor and gaiety; and for this reason she was much in demand by soldiers who had picked her out as I had done, and of whom I would sometimes find a whole row sitting on the bench in the anteroom.
Her price for going out was prohibitive, but I dropped in for a call once or twice. I also got to know her half-sister, who was not pretty and seemed rather sensible: she did not look like a prostitute either. It was queer to sit behind the scenes of this business which in its way dealt in glamor. For a man, at least an American, always expects of a woman—in relations however commercial—a touch of romance and passion, and the woman must try to supply it. Nothing has ever brought home to me so sharply the difference, in this connection, between the woman’s and the man’s point of view as seeing these girls in Naples return to the general conversation after being away in the next room with their customers, laughing about the things that had happened or discussing them in a practical way as if they had been incidents of marketing. That they were sometimes only half-dressed did not make them self-conscious in the least nor was it intended to appeal to my appetites. Yet they had just lit men’s expectations, created a suggestion of mystery and—even in that unspeakable den—gratified them by moments of magic.
Giannetta sounded quite cute in Italian, but when she broke into American the effect was absolutely bloodcurdling. She had been able to learn from her customers nothing but the toughest talk: a jargon of male idioms and obscenities that sounded horrible as it came from her good little mouth. The Americans have brought to Italy. along with their campaign to swat the fly, some of the worst features of American society. There was plenty of racketeering in the army; and that summer the Roman police had been to considerable trouble to round up a gang of American deserters who had been holding people up for months and had committed several murders. It made me uncomfortable in Naples to see shady-looking Italians in clothes that had been stolen or bought from G.I.’s. The Neapolitan and American underworlds had merged in the Via Roma and were sometimes, except for insignia, indistinguishable from one another.