THE INVOLUNTARY CITY
One of the things to see in Naples—after the requisite visits to the excavations of Pompeii, to the dormant Solfatara volcano, and, if there is time, the Vesuvian crater—is the building known as Granili III and IV* in the coastal neighborhood that connects the port to the first suburbs on Vesuvius. It is around three hundred meters long, between fifteen and twenty meters wide, and a lot taller. To someone who sees it unexpectedly, getting off one of the small trams operating along the workers’ routes, it looks like a hill or a bald mountain, invaded by termites, which traverse it with no sound or sign that reveals a particular purpose. In the past, the walls were a dark red, which still emerges, here and there, amid vast patches of yellow and dabs of an equivocal green. I could count a hundred and seventy-four openings, the majority of them barred, on the single façade which is of an unprecedented width and height for modern taste; some terraces; and, at the back of the building, eight sewage pipes that, situated on the third floor, let their slow waters flow along the silent wall. There are three floors, plus a ground floor, half hidden in the earth and protected by a ditch, and they contain three hundred and forty-eight rooms, all equally high and large, distributed with perfect regularity to the right and left of four corridors, one per floor, whose total length is one kilometer two hundred meters. Every corridor is illuminated by no more than twenty-eight lamps, each with five candlepower. The width of each corridor is from seven to eight meters, and so the word “corridor” designates, more than anything else, four streets of an ordinary city neighborhood, elevated like the floors of a bus, and without any sky. Especially for the ground floor and the two floors above it, the light of the sun is represented by those twenty-eight electric lamps, which here shine weakly both day and night.
On the two sides of each corridor eighty-six doors of private dwellings open, forty-three on the right, forty-three on the left (plus that of a bathroom), marked by a series of numbers that go from one to three hundred and forty-eight. In each of these spaces between one and five families live, with an average of three families per room. The total number of inhabitants of this dwelling is three thousand people, divided into five hundred and seventy families, with an average of six people per family. When three, four, or five families live in the same space, it reaches a density of twenty-five or thirty inhabitants per room.
Having stated in summary fashion some facts about the structure and population of this Neapolitan neighborhood, one realizes that one has expressed almost nothing. Every day, in a thousand expert offices in all the cities and countries of the globe, perfect machines line up numbers and sums of statistics, intended to precisely describe how and in what measure the economic, political, and moral life of every single community and nation originates, grows, and dissolves. Other data, of an almost astral depth, refer instead to the life and nature of ancient peoples, their system of rule, triumphs, civilization, and demise; or, skipping over every historical interest dear to our hearts, address themselves to life or the probability of life on the planets that shine in space. Granili III and IV, one of the most evocative phenomena in the world, and like Southern Italy, dead to the progress of time, should therefore be, rather than described with ingenuous figures by this or that obscure reporter, visited carefully, in all its deformities and absurd horror, by groups of economists, jurists, doctors. Special commissions could go and count the number of living and dead, and of the former and the latter examine the reasons that led them there or kept them there or carried them away, because Granili III and IV is not only what could be called a temporary settlement of homeless people but, rather, the demonstration, in clinical and legal terms, of the fall of a race. According to the most charitable judgment, only a profoundly diseased human system could tolerate, as Naples tolerates, without being disturbed, the putrefaction of one of its limbs, because this, and no other, is the sign under which the institution of the Granili lives and thrives. To seek in Naples the nadir of Naples no longer occurs to anyone after a visit to the Bourbon barracks. Here the barometers no longer display any measure; compasses go crazy. The men you meet can’t do you any harm: ghosts from a life in which wind and sun existed—these good things they no longer remember. They creep or climb or stagger: that is their way of moving. They speak very little; they are no longer Neapolitans, or anything else. A committee of priests and American scholars, which, days ago, boldly crossed the threshold of that melancholy dwelling, quickly turned back, with incoherent words and looks.
I had marked on a box of matches, which was later useful for other reasons, the name of Signora Antonia Lo Savio. One morning in November, with no other direction, I crossed the threshold of the grand entrance that opens on the right side of Granili III and IV. The porter, sitting behind a large black caldron in which clothes were boiling, examined me coldly, and when she told me that she didn’t know who this Lo Savio was, and that I should go and ask on the first floor, I felt the temptation to put it all off to another day. It was a violent temptation, like nausea in the face of surgery. Behind me, in the area in front of the building, a dozen children were playing, almost without speaking, throwing stones. Some, seeing me, had stopped playing, and approached silently. In front of me, I saw the ground-floor corridor, extending for three hundred meters, but at that moment it seemed an incalculable distance. In the center and toward the end of this conduit some shadows moved, without any precision, like molecules in a beam of light; some small fires gleamed; from behind one of the doors came a persistent, harsh lullaby. Gusts of a bitter odor, mainly of toilets, continually reached the threshold, mixed with the darker smell of dampness. It seemed impossible to advance ten meters into that tunnel without fainting. Taking a few steps, I saw a dim light to my right, and discovered one of those stairways with very wide steps, no higher than a finger, which once allowed horses, kept on the ground floor, to reach the first floor with their burdens. Maybe it was less cold than I had feared, but the darkness was almost absolute. I risked stumbling, and I lighted a match, but immediately extinguished it: here were some very small lamps, inside which reddish wires quivered and writhed continuously. In this glimmer, the first-floor corridor took shape.
Toward the end, someone was roasting coffee, adding burned beans to the smell of urine and dampness. The smoke, however, made one’s eyes tear, and put a pinker halo around the lights, tiny as pins. I passed a group of children, seeing them only when they were close to me; they were playing ring-around-the-rosy, holding one another by the hand but at a distance, and throwing back their disheveled heads, with a pleasure stronger than that of a normal game. I grazed locks of hard hair, as if pasted, and arms whose flesh was cold. Finally I saw the woman who was roasting the coffee, sitting in the doorway of her home. Inside there was a disorder and a savage glow, from an unexpected ray of sunlight that fell from the window (open at the back of the building), amid pots and rags, onto the mattresses. There was also some blood. The woman, dark and lean, was sitting on a chair that had lost its straw seat, and, with a kind of pride, kept turning the wooden handle of the iron cylinder, from whose little door rose a cloud of smoke, surrounding her head. Three or four other girls, in black dresses open over white chests, stood near her, and followed with bright, serious eyes the dance of the beans in the cylinder. Seeing me, they moved aside, and the woman stopped bouncing the cylinder on the fire, which for a moment almost ceased to provide any light. The name Antonia Lo Savio left them silent. I realized later, during subsequent visits, that that silence, rather than indicating puzzlement or indecision, manifested curiosity and a more sinister, if weak, feeling: the desire to drag, for a moment, into the obscurity in which they dominated, the stranger who was obviously habituated to light. At least, during my visits, many of these people seemed to enjoy not answering me or directing me to places from which I would not easily have been able to get out. I was about to keep going, making an effort to appear calm, when one of the girls, turning toward a door, said slowly in dialect, without looking at me: “Vidite lloco—You’re looking at the place.”
A small woman, completely bloated, like a dying bird, her black hair cascading over a hunchback, and with a lemon-colored face, dominated by a large, pointed nose that hung over a harelip, was combing her hair in front of a fragment of mirror, holding some hairpins between her teeth. She smiled, seeing me, and said, “Nu minuto—just a minute.” My happiness at seeing such a smile in such a place led me to reflect for a moment whether it was fitting or not to address her as “signora.” She was only an enormous flea, but what grace and kindness animated her tiny eyes. “Signora,” I said, approaching rapidly, and I mentioned the name of Dr. De Luca, the director of the clinic for the poor of the Granili, who had sent me to her so that she could show me around a bit. “Nu minuto … if you will be so kind as to oblige me,” she repeated, continuing to smile and comb her hair, and I noticed then that, behind the rattle of catarrh, her voice was sweet. I think it was that sensation, unconsciously perceived, that somewhat restored my courage. I leaned against the door, waiting for that creature to finish combing her hair, and meanwhile I glanced at the coffee roasters. The smoke had thinned and in that sudden gray they appeared even paler. They murmured a few words, in which the name of Signora Lo Savio figured, with a silent laugh, full of disdain, and I was disturbed by what I thought were the reasons for that hostility. Signora Lo Savio, in the doorway of her home, was finishing with her hair, with a certain girlish delay, as if it were May and she were thinking of her love, when a child, hands in pockets, hair straight on his head, with a bold yet dark expression, approached. He proceeded, with an imperceptible hesitation, toward the center of the room, and went to sit on the bed platform (I never saw, in this great structure, a made bed, only mattresses spread out or piled up, at most with a covering thrown on top). Once seated, and swinging his thin legs, he began to sing softly: “E ce steva ’na vota ’na reggina, che teneva i capille anella anella—Once upon a time there was a queen who had curly curly hair,” in a toneless voice. He broke off suddenly to speak to Signora Lo Savio—“Signora, do you have a little bread?”—and from this I understood that she wasn’t his relative. While Signora Lo Savio, with the last hairpin in her mouth, answered something, I approached the child and asked him his name. He answered, “Luigino.” I asked other questions and he didn’t respond at all. On his whole face appeared an ambiguous, disdainful smile, which contrasted bizarrely with the dead, absent expression of his eyes. Feeling embarrassed, as if his smile, mysteriously mature, already the smile not of a child but of a man, and of a man accustomed to dealing only with prostitutes, contained a judgment, an atrocious evaluation of my person, I moved a few steps away. And here was Signora Lo Savio approaching with the bread, which the boy began to eat. “That poor child,” she now said, “has neither father nor mother. He’s been here since ’46, with a cousin of mine, next door. On top of that, he’s also blind.”
The boy was silent for a moment, and in that moment the hands that clutched the bread slid down to his knees. In some way he was observing me. “I see a little; and now I see a shadow lowering its head. Are you going, signora?”
I answered yes, after a few moments, and set off with Signora Lo Savio.
“I’d come with you but I’m waiting for a friend,” he continued, with a new intonation, in which the boldness of the lie, necessary to save him, died in a kind of stunned piety, a tender warmth. He had raised his head for a moment and, laying it back down on the straw, he began singing again, “E ’na barca arrivaie alla marina—and a boat arrived at the port” in a faint voice and with a steadiness that must have had the purpose, every morning, of cajoling him again to sleep.
Coming out with my guide, I sought in my confused mind reasons that would allow me to immediately abandon that place, and reach the square and the first bus or tram stop. It seemed to me that, as soon as I was out of there, I would shout and run to hug the first people I encountered. I looked at Signora Lo Savio, but my eyes kept moving away from her. I didn’t quite know where to place them. In the light of the few lamps, I saw her better: queen of the house of the dead, a crushed figure, bloated, horrendous, the fruit, in her turn, of profoundly defective creatures, and yet something regal remained in her: a confidence in the way she moved and spoke, and something else, as well—a vivid flash in the depths of her mouse-like eyes, in which one could surely perceive, along with the knowledge of evil and its extent, all the human pleasure needed to confront it. Behind that deplorable forehead, a measure of hope existed. Having realized that I was stumbling as I walked, she hurried to guide my elbow with her hand, but without touching it. This persistence of humility amid such unremitting courage, this dignity in keeping her distance from those whom she considered saved, imposed on me a certain calm, and I said to myself that I had no right to appear weak. We walked along the corridor of the first floor, toward the horse stairs, leading to the ground floor, which, according to my guide, was the most important thing. In a few words, she explained to me the reason for the aversion of a good part of the female population of the place. It had begun when Signora Lo Savio decided to devote herself to the clinic, and was then suspected of enjoying the partiality of the director, and of gaining immediate advantages from her activity, like medicines, that she would resell, food packages from the local welfare agency, and other things. “Six months ago I abandoned my home and everything,” she confessed simply. “I comb my hair and I come down. Because this is not a home, signora, you see, this is a place of afflictions. Wherever you pass, the walls groan.”
It wasn’t the walls, of course, it was the wind, which crept in between the great doors; the big structure really seemed to be shuddering continuously, almost imperceptibly, as if from an internal landslide, from an anguish and dissolution of all the quasi-human material that composed it. Now the walls appeared wet, corroded, all encrustations and dark drips. We met two children going up, chasing each other with obscene gestures. A woman came down from the second floor, carrying a green bottle wrapped in a handkerchief, as if it were a child, and with her other hand pressing her cheek, from which a kind of lump of reddish fungus protruded, perhaps caused by the dampness. Suddenly, we heard a breathless, very strange voice singing a sacred hymn in which the goodness of existence was praised. “That’s the maestro,” said Signora Lo Savio, “a holy man, a refined person. He’s had asthma for twenty-five years, and he can’t work anymore. But when he feels better, he always talks about God.”
I thought that the door she pushed was that of the asthmatic. We were on the ground floor, and the darkness and the silence were slightly more intense than before, broken only by the vague gray glow that appeared in the distance, three hundred meters away, where the corridor ended, and by the imperceptible lamps that followed one another like fireflies attached to the ceiling. Here and there, doors, doors, doors, but made of boards, or metal sheets, or sometimes even pieces of cardboard or faded curtains.
“May I?”
“Please.”
Strange room. A woman in the background, enormous and strong, dressed in black, upright behind a table, was smoking a butt. On the table stood an empty bottle and a wooden spoon. Behind the woman, like a curtain, was an immense window, with some boards nailed to it and crisscrossed by stakes, in such a way as to impede the passage of the slightest bit of light or air. In this room, that is, 258B, there was a persistent odor of feces, collected in hidden chamber pots, the same that we found in almost all these rooms. These chamber pots must have been placed behind partitions composed of packing paper or shreds of blankets, and no more than a meter high, which divided the space into two or three lodgings. The woman had immediately looked at my hands, with a dark eye, made shifty by a squint, and seeing that they were empty displayed an expression of disappointment. Because the ladies of the Neapolitan aristocracy from time to time send packages, the stranger who arrives here empty-handed can be considered only an enemy or a lunatic. I understood this slowly.
“This lady,” Signora Lo Savio said, “has come to see how you are. She can be useful to you. Talk to her, talk, my dear.”
That mean, squinting gaze fell on me still, descending down my neck like a sticky liquid. Then, overcoming the weight and weariness of the enormous flesh that enfolded her, Maria De Angelis said, in a whining, unpleasant voice that was as if charged with disgust but also clouded by a deep sleep: “Help us.”
At the foot of a mattress on the floor, there were some crusts of bread, and amid these, barely moving, like dust balls, three long sewer rats were gnawing on the bread. The woman’s voice was so normal, in its weary disgust, and the scene so tranquil, and those three animals appeared so sure of being able to gnaw on those crusts of bread, that I had the impression that I was dreaming, or at least contemplating a drawing, of a horrendous truthfulness, that had mesmerized me to the point of making me confuse a representation with life itself. I knew that those animals would soon go back into their hole, as in fact, after a few moments, they did, but now the whole room was infected by them, along with the woman in black, and Signora Lo Savio and I myself: it seemed to me that we partook of their dark nature. Meanwhile from behind a curtain came a youth in evening dress, adjusting his tie, his face covered by pustules, and skin, under those brown spots, of a pale green. He had a violin in his hand, and just touched it with his old fingers.
“My son, a street musician,” the mother introduced him.
“Do you earn something?”
“Depends.”
“Do you have other children?” I said to the mother.
“With this one, seven. Antonio, boot cleaner; Giuseppe, porter; this one who plays; one mentally ill; the others unemployed.”
“And your husband?”
She didn’t answer.
As we went out, a youth dressed almost like a woman, with a shawl over his shoulders and a delicate appearance, greeted me, bowing to the floor. “Oh, Ma,” I heard him say as he entered the house, turning to the woman, “today I saw a little house near the sea, there was lemon verbena growing, I’d like to rent it.” He said other confused words, then he returned to the doorway, making faces, with a thoughtful air.
Maestro Cutolo’s house was a few meters farther on, opposite that of the lunatic, and I realized why that good man sang. A benefactor who hadn’t wanted to give his name had made a gift to the teacher, providing some glass panes that had been installed in the high window. Thus flooded with the pale winter light, the big room appeared clean and in a certain way cheerful, an impression that wasn’t later refuted. Sitting on the floor in the sun, two lovely children were playing; they were almost naked, with black slanting eyes and serious smiles. Signor Cutolo, who opened the door, was in his underwear, and he apologized profusely for this detail. We had pleasantly surprised him with our visit, and he hadn’t had time to straighten himself. He was a man still young, around forty, of medium height, but so slender as to seem an adolescent. His hair was blond, his eyes blue, his face hollow and flooded by a smile whose depths, like the bottom of a shallow pool, were an inconsolable sadness. “I’m happy,” he declared to us immediately, “because my heart is full of holy obedience to God’s wishes.”
“Do you feel better today?” my guide asked. “We overheard you singing.”
“Thanks to the holy indulgence of God to his poor servant, yes,” he answered politely, breathless.
I looked at him, and that face seemed to remind me of another, like an old image veiled by a new one. Suddenly, I found again the man he had been twenty years earlier, when I lived in a building in the Naples port zone which at that time was full of commerce, flags, sails, cargoes, and the joy of money. He, Cutolo, was an office boy at the Compagnia di Navigazione Garibaldi, on the third floor. He hurried to church whenever he could; he was from a respectable family and had an accountant’s diploma.
“How ever did you get here?”
“During the war, my home was destroyed. My father died, God bless his soul, and it was left to me to support my mother and two sisters. The holy will of God decided that this sacrifice would not last long. God called my mother to him; one sister married a soldier, and now is in Avellino; another lives in Sezione Avvocata, with a widow. I, thank God, now I have my little home, my children, a good wife, I can’t complain. The clinic gives me medicines.”
“What does your wife do?”
“Maid, with a devout family.”
His eyes sunken by the effort to breathe, he looked at me and smiled.
“I eat medicine, I eat it. I’m ashamed of taking such great advantage of Dr. De Luca’s kindness.”
He called the children, who approached slowly, and held them close by his side, with a flash of inexpressible pride. They were naked, and their beautiful faces, their gazes, were healthy and yet sad. I imagined their mother, a strong peasant, a servant.
“For the Holy Year I would have liked another one, my wife didn’t obey,” he said with sweet vanity. “She refused the Creator Spirit who animates the world.”
The two brothers stared first at me, then at him, with thoughtful faces, biting their dirty nails.
“I love children so much, there would be so much to do here,” Cutolo continued, with anxious sadness, looking toward the door. “In this house there must be at least eight hundred of these kids, but they are unacquainted with holy obedience: unfortunately they haven’t been brought up well. Sometimes I call them, I’d like to teach them the principles of our holy religion, some inspirational songs, like this, to improve them. But they refuse, they always refuse.”
As he spoke, the heads of some individuals between seven and ten years of age peeked in through the door, which had been left open. A dozen attentive eyes, some red and half closed, some full of an animal greed, rolled in deep sockets. One of them, who had a particularly strong, intelligent face, clutched something in his hand. Suddenly, one of the little Cutolo brothers began to shout and jump up and down like a lunatic, holding one foot in his hand: “Oi ma,’ Oi ma.’” He had been hit with a stone, and, at the same time, as silently as they had appeared, those four or five figures disappeared.
The teacher, after a moment of hesitation, perhaps of shame, began to comfort his son, urging him to forgive those rascals who had not had the advantage of a Christian education. Coming out the door, I saw the boys, who had stopped in the darkness, twenty meters on, breathing hard, like the teacher, with the same expression of ineffable joy in their eyes.
Although I had seen only these few things, it was late. In the city and elsewhere, in the whole world, it was time for people to go home. Even here, in this land of night, some were returning, groping their way from the end of the corridor, tramps, beggars, musicians, faceless men and women. In a few homes someone was cooking: smoke, which had the density of a blue body, escaped from some doors, yellow flames could be glimpsed inside, the black faces of people squatting, holding a bowl on their knees. In other rooms, instead, everything was motionless, as if life had become petrified; men still in bed turned under gray blankets, women were absorbed in combing their hair, in the enchanted slow motion of those who do not know what will be, afterward, the other occupation of their day. The entire ground floor, and the first floor to which we were ascending, were in these conditions of depressed inertia. One expected nothing, and no one. On the second and third floors, Signora Lo Savio explained to me, life assumed instead a human aspect, resumed a rhythm that might in some way resemble that of a normal city. The women made the beds in the morning, they swept, dusted, tidied themselves and the children, many of whom were sent off, with real black smocks and blue ties, to a school run by the nuns. A number of the men had jobs. They’d acquired radios and had those sewage pipes constructed, which, set up on the third floor, afflicted the inhabitants on the lower floors with their stink and stained their windows.
While we went up, enjoying a certain light of day that began to pour down from the staircase, and breathing a less oppressive air, we were joined by a group of boys and girls in their black smocks, with bows and schoolbags, who were returning from school. Through an open door, a radio was broadcasting. We heard a clear male voice, the announcer of Radio Roma, utter: “And now, dear listeners,” and shortly afterward the voice of a singer modulated the first notes of Passion. As in all Naples, here, too, the volume was kept very high, partly out of eagerness for the sound, a characteristic of this population, but also out of the completely bourgeois pleasure of being able to demonstrate to the neighbors that one is well off and can afford the luxury of a powerful gadget.
We didn’t go into any of these homes: the families were fairly ordinary, the same you would meet on the top floors of old apartment buildings in the city. Many of the windows had been supplied with glass panes, but where they remained closed up, electric lights hung from the ceiling—lights that were definitely stronger than those on the first floors. Here one could see clearly, and, Signora Lo Savio told me, the third floor was ablaze with lights, even near the beds, which had their sheets; there were closets with regular hooks for clothes, you could see polished tables with doilies, artificial flowers, portraits, and occasionally under the wall clocks, couches. Some of the men in these families had well-paid jobs; they were white-collar employees, clerks in banks or salesclerks, good people, who were still dignified and calm, and, having lost their home after a collapse or an evacuation, and unable to find another right away, had adapted to living at the Granili, without giving up their decorum, the product of an honored tradition. They avoided any contact with the inhabitants of the first floors, demonstrating toward their degradation a severity not without compassion, and mixed with satisfaction for their own prosperity, which they attributed to a virtuous life, having no doubt with regard to its stability. At times, owing to an absolutely random circumstance, a chance event, which would soon, just as randomly, be over, like unemployment, or an illness, it happened that one of these good citizens was forced to give up his lodging, for a small sum, to a more fortunate family head, and adapt to settling with his family on a lower floor, though he was quite sure that in just a short time he would move back up to the third floor, or even leave the Granili. That man, that family, never returned to the surface, nor did they get out of there entirely, although in the first days it had seemed possible. The children, once tidy and serene, in that darkness became covered with insects and their faces grew graver and paler, the girls went with married men, the men got sick. No one rose again, from down there. It wasn’t easy to climb back up those stairs that appeared so flat and accessible. There was something that called, from down there, and those who began to descend were lost, but they didn’t realize it until the end.
“Signora, excuse me,” a kind of maîtresse in a dressing gown was saying, standing in front of the door of one of these homes, with a cup in her hand and a smile in her bluish eyes. “I need some salt. I just put in the pasta, and I realized we don’t have any.”
Two twenty-year-old youths went back into their home, discussing the soccer game.
An old pensioner, sitting on a chair in front of his door, was reading Il Mattino.
Clear voices of children could be heard shouting over their soup.
In another apartment, two girls, as tall as horses, in blue sweaters, their faces powdered, were intently reading an illustrated weekly in front of the radio. Più forte ’e ’na catena—Stronger than a chain, cried the radio, as in all the neighborhoods of monarchic, scheming Naples, on Sundays, around one o’clock, when the ancient, familiar odor of ragù spreads through the orderly, bright rooms, full of relatives and youths returning from Mass.
We were, or at least I was, in that state of mind between anguish and relief of someone who, coming out of a prison, returns to light, air, and, in some sense, a kind of sweet human freedom, a certain standard of life, when a confused and sorrowful sound, whose meaning couldn’t be clearly perceived, and which wavered between suffering and a sort of tortured relief, attracted our attention. That sound, a combination of footsteps and sobbing, rose from one of the lower floors, through the deep stairwell, which in the meantime we had again approached. The cheerful voice of the Radio Roma announcer wasn’t enough to muffle it, nor was the almost serene atmosphere of the third floor. Signora Lo Savio, after a moment of reflection, had begun to go rapidly down the stairs, without paying any attention to me, and I followed. At the second floor, with night returning, those sounds and voices were clearer: footsteps of men and women, not many, but certainly a good number, who were walking, carrying something, and tranquil voices that mourned or consoled. The woman whose face was covered by a fungus passed in front of us, speaking softly to a fat woman, and saying, “Now it’s day, for that creature, now he’ll see God!” to which the other assented placidly, drying her eyes with a rag. Other people looked out, motionless, from the doors on the corridor, commenting on the event in their dialect: “Pazzianno è fernuto—while he was playing he died.” On the ground floor, finally, we saw what was going on. They were carrying away a certain Antonio Esposito, seven years old, nicknamed Scarpetella, who had died half an hour earlier, of unknown causes, while he was playing with some boys of his own age. Suddenly he had brought his hand to his heart and sat down in a corner. Now they were carrying him to the morgue for verification, and parents and friends were taking advantage of this to improvise a funeral. And it was, understandably, the simplest funeral I’d ever seen. The dead boy wasn’t even in a coffin but in the arms of his mother, who was a yellow thing, somewhere between a fox and a trash bin. The child was half wrapped in a blanket, from which the edges hung down here and there, along with his slender arms. He was fair-haired, with a delicate face, his lips half parted in an expression of wonder, which not even the bandage around his jaws could contain. His calm and his joy, characteristic of those who have left life, were somehow emphasized by a glob of snot under his right nostril which made one think of an abandon and a silence that no one would any longer disturb. Behind them came the father, who, probably owing to some confusion in his mind at this sudden misfortune, was carrying the boy’s shoes. He spoke with the priest, who was near him; he was an obese, apathetic man, making an effort to appear calm, to judge from the way he pulled the lapels of his jacket over his bare chest toward his neck. God had punished them—the year before, too, one had died like that. After the misfortune of Vincenzina they had had no peace. This one seemed sound, in good health. Behind the parents, five or six youths followed, with half-witted looks, all children of the fox and siblings of the dead child, flanked by a group of women who were praying aloud, and this, along with the false sobs of one of the brothers, was the absurd noise that had struck me. How absurd was the composure of the man and the woman, in a city like Naples, where people are constantly performing. All the doors, as on the first floor, now were open, without, however, a word spoken, not a pitiful comment, as would be customary among the lower classes. We also saw Maestro Cutolo, with his children close by his side, wearing an ecstatic expression. “A beautiful creature,” he exclaimed, seeing us, “God, in His infinite goodness, wanted to take him away from all occasions for evil in this life, calling him to Himself. Let us praise His infinite wisdom. Now that little scamp Scarpetella is climbing the trees in Heaven.”
He hadn’t finished speaking when under those black vaults a choked, tortured, horrible cry sounded, as if the person who had produced it couldn’t get free of it. At the same time, a glossy young woman of perhaps twenty, adorned with baubles, came running from the entrance to the corridor, where some light appeared. Tearing herself away from two men who accompanied her and who appeared hesitant, she ran toward the group, and for a moment mingled with it. The funeral paused, like a procession when one of the devout wants to pin an offering of money to the Madonna’s robe. “What’s this! You’re making fun! You’re heartless!” We heard no more.
“Get out!” cried a harsh voice after a moment. It was the mother, who, after the first moment of bewilderment, was trying to tear the dead child from the girl’s embrace. But she, like one demented, held tight to him; practically falling to her knees, out of weakness or for some other reason, she tried to pull him to herself, and since she couldn’t reach his face, as the mother tried to cover it, she embraced his bare, dirty legs, his bare feet.
“Shameless! That girl is shameless,” the father now said to the priest, “she left home without a thought for us. We asked her for help in our need, and she answered that she no longer had parents. Now she’s in a state because of her poor brother.”
“Scarpatella!” the girl called out, with a cry in which tenderness and fear were a single thing, “Don’t fool around, wake up. You called me morning and night, even in sleep. I don’t have anyone, dear heart.” And then out came a great wail.
Now the fox looked at her oldest daughter, with a flash, an indefinable smile, between foolish and bitter, in her shining eyes. “He was always running after her,” she explained, “tap tap, in his little shoes. Now where is she? he asked when she went away.”
“Have mercy,” said the priest, indifferently, “God will have mercy on your poor Antonio, who at this hour stands before Him, with his little sins.” He leaned over to murmur something in the ear of the young woman, who immediately looked up, with a spellbound expression, while she continued to hug to her breast the rigid bundle. She laid this down, with a kiss, in the arms of the woman, and, red in the face but with no more tears, searched in her shiny leather purse, which had slid to the ground, for a large pink bill, and handed it to the mother. She smiled, and the father, too, softened, lowering his head. The child’s mouth had fallen open, and someone adjusted the bandage. Then, with the sad prayers that had made such an impression on us, the procession resumed its tranquil and apparently sorrowful journey, toward the gray arc of light that announced the way out.
After that, I didn’t understand or see anything precise. Signora Lo Savio led me from door to door throughout the whole first floor, and again on the ground floor, where we had forgotten some families. Of the mournful event no one spoke, and I realized that down there no possibility of emotion survived. There was darkness, and nothing else. Silence, swift memories of another life, a sweeter life, nothing else. Not even Signora Lo Savio spoke. She would push on a door politely: “May we?” Some answered, “Come in.” Some didn’t answer at all; then she went in, looking around with her penetrating eyes. Immediately eight, ten, fifteen people came out of the shadows, one rising from a bed, like a dead person who is dreaming, another holding his savage head above a wooden partition for a moment. Women, whose femininity was revealed only by a skirt and hair—more like a crust of dust than a hair style—approached in silence, pushing their children in front of them, as if that cursed childhood could protect or give them heart. The men, instead, stayed behind, as if ashamed. Some looked at my shoes, my hands, not daring to raise their eyes to my face. In many families, as in that of Maria De Angelis, there was one who was introduced as mentally ill: “What work do you do?” I asked and he, after a hesitation, trying to smile: “Mentally ill.” “You see!” the women cried, with a kind of triumph, “Jesus Christ wants to test us. Christ will reward those who are good to us!” And they observed Signora Lo Savio and me, anxious to hear a mention of packages. I looked mainly at the children, and realized that they could die suddenly, running around, like Scarpetella. That childhood had nothing childish about it but the number of years. Otherwise, they were little men and women, already knowing everything, the beginning and the end of things, already consumed by vices, by idleness, by the most unendurable poverty, ill in body and twisted in mind, with corrupt or foolish smiles, sly and desolate at the same time. Ninety per cent of them, Signora Lo Savio said to me, already have tuberculosis or are susceptible to it, have rickets, or are infected with syphilis, like their fathers and mothers. They are normally present when their parents copulate, and they imitate it in games. There are no other games here, apart from throwing stones. “I want to show you a little creature,” she said.
She led me to the end of the hall, where, from a faint green light that was visible through a crack, one understood that evening had descended in Naples. There was a door from which came not a sound or a voice. Signora Lo Savio knocked lightly and entered without waiting for an answer, like someone who is at home.
It was a vast, clean, deserted room, somewhere between a cave and a temple. If not for the presence of a tiny lamp, whose light, placed high up, gave more irritation than joy, that place would have made you think of an ancient and forgotten ruin. There was an odor of dampness, stronger and grimmer than elsewhere, filtered by things in decay. A woman still young, and with an ecstatic look, came toward us.
“How is your Nunzia?” asked Signora Lo Savio.
“Come.”
She led us to a cradle made out of a Coca-Cola carton, which looked small and wretched against the background of one of the usual solemn, hermetically barred windows. In that little bed, without any underwear, on a very small pillow, under a hard, crusted man’s jacket, rested what seemed to be a newborn with a bizarrely gentle and adultlike face: a delicate, very white face, illuminated by eyes in which the blue of evening shone, intelligent and sweet, and which moved here and there, observing everything, with an attention greater than what a child of a few months can conceive. Seeing us, those eyes rested on us, on me, rose to the forehead, turned, sought the mother, as if questioning. The mother picked up the jacket with one hand, and we saw a tiny body, the length of a few handbreadths, perfectly skeletal: the bones were as thin as pencils, the feet all wrinkles, tiny as the claws of a bird. At the contact with the cold air, the child drew them to herself, slowly. The mother let the jacket-blanket fall back.
I wasn’t wrong when, seeing her, I felt that Nunzia Faiella had already known life for some time, and saw and understood everything, without being able to speak.
“That child is two years old,” Signora Lo Savio whispered to me. “Because of her internal organs, she hasn’t grown … Nunzia, dear one …” she called her, sadly.
Hearing those words, that being smiled weakly.
“Once I took her out … to the doctor,” said the young woman, speaking in a rough, masculine voice, between exalted and resigned (and so I understood that only once in her existence had Nunzia Faiella seen the light of the sun, perhaps a pale winter sun), “she saw the air, the sun … she was stupefied.”
Even now, Nunzia Faiella was amazed: her sweet eyes examined from time to time the high ceiling, the greenish walls, they withdrew and returned continually to the glimmer of the lamp, which perhaps reminded her of something. There was no sadness or even suffering in those eyes, in that lonely life, but a sense of waiting, of a punishment served in silence, of a thing that could come from beyond those immense walls, from beyond that high blind window, that darkness, that stench, that scent of death.
“Nunzia,” Signora Lo Savio called again, bending over the carton and speaking affectionately to the creature, “what are you doing? Do you want to leave your mamma? Do you want to have Christmas with Baby Jesus?”
Then something happened that I would never have expected. The child turned to look at her mother, with an uncertain smile, which suddenly became a frown, then yielded to a weeping so weak, suffocated, and faint that it seemed to come from inside a cabinet; it was like someone crying to himself, with neither the strength nor the hope of being heard.
Coming out of that room, I collided violently with two women who had learned of the arrival of a group of journalists, and were rushing to make a complaint about an abomination that they had endured for some time. One of the two toilets on the ground floor had been closed on purpose, they said, and they, who were neighbors, had to go three hundred meters every day in order to empty the chamber pots into the toilet at the other end of the corridor, where the clinic was. From anger they moved on to complaint. They were tigers who had suffered too much in their life, so that human laments did not come out. They began to speak of their unemployed men, without underwear, shoes, anything, of children who tortured them with their disobedience. They wept and clung to us, they wished to show us their homes. It was impossible to decline.
In one of them, Dr. De Luca’s assistant, a youth with a cold and irritated demeanor, sloppily dressed, was examining an old man whose end appeared imminent, and who was the uncle of one of the two women, Assuntina. The room was full of people, shadows, who, it seemed, gave off a stench. I couldn’t see the dying man, hidden by the crowd and by the doctor, but my attention was drawn to another person; I couldn’t call him a man, who, standing behind the doctor, tapped him on the shoulder from time to time. He was a creature of an indefinable age, untidy, strange, with something meek and terrible about him at the same time. His eyes were protected by thick eyeglasses, and one of the lenses seemed twice as thick as the other. He had a fringe of gray hair over his forehead, which got under his glasses, giving his pupils a greater ambiguity. While with one hand he touched the doctor, with the other, the left, he was constantly scratching his chest, with a kind of tic, trying to open his shirt.
Finally the doctor turned.
“You, what do you want?” he said abruptly.
“Bi … bi … bi … bismuth.”
“Pass by the clinic later.”
“Yes … yes … yes …”
“Speak properly!” a woman said aggressively, coming out from behind a curtain. She was like one of those bitches with countless teats, who drag themselves with solemn sadness from one rejection to the next. Her hair was still golden, but her face was ashen, her eyes spent, her mouth toothless. Her narrow, childlike shoulders were in contrast with the large curve of her belly over the short legs. On her finger, she wore a wedding ring.
“The doc-tor un-der-stands,” said the sick man, humbly.
A minute later, the doctor had left, and the shadows had all gone back into their holes, in this case the four corners of the room, which was large, and was divided by means of boxes, old sheets drawn along two poles, and also pages of newspaper, all illuminated by an oil lamp. Assuntina was giving some medicine to her uncle, who smiled stiffly, absorbed, when from right behind that bed, where there was a partition, I heard the sound of anxious, choked, blessed breathing. I stuck my head out a bit, and saw, at the foot of another bed, the syphilitic and his wife. He was sitting on the edge, she was on her knees in front of him, and with her tongue out of her mouth was licking one of his hands. The unhappy man’s eyeglasses had fallen off, he was looking up, as if blind, and his whole body trembled.
At the Granili, night was beginning, and the involuntary city was preparing to consume its few goods, in a fever that would last until the following morning, the hour when complaints, surprise, mourning, the moribund horror of living start again.
* Originally built as a granary in the 18th century, this vast seafront structure later became a barracks and was bombed in 1943. Despite heavy damage, huge numbers of Neapolitans left homeless in World War II took refuge in the complex. It was demolished soon after Ortese’s book first appeared in 1953 and its occupants were transferred to public housing on the outskirts of Naples.