Naples '44 (23 page)

The man in the bed, understanding now that the game was up, began to writhe and moan. A further examination showed that he had been hit twice in the thigh. The agent handcuffed him to the bed, told the old man to put his clothes on and come with us, and we went off to find the rest.

At the checkpoint we found the Canadians, the MPs and the Marshal reassembled. The Canadians had shot the bandits' lorry to pieces, but most of the bandits had managed to get away. For all that, we had eight prisoners – two of them wounded, including our Negro (inevitably an American deserter) – with no casualties on our side. One of the prisoners, a handsome youth of about eighteen, brought in grinning with fear, had a huge sum of money on him, and Jason made the unbelievable suggestion that he be allowed to take this boy out of sight, shoot him, and keep the money. I could not at the time make up my mind whether this was a silly joke, or whether the suggestion – put in a half-jesting manner – was to test my reaction. For all his wildness, Jason had always seemed to me good-hearted, but now he alarmed me. I was beginning also to see that the situation in Benevento was one from which I should do what I could to extricate myself as soon as possible.

A bad start to the week. A visit to the
ammasso
failed to uncover evidence that anything but trivial amounts of olive oil had been deposited there after last night's seizures. The
Responsabile
was in turn shifty, evasive and sullen, and later, when tackled on the subject, the Marshal was equally unforthcoming. Asked what had become of the confiscated tyres, he said he hadn't the faintest idea, and could only presume that the Canadians had taken charge of them. This the Canadians denied. The Marshal
wanted to make me a present of a showy watch, and was offended when I turned the offer down. These days his habitual geniality seemed to be wearing thin.

I am beginning to feel that the cooling in the Marshal's attitude reflects a change in feeling of the townspeople in general. The friends I have made have suddenly become over-polite, in this way debarring me from access even to that tiny portion of their private thoughts to which I was once admitted. Open criticism would be unthinkable but I have already heard in a most roundabout way that the arrest of the farmer De Micco for sheltering the wounded bandit has met with general disapproval. ‘Who wouldn't have done the same thing?' I suspect that people see us – the Canadians, the MPs and myself – as being manipulated by the Marshal, and they secretly despise us for our weakness and our blindness in allowing this to happen.

The fact is that we have upset the balance of nature here. I personally have been rigid when I should have been flexible. Here the police – corrupt and tyrannical as they are – and the civil population play a game together, but the rules are complex and I do not understand them, and through lack of this understanding, I lose respect. Every single person who comes to the office to ask me for a travel pass puts a one-hundred-lire note down on the desk, and I push it away. What I cannot and must not in my position accept, is the fact that these people are not offering what we think of as a bribe, but making a routine gesture of courtesy. This is an African tribal system in which every well-bred person expects to give and receive dashes. My predecessor, who was more flexible than I, handed out dashes in accordance with the list he left me. This I have not done, and by failing to do so I am probably dismissed as ill-mannered and avaricious. By this failure to exchange ritual gifts I have almost certainly lost friends.

I'm probably making too much fuss about the missing tyres and olive oil, and suspect that this isn't really the way these things should be done. It may well be that to keep my position and respect, what I should do is turn my back on the whole episode, acknowledge gracefully that I've lost a trick, and avoid making difficulties for those – and there may be many of them – who have benefited from the windfall.

I have left the Canadians in their stronghold in Sagranella and moved back into the Hotel Vesuvio, where this evening I received a distressing confirmation of my fear that I may now be considered a potential or actual
jettatore
, a possessor of the evil eye. When I first moved into the hotel I noticed that Don Enrico, enthroned in his wicker armchair in a position in which he could keep under observation every person who entered or left the hotel, occasionally groped in his pocket to touch his testicles on the appearance of a stranger. This, Don Ubaldo explained to me, was a precaution – commonplace in the South, but frequently practised by Northerners, including Mussolini himself – to ward off the evil eye. On two or three occasions in the last week I have noticed women hastily cover their faces with a scarf or a veil at my approach, and scuttle past with averted faces. This, apparently, is how women deal with the problem. Now, this evening, coming into the hotel, I found a row of half a dozen regulars – Don Enrico included – sitting under the palms, and at the sight of me I seemed to notice a sly movement of every left hand towards the right side of the crutch. A disconcerting confirmation of loss of favour.

In any case, setting aside all questions of my personal shortcomings, I have arrived at a time when, in their hearts, these people must be thoroughly sick and tired of us. A year ago we liberated them from the Fascist Monster, and they still sit doing their best to smile politely at us, as hungry as ever, more disease-ridden than ever before, in the ruins of their beautiful city where law and order have ceased to exist. And what is the prize that is to be eventually won? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Benito Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared with this.

Neil Armstrong, on his way back to Bari, brought messages from HQ. It is eighteen months since we parted company in Tunisia, since which he has been through the whole of the Italian campaign, beginning with Sicily. Seeing him again, I realise how totally he has changed, and how completely Southern Italy has taken over and transformed this Englishman. Nowadays I would take him for an Italian disguised in a British uniform; one of the lean and silent kind who speak in meaningful grunts, and a play of hands with which they build up their thoughts, like a potter at his wheel. We carried our wicker chairs to the doorway of the hotel and surveyed the Benevento scene, sipping an apéritif of marsala while a black-market meal was being put together. Sun crackled on the walls. A man who, incredibly in this environment of searing drought, repaired umbrellas for a living, emitted in passing us the despairing howl which is the call of his trade. The finest hearse in all the province – carved all over with angels and cupids of silver and gold – rumbled past drawn by eight black horses to pick up some victim of the pest. Two
scugnizzi
came into sight in pursuit of a crippled cat, whose death would furnish their meagre lives with a moment of pleasure.

We swapped stories and boasted about the burdens we were carrying in our respective places of exile. I mentioned the case of the vanishing corpse outside the Café Roma. ‘
Eh gìa
,' Armstrong said. It was one of those meaningless Italian expressions that served for comments of all kinds, but was a vehicle for resignation. I watched the once straightforward English face which a year of solitary confinement in the heel of Italy had turned into such a marvellous barometer of wariness and scepticism. When one of the regulars came through the door and passed us muttering a polite
ossequi
, Armstrong's eyes swivelled cautiously, and although his hand did not move, I almost expected him to grope for his testicles.

Benevento, he had come to the conclusion, was a poor sort of place compared to Bari, and he was sorry to see me marooned here. The towns of the far South had been less smashed up in the war, and as the drains went on working there were few cases of the typhoid and smallpox that
scourged the Naples area. People killed each other down there for reasons of their own as they did here, but Armstrong had learned to keep out of involvements of this kind. He had also learned to cope with the local Carabinieri marshals, though he agreed that few of them demonstrated the kind of sinister power possessed by Altamura.

There were two messages for me; one requesting information on the activities of Maresciallo Altamura for transmission to Major Pecorella in Naples, the second calling for investigation of an alleged rape.

The rape had been committed by an unidentified member of the Allied forces, and on reading this my heart sank. If any soldier had raped a woman in Benevento, the chances that this would have been one of the Canadians were strong. The lady, one Irene Imbrosi, occupied a flat in the Corso Umberto in a block where men of substance housed their lady-loves. Irene received me in a well-furnished room with a religious atmosphere provided by several plaster saints and an ugly model in silver of the Cathedral of Milan. She was majestic in true Southern style, with a cataract of black hair, the eyes of a tragedienne and the innocence of expression that completes the armament of any outstanding harlot.

There was something mysterious about this complaint, seeming to fly in the face of local prejudice. Rape is a fairly everyday event in this part of the world, and is not necessarily a serious business for the victim. Peasant girls in some of the big estates are raped by their overseers as a matter of course every day of the week. It is said that a local count provides members of his work force to any male guest who visits the
latifundia
for a riding or shooting holiday, his sole stipulation being not to spoil them with gifts of money. Concealment of what has happened is what matters, to avoid a personal slump in value in the sexual market. Why had Irene reported her experience to her lover, a
barone
who owned half a million olive trees, who, bypassing the local authorities, had gone straight to AMG in Naples with his complaint?

Irene's story of her attack was that an unknown soldier had seen her in the street, followed her home, forced his way into the flat which he said he had authority to search, found a cache of army blankets, and then perpetrated the rape. ‘Everybody has army blankets,' she said. ‘You
couldn't go through a single flat in the building without finding some.' And this was true.

I asked if she had any marks on her body to show a doctor, if necessary, as evidence that violence was used, and she didn't think so.

There seemed to be no real anger in her at the memory of the outrage she had suffered, and her indignation lacked conviction. She could give no description of her assailant that might have led to the identification of any man of flesh and blood. The description of the man who had pounced on Irene, carried her through into the bedroom, and flung her on to the bed sounded like that of any of the anonymous, faceless suspects sent to us by No. 3 District for inclusion in the Black Book: average height, age, size and colour – she couldn't even be quite sure whether or not he had a moustache. Twice she said, ‘I don't want to cause any trouble for anyone,' and had to be reminded of the seriousness of the charge.

Finally I decided to ask her what had made her tell the Baron about the attack, and after some embarrassment, sidestepping and
self-contradiction
, the truth began to filter through. The rape turned out to have been prolonged, almost a leisurely affair, occupying some hours, and the Baron, happening to have decided to visit his mistress on that afternoon, had arrived on the scene only minutes after the soldier had hitched up his trousers and gone his way. He had taken note of the condition of the bedroom, and then the bed, and been compelled to draw conclusions. A good and religious man - a leader of the nascent Christian Democratic Party – he had accepted Irene's account of her misadventure without question and had no blame for her, but had felt himself unable to continue their affair. Out of the generosity of his heart, she said, he had then produced a suggestion: namely, that should it be possible to track down the soldier involved and persuade him to take Irene in marriage, he would make a handsome settlement in their favour.

This, then, was the situation in a nutshell. If any presentable Allied soldier could be tempted to come forward, admit to the rape of Irene, and agree to marry her, he could expect a wedding-present of a quarter of a million lire along with his beautiful wife. Hence Irene's determination
not to provide a description which might fail to tally with that of an acceptable candidate.

This appeared to me quite likely to have been a plot staged by the Baron to disengage himself from the liaison in a graceful fashion, and with good conscience. Anything could happen in Benevento.

After duty visits to Ischia and Rome I returned to Naples today, and am back in the Riviere di Chiaia until further notice. Here I found a great accumulation of work. The fact is that we are far too thin on the ground to be dispersed outside the city in the way we have been. In addition, the Section has been weakened by sickness, Moore with hepatitis and Parkinson with a mysterious and chronic infection of the liver. However, both work on with unabated vigour. Two other members suffer from intense depression, and I have had malaria for the third time.

Overwork has certainly contributed to this general decline in health. One is tempted by the strangeness and excitement of the life, by the fascination of this legalised eavesdropping on humanity in which we are continually involved, to work on regardless of the clock. I have frequently found myself occupied in Section activities for up to fifteen hours a day, and on three occasions lately have fallen asleep at the wheel of a car – once while driving the Canadians' Dodge, in which – at two in the morning – I mounted a traffic island in Naples and snapped off a lamp standard.

The news from Benevento is that Marshal Altamura has been charged by the order of Major Pecorella with irregularities and withdrawn from service there, doubtless to the relief of that long-suffering town.