Naples '44 (25 page)

The doctors went to work with their speculums and swabs while the great, bare, grimy
sala
resounded with the noise of weeping. Parkinson, Placella and I walked dutifully past the exposed pudenda, nodding our satisfaction at the work, waited while another row of victims, knickers in hand, faces streaming with tears, took their places, then returned. Occasionally Placella would stop with a cry of pretended astonishment to point out to us some collector's item of a chancre. An ugly and most depressing experience.

Success of the scheme depended on the vindication of Parkinson's theory that two prostitutes known to be infected with syphilis, who had been carefully included in this roundup, would be able to bribe their way out, and this they did. They were immediately arrested and freely admitted that they, as well as other infected women, had been approached by a hospital underling known in the half-world of Naples
as
sciacquapalle
(balls-rinser). This man arranged for the supply of a certificate of good health on the payment, through him, of 10,000 lire to the hospital's Assistant Director.

Professore Placella estimated that in this way about three infected prostitutes a day had been released from the Pace, and that each one could be responsible for as many as five thousand new cases of VD annually. Thanks to Parkinson's efforts, this particular hole in the dyke will be stopped. The forms are being typed out for the Assistant Director's arrest tomorrow. The Germans would shoot him, and they would be right to do so. As it is, he has been able to buy friendship and support in AMG – now almost totally corrupt – so in due course he will come to trial and almost certainly get off.

I am concerned at the increasing number of applications by officers or other ranks to marry Italian civilians. COs must realise that everything possible will be done to discourage such marriages, few of which turn out happily or even survive more than a short period. Statistics of last war marriages with foreigners prove that only five per cent turned out successful. There is no reason to hope that present war international marriages will prove any more satisfactory. The reverse is more likely, owing to the even more bitter feeling to which it has given rise. After the last war there were many cases of men who could not stand the unhappiness of their wives and children any longer, and went to live in the wife's country, usually to their unending regret. In all cases the wife forced them to do so. It is the duty of all officers to protect our troops from matrimonial shipwreck. It should be pointed out that the soldier has no future security to offer his wife. He is at present a temporary government employee, and the future is dependent upon obtaining a suitable permanent job in civilian life. No one can marry with impunity upon such a basis. There are many other differences which, although small in themselves, such as different tastes as regards cooking, do militate strongly against happiness.

This circular issued by the GOC, No. 3 District, dated 5 September
1944, is probably the real reason behind the sudden coming to an end of my investigation into the suitability of marriages proposed between the British soldiery and Italian girls in the Naples area. In the first three months forty-three such vettings have been carried out, and in twelve cases the report has been favourable. Recently, however much the General may complain of the increased rate of application, few have come my way. I suspect that pressure has been put upon soldiers to change their minds, and that in some cases the men have been quietly posted out of the area. However this may be, I am out of it for good, having been relieved by the FSO of this particular duty in so subtle a fashion that I'm bound to suspect that after a year of close contact with the seamy side of life in Naples he's been unable to avoid infection by the deviousness of the environment.

Three days ago I was sent to vet Liana Pagano, living at Via Aniello Falcone, aged thirty-two; a widow, aged twenty-two, mother dead, father mechanic working at Navale Meccanico (never inscribed in Fascist Party), one sister married into the family of a priest, one still at school, was born and has always lived in Naples, has one child, speaks English slightly, is not pregnant. In other words an apparently respectable girl, from a respectable lower-class background – the fact that a sister is married into a priest's family being an important factor in the family's standing and its morale.

Liana was cheerful, fresh-faced (no make-up), and full of bustling, darting movement. She lived in two bare, scoured and whitewashed rooms over
bassi
occupied by families one rung lower down in the social scale, and had with her a sparkling black-eyed boy of four, almost as big as herself. The Commisario at the local
stazione
, visited in advance, confirmed that there was no record, and speaking of her the scheming, predatory features seemed to soften a little. She was ‘as good as bread', he said, and suddenly I noticed for the first time that the Neapolitans show a reverence for bread greater even than for gold.

Her husband, Liana told me, had been killed in the war. She showed me a jaunty card sent from Cyrenaica the day before he had gone into a desert battle, to be seen no more. Africa, as she put it, had eaten him up.
A photograph, the cell-like room's only decoration, showed him buttoned into his tight uniform with his fine, young, up-swept moustache, and his feathered hat. He had been in the Wolves of Tuscany – once a crack unit before the hurricane of war had swept it away. Now she was in love with a REME sergeant, who sounded a sedate fellow and was virtually certain to survive. She needed a father for her boy, she said.

I asked her the key question – on what did she live? She showed me the doeskin gloves she made for sale in the shops in the Via Roma. Her income from this was the equivalent of about one pound a week. In the spring and the autumn, she said, she helped out on a cousin's farm at Casoria, hoeing in spring and helping with the apple harvest in autumn. For this she received a little more – the equivalent of twenty-five shillings a week – but the work was hard, fourteen hours a day. October is the best month of the year in Southern Italy. We went out on to the balcony into the mild sunshine. All round us were white walls, gloriously sculpted and dimpled by light. Women were hanging out washing above and below, and snatches came from them of the sweet songs composed in the slum of Santa Lucia all round us. It was a moment of poetry. ‘Do what you can for me,' she said, and I promised I would and went away to compose the kind of subdued and matter-of-fact report that was best calculated to further Liana's cause.

Having read this, the FSO proceeded to put his plan into action by sending for my friend, that investigatory tiger, Robert Parkinson, and telling him to vet the girl. Parkinson was taken by surprise, knowing that I normally dealt with all marriage vettings, but was unable to confer with me, because I'd been found a job taking me out into the country, the idea possibly being to keep me out of the way.

The choice of Parkinson was probably deliberate, and reflected the fact that the FSO was in no doubt now as to the divergence in our attitudes towards Italy and Italians. A year among the Italians had converted me to such an admiration for their humanity and culture that I realise that were I given the chance to be born again and to choose the place of my birth, Italy would be the country of my choice.

Not so Parkinson. It was a curious fact that of all of us Robert might have achieved the deepest penetration of Italian life, and yet in his way remained aloof from it. All his free time was spent with his Italian friends. He spoke the language with a kind of grave rectitude, quoted Leopardi, sent cards and flowers on people's saint's day, and presents for their children on the Feast of Epiphany. Like Eric Williams, he could stand at a window in our first-floor headquarters and conduct a basic conversation with someone in the Via Calabritto below purely by movements of the head and hands. In other words, almost an Italian. Italy and Italians fascinated him. He enjoyed, as we all did, the intrigue – games we all played together. He was enchanted by the genial trickeries of our environment. His curiosity was endlessly stimulated, but I felt his love was never awakened. He would find it harder than I do to give an Italian the benefit of the doubt.

Robert, as instructed, went off to see Liana, who must have been surprised to receive two military visitors in one day. He would have sat on the same low hard chair on which I had sat, bleakly enduring the asceticism of his surroundings, immune to Liana's gamine charm, noting that the whole equipment of living in the apartment, apart from a table, two chairs and a bed, was kept in a single battered tin trunk. This penury he would compare in his mind's eye with the REME sergeant's probable background of dinner services and matching suites. He might have glanced at the photo of the Wolf of Tuscany whose vanished arrogance would have seemed to him contemptible rather than pathetic. He would undoubtedly have registered the siting of the lavatory, as so often is the case, behind a sort of stable door in the tiny area of the living-room serving as a kitchen.

There is an inherent Mediterranean austerity much in evidence in the Naples area, in Sorrento and Capri, which seems to come from the sea, since it is hardly to be found inland. This expresses itself in a taste for unadorned spaces, and is the visual equivalent of intervals of silence. I suspected that Parkinson found this emptiness of design alien and repellent, and that there would have been no appeal in Liana's spotless linen hanging on the balcony, her whitewashed walls and the scrubbed
floor tiles where linoleum should have been. He would have questioned her in his slow, deliberate way, like a counsel for the prosecution, snapped his notebook with awful finality, bowed and gone away. When the FSO called me in and read out the two reports no one would have believed that they could have had to do with the same girl. So Liana will not get her British husband, and I will be doing no more marriage vettings. With the combined efforts of the GOC and Sergeant Parkinson, there will be few international marriages from now on in this area.  

The thunderbolt has fallen. Today I was ordered to prepare to leave immediately for Taranto, to embark on the
Reina del Pacifico
for Port Said, where I am to pick up three thousand Russian soldiers who had been fighting with the Germans and gone over to the Partisans. These are to be repatriated, evidently with discretion, to the Soviet Union, via the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and Khorramshahr in Iran. Instructions are, as usual, vague to the point of cryptic. The AFHQ order reads, ‘You will be away as long as necessary,' but does not define the duties to be performed.

My intuition warns me that my stay in Naples has come to an end, a surmise reinforced by the FSO's mention of the near-certainty that as soon as this mission is completed I shall be posted for liaison duties with the Russians on the Eastern Front.

So I am left with only hours to spare and no time to say goodbye to any of the friends scattered through so many towns. There will be no time for a last glass of marsala with any of the scheming sindacos or the Machiavellian chiefs of police, who have always, for all their innumerable shortcomings, shown hospitality to me as a stranger. There will be no time for a last coffee substitute in the Gran Caffè in the Galleria to say goodbye and good luck to several girls who are virtually fixtures of the place, and bear me no ill-will because I was unable to help them to marry Allied personnel. I realise that I have had my last meal at ‘Zi' Teresa's and will never again shake the gnarled paw of the old aunt herself, as she sits behind the showcase full of octopus and crabs, trying to pick out the sound of her cash-register bell from the music of the house troubadors.
There won't be even a half-hour to spare for a dash up to the Vomero for a last panoramic view across the gardens of the Villa Floridiana of the great grey and red city spread below, presenting at this distance a totally fallacious aspect of dignified calm; or for a final contemplation of the somnolent Vesuvius, so changed in outline since its reshaping by the eruption.

Instead, with a foretaste of the nostalgia to come, I have to make do with what is on the spot. I do my packing in the bedroom, trying as I do so to imprint on my memory all the details of the piazza, admiring for the last time the statuary: Proserpine – her bottom pocked by some
tommy-gunner's
high-spirited fire – being carried off by Pluto; Hercules at grips with the Hydra. In the background I watch the sea charging up the anthracite beach.

Into the office to gather my papers together and write the day's report, realising with sorrow how many projects have been started but will now never be completed. A movement at a window across the road distracts me and I look up to see a woman called Giulietta appear momentarily between the shutters naked from the waist up on the pretence of washing herself – a familiar sight which we have come to accept as no more than a tiny offering to the god of fertility. A seller of brooms passes below in the street with a cry like a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Evening meals are already being prepared, and the smell of the miracle of good cooking thrusts back for a moment that of drains. For the last time I look into the eyes of the enormous and enigmatic female statues flanking the entrance to the Calabritto Palace, and then into the courtyard itself, where a small child is pissing into the mouth of a stone lion.

Perhaps when everything is ready for the move off – at half past six tomorrow from the Stazione Centrale – there will at least be a moment left to call on Lattarullo, most faithful of my Neapolitan allies. I know in advance that, having staggered under the impact of the news and then recovered with proper fortitude, he will whisper, ‘I've got a treat for you.' This he will describe as
caccia
– game – but it will be a muscled city pigeon netted on someone's roof. He will dash out to find the neighbourhood
girl, who will stew it in garlic and herbs and serve it up on the great ancestral salver. When it is time to go he will take my hand and say, ‘I'll be at the station tomorrow, to see you off,' and I know he will be there as promised, dressed in all the dignity of his ‘Zio di Roma' suit for such an occasion.