Naples '44 (4 page)

Complaints are coming in about looting by Allied troops. The officers in this war have shown themselves to be much abler at this kind of thing than the other ranks. The charge has been made that officers of the King's Dragoon Guards, to whom fell the honour of being the first British unit to enter Naples, have cut the paintings from the frames in the Princess's Palace, and made off with the collection of Capodimonte china. The OSS have cleaned out Achille Lauro's sumptuous house. Some of the bulkier items of booty are stated to have been crated up for return to England with the connivance of the Navy.

A week in which our activities have been hampered, and even frustrated, by false alarms and scares of every conceivable kind. Anyone whose activities depart in any way from the standards of normality set by the city is regarded as a spy, and we have been involved in endless wild-goose chases. None of these forays out into the night produced results. The suspected spies were always harmless eccentrics. The mysterious stranger in the next flat tinkering with a powerful radio was not an enemy agent operating a transmitter, but a man trying to get the BBC. In houses said to contain caches of arms we found nothing more lethal than unemptied babies' chamberpots; while flashing lights in the night were always people on their way to the cesspit at the bottom of the garden.

Now that the mail is operating normally again, a horde of censors are busily slitting open letters to probe for hidden meaning among the trivia of family and business correspondence, and when in doubt they fall back on us. Unhappily many telephone conversations are being monitored, too, and the typed out ‘intercepts' sent to us contain their fair share of absurdity. The prize example received so far was one solemnly headed ‘Illegal use of telescope'. This referred to a passage in an overheard conversation between two lovers in which the girl had said, ‘I can't see you today because my husband will be here, but I'll admire you, as ever, through love's telescope.' No. 3 District adds to these burdens by bombarding us with addenda for the Black Book, which serves as the rag-bag for everybody's paranoia. In one case we had to make an entry for a suspect about which nothing is known but his possession of three teats on the left breast, while another was described as ‘having the face of a hypocrite'.

All these things encourage the growth of disbelief, so that when a few days ago reports began to come in about mysterious knocking sounds coming from the depths of the earth, we were unimpressed. But when yesterday the Italian Pubblica Sicurezza Police – sceptics like ourselves – were on the phone to talk about the knockings, adding that they had even been heard by a senior policeman, notice had to be taken. The knockings
had been reported from a number of widely separated areas in the northern part of the city. It was the police's theory, supported by much rumour and some credible evidence, that a picked squad of German SS had volunteered to remain behind after the German retreat from Naples, and that they had hidden in the catacombs, from which they might at any time make a surprise sortie. There was also a likelihood, if this were the case, that their plans had gone wrong, and that they had lost themselves in the darkness of a vast and only partially charted labyrinth, in which case the knocking could be explained as their attempt to draw attention to their predicament.

Only a small part of the catacombs – the most extensive in Italy, and possibly the world – is accessible to visitors and the police had had some difficulty in finding an old map showing their full extent. There was no way of knowing how accurate this map remained after the damage of the earth tremors of the past and the subsidences they were certain to have caused. However, the map was studied in its relation to the location of the places where knocking sounds had been heard and, the general opinion being that the Germans were down there somewhere, a force numbering about fifty men was assembled, to include the Italian Police, the American Counter-Intelligence Corps and ourselves, to enter and explore the catacombs.

Of the two networks of catacombs under Naples, the principal one, which concerned us, is entered from the back of the church of San Gennaro. These catacombs are believed to date from the first century, and consist of four galleries, excavated one below the other, each gallery having numerous ramifications and lateral passages. The two nethermost galleries having partially fallen in, they have not been accessible in modern times.

It was decided to enter the catacombs shortly after dawn, and we arrived at the church in a dozen jeeps, lavishly equipped with gear of the kind used in cave-exploration, as well as all the usual weaponry. The monks in charge were already up and about, and showed us extreme hostility. One monk who planted himself, arms outstretched, at the entrance to the catacombs had to be removed by force, and then, when
we went in, followed us, keeping up a resounding denunciation of our desecration of a holy place.

The Americans had equipped themselves with lamps like miniature searchlights; these shone on the walls of the anterooms through which we passed to reach the galleries, showing them to be so closely covered with frescoes – mostly in excellent condition after sixteen centuries – as to give the impression of colossal ikons. We were instantly confronted with the purpose for which the catacombs had been designed. Rows of niches forming burial chambers had been cut one above the other in the walls, and all these were crammed with skeletons, many said to have been plague victims of the sixteenth century. When somebody picked up a skull to examine it the angry monk trudging at our heels roared at him to put it back. Questioned about the possibility of Germans being in the catacombs, this man had answered in an evasive and suspicious way.

It soon became clear that we were looking for a needle in a haystack. We were in narrow, bone-choked streets, with innumerable side turnings to be explored, each with its many dark chambers in any one of which our quarry could have hidden, or from which they could have suddenly sprung out to ambush us, if they were still alive. These men, had they gone into the catacombs – and we were all still convinced they had – must have been in the darkness for nearly a fortnight since their torch batteries had finally given out. After which, groping their way, or crawling about among the bones, they would have encountered terrible hazards. Even in the second gallery we came suddenly to a black chasm. In the depths of this, where the whole roadway from wall to wall had caved in, the lights showed us a pile of dust from which protruded a few ancient rib-bones. We dangled a microphone into this pit and listened while the monk muttered at our backs, but the silence below was absolute.

We gave up and went back. It was two days now since the last knocking had been reported, and strange that the strength of men, however close to starvation, should have ebbed so suddenly that we could hear not even a moan or cry. The general opinion was that the monk knew more than he was prepared to say. There was even the possibility, the Police Commissario suggested, that he had gone into the catacombs
and rescued the Germans. Whether or not this was so, it was unlikely that we should ever know.

Among the civilian contacts of these first few days, my prize acquisition was Vincente Lattarullo, a man steeped in the knowledge of the ways of Naples.

When originally asked what was his business with us, he answered in a dry whisper, ‘I am motivated by a passion for justice,' and, saying this, he appeared to vibrate. It turned out that this distinguished,
fragile-looking
man, who sometimes halted in mid-sentence and swayed a little, as if about to faint, wished to denounce the activities of an American requisitioning officer who was going round offering Italian car-owners a guarantee against their cars being requisitioned on payment of 100,000 lire. We told him that there was absolutely nothing we could do about it.

I took him to the Bar Vittoria next door for a
marsala all'uovo
, but when the barman brought the egg to be broken into his glass I saw the anguish in Lattarullo's face, and stopped him in mid-action. Apologies streamed forth and then Lattarullo begged to be allowed to take the egg home. Moments later the impact of the alcohol on an empty stomach set him swaying again and I realised that the man was starving. Unfortunately there was no food of any kind anywhere within range, except the prized and precious eggs, rationed on a basis of one per day to favoured customers. However, Lattarullo was prevailed upon to accept my egg as well, which he beat up in a cup, and swallowed very slowly there and then.

He proved to be one of the four thousand lawyers of Naples, ninety per cent of whom – surplus to the needs of the courts – had never practised, and who for the most part lived in extreme penury. There are estimated to be at least as many medical doctors in a similar situation; these famished professionals being the end-product of the determination of every middle-class Neapolitan family to have a uselessly qualified son. The parents are prepared to go hungry so long as the son is entitled to be addressed with respect as
avvocato
, or
dottore
.

Lattarullo had succeeded in staying alive on a legacy originally worth about a pound a week, now reduced by devaluation to about five shillings, and in order to do this had worked out a scientific system of self-restraints. He stayed most of the day in bed, and when he got up walked short distances along a planned itinerary, stopping to rest every few hundred yards in a church. He ate an evening meal only, normally composed of a little bread dipped in olive oil, into which was rubbed a tomato. Sometimes he visited another professional man in similar circumstances and they exchanged gossip, sipped a cup of coffee made from roasted acorns, and starved socially for an hour or so. He gave the impression that he knew everything that was going on in Naples. I walked back to his flat with him, and found him living in two rooms containing three chairs, a bed, and a rickety table on which stood an embittered aspidistra plant. The lighting and the water had been cut off years ago, he said.

It appeared that Lattarullo had a secondary profession producing occasional windfalls of revenue. This had to be suspended in the present emergency. He admitted with a touch of pride to acting as a
Zio
di Roma
– an ‘uncle from Rome' – at funerals. Neapolitan funerals are obsessed with face. A man who may have been a near-pauper all his life is certain to be put away in a magnificent coffin, but apart from that no other little touch likely to honour the dead and increase the bereaved family's prestige is overlooked.

The uncle from Rome is a popular character in this little farce. Why should people insist on Rome? Why not Bari or Taranto? But no, Rome it has to be. The uncle lets it be known that he has just arrived on the Rome express, or he shows up at the slum tenement or lowly
basso
in an Alfa-Romeo with a Roman numberplate and an SPQR badge, out of which he steps in his well-cut morning suit, on the jacket lapel of which he sports the ribbon of a Commendatore of the Crown of Italy, to temper with his restrained and dignified condolences the theatrical display of Neapolitan grief.

Lattarullo said that he had frequently played this part. His qualifications were his patrician appearance, and a studied Roman accent and manner. He never uses the third person singular personal pronoun
lui
, as
all the people who surround him do, but says
egli
, as they do in textbooks, and he addresses all and sundry with old-fashioned politeness as
lei
. Where the Neapolitans tend to familiarity and ingratiation, Lattarullo shows a proper Roman aloofness and taciturnity. When Lattarullo meets a man he says
buon giorno
and leaves it at that, and he goes off with a curt goodbye. This, say the Neapolitans, who are fulsome and cloying in their greetings, is how a real Roman gentleman speaks. If anybody at the wake happens to have noticed Lattarullo about the streets of Naples on other occasions, he takes care to keep it to himself.

A narrow escape today while motorcycling along the Via Partenope. I was riding towards the Castel Nuovo, through an area badly damaged by bombing, with the sea on the right and semi-derelict buildings on the left, when I noticed a sudden change ahead from blue sky, sunshine and shadow, to a great opaque whiteness, shutting off the view of the port. The effect was one of a whole district blotted out by a pall of the white smoke sometimes spread from the chimneys of a factory producing lime. On turning a bend, I came upon an apocalyptic scene. A number of buildings including a bank had been pulverised by a terrific explosion that had clearly just taken place. Bodies were scattered all over the street, but here and there among them stood the living as motionless as statues, and all coated in thick white dust. What engraved this scene on the mind and the imagination was that nothing moved, and that the silence was total. Dust drifted down from the sky like a most delicate snowfall. A woman stood like Lot's wife turned to salt beside a cart drawn by two mules. One mule lay apparently dead, the other stood quietly at its side, without so much as twitching an ear. Nearby two men lay in the positions of bodies overcome by the ash at Pompeii, and a third, who had probably been in their company, stood swaying very slightly, his eyes shut. I spoke to him, but he did not reply. There was no blood to be seen anywhere.

This turned out to be one of a series of explosions produced by delayed-action explosive devices constructed by the Germans shortly before their departure, in each case from several hundred mines buried
under principal buildings. My friend White's visit to the Central Post Office at about the time I was motorcycling along the Via Partenope nearly involved him in disaster. He had gone there to discuss the reorganisation of the postal services and – I suspect – methods of censorship, and about ten minutes after he left the building blew up, killing heaven knows how many passers-by. A senseless massacre perpetrated on the Italian civil population.