Naples '44 (7 page)

In those days the only profession open to a young man of good family was the diplomatic service, and as there were only sixty such posts offered by the Kingdom of Naples, the ninety per cent of applicants who were unsuccessful had to endure aristocratic idleness. The twentieth-century version of this situation as reflected in the somewhat sterile existences of Lattarullo, Losurdo and Mosca seemed little changed in its essentials. Nowadays the learned professions have taken the place of diplomacy, but they are so overcrowded they only provide a living for less than one man in ten who enters them. Lattarullo and company have been brought up to the idea that they cannot enter trade, and they are debarred by the same rule from physical creation of any kind. Therefore while others go hungry, they virtually starve.

The sexual attitudes of Neapolitans never fail to produce new surprises. Today Prince A., now well known to us all and an enthusiastic informant
from our first days at the Riviera di Chiaia, visited us with his sister, whom we met for the first time. The Prince is the absentee landlord of a vast estate somewhere in the South, and owns a nearby palace stacked with family portraits and Chinese antiques. He is the head of what is regarded as the second or third noble family of Southern Italy. The Prince is about thirty years of age, and his sister could be twenty-four. Both are remarkably alike in appearance: thin, with extremely pale skin and cold, patrician expressions bordering on severity. The purpose of the visit was to enquire if we could arrange for the sister to enter an army brothel. We explained that there was no such institution in the British Army. ‘A pity,' the Prince said. Both of them speak excellent English, learned from an English governess.

‘Ah well, Luisa, I suppose if it can't be, it can't be.' They thanked us with polite calm, and departed.

Last week a section member was invited by a female contact to visit the Naples cemetery with her on the coming Sunday afternoon. Informants have to be cultivated in small ways whenever possible, and he was quite prepared to indulge a whim of this kind, in the belief that he would be escorting his friend on a visit to a family tomb, expecting to buy a bunch of chrysanthemums from the stall at the gate. However, hardly were they inside when the lady dragged him behind a tombstone, and then – despite the cold – lay down and pulled up her skirts. He noticed that the cemetery contained a number of other couples in vigorous activity in broad daylight. ‘There were more people above ground than under it,' he said. It turned out that the cemetery is the lovers' lane of Naples, and custom is such that one becomes invisible as soon as one passes through the gates. If a visitor runs into anyone he knows neither a sign nor a glance can be exchanged, nor does one recognise any friend encountered on the 133 bus which goes to the cemetery. I have learned that to suggest to a lady a Sunday-afternoon ride on a 133 bus is tantamount to solicitation for immoral purposes.

In recognition of his medical interests in civilian life, Parkinson deals with the doctors of Naples. One of his most valuable contacts is Professore Placella, whose speciality is the restoration of virginity. He boasts that his replacement hymen is much better than the original, and
that – costing only 10,000 lire – it takes the most vigorous husband up to three nights to demolish it.

Lattarullo invited me to lunch. I told him he couldn't afford it, and in any case where was the food to come from? He smiled mysteriously and said, ‘You'll see.' He seemed so very eager for me to accept this invitation that I did so. Before going to his flat in the Via San Felice I ordered a couple of marsalas in our bar, and pocketed the eggs to take with me. I got to the flat and I found that another guest had arrived, introduced as Cavaliere Visco, a small man with enormously thick eyebrows, bad breath, and hands covered with hair. There was a faint, thin smell of cooking about the flat, as out of place as church incense in a brothel, and a neighbourhood girl who had obviously been called in to clean up was dragging herself about in the background with a mop. In Neapolitan fashion, Lattarullo had borrowed a chair here and crockery and cutlery there, and for this occasion his one remaining possession of value came into its own. This was a silver salver, stated to have been given to one of his ancestors by Vittorio Emanuele, which he had managed to hang on to through thick and thin.

The neighbourhood girl put her mop away, wiped her hands on her dress, went off, and came back shortly carrying the salver. I had seen this magnificent object with its embossed decoration of cupids and vineleaves before, but only through the rents in the brown paper wrapper in which it was normally kept. Now, polished up and put to its proper use, I was dazzled by its splendour. As the girl carried the salver in, it seemed to draw all the light out of its surroundings, and Lattarullo and the Cavaliere became paler than ever, and Visco spread his hairy palms in delight.

The meal we were about to eat formed a tiny wet mound in the centre of the enormous dish, and I recognised it instantly from its odour, apart from its appearance, as ‘Meat and Vegetables', the most disgusting of all Army rations. This little glutinous pile of age-old mutton was encircled by cubes of the dirty-grey bread of the kind sold on the black market. Visco whinnied with delight, and understanding the planning, the effort
and the sacrifice that had gone into this offering, I managed a show of damp enthusiasm.

After the meal Lattarullo explained the reason for this meeting. He told me that he had become a member of a Separatist organisation dedicated to the restoration of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and that Visco was one of the leaders. Visco then set forth the philosophy and the aims of his movement. The South of Italy and Sicily, he argued, formed a cultural and economic unity, prosperous only when in political combination. Ruled from the North, these had always been written off as naturally backward areas, of value only as a source of cheap labour and cheap foodstuffs. I had to agree with this. The facts are, as every Italian will admit, that the South is virtually a colony of the industrialised North.

At this moment, Visco said, the South was faced with a new danger. With the collapse of Fascism, a political swing to the Left was certain. A high percentage of soldiers returning from the war were known to have been influenced by Communist ideas, and Visco and his friends believed that the North – traditionally the stronghold of Socialist sentiment – was destined to go Red. This being the case, he argued, the best hope for the South was to protect itself by cutting adrift from the rest of Italy, and reforming the old political combination of Naples and Sicily either as a Christian anti-Socialist Monarchy leaning heavily for support on the West, or even as a colony of Great Britain, or as a new American State.

The way of life suggested for this new kingdom, colony or state seemed extraordinary. As industrialisation lay, according to Visco, at the root of all social evil, it was to be rigorously suppressed, and the few factories already in existence in the South would be demolished. Southerners were to be returned to virtue on the soil. Field workers would be housed in barracks, clothed in knee-length homespun tunics in the style of the Roman peasants of old (the Patricians would wear togas), and fed on a low diet of maize gruel. They would be encouraged to early rising, early marriage, to regular prayer and the procreation of large families. Even the few existing tractors would be scrapped and replaced by the ‘nail plough' in use in Roman times. Visco believed, too, in keeping
women fully occupied. Whatever spare time was left over from their spinning was to be absorbed in profitable fieldwork, and they would labour at the side of the men, carrying their young babies as Indian squaws do, bound to their backs.

I listened gravely to these flights of fancy. Visco said that the Separatists had secret supporters everywhere, and that they would soon begin recruiting and drilling. Naturally they needed funds and arms. He hoped that the Allies would realise that any support they felt prepared to give to assist in the establishment of an anti-Communist state in an area of such vital strategic importance would be a wonderful investment.

Finally, he said, the Separatists would need experienced officers. He believed that the war with Germany would be over by Christmas, and with its ending the Separatists expected to open their offensive. Visco was prepared to offer me or any of my friends a commission in the Separatist army as soon as we were free from our present commitments. ‘You could stay here when the war is over,' he said. ‘Settle down and become a landowner … Here you would enjoy many privileges. You would live like a barone. Why go back to England and the fog?'

I listened with all the gravity I could manage, but found it hard to keep a straight face.

Food, for the Neapolitans, comes even before love, and its pursuit is equally insatiable and ingenious. They are almost as adaptable, too, as the Chinese in the matter of the foodstuffs they are prepared to consume. A contact from Nola mentioned that the villages in his area had lost all their breeding storks because last year the villagers eked out shortages by eating their nestlings. This is regarded as a calamity by those who did not benefit directly, as there is a widespread and superstitious aversion in Italy, as elsewhere, to molesting storks in any way.

Another example of culinary enterprise was provided by the consumption of all the tropical fish in Naples's celebrated aquarium in the days preceding the liberation, no fish being spared however strange and specialised in its appearance and habits. All Neapolitans believe that
at the banquet offered to welcome General Mark Clark – who had expressed a preference for fish – the principal course was a baby manatee – the most prized item of the aquarium's collection – which was boiled and served with a garlic sauce. These two instances demonstrate a genius for improvisation. But some of the traditional local cooking is weird enough in its own right. On Vesuvius they make a soft cheese to which lamb's intestine is added. Shrove Tuesday's speciality is
sanguinaccio
– pig's blood cooked with chocolate and herbs.

My experience of Neapolitan gastronomy was expanded by an invitation to a dinner, the main feature of which was a spaghetti-eating competition. Such contests have been a normal feature of social life, latterly revived and raised almost to the level of a cult as a result of the reappearance on the black market of the necessary raw materials.

Present: men of gravity and substance, including an
ex-Vice-Questore,
a director of the Banco di Roma, and several leading lawyers – but no women. The portions of spaghetti were weighed out on a pair of scales before transfer to each plate. The method of attack was the classic one, said to have been introduced by Fernando IV, and demonstrated by him for the benefit of an ecstatic audience in his box at the Naples Opera. The forkful of spaghetti is lifted high into the air, and allowed to dangle and then drop into the open mouth, the head being held well back. I noticed that the most likely-looking contestants did not attempt to chew the spaghetti, but appeared to hold it in the throat which, when crammed, they emptied with a violent convulsion of the Adam's apple – sometimes going red in the face as they did so. Winner: a
sixty-five-year-old
doctor who consumed four heaped platefuls weighing 1.4 kilograms, and was acclaimed by hand-clapping and cheers. These he cheerfully acknowledged and then left the room to vomit.

Most of the restaurants are open again, and these – though in theory out of bounds – are crowded with officers. Here the black market reigns supreme, and some of the prices asked, and obtained, are extraordinary. At Zi' Teresa's, a large lobster is said to cost up to the equivalent of a
pound, and a good fish meal is priced at an exorbitant ten shillings. Wine is correspondingly expensive, with Chianti from a leading vineyard priced at five shillings a bottle. There is no need to pay these extravagant prices. All one has to do to have the restaurateur instantly and smilingly knock off half the charge is to ask him to sign the bill.

At Zi' Teresa's I ran into Captain Frazer, whom I had not seen for a couple of months. The change in his appearance was startling. I found him sitting alone engaged in the moody consumption of the raw semiliquid custardy contents of a pile of bisected sea urchins, and it was clear he was not enjoying his meal. We had a confidential chat and he told me that he had been recommended to eat all the shellfish he could with a view to rectifying problems that had arisen in his relationship with the Signora Lola. In the shadows of the black market he could only afford sea urchins and found the whole business rather a chore. He appeared incredibly gaunt and wasted. His beautifully-cut uniform hung from his limbs, and when he got up and strode away, he looked more like a walking greatcoat than a living man.

The really unpleasant part about this job is having to make arrests. This is all the worse because we are convinced that these arrests are almost always unnecessary, and are the result of manipulation by which we are dragged into private vendettas. This being so, there is a tendency when action of this kind is in the offing to find some reason to stay away from headquarters. Today, having overheard some mention of a woman who would have to be picked up, I quietly slipped away to Casoria, where I attended the funeral of a Carabiniere murdered yesterday by the bandits there (several professional wailers in attendance). The funeral over, I drank a few marsalas with the Police Chief, went on to call on contacts in the stricken town of Afragola, questioned a girl of Madonna-like grace in Acerra who had most foolishly applied to marry a guardsman at present serving six months in the glasshouse, and then meandered back to Naples. By this time it was four in the afternoon, and I felt I was out of danger. I was hardly in my room, beginning on my notes, when
Dashwood came in wearing his Buddhistic smile that warned of calamity. ‘Glad you're back,' he said. ‘You're just the man …'