Naples '44 (8 page)

The lady to be arrested and taken to the Filangieri prison was a Signora Esposito-Lau, a German married to an Italian, charged with nothing more serious than enthusiastic fraternisation with her countrymen in Naples, and with paying frequent visits home to her parents in Frankfurt. In view of the Psychological Warfare Bureau's report (which I believe to be exaggerated) that 96 per cent of the Italian population collaborated wholeheartedly with the Germans, it seemed absurd that this woman, who had held no official position of any kind, and was not known to have been a Nazi or a Fascist, should be singled out for victimisation, and I could only suppose that she or her husband had made enemies who were avenging themselves in this way.

My inexperience in these matters makes me awkward and inept. The army provided no course, no instruction or advice of any kind on how a woman should be arrested or how to cope with the tempest of hysteria and grief when, without warning of any kind, she is told that she is to be taken from her home and her family and put in prison for an unspecified period. A small, frightened little Signor Esposito-Lau himself answered the door, with his wife at his heels. I mumbled what I had to say, and the wife fell to the ground in a faint, damaging her head on a chair. The neighbours on both sides had to be fetched to help resuscitate her, to console her, to dress her suitably for incarceration, and the house was soon full of weeping. I kept in the background, and found myself answering in an undertaker's whisper when anybody spoke to me.

Esposito-Lau, the husband, was quiet and dignified. He told me he was being punished for his success in business, and I'm sure he was. Unfortunately these people knew only too well the hunger and the freezing cold the frail-looking little wife would face in the Filangieri prison. There was a wild rush round to find articles of warm clothing, and when these were not forthcoming I calmed the crisis by telling them that I would come back next day, collect any missing articles and deliver them in person to the prison.

So I actually made some friends. One of the neighbours, a Signora
Norah Gemelli, turned out to have an Irish mother and to speak perfect English. She made tea and we talked about Dante, and the
unpleasantness
of war, and gradually the sobs subsided and the tears were dried, and the fragile little prisoner hugged her husband and her friends for the last time, and made ready to go.

A day off on a remarkably fine Sunday for the season offered an opportunity for further acquaintance with the neighbourhood. Our surroundings provide a rare blend of grandeur and lower-class vivacity, the palaces among which we live having quite failed to keep the working man and his family at bay. From our front windows we look out over the formal gardens of the Villa Nazionale with their rare palms and their ranks of statues of the Greek heroes and gods, all of which have been contrived for the delight of the nobility of bygone generations, whereas the view from the office windows is straight into the fifteen-feet-high
portone
of the Calabritto Palace. Here, all the ground-floor rooms surrounding the vast courtyard, which is at once nursery, playground and market, have been taken over by small businesses: a clock-repairer, a maker of artificial flowers, a working cobbler, a tripe-boiler, a seamstress, and others. In this way the many families who share the palace have developed their enclosed little village whose inhabitants hardly ever bother to leave it, since most of their requirements can be dealt with on the spot.

In my tour of the neighbourhood I found this social amalgam to be the normal thing; the poor and the rich in our
rione
live side by side, constantly rubbing elbows while appearing to be hardly conscious of each other's presence. Fifty or sixty per cent of poor families occupy one windowless room, and have been bred to endure airless nights on the ground floors of the palazzi, or in gloomy, sunless back streets. The aristocrats who remain make do with about twenty rooms on one of the upper floors of their ancestral home, and for the most part, let off the rest. In the past everybody who could afford to do so lived on the Riviera di Chiaia, where the sun and the sea air and the palm-shaded gardens
defended them from the plagues and the poxes that constantly ravaged the labyrinthine city itself. Carraciolo, the hero of the Neapolitan republican insurrection, cold-bloodedly slaughtered by Nelson when our admiral intervened to put the effete Bourbon King back on the throne, lived a hundred yards away from our headquarters. I visited his family palace today, and found it the most charming of these great seafront buildings, with a small courtyard with a fountain flanked by Roman busts, marble cherubs and prancing horses, the total effect being almost playful in the gravity of the Neapolitan-Catalan architectural environment.

Exactly opposite the Palazzo Carraciolo in the Villa Nazionale stands the now desolate aquarium in its grove of Judas trees and evergreen oaks, and I went there too. The Bay of Naples, said the sole remaining employee, was famous for its rare crustaceans and octopods, some of which were to be found nowhere else in the sea. They had had a unique collection of these, but they had all been fished out along with General Clark's unhappy manatee, to go into the pot in the first days of the liberation. A few molluscs and sea-anemones had survived for a matter of days, and then they, too, had died through the failure of the filtration plant.

The Via Carducci joins the Riviera at this point, and I followed it into the square containing the church of San Pasquale. This possesses the miraculously preserved body of the Blessed Egideo whom I found on view in the glass case in which he has lain for some two hundred years. The flesh, as proclaimed, showed no signs of decay, and the Blessed Egideo's facial expression was serene to the point of indifference. He enjoys huge fame in the area of San Pasquale as the protector of women in pregnancy, and only requires to add two more miracles to his already impressive list to complete all the qualifications for full sainthood.

San Pasquale is a community of its own, with its own fiestas and folklore, and even a surviving feudal chieftain, the Prince of Rocella, who raised a force of partisans in these streets and led them against the Germans in the celebrated four days of the uprising. Here I found myself immersed in the popular life of Naples which has been resurrected
among the ruins. A hand-operated roundabout for children had been set up, and an old man with a concertina was squeaking out ‘
O Sole Mio
' and selling printed fortunes for a lira apiece. Fishing has at last been legally resumed and in the street market an excited crowd had gathered to watch the cutting-up of a tremendous swordfish, rarely caught at this time of the year. The head had been cut off and stood up in the street for separate display, the sword pointing upwards and the huge flat blue eyes staring into the sky. This is a lucky sight, with phallic associations, and the onlookers circled the head reverently as if about to break into a dance.

Luck, and even more so bad luck, plays a powerful part in the lives of Neapolitans. There is not a jeweller's shop in the city that does not sell amulets in the form of a little coral horn to be worn on a necklace or a bracelet, and here in the Via Carducci something was pointed out to me which I did not imagine could exist – a house considered to suffer from the evil eye, which is carefully avoided by passers-by. There was nothing particularly sinister in the appearance of Number 15, which was just a small modern block of flats in which several tenants had put an end to their lives. The eventual remedy would be for a number of the neighbours to get together and put up the money to build a shrine in the street wall of the malefic building, placing it under the special protection of some powerful exorcist such as San Gaetano.

Again the vendetta. Not only are we subjected to a flood of accusations and denunciations that come direct from the Italian citizenry, but to a further, and usually even more senseless and baseless outpouring, from the static military units in the area. These – road and railway construction companies, petrol supply companies, signal units, base depots, and so on – are thick on the ground in the Naples area, and their commanding officers soon fall victims to the Italian interpreters they employ who tell them what the interpreters think fit that they should know, and ply them with wild legends of spies and Fascist saboteurs. They also do what they can to involve these gullible and innocent men – just as they do us – in the local feuds.

The chiefs of police, being for the most part villains, figure very largely in these indignant reports from the units and recently a number of charges have been made against Marshal Benvenuto, who rules with a rod of iron in the village of Torrito, near Aversa. An Italian police marshal is only the equivalent in rank of a sergeant-major, but he wields huge and often tyrannical power in small Italian towns, where he is in command of the forces of law and order. Benvenuto is said to use the unsatisfactory food situation to spread propaganda against the Allies, and in the words of one anonymous accusation ‘to promise with open malice in a few days' time to arrest anybody who doesn't please him'. More seriously, he is charged with carrying on a personal vendetta against a famous partisan, Giovanni Albano, whom he arrested on an allegedly trumped-up charge soon after the Allies' arrival, and whom he has since been doing his best to have interned.

We really have too much on our plates to have to bother with this kind of thing, but the story of how we rewarded those who shed their blood for us in the ‘heroic four days' of the partisan uprising at the end of September has to be prevented from becoming a legend, so today, with extreme reluctance, I took myself off to Torrito to see Albano and hear from him his story of what had happened.

Torrito seems to have had some pretensions to grandeur before falling into its present misery. All the houses in the main street had balconies. There was a small garden with a few palms in the little square, a school, a club, and three or four once-imposing mansions – now largely ruined. At the crossroads of the main street and the Aversa highway, on September 30, there took place a massacre conducted by the Germans. Twenty-four persons including a woman, a monk, and three boys in their teens, all the human beings the SS, who were in a hurry, could discover in the neighbouring houses, were lined up against the wall and shot. The massacre was a reprisal for the action of the partisans under Albano's leadership in the nearby village of Palo di Orta. I found the whole population of Torrito to be in mourning.

I was admitted with some caution to Albano's presence by a woman of his household, and found him a haggard, haunted man who spoke
very quietly, as if in fear of being overheard. His story of September 30 was that on that day the Germans were beginning their withdrawal from the area when a message reached Torrito that the Germans were at Palo di Orta, whereupon Albano and the twenty partisans he commanded had gone there to engage them. In the fighting which ensued, he and his partisans had captured two prisoners, six cars and a motorcycle, and taken them back to Torrito. Here he sent for Marshal Benvenuto to demand his support in case of reprisals. But the Marshal ignored the summons. Albano then turned over the two German prisoners to the Marshal's safekeeping, but Benvenuto, washing his hands of the whole enterprise, not only released the two men but provided them with civilian clothes to lessen the likelihood of their recapture. Unfortunately, as it turned out, they were unable to find their way back to their unit. When the German tanks reached Torrito the two uniforms were discovered and, under the assumption the wearers had been killed, the massacre was ordered. Two days later, when the Allies arrived, Benvenuto arrested Albano on what sounded to me like the extraordinary charge of criminal collaboration with the Germans, and produced several witnesses in support of these charges. He was sent to prison, and had been released on bail to await trial.

There seemed to be little material for an epic of the Resistance in this. Since Albano made no claim at any time to have actually killed Germans, it was to be supposed that he had not, and the two captured prisoners had been promptly released. On the other hand the charge of criminal collaboration seemed a strange one, so my first move was to visit the senior police officer for the area at Afragola, for a second opinion as to the true facts of the case. The marshall at Afragola was contemptuous of Albano's reputation as a folk-hero, describing him as a ‘foreigner' from Sicily, and a member of the Sicilian Mafia. I then pressed for copies of statements made by witnesses in the case, and these were produced; one by a Luigi Pascarella, and another by a woman named Anna Consomata.

I checked Pascarella and Consomata in the dossier section of the Questura, and found that they both had records: Pascarella several times for pimping and petty theft, and Consomata for prostitution. After that both had to be visited. I found Pascarella at Fratta Maggiore, read his statement to him, and watched the changes in the small, mean, natural underdog's face.

‘In August 1943 Giovanni Albano came to see me. He told me that two escaped Indian soldiers had taken shelter in his house. He said that he was worried because if they were found there he would be shot. I advised him to send them away but he said that he had heard that the Germans paid a reward for the recapture of escaped prisoners. He was very much against the Allies, and told me that if they won the war we should all be finished. I agreed to accompany him to the German Headquarters and there I heard him denounce the presence of the Indians in his house. Albano was known as an informer of the OVRA.'

‘What was the actual date when Albano came to see you?' I asked him.

‘It was the beginning of the month.'

‘You were in prison until the 15th.'

‘It could have been after that.'

‘It wasn't. This statement is false. How did Marshal Benvenuto compel you to sign it?'

A moment of depressed silence, then a spread of hands as if to show the nail-marks in the palms. ‘He threatened to frame my wife for
prostitution
if I didn't.'