The Skin (33 page)

The sea presented, perhaps, an even more horrifying picture than the land. As far as the eye could reach there was nothing but a hard, livid crust, pitted everywhere with holes that resembled the pock-marks of some frightful disease; and beneath that motionless crust one sensed the explosive presence of a prodigious force, of a fury scarce repressed, as though the sea were threatening to rise from its bed, to break its hard, scaly back, that it might make war on the land and vent its dreadful fury. Outside Portici, Torre del Greco, Torre Annunziata and Castellammare boats could be seen retreating in great haste from the perilous shore, propelled in desperation by oars alone, since out at sea the wind had dropped like a dead bird, though it was blowing violently to landward. Other boats were to be seen hurrying from Sorrento, Meta and Capri to bring help to the luckless inhabitants of the seaside villages, trapped by the fury of the flames. Torrents of mud flowed sluggishly down the sides of Mount Somma, forming twisted, coiled heaps like black snakes; and where the torrents of mud met the rivers of lava clouds of purple vapour rose aloft, and a dreadful hissing sound reached our ears, like the sizzling of red-hot iron when it is immersed in water.

A huge black cloud, in shape resembling the ink-sac of a cuttlefish, swollen with ashes and fragments of glowing lava, was struggling to break away from the crest of Vesuvius. Propelled by the wind, which, fortunately for Naples, was by some miracle blowing from the north-west, it trailed slowly across the sky in the direction of Catellsammare di Stabia. The roar emitted by that black, lava-filled cloud as it rolled through the heavens was like the rumbling of a lorry laden with stones when it enters a bumpy street. Every so often, from some gap in the cloud, a deluge of lava rained down upon earth and sea, landing on the fields and the hard sea-crust with a crash like that which is heard when the same lorry tips up its load; and as the lava touched the ground and the hard surface of the sea it raised clouds of reddish dust, which spread into the sky, blotting out the stars. Vesuvius screamed horribly in the red darkness of that awful night, and a despairing lament arose from the unhappy city.

I pressed Jack's arm, and felt him tremble. His face was pale as he contemplated that vision of hell, and horror, dread and wonder mingled in his wide eyes. "Let us go," I said to him, tugging him by the arm. We moved away, and set off along the Vicolo di Santa Maria Egiziaca in the direction of the Piazza Reale. The walls of that narrow alley reflected such a blaze of crimson light that we walked like blind men, groping our way. Naked people were leaning out of all the windows, waving their arms and calling to one another with shrill cries and piercing wails. Others who were rushing panic-stricken through the streets raised their eyes, crying out themselves and weeping, without pausing or slowing down in their headlong flight. There were people everywhere, some looking miserable, others fierce, clad in rags or naked; some were hurrying to the chapels with wax candles and torches for the Madonnas and the Saints; others, kneeling on the pavement, were calling aloud upon the Virgin and St. Januarius to help them, beating their breasts, while frenzied tears poured down their ravaged cheeks.

It often happens at a time of great and desperate peril that a sacred image, or the feeble glimmer of a candle in a chapel, suddenly revives the memory of a faith long neglected, and fans the embers of hope, repentance, fear, and a trust in God that has been long denied or forgotten. The man who has forgotten God pauses; bewildered and deeply moved, he contemplates the sacred image, and his heart trembles in an ecstasy of love. So it was with Jack. All of a sudden he stopped outside a chapel, and covered his face with his hands, crying: "Oh, Lord! Oh, my Lord!"

In answer to his cry there came from the depths of the chapel a sound like the chirping of birds. We heard a feeble fluttering of wings, a stirring as of birds in a nest. Jack drew back in terror. "Don't be afraid, Jack," I said to him, pressing his arm. "They are the birds of the Madonna." During those terrible years, as soon as the airraid sirens announced the approach of enemy bombers all the poor little birds of Naples took refuge in the chapels: sparrows, swallows, their feathers rumpled, their round eyes shining under their white lids. They used to hide in remote corners of the chapels, where, huddling together and trembling, they would nest among the wax and papier-mache statuettes of the souls in Purgatory. "Do you think I've scared them?" Jack asked me in a low voice. And we moved away on tip-toe, so as not to scare the little birds of the Madonna.

Along the streets walked nearly-naked old men with whitish, bony shins, leaning against the walls for support. Their snowy locks, ruffled by the wind of fear, hung in disarray over their foreheads, and they kept shouting at the top of their voices. Their words were clipped, and sounded to me like Latin; they were, perhaps, ritual magic formulas of malediction, or of exhortation to the people to repent, to confess their sins aloud, and to prepare for death like Christians. Bands of harassed-looking working-class women hurried along at frantic speed, almost at a run, keeping close together as if they were warriors assailing a fortress; and as they ran they hurled obscene insults and threats at the weeping, gesticulating groups of people in the windows, exhorting them to repent of the infamies for which all were responsible, since the day of judgment had come at last, and neither women, nor old men, nor children would escape the chastisement of God. To their insults and threats the people at the windows responded with loud wails, frightful abuse and vile curses, which the crowd in the street echoed with groans and cries, shaking their fists in the air and uttering dreadful sobs.

From the Piazza Reale we had climbed the hill to Santa Teresella degli Spagnoli; and as we walked down in the direction of Toledo the tumult increased, the demonstrations of fear, rage and pity became more frequent, and the demeanour of the people grew fiercer and more threatening. Near the Piazza delle Carrette, outside a brothel famous for its negro
clientèle,
a crowd of infuriated women yelled and stormed, trying to break down the door, which the prostitutes had barricaded in furious haste. At last the crowd burst into the house, and came out dragging by the hair a bleeding, terrified mob of naked harlots and negro soldiers, who at the sight of the flaming sky, the clouds of lava suspended above the sea, and Vesuvius, wrapped in its dreadful fiery shroud, became as meek as frightened children. While some were attacking the brothels others were invading the butchers' and bakers' shops. The people, as always, tempered their blind fury with manifestations of their traditional hunger. Yet the underlying cause of their fanatical rage was not hunger, but fear—a fear that was turning to class bitterness, vindictiveness, and a hatred of self and of others. As always, the populace ascribed to that awful scourge the character of a punishment from heaven; they saw in the wrath of Vesuvius the anger of the Virgin, of the Saints, of the Gods of the Christian Olympus, who had become incensed at the sins, the corruption and the viciousness of men. And side by side with repentance, with a melancholy desire to expiate their misdeeds, with the eager hope of seeing the wicked punished, with an ingenuous confidence in the justice of a Nature that was so cruel and unjust—side by side with shame at their own wretchedness, of which the people are sadly conscious, there was growing up, as always, in the minds of the populace a base feeling of impunity, the origin of so many deeds of wickedness, and a miserable conviction that in the midst of such great destruction, such widespread chaos, anything is lawful and just. And so men were seen in those days to perform deeds both base and sublime, inspired by blind fury or by cold reason, almost by a wonderful desperation. Such is the power exercised by fear, and by shame at their sins, over the souls of simple men.

Such, too, were the sentiments which determined my attitude of mind, and Jack's, in the face of this inhuman scourge. No longer were we united only in our friendship, our affection, and our pity for the conquered and the conquerors, but also in virtue of the fact that we too felt afraid and ashamed. Jack was humbled and appalled by that frightful upheaval of nature. And so too were all those American soldiers who but a moment before had been so sure of themselves, so disdainful, so proud of their status as free men, and who now were darting about in all directions among the crowd, forcing their way along with their fists and elbows, and expressing their mental confusion in the disarray of their uniforms and the craziness of their behaviour. They rushed along, some in silence, their faces distorted by fear, others covering their eyes with their hands and groaning, some in brawling gangs, others alone, and all peering about them like hunted dogs.

In the maze of alleys that leads down to Toledo and Chiaia the mob grew thicker and more frenzied at every step; for popular disorders develop in the same way as disorders of the blood in the human body: in such cases the blood tends to collect in one place and to cause disturbances now in the heart, now in the brain, now in one or other of the intestines. People were coming down from the remotest quarters of the city and collecting in what from time immemorial have been regarded as the holy places of Naples—in the Piazza Reale, around the Tribunali, the Maschio Angioino and the Cathedral, where the miraculous blood of St. Januarius is preserved. There the uproar was terrific, sometimes assuming the proportions of a riot. Lost in that fearsome crowd, which swept them now this way, now that, as it surged to and fro, turning them round and buffeting them like the gale in Dante's Hell, the American soldiers looked as if they too were possessed by a primaeval terror and fury. Their faces were begrimed with sweat and ashes, their uniforms were in rags. Now they too were humbled. No longer were they free men, no longer were they proud conquerors. They were conquered wretches, victims of the blind fury of nature. They too were seared to the depths of their souls by the fire that was consuming the sky and the earth.

From time to time a hollow, muffled rumbling, which spread through the secret recesses of the earth, shook the pavement beneath our feet and made the houses rock. A hoarse, deep, gurgling voice rose from the wells and from the mouths of the sewers. The fountains exhaled sulphurous vapours or threw up jets of boiling mud. That subterranean rumbling, that deep voice, that boiling mud caused a sudden efflux of people from their lairs in the bowels of the earth. For during those melancholy years the wretched populace, in order to escape the merciless air-raids, had made their homes in the winding tunnels of the ancient Angevin aqueduct which runs beneath the streets of Naples. This aqueduct, say the archaeologists, was excavated by the first inhabitants of the city, who were Greeks or Phoenicians, or by the Pelasgians, those mysterious men who came from the sea. There is an allusion to the Angevin aqueduct and its strange population in Boccaccio's tale of Andreuccio de Perugia. These unhappy creatures were emerging from their filthy hell-holes, from the dark caves, the underground passages, the wells and the mouths of the sewers. Each one carried on his shoulders his wretched chattels, or, like a modern Aeneas, his aged father, or his young children, or the
pecuriello,
the paschal lamb, which at Eastertide (it was actually Holy Week) brings joy to even the meanest Neapolitan home, and is sacred, because it is the image of Christ.

This "resurrection," to which the coincidence of Easter gave a dread significance, the resurgence from the tomb of these ragged hordes, was a sure sign of the existence of a danger both grave and imminent. For what hunger, and cholera, and earthquakes—which, according to an ancient belief, destroy palaces and hovels but respect the caverns and the underground passages beneath the city's foundations—cannot accomplish was possible to the rivers of boiling mud with which Vesuvius in its spite was gleefully driving those poor wretches like rats from the sewers.

Those crowds of mud-stained, spectral beings who were everywhere emerging from beneath the ground, that seething mob which was rushing like a river in flood towards the low-lying parts of the city, and the brawls, the yells, the tears, the oaths, the songs the panic, the sudden stampedes, and the ferocious struggles that would break out in the vicinity of a chapel, a fountain, a cross, or a baker's shop, created a frightful, stupendous chaos of sound, which filled the city and was overflowing on to the sea-front, into Via Partenope, Via Caracciolo, the Riviera di Chiaia, and the streets and squares that front the sea between the Granili and Mergellina. It was as if the people in their despair looked to the sea alone for salvation, as if they expected that the waves would quench the flames which were devouring the land, or that the marvellous compassion of the Virgin or St. Januarius would enable them to walk on the waters and escape.

But when they reached the sea-front, where they were greeted by the fearsome spectacle of Vesuvius, red-hot, with streams of lava winding their way down its slopes, and the blazing villages (the blast from the prodigious conflagration spread as far as the island of Capri, which could be seen drifting on the horizon, and the snow-covered mountains of Cilento), the crowd dropped to their knees; and at the sight of the sea, which was covered with a horrible green and yellow film like the mottled hide of some loathsome reptile, they called upon heaven to help them, uttering loud wails, bestial yells and savage oaths. Many, spurred on by the curses and the frightful abuse of the infuriated, envious populace, plunged into the waves, hoping that they would provide a foothold, and were ignominiously drowned.

After wandering round for a long time we finally emerged into the vast square, dominated by the Maschio Angioino, that opens on to the harbour. And there before us, swathed from head to foot in its purple mantle, we saw Vesuvius. That ghostly Caesar with his dog-like head, sitting on his throne of lava and ashes, cleft the sky with his flame-crowned brow, and barked horribly. The pillar of fire that rose from his throat penetrated deep into the celestial vault and vanished into the abyss of heaven. Rivers of blood streamed from his gaping red jaws, and earth, sky and sea trembled.