Timebends (30 page)

But the glimpse of the West's future that I had imagined I would find in Europe was as confusing there as it was in Brooklyn. The Italian Communist Party might be the largest in Europe, but it was quietly advising people to vote for the Christian Democrats in the upcoming election lest America cut off its food shipments and the country starve, the Russians having nothing to send in the event of a Red electoral victory. I was still under the sway of an apocalyptic idea of history and constantly had to remind myself that the crowds in the streets and the people we met, far from being the innocent victims of Mussolini's stupidity and arrogant posturing, had for the most part supported fascism or not resisted it. Surprisingly few were, like Ezio Tedei, dangerous enough to have been put away, and he seemed even now a supremely innocent if not naive man awaiting a revolution whose signs I could find nowhere.

There was a so-called Ring around Rome where thousands of homeless families were living in lightless caves dug into precipices and hillsides. We climbed up and sat with them, skin-and-bones people living in their own filth, lugging pails of water up from hydrants far down below in the streets. From some of the caves they had a view of brand-new apartment houses going up across a highway as the rain of February swept across their faces. This was the Rome of
Bicycle Thief.
Of course it could not have dawned on me that in forty years New York would admit to even more homeless than Rome had after the devastation of war. Nor would I have easily believed then in the erosion of outrage, including my own most of the time, to the point where I am used to this catastrophe as a merely sad consequence of life in imperial New York, the world's most exciting city.

South of Foggia the red flag flew over one city hall after another, and Longhi and I would sit with peasants who drew out from under their beds maps of the latifundia, the estates that would be divided up among them once the Communists had won the oncoming national election. They had their names written on parcels on these maps and were already sure where each one's boundaries
were going to be and with their dark fingers were glad to trace them for me. Moving up and down the country that winter, almost three years after the end of the war, I realized one day that we had not seen a single fat Italian. Where were the ample mamas and the belly-heaving papas? It was all over in Italy, finished. People everywhere were asking if we thought Italy could be admitted as the forty-ninth state in the American Union, and they weren't kidding either.

Still, it was not sad in the way France seemed to be; Italian energy was like a weed that took root anywhere, no matter what. In a small town in the southeast, every afternoon about four, Vinny's maiden aunt Emilia, a schoolteacher in her fifties, would rush out into the square, where loudspeakers erupted with speeches phoned in from the Christian Democratic Party headquarters in Foggia, the provincial capital, while a few yards away another loudspeaker bawled out a fiery speech by the Communists, wired from Rome. The cacophony was spectacular. A passionately sincere string of a woman, Emilia would try to herd strollers to collect around the Demo-Christian loudspeaker and turn their backs on the Communist one. By five-thirty the loudspeakers cut out so that the evening promenade could begin; the party lines melted as people did as they had done for a thousand years, walked around and around the piazza, the marriageable young stopping to chat and look one another over like penguins. Emilia was fascinated to learn that I was a Jew, having taken for granted that they no longer existed—not because of what was not yet called the Holocaust but out of some unexamined belief that they had all been converted after the resurrection of Christ or had somehow vanished into the pages of the Bible. “But,” she smiled reassuringly, “you believe in Christ, too, of course.” I thought, when I informed her otherwise, that a flicker of terror passed over her devout eyes as she stared at me, but we were soon friendly again, it being part of her faith that not everything in life was supposed to be comprehensible. I, on the other hand, still imagined that nothing was beyond the reach of the mind.

One afternoon a church procession appeared on the street and stopped what little traffic there was, and as we waited while the golden crucifix and the saint's statue were carried past by chanting choirboys, I wondered if indeed the old ways were as dead as people thought. A middle-aged man in front of us stood with bowed head, his hat over his heart, and after the procession passed, Longhi delicately asked him what sacred occasion was being celebrated. “Who the hell knows?” he replied, stuck his hat back on,
and hurried impatiently across the street. That, to me, was Italy then, a touching performance wrapped around a cynical joke. The French took collapse far more to heart, as though they had been cheated unfairly of some victory or had bad consciences for having collaborated. The Italians seemed to understand that as usual they had kidded themselves with Mussolini's grandiosity. And anyway the main idea was to live, not die for something.

On the lovely Adriatic breakwater in Mola di Bari, just above the heel of the boot, was a different sort of procession at around five in the afternoon. Longhi had a number of addresses from Red Hook longshoremen's families to look up here, and he went from house to house, a one-man Red Cross, bringing news of Brooklyn, making notes on the ages of the children and how the women were faring. The husbands' second families back in Brooklyn were of course never mentioned, but their existence was understood. These women's dramas were being ground out grain by grain between the molars of economic necessity, and if some of the “first wives” were now grim and aging, others were still in their thirties, and their doe's eyes revealed how fearful they were of ultimate abandonment. But Vinny loved few things more than to reassure women, and they adored looking up at him, so unusually tall for an Italian and so full of good, healthy food.

At around five we saw a promenade at the seafront consisting of an unusual number of single men walking together, some arm in arm, a common custom, but not dressed like other Italians; they wore dark New York overcoats and gray New York hats with brims turned up all around, and buttoned white shirts without ties, and pointy, thin-soled, brilliantly shined city shoes. In one of the cafés facing the sea we accosted four who were having their coffee. At first they spoke Italian, but Vinny's witty grin brought acknowledging smiles and they happily lapsed into Brooklynese. Clearly they were on the lam, “the boys” waiting out some threat of prosecution in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, or LA, condemned to watch the profitless sun going up and down in this beautiful but boring exile until the fix was in and they could hit the States again.

Italy was giving me courage for the play forming in my head,
A View from the Bridge,
but I was not yet sure I dared write as intimately about Italians as it would demand. All I was sure I understood was that the difference between America and Europe was that Europe was full of relatives and in America the pull of the blood connection was gone. In Rome, Vinny felt compelled to visit a cousin, a captain who worked at the top staff level of the War Department of Italy. Formal, foot-clomping guards in white spats
and white gloves crisscrossed balletically in front of the entrance of what amounted to their Pentagon, rifles in firm grips held before them. At the tiny information wicket Vinny asked to see Captain Franco Longhi, but the attendant behind the thin bars was sorry, there could be no visitors here without previous notification.

“Captain Longhi is my cousin.”

The face of the man behind the window went still. “Your
cousin?”

“I'm from America. Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn!”

Instantly he was on the phone, and I thought I saw his eyes growing moist. In a moment we were in an elevator and, emerging from it, were greeted by three or four colonels, a couple of generals, and weepy women secretaries looking on with hands clasped under their chins as Captain Longhi embraced Vinny—Italians instantly divide up into audiences and actors—and all work halted here in the heart of the Italian military as we sat around on desks for at least half an hour listening to the cousins exchanging news of various relatives, some of whom had died in this or that Italian battle or of old age and disease. A general finally ordered the captain to take us to lunch, and over our salad he asked Vinny if he had an in with the Parker Pen Company in America; the one thing you could surely sell in Italy in 1948 was a genuine Parker pen. There were unfortunately a lot of fakes made in Naples, but people were on to them now . . .

“This is the way the world ends” kept revolving in my head as we walked on the Neapolitan promenades, which, with their baroque lampposts, were either tilted toward the bay or had been bombed to rubble even as the facing hotels kept enough lights on to invite nonexistent guests. The young whores roved in chattering packs and reached down between our legs and laughed, calling us fags for not taking them on. In daylight, women balancing laundry baskets on their heads walked through the street crowds near the foreigners' hotels and with magical hands snatched the hats off passing strangers, quickly popping them into their baskets and leaving the victims to turn around and around looking for a hat that had vanished in air. Once I was sitting in a carriage alone, waiting for Vinny to change some money in a nearby bank, when a young guy came over and began pulling our valises literally from under my feet, quite as though he had some instruction from us to take them. I complained in English, and he looked up with a certain civilized recognition but went right on trying to pull the bags out of the carriage until I kicked his hands with the heel of my shoe,
at which he looked up at me again and shrugged and went his way, no hard feelings. Another performance.

And the wicked Neapolitan stories then. Of the parish priest who came upon a long line of neighborhood people in front of a house and followed it up the stairs into a second-floor apartment. Entering, he found one of his elderly parishioners charging people a few cents each to go into the bedroom to get a look at his unmarried young daughter in bed with her new baby, which was black. There were many black American troops in Naples then, and a black baby born to a white woman was both scandalous and somehow unbelievable, like a miracle. The priest, of course, exploded in outrage. “It's bad enough your daughter is not married, but you are brazen enough to profit from her misfortune before the whole neighborhood!” The girl's father took the priest aside and whispered, “Don't worry, Padre, it's not really her baby.”

It was finished in Italy, all over, but just outside Rome was an improvised backyard restaurant with four or five wobbly tables and a sign overhead reading, “Come In. Eat! Nobody Ever Died Here!” For a moment in history we were in a place where people most enjoyed the distinction of being alive and not dead, an aristocracy of survivors.

A different kind of survivor, though, at the windy Mola di Bari littoral. The town mayor confided that the
“ebrei,
” Jews out of the German death camps, had been given shelter in the line of grand seafront palazzos that had been built by prominent Fascisti who had fled or were now in prison. Vinny found the way, which was difficult because the British were pressuring the Italian government not to allow concentration camp Jews into the country or, once in, to prevent them from taking ship to Palestine, and no one wanted to mention their presence to strangers. All Mola di Bari and Bari conspired to keep the secret. Finally at evening we found them, hundreds of people camped in perhaps twenty large houses facing the Adriatic, many nearly piled one on top of the other in corridors. When we walked in I felt an icy hostility such as I had never known, a sense of my nonexistence, of my being transparent. The women turned away from us to look after children, men and boys passed us by like draughts of air. But I knew that to make a wrong move that could be interpreted as aggression would mean being torn to pieces. I approached two young men, unshaven but clean, who watched me with looks of undisguised threat. I tried English, Vinny did some Italian, and finally I attempted some pidgin Yiddish-German, simply to wish them well and to identify
myself as a Jew. They were not interested in my problem and could see no help in me for their own, which was simply to get aboard a ship to Palestine and leave the graveyard of Europe forever. Their mistrust was like acid in my face; I was talking to burnt wood, charred iron, bone with eyes. In coming years I would wonder why it never occurred to me to throw in my lot with them when they were the product of precisely the catastrophe I had in various ways given my writing life to try to prevent. To this day, thinking of them there on their dark porches silently scanning the sea for their ship, unwanted by any of the civilized powers, their very presence here illegal and menaced by British diplomatic intervention, I feel myself disembodied, detached, ashamed of my stupidity, my failure to recognize myself in them.

It reminds me of a similar hole in my heart regarding my response to the first report of Hiroshima. How could I have felt such wonder? Such relief, too, that the war was over at last? How could I have dared study the first descriptions of the workings of the bomb and feel some pride in man's intellect?

Whence this detachment? One day it would seem the very soul of the matter: a failure to imagine will make us die.

In his passionately intimate Italian, Vinny asked the hotel clerk where we could find a place to eat lunch. Foreigners were still so rare at the Hotel des Palmes that the man was embarrassed to inform us that no restaurant existed as yet in Palermo, except one on the other side of town that served only dinner. Indeed, as we could see, even our hotel was only half standing after the misfortune with that American bomb. By this time Europe to me was a middle-aged concierge in tails with a wing collar and a stained gray silk tie and broken fingernails. The lobby, surrounded by elaborate archways with heavy buttresses suitable for masking trysts and quiet business conversations of doubtful legality, ended abruptly at a vast brown shroud of canvas beyond which lay the ruins of the fallen half of the building.