Voyage By Dhow (19 page)

But most of the coups pulled off by the organized gangs, the Camorra, which imitate the Mafia of Sicily, are theatrical rather than violent. Three robbers who succeeded in sealing off Parker’s Hotel from the outside world, and who took two hours to ransack it from top to bottom, prepared and consumed a leisurely meal before departing.

The recent capture of the Ischia ferry-boat was another episode that might have been modelled on a film; having despoiled the passengers with the now familiar show of civility and regret, the bandits leapt to the deck of a following motor-launch waving farewells and blowing kisses to the girls before vanishing into the night.

If one has an affection for such movies as
The French Connection
, this is an environment not wholly without its own brand of attraction. What in its way can be more pleasant than to draw a chair out on to the balcony of a room in the Hotel Excelsior overlooking the exquisite small harbour of Santa Lucia, and there, glass in hand and without the slightest risk to one’s safety and comfort, play the part of an extra in such a film? The view is of the majestic fortress of the Castel dell’Ovo, dominating a port scene by a naïve painter: simple fishermen’s houses that have become restaurants, painted boats, tiny, foreshortened maritime figures, going nowhere in particular, a quayside stacked with the pleasant litter of the sea.

There is less innocence in the prospect than at first meets the eye, because a corner of the port has been taken over by a fleet of some forty large motor-launches, painted the darkest of marine blues, devoid of all trappings, and having about them an air of sinister functionalism. From time to time one starts up with a tremendous chuckle of twin 230 Mercury engines, is manoeuvred in swaggering fashion round the other boats and out of the port before, a moment later, trailing a wake like a destroyer, it heads for the horizon.

This is the fleet of the best-organized and most successful
contrabandisti
in southern Italy, and in these launches (which give the impression of having been specially designed for the trade) are smuggled in the cigarettes and who knows what else picked up in incessant rendezvous with the ships steaming out from the ports of Tunisia. Smuggling is hardly the word to describe these operations, all stages of which, taking place in Italian waters, are on open display. The boats come and go throughout the day, unload their cargoes without concealment and cut a few jubilant capers in the harbour before tying up. There are no signs of the law in the harbour area, and motor-cycle policemen passing through Santa Lucia do so hurriedly with eyes averted. Understandings have clearly been reached at high levels. Customs launches lack the speed to catch the
contrabandisti
at sea, and rarely dare to enter the port. Occasional disagreements among the smugglers themselves can, however, be explosive: hotel guests a week or so before our arrival had a ringside seat at a brief battle, followed by a spectacular incineration of boats.

It is a situation viewed by Neapolitans with tacit approval if not with enthusiasm, and the benefits of the direct trade with north Africa to the man in the street are immediately visible. There is hardly a street without a small boy seated at a table to offer Marlboro cigarettes, made in Tunis (only the government health-warning is missing), at less than 500 lire as opposed to the 800 lire charged in the shops. The authorities seem to regard the traffic as hardly more than an inevitable evil. ‘I refuse to admit that this is a crime,’ said Maurizio Valenzi, the communist Mayor of Naples. ‘For me it is an illegal solution.’ The mayor shared the frequently voiced Neapolitan view that his city is the victim of a calumnious outside world. ‘If you are looking for crime on a big scale, go to Rome or Milan,’ he said. ‘The worst thing that can happen to you here is to have your pocket picked. Nobody gets mugged in Naples and we treat women with respect. Whoever heard of a Neapolitan being pulled in for knocking a child about? Even the Red Brigade don’t operate here.’

Valenzi is as Neapolitan as Brezhnev is Muscovite, lively of expression and gesture, a distinguished painter and a first-rate oratorical performer in a country in which no politician can survive without the knack of rhetoric and a powerful voice. His appearance recalls the views on matters of dress held by Togliatti, party leader for so many years: ‘What pleases me is to see a comrade dressed in a good double-breasted suit—if possible, dark blue.’ Valenzi is wholly congruous in the rococo furnishings, the marble and the glitter of the Naples Town Hall. He is fired by local patriotism, impatient of criticism of his city, and particularly saddened by those contained in a book by a communist author, Maria Antoinetta Macciocchi, who had been a parliamentary candidate for one of the poor quarters of the city. ‘She wasn’t much liked here,’ the mayor said.

Macciocchi had mentioned that the rat population of central Naples was 7 million. Many of these, she said, were shared out in the
bassi
, those claustrophobic dwellings consisting of a single room that line the streets of the old town, in which as many as fifteen members of a family may live as best they can with no windows, the street doors shut at night, no running water and a closet behind a curtain. The mayor, who showed a partiality for euphemism, shied away from the word
bassi
, but agreed that 69,000 families lived in ‘unhygienic houses’. ‘The municipality,’ he said, ‘has plans to do something.’

‘Our submerged economy’ was Valenzi’s description for the child labour existing in Naples to an extent found nowhere else in the Western world. There is no way of calculating the number of children from the age of eight upwards employed in cafés, bars, or the innumerable sweat-shops tucked away in the narrow streets; but there are certainly tens of thousands of them. It would appear to be another ‘illegal solution’. Naples has the highest birth-rate in Italy—twice the national average—and it is an everyday accomplishment for a woman to have borne ten children by the age of thirty-five and to have completed a brood of fifteen or sixteen by the time she ceases to reproduce. Such families are a source of complacency rather than despair. One is assured that they testify to a woman’s sexual attraction and her husband’s virility. More importantly, perhaps, they represent an insurance policy against economic disaster. When up to five or six children contribute small regular sums to the budget a family is not only more affluent but securer than a less numerous one in the trap of chronic unemployment.

These are the facts of Neapolitan life against which Mayor Valenzi struggles like Canute against the waves. If the child in proletarian Naples is an economic weapon in the family armoury it follows as a consequence that such central areas of the city as the Vicaria district have the highest population density in Europe—possibly in the world—with up to three people occupying every two square
metres
. But if overcrowding, and its damaging effect on public health, is the most pressing problem that face the mayor and his council, it is the terrific anachronism of child labour with its whiff of early-Victorian England that gives the city a bad name. Therefore gestures have to be made, and from time to time the police are ordered into action to close down all establishments employing child labour and to punish their owners with exemplary fines. What follows is economic disaster for all involved—sometimes desperate impoverishment for the families thrown back on the providing power of the father who, statistically speaking, can expect to spend a third of his life unemployed. At this point the exploiters and the exploited only too often join forces in protest, and their votes are lost to whatever party is held responsible for their plight.

How is this situation to be tackled? How can any political party hope to put an end to the Neapolitan tradition of the large family which engenders the poverty which is to be fought by even larger families? Schooling in Italy is compulsory up to fourteen years of age, but the school inspectors are as helpless as the politicians. The little courtyards tucked away everywhere in Naples are full of small boys aged upwards of eight years who work ten or twelve hours a day, for as little as £2 a week, stitching and glueing shoes. A happier-looking, more intelligent collection of children it would be hard to find in the family atmosphere that pervades even the workshop. None of them will ever read or write.

Naples sharpens the stranger’s wits and teaches him to look after himself. The lesson is not a difficult one to learn, and in a matter of hours, days at most, amusement is apt to take over from indignation. One exchanges laughter with the agreeable young man who offers a perfect imitation of a Seiko watch that only ticks for a minute or two when it is wound up; or points without severity, on taking a taxi, to the meter inevitably still registering the fare clocked up by the last passenger. There are basic precautions to be taken: passports and valuables are automatically committed to the hotel’s safe, and only enough money carried to meet immediate requirements. When parking a car it is not a bad idea to secure the steering wheel with a chain and padlock. These things attended to, one can relax and join in the local games.

Our own arrival in Naples was on the second day of the ancient and popular feast of Santa Maria del Carmine, held in the streets adjacent to the old church at the far end of the port. Del Carmine is the parish church of one of a number of districts, once virtually separate villages. Each has its history, traditions, customs—and often the enfeebled remnant of a once-powerful ruling family. And such was the spirit of rivalry between one district and another that fifty years ago intermarriage between districts was rare.

The church possesses a picture of a ‘black’ Virgin, held responsible for many cures, in particular of epileptics and lepers and of those afflicted with all kinds of pox. The most unusual and attractive feature of the
festa
is the ‘burning’ of the church tower, by the setting alight of bales of straw fastened to its walls, with the intention of cleansing it, and thus the district itself, of evil spirits during the forthcoming year. It was a disappointment to learn that the tower was not to be ‘burned’ on this occasion: repairs to its structure had been found necessary, and the scaffolding was already in place. The cancellation of the ceremony had cast a certain gloom over the neighbourhood, which depends largely on fishing and feared that catches might be affected.

The Corso Garibaldi, a wide if dishevelled street running past the church, was filled by early evening with a holiday crowd. Here all the familiar ingredients of a Neapolitan
festa
were assembled: the stalls with tooth-cracking nougat, solid cakes and cheroots; the shooting booths; the intimidating display of strange shellfish; balloons and holy pictures—and black-market cigarettes.

In Naples the cult of the enormous Japanese motorcycle has arrived and they were here in fearsome concentration, roaring through whatever space they found among the press of human bodies. We saw one elfin girl mounted on a Kawasaki ‘King Kong’ hyper-bike. Children are not over-protected in Naples. The minimum age for a Vespa rider seemed to be twelve or thirteen; and crash helmets were absolutely out.

These are the occasions when, in holiday mood, Neapolitans resolutely suspend belief. A professional ‘uncle from Rome’ was pointed out to us, aloof and immaculate in his dark suit, ready to hire himself to any family wishing to impress its guests on an occasion such as a christening, wedding or funeral.
Magliari
—confidence tricksters who flock to all such
festas
—were there in numbers, instantly recognizable even to an outsider by the apparatus of their trade.

The grade-A hoax operator presents himself as a rejected suitor offering the ‘silver’ service bought for the wedding that will no longer take place.
Magliari
in truck-drivers’ overalls and with oil on their fingers flog trashy radios and defective tape-recorders ‘off the back of the van’. A local boy in burnous and headcloths, skin yellowed by several layers of instant-tan, hawks vile carpets which, he claims, have been brought over from Tunisia with the cigarettes. How do Neapolitans—those masters of guile—allow themselves to be taken in?

Until two years ago the seller of Acqua Ferrata would have been here. This most esteemed and expensive of curative waters, nauseatingly flavoured with iron, was drawn from a hole in the ground somewhere in Santa Lucia and offered—exactly as illustrated in the Pompeii frescos—in containers shaped like a woman’s breast. Since then, following a typhoid scare, the health department has stepped in and Acqua Ferrata is at an end—temporarily, perhaps—to be replaced with a poorish substitute: fresh lemonade animated with bicarbonate of soda.

One figure alone from the remote past had survived at del Carmine: the
pazzariello
, the joker of antiquity, also shown in the Pompeii frescos. Once he drove out devils, and as recently as the time of the last war no new business could be opened before a
pazzariello
had been called in to lash out with his stick at every corner of a building where a devil might have concealed himself. The office was an honoured one, hereditary and indispensable, too, in a city where even now people cross the road in the Via Carducci to avoid passing too close to a building notoriously under the influence of the evil eye. But now the magic power of the
pazzariello
has drained away; the one we saw, doing his best to dodge the motorcyclists as he capered about in the Corso Garibaldi, was there to advertise a fish restaurant.

Our visit to del Carmine provided a mild adventure. Among the exhibition of holy pictures, most of them crude versions of the celebrated ikon on display in the church, we noted one of a strikingly different kind; a portrait of a somewhat stolid-looking middle-aged man, stiff in a formal suit:
Il Santo Dottore Moscati.
It turned out that the holy doctor was a GP of the district, recently deceased and newly canonized by popular acclamation, without reference to Vatican or Church, as a result of a number of miraculous cures he had effected.

The display with its new, popular saint seemed to call for a photograph, but the elderly lady in charge fought shy of the camera and retreated in haste, shielding her face with one of the ikons and leaving her husband to conduct any further negotiations. The old man made no objection to being photographed when we agreed to buy a picture of Dr Moscati. Since the light was already failing, the camera was set up on a tripod and the preparations put in hand. Immediately a crowd began to collect, drawn by the powerful magnet of this performance from the competing attractions of a shooting booth and the church just across the road. A Neapolitan friend who had guided us to the
festa
became concerned, feeling that we were attracting too much attention and were too vulnerable, surrounded by photographic gear, to a passing
scippatore
. But the crowd was co-operative and affable; working Neapolitans, as gregarious as pigeons, love nothing better than a new face and an excuse to exchange a smile with a foreigner. People were actually jostling each other and manoeuvring to be included in the photograph, so that, realizing that we were among friends, all warnings were ignored and the photography went ahead.