Naples '44 (10 page)

In the afternoon I drove out to Afragola through cold, pitiless rain, and had great difficulty in finding the Priore shack in the waterlogged fields. Inside, hideous, stinking poverty; an old lady shrivelled as a mummy lying fully dressed under a pile of rags in a bed. Starving cats, rats, leaking roof, a suffocating smell of excrement. Not the slightest sign of food anywhere. Nearest house two hundred yards away.

At the Carabinieri Station I found the Brigadiere in a state of shock, sitting at his desk staring into space. He was suffering from daily gunfights between rival gangs, bandits, pillaging army deserters, vendettas, kidnappings, mysterious disappearances, reported cases of typhus, the
non-arrival of his pay and the shortage of supplies of every kind, including ammunition, and it flabbergasted him that it was possible for anyone to be concerned about the fate of one abandoned old woman. ‘If it worries you so much,' he said, ‘why not just let the old man go?'

From Afragola I went to the MP's HQ to take away samples of wire, and then on to Signals for expert examination. ‘Of course it's German wire,' the Captain said, ‘but half the wire we use is. It's our wire now. Surely it all depends when the cutting took place?' He studied the copper where it had been chopped into. ‘Looks quite bright, doesn't it?'

Back at HQ I recommended Priore's release, and was told that the recommendation was out of order. Priore was held in Poggio Reale at the disposition of the Military Police, noted for their stubborn defence of their territorial rights. So Priore would be brought to trial in a week's time – or maybe two weeks, or even three weeks, depending on pressure of business in the courts. Meanwhile the wife would die alone in their shack. There was nothing whatever to be done.

Rumours are the standby – the bread and butter – of any security section, and in a section like this where a daily report is insisted upon, and material has to be raked up to fill it from one source or another, they are avidly snatched up for use as space-fillers. It is said that in some sections, less worthy than ours, they are unscrupulously manufactured by section members themselves. At all events, whether true or – as in most cases – false, they are rarely of the slightest importance.

This morning's rumour, picked from my report by the FSO, proved to be the rare exception, and in reading it he fairly bounded from his chair and within minutes was on his way to Army Headquarters. The rumour was that an invasion was planned at Anzio, just south of Rome, and would take place next week. An hour or two later the FSO was back, frothing with excitement. In this case the rumour was fact. The invasion was on, and I was ordered forthwith to track down the source of the leak which might necessitate having to call the whole operation off.

A ticklish business indeed, because the information came from the
Gemellis with whom I dined last night. Since the time of the arrest of their next-door neighbour Signora Esposito-Lau, I had struck up a friendship with both Norah and her husband Alberto, and it was a friendship of the kind that I hoped would outlast the war. Whenever I found myself at a loose end of an evening it had become my habit to run up to the Via Filippo Palizzi and spend it with my friends chatting about life in general, or listening to readings of poetry by Norah, usually from Dante or Leopardi. Through the Gemellis I had made a network of friendships, and now being told that I was obliged to go back to these people and browbeat them if necessary, to obtain further information, meant the certain loss of their confidence and their affection.

I saw Norah and did the best I could to explain the predicament I was in. The fact that she was only half Italian and had either inherited or believed she had inherited emotional attitudes from her Irish mother, clearly helped. She clung to a sentimental fictional view of our basic rectitude as a nation. I was Welsh, too, which was half way to being Irish. We were all Celts together, united in our little Camorra against the big Camorra of Naples, the Americans and other foreigners in general. The upshot was I got the name of an Ingeniere Crespi, at whose house at a dinner-party attended by the Gemellis the thing had started, and Norah went off to see Signora Crespi and prepare her for my visit.

Fortunately the honoured and terrible tradition of Omertà is gradually dying out in the Neapolitan upper classes. Had the sweet and smiling little Signora Crespi and her family inhabited a
basso
in Sant' Antonio Abate, stronghold in Naples of all the ancient and mysterious traditions, one of which raises the guest to the dignity and sanctity of a member of a family, she would not have talked. She would have ducked and dodged, and in the end produced the inevitable trump card: ‘I made it all up, I was lying to impress my friends, so do what you like about it.' But Signora Crespi lived in a Via dei Mille block of flats with a uniformed porter, and a lift that would work again one day, and her husband was a successful man and her son went to the university, and all these things had had their civilising and their taming effect. The Signora talked, describing the occasion at another dinner-party when a British civilian
technician employed by the Navy had become a little tipsy and boastful, reacting to the general contention that the war had reached a state of stalemate by brandishing the news of the impending invasion.

This was a textbook case of a breach of security, of the kind described at the Matlock course. One had heard of this kind of thing, but never believed that it could really happen. The fateful news of the landing might as well have been shouted by heralds down from the heights of the Vomero. It would have spread by now in all directions. If I had picked it up it was hard to believe that one of the line-crossers would not have done so too. It was clear from the FSO's alarm that all the terrific paraphernalia of preparation for an operation of this scale was well under way. The question was, dared we go ahead, with in all probability a fifty-fifty chance that the Germans would be dug in, waiting for us?

Another morning of terrible confusion in the Castel Capuano, with justice dispensed in the present eccentric, almost whimsical fashion. My interest was in the poor, halfwitted old Antonio Priore, who had been arrested for cutting a main telephone cable to sell the copper. He didn't show up, so presumably – as is so often the case – he had got himself lost in the overcrowded gaol. While kicking my heels I looked in on a few other trials.

Most of these were farcical. The court was in the centre of the Porta Capuana black-market district in which stolen army supplies of every kind were openly and abundantly displayed on every roadside stall, and yet there were men here in the dock laden with chains, to receive the current prison sentence of three months, plus a fine of 30,000 lire, for being found in possession of five or six cartons of American cigarettes. A case came up of a man charged with possession. An MP appeared and claimed to have arrested him, but the man, who had already been in prison six weeks, denied this. He told the judge he was arrested by a squad of MPs, not including this one, and had never been able to find out why. The MP gave his evidence in such a shaky manner that the judge repeatedly questioned him.

JUDGE:
But do you remember him or don't you?

MP:
There's something familiar about his face. That's all I can say. I've had fifty other cases since this man was picked up.

JUDGE:
I wish to see your notes on this particular case.

It turned out that the MP had no notes, and the case was dismissed.

The man who had the good luck to be called immediately after this particular fiasco benefited from the young judge's increasing demoralization and got off with a fine of only 200 lire for possession of Army boots. There followed two far more serious cases in which not only did the witness for the prosecution fail to appear, but all the statements, which should have been attached to the other documents, were missing. The judge ordered the witnesses to be fetched immediately, but it was then discovered that instead of their home addresses, the only addresses given had been c/o the Central Police Station.

This might have been no more than another innocent example of chaos, or something more sinister – the bribery of prison or court officials in the hope that the judge would throw up his hands in despair and dismiss the case. If so, it could be a dangerous game for the defendants, because in this instance the judge ordered a postponement, and sentences were getting heavier every week.

The next man in the dock, charged with the possession of articles of military clothing, was a typical old Neapolitan sweat of the kind that pretends to be halfwitted to be allowed to get away with his jokes. He was thoroughly enjoying himself, spoke in an exaggerated dialect hardly recognisable as Italian, and went in for a mime that sent up titters all over the court. The interpreter took care to leave out most of his asides, but the judge, bewildered and irritated by the laughter, wanted to know what it was all about.

JUDGE:
Didn't he just say something about the Americans? What did he say?

INTERPRETER:
Just a stupid remark, your honour. Nothing to do with the case.

JUDGE:
Will you please leave it to me to decide what has to do with the case, and what has not. I insist on knowing what he said.

INTERPRETER:
He said, ‘When the Germans were here we ate once a day. Now the Americans have come we eat once a week.'

JUDGE:
Ask him if it means nothing to him that we have freed him and his kind from Fascism. How can he talk about us and the Germans in the same breath?

The interpreter translated the judge's remarks and the old man rolled up his eyes, let out a derisive gabble, and then went through the gesture of displaying his sexual parts. A gale of laughter went up.

JUDGE:
I'm losing all patience with him. What does he say now?

INTERPRETER:
With respect, your honour, he says, Americans or Germans, it's all the same to him. We've been screwed by both of them.

JUDGE:
He's off his head. Get him out of my sight. Case dismissed.

THE PRISONER:
Best wishes, your lordship. May all your kids be males.

The Anzio landing took place yesterday, so far – miraculously – with every sign of success. It seems incredible the Germans should not have been ready and waiting. They must be asleep. On January 19, thirty-five maps of operational significance – presumably concerned with the landing – were found on the floor of a warehouse in Torre Annunziata. Civilians were taking them away to make a fire. They said that about five hundred more had already been burned.

Thieves have scaled the ramparts of Castellammare castle, which houses the Field Security Headquarters for Italy, removed the wheels from all the vehicles, and escaped back with them over the walls, which are thirty feet in height. Despite sentries at the gate and roving patrols within, Castellammare – source of all discipline and doctrine in matters of security – has been breached and ravished. As the Italians put it, we've been
fottuti
. They see us as only one degree better than cuckolds. The operation, carried out with contemptuous ease, took about five minutes
to complete. This will provide splendid material for the ballad-singers of the area, whose audiences revel in colourful villainy.

I was reminded by this display of audacity and resourcefulness of the first days of our arrival in Naples, and my amazement at the spectacle of a damaged tank abandoned at the Porta Capuana, which, although one never saw a finger laid on it, shrank away day by day, as if its armour-plating had been made of ice, until nothing whatever remained. Things have come a long way since then. There have been newspaper accounts of urban buses seen careering away into the remote fastness of the Apennines, there to be reduced in comfort to their component parts. Trams, left where they had come to a standstill when the departing Germans wrecked the generating station, have been spirited away in the night. A railway engine, stranded in open country owing to the looting of rails and sleepers, was driven off when these rails and sleepers were quite incredibly relaid, to a place more discreetly located for its demolition.

No feat, according to the newspapers and to public rumour, both of which dwell with great delight on such flamboyant acts of piracy, is too outrageous for this new breed of robber. In the region of Agropoli small ships left unguarded have been lifted out of the water and mysteriously transported away, and portions of their superstructures have later been discovered miles inland, hidden in orchards as if they had been carried there and left high and dry by some tidal wave. In revenge, said the newspaper reporting this case, a party of fishermen raided an isolated castle in the area and went off with tapestries which they used to repair their sails.

Nothing has been too large or too small – from telegraph poles to phials of penicillin – to escape the Neapolitan kleptomania. A week or two ago an orchestra playing at the San Carlo to an audience largely clothed in Allied hospital blankets, returned from a five-minute interval to find all its instruments missing. A theoretically priceless collection of Roman cameos was abstracted from the museum and replaced by modern imitations, the thief only learning – so the reports go – when he came to dispose of his booty that the originals themselves were counterfeit. Now the statues are disappearing from the public squares,
and one cemetery has lost most of its tombstones. Even the manhole covers have been found to have a marketable value, so that suddenly these too have all gone, and everywhere there are holes in the road.

I have come to the conclusion that the people of Naples know nothing – and care nothing – for the life of the countryside around them. They have crowded together in their human rookeries to live the affable, rootless life of the soft city, having shed, probably with gratitude and relief, the uncomfortable traditions of the Italian South. When, for example, I talked to Lattarullo about such things as vendettas he replied intelligently and after some thought, but all he had to say might have been taken from a book dealing with primitive tribal customs. He had no first-hand knowledge at all of such things – nor had any of my Italian friends. Ten miles from the cafés of the Piazza Dante finds one deep in vendetta country – but Afragola with its Bronze-Age rituals might, for the Neapolitans, be a thousand miles away. The main road to Caserta, which everybody visited for its palace, passed through the outskirts of Afragola, but Lattarullo had never bothered to turn aside and drive a hundred yards or so into the town which gave both Al Capone and the Neapolitan clowns to the world – although he and all my other contacts had been to Rome many times. Afragola, which belonged to another age, and another world, was just as alien and incomprehensible to them as it was to me.