Naples '44 (13 page)

I drove out in a slow, grey, snowfall to visit Professor Saraceno, a leading seismologist who showed himself pleasantly excited at the prospect of the vindication of certain of his theories. He said that the destruction of Pompeii probably followed the undercutting by the eruption of those days of part of the crater wall. This eventually fell into the crater, sealing off for a time the eruptive forces until such time as pressure built up to produce an explosion which discharged millions of tons of pulverised rock into the air. From an inspection he had made of the crater some months previously, he believed a disaster of the same kind could be repeated, and I got the impression that he would not be wholly dismayed if it were. I thanked him sincerely, and repaid his advice with a tin of corned beef, which he accepted with gratitude.

An increase in the violence of the eruption, and also of the population's fears. Following the news that San Sebastiano was about to be carried away by the lava stream, and Cercola was threatened, I was sent to get an on-the-spot report.

Sticky going all the way through the ash, with several skids. At San Giorgio a roadblock had been put up and all vehicles not concerned with the emergency were being turned back. There were reports in this area of showers of the small volcanic stones technically known as
lapilli
, and here and there larger rocks had fallen, causing so far one death. At this point I was right under the great grey cloud, full of swellings and protuberances, like some colossal pulsating brain.

Reaching San Sebastiano, it seemed incredible that all its people could have consented to go on living in such a position. The town was built at the very tip of a tongue of land until now spared by the volcano, but completely outflanked by the tremendous lava fields left by the eruption of 1872, and in effect lying in a valley between them. There were nine major eruptions in the last century alone, lava being on several occasions discharged in this direction, while lava streams have frequently burst forth from lateral openings at lower levels on the slopes. Here, stranded as it was in the no-man's-land of the volcano, any outsider
would have predicted the town's eventual destruction as a matter of mathematical certainty, yet apparently no citizen of San Sebastiano would admit even to the possibility of this. Civic permanency is a matter of religious faith. Buildings are solidly constructed to withstand the centuries. Slow-growing trees are planted. Main-street businesses advertise with pride the age of their establishment. The population creeps up numerically and the young people stay on. All windows face westwards in hope across green valleys towards Naples, and the houses turn their backs on the grey eternal cone of the volcano. San Sebastiano fights back with colour against the ashen desert of old lava that almost encircles it. Even in wartime I found it a well-painted place, with geraniums in window-boxes everywhere, and an additional liveliness provided by the political parties with their posters and their flags.

At the time of my arrival the lava was pushing its way very quietly down the main street, and about fifty yards from the edge of this great, slowly-shifting slagheap, a crowd of several hundred people, mostly in black, knelt in prayer. Holy banners and church images were held aloft, and acolytes swung censers and sprinkled holy water in the direction of the cinders. Occasionally a grief-crazed citizen would grab one of the banners and dash towards the wall of lava, shaking it angrily as if to warn off the malignant spirits of the eruption. The spectacle of the eruption was totally unexpected. I had been prepared for rivers of fire, but there was no fire and no burning anywhere – only the slow, deliberate suffocation of the town under millions of tons of clinkers. The lava was moving at a rate of only a few yards an hour, and it had covered half the town to a depth of perhaps thirty feet. A complete, undamaged cupola of a church, severed from the submerged building, jogged slowly towards us on its bed of cinders. The whole process was strangely quiet. The black slagheap shook, trembled and jerked a little and cinders rattled down its slope. A house, cautiously encircled and then overwhelmed, disappeared from sight intact, and a faint, distant grinding sound followed as the lava began its digestion. As I watched, a tall building housing what was clearly the town's smart café took the pressure of the lava's movement. For perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes it resisted, then the juddering,
trembling spasm of the lava seemed to pass into its fabric, and it, too, began to tremble, before its walls bulged and it went down.

Dominant in every way, for sheer size, and the number of persons supporting the platform of the images confronting the eruption, was that of San Sebastiano himself, but wandering away into a side street, I noticed the presence of another image, also with numerous attendants, which was covered with a white sheet. One of the Carabinieri patrolling on the lookout for looters told me that this was an image of San Gennaro, smuggled in from Naples on an outside chance that it might be of some use if all else failed. It had been covered with a sheet to avoid offence to the confraternity of San Sebastiano and the Saint himself who might have been expected to resent this intrusion into his territory. As the last resort only, San Gennaro would be brought into the open and implored to perform a miracle. The Carabiniere did not think this would be necessary, because it was clear to him that the lava stream was slowing down.

We strolled back together into the main street, and in fact there had been no advance that I could detect within the last hour. The café had gone, but the cinema next door was still there, protected now by a dozen young men who had formed a line and had advanced, brandishing crosses, to within a few yards of the lava. Not a single clinker tumbled down the black slope as we watched. Flakes of ash, softer than snow, were still drifting down, but the day seemed to have lightened, and for a moment the sunlit cone of the volcano came into sight ahead, as if through a tear in a curtain. Childish voices somewhere in the rear had begun to sing a
Te Deum
. It seemed likely that half the town would be saved.

It was clear today that the eruption had lost its force, and the news was that roughly half San Sebastiano had in fact been spared.

I visited Lattarullo who introduced me to a friend, Carlo Del Giudice, another non-practising lawyer who made an incredibly precarious living by writing newspaper articles on folklore and astronomy. He got an
article published once or twice a month and, taking devaluation into account, received about the equivalent of one pound for each contribution. Like Lattarullo, he lived on cups of coffee substitute, pumpkin seeds and an occasional pizza, and smoked cigarettes made up by real craftsmen from ends collected in the street. These some people even prefer to straightforward Camels, Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes, as having more flavour. Unlike Lattarullo, starvation had not made him stringy and emaciated, but produced a kind of puffy inflation. He looked hollow.

Del Giudice was an expert on the subject of San Gennaro, and therefore Vesuvius, as the two were linked together, and had privately published a little book dealing with the scientific and natural explanations of miracles. Neither he nor any of his friends, all of them connoisseurs of eruptions, had been allowed to get anywhere near Vesuvius, so he was delighted to be able to talk to someone who had viewed the eruption at close quarters and enquired into every detail of my experiences at San Sebastiano. Above all, he was most interested to hear of an image of San Gennaro being kept round a corner out of sight, ready to go into action in a final emergency.

According to the opinion of most Neapolitans, Del Giudice said, it wouldn't have made the slightest difference if it had. San Gennaro had confined his miracle-working to Naples for fourteen centuries since his martyrdom at Pozzuoli and it was believed of him that he wouldn't lift a finger to save the rest of the world from destruction. San Gennaro's job had been to keep the fires of Vesuvius at bay, but only on behalf of Naples. During this period Resina and Torre Del Greco, only five and seven miles respectively down the coast, had been overwhelmed by lava and rebuilt seven times.

He personally was a sceptic and a rationalist, Del Giudice said, and Lattarullo nodded approval; he was too. However, three people out of four – and he included the educated classes – were openly or secretly of the belief that Naples could only be protected from Vesuvius with San Gennaro on its side. He cited the one period in history when Naples had tried to change saints, and what the consequences had been. In 1799
Napoleon's troops took Naples, and the Saint was involved in the resistance to the occupation. It was made clear through the priests of his cult that the miraculous liquefaction of his congealed blood kept in an ampulla in the Cathedral would not take place on the first Saturday in May, as it had always done. As the prosperity of Naples was always believed to depend on this recurrent miracle, riots began, and French soldiers were assassinated. At eight in the evening of the day when the miracle was due to take place, and the crowds were howling and rampaging in the streets, a French staff-officer went to the officiating priest and gave him ten minutes to produce the miracle, or be shot. The blood promptly liquefied but San Gennaro, charged by the Neapolitans with collaboration, was dismissed and his image thrown into the sea. He was replaced by San Antonio Abate, chosen as the heaven-appointed guardian against fire, but it turned out that the only fires he could prevent or suppress – and according to Del Giudice he was immensely successful in this way during his tenure of office – were those of man-made origin. From historical evidence, he said, private houses practically ceased to burn down with San Antonio in control, but in dealing with the first eruption of the volcano he proved to be out of his depth, and with the lava rolling towards the city fishermen were sent to drag the sea-bed and recover the image of San Gennaro. There was a moment of crisis while the fisherman searched unsuccessfully for the image, which by then had been in the water for several years, but in the nick of time a statue of the saint which had been erected on the Maddaloni Bridge and had somehow been forgotten came to the rescue, raising and spreading its marble arms to halt the passage of the lava. With this miraculous happening, reported to have been witnessed by thousands, the day of San Antonio was at an end, and San Gennaro was back again.

People, Del Giudice said, will believe anything.

Fear is expressed that the blood of San Gennaro may refuse to liquefy this year, and that such a failure might be exploited by secret anti-Allied factions and troublemakers to set off large-scale rioting of the kind that
has frequently happened in Neapolitan history when the miracle has failed. Everywhere there is a craving for miracles and cures. The war has pushed the Neapolitans back into the Middle Ages. Churches are suddenly full of images that talk, bleed, sweat, nod their heads and exude health-giving liquors to be mopped up by handkerchiefs, or even collected in bottles, and anxious, ecstatic crowds gather waiting for these marvels to happen. Every day the newspapers report new miracles. In the church of Santo Agnello, a speaking crucifix carries on a regular conversation with the image of Santa Maria d'Intercessione – a fact confirmed by reporters on the spot. The image of Santa Maria del Carmine, first recorded as having bowed its head to avoid a cannot-shot during the siege of Naples by Alfonso of Aragon, now does this as a matter of daily routine. This church used to be visited annually by the King and his court to watch the royal barber shave the hair that had miraculously grown on an ivory Christ during the preceding twelve months. The custom is likely to be renewed. And even if San Gennaro's blood doesn't liquefy they have a phial of the blood of St John in San Giovanni a Carbonara, which – say the papers – bubbles away every time the gospel is read to it.

The woman who cooks for us mentioned today that she would be taking time off to visit the chapel of Sant' Aspreno. She suffers from neuralgia and expects to obtain relief by pushing her head through a hole in the wall of the chapel. The Saint is patron of sufferers from headaches, and there are daily queues at the chapel waiting to be able to submit themselves to this treatment. Naples has reached a state of nervous exhaustion when mass hallucination has become a commonplace, and belief of any kind can be more real than reality.

The streets of Naples are full of people hawking personal possessions of all kinds: pieces of jewellery, old books, pictures, clothing, etc. Many of them are members of the middle class, and the approach is made in a shamefaced and surreptitious way. One and all, they are in a state of desperate need.

Today at the top of the Via Roma near the Piazza Dante I was stopped by a pleasant-faced old lady, who had nothing for sale but who implored me to go with her to her house in a side-street nearby. She had something to show me, and was so insistent that I followed her to the typical
basso
in a side-street, where she lived. The single, windowless room was lit by a minute electric bulb over the usual shrine, and I saw a thin girl standing in a corner. The reason for the appeal now became clear. This, said the woman, was her child, aged thirteen, and she wished to prostitute her. Many soldiers, it seems, will pay for sexual activity less than full intercourse, and she had a revolting scale of fees for these services. For example, the girl would strip and display her pubescent organs for twenty lire.

I told the woman that I would report her to the police, and she pretended to weep, but it was an empty threat, and she knew it. Nothing can be done. There are no police to deal with the thousands of squalid little crimes like this committed every day in the city.

On my way back I was stopped and drawn into a corner by a priest, white-lipped and smiling. He opened a bag full of umbrella handles, candlesticks and small ornaments of all kinds carved out of the bones of the saints, i.e. from bones filched from one of the catacombs. He, too, had to live.