Neapolitan Chronicles

Anna Maria Ortese

• Publisher: New Vessel Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781939931566
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This prizewinning collection of stories and essays set in post-WWII Naples is "required reading for [Elena] Ferrante fans" ( Kirkus Reviews ). A classic of European literature, this superb collection of fiction and reportage is set in Italy's most vibrant and turbulent metropolis—Naples—in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Depicting the widespread suffering and brutal desperation that plagued the city, it comprises a mix of masterful storytelling and piercing journalism. This book, with its unforgettable portrait of Naples high and low, is also a stunning literary companion to the great neorealist films of the era by directors such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. From an author who has won most of Italy's major literary prizes and served as "a major inspiration for Elana Ferrante, " Neapolitan Chronicles is exquisitely rendered in English by acclaimed translators Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee ( The New York Times ). Included in the collection is "A Pair of Eyeglasses, " one of the most widely praised Italian short stories of the last century. "Elena Ferrante has cited Ortese as one of her greatest influences... This collection of short stories and essays [infuses] a grimy, chaotic Naples with unsentimental menace." — The New Yorker "A writer of exceptional prowess and force. The stories collected in this volume, which reverberate with Chekhovian energy and melancholy, are revered in Italy by writers and readers alike." —Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies

THE SILENCE OF REASON

EVENING DESCENDS UPON THE HILLS

On the evening of June 19 (evening in a manner of speaking, since the sky was bright and the sun was still high over the sea, its glare intense), I boarded the #3 tram, which runs along the Riviera di Chiaia to Mergellina. I sat in a corner seat next to a woman without a nose, who had an enormous plant in her lap, and I began to think about what I would say to justify my visit to Luigi Compagnone,* who worked in the cultural department of Radio Naples and whom I hadn’t seen in quite some time, and to whose home, in fact, I was now going. I needed some information about four or five young Neapolitan writers—Prisco, Rea, Incoronato, and La Capria* (whose first novel was just coming out, from a publisher in the north); I didn’t exclude Pratolini,† even if the author of A Tale of Poor Lovers couldn’t call himself Neapolitan, nor was he a writer at the start of his career, but I had learned that he was about to leave Naples permanently, if he hadn’t already. For a certain period, Compagnone had entertained all these writers at his home, and I hoped to get from him some particularly juicy bit of news, the kind that raises the tone of a piece of writing. “What the Young Writers of Naples Are Up To” was the title of my article, which had been commissioned by an illustrated weekly magazine.

No one could have said that the tram was in a hurry. It was now moving so much more slowly than when I got on at Piazza Vittoria—when its speed had been more or less normal—that one might reasonably suspect the driver had fallen asleep, or was lying wounded in his seat, one eye half open. In reality, the man, in a faded jacket with its buttons missing, was sitting in a normal fashion in the driver’s place, but was slowing down more and more because of the poor condition of the roadway, which appeared to be in ruins.

Leaning out the window, I saw, for a stretch of a kilometer or so—about the length of the Riviera di Chiaia—a swarm of half-naked men, with gray backs, gray shorts, gray heads and hands, who were breaking up the pavement. The paving stones were all dislodged, so that the street resembled a raging torrent whose turbulent waters, once rushing obliquely, were suddenly straightened out and petrified. Many streets, when a certain kind of roadwork is done, take on this distressed and destitute appearance. But here something was different, which soon made it necessary to reject those two descriptive adjectives. No, one could speak neither of distressed or of destitute; this street was, instead, smiling and terrible, much like the expression of intelligence and generosity that the faces of the dead have. It was a dead street, or at least that’s how I defined it to myself, hoping to be able to find later a less vehement and irrational description, something that turned out to be impossible.

On the right side of the street, I saw the same nineteenth-century houses and late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century palaces that had gradually replaced the fishermen’s hovels that, two centuries earlier, had been so numerous in that area of the city that runs right up against the sea. There was no place more graceful and charming, even after the savage years between 1940 and ’45: the hail of tiny holes that marked the façades after the machine-gun bombardments, and the great solemn gaps opened up by the bombs, had for a while animated those walls, harmonizing perfectly with the humans swarming at their base. The thing both dark and brightly colored, that interminable procession of the working class incessantly stirring at the foundations of the buildings, had, for the first time in those years following the tempest of war, emitted a new sound, unexpected and enchanting, like surf rustling on the sand after a hurricane. In that dull, continuous sound was anxiety, but also, even more, hope. That was why the windows of the houses glistened, and the pink and yellow façades were given new vitality when struck by another sun. After several years (it was awhile since I’d been in Naples), the famous Riviera di Chiaia seemed different. A patina, a mysterious concoction of rain, dust, and above all boredom, had spread across the façades, covering their wounds, and returning the landscape to that rarefied immobility, that expressive, ambiguous smile that appears on the faces of the dead. Perhaps if it hadn’t been for that eternal Neapolitan crowd that moved on its own, like a snake struck by the sun but not yet dead, amid the distinct presences of a remote age, the landscape would not have appeared so ghostly. But those half-naked men and women and children, those dogs and cats and birds, all those dark, weary, empty forms, all those throats barely emitting a dry sound, all those eyes full of an obsessive light, of an unspoken plea; all those living creatures who dragged themselves along in a continuous motion resembling the actions of someone with a fever, or the nervous mania that possesses certain beings before dying, through a gesture that seems crucial but is never the right one—that great husk of a crowd, those people who cooked, combed their hair, conducted business, made love, slept (though never really slept) in the open air, was always stirring, always disturbing the archaic calm of the landscape, and, mixing human decadence with the immutable decency of things, drew from it that ambiguous smile, that sense of death taking place, of life on a plane different from life, arising from corruption alone.

The sun, shining through a windowpane, momentarily reddened the knees of the woman sitting next to me. She was looking out the window at the street and the silent crowd of workers and poor people who enlivened it. A very slight, self-satisfied smile danced in her black eyes above the scar. With the familiarity common to people for whom others exist only for the purposes of conversation—and the conversation is more than anything an endless monologue—she informed me that the roadwork was to be finished by September 8, the day of the Festival of Piedigrotta,* so that the street would be ready for the installation of the special lighting, which this year, thanks to the new mayor, was supposed to be extraordinary. A skinny man sitting in front of us, who looked truly ill, nodded. He whispered the following words, which I quote here more for how strange they sounded on his lips than for their meaning: “Lassa fa’ a Dio”—Leave it to God. Just afterward, the tram, which had slowed nearly to a stop because of an even thicker crowd of workers, resumed its normal speed. In the meantime the sun had set.

For a few minutes, I was able to see on the left side of the street dark smudges of trees in the public garden that runs nearly the entire length of the Riviera di Chiaia, separating it from the sea. In the early years of the eighteenth century, this park consisted only of a double row of trees and thirteen fountains placed along the beach by the Duke of Medina. At the end of that century, it was converted into gardens by Ferdinand IV, and since then has been one of the most fabled areas of Naples. On the side nearest Via Caracciolo there is a bridle path still frequented by the aristocracy, while the central paths are continually crowded with the children of the bourgeoisie, riding their bikes and scooters. The children of the working class, from the ages of five to fifteen, happily occupy, instead, the shadiest spots; they go there to pee or to torture animals or to sit around dreaming of love, seduction, and songs. Tuberculosis sufferers are brought there by their relatives on doctors’ orders and fade away on the flagstones like white butterfly wings. And although the luxurious building housing the Press Club lends the gardens a dignified air, at night the place is crisscrossed by American soldiers and Neapolitan youths, and is far from safe.

Not even at that moment when the last rays of the sun touched the highest branches of the live oaks, the palms, and the monkey puzzle trees, faintly gilding the decapitated statues and busts, did the place feel safe. And as we approached the far end the gardens became gloomier. Suddenly, I saw this: five youths of an indeterminate age were sitting on a low wall, waiting with totally expressionless faces for the tram to pass. When it neared, one of them stood up and, quickly, imitated by the others, unbuttoned his trousers. Then, taking their cocks in their fingers as if they were flowers, they began to run along the wall, in an attempt to follow the tram, with shrill, sad, passionate cries, wanting to draw our attention to all they possessed.

Not one of the passengers sitting on that side of the tram who saw them mentioned the matter or found it amusing. The driver, who stood up for a moment, fearing that he might have run over someone, sat down with an irritated sigh, and accelerated, so that soon the five troubled souls vanished.

Other boys appeared, with the same pale, rapt faces, and I was afraid of discovering the reasons for their sick intensity. Two of them had hung a small animal from a tree branch and others were intent on skewering a butterfly. Here and there some were urinating. They had no legitimate occupation and were buoyed by a childish madness. Some of them even sang a short hymn to the Virgin Mary.

The noseless woman was observing me quietly, and observing the street, and, observing me and the street together; she must have thought something about what I was thinking, because the smile with which she mentioned the upcoming festival had disappeared, replaced by a fleeting gleam of suspicion. Finally, I realized that she had stopped thinking and was staring me right in the face. Her stare was vacant, and yet her intensity and curiosity made me uncomfortable. The man, too, was now staring me right in the face, then he stared at my hands and feet. I couldn’t get upset about it because he looked so deathly ill, but still I found it somewhat annoying. So I didn’t wait for the last stop and got off at Piazza Principe di Napoli. The tram continued on without me, and for a moment, as I waited to cross the street, I saw those two blotches—Christian blotches pressed against the window—deep in thought, following me mechanically with their gaze.

Compagnone’s apartment was on Viale Elena, the second of the three streets running out of Piazza Principe di Napoli, which are: Via Caracciolo, Viale Regina Elena, and the fork of Via Mergellina and Via Piedigrotta. While Via Piedigrotta turns toward Piazza Piedigrotta, where the church of the same name is the site of the annual festival, the others flow into Piazza Sannazzaro, near the renowned Mergellina harbor. From this small harbor, originally called Mergoglino, always full of gaily colored boats, and immersed in a silence and light that subdue the colors, the shouts, the splash of oars cleaving the crystal-clear water, the Via Nuova di Posillipo starts, then runs along the entire hill. One could say that here ends working-class Naples (which is all of Naples) and civilized, bourgeois Naples begins, where people do not live in apartment buildings or hovels but only in villas surrounded by large, dark gardens and with their own beachfronts. In actuality, the division is not so precise, since one can find all over Naples beautiful buildings encircled by lush gardens, with marble staircases and drawing rooms, where it’s impossible to imagine the gloom and stench of the alleys right outside. Just as in Naples proper the areas of beauty and joy are islands, from Viale Elena onward, the islands, or exceptions, are ugliness and poverty. At Mergellina begin those high walls of yellow tufa, high as the sky, in which are nestled the graves of Leopardi and Virgil, and which protect the gardens of Posillipo from the Phlegrean Fields. These continue on the other side, scattered with spent volcanoes and sulfur springs around the inhabited areas and deserted places alike, in Bagnoli, Pozzuoli, and Cuma.

Compagnone had lived on Viale Elena for several years, but I don’t remember if he ever liked it. He lived on the mezzanine floor and was particularly repulsed by the sight of people who appeared while he was sitting at his desk, filthy faces from nearby Mergellina, in stark contrast with the dignity of the neighborhood, and by hearing almost every night shots fired in celebration of one saint or another as the fireworks fell on his terrace. After a while, though, he stopped noticing so much. He was a tall young man, distinguished-looking, with a small head, classical features, and abundant brown hair. His delicately shaped eyes were deep blue and veiled by long lashes. Similarly delicate, and one might even say Greek in form, were his nose and his mouth, whose tightly joined lips only now and again curved slightly at the corners into a murky smile. There was something in his face of both extreme youth and old age, and over the years the struggle between an innate nobility and kindness and an equally strong desperation and malice became increasingly evident, and little by little, especially for those who didn’t see him frequently, that baser part of him, like a hidden evil, had advanced. Not by much, however, and one might not even be aware of it.

I crossed Piazza Principe di Napoli to Via Mergellina with the intention of reaching Viale Elena from Via Galiani, which cuts across those two parallel streets and passes right in front of Compagnone’s building. I was very near the Caffè Fontana when I thought I saw him. He was coming toward me from the opposite sidewalk, with his usual unhurried, slightly weary, limping gait. His face was pale, as if he was cold, and his eyes looked around joylessly, or rather with a mute, oppressive rage. I was about to greet him when I realized I was simply remembering him.

I realized another thing, too: the nonchalance with which I had set out to see Compagnone, as if, as I had believed until then, he was just another Radio Naples bureaucrat—that nonchalance had vanished. I hesitated before turning onto Via Galiani, as if the ground under my feet were moving slightly. Even the buildings seemed to be slightly distorted, and here and there pale, troubled figures looked out, full of resignation and fury.

In that state of mind, between stunned and oppressed, I took a few steps and immediately saw the asphalt at the far end of Viale Elena, and the continuation of Via Galiani, and then, also, the asphalt of Via Caracciolo, illuminated by the blue glow of the sea. The bureaucrat’s apartment was situated on that last stretch of Via Galiani, in a building at the corner of Viale Elena. I saw the front gate and the mezzanine terrace. As usual, the gate was ajar, and the terrace was empty. I could have gone in by the main entrance, but I preferred to follow an old habit that, in years past, had led me to enter Compagnone’s house only through the gate, where almost every evening and even late into the night it was possible to see the small living room lit up and the bureaucrat sitting in a corner, with a weary, acerbic look, surrounded by his young friends. This time I was not mistaken, the living room was completely dark; not even the smallest ray of light escaped through the door’s glass panes, and I could vaguely distinguish only the outlines of the furniture. The doors to the adjoining terrace were also closed, and from the thin lines strung up between the walls not a sock or a handkerchief dangled, leading me to conclude that young Anita, Compagnone’s wife, had gone out with the baby. Nevertheless, I pushed open the gate, went up...