Kaputt (58 page)

"A victim?" I said.

"Don't you think the Italian people know who is the only person responsible for everything? They know how to differentiate between me and Mussolini! They know that I was opposed to war, that I did everything in my power—"

"The Italian people," I interrupted, "know nothing, do not want to know anything, and believe in nothing any longer. You and the others should have done something in 1940 to prevent this war. You should have done something, risked something!

That was the time to sell your lives dearly. Now your lives are worth nothing. But you were too fond of power. That is the truth and the Italians know it."

"Do you think that if I cleared out today..."

"It is too late now. You will drown with him."

"Then what should I do?" Galeazzo said with shrill impatience in his voice. "What am I expected to do? Should I allow myself to be thrown away like a filthy rag when it suits his convenience? Should I resign myself to drowning with him? I do not want to die!"

"To die? It isn't worth while," I replied, repeating the words of the French Ambassador François Poncet.

"Quite so, it isn't worth while," Galeazzo said. "Why die? The Italians are a kind people. They do not want anyone's death."

"You are mistaken," I said. "The Italians are no longer what they once were. They would be pleased to see you die—him and you. Him and you, and all the others."

"And what would our deaths accomplish?" asked Galeazzo.

"Nothing. Nothing at all."

Galeazzo was silent. He was pale and his brow was damp with sweat. At that moment a girl crossed the meadow on the way to meet a group of golfers who were walking toward the clubhouse, swinging their putters in their hands.

"What a good-looking girl!" Galeazzo said. "Would you like to have her?" and he gave me a slight dig in the ribs with his elbow.

XVIII. Blood

A
S
SOON
as I was released from the
Regina Coeli
prison in Rome I went straight to the railway station and boarded the Naples train. It was the seventh of August 1943. I was running away from the war, the slaughter, typhus and hunger; I was running away from the prison, from the stinking, dark, airless cell, the filthy straw mattress, the loathsome soup, bugs, lice and the pail full of excrement. I wanted to go home, I wanted to go to Capri, to my lonely house high above the sea.

By then I had reached the end of my long, cruel four-year journey through war, blood, hunger, burned villages and wrecked towns. I was tired, disillusioned and cowed. Jail after jail, always a jail in Italy. Nothing but jail, policemen and manacled men—that is Italy. Mario Alicata and Cesarini Sforza, as soon as they had been released from
Regina Coeli,
after the long months they had spent in their cells also had gone home. I went to the railway station and boarded the Naples train. I, too, wanted to go home. The train was packed with refugees, old people, women, children, officers, soldiers, priests and policemen,- the roofs of the coaches swarmed with soldiers, some of them were armed, others not; some were in uniform, others in tatters, dirty and downcast; still others were half-naked, filthy and merry; they were deserters going home, or simply fleeing without knowing where, singing and laughing, as if overwhelmed and inspired by a great and wondrous fear.

They were fleeing from war, hunger and plague, from the wreckage, the terror and death; they were running toward war, hunger and plague, toward the wreckage, the terror and death. They were fleeing from the Germans, bombardments, want and fear. They were running toward Naples, toward war, the Germans, bombardments, want and fear; toward filthy air shelters polluted with the dung of famished, worn-out and stupefied people. They were fleeing from despair, from the miserable and wondrous despair of a lost war; they were running toward the hope of an end to their hunger, an end to their fear, an end to the war—toward the miserable and wondrous hope of a lost war. They were fleeing from Italy and running toward Italy.

The heat was stifling. I had not as yet had a chance to wash. I was just as I had been in my cell, number 462 in the fourth block of
Regina Coeli.
I still had the sweet, greasy smell of bugs about me. I was unshaven, my hair was disheveled, nails cracked. We were twenty, thirty, forty, no one knows how many, in the compartment; we were pressed against each other, piled on each other; our lips were swollen with thirst. Our faces were purple and we stood on tiptoe, our necks stretched upward, our mouths wide open so we could breathe. We looked like people who had been hung and were swinging horribly with each jolt of the train. Every now and then a "toc, toc, toe" came from the sky, the train stopped with a jerk. Everybody leaped to the ground, crouched in the ditches and hollows along the railway embankment and gazed upward until that "toc, toc, toe" came to an end. At every station we met long German trains that were moving or waiting on sidings—trains loaded with soldiers and weapons. The Germans looked at us with their cruel, gray eyes. What weariness, what contempt, what hatred were in those eyes! My companions said, "Where are they going?" One of them asked me whether I was returning from the front. "What front?" a soldier asked. "There is no front any more. No war any more. No more unfailing victory. No more
long live the Duce!
No more anything. What front?"

I answered, "I am returning from
Regina Coeli."
The soldier looked at me with suspicion, "What is
Regina Coeli
? A convent?" he asked. "It is a prison," I replied. "What prison?" the soldier challenged. "There is no longer any prison. No more policemen, no more jailers, no more jail. No more anything. There is no longer any prison in Italy. Prison is ended, Italy is ended. No more anything! "

Everybody laughed as they listened to the soldier. It was a coarse, evil, painful laughter, a despairing laughter. They laughed in his face, and I also laughed, "There is no longer any prison in Italy!" they said. "No longer any prison! Ha, ha, ha!" Everybody laughed in our compartment, in the corridor, in the other compartments, in the other corridors, in the other coaches, everybody laughed. The train itself laughed, from one end to the other, as it jolted and twisted on the rails, and laughing coarsely the train whistled, slowed down and came to a stop before a huge pile of debris and bloody rags. This was Naples.

Through a black, glistening cloud of flies the sun beat down on the roofs and asphalt paving; gusts of heat rose from the debris piled around the disemboweled buildings, a mist of dry dust rose like a cloud of sand from beneath the feet of pedestrians. At first, the city looked deserted. Then, little by little, one distinguished a hum coming from the lanes and courtyards, a stifled chatter of voices, a faint and distant noise. Penetrating the secret of the
bassi
—the windowless ground-floors, probing the depth of the narrow clefts between the towering houses that are the noble streets of ancient Naples, one saw a restless swarm of people who stood, moved about and gesticulated; groups of people were squatting on their haunches and around little fires that burned between two stones, watching the water boil in old gasoline cans, kettles, pans or coffeepots; men, women and children slept piled upon each other, on mattresses, straw beds and bedding of any and all kinds, stretched out before the gates, in the courtyards, among the debris, in the shade of crumbling walls or by the entrances to the caves hewn in the damp, brackish
tufa,
a limestone that penetrates to the bowels of the earth in every part of Naples. Inside the
bassi
people were standing, sitting or resting on the high, baroque, iron or brass beds decorated with landscapes, saints and Madonnas. Many crouched silently on the thresholds with that melancholy air of the Neapolitans who, not knowing what to do, simply wait. At first the city seemed silent as well as deserted, but little by little, it seemed to me a confused rumble came into being in the dusty air. It acquired form and consistency in my ears until it resounded all around me with the steady, continuous, solid roar of a raging river.

I was walking toward the harbor, along a straight, long road, walking as in a dream, stunned by that infernal din, blinded by the dust swept up by the sea breeze from the debris of the wrecked houses. The sun struck with its large, golden hammer the terraces and fronts of houses, stirring up swarms of buzzing black flies; when I lifted my eyes, I saw the wide-open windows, balconies and the women combing their hair and looking from the windows at the sky as if it were a mirror. Singing voices fell from somewhere above and were taken up at once by a thousand lips that sent them humming from mouth to mouth, from window to window, from street to street, as if they were bounced by jugglers. Groups of sweaty, barefoot boys dressed in rags and tattered shirts—the youngest ones stark naked—chased screaming up and down the streets,- yet there was something distant, cautious, and wily about them; they were not playing any adventurous and fanciful game. Watching them carefully, one soon discovered that they were busy trading: one was carrying a basket of lettuce, another a handful of charcoal, another a can of nondescript dish-water, another an armful of wood, while others, like little ants hauling a grain of wheat, were struggling with a charred beam or a cask or old ramshackle pieces of furniture unearthed from the piles of debris. The stench of corpses rose from under the mountains of stones and plaster. Entire families of lazy fat flies with gold wings buzzed over the debris. At last I came to the sea.

The sight of the sea moved me and I began to weep. A river, a plain, a mountain, not even a tree or a cloud—nothing has in it the feeling of freedom like the sea. A prisoner in jail stares hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year at the walls of his cell. They are always the same white smooth walls, and when he gazes at those walls, at the sea, he cannot imagine it blue,- he can only imagine the sea's being white, smooth, bare, without waves, without storms—a squalid sea illuminated by the flat light penetrating through the bars of his window. That is his sea, that is his freedom—a white, smooth bare sea, a squalid and cold freedom.

But there, before me, was the warm and delicate sea, the Neapolitan sea, the free blue sea of Naples—all crumpled into little waves that rippled after one another with a gentle sound under the caress of a wind scented with brine and rosemary. There, before me, was the blue sea, the free and limitless sea rippling in the wind; not the white, cold, smooth bare sea of the prison but the warm, deep blue sea. There, before me, was the sea, there was freedom, and I wept gazing at it from a distance, from the road that descended to the sea across a large square. I did not dare to come any closer. I even did not dare to stretch out my hand toward it lest it flee, lest it disappear beyond the skyline, lest it retreat in disgust from my dirty, greasy hand with its cracked nails.

Gazing at the distant sea, I stood motionless in the middle of the street and wept. And I did not even hear the humming of bees high up in the remote sky. I did not notice the people fleeing to the caves hewn into the hill. Finally a boy approached me, touched my arm and said in a gentle voice:
"Signo' stanno venenno
—Sir, they are coming!" Then I realized that I was surrounded by a mob that ran screaming down the wide road sloping toward the shimmering sea. I was not sure where I was, but seeing the columns of a church, I thought I recognized Santa Lucia Street. The mob rushed through a large gate and disappeared as though it had been swallowed into some secret cave. I was about to follow them and seek shelter within the dark bowels of the earth when I raised my eyes and became paralyzed with fear.

A silent crowd was moving toward me along the lanes and down the steps that lead from Santa Lucia Street to Pizzofalcone and Monte di Dio. It was a mysterious crowd of ghosts and monsters that have their lairs in the grottos in the courtyards and in the
bassi
of that quarter of Naples that lies at the far end of the hundred dark alleys and constitutes the maze of the Pallonetto. They moved toward me in a body, like an army about to attack a fortified castle. They walked slowly and silently, in that lonely silence that comes before the crash of the first bombs, in that terrified loneliness draped around them by the sacred character of their horrible deformities. They were the cripples: the halt, the twisted, the lame, the hunch-backed, the maimed, the legless— those "monsters" who, in Turin, are sheltered from human sight within the merciful solitude of the
Cottolengo.
The war had driven them out of the religious seclusion in the innermost part of the houses, where pity, horror, superstition and family shame, had hidden them all their lives and kept them in darkness and silence. The "monsters" moved slowly, helping each other, half-naked, clothed in rags, their faces distorted, not by fear, but by hatred and glory. Maybe because of the dazzling light and the ghostly glow of that moment, or because of the terror of the impending downpour of steel and fire, the expression on those faces was satanic—an evil leer with nothing but spite for all creation— a strange light shone in their eyes that burned with fever or were flooded with tears. A horrible grin twisted their drooling mouths. They all had in common: fear, a helpless rage, and foaming saliva at their mouths.

There were women covered all over with hair and clothed in filthy rags, their breasts dangling from under tattered slips. One woman, covered with stiff bristles, led a young man of about thirty, who could have been her husband or her brother; his eyes were wide open and staring, his legs were shrunk and twisted by some disease of the bones,- she walked with her breasts bare—one small and withered, eaten away by decay or gnawed by cancer, a black, almost carbonized breast, while the other one, flabby and shriveled, hung down to her belly. Some were skeletons clothed in rags, their heads covered with yellow skin stretched tightly over their skulls, their teeth bared by an atrocious grin; some were old men, bald and toothless, with dog faces. There were young girls with monstrously large and swollen heads attached to tiny, fleshless bodies,- there were old hags huge, fat, swollen, with enormous bellies and small shriveled birdlike heads on which the hair stood hard and bristly, like feathers. There were crippled children with ape-like faces; some of them dragged themselves on all fours; others limped, leaning on makeshift crutches,- still others huddled in small, primitive carts that were pushed along by their companions. They were the "monsters" preserved with a sacred timidity in the inner bosom of the Neapolitan alleys, the objects of religious idolatry as intercessors in that worship of magic that is the secret cult of the people. For the first time in their consecrated existence the war had driven them from their lairs into the sunlight; their silent march toward the caves hewn in the hill was like a procession of sacred idols, like an array of Plutonic deities who, having emerged to the surface because of some subterranean cataclysm, were again seeking shelter within the mysterious bowels of the earth.