Kaputt (59 page)

Suddenly I saw the god among them. I saw the secret god on whom the worship of the "monsters" centered. I saw the king of that "court of miracles."
It
moved forward slowly, assisted by a mob of horrible dwarfs. I did not know whether the creature was a man or a beast;
It
was hidden from head to foot by a large cloth covering and looked thin and small in stature. Thrown over Its head, as if to shelter
It
from profane eyes, was one of those silken coverlets that in Naples adorn even the poorest beds; it was yellow and very large,- the coverlet hung from the shoulders, reached the feet and dragged along the ground as it fluttered in the breeze that blew from the sea. Some of the dwarfs, who formed a circle around
It,
supported
It,
because
It
was blinded by the coverlet and could not walk without assistance. Others with stifled shrieks that sounded like grunts, made way for
It
by shoving the crippled, the lame and the blind who had straggled on the dusty way. With their Angers they quickly cleared a path of pebbles, bricks and plaster so
It
would not stumble. Others grasped the edges of the coverlet so the god would not slip or so the wind, by lifting the coverlet, would not reveal Its horrible secret to profane eyes. Their efforts did not prevent me from catching, beneath an edge lifted by the wind, a glimpse of a leg that seemed to be as hairy as a beast's.

It
walked slowly, with Its hands beneath the coverlet outstretched in the attitude of the blind; Its knees seemed burdened and weighted down by a mysterious load
It
carried on Its head. Beneath the coverlet, where the head should have been, was something shapeless and huge that swayed slowly and hung first on one shoulder, and then on the other; what made me shudder was that the monster made no effort to keep the load from dropping.
It
made none of those instinctive gestures that help to balance a large, heavy object on the head. With a chill I thought that the horrible monster, the secret god of Naples could be a man or a woman with an animal's head; a goat's, or a dog's, or judging by its size, most likely a calf's head; or maybe there were two heads. This seemed even nearer to the truth, judging by the strange movements beneath the coverlet, as if both heads moved independently of each other. The lane along which
It
descended was piled with debris and filth; almost every house had been bombed and wrecked. Against that background of ruin and death the god proceeded as if across a desert.
It
had fled from Its secret temple; now
It
was on the way to descend into the bowels of the earth, into the subterranean kingdom of Plutonic Naples. I do not know whether I screamed, or whether I merely drew back with fear; the god surrounded by Its court of dwarfs was approaching me, and Its two monstrous heads were swaying beneath the yellow coverlet. Brought back from my horror by the guttural shouts of the dwarfs who were very near, I turned in search of an escape and found myself at the mouth of a cavern toward which, in a sinister silence broken only by the solitary scream of a child or by a woman's prayer, the consecrated mob of monsters was moving, followed by their terrible god. They walked dragging their feet through the dust and plaster; their arms were held to their breasts, their hooked hands twisted outward, their lips protruding; they were ready to scratch, bite, tear and rend flesh to open for themselves a path into the stinking darkness of the cavern. The silence was charged with wrath and menace.

Driven by that mob of monsters, I entered the cavern; it was a dark and deep grotto, one of those subterranean galleries through which pass the Angevin aqueducts that form a huge unexplored maze underneath Naples. Here and there a shaft of light penetrated through a pit that opened on a street above; some of those pits were mentioned by Boccaccio in the story of Andreuccio da Perugia. In those gloomy dens, in those thousands of caverns cut in the
tufa
had lived for three years this queer, ragged population that had found shelter and safety from the bombs in that subterranean maze. They lived in frightful promiscuity, wallowing in their own excrement, sleeping on bedding brought from the ruined houses, trafficking, trading, celebrating weddings and funerals, going on with their small tasks, their commerce and their sinister activities. As soon as I had taken a few steps through that subterranean city, I turned my head and through the mouth of the cavern I saw the shimmering sea. Thick clouds of smoke and dust were rising above the harbor. The crash of bombs seemed faint in that Plutonic country; the walls of the cavern shook and rivulets of dust cascaded through the cracks in the
tufa.
Instead of weeping, of teeth-grinding or sobs, I was met by a din of shouts, songs and voices hailing and answering above the noise of the crowd. I recognized the age-long, joyous real voice of Naples. I felt as if I were looking on a marketplace, on a square filled with a festive crowd aroused by the tunes of Piedigrotta or by the liturgical chants of a procession. It was the real, the living Naples that had survived three years of bombardment, hunger and plague,- it was the Naples of people, of the alleys, of
bassi,
of hovels, of the quarters without light, sun or bread. The electric lights hanging from the vault of the cavern showed many thousands of faces, and the constant motion that kept the crowd on the go produced an illusion of a large square in a crowded quarter of Naples on the night of a great and popular festival.

I had never felt so close to the people—I—who until then had always felt like a stranger in Naples; I had never felt so close to that crowd which until that day had seemed so different and alien. I was covered with dust and sweat, my uniform was torn, my face unshaven, my hands and face greasy and soiled. I had come out of prison only a few hours before and found in that crowd a human warmth, a human affection, a human companionship, distress of the same kind as my own, suffering of the same human kind as my own, but only greater, deeper and perhaps more real and ancient than mine. A suffering rendered sacred by its age, its fatalism, its mysterious nature, compared with which my own suffering was only human, new and without any deep roots in my own age. A suffering bereft of despair and lighted by a great, beautiful hope, compared with which my own poor and small despair was merely a puny feeling that made me feel ashamed.

Bright fires were burning along the walls of the cavern where the
tufa,
cut by the chisel, forms so many rustic niches and where the lateral conduits of the Angevin aqueduct branch off from the main stream of the subterranean rivers that run under the hill. Pots of soup were boiling over the fires. They seemed to me the very community kitchens which Mussolini had forbidden in Naples and which the people, left on their own by the flight of the princes and the wealthy, were organizing with their own means, by their own initiative, in an effort to avoid starvation, by mutual assistance. The smell of potato and bean soup rose from the pots along with the familiar cry
"Doie lire! doie lire! 'na ministra 'e ver dur a, doie lire! doie lire!
—Two liras! two liras for vegetable soup, two liras, two liras!" Earthenware dishes, cups, tins and containers of all sorts were hoisted by hundreds of hands,- they strode over the sea of heads, floated above the crowd and glistened white with the reflection of the electric lights. Through the red glow of the fires came the sucking of lips, the rude, brutal crackling of jaws and the tinkle of plates, miserable pewter and tinware. Now and then the chewing slowed down, the jaws stopped, the shouting and the voices died down, the cries of water vendors and cooks were stifled in their throats. Everybody stood and listened in fearful silence, broken only by the hiss of breathing that replaced the din and clamor of voices. The wave of the bomb crash ran through the cavern with the swish of an ebbing sea, it ran from niche to niche, deep into the gloomy bowels of the hill. The silence was devotional, a pause that came not from fear, but from pity and sorrow. "Those poor things!" somebody near me shouted, thinking of the anguish in the hit houses, of the people buried alive beneath the debris, in the cellars, in the puny shelters of the harbor district. Little by little a song rose from the end of the cavern as crowds of women joined the chanting litanies for the dead; queer, ragged priests, bearded, incredibly filthy, their black cassocks whitened by the plaster dust, blended their voices with the women's choir; they stopped from time to time to bless the crowd and to grant everybody absolution from their sins in a barbarous mixture of Latin and Neapolitan. The crowd shouted the names of their dead, of their relatives who were in danger, of their kinsmen living in the harbor districts hammered by the bombings, of those who were away at sea or at war. The people shouted "Micheee! Rafiliii! Carmiliiii! Guncittiii! Mariii! Gennariii! Pascaaa! Peppiii! Maculatiii!" and they stretched their hands toward the priests with fists closed, as if they were clutching relics of their dead in their fingers—a lock of hair, a piece of cloth or leather, a splinter of bone. For a few minutes the huge crowd wept, dropped on their knees and raised their arms toward Heaven and shouted pleas to the Carmine Madonna—to San Gennaro and to Santa Lucia, while the crashes of the bombs came closer, shook the earth, echoed through the hollow hill and penetrated the foul, gloomy dens with their hot blasts. Then, suddenly, as the explosions became more distant, the melodious cries of cooks and peddlers of potato fritters and of water,
"Acqua fresca! Acqua fresca!"
broke through the lamentations of women and the deep chanting of priests. Coins tinkled in the alms boxes that filthy lean monks and worn-out nuns shook among the crowds, and here and there laughter was heard, a shrill outburst of laughter, a song, a gay voice, the name of a woman echoing, rebounding and singing through the cavern. The ancient noise of Naples, the loud ancient voice of Naples rose and was heard again and again, like the voice of the sea.

At that moment a woman was taken with labor pains. She screamed, prayed, moaned and howled like a dog at night. Instantly, a hundred volunteer midwives, wooly-haired grandmothers, their eyes glistening with joy, made their way through the crowd and closed in around the woman in labor, who suddenly sent forth a piercing scream. The midwives fought for the infant and one of them, a fat and shapeless old hag with touseled hair, quicker and more daring than the others, clutched it, fingered it, lifted it high to protect it from the crowd, dried it with her skirt, and washed it by licking it and spitting in its face, just as a priest came up to christen it. "A little water!" he called. Everybody offered bottles, coffeepots and jars. The crowd shouted, "Name him Benedetto! Name him Benvenuto! Name him Gennaro! Gennaro! Gennaro!" These cries, these names faded into the vast subterranean noise, into songs, the laughter and the long melodious cries of cooks and peddlers; they blended like separate parts of one song, of one life, with the neighing of horses that the cabmen had led into the safety of the shelter. The huge cavern seemed like a great square on the night of Piedigrotta, when the noise of the feast is dying down in the city, and the crowd, returning from Fuorigrotta, alights from carriages and lingers in the square to breathe a little fresh air before going to bed and drinks another lemonade, eats another pastry while everywhere people are saying good night and bidding farewells and loud good-bys to godfathers, godmothers, friends and relatives.

Crowds of boys at the entrance to the cavern were already announcing that the danger was over and shouting news about houses that had been hit, about the dead, the wounded, the buried and the damage. The crowd was stirring and getting ready to leave, when from above, from a kind of castle of furniture erected in a deep niche, as though from a high balcony, a tall old lout with a thick black beard raised his arms and towering with his imposing build above the crowd, began to shout in a fierce, terrible, rousing voice:
Ih bone femmene, ih figli 'e bone femmene, ih che bordello! jatevenne! jatavenne! jatavenne!
—Hi, good women, hi, sons of good women, what an uproar! Away! Away! Away!" and he gestured with his hands as if he were driving intruders from his castle. He yawned and rubbed his eyes, not as if he merely had been roused from his bed and slumber, but as if the great crowd of strangers were annoying him, as if it were a threat to his prerogatives, as if it had invaded the subterranean kingdom of which he was king and master.

So complete was the illusion that I was in the neighborhood of Rua Catalana, of Dogana del Sale, of Spezieria Vecchia, near the harbor, that I lifted my eyes to the ceiling of black
tufa
and expected to see Vesuvius looking down from the horizon with its short clay pipe between its teeth, and a pink scarf of clouds around its neck like an old sailor looking out of a window at the sea. Gradually the crowd laughing and chattering, calling out names, as if leaving a show, flowed out of the mouth of the cavern. As the people took the first steps in the open air they stumbled and lifted their eyes in anguish to the dense cloud of dust and smoke enveloping the entire city.

The sky was dull blue and the sea a glistening green. I walked hemmed in by a crowd, climbed toward Toledo, and in the meanwhile looked around in the hope to find a face I knew, a friend who would take me in for the night, until the little steamer that was to take me home arrived in the harbor from Capri. For two days the Capri steamer had avoided the landing at Santa Lucia; nobody knew how much longer I would have to wait before being able to reach home. Little by little, as the sunset approached, the heat became damp and heavy; I seemed to be walking wrapped in a woolen blanket. Here and there the streets were flanked with huge mounds of debris that under the delicious sky of blue silk seemed to me more cruel and funereal than the debris of Warsaw, Belgrade, Kiev, Hamburg and Berlin under their own misty, cold, uneasy skies. A feeling of loneliness froze my heart and I searched around me hoping to recognize the face of a friend among the crowds of ragged people who had a wonderful light of dignity and courage in their eyes, white with hunger, lack of sleep and anguish.