The Skin (9 page)

Seated on the doorsteps of their hovels, the people watched us in silence, following us into the distance with their eyes. There were almost naked children, there were old men whose skin was white and transparent as the fungus that grows in cellars, there were women with swollen bellies and thin, ashen faces, and pale, emaciated girls with withered breasts and narrow flanks. All around us was a glint of eyes in the green shadow, a muted laughter, a flashing of teeth, and a silent gesticulation which clove the rays of light that filter into the alleys of Naples at sunset, a light the colour of dirty water, the ghostly light of an aquarium. The people watched us in silence, opening and closing their mouths as fishes do.

Sleeping men, dressed in ragged military uniforms, lay in heaps on the pavements outside the doors of the hovels. They were Italian soldiers, many of them Sardinians or Lombards; nearly all were airmen from the neighbouring flying-field at Capodichino who, after the collapse of the army, to avoid falling into the hands of the Germans or the Allies had sought refuge in the alleys of Naples, where they lived on the charity of the people, who are as poor as they are generous. Stray dogs, attracted by the pungent odour of sleep, that familiar odour of dirty hair and coagulated sweat, went about sniffing the sleepers, nibbling their gaping shoes and tattered uniforms and licking the shadows thrown flat against the walls by their bodies as they lay huddled in sleep.

Not a voice was to be heard, not even the crying of a child. A strange silence brooded over the starving city, moist with the pungent sweat of hunger. It was like that wonderful silence which pervades the poetry of the Greeks, when the moon climbs slowly from the sea. And indeed the moon, pale and transparent as a rose, was even now climbing above the line of the distant horizon, and the sky was fragrant as a garden. From the doorsteps of their hovels the people lifted their heads to watch the rose as it climbed slowly from the sea, embroidered upon the blue silk quilt of the sky. On one side of the quilt, a little way down to the left, was embroidered a likeness of Vesuvius in yellow and red, and high up, a little to the right, above the vague shadow of the island of Capri, were embroidered in letters of gold the words of the prayer
Ave Maria maris stella.
When the sky resembles his own beautiful quilt of blue silk, covered with embroidery like the mantle of the Madonna, every Neapolitan is happy; it would be so lovely to die on so clear and calm an evening.

Suddenly we saw a black cart pull up at the entrance to an alley. It was drawn by two horses covered with silver saddle-cloths and plumed like the steeds of the Paladins of France. Two men were sitting on the box. The one holding the reins cracked his whip, the other rose to his feet, blew into a curved bugle, which gave forth a harsh, piercing lament, then in a hoarse voice cried "Poggioreale! Poggioreale!"—the name of the cemetery and also of the prison of Naples. I had many times been confined in Poggioreale Gaol, and the name struck a chill into my heart. The man repeated his cry several times, until a vague murmur, which gradually swelled into a deafening uproar, arose from the alley, and an ear-splitting wail spread from hovel to hovel.

It was death's hour—the hour when the carts of the Municipal Cleansing Department, the few carts spared by the terrible, ceaseless air-raids of those years, went from alley to alley, from hovel to hovel, to collect the dead, just as, before the war, they used to go to collect the garbage. The misery of the times, the public disorder, the high death-rate, the greed of the speculators, the negligence of the authorities and the universal corruption were such that to accord the dead Christian burial had become almost an impossibility, the privilege of the few. To take a dead man to Poggioreale on a cart drawn by a little donkey cost ten or fifteen thousand lire. And since we were still in the early months of the Allied occupation, and the populace had not yet had time to scrape together a few
soldi
by illicit dealings on the black market, they could not afford the luxury of giving their dead that Christian burial of which, though poor, they were worthy. For five, ten and even fifteen days the corpses remained in the houses waiting for the garbage-cart. Slowly they decomposed on the beds, in the warm, smoky light of the wax candles, listening to the familiar voices, to the bubbling of the coffee-urn and the pot of kidney beans on the glowing range which stood in the middle of the room, to the cries of the children as they played, naked, on the floor, to the groans of the old men crouched on the chamber-pots amid the warm, sticky odour of excrement, an odour like that which emanates from corpses that are already in a state of dissolution.

At the cry of the
monatto,
at the sound of his bugle, there arose from the alleys a murmuring, a frantic shouting, a raucous hymn of woe and supplication. A crowd of men and women emerged from their den bearing on their shoulders a rough box (there was a dearth of timber, and the coffins were made of old unplaned tables, the panels of cupboards, and worm-eaten shutters). They came running out, weeping aloud and shouting, as though some grave and imminent peril threatened them, crowding round the coffin in jealous frenzy, as if afraid that someone might come and dispute their possession of the corpse, and snatch it from their arms and from their affections. And their running, their shouting, their jealous fear, the way they turned round and stared with suspicion in their eyes, as though they were being pursued, made that strange funeral seem in some obscure way like an act of theft, and endowed it with the character of an abduction, with a quality of lawlessness.

Down one of the alleys, carrying in his arms a dead child wrapped in a sheet, there came, almost at a run, a bearded man, followed and hemmed in by a horde of women, who were tearing their hair and their garments, violently beating their breasts, bellies and thighs, and uttering a loud, broken lament, more animal than human, like the howl of a wounded beast. People appeared in the doorways, shouting and waving their arms, and through the wide-open doors one could see, getting up and sitting on their beds or lying with their faces turned towards the door, frightened children, terribly dishevelled and emaciated women, or couples still locked in an embrace; and all were following the noisy funeral
cortege
with wide eyes as it passed down the alley. Meanwhile, the already overloaded cart had become the centre of a tussle between the latest comers, who were fighting among themselves to secure a little space for their own dead. And as the brawl developed the miserable alleys of Forcella were filled with the sounds of tumult.

*       *       *       *

It was not the first time that I had witnessed a brawl over a corpse. During the terrible raid to which Naples was subjected on April 28th, 1943, I had taken refuge in the vast cave which opens into the side of Mount Echia, behind the old Albergo di Russia, in Via Santa Lucia. The cave was packed tight with an enormous, yelling, unruly mob of people. I found myself near old Marino Canale, who for forty years had been skipper of the little steamer that plies between Naples and Capri, and Captain Cannavale, also from Capri, who during the last three years had been going to and fro between Naples and Libya on the troop-ships. Cannavale had returned that morning from Tobruk, and he was now going home on leave. I felt afraid of that terrible Neapolitan mob. "Let's get out of here. It's safer out in the open, under the bombs, than in here among all these people," I said to Canale and Cannavale. "Why? The Neapolitans are fine people," said Cannavale. "I don't say they're bad," I answered, "but any crowd is dangerous when it's afraid. They'll crush us to death." Cannavale gave me a strange look. "I have been sunk six times, and I haven't died at sea. Why should I die here?" he said. "Ah! Naples is worse than the sea," I answered. And I went out, dragging Marino Canale along by the arm, while he shouted in my ear: "You're mad! You want me to be killed!"

The bare, deserted street, in which nothing moved, was bathed in that ghastly, cold, slanting light which sometimes illuminates scenes in documentary films. The azure of the sky, the green of the trees, the blue of the sea, the yellow, pink and ochre of the house-fronts were obscured. Everything was black and white and overlaid with a grey dust, which resembled the ashes that rain slowly down on Naples during eruptions of Vesuvius. The sun was a white spot in the middle of a vast, dirty-grey canvas. Several hundred Liberators were passing high over our heads, bombs were falling in various parts of the city with a dull thump, houses were collapsing with a terrifying roar. We had started to run down the middle of the street in the direction of Chiatamone when two bombs fell behind us, one after the other, right in the entrance to the cave which we had left a few moments before. The blast from the explosion threw us to the ground. I turned on my back, following the Liberators with my eyes as they made off in the direction of Capri. I looked at my watch: it was a quarter past twelve. The city was like a lump of cow-dung that has been squashed by the foot of a passer-by.

We sat down on the edge of the pavement, and for a long moment were silent. A terrible cry could be heard coming from the cave, but it was faint and far away. "Poor fellow," said Marino Canale, "he was going home on leave. A hundred times in three years he has crossed the sea between Italy and Africa, and now he's died of suffocation underground." We rose and set off for the mouth of the cavern. The roof had collapsed, and muffled yells came from beneath the ground. "It's murder in there," said Marino Canale. We lay on the ground and put our ears against the debris. No cries for help arose from that vast sepulchre, but the din of a ferocious brawl. "It's murder! It's murder!" cried Marino Canale, and he wept, hammering his fists against the heap of earth and stones. I sat down on the pavement and lit a cigarette. There was nothing else to do.

Meanwhile swarms of terrified people were arriving from the Vicolo del Pallonetto. They threw themselves on the debris, digging with their finger-nails like a pack of dogs looking for a bone. Finally help arrived in the shape of a company of soldiers, who had no implements but, in compensation, were armed with rifles and machine-guns. They were dead tired; were dressed in worn-out uniforms, and there were holes in their shoes. Cursing, they threw themselves to the ground, and fell asleep.

"What have you come to do?" I asked the officer in command of the company.

"Our job is to preserve law and order."

"Ah, good. You'll shoot them all, I hope, when they pull them out—those blackguards who've got buried in there."

"Our orders are to keep the crowd away," replied the officer, looking at me hard.

"No, your orders are to shoot the dead as soon as they pull them out of that tomb."

"What do you expect
me
to do?" said the officer, passing his hand over his brow. "It's three days since my men have closed their eyes, and two since they've had anything to eat."

At about five o'clock a Red Cross ambulance arrived with a few orderlies, and a company of sappers with picks and shovels. At about seven the first corpses were dug out. They were bloated, purple, unrecognizable. All bore the marks of strange wounds: their faces, hands and chests were bitten and scratched, and many had knife-injuries. A police superintendent, followed by a few constables, approached the dead and began counting them aloud: "Thirty-seven . . . fifty-two . . . sixty-one . . .", while the constable rummaged in the pockets of the corpses, looking for documents. I thought he wanted to arrest them. I certainly shouldn't have been surprised if he had arrested them. His tone was that of a police superintendent who confronts a malefactor with the intention of putting the handcuffs on him. "Papers! Papers!" he shouted. I thought of the annoyance to which these poor corpses would have been subjected if their papers hadn't been in order.

By midnight more than four hundred corpses and about a hundred injured had been dug out. At about one a few soldiers arrived with a searchlight. A blinding shaft of white light penetrated into the mouth of the cavern. At a certain stage in the proceedings I went up to an individual who seemed to be in charge of the rescue operations.

"Why don't you send for more ambulances? One is useless," I said to him.

The man was a municipal engineer—an excellent fellow. "There are only twelve ambulances left in the whole of Naples. The rest have been sent to Rome, where they don't need them. Poor Naples! Two raids a day, and we haven't even got ambulances. Thousands of people have been killed to-day: as always, the working-class districts are the worst hit. But what can I do with twelve ambulances? We need a thousand."

I said to him: "Requisition a few thousand bicycles. The injured can go to hospital on bicycles, can't they?"

"Yes, but what about the dead? The injured can go to hospital on bicycles, but what about the dead?" said the engineer.

"The dead can go on foot," I said, "and if they don't want to walk kick them up the backside. Don't you agree?"

The engineer looked at me strangely, and said: "You're trying to be funny. I'm not. But it will end as you say. We shall only get the dead to the cemetery if we kick them there."

"They deserve it. They're a proper nuisance, the dead. Always corpses, more corpses, and still more corpses! Corpses everywhere! For three years we've seen nothing but corpses in the streets of Naples. And what airs they give themselves—as if they were the only people in the world! Let them lay off, once and for all! Otherwise, boot them to the cemetery, and Bob's your uncle!"

"Exactly. And Bob's your uncle!" said the engineer, giving me a strange look.

We lit cigarettes, and began to smoke, scanning the corpses lined up on the pavements in the  blinding glare of the searchlight.

Suddenly we heard a frightful uproar. The crowd had rushed the ambulance, hurling stones at the orderlies and the soldiers.

"It always ends like that," said the engineer. "The crowd demands that the dead should be taken to hospital. They think the doctors can revive the corpses with the aid of a few injections or artificial respiration. But the dead are dead—more than just dead! Do you see the state they're in? Their faces are pushed in, their brains are sticking out of their ears, their intestines are in their trousers. But the people are like that. They want their dead taken to hospital, not to the cemetery. Oh, grief makes people mad!"