On the Shores of the Mediterranean (4 page)

Then, when he had sucked everyone in the Piazza dry of lire, Signor Salvatore marched his band of
pazarielli
, signifying, in the dialect, entertainers of a surrealistic, loony kind, away up the Salita Piedigrotta in the steps of the old lady, the old man and woman collecting bread, the sickly young man with the prints of Santa Lucia, the seller of musical instruments that looked like ice-cream cornets, the
venditore di volanti
and the
torronaro
, to the place where they had parked the old, beat-up van which would take them all back to dear old Afragola in the heart of the Triangolo della Morte.

The entertainment was at an end. Suddenly the tables began to empty and the waiters began stacking them and the chairs against the walls. The evening was over.

But not quite over. There was one establishment that during the hours of darkness never closed. The proprietor was called Gennaro and he lived on the first floor over what a sign over the door described as a
Ferramenta e Hobbyistica
, an ironmonger’s shop which also catered for those interested in hobbies, which stood next door to the shop where the grumpy old lady dispensed her
vini
and Nastri Azzurri.

This man Gennaro had a monopoly of contraband cigarettes in the Piazza, perhaps over an even wider area. All you had to do
was to stand below the balcony and call, ‘Gennaro!’ and then more softly,
‘Un pacco!’
and shooting down on a rope came a
panaro
, a wicker basket, into which you put 2000 lire which was immediately whisked away aloft. Then by return of post, as it were, you received a packet of genuine Marlboros, the only thing lacking being the Italian excise stamp.

But why 2000 lire a packet when the going price, bought from an official government
tabaccaio
, tobacconist, was 1800 lire including duty and tax? Because all the official establishments were shut. Gennaro made a killing with his
contrabbando
which by day would have to sell for infinitely less than 1800 lire to compete with what was a monopoly of the state.

There was nothing extraordinary about this way of doing business, with a basket on the end of a rope. In Naples, where many of the old tenements are eight storeys high, it is commonplace. The only difference is that there the trade is generally legitimate and the buyers, often elderly ladies living alone on an upper floor, are the ones who lower the
panari
to the sellers of such commodities as vegetables in the street below, who have attracted their attention by shouting at the tops of their voices in the dialect,
‘Signo
[Signora]! The price of whatever it is is so-and-so a kilo.
Acalate ’o panaro!’
(‘Lower your basket!’)

When Wanda decided to buy the only packet of Marlboros she ever bought from Gennaro and she shouted up,
‘Gennaro, un pacco!’
, the strangeness of these three words, in her north Italian, Parmigiano accent, made him sufficiently inquisitive to lean out over the railings to see who owned it, and for a moment we found ourselves being looked down on by a hard-looking character of sixty-odd with short white hair and eyes like Carrara marbles. What we were looking up at was the last link in an illicit industry, the one that actually dealt with the public. An industry which at the height of its prosperity, largely in the field of cigarette
smuggling, which continued well into the seventies, supported, by its own admission, some 50,000 Napoletani and their families, out of a total population of some 1,200,000.

In the good old days up to about 1978 when the
contrabbandieri
used to challenge the customs officers to football matches, money would change hands in large quantities to keep them sweet – which it probably still does – and the smugglers’ equivalent to the Royal Yacht Squadron bar at Cowes was the Bar Paris in Santa Lucia. But by that time the Camorra, and therefore the
contrabbandieri
, were already deeply involved with drugs and the special relationship they had enjoyed with the Guardie had come to an end, and, what had been unthinkable until then, the Guardie actually took to opening fire, if not actually at the
contrabbandieri
themselves, then on their
motoscafi
, although how it was possible to discriminate between one and the other at night it is difficult to imagine.

It was at this time that the
contrabbandieri
did something that only Neapolitans would think of doing. They formed a union which they christened Il Colletivo Autonomo Contrabbandieri, the Autonomous Collective of Smugglers, and called a public protest meeting, advertising it with posters which read more or less as follows:

SMUGGLING AT NAPLES ALLOWS 50,000 FAMILIES TO SURVIVE ALBEIT WITH DIFFICULTY. FOR ALMOST A YEAR NOW THE GOVERNMENT AND THE CUSTOMS HAVE DECLARED WAR ON US. HANDS OFF THE CONTRABAND UNTIL YOU FIND US ANOTHER WAY OF LIFE! COME TO THE MEETING OF ALL SMUGGLERS OF NAPLES ON THURSDAY NEXT IN FRONT OF THE UNIVERSITY IN VIA MEZZOCANONE 16.

A particularly appropriate venue as large numbers of students actually worked for the Paranze a Terra (an organization for distributing contraband).

Now, five or more years later, there were still 50,000 Neapolitan families involved in smuggling at Naples and more money was involved, as would be natural to keep pace with inflation even without taking account of drug smugglers.

There had been some changes in Naples since we had last taken a fairly prolonged look at it, back in the autumn of 1963, and it would have been surprising if there had not been.

Then we had been working on a guide book to the hotels,
pensioni
and restaurants in southern Italy, a task that had left us, even before we left Naples and began to tackle the rest of the Italian peninsula, in a state of near collapse. At that time the
pensione
with the piano had not existed, although there were one or two hotels and
pensioni
that ran it very close.

Some of the biggest changes that had taken place, apart from whole areas in which the original buildings had either fallen down of their own accord or had been knocked down and rebuilt, were down in the docks, all along the waterfront as far as San Giovanni a Teduccio, where the
pontili
, the landing stages, stretch out like long fingers into the filthy waters of the Bay, always a dangerous place, if only because of the long lines of freight cars propelled by tank engines that used to come stealing up behind one on their way to or from some marshalling yard. One was only saved from death by the engine drivers letting off a tremendous blast on their whistles. Altogether the place was a madhouse, what with steam engines whistling, ships, some of them big passenger liners, blasting off on their sirens announcing that they were leaving for the Hudson River and similarly distant destinations, and the appalling din made when a crane driver skilfully dropped a whole
slingful of packing cases into a ship’s holds, shattering them so that the
portuali
, the stevedores, could get their hands on the contents, just as crane drivers and stevedores did in every other port in the world at that time.

Now there were no more steam engines; no more
transatlantici
stealing out into the Bay in the golden light of early morning; no more crane drivers dropping packing cases making music in the ears of the
portuali
. These noises had been replaced by the ghostly whirrings of the special lifting machines, each of them worked by one man in what had become an automated wilderness, as they picked up the pilfer-proof containers and either loaded them on to a container ship with the minimum of human interference, or else on to an articulated truck.

Now, denied what for centuries they had regarded as their legitimate perquisites of office, the heart had gone out of the
portuali
, and providing that the money could be found, and it almost certainly would be, by 1985, 750 out of a total workforce of 1700
portuali
would have voluntarily taken the sack. What to do with the remaining 950 was a problem that no one in the government or in the port authority had yet had the courage to face. What was obvious was that as far as being a place of interest to travellers such as ourselves, or to anyone but the technically minded, Naples, as a port, like Barcelona, Marseilles, Trieste, the Piraeus, Iskenderun, Beirut, Haifa, Alexandria, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers and Tangier, was finished.

What had gone, too, from many parts of the city in which previously it had operated at full blast, was what can only be described as the roaring street life. The change was particularly noticeable in the heart of Montecalvario, the large grid-iron of streets, alleys and flights of steps to the west of Via Toledo, that immensely long, straight street which under five different names (the others are Via Roma, Via Enrico Pessina, Via Santa Teresa
degli Scalzi and Corso Amedeo di Savoia Duca d’Aosta), rather like Broadway, bisects the city from south to north, from the Royal Palace where it looks out on Piazza Trieste e Trento at the seaward southern end to the foot of Capodimonte at the top, north end where the other royal palace of Naples looks out over the city and the Bay.

These changes were not noticeable at first. It is only when you reach La Speranzella, the Street of Some Hope, which runs across Montecalvario parallel to the Toledo, and you see that many of the tall tenements are only prevented from collapsing by forests of wooden beams and metal scaffolding and that they have been abandoned by all except the most stubborn or desperate for accommodation, that you realize that the heart of Montecalvario is gone and that one single, fairly powerful earth tremor would bring the whole place crashing down in a vast mountain of rubble.

Here every different flight of steps from one level to another, every one of the sixty or more streets, every alley, has its own shrine, to Santa Lucia, San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples, to Our Lady of Piedigrotta and so on, tended by old ladies who charge the lamps with oil, change the candles, collect any offerings, while meanwhile, in a sort of grotto beneath the shrine, the terracotta figures of men and women, which often include a priest among them, fry in purgatory.

Now what was perhaps the most vigorous street life in Naples was to be found in and on either side of Spaccanapoli, literally the Street that splits Naples, in the same way as Via Toledo does from north to south but from west to east. A long, long street with eight different names which begins as Via Santa Lucia al Monte high up in Montecalvario below the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, coming to an end in a
vicolo cieco
, a cul-de-sac, called Borgo Tupputi, half a mile from the Stazione Centrale in Piazza Garibaldi. An astonishing, fascinating street full of medieval,
Renaissance, baroque and rococo churches, palaces and monuments; bookshops; repairers and vendors of second-hand dolls; and with long, narrow dangerous alleys running uphill from it in an area infested with robbers, one of which is full of makers and sellers of
presepi
(cribs) and the painted terracotta figures of the infant Christ, the Virgin, the Shepherds and the Kings and the animals which every Neapolitan family brings out in Christmas week; artificial flowers for cemeteries and religious images. The streets running down from it towards Corso Umberto, such as those around the Forcella, the home of Luigi Giugliano, whose uncle had been deported to Frosinone, were still the abode of
puttane
, tarts, some of them enormous.

Twenty years previously, sent off by Wanda to conduct this particular piece of fieldwork by myself, awe had overcome lust as I looked for the first time at these mountainous women somehow inserted into skirts so tight that it seemed that they must burst, bigger even than many of their biggest customers, who were themselves gigantic. Now, fat or thin, they were fighting an uphill battle against the thousands of male prostitutes and transvestites who, as long ago as the seventies, as everywhere else in Italy, were already beginning to outnumber them, if they had not already done so. Some, seeing their livelihood threatened by the indifference of a seemingly increasingly myopic clientele and not receiving much support from the Nuova Famiglia or the NCO, who would take a percentage of any earnings, whether they were male, female or transvestite, pinned cards on the doors of their places of business announcing that whoever was inside was a
PUTTANA VERA
– a Genuine Prostitute.

The beggars of Naples were now less numerous, less ragged than they had been twenty years previously. The poor, in fact, although they might be relatively poorer than they had been, now looked slightly more prosperous, more bourgeois. Some of the
raggedest beggars were still to be found lying on the steps leading up into the enormous Galleria Umberto Primo, which has a nave 160 yards long and is 125 feet high with a dome towering 60 feet above that, a place that for at least a couple of decades after 1943 was the centre of every imaginable and unimaginable clandestine activity. It was now more difficult to see in Naples what had appeared in a photograph taken in the seventies, and used by de Crescenza to illustrate his book, of a man lying on a flight of steps apparently in the depths of winter with an empty begging bowl beside him and a notice which read,
‘Ridotto in questo condizione di mio cognato’
(‘Reduced to this condition by my brother-in-law’).

But although there were now more bag-snatchers, more pickpockets, more people ready to beat you up if for no better reason than to give you something to remember them by, as there were almost everywhere else in the Mediterranean lands, or Europe, or the entire world for that matter, there seemed to be slightly less
trufferia
, petty swindling. It was now less certain that, having made some purchase in the Mercato della Duchesca, or in the street, in the Forcella, for instance, and having had it parcelled up, you would find on opening it up later that something of the same size and weight had been substituted for it, although I was sold a guide book to Pompeii, sealed in plastic, which turned out to be nothing more than the cover with blank pages inside.