The Witch of Napoli (2 page)

But it was her eyes that really hypnotized men.

Lord Carraig sent French astronomer Alan Bonnay a letter shortly after he met Alessandra for the first time. “Her large eyes, filled with strange fire, sparkled in their orbits, or again seem filled with swift gleams of phosphorescent fire, sometimes bluish, sometimes golden. If I did not fear that the metaphor were too easy when it concerns a Neapolitan woman, I should say that her eyes appear like the glowing lava fires of Vesuvius, seen from a distance in a dark night.”

She certainly used them to her advantage. Unlike most women, she didn’t drop her gaze when she talked with a man. She
looked
at you, and you could read whatever you wanted into that. She didn’t care.

I fell in love with her that night.

I wasn’t a virgin when Alessandra showed up – I was sixteen, after all – but my sexual experience was limited to Coco, the skinny, pimply-faced girl who helped run uncle Mario’s shop. She was constantly flirting with me, so one day when he left early I invited her into the store room. It was the first time for both of us. It took me forever to get her blouse over her head, she lay there stiff as a board with her eyes scrunched closed, and as soon as I came she pushed me off her and broke into tears. I didn’t know what was going on. She was afraid I had made her pregnant and she begged me to marry her, threatening to tell her brother if I didn’t. Every time uncle Mario left the shop, she would start to cry and throw things at me, accusing me of ruining her, and I was a heartless bastard, and her brother was going to come over to the shop and cut off my balls. A month later, she found out she wasn’t pregnant and wanted me to take her to the cinema so we could fool around.

Alessandra was the first
woman
in my life.

I felt a sudden surge of jealousy when she turned her attention to Dr. Cappelli, a fellow professor from the university who assisted Rossi with his psychic explorations. He was tall and handsome, with an engaging smile, and an amateur magician to boot. The two of them sat knee-to-knee in a corner as Cappelli demonstrated a coin trick that left her laughing and searching his sleeve. Pigotti marched over, yanked her to her feet, and shoved her over to where I was setting up. He returned to his post at the door, glaring at Cappelli.

I posed Alessandra sitting on an arm chair in the parlor, flanked by two elegant fan palms and holding Rossi’s white cat in the lap of her black silk dress. When I leaned forward to square her shoulders to the camera, I could feel the heat of her body, and her dark hair touched my cheek. She looked up at me.

“I’ve never been photographed before, Tommaso,” she confessed. “Do you think I look ugly?”

At first I thought she was teasing me, and then I realized she wasn’t. I stared at her dumbfounded. I wanted to shout, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. Instead, all I could say was “I think you look very nice.”

She reached out to touch my hand. “
Grazie
,” she said softly.

No matter how beautiful women are, they’re always worried that they aren’t attractive enough. They need to be reassured. A few don’t, but even they appreciate the attention.

The minute I fired off the photograph, Rossi began herding everyone towards the séance room. I didn’t know if I would ever see Alessandra again, and it frightened me. As Rossi was closing the door, I stopped it with my foot.

“I could set up my camera in the séance room,” I suggested boldly. “If anything happens, I can capture a photograph of it.” Behind him, I could see Alessandra settling down in her chair and the other sitters taking their places around the table. Rossi shook his head.

“Impossible. These manifestations happen very quickly and rarely last more than a few seconds.”

“That’s all I need, sir.” I replied. “A second.”

Rossi hesitated, hand on the doorknob. He seemed to mull it over in his head. I held my breath.

“Wait here,” he said finally.

He retreated inside. Through the door, I could see him huddling with Alessandra and Pigotti. Pigotti didn’t look very happy, but Alessandra threw a smile my way. Finally, Rossi returned to the door. I could come inside, but I had to remain in the corner with my camera, I wasn’t to speak, and I couldn’t take a photograph unless Rossi gave me a signal.

So I hustle in my equipment, jam myself into the corner, and load my flash gun. Pigotti crowds in next to me, the stink of his body strong, his hooded eyes fixed on Alessandra. Six people hold hands around a small, four-legged card table, a turned-down oil lamp providing the only illumination. It’s gloomy, shadowy, and hard to see. I strain my eyes. A clock on the wall quietly ticks away the minutes,
tic, toc, tic, toc
. Maybe 30 minutes pass, and despite the enthusiastic prayers at the start, absolutely nothing happens. Other than Alessandra’s coughing, the room is dead silent. I’m running out of time to get the photo and get back to the paper. Suddenly the table jerks forward, and the woman in front of me lets out a gasp. Then another sudden jerk. I watch dumbfounded as the table slowly tilts backwards on two legs and balances there, a toy music box skidding off and bouncing across the floor, sounding a note. More gasps and cries. I’m ready to shit in my pants.

Alessandra cries out, “Spirits, we know you are here. Show us more!” The table returns to four legs, remains there for several seconds, then slowly begins to rise into the air. The sitters scramble to their feet, trying to keep their hands on the top of the table. Then it hangs there, motionless.

“
E’ fatto
!” Alessandra screams. It’s done!

“Now!” cries Rossi.

I fire the flash, and in that split-second burst of illumination I see the table suspended in the air, a meter off the floor.
Maronna!

The woman in front of me collapses, the table crashes to the floor, and the gas lamp is quickly turned up. Alessandra is bent over, pale and panting hard, her head in her hands. She finally turns and vomits into a pan. Rossi mops the sweat from her face, and the hostess gives her a glass of water which she drools from her lips, then Rossi goes over to Pigotti and pays him the fee.

As I’m hurrying to fold up my camera, I overhear these two withered English biddies who attended the séance gushing over the miracle they just witnessed.

“She’s the spirit medium we’ve been looking for,” gushes the first.

“I agree,” sniffs the second, “but why would God use such an uneducated, immoral woman for His divine work? Besides, she smells like a goat.” And they laughed.

They were damn lucky Alessandra didn’t hear them. She would have thrashed them.

When I developed the plate in the darkroom that night, I immediately knew I had the photograph which would make my name. The next morning, Venzano summoned me into his office, and handed me a copy of the paper. My photo was splashed across the front page. Right below it, in tiny, six-point type, was my name.
Photo by Tommaso Labella.
It was my first byline in the business, and it appeared in the newspaper on March 26, 1899.

• • •

Almost 20 years ago, now. It’s hard to believe.

This morning, before Antonio started assembling the big Sunday special on Alessandra, I called him into my office, closed the door, reached into a drawer, and pulled out my private file on her – copies of Huxley’s reports, Lombardi’s correspondence with other scientists, hundreds of newspaper clippings.

“Look through this,” I said. You’ll find a lot of good stuff. But check with me before you use anything.”

I explained to Antonio how I chronicled Alessandra’s rise to fame every step of the way, crouching in corners of séance rooms, eavesdropping on conversations, scooping up tidbits of information to share with Venzano. I was never a pest. I keep secrets when necessary, and I always made sure my photos flattered her, right to the end. She was vain, like all women, and had a scar on her forehead which she did her best to hide with her hair. I never showed it in my photos. She told me she fell off a donkey cart as a child, but I know Pigotti gave it to her.

“We understood each other,” I told Antonio.

She knew where I came from, and how far I had to climb to get to the top, just like she had to. People see me now, editor of the powerful and influential
Messaggero
, showing up at
The Barber of Seville
with a beautiful
contessa
on my arm, dining with Roman nobility, dressed in Castangia suits and drinking Veuve Clicquot. They don’t know I started at the bottom. But I had ambition. I wanted to sit in the editor’s seat, to “earn my bread by the sweat of my pen,” as Aretino famously put it. So I educated myself, shooting photos for the
Mattino
then sneaking into the Biblioteca Nazionale on Saturday afternoons to read Manzoni and Leopardi, learning how to pen an elegant sentence, and memorizing lines from Dante and Boccaccio and Petrarca to impress my superiors.

“You’ve probably never heard of Petrarca,” I teased.

Antonio looked up from the file he was thumbing through and laughed. “Let me hear you spout a few verses.”

I struck a pose, my hands outstretched, reaching for the stars.

Antonio recognized it right away. He had spent a year at the university. “Petrarca’s love sonnet for his unattainable Laura, no?”

“Bravo, Antonio,” I replied. “I’ve used his poetry to coax more than one lady into bed.”

He grinned. “Including Alessandra?”

I shook my head. “I tried a few lines on her when we first met, but it sailed right over her head. She never heard of Petrarca. We always laughed about that. We were two
bricconi
from Naples who fooled the world. But we never forgot where we came from.”

What I didn’t share with Antonio, or anyone else at the newspaper, was that I also ended up with her private diaries – 38 notebooks, written in her childish, semi-illiterate scrawl, in a dialect only we Neapolitans understand, describing what she saw and did and felt in her extraordinary life, who she slept with, her feelings and desires, her memories and secrets. She trusted me to tell her story.

I tell you this in confidence: Hachette in Paris has approached me to write her biography – for 1,000 francs – but I turned them down, and I’ll tell you why. It’s a new century. The cinema is the rage now. I will give it to Pathé Frères and let them tell her story. The magic of film for a woman who produced magic right in front of our eyes.

The lower classes will flock to the theatres to see her story because she was one of
them
, their Cinderella, the poor girl who escapes poverty and humiliation and ends up wearing the glass slipper – she led the life
they
dream about, but will never taste. They’ll also come because they’re dying to know like the rest of Europe – was their heroine a fraud? Did she do it with tricks and wires and sleight of hand, or did she really have supernatural powers?

The answer may surprise you.

A
lessandra was a nobody.

She came from this little goat-shit village in Bari.

I’ve seen the dump with my own eyes. Shortly after I first met her, she returned home to visit her father’s grave and I jumped at the chance to tag along.

It was a hot, sticky day, and I stood in the shade of a dusty cypress tree fanning myself with my hat as she searched around for his grave. She finally stumbled across it, overgrown with brush, the headstone knocked flat. She let out a loud curse, fell to her knees, and began ripping out the weeds, sweeping the earth, and propping the tombstone back up. She had brought some of his favorite Turkish cigarettes and a bottle of grappa and was arranging them in front of the stone when we heard a noise. I looked back and saw a gaggle of old crones marching up the dirt road, led by the parish priest, yelling and screaming for Alessandra to get out of town, calling her a witch and a whore. Alessandra let out a howl, jumped to her feet, grabbed a stick, and chased them all the way back to the village. Alessandra wasn’t afraid of anybody in this life but Pigotti and the Devil.

Satan was still real to us back then, when she was born.

As a child, she saw eyes glaring at her in the darkness, and was frightened one night when invisible hands stripped off her bedclothes – a tidbit I made sure Antonio included in his story. She was born left-handed, a sure sign, and always wore a
corno
on a silver chain around her neck to protect her from the
malocchio
, the evil eye, just like I do. This was despite Lombardi’s protestations that it made her look like some superstitious hick. The truth is, she
was
superstitious. She believed in omens and curses, and tried one on Huxley when things went sour for her in England.

Alessandra’s mother was a
strega
who practiced the “old religion,” what some people call witchcraft. Fortunately, the newspapers never found out.

When Alessandra was born, her mother refused to have her baptized.

“The village priest showed up at our doorstep with his bucket of holy water, demanding to douse me, but my mother slammed the door in his face,” Alessandra told me. “After that, villagers looked at us strangely. One boy used to throw stones at me after school, and scream that I was going to hell. Old women sitting in the piazza would cross themselves whenever they saw my mother approaching.” I could see pain in her eyes as she spoke.

“It must have been pretty tough,” I said.

“I didn’t have a lot of friends, and the taunting never stopped. The summer I turned five, I came home one day and fell on my knees and begged my mother to let me be baptized. I just wanted it to stop, to be like everyone else. She told me she couldn’t, but that I would understand someday. I ran to my bedroom and flung myself on my bed and sobbed. My father came in to console me, but I drove him away.

“Late that night my mother came into my room and woke me up. She told me we were going to the forest. I said, ‘Why, mama?’ and she just smiled at me. I dressed and followed her outside and we made our way through the village. The streets were dark and silent except for the murmur of crickets and the occasional half-hearted bark of a dog woken by our footsteps. Once we got outside the walls, my mother took off her sandals and told me to do the same. She put them in the small bag she carried and we set off again. The night air was wonderful, filled with the fragrance of lemon flowers. And above my head – so close I felt I could reach up and touch it – was this full moon. It was so beautiful it made your heart ache.