The Witch of Napoli (3 page)

“My mother sang softly as we walked along – strange songs I never heard her sing at home, but which were sweet and filled my heart with happiness even though I couldn’t understand the words. But when we reached the forest, I began to be afraid. ‘Maybe a fox will eat us,’ I said, and I clung tighter to her. Once again my mother just smiled at me. She sat down, and she pulled me into her lap and held me in her arms and sang another song, and as we sat there a fox trotted out of the shadows and sat down at the edge of the trees and looked at us. I felt like my mother was singing to him, and he was listening to her. And when she finished and fell silent, he turned around and slipped back into the darkness, and I no longer felt afraid.

“We followed this winding path for a long time until we reached a small clearing in the forest where a tall, old tree stood. I waited there until my mother came back with these small mushrooms and we ate them, and then she took my hands in hers and we started to dance under the moon. As she twirled me around, my feet left the ground and I was flying through the stars spinning above my head and my heart was bursting with love for my mother, and the next thing I remember I awoke on the grass in the crook of her arm, her soft brown eyes smiling down at me. I looked up and asked her what happened and she said I was of the blood, like her, and her mother, and she would explain everything at the right time.”

I stopped Alessandra. “Of the blood?”

“The Old Religion. You’re born into it.”

“So you’re a witch?” I laughed.

Alessandra glared at me. “Don’t joke about things you know nothing about.”

I held up my hands. “Sorry.”

Alessandra was silent for a long time, then she sighed.

“Shortly afterwards my mother fell sick. She sent me back to the forest to find a special herb she needed to get well, and I looked and looked but couldn’t find it, and she got sicker and sicker. Then one morning while I was sitting at her bedside she told me she had seen a peacock feather in her dream, and knew her time was short. I didn’t understand at first, but that evening she called me and my father to her and told him to take care of me. That scared me and I cried and begged her not to leave me, and she took my hand and drew me close, and looked at me for a long time, then whispered ‘We will see each other again.’”

Alessandra looked away. I said nothing.

“All these spirits I talk to,” she said bitterly. “I always hope to hear
her
voice. But I never do.”

When she was only 13 years old life screwed her a second time. One evening when we got drunk together – she could drink me under the table – I asked her about her father and tears welled up in her eyes. I was surprised, because Alessandra wasn’t a woman who cried easily.

“Fucking bastards!” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek. “Damn them all!” Then she told me what had happened.

It was a hot, summer day and she was up in the hills, flirting with a boy named Giuseppe as they tended their goats. While they’re up there fooling around, the King of Naples’s soldiers ride into her village, looking for her father who made the stupid mistake of publicly supporting Garibaldi during the revolution. Father Angelo, the village priest, tells them where to find him, piously assuring them that the Church supports the monarchy. The soldiers chase down Alessandra’s father, beat the shit out of him, drag him back to town, and the captain of the horsemen, an English mercenary, orders the villagers to assemble in the village square to watch his execution.

Alessandra shouldn’t have known what was happening to her father – she was way up on the mountain – but she had her mother’s “gift.”

“I had just grabbed Giuseppe’s hat and put it on my head,” she told me, “and we were laughing, and then out of nowhere I suddenly felt this incredible rush of panic, and I screamed, ‘Something happened to my father!’ and I jumped up and started running for home. I didn’t know how I knew – I just knew. I ran as fast as I could, my heart pounding, running and stumbling and falling and crying as I ran because I knew he was in great danger.”

When she got there, she found her father standing against the church wall, facing a firing squad.

“I started scratching and clawing and biting the soldiers, screaming for someone to help me, before I finally realized they were all cowards – every one of them – and no one was going to help me. My father was going to die.”

But not before the captain had some fun with her. He reached down, yanked her into the saddle by her hair, lifted her dress and pretended to hump her doggy style to roars of laughter, then twisted her head around, forcing her to look in her father’s eyes as he gave the order to fire. After the volley, the bastard dismounts, strolls over to the jerking body, pulls out his pistol, and gives Alessandra’s father the
coup de grace
, splattering his brains against the wall. Then Father Angelo sanctimoniously mumbles a prayer and tosses holy water on the bullet-riddled corpse.

Christ, she was just thirteen years old.

She’s lost her mother, and now her father’s a bloody pile of rags and buzzing flies. She’s an orphan, alone in this world. OK, that’s life, you have to get over it and move on, and she did, but she never fully trusted anyone after that. The heart turns to stone, as Dante says. You’ve got to look out for yourself because no one else is.

After the soldiers left, and villagers dug a hole for her father, the prick Angelo arranges for his fat housekeeper to take Alessandra into their little love nest. That’s when spooky stuff starts to happen. A knife on the kitchen table levitates into the air and flies at the housekeeper. A wine bottle suddenly explodes in the priest’s hand as Alessandra glares at him. The housekeeper accuses her of being possessed by demons, and Father Angelo performs an exorcism on Alessandra before packing her off to an orphanage in Naples run by nuns.

A nobody ends up a nobody.

T
hat should have been the end of her story, but it wasn’t.

Instead, a rich, expatriate British couple, the Croppers, childless and bored with dressing up their dogs, visit the orphanage, discover her and decide to adopt her.

Alessandra despised them. And why not? An Englishman had killed her father. But she was suspicious of all foreigners. Her father taught her how the Spanish and French and Austrian turds used our country like a cheap whore for centuries before Garibaldi tossed them out on their ass. Besides, she had lived all her short life in the country.

“I was like a wild animal, a forest bird,” she told me later, “and these foolish
stranieri
foreigners wanted to make me into a prissy English girl. They dressed me in pinafores and starched blouses, demanded that I take a bath every day, and comb my hair, and use a fork at the table. When I refused, they scolded me and I cursed them back in Italian.”

The Croppers dabbled in Spiritualism, and one evening Mrs. Cropper needed more sitters for her circle. Alessandra was pressed into service, sullenly took her chair, and phantom raps and spooky levitations dramatically increased. Not every night, but enough for the wife to suspect Alessandra might be the one attracting the spirits. She let Alessandra skip her hated piano lessons in return for spending evenings at the séance table. At this stage in her career as a spirit medium, Alessandra didn’t fall into mesmeric trances, and Savonarola hadn’t shown up yet – that stuff came later – but she did hear spirit voices inside her head and parroted their messages to the eager sitters crowded around the table. And when she didn’t hear them, she quickly learned to make things up.

The English couple gushed in letters to their friends about their little “Sandra” and her most extraordinary and varied supernatural powers. But soon their tone changed, as Alessandra started experimenting on her own.

“I got bored sitting for hours around the table,” she confessed, “so I started asking the spirits to play tricks on the other sitters. I just closed my eyes and wished hard, and things happened.” How they happened, she didn’t know. Unlike Lombardi, Alessandra never tried to understand her psychic powers. Where they came from – God, the Devil, or her own mind like Lombardi believed – she didn’t care.

One evening, Mrs. Cropper and her circle of friends begged the hovering spirits to produce an “apport.” An apport is a gift from the spirits – a flower, or coin, or ring that materializes out of thin air.

After fifteen minutes of fervent singing and praying, they heard a loud thump, turned up the lamps, and discovered a dead rat lying on the table.

“Two of the women fainted on the spot,” she laughed. “You would have loved it, Tommaso.”

But the group eventually became suspicious of her and started leaving her out. The final time she was invited, the gas lights were turned up after the séance ended and a gentleman sitter discovered his wallet missing. The next morning, the maid found it hidden in a tin box under Alessandra’s bed. Alessandra brazenly blamed mischievous spirits for teleporting it there. After six months, the Croppers finally threw up their hands in despair. They locked Alessandra in her room, packed up her belongings, and sent the cook off to the convent to tell Mother Superior they were returning Alessandra in the morning.

That night, Alessandra escaped the house.

“I had a second key,” she admitted. “I was sneaking out every night when they were asleep to see this boy. The night I ran away, I broke into the kitchen and stuffed my dress pockets with their silverware. I sold a spoon whenever I got hungry.”

She found work as a laundress, and got married at 15. Her first husband was only a year older than her. She was madly in love with him, but he didn’t put bread on the table. To keep them from starving, Alessandra started holding séances herself. There were a lot of dead for her to talk to. Cholera swept through Naples all the time, and every family had lost a child to yellow fever or typhoid fever and hoped to make contact one last time. Mothers besieged her seeking assurance that their little boy or girl was safe and happy on the Other Side. A few were simply looking for a supernatural thrill, hoping to hear a rap, or feel a phantom touch or watch a table levitate in the air. They paid Alessandra what they could – a cup of goat milk, a lemon, something stolen from a house they cleaned – and it helped keep them alive. But one day she came home and found her clothes in the street. Her husband had gambled the rent money, lost it, and had taken off, leaving her with nothing. Someone told her to talk to Pigotti. He could help her.

“They told me he had money and liked pretty women,” she told me. “I was desperate so I moved in with him.”

It was a terrible mistake.

A
lessandra is beyond his reach now, thank God.

Pigotti took over her show and her bed but he was insanely jealous. He couldn’t stand the thought of her sitting in a darkened room holding hands or pressing her leg against other men. He wasn’t dumb; he saw how men undressed her with their eyes. But he liked the money more.

I should have been afraid of him after that first séance, but I was cocky, sixteen, and crazy in love with Alessandra.

I finally came up with a scheme.

I made a print of her with the cat – after cropping Rossi out of the picture – and mounted it in a pretty walnut frame, then sent her a message through Rossi offering her the picture and suggesting we meet for lunch. I waited nervously for her response, worried that I had appeared too aggressive, but a few days later received a scribbled note telling me to meet her that night at eight o’clock in the Piazza del Plebiscito. I snuck out of work early and hurried back to my apartment to press my white dress shirt, brush off my suit jacket, and pat a few drops of cologne water on my face before catching the tram to the piazza.

It was a beautiful April evening, the sky turning pink from the setting sun and a large crowd of smartly-dressed ladies and gentlemen already strolling the arcades and enjoying the cool sea breeze up from the harbor. I got there early and dodged my way through the clopping horses and the slowly circling carriages to the Caffè Gambrinus, expecting to see uncle Mario outside the entrance, in our usual spot, selling postcards. He wasn’t, but Marcello was still there waiting tables.

“Aren’t you the big shot now, working for the
Mattino
,” he teased when he took my order. “You better leave me a big tip.”

“Important people expect superior service,” I laughed. “A
caffe nero
, and make it quick.”

I sat there enjoying the show, one I never got tired of. Foreigners flock to the piazza to tour the royal palace which fronts the square, shopping for hats and gloves, lava and coral cameos, and copies of ancient bronzes. They always proved entertaining. As Marcello gabbed away in my ear, I sipped my coffee and watched a knot of German tourists, clutching their Baedekers and pestered by beggars and bootblacks, make their way towards the grand fountain to see the dancing dogs. Trailing behind them was a pair of Carabinieri, smartly dressed in their cocked hats and black and red police uniforms, watching for pickpockets. The Germans paused in front of an ice water vendor to inspect his tub of snow and lemons, and the eager proprietor hastily filled a tin cup and pushed it toward one of the ladies. But her fat husband shoved the cup away, and started shaking his finger at her – undoubtedly scolding her about drinking the local water. The insulted vendor jumped up to defend his refreshment, gesticulating wildly and pleading his case to the ragged crowd which quickly surrounded them. The embarrassed Huns finally broke through the ring of gawkers and hurried off, but not before Herr Professor stepped in some horse shit, which left everyone laughing.

At 7:30, the bells tolled in the basilica of San Francesco across the square, and they turned on the gaslights encircling the piazza, illuminating the twilight evening with a necklace of light. Newsboys from the
Piccolo
descended on the square like a flock of noisy crows, hawking the evening edition. We had stuck it to them with the Alessandra séance story. The
Piccolo
’s editor was furious with his reporters for not picking it up before we got it. I bought a copy, lit a cigar, and thumbed through it, killing time. When the bell finally sounded eight, I warned Marcello to hold the table for me and hurried across the piazza to the church to look for Alessandra, her photograph in a wrapped box tucked under my arm.