Neapolitan Chronicles by Anna Maria Ortese

Author:Anna Maria Ortese
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781939931566
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Published: 2018-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

* Originally built as a granary in the 18th century, this vast seafront structure later became a barracks and was bombed in 1943. Despite heavy damage, huge numbers of Neapolitans left homeless in World War II took refuge in the complex. It was demolished soon after Ortese’s book first appeared in 1953 and its occupants were transferred to public housing on the outskirts of Naples.

THE SILENCE OF REASON

EVENING DESCENDS UPON THE HILLS

On the evening of June 19 (evening in a manner of speaking, since the sky was bright and the sun was still high over the sea, its glare intense), I boarded the #3 tram, which runs along the Riviera di Chiaia to Mergellina. I sat in a corner seat next to a woman without a nose, who had an enormous plant in her lap, and I began to think about what I would say to justify my visit to Luigi Compagnone,* who worked in the cultural department of Radio Naples and whom I hadn’t seen in quite some time, and to whose home, in fact, I was now going. I needed some information about four or five young Neapolitan writers—Prisco, Rea, Incoronato, and La Capria* (whose first novel was just coming out, from a publisher in the north); I didn’t exclude Pratolini,† even if the author of A Tale of Poor Lovers couldn’t call himself Neapolitan, nor was he a writer at the start of his career, but I had learned that he was about to leave Naples permanently, if he hadn’t already. For a certain period, Compagnone had entertained all these writers at his home, and I hoped to get from him some particularly juicy bit of news, the kind that raises the tone of a piece of writing. “What the Young Writers of Naples Are Up To” was the title of my article, which had been commissioned by an illustrated weekly magazine.

No one could have said that the tram was in a hurry. It was now moving so much more slowly than when I got on at Piazza Vittoria—when its speed had been more or less normal—that one might reasonably suspect the driver had fallen asleep, or was lying wounded in his seat, one eye half open. In reality, the man, in a faded jacket with its buttons missing, was sitting in a normal fashion in the driver’s place, but was slowing down more and more because of the poor condition of the roadway, which appeared to be in ruins.

Leaning out the window, I saw, for a stretch of a kilometer or so—about the length of the Riviera di Chiaia—a swarm of half-naked men, with gray backs, gray shorts, gray heads and hands, who were breaking up the pavement. The paving stones were all dislodged, so that the street resembled a raging torrent whose turbulent waters, once rushing obliquely, were suddenly straightened out and petrified. Many streets, when a certain kind of roadwork is done, take on this distressed and destitute appearance. But here something was different, which soon made it necessary to reject those two descriptive adjectives.

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