Books & Rough Business

V

20 Books and Rough Business V After the Nazi occupiers had been driven from the city—in the extraordinary partisan uprising known as the “Four Days of Naples,” a great story but not mine—we were lucky enough to have a transitional administration run by Americans. The Fifth Army, the same as worked its bloody way up the peninsula from Salerno to the Po River valley, took care of basic police work and public health. So it was the GIs who distributed a machine-made version of nutrition: powdered peas and boxed meats. On the other hand, according to one of my neighbors, the soldiers from the States also had a small ration of chocolate. Myself, I just about fainted at the news. My mother however kept her head, and took all the children over to the central train station. She’d heard more than we had: how the Americans had set up trucks in the station piazza, and how they handed out food from the truck-beds. The crowds were a nightmare—Neapolitans don’t like to make lines—and we wormed in as best we could. Then at some point the dream turned much nicer, as the GIs came up with fresh white bread, bread such has most of us hadn’t tasted since the sky had first rumbled with Flying Fortresses. The bakery smell proved even more powerful than the thought of chocolate. Eventually we loaded up on everything we could: no sweets after all, but bread and milk, the boxed meats and powdered peas, plus packets of knotty chestnuts. Yet before they filled our arms and packed our pockets, the Americans insisted on spraying each of us thoroughly with a white powder. I knew the stuff was medicine, just from the smell, and as the work went on I learned it was disinfectant. The idea was to kill lice and crabs, to 21 Tullio Pironti prevent worse diseases. Nevertheless the medics in their masks and gloves, drawing near with their tanks and nozzles, were enough to scare my sister Wanda. My mother had to hold on to her, to keep her from scampering off. Even so, as we children turned white from head to foot, it sent Mama into a fit of nervous laughter. She’d had enough, no doubt, of seeing her children as ghosts. It was during those same days, I believe, that I began to notice my mother’s beauty. Perhaps it was coming out again, the glow in her fleshy dark features, the shine in her black hair and eyes. Perhaps as the worst of the family’s deprivations ended, she began to warm again to the love between her and my father. To him she wasn’t Rosa but Rusinè, and to her he wasn’t Antonio but ratherTotò. In town the pet name was common enough, and indeed it grew famous, thanks to the local comic genius who was already turning up in the first cheap films to appear as the war wound down. That Totò became one of our classic screen faces. A writer, actor, and director, he became a local saint of the countrywide boom in the arts, and in years to come, I would work with one or two of his former colleagues. But my Totò, my Papa, calls to mind an older Italy. You see the past especially in the relationship between him and his beloved Rusinè. Theirs is a story out of the Golden Age of Naples, when Mozart was in town, writing operas for the Borbon kings. My father first got to know my mother when they were both ten, and when they got engaged two years later, it was no adolescent joke; six years further along, at the age of eighteen, they married. Like many Neapolitans of their generation, they worked out an occult confirmation for their choices, part astrology and part numerology. They’d been born the same day in January, in the same year—fittingly, before the turn of the century. At least my father could joke about it. From time to time he needled his Rusinè that she was so much older than he; she’d been born fully two hours earlier! But thisTotò was entirely serious about building a family. In short order, the two of them had six children. The first was Italia. My oldest sister’s name reflected the patriotic fervor of Mussolini’s first years in charge—though by the time Il Duce had abdicated , our...