For that day, at any rate, I was right. There was a bright, newly-painted hotel that looked out across the port of Santa Lucia and when I ordered the taxi to drop me there they welcomed me as though they had been expecting me. They gave me a room on the second floor looking out over the Bay. There was a little balcony and I sat there in the sun and went to sleep with the blue of the Mediterranean glittering below me.
Later I got a taxi and went to a little restaurant I’d known out beyond Posillipo. The night was warm and there was a moon. I had frutti di mare and spaghetti, and Lachrima Christi, eating at a table in the open with the inevitable Italian fiddler playing O Sole Mio and Sorrento. The stillness and beauty of the night brought a sense of loneliness. And then I remembered that Zina Valle was arriving in Naples the next day and something primitive stirred in my blood. At least I ought to thank her for changing over those drinks. She’d probably saved my life. It was an excuse to call on her at any rate.
That night, when I got back to the hotel, I asked for the telephone directory. Valle, Cssa. Zina, Villa Carlotta. She was there all right and I made a note of her telephone number.
I woke next morning to sunshine and a lovely warm, scented air coming in through the open balcony windows. Sitting up in bed I looked out on to the blue of Naples Bay with the fishing boats and the yachts putting out from Porto Sanazarro Barbaia. I had breakfast on the balcony in my dressing-gown and then sat with a cigarette and a long cognac and seltz, dreaming of what I would do with myself all day in that golden, sunlit world. It seemed so wonderful that I couldn’t believe that the spell could ever be broken. I would go out to the restaurant for lunch and then I’d lie in the sun on the rocks by the water’s edge. And later I would telephone the Villa Carlotta.
I reached the restaurant just after twelve and as I was paying off my taxi a big cream-coloured Fiat swung into the parking place. There was nobody in it but the chauffeur. He got out, tossed his cap into the back and unbuttoned the jacket of his olive-green uniform. He wore nothing under the jacket. He undid the belt of his trousers and slipped them off, revealing a pair of maroon bathing trunks. I stood there, staring in fascination at this transformation from chauffeur to bather. He must have been conscious of this, for when he’d tossed jacket and trousers into the car he turned and scowled at me. He was a well-built, broad-shouldered youth of about twenty with a strong face and a mass of long, black hair which he had a habit of tossing back from his wide forehead. His eyes looked very black under the scowl. And then the scowl was replaced by a wide, urchin grin.
I knew him at once then. Instead of the chauffeur I saw a ragged little urchin with a broad grin and a white American sailor’s hat. He’d been in this car park to greet us every time we’d come out here in that spring of 1944. ‘I know you,’ I said in English.
He came towards me. ‘Me watchee,’ he said, grinning all over his face.
That had been his business slogan. He would jump on the running board or run beside the trucks shouting, ‘Me watchee. Me watchee.’ I had never heard him say anything else in English. He and his gang had kept the parking place clear of thieves and as long as you paid for your protection you could leave anything in the truck and know it would be safe. When I had come back to the restaurant in 1945 there had been the same cry of ‘Me watchee’ but the boy who ran beside the truck had been smaller. It had been his younger brother. Roberto, the original ‘Me Watchee,’ had made enough to buy a boat and we had found him jostling the fishermen at the foot of the steps.
‘What happened to the boat?’ I asked him in Italian.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘The American and English soldiers go, signore. There is no trade, so I sell and buy a truck. Then that fall to pieces and I become a chauffeur.’