The Land of Cockayne: A Novel

by Matilde Serao

The rushing scirocco lashed up the waves in the bay furiously; they got livid with rage, and foamed under the chill curtain of clouds, and all the bathing-places from Marinella to Posillipo had to take up the boards of their wooden huts to let the raging sea pass through, or they would have been broken to pieces. There lay the great irrecoverable loss, for the long files of provincial people that come from Calabria, Basilicata, Abruzzi, and Molise, to take sea-baths, and fill up the inns and second-class eating-houses, who sit four in a carriage that barely holds two—these country people, who are Naples' summer source of revenue, being afraid of the bad weather, always went on intending to start for Naples the next week, and ended by never leaving their villages at all. Those who had arrived the first week in July, intending to stay till the end of August, on finding they could only have a bathe on one day out of five, and then have to face a stormy sea, got frightened and discouraged, and ended by going back to Campobasso, to Avellino, Benevento, and Potenza, to the great sorrow of the girls and young fellows. It was a lost season.

At the Fiori Inn, in Fiorentini Square, the Campidoglio, in Municipio Square, and the Centrale, at Fontana Medina, there was a void; as for the Allegria, in Carità Square, one of the greatest resorts of country people, it was a desert.

Very warm days came at times between the stormy ones, which were very exhausting. It was a real African climate, and the bathing-places—De Crescenzio, Cannavacciuolo, Sciattone, Manetta and Pappalordo—had five days' emptiness to one day of too large a crowd of people. The owners shook their heads despondingly, whilst the bronzed, thin, black-toothed, hoarse-voiced bathing-women, shoeless, in shift, petticoat and straw hats, ran after sheets of doubtful whiteness on the dirty brown sands, where the wind caught them and threatened to cast them into the sea. What rain! what rain! The eating-houses in the centre of Naples had poor business, but those who put tables out in the open air on Santa Lucia causeway, the eating-houses that go from Mergellina to Posillipo, the Bersaglio, the Schiava, the Figlio di Pietro, all those whose slender existence depends on fine weather, summer and winter, these suffered most; no one had anything to do, from the cook yawning in the kitchen to the few waiters left, who sat sleepily in the steamy atmosphere that even the storms did not freshen up. Only crawling flies buzzed on the uselessly prepared tables. There was a general idleness; a chorus of oaths and lamentations arose at every new outburst of showers. Even the evenings at the Villa, round the bandstand, where the municipal band plays its old polkas and variations on 'Forza del Destino' of ancient date, where a penny for a seat is all that is needed to be able to enjoy the pleasant sight of a middle-class crowd, seated or wandering round the band, just a penny to sit in the open air and hear the modest concert—even these simple, economical, popular evenings were spoilt. Among the tradesmen's daughters, for whom the Villa means an occasion to show their humble white frocks, sewn and starched at home, to see their lovers, even at a distance, under the flickering gas-lamps, to go a step further on the road, often a long one, that leads to marriage—among these girls there was secret weeping. The chair-hirer wandered through the deserted, damp avenues, full of snails, to see if no one would come to brave the bad weather, or, driven desperate, he settled himself in a corner of Vacca Café to talk over his woes with one of the waiters. What a season!

Don Domenico Mayer's son and daughter, who in other years went every evening to the Villa, walking there and back, so as to spend only fourpence, this year nearly expired with heat and boredom in their Rossi Palazzo flat. Their father was so stern. Their mother was even more sickly and doleful than usual. It was a bad season for the three sisters scattered in different parts of Naples—Carmela, the cigar-maker; Annarella, the servant; and Filomena, the young girl who lived in sin. Above all, their mother was dead in the cellar where she had lived with Carmela, and in spite of having got a pauper's coffin for her from the Pendino district authorities, and her being thrown into the common pit on the great heap of the wretched at Poggio Reale, Carmela still had had to pay seventy or eighty francs for burial expenses, without even having the consolation of knowing that her mother had had a separate grave. For some time Carmela had paid a small weekly sum to a pious Congregazione so as to have at her own death, or any of her family's, a separate carriage following and a grave; but debts and wretchedness, gambling resorted to in desperation, had prevented her from going on paying the fees, and she had lost her claim. She was left alone, with no mother, in that damp, dark cellar, in debt up to the eyes, not having twelve francs even to get a black dress or any mourning; she wore a light-coloured cotton with a black kerchief at her neck, and her neighbours criticised her for her heartlessness. Her everlasting lover, Raffaele, had now risen to the highest grades of the Camorrist hierarchy from having taken part in two duels, or dichiaramenti, and from having a mark against him with the police; he had got still more haughty to her, especially after her mother's death; he fled from Carmela, and when she went after him at inn doors and suburban taverns, he treated her brutally, all the more that she had got into a wretched condition; she could not give him five francs ever now, or even the two francs he haughtily asked for and she humbly gave.

A subtle suspicion was growing in the girl's mind, and from her mother's death, her excessive poverty, and Raffaele's suspected false-dealing, she lost her head. She often failed to go to the tobacco factory, and lost her day's work, or worked so absent-mindedly, so badly, she was fined and got very little on Saturday. Often during the week she broke her fast with a penny-worth of dry bread dipped in macaroni-water, that a neighbour, not so poor as herself, treated her to. It was too hard, too hard, for one who only wished for others' happiness, to see her mother die of privation, and then thrown into a common paupers' ditch, to mingle her bones with theirs; to see her lover going down gradually the whole ladder of vice, even to prison, perhaps to capital crime; and also to see her sisters fading away for want of moral and physical comfort. Now, with her mother gone to her eternal rest—how Carmela envied her sometimes!—and with Raffaele always going farther off from her, she, feeling her heart as cold as her stomach, went oftener to see her sisters. She thought of going to live with Annarella, for economy's sake, and not to live in such a lonely way; but Annarella lived in a cellar in Rosariella di Porta Medina—she, her husband, and two children, already getting of a good size—in a cellar with a beaten earth floor and walls not white-washed for years. The husband and wife slept on a bed made of two iron trestles, with three squeaking boards laid over them lengthwise, and a big mattress stuffed with maize leaves—the paglione, which has an opening in the middle to put in the hand when the bed is made. The girl slept by the mother in the big conjugal bed, and they made up a little bed for the boy every evening upon two broken chairs.

Frightful, utter misery had gradually fallen on the glove-cutter's family. He not only staked his whole week's pay on the lottery, but on Friday evening and Saturday morning he beat his wife, enraged if she had only one or two francs to give him. Now the children were beginning to earn something. The girl worked at a dressmaker's, the boy as a stable-hand; and when he could not get anything from his wife, Gaetano went to the dressmaker's where his little girl worked by the week, called her down, and, by dint of lies, wheedling, or blows, one after the other, he managed always to draw some pence from the child, who got the dressmaker to advance them on her week's pay. With his son, now a boy of twelve, Gaetano behaved still worse. The stable-boy often refused him money, taunting him with his vice and the wretchedness he had reduced his mother to. The father rained down blows on him. The boy, choking with tears, shouted, swore, and struggled. People came up to hear a son call his father a scoundrel, an assassin. Once, when his father gave him a blow on the nose, making the blood flow, he got enraged and bit his hand. On Saturday evening, when they came back to their home, the children carried the marks of their father's blows. The mother, who had forgotten the blows she got herself, found the marks, and wept over her poor children, asking them:

'How much has he taken away from you?'

'Fourteen sous,' Teresina answered sadly.

'He took half a franc from me,' said Carmine, raging.

'Merciful God!' the mother cried out, weeping.