'That is true—it is true!' Formosa murmured, looking into the darkness with wild eyes.
CHAPTER V
CARNIVAL AT NAPLES
From the first days of January, Naples was taken with a mania for work that spread from one house and shop to another, from street to street, quarter to quarter, from fashionable parts to the poorest, with a continuous movement, rising and falling. A stronger noise of saws, planes and hammers came from the factories and workshops: in the shops, with doors left ajar, and in the houses they sat up late: the smallest as well as the big industries seemed to have got a mysterious impulse, a breath of new life, into their half-dying state.
The demand for gloves had increased beyond bounds, especially white and dove-coloured ones: the humblest general shops kept them. In the artificial-flower shops, that compete with the French trade with growing success, a great quantity of boughs, bunches, wreaths of flowers, and ferns were got ready; big and small bouquets of bright, warm-coloured flowers to take the eye—the finest intended for ladies' hair and bosoms, the coarser for decorating houses, shops, horses and carriages. Roses, camellias, pinks, were most in request. At all the tailors' and dressmakers', satin, velvet, gauze, crape, were draped in all styles, made into dresses, mantles, hoods, and scarves; whilst at the shoe-makers', binders spent ten hours a day making pink, blue, white, gray, and lilac shoes, fancy, gold-embroidered boots, and some bound in fur. The glove, flower, dress, and shoe makers' work began the first hours in the morning and ended at eleven at night; but the only others that came up to them were the cardboard shops. Here paper, in men and women's hands, was bent into a thousand shapes and sizes. It was painted, cut out, twisted, even curled up; it was made up with straw, metal, and rich brocade stuff, starting from the twisted paper that holds a sweet or cracker to the big expensive box. From the little chocolate-box, made of cardboard and a scrap of satin, to the handsome, neat satchel with a second cardboard lining; from the roll, made of two or three old gambling cards, a little Bristol board, and bright-coloured pictures, to straw cornucopias, covered with ribbons; from ugly, mean things to lovely and expensive ones, the work was never-ending. All this paper-work was arranged on large boards; the colours were dazzling and took the eye. Every day they were sent off to the sweet-shops, where they were filled with confetti, dainties, sweets, and sugar almonds.
Yes, the work was hardest, always, in the confectioners', from the humble Fragalà of San Lorenzo quarter and the gorgeous but middle-class Fragalà of Spirito Santo up to the exquisite fashionable confectioner in Piazza San Ferdinando. Above all, there was a grand making of caraways, white and coloured, of all sizes, with caraway-seeds and a powdery sugar covering; there were whole stores of them in tins, canisters of all sizes, overflowing baskets made like canisters, all kept carefully from damp, which ruins caraways. Such a stock!—if it had been gunpowder, there would have been enough to conquer an army. The other heavy work was getting sausages and black-puddings ready, all covered with yellow bits of Spanish bread—pig's blood, that is to say—made up with chocolate, pistachios, vanilla, lemon, and cinnamon, so presented as to hide the coarseness. In the back-shops they weighed cinnamon, sliced lemons, crushed pistachio nuts, boiled sweets of all colours and kinds; ovens roared, stoves were made red-hot, kettles boiled and gurgled, and workmen, in shirt-sleeves and caps, with bare arms and necks, stirring with big ladles, beating pestles in marble mortars, looked like odd figures in purgatory, lighted up by the furnace flames.
All trades were busy: advertisements were put up; whole sheets of them were spread on the city walls. Fashionable barbers took on new lads; the three celebrated Naples pizzaiuoli of Freddo and Chiaia Lanes, of Carità Square, of Port Alba, informed the public, which loves pizza with Marano and Procida wine, that they would be open till morning. The Café Napoli, the Grande, and the Europa covered their windows with thick cloths, and held a grand cleaning up all through the rooms; the theatres announced four times more illuminations, whilst at the door of fancy shops, the windows of miserable or fashionable bazaars, were shown black velvet masks, wax noses, and huge cardboard heads, three times the natural size, and much uglier than Nature; network masks, to protect the face from caraways, ladles for throwing them, long tongs for handing up sweets or flowers to the balconies, scarves and ribbons, fantastic ballroom decorations, and entire costumes of tissue-paper. Along the streets in Monte Calvario quarter, across and parallel to Toledo, in the darkest old-clothes shops and retail dealers', dominos hung on wooden pegs for the popular balls: Mephistopheles costumes in red and blue, Spanish grandees in cotton velvet, harlequins made up of old carpets, Sorrento peasant women's dresses in gay colours, Pulcinellos, and almost white dress; above all, shining helmets, with cuirass of cardboard to match, and wooden swords. Masquerading costumes were on hire everywhere for a few francs; they gave a jocular tone to these dull lanes, hanging even from the first-floor balconies, sticking out in a row from the damp, dark shops with grinning, devilish masks, or showing sickly faces of white or greeny-blue satin.
Wherever one went, in lower class neighbourhoods as well as in aristocratic parts, one could see a lively movement, cheerful labour, a noisy bustling about, a never-ending activity, a daily and nightly ferment of all forces, the constant, lively, energetic action of a whole peaceful, laborious town, intent upon one single piece of work, given up to it heart and mind, hand and foot, using up its nerves, blood, and muscles in this one tremendous work. Everywhere, everywhere, one guessed or knew it; it caught the eye; it was written up what this great work was—'For the coming carnival festivities.'
Nothing else but the carnival. The great city gave itself over to that impetuous, joyous exertion, not for love of work in itself—for work that is the cause and consequence of well-doing, which in itself is the ground-work of goodness and respectability. The great town had not given itself over to that lively activity for any immediate civic reason, for hygienic improvements, industrial art exhibitions, changing old quarters or making new ones: it was for the carnival only—a carnival by official decree of the Prefecture and of the Municipal Palace; a carnival warmed up by committees, associations, commissions, set agoing by thousands of people, arranged and carried out as a great institution, widely spread in the minds of the whole five hundred thousand inhabitants, made to resound as far as the southern provinces, echoing even to Rome and to Florence, putting in the place of any other project, initiative or work, this of the carnival; nothing but the carnival—enthusiastically, even deliriously.