Naples '44 by Norman Lewis Page A

constitution, he was said by Lo Scalzo to have died of a heart attack either in the act of the marriage’s consummation, or shortly after.
    All this happened a decade ago, since which time the Marshal said Donna Maria had run the estate with professional efficiency. I found her a soft, well-rounded woman with a dreaming smile, no longer showing any signs of what must have been the impressive musculature of her youth. We drank fizzy wine from the estate, chewed on hard biscuits, and complained of the times we lived in. Later Lo Scalzo mentioned that Donna Maria employed her own private army to keep order on her land, for which reason it was an oasis of discipline and calm in the general anarchy of its environment. No one could pull the wool over her eyes, he said. She knew just as much about what went on behind the scenes as did the Sindaco himself, but – as the Camorra did not admit women to its membership – she was a far more dependable source of information from my point of view.
January 12
    The epidemic of wire-cutting continues with the General’s threats rumbling in the background and a great drive by the MPs. As usual the small people who cut the wire bear the brunt of the offensive, but no attempt is made to track down the traders who buy and sell the copper.
    There is plenty of muddle and tragedy in this tiny corner of our war effort. Yesterday Antonio Priore, scrap-merchant, age unknown but thought to be about seventy, was pushing his hand-cart through thestreets of Afragola when he was stopped by an MP patrol who went through his load of scrap and found severed lengths of wire. Priore seemed at first to be under the impression that they were interested in buying the wire, and explained through the interpreter that there was plenty more where that came from. He was astonished to be arrested, contending that the wire was German; he claimed that Italians had been urged in Allied broadcasts during the German occupation to do just what he had done.
    This was clearly the MP’s pigeon, but for some reason I was dragged in and sent to see Priore in Poggio Reale, where I found him shivering and shaking in his cell. He was very old and decrepit, and if not positively halfwitted, certainly far from bright. The old man was clearly bewildered to be in Poggio Reale. He had always understood, he said, that the Allies had promised to reward Italians like himself who worked for their cause, and what better proof was there of the patriotic work he had undertaken than the possession of quantities of German wire? So far there had been no talk of rewarding him in any way, and all the thanks he had received was to be hauled off and thrown into prison. ‘So the Allies won, eh? And good luck to them,’ he said. ‘I certainly did what little I could.’ He clearly thought I had come to take him out. ‘Be nice to get back home to the old woman,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like to think of her in that house all on her own last night. Can’t get about too well any more.’ He had old, red, runny eyes that looked as though they were full of tears when I arrived, so it was difficult to decide whether or not he was weeping when I left.
    In the afternoon I drove out to Afragola through cold, pitiless rain, and had great difficulty in finding the Priore shack in the waterlogged fields. Inside, hideous, stinking poverty; an old lady shrivelled as a mummy lying fully dressed under a pile of rags in a bed. Starving cats, rats, leaking roof, a suffocating smell of excrement. Not the slightest sign of food anywhere. Nearest house two hundred yards away.
    At the Carabinieri Station I found the Brigadiere in a state of shock, sitting at his desk staring into space. He was suffering from daily gunfights between rival gangs, bandits, pillaging army deserters, vendettas, kidnappings, mysterious disappearances, reported cases of typhus, thenon-arrival of his pay and the shortage of supplies of every kind,