Friday,
July 27, 2007
The
ANNOTICO Report
This
Britisher found the noise of
By
day, the variety of sounds were a complex texture of
seduction and stimulation. Benedetta derisively called this
"Your wet-kiss theory of
I
was hypnotized by a common ceremony of Benedetta and
her female chums gathered over a tray of coffee and aperitifs, and all of them
talked simultaneously, with great animation. Every now and then somebody would
make a move to go home but the leave-taker, to my astonishment, would continue
talking while heading out the door. She would keep conversing over her
shoulder, be pulled back inside by the force of the rejoinders, then head
outdoors again, and then be pulled back. This shuttle would be repeated, Jimmy
Durante-style, any number of times. Hesitating on the threshold seemed a
pleasure in itself.
Benedetta's people occupied two apartments in a crumbling palazzo that were on
top of the other, and overlooked a pleasant square. In the
upstairs apartment, vacant save for a bed, a table and a piano, her Old uncle, Zi' Ippolito, had lived alone
until his death a few weeks ago. Ippolito had a small income from some obscure
source - certainly not his avocation of wedding singer - with which to meet his
bachelor expenses, and he was not disposed to spread it around.
However,
"When Zi' Ippolito died," she went on, "many girls and women flocked to his funeral
chamber. All of them wept profusely but nobody in the family knew who they
were. A florist, engaged for the funeral knew them all, at least by name. He
told me that every time Zi' Ippolito fancied another woman, he sent her enough flowers to fill up her room. "The
women, were enchanted. They accepted the flowers as
proof of his passion - they simply couldn't resist him, don't you see?"
Did it make any difference that Zi' Ippolito had a
"deal" with the florist to buy the flowers at five in the morning,
cut-rate?
The rest of Zi' Ippolito's funeral
arrangements, were left in the hands of an ageless lady, Eufemia who took
charge of all such rites but she wasn't blood kin. Her principal office, was to converse with the dear departed. Such
interviews, served a serious purpose, because the period just after a funeral
could torment the living, who had so many unpaid debts
to the deceased, so many gripes and regrets. Luckily, dead souls could be
easily contacted when they had newly migrated to the next life and Eufemia reached them efficiently, without delay. She
functioned as a kind of otherworldly radio transmitter and, in this, I came to realize she was like many other Neapolitan
women, both old and young. I began to see that the whole city still subscribed,
though only half consciously, to some very old ideas -- ideas that probably
went back to Greek antiquity. There was the Orphic idea that we can induce the
gods of the underworld to put us in touch with the dead.....
Thanks
to Joan Fraschetta
A Place Where You Never
Sleep Alone
Financial
Times,
By
Dan Hofstadter
Published:
Feb 18, 2006
This is an edited extract from '
Whenever,
after a long absence, I return to
Yet soon the
noises soothe me and, suspended between wakefulness and sleep, I enjoy a
sensation of homecoming, of rejoining a crowd of kindred spirits, faces I have
always known. The sounds summon up mental pictures and in my mind's eye I can
see the one-room street beneath my window, I can see those tiny street-level
flats, with their open windows and monumental, tomblike beds, and gold-embossed
icons of the Madonna. I can see the old ladies gossiping in chairs along the
sidewalk and the kids revving up their bikes at the corner, I can see the circolo sociale
where grizzled gents play scala under
a neon strip, smoking, coughing, trading affectionate insults.
Looking back
through the haze of the years, I think it was actually the crowdedness of
Benedetta's people occupied two
apartments in a crumbling palazzo notable
for the peculiar, ungraspable shapes of its rooms. One apartment was on top of
the other, and both overlooked a pleasantly decrepit square. In the upstairs
apartment, vacant save for a bed, a table and a piano, her old uncle, Zi' Ippolito, had lived alone until his death a few weeks
before my arrival. The rest of the family resided downstairs. Ippolito had a
small income from some obscure source - certainly not his avocation of wedding
singer - with which to meet his bachelor expenses, and he was not disposed to
spread it around.
"When Zi' Ippolito died," she went on, "many girls and
women flocked to his funeral chamber. All of them wept profusely but nobody in
the family knew who they were. A florist, though, an acquaintance of ours, had
been engaged for the funeral and he knew them all, at least by name. He ran a
concession in the flower market by the Castel Nuovo
and he told me some things about my uncle. He told me that every time Zi' Ippolito fancied another woman, he sent her enough
flowers to fill up her room."
The women, Benedetta said, were enchanted. "They accepted the
flowers as proof of his passion - they simply couldn't resist him, don't you
see? What they didn't know - what the florist explained to me - was that he and
Zi' Ippolito had a standing arrangement. My uncle
always bought the flowers at five in the morning, cut-rate."
The rest of her
uncle's funeral arrangements, Benedetta told me, were
left in the hands of an ageless lady, gnomelike and
bewhiskered, named Eufemia. Eufemia
took charge of all such rites but she wasn't blood kin and indeed Benedetta couldn't explain her relation to the family. (She
may have been the daughter, if I can trust my diary, of Norma Immaculata's sister-in-law.) Her principal office, though,
and this Benedetta knew first-hand, was to converse
with the dear departed. Such interviews, Benedetta
explained, served a serious purpose, because the period just after a funeral
could torment the living, who had so many unpaid debts
to the deceased, so many gripes and regrets. Luckily, dead souls could be
easily contacted when they had newly migrated to the next life and Eufemia reached them efficiently, without delay. She
functioned as a kind of otherworldly radio transmitter and, in this, I came to realise she was like many other Neapolitan women, both old
and young.
Mulling over what
Benedetta told me about her family, I began to see
that the whole city still subscribed, though only half consciously, to some
very old ideas -- ideas that probably went back to Greek antiquity. There was
the Orphic idea that we can induce the gods of the underworld to put us in
touch with the dead. Mainly there was the assumption that none of life's many
chambers were totally sealed off from any of the others - everything
communicated with everything else. Judges burst into song in front of
defendants; old bachelors carried on like young lovers; and florists took the
place of funeral orators, even if what they said could hardly qualify as a
eulogy.
Then twilight
came, our favourite hour, and a strange silence hung
about those heights where we passed arm in arm into a different, more rarefied
world. The roar of Naples subsided into a distant sibilance, the stillness
broken only by the occasional mewing of a cat or the sound of two boys with a
ball, and spiked grilles closed off jungle-like gardens, and the streets bent
away into the shadows. Yet as we climbed still higher, shafts of sunlight
washed the fronts of broad palazzi, illuminating tiny figures at the
windows, and we vied with each other in pointing them out. Look, that old woman
reeling in her wash . . . that child gazing at the sky . . . And when Benedetta told me that she would never let me leave her,
that she would be sure to "walk away first," I pictured her moving
briskly down a long stone stairway, her bare arms swinging, her hair lifted
lightly by the breeze.
Now, more than
two decades later, I am reminded of something strange she once said. She loved
Since those days
with Benedetta, I have been back to
Perhaps that is
why I have rarely ended a day in
This is an
edited extract from 'Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples' by Dan Hofstadter,
published in the UK by Profile Books at #16.99 on February 24 2006 (first
published in the US last November by Alfred A. Knopf)
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