French-Italian writer Jean-Noël Schifano’s Chroniques
Napolitaines (1984) contains six tales built around actual persons and
events from the Naples of the late 15th to mid-17th
centuries, brought to life through a combination of linguistic virtuosity, scholarly
care and attention to detail, and capacious imagination, making the book an
impressive short work of historical fiction. A warning and a pity: the book is
unavailable in English.
For anyone still reading, another warning: the tales in Chroniques
Napolitaines make for one blood-drenched book. For Schifano, the only
French citizen ever to have been named an honorary citizen of Naples, the city
where he lived for many years is a one “of bad Catholics and great sinners…capable
of anything out of passion,” where the Neapolitan eye is “a demand for
forgiveness that accuses,” and where “the passion of love” is only equaled by “the
passion for vengeance.” Here the main streets of ancient Naples, Spaccanapoli
and Toledo, are a cross on which the city is “every day crucified, every day
resuscitated.” Drawing on old records
and anecdotes, yet inserting occasional references to the present as though taking
the reader on a guided tour of centuries, Schifano’s versions of these stories
depict dramatic love affairs, vicious acts of revenge, frenzied political revolts,
and barbaric and bizarre tortures (a punishment for parricide involved throwing
the convict into the sea inside a sack shared by a dog, monkey and viper). But
Schifano also marvels at the less physically violent aspects of the city: its feverish
baroque intensity in both life and art; its citizens’ fierce pride and bristling
rejection of orthodoxy and rigidity, particularly when imposed by foreign
interlopers (the historical scope of the stories falls largely within the Spanish
rule of the city); the manner in which the thick mantle of the past continually
oozes up through the lava-black streets into the present.
Schifano’s work contains a plethora of fascinating
historical details about Naples. References to the presence of the past in the many-layered
city abound, including Schifano’s mention of the discovery in 1973, in
subterranean chambers beneath the National Archives, of poems by Tirenella, a
female poet, who, like a “Louise Labé of Naples,” wrote in dialect of
“tyrannical torments.” Another tale mentions Neapolitan desserts of the period,
including “Monks’ Fleas,” rounded cakes dusted with burned bits of ground
almonds, and “Oranges of Crime,” eaten with three-quarters of the pulp replaced
by a mixture of honey and fresh pig’s blood. A Neapolitan was never said to be
“crazy,” but to have “parted into the imagination.” Here amid the garbage piles
roamed the zoccola, a cat-sized race
of “indestructible” rats. And here in a city that smells “of fish when the sun
rises and sulfur when it sets,” one encountered everywhere “the secret watchword”
of all Neapolitans: “Chi m’o fa fa?”
– “Who’s going to make me?”
The drama and violence of Schifano’s Naples evince
themselves in the first story, which recounts the furious love affair between the
wife of composer Carlo Gesualdo and the Duke of Andria, and the brutal
punishment dispensed by the composer when the affair is discovered. Another
story, “La felouque du vice-roi,” briefly recaps the brief reign of fisherman-turned-revolutionary
Massaniello, the capopopolo or “boss
of the people,” who in 1647 led a bloody and short-lived populist revolt
against the city’s Spanish rulers. In “Grecs Intermedes,” Schifano – who
evidently relishes mining the city’s history for intriguing cases - explicitly
refers readers to source documents for an extraordinary trial in which both a
tailor and the donkey with which he had been accused of committing an unnatural
act were convicted and publically hanged. Schifano nakedly conveys both the atrocity
and absurdity of this scene, including an entire paragraph of taunts from the
young lazzaroni who mock with cruel
laughter the spectacle of the tailor being led through Naples’ streets, his
bare feet tethered with leather straps to the hind legs of the donkey plodding
before him. This anecdote opens the tale of Tiberio de Vela, scion of a noble
family, one of the city’s most notorious “sodomites,” and proud member of the
Camorra, then a fraternal honor society scarcely less criminal than its
contemporary incarnation. For a period of two years, de Vela roamed about with his
gang, stealing young boys off the streets and taking them to an estate by the steaming
fumaroles of Pozzuoli near the sulfurous Phlegraean Fields to the north of the
city. Here, fantastically orchestrated orgies occurred until universal dismay
at the failure of the miraculous monthly “liquefaction” of San Gennaro’s blood in
the cathedral of Naples, having until then occurred without interruption for 13
centuries, forced the authorities to abandon the blind eye turned to de Vela’s
obscenities and conferred by his family’s status, and give the people a gruesome public
punishment - not for readers with weak stomachs - commensurate with the drama
of the failed miracle.
Schifano has a formidable dexterity with language and a keen
ability to imagine the dialogue of the time, mining French for archaic, arcane idioms
and vocabulary and sprinkling his narrative with words and phrases from
Neapolitan dialect. Without sacrificing any wealth of description or essentials
of the history, Schifano also condenses grand events into compact packages; all
but one of the stories come in under 35 pages, and even the longest one is
divided into linked stories.
This long story, “Les heures contraires” (The Contrary Hours,
referring to a Neapolitan term for that time of afternoon when the Neapolitan
heat seems to make the city a purgatory of souls caught between flames and
death), plunges the reader fully into Naples’ gritty ruthlessness (and since Chroniques
napolitaines is unavailable in English, I’ll supply perhaps too much plot
detail). Schifano’s stories often link discrete anecdotes as though layering
impressions upon the reader, and “Les Heures Contraires” is no exception. Using
as a motif the common 16th century practice of poisoning as a means
of dispensing of enemies, Schifano begins with an episodic series of poisonings.
These culminate in a lengthy account of events that unfolded during the reign
of Don Pedro of Toledo. This ill-educated, rapacious Spanish libertine, jealous
of the pagan liberties of Neapolitan youth, who “worshipped at the same time
Isis, Osiris, the Virgin and Holy Child, the sun and the moon, the member of
Priapus and the cross of Christ,” provoked a wave of sexually-driven violence
in the city such that even cloisters were not immune.
The most notorious of these incursions occurred in the
convent of Sant’Arcangelo di Baiano in Forcella, among the fiercest of Naples’
neighborhoods. Schifano restores to its proper Neapolitan origins this tale borrowed
by Stendhal and removed to Tuscany in one of his unfinished “Italian Chronicles.”
Into this convent a number of daughters of noble families were inducted in
order to put an end to adolescent love affairs and thus prevent scandal and
matches unpropitious to the families’ welfare. Schifano sensitively depicts the
conflicts of these young novices, who, far from being religious devotees, were
essentially prisoners. A scene depicting a young girl’s depilation as part of
her “eternal” consecration into Sant’Arcangelo is chilling, as is a scene in
which the ambitious new abbess wins protection for the convent by allowing a powerful
duke into the convent to rape her own 12-year-old niece.
Subterfuges the girls use to continue to see their lovers
often result in disaster. Suitors of two young novices are assaulted by thugs
hired by the girls’ families, their bloodied bodies thrown into the convent to
die in front of the eyes of the girls (who in revenge conspire to poison the
mother superior). When another novice attempts to conceal her lover inside a
crate containing a clavier, the delivery, accidentally left in the courtyard to
bake under the hot sun, causes the young man to suffocate rather than risk breaking
out and compromising his beloved’s honor. Schifano’s omniscient narrator follows
another novice who, thanks to a door left unlocked, escapes one night to join a
gentleman with whom she is infatuated, but is first castigated by the man for
violating her vows, then taken by him, then discovered upon her return.
Finally, two fetuses are found discarded next to the convent. Fury erupts out
of shock that a mother could kill her own babies (and not, in pagan Naples, out
of any religious objection). In the only major European city where, thanks to
the “ferocious eccentricities” of its people, “the courts of the Inquisition had
no right to be conducted,” the cumulative anger merges with friction in the
Neapolitans’ tolerance of Spanish rule, leading to a disastrous eruption of street
battles, protests before the convent, and an almost comical wave of efforts by
the ecclesiastical authorities to impose inquisitional order on Sant’Arcangelo
– the last checked by the intercession of the girls’ families, Neapolitan
repugnance at sermonizing foreign clerics, the quick dispatch of one cleric via
poison, and by the girls themselves.
In drawing the tale to a close, Schifano constructs
successive anecdotes in which three of the girls deliver forceful, furious
speeches. The first, Tullia, viciously lances one cleric’s authority, sending
him packing simply by raising the specter of her family’s power. Subsequently,
when a vicar takes refuge in the cell of another of the girls during an attack
on the convent, the narrator juxtaposes both the injurious confinement and the fabulous
wealth of these daughters of the rich, as the vicar is “scandalized” to see
…suspended on the walls carpeted in
sunflower-colored satin embroidered with silver, two large paintings. One
represented a rosy and amorous Aurora lifting into the skies of Syria the hero
Cephalus, that same Greek who made love with a bear in obeisance to the oracle
of Delphi, thus assuring his progeny; the other, Sélène and Endymion, the
beautiful and naked boy asleep beneath the avid yellow shadow of the beautiful
and naked Nyctalope, queen of the lunar work of love, descending from her
starry chariot. Ostentatiously, the Vicar turned his eyes away from these
profane, culpably lascivious visions, slowly directing his steps toward the
door, seized abruptly by a whirlwind of thoughts and sensations as heavy and
burning as the August sun that swept the second gallery without pity. But the
Abbess held him back. She wished to give him the perfidious pleasure of
detailing for him furnishings and curiosities, the whole inventory exchanging
itself in a jealous and impossible transference between the old woman and the
young.
For an entire page, the abbess continues to catalog of the
room’s contents: its “ebony footstools inlaid with mother of pearl,” finely wrought
silver-work basins enameled in vermillion and “filled with tulips of milky
calcedonian,” marble busts of nymphs and éphèbes, “a great ivory chest with
fastenings of gold and studded with garnets,” Persian rugs depicting hunting
scenes, frescoes of silver putti
playing among sinuous vines, grand chandeliers. When the vicar suggests to Guilia,
the cell’s inhabitant, that her lodgings should possess an order more appropriate
for a religious novice, the girl snarls at him:
Is it insufficient to satisfy your own
extravagance…that I waste away in this atrocious solitude? I, Guilia Caracciolo
di Brianza, born of a blood more illustrious than the earth, arrivals from
Cunes with the first Greeks who founded Paleopolis, who with each of my steps follow
the footprints of thirty centuries of armed nobles brandishing the herald of
three gold bands beneath an azure field, I, of the most venerable branch of the
Caracciolo, deprived of my liberty and my rights, should be disallowed play with
such innocent objects because you, who were nothing before your birth, remain
nothing while alive, and will be nothing after your death, should so will it?...
Is it so great a crime, in this century, to embellish one’s prison cell, when
one’s own parentage casts away all one’s worth, despoils it, disperses it
across the world? You, civil servant of Heaven, you come here to add upon the
cruelties of my cruel family; to preach charity, but invade my bedchamber to tear
from the miserable a last and frivolous illusion, the beauty of time going past,
the powerful dreams of humanity that course through my veins, to remind us outright
of this indignity: the tender age at which, ignorant of the world save for the
grandeur of our race, and prepared at any moment for the greatest gestures, for
the most supreme sacrifices, we were manipulated so sinisterly in order that we
renounce life!...
Chastened, but determined still to make an example, the vicar
conducts an expeditious trial, held within the convent’s prayer chapel, which
immediately confers sentence: several of the girls are to be imprisoned, others
exiled, and the two responsible for poisoning the mother superior to be poisoned
on the spot. The speech by one of these girls, Chiara, contains all of the
defiance and contempt Neapolitans would expect:
Let us drink, she said, in this royal
cesspool, to the health of dead souls and their black thirsts! And she drank in
one gulp the viscous liquid, down to the final drop. Eufrasia let the tears course
down her cheeks and whimpered, shaken by sobs sounding like some dirge of
antiquity. Chiara moved close to her and helped her bring the goblet to her
mouth, afterwards brushing with a gentle kiss the already tumescent flesh,
bitter with the taste of the hemlock. Whether to collect the empty goblets or
interrupt the girls’ embrace, the Sicaire took a step towards them. Chiara
turned sharply, hurling at the feet of the armed man the two chalices, which
rebounded and rolled upon the marble in twin, resonating circles. Crying aloud she
addressed the tribunal and the whole assembly nailed in a stupor before the
chapel’s golden aureoles: Back, cursed wasps! I am condemned to die, but stay
away from me, macabre abusers from beyond the grave! I am the immaculate,
unbridled! Leave us to die alone before our empty vaults, impudent preachers,
unspeakable judges, away from the penetrating lasciviousness of your cadaverous
eyes!
Her companion already dead, Chiara scribbles to her brother,
with her last bit of strength, a note poignantly, devastatingly practical and
accusatory, willing her belongings to her sister inmates and affirming that whatever
fees may be due to the convent have been paid in full.
Though Schifano’s book is filled with grand characters, the star
of Chroniques napolitaines is Naples itself. Woven of passion and
punishment, the tales work together to forge an indelible image of a span of
history in what may be the most troubled, complex and unique city of Europe. As
brutal as Schifano’s tales may be, they still revel in the sharply paradoxical
and often hidden splendors of Naples, as though to emulate the exaggerated chiaroscuro and saturated detail of the Neapolitan
Baroque paintings of Caravaggio, Stanzione, and Gentileschi (a luxuriousness
evident if one compares Schifano’s story of Sant’Arcangelo with the flat affect
and spare narrative of Stendhal’s chronicle, The Abbess of Castro, which
depicts violent events in another Italian convent). Above all, one senses
Schifano’s awe at Naples’ human dimension, his almost obsessive passion to
grasp, through its layers of the past, the city’s singularity and the almost
theatrical violence of its glory and ferocity, his unflinching attempt to
restore to grand measure a people “all at once the most idolatrous, skeptical
and ironic people on earth…each individual creat[ing] in his own way his own tolerant
religion, constituted from the gestures of the day-to-day and of millennia.” A tour de force.
Translations are my own, as are the defects of them.
