“In the sunlit lands
of the far South there is a kind of secret ministry for the defence of Nature
against Reason, a sort of all-powerful genius loci, which watches over the unbroken sleep of the inhabitants.” - Anna Maria Ortese, “Strange Apparition”
Among my favorite discoveries in Italian literature this
year has been Raffaele La Capria’s 1961 novel The Mortal Wound (Ferito a Morte, English translation 1964
by Marguerite Waldman). La Capria is one of the Neapolitan writers whom Anna
Maria Ortese, in The Sea Doesn’t Bathe Naples, criticizes for exercising
“an art apparently rooted in arid desperation.” In The Mortal Wound La
Capria returns the favor: one of his characters explicitly references Ortese’s
title, rejecting a point of view that dwells on “the two Naples, one a
rigged-up affair, the other the real life. The Naples bathed by the sea and the
Naples of the back alleys, Vesuvius and counter-Vesuvius. And so forth and so
on.“ Though the two authors diverge in their approaches to literature, they share
a bred-in-the-bone affection for their city fused with a scathing condemnation
of its failings. In The Mortal Wound, La Capria levels his entire generation;
the book, a portrait of dissolution and paralysis, emerged as among the most
important novels of postwar Naples.[i]
La Capria’s title, The Mortal Wound, refers to Naples
itself, both setting and subject of this fascinating and moving work, which in
addition boasts of two noteworthy characteristics that have placed it on the
literary map. First, it contains the first reference to pasta puttanesca, in a brief but entertaining passage that does
little to shed light on the notoriously-named dish other than to suggest a Syracusan
origin. Second, The Mortal Wound served as a key inspiration for
director Paolo Sorrentino’s Academy Award-winning 2013 film The Great Beauty
(La Grande Bellezza). One can
recognize discrete elements of the novel in the film, but readers expecting a
faithful correspondence may be disappointed: the similarities are almost
entirely thematic and in the works’ overarching tone of nostalgic regret.
Lyrical and atmospheric, The Mortal Wound uses a
polyphonic set of narrators and a mixture of dialogue, interior
monologue, and free indirect discourse, peppered by frequent flashbacks, to
capture the generation of Neapolitans from World War II into the years
preceding Italy’s “Boom,” and covering the period of mayor Achille Lauro’s
transformation of the city that saw incomes rise in tandem with organized crime
and corruption; civic improvements as well as rampant real estate speculation; and
a pursuit of profit that saw cherished aspects of old Naples quickly razed in
a rush to riches.
La Capria filters this portrait largely through Massimo
DeLuca, eldest son of a once well-off family now reduced nearly to ruin but still
clinging to the manners and habits of its former prosperity. Sifting through
the complexity of the novel’s narrative style - translator Waldman’s choice to
place portions of the text into italics, ostensibly to facilitate distinction
between the novel’s shifting narrators, is of marginal help - one pieces
together Massimo’s life.
The young Massimo spends much of his time hanging around
clubs, cafés and casinos, engaging in repetitive discourse about Neapolitan
torpor and entrapment, of the “southern labyrinth” where the exertion of reason
is useless, of those who leave and those who stay, of fortunes made in the
Americas, of the differences between Pommery and Veuve Cliquot. Massimo’s
coterie of ruined Neapolitans of all ages, “a community of
idlenesses,” find little to do with themselves other than gamble for days on
end and chase sensuality (L’Oro di Napoli, the 1957 film by La Capria’s
close friend Vittorio di Sica, features an amusing portrait of a gambler La
Capria might have used as a model). The best minds of Massimo’s generation - not
starving, hysterical, or naked, but passive and pliant - watch their lives pour
through their fingers. Even the recent war evokes a bitter nostalgia: “If
nothing ever happens in Naples, you say, when war breaks out, for better or
worse something’s got to happen even here. Because look, Massimo said, ‘a war
seems better than the way I spend my days, without knowing where to go or what
to do.’” Arguments fizz out with a whimper; when one character challenges
another to a duel, he’s ridiculed for both the anachronism and the economics of
the idea: “…so much for the doctor, so much for the taxi, so much for the
reconciliation supper.”
Acutely afflicted by the city’s intractable hold, Massimo
nonetheless remains distinct and aloof from the others, and feels most at home while diving
for fish in the Bay of Naples with his younger brother, Nini. “Under water,” as
Massimo’s journalist friend Gaetano asks him, “you forget even that you were
born, don’t you?” La Capria repeatedly plays with the contrast between this silent
undersea beauty and the grinding city above, his submarine passages
turning into flights of lyrical prose, an escape into a magical world:
The breathing of the sea covered and
uncovered the rock extended below the water like the wreck of a ship. Round it
pressed the dense blue, probed in vain by conical sun-shafts, by luminous
barbs. Tiny green wrasse and rainbow wrasse, butterfly-blennies, blue
damsel-fish and saddled bream, drawn forward and pushed back by that breathing,
for an instant hovering black in that deep blue light, then immediately hurled
back again invisible against the carpet of brown seaweed.
If parts of Naples have not been bathed by the sea, the same
cannot be said of what the sea receives from Naples. An environmental
consciousness pervades The Mortal Wound, as the enchanting world in
which Massimo seeks refuge is imperiled by garbage, industrial waste and sewage,
as well as by the collateral damage from German, British and American attacks on
the city during the war, such as the devastating and lingering effects of
phosphorus bombs.
Despite these assaults, Nature remains the triumphant enemy.
The city is “The Virgin Forest,” a once glorious European capital fallen into a
pitiable, inert modern state now bypassed by the currents of History, the “blue
line running through countries and cities: New York, London, Paris, Zurich,
Rome, even Rome! But there the line suddenly veers, indeed recoils in horror
and runs off…to the north.” The DeLuca family’s parallel decline is
atmospherically woven into their living quarters, the Palazzo Medina (identifiable
as the real-life Palazzo Donn’Anna), a crumbling 300-year-old edifice not so
much bathed by the bay as being swallowed by it:
The façade, more exposed to the sea, is
a trifle out of true; has it given way at the base or is that only an impression?
as though the ebb and flow of waves had rotted the foundation? Wind and salt
water eating away the blocks of tufa, now concave and gritty, only their edges
jut out with the lime and bricks; a constant imperceptible crumbling; if you
pass your finger over it you can feel the yellow dust coming away. For the past
three hundred years the palace has withstood the moods of the sea, the blows of
waves and bombs, but the centuries will conquer it with patience, millimetre by
millimetre, until the quiet Neapolitan waters will claim their victory on a
beautiful day like this, as they are already doing over the three or four
surviving buttresses of Pollione’s villa under Cape Posilippo, and fishes will
swim in the rooms rendered unrecognizable by marine incrustations, the erosions
of waved and corroding mollusks. Only a matter of time.
This same abandonment to Nature is reflected in daily lives
of Massimo and those around him, a fatal Neapolitan passivity that impedes
forward motion and keeps its inhabitants rooted in place. Even Capri,
glittering on the horizon, exists only as a far-away dream neither of the young brothers has ever visited. Gaetano jokingly
suggests that Neapolitans should install “a lovely neon sign, very large, at
the top of Vesuvius, for everyone to read: WHOEVER STAYS WILL BE DEFEATED.”
And yet Massimo stays. Ruminating on a letter from Gaetano,
who has left Naples and written to ask, “Why are you still there?” Massimo ruminates,
“And how could I tell him the absurd thing, how am I to tell him: to find again
a single one of those days intact as it used to be, to find it by chance, one
morning, going out with the fishing boat and the gun?” The intact moment
Massimo seeks most is a certain night with Carla Boursier – she herself passes through the novel like an elusive ghost - the “great lost moment”
of Massimo’s life (recognizable in Jep Gambardella’s retreat into similar
memories in La Grande Belezza), a past, fleeting fantasy of love and
promise that haunts Massimo and holds him like an anchor.
This is one sad book. Regarding those who do manage to get
away, La Capria omits details of their sojourns in Rome and elsewhere, as
though Neapolitanism is so entrenched as to blot out anything unrelated to it. But
the almost unrelenting paralysis is partially set off by the southern Italian wit
and creativity of those of Massimo’s coterie who somehow manage to make it into
middle age without having succumbed to the “dream of the new car, the sports
model, money…narrow lives, in a circle of scruffy friends.” Dissolute playboys
and bon vivants, they trade goods on the black market, flit among and live off
the rich foreigners who visit Capri and Ischia, survive by solely through their wits and
not inconsiderable wit. A dark but sharp humor is woven into La Capria’s novel.
For instance, one of Massimo’s friends is named Rossomalpelo, a literary joke
referencing Verga’s grim short story featuring one of the most unfortunate
characters in any literature. Here, he’s among those who leave, and when
Massimo runs into him again in Naples after many years, he’s a successful
architect, “well-informed and capable of indignation,” helping to pile Lauro’s
shoddy modern edifices onto the historic old buildings of the city. If
Massimo’s generation has wallowed in indifference and idleness, they partially
compensate by a vivid humor and capriciousness. The final chapters, for all the
spiritual emptiness they display, are injected with gags and scams that would be laugh out loud funny (particularly a
stunt that Nini pulls in Capri’s famous Blue Grotto) were not they emblematic
of something stunted and immature in men who have allowed their time to pass
them by.
There’s a certain heroism in this dissolution, as conveyed
in one character’s disparaging remark offering up Romans as a contrast,
referring to their “…dreams of modest happiness, the acme of prudence at the
age of twenty, they never once compromise themselves with a daring remark:
tactical and practical.” “The mortal wound” of Naples, however, presents one a
limited set of choices: to leave for a more mundane world, to abandon the
struggle and succumb entirely, or to reinvent oneself, however meanly and hopelessly.
As Sasà, disgraced in middle age but once the paragon of youth among Massimo’s
friends, asserts: “You see, in a city where seventy per cent have no regular
employment you’ve simply got to invent something, don’t you? They force us to.”
Displaying almost none of the determined activism of Anna
Maria Ortese’s work, The Mortal Wound nonetheless conveys its “arid
desperation” with sensitivity, lyricism and humor, and above all with a fierce
and fatal appreciation of Naples itself. La Capria movingly depicts a
generation that, in failing to escape or to act, in a simultaneous submission to
and rejection of Naples’ “absurd scale of values,” has little to honor in life
other than those maddeningly ambiguous, Neapolitan gifts of resistance,
reinvention, and a terminal, blind refusal to capitulate despite certain
defeat.
[i] Though the novel is second in a trilogy, “Tre Romanzi
del una Giornata” (Three Novels of a Day), the books, published approximately
ten years apart, can be read as stand-alone works (the first, A Day of
Impatience [1952], is also available in an English translation by William
Weaver).
