Beware of Pity: Anna Maria Ortese's The Iguana

As evidence that the influence of the weirdness of Giambattista Basile’s Neapolitan fairy-tales may have carried into the 20^th century, one might point to Anna Maria Ortese and her peculiar, compelling 1965 novel, The Iguana. With a deceptively light tone, Ortese offers up, in her modern fairy tale, both a playful toying with the purposes of literature and a deeply haunting portrayal of the development of a moral conscience.

The first of the novel's two parts, "The Man Who Buys Islands," opens in a vaguely defined temporal space merging elements of the contemporary world with those of the 19th century and before. The spoiled young Don Carlo Ludovico Aleardo de Grees, of the Dukes of Estremadura-Aleardi and Count of Milan (nickname: “Daddo”) is sent by his wealthy mother on an expedition to buy up new lands for building resorts to accommodate the leisure tastes of Milanese vacationers. At the same time, the Count’s publisher friend Adelchi urges him to scour these territories for manuscripts that might introduce “something really new, something extraordinary” to the Milanese reading public. Off the cuff, perhaps not fully comprehending Adelchi’s profit-mindedness, the Count envisions  something like the confessions of a madman who falls in love with an iguana. In Ortese’s world – one strongly influenced by the realismo magico of Massimo Bontempelli, a mentor responsible for publishing Ortese’s first works – a bit of magic produces exactly such a story, as though Daddo’s merely having imagined the tale brings it into being.

Several days into his voyage, off the coast of Portugal, the Count spots an island, Ocaña, which appears to be moving (a conceit that must be one of the most recurrent and curious in Italian literature).  The captain notes that it's still uncharted, because “good Christians…don't much bother about things that belong to the devil.” Despite this malign reputation, the island is cartoonish: a low hill, a grove of olive trees, a grey house “like a prop,” “a few sheep, some lying in the grass, some grazing, heads low, and, like all sheep, thinking perhaps of nothing.”

Beneath a tree some people are listening to another reading a book, so Daddo orders the ship to stop. These few inhabitants turn out to what’s left of a once illustrious family now reduced to ruin: Don Ilario Jimenes of the Marquis of Segovia, Count of Guzman, and his three brothers, along with a grandmotherly figure who scurries into the house at the Count’s disembarkation.

The brothers appear anxious; the Marquis – “a poet, perhaps a bibliophile, at any rate a spirit immersed in eternal fantasy,” as Daddo will soon learn - appears ill. Daddo’s first words betray his sense that something is awry: “Can I be of any help?” But the brothers receive him graciously, inviting him inside their humble home. Encountering the figure he’d seen moments before, the Count receives a shock:

Daddo’s surprise was tremendous. He had taken her for a shrunken old woman, but he was looking at an animal! In front of him was a bright green beast, about the height of a child – an enormous lizard from the look of her, but dressed in woman’s clothes with a dark skirt, a white corset, old and shabby, and a multicolored apron clearly patchworked from the family’s stock of rags. To hide her ingenuous little snout, which was a sort of whitish green, she wore yet another dark cloth on her head. She was barefoot.

As he gets to know the family, Daddo becomes increasingly obsessed by this curious being, at once so innocent, alert, grubbing and downtrodden. He is dismayed by how the brothers treat this apparent servant, Estrellita, speaking to her sharply and consigning her to a lightless basement where she sleeps amid rags and entertains herself by counting and burying a horde of stones the Count assumes she believes is her pay. The creature is a ruin, desperately afflicted and self-loathing: “She lived with a horrible suspicion. After a period, initially, when it was simply unendurable, it now so deeply grieved her that she could not address it at all: the suspicion, almost the certainty, that she herself was the Devil – ‘the spirit of the shades,’ harried by the wrath of God.” Daddo is further appalled when he learns that the brothers had purchased Estrellia, information that offends his sense of “chivalry” and an ethic that can see a “soul no different from his own and [hear its] appeal of brotherly solidarity.”

This exposition out of the way, the narrative then traces Count Aleardo’s efforts to restore Estrellita to her full human measure, while at the same time negotiating purchase and publication of the Marquis’ writings (a history of Portugal and a memoir), and also disentangling the secretive relationship between Estrellita and the Marquis against the background of a propitious impending marriage between the latter and a daughter of the Hopins family, rich Americans who’ve come to the island under obscure pretexts. Daddo’s sympathies and affection for Estrellita increase in tandem with his perception of the island’s malignance: “No, there was no such thing as order here, something even that made order impossible.”

With a tremendous sense of empathy for the destitute and miserable, Ortese sensitively depicts both the impact of the treatment doled out to Estrellita by the brothers, intent on reducing her to nothing, and Aleardo’s growth in determination to understand the iguana and her oppressors. Affecting at first a bourgeois do-gooder-ism, the Count is forced repeatedly to recalibrate his assumptions and noble intentions as they run up against new knowledge and complexities of the heart. Fog, a recurrent motif, underscores the situation’s moral opacity. With an epiphany only marginally more morally advanced than the behavior of the brothers, the Count realizes that “if the Iguana had been bought, she could be bought again and he could restore her not only to her freedom, but as well to all the dreams of her little bestial soul.” But through a continual dialectical process of re-evaluating himself and his sentiments for the poor Iguana, the Count gradually undergoes an almost Augustinian spiritual transformation, an orientation to the reality of suffering that pushes him towards being “healed of his fantasizing mind.”

Ortese uses Aleardo’s tossed-off story idea to delve into a range of themes, philosophical questions and metafictional devices unusual to find in a single volume, particularly one with such a fabulist bent. She queries the shadow line between animal and human; the nature of evil; the neglectful treatment of the natural world and the environment; the ability to transform moral indignation into numb acquiescence and vice-versa; the perils of assumptions, rescue fantasies and pity; the monstrous damages that poverty, isolation, and oppression can inflict; the hidden injuries of class; the destructive impact of speculation and profiteering; the damaging claims on knowledge made by an imperialist mentality (among other things, The Iguana ingeniously recycles that staple of European literature, the encounter with the exotic). Ortese even addresses the dubious place of God through a scene featuring a trial over the death of God that is at the same time surreal, moving and amusing (“’Where were the accused?’ inquired the judge…‘On their yachts, sir,’ answered Cole”). Ortese appears to reserve particular scorn for Milanese/Lombard values, castigating “the violence Lombards typically employ in doing good works,” and seeing in these northerners “a severe and almost stupid simplicity of heart that asks God no questions, awaiting only His orders and then giving them execution with infantile sense of scruple” (in Italy’s north-south division, it’s abundantly clear where Ortese’s sympathies lie).

Ortese’s manner of injecting these thematic elements initially seems jarring, almost as though, in planning her novel, she might have left unrevised placeholders for ideas later to be developed and emulsified into her narrative. However, one quickly comes to see this as a deliberate stylistic device; as a fairy tale, The Iguana leaves its viscera visible, as though the story's latent and manifest content were exposed in equal proportion. Like Bontempelli, Ortese also makes off with all kinds of authorial privilege, frequently appealing to “you the Reader” as though speaking aloud, slotting in subjects she wants to address, even announcing that she’s going to shift narrative direction. Ortese evinces both a mastery of literary devices and a playful distaste, paradoxical in so challenging a work, for the uses to which they are too often put. Freely, even mercilessly, she constantly reminds the reader that The Iguana is a fiction, in the process probing fiction’s purposes and meaning. From the beginning, the narrative attacks the commodification of literature (“purposely designed to excite precisely those feelings of perplexity and boredom that were a sure guarantee of good sales”). And like Bontempelli's own realismo magico, Ortese’s fantasy elements enhance the world rather than offer escape from it. Often as not, the “magic” is but a simple trick of perception, as when Daddo spies a light over the hill that he takes to be Ocaña’s “second moon,” but which reveals itself to be the lamp of a ship – or more accurately, both the lamp of a ship and a second moon. Everything on Ocaña multiplies and transforms; characters take on other names and other personalities; the olive trees become oaks; the “prop” house on the island becomes a “splendid” mansion; Estrellita is at once lizard, crone and serving girl. Time too is topsy-turvy; towards the end of the novel the Count notes that he’s been on the island only since the previous day, while on the same page another character suggests that years have passed since his arrival.

These metamorphoses plunge the reader into no small amount of confusion. Ortese’s title for the second part of the novel, “The Storm,” underscores this turbulence (and further points allusively to Shakespeare's The Tempest). Yet Ortese frequently tosses out subtle lifelines, even fusing the reader’s struggles at understanding with those of the Count himself:

He managed nonetheless to discern these words, in which reality and symbol were desperately, unfortunately intermingled, as in avant-garde novels…It was difficult to remember so many shiftings, just as it was difficult to see them in the first place, difficult to make distinctions within these continuous superimpositions of the real and the unreal…

Ortese wants the reader to work. Though the novel's tone is at times as light as a cloud, the questions the novel raises are as weighty as those in Camus’ The Plague. And while neither the numerous twists and transformations in the plot nor the demanding issues Ortese raises make for easy reading, The Iguana is a novel that sticks in the mind long after finishing it, not least thanks to the memorable and affecting character of the book’s title, whose wrenching protests of “Nao, nao, nao!” remain with one like an irreparable betrayal.

French-Sicilian writer Jean-Noel Schifano, in his Dictionnaire Amoureux de Naples, a collection of essays formed around each letter of the alphabet, selected Anna Maria Ortese as his entry for “O.” Though Ortese was born in Rome and passed her final decades in Rapallo, she called Naples “my native city,” having spent formative years in a poor neighborhood where, to borrow the title of one of Ortese’s earliest works, “the sea doesn’t bathe Naples.” The city would largely remain the geographical and psychological pole around which this remarkable autodidact's work would revolve (including as setting for a surrealist detective novel featuring as its principal character an Arizona mountain lion). Ortese is slowly coming to be recognized as one of Italy’s most important and distinctly original post-war writers. “She makes us think about things we do not normally think about,” writes Schifano in his appreciative essay. And while The Iguana, with its fantastical elements, gives ample evidence to support Schifano's pronouncement, it's also a book that displays an engagement with the realities of human suffering characteristic of much Neapolitan literature, disturbing our complacency concerning a status quo that works “to the harm of people who are weaker than we are…Something in our education, in our way of seeing the world, some fundamental error that calls down calamity on a great number of people.” One emerges from Ortese’s book in sympathy with Count Aleardo's life-changing encounter on this strange moving island, feeling that despite everything, "the world...is really such a beautiful place...the Universe something gracious," yet also with the conviction that literature is a force that can be used "to strike against" misery and injustice. While perhaps this may not be exactly what Aleardo's friend Adelchi had in mind, The Iguana makes a strong claim for indeed being "something really new, something extraordinary," a feat of real imagination to offer to readers fed on fantasy.

In Praise of Folly: J. Rodolfo Wilcock's The Temple of Iconoclasts

In the customary and deeply-rooted division of Italian writers into those from the north and those from the south, the iconoclastic writer Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (1919-1978) might best count as one from the west. Wilcock is that rare figure who led two literary careers in two different languages, the first in Buenos Aires as a member of the group that included Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo; then second, after fleeing the Perón dictatorship, in and around Rome where he wrote exclusively in Italian and moved within the eminent circle that included Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, and Pier Paolo Pasolini (the screenshot above shows Wilcock playing Caiaphas in Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to St. Matthew). Thus the timely republication of Wilcock’s 1977 book, The Temple of Iconoclasts (Sinagoga degli iconoclasti), makes for an ideal bridge between my current explorations of Italian literature and the annual Caravana de Recuerdos “Argentine Literature of Doom” reading event. Though I’d been curious to read the book after learning of it in an interview with translator Lawrence Venuti years ago, it had proven maddeningly impossible to find. I now know why. Venuti, in a new preface, explains that all but some 500 copies of the original edition of his translation were accidentally pulped.

In this new edition, Venuti expands on Wilcock’s improbable life. I won’t repeat the details (far richer than Wilcock’s current Wikipedia entry), but suffice to say that Venuti’s choice to title his preface simply “J. Rudolfo Wilcock,” thus appearing to slot the writer democratically among the 35 names that follow it in the table of contents, is an apt and clever one. The Temple of Iconoclasts consists of brief fictional and semi-fictional biographies, from 5 lines to 25 pages, of equally improbable inventors, metaphysicians, biologists, artists, sociologists, clerics, anthropologists, engineers, chemists, and others who, despite day jobs ranging from clockmaker to gravedigger, pursued fantastic theories, created unusual inventions, or simply asserted their existence in some idiosyncratic way. In Wilcock’s melding of fact, fiction and whimsicality, he subversively lances intellectual pretense and arrogance. His pieces inhabit that murky zone between human intellectual endeavor and madness, a line further muddied by Wilcock’s tossing in actual persons whose names pop into these sketches from time to time, including Thomas Edison, Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, Wilhelm Reich, and even Wilcock’s own great-grandfather.

Nearly all of Wilcock’s brainiacs also write. If only as a source for additions to The Invisible Library, The Temple of Iconoclasts would still provide abundant amusement. There’s hack vulcanologist’s Klaus Nachtknecht’s The Salubrious Magma; philosopher Absalon Amet and his wife Plaisance’s Select Thoughts and Words from the Universal Mechanical Philosophy; Antonine Amédée Bélouin’s The Bélouin Network: Initial Project for an Underwater Railroad;” Franz Piet Vredjuik’s Universal Sin, or A Discourse on the Identity between Sound and Light; and Aaron Rosenblum’s  beguiling utopian failure, Back to Happiness, or Joyride to Hell, proposing a return to the purportedly rosiest period of human history, identified by Rosenblum as England under the reign of Elizabeth 1. Like César Aira’s Dr. Aira, with his proliferating screens aimed at excluding everything in the universe incompatible with his miracle cures, Rosenblum attempts to subtract from the present everything incompatible with life in the year 1580. The narrator’s extensive list of the glories and afflictions lost and regained through this mercifully unrealized project is both one of the book’s highlights and an almost irremediable skewering of utopian thought.

In another sketch, Jules Flamart, a lexicologist bored with the typical dictionary, creates a dictionary-novel, La Langue en action, which pairs each word with a narrative connection to the next word. Wilcock creates three entire pages of excerpts that had me wishing he’d gone on to complete the entire 850 page work. This is one of several texts Wilcock creates for his “iconoclasts.” The longest of these, in a piece on radical theater director Llorenz Riber, includes four theater reviews and an entire three-act screenplay, all of which reveal that a neurotic obsession with rabbits, born in Riber’s childhood, has burrowed its way into everything the director has created, including adaptations of Sartre’s No Exit and a Georges Feydeau-inspired, everyone-in-the-closet farce in which Riber has replaced the main characters’ family names with those of Nazi concentration camps. The cringe-worthy critical assessments of Riber's productions, worth the price of the book by themselves, are so are gloriously over the top that they could scare off anyone from creative or critical effort, yet simultaneously create an almost desperate desire to see Riber’s pieces produced on stage (or at the very least, some of Wilcock’s own criticism translated into English). Wilcock’s prodigious imagination is perhaps most amply revealed in a lengthy list of inventions created by Jesús Pica Planas, which echoes Kenji Kawakami’s useless Japanese inventions, and each item of which might well have served as a seed for helping populate an additional volume of Wilcock’s eccentrics.

The Temple of Iconoclasts is strikingly reminiscent of the weird, wild stories of Wilcock’s fellow Argentinian, Leopoldo Lugones, an evident influence even to the point of some of Wilcock’s examples seeming to riff on Lugones’ own extravagant conceits (Roger Babson’s nutty experiments with gravity, for instance, or John O. Kinnaman’s unsuccessful attempt to locate Lot’s wife in mounds of salt near ancient Sodom). In some sketches, the patient and detailed elaboration of Wilcock’s creations echoes those of Raymond Roussel. Venuti also notes as a precursor to The Temple of Iconoclasts Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, and as a descendent Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas. Bolaño acknowledged Wilcock’s book as the key influence on his own, and the handful of references to Nazism in The Temple of Iconoclasts seems even to provide the thematic spark for Bolaño’s homage. But Wilcock’s language possesses a density and expressiveness (no knock on Venuti, but one can scarcely imagine how delightful this book must sound in the original Italian); an affection for his subjects; and above all a fat streak of hilarity that rivals and even surpasses those of these other writers. This is one funny book, filled with glacial understatement, pointed one-liners, and a wit that ranges from tender to withering. Given Wilcock’s great funds of whimsy and waggery, his work also calls to mind Los Angeles artist David Wilson’s enchanting and stupefying Museum of Jurassic Technology, where the visitor is seduced by what appears to be a natural science museum until he or she pauses to reflect on the exhibits on display, which, in a moment of epiphany like a quick intake of nitrous oxide, produce a giddy euphoria. To read Wilcock’s book is to enter the paradise of both the mad dreamer and the wry skeptic, to marvel at the varieties of the human pursuit of knowledge, to feel chastened and humbled in one’s most insignificant mental efforts, and to have an exceedingly good time.

Neapolitan Sextet: Jean-Noël Schifano's Chroniques napolitaines

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 15^th to mid-17^th 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 16^th 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.