Financial Times, UK By Dan Hofstadter, Published: Feb 18, 2006
This is an edited extract from 'Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples' by Dan Hofstadter, Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher
Whenever, after a long absence, I return to Naples, that beautiful and wounded city, I find myself looking forward to bedtime, to the first few moments of falling asleep. I always stay in one of the more populous quarters, in a room overlooking a steep, narrow street, and as I throw open my window a vast wave of sound floods over me. Settled in bed, I'm disconcerted at first by the sheer volume, by my feeling of floating helplessly in a tide of half-drowned voices, people calling or quarrelling, snatches of jokes, television commercials, soccer games, ghosts of song twisted by the wind; footfalls mingle with rasping scooters, a baby's crying with the honking of horns.
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.
Naples is one of the world's noisiest cities, yet by night those noises form a pillow of sound. They relieve me of a childhood fear, reassure me that in some sense I never sleep alone. In Naples sleep is crowded, full of faces, gestures, winks, and warnings - I feel that I drowse in a room packed with people. Yet only after I'd lived in Naples for the better part of a year did it occur to me that to be half asleep here, half exposed to a world of wanton fantasy, was to be perfectly in tune with the city's truest nature. For Naples was and, I believe, remains a place best, or perhaps only, grasped through myth and memory and half-remembered dream.
Looking back through the haze of the years, I think it was actually the crowdedness of Naples that seduced me. The city clasped me in a warm, maternal, slightly musty embrace. I remember that during one of my many later sojourns, I tried explaining this to Benedetta. I tried telling her that the sheer close-packing of people and objects delighted me - how every street and piazza was so amazingly congested, so wildly overstocked with physical and emotional inventory. I had felt this in a reliquary chapel contrived like a chest of drawers, each bearing a tiny bronze bust of the bishop whose ashes it contained; and again when I saw the bridal stores beside the cathedral, with their tempests of tulle and white lace; and yet again in a salumeria from whose ceiling an abundant fruitage of hams, sausages, and mortadellas overhung a banner-draped altar to Napoli soccer club. Wherever I went, I told her, I felt swathed by textures that seemed to breathe, as if animated by some magical force. "Your wet-kiss theory of Naples," Benedetta called all this, curling her upper lip in derision. This always unnerved me a little, because of that lip's heartbreaking curve.
Naples, I began to feel, was a city of trespasses, of people who disliked boundaries and made a point of ignoring them. I remember a compelling instance of this. Towards closing time, Benedetta and I often poked into a shop in the Via Chiaia where a couple of her female chums sold women's clothing. Usually a group of friends had gathered there 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. He, or more likely she, would keep conversing over her shoulder, be pulled back inside by the force of the rejoinders, then head outdoors again, 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 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 America mostly because of the movies she had seen but she did in fact visit America once, staying for a week in a borrowed Manhattan apartment. And there she was unable to get a good night's sleep. She had observed in horror films that such apartments had a second front door (what we New Yorkers call the "service entrance"), through which assailants and monsters broke, and she would wake up repeatedly, as the hours ticked away, compulsively checking that this ingress was secure. "A second door!" she exclaimed to me, shaking her head - flats in Naples had only one door, surely all that anybody needed. And it strikes me now that the way I felt about Naples was precisely the opposite. In Naples I slept easily amid apocalyptic noise because I wanted not to protect myself but to dissolve in my surroundings, like a bar of soap in the bath of the night.
Since those days with Benedetta, I have been back to Naples some 15 or 20 times, once for the better part of a year. After each sojourn, I come away with a mind drenched in the same persistent reveries. Obliged by the primacy of gesture to pay more heed to the set of a chin or the turn of a wrist than I would elsewhere, I tend to see people as figures draped or posed against a background - at times it's like living in a theatre, Meanwhile the backdrop too possesses my thoughts - the sombre gray and rose of the palazzi; the blue sea; the islands, low-lying or craggy; the volcano sliding into view in the notches between buildings or at the end of winding streets. One's consciousness, that of the natives, brims over with the landscape, which never quite forfeits its spicy hint of malediction. l curse you with fiery clouds, l bless you with the richest soil in Europe: curses and blessings, blessings and curses . . .
Perhaps that is why I have rarely ended a day in Naples without a luminous sense of where I am, a vision of the place floating lightly on my brain. And perhaps because the city is already so dreamlike, the process of falling asleep leads into a world not so different from the waking world, a realm where things can almost be touched or hefted, like a little collection of objects - here a castle, there a volcano, farther away a town felled by ashes. In Naples I still waken, on those mornings when I remember some fragment of my dream, with a sense of mysteries half understood.
This is an edited extract from 'Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples' by Dan Hofstadter, published in the UK by Profile Books at Ј16.99 on February 24 2006 (first published in the US last November by Alfred A. Knopf)
