Suffering Bereft of Despair

One of the most moving portraits of human faith and endurance I know spilled from the quill of a former fascist. Okay, perhaps not literally from a feather pen, but the anachronism is excusable, for Curzio Malaparte—as the author, born Kurt Erich Suckert, came to be known in his maturity—was both totally modern and a stoic throwback. Even as the twentieth century slid from one cataclysm to the next, this renaissance man and war hero dined with imperial princesses, fenced with a future pope, marched on Rome with Mussolini, was later jailed by Il Duce’s regime, and finally, as a war correspondent, wearing his Italian captain’s uniform like a cloak of invincibility, undertook a nightmarish tour of Europe amid the Second World War, from neutral Sweden to the Eastern Front.

The exact antithesis of Bonaparte, his chosen nom de plume means “the bad side.” His time and travels did give the intrepid Malaparte ample opportunity to plumb the depths of degradation, as a willing witness. And yet the atrocity exhibition that fills the pages of his masterpiece, Kaputt, serves in the end to make his vision of human goodness and a common spiritual and cultural life, surviving in the unlikeliest of places, all the more compelling.

The poignant portrayal in question comes from the last chapter of Kaputt, published in October 1944. The title refers to a Europe that even before the war’s end was, as Malaparte writes in the preface, “broken, finished, gone to pieces, gone to ruin.” It is August 1943, and our correspondent, lately released from the Regina Coeli prison in Rome—where not for the first time he has served a short stint since growing disillusioned with Mussolini—joins the desperate crush of people taking the train to Naples. They are both “fleeing from Italy and running toward Italy.” Having supped full of horrors in Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine, Malaparte at first can see only grotesques thronging the city streets. The rich and middle classes have already fled; the poor souls who remain live amid the “stench of corpses [that] rose from under the mountains of stones and plaster.” An approaching air raid prompts Malaparte to seek shelter underground, in the company of thousands of Neapolitans. What he finds there, though in some respects squalid, astonishes him:

The crash of bombs seemed faint in that Plutonic country. . . . Instead of weeping, of teeth-grinding or sobs, I was met by a din of shouts, songs and voices hailing and answering above the noise of the crowd. I recognized the age-long, joyous real voice of Naples. I felt as if I were looking on a marketplace, on a square filled with a festive crowd aroused by the tunes of Piedigrotta or by the liturgical chants of a procession.

The sound of a bomb brings a “devotional” silence, “not from fear, but from pity and sorrow . . . thinking of the anguish in the hit houses, of the people buried alive beneath the debris, in the cellars, in the puny shelters of the harbor district.” Everyone’s thoughts are bent on the dead and dying, on the holes newly blasted in the tumbled landscape of their beleaguered city. But again it is not suffering that impresses itself on Malaparte’s newly refreshed senses, but rather rude life or faith, the undying faith of a besieged people as they rise to meet the terrible moment:

Little by little a song rose from the end of the cavern as crowds of women joined the chanting litanies for the dead; queer, ragged priests, bearded, incredibly filthy, their black cassocks whitened by the plaster dust, blended their voices with the women’s choir; they stopped from time to time to bless the crowd and to grant everybody absolution from their sins in a barbarous mixture of Latin and Neapolitan. . . . For a few minutes the huge crowd wept, dropped on their knees and raised their arms toward Heaven and shouted pleas to the Carmine Madonna—to San Gennaro and to Santa Lucia, while the crashes of the bombs came closer, shook the earth, echoed through the hollow hill and penetrated the foul, gloomy dens with their hot blasts. Then, suddenly, as the explosions became more distant, the melodious cries of cooks and peddlers, of potato fritters and of water, “Acqua fresca! Acqua fresca!” broke through the lamentations of women and the deep chanting of priests. . . . The ancient noise of Naples, the loud ancient voice of Naples rose and was heard again and again, like the voice of the sea.

Few passages in literature depict the undefeated human spirit with such persuasive force. And Malaparte, partaking of that subterranean communion, rediscovers his own broken, embattled humanity; rediscovers himself as part of humanity writ large. Having awoken that morning in a foul-smelling cell, filthy, unshaven, sick at heart—his capacity to care for others having been subjected to the most terrible trial by a “long, cruel four-year journey through war, blood, hunger, burned villages and wrecked towns”—all at once he finds his callousness splitting open like a snake’s undersized skin. “I had never felt so close to that crowd,” he writes, “which until that day had seemed so different and alien.”

Their suffering, he sees, is not merely “of the same human kind as my own,” but in fact deeper, more real, and more uplifting, “suffering bereft of despair and lighted by a great, beautiful hope, compared with which my own poor and small despair was merely a puny feeling that made me feel ashamed.” Malaparte emerges from underground after the air raid to behold a Naples still ruined, a people still destitute, but no longer a monstrous city of the miserable and misshapen. Now he notices that the streets are full of people “intent on helping others . . . distributing their meager sustenance among the poorest, the oldest and the sick who were stretched out amid the wreckage in the shadow of unsteady walls.” Not the city but his faculty of sight is transfigured.

The Allies entered the city on October 1, 1943, simultaneously liberating and conquering, freeing and defeating, the demoralized Neapolitans. The ambivalent blessing of their occupation is the subject of Malaparte’s 1950 follow-up, The Skin, in some ways an even more unsettling read than Kaputt, because now some of the villains and fools wear American faces. Now Allied hands sully and pervert the innocent.

However that may be, much of the authentic beauty in the passage above derives from the mix of sacred and profane occupations—the priests’ deep chanting mingling and competing with the peddlers’ cries. The imbroglio of underground Naples impresses us in Malaparte’s description as a microcosm of this intermediate world of ours, where bomb blasts are always counterpointed by human song, not only dirges for the dead but true hallelujahs. On this earth where, as Sir Thomas Browne wrote, darkness and light divide the course of time, the mundane follows the miraculous in a never-ending daily round. Laughter and liturgy. Acqua fresca and holy water. Potato fritters and the Eucharist.