The Angry Mountain (14 page)

“Looks kind of peaceful, doesn't she?” Hacket said. He hadn't stopped talking since we left Milan. I knew all about his wife and family and the colliery screening business he owned back in Pittsburgh, and I welcomed the change of subject. “You wouldn't think to look at her that she'd produced some sixty major eruptions in the last four hundred years.” His pale grey eyes gleamed behind the thick, rimless glasses. He gave a chuckle and dug me in the ribs. “See Naples and die—eh? Guess the fellow who dreamed that one up must have been here when she was in eruption.” He sighed. “But she doesn't look very active now. And I come all the way from Pittsburgh to see that mountain. Geology is my hobby.”

I noticed another puff of gas above the great circle of the crater. “Well, she's more active than when I last saw her in 1945 if that's any encouragement to you,” I said.

He had his camera out of its case and was taking a shot of the mountain through the window. When he'd taken it he turned to me again. “You were here during the war?”

I nodded.

“Did you see the eruption in 1944?”

“No, I just missed it.”

He clicked his tongue sympathetically. “You missed something big there, sir. My boy—the one that's running a road haulage business back home now—he was out here. He was driving one of the AMG trucks when they evacuated San Sebastiano. He saw Somma Vesuviana wiped out by the lava flow and watched San Sebastiano gradually engulfed by it. Well, I just had to come and see for myself. He says the dome of the church is still showing just above the solidified surface of the lava rock. And you missed it all?” He shook his head pityingly as though I'd missed a good film.

“You can't choose where you'll be when there's a war on,” I said rather tersely.

“I guess that's so.”

“Anyway, I climbed Vesuvius only a week or two before the eruption.”

“You did?” He had swung round in his seat to face me and his eyes gleamed behind the thick lenses. “That's something my boy never done. I kept on asking him, what was it like before the eruption. But he didn't seem to have taken much notice of Vesuvius until it happened—sort of took it for granted. Now tell me, what was it like? I suppose it was much the same as it is now. Did you go right to the top?”

“Yes.” I was thinking how we'd gone up by the tourist road from Torre Annunziata to where it was blocked by an old lava flow and how we'd climbed the rest of the way on foot. I'd had both my legs then. “It was very different,” I murmured.

“It was? Gee! This is a bit of luck for me meeting someone who saw it before the eruption. What was it like?”

His excitement was infectious. “The lower slopes were quite gentle,” I said. “But the last bit was steep, like a battlement of lava. And the top was a plateau about a mile
across which steamed with the heat pouring out of the fissures. The whole plateau was composed of solidified lava which rang hollow like metal casing as we walked across it. Right in the centre of the plateau was a huge heap of cinders about 300 feet high. From Naples it looked like a small pimple right at the very top, but close to it was more like a slag heap.”

“And that was where the crater was?”

I nodded. “We climbed the slag heap and from the top we were able to look down into the crater mouth.”

“Could you see anything?”

“Oh, yes. She was blowing off about every thirty seconds then, sending stones whistling up to a height of about 2000 ft.”

“You don't say. Wasn't it dangerous?”

I laughed. “Well, I'll admit I wished I'd got a tin hat with me. But fortunately the funnel of the crater was sloped slightly away from us. We could hear the stones falling on the other side of the plateau. And inside the mouth of the crater great slabs of red hot, plastic rock were rising and falling like phlegm in the throat of a dragon.”

He nodded, eyes gleaming. “A remarkable experience. I must tell my boy about this. A very remarkable experience. And you say the mountain is greatly changed?”

“It was the ash,” I pointed out.

“Ah yes, the ash.” He nodded. “My boy told me that it blew right across to the Adriatic coast—six inches of ash in the streets of Bari, two hundred kilometres away, he told me.”

One of the crew came aft at that moment and ordered us to fix our safety belts. A few minutes later we touched down at Pomigliano. The airport was hot and dusty. The sun blazed out of a cloudless sky. The air was almost tropical after Milan and I wished I'd changed into lighter clothing.

The airport bus took us into Naples through narrow, squalid, tram-lined streets where the houses opened straight on to the road and bare-footed children played half-naked in the gaping doorways. Naples hadn't changed much—the same poverty and dirt. The white-painted hearses of the
children would still be winding up the Via di Capodimonte to the cemetery and for all I knew the homeless would still be dying of malnutrition in the quarry vaults under the Via Roma. We came in by way of the Piazza Garibaldi and the Corso Umberto and as the bus ground its way through the chattering, laughing crowds time seemed suddenly to have stood still and I was back in 1944, a flight-lieutenant with nineteen German planes and more than sixty bomber sorties to my credit and nothing worse than a bullet scar across my ribs. That was before Maxwell had got me posted to Foggia, before I'd started those damned flights up to the north, dropping officers and supplies to the
partigiani
in the Etruscan hills.

At the air booking office I said good-bye to Hacket. He had been kind and helpful, but I wanted to be on my own. To be honest, I found him a tiring companion. “Where are you staying?” he asked me as we stood on the hot pavement.

“I don't know,” I said. “I'll find some little hotel along the waterfront, I expect.”

“Well, you'll find me at the Hotel Grand. Any time you feel like a drink, just give me a call.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Perhaps you'll come and have dinner with me sometime.” A taxi drew up and I got in with my suitcase. “And thank you again for being so kind to me last night.” Then I ordered the driver to go to the Porto Santa Lucia. “I'll telephone you,” I said as the taxi drove off. I looked back and he waved his grey homburg to me, his rimless glasses catching the sunlight so that he looked like an owl surprised by the noontide glare. He looked very American, standing there in the sun with his sleek grey suit and the camera slung across his shoulders as though it belonged there permanently, like a piece of equipment issued to him before he left the States.

The taxi crossed the Piazza del Plebescito, past the Palazzo Reale where the big Naafi Club had been during the war,
and slid down to the waterfront. The sea was flat like a mirror, a misty blue burnished by the sun. The sails of yachts gleamed like gliding pyramids of white, and humped against the skyline was the dim outline of Capri, half lost in the haze. I stopped at the little port of Santa Lucia that nestles against the dark, rocky mass of the Castello dell'Ovo. Sitting there in the warmth of the sun, watching a fishing boat preparing to sail, with the sweep of Naples Bay spread before me and Vesuvius standing in the background like a huge, battered pyramid, Milan faded away, a nightmare only vaguely remembered. I felt relaxed and at peace with the world, like a ghost that has come back and found his youth again—sight, sound, smell, it was the same Naples, a wonderful heady concoction of riches and squallor, sun and dust and ragged, thieving urchins. Probably they still sold their sisters in the Galleria Umberto and stole from every unguarded vehicle that ran down the Via Roma. But I didn't care. I didn't care about the mixture of wealth and poverty and the thousands who died every day of starvation and horrible, incurable diseases and filled the hearses that the gaunt horses dragged up to Capodimonte. It was all romance to me and I just sat there, drinking it in and letting the lotus of Naples take hold of me.

I hadn't booked accommodation. But I knew it would be all right. I just felt that nothing could go wrong now.

For that day, at any rate, I was right. There was a bright, newly-painted hotel that looked out across the port of Santa Lucia and when I ordered the taxi to drop me there they welcomed me as though they had been expecting me. They gave me a room on the second floor looking out over the Bay. There was a little balcony and I sat there in the sun and went to sleep with the blue of the Mediterranean glittering below me.

Later I got a taxi and went to a little restaurant I'd known out beyond Posillipo. The night was warm and there was a moon. I had frutti di mare and spaghetti, and
Lachrima Christi, eating at a table in the open with the inevitable Italian fiddler playing
O Sole Mio
and
Sorrento.
The stillness and beauty of the night brought a sense of loneliness. And then I remembered that Zina Valle was arriving in Naples the next day and something primitive stirred in my blood. At least I ought to thank her for changing over those drinks. She'd probably saved my life. It was an excuse to call on her at any rate.

That night, when I got back to the hotel, I asked for the telephone directory.
Valle, Cssa.
Villa Carlotta.
She was there all right and I made a note of her telephone number.

I woke next morning to sunshine and a lovely warm, scented air coming in through the open balcony windows. Sitting up in bed I looked out on to the blue of Naples Bay with the fishing boats and the yachts putting out from Porto Sanazarro Barbaia. I had breakfast on the balcony in my dressing-gown and then sat with a cigarette and a long cognac and seltz, dreaming of what I would do with myself all day in that golden, sunlit world. It seemed so wonderful that I couldn't believe that the spell could ever be broken. I would go out to the restaurant for lunch and then I'd lie in the sun on the rocks by the water's edge. And later I would telephone the Villa Carlotta.

I reached the restaurant just after twelve and as I was paying off my taxi a big cream-coloured Fiat swung into the parking place. There was nobody in it but the chauffeur. He got out, tossed his cap into the back and unbuttoned the jacket of his olive-green uniform. He wore nothing under the jacket. He undid the belt of his trousers and slipped them off, revealing a pair of maroon bathing trunks. I stood there, staring in fascination at this transformation from chauffeur to bather. He must have been conscious of this, for when he'd tossed jacket and trousers into the car he turned and scowled at me. He was a well-built, broad-shouldered youth of about twenty with a strong face and a mass of long, black hair which he had a habit of tossing back from his wide forehead.
His eyes looked very black under the scowl. And then the scowl was replaced by a wide, urchin grin.

I knew him at once then. Instead of the chauffeur I saw a ragged little urchin with a broad grin and a white American sailor's hat. He'd been in this car park to greet us every time we'd come out here in that spring of 1944. “I know you,” I said in English.

He came towards me. “Me watchee,” he said, grinning all over his face.

That had been his business slogan. He would jump on the running board or run beside the trucks shouting, “Me watchee. Me watchee.” I had never heard him say anything else in English. He and his gang had kept the parking place clear of thieves and as long as you paid for your protection you could leave anything in the truck and know it would be safe. When I had come back to the restaurant in 1945 there had been the same cry of “Me watchee” but the boy who ran beside the truck had been smaller. It had been his younger brother. Roberto, the original “Me Watchee,” had made enough to buy a boat and we had found him jostling the fishermen at the foot of the steps.

“What happened to the boat?” I asked him in Italian.

He shrugged his shoulders. “The American and English soldiers go, signore. There is no trade, so I sell and buy a truck. Then that fall to pieces and I become a chauffeur.”

“Come and have a drink,” I suggested.

“
Grazie, signore. Grazie.
”

We went down to the restaurant and I had a bottle of vino brought out to a table on the balcony. The reflection of the sun on the sea was blinding. We talked of fishing and the tourist trade. Then we got on to politics and I asked him about the Communists. The corners of his lips dragged down. “Only the Church saves Napoli from the Communists, signore,” he said. “But the Church cannot fight arms.”

“How do you mean?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I know nothing. It is all
talk. But the arms come in and disappear to the south. They say there is a Communist army in Calabria.”

“There's always an army in Calabria,” I said. When I'd left Naples there had been rumours of a brigand force of 20,000 fully armed with field pieces, even tanks.

He nodded. “That is so, signore. But it is different now. It is all organised. I have heard the Conte Valle speak of it with
Comandante dell'Armate del Sud.
He is in the
Governo
and he say arms are arriving all the time and everything go underground.”

“Did you say the Conte Valle?” I asked.

“
Sì, sì, signore.
Il conte is in the
Ministero della Guerra.
”

His mention of the Conte Valle took me by surprise. Somehow I'd got the impression she was a widow. “Is that the husband of the Contessa Zina Valle?” I asked him.

His eyes narrowed. “You know the Contessa, signore?”

“I met her in Milano,” I said. “Conte Valle is her husband?”

“
Sì, signore.
” He was frowning and his brown fingers had tightened round his tumbler. “Where do you meet the Contessa?” he asked.

“At the house of a business man named Sismondi,” I answered.

The scowl was still on his face. “Was any one else there with her?” His voice sounded thick and angry. It seemed strange for a chauffeur to show such interest in a member of the aristocracy and I said so. He gave me a quick shrug and then grinned. “It is all very simple, signore. I am chauffeur to the Contessa. I like to swim. When the Contessa is away I can come out here and enjoy the sea. But I am always afraid she will come back too soon and be angry because I am not there at the Villa Carlotta. She is very bad when she is angry. She telephone that she arrive this afternoon. Did she tell you anything about her plans?”