Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

They trudged on. Orecchia was fitter than Castrolami and climbed the hill easily. He could see, in front, the haughty swing of her hips.

The priest came from a side door. A cleaner who polished the altar silver had said he would be there soon, but it had been an hour. The measure of Eddie’s stress, lethargy, lost nerve was that he had been prepared to sit out the hour on a shadowed pew, only moving to do something he had not attempted before: he had made a donation, taken a candle and lit it, then sat some more.

When the priest came through the side door, the cleaner went to him, pointed to Eddie and returned to his polishing.

The priest approached. His short hair, rimless glasses and creased cassock made no concession to style. He sat on the bench beside Eddie, who introduced himself, then asked for Immacolata Borelli. Oh, yes, the priest knew Immacolata Borelli. His eyes flashed and his back straightened. Eddie warmed. Where would he find her home? There was no immediate response. He thought the priest considered. Eddie, ignorant, didn’t understand. Why, if the priest knew, should he hesitate? Eddie, innocent, did not comprehend. Sadness fell on the face of the priest, as if he had made a decision that wounded him. He sighed, stood up, and the sadness was wiped away. The face was devoid now of expression. He took Eddie down the aisle, and Eddie paused to put a five-euro note into the box for the repair of the church. He was led out into the brightness. The kids waited on the far side of the street and watched, with the boy on the scooter. The priest pointed far down the via Forcella. Eddie could just make out the fruit and vegetables stall that protruded into half of the street’s width. Beyond it was the fish stand. The priest said that the door between the fruit and vegetables and the fish was the home of the grandparents of Immacolata Borelli. For a moment, his head was beside the two scars on the stone, then he backed away. Eddie had been past those stalls twice, had asked in the tabaccaio opposite and been ignored. When he turned to thank the priest the church door was already closed.

What should he have done? What should he have said to the foreign boy, a fool, who came to Forcella and asked for the home of Carmine and Anna Borelli? What was his responsibility? Too tired, he had deflected the problem – had done as he was asked and had not accepted responsibility. The foreign boy wanted to meet Immacolata, and he could picture her, the granddaughter of Carmine and Anna Borelli: it had been her brother, the middle of their three grandsons, who had fired the two pistol shots at a predecessor. It was too much for him to take on as personal responsibility.

Fear stalked him. Fear corroded principle, decency, courage. He had no stomach for the war on the streets. He had crumpled. Predecessors had fought the culture of criminality in Forcella and been broken, or had moved away in indecent haste, or were in Rome under police guard.

He could justify to himself that he could have done nothing to divert the foreigner from visiting the grandparents of Immacolata Borelli – and she was the only one of them with, perhaps, a thimbleful of charity and goodness. He felt cold in the church, shivered and crossed himself.

The Allies had reached Naples. The Fascists had fled. An opportunity had arrived. The troops, British and American, reached the city on 1 October 1943, and within a week the fortunes of the infant Borelli clan had prospered. Carmine, out of gaol, would never deny that the first moves of Anna, his young wife, were integral to them. She had opened the brothel.

It was the first to function within a short walk of the seafront where American officers were billeted in the sequestrated hotels. She brought in women from all classes of Neapolitan society. They shared common features – acute hunger, extreme poverty, the ambition only to survive. It was on a small courtyard where the walls of two buildings were held up by timber supports; a third side had taken a direct hit during a bombing raid. It was within a stone’s throw of the Palazzo Sessa – home of Sir William Hamilton, Emma, and Horatio Nelson – and the officers trooped there. The women Anna Borelli recruited began work with the puffiness in their faces that came from near-fatal starvation, but food supplies came with the patrons, and silk stockings, lipsticks, chocolate and cigarettes. They were the wives of stall-holders and lawyers, of labourers and advocates, of street-sweepers and civil servants. Soon they had colour in their cheeks, and they started to eat well, their families too. There were mornings when a queue of women, dressed in their best, had formed outside the heavy front door to plead for the opportunity to be fucked by GIs, and Anna took the most attractive, the most sexually experienced. She did not employ uninitiated teenage girls: the GIs wanted women who did not waste time, were easy to penetrate, who knew the trade. It was said – among the women who came to work at noon and went home at midnight – that in the first days Anna Borelli herself had lain under the gross belly of an American lieutenant colonel, that she could make him squeal like a spiked boar, and the security of the building was guaranteed.

The war of Carmine Borelli was fitful. Called up on his eighteenth birthday, the papers instructed him on which barracks in the town he should report to, and the day after he went into hiding, courting Anna while he was on the run and dodging raids by the Fascist police, coming out of hiding for the day, his marriage to Anna in the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, being informed on, and arrested the following evening. A question never asked and therefore never answered: how was Anna Borelli so skilled in lovemaking, after one night with her nineteen-year-old husband, that she could so successfully entertain the American lieutenant colonel? After two years in Poggioreale gaol, he was freed by Allied forces after he had woven a tale of a young, persecuted liberal democrat imprisoned for his beliefs. He had found the first employees of his wife in cubicles wide enough for a bed, a chair and a narrow table for a washstand, and had shaken the hand of the lieutenant colonel in the hallway, ignoring the man’s apparent intimacy with his wife. They had, together, not looked back.

Within weeks, she had opened two more brothels. Within months, he had become a king in the black-market sale of goods brought by the Americans into the Naples docks, and he had started his mercato nero with those stockings, cans of food, packs of cigarettes, coffee, sugar and chocolate that the first customers had given his wife by way of a gratuity. First a handcart, then a small closed-sided van, then a flat-bed lorry, then many lorries, and always protection from the military government – and the question he never asked of his wife.

It was in the bloodstream of both: the search for power, authority and wealth bred microbes in their veins, which they had never lost.

He had walked down the street from the church, past the shops that were now familiar to him, past the men who sat and played cards or dominoes, and past the Madonna figures in niches in the stonework where candles burned and flowers drooped. He had paused beside the fish-seller’s stand and had watched water from a fine spray fall on the swordfish. He had never seen a swordfish, and this one was more than five feet long, its sword another four, and… he realised the outer door was open. He could have sworn on oath that it had been closed the previous times he’d gone by. He had known then that the kids or the scooter rider had forewarned them.

He said simply, ‘I came to find Immacolata.’

The old man had American-accented English. ‘You knew her in London? You knew her well?’

The old woman had a crow’s croak, and spoke English. ‘Do you sleep with her? Do you do fuck-fuck with her?’