Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life Read online

  The building on Via Solfatara had a red marble entrance of a shade so beautiful that it had no reason to envy the Hollywood villas I was to see during my career. It was a warm, almost orangey tone, a typically Neapolitan hue. When I saw it many years later it was different, with sad purplish nuances. Perhaps because of time, or the wounds of war, or perhaps because my eyes had become clouded.

  The apartment was small, but it seemed to expand like an accordion to fit us all in. Our family of seven had grown. My mother, to earn a penny or two, would play in the cafés and trattorie of Pozzuoli and Naples. Sometimes she’d go all the way up to Rome to meet Riccardo. And that’s how one day she came back to her parents, shaking all over, to tell them she was pregnant again.

  “Of course, because God rubs salt into the wounds,” was Mimì’s reaction, resigned before the lack of judgment of that hard-headed, untamable daughter. This time the young Scicolone didn’t let himself be persuaded to provide even a last name for his child. He wanted nothing to do with us and so my sister, Maria, was born a Villani, in 1938. She would bear that name for many years.

  I saw my natural father, Riccardo, for the first time when I was about five. Mammina had sent him a telegram saying that I was very ill, in order to persuade him to come visit. Biding his time, of course, but eventually he arrived, and brought me a beautiful toy car with blue pedals, red wheels, and on the side, my nickname, Lella. I was so emotional and excited about seeing him that I was too nervous to look him in the face. To me, my father was Mimì, and no one else could take his place. Every now and again I wonder if my father’s feelings were hurt when I couldn’t meet his eyes. The fact is that the toy car he gave me still exists—I keep it somewhere in my heart.

  Another time he brought me a pair of roller skates. I would race around on them in the entrance hall. Every day my sister would beg me to lend them to her. And I, being a sadistic older sister, would give them to her after they’d just been oiled. Poor little Maria took so many spills!

  I lived my life as best I could, hidden behind a thin yet sturdy veil of shyness. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but I was really shy, perhaps because of our situation: My father was absent, and my mother was too blond, too tall, too lively, and, above all, unmarried. Her eccentric, excessive beauty embarrassed me. She was a ragazza madre, a girl-mother, as the saying goes. I dreamed of a normal, reassuring mother, with black hair, a creased apron, her hands rough, and her eyes tired—like Mamma Luisa, whom I would find once again a few decades later in A Special Day, a movie in which I play a character named Antonietta, a devoted housewife and mother of six.

  I prayed to God that Mammina wouldn’t pick me up from school because it made me ashamed in front of my schoolmates. The religious institute that I attended was run by nuns, and, afraid of being teased, I would enter the classroom first or last, after the other students were already in class. I was neat and diligent, and did my duty like a little soldier. But I wasn’t at ease with the other children. Little girls, everyone knows, can be really mean. Because I was very dark and also really skinny, everyone called me Toothpick.

  I did have a real friend, Adele, who stayed my friend throughout my life. She’s no longer with us, and when she passed away she took with her my childhood and all its flavors, the good and the bad. She lived on the same landing as mine. As soon as we got up in the morning, we’d meet on the staircase and stay together until evening. After elementary school we were separated—she went to vocational school and I went to teaching school—but there was really nothing that could keep us apart.

  Her family was slightly better off than mine, or maybe it was just smaller than ours, with fewer mouths to feed. Whenever it was Adele’s birthday she’d be given a doll that she shared with me. In contrast, my grandmother would give me charcoal for the Epiphany, saying that I’d been naughty. But as she said it she’d look at me with tenderness in her eyes, so I would understand that it wasn’t true, and that the problem, as always, was money.

  When the war came we were even hungrier than before. Sometimes I just couldn’t resist the smell of food that came from Adele’s kitchen, and I’d approach it with hope that they’d include me. Sometimes, but not often, Adele’s mother would invite me over to have lunch with them.

  Many years later, when I went back to Pozzuoli to film a special for television, I made sure Adele was invited. From that moment on we never were out of touch with each other again, until the day I called and she didn’t answer the phone. It was my birthday, one of the saddest I can remember. Adele had had a stroke and she was wheelchair-bound, unable to speak. She would weep silently when her daughters talked to her about me, about us, about our lives as children.

  At school I was fascinated by the orphans, whom the nuns always sat in the last rows, so that they wouldn’t forget their misfortune. I’d sit right in front of them, as if I fell somewhere in between their misfortune and an ordinariness that didn’t belong to me. I would have liked to visit the orphanage adjoining the convent, but in between the buildings there was a long flight of stairs that was absolutely out of bounds to us.

  The nuns were strict and I was afraid of them, even though they took special care of me. When they had to punish us, they’d tell us to put out our hands so that they could smack them. But they never even touched mine.

  I was shy, really, but I did like to go against the grain. When I solemnly wrote to Nonna Sofia about my first Holy Communion, the truth is that I had already taken Communion a while back, in great secret. I had gone to church, stood in line, knelt before the priest and, lowering my eyes, I had answered: “Amen.” When I got home I told Mamma Luisa about my adventure, convinced that she would be happy to have such a saintly granddaughter. “What have you done!” she shouted, in despair at my more or less innocent transgression. That transgression was simply my instinctive way of meeting with God. I searched for him, and sometimes found him, in the most unexpected places.

  THOSE NIGHTS SPENT IN THE TRAIN TUNNEL

  When war came to Italy, I was six. By the time it ended, I was eleven. It filled my eyes with images that I would never be able to erase. When I think of my first memories, I can hear the bombs falling and exploding and the antiaircraft siren wailing. I can feel the hunger pangs and see the cold darkness of those dreadful nights of war. Suddenly, all my fears come back. It might seem hard to believe, but I still sleep with the light on today.

  The Germans were the first troops to arrive in our small town. They were Italy’s allies at the time. In the morning they would march outside the house, tall, blond, blue-eyed, and I would watch them, entranced, from the window, torn between fear and excitement. To my little girl’s eyes they seemed neither mean nor dangerous. But then I’d unintentionally overhear my grandparents talking about deportations and Jews, torture and pulled-out fingernails, retaliation and betrayal, and I’d know that something else was going on. I’d race to the kitchen and ask them questions, but they’d deny discussing such topics. “Non avimm’ detto niente” (We didn’t say anything), they’d reply impassibly. So I could tell that the soldiers were not as harmless as they looked to me.

  At first, we were all in the eye of the storm, but soon our lives would be hit hard by the winds of war—and by the air raids. Little by little everything came to a standstill—school, the Sacchini cinema and theater, the band playing in the town square. Everything stopped except for the bombs.

  For the Allies, Naples was a key target: it was one of the most important ports in the Mediterranean, at the center of the supply route to North Africa, which the Axis powers controlled. Along with Taranto and La Spezia, Naples was an important Italian naval base. Important industries were also located all around the city, which made the region even more strategic: Baia Domizia, Castellammare di Stabia, Torre Annunziata, Pomigliano, Poggioreale, Bagnoli, and not least our own Pozzuoli. At the outbreak of the war, the Allied attacks were aimed at military targets, but after a certain point, the bombs started to rain down on the town and the coastline.
It took me a while to understand that the streaks the bombs left in the sky had nothing to do with the fireworks for the Feast of the Madonna of Pompeii. Houses and schools, churches and hospitals, hotels and markets were struck repeatedly.

  I remember everything as though it were yesterday. As soon as the siren sounded, we’d race off to take refuge in the railway tunnel, on the Pozzuoli–Naples line. The railway was a main target for the Allies, like all routes of communication, but for us the tunnel was a place of shelter. We would arrive there with our mattresses and lay them down on the gravel, next to the tracks. We’d all huddle together in the middle—it was dangerous to stay close to the exit—and prepare to spend the night. Sometimes it was humid and cold, other times it was muggy without the slightest breeze. But it was always infested with mice and cockroaches. And it was filled with the roar of the airplanes and by our anguish and our fear that we would not make it out of there alive.

  In the tunnel we’d share the little we had and we’d encourage each other. We’d cry and we’d try to sleep. We’d argue and sometimes women would even give birth. All together, one on top of the other, ranting and consoling one another, we hoped the nightmare would end. Then, at dawn or around four thirty, we’d rush out to avoid being run over by the early train.

  Often the bombs would start falling unexpectedly—the siren didn’t always work—and I’d be so frightened that instead of getting dressed I’d start undressing. It happened over and over again that the first airplanes surprised me naked, still at home. Together with my mother I’d run breathlessly toward the shelter. But one evening shrapnel from a bomb hit me on the chin and I got to the tunnel scared to death and bleeding. It was nothing serious but it left a scar. A few months later, that scar would unexpectedly bring us a gift of food.

  Hunger was the major theme of my childhood.

  Sometimes, when we’d leave the shelter, my mother would walk us into the country, into the hills just outside Pozzuoli, where the shepherds’ grottoes were. A friend of my uncle would give her a glass of fresh milk for Maria and me. They called it ’a rennetura, which meant that it had been milked right after the calf had eaten. It was thick and as yellow as butter, and it made up for days and days of no food. Yes, because the longer the war continued and the bombing grew more intense, the greater the shortage of water and food. Rationing wasn’t enough, all transportation was blocked, and the bombs had destroyed the water main. The people were on their knees.

  Mamma Luisa would send me to do the shopping at Signora Sticchione’s, where we had a sort of open account, which she jotted down on a scrap of the same brown paper she used to wrap the bread in. On the third of the month there was no money left and she’d give us credit, mumbling bitterly to herself: “Ci risiamo ’n’ata vota (Here we go again) . . .”

  The truth is we were all more or less in the same boat. I’d purchase eight coffee beans in a teaspoon, a cuppetiello, which my grandmother would grind and use to “disguise” the barley she had to brew. We were also due a loaf of bread with the addition of a small bun, called ’a jonta, which never made it home because I couldn’t stand the hunger and I’d eat the little roll before getting there. My grandmother would ask me: “Ma addò sta?” (Well, where is it, then?), but she never rubbed it in. She loved me deeply and to see me in pain made her suffer so much.

  As time passed there was no more buying food, no money, no supplies. On some days, we wouldn’t even have a crumb to eat. There’s a vivid scene in Nanni Loy’s The Four Days of Naples, a movie made after the war about the uprising of the Neapolitans against the occupying Germans, in which one of the young characters sinks his teeth into a loaf of bread so voraciously, so desperately, I can still identify with him. In those four famous days in late September, when Naples rose up against the Germans—even before the Allies arrived, it was the climax of a terrible period of deprivation and marked the beginning of the end of the war in Italy.

  But before the end of the war, when the bombs that were falling on Pozzuoli had become unbearable, we were ordered to evacuate. Having no alternative, we took refuge in Naples with the Mattia family, Mamma Luisa’s relatives. My uncles, Guido and Mario, who had gone into hiding to avoid the German conscription, had come with us on the train, but they had taken a terrible risk. At one station, the Germans had boarded the train to look for able-bodied men, and my uncles were almost caught. Two nuns who shared the compartment with us quickly hid them under their habits, saving them. This would later become a sort of legend, as well as a family joke. But at the time it was no laughing matter. We felt deep gratitude for these two women who risked their lives for perfect strangers.

  The Mattias would not be as kind. They weren’t brave enough to throw us out, but they took us in, reluctantly. I was all skin and bones, and Maria contracted typhus, which had spread throughout the city.

  My mother went begging for food for us, but she didn’t always manage to get any. She’d bring us a potato, a fistful of rice, or some of that black bread that was so hard on the outside, but stuck to the knife when cut because it was moist inside. Maria and I would always stay home to hold on to our place in the apartment, in case the Mattias refused to let us come inside again. We’d shape puppets with bread dough, and then place them to dry on the window ledge. The next morning we’d be so hungry we’d eat them all in one bite.

  One evening, looking out the window, Romilda saw a woman pushing a baby carriage and carrying a loaf of bread. Counting on maternal solidarity, she threw herself at the woman, begging for a piece of bread as she pointed to our malnourished faces in the window. That mother was so moved that she shared her loaf of bread with us.

  Then came September 8, 1943, when the Germans suddenly turned into oppressors as well as occupiers, and they gripped Naples in an iron vise, setting strict curfews and further conscription of our men. The Italian government had surrendered to the Allied forces, who had invaded the South, and the Germans could smell the scent of defeat. They took all their frustration out on us in a cruel and indiscriminate way. Exhausted by hunger, disease, and bombs, the Neapolitans reacted against them. I remember the day a young Italian sailor was arrested, his only fault being to have celebrated the news of the armistice, the hope that peace was on its way. He was shot on the steps of the university, right before the eyes of the other townspeople who, in spite of their shock and revulsion, were forced by the German soldiers to applaud.

  Soon after, the city rose up spontaneously, from quarter to quarter, from house to house. People of all ages, of all social classes fought together. Still trying to keep control, the Germans called up men between the ages of eighteen to thirty-five for compulsory labor, but only 150 out of 30,000 showed up. By September 27, it was an all-out war between the Neapolitans and the Germans. A group of brave street urchins took part, as well, and became the heroes of the revolt. The Neapolitan uprising kept the Germans from organizing against the Allies and, after the four days of our revolt, they made a deal with the insurgents and withdrew. On October 1, 1943, General Clark entered the city leading the Allied troops.

  The first Allied soldier I saw was wearing a kilt. He belonged to the Scottish troops that paraded through the streets of the city amid the laughter and the teasing of the young boys. The Americans gave out candy, biscuits, chewing gum. One soldier tossed me a piece of chocolate, but I had no idea what it was and didn’t dare taste it. I took a can of instant coffee home and gave it to Mamma Luisa. It took her a while to understand that all she had to do was add some hot water to turn it into a beverage whose taste she had long forgotten.

  “LONE PINE . . .”

  After the war, it was time to start over again. We left Naples and walked back to our house in Pozzuoli. Maria, who was still sick, rode on Zio Mario’s shoulders. The building had been bombed but it was still standing. We put cardboard and newspapers in the windows and stood in the long lines at the black market. Along with our hunger and thirst we now had to deal with lice, which tormented us for months and months until
they were eradicated by that great American invention DDT. When the lice finally disappeared, it was a sign to me that the war had truly come to an end.

  The Allies handed out real food—even white bread, which was a real luxury for us—and the farmers, little by little, began to cultivate the land again. But when winter came, the cold took our breath away. We were nine of us now at Mamma Luisa’s, with the arrival of a cousin. We’d all stay close together in the kitchen, the warmest room in the house. But outside, the world was still a daunting place.

  A division of Moroccan soldiers led by a French officer occupied the entrance to our building. Totally disrespectful, they acted as though it were their own home, loafing there from dawn till dusk. They made us feel unsafe and every now and then they’d come and bang on the door, rousing us from our sleep. More than fifteen years later, on the set for Two Women my memory of them would help me to make a dramatic part of the movie, when my character is attacked by Moroccan troops, even more realistic.

  In the morning, when I’d go down the stairs to go to school, there would be condoms strewn all around the entrance. Naturally, I had no idea what they were and one day picked one up, thinking it was a balloon. Just as I had done after taking Communion, I went to Mamma Luisa joyfully, holding that small trophy in my hands. And again I quickly realized I had made a mistake. My grandmother wouldn’t let me walk down there anymore—“No more balloons for you.” She also spoke to the French officer, who from that day on kept a closer eye on his men.

  My mother had started playing the piano again, in a trattoria with blue walls opposite from where we lived. My sister, who had recovered from her illness, would often join her to sing: “Pino solitario ascolta questo addio che il vento porterà . . .” (Lone pine, heed this farewell the wind brings with it). Maria was just a child, but she looked like a mature artist. I watched her and Mammina admiringly but, as usual, filled with shame, while the American soldiers felt right at home and raved about my mother and my sister’s talent. Because of their appreciation, someone had the idea to welcome the soldiers into our good parlor on Sunday afternoons, to make a penny or two by opening a sort of domestic café. Mamma Luisa served homemade brandy, blending the alcohol she’d buy at the black market with cherry-flavored Strega, and Mammina would play while the soldiers hummed and sang songs by Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. My job was to carry the bottles to be watered down back and forth and to learn how to dance the boogie-woogie.