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'Luigi Alfredo
Ricciardi, Commmissario of Public Safety in the Mobile Squad of the Regia
Questura, or Royal Police Headquarters, of Naples. The man who saw the
dead'
This cop, this
Commissario Ricciardi, is more like an undertaker who lost his hat passing
through the gates of Hell. While the Neapolitan underclass hates cops, the
people fear him instinctively, as if he's a warlock, can see their shame and
guilt and cheap ambition at a single glance. Of course he's no fascist, just an
orphan aristo who lives with his nanny and plays at being middle-class by
holding a middle-class job. He's the 'New Man' although he holds no party card,
a citizen of the present, lost between the old and the new, forensics and
intuition, formality and poetry. He's a fantasy, as no one so sensitive could
function as a homicide detective; maybe a rogue priest committed to exorcisms
and a formal appreciation of the occult, yes, maybe that... but not a homicide
detective. He's too much of a Stephen King contrivance to be real, yet de
Giovanni gets away with this unlikely casting because Ricciardi's role is
understated within the cast.
Is he the protagonist?
Not really. His Sergeant's story is just as important as his own, if not more
so, and several of the characters have just as much time in the spotlight. You
might think of Ricciardi as being symbolism, a cipher for the poverty and
suffering of the people, a mini Jesus with a mission. Of course he's in love,
and loves from afar, a fugitive voyeur too polite to engage in
foreplay.
'...nor did he pay
attention to the bare-breasted women, who withdrew into the darkness of the
cross-streets as he passed only to reemerge, immediately, offering themselves
to anyone who felt the springtime pulsating in his veins, or who simply felt
loneliness in his heart.'
The novel is more
concerned about setting and characterization than plot, as scenes are often
redundant in terms of advancing the action, although their sociology keeps us
engaged -- manners, mood, and imagery. It all works. The lines, the images, the
sensibility:
'A silence fell
that was as thick as the earth covering a grave'
'So he said, let
her stay home in the dark, since even the sunlight was disqusted at the thought
of touching her'
No one is immune to
this Neapolitan melancholy. Maione the cop -- Ricciardi's sergeant -- has
fallen in love with Filomena precisely because of her disfigurement, as if she
has become a living symbolism of his profession rather than the victim of an
unknown lover.
Ricciardi dislikes
modernism, the new architecture, is 'always moved by the sight of ancient,
noble arches and the delicate friezes that lightly ornamented the massive
marble blocks'. This marks him clearly as a Romantic, a prisoner of the
Sublime.
'Ricciardi couldn't
say exactly why, but he found it somehow more upsetting to think that people
were dying needlessly in the service of ugliness.'
So there it is. One
detects a rebuttal of the new fascist architecture and the brutalist grandeur
of fascist Rome.
Blood Curse is only a
'detective novel' because it has a couple of detectives as characters, not
because it follows the convention of resolving the mystery through the eyes of
the investigator. To be sure, it uses the cheat-narrative method of withholding
information by cutting from the scene, coitus interruptus, although the
emphasis on character and relaying information from each character's
point-of-view make this novel straddle both the mystery and mainstream styles.
That de Giovanni is aware of this, is in revolt against the cliché, is
signalled when Ricciardi's boss lends him a galla (the Italian "yellow"
crime series) detective novel:
'...the good guys
all had Italian names and the bad guys had American names, the women were
blonde and emancipated, and the men were tough and
tenderhearted.'
Ricciardi reads it in
spite of himself, his scorn for the easy propaganda of the pulp genre... yet,
save for the fantasy women and the ethnocentric morality, is it really that
much different from the world he finds himself in? The difference is in the
action, the speed of the sex and violence, the filmic need to make the story
move fast regardless of time and space.
Blood Curse is slow,
almost lazy in its movement. The landscape and its atmosphere predominate, as
if the characters are mere puppets of the Neapolitan spring, infected by a
Lawrencentian blood fever. It's this old-fashioned (or 'traditional') tip
towards literary naturalism that underscores de Giovanni's poetic style, gives
it a calculated sense of pity and mercy towards the characters rather than a
headlong gallop towards the end and the bitter truth so typical of the
crypto-fascist pulp genre. Just as Commissario Ricciardi is antipathetic
towards modernism, so too Maurizio de Giovanni.
The murder at the
heart of it all -- Carmela Calisle, fortune-teller and secret loan-shark, the
malignant Mother Teresa of the Spanish Quarter, kicked to death in her ratty
apartment -- is a clever crime to hinge the action on. The symbolism in it
reflects not only the superstition of the Neapolitan regardless of class but
also the desperation of a society stagnated in poverty and class privilege. The
old lady was a bit of a detective too, it seems, as she used the concierge to
sleuth-out information on her clients and so provide them with uncanny truths
which helped indemnify her predictions. And, of course, her loans to her less
mystical clients.
'In the rotating
succession of Kings, aces and Queens, the old woman read what was fated for
every single day of her life'
So who did it? Emmma
Serra di Arpaja, free spirit noblewoman who drives a little red sports car
(just like Mussolini)? Her husband, the tortured professor and
lawyer?
Or Tonino Iodice, the
pizza man who's stretched his business a little too far for his credit? How
about Don Luigi Costanzo, the neighbourhood camorristi thug who lusts
after the beautiful widow? Bambinella, Brigadier Maione's tout... Nunzia
Petrone, the fortune teller's spy... Romor, the lothario tenor... Gaettano, the
precious Oedipus Rex son of the mutilated one... or Teresa, the peasant maid...
it could be anyone of them. There's no New Age airport mall homogeneity about
this cast, no post-modern uniformity. All is caricature, like potatoes bursting
from the sack.
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© LR
August 2017
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