See Nipples. Then Die
Alone in Quartieri Spagnoli, like the butcher tossing viscera into the dog’s bowl. The front door opens onto a tiny room; bed, stovetop, television. Nigeria against Argentina, one-all in the second half. An old man in vest and underpants sits propped up on pillows, his back against the wall, across from a young African who occupies the only upright chair. A crucifix on the wall. They gaze impassively at the plastic box as it cackles and shrieks, each cradling a beer. We slip through this place ignored, like a shadow or a cat. Here every shade of Human bubbles up like soup: everywhere is Africa and India: the Middle-East: China and the Silk Road. Even words feel as though they were hacked up with scissors, a necklace of language restrung; and in the singing from an upper room, no trace of northern languor. ‘Chi chiagne fotte a chi ride’. He who weeps fucks he who laughs. Don’t be a cry baby, asshole. Naples is a city of conviction.
Old couples sell unfrozen ice-pops, pencils, bags of binkies from their bedroom windows. Antique ladies, like fishermen, lower buckets on ropes to the street below, where shoals of young men armed with groceries glitter in the Davy Jones dark, then haul up their catch to fifth floor windows hand-over-hand. We press ourselves into doorways dodging twelve year-old girls, three to a scooter, blazing through the chasm of Vico Lungo San Matteo, imperious as Velázquez Infantas. The man at the counter of the minimarket behind a crack in the wall smiles the bashful chicklet grin of a long-lashed girl; here a year from Pakistan, edging slowly north, one doorway at a time, to France. No more than twenty-five, he gazes at his hands like a sad priest, bemoaning the behavior of the young. Blood orange juice, wine, crisps, a plastic tray of proscuitto, chocolate biscuits, gummi cola-bottles: nine euro. We’ll go to him for bread in the morning. Six floors up in our one-room shed on the roof of Gioachino Rossini’s house, the air sublimating from this symphony of a city is frying fish and fireworks.
Hurling oneself off the ragged cliff of love again, career in the garbage, making life hard in every way possible. Surely this must keen the blade, banish fear and laziness forever? How could such imposters survive the fall? Yet there they are in bed with you, either side, grinning like a couple of kippers. The power of unlikely love, the poetic hum the cosmos makes when it’s busy being affirmational, turns out to be an attack in a dark alley in the Quartieri Spagnoli with a claw hammer. But the potency of its anaesthetic affords you no augury. Until the sun comes up. And reveals that what looked like liberation has shattered your wings, left you staring at a new understanding of what it is to be alone. Whereby the mere idea of an embrace is unthinkable; worse, disgusting. That flying is not flying, but falling. Old bones groan and the rocks below. Throw your skinny body down, son.
Goethe muttered ‘see nipples and then die.’ At least they think that’s what he said, as he stuffed alici fritte down his gizzard from a paper cone, shooing away eight year-old boys selling cigarettes on the streets of Sanità. We depart Naples worn to husks. Weeks of tiny apartments with empty fridges, two IKEA spoons, a threadbare towel and a stack of brochures for trattorie tipiche and fishing boat rental. The Airbnb revolution. Let them eat cake. With one plastic fork. It’s time for our own sheets, our carello to the supermarket on Zattere and the back door open to washing on the line, burrata in a bowl. North. It’s time.
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