Something old....

1

Pupils of black milk, whites tinged with the blue blur one finds on white bread as it turns. In this city of cavernous, volcanic, knife-snapping loaves one can live off for a fortnight, Paul somehow always manages to find a pair of fragile sweet stomach-white batons. He and Sarah eat them with anemic saltless butter and apricot jam in the mornings. By the evening what remains has begun to separate into a hoarse crust and a milky pap. After a hot night left out on the kitchen table a weak indigo fuzz spreads over the pappy bits. Every few weeks, when we decide to clean, one of us invariably finds under the piles of newspapers, flyers and burnt-out candles a rotting end wrapped up in brown paper. I’ve never asked Paul where he buys his bread. I prefer the hunks of pane cafone hacked off for me with a two-foot-long knife at the store at the end of the vicolo, or the warm crusty triangles the lean man with a son in Spain pulls out from the passenger’s seat of his van for me on Sunday mornings. The latter taste of wet dog, but I don’t mind. At least they taste of something. In a city of so many elementary culinary splendours, the bread here baffles.

2

A head of fire waiting to break out. You please me much, I can’t be with you. It is better that we don’t see each other. How can I make you understand that it is better for us not to see each other? You must cancel my number. You must not call me, you must send me no more messages. I have been with him for two months. I think I may be coming to love him. I don’t want to think of you when I am making love to him. If you won’t cancel my number, I will buy a new card for my telephone, I will change my number. I will go now and buy it. Please do this for me, for my sake. It is only your fixation, I am only a fixation for you. I am a pessimal fiancée. I am pigheaded, you are pigheaded, it would be impossible. I will not see you. I have decided, I’ve decided already. I’m capricious. That she retracted when I pressed her for examples, that old trick young men soon learn from women. I asked her what she wanted, not from me, not from him. To be loved. Without guile, and looking at me. I could see the rim of violet where her contact lens overlapped the iris.

 

3

Paul and I stand on opposite sides of the toilet bowl, each drinking and pissing at the same time. A philosophical experiment, one hand tilting back the bottle, the other pulling back on the foreskin slightly to avoid splashing. Paul got the idea from some book in America. Our bathroom’s long and brown as the era in which it was installed, the huge bulbous brown bidet doesn’t work, the big blue plastic tub that once held cement mix, left behind by the builder-plumber, still stands in it. The smudged ash of his cigarette is still there on the bidet rim. Still pissing a saltire, two crossing streams that don’t touch, both watery, mine slightly the yellower. Somewhere in the palazzo there is music, a sentimental falsetto Neapolitan wail which calls us back to the nearer music left on in the hall, something Yiddish. The cockroaches that inhabited the bathroom a few months ago when we moved in have been replaced by tiny ants that seem rather purposeless for their species. We  christened each cockroach “Caravaggio,” a mishearing of the Italian that fitted their gleaming black carapaces and made alluding to their presence in the company of delicate sensibilities much easier.

 

4

Sarah has gone back to Paris for a week, and suddenly Paul has exploded into life. He spent yesterday befriending the vicolo, and I am invited along with him to visit the mosque with Mohamud. Mohamud lives halfway down the vicolo with five other Algerian men in a one-room basso. We go to call on him in the morning, his is the first door after the little shrine to the virgin encrusted with seashells and photographs of dead relatives.  Paul eases open one of the grubby white plastic slats over the window and calls for Mohamud. An indistinct murmur, as of woken sleepers, comes from inside. After a few minutes two men appear in loose crumpled clothes and sandals. We greet them, Paul introduces me, we all exchange warm pleasantries in French, Neapolitan and Italian, and they head off, shambling down to Forcella. After a little longer Mohamud emerges, linking. More introductions, and we set off. Mostly he speaks in French to Paul, but also a free-running burble of Italian and Neapolitan, French and English with me. He explains that there are two mosques in Naples, the one we are going to near Piazza del Mercato, and another near the main railway terminus in Piazza Garibaldi. Paul has already told me of the obsession of one of the other Algerians with Jaques Cousteau, who discovered a part of the ocean where salt- and freshwater meet but do not mix. On learning that the Koran spoke of this, Mohamud now tells me, Cousteau was converted to Islam. I had no idea that Cousteau was Muslim.

 5

From afar I caught the flare of her hair, moving past Garibaldi, blue bag as ever on her lowslung hip convincing me it was her. Garibaldi indifferent, moustaches heavy over the heavy moustaches of the Albanians and Algerians sprawled in vacant anticipation on his monumental pedestal. I moved after, knowing already where she was going, timing my arrival between the trams and buses, and caught her before her blue pullman. Her eyes and mouth showed simple gladness, and I wanted a more tortured fear at my presence. 

 

well, it won me £60 when I needed it....