L’Ammore è ’na palomma
ca nun vo cchiù vulà
love is a dove that no longer wishes to fly, and he became aware that inadvertently his eyes had fallen upon the twenty people present, as if personally checking their approval of a poem that was very close to his heart, but by which he was in essence not particularly convinced, in the sense that apart from the musicality of the verse it was a conceptual proposition that on more than one occasion had prompted strong doubts concerning the final and recondite significance, but why for heaven’s sake recondite?, of this poetry of his. In that brief space, his eyes rose to check beyond his glasses, and he felt a sense of unease. Because those twenty people, rather than pressing together compactly in the centre in front of him were all scattered like dust around the hall, and every one of them had chosen to sit towards the back rows of chairs, and in the end the first rows, which were the ones directly in front of his eyes, were deserted, completely deserted, and each one of those present was there on his own, as if those were not chairs but so many tiny cells without the possibility of communication. So he continued
l’Ammore è ’na palomma
ca s’è fermata ccà
love is a dove that has settled here, and it was also clear enough that this rain was not about to stop, it was not about to stop at all. They knew it well, the Naples rain, which never falls or hardly ever, but when it falls it doesn’t stop. And in the end from the windows of the Press Club there came that sticky dampness, that mellifluous smell of damp which, passing through the wallpaper and the carpets, reached people’s shoes and feet, and there was no refuge, there was no refuge at all. The damp rose within until it reached your bones and slowly spread, and then those pains, like the pains of a creaking structure, and then you had to wonder: would it collapse from one moment to the next?
Because in fact from that third day of rain public transport had experienced very notable difficulties, and many lines had been closed, and many journeys cancelled on some of the routes that served the poorest districts, and maybe in terms of quantity that wasn’t a terrible blow, because in fact there were few people in the streets, there were few of them now, but at seven or eight in the morning and at five in the afternoon there was always that stream of unskilled workers from the provinces, their hair stiff with dust and their combs in their belts and their fake leather bags holding their belongings climbing aboard public transport and cheerfully heading home again. Using the excuse of the bus going over a bump, every now and again they bumped into the cleaning women, but the cleaning women were aware of their little game, and no longer left their backsides exposed or very much in evidence, and instead they stood with those same backsides pressed against the cold metal walls of the big vehicle, and they were even able to escape the odd pinched buttock, and not that much harm was done, the important thing was that it didn’t assume pathological intensity or manic fixation. Ultimately a hand on your backside, vulgar though it might be, is always an act of homage, a gesture of esteem. And after all there were as one might say notable difficulties with bus connections.
The buses passed in silence through big puddles, spraying muddy liquid up either side. This was particularly apparent on the Riviera di Chiaia, outside number 10, the location of the little Café Susan, run by Salvatore Picozzi, who had ten years before gone to live in London and returned two years later with the pure and melancholy Susan, she with the pale blue eyes and strawberry-blonde hair and totally in love with him because the first few times they had been together in the cold boardinghouse room he had set to work with such enthusiasm that the poor English girl had had more fluid spurted between her legs during those nights than ever happened before save in her most unbridled nocturnal fantasies. Much time had passed since then, since those famous nights, a great deal of time to tell the truth, and you know what happens, a wife is always a wife, and you can’t spend the whole day fucking her this way and that. In fact love is a great thing in what we might call the initial phase, but otherwise you have to adapt, and after all by day there are lots of things to be done, you can’t just spend hour after hour every night pumping juice between your wife’s plump thighs. But one would also have to say: the sweet enchantment of the foreign wife of Salvatore Picozzi had carried on in the years to come, when he had returned to Naples, in his district of La Torretta, because in fact all his friends and all his relatives and all his acquaintances always put on a big homecoming party for him because of that foreign wife of his and effectively expressed a marvelling respect for this thing that had happened in smoggy London, finding a young woman with pale blue eyes and strawberry-blonde hair. In reality, in his depths of his heart, Salvatore Picozzi had always felt a vague kind of self-important pride because of the marvelling respect that the others felt for his English wife, and he had convinced himself over time that his situation bestowed on him a certain pleasing prestige, and he had begun to look at his wife in a different way from other women. Because the other women were only and simply pretty Neapolitan girls and there were lots of those, really lots of them, with their tight jeans and the make-up on their eyes, but in fact there wasn’t a single English wife in the district apart from his. His was youthful and delicate from the tips of her hair to her thin waist, she had fine, sweet northern features and gentle eyes that were sometimes cold but certainly unusual in the city of Naples, and it was only from the waist down that his English wife changed personality, from the line of her waist in fact there swelled truly majestic hips and big full thighs and firm calves. And all that hair, all that hair between her legs. Every now and again he remembered those first nights with her in the boarding house and how delighted he was to look between her legs because of that full red hair, and it was almost a mystery, almost, a surprise, an unexpected discovery. When he was indoors, in the warmth of Pub 24, rinsing the cups in lukewarm water, he thought again of that curly red mass of hers, and with a tender smile he found himself hardening. Those nights had been unforgettable, yes, truly, unforgettable for him and for her. Pure, melancholy Susan had writhed between the sheets like a crazed cat, and her convulsive thrusts and thrashing had continued over time, and in that unknown tongue of hers which he struggled to understand, she had said certain words she had said certain mysterious things to him, and he had never summoned the courage to ask her what they were. Not least because, once he had asked, she had told him candidly and with a serious expression that he must be mistaken, perhaps he had mistaken her for somebody else. Watching her reply like that, Salvatore Picozzi had thought at first that all women are whores, and the second thing he had thought was that perhaps he really was mistaken, perhaps another woman had said those lustful things to him in the English language. But as far as he could remember, he had been with no other women, apart from a couple of prostitutes in Soho and a young waitress from the same part of the city, who certainly hadn’t said those things, and if they had they had done so in a profoundly different tone of voice. And in fact, that night, the general meaning of Susan’s words had become suddenly and immediately clear, there was no mistaking it, but the problem had remained, because in a general sense he didn’t want to understand, in fact he understood perfectly well, not the words in detail one by one, to understand precisely the terms used by that that woman who would subsequently become his wife and who subsequently knew other nights of unbridled lust with him, but because more than ever that night she came out with strange words said in that strange way. Sometimes, in fact, he had taken the greatest trouble in every conceivable way to wrest from her another night like that one, but he had never managed to do so, however hard he tried. That thought about her words had lingered in his mind, and in fact he too had tried to say a number of things, in the course of the unbridled embraces they had enjoyed subsequent to their time in London, but he had not been successful, no, he had not been successful. In fact, while speaking he had experienced a sensation of embarrassment, if not of actual unease, and indeed his wife had later delicately referred to his fragmentary outburst
s. Also giving him to understand, quite clearly, because perhaps there was no need to insist, that perhaps his outbursts had the effect opposite to that intended. In short, Salvatore Picozzi wanted to say on that occasion but you – !, and he didn’t say it, he kept it to himself. And there was that thought which now divided him from Susan. Because otherwise they had always lived a life of loving companionship. And Café Susan had been a warm and tender edifice that they had built together. For some time their life had proceeded in that way, with Salvatore Picozzi behind the bar and strawberry-blonde Susan with the pale blue eyes behind another smaller counter on the right as you came in, by the till and the little packets of sweets and chewing gum. Now there was that complicit tenderness between them. Sometimes they smiled at one another from a distance. In short, there was a secret understanding between them. He had developed something of a belly, in fact a considerable belly, not least because she had really learned to cook, and pure and melancholy Susan had assumed the habit of drinking a good glass of whisky after dinner, and sometimes two, or three, and then they went to bed under the covers and with that whisky inside them they made love without great acrobatics, but they did it really well, with that thing that went on and on, and in short it only occurred to him much later that she had come and in fact she had come more than once and sometimes in short they repeated those crazy nights. Then by day they both stood inside Café Susan, she at the till and also answering the telephone, he at the espresso machine preparing the trays with the things for the little boys who were wandering about the place. Once when there had been a traffic jam that had lasted for hours and hours, he had had a brilliant idea and had started making coffee at very great speed, and immediately employed five of six of the little boys who had gone about among the cars selling coffee at twice the normal price. He had sold a truly indescribable quantity. Because in fact people would buy anything when they found themselves stuck in the car because of the traffic, and couldn’t go forwards or backwards. He had also thought about selling newspapers, the day after the day with the coffee, but then in the end he couldn’t reach an agreement with the newsagent. In fact the newsagent couldn’t begin to understand his brilliant idea, he even objected that the traffic wasn’t constantly stuck every day, which meant that this new initiative remained entirely hypothetical. You’re best off on your own in the end. So the days passed like that, and since it had started raining for Salvatore Picozzi and his English wife Susan this had not been a big problem, because they had gone on peacefully making coffee as always. It only remained to be said that the number of customers had diminished remarkably during those days, but otherwise it really seemed that life was passing in exactly the same way as ever. In short, everything would be fine for some time to come, everything was fine, everything was agreed, had it not been for the holes in the road which during those days of uninterrupted rain had spread considerably until they became veritable trenches. And that had been the beginning of the problem with the buses passing no more than four metres away, and when the buses passed and took the hole outside from a particular angle, well, there was nothing to be done: from beneath the vehicle’s enormous wheel, the rear wheel on the right, there came a spray of muddy liquid which reached the pavement and not only reached the pavement but also hit part of the tiny window and the front door of the bar which was tiny anyway and therefore vulnerable to the stench of that brown liquid which consisted of dust mixed with water. In fact Salvatore Picozzi took a great deal of trouble asking the people from the Municipality to intervene as soon as possible, because he certainly couldn’t go on like that, and Susan looked at him with that steady gaze of hers while he phoned furiously and between her teeth she muttered some English words of disdain for the Italians, and he wasn’t happy with that at all, but then again he wasn’t happy about anything at all, and he couldn’t help accepting that his wife really had every reason in the world to be disdainful towards the Italians, objectively speaking: towards the Neapolitans, because not all Italians are like that, some are even worse. And in short during those days the chance event of the puddles had become a resolutely endemic fact, a constitutional fact one might even have said. That had contributed considerably to the poisoning of his last three days, not so much on the grounds of economic disadvantage because of the constantly diminishing number of customers, not so much because of that as because of the fact that, fuck!, it’s impossible to get a minute’s peace around here! He had been given occasion to realise: in this city there was no chance of getting a minute’s peace at all. Just when it seemed that everything should be proceeding smoothly and peacefully, something unpleasant inevitably came along to disrupt the deep-rooted order of those days and the life that was dragging itself along without any particular animosity but pleasantly, certainly pleasantly. Because in life it is plain that you can’t have everything, and when you have a young English wife who’s good in bed and good in the bar, when you have a little bar that lets you live peacefully and lets you buy your wife a handbag from time to time, when you have the wondering admiration of your neighbours and your acquaintances, and in short, when you have all that what else do you want? Or don’t you want to spend your life breaking your back like the guy in Bar Renato, who thinks about nothing at all but the money that’s coming in and coming in, and if it doesn’t come in he really falls ill, physically, and his face turns pale. And in short what the fuck do you want out of life?, a sudden madness?, a split-second lack of reason?, a foul and hidden desire?, come on, tell me, what the fuck do you want? Had it not been for the puddles, these days right now would have passed calmly, but unfortunately those puddles were there, and then there were those bloody buses speeding up right outside the café and spraying a brown liquid at the doorway of the bar and spattering the whole floor and on a few occasions even hitting the calves of the customers, and this was a matter of the utmost gravity, certainly, he realised that. People would stop coming to Susan’s for coffee the day they realised that coffee at Susan’s risked ruining a pair of trousers with the muddy puddle-water. And in the end where did it say that he suddenly had to suffer because of this fucking Municipality that couldn’t be bothered to maintain the streets in a decent way? As soon as the workmen arrived he’d give them a piece of his mind. Of course, that’s what he would do. Even though he was perfectly aware, it was quite obvious, that the workmen did not bear any responsibility. They were just doing what they had been told to do. In short, do you know what the truth is?, the truth is that everything here is a mess, a complete mess, and when you want to pick a fight with an authority you can never find him, never really identify him, because it appears that everyone here is at ease with his conscience, everyone has done his own duty beyond a doubt, and in the end what is there left for you to do, beat your head against the wall?, come on, forget it, please, forget it.
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