A Napoli
No sooner had N. and I got out of the train station than we witnessed a man bray a fellow commuter with his moped helmet, his arms flung in the air in an extremity of drama that we couldn’t quite make out. Other drivers beep their horns at the cessation of traffic. Pedestrians stand between the two men. Everyone screams at each other, urging calm.
In Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis’s essay on Napoli, the pair describe a city of clashes, between the church authority and unruly proletarians, between petty criminals and the police, between the social order and the self-administration of the camorra. Their essay notes the parallels between these submerged yet always tangible tensions and the shadow of Vesuvius that looms over the city.
Across our three nights in Naples we – four English lads, the next day joined by a French chap I don’t know so well, and finally by an Italian-Irish friend I do – are certainly bathed in the soft ripple of tension.
I’m glad we have Vesuvius to excuse us.
I remember reading the Benjamin and Lacis essay on my first ever trip to Napoli several years ago, sat outside a cafe with my travel partner, probably similarly confused from a ridiculously early flight (because it’s the cheapest). It’s a Thursday. This long weekend is my fourth time in the city. A place where the streets are filled with rubbish, everything stinks of piss, but the people are a chaotic delight. I love port cities, they make me think of Genet novels, the glimmer of light in a pool of piss in some next alleyway, and backstreet sodomy.
It’s a couple of hours until G. arrives from Rome and S. arrives from Berlin. While we wait, both running on around three hours sleep, I take N. to my favourite lunch spot, Mangi & Bevi, sat on a back street near the university; it’s a white-collar workers’ restaurant, populated by middle management and grad students. It’s also criminally cheap, 13 euros for food and drink. You order what you want by scribbling down the dishes from one scrap of handwritten paper to another. The food is sublime.
First, we eat gnocchi with a rich tomato sauce where cheese glues the sauce and pasta together like a ligament. Then we are treated to a plate of honeycomb tripe and beans, strips of fried courgette and aubergine, and a local salsiccia presented in little steak-like cutlets alongside crisp lettuce. A portrait of Sofia Loren, the patron babe of Napoli, beams down upon us. I covet the polpette at the neighbouring table, two meatballs sat in a dish of rich, red tomato sauce.
For the remaining days N. tells G. and S. that this lunch was his best meal of the weekend, much to my delight. We eat some great meals across the weekend, including a hectic drunken night at Mimi’s, where the waiter brings the food on a cart and I finally devour polpette. But, apart from getting the waiters extremely excited about Napoli winning the Serie A such that they treat us to football songs as they chase us out the restaurant to go home, nothing matches the simplicity of M&B.
In Neopolitan summer the beaches are full of terracotta tanned bodies with tense muscles in lime green speedos and bikinis, black hair slicked back into flicked curtains, eros abounding, tribal tattoos creasing across lower backs. And Napoli has that fiercely provincial pride. It’s not Italy. It’s Napoli. Like Liverpool on the Med.
Unfortunately it is not yet summer. Grey skies broken up for a blast of eighteen degrees heat on Friday afternoon. Like true Brits abroad, we are the only people not wearing sweaters or coats. We venture to Ercolano, sit on some rocks between the sea and the railway line, surrounded by the smell of rubbish, necking a mandarin liquor made from the oranges of the monastery in the centre that we visited that morning. Praise be to monks for making this Italian Buckfast.
The rest of the trip is a bit of a blur. The spirit of Vesuvius compels us to our worst behaviour. And for all our cosmopolitan fashionings, to everyone else, we probably just look like the most unbearable English people alive. But for all their supposed hospitality, Italians can be contemptuous and intolerant. That’s how P. talks about his experiences when I meet him for drinks on Saturday night. From the Gambia but living in Napoli for ten years, P. is a friend here. He makes the most exquisite cushions in his studio. He tells me about the ways his friends are treated by the authorities, they don’t bear repeating. But you can imagine.
If I’m hopping around a bit, it’s because being shitfaced has no narrative structure. You’re drunk. You make things happen. You think these are merely things that have happened to you. But really you made them, under the glare of bar lights. In the streets of the historic centre, the area around the university, everywhere is stuffed with students, drug dealers, reprobates, troublemakers, and people looking for a good time, everyone dizzy from 2 euro spritzes, the glare of sugar behind their stupefied eyes.
In the morning the things that you did present themself to you as a disordered set of chaotic experiences, through the fuzz and sticky mouth, and you wish them away – stomping around in your pants in front of men who’ve never seen your thighs before. This controlled derangement of the order of sensory experience, it breaks up the boredom of the working day, doesn’t it? There’s more about the disorder that I could tell you. But I don’t want to. I do like to keep myself out of trouble, you know.
This entry took a lot longer than I’d hoped. January and February I just try to get by. I said my 200th subscriber will get a copy of Other Life posted to them, and for the 250th subscriber, I’ll write you a poem about something you choose. I’m thrilled to say the 200th subscriber was Jamie P. and the 250th was Al Anderson. I’ll contact you both soon.
I will send my 300th subscriber another copy of Other Life and the 350th also gets a poem about a topic of their choosing.