Naples – our pillaged memory
Oh Naples, whose beauty sparkles in the night like a malediction. Oh city of deep black eyes and long, strong hands, shoulders broad as the ocean – you've let yourself go. You just lowered your eyes, lowered your guard; and here you are, contaminated like a vulgar den that even the rats have deserted. Naples and its belt; the city and its lifeless lands, its bodies that have lost everything; the leaves and the sap; the colour and the rustling that makes the birds dream.
Naples is an enigma, a face behind other faces, a spirit in which vice and virtue blend and exchange roles, and laugh about it all. The citizen learns that what he sees isn't what exists; or rather, what's apparent is just a veil drawn over other things, from drama to fantasy, where death dances on a Vespa down dark, labyrinthine alleys. Death – a dubious joke, a fugue; the proof of a season, swooning. At present, it's putting on a show with piles of garbage that rise and rise, all the way up to the sky.
Naples is a mixture. It's already a dish cooked by several hands, with spices from afar and scents that combine the quintessence of flowers with the decayed remains of sardines left out on the sidewalk for the cats.
Naples is a city with so many lovers that its trees have lost their fruit. Its phantoms have mislaid their manes and its streets their names; because Naples has been buried like something shameful under heaps of filth on which flourishes the pollen of sickness, cholera or plague – take your pick. Even the wind does its bit for the transport of nauseating miasmas.
Naples is being denuded, then forgotten, like a bride abandoned on her wedding night. Nobody's taking care of her any longer, not even the brigands who owe her their fortune.
As in a desert after battle, the districts that watched over the beauty of Naples have declined. They've become open sores under a moribund sun, in the defeated eyes of haggard strangers. You have to beseech words for a morsel of mercy to tell how the wounds of San Giorgio or San Antonio might be treated. You have to ask the wind to take another route; there's nothing to come here for.
You wait for good news, as in time of war; and none comes. Bags pile up on bags and spread out like a backdrop for a play on the end of the world.
The memory of Naples reposes, now, in so much dirt. What well-meaning hand will drag it out of this magma that makes no sense? All the mirrors have gone crazy, reflecting other faces, new images in which children walk upside down. Fear grows like a rumour and makes holes in bodies. It's an epidemic – one of dirty money, and traffickers in all that can be bought or sold.
The dogs are sad. They go round in circles, howling at men's madness. It's a sea that's come to land at the entrance to the city, full of objects and remorse left by Naples. All the rubbish speaks of life; there's skin and bones, remnants of existence. Each bag contains a little life. There's kitchen detritus, gone-off food, broken toys, a worn-out toothbrush, a shoe, old tomatoes, and much shit.
Shit's human! What a platitude; what an observation! It took this invasion of filth to show that man's not this oh-so-refined creature dancing with a rose in his buttonhole. Naples and its surroundings under amazing amounts of garbage – it's the future of the world. It's a kind of violence that besmirches the eyes. And the eyes look away. In modesty; maybe in fear.
But what if the sated rats come down into the town for an interminable parade? And what if they start attacking the children in their sleep? Rats and flies. Rats and crows. Rats and death, hovering over the city. It's a powder keg of a war without a name.
Between the road and the city, a dried-up river bed, a frontier in the rubbish of impoverished humanity. They're told that's the way it is. They're told it's the government's fault. They're told it's the illegal immigrants' rubbish, doomed to be overlooked. They're told so many things that even the cats, the stray dogs and the moles believe them.
There's a season without a name. But it's hot and shady, rainy and metallic; a season that'll burn in children's eyes. The one that'll raise all the dust of this business. Beauty will be bruised; memory will turn yellow; passion will be extinguished in the ash of a river made of words.
The centre's been spared. But beyond that, lives (and slivers of lives) are exposed to the sun. What's this sofa doing here, in cotton or leather; an imitation of the Manchester armchair, between rotten vegetables and dirty, torn sheets; a bicycle wheel (probably stolen), a fake leather briefcase, a cardboard box full of rags; and dry branches to cover the whole thing up?
Bags were ripped apart like cadavers after reprisals – bodies open to the sky, and the accursed sun that provoked all the world's flies. It was in Pozzuoli, a place where people lived in slow motion.
But what became of the grace that presided over Naples? It subsided like shame or modesty. It slipped away one morning when everything was beginning. Naples and its peripheries smell of shit and pus! They're losing their jewels for good, their pearls, their coral necklaces; the brides' tiaras and their white dresses. Life's broken, and time's breaking down everything that gets thrown away; that which no one picks up!
In Marigliano, Bacoli or Acerra, the nightmare's no longer a hideous dream that awakens frightened children. The nightmare's a statue, raised up, then strewn across neighbourhoods to sequester the honest folks' dignity; a nightmare that's growing day by day, releasing its effluvia and its moulds, as in a dramatisation of misfortune when it tears a people apart.
A political reading of this massacre – it's sibylline. How can you identify those who are responsible, those who pull the strings, the others who take advantage and, in the end, the ones who insult the city? Hard to tell the difference between those who've retained their dignity and those who've thrown it away. Like an extinct volcano, without a gleam of hope, you go out onto the balcony and contemplate the damage people are capable of. It's a parody of life – a life overshadowed and enveloped in plastic bags that are going to survive us for all eternity.
It's the fault of the wind that blows the pieces of paper and plastic along, giving the impression of a view over the sea – a black and white sea, sometimes grey. The blue's been sacrificed. A heavy sea that swells like an old bag woman rummaging through dustbins in search of food.
We're here in Villaricca, on the brink of a heralded catastrophe. The horizon has toppled with fatigue. You can't see it any more. All these wounds, to be treated! All these fears, to be assuaged!
We no longer carry the evidence around in our hearts or our hands. Naples keeps on falling, like a beautiful woman stupefied by alcohol. She loses her threads, her dreams, her illusions. Whether in San Giuseppe, Monteruscello or Pianura, her stars have fallen. Her heart's no longer in it. These heaps of ephemeral ruins have broken her mirrors. Her pale eyes come to rest on this ugliness, and cast around for a country to sleep in.
This scrawny tree stands like a challenge to the environment of bags. It serves no purpose. It's the tree of this autumn that's ruined the city. It's a witness tree, like a Giacometti statue, isolated in a desert of rottenness and renunciation. It's proud and poetic. A nonsense on an immobile jetty.
This house has been attacked by hordes of filth. It's surrounded. The bags will soon get the upper hand, and, submerged, it'll disappear as in a fable of time losing its bearings. For the moment, these are occupied territories whose fate is uncertain. We continue to live and die here. To get out of the coffin, arms are stretched forth in an effort to clear a path, just for the time it takes to make an exit; then everything goes back to its place in an eternity that breaks hearts.
René Char said, "No bird has the heart to sing in a bush of questions". In this fauna of rubbish that decomposes to infinity, no poet has the heart to sing the beauties of Naples. The bird no longer lives in the tree. The tree no longer has the dignity of a tree. The poets are bereaved by so much organised ugliness. No further right to frivolity; no further place for the old debate – Naples versus Venice. A spoiled image. A heart clasped and crumpled. No more savour to be extracted from this monumental waste.
There are several paths to Naples, but only one memory: the residence of secrecy. All these bags around the city are deafening sounds. Men scream, and no one hears them. The bags advance as though wafted into the city by an evil wind. Children are amused by them; then, disappointed, they settle for dreaming of a clean town run by clean hands, protected by clean votes. Naples awaits its saviour.
Maybe it's just a hallucination. Day and night entwine in aluminium foil. It's a question of solidarity, like when Naples was an open city. A hand-whitened city, and breasts defying crime and ignorance. Naples won't be the wreck or the error of a drama from which so much humanity has absented itself.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
March 2008
(translated by John Doherty)