The hot, heartless world meanders past the windows: the train stupidly follows its monotonous southern impulse. There is a nun sitting quietly in the corner of our carriage. She is small and plump in her dove-gray habit. Her tiny feet are crossed neatly at the ankle beneath her long skirts. She has a broad, flat face and a high, rounded forehead like the forehead of an elderly china doll, with the close-fitting band of her veil at the top. She seems so distant from the experience of pain, so dry and plump and spotless, so indefatigably neutral, with her wooden crucifix as chunky as a child’s toy: she sits like a mannequin in her corner, old and virginal, looking out of the window with small, pale blue eyes. What does she know of loss? What does she know of the skin that must be shed, the pound of flesh exacted in order to do and dare in this world? She opens her bag and takes out a little packet of wafer biscuits. They remind me of communion wafers, pale and refined and textureless. She offers the biscuits to the children, with a tiny crescent smile. They take one each. They are dry, these biscuits, weightless and so dry that they make a crisp, brittle sound when they are eaten, but their religious dryness is itself a form of consolation: the children eat them as I once ate the communion wafer, with its feeling of a dressing on the tongue, a gauze, as though emotion itself were being blotted up. Every few minutes she opens her bag and offers them another. They eat them peacefully. I wish to tell her that it is my fear of separation that has resulted in our presence on this train. I wish to explain to her my belief that it is better to lose houses and friends than to be excluded from your parents’ desires. I would say, if we spoke a common language, that it is better to feel pain than not to confront the possibility that you will be hurt; that it is better to commit yourself to the life of knowledge than to cling onto the world of possession.
In the hot afternoon we enter Rome. The train sits there among other trains: the nun gets off. Presently we pull away again. The great city elapses and falls behind. Then we are in green fields that slope down toward the sea. The shoulder of land with its dense green vegetation obscures the probing silvery surf: the blue ancient water makes a simple shape beside the green shape of the fields, and sometimes there are old pink-colored villas standing in a furze of trees that look down on the mystery of the shoreline. Is it possible that Rome is only an hour behind us? We seem so far from anywhere, so remote. This electric-green land hunched around the mineral-colored water: it appears dateless, older than the oldest artifact, older than mountains. A mountain is prolix compared with this place that seems to stand in the dawn of the world’s consciousness. The train goes slowly, in ebbing fits of movement. Then finally it stops altogether, and for first one hour, then two, we are stranded in the heat until it seems that we will never move again. The carriage grows hotter. People move up and down the aisles and hang out of the windows. We hear that there has been an accident further up the line. We have no water left. We will disintegrate: we will be broken down here, slowly erased by the sun and turned to mute and unrecorded dust, while the sea watches us out of its old blue unblinking eye.
The train starts to move again. The carriage is so hot that our clothes are soaked with sweat. We gaze silently out of the windows. We have forgotten the house in the valley, and England, and the panic of loss: they have been wrung from our minds as the sweat has been wrung from our bodies. I am glad now that the train stopped, for I have come to recognize the process of adjustment as a discipline, whose strictures become more binding the longer they are deferred. And it is clear that while we suffered we passed into a different world: the faces in the train are different, the smell and texture of the air, the soft, heavy, vitreous light. Just as the children diving for coins find a place of liberation at the bottom of the pool, so we have discovered a strange freedom at the very root of our intentions.
The air is too hot to breathe. We close our lips and fold up our lungs, and prepare to swim.
Naples is a city that has the appearance of living among its own ruins. The great pitted half-derelict terraces crawl with brilliant life like coral reefs. There are streets like crevasses, dark and resinous, and streets like canyons that are filthy and beautiful and grandiose, ravaged across their faces where the walls have here and there collapsed into rubble. Everywhere there is a feeling of moisture, the humidity of the life cycle, of birth and decay: the pavements are heaped with rotting food and rubbish, and the roads are crammed with traffic whose fumes impart their gray, oily cast to the fetid air. Sinuous, lustrous-haired boys and girls fly past like nereids on mopeds; beautiful, tragic women pick their way through the refuse in slender, murderous shoes. And the men, so dark and pagan-looking, so powerful and savagely polite! The men of Naples strike one as absolutely mysterious. They are like little gods, with their air of personal legitimacy, and their fatalistic courtesy that seems to recognize no authority beyond themselves.
I imagine that all cities were once like Naples, in the sense of being alive; an interior sort of life that is beyond the reach of rationality, like that of a bodily organ presiding over its own world of waste and renewal. A bodily organ has no conception of civilization. It is merely programmed to favor life. The virtuous and the malign circulate around its secret ventricles, forever enacting the struggle that is the struggle of all organic things. It is almost shocking to see it, coming from the neutered north. And indeed, even the Italians have warned us about Naples. We have been advised to remove our jewelry, to stuff our money into our underwear. The nereids on mopeds, we have been told, will snatch your purse from your hands as they skim past. They will cheerfully yank the jewels from around your throat and the gold from your ears.
Our pensione stands in a dark, moist crease in the innards of a building off the Via Toledo. The black walls are ribbed with narrow iron stairways; far above, the early evening sky lowers a last pale finger of light into the well of gloom. We change our filthy clothes and go out again. It is nearly dark: people are coming out in their finery, their gowns and their glitter, their fancy shoes. Limousines nose through the chaotic streets. The bars are full, the theater is opening its doors. The Piazza Bellini is strung with lights. We walk for a while through the vertiginous, chasm-like streets, where people converse high up from one side to the other through the gloaming. I have noticed something, but it has taken me a while to establish what it is: there are no tourists. There are a few foreigners, like ourselves, but a foreigner is not the same thing as a tourist. A foreigner is isolated, observant, displaced. A foreigner lies low, and takes stock. But a tourist feels at home when he is not.
At last night falls. The darkness is thick and hot and very black. The World Cup is on, and the restaurants have brought out their television sets and rigged them up on the pavements. We eat a pizza and watch the game with the waiters. The children have gelati. It grows late, but the thick, hot darkness makes it difficult to think of going to bed. There is a feeling of pause, of stasis. How can time pass through this thick, resistant matter? The streets are still full of people. There are tiny children running in the alleyways. The darkness has no quality of intermission. It is like a blockage. I can’t imagine it ever clearing itself to make way for the dawn. At eleven o’clock we go in, and though I think that I will never sleep in the gloomy well that has to tunnel up and up before it can disclose the sky, we wake to find that it is day, that time was permitted to pass after all and the sun allowed to rise, and that the smell of espresso is creeping like a thief through our open window.