"Avram Davidson - Naples" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

NAPLES




By




AvramDavidson




This story opened the first Shadows. I almost didn't buy it. When I received it fromAvram's agent, I
dithered because at the time I still wasn't sure exactly what I wantedтАФalthough I thought I'd know it
when I saw it. Finally I said," the hell with it," sent out the contract, andтАжAvram Davidson won the
World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. Since then, I don't dither very much at all. This is the perfect
example of instinct overruling whatever "editorial requirements" means.

It is also quintessentialAvram Davidson, and you just cannot get any better than that.
 IT IS A curious thing, the reason of it being not certainly known to meтАФthough I conjecture it might be
povertyтАФwhy, when all the other monarchs of Europe were still building palaces in marble and granite,
the kings of that anomalous and ill-fated kingdom called Of Naples and the TwoSicilies chose to build
theirs in red brick. However, choose it they did: These last of the Italian Bourbons have long since lost
their last thrones, nocastrato singers sing for them from behind screens to lighten their well-deserved
melancholy anymore, and their descendants now earn their livings in such occupations as
gentlemen-sales-clerks in fashionable jewelry storesтАФnot, perhaps, entirely removed from all memory of
the glory that once (such as it was) was theirs. But the red-brickpalazzi are still there, they still line a part
of the waterfront of Naples, andтАФsome of them, at leastтАФ are still doing duty as seats of governance.
(Elsewhere, for reasons equally a mystery to me, unless there is indeed some connection between red
bricks and poverty, buildings in the same style and of the same material usually indicate that within them
the Little Sisters of the Poor, or some similar religious group, perform their selfless duties on behalf of the
sick, the aged, and the otherwise bereft and afflicted; and which is the nobler function and whose the
greater reward are questions that will not long detain us.)

Some twenty years ago or so, a man neither young nor old nor ugly nor comely, neither obviously rich
nor equally poor, made his way from the docks past the red-brickpalazzi and into the lower town of
ancient and teeming Naples. He observed incuriously that the streets, instead of swarming with the short
and swarthy, as foreign legend implies, swarmed instead with the tall and pale. But the expectations of
tradition were served in other ways: by multitudes of donkey carts, by women dressed and draped in
black, by manymany beggars, and by other signs of deep and evident poverty. Almost at once a young
man approached him with a murmured offer of service; the young man clutched the upturned collar of his
jacket round about his throat, and, as the day was not even cool, let alone cold, it might have been
assumed that the reason for the young man's gesture was that he probably did not wish to reveal the
absence of a shirt. It was not altogether certain that the young man had no shirt at all, probably he had a
shirt and probably this was its day to be washed and probably it was even now hanging from a line
stretched across an alley where the sun did not enter in sufficient strength to dry it quickly.