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

There were many such alleys and many such lines, and, it is to be feared, many such shirts. There were
also many such men, not all of them young; and if a count had been made, it might have been found that
there were not enough shirts to go around.

Naples.

The traveler continued, with frequent pauses andconsiderings , to make his way slowly from the port
area and slowly up the steep hill. Now and then he frowned slightly and now and then he slightly smiled.
Long ago some humble hero or heroine discovered that if the hard wheat of the peninsula, subject to
mold and rust and rot if stored in the ear, be ground into flour and mixed with water into a paste and
extruded under pressure in the form of long strips, and dried, it would never rot at all and would keep as
near forever as the hunger of the people would allow it. And when boiled it formed a food nutritious as
bread and far more durable, and, when combined with such elements as oil or tomato or meat or cheese
and perhaps the leaves of the bay and the basil, be good food indeed. However, the passage of time
failed to bring these added ingredients within the means and reach of all. So, to vary in some measure at
least the monotony of the plain pasta, it was made in the widest conceivable variety of shapes: thin strips
and thick strips, ribbons broad and narrow, hollow tubes long and hollow tubes bent like elbows, bows
and shells and stars and wheels and rosettes and what-have-you. And, if you have nothing, it is anyway
some relief to eat your plain pasta in a different designтАж when you have, of course, pasta to eat.

At least every other doorway in the narrow streets and the narrower alleys kept a shop, and many of the
shops sold pasta: for the further sake of variety the pasta was not merely stacked up in packages, it was
alsoтАФthe straight kindsтАФsplayed about as though the stalks held flowers at their upper ends. And when
the traveler saw these he faintly smiled. The young man who paced him step for step also looked at these
modest displays. But he never smiled at them. In fact, although he continued his soft murmurs, he never
smiled at all.

Most of these ways seemed hardly wide enough for outside displays, but such there were; there were
second-hand clothes and fewer by far displays of some few new clothes; there were whole cheeses,
although none hereabouts were seen to buy them whole, and perhaps not very many very often bought
them by the slice or crumbling piece. And there were small fish, alive, alive-o, and larger fish in dim slabs
that had not been alive in a long time, dry and hard and strong-smelling and salty, redolent of distant and
storm-tossed seas. Tomatoes and peppers lay about in baskets. Oil was poured in careful drops into tiny
bottles. There were also olives in many colors. Pictures of saints were sold, and the same shops sold,
too, odd little emblematic images in coral and silver andтАФthis was surely strange in such a scene of
povertyтАФeven gold: behind the narrow windows of narrow shops, crosses, too, yes, and beads: the
universalsignia of that religionтАж But what were these horns? What were these tiny hands, fingers tucked
into a fist with the thumb protruding between first and second fingers?

Best not to ask, you would empty the street in a trice. Everybody in Naples knows,no one in Naples
would speak of it above a whisperтАж to a stranger, not at all. Speak not the word, lest it come to pass.
Look not overlong at anyone in these streets, particularly not at the children they produce in such
numbers of abundance. Who knows if your eye be not evil?

The eye of the traveler passed over the swarming and raggedbambini without stopping, and in the same
manner he glanced at thescrannel cats and the charcoal braziers fanned by the toiling housewives: When
one's home is but one room, one may well prefer the street as a kitchen.

When one has that which to cook, and fuel with which to cook it.