Nonfiction | Napoli

Do cities have feelings in them? Naples? What is it to a woman that upped and left again, as she always does, a woman of 36, gone from Birmingham, gone from London, gone from Mayo, gone again. Madness. What are you searching for? Come home sweetheart. Some people who love me say this. It is time to get started.

The fruit seller opened up his shutter yesterday, just after he had closed for the day to give me a kilo of tomatoes and seven green apples, the ones I used to like as a kid, not the sour ones, the softer paler ones that must be perfectly ripe to be nice. He weighed them out to show me he was giving me more than even he suggested. I gave him a fiver for it all and his son stubbed out his cigarette and turned to the van and said, ‘a lunedí, bella.’ I was smiling under my mask and they might not have seen just how much.

            And before the virus there was Valentines Day in Naples. The streets, at crossroads, the markets, outside shops, all ablaze with red and roses and huge teddy bears and lights, big red hearts and neon signs saying LOVE. Naples arrived at Valentine’s Day like an eccentric aunt back from a big trip, with presents for everyone. An amorous old woman wearing lipstick and a shiny tracksuit, still winking at young men, returned and unloading her bag of love all over the city and the only question that came to mind was, which present is mine? It was glorious. It was fragile, the things pointed only at the hand that would give them away. They were promises of courage, they were the props. I saw a boy walking up hill with a huge school bag in his back and a coat, all dishevelled but in one hand a perfect little gift bag with a big red bow. I remember him because of how he held the bag out - separate from all the chaos of himself. Boys with bags and flowers, they were young. Women resplendent. I saw something falling away, something in me that had been unconscious. In the middle of the neon lights and shiny red hearts, the bows and the flowers the city was fighting death with all it could give. Under the lights, the water in and out of the pool, moving, inevitable, empty full empty full empty full. 

            I walked up to the Museo Capodimonte six weeks into the Lockdown, I had been drawing life from the clinky tink of cutlery against plates on the air of my balcony, and the shouts, the rising, rising, of something in an apartment on my street. I had sunk into food and cigarettes, and Skype and always somehow, pulled myself back up, up out to the world, to the sky or the splash dart rain against the big window doors out to the balcony, the little stone ledge of outside. I took a walk. My hands started to sweat into my gloves. I am living further south than I have ever done before, soon it will be the kind of summer which I have never fallen into the way I will fall soon. There were shutters bolted down, the thick colours of paint on walls, lips, murals more majestic with less sounds around them. Filth, the filth around the bins. I had a fleeting thought of collecting all the bags of bottles someone had dumped and slipping the glass through the rubber hole, but as I neared I found myself walking past. It would mean something to be seen to have stopped, to not be known by the people hanging out of their balconies, and I am still scared of so many things. There is a big road which leads to a flight of more than a hundred steps. At the top of the steps is a magnificent tree, and when I got there I touched it. The branches spread like an actor’s arms falling half way between throwing them high above his head and folding into a bow. There is something so proud in that tree, and surrender, but no, I can’t yet say I see the whole of it, it has lasted so long, it is enormous, and so green and alone, and it is the prize at the centre of a little square at the top of the steps, so I touched it and I wanted to rest my cheek against it, but some men were sitting close by and I was scared again. I walked to the gates of the museum, where the air became suddenly sweet, rich, tastable, something deep, perfect, so smoothly sweet that I stopped to look for something, a huge open flower, some life to merit it. But there were just the things I had always seen on walks to this museum, the fruit trees, the bushes beside the pavement, a garden far below. I began to try and find it, the source of the smell, I jammed my little head into gaps between the railings, into the bushes, mainly green, some tiny white bouquets of flowers, rustling, further on bigger leaves, the fruit trees, fallen oranges on concrete. I stood, confused. I had never smelt the world so sweet. I promised then I would come back to where the air smelt like this, walk up to where the air smelt sweet and for a moment I realised I had never conceived of the world like this. To walk to where the air is sweet, which must happen perhaps at a time of day, at a time of year, in a place, and I was in that place, fully alive. Wandering on a path I had taken before.