See Naples and Live

Money," he repeated in the same tone of flat demand as the first time, suggesting even more strongly than before that the word constituted the nucleus of his English.

I continued to ignore him, staring out the glass doors of the new Stazione Centrale into the piazza from which the statue of Garibaldi had watched so many armies, military and otherwise, invade the city.

"Money," the word this time accompanied by a hand held out, palm up, at the level of his face, the voice this time decidedly remonstrative.

"No," I said, shaking my head. "Niènte, niènte," the nucleus of my Italian.

There we stood: the tall American in the tan raincoat too lightweight for the gloomy chill of late afternoon in winter Naples and the sockless ten-year-old boy in the man's jacket he inhabited like an overcoat, with the large, black eyes and piquant mouth of a Murillo urchin and all the savvy of a street psychologist.

"Money," he repeated impatiently, as if I was wasting his time, and took the edge of my raincoat between his thumb and forefinger, all the while subjecting me to the gaze of those enormous eyes that were at once so soulful and so insolent. He felt my coat, appraising the fabric.

I knew it was a game, but I had been playing that game for four months and had lost my cool. "Basta!" I exclaimed too fiercely and wrenched my coat away. "Basta! Niènte!"

He took my measure in an instant. There was no resigned quiver of the lips, not even a contemptuous smile. He simply shrugged and gave me up. He simply turned as if I had never existed, already picking out his next mark, and left me standing there, in the puddle of my own foolishness. I went out through the doors and got my bag into a cab, feeling as irritable as a dog with fleas.

It wasn't only the kid. It was that the last days in Rome had been bleak. It was that it had rained for a week and none of the light bulbs in my pensione were over 25 watts and I was surfeited with churches and museums. It was that the trip was coming to an end in a welter of wet feet and too many whiskeys. It was that I was flying home in a week, and home meant Vietnam, riots, work, nerves and an election year too crucial to the future of my country to be ignored, even by the relatively embittered. I didn't want to go home, but there was no choice. It was time to be in America again; it might be the last time when just being there to be counted could make some difference. So, with the end of my lire, I'd come south, hoping for a few last sunny days.

Besides, Naples occupied a special place in the landscape of my imagination. Like many Americans in their 40s, to whom the Vietnam war was a squalid and dishonorable adventure, I sometimes found myself longing for the older, the juster, the more innocent War in which I had once served. And Naples, perhaps more than any other European city, held memories of that War for an American veteran--even one, like myself, who had never gotten there. And now it was cold, the streets were a drizzly blur and the Neapolitans seemed intent on taking back, lira by lira, whatever reparations the GIs had incurred 25 years before.

First, there was the cabdriver. Pulling up before the small marquee of the Hotel Rex half a block from the bay, where far-off lights on Capri winked and the feel of deep water nearby came in on the wind, he wanted 800 lire and was disinclined to turn on his meter light. Caught between languages (I understood a lot but spoke little), I established with the help of my Zippo that the fare was actually 440. Oh, well, the man mumbled without a flicker of the eyes, all right, 700, then. There was the bag, there were taxes, there was something else that was lost as his dialect thickened. I knew it was a con; I knew he was simply seeing how much the traffic would bear; I was outraged; and I paid. The barefaced audacity of it put me in check.

Then there was the desk clerk. No, the room was not 3100 life, as the list in my pocket from the Italian Travel Office stated. "Thirty-one hundred lire for this?" his flourish of the hand seemed to say. For these bland, pastel reproductions of "romantic" Neapolitan scenes? For these pipe-and-leatherette armchairs? For the now-international smell of plastic and chlorophyll and disinfectant that typifies Motelland? No, such up-to-date splendors went for 3500 and were cheap at the price. I whipped out the list and indicated his hotel and its rates with an irate forefinger. He frowned and spluttered and threw up his hands and argued and beseeched the ceiling in a long harangue. Then he acceded with a loser's shrug and huffed out of the room.

A cold sea wind stiffened as I walked along the Via Partenope a little later. Behind me, the Leonardo da Vinci (pale, lavish, garlanded with lights and between cruises) was tied up amid the ghosts of rusty transports. Ahead, the opulent hotels, fronting on the water, each exhibited the empty lobby and fumetti-reading bellboy of the onset of December. Beyond them, the explanade curved gracefully around a bay so ample that all the world's navies could have dumped their crews and garbage there. Above it, Naples itself was spread out in a fantastic, terraced semicircle of sparkling lights on its shadowy hillsides. The thought came inevitably: This spot had simply cried out for a city.

To the refugee from the cheerless suburban rectitude of middle-class America in search of the picturesque or the quaint, back-street Naples at night must appear like the Lower East Side of New York in the bad old days--festooned with loaded wash lines, littered with stale vegetable greens, ill-lit, pestilential, a filthy rabbit warren of steep alleys raw with onion and tenements as noisome and noisy as Hogarth's London, with the stench and uproar by which the poor insulate themselves against despair. It is all of that and it exhilarated me. The greatness of a city is best measured by the vividness of the life in its slums; and Naples, by that yardstick, is a very great city, indeed. Despite its hustler's eye and thief's fingers and con man's spiel, it remains as life-shrewd, hot-tempered, toughhearted and indefatigably gay as a De Sica whore. What other city could have overcome my peevish mood simply by trying to fleece me at every step?

Coming down a narrow, cobbled street slippery with spittle, headlong as San Francisco, where kids smoked and yelled and gesticulated in restless groups and spectral grandfathers sat silhouetted in the doorways of mysterious, dim bedrooms opening right onto the pavement, I became aware of a strange ambiance that I remembered from my first days in New York after the War. It was the feeling of neighborhood, of a community created out of passions, appetites and dangers suffered in common, of a mean life that was not demeaning; and I felt a pinch of gruding envy for these people and for that old, raucous city past that was all but obliterated in America now. Then, suddenly, an engine revved up at the top of the street and the single idiot eye of a motor scooter's headlight zigzagged wildly down upon me, as the rider was pelted with moldy lettuce heads, a succession of forearms--obscenely chopped by wrists--were leveled in his direction and insults as spicy as peperone went clamoring up through the fluttering bed sheets. I jumped into a doorway a split second before he flashed by with a cackle of sportive laughter. It wasn't a town that encouraged woolgathering.

I descended out of the murky honeycomb of that quarter by a series of steps. Muffled radios behind shuttered windows tinkled with phantom mandolins. Deliveryboys with baskets of vegetables or bread loaves balanced on their heads hurried past, lurching down the perilous inclines with the same reckless leaps as the scavenger cats that trooped after them, hoping for spillage. At the bottom, the restaurants on the Via Santa Lucia were thronging. Cashier girls stared out the plate glass at the dark, preening young men--peacocks of the night--who ambled by with coats thrown like capes over their shoulders, Fellini style. It was very cold now; it would rain again later and I was suddenly ravenous.

I went into a place that had a reasonable fixed price that included wine. It was overheated, pungent with odors, not crowded and very brightly lit, the way modest Italian trattorias mostly are, as if to say, "See, we have nothing to hide." The wine that came with the scaloppine was bad, sour as vinegar, but the waiter only looked at it casually, smiled and gave a particularly cynical version of the Neapolitan shrug. I countered by ordering a half liter of Ruffino, which, I concluded, must be the next move in the ritual. All at once, I was in unaccountable good spirits. Somehow, the cheerful air of swindle had become invigorating.

Besides, there was going to be music. A middle-aged man, with the wiry pompadour of a onetime peacock now gone quite gray and one of those indescribably urbane faces that you see all over Italy (the sheer weight of experience stamped into it as indelibly as tank tracks into macadam), was shouldering an accordion. His young wife swept a long fall of black hair away from her pale cheeks to accommodate a violin and, after tuning up briefly, they began to play. And the song they played was Lilli Marlene.

They moved among the tables slowly, the man singing the verses one after the other in a clear, unsentimental tenor thickened by cigarettes and the young woman following behind, the poignant line of her chin canted into the fragile wood of the instrument. They paused at each table, offering it the challenge of their dispassionate eyes, and the man would half turn at the end of each chorus to direct the listeners to the delicate, taut wrists of his lovely young wife, (continued on page 136)See Naples and Live(continued from page 126) inviting them to admire her and be moved to generosity.

It was at this point that I noticed two similar parties on either side of the room--the same gruff, florid-cheeked father, the same past-40, well-dressed mother, the same bored teenage kids. The two fathers were undergoing an identical experience, an experience for which they obviously were not prepared. A cruel nostalgia seemed to be gripping them both; and when they turned and spoke offhandedly to their wives in an effort to regain composure, it became clear that the man nearest me was a German and the one across the room was an American.

They were veterans, making that strangest, saddest of all sentimental journeys: taking the wife and kids back to the battlefield on which, like absentee landlords, they had a permanent claim because they had fought for it and survived. In this case, probably Caserta. One tried not to draw any of the trite conclusions about the quality of a peace in comparison with which war retained all the misty aura of youth's springtime camaraderies; but, nevertheless, there they sat, 25 years older, paunchier and more vulnerable, undone by that old song that had belonged to both armies and, all unawares, fraternizing at last in the no man's land of a common memory. The bittersweet taste of 1943 was in their mouths, I fancied, bringing back, like Proust's madeleine, war's most unmanning moments--the moments of leave, the moments of being weary and young and homesick and bored and alone in a foreign city. Perhaps, separated by only a few weeks, each had eaten lonely suppers in this very place a quarter of a century ago, for the expression on their faces now was identical: They were haunted by their own dead youth. I fancied, as well, that both of them were thinking that they hadn't had enough to drink. I knew I was. But the musicians had finished and were passing among us with a salver; and in a moment, they launched into Beer Barrel Polka, in case there were any English in the room.

They didn't miss a trick. It seemed such a cynical trafficking in emotions--the moral equivalent of the larceny that ruled the streets. Yet it was obviously what the diners wanted. And it was what that same reflex of nostalgia in me wanted, too--for the sad, wine-fumy, bravely maudlin song to go on and on, so that I could believe for a little longer that the unexamined feelings it aroused were real. I wanted to be a veteran of a time and a war that were safely past, safely over, instead of a civilian soldier (in that newer and nastier kind of war--the war against the war that was tearing up America's streets and soul), whose leave was almost over.

Still, I felt conned, somehow derided by the musicians' glib assumption that we "conquerors" had refused to grow out of the easy simplicities of the completed past into the uneasy complications of a future that had yet to be made. Didn't they care about the anguish and the heroism of 25 years before? Perhaps they cared about something else. Something other than bitter memories or the sentimentalizing of the dead. Something other than history. But what? I was up at seven o'clock the next morning, pondering it.

It had snowed on Vesuvius during the night. The upper slopes wore a scapular of white and the volcano resembled the Fujiyama of all those happy postcards from traveling relatives in the Thirties. The sullen sky was breaking up over the long arm of the Sorrento Peninsula to the south and dirty, optimistic Naples had been awake for hours, relishing the big deals of a new day. I headed for the Galleria Umberto to have a look, John Horne Burns having bequeathed the spot to all literary-minded folk of my age; and crossing Piazza Plebiscito (now a parking lot full of Fiats), I passed the series of large statues that face it from niches in the façade of the Palazzo Reale: German marauders, Spanish viceroys, Anjou kings, a Bourbon or two--all the foreign tyrants who had ruled and squabbled over Naples for a thousand years. They were blunt, unattractive, brownish statues, subtly mocked by the sculptor's hand, somehow set at nought in the very act of their commemoration, and they gazed out impotently over the brash cartops of the city that had survived the worst that they could do. Of what were they supposed to be a reminder? Had a place been saved for General Mark Clark and the Nazi commandant whom he succeeded? It was as curious a way to solemnize one's history as if Atlanta had erected a memorial to Sherman.

Working girls thronged the Via Roma, bold-eyed, dark as Moors, smoldering in their flesh, loud as a treeful of magpies, hurrying along toward gossip and morning cappuccino. The Galleria faced the opera house across a narrow street of pell-mell traffic--a huge, splendid black-and-gold arcade with a steep curve of sooty glass roof that suffused the chilly interior in a pallied, underwater light in which every mole, every trace of feminine mustache stood out as graphically as a secret vice in the impersonal glare of a line-up. I wandered back and forth among the crowds that milled around, dwarfed, at the bottom of that immense five-story room pretending to be a street.

I had a coffee in one of the little bars where you buy your ticket first and then present it to the boy at the machine, and watched the cashier girl ring up half the amount and pocket the difference, and then, a moment later, ring up 130 lire for a 180-lira tab and pocket that, too. It seemed marvelous and, all of a sudden, admirable, the way some kinds of lawlessness in our time seem to strike a blow for an older law. Everyone cheated everyone else as a matter of course; and yet that peculiar lechery, that lascivious quiver of wet-mouthed greed that contorts faces along 42nd Street, was not in evidence here. No, the confident audacity of Neapolitan pilage seemed a triumph over the glum seriousness of money itself, thereby restoring some human balance; the poverty of Naples, like its bitter history, mocked itself and its appetites. In the States, the poor and the outraged marched and rioted. Here, they boosted from the till and set up statues to their oppressors. But what in God's name did they care about?

I wandered back toward the hotel and had breakfast. Toast, butter and jam--for an extra charge, of course--arrived with the eggs, for the simple reason that I had failed not to order them; and by the time I had finished, the day had become fair. The sky was a milky blue, the air mild and aromatic as vermouth, the rain-washed pavement smelled fresh with possibilities and I decided to go up into the Vomero quarter, where, I had heard, one got the most lavish view of Naples and its bay.

The funicolare centrale, in which I was jammed chest to breast with chattering schoolgirls, was a subway on a slant that clanked ponderously up its sloping mine shaft, the chain that pulled it vibrating up through one's shoes. On the top, out in the sun again, the drama of the city's setting became clear. Naples appeared to float in the air in the same way that Venice appears to float on the water. I looked down on all the tangled warrens I had wandered in the night before--down over diminishing levels of roofs, terraces, stairways, balconies, everything built on top of something else, house on house, street on roof, stairs, stairs everywhere; down through the stupefying complexity of myriad lives that I viewed, as a god might, in a stunning, vertical perspective; the balconied lives of a Mediterranean people, a people in thrall to the sun. I looked down, down and then out--out over the wide, lucid expanse of that great bay, pale blue as an April sky, that had the power that all truly breath-taking places possess--the power to so awe, to so humble you that you become for a moment saner, soberer at the very sight, aware that, after all, the inmost drive of our natures is to yearn for beauty and to (continued on page 214)See Naples and Live(continued from page 136) suffer the knowledge of our own smallness in its presence. Capri was haze-shrouded, distant, beckoning with the witchery of all islands; Vesuvius was the powerful shoulder of a slumbering brown giant on the left; and the long, generous, shimmering horizon southward to Amalfi opened the heart, like a lens.

Poets used to rhapsodize about places that seemed "blest" by God, an uncomfortable idea in our godless, unpoetic times; and Naples--dirty, brawling, thieving Naples--is such a place. Something-stirs in you when you see it from above, an old languor that is not without an even older reverence. The extravagant humanity of the Neapolitans, the avid appetite for life, sheer sensual life, that drums so insistently in their streets, must be the result of that beckoning island always before them and that threatening mountain behind. No cause, no ideology, no fanaticism can survive for long the sight of Naples' bay; and with all the surprise of an important discovery, I realized that I had forgotten what it was like to be completely happy.

The rest of the day was vivid with this emotion. I walked in the park around the Villa Floridiana, where the sunless, meandering paths were cold with that deep and penetrating chill that makes you feel keen in your own flesh, all atingle with the damp, verdant green of shadowed places on a warmish winter's day. Mothers wheeled babies, old men sat, offering wizened faces to the sun, and the city was dazzling below--tile red, earth brown, palm green--its seething life only a faint echo in that upper air.

I walked without direction, searching for a way down, noticing everything with delight, following my nose. It seemed enough. I came down out of that quarter on a long, steep succession of stairs that weren't on my street map, calves aching toward the bottom from the effort to keep upright on the inclines, famished now, wanting fish, cheese, bread, wine, my hunger somehow so perfected that I could relish it as if it were food.

As I came out at last onto the level of the Riviera di Chiaia and began looking for a likely trat, a woman coming toward me, modestly but neatly dressed, carefully made up, not more than 40 and rather pretty, with a Giocondalike smile in one corner of her mouth, suddenly extended her left hand as we converged. Nothing more: no plea, no expression of pitiable destitution, no huge-eyed baby thrust forward as a prop. She simply held out her hand for alms, all the while smiling mysteriously and with just a touch of distant irony, as if to say: "Why not? This is my city. And if you're not a sentimental American, perhaps at least you can be embarrassed." I was too astonished to respond in any way and she passed on with an indifferent, Private little shrug. Had she hated, loved, trafficked with my countrymen as a girl? Had we killed her brother, laughed at her mustachioed father, bought her sister with a chocolate bar? The guilt of history stirred up for a moment and then died. I turned and saw her chatting with a man who was furiously trying to back his vegetable truck into an alley too narrow to accommodate it. An attractive, self-possessed woman in the middle of her day; I had the strong urge to run back and give her all my money. I wanted to acknowledge some new Neapolitan insight that had come to me. I craved a gesture as Zenlike as hers had seemed, and then realized that gestures were simply that--self-serving--and in Naples you pushed reality a little, seeing if it would give; but no city could be less metaphysical. So, instead, I laughed to myself and admired her.

I ate deliciously and at length--zuppa di pesce thick with mussels and shrimps, fritto misto mare (so that I might savor one last time the virginal squid in their delicate peignoirs of batter) and an icecold half liter of table wine that digested my food for me as I walked down the long esplanade toward the hotel, the sun westering now over Ischia, the sky ribbed with strange ladders of Turneresque cloud. That good day was darkening, the wind was harsher off the water, the Capri boat came cresting in on the rising sea and a fisherman, standing in his big, double-ended dory, rowed double-armed against the weather, wearying a little. I feft complete. And tomorrow? Tomorrow, Pompeii. I was up to anything now. Even a city that was a tomb.

The train to Pompeii was four or five jolting Toonerville trolleys hitched together, and my stomach was already unsettled by a pat of rancid butter I'd wolfed down with my breakfast roll. It was a warm blue-and-gold morning, with just a hint of snap when you were out of the sun, and the cars were crowded with laughing young people off for the day to Castellammare. But death was on my mind as we rattled out through plaster-and-pastel housing developments in the suburbs, and I kept looking beyond the orange groves and the patches of feathery, lacelike finòcchio to Vesuvius--so close, right over there across the fields, still partially crested with snow, its treeless slopes as bald as a burial mound. My guts were rumbling uncomfortably. I'd never been in a dead city before and I was arming myself against the analogies to my own era that seemed bound to come.

Then we were beyond the suburbs and the mountain, and the heavily cultivated, tropical land ran right down to the bay on one side and a plain opened out on the other, ringed by a far-off range of lavender hills with a sparkle of towns on their sun-drenched lower reaches, and we were there: a small depot of peeling and exhausted stucco, a few dusty palms and, across a road jammed with horse carriages, the gray heaps of ruin that were all that was left of Pompeii's outer wall. Guides, souvenir sellers and carriage drivers swarmed around us, each trying to outperform, outpromise, out-hector the other. But a man with indiagestion cannot be conned, and I made for the tiny coffee bar in the station and a Campari to settle my stomach. There, as the oily, bitter liquid did its job, I listened to a man with a superior pitch. He pointed up the road to the official entrance, recited the prices of the ristorante in the ruins, laid a simplified street plan down on the bar and then fell silent. Three hundred lire and no sales talk.

Off I went. What struck me immediately, as it had in Naples, was the perfection of the site. I'd have built a city there, too, and damn the broken-pated mountain less than a mile away, with its jagged crest ominously suggesting a crater! Here was a level, sunny Plain, well watered, on a strategic road from the south, the bay not too far off, with pleasing views on all sides and a salubrious climate. Life in Pompeii, before the holocaust, must have been good; that was my feeling.

I wandered. It was a smallish city for smallish people. I saw some of the people in the museum on the site--the famous plaster "positives" that have been made from the "negatives" left by the ash--and none of them was much over five foot, three. The bodies did not strike me as particularly anguished, our century having accustomed us to that vaguely fetal crouch that people assume when they are about to meet death raining out of the sky; it was a dog, sprawled on his back, lips retracted into a snarl, legs spraddled in a convulsion of agony, that unnerved me most--the old Protestant assumption that animals are somehow more innocent than humans and their deaths thereby less warranted coming back, despite decades of disbelief.

I saw the city, too--the one-chariot-wide streets, their paving stones deeply grooved by iron-rimmed wheels 2000 years ago; the houses with their cool, fountained atria within; a modest temple or two; the granaries; the brothel with a padlock that read in English. "Made in Italy"; the public baths that could still function, so little demolished were they; and the small fòro triangolare with its frail, candle-flame cedars that had proved so much less frail than the city itself. And almost everything was roofless, shorn off, leveled at a single height, as if by an enormous scythe (the level of the suffocating ash), and at the end of every westward-running street, the glowering, mute hump of the volcano.

I waited for the solemnity, the "long thoughts" that seems proper in the presence of a human catastrophe, but they didn't come. Names, street numbers and even graffiti were still scrawled on the walls of wineshops. Frescoes depicting delicate, Dalilike figures (all black, sienna, green and orange) and rendered in a style, like Dali's, that suggested canny borrowings from older, better cultures had survived inside some of the grander houses. But it was the sounds of life, by their very absence from these streets, that impressed me most--the clatter of rushhour chariots, the street seller's hoarse cries, the hubbub of the markets, the careless twist of a song. I had a strong feeling of Pompeii as a provincial city, not very important, not unusually corrupt or sophisticated, a little vulgar, certainly humid in the summer, predominantly mercantile, impatient with "speculations," sensual but not particularly decadent, as pushy as Dallas used to be, until one day....

I went into the ristorante ("Government restaurant!" the hawker in the pin-stripe suit and porter's cap bawled out, as if to reassure travelers suffering from Neapolitan battle fatigue) and had a good lunch, the waiter wheeling up the most expensive meats on a cart, the bartender saying. "I know what you want, signore--Cutty Sark!" But what I wanted was wine, and so I had a bottle of Lacrima Christi, very cold, very subtle and--tears of Christ!--very ironical on that spot. I thought of the old novel by Bulwer-Lytton in which the twilight of paganism had hung over this city like a judgment of the gods and realized that he had missed the point of Pompeii and its last days, which wasn't superstition but absurdity. It hadn't been destroyed, it had been entombed; and, in point of fact, the ash had preserved it from the demolitions of time that had worked such damage elsewhere. Wine presses, oil vats, cooking utensils, even blackened, petrified loaves of bread--all buried, an entire city and its unique life style buried in an afternoon and, thus, fixed forever. There was no way not to think of the smashed cities of my own time, the Dresdents, Coventrys, Hiroshimas--all obliterated beyond recognition. There was no way not to realize that the difference was simply this: Nature was capricious, but man was vindictive; and after this most murderous of centuries, we could glimpse what had eluded Bulwer-Lytton. At the last, his morality and our politics had less substance than the cedars of Pompeii.

"They certainly know how to carry things," I thought to myself, watching the cocky bar boy, with a case of acqua minerale balanced on his head, who passed the table at that moment, as graceful as a stag beneath his antlers. Disasters, defeats. That's what they carried so well. But, more, the burden of history--that burden of violence and anguish in the past that over the backs of so many of us over 40 now, that burden of intolerable memory that increases in direct proportion to our awareness of how futile all the losses, all the ideologies and all the horrors have been. Looking out the long windows that had been adroitly placed to provide the diners with a view of Vesuvius. I had an inkling of what it was the Neapolitans cared about and realized how fitting it was that my trip was ending among them. Their calamitous coast--so beautiful, so "blest"--remained, despite everything, a reminder of a harmony older than history and all its discontents.

The sky was bruising up as I went back to Naples in the twilight, past empty depot platforms with their flyspecked lamps, through dark groves where one sensed that the earth was still warm, alive, mysteriously fecund. The sun was going down under rain clouds beyond Capri, a single vast beam of light pierced through--pure, white, lucid as the eye of God--to fall between the island and the mainland, and Naples was an exquisite necklace of lights strung out in the dusk around the throat of the bay. I didn't ruminate anymore; the moment had a singular clarity. It was one of those rare times when life seems to shift its direction, and I was content in the awareness of it.

That night, while waiting for dinner, I chanced upon this bit of wisdom in a Victorian travel book by Augustus Hare from the hotel lobby: "The treatment of the dead shows the character of this idolatrous and self-seeking people in its saddest aspect. When the funeral of a friend passes, a Neapolitan will exclaim with characteristic selfishness, 'Salute a noi'--Health to ourselves--without a thought of the departed."

I had to laugh. If one's sttitude toward death illustrated one's attitude toward life, and vice versa, whose view had proved the least idolatrous? How could the pious Mr. Hare have known that a scant 70 years after he wrote, the world would have become such a death-haunted place that no exclamation could be more purely reverent of life than the Neapolitans' "Health to ourselves!"? For they had suffered, starved, prospered and endured for 19 centuries in the very shadow of that mountain that had laid an inexplicable and existential death upon Pompeii. Their lot had always been squalor, conquest, calamity and deceit. Long ago, they had earned a bitterness that should have soured them to the very dregs of the spirit. But what they cared about was sun, wine, the new day, with its unknown possibilities for further riches, and all the passions--griefs as well as joys--by which, alone, we become truly human. They knew that the only real duty was to survive the past. Their faith was in the unfolding of life, not in its close.

And now we had all lived beyond the time when mourning did any good. Now there were too many corpses to be mourned and so often the mourners were only murderers off-duty--like those troubled GIs who rebuild schools, out of bricks and bad conscience, in the Mekong Delta. But everything in Naples shouted: Break the cycle! Let history, before whose altar only fools or scoundrels kneel, insist that violence is inevitable, that nothing can be done! Saigon will outlast those lies, as Naples has. Let the dead bury their dead, and bad dreams to them! But let the living, among whom now I numbered myself, be done with paralyzing memories and proclaim, instead, a stubborn "Health to those of us who are left!," in hopes of restoring to human life that supreme value our century has held so cheap.

As I perused the menu with that unhurried delight that is usually reserved for the table of contents of a favorite anthology of poetry. I realized that I was mysteriously mended somewhere in my nerves and spirit. I was bound to get embroiled again, once I got home, because I loved my country too much to remain indifferent to the upheavals that were trying its soul, and, like it or not, my final expatriation from its particular moment in history had yet to occur; but, nevertheless, I was ready to go back. I was fortified. I had an edge. And that edge was the knowledge that we would all be Neapolitans one day. If we were lucky.