Twisted, Crumpled
Some time gone, in the narrow streets of the Pallonetto di Santa Lucia hard by the port of Naples, a man who people would later say was a German businessman or an American diplomat or a Swiss archaeologist was robbed by a small boy. This in itself was no exceptional event. Such things happened there, and still do: the area is known for its scippatori – small-time pickpockets, wallet-snatchers and jewellery-grabbers, often children. No one knows what the man, who may have been a Danish film director or a French art dealer or a Ukrainian journalist, was doing in the Pallonetto, a neighbourhood rarely frequented by tourists even of the more intrepid kind. No one, victim and perp aside, saw the theft happen. The man had been walking along the seafront at Santa Lucia, it was suggested, and only ended up in the warren of the Pallonetto as he attempted to give chase to the tyke. He’d walked out of one of the glitzy hotels on the lungomare, the Vesuvio or the Excelsior or the Continental, taken a wrong turn and got lost. His eye had been caught by a pretty girl or boy then he had ill-advisedly followed their glance. The Pallonetto is a dangerous place even for its inhabitants, where petty crime is rife precisely because any miscreant (the smaller the better) can easily disappear into the hive of streets, especially if they know the place well. One strategy is for a small gang of kids to surround a target, take what they can then disperse in various directions, leaving the victim unsure of which scugnizzo to pursue.
The man, who has been described as a Greek political journalist, an English independent television producer or an Austrian trader of vintage automobiles, was wearing a well-cut dark blue linen suit, a white shirt and a pair of expensive sports shoes, and wore his hair close cropped, gave fair chase into the deepest parts of the Pallonetto yet was frustrated not so much by the rapidly-vanishing fleet-footed urchin, but by local collusion. Seeing him running and guessing the cause of his predicament, people standing in shop doorways or on street corners, leaning on cars or out of windows, sitting on motorini or plastic chairs outside bars, dispatched him in various wrong directions. At one particularly galling junction, he was met by a wall of three men who blocked access to the narrow street by standing shoulder to shoulder and refusing to move. At this point he realised the locals were not interested in helping him at all, and were, in fact, protecting the pickpocket, probably as some small part of a much larger scam, a sense of collective loyalty, a hope for some shares in the booty, or a general mistrust of outsiders who looked like Spanish e-commerce consultants, Portuguese property developers or Swedish publishing executives. When he found his path, the one he felt sure the boy had taken, once again blocked he decided to take issue with the blocker.
The blocker, nicknamed ’o stuort’ due to his curious gait, was a stocky man, shorter than his opponent but with a bull neck and a torso whose thickness challenged the t-shirt he wore. He was known to many in the close-knit neighbourhood as an enthusiastic dispenser of ready justice, a man who followed the law as he saw it, a man with handy fists and upon whose tongue no hair grew. ’O stuort’ squared up and faced the intruder.
Lascia sta’ he said. Leave it. He took a step forward and girded himself up to his full height. His intent was clear. Though still shorter than the first man by a head, he was clearly ready to mete out some due process.
No one knew what had been stolen from the man who may have been a Canadian fashion designer, a Belgian window dresser or a South African lawyer, but whether a wallet, a watch, a phone, a passport, or some object of little monetary but immense personal value, he was clearly bent on getting back what had been taken from him. Unintimidated by the stuort’ he said one word:
Paghi. You will pay.
He reached out and took ’o stuort’ by the throat. Though he was only of average height and build, those who saw this take place remember that his hands encircled ’o stuort’s thick neck easily. He began to squeeze.
Paghi, he repeated.
’O stuort’ began to perspire, though not from the heat of the day. It was as if the man was squeezing the very sweat from him. ’O stuort’s eyes began to water. A vein throbbed dangerously across his forehead. He turned a shade of red that verged on purple, then a different colour altogether. The thick greasy sweat which oozed from his pores began to gather and congeal in the creases on his brow, ran in slow rivulets to collect in the gutters of his collarbone. The man continued to squeeze.
The sweat began to change colour, to darken and thicken, then turned into creased, dog-cornered, well-used one thousand lire notes. Tears welled then pooled in the corners of ’o stuort’s eyes, becoming coins as they slid over his face. Gasping, he opened his mouth and belched out blue notes of uncertain denomination.
The man, who now more resembled an Argentinian detective, an Australian lawmaker, or a Dutch container shipping magnate, continued to squeeze, though by this point, onlookers recall, he no longer had his fingers around the stuort’s neck but his chest, his thin but strong hands constricting the entire body of the stocky criminal whose perspiring had become unstoppable, no longer merely sweat, but every single drop of liquid in the man, tears, spit, piss, leaching out and coalescing into grubby bank notes and tarnished coins of all nations and eras. They slithered down his cheeks, his neck, his arms, his torso and his legs before flopping onto the dusty ground.
Doubloons, groats, farthings, kroner and shekels spilled from him. Złoty, sou, ducats, piaster and medieval scudi belched forth. Zecchini, roubles, leks and dinar were croaked up. Pesos, francs, escudos, kroner and dollars burst from his skin like boils. Drachmae, florins, forints, rand, rials, ringgit, rupees, shillings and thalers ran through the street. Piasters, guilders and sesterces pooled around the onlookers’ ankles. The stuort’ vomited profusely, convulsively, spasms right up from his diaphragm, again and again and again until he was dry heaving, then paused to draw breath before eventually managing a couple of small milky pukes (cents, pfennigs, ha’pennies) at which point everyone thought it had stopped whereafter he exploded a flood of diarrhoea (counterfeits, cryptocurrencies) then finaled with a small, sad, wet fart.
The man, by this point a Slovenian drug dealer or an Albanian smuggler or a Czech gun runner, continued to squeeze until ’o stuort’ was as thin and broken as a reed and sagged like an old balloon, eventually lifting him off the ground a foot or so then casually throwing him aside as if discarding a used dishrag. He glanced at the collection of notes and coins spread on the floor, kicked at them desultorily, then left.
’O stuort’ was never the same, and passed the rest of his days quietly, wrinkled and broken, the creases never quite disappearing. Those who ran into him said he looked like a piece of the brown paper used to serve pizzette then discarded, or a lemon rind drained of all its juice and left to slowly rot. They no longer called him ’o stuort’ but ’o arrepecchiat’, and he said nothing about this.
Of the blue-suited, short-haired stranger, whoever he may have been, I know nothing, but of what was taken from him and the boy who took it, I know a lot, because I am him. I tell this story which both true and not, because I remember it all.