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among his wrinkles, just one....
     
     
    What an adventure! It was September 1906. I was in my twentieth year, the age for military service. But that was not the point. For three years I had been travelling in Russia, China and Central Asia, with my boss, Rogovine, who had made me a partner in his jewellery business, and now, in order to hold me by still closer ties, wanted me to marry his only daughter. But I had no more desire to do so than I had to become a businessman or a soldier. However, it was not on his daughter's account that we had fallen out, and I had finally deserted Rogovine in Persia. Esther was only eleven years old, and there was time for Rogovine to change his mind, make other plans for the future, vest his hopes in another salesman and choose a more suitable son-in-law, a neighbour, compatriot or co-religionist, for Rogovine was of the Old Orthodox faith, like most Russian goldsmiths. No, we quarrelled, fell out and parted as enemies not because of Esther, although that question was frequently brought
    up and with increasing acrimony, but because of a hollow cane.
    But Pasquale's farm no longer existed. In its place stood a block of flats like a barracks, and nobody could tell me what had become of Pasquale and his family. After my father was expropriated, the housing estate on the Vomero prospered and the neighbourhood of the solfatara became middle class. Houses with terraces were being built and the whole terrain was divided up into well-tended little properties, planted with fruit trees whose branches were tangled with vine-leaves; between the gleaming leaves of orange and lemon trees, or through stifling masses of oleander, one glimpsed dwellings of the suburban-villa type, simple, pretentious or coy, and most of them with ridiculous names, that had replaced the anonymous country houses formerly occupying this hillside, with their ruined walls, their doorsteps split by the roots of fig trees, their old women sitting at the threshold watching over the children and the chickens, their little saints set in a niche, a mangy ass, or two or three tethered goats, and that good, fat dumpling who is your Neapolitan peasant, Pasquale, Gennaro, Beppino or Gesu, taking a siesta, sprawled on an armful of fresh maize stalks, with his tagliora, or flannel waistband, undone, and smiling a hairy smile at the angels while awaiting the return of his wife, who has gone into the town, barefooted, her winnowing baskets balanced on her head, her market-scales in her hand, and shouting her seasonal cry as she sells her vegetables: aubergines, fennel, capsicums, tomatoes, cabbages, broad beans, and her fruit: almonds, grapes, figs, peaches, strawberries, pomegranates, oranges, mandarins, lemons, carobs, and, in the height of the summer, splendid water-melons, which the donkey brings down to Posilippo in the evening, carrying a double cargo in his pack-saddle. These watermelons are piled in pyramids at the side of the road, split and sold in juicy red slices to all the lazzaroni who bask in the sun beside the sea, eating hungrily while they make eyes at the women and the plump, laughing girls flaunting themselves on the cushions of the fiacres and carriages passing at a trot, escorted by a swarm of little beggars, boys and girls — the most wretched of whom go completely naked, clothed only in scabs and scrofula! — who turn cartwheels in the dust, run between the legs of the horses, cling on to the carriage doors and sing and plead and make agonized grimaces, one hand over the heart, the other extended :
     
    I am dying of hunger, Signore!
    Give me a penny,
    Please, kind sir!
     
    Without respite. Until the sun goes down and the moon rises, and the guitars fall silent, and the shopkeepers and the bourgeoisie at last come out of the restaurants by the sea, and the lamps go out, and everyone goes home, to sleep and to be harassed all night long by mosquitoes.
    But one should never return to the garden of one's childhood which