A Mother’s Milk

A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.

My hands are clammy, sticky. Tremors in my vocal cords garble my voice.

My taxi driver in Naples, Italy, careens around corners and into condensed streets packed with people, shops, food stands, hawkers, dealers and hanging laundry. Half closing my eyes, I tighten my seat belt. I wish he would concentrate on his driving, but no chance of that. In between talking on his cell phone and gesturing obscenely to pedestrians, his hands leave the wheel to point out the historic monuments and notable churches.

To hear my driver tell it, crime in Naples is widespread, the modern mafia rampant, racism and violence against immigrants commonplace. Naples sounds a lot like home.

In the Centro Storico district, dating from 470 B.C. (before cabs?), amid the noise, jumble and crass commercialism of city’s finest pizzerias and junkiest tourist shops, among the homeless people and the street hustlers, mixed in with gawking tourists, sits an institution of mercy. The Pio Monte della Misericordia was founded in 1602 to “heal the sick, free the prisoners, shelter the pilgrims, redeem the captives, bury the dead, succor the shameful.”

The Pio Monte is housed in a Baroque building with other charities, a chapel and a museum showcasing artworks dating from the 15th century. On display, Caravaggio’s masterpiece The Seven Acts of Mercy depicts the traditional seven acts of Christian charity. The artist draws me into his painting with his signature dark shadows pierced by angelic light. A shiver works its way up my spine.

One scene bleeds me, like a sharp, slashing paper cut. A peasant woman exposes her full breast to a starving prisoner who suckles her life-giving milk through the bars of his medieval jail.

The artwork leaps four hundred years forward through time. I’m dragged from the cobbled, picturesque, dirty, dingy, charming, vibrant streets of old Naples into the ugliness of 21st century America. An America unwilling to show itself mercy. My breathing comes harder, faster.

Leaving the Pio Monte after dark, strolling on the glowering, nighttime streets of Naples is not half as frightening as most American cities by day or night. My neighbor with a handgun scares me more than any madcap Napoli taxi driver.

To quiet our fears, American politicians worship the golden calf—the plastic panacea, the placebo—of more dungeons, harsher penalties, more guns. Terrified of the best-armed criminals in the world, America locks up our underclasses, our unfortunates, our hardened criminals. America imprisons five times more people per capita than any other place in the world.

We sacrifice ourselves to the God of Guns. Our streets, churches, movie theaters, schoolhouses, shopping malls, parking lots, even our front doors are shooting galleries. Gun sales fill corporate coffers. And churchyard cemeteries.

Tomorrow, I’m planning to look for a teaching job, check out the Naples housing market, learn about permanent residency. Talk to my wife about moving here.

No more taxi rides.

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