A Mother’s Milk

A fictional travelogue; three minute read.

My passport says American, but travel has taught me that I am, by nature, a Mediterranean. Whether Greek, Turkish, Italian or Tunisian, that I haven’t figured out. Maybe Naples knows.

“Over there, that’s the Naples Opera House—oldest in the world,“ my taxi driver announces as if I had negotiated getting informational tidbits as a condition of hiring his cab. My skin prickles. I want silence, he wants a tip.

In the Centro Storico district, amid the noise, jumble and commercialism of the city’s finest pizzerias and junkiest tourist shops, the taxi rolls to a stop in front of Pio Monte della Misericordia. Crossing the threshold, I enter a world apart.

Founded in 1602 to “heal the sick, free the prisoners, shelter the pilgrims, redeem the captives, bury the dead, succor the shameful,” reads the plaque. The date sticks in my history teacher’s brain because it is the same year the Dutch East India Company kicked off imperial capitalism. I wonder if my high school history students would appreciate the contrast, the irony. Probably not.

In a 15th century Baroque building with other charities and a chapel, Pio Monte is home to Caravaggio’s The Seven Acts of Mercy. The painting’s dark shadows pierced by angelic light run a shiver up my spine.

My eyes are drawn to a stocky peasant woman—her layered flesh suggesting the comforting folds of her body—presenting her full-to-bursting breast to a starving prisoner. Through his jailhouse bars, he suckles her life-giving milk.

The artwork demands that I consider the throngs of men ignoring the woman’s charity. Am I one of them? Unable to pursue mercy because I am hardening?

I can hear my heart’s humanity arguing with my teacher’s paycheck. Keep my high school history teaching job or show myself mercy?

The artwork drags me four hundred years into the present. It’s like I blinked and was transported from the cobbled, charming streets of Naples into the ugliness of 21st century America.

No doubt the Italian government has its quirks and corruption, but I’m not here to discover them. The United States has plenty enough to criticize. Every day, every hour, even in Naples, the news from back home follows me.

As Caravaggio might paint America, my country is unwilling to show itself mercy. As if I’m allergic to even fragmentary cruelty, back home I feel congested, unable to fill my lungs. My breathing comes harder by the day.

Next to me, a sweater-clad mother with bright-white teeth holds a fidgety little boy. A priest with black hair and blacker eyes gazes upwards. A chubby man in chinos is taking pictures, nonstop. Mercifully, we’re all quiet. Communing with the artwork, contemplating. A temporary community finding our civic virtue.

My heart constricts to realize that my students have never known any other president than Trump. My words are just words to be recalled for the next exam. To them, the modern presidencies of Roosevelt, Reagan, Kennedy are ancient, ancient history. Living under an ennobling president is as incomprehensible as camping out with dinosaurs.

I’m going to look into applying for a teaching job here. I’ll check out the Naples housing market. Find out about permanent residency.

My hands are clammy. Mercy starts tomorrow.

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