Carmine Muraglia

[The video is of surprisingly high quality, but purposefully distorted. Bathed in the warm evening sun of the park, it is at once both hyperrealised and dreamlike. This feeling is not helped by Carmine's now famous surliness: he refuses to look directly into the camera, and he speaks entirely in Italian. Whilst he has stubbornly supplied no subtitles, he is no technological expert - translation services must still exist. The end result is something more akin to a music video without the video, or a direct link into someone's dream]

It is again early evening. The heat has begun to subside now, and people are taking to the streets in a bid to see, and to be seen. The smell of our pizzas hang in the air, the best pizza in all of the world. That is as it has ever been - we invented them, and we have mastered them. The peak of Vesuvius is already in darkness, looming over the city like both our greatest friend and most dangerous threat: she, at least, makes her dichotomy clear to all who live in her great shadow. She makes no bones about what she is, she does not sing her siren song to lure in unwary travelers.

[He stops for a moment, looking up and off-screen: he stares in contempt at the skyscrapers that seem to him like fingers of a grasping hand, closing in to claim him] We now who are trapped here in the Asphodel fields, we who wander in an ashen land of broken promises. We were enticed by insinuations of wealth and glory, of happiness and freedom. Now the money rots in our pockets, and freedom tastes of burnt flesh. If there is a single happy soul in this forsaken place, he does not live in the pits where we condemned men do.

I am again sitting at a table, in a café along the bay. San Ferdinando is not my quarter, but I have adopted it as much as it has adopted me. I can smell the oleander on the evening breeze, and can taste it as clearly as I taste the wine in my hand. [A hint of a grin, as his memories begin to colour] A man catches my eye, he has a smile that nobody in Italy would mistake. It is the visual expression of a universal language which we invented, and which we mastered. It is beautiful, and because of that it is true.

[His smile fades now, replaced by the ever-present scowl. He has been playing with a leaf, picked absent-mindedly off a nearby bush, but now he crushes it between his fingertips] But now there is nothing true in the world, and because of that the world is ugly. I have no time or patience for the false and the grotesque. I have no patience for New York, or its people. I have no time for the present.

"I monitor my gross income hourly. My hourly figures become my indicators. My indicators become my projections ... If my projections hold true, in a month I'll be out of business." My cousin said those words to me the day I came to America and I will never forget that. Stupidly, I believed him.

I long for the days when this store made enough money to warrant hourly monitoring. These days I am lucky if I make enough to bother cashing up at the end of the day. They say that silent enim leges inter arma. Perhaps that is true. If it is, then clearly the law has l'anima gemella in music. I rely on regular custom these days. Passing trade has all but stagnated now that people have less money. I cannot blame them: who wants a guitar if it is a choice between that and food?

I was [...] visited on Sunday. Fortunately, my paperwork was in order and I was left for the most part in relative peace. Accidents happen of course (especially when my English is not so fluent as it should be) but I have finished repairing the worst of the damage. The rest is superficial, like so many things on this bastard continent.

( The days were long and the nights so cold, the pages turn and the tale unfolds: he left me for another lady... )