A child isn’t a child, in Naples. A child isn’t a bambino, a child is a criaturo. “Teng’a creatura,” I have a child, a creature, says a mother, and she butts into line at the bank or leaves her car double-parked in front of the nursery school, shouting those words at the traffic cop on duty. The creature dictates a law all its own, it takes advantage of the rights that belong to it, unquestioned, more than any law passed by the state. Does a window get broken because a back-alley goalie failed to block a kick? Ch’amma a fà, so’ creaturo: what can we do, kids will be kids—that’s the all-encompassing justification of the janitor, the hall monitor, the schoolteacher, the mother of one child who’s just beaten up another.
These creatures are very close to all of creation. They belong to it like the shameless blue sky that hovers over the off-kilter TV antennas on the rooftops, the wind that whistles at the intersections of the alleys and vicoli, the hollowed-out tufa of the car parks and storehouses that, not that many years ago, were actually private homes.
That is why, in Naples, creatures are sacred, holier than elsewhere. Sacred is what brings the gift of life, in absolute terms, with no knowledge of the death that it carries within it. Like animals, like plants, like the fertile soil of the vegetable gardens at the foot of the volcano that, were it to reawaken, would devour everything and everyone.
Everything that has substance and meaning takes shape around children: families, the neighborhoods from Forcella to Vomero, from Chiaia to Secondigliano.
That’s why the child is the king of Naples; the only king that no one has ever tried to hurl from his throne. But like a young dauphin from the old days, the child, the creature—’o criaturo—enjoys none of the rights of childhood.
Creation does nothing to educate, it does nothing to protect, it teaches no distinction between good and evil. Creation knows nothing but the sacred potential of existence and transformation, remaining forever immortal. The creature comes into the world in imitation of it. The creature grows. It learns to clear a space for itself, or else to submit. It learns by playing, like all puppies do, which, in order to keep them from wandering into mortal danger, must be grabbed by the scruff of their neck and held back. But some are always lost. Some invariably wind up in the jaws of a predator.
All the children in the world believe that they’re immortal. Any newborn appears to its parents like a book of blank pages on which the world will ink a history that they dream will be better than theirs. The creatures of Naples, though, don’t have that time before them.
They define at every instant in this existence what they are and what they will be, just as creation itself decides without deciding, concerning a tree felled by a lightning bolt, a seed that gives birth to a flower in the midst of an arid, hardscrabble flower bed.
Baby kittens are blind and toothless, but soon enough they will become hunters. Baby rats are born hairless and pink, but those that survive will become long, fat, and hairy, learning young to go out at night, alone, under cover of darkness. Only little human creatures must establish which among them will become prey, and which will become predators.
It’s not merely out of black hunger yesterday, or for an iPhone today, that the children of Naples steal, shoot, and occasionally murder. Rather, it’s because the life of each and every criaturo defies death, just as it ought to: until death comes and finds them, and takes them in its talons.