In the silence of the port's black hole, the molecular structure of merchandise seems to break down, only to recompose once it gets beyond the perimeter of the coast. Goods have to leave the port immediately. Everything happens so quickly that they disappear in the process, evaporate as if they'd never existed. As if nothing had happened, as if it had all been simply an act. An imaginary voyage, a false landing, a phantom ship, evanescent cargo. Goods need to arrive in the buyer's hands without leaving any drool to mark their route, they have to reach their warehouse quickly, right away, before time can even begin -- time that might allow for an inspection. Hundreds of pounds of merchandise move as if they were a package hand-delivered by the mailman. In the port of Naples -- 330 acres spread out along seven miles of coastline -- time undergoes unique expansions and contractions. Things that take an hour elsewhere seem to happen here in less than a minute. Here the proverbial slowness that makes the Neapolitan's every move molasses-like is quashed, confuted, negated. The ruthless swiftness of Chinese merchandise overruns the temporal dimension of customs inspections, killing time itself. A massacre of minutes, a slaughter of seconds stolen from the records, chased by trucks, hurried along by cranes, helped by forklifts that disembowel the containers.
My God, can he write! Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.
However, as a reporter on such cases as the waste emergency in Campania, he is just a plain, damned good reporter.
passes through here ... open wound ... end point for the interminable voyage ... enter the gulf ... hole in the earth out of which what's made in China comes ... everything made in China is poured out here ... Like a bucket of water dumped into a hole in the sand. The water eats the sand, and the hole gets bigger and deeper ... in the silence of the port's black hole ... unique expansions and contractions ... disembowel the containers ...
-- until they rise up within view --
rumbling with heaving iron, the sheet metal and screws slowly penetrate the tiny Neapolitan opening
At this point, there is no need to name it, but after all that metaphorical teasing and foreplay, Saviano disposes with false modesty:
It is as if the anus of the sea were opening out, causing great pain to the sphincter muscles.
Gomorrah indeed. No wonder some people panic from reading him.
But his metaphors are not the only reason. The stark facts he enumerates are jarring as well:
According to the Italian Customs Agency, 60 percent of the goods arriving in Naples escape official customs inspection, 20 percent of the bills of entry go unchecked, and fifty thousand shipments are contraband, 99 percent of them from China -- all for an estimated 200 million euros in evaded taxes each semester. The containers that need to disappear before being inspected are in the first row. Every container is duly numbered, but the numbers on many of them are identical. So one inspected container baptizes all the illegal ones with the same number.
And then back to the metaphors...
The port is detached from the city. An infected appendix, never quite degenerating into peritonitis, always there in the abdomen of the coastline. ... A grounded amphibian, a marine metamorphosis.
When Céline was asked what he thought about literature, he remarked that there were two kinds of literature. When pressed to elaborate, Céline replied that there are those who write literature and then there are those that construct needles to shove up flies' asses.
