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.
