Life's Chain: Banalities and Their Glitches
Seeing grace hidden in the grotesque
Naples. Via Santa Teresa degli Scalzi opens like a wound in the stone. A stairway to heaven that promises nothing but gives everything. The doctor's small office is a mystery hidden on the second floor, behind a door that has witnessed three centuries of pain and hope.
Those were the days of unofficial guardians in public medical offices, vanished figures who would guard the entrance demanding two thousand lire "at the door." A widespread practice in Italy, not exactly legal but tolerated, a small toll to access healthcare. Like the one I met that day, bringing my grandmother to the doctor.
The Madonna watches from above. A copy from the Neapolitan school of painting, probably inspired by Massimo Stanzione. She has that austere sweetness typical of the 1600s, that way of looking beyond whoever looks at her. Below her, the clerk counts and recounts the crumpled banknotes, muttering between his teeth: "Duimila... quatte... seimila... duimila... 'sta vechiarella m'ha rate 'nu piezz' 'e mille lire scamazzato..." ["Two thousand... four... six thousand... two thousand... this old lady gave me a crumpled thousand-lire bill..."]
His calloused fingers caress the money with mechanical, ritual gestures. A banknote escapes him, floating like a dead leaf to the ground. "Sang' 'e chi t'è bbiv'..." ["Blood of those who bore you..."] he hisses, bending down to pick it up. The Madonna watches him without judgment, he looks at her without seeing her, lost in his rosary of crumpled paper. An involuntary duet that repeats every day, like a blasphemous prayer.
It's strange how certain images stay with you, how certain contrasts make you laugh and think at the same time: the beauty of that ancient painting and the crudeness of the foul-mouthed clerk, the Madonna's eternity and the banality of poorly counted change.
The beauty is this: finding poetry in squalid things, seeing grace hidden in the grotesque. Like when you look at any waiting room and discover it contains everything: paradise, hell, the purgatory of small daily waits. I still laugh now, recalling that scene from over 25 years ago. As a child, my grandmother, the clerk who didn't know he was part of a bigger picture—the Madonna overlooks everything, like a benevolent queen over a kingdom of small human miseries.
Life is like that. A chain of banalities following one another with non-banal things in between. It's not a bad thing. If you love life as I love it, you're happy, you acknowledge it and remain always curious, with the desire to be amazed. Even in front of a clerk cursing under an ancient Madonna, in the soft light of any ordinary afternoon.
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