And in those days, if a writer had not shattered himself against his own sentences and died while doing so, I could not believe a word of what he wrote. If I did not sense, when reading, that language lay in the balance, suspended, sentence by sentence, between life and death, then the book held no interest for me.

A black-veiled nun, holding plastic bags full of cucumbers, apricots, and onions in one hand and pressing two tall blonde Barbie dolls wrapped in plastic to her breast with the other, stopped before the tomato vendor, whose vegetable knife hung from a lanyard around his neck, laid the dolls on a wooden crate, and asked for a few kilos of tomatoes on the vine.

With an air somewhat distraught, nostalgic, and sad, a Spanish teenager glanced at the face and bust of a Sicilian-speaking postulant selling holy paraphernalia, who shook hundreds of small statues of Christ out of numerous plastic bags, letting them fall crackling into a trunk, while his father, rooting around in the bowl, taking one tiny crucifix after another in his hands, stared at them appraisingly.

A girl, hardly ten, holding a Barbie doll by its hair, bent over the edge of the fountain, sprinkled her face and forearms, and stared to the side for a moment as Piccoletto, who was also seated on the edge of the fountain, his legs outspread, chewing at his silver crucifix, pulled off his socks. The girl stared long into his leg holes at his balls hanging from his baggy yellow underwear and at the creased foreskin draped over the head of his large member.

The long, damp eyelash hairs of his open left eye grazed his eyebrow, the long, blood-caked eyelash hairs of his closed right eye grazed his freckle-dotted cheek.

A gypsy girl peeled a fresh green fig with her long and filthy red-lacquered fingernails.

Another gypsy girl — two gold upper teeth shone in the void of her harelip — lifted her right breast slightly and placed her nipple in the mouth of her child, whose eyelids were sealed shut with pus.

   "Signori, buon giorno! Un chilo di salmone originale, soltanto dieci mila lire," called Piccoletto, and chewed at his fingernails, smelling of fish slime and fish blood & blackened with squid ink at the edges.

In the clay vessel where the putrid-smelling bone stock was rendered from the bones of slaughtered animals, to be painted on the horses with a black crow's feather around the eyes & nostrils and on the belly, to protect them from the mosquitoes and horseflies...

The offal vendor folded a beef tongue, wrapped it in paper, passed it to a Chinese woman and wiped the sprinkles of blood from the price tag with a damp washcloth.