“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath in the apartment that my parents newly married had bought in Rione Alto at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri. Everything—the spaces of Naples the blue light of a very cold February those words—remained fixed. But I slipped away and am still s“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath in the apartment that my parents newly married had bought in Rione Alto at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri. Everything—the spaces of Naples the blue light of a very cold February those words—remained fixed. But I slipped away and am still slipping away within these lines that are intended to give me a story while in fact I am nothing nothing of my own nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot and nobody not even the one who at this moment is writing knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering without redemption.”(less)