Trafika Europe 14 - Italian Piazza

Frank Iodice

almost l ike a photo inside the photos, maybe it was just a wicked game that he was playing with himself. Why not take a self-portrait l ike anyone else? Maybe he had some, but had neither exhibited nor publ ished them on the sites he col laborated with. He was a man with enormous potential at least in the field of photography, some of the images were impeccable in terms of both their qual ity and the stories they told, but he didn’t care. It was as though he desired anonymity, wanting to hide himself in those l ittle mirrors on the shelves of an outdoor antique market. This whole story, in a certain sense, had been his own doing. He was the one who went to Campania, to Naples, and to meet someone he wouldn’t even tel l Morel about. He’d wisely understood that the only thing Morel was interested in was money, because he enjoyed wasting it. What point would there be in tel l ing him how things had gone? Nevertheless, the moment had come to go back over his recent trip. Ciepiela had been to Naples a few months before meeting Morel. They ’d gotten on wel l since their first meeting, at the Monte Carlo casino, where they ’d played with the first bi l ls, those stolen from Morel in Cannes—and lost them. In Campania, at Vi l laricca, the same place where Don Vito’s new l ibrary was taking shape, Ciepiela had received the bundles of watermark paper as a gift from the sultan of Qatar. The dying old

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