L'ommo 'e mmerda

Seventy-one carries the bluntest name on the whole list — in Naples a worthless man is called by a single word, and nobody bats an eye. The Smorfia never showed any consideration for people who behave badly: it gave them a number, and called them what people at the market would call them. The meaning is precise: disloyalty, pettiness, a wrong done on purpose. Not a mistake, not weakness — those live elsewhere. Here is someone who chooses to behave badly knowing full well what they’re doing, and who may go on saying hello to you as if nothing happened. In dreams, seventy-one arrives when someone has been two-faced. A broken promise, words carried to someone who shouldn’t have heard them, a favor turned against you. And it also arrives, more rarely and more uncomfortably, when that someone is you — dreams don’t go easy on anyone, not even on the dreamer. The image that leads here is the worthless man, and the Smorfia says it without beating around the bush. If seventy-one came up in your dream, there was disloyalty in it. We won’t tell you whose, or what to do about it: this is a page that reads images, not a courtroom.