'A vocca

'A vocca. Eighty is the mouth, and in a culture that lives on the spoken word it couldn’t be just any number. The mouth does two things, and the Smorfia keeps them together without telling them apart: it eats and it speaks. Taking nourishment and saying things, taking in and sending out — the same opening for two opposite movements, and in Naples both are done in company and out loud. In dreams, eighty arrives when something needs to be said, or has been said. A sentence that slipped out and that you can’t take back, something left unsaid that sits heavy on your stomach — and the expression is no accident, because the body puts unspoken words in the same place it puts food. In dreams it becomes the mouth that won’t open, the voice that won’t come out, the speech prepared and never given: these are among the most common scenes people tell us. And it arrives when there’s appetite, in the broadest sense of the word: desire for something, hunger for life, the urge to take something that’s yours by right. The Smorfia doesn’t separate hunger from speech because, in folk experience, they come from the same place — need. The image that leads here is the mouth and nothing else. When a symbol already holds everything, the Smorfia doesn’t give it company. If eighty showed up in your dream, speaking or taking was involved. It’s worth asking which of the two: sometimes what feels like hunger is just something you haven’t told anyone yet.