Free Happy Ant-Heap by Norman Lewis Page B

shell or concentrated in the underbelly and the legs. The whole prawn, minus the head, was thus subjected to meticulous chewing, and all that could possibly be swallowed went down the throat.
    The first prawn-eater did just this, and I was close enough to him to listen to the subdued crackle of the shell in his jaws. When he spat, as delicately as he could, a pinkness of prawn juices mixed with blood appeared at the corner of his mouth. He edged away from the bar, and the prawn-eaters waiting their turn followed. Soon a whitish detritus of prawns’ heads and a greyish pulp of shell fragments spread across the floor among the sparkling boots.
    In ten minutes, it was all over and time for the serious drinking to begin. But did this manly performance of Papa Hemingway and his disciples at Sloppy Joe’s benefit any of them in any conceivable way or delay the process of ageing, as in the Island of Youth? Almost certainly not. The novelist, when I eventually met him, appeared old for his years and, after the jubilant shots taken with Castro, a persistent melancholy had returned to his expression. A year later, at the age of sixty-two, he was to blow his brains out. There had been some talk of mental instability in the press, but this his brother denied. Ernest’s tragic end, he said, had been due not to any mental decline but to his despair at the treachery of a body in which throughout his life he had taken so much pride.
    So much for prawns.
    But what about peas—or cheese? Casanova’s formidable record is unexceptional by comparison with that of Ninon de Lenclos, the eighteenth-century beauty who is reputed to have had more than 5,000 partners in an outstandingly active forty years. Asked if, in what is an essentially repetitious process, she ever experienced boredom, her reply was, ‘Certainly not. Love may look always the same, but indeed it is new and different on every occasion.’ She attributed her outstandingly successful amatory career partly to the assistance provided by pureed peas, to which she sometimes added a little sherry. She was also partial to cheese, which would come as no surprise to an Italian; cheese is one of the supreme aphrodisiacs of the Italian people, if we allow that aphrodisiacs have any real existence.
    Italian cheese in its most distinguished form— mozzarella di bufala— certainly has most of the attributes upon which aphrodisiacs base their mysterious attraction. It may not quite reach the heights of those witches’ brews which tempt the sexually sluggish with their fusion of hope and alarm: ‘Take several brains of male sparrows,’ Aristotle instructs, ‘and pigeons that have not begun to fly’—these to be boiled with turnips and carrots in goat’s milk, and then sprinkled with clover seeds. But authentic mozzarella di bufala is rare, and rarity (plus difficulty of access or extraction) is the thing.
    The cheese is produced in tiny quantities in an almost inaccessible swamp south of Naples by an outdated animal whose ancestors were probably brought to this once-Greek colony in classical antiquity. Because there is so little of it, and because it is so superior to its many commercial imitations, mozzarella di bufala is expensive. During the Second World War, I spent a year in the vicinity of these swamps and watched the unsuccessful peasant descendants of a heroic past sloshing miserably through the swamp water to root up the occasional edible plant. The finest present I could send to any Italian friend driven by the disruptions of war from this splendid area was a kilo of mozzarella with all the overbrimming magic that for them it contained.
    It was during my war year in Naples that I first noticed one of the outstanding mysteries concerning aphrodisiacs. Why were so many educated men prepared to submit themselves, even if only occasionally, to patent absurdities and primitive beliefs?
    Many of my Italian friends had completed university courses. One was a lecturer in psychology,