Visiting a transvestite religious festival outside Naples

It’s a bitter winter’ s day and everyone is moving except for Angelo, who is rooted, solid as a rock, in the midst of the crowd. His curved body is topped by a black flat-cap on grey curls, and he is so short and round it is difficult to tell whether he is sitting or standing. He has a blooming jowl, deep-set eyes, and resembles nothing so much as an amenable scone. We are in the mountains of Basilicata and he is here to sing popular Neapolitan songs. He holds an instrument which is like a great wooden fork with movable prongs. The prongs are straight, square and very blue. When he shakes himself about they clack together like giant castanets. I ask him what the instrument is called, but he seems to think it is needless curiosity to give it a name:

‘Oh, this in my hand?’ he says, and looks down at it as if he’s never seen it before: ‘How would I know? It’s in my hand, I play it’.

The steep road is becoming choked with buses that glint aggressively in the harsh light. They trail out of the tiny parking space and breathlessly wheeze their doors open and shut. From one a flock of laughing, flirtatious, outrageously dressed women flood onto the snow. There is something unsettling about them; they are either mannered or mask-like under their heavy make up, all red lips and chunky blonde hair. It’s hard to lay my finger on what exactly is out of place. They bring a buzz as they flow raucously into the crowd clotting the piazza.

Angelo clacks his prongs and music spontaneously erupts around us. I stare blurrily at one of the ladies mincing in front of me. And suddenly I am aware that she’s actually mincing, twirling her bare torso and pink feather boa on theatrical tiptoes, periscoping sideways over thrust-out shoulders, under spinning castanets. And of course I realise what was so odd about all those women: they were not women at all, this is not a woman, and nor is ‘her’ partner, who now I realise is enormous, and has a jaw of steel and a greasy low ponytail. Not even their retinue: one broad-shouldered, well-wrapped figure, slowly flipping a cymbal which flashes in the sun. Or am I imagining things now? No, he’s bending towards me and blowing a kiss from thin scarlet lips that glow from behind a darkening of stubble.