Expensive Like Salt: Neno in the Shops of Rome

Kokalari uses a domestic setting throughout What Caught Her Eye: storytelling that does not pause daily work but unfolds alongside it. Neno talks. The cabbage gets cut. The meat burns on the fire and someone is sent to check on it. The potatoes must not be thrown in yet or they will turn to mush by dinnertime. More cabbage is needed or there will not be enough burek. All of it happens in the same breath as the shops of Rome.

AUTHOR & LITERARY HISTORYTRANSLATION

Albanika Press

8/25/20264 min read

After lunch, Neno sits at the head of the room with a tray of cabbage. Her sleeves are rolled up, her hair uncombed, the strings of her headscarf hanging loose. She opens the leaves with her right hand, chooses the best ones, lays them in her left palm, and cuts them carefully, piece by piece. Around her the household is at work: the eldest daughter-in-law nursing Ali, Haxho embroidering for her dowry, Ibrahim’s wife washing dishes in the cellar, the neighbor Haso waiting at the doorstep for her son to return from market.

There is no other sound in the room but Neno’s voice.

This is the domestic setting Kokalari uses throughout What Caught Her Eye: storytelling that does not pause daily work but unfolds alongside it. Neno talks. The cabbage gets cut. The meat burns on the fire and someone is sent to check on it. The potatoes must not be thrown in yet or they will turn to mush by dinnertime. More cabbage is needed or there will not be enough burek. All of it happens in the same breath as the shops of Rome.

The Window and What It Holds

What Rome caught Neno’s eye with was not its monuments or its streets but its shops. Specifically: what was in them, how it was displayed, and how much it cost.

Money vanishes from your hands there, she tells Haso. Expensive like salt. But it is hard not to buy — what wonderful things there were to see. Shirts and underthings piled one atop another in shop windows. Factory-made clothes with not a wrinkle on them, as if frozen in ice. Pillows embroidered in silk and velvet. Glassware that shimmered where it stood. They made you envious just to look at them, let alone to own them.

And then the mannequins: big dolls dressed in ready-to-wear clothes, looking like living people, as if they are about to speak. The image startles Neno into something close to wonder. She “lost her eyes” on a suit already cut and sewn — a phrase that in Albanian carries the sense of being transfixed, unable to look away.

The department store with four floors stops her entirely. On the first, woolens, stockings, silks. On the second, underwear and ready-made clothes. On the third, men’s clothing. On the fourth, toys for children. Even a grown person, she says, would feel envy — let alone a child. Then her granddaughter disappears from sight and is found ascending the moving staircase alone, laughing. All you had to do was step on it and it would carry you up.

“Oh, the things they have to make life easy — and then they say they work hard and get tired. We — we break our backs all day long, from morning till evening.”

The Calculation Behind the Wonder

What makes Neno’s account of the shops so characteristic is that admiration and practicality run together without a seam between them. She does not simply marvel. She assesses.

When Haxho asks why she didn’t bring back shoes for each of them, Neno’s response is immediate: wear them once on the stones of Gjirokastra and you would leave their soles behind. Pretty, yes — but like cigarette paper; they don’t last at all. She regrets the bed sheets she did not buy, and describes the shop in which she saw them with evident longing — ten or fifteen shopkeepers, each coaxing, showing, waiting hand and foot, cutting cloth. The salesgirls with black aprons and red lips made sure you did not walk out empty-handed.

The longing is real. But so is the household arithmetic that governs it. She travelled out of necessity, she reminds Haso; her mind was not truly on shopping. And when she did buy, she did not buy much. The bed sheets she keeps thinking about — the ones she did not get — are the measure of a woman who saw what she wanted and did not allow herself to have it, because she was keeping the sum in her head.

Haso’s Counterpoint

The story’s most revealing exchange is not between Neno and her granddaughter but between Neno and Haso. When Neno describes the moving staircase and the ease of life in Rome, Haso responds with a bitterness that goes beyond the conversation:

“Some are born of mothers, and some are born of cows in this world. God has dropped us in this corner and forgotten to give us any blessings. Our ribs ache from work, our arms are sore from washing, and we never see a bright day— we never step outside the house.”

Neno does not dispute it. I don’t say no, dear Haso, she replies. They live the life, and we only call ours a life. That’s how things have turned out — there’s nothing to be done about it.

The exchange is one of the quietest and most honest moments in the Rome stories. Neno has returned with the knowledge of what exists elsewhere — the shops, the moving staircase, the parks, the ease — and she and Haso sit with cabbage and embroidery and unweaned children and acknowledge, without drama, the distance between that world and this one. The story does not resolve it. It returns to the tray, the cellar, the daughter-in-law washing dishes for what seems like a hundred hours, and Neno going down to check on her, holding the tray in both hands.

Old Neno’s Stories — the first English translation of Musine Kokalari’s work — is available now:

📖 Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/old-nenos-stories-musine-kokalari/1149899284

📖 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Old-Nenos-Stories-Selected-Literature/dp/B0GYGKL94G

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