La Superba (20 page)

Since the beginning of the summer, there has been a blonde woman who makes an appearance as a duchess almost every day on the terrace of Caffè Letterario on Piazza delle Erbe. Just as Her Majesty's arrival in former times was announced by a chorus of trumpets, her appearance is preceded by her barking lapdog, which isn't on a leash and which runs along ahead of her barking hysterically because it has learned by now that Caffè Letterario's terrace is a place where they serve aperitif snacks that little dogs can cajole for themselves if they look cute enough, or, if that doesn't work, tenaciously make it clear with irritating barking that the only way to shut them up is with a tasty morsel. She follows along at an appropriate distance. She has long, blonde, frizzy curls that stand out quite noticeably among this Mediterranean constellation and wraps herself as a rule in long, loose garments. She's of an indeterminate age above sixty. She walks just a little too slowly, as though suffering from physical discomfort, and along with this, the smile she bestows on everyone who stares at her is a little too forced, as though to show that she's a brave, strong woman who
won't be daunted by physical discomfort. But both the painfully slow walk and the fake smile she tries to mask are put-on. She is consummate phoniness. Although there's nothing wrong with her, she plays the role of someone who is smiling bravely to show there's nothing wrong with her.

When she finally reaches the terrace and the dog is jumping up at her barking enthusiastically, her gaze grows fixed. There are actually a few tables free but they don't come up to her strict requirements. As everyone in her duchy ought to know, she drinks dry martini cocktails, and these are served in low wide glasses with a stem and filled up to the brim. That's why it would be impossible for her to sit down at a sloping table. That almost every table on the slightly sloping medieval cobblestones of Piazza delle Erbe is sloping is no excuse in her eyes. And as she stands there in a posture that radiates head-shaking incomprehension at the shocking lack of class awareness in her subjects, one of the waitresses comes running outside to set up a new table especially, while uttering exhaustive apologies. “Thank you, waitress,” she says without looking at her, before draping herself over her chair with a sigh.

Her whole attitude doesn't suggest that she has come to Piazza delle Erbe to merely enjoy drinking dry martini cocktails—she is granting an audience. Sitting there the whole evening drinking while her lapdog barks incessantly is a favor she bestows on the people out of kindness and generosity. When no one appears to lap up her wisdom, which sometimes happens for unknown reasons, she reaches for her mobile phone to provide random victims from her almost endless list of contacts with unrequested hours of good advice. She adopts a pained smile when confronted with so much
ignorance at the other end of the line and is visibly impressed with herself for not losing her patience while she generously explains for the nth time how the world works, if you look at it objectively. She understands every imaginable topic: politics and spirituality, men and dogs, gastronomy and health, astrology and ethics, interior decorating and exorcism, psychology and the weather—and when anyone else offers a different opinion on these subjects she considers it a waste of her precious time. Worse still, it's a failure to appreciate the inexhaustible well of knowledge she delves into and, in fact, nothing less than an insult to the generosity with which she imparts it to those lucky individuals, but she'll hide her disappointment at so much ungratefulness behind a fake smile that actually means she's hiding her disappointment at so much ungratefulness. She'll never ask a question because she knows all the answers, even to the questions we've never asked ourselves. If it had been up to her, she could have solved everyone else's problems before they even happened. Her thankless vocation is to explain everything, to just keep on explaining everything over and over again to the deaf ears of the blind populace because she is, as we ought to know, a good person.

And as soon as anyone sits down at her table, the true source of her wisdom is revealed. It's her voluminous handbag, along with other objects that she lugs around with her each day that mark her out as a woman of the world, prepared for anything—like a glue gun, mace, a spare wig, a roll of barbed wire, a goldfish bowl, underwear in all sizes, an angle grinder, and a spirit level. And what she fishes out of the bottom of her bag are the Major Arcana.

For a dry martini cocktail or five euros in cash, she'll read
your cards. In Italian they are called
tarocchi
—elsewhere, tarot. She has a large pack of cards with the most traditional illustrations and they are well used, anyone can see that from a few feet away. And the people who make use of her services aren't all superstitious old women, who are beyond rescue in any case. A remarkable number of uncertain young women turn up at her table. For them, five euros or the equivalent in martini is a serious amount of money. She shakes her old, wise head of frizzy blonde curls as they drink in her every word, shaking with nerves in the hope of catching a glimmer of good news about their future, or, if that's not possible, an ambiguous phrase that might also be interpreted positively with a bit of good will. Unfortunately, the cards leave no room for doubt. All character failings are visible and mistakes made in the past will be avenged and hope is an expression of naïveté or ignorance. And she can see in the cards that a young man will soon announce himself, but there isn't anything good to be expected from him, either. The witch smiles apologetically. The girl has to understand that she, unlike the many charlatans, doesn't beat about the bush. She tells them what the cards say, even when the message is tough. This is proof of her goodness. The girl goes up to the register, salty tears on her cheeks, to pay for one cocktail. She had hoped for better news, but still, she's grateful. Now at least she knows the truth. And that's worth more than wishful thinking. Isn't it?

I've observed it many times and constantly ask myself why the paying clientele have to be so brutally disappointed. What kind of peculiar take on customer relations is that? The witch sits there with the cards in front of her making everything up, so why not
make up something nice, I'd say. Then at least they'd come back. But I've realized that that was a naive thought. People go to her with problems. Her job is to take those problems seriously, to emphasize them and magnify them. Everything is much worse than you thought. That's true customer relations. If she said that it wasn't really all that bad, you'd go home whistling and wouldn't return because the problem would be gone. If, on the other hand, she said with a concerned smile that she was sorry to have to admit that all your concerns were justified and that the situation was even a little worse than you thought, you'd come back a week later with your worsened problems and quiver nervously as you ask whether the cards have something a little more favorable to say now. She'd shake her wise, old head with a smile. Of course she could pretend. But she's not like that. She's a good person. She'll always tell you the truth. And the truth is lying on the table before her. Unfortunately, the cards never lie.

The witch has a name. She's called Fulvia. I hate her. But that was perhaps clear by now.

5.

I went to the theater yesterday. The play wasn't very interesting. It consisted of a succession of three short monologues from the perspectives of three different people who had fled the poverty of early nineteenth-century Italy and emigrated to La Merica, as they consistently called the Promised Land on the other side of the Atlantic. The texts were based on authentic letters and diary extracts. It was interesting material, and the artistic goal of holding up a mirror
from the past to the current immigration problems was certainly legitimate, but the construction of three monologues was much too static and the piece devoid of any kind of dramatic tension.

I went because I'd been invited by the play's director, Walter, a very young man I met a few weeks ago in Zaccharia, the café next to the Mandragola, on the minuscule, well hidden square in front of the old Roman church of San Cosimo and San Damiano. The bar was frequented by all kinds of arty folks, mainly actors and actresses, and that was exactly why I didn't go there very often. Put a couple of dozen, in their eyes very talented and scandalously underappreciated, thespians in one room and before long the atmosphere will be somewhat fraught and hysterical. What's more, they all know I'm a writer and conveniently assume that I'm just as underappreciated as they are. Why else would I be in the Zaccharia? Right. That's the question I ask myself.

But Walter is a decent guy. At least he doesn't complain. He's a foreigner and that has something to do with it. Like me, he comes from the north. He is, if I remember correctly, half Danish and half French, born in Switzerland, and he's worked all over the place, mainly in England, Germany, and Spain. Thanks to his northern European background, he is characterized by a measure of sobriety and refreshing realism. Or you could say that the fact he lacks Italian genes deprives him of the talent to wallow melodramatically in typical Italian self-pity, deriving from a paradoxical mix of conceitedness and an inferiority complex. Instead of drowning his frustrations, bitterness, and anger at the disgusting, degenerate world in which there is apparently no place left for high art amid grimly nodding like-minded people, he does
something about it. Instead of waiting next to his telephone with a perpetually gloomy expression for the big job that never comes, he organizes small performances with actors he's friendly with. Bits and pieces. An adaptation of Kafka short stories in the cellars of Bar Il Conte in exchange for free drinks; improvised cabaret in Anna's nightclub for a hundred euros a night; an outdoor performance on the square after which the prettiest actress goes around with a hat—that kind of thing. They aren't particularly impressive productions that will give a good gloss to his CV, but in any case he's doing something.

And so now it's that play with the three monologues about Italian emigration in a tiny theater on Piazza Cambiaso in the red light district close to Via della Maddalena. It wasn't his own idea, he was asked to stage it. And he was the first person to agree with me that it lacked dramatic development and was actually a complete failure as a play. He'd played around a bit with the letters and diary fragments the actors had given him, but he wasn't a writer, he admitted it outright. Maybe I'd be able to take a look at it? The material was indeed interesting, wasn't it? There had to be a lot more to be had from it? I nodded. Maybe.

But the play wasn't the main reason he'd invited me. It was the theater. He gave me a tour after the show. It was a modest but exquisite renaissance palazzo with marble columns and frescoes by a pupil of Michelangelo. It had recently been wonderfully restored. A majestic marble staircase led to the upstairs floor where there was a tastefully furnished bar and small restaurant. The hall with columns and Gothic vaults on the ground floor gave access to the theater. It was intimate, no more than a hundred seats. But it was
ultramodern, completely decked out in the technical sense and maximally flexible with a completely collapsible stage, state-of-the-art audio equipment, and an arsenal of lights that many a technician from a big theater would find delectable. It was a polished pearl, a brilliant jewel, hidden in the deepest depths of the labyrinth.

“And do you know what the most remarkable thing is?” Walter said. “They hardly do anything with it. The current owners don't have a clue how to run a theater. They want to get rid of it. They've put it up for sale and already asked me if I might be interested. Of course I'm interested. It'd be a dream. But it's impossible for me to organize it all on my own. And that's why I thought of you, Ilja. How would you like to buy this theater with me?”

6.

I was honored that Walter clearly had that much faith in me, but of course I wasn't going to buy a theater. I'd never wanted to do that, so why would I suddenly want to do it now? Apart from that, I didn't have any money. So it was an easy decision.

I was charmed by the idea of doing something with the witness accounts of the great Italian emigration. Walter was right. It was fine material. And there was undoubtedly a lot more in the archives than these few letters and diary fragments he'd worked into his play. It had all happened a relatively short time ago. The two major emigration waves of Italians leaving for the United States or Latin America were at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It was a movement of unprecedented scale, a true mass migration. I'd googled the figures
and was shocked by them. The various sources I could quickly put my hands on were more or less in agreement that between 1860 and the beginning of the Second World War, a total of around twenty million Italians risked the crossing to the Promised Land on the other side of the Atlantic. Pause and let the magnitude of that sink in, my friend. Twenty million. That's almost a third of the current population of Italy. That's twenty-five percent more than the total population of my home country, infants and the elderly included. I know you can't use the figures like that because those twenty million Italians emigrated over a period of eighty years, but still, to get an idea of the gigantic dimensions; imagine if a third of the population moved somewhere else, or in the case of my home country, more than the total population. The entire country would be left empty. No one would live there anymore. Everyone gone to America. And then us in Europe worrying when a few hundred Senegalese get washed up on Lampedusa.

What's more, I began to realize that the story of the mass Italian emigration was enormously connected to this city. The Genoese and other inhabitants of Liguria were pretty much the pioneers. They were overrepresented in the first wave of emigration. Their favorite destination on the paradisiacal continent La Merica was the mysterious Land of Silver. They settled in large numbers in a district of Buenos Aires they called Boca, after their beloved fishing port, Boccadasse, which by now has been swallowed up by the city and is part of the Genoa Sturla area, but has lost none of its idyllic pull. Supporters of Boca Juniors, one of the big famous football clubs from that part of Buenos Aires, still called themselves “Zeneisi”—Genoese in Genoa dialect. The famous song
“
Ma se ghe pensu
,” the nostalgia-drenched anthem of all Italian emigrants, is sung in Genoese dialect. The story goes that the Genoese immigrants in Buenos Aires invented jeans. That's why they are called jeans—a bastardization of the word “Zeneise.” I'd heard that story before and naturally I'd never believed it, but it seems it's true. I've found various reliable sources that confirm this.