La Superba (35 page)

“Piazzetta Cambiaso.”

She gave me a confused look.

“That little piazza on the crossroads between Vico dietro il Coro di Santa Maria delle Vigne and Vico delle Lepre, opposite Da Francesa, the fish restaurant, between Piazza Soziglia and Via della Maddalena, actually on the corner of Piazza Lavagna.”

“I don't know that part.”

“De Maddalena.”

“I never go there. I never go further than Piazza Soziglia and Via Luccoli.”

There you had it again. Maybe it was better that the whole project had ended in disaster. Real Genoese like the signora didn't even dare to set foot in those alleys.

“But you know the rest of Centro Storico.”

“I've lived here a lot longer than my youthful appearance might suggest, Leonardo.”

“More than twenty years?”

“Don't flatter me. At least, not in such a cheap way. I know every street in this neighborhood, Molo.”

“Do you know Vico dei Librai?”

She seemed to freeze. “Why do you ask that?”

“Oh, no reason. It's just…”

“Did somebody ask you the way?”

“Yes, it was…”

“An old woman? Where?”

“Just next to Porta Soprana. On Salita del Prione.”

The signora made the sign of the cross.

8.

“You've met her,” the signora said, “the old lady of Vico dei Librai.” She was speaking softly all of a sudden, as though we were discussing someone who had just died.

“Is she famous?”

“You could say that. Or, rather, you couldn't say that, because to be famous you at least have to exist, which in her case is definitely the question. But that question is famous. She's a myth, but anyone staying in these dark alleys long enough, where the shadows are more skittish than the rats, runs into her sooner or later. What did she look like?”

I told her the whole story. She nodded. “Yes,” she said quietly, “that's exactly what the other witnesses said about her. And that hundred-lira note, do you still have it?”

“No, the barman in the Barbarossa kept it. She was using it to pay for a drink, after all. But please tell me who she is.”

“Vico dei Librai doesn't exist, at least, not anymore. It was in the area that used to be called Madre di Dio, just near the old Barbarossa city walls, at the foot of Porta Soprana. It was an old working class neighborhood. One night in 1942, the neighborhood was flattened by shelling from the English fleet. And after the war, they built that hideous new Genoa that you know, with new streets and tarmacked squares named after poets who'd have been rendered speechless at the sight of those underground motorways and fly-overs. Piazza Dante, Via D'Annunzio, and the Giardini di Plastica. Vico dei Librai used to be somewhere there. Until one winter's night in 1942.

“The story goes that the old lady of Vico dei Librai was on her way home that evening. She'd taken bread to the orphans and flowers to the church. She was later than usual that night because she'd had to shelter from the bombing. When things finally quieted down, she continued on her way home. She was overcome by the cold somewhere near Campo Pisano. She stopped to rest on the steps of the doorway to a palazzo and passed out. Or died. Or maybe it's the same thing. But when she woke up, her neighborhood didn't exist anymore. Since then she's been roaming the city, particularly on bitter winter nights, asking the way to Vico dei Librai in antiquated Genoese dialect.”

9.

In terms of ghosts and spirits, I've had a clear policy all my life. Although there is no scientific evidence for their existence and every checkable and verifiable foundation of modern metaphysics excludes the possibility of their existence, I've always chosen, against my better judgment, to believe in their existence because it's more amusing than justifiably not believing in them. The stories are too wonderful to dismiss as nonsense and then ignore. I've believed in them as I've believed in the characters of novels who have come into my life and whom I understand in so much as they play a part in a story that interests me. And in that way, I can picture them as fully alive.

But you can imagine, dear friend, that it's a rather unsettling experience if ghosts suddenly decide to exist on their own, instead of me beneficently allowing them to exist. That's not
what's supposed to happen. Then I lose control. Neither do I want a character in a novel whom I've invented to come and sit down at my table and interfere with my chapter structure and the way I'm depicting him, threatening to inform the trade union for fictional figures about my dubious practices and considering taking that ultimate measure: going on strike. That would be a pretty mess. It happened to me before, with my last book,
Real Life: A Novel
, when the characters, under the leadership of master schemer Drinsky, started a revolt because of what they considered to be disappointing catering, and it turned into a bloodbath. I had to make an example of that Drinsky and execute him. I don't want to have to go through that a second time. So the last thing I need is a ghost who decides to exist.

And I wasn't even drunk that evening. I had been planning to be, but everything was closed and that was exactly why I'd slipped and scrambled uphill to the historical Bar Barbarossa. I really did see her. I really did talk to her. I really did hold that hundred-lira note. I can start doubting all those things retrospectively, but that's just as irrational as believing in ghosts.

The signora gave me a book about Genoa's ghosts, poorly written tourist trash, but she's in there, the old woman of Vico dei Librai, and everything was the same. That was exactly what she'd looked like, exactly how she'd acted, exactly the question she'd asked and that was exactly the way she'd mysteriously vanished. If I'd read the book first, I might have been able to invent that I'd actually met her. But the other way round, no, that doesn't work, there are too many consequences.

I read the whole book as a knee-jerk reaction. Genoa was truly
infested with ghosts. And the worst thing is that I'm seeing them everywhere now. I go to Piazza San Matteo and bump into Branca Doria, who shows me his blood-smeared hands. Centuries ago, he used to live in the beautiful palazzo to the left of the church. His good friend and brother-in-law, Michele Zanche, while visiting him, was betrayed and murdered in cold blood by Doria. This led Dante to place Doria in the third zone of the ninth ring of hell, even though he was still alive when Dante was writing. But at that time, people knew that anyone betraying a friend would immediately lose their soul and reside in hell, while their earthly body would be possessed by a demon, until their heart gave out. Doria tried to wipe off his bloodied hands on the second column on the left of the church.

At Porta dei Vacca, I saw the coach driven by a monk who was faceless under his hood, taking the restless victims of violence to a quiet place in the mountains. I heard the prisoners' chains rattling on Campo Pisano. I saw the veiled woman of Vico del Duca, and on Piazza del Amor Perfetto I saw the beautiful prostitute holding a cabbage from a window on the fifth floor, but when I took a better look, I saw that it wasn't a cabbage but the head of a jealous lover.

Just by there, on Piazza Banchi, at night I heard the ethereal music of the composer Alessandro Stradella, who had met with major success in Venice but had fallen in love with the wrong woman there. He'd fled to Genoa and hidden in the labyrinth. But an assassin had been able to find him and stabbed him on the steps as he tried to escape into the church.

On my way home, I sometimes saw a man in a purple tunic leaning against the portico of the San Donato church. That's
Stefano Raggi. He was wrongly accused of betraying the Doge and, to save himself from being disgraced, rammed a crucifix into his heart on the church steps, screaming that he would never leave the city.

And the worst was Via del Campo, in the middle, by the fountain. In the light of the moon, I saw the bloodiest of scenes, like a macabre kind of
son et lumière
. Giulio Cesare Vacchero's house once stood here, a nobleman and putative confidant of the Doge, who conspired against him with Count Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy and then was betrayed in turn. A supposed friend informed the Doge of the plot and Guilio Cesare Vacchero was executed, his possessions confiscated, his sons banished, his house razed to the ground, and now in the place where his house once stood, there's a marble column with a Latin inscription that has immortalized all of this for eternity:

    
JULIJ CAESARIS VACHERIJ

    
PERDITISSIMI HOMINIS

    
INFAMIS MEMORIA

    
QUI CUM IN REMPUBLICAM CONSPIRASSET

    
OBTRUNCATO CAPITE PUBLICATIS BONIS

    
EXPULSIS FILIIS DIRUTAQUE DOMO

    
DEBITAS POENAS LUIT

    
A. S. MDCXXVIII

I don't need to translate that for you. Anyone can understand it. And his grandchildren were so ashamed of it they built the fountain to obscure the view of this column.

By now I no longer know whether I can see the apparitions because as a writer I have been occupationally cursed with a great deal of empathy and the old lady of Vico dei Librai has weakened reason's last line of defense, causing me to lose myself in my imagination, or whether I'm really seeing and hearing them and rapidly losing my mind.

10.

I try to imagine it. Every boy born in the known world back then dreamed of it. Every shield-bearer up to his ankles in shit, cleaning the stables, fell asleep with cheeks red with excitement that he saw reflected in the suit of armor he'd polished for his master until it shined. And he'd never forget the day the horses were saddled. The quiet, dull clap of black leather on the back of a gelding as the stirrups tinkled. The flapping of the banners. The heavy thumping footsteps of a knight weighed down with armor. The groaning and squeaking of the pulley that dropped him onto his horse's hollow back. The historical pronouncement that echoed in the cavities of his suit of armor. The dry click of his helmet's visor. The swelling storm. The banners do battle with the wind. You avert your gaze submissively as you pass his shield with its religious insignia. A determined sword snaps into its scabbard. The best sword ever wrought. Thousands of swords snap in response. The best swords ever seen on the surface of this heavy, black, boggy earth: clumped, fertile, black. The order is given in a guttural bark. The horse whinnies at the sharp jab of the brand new shining spurs in its dun flanks. Hundreds of horses whinny.
You ride behind them with the carts of onions and potatoes. It's the happiest day of your life. You're on your way. The adventure is beginning. Your life is beginning. It's beginning at last.

Months later you're standing at the gates, emaciated beneath the dusty, tattered pennants. You saw dozens of good men drown in the first river they had to cross. In the southern expanses it was easy to survive stealing chickens from the farmers and raping their daughters. And that's where the rendezvous with the troops from the islands took place. They were a week later than agreed, but more numerous than the stars in the night sky. Their king had the heart of a lion. He was three hundred feet tall, sat on a golden horse, and radiated light. His cloak bearing the religious insignia flowed behind him like the ocean embracing the continents. He didn't eat onions and potatoes but tiger marrow and dragon's wings, served in the gilded skulls of his enemies.

You crossed the mountains with him and his army. The mountains were higher than anything you'd ever seen in your life or could have imagined. An experienced spear-thrower wouldn't be able to reach any further than the sturdy, indifferent ankle of one of those giants. The army's top archer wouldn't make it to the line where the trees had been eaten away from the top with his lightest, fastest arrow and his heaviest iron bow, which no one other than he could span. You trudged along slippery, frozen mountain passes with thousands of shining knights. Noblemen disappeared into ravines, suits of armor and horses and all. It's a wonder you still have your cart of onions and potatoes and that you're alive. Many froze to death at night in the camps. Many collapsed during the day of exhaustion and were left behind. Some fell prey to wolves
in the night, as white as the snow that concealed them. Cutting winds wailed in anticipation of the new victims of a new night. Indifferent mountains stayed silent. The day grinned and the night sliced. Major figures from the known world fell into oblivion with sliding hooves, jingling with skillfully forged precious metals. Dying screams began to seem commonplace.

But things did come to an end, even for those like you who had survived. You no longer knew whether you should be thankful or not. When you saw the sizzling plains of the south, you almost wished you had been torn apart by hot-blooded snow wolves, high up on the roof of the world, shivering with cold. Eye to eye with the heat-cracked mud before you, it seemed like mercy in comparison. And this is where the second rendezvous with the knights of the kingdom took place. Their tents were more elegant than a princess' skirts. Their suits of armor gleamed in the latest fashion. Plumes fanned frivolously on their helmets. The stirrups of their coiffed horses had been gilded. The onions and potatoes were no longer needed. They ate half-drowned songbirds with marbled peacock's tongue and stuffed caviar. Their golden helmets shone next to their golden plates like at home in their white castles on gentle rivers that ran through woods where unicorns grazed that could only be painted in pastel tones. And when, the next morning, the golden king had the bugle blown, it was the loveliest sound you'd ever heard. You buttoned up your trousers, let the onions be, and stumbled determinedly to your deeply desired downfall.

11.

As the mountain mists and the shimmering of the southern plains still clouded your eyes—or perhaps it was tiredness or the drunkenness of adventure or the blinding brilliance of hundreds of thousands of suits of armor in the sun—you imagined you could see the contours of a city on the horizon. Thousands of towers. You heard the bells chiming. Walls as high as castles and palaces as high as mountains. You'd never seen anything like it. A landscape of marble, built by human hand. Behind those smooth, shining, white, inaccessible, high walls that spanned the entire width of the land as far as the eye could see must live a privileged folk who bathe in asses' milk before dressing in purple, it couldn't be otherwise. Where you come from, they scrape onions and potatoes from the black earth; here the most colorful fruits grow on every tree, fat silver fish leap onto the banks to offer themselves to you, and pheasants and birds of paradise fly through the open window and spontaneously chirp into the hissing pans of golden oil. Where you come from, filthy beer is drunk from dirty tankards; here clear wine spurts from every fountain on every square. Perhaps you're exaggerating a little. But the city did make that much of an impression when you saw it in the distance. Her name was Genoa. The other shield-bearers had already been whispering its name for months like a secret prayer. This was the capital of an independent republic, they said: the Serenissima Repubblica di Genova. They said its motto was “
respublica superiorem non recognoscens
.” You didn't really understand it, which impressed you all the more.