La Superba (7 page)

But no. It was a pity, but hey. I washed the outside of the garbage bag with a sponge scourer. The leg inside felt disgustingly soft. It was decaying. All of a sudden I could no longer take it. I had to get rid of it as quickly as possible. I decided washing would no longer be necessary if I just threw the bag in the water. Somewhere far away. And of course not in the sea. I wasn't that stupid. The package would be politely returned to sender by the languid summer waves. I needed fast flowing water. I needed the river. I walked toward the Bisagno.

17.

There wasn't much water in the Bisagno. It was summer. The river, which can swell in the autumn to present a serious threat to the area around Brignole Station, had shrunk to an impotent trickle in a bed of dried-up rocks. Traffic raced along behind me along Via Bobbio. I saw the Marassi football stadium in the distance. Behind it was the prison, and behind that the graveyard.

There I stood with a garbage bag containing a rotting woman's leg. Yep. Well done, Leonardo. It would take an Olympian throw to even reach the water. A police car with siren and flashing light raced past. I could go to the bridge. And then I could drop it from the middle…Do you believe this yourself? The package would get stuck in a stupid little bush at the second bend, if it didn't immediately get stranded on the stones. And then what? Climb down. I could picture the whole thing. Mr. Poet descending corpulently from the embankment to pick up a garbage bag from the riverbed. And what do you think you're doing, Sir? Do the contents of said garbage bag look familiar to you? And might you find it a good idea to accompany us to the nearby station so you can explain in peace and quiet and greater detail what exactly we're dealing with here? Or words to that effect. Or not to that effect at all, because unlike the dust-busting brigade in my homeland whose daily work involves getting cats out of trees, the Italian
carabinieri
are an army that have been fighting organized crime for decades. Blind eyes are sometimes turned in their prison cells. They know how to get a person to confess. They have plenty of experience.

I had to go to the sea. Nervi. High cliffs. No beach. I should weigh down the bag with stones, but I didn't want to open it another time and smell what I never wanted to smell again. I should have put another bag around it and put the stones in there. But there was no way I was going home again. I had to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Maybe I could try to throw stones onto it. Or something like that.

I took the train from Brignole Station. It stopped at Sturla, Quarto, and Quinto before it reached Nervi. It seemed to take forever. Commuters wrinkled their noses. Yes, I'm sorry, I'm aware of it. I'm sitting here with a rotting leg in my bag. And as a matter of fact, everything you have in your briefcase is probably much worse. I don't even want to know. No, I really don't.

Nervi's station is on the seafront. By now, I'd really had it up to here with the whole business, so much so that I couldn't summon up the energy to look for a special, secret, well-chosen place and just dumped the bag into the sea from the platform. The waves were on my side. Pure luck. The bag floated away. There were black clouds above the mountains on the other side of the city. Forest fires. A yellow fire-fighting plane maneuvered above the bay. Tomorrow was going to be hot again. I used the same ticket to take the train home.

18.

Sunday had descended upon Genoa. The city lay like a woman with a bad cold who'd decided to spend the day in bed. The pillows were damp, the bottom sheet damp, the duvet twisted in
its cover, but she didn't have the strength to change the sheets or make the bed. Bright sun shone through the window onto her snotty face. She turned over and closed her eyes. Yesterday's dirty dishes were still piled up on the counter. Her risky evening dress lay in a corner of the room. She wouldn't be swishing and swirling before the hungry eyes of the night this evening. She reached with a sigh for the half-empty packet of cigarettes on the bedside table and the lighter. After two drags, she extinguished the cigarette on the saucer under the cup of her now-lukewarm tea. Everything tasted funny today. It was hot, unbearably hot. She kicked the duvet half onto the floor and fell asleep. She didn't dream about anything in particular. She dreamed gray, lingering dreams like a boring, tacky film, and would remember nothing of them. When she awoke it was the evening. But she didn't feel better.

I shuffled through the empty streets of my new city. The shutters had been lowered in all the alleyways. The hawkers' raucous arias were nowhere to be heard, and nowhere to be heard was the fierce barking or scornful throat-clearing of life. Even the beggars had taken the day off. Scattered about were a few bars that were reluctantly a little bit open, yawning behind their façades. The Bar of Mirrors was closed. I felt like a man who had done his best with roses and champagne, had ironed his best suit to the nines and lightly sprinkled his cheeks with his most expensive aftershave, ready for the evening and the rest of his life, and the woman he has a date with fails to show up. She doesn't send a text until late that night. “In bed with a bad cold. Sorry.” And he replies, “No worries. Better for me too anyway. Get well soon. Hope to see you.” And he throws a wine glass in anger. Then sighs deeply.
He gets to his feet to tidy away the broken glass, cutting his finger in the process. A drop of blood stains his suit.

I was alone. Of course I was alone. I'd had that feeling for the past couple of days, but on this Sunday, it broke through like a heavy cold, dampening my desire to do anything at all. I tried to reflect on this, but didn't feel like it. Loneliness had nestled in my cavities like a gray lump of snot. It made my face hurt. The heat was unbearable, even in the darkness of the narrow alleyways I knew like the inside of my pocket. I didn't feel like sweating, either, but I was. Maybe I should have stayed in bed. But I didn't feel like that, either.

What have I achieved up to this point? Back home everyone recognizes me and I'm pestered every day for an autograph or an opinion about something. Not here. I have taken up residence. I carry a key to a real Genoese house. It is a large, real key with a fat bow on a long steel shaft, which has to be forced with conviction into a heavy old door, and you need to use force to turn the key. I didn't intend this as a metaphor, but in retrospect it could be interpreted as such. Go ahead then, my friend. Invent something beautiful about heavy doors and the large, indigenous keys needed, along with conviction and force. I'm sure you can do it. Think about Rashid too. I don't feel like pre-digesting it for you. It's Sunday. I'm alone.

Out of boredom, I try to remember the Sundays of my childhood. They had to do with paving stones and ants that had taken up residence in the strips of sand between the paving stones without a permit. I considered that illegal occupancy and tried to chase them away with spit and sticks and, when that didn't help, warm
yellow piss. In the olden days, it was always hot on Sundays.

In Genoa, the pavements were as gray and solid as the walls of her palazzi. Big blocks of sagging stone. You'd need three men to lift one of those boulders and set it straight. The cracks between them were the city's ashtrays. There wasn't a single ant that would dare start a family here. In many places, there was barely enough space between the stones for a rat's nest. In Genoa's glory years, from above, it must have looked like a stone floor of gray palaces with cracks and crannies between them where rats could come and go as they pleased. In their glory years, God tried to fight them with spit and sticks and, when that didn't help, warm yellow piss. The city still looks like shit. But God is no longer who he used to be and he's given up. La Superba beat God by blocking his view of the alleyways. Every kind of dirt and decadence can run rampant in the cracks and cavities of this city. There are even transvestites here, it seems. I haven't found them yet. I mean, I haven't run into any yet.

I'd invented a game, and also come up with an official name for it. You're either a celebrated writer or you aren't. It's called “girl surfing.” The rules are simple. You pick out a random girl as she walks by and start to follow her. If you tend to go on aimless walks anyway, you might as well walk after a random girl. As you follow her, you fantasize about her. About what she's like up close and under all those clothes, about how she'd sigh and reach for a half-empty packet of cigarettes on your bedside table. You keep on doing this until you see a prettier girl. Then you swap and carry on following her until you see an even prettier girl. The game becomes more and more satisfying the longer you play it.
And in the meantime you get to know the city. To add a didactic element to the game, I invented the extra rule that I had to fantasize in Italian. I would learn the most by doing so out loud, but I realized I'd better be careful with that. I caught a fantastic wave during the week, one of the best since I arrived in Genoa. She was small and olive-colored with a nonchalant miniskirt and racy boots. I got to follow her all the way from Maddalena, past Molo, to Portoria. My fantasies became ever more colorful and explicit. I was able to express them beautifully in Italian. But at a certain point, I was standing close to her in a herd of commuters waiting for a traffic light to turn green, and I'd forgotten that, for autodidactic reasons, I was speaking out loud. I decided to switch then, even though my fantasies at that very moment were about what I would do when she reached the heavy door to her house and rammed the big key with conviction and force into her lock.

Not much surfing to be done today. Even for the waves it was Sunday. Here and there, a tired tourist in Bermuda shorts was encouragingly patted on her fat rolls by the skinny man of the moment carrying the map and the rucksack containing important things firmly strapped to his back. “Where are our international travel insurance papers? Have you seen our international travel insurance papers?” And she didn't even recognize me. I was alone.

What had I achieved up to now?

19.

“You've made a big impression in Centro Storico. Everyone knows you.”

Her name was Cinzia. She was a young, pretty girl with a long face. I recognized her as the waitress from Caffè Letterario on Piazza delle Erbe. The one with the red tables. I often went there since I knew what it was called. But there was something odd about her. I saw her too often during the day, and too often on her own for an Italian girl of her age, especially for an Italian girl that went about dressed in a suggestive top, deeply cut, with an open back, no sleeves, and shorts. She had lovely legs and wore high heels. She wore makeup, but it was subtle and tasteful. Almost every afternoon she sat on her own at a table in the Bar of Mirrors, studying. She came from Sardinia and was studying education in Genoa. She'd been here two years. Sometimes I saw her with Don, an emeritus professor of English language and literature in his seventies who had been living in a hotel room for twenty years with a view of the seven bars on the Piazza delle Erbe. He had a Union Jack hanging out of his window, didn't speak any Italian, and survived on a sole diet of gin and tonic. “
Capuccino senza schiuma
,” as he called it. But I hadn't seen him for a few days now, and she was sitting on her own in the Bar of Mirrors, and she came outside to smoke, and because there weren't any free tables on the terrace, I invited her to join me at mine.

“That's what you say.”

“It's true. I was sitting at this table yesterday, too, and there were other people sitting here, people I didn't know, and they were talking about you. About you. They were wondering who you were and what you were doing here.”

She was attracted to older intellectuals. That must be her problem. You saw it every evening on Italian TV. It didn't matter
which program you watched. Whether it was infomercials, which it mostly was, or a talk show, or a quiz, or a sports program, there was always a light blue background with a handful of young, pretty, stupid girls in bikinis and a single older intellectual, sweating in his suit, making jokes about the girls—only they were too thick to understand them: a golden formula, I give you that. The man uses a few subjunctives, one of the girls doesn't get it and says something ungrammatical, the audience screams, and the girl has to take off her bikini top as punishment, causing the intellectual of the moment to make another cutting remark, causing the audience to scream again.

All of Italy is made like that. It's the man's job to make cutting remarks and the woman's job to take her top off afterward. In any case, the gender roles are clear. You know who's who. That's the way the Church likes it. A man shouldn't suddenly turn out to be a woman or vice versa. I wondered what it would be like to take off Cinzia's top.

“That's what I like about you. I really appreciate that. You are the first—no, second—man I've met who hadn't immediately wanted to take off my top after we've exchanged just a couple of words.”

“Maybe that's because I'm not Italian.” I smiled in a very mysterious, intellectual manner.

“Maybe.” She fiddled with her top a little.

“I always find Italian men quite—how do you say it in Italian—quite expressive.”

“Women too,” she said.

20.

Before she left, Cinzia gave me a mission: I had to find the Mandragola. I was charmed by the medieval allure of the quest, and I wanted to ask her whether I could wear the silken handkerchief embroidered with her initials beneath my shining breastplate during my long, long journey to traverse sevenfold mountains of sevenfold rivers, and sevenfold woods. I would count upon her snow-white handkerchief to protect me from griffins and seas of fire, witches and dragons that drenched themselves in the dripping blood of druids.

The Mandragola is a legendary flower which grows in just one place and blooms only once in a hundred years. The magic scent of her blossom could save mankind. “It's a bar. More like a kind of nightclub.” “And where is it then?” “I'm not telling you. I'll be working at the Caffè Letterario tomorrow. Come and let me know if you've found it.”