La Superba

by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

  “Well, that’s what I wanted to say. Now you know.

  “And, oh yes, one more thing. Feel free to go to the Bar of Mirrors. I don’t work there anymore. I handed in my notice this morning.”

  FIRST INTERMEZZO

  We All Live in a Yellow Submarine

  1.

  It was Don’s birthday and there was no way we could forget it. He was turning seventy-three. That morning I saw him sitting with Boar—that’s Elio’s nickname, the manager of the Schooner, a restaurant on Salita Pollaiuoli, you go past the Bar of Mirrors and it’s a bit further along, toward Via San Bernardo and San Donato. Boar has a simple strategy. No one can smoke in his restaurant unless it happens to be empty. That’s why the restaurant is closed pretty much all day. Boar stands there in his dirty wife-beater, puffing away behind the counter under the no smoking sign. Sometimes the door is open to let in some fresh air. Unsuspecting, high-spirited tourists, wandering in for a bite to eat in the world famous Schooner restaurant, are bundled off by the Boar. Chiuso. Closed. Shut. No, no restaurant today. Because otherwise he’d have to get changed, clear the ashtrays from the tables, look for the menus, work. He’d rather close the door again and turn up the music. Ella Fitzgerald. Listen to this. Sarah Vaughan. And then something with a sousaphone solo. His vest turns as yellow as his fingers, steeped in nicotine. Wine. Beer. Gin and tonic. Don. And anyone else in there has to be a friend of either Boar’s or Don’s. Even at eleven in the morning.

  Italian humor mainly consists of laughing very loudly after you’ve told a joke and then raising your voice and re-telling the same joke three times over. Sarah Vaughan sang a song called “You Are My Honeybee.” Boar, who, unlike the rest of them, understands a bit of English, translated the line into Italian. “She sings, ‘You are my honeybee.’ That means he comes along and pricks her, know what I mean?” He accompanied this with a vulgar gesture. While there was laughter around the bar, he raised his voice, clearly as pleased as punch with his minor success, and continued, “You are my honeybee. Get it? He has a sting…He pricks her with his…you know. And then she sings that he’s her honeybee. Get it? Get it?! You are my honeybee. Unbelievable. That’s what she’s singing. And he’s pricking her…” Again and again he made the same obscene gesture. And if anyone else tried to chime in, he defended his personal success by repeating the same thing even more loudly. An Italian party consists of telling as many jokes as possible, as often as possible, and drowning out any others trying to do the same.

  And among it all, Don floated, flourished, triumphed, and warbled like a jamming device. He danced along on a giant woolly cloud of gin and tonic. It was his birthday for sure. He had been in Genoa for more than twenty years by now, and he still hardly spoke any Italian, but he knew the obscene gestures as well as the next person. And as soon as the next girl came tripping in to wish him a happy birthday, he spread his arms and sang, “You are my honeybee,” to Boar’s great amusement and that of all the other Italians at the bar. Don knew how to make friends in Genoa, or anywhere else in the world—he didn’t care, as long as they served gin and tonic with as little tonic as possible, and as long as he was given special dispensation to smoke with the barman in a bar where you couldn’t smoke. He slapped women’s bottoms, squeezed their breasts, and laid his head on their laps. Clearly, a seventy-three-year-old alcoholic with an English accent could get away with a lot.

  “We’re just as scoundrelous as all those Italians,” he said to me in English.

  “We’re anthropologists,” I proposed.

  “Here’s to anthropologists! Let’s drink to that! Cheers, big ears!” And then he began to dish up a long, priceless anecdote about an anthropologist he’d met in Burma or Malaysia. I’d heard this anecdote ten times already, but each time I’d been denied the punch line because of the arrival of yet another woman needing to be serenaded, hugged, or felt up.

  At the time, Don was my dearest friend in the labyrinth. He was the only one who, by getting profusely lost every day, never got lost. His world had shrunk to a handful of bars near his hotel on Salita Pollaiuoli and although he regularly couldn’t find his way back to his hotel from the Piazza delle Erbe, which his room looked out on, in his unbroken delirium, he was the most constant, stable, reliable, and most realistic of all the people I knew. And I don’t mean that as a funny way of saying that he was predictable and easily locatable at any given moment of the day. He was the only one who understood. He didn’t live in a fantasy world; because in all its modesty, he had made a beautiful fantasy come true: drinking himself to death, laughing and dancing among cheerful sweet nothings, smiling Italians, and a few bottoms to slap and tits to squeeze. He no longer had any illusions. Instead, he had decided that every day was a party. Every day was Don’s birthday for Don. Grande Don.

  2.

  His real name was Donald Perrygrove Sinclair, but because he was the godfather of the square and, on a busy night, hundreds came by to kiss his hand, he was called Don. He was the English Professor. The little Italian he spoke he pronounced with such a heavy Oxbridge accent that he turned himself into more than one English Professor: the way he said it, it sounded like Il Professori Inglesi. And everyone copied him, because it seemed to fit. He was too magnificent to make do with the banal singular.

  And he was several people, too. He was the rumpled, soiled old age pensioner in the morning with a gin and tonic in his shaking hand. He was Oscar Wilde in the afternoon, a ravishing conversationalist who, while enjoying a gin and tonic, sailed along on the currents of art and literature, sublimely acting out what pleased and rankled him, quoting Shakespeare and his own verse, dishing up priceless anecdotes. He was the Don the Italians loved after sunset, the pissed clown who sang and danced with a glass of gin and tonic in his hand, without a care for decorum or even any recollection of what the word meant. There was no way he could remember the names or faces of the dozens of friends, male and female, who filed past his table after sunset whom he’d undoubtedly met before at some point, but also after sunset. This was why he hugged and kissed everybody. He resolved painful misunderstandings, which were inevitable, by bursting into song. He had a large repertoire, but his favorite was “We all live in a yellow submarine.” He was the Don who tripped and injured himself after closing time. This was because he suffered from dizzy spells, according to his own diagnosis. He actually went to the doctor once to ask what was causing the dizziness. “And what did the doctor say?” I asked when he returned. “He’s an old friend of mine. I can’t lie to him. He asked me how much I drink and when was the last time I’d eaten. I’m a very intelligent man but not that clever.”

  He was seventy-two when I met him for the first time. He told me he’d come to Genoa more than twenty years earlier to teach English. He had a one-year contract. He never left, not even once he retired. He had lived in the hotel on Salita Pollaiuoli for more than twenty years, close to the Bar of Mirrors. He had four girlfriends who were venomously jealous of each other. He had more than four girlfriends. He kissed, felt up, embraced, and pawed everything with a pair of tits, and then he’d say, “I love you.” And all that about a hundred times a night. “Shot by a jealous husband at the age of ninety-five. That’s my ambition. What a way to go.” His greatest mistress was undoubtedly his glass of gin and tonic. He often said it himself, “I’ve abandoned nine women, but never a glass of gin and tonic.” Cappuccino senza schiuma, he called it lovingly. He never emptied his glass, but cherished, adored, and nurtured it the whole day long. Each time he was halfway, he’d ask for extra ice and a lacrima—a tear, a shot of extra gin. “Drunk on tears. That would be a wonderful name for a pop group.” Early in the afternoon, it was already pure gin with a dash of the memory of tonic. “Enough gin to keep the Titanic afloat and enough ice to sink her.” He was a professional alcoholic who didn’t spend a single second of the day with an empty glass. And at night, at closing time, there wasn’t a barman who knew how much gin and tonic to put on the bill. All things considered, he’d
only drunk the one.

  “I had my first gin and tonic when I was eleven, with my Uncle George. It was all his fault. He was a great character. The man never uttered a word of sense in his life, until he suddenly came out with: ‘They say you live longer if you don’t smoke or drink. But that’s not true. It just seems longer.’”

  He didn’t like moving around, that much was clear. He liked Genoa. “My hotel room looks out onto seven bars. Eight if you count the Internet café. Please stay. Please stay in Genoa, Ilja. It’s heaven. Everything you need is here.”

  3.

  Apart from gin and tonic, Don only needed one other thing to survive and that was attention. He was the king of the Piazza delle Erbe, where all the tables were crooked. He would install himself, by preference, on the high side of one of the higher tables, because sooner or later a bottle of tonic would topple over and in accordance with the rules of gravity, would land not in his lap, but in the lap of whoever was sitting opposite him on the lower side of the table. He was a professional. He thought of everything. When it came to drink, he didn’t leave anything to chance.

  Usually he sat on his own on the high side of his high table and held court. The crowds greeted him and moved on. The two most common words in Genoa were “Ciao, Don.” He sat there like a retired cabaret artist waiting for an audience. Like a sleeping monkey in an old-fashioned machine, the kind you had to put a coin into to wake it up and then it would do a little song and dance. Don was like that, prepared at any moment of the evening to do his act as soon as a grateful audience presented itself. In the meantime, he’d doze off behind his sunglasses with a half-liter of gin and tonic in front of him on his high table.

  And like every cabaret artist, he was in constant need of new spectators. His repertoire was large, but sooner or later he’d lapse into repetition. The gin and tonic didn’t help, either. He was capable of dishing up the same priceless anecdote three nights in a row because for two evenings in a row he’d forgotten he’d told it the night before. Though this wasn’t a real problem, because the combination of his antiquarian Oxbridge accent and the gin and tonic made him as good as incomprehensible, so you had to hear the same anecdote at least three times to understand it.

  His favorite audience members were the boaties. Ah, the boaties. How should I describe them? Genoa is a port city, right? The cruise ships moor to the west of the Centro Storico; further to the west are the ferries for Sicilia, Sardinia, and Africa, and even further to the west from there, kilometers and kilometers of container ship facilities. But all the same, we’re talking about the Mediterranean. So there’s also a large harbor for yachts. And that’s in Porto Antico, right beneath the Centro Storico, at walking distance from the Piazza delle Erbe. That’s where you find the luxury motor yachts, the over-forty-meter crew. If the owner isn’t there. If he is, they go to Sardinia, Portofino, Saint Tropez, Saint Tropez, and Saint Tropez. But the owner is only there two or three weeks a year. Aside from that, they also have a few charters, but for the rest of the year the boat stays here. And to maintain a luxury motor yacht of more than forty meters moored in the haven, you need a crew of ten or eleven. There’s a German or a Russian captain everyone hates; half are Filipinos, who do the hard work and cook for each other; and the other half come from the Commonwealth. They’re the boaties. Australians, Kiwis, and Canadians with much too much money and far too many gadgets, off on an adventure in the Mediterranean, only it’s not a real adventure because they hang out together all the time in overpaid luxury. They come along to the piazza from time to time with their iPhones to noisily throw away hundreds of euros on cocktails and leave a stupidly large tip for all the glasses they’ve broken and all the nuisance they’ve caused.

  They were Don’s most appreciative audience. It also meant he didn’t have to speak Italian, which he couldn’t anyway. Spoiled young men from the colonies found his archaic Oxbridge accent hilarious. Sometimes it seemed as though they expressly sought him out. As though he had been explicitly marked out as a tourist attraction in their travel guides. With three stars. And up he’d pop. As though someone had put a coin in the machine. He’d do all his anecdotes and all his jokes. He satisfied every expectation. And they would buy his next gin and tonic just like you’d throw a new coin into the monkey automat. And at the end of the evening, when he could no longer talk, he’d begin to sing. They already knew the song. “We all live in a yellow submarine…”

  4.

  He considered me a new member of the audience, too. He told me stories about his own life. He was a brilliant storyteller. At least, after his third gin and tonic and before his thirteenth, which on average left a window of opportunity of between three and six hours. He told me how he had been expelled from school almost a century ago. Of course with a surname like Perrygrove Sinclair and a father who’d ascended to great heights in Her Majesty’s Royal Army, he’d been sent to one of the most prestigious public schools in the United Kingdom.

  “In my second to last year, we got this math teacher from India. A brilliant man, I’ve no doubt about that. But he had a terrible stutter. And I wrote a limerick about it in my exercise book. But he saw it and confiscated my book. He read the limerick. And then there was trouble.

  “The next morning I had to go to the headmaster’s office. Along with my father. The headmaster had my exercise book lying on his desk. He put on a stern face, opened the book, and read out the limerick. I sniggered. ‘There’s nothing funny about it, Perrygrove Sinclair. Did you write this?’ My father sat motionlessly in his chair, resting his weight on his walking stick. He’d adopted a stern expression, too. ‘Although it might not be perfect in terms of meter,’ I said, ‘I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m the proud author of this poem.’ The headmaster slammed his hand on the desk. ‘There’s isn’t a single reason to be proud of this filth.’ Then my father stood up. ‘I agree with you completely, headmaster. My son has sullied the good name of the many generations of Perrygrove Sinclairs who have been educated here.’ He decided to take me out of school and sent me into the army.”

  Don took a sip of his gin and tonic and asked the passing waitress for some extra ice and a lacrima.

  “And now, of course, you’ll ask whether I can still remember the limerick.

  A math teacher from Calcutta,

  was stuck with an incredible stutter.

  But his girl smiled with glee,

  for she found out that he

  took more time than others to fu…fu…fu…

  “Only the last line still rhymed, you know. But you got that already. When I read it out to my mother that evening, she laughed. She kissed my forehead. The next morning I took the bus to the barracks.

  “A year later I was in Malaysia. For the so-called Emergency. You weren’t allowed to call it a war, but it was one. It began in 1948 and didn’t end until 1960 or 1961. I was in the parachute regiment. One day a grenade exploded a little too close by. All my guts were blown open. I’ll show you the scars. Look. See that? I almost died. Because of a limerick. I almost died because of a fucking poem.”

  5.

  Quite frequently he’d emerge from his hotel in the afternoon with visible wounds from the night before. Scabs on his head or elbows or bloodstains on his shirt. When I asked him once what had happened, he spread his arms and replied triumphantly, “I can’t remember anymore.” And when I carried on asking, he said, “Normal people fall down the stairs, I fall up the stairs.” And when I carried on asking some more, he said, “There’s a security camera next to the entrance to my hotel. I’d love to see a compilation of all my spectacular homecomings.”

  Slowly something else began to dawn on me, something he kept carefully hidden behind his suits and ties, his impeccable appearance—a few bloodstains notwithstanding—his Oxbridge accent, his lacrima gin, and his residency in a hotel room from whose window he’d hung a Union Jack. He was totally broke.

  It became clear to me one evening when he asked me to come up to his hotel room to fix hi
s television. Repairing it wasn’t the problem. That was a simple matter of putting the plug in the socket. But the socket! A kind of pre-war construction made of several cracked Bakelite components. There were bare wires. “Is this yours?” I asked. “No, it’s the hotel’s.” And then I took a closer look. There were patches of damp everywhere. The wallpaper was peeling from the walls. His bed was a yellowed mattress on top of an old door. I went to the bathroom, but I’d have been better off not going. There were empty gin bottles and the remains of kebabs all over the place.

  “How much do you pay for this room, Don?”

  “I’ve been here so long. The owner’s an old friend of mine. I’ve known him since—”

  “How much do you pay for this room, Don?”

  “Two hundred.”

  “And how often do they clean it?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How often?”

  “The problem is I have to clean it myself before the cleaner dares come in.”

  We carried on our conversation out on the square. He took a sip of gin and tonic.

  “Just before my father died,” he said, “he summoned me to his study. It was the first time we’d spoken to each other since he took me out of school. Well, to say ‘we spoke to each other’ is an exaggeration. He gave me a file. It contained all the paperwork for his pension, his life insurance, my mother’s, and my pension, all perfectly documented and ordered and all of them with one of the most traditional and reliable banks in England.”

  A waitress went past so he ordered ice and a lacrima.

  “Barings Bank.”

  He paused for a moment.