La Superba

by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

  He didn’t wait for my reply. He stood up and walked away. Then he changed his mind. He came back and said, “Do you know what the best thing was? It was my birthday. But it seems like every day’s my birthday in this beautiful city in the fairyland of Europe.” He laughed. He kissed my forehead and left. “Fatou yo,” he sang quietly as he went. It was the last time I saw him.

  PART THREE

  The Most Beautiful Girl in Genoa (Reprise)

  1.

  How wafer-thin must it be, the difference between everything and nothing? Mere centimeters of cracking, sodden wood separate the sailor from his grave. A couple of steel plates make up the difference between hope and despair for tens of thousands on their way to the New World. Something improvised out of plastic brings Africans to Europe or it doesn’t.

  I can’t live anywhere. I’m only fooling myself with pavings, walls, and names, places that have something to do with happiness. It’s as thin as tracing paper. When winter comes, I won’t know how I’ll cope because the places you’re allowed to smoke indoors aren’t exactly happy-making. In my home country, everything would be much worse. I drink too much. I need warm, beautiful places where I can drink too much and smoke too much and easily meet friends who admire, worship, cherish, admire, worship, and cherish me. Naked girls who coo when faced with the heft of my celebrity. Frothy girls who automatically plop themselves in my lap because of all of the capital letters in my name.

  I can’t live anywhere. I think it’s about places but instead it’s about smoking in bars and restaurants and the time the pub shuts. Everywhere. Doesn’t matter where. Should I go farther south, then? No one will know me there for sure. And how will I get girls, then? What’s there to do in Genoa when it’s raining? What’s there to do in Casablanca when it’s raining? What’s there to do in Cape Town when it’s raining? Tell me how to live and I’ll laugh in your face. Forget it. I’d rather wait for the waiter. And a clean ashtray.

  And meanwhile, you spend a while in a city you think you discovered yourself. Genoa—ooh, you think you’re seriously different from your eternal writer friends with their eternal Venice, Florence, or Rome?—real and authentic, with a port, immigration, a labyrinth you can get lost in, problems, transvestites. Fuck that. Do you believe it yourself? Mere centimeters of creaking, sodden wood.

  By now I no longer find dying such a bad idea. I used to panic at the thought. Now I understand that it doesn’t matter much how far south I travel. It’ll be the same everywhere. You can do something or not. You can find a city, friends to drink with, and cafés to make your own with renewed, unsuspected passion, but you know that one day you’ll betray it all for a new illusion. And then you’ll write about it. That’s the biggest illusion of all. I only write thanks to the lack of women and drinking pals keeping me, protesting, from my work. If Genoa really were as great as I say it is, you wouldn’t hear anything about it, my friend. Everything I write is fake because I don’t write when I’m myself. It’s an escape from reality on a rickety raft of language, like the boats that went to La Merica, the same as those poor suckers come to Europe, the Promised Land.

  The only place I can live is elsewhere. I’m going south, she’s going north. It probably won’t really matter if we die—she of hunger, me of boredom and thirst. It would save us a lot of futile dreams.

  2.

  There’s no winter in Italy. By that I mean that in the two or three months that it’s genuinely cold, Italy no longer exists, in the sense that it stops functioning. Yesterday a thin layer of snow fell on Genoa. A millimeter that melted away in no time. Normal life was completely disrupted. The buses crawled along Via XX Settembre with snow chains on their wheels. Schools were closed. Shops, bars, and restaurants shut earlier than usual because the suppliers could no longer reach them. The only people still out on the street are weirdos or foreigners. A homeless person or a Senegalese tried in vain to sell umbrellas for five euros to nonexistent tourists. A cold, wet wind drives through the abandoned streets. I notice I’ve switched to the present tense for no reason. It’s because I’m so fucking cold. I’m writing this in the smoking room of the Britannia, a tasteless English pub I only come to for its smoking room. It’s the only place I can go to since the upstairs room at Bar Berto was closed down by the police because the fume extraction system didn’t meet safety regulations. But the owner of the Britannia is a stingy old miser who has never given me a discount and makes a profit by turning off the heating to save on fuel costs. See him standing there behind the bar in two thick jumpers selling cocktails and beer over his reading glasses at extortionate prices. I hate him. Yet I still come here because I don’t know of any better place to go in the winter. Or I’d have to stop smoking, but that would be the other extreme, I’m sure you’d agree with me, my friend. Then they’d have won. The others. Our enemies.

  In the meantime, the Genoese shut themselves away in their palazzi. They have their own rituals. They turn their backs on the city before ostensibly dedicating themselves voluntarily to demanding members of their family. For them too, Italy ceases to exist for a couple of months. Or they leave for their lodges in the mountains where there’s supposed to be snow, where each year they ski for an hour between lunch and the aperitif, with similarly minded people who are all dressed in the latest ski fashions.

  And so the labyrinth becomes a grim and impassible place. The smooth, pitch-black, threatening paving stones gleam in the darkness that has descended early. A short walk is a survival trek past closed doors and shuttered windows. It’s like in Dickens or those Anton Pieck Christmas cards, but then not picturesque. The snow isn’t warm, white, and fluffy but dirty and wet and gray. And the friendly, smiling beggars in their special Christmas tatters who tap hopefully on the windows receive no alms. They can fuck off.

  Yesterday a homeless man froze to death in the passage under the Carlo Felice opera. It was in the papers today. The story is all the more cruel because there was a grand opening ceremony taking place for the opera’s symphonic winter season five meters above his head, with the mayor and all the Genoese magistrates in attendance. His name was Babu. I knew him. An African boy. He often came past the terraces begging. I never gave him anything. Today I walked to the passage under the opera. His fellow homeless had set up an altar for him in the alcove where he perished. Genoese wearing fur coats came by to leave offerings and assuage their guilty feelings. The alcove was full of flowers, packets of cigarettes, and bottles of gin. And so Babu got everything from his new fatherland he had ever desired.

  3.

  The flowers were still there today. The packets of cigarettes and bottles of gin had gone. Babu’s homeless friends were nowhere to be seen, either. Mediagenic tragedy and strokes of luck have often made uneasy bedfellows.

  That last line will have to be cut when I rework these notes into a novel. Much too pretentious. One of those sentences where you, as a vain writer, openly stand there posing with your unique ability to grasp reality with a telling analogy. Linking the concrete to the abstract. Normal people don’t see those deep kinds of connections. The momentary pleasure of a cigarette is a reconciliation with the transient nature of life. Those kinds of profundities. X=y. I can just toss them off. Perhaps my pen’s hesitation above the paper was a harbinger of the slowly dawning realization that I was on the wrong track. Pleasure is nothing more than forgetting everything ahead of us after the moment of pleasure is gone. There was another paradox in that, did you spot it? And another, I’ll make one with rum and Coke. Rum and Coke is the music of the night that sounds like a cacophony in the morning. And do you know that really happens, too? I’m actually drinking rum and Coke as I write this, and right away an Italian girl comes over to ask what I’m writing. I say I’m writing about her. She doesn’t believe me.

  If I turned this into a book, I’d have to delete the whole of that last paragraph. If I ever wanted to turn it into a book. Sometimes you ask yourself whether it’s worth all the effort. People don’t read anymore. And the
y’re right. They have better things to do. Like surviving, buying Christmas presents for their in-laws, keeping their mistresses a secret, or assuaging their guilt by giving gin and cigarettes to the friends of a tramp who froze to death. People already know how everything is and should be. They don’t need a book to teach them. I’ve always thought that our role as literati was to shake things up. To unsettle fixed values. Even if just for a moment. But now I realize that people don’t need that at all. Their daily lives are already challenging and unsettling enough. Thanks to their obligation to continuously fulfill all their obligations, they are continuously on unstable ground. They look for stability in their rituals and routines. They look for consolation, for someone to pin them down and tell them that things always run their course and that it’s not their fault that a tramp froze to death in a passageway under the opera, because they are decent people who after a hard day’s work for their boss use up their last strength getting to the right shop just before closing time to buy the right kind of panettone for their mother-in-law. What more can you do? Read a disturbing book about immigration? Per carità. They already have their hands full with their own problems. Do you know how difficult it is to find a garage in this city? And do you know what happens when you simply park your car on the street? The Moroccan and Senegalese rabble know what to do with it, I can tell you. But we’re good folks, we vote for the left and take cigarettes and gin to the Moroccan and Senegalese friends of Babu.

  And they weren’t even his friends. I never saw them together. Those so-called homeless friends of the homeless Babu live in Via di Pré or the Maddalena quarter. They’re burglars and pickpockets. They have to survive, too. They read it in the paper, just like me and all the other Genoese. They understood the rare opportunity, put on their filthiest clothes, chased away the real tramps, and lit candles in the passageway under the opera. They’re not there anymore today. Of course they aren’t. They’ll never be there again, unless there’s something new to be had. And you come along with literature? Like a world traveler musing in the hotel lobby? You have to feel the despair of the wet gray snow and lose yourself in a dream that gets watered down under your increasingly unsteady tread to understand anything at all. You don’t need to read books, you need to try to survive outside where you get screwed, fucked over, and robbed.

  X is never y since it depends completely on what you want to achieve with x and y. The abstract is always concrete. Friendship is always about fifty euros. Mourning a so-called friend who froze to death reaps multiple rewards. Everyone cons everyone else, that’s what it comes down to. That’s what I’ve learned, my friend. Tomorrow I’ll write something more cheerful again.

  4.

  Sometimes, in the dark pit of the night after closing time at the end of that thieves’ alley San Bernardo, at the furthest tip of the labyrinth, in the neglected and forgotten part after Via delle Grazie, where you can smell the fish market and the rotting waters of the port, there’s a nightclub. Sometimes. Because just as often it’s closed or you can’t find it. It’s where there’s a drain for the dregs of the night: actors, transvestites, Moroccans, and the clientele they have to accompany to the toilets every five minutes in order to snort drugs, suck cocks, or both. It smells of smoke, piss, vomit, and hash, and those smells are freshly produced all around you continuously. Fights regularly break out, arising from conflicts that none of those involved can remember the next day, and mostly ending with someone slipping in a pool of vomit, smacking his chin on the bar, and being carted off.

  The proprietor, Pasquale, is just standing there mixing cocktails in plastic cups; if requested, he’ll explain that he has a permit to run an arts club. Cocaine is sold in his toilets, kilos at a time, but Pasquale pretends not to notice. He avoids trouble that way. Both the Mafia and the Moroccans protect him because they need him, or at least his arts club, or at least its toilets.

  That’s the mistake Fabio made with his bar in the same neighborhood. He tried to keep it clean. He got the police involved and threw the Moroccans out. They smashed his bar to bits and since then Fabio’s been missing an eye and his walking has gotten a lot worse. And they also seem to have found out where he parks his car and where he lives.

  Pasquale, on the other hand, has been in business for nearly twenty years—if you can call it a business, getting the drunken outcasts of the night even drunker while pretending not to notice a thing and never cleaning your toilets, no matter how encrusted the shit gets on the walls. I go there sometimes. I like to go there. Being lonely among other lonely people is a sublimated form of loneliness. I sit there at the sticky bar like a silhouette of a midnight cowboy, nursing a much too strong Negroni in my wisdom-clenched fists, and conduct laconic one-line conversations with actors who can no longer get their words out, and maybe because of this or for other reasons they can’t determine, get tears in their eyes and, assuming they’ve made a new friend, sycophantically offer me another Negroni with their last pennies.

  And one evening, I kissed the dangerous transvestite Penelope Please with my thirsty tongue, which put up a minutes-long fight against her drunken tongue while I protected the wallet in my back pocket with one hand, and proof that indeed she was no woman took on ever more convincing forms in the other. Not for any particular reason, just because I felt like it. Because the place compels you to do things you wouldn’t do elsewhere. If you’ve sunk so low as to find yourself there, there are no more appearances to keep up and you might as well descend to dissipation and ruin for good.

  And that evening, content with the poetry of my existence, as I wandered along the Via San Bernardo like a giant, lonely wraith, I was mugged. I had always thought that I looked too big and strong to be robbed. Muggers don’t want trouble; they look for easy prey, like an unsuspecting tourist or a drunk Erasmus student. I’m almost two meters tall, weigh more than a hundred kilos, have a black belt in aikido, and can look very threatening, even when I’m drunk. But there were two of them and they were professionals. Of course they were Moroccans. I think I’d even seen them earlier in the nightclub. They’d watched me and followed me. They knew exactly which pocket my wallet was in. I managed to throw one of them to the ground, but in doing so I lost my balance, and by then the other had grabbed my wallet. They ran away and disappeared into the dark labyrinth. The whole skirmish had lasted no more than a few seconds. And I hadn’t stood a chance. I didn’t even try to go after them. Hard, intent, and stoic, I went on my way. I was in Genoa. I was no longer a virgin. And I’ll be damned if a smile didn’t appear on my face.

  5.

  Today, right at the end of Via San Vincenzo, just by Brignole station, I discovered a porn cinema. I must have walked past it hundreds of times, but I’d never noticed it before. There weren’t any suggestive photos in the window, no screaming advertisements for forbidden pleasures. But today my gaze fell upon an amateurish poster, made in a print shop, with the English words “nonstop show.” I had to choose between screen 1 and screen 2. I asked what the difference was. I didn’t understand the answer. Then I asked which show was cheaper. I was intending to choose the more expensive. The price was the same, so I ended up in screen 1.

  It was a real cinema with a large screen, rows of tip-up seats, and a balcony with boxes and seating at the sides. It was dark inside. I needed the flesh-colored light of the screen to see that I wasn’t alone. The silhouettes of twenty or thirty men were as widely spread around the room as possible. When we had tests at school, we had to sit a ways apart so that we couldn’t copy each other. Everyone was sitting separately here, too. No cheating.

  The show consisted of a French porn film, I guessed from around the mid-1980s. Its dialogue had been dubbed into Italian. They’d left the original sounds intact in the sex scenes. This confirmed my fantasy that Italian girls only acted like they spoke Italian until you stuffed something into them. The film was actually quite good. There were pretty girls with small tits. The scenes proceeded smoothly, without a surplus of soporific gymnastics
in close up. There was even a kind of storyline: the man with the long coat and sunglasses commissioned various girls to make their fantasies come true. And they did that. That was what the film was about. And so it might happen that a girl was masturbating in a graveyard at night before being taken by two supposed tramps, until the man with the long coat and sunglasses appeared on the scene to finish things off properly. There was also a remote controlled car that had special hooks that could steal the panties of girls who just happened to have taken off their panties in a public place.

  I sat as far apart from the others as I could and wondered whether there was anything like this in my home country. I knew we used to have them, sure. On the day of my eighteenth birthday I’d been to the legendary Cinema Rex. Those were the days. But the whole porn business had been so Youtubed and Youporned and Redtubed over the past few years. A real cinema with tip-up seats and popcorn, velvet, and a silver screen, a counter where you had to pay to be allowed inside, the emotion shared with a room full of like-minded people in the darkness of hidden fantasies that the city didn’t want to know about. And when it was over, stepping blinking out into a daylight filled with shoppers while inside your head you were still in the film. I was grateful to have found a real porn cinema.

  But it didn’t really excite me all that much. At least, that’s what I’d decided in advance. The problem with such a lovely old-fashioned porn cinema is, of course, that, despite the relative gloom and spread-out seating strategy, you hardly have any privacy. In some ways, it’s still a public building. That’s why you can’t smoke there, for example. And it’s not really the perfect spot to have a nice long wank. At least that was the way I tended to think about it. But when I took a look around in the skin-colored gleam of the big screen, I saw that pretty much all the paying customers differed from me in that respect.