La Superba

by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

  14.

  It was nighttime. But I was having trouble falling asleep. Ghosts from my past popped up in dreams that didn’t want to become dreams. Specters from my fatherland appeared. My publisher’s flabby face loomed dangerously close and gave me an accusing look. He was silent but I knew exactly what he meant. He drummed his fingers impatiently on the table. I tried to hide from him behind a pile of letters, but for some reason or other, you were loitering there, my good friend, and your face didn’t look too friendly. And you were right, too. I’m sorry I still haven’t paid back the money I borrowed from you. And I hardly dare to ask, but that whole business with my so-called rich mistress only cost me money. I saw Monia’s face before me. I tried to repress it, but then she pushed her scandalously big tits in my face. I jerked awake out of my insomnia because I couldn’t breathe. I smelled the sour stench of her cavities. She stank of an amputated woman’s leg in a garbage bag. She stuck both her fiery red tongues out and hissed that she was my bride. Her head turned three hundred and sixty degrees. “Is there anything you don’t know?” she asked me. “Fuck me. Or are you a vegetarian?” She spread her legs and kicked off one shoe. It was full of vomit. “Oi, oi,” the downstairs neighbor said. “Oi, oi.” The cast iron portcullis halfway down the stairs clicked shut.

  I got up and went to the bathroom to wash my face. I didn’t turn on the light so as not to make myself any more awake than I already was. I had to throw up. And then when I looked in the dark mirror, I saw her. She could only be seen in mirrors. I leaned forward cautiously to give her a kiss. She responded to my gesture. My lips touched her cool, glassy lips.

  “You’re the most beautiful girl in Genoa.”

  “Do you always say that to your own reflection?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You live in your imagination too much.”

  “You’ve always been the only girl I’ve ever loved.”

  “Step back. Slowly.”

  As I slowly distanced myself from the mirror, she did the same, at exactly the same pace, until instead of just her face, I could see her entire body. She was wearing her uniform from the bar. One of her feet was pink with disinfectant. Her trouser leg was rolled up, probably because the seam would rub too much otherwise and irritate her wounds. I couldn’t see her other foot.

  “What happened?”

  Instead of replying, she began to take her trousers off.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m showing you how real you are.”

  She had already undone her belt. She undid the top button and then the zipper. She held on to her trousers.

  “Are you ready?” she asked, and before I could reply she had dropped her trousers and stood naked before me in the mirror. She only had one leg.

  15.

  I turned on the light. She had disappeared. I washed my face again. I involuntarily stroked the mirror in the way a person strokes an eastern lamp in the hope the story’s true. But the only genie that appeared was my own naked reflection telling me I needed to get some sleep.

  But I couldn’t sleep anymore. My hard little IKEA bed felt like the narrow bunk of the lower deck of a creaking galleon on its way to the holy land or like the third-class sleeping quarters of an ocean steamer on its way to La Merica. “Fatou yo,” I sang softly. “We all live in a yellow submarine.” Outside there was some noise. Someone shouted something in Arabic. He began to kick and hit doors, including mine. I pulled the sheets over my head. Then he shouted in Italian that he wanted revenge. The neighbor on the other side of the street knew what to do. She opened her shutters and threw a flowerpot onto his head from the fifth floor. He disappeared weeping into the labyrinth. But the neighbor stayed there, discussing the incident in a loud voice with my upstairs neighbor, who’d clearly also woken up. And that woke up various other neighbors who found the discussion even more annoying than the thing that had induced it, which set off a kind of chain reaction and led to even angrier discussions that in the end pretty much the entire street took part in. Everyone was leaning out of their open windows, screaming that the others shouldn’t scream so much. There were people sleeping here, they screamed, who, unlike all the other screaming freeloaders, had to go to work in the morning to earn their keep, for fuck’s sake.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. I got dressed and went outside. There was nobody left on the street. My footsteps echoed hollowly through the high, peeling house intent, and stoic fronts. Rats shot away into the cracks and crevices between the street and the houses. Dark and forbidding, I walked randomly. Here and there, white teeth shone in murky alcoves. Chances were weighed up. But I wasn’t drunk. I was big and angry. I’d have bitten off any thrust knife at the shoulder, arm and all. And they knew it.

  I felt like fucking a whore. It was the perfect night for it. But the whores weren’t around. They’re for lunch, when the Genoese magistrates nervously grip their calf-leather briefcases under their sweaty armpits. But I was determined to find someone. I went on my way, hard, intent and stoical. After Via della Maddalena there was still Via del Campo. Via del Campo is a whore. If you want to possess her, all you have to do is take her by the hand. She sells the same rose to everyone. And after Via del Campo there’s Via delle Croce Bianca and the Ghetto if necessary.

  But even the Ghetto was deserted at this hour. I wandered aimlessly through lifeless alleyways. When there aren’t any fat, hairy transvestites to look at, it becomes noticeable how truly dilapidated the alleys are. Entire sections aren’t even paved. Plasterwork crumbles under your gaze. You only have to lean against a wall for a little rest to find yourself involuntarily creating a new passageway, a random alley you might name after yourself for a night before it all begins to shift once more.

  Sighing, I sat down on some steps up to a door. “And this then?” I asked myself. “Is this just fantasy, too?” The door opened from the inside. I turned around.

  “Your fantasy is my profession.”

  I couldn’t see him very well in the darkness but he was certainly well built. He was wearing a wig and a short, tight miniskirt. He was missing a leg. “Come,” he said.

  “What’s your name?” A stupid question, I know, but in my fright I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I heard the griffins screech.

  “Ornella,” he said.

  16.

  He hopped on his crutches ahead of me into the sex cubicle. It was a seedy cubbyhole, not much more than a small garage with a bed in it, but there was more light there than in the alleyway. Although outside, with a bit of goodwill, sufficient horniness, and perseverance, he had something womanly about him, little of the illusion remained in this electric light. He had shaved his face and leg, put on a wig, a single sexy stocking, and a leopard-print skirt that was quite tight around his belly, and stuffed his bra. But that was the full extent of it. I noticed I couldn’t bring myself to use feminine pronouns for him, not even to keep the illusion intact. He looked like a parody of his own fantasies. He wanted it too much. In theory this can be quite a turn on—a person who, despite an evident lack of the necessary talents and physical attributes, is hungry to play the game and knows himself desired—indeed, that’s generally a lot more exciting than a sketched body that only has to be touched to arch back, wispily sighing in the knowledge it can induce ecstasy without even having to lift a finger—but you can also overdo an evident lack of the necessary physical attributes.

  He leaned his crutches in the corner and sat down on the bed. “Come,” he said. He gestured for me to sit down next to him. I stayed standing.

  “What’s wrong?”

  And then there was the matter of that one leg. It wasn’t really the problem. It was more the missing leg that was unsettling. Legs usually get in the way, alright, that’s one way of looking at it, I got that. But all in all, it was quite a specialist fetish. Something for the rare connoisseur.

  “Why do you do this?” I asked.

  “And you?”

  It was a fair questi
on in return, I had to admit. It was exactly what I was starting to wonder myself. “How long have you had it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your leg.”

  “I think the question is more how long I haven’t had it.”

  He was clever, too. But that was something I really didn’t need. It was the last thing I’d left my house for in the middle of the night. This was slowly turning into an even bigger nightmare than the nightmares I’d been running away from. Maybe it was best to leave.

  “What I’ve got between my, albeit, no longer existent legs still functions perfectly well, by the way. What’s your name? You can invent a name if you like, I don’t care.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Then I’ll call you Giulia. What’s your greatest desire?”

  “I no longer have any desires right this instant.”

  “Oh yes you do, dear Giulia, you’re overflowing with passionate desires, even though I might not be the one who can fulfill them. But your desires are flickering in your eyes. I see that kind of thing.”

  “Once again, I’m sorry. I sincerely apologize. I made a mistake. But I’ll pay you. How much is it?”

  “It’s nighttime. It’s the hour of the wolf. Only you and I are awake in this cursed labyrinth. I’ll tell you a story. Take a seat. You don’t have to pay anything. All I want is for you to listen.”

  17.

  “You might not think so at first sight, but I used to be a man. Or maybe you would think that at first sight, but I’m perfectly capable of making you forget that at second sight. Love is all about illusions. As a man, I learned that in a painful way, and as a woman I’m applying that lesson now. If you want to be desired, you have to satisfy the image the other has of you. Being yourself and others respecting you for who you are and things like that are just foolish talk by people in relationships and happy about it, without knowing true love: she is a cruel goddess who requires sacrifices. She rends the earth with her eyelashes. She can break strong men with a glance, the way she broke me. She crushes, or worse still, ignores, anyone who thinks they can stay themselves—that they’ll even be respected for it.

  “As though there is such a thing as being yourself. That’s another problem. As though there’s even such a thing as yourself. Identity is always a concoction, a construction based on the image that a person has of what others think of them. And that’s not a constant. It’s as changeable as the shape of a cloud in the wind—now it looks like Scandinavia, and the next moment some ducks, a lady, or sheep and a shepherd.

  “What you have to learn, Giulia, is that the highest achievement is to coincide fully with the fantasies of your lover. And you don’t have to worry about him doing the same. Or her. Sorry. I know you’re not far enough to consider that distinction irrelevant. But the time will come. You have the potential to become a sensible girl. You have to become her. Or him. But I won’t make it too difficult for you. You have to become her. You won’t begin to love her until you see her face in the mirror. But your real job is to ensure that she sees your face in the mirror. Which is to say that she sees her own face, because that face has become your mirror image. Do you understand that, dear Giulia? It’s a dangerous game, you’re right about that. You find yourself in a labyrinth of mirrors in which it’s easy to lose your way. But that has to be your desire—to lose your way.

  “I can see you don’t understand. Poor girl. Come and sit down. I’ll explain it in a better way.”

  “I’m not a girl.”

  “Of course not. Sorry. I’ve never been one, either. I was a man with both legs firmly planted on the ground. I could plaster walls and chop logs. I’ve never been afraid of insects, no matter their size. I was big, black, and forbidding. I laughed at rats. If I’d been born in a different century, I’ve have had a sword on my hip.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Her name was Moana. That isn’t her real name, but it doesn’t matter. To me she was the most beautiful girl in Genoa. She was the love of my life. I loved her so much that adoring her like any other would was no longer enough. My greatest desire was to be one with her. I didn’t want to possess her, that’s banal, that’s for normal people who have relationships. I wanted to become her.”

  “And did you manage?”

  “Don’t be so cynical, Giulia.”

  “I apologize. Carry on.”

  “The story is actually quite short and rather predictable.”

  “I want to hear it.”

  “Do you know what it means if you decide to love a woman for once and for all?”

  “Don’t ask questions, just tell me the story.”

  “She sat in the highest towers of my longings and writhed under the tentacles of my darkest nights. She was the impregnable plateau I had to conquer and the fertile garden I would lay myself down to rest in afterward. She was the fire that scorched me and turned me to ashes and she was the fire that gave me warmth and strength. She was the hissing ice that cooled me down and reassured me, and she was the hard ice that rejected me.”

  “Why are you talking like that all of a sudden?”

  “Like what? Poetic?”

  “You said it.”

  “Bastard.”

  “And then?”

  “It’s a very dramatic, painful story. But given your lack of interest, I’ll skip to the heart of the matter—she found someone else. And at the end of the day, it didn’t even matter that much. I’d learned what I needed to learn.”

  “Good story. And then you became a transvestite?”

  “Watch it, you. I’ll read you something I wrote recently. Do you want to hear it? Hang on, here it is.”

  “I don’t seem to have a choice.”

  18.

  “There are people who say I’m a fiction. But you could say that about anybody. Just as the man in the real estate agent’s suit I saw walking along the street this morning invented himself in a real estate agent’s suit, and the politician I saw on television yesterday invented, in consultation with his advisors and spin doctors, his air of authenticity so attractive to voters, I invented myself. I dreamed myself up and then granted myself the freedom to exist.

  “There are other people who say that I’m a man’s dream. As though that’s a crime. Since I’ve allowed myself to walk through every world imaginable on the haughty legs of sorrow, the echo of my high heels resounds in many people’s dreams. I like to be desired, because I’m as much a desirer as the rest of them. Sometimes I’m just like everybody else.

  “Do you know that particular story? Pygmalion was his name. He had a funny name because he was an ancient Greek. He was a sculptor, an artist. Let’s say he knew what beauty was. And of course he was in love with Aphrodite, the goddess of desire. Men shaped gods in their own image and Aphrodite was lust’s incarnate fantasy. Or how do you say that? The fantasy of incarnate lust. Anyone not desiring her hadn’t properly envisioned her. And no one was better at envisioning her than the artist Pygmalion. He made a sculpture of her from the whitest, most expensive ivory that was available in those days. It was a work of love. It was a sacrifice to the goddess. It was a sacrifice to his own fantasy. And when the statue was ready, he took her to bed with him. In crude human words, you’d say he made love to her like a pimply computer nerd might fuck a homemade inflatable doll. But those are crude human words. He united himself with his deepest longing. It was the highest form of love. The goddess Aphrodite understood. And to reward him, she brought the statue to life.

  “I might not have told the story entirely correctly because now it sounds like there are three characters: Pygmalion, Aphrodite, and the statue brought to life. But that’s wrong—all three are one and the same person. It’s very important to understand that. Alright, it’s not easy, I admit. But people who don’t understand it will never understand what love is. That’s the tragedy.”

  That was all, apparently. He shut up. Or paused for a moment. I reflected. I understood what he wanted to say and it wasn’t
even that badly formulated. But I wasn’t at all thinking about what he’d said. I was thinking about the situation. As far as I was concerned, it was much more interesting. Because imagine this, dear friend: in the dead of the night, in the sketchiest part of a thoroughly corrupt town, the author so celebrated in my home country is perched on a rickety cot next to a disastrous transvestite with one leg reading a story he wrote himself, intended as a valuable lesson. During my countless interviews and public debates back home, I’ve often been asked for my definition of poetry. This nocturnal scene came closer to the truth than any smart answer I ever gave. I smiled. I was grateful to my new friend. I wrapped my arm around his shoulder. “Thank you.”

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “Because of the situation.”

  He kissed me gently on the cheek. I allowed him to. “Tell me about your leg.”

  19.

  “What?”

  “How it happened.”

  He sighed. “Do you really want to know? One leg more or less is not that important, certainly in comparison to what I just told you.”

  “I really want to know. Were you born that way?”

  “No.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Not that long ago. I was the victim of my own success. I know that you see me as a man with a beer belly in a tight dress wearing a wig. In some ways, you’re right. I am, too. But I can bewitch men with my availability. In their rough hands, I can change into the woman of their dreams by becoming an empty mirror for their obsessions. Here in the Ghetto your main clients are Moroccan adolescents whose religion forbids them from loving and leads them to perversity. When they’re together they act tough and brag but once they’re alone in this room, they quiver like children. But if a boy wants me to be a sheep, I’m a sheep. If he wants me to be one of the promised virgins in paradise, I will be. And that’s how he falls in love.”

  “Did he fuck you?”

  “He didn’t dare. He bought me gifts. Rings and bracelets. Like these ones. Cheap trinkets. But he was sweet. He wanted to lie down next to me and then said he felt small.”