La Superba (13 page)

It's just struck me that it sounds a bit odd when I tell it to you like that. And yet it was exactly as I said. I had soft, sweet lesbian sex with Inge, about whom I'd long fantasized, and with my own fantasy. And then it got even crazier.

38.

The next day it was raining. We went to have coffee in the Bar of Mirrors. The girl was there, but she didn't seem to want to have anything to do with us. She didn't greet us, let the other waitresses serve us, and didn't look at us. When the rain had stopped, I paid her, leaving a big tip. She didn't even thank me. When we walked out, I saw her watching us in the mirrors. She quickly turned her face away when she saw in the mirrors that I was watching her in the mirrors. But I'd seen it in the mirrors. She was crying.

I took Inge on a long walk through the labyrinth. We walked to Porto Antico and back up via the dirty streets near San Cosimo and Santa Maria in Castello, over the cobblestones I love so much, through the gates and arches so fond to me, past the names which sing so in my ears, downwards along Vico Amandorla to Campo Pisano. The sun broke through. But I had a strange, dark feeling in my stomach. She was crying. I was sure of it. I'd seen it.

Every time I thought about it, I felt a nest of baby rats gnawing
at my innards, at my masculinity, and my convictions. But Inge was walking along very obviously enjoying herself. Her blonde hair shone like Saint Elmo's fire in the night. It was all strolling hand in hand for her. It was all getting lost in a fairy tale to her. It was, for her, like it was for me the first time I got lost. And when we passed the high bridge under Ravasco, which is the bridge to Carignano, and caught sight of the colossal spaceships stranded in the no-man's-land of the Giardini di Plastica, she said, “It looks like some kind of virtual world, like Second Life. It's amazing.” She took a picture of me with her mobile phone.

Later in the afternoon, we walked the long route parallel to the sea, from Via Canneto Il Curto, Via San Luca, Piazza Fossatello, and Via del Campo toward the Pré. I wanted to show her Africa. I wanted to see how exotically she, in all her colossal blondeness, would stand out against the dark background of alleyways filled with danger and grinning white teeth. She was surprised by how many wig shops there were. “Which would you choose?” she asked. “For you?” “No, I'm already a dumb blonde. For yourself.” I pointed out a blonde wig that looked a bit like her own hairstyle. “No, no need to be sweet. I know you want that one.” She pointed out a wig of beautiful, long, dark Italian hair you'd be able to wear up, just like the girl in the mirrors. “Then you'd be the most beautiful girl in Genoa,” she said. She kissed me on the lips. Then she burst into a fit of giggles.

After that I had to show her the transvestites in the Ghetto around Vico della Croce Bianca, you'll understand that. She was frightened in the dark streets filled with the shadows of scummy men searching for hairy-assed fifty-year-olds in fishnets.
I had to hold her. She pressed herself to me as though I were a local guide who could protect her from the savages. But she found the transvestites themselves endlessly fascinating. Although she was frightened, we had to take the same route three times. “That was the most impressive bit of Genoa,” she'd say the next day when we said goodbye at the station. “After you, of course.” And again she'd burst into a fit of giggles.

39.

In the evening, I wanted us to go to Capitan Baliano to watch the match. She had no interest in football, but it was the derby that evening and I told her the experience would crucial to her understanding of the city. I had to see the match, I'd been looking forward to it for weeks. For days, I'd read about nothing else on the pink pages of the
Gazzetta dello Sport
. The bar was packed. She was one of the few women there and was therefore offered a seat. She sat there sending text messages to her American husband or her three children. I stood behind her chair and laid my hand on her shoulder.

All of a sudden, I saw her in the big mirror behind the bar. She was looking at us, still crying. I searched for her in the crowd but couldn't find her. Is she a girl I can only observe through mirrors? When I looked in the mirror again she had disappeared.

I couldn't concentrate on the match. In the second half, Milito, the Prince, scored the only goal. An inferno of joy burst out. People jumped in the air, their fists clenched. Beer and coffee poured over the tables. Fabio the barman danced for joy in front of his flat screen. I hugged Inge so I could celebrate on a busty
note and then I saw her again. She was standing motionlessly in a corner, crying. I went over to her but she wasn't there.

Genoa won the derby against Sampdoria 1-0. The city's statues were covered in red and blue flags. Cars drove along the Sopraelevata tooting their horns. The fountain on Piazza de Ferrari was danced empty. Fireworks were set off on Piazza delle Erbe. We watched it through the windows of Caffè Letterario, where we had good, long conversations about beautiful things. We kissed. “Isn't that that girl?” Inge asked. I couldn't see properly through the smoke from the firecrackers and rockets. I went outside and saw her running away along Vico delle Erbe toward Piazza Matteotti and Palazzo Ducale. I tried to catch up with her but she was too far away and the square was too full of frenzied joy. I tried to find her in the alleys behind Palazzo Ducale and even ran all the way to Piazza Campetto, but she had disappeared in the labyrinth that was pretty much impenetrable thanks to the hordes of boisterous football fans.

When, deep in the night, we walked back to my apartment along Via San Bernardo and Vico Vegetti past the smoldering embers of a memorable day, I was certain she was following us and thought we'd be too intent on each other to look back. I didn't look back because I knew she'd have run screaming back into the underworld of the labyrinth.

That night, Inge played gently with me like we had played with her together the night before. She squeezed my tits and kissed my nipples. She slowly stroked my fat belly full of gnawing rats. She burst out laughing. “What is it?” “I just remembered that you're a very famous poet.” She moved her hand downwards and began to work my cock a little. “You're a very strange girl,” she said.
“You're a pregnant transvestite.” She kissed me and fell asleep.

40.

I dreamed that I woke up next to the most beautiful girl in Genoa. She wasn't in the Bar of Mirrors where she belonged, but on a double IKEA mattress on the flagstones of the sitting room in my apartment on Vico Alabardieri. She was lying there asleep with a lot of cuddly toys. I was lying on a rickety one-man IKEA sofa bed with my head facing the other way. I started, because instead of her shining, chestnut Italian hair she had short white hair with various bald spots. I stroked her head and she smiled. She stirred slightly, slipped into my bed, squeezed my nipple, and began to carefully and gently fuck me. No, that wasn't how it went, because I climbed out of my creaky bed to go feel her pink hair. I lay down next to her on the big mattress. She was small, almost as small as a cuddly toy. She stirred slightly and said, “Don't I have any goddamn right to privacy?” I said she shouldn't worry. I actually wanted to say that the crux of what they call love is trying to get closer to someone during difficult periods, not shutting the other out. Or something like that. I couldn't quite articulate it. She had already gotten up and dressed in a lot of very thick, gray clothes. “Where are you going?” But she'd already closed the door behind her. She'd already turned the big long key twice in the lock.

Then I dreamed I'd fallen asleep again and that I was dreaming I was in an English pub in the middle of Genoa. I was allowed to smoke there and everyone spoke Italian. It was dark and there were nice seats to sit on, like in a bus. There were names and hearts
scratched into the tables. On the seat I was sitting on, someone had written in Italian in felt pen, “I have no money or things I can give to you, only all of myself and the nights we spend together.” From the grammatical form of “all of myself” I could tell that this outpouring had been written by a woman. Swedish music by ABBA was playing; they were singing in English that breaking up was never easy, but knowing each other the way they did, it was the best thing to do.

I woke up and thought it might be better to go and lie back down on my sofa bed, because if she returned, she'd certainly think she had a right to her privacy on her enormous mattress covered in cuddly toys. She was certain to come back. Though it wasn't certain that everything would be fine and I would be happy.

I dreamed that she came back. She opened the heavy lock and closed it behind her with the long key. She said nothing. In my dream, I secretly opened one eye to look at her. She wasn't wearing thick, gray clothes any more. She was naked like a sick rat. I saw her wounds. On her feet, her leg, her lower arm, all over. She'd turned them pink with iodine, perhaps hoping they might stand out less that way. She was bald, small, wounded, and helpless. I was the only one who could save her. If she allowed me to. If she wanted me to. She didn't look at me. She was too proud to even cry.

I dreamed that the next day she'd be beautiful again and that she'd bring me
stuzzichini
as though nothing had happened. As though everything that had happened was of no importance. As though we all had a different life than the one we had. As though we'd never meet because of this.

41.

Someone who looks like a banker walks into the BNL bank on Piazza Matteoti. Someone who looks like a crook—with a broken nose, low forehead, and big, protruding ears—comes out of the police station next door, while eight
carabinieri
stand smoking on the pavement and laughing and acting out on a friend how they'd arrest him. Someone who looks like an elderly Italian gentleman saunters past as an elderly Italian gentleman would saunter on his afternoon stroll along the Via San Lorenzo to Porto Antico where he'll sit on a bench to look at the ships.

Everyone is the embodiment of their own fantasy. Everyone looks the way they imagine and lives the life that goes with that. The butcher on Via Canetto Il Lungo looks like a butcher—a colossal hunk of meat with a bloody apron and magisterial claws made to plow through carcasses. He looks like that because he immerses himself so well in his fantasy of being a butcher. And the elderly Italian gentleman sits on a bench on Piazza Caricamento near Porto Antico, looks at the ships and fantasizes about far-off destinations: Barcelona, Tunis, Panama, La Merica. And when he returns home obediently in time for dinner, he feels satisfied, enriched, and somewhat tired, like a man returning home after a long, adventurous sea voyage. His grandchildren wanted to offer him a cruise to Barcelona but he refused the gift because he'd been going there every afternoon all those years and every afternoon it was beautiful weather and the most beautiful people strolled along the unnaturally beautiful boulevards toward the seafront to sit on a bench every afternoon and fantasize about Genoa,
La Superba, that robbers' den on the Mediterranean, where the whores are as black as the endless night in the alleys, where the only light flashed off flicked-open knives, and where you might be kidnapped on every street corner and sold as a white slave in the slums of Tangier or Casablanca. Every afternoon, the elderly gentleman had to smile about their fantasies of his city. But he's grateful for them because the myth they invent makes Genoa deeper, richer, and more beautiful. And there are days when he's in the mood to believe their myth. Those are the days he returns home a little later than usual, almost too late for dinner. And like every evening, he says nothing about his adventures.

Everyone's had the nightmare that the world around him has been created by an invisible director—that he's living in a stage set populated by extras and that everyone knows about it apart from him. Like in that film. What's it called again? I've written about it before, in another book. Look that up for me, my friend, would you? Entire religions have been built on that nightmare. Almost every religion. At least, every monotheistic denomination. The world we think we see is in fact the perverse fantasy of an omnipotent director who wants to test us in a complicated game. It's up to us to guess the rules of the game. A fantastic game show of life and death. If you guess right, you get seventy times seven vestal virgins under streams of ambrosia and harp music in the blinding artificial light of the Almighty One. If you guess wrong, you burn in Hell for all eternity. A golden formula that scores high viewer ratings among the ever-critical, ever-bored audience of immortals.

Everyone is familiar with the opposite fantasy too. Everyone has played God at some point in their thoughts. The world around
us exists only because we observe it, give it meaning, and invent it. Without our eyes and thoughts, the world wouldn't exist or would just hang around pointlessly on its own somewhere like a far-off galaxy still waiting for us to discover it, see it, and give it a name. Everything that exists exists only in our minds, otherwise it doesn't exist. And who says that there are many of us? Who says I'm not the only one? Who says that you exist, my friend? It's much more likely that I've made you up. In the same way, I've made up the street names, the pavement, and the people strolling by. And not just because I'm a writer. I only see what I want to see, as all people only see what they think they know or expect. If I invented a butcher, I would invent him exactly like that: a colossal man with a bloody apron. Maybe he's a banker and the redheaded girl on a scooter is the butcher. But it isn't like that because it's not like that in my mind. And as soon as I see an elderly Italian gentleman sitting on a bench watching ships, I'll imagine what he's thinking. It's my job. But that's not the point. We're all like that. You too, my friend. We all live in each other's invented worlds without any real contact. We are extras in each other's fictional autobiographies. We are the decor of each other's illusions.