La Superba (3 page)

Fat women as such aren't the problem, particularly when they're blonde. Don't get me wrong. I've been able to treat a few to breakfast in my time, I'll be damned if it isn't true. They're animals. You'll have the best sex of your life with fat girls, believe me, my friend. If they want to. If they don't want to, they're pointless and pathetic. But usually they do want to. They'll rule your bed like six porno films at the same time. They won't lie photogenically on their backs and wait for what you will or won't do with your automatic libido; they'll ride you until you bleed in the full realization that they have to make amends to be considered women.

There are only two kinds of women: those who understand and those who talk. Those who get the game and understand they'll first have to make a woman of themselves to be allowed to play, and those who knowingly disqualify themselves with the
crazy idea that it's about something other than the game. That's the truth, my friend. That's the truth. And I discovered it. And the game is complicated enough, so don't come to me with your improvements or complications. You know I'm right. And I'm not a sexist or a racist. Exactly the same rules apply to black women as far as I'm concerned.

The ideal women are men. In their attempts to become desirable women, they have to exaggerate. As a parody of sexy women, they transform themselves into inflatable dolls of tits and erectile tissue, and that's exactly what's so sexy. They know exactly what they're there for—but women like that don't exist. Although I have seen them on occasion down by the harbor, on the roadside near the Soprealevata highway's exit ramp. And later I saw two more near the Palazzo Principe train station. But I've forgotten where and have never been able to find them there again, nor near the harbor. Maybe I keep going back at the wrong time.

6.

But in the meantime, the fact was that I had an amputated female leg in my house. Although I needed to come up with a solution as fast as possible, of course, in any case before it began to smell a bit funky, it was also exciting in a peculiar kind of a way. I went home earlier than usual. But I didn't take the leg out of the cupboard. I could spend hours thinking about not doing things like that. And then I thought of something. Was it true? Yes, it was true. Was I sure? I was sure. I'd only touched the stocking. I hadn't touched the sexy bit of naked thigh above the garter. I certainly would have
remembered how that felt. I was immediately grabbed by an almost irrepressible urge to do it anyway. But that wasn't the point. I realized that I could get rid of all the fingerprints and traces of DNA by taking off the stocking.

It was a sensible plan. No, it wasn't exciting; it really was a sensible plan. The best plans are. Exciting and sensible. In inverse order, but in this case that didn't matter. It didn't matter in any single case, except for the fact that the question whether something was exciting or not almost always takes priority and the question whether it's sensible or not usually tends to get pushed to the background, at the most being claimed retrospectively, as a means of justification, which is not really that regrettable given that this all too human mechanism contributes significantly to the preservation of the human race.

I was raving, I know I was. I was nervous. I opened my bedroom wardrobe. As though I was removing an easily broken ivory artifact from a safe with white gloves to allow a scholar, who had traveled from afar, to study it, or as though I was scooping a delicate, fragile algae from the surface of a forgotten, glassy lake of unfathomable depths—that was the way I took the leg from the IKEA wardrobe and laid it on the table. In other words, slowly and carefully. The pompous comparisons are only intended to maintain the tension. Well, not only. With a bit of good will, they also evoke the reverent trembling of my hands.

I stroked the curves of her foot, her heel, instep, and ankle. I gently pinched each toe. “You have such tiny little toes,” I said. She began to laugh. It tickled. The back of my hand slid along her shin. The jagged edge of a nail caught in her stocking for a
moment. “Sorry.” I followed the soft lines of the subtle contours of her knee with my index finger. I let my hand descend to the tender, vulnerable skin of the back of her knee, where I lingered a while so I could summon up the courage to take her whole calf in my hand. The bulging muscle filled my reverent hand like a breast. Shapely yet bashful, firm yet soft, sturdy yet cute, she was light in the palm of my hand, which she perfectly filled. We were made for each other. “You probably say that to all the ladies.” I didn't reply. I moved my hand excruciatingly slowly up along the inside of her leg to her thigh. She began to moan. “What are you doing?” she whispered. But I wasn't doing anything. I teasingly tugged at her garter with little, absent-minded, detached movements. And then I climbed the sloping mound of her thigh muscle. I let my fingertips and my thumb rest in the shallow, barely noticeable hollows on both sides. I began to knead, gently and carefully. She liked it. She made growling noises like a purring cat. And as my hand crept farther and farther upwards, like a hungry animal, she began to moan more and more loudly.

I stopped abruptly where the stocking ended. With a surgeon's precision, I took the garter band between the thumb and index finger of each hand and, without touching the skin, peeled the stocking slowly from her increasingly bared leg. I denuded her copper thigh, her round, funny knee, her mirror-smooth shin and her cheekily rounded calf, her chiseled ankle, where I faltered for a moment to change direction and finish my work with an elegant maneuver by which I freed her heel, her curved instep, and her giggling toes. I laid the stocking next to her on the table. She shivered but not from the cold. The minuscule, scarcely visible blonde
hairs were now standing on end. She sighed deeply and moved her leg to the side to allow me access. “Please,” she whispered. I kissed her mouth and came.

7.

And that was how I ruined everything. Fuck, what a moron I was. A big blob of my sperm on an amputated woman's leg. That was exactly the kind of DNA the CIA folks liked best. With the certainty that a man was involved in the unsavory affair, and the bonus of quite a big hint as to the motive. And then to try coming up with the excuse, in the face of such persuasive evidence, that you'd just happened upon the leg in the street during a storm-induced power outage, and that that blob was only there thanks or no thanks to the fact that she had moved her leg aside with a sigh, after I'd carefully taken off her stocking, and had whispered that it was alright. “But you must believe me, your honor, I swear to you, that's what happened.”

I live in my imagination too much. And look what comes of it. Problems come of it. Sperm on a ripped-off, rotting limb comes of it. What a fine mess I'd gotten myself into. How humiliating. How could I have let myself get carried away like that? Of course it's also part of my job to represent the thoughts and motivations of others as vividly as possible and if necessary, to create characters from nothing, characters onto whom I can project myself so vividly that they become flesh and blood, allowing me to set down a convincing portrait of them on paper. But that doesn't mean that when I'm not holding a pen, I should start believing in
my own delusions and consider one leg sufficient to project the rest spread-eagled onto it, breathe life into a whole new willing mistress and throw myself, panting, upon her. That would get me into another fine mess. Worse, it already had.

I decided I had to get rid of the leg as quickly as possible. But first, of course, I had to give it a thorough cleaning. Naked skin is easy to wash, easier than skin clothed in nylon. That was what I told myself as I tried to apply some kind of logic to my actions and retrospectively give the stocking striptease a rational justification. I put the leg in the shower. It was a strange kind of automatism, if I can use that word for something I'd never done before and, with a probability bordering on certainty, would never do again. All things considered, it was an object and you washed objects in the sink, but clearly I thought legs belonged under the shower, as though there were still a woman attached to it.

And then I realized that I'd miss her. I undressed and got into the shower with her. But that was only intended as a sweet gesture, like having a shower together after sex. I washed her gently, carefully and attentively. It was our farewell. After that I got a garbage bag and pulled it over the leg without touching the freshly-washed skin or leaving any evidence. I tied the bag tightly shut, got dressed, went outside and threw the bag into the builders' dumpster. Sure enough, I felt a little sad.

8.

Come si deve
. If there's a concept that characterizes and unifies Italy (in so much as that exists), it is this life philosophy that everything
has to be the way it should be,
come si deve
. Of course everyone has different ideas about that—how things should be—but everyone does agree that it must be as it should be, not necessarily because that's good, but because it has always been that way. The most obvious example is food. Each region, each province, each city, each quarter has different ideas about how
spaghetti al ragù
should taste. They even call it different things. But everyone agrees that it should taste like it has always tasted. A chef 's creativity is not appreciated. The chef should be a craftsman like a cobbler, not an artist. The chef, like the best cobbler, doesn't spring any surprises on you. That's why you always eat so well in Italy. And that's why they have such nice shoes.

But that's what all of life is like in Italy, from the cradle to the grave. You're born, grow up, get married and leave home, have children who leave home when they get married, and you die. You celebrate Christmas at Christmastime and eat roast lamb at Easter. You go to the seaside in August. All the shops will be closed. In Genoa, it's an entire month of scarcely being able to buy the bare necessities. There are only two tobacconists open in the whole city center, one newspaper kiosk, and one liquor store. If you're lucky. And just try to find them. Bewildered tourists wander around among the closed shutters. The mayor calls for legislative measures, and rightly so, but just try to do anything about it, because everyone goes to the seaside in August and not in June or July, which would be much more sensible since at least there'd be a place on the beach and everything would cost half what it costs in August. But that's not
come si deve
.

It is life according to a liturgical calendar of recurrent, annual
family parties, family outings, birthdays, name days, home and away matches, qualifying rounds and finals. It's a spiral that ends after seventy or eighty rotations with a memorial plaque on the gray walls of a church, formulated and designed like all the other memorial plaques. We look back with pride and gratefulness at a rich and full life that progressed just like other lives, in the same streets, on the same squares, in the same houses, and on the same beaches, with breakfast at half past seven,
pranzo
at half past twelve,
cena
at nine o'clock, blessed with children and grandchildren who will do everything exactly the same.
Stanno tutti bene. Tutto a posto. Come si deve.

I've seen a woman who was exactly like that. I see her all over the place because she's always at the right place at the right time. She has breakfast at Caffè del Duomo on San Lorenzo. She lunches at Capitan Baliano on Matteotti. At six on the dot she comes into the Bar of Mirrors for an aperitif. She has a glass of Prosecco and then, why not, another glass of Prosecco. She always says that as she orders it: “Oh, why not, another glass of Prosecco.” As though it were an exception. And she'll never order a third glass of Prosecco. She always says that, too: “I never have three glasses of Prosecco as an aperitif. Two is enough for me.” She's an exemplary Italian in every way. I couldn't imagine her in any country but Italy. She's so
come si deve
that outside of Italy she'd wither and die like a tree that had been transplanted out of the specific, precious microclimate of its natural habitat. On Saturdays she meets her friend on the square at exactly the right time on exactly the right day at exactly the right place to eat pizza. She is exactly fifteen minutes late for the meeting and her friend is exactly fifteen minutes later than she.
They then have a fixed ritual of apologies from the lady who's too late, resolutely waved off by the lady who was less late. It's a stainless steel routine that's repeated to the second, time after time, week after week, year in year out, generation after generation.

Two days a week, she has her granddaughter, a notorious redheaded diva of about three years old. She's called Viola. I know this because that's what everyone keeps calling her. Her, too. Each time the little girl does something, it doesn't matter what—climb up onto her lap, climb down off her lap, walk in circles around the parasol stand, stir the Prosecco with her finger—she says, “Viola, don't do that!” As an aperitif she gets an
acqua frizzante
with a straw and a bowl of
patattine
—what do you call those again? Fries? Then she says, “Look, Viola! Here's Viola's aperitif!”

The most beautiful girl in Genoa, who works at the Bar of Mirrors, is besotted by Viola. She kisses her, strokes her red curls, cuddles her, and babbles away endlessly to her about the fries, about her new shoes, about the color of the straw, pigeons, parasols, freckles, dancing, and the bandages on her cuts and scrapes that haven't healed yet. It's astonishing. It's a holy miracle to witness. The magic of the fairy-tale harmony between a little tyke and a good fairy. The most beautiful girl in Genoa should be as unapproachable as a glimpse of an image you catch in a mirror, but before my very eyes she turns into the most endearing essence of approachability. The old lady watched with the smile of an Italian grandmother who found it only natural that her granddaughter should be adored by waitresses. I decided to speak to her.