La Superba (41 page)

Perhaps, if I do my utter best, my letter to the Inspector of Direct Taxes will please my publisher. Perhaps he will publish it in a small edition. Perhaps I could wheedle a nice advance for it. Because just like my illustrious predecessors in the genre, I am under no illusion that, aside from an eventual publication and the obligatory chapter in an eventual biography, I will make any profit. In the most likely scenario, I can count myself lucky if I can sell my letter to the Inspector of Direct Taxes, the truest and most autobiographical document that I have ever written, as a curiosity to a literary magazine like
The Lying Dog
or
The Barren Rabbit
. After which my belongings will be impounded.

Unfortunately, my fatherland is not like Italy. Back home your belongings are packed up, while here a calm conversation is possible. Back home there are laws, while you don't necessarily have to see things like that here. Back home the system works, while here
it would be out of the question to have a system that transcended an individual approach to individual cases and that was still valid the next day. Back home there are payment terms of seven days, while here, with a bit of ingenuity, enough can be invented to make them last seven years.

As soon as I'd read the letter you forwarded, I secured my possessions back home. In concrete terms, I emptied my account at the post office, not hesitating to get maximally overdrawn. Take what's for the picking. Don't ask questions, take advantage. A bald chicken can't be plucked. Eleven hundred euros. I have eleven hundred euros in the inside pocket of my jacket now. If I'm frugal, it'll be just enough for a month. It probably won't be. And with that, I'm five thousand in the red and hiding from a tax bill that's ten times that. With a mixture of alienation and relief, I realized that I had cut off my return route home. I can't go back, even if I wanted to, or in any case not until by some miracle I've become rich enough to pay my debts there.

I'll be safe here in the labyrinth. The Dutch tax authorities won't be able to find me here. But, at the same time, objectively seen, it wouldn't be that foolish to escape this city because of the Parodis' case against me. Of course, in theory I will win in the long run. But I'm not stupid. I've gotten the point. They're smoking me out with their fortune. They have all the time in the world. It will be impossible for me to hold out as long as they. I don't stand a chance. But I don't want to leave at all. This is my city. My life's here.

My last eleven hundred euros in my pocket and without a plan, I'm signing off here in the realization that I can neither stay nor return. But have a drink on me. I'll think of something.

33.

A strange sound woke me up. When I looked out of the window, I saw men in hermetic silver suits proceeding silently along my alleyway. They were spraying a bilious green liquid into all the cracks and holes in the old city. They moved like robots. I got dressed and went outside to ask what they were doing. I addressed someone wearing a glass oxygen mask carrying a spray gun. He didn't even see me. I tapped him on the shoulder. He didn't react. So I tapped a little harder, and then on the visor covering his face. He gestured no with the index finger of his right hand and carried on working. Green steam rose upwards. His colleague stuck stickers on the walls:

    
derattizzazione in corso

    
non toccare le esche

I went back to bed and dreamed about the sun. When I was a boy and a long way from here and my knees were bare, there was sun every Sunday at grandma and granddad's house. Ants crawled secretively between the paving stones. But I knew what to do about that. I'd poke their nests open very carefully with sticks. Grinning like an omniscient god, I'd survey their panic. I'd spit on the columns of refugees a bit for fun. I didn't discriminate between enemy troops and civilians. And when I'd had enough, I'd take my pee-pee out of my shorts and annihilate their entire habitat with my piss-yellow Agent Orange.

I wonder how Djiby's doing. And Rashid. The European Court employs methods that are as slow as gas. The first thing to evaporate is the fake Rolex on your wrist. Afterward, hope evaporates.
And after that, green clouds rise up. You try to tap on the glass of the mask of authority, but they ignore you or gesture no with their finger.

A magical finger. And where's your magic, Rashid? Where are the dry, lucid, razor-sharp mathematical harmonies of your old, tawny-skinned folk? And Djiby, where is the magic of your bubbling laugh in the face of every inferno? And where is your magic, Leonardo, Ilja, Ilja Leonard, the magic of your splashing words that surge higher than any of the seven seas? All of our magic has become beached on a sandbank of procedures, paperwork, and problems.

The white ship sounded its horn just once. It was a porcelain ship that sailed to every country that everyone on board had ever dreamed of. Two blasts of the horn warned of the danger of incoming reality. In the meantime, in the harbor, a slow ballet could be observed of bone-white, floating palaces that avoided each other in their determination to dream in every direction at once.

And you, Leonardo, Ilja Leonard, are you going to stay onshore with the rats, or are you going to join the rats on the ships heading south where everything will be even more of the same than it already is? A fresh, cheerful crusade would do you good. Up against the Moors wearing a hip suit of armor. Every scratch that you can inflict on the black, stinking leather of a savage with your expensive designer saber will make the annals of history. Singers will sing of the heroic deeds of Don Leonardo at the walls of Aleppo, the walls of Sanaa, the walls of the Holy City, for all eternity.

Three blasts of the horn meant nothing. Or, better said, it meant everything, but even the oldest mariners in the city could no longer remember what. They'd last heard that signal when their
grandparents were children and they'd heard from their grandparents that nobody remembered what three blasts of the horn meant.

You want to embrace someone so you embrace your own arm. Until the cramp starts to hurt. You allow yourself to cry. But even that doesn't work. When nobody's watching, the black ship with lowered black sails sails silently into the black night.

34.

Around midday I walked along Via della Maddalena. It seemed like midnight. Pitch-black whores leaned against the gray walls of dark alleyways in black thigh-high boots. They hissed between their shining white teeth. They said words like “
amore
.” They said they wanted to run their fingers through my long hair. I was on my way to the theater. I was hoping Pierluigi would be there. Since he and his father had launched a court case against me, he'd stopped answering his phone. He'd probably even changed his number, because I'd also tried calling on the mobile phone of a friend he couldn't possibly know and many times from Caffè Letterario's landline. I had to speak to him. Maybe I could persuade him to have some sense. Maybe I could even convince him that their exhaustion strategy would only cost them money, too, as I could never comply with their demands because I simply didn't have that much money. I was even prepared to offer my excuses. Maybe I could suggest working together. I would write plays for them and help them put together the program. If necessary, unpaid. I'd offer them access to my contacts abroad. I was prepared to do anything if this absurd court case was dropped.

But Pierluigi wasn't there. The theater was closed, just like yesterday, the day before yesterday, and the days before that. There were no shows or events advertised. I wandered aimlessly through the streets. In Vico Angeli my eye fell upon a whore who was different from the rest: she was white. That itself was highly unusual. And she was slender and attractive. She wasn't flaunting all kinds of showy bulbous wares. She even looked pretty, and that was truly unique in these parts. She was a little hidden in an alcove, almost timid, as though she wanted to attract as little attention as possible from potential customers. She was wearing a strange red wig that reinforced the impression of shyness. It seemed as though she wanted to hide her face while she reluctantly showed off her slender body.

She fascinated me. I tried to look her in the eye. For a short moment our gazes met. She let out a shriek and ran away. I followed her. During the half second she'd looked at me, I'd seen something familiar in her eyes. I had to know what that was. I had to know who she was.

When I reached the corner of Via della Maddalena she was nowhere to be seen. She was quicker than I. She'd probably run farther downhill to Vico dei Corrieri or Vico Lavagna. But perhaps that was too simple. I hazarded a guess that she'd count on me being that simple. In that case she would have gone upward to the parallel alleyway, Vico del Duca, and then she'd probably hide in that narrow alley called Vico Trogoletto that crosses it, out of sight of Via della Maddalena. I went up to the next alley that ran parallel to Vico Angeli, Vico Salaghi, but I didn't see her in Vico Trogoletto. I walked down along Vico del Duca, and when I came out on
Via della Maddalena, I saw her peering around the corner from Vico Angeli. She saw me and fled along Via della Maddalena. She took the first left. I ran as fast as I could in pursuit. She'd committed an error. Obviously she didn't know the alleys in this neighborhood as well as I did. The first left was Vico Malone and that was a dead end.

35.

She stood with her back to the alley against the fence blocking her exit. “Please,” she whispered. “Go away.” She hid her face in her hands. “Please go away. I beg you. It'll be better for everyone.”

“I'm not going to hurt you.”

“Yes you will. You'll hurt me. And you'll hurt yourself, too.” Her shoulders shook. She was crying. I cautiously laid a hand on her back. “Don't touch me!” I pulled my hand back in shock. There had been something strangely familiar about that touch.

“I don't want anything from you,” I said gently. “I just want to see your face. I want to know who you are. And then I'll go. I promise you. If you want, I can even pay for it.”

When I said that, her crying increased dramatically in volume. She crumpled. Her whole body shuddered. I was overwhelmed by a warm, salty flood of pity. I had an almost irresistible urge to softly take her in my arms, but I didn't dare touch her again. I didn't know what to do. I rocked on my heels. What should I do? Perhaps she was right. Maybe I should just go away. What was I doing? I'd cornered a slender white prostitute wearing a red wig in a dead-end alley off Via della Maddalena. All that was missing was a pimp coughing politely with a knife to my back and
asking why I was scaring the wits out of his herd. And then there was still the possibility, however improbable it might be in this neighborhood, of police patrols and being charged with harassment or worse. As if I wasn't in enough trouble already. Perhaps I really should leave her alone. But something was stronger than I. I had to know who she was. It couldn't be a crime to want to see her face, could it?

“You'll be making the biggest mistake of your life,” she whispered, “if you don't go away immediately.”

“I don't believe you. But if it is so, I'm prepared. And what kind of damage can seeing your face cause to us? Unless you're so pretty I'll never get you out of my mind, which is a possibility I'm not ruling out, I don't think we're really capable of causing each other pain.”

“You don't know what you're saying.”

“Wouldn't be the first time,” I said. But she didn't laugh.

“I've warned you, Leonardo.”

“How do you know my name?”

She didn't reply. She straightened up proudly, still facing the fence, and pulled off her red wig. Long black hair flowed down her back. And then she turned around.

36.

Processions of penitents marched through the depopulated cities. Anyone still strong enough to knead dough or work the bellows for the blacksmith's fire abandoned their ovens and anvils to dress in camelhair and walk barefoot, praying and wailing, through the
streets among the stinking bodies covered in suppurating boils and black blotches. In some cities, people were so desperate to suffer sufficiently and pay penance that the streets were scattered with thorns, shards of glass, and glowing coals, replenished on a daily basis by the authorities. Anyone discovering a swelling or a black patch on their skin threw themselves screaming onto one of the many man-sized funeral pyres, the name of the one true God on their lips. Young widows smeared their young breasts with the fresh ash of their husbands, fathers, sons, and lovers. The sound of every city in Europe was of lamentations directed at the heavens. The smell was the odor of putrefaction and burning human remains.

Processions of penitents marched across the depopulated countryside. Long corteges of penitents dressed in jute and ash proceeded through fields of corn that were no longer harvested, cows that were no longer milked, and sheep that were no longer tended. They walked under cloudless skies across blistering hot gravel in the scorching midday sun and slept under open skies on bare rocks in the cutting cold of the night. They trampled every flower. At every blackberry bush, fights broke out over who was the greatest sinner, who then would be first to be allowed to wallow in the sharp thorns. They carried whips with heavy knots in the ropes with which, sobbing, they flailed their own backs until they bled. They pulled their own hair out with their bare hands. They broke the bones in their hands and feet with sharp, abrasive rocks. If an occasional villager offered them alms or a morsel of bread out of pity, they'd angrily kick him lame for having wanted to lessen their suffering.

All Europe had fallen prey to despair, desperation, apathy, and,
most of all, a crippling sense of guilt. The Black Death testing all the Christian kingdoms couldn't be anything other than God's punishment. And that punishment was so unimaginably heavy that immense sins must have been committed for the Almighty to bring down such devastating wrath on mankind. If the epidemic was God's punishment, the only remedy was to pay penance. And given the severity of the punishment, penance couldn't be severe enough. And it didn't help. On the contrary. Ironically enough, the processions just helped to spread the illness farther afield. And because they didn't help, the self-castigations became more and more extreme, the processions of penitents longer, their journeys farther, until there was nothing left but a pure, undiluted, silent sense of guilt, that, although it was unbearable, could only be borne.