Читать книгу La Superba - Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer - Страница 8

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The most beautiful girl in Genoa works in the Bar of Mirrors. She is neatly dressed like all the girls who work there. She also has a boyfriend who drops in on her from time to time at work. He uses hair gel and wears a sleeveless t-shirt with SOHO on it. He’s an asshole. Sometimes I watch them in the mirrors, kissing secretly in the cubbyhole where she prepares the small dishes they serve free with the aperitif.

This morning on the Via della Maddelena I saw someone who’d been mugged. “Al ladro!” he shouted. “Al ladro!” Then a boy came running round the corner. The man chased after him. He was wearing a white vest and he had a fat face and a fat belly. He looked like an honest man who’d learned to work hard for paltry pay from a young age. The boy ran uphill, to the Via Garibaldi, past the sundial and then carried on climbing, up the steps of the Salita San Francesco. The fat man who had been mugged didn’t stand a chance.

Later I sat drinking on the Piazza delle Erbe. It’s an unusual kind of place, evening just happens there without me having to organize anything. The little orange tables belong to the Bar Berto, the oldest pub on the square, famous for its aperitif. The white tables belong to the nameless trattoria where it’s impossible to eat without a booking. The red and yellow tables belong to various cafés and behind them there’s another terrace, a little lower down. I can look up the names if you’re interested. I was sitting at a blue table on the upper part of the square, looking out onto Bar Berto’s terrace. The blue tables belong to Threegaio, set up by three homosexuals who brainstormed for days on end and still couldn’t come up with a better name than that. I was drinking Vermentino from the Golfo di Tigullio. An impressive looking she-man wearing very dark sunglasses was sitting on a bar stool in front of the building. It was a reassuring sight, she was always there. Street musicians. Rose sellers. And then she spoke to me, “There’s something feminine about you.” She ran her fingers through my hair like a man claiming something as his own. “What’s your name?” Her voice was like a dockworker’s. “Don’t worry, I know. I’ll call you Giulia.”

That night there was a short but violent thunderstorm. I was on my way home when it started. I sheltered in an arcade. It had an official name I noticed later: Archivolto Mongiardino. The black sky lit up green. I’d never seen anything like it. The rain clattered down like two cast iron portcullises on either side of the vault. After a few minutes it stopped.

But the streetlights had gone out. In the alleys barely penetrated by daylight, a medieval darkness reigned. My house wasn’t far. I could find it by feeling my way, I was sure. Yes, the street went upwards here. This had to be Vico Vegetti. To my left and right, I felt scaffolding. That was right. There were renovations here. And then I almost tripped over something. A wooden beam or something similar. That’s what it felt like. Dangerous leaving something like that lying around in the street. I bent down to move it to one side. But it didn’t feel like wood. It was too cold and slippery for that. It was too rounded to be a beam. It felt strange, and a bit disgusting, too. I tried to use the light of my mobile phone as a torch, but it was too weak. I was almost home. I decided to push the thing behind the builders’ dumpsters and come back the next day to examine it. I was curious. I really wanted to know what it was.

Prostitutes are for lunch. They appear around eleven or half past eleven. They hang around in the labyrinth of alleyways in the sloping triangle between Via Garibaldi, Via San Luca, and Via Luccoli, on either side of the Via della Maddalena, in small dark streets with poetic names like Vico della Rosa, Vico dei Angeli, and Vico ai Quattro Canti di San Francisco. In these alleys the sun doesn’t even shine at midday. They lean there casually against doorposts or sit in clusters on the street. They say things like “amore” to me. They say that they love me and they want me to come with them. They say they want to run their fingers through my hair. They are black. They are blacker than the anthracite shadows in this city’s entrails. They give off the smell of night in the afternoon. They stand there on haughty, towering legs, a flickering glimmer of arrogance in their eyes. They sink their white teeth into men’s pale white flesh. I don’t know how I’d ever get out alive. Civil servants with leather briefcases dart away skittishly.

Later I see them again in the Galleria Mazzini: Genoa’s magistrates in their shirtsleeves, dark blue jackets slung across their shoulders, their calf-leather briefcases filled with the few documents of any real importance in their sole charge. They like to walk on the marble floor, past the antiques on display, enjoying the lofty reverberations of their footsteps under the crystalline roof. Griffins with the Genoese coat of arms on their chests support the chandeliers, their beaks twisted with arrogance. If you walk through the Galleria from the Piazza Corvetto, you come out at the Opera. Where else?

I walked toward the sea. In the distance, a yellow airplane glided over the waves and scooped up water. There were forest fires in the mountains. I know people who can tell tomorrow’s weather from the height at which the swallows soar. But the low flight of a fire plane is the most reliable indication of a blistering summer.

I’ve bought myself a new wardrobe so that I can slip into this elegant new world a new man. A couple of Italian summer suits, tailored shirts, an elegant pair of shoes, as soft as butter but as sharp as a knife, and a real panama hat. It cost me a fortune, but I considered it a necessary investment to give my assimilation a boost.

That evening, I spoke to Rashid. He sells roses. I usually bump into him a couple of times a night. I offered him a drink. He came to sit with me for a while. He was from Casablanca, he said, an engineer who specialized in air-conditioning and refrigeration. In Casablanca, he has a large house but no money. That’s why he came to Genoa, but he can’t get a job because he doesn’t speak Italian. During the day, he tries to learn Italian from YouTube videos. In the evenings, he sells roses. Every evening he does the rounds of all the terraces to Nervi. Then he walks back. To Nervi and back is twenty-four kilometers. He lives with eleven other Moroccans in a two-room apartment. “Of course there are rats, but luckily they aren’t that big. All Moroccans think you can get rich without even trying in Europe. Of course they won’t go back until they’ve saved enough to rent a Mercedes for a fortnight and put on a show that they’ve become spectacularly rich and successful in Europe. It’s a fairy tale that gets better with every retelling. But I’ve seen the reality, Ilja. I’ve seen the reality.”

When I walked home, the flag was fluttering high on top of the Palazzo Ducale’s towers. It wasn’t the European flag, nor the Italian flag. It was a red cross on a white background: the Genoese flag. La Superba. Above the harbor and in the distance, above the black mountains of Liguria, I heard the griffins screeching.

And then it came back to me. The previous night I’d stumbled over an object in the dark on the Vico Vegetti. And I’d hidden the object behind a garbage can. Now the streetlights were working again and I was actually quite curious.

But the thing wasn’t there anymore. There was all kinds of stuff near the garbage cans down on the corner of the Piazza San Bernardo, but nothing you could stumble over. Well, perhaps it wasn’t that important. Besides, I realized that showing so much interest in garbage might look a bit funny to the few passersby. In any case, it wasn’t the image I wanted to adopt as a proud, brand-new immigrant to the city. I went home.

But a little higher up in the alleyway, near the scaffolding, there was a dumpster full of builders’ waste. I remembered clinging onto the scaffolding in the pitch dark when the power cut out. On the off chance, I looked to see whether the thing might be there. At first I didn’t see it, but then I did. I looked back over my shoulder to see if anyone was looking, picked it up, and got the fright of my life.

It was a leg—a woman’s leg. Unmistakably a woman’s leg. And when it had been in the right context, it had been attractive—slender and long, perfectly proportioned. It was no longer wearing a shoe, but it still had on a stocking, the long, old-fashioned kind that only models on the Internet still wore. To cut to the chase, there I was, in the middle of the night, in my new foreign city holding an amputated female leg, and, all things considered, this didn’t seem to me the ideal start to my new life. Maybe I should call the police. But maybe I’d better not. I put the leg back and went off to bed.

But later I awoke with a start, bathed in sweat. How could I have been so stupid? Of course I could tell myself that I had my own reasons—which for that matter many would have found understandable—for not wanting to have anything to do with a chopped-off woman’s leg I’d accidentally discovered in a public place—but I’d stood there holding it in my hands. What I’m saying is I’d stood there groping it twice with my callow, canicular paws. Hadn’t I ever heard of fingerprints? Or DNA evidence? And when the leg attracted the attention of the carabinieri, which sooner or later it was likely to do, would they carelessly toss it to one side as yet another sawn-off woman’s leg found in the alleyways, or wouldn’t they possibly be curious as to whom it had belonged to, who had amputated it, and whether this had happened with the approval of its rightful owner? And wouldn’t they, once that curiosity had taken root, carry out a simple search for clues? And wasn’t an investigation of the neighborhood then quite an obvious next step? Wake up, you dope.

But I no longer needed to tell myself that. I was already wide awake. More than that, I was already getting dressed. It was still nighttime, dark, no one about. I had to act quickly. The leg was still there. I didn’t have any kind of detailed plan, but removing the corpus delicti from the public arena seemed a sensible place to start. I took it home with me and leaned it against the back of the IKEA wardrobe in my bedroom.

I want to be part of this world. When I woke up, I heard the city starting to chew the day between her ancient, rotten teeth. In different parts of the neighborhood, her crumbling ivories were being drilled. Neighbors swore at each other through open windows. On the wall of the palazzo my bedroom looked out on, someone had written that all smiles are mysterious. Someone else had written that he thinks the Genoa football club is better than the Sampdoria football club, but in terms much more explicit than that. Someone else had written that he loved a girl named Diana and that to him she was a dream become reality. Later on, he or somebody else had crossed out the confession. There was garbage on the street. Pigeons pecked around in their own shit.

Today ships will arrive with Dutch, German, and Danish tourists on their way back from Sardinia and Corsica. They arrive dozens of times a day, and the tourists cautiously and reluctantly lose themselves a bit inside the labyrinth for an afternoon. They seldom dare venture much further than the alleys a few meters from the Via San Lorenzo. Others walk along the Via Garibaldi to the Palazzo Rosso and the Palazzo Bianco, oblivious to the dark jungle lying at their feet.

I like tourists. I can watch them and follow them for hours. They are touching in their tired attempts to make something of the day. When I was a boy, school used to give us lists of all the things we shouldn’t forget to take on our school trip. The last item on the list was always “a good mood.” That’s what tourists carry in their rucksacks when they trudge through the streets and look at the map on every corner to try to find out where on earth they are. And why was that again? Finding every building pretty, every square nice, and every little shop cute is a matter of survival. Sweat pours from their foreheads. They think they understand everything, but they’re suspicious at the wrong moments, while not fearing the real dangers. In Genoa, they are more helpless than anywhere else. Incomprehension and insecurity are written all over their faces as they hesitantly wander around the labyrinth. I like them. They’re my brothers. I feel connected to them.

But I want to be part of this world. I want to live in the labyrinth like a happy monster, along with thousands of other happy monsters. I want to nestle in the city’s innards. I want to understand the grinding of its old buildings’ teeth. I went outside and walked along the Vico Vegetti, the Via San Bernado, past the garbage cans and the Piazza Venerosa, down to the Via Canneto Il Lungo to do some shopping at Di per Di. I bought detergent, grissini, and a bottle of wine. Then I took the same route home. But I did happen to be walking along with a plastic bag from Di per Di. My bag was my green card, my residence permit, my asylum. Everyone could see that I’d been admitted. Everyone could see I lived here. I had spoken scarcely more Italian than the words “prego” and “grazie,” but when they spotted my plastic bag from the supermarket, no one could consider me an outsider any longer. I stopped at a kiosk and bought Il Secolo XIX, Genoa’s local paper. I had resolved to read it every day. I clamped it proudly under my arm, making sure it was folded in such a way that everyone could see that it was Il Secolo.

When I got home, I looked at the wall of my building. I live on the ground floor of a tall palazzo in a narrow alleyway that climbs steeply. “Ground floor” is a relative concept for an alley at such a steep gradient. To the right of my entrance, there must be a large area under my bedroom that is probably storage space for the restaurant at number one rosso, which has been closed since my first day here. The whole building is made of deeply-pitted, grayish chunks of rock, crumbling cement, and patches of old layers of plaster here and there. All in all, the entire thing is rotten, peeling, and decayed. But it has been for centuries. And proud of it. When this was built, there was no gas, electricity, running water, television, or Internet. All these amenities had been tacked onto the outside in a makeshift way over the years. There are wires running from the roof along the front wall, entering through holes drilled into the various apartments. The plumbing and sewage have been added to the outside too—a disordered tangle of lead piping. Next to my front door, I noticed a thick pipe entering my house through a hole. And then I saw the sticker again:

derattizzazione in corso

non toccare le esche

The same sticker I had spotted all over the city over the past days had been placed on the water pipes going through the wall into my house, too. I smiled contentedly. I didn’t live in a hotel. I lived in a real building, a real Genoese building with the same sticker as so many other buildings in the city. I must look up what it means at some point, just for the fun of it.

My waitress has had a nasty fall. Or something else happened. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days in the Bar of Mirrors. Then I saw her walking along the Salita Pollaiuoli in her own clothes. She said “Ciao” to me. She had a bandage around her left elbow and her left wrist was stained red with iodine disinfectant. There were red patches on her left leg and foot, too. Later I was relieved to see her serving in her neat waitress uniform. Her white shirt was short-sleeved so the bandage and the red patches on her arm were visible to all. The patches on her leg were concealed by her black trousers, but she’d rolled up the trouser leg to her ankle, probably because the seam irritated the wound on her foot too much otherwise. It was clearly visible because she was wearing open shoes. Closed-toe shoes would hurt too much, I was sure of that. I repeatedly ordered drinks from her, and each time I wanted to ask what had happened and whether she was alright. But I didn’t dare. I was worried she’d take the question the wrong way. I was afraid that she’d think of her tall boyfriend with the gel in his hair, that bastard, even though I didn’t see him that night.

I’ve noticed how good friends greeted each other. Imagine this: you’re a fat man wearing a dark blue polo shirt. You’re wearing your sunglasses on the top of your head. You heave yourself up onto the terrace, puffing and panting. With visible reluctance, you go and sit down at a free table as you remove your mobile phone from your trouser pocket all in a single, fluid movement. The waitress comes and asks you what you want to drink. The question is not unexpected but still it annoys you. You stare at the floor and in your mind’s eye run through all the drinks in the world. Each one seems even more disgusting that the previous. Finally you order a Campari and soda with a dismissive gesture. You order it in such a way that it is clear to everyone on the terrace that you understand that you’ll have to order something and you’ll just order a fucking Campari and soda then. After that, you immediately continue messing with your mobile phone, causing you to puff and pant again, meaning: I’m an important man and that’s why everyone’s bothering me, but I hate this damn thing, this phone, if I designed one it would be so much better, but that doesn’t interest me, and, what’s more, that’s how things always go in this country, no wonder the economy’s doing so badly and that it’s unbearably hot. It means: I just got a message from the prime minister but I don’t know how this phone works and I wish he’d leave me alone for a moment and decide himself whether to invade Afghanistan or not, but he’s incapable of it, he can’t even hitch up his own trousers without me. Next the Campari and soda is served. You don’t even glance at the drink, nor at the waitress who brings it. You’re much too busy puffing and panting and not understanding how your own phone works, not understanding how anyone can invent a device that even you can’t figure out. The waitress asks if you’d like anything to eat. You growl something incomprehensibly exotic like: just a small bowl of green, pitted olives with Tabasco on the side. Or: gnocchi with chili sauce, hold the pesto, lemon on a stick. Or: peanuts. Then your friend turns up. He’s happy to see you and particularly happy that he’s not the first one to arrive today and that you’re already there. He shouts, “Ciao!” even before he’s walked onto the terrace and then “Ciao!” again, and then a third time “Ciao!” as he sits down at your table. All this time you don’t look at him. You’re much too busy.

A waitress comes over to him, too, and he orders a drink. You’re just in the process of sending your message to the prime minister and you can’t understand why the damn thing won’t send. Your friend says “Cheers,” but you try the prime minister’s other number first. Doesn’t work, either. You huff and puff. Things are like this all the time in Italy these days. You slap the phone onto the table dejectedly. Only then do you look at your friend and say something like, “If Milan bought Ronaldinho, I could have told you Abramovich would put down 150 million for Kaká. It’s crazy they’re not investing in a center back this season. Crazy!”

The Bar of Mirrors is like a porcelain grotto inside. People walk up and down the inclined street outside. The street goes up to the Piazza Matteotti before the Palazzo Ducale. You might also say that it goes to the Via San Lorenzo or the Piazza de Ferrari. It goes down, too. But not many people dare go that way. You get to the San Donato, the touristy bit, which is alright, but then it begins to rise up again. The Stradone Sant’Agostino is the least adventurous. It leads to the monastery and Genoa University’s Faculty of Architecture and, behind that, the Piazza Sarzano. From Piazza Sarzano you can go back down again to the harbor, the sea. If you really have to. But it’s not recommended. The medieval Barbarossa Walls are in the way. And the small streets that do exist can’t be found on any map. “Small streets” is not a good description, they’re more like staircases or improvised temporary walkways over crumbling stones.

The street that ascends and descends is called Salita Pollaiuoli. If you dare turn right before San Donato, you come out on the Via San Bernardo. As the crow flies it is about another fifty meters or so to the Torre dei Embriaci where there’s a good bar. But just try finding it. I’d be interested to know if I’d ever see you again.

Of course I’ll see you again. I bump into the same people all day, even though the labyrinth stretches from Darsena to Foce, from the sea to the mountains, from the harbor to the highway, from Principe Station to Brignole Station. I’ve asked myself how that’s possible. You’d expect a maze to have been built so that people would be out of sight of each other, so they wouldn’t bump into each other all the time—a maze of this size ought to reduce the chances of bumping into the same people to zero. But now I understand that it’s the exact opposite. People can avoid each other in a city of straight lines with clear boulevards and avenues between home and office, office and gym, gym and supermarket, supermarket and home, departure and destination. The person who knows where he’s hurrying doesn’t notice a thing and is no longer observed. In a city of straight lines, people are like electrons in a copper wire—fast, interchangeable, and invisible. The stream can be measured, but individuals cannot be observed with the naked eye. A labyrinth is precisely the place to encounter other people. You can never find the same place twice. But because no one can, everyone wanders around those same alleyways all day. Some spend their whole lives wandering around here. Or longer. I’m sure I’ll see you again, my friend. It’s impossible to find the same piazza twice or walk along the same alleyway twice, unless you are trying not to.

Today I thought about all the different kinds of girls in Genoa.

Some women don’t fit into any category, that’s true. Like the girl in the Bar of Mirrors. She’s made of different fabric than other girls—the same stuff smiles are made of: pathos and summer days. Her mere existence makes me as happy as a small child, and I imagine myself sobbing against her soft shoulders. We’ll leave her aside then. We’re talking about girls, not the rare epiphany of a goddess.

I used to think were two kinds of girls: pretty and ugly. But in light of my most recent research findings, that dichotomy is no longer valid, although I fear the simplicity of the model will always retain its charm.

Of course there are pretty girls. That’s not the problem. You’d like to sketch them carefully with a pencil. You’d like to skate over their smooth undulations with precise fingertips. You’d like to briefly taste the perfect balance of their curves, lines, forms, and volume with a connoisseur’s tongue. Even more than that, you’d like them to take their clothes off and then not to have to do a thing. They might be like a photo you’d be all too happy to download—perfectly suggestive, or explicitly spotlighted.

Girls like that are the way Milo Manara draws them: hieroglyphs of promise. They’re never not posing, though they don’t even need to pose since they already fulfill every standard just standing there. You’d never actually be able to smell them, never be able to tease them by playing with a minuscule roll of fat, nor lick the sour sweat from their armpits, if only because they’re imaginary, just drawn that way. There is something artificially innocent about them, something oo-la-la-ish. Of course they end up in army barracks without their panties, but that’s just because they happened to be kidnapped by soldiers when they were in the middle of undressing. You get that a lot. But they’ll never ring your doorbell without their panties asking if they can give you a handjob in the rain because they’ve never done that before. They’ll never sit on your silver candelabra without further explanation, then lick your table clean before disappearing on home without saying a word.

Recently I got one of those celebrity magazines free with Il Secolo XIX, full of photos of real Manara girls in little more than bikinis. In the accompanying interviews, they say stuff like, “I love men who are honest”; “My daughter is the most important thing in my life”; “I’ll never have sex if Love with a capital L isn’t part of the picture”; and “I’ll always have a special place in my heart for God.” Seriously, just give me the ugly girls then. At least they understand they have to do their best. Or the pretty girls, but then without the interviews, for God’s sake. Or just the bikini-less ones, preferably captured on film.

I saw a tourist girl at San Lorenzo with her tourist boyfriend. He had a camera, she had pink high heels, a yellow handbag, and a scandalous denim miniskirt. They were Russian, you could see that. I checked it for you just to make sure, my friend: they spoke Russian. He wanted to take a picture of her in front of the cathedral. She protested. She wasn’t looking her best today. But when he got ready to take a shot anyway, she put her middle finger to her bottom lip and her other hand to her crotch. They took dozens of photographs like that: next to one of the lions, then the other, in front of the big door, on the steps next to the tower, and so on and so on. She adopted a porno pose for every shot. She wasn’t particularly good-looking, more shameless than refined. She was bored but not so listless to not realize she’d have to do something for a sexy result. I watched her, breathless. There wasn’t a spark of humor or fun in her poses, no fiery lust in her eyes. She bent her body mechanically for the predictable desires of the photographer and all those future browsers who’d click the thumbnails into a cliché of lust. And that was exactly what was so irresistibly sexy.

You’ve also got women with spunk lighting up their eyes in anticipation. In a manner of speaking. They’re usually too young for their age. Lacey nothings frame their gym-fed, well-baked muscles. Someone like that is dry and unpalatable. She dresses like an unwrapped mummy, like that woman of indeterminate age somewhere in her late forties, with short black hair and skirts that get shorter by the day—the one who pays a neighborly visit a couple of times a day, smiling mysteriously, to Laura Sciunnach’s jewelry shop in the Salita Pollaiuoli, across from the Bar of Mirrors, because Bibi with all the tattoos works there, the perfect Don Juan, whose scorn for women causes them to swoon. She’s ugly, but she walks along the street as though she’d inserted two vibrators before closing the door and stepping out onto the street. She never double-locks the door when she comes home drunk at night. She’s like a hungry keyhole through which she wants to be spied. If only somebody would ravish her, for God’s sake. Dripping with lust, she’d report it to the disbelieving carabinieri half her age in their shiny boots, their shiny, shiny boots. And she’s not that ugly, really. I tried to make eye contact with her. I try to make eye contact with her several times a day from the terrace of the Bar of Mirrors.

On the terrace of the Doge Café on Piazza Matteotti, I saw a girl who had painted a girl on herself. She was Cleopatra behind her own death mask. Or maybe she was someone completely different behind Cleopatra’s mask, the only people who know that are the ones who wake up beside her the next morning, rub the sleep from their eyes, full of disbelief, and begin the difficult process of reconstructing the night before in an attempt to figure out the identity of this pale, unknown lady who has so obviously nestled herself between their sheets. And it’s not until she has restored her façade for hours in the bathroom that they remember. Women like that cost money. They don’t just need lotions and potions but designer clothing for every hour of the day, in line with the fashion of the moment, and a lot of shoes, in particular, a lot of shoes. All of those clothes and shoes are only bought to take off again. But to achieve that goal, they have to be expensive, everyone knows that. Each morning she turns herself into the woman she thinks a woman should look like—as she thinks I want her to look. It doesn’t matter whether she knows what I want or not. It’s more important that she does her best to satisfy her image of my image of her.

The worst are fat American women who are under the misapprehension that intelligence is more important than looks. That’s such a stupid concept. They talk about immigration laws in slow, clear English. She was on the terrace of the Doge Café in front of Palazzo Ducale, too, but she was a misunderstanding. With her tits like burst balloons in a comfy summer dress like a pre-war tent, she had no right to talk about any subject whatsoever. She should withdraw to a dark sitting room in Ohio and sit at her computer with shaking fingers and send messages to Internet forums for women with suicidal tendencies under the pseudonym FaTgIrL. She was eligible for a postnatal abortion. Her mere existence was bad enough. The fact she wasn’t ashamed, that she marred, insulted the elegance of Genoa’s, of Liguria’s, of all of Italy’s Piazza Matteotti with her pontifical presence, and the fact she also thought she had the right to be considered a human being rather than an ugly, fat woman, was repulsive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I loved speaking Italian. I wasn’t very good at it, but I liked to, which seems to me to perfectly fit the definition of an amateur. Whenever I was on a roll, or at least thought I was, it felt like swimming in the waves of a warm sea. I could bob on the rhythm of the long and short syllables. I would stretch myself out on long, clear vowels and then make a playful, thrashing sprint across the staccato of consonants. I’d dive down into a daring construction, knowing I’d need a subjunctive sooner or later, but would come up spluttering. It didn’t matter what it was about or whether it was about anything. It was a game. I didn’t need to swim anywhere; it was enjoyable enough just to be in the water.

Although I loved Italian and tried my best to learn it, I didn’t really take it seriously as a language. It’s a language for children, a language that tastes of rice with butter and sugar. The language is perfectly suited to a month at the seaside in August with the whole family, when the world can be easily organized and divided into clear categories like bello and brutto, buono and schifoso, libero and occupato, pranzo and cena. The language is also exceptionally suited to shouting at children the whole damn day that they shouldn’t do that, whatever it is they’re doing, and to say that’s enough. You can also say goodbye to each other the whole day in it. It’s a language that makes a racket and that’s the only thing that counts, like when children are happy, weeks-on-end happy, drive-you-crazy happy with a rattle.

But I was, too. I was happy. I wanted to make a racket. And the fact, the more than obvious fact, that I had to practice and improve my Italian gave me a wonderful excuse to address complete strangers on any random subject. I would never do that in my own language because those people don’t interest me, let alone what they have to say, and because my own language isn’t a toy. And if I accidentally say something insulting in Italian, I can always add a few grammatical blunders and then sit there smiling naively like a screwball foreigner. I could get away with anything—that was what was so fun about it.

So that was how I spoke to Viola’s grandmother. She was so Italian and so come si deve I thought she’d prove entertaining training material.

“My name is Franca. But it’s better that you call me Signora Mancinelli and use the formal mode of address because you have to practice your Italian and the formal modes are more difficult. And you? What? Giulia? Giulian? Gigia? Leonardo. That is a bit easier, indeed. Like Leonardo da Vinci. I can remember that. Or, if you asked today’s youth, Leonardo DiCaprio. I’m an elderly lady of the upper class. They still had education in my days. I know who Leonardo da Vinci was. See that man over there? Look hard.”

He sits on the terrace at the Bar of Mirrors almost every day, a bon vivant, suffering from some subsidence, who acts too young for his age. He has white hair and wears brightly colored Hawaiian shirts from the plastic boxes of remainders at the market. When he comes shuffling along with his plastic bags from the Di per Di, he looks like a tramp. But once he’s sitting down he orders a mojito. Tramps don’t drink cocktails. And he has plenty of chitchat. Everyone who says hello to him is treated to an undoubtedly priceless anecdote, freshly plucked from the riches of his daily life. He bares his teeth as he smiles and draws passersby and waitresses into his monologue. He wears glasses on his forehead, which are supposed to give him the air of an elderly intellectual. But I don’t fall for that. He has holes in his shoes. His eyes are deep-set, his cheeks have caved in, and his stubble sticks to his chin like the frayed edges of an unwashed bathmat. He nods briefly at fellow tramps passing by over the gray paving stones.

“Watch out,” the signora says. “He’s a very important man. Bernardo is his name, Bernardo Massi. He’s rich.” She leaves a meaningful silence. “Very rich. Although they say his wife left him. But I know he still has a palazzo on the Piazza Corvetto.” I nodded to show I’d understood how significant that was. I tried to get a better look at him but some tourists had sat down at the table between him and me. They were seriously blocking the view with an excess of cameras and sticky body parts, peering at a map. The waitress came and they ordered a beer and an iced tea. The waitress asked whether they wanted anything to eat. They have the charming habit here of serving a range of snacks with the aperitif, with the compliments of the establishment. But the tourists became acutely suspicious, suspecting it was a dirty trick to make them pay for more than the two drinks they’d ordered and which would certainly be too expensive, here right in the center, and you know, you have to be very careful in these southern countries because they’ll rip you off right in front of your nose, and in any case we’re never coming back here, it’s much too expensive, but why am I fussing about it, are you fussing about it, we’re on holiday, so we’d better enjoy it, otherwise you don’t really have a life do you, that’s what I always say, it’s pretty important to enjoy yourself in life, even on holiday, so let’s just drink our drinks.

I don’t know whether it’s shamelessness, indifference, or a cultural code. But why in God’s name do tourists have to wear their dirty underwear as soon they sit down in a southern country and block my view? He was wearing a stained t-shirt from a German football club and shorts that had been washed to shreds; she was wearing comfy, baggy holiday shorts. They looked like intelligent, wealthy people to me. No doubt they had a house in Dortmund and a delectable DVD collection in their designer shelving unit, a car with fancy wheel trims in the garage, and evening wear for their work’s New Year’s reception in their recessed wardrobe.

In the Pré quarter, where Rashid lives along with the rest of Africa, every underprivileged illegal immigrant spends the first sixty euros he earns on a fake Rolex with imitation diamonds so that he can begin to fit in a little bit with the respectable Europeans, and those heirs of the wirtschaftswunder were just sitting there in their underwear. What kind of an impression do you think that made? And what do you think it means? What did they mean to say by this? If you’re on the beach by the Deiva Marina or at a campsite in Pieve Ligure I can understand it. But this was right in front of my view, on the most precious terrace in the city, in the shadow of centuries, in the historical center of Genoa, La Superba, the heart of the heartless one that had allowed them to penetrate to the roots of her pride. Does it mean they don’t understand or they don’t want to understand? Or are they sending out a special message? Like: We just happen to be on holiday here, nice to get away from all the stress, and that’s why we’re doing what we want, just having a lovely nice time being ourselves for those three weeks a year, you know. Or: Those Italians don’t know a thing, it’s just one big hip-hip-hooray beach from the Costa Brava to Alanya. Or is it actually intended as a status symbol dressing like that, does it mean you can permit yourselves to go on holiday without caring about anything whatsoever?

“Don’t be fooled by appearances,” the signora said.

“My apologies, signora, I was distracted for a moment.”

“He looks like an unmade bed. He dresses as though he has shares in the illegal sewing shops in the Pré. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did. I must ask Ursula some time.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Ursula Smeraldo. She has a countess in her family. By marriage, though. And just between you and me, she’s rather down on her luck, if you get my meaning. But we’re practically neighbors on the Via Giustiniani, and it would be strange if I didn’t greet her. What’s more, she knows what’s going on.”

The tourists’ shamelessness reached a new low. They’d unfolded their map and asked the waitress where something was. They had the goddamn guts to speak to her! Probably about something ridiculous like the aquarium. She stood bent over their table for minutes on end, giving them all kinds of explanations. My waitress. She was sacred. No one can ask her the way to the aquarium in their underpants. She’s not allowed to reply, and certainly not so extensively and sweetly and prettily. Not so sweetly and prettily. Not so extensively. Not so bent over and so much in my line of vision it hurt.

“I know about her, too.”

I gave the signora an irritated look.

“Ursula told me that Bernardo Massi broke up with his wife. But everyone knows that he’s powerful and important, that he’s rich, I mean, even though he dresses like a tramp. Don’t be fooled by the exterior. Everything is hidden in Genoa. We don’t have any squares with fountains, no palazzi with fancy façades. All the gold and art treasures are hidden away behind incredibly thick walls of common gray limestone. A true businessman stashes away his fortune in an old sock and goes out onto the street wearing tatters in the hope of receiving alms. In Milan and Rome, everyone wants to show off everything, fare bella figura, with a flamboyant display of good taste and excess. In Genoa everyone understands that it doesn’t give you an advantage. To the contrary. The man who splashes his wealth about ostentatiously has far too many friends, as the saying goes. The saying is a bit different from that, but you understand what I’m saying. Do you understand what I’m saying? You have to learn how to behave in this city. It’s a porcelain grotto.”

“I think I can only see the exterior,” I say. Only then did the waitress turn around. She asked us whether we might like something to eat. She asked it coolly, unapproachably, and proud, like someone with a countess in her family, like the marble duchess herself—La Superba.

10.

If I think about these notes, my friend, and think about how I’ll turn them into a novel someday, a novel that needs to be carried along by a protagonist who will sing himself free from me and insist on the right to his or her own name, experiences, and downfall in exchange for my personal confrontation with my new city, which is more like a triumphal tour than a tragic course toward inevitable failure—and, on the grounds of that alone, is not suitable material for a great book—then I think about how crucial it will be to make tangible sense of the feeling of happiness that this city has given me time after time, even if only as a sparkling prelude to the punches of fate. Happiness, I say. I realize you could no longer repress a giggle when I said that. I realize that it’s strange to hear such a weak and hackneyed word come out of my mouth. Happiness is something for lovers before they have their first fight, for girls in floral dresses at the seaside who don’t see the jellyfish and the ptomaines, or for an old man with a photo album who can no longer really tell the difference between the past and the present. Happiness is basically a temporary illusion without any profundity, style, or class. The candy floss of emotions. And yet, for lack of a better word, I feel happy in Genoa, in a golden yellow, slow, permanent way. Not like candy floss, but like good glass. Not like a carnival, but like a primeval forest. Not like the clash of cymbals, but a symphony.

It is also remarkable, or I daresay unbelievable, that happiness is dependent upon location, on longitude and latitude, city limits, pavement, and street names. I’ve read enough philosophy, both Western and Eastern, to realize that wisdom dictates you should laugh at me and dismiss my sensation as an aberrance. So be it. That’s the point. The more I think about it as I write these words, the more I become convinced of the importance of putting into words this impossible, undesirable, unbelievable feeling of happiness.

Street names and pavement. That’s the way I formulated it. In the first instance as a stylistic device, of course, sketched with the rough sprezzatura that characterizes my writing. But in the second instance, it’s true, too. I’ll give you an example: Vico Amandorla can make me so happy. It’s an insignificant alleyway that runs from Vico Vegetti to Stradone Sant’Agostino. It’s a short stretch, and you don’t encounter anything of any importance along the way. The alleyway isn’t even pretty, at least not in the conventional manner. Normal, ugly old houses and normal, smelly old trash. But the alley curves up the hill like a snake. A little old lady struggles uphill in the opposite direction. The alley is actually too steep, built wrongly centuries and centuries ago or just sprung into existence in a very awkward manner. The alley is pointless, too. You come out too far down, below the Piazza Negri. If you want to be there, at San Donato, it’s much better to just take Vico Vegetti downhill and then turn right along Via San Bernardo. That’s faster and more convenient. And if you want to be in the higher part of the Stradone Sant’Agostino, at Piazza Sarzano, it’s much quicker and more convenient to follow the same Vico Vegetti in the other direction, past the Facoltà di Architettura straight to Piazza Negri. All of this makes me very happy. And then the pavement. This alley isn’t paved with the large blocks of gray granite you get everywhere in Genoa, but with cobblestones as big as a fist. You can’t walk on them. There’s a strip of navigable road laid with narrow bricks on their sides. Half of them have sunk or come loose. There hasn’t been any maintenance here since the early Middle Ages. And then that name. Who in the world wouldn’t want to stroll along Vico Amandorla? It’s a name that smells like a promise, as soft as marzipan, as mature as liquor in forgotten casks, in the cellar of a faraway monastery where the last monk died twenty years ago one afternoon with an innocent child’s prayer on his lips in the cloister gardens, in the shadow of an almond tree, as happy as a man after a rich dinner with dear friends. Say the name quietly if you are afraid and you won’t be afraid anymore: Vico Amandorla.

From Piazza Negri you can walk, during museum opening hours, through the cloister gardens of Sant’Agostino to Piazza Sarzano and the city walls. The passage through the cloister is triangular, undoubtedly as an architectonic compromise with exceptional topographical circumstances. The tip points toward the tower, which is sprinkled with colorful mosaics that clash with the strict and sober gray of the cloister. What’s the statement? What must the monks who wore away the pavement of the cloister passage with their footsteps have thought at the sight of their own festive tower? That it was Mardi Gras outside? That the gray life in the cloister clashed with that path upwards to heaven, a path as garish and variegated as a rocket, ready to be fired so that it can burst out into a cascade of colors?

Piazza Sarzano is a square that I still don’t really get, a square like a formless mollusk with a Metro station I never see anyone going into or coming out of. But just to the right of it, left of the church, is a secret passageway to another city—a medieval wormhole. With its profound and contented pavement, the street swings steeply up the hill to a forgotten and abandoned mountain village straight out of Umbria or Abruzzo. A handful of narrow, abandoned little streets that rise and fall around a shell-shaped village square that slumbers in the sunshine. But in the distance you don’t see any mountaintops, no hills crosshatched with vines, no goatherds, but the docks of Genoa. This is a magical place you cannot be in without realizing that you actually can’t be there because the place cannot exist. This is Campo Pisano, a perfect name euphonically, an ideal marriage between sound and rhythm. Its meter is the triumphant final chord of a heroic verse. The name fits perfectly after the bucolic diaeresis of the dactylic hexameter. The succession of a bi-syllabic and tri-syllabic obeys the Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder and creates a charming auslaut after the first unmarked element of the dactyl, by which an ideal alternation between a falling and a rising rhythm arises. The sound is carried by the open vowels that shine like the three primary colors on an abstract painting by Mondrian. The falling movement from the a to the o finds a playful counterpoint in the high i before it is repeated.

The cool hard consonants articulate the composition like the black lines on the same painting, with the racy repetition of the p right in the middle. It is a name like an incantation to evoke a magical abode. A spell of otherworldly sophistication is needed to bring to life an impossible place. If someone were to unscrew the street’s nameplate from the wall, Campo Pisano would vanish into the mists of the docks, only to reappear when an ancient high priest remembered the name and it passed through his wrinkly lips between the Barbarossa walls and the sea. Campo Pisano. It’s a happy place with a tragic past, in the same way that only people who have known pain can be happy because people who are painlessly happy like that blow away like a Sunday paper in the wind of an early day in spring. This place was once a kind of Abu Ghraib. Prisoners of war were locked up here after La Superba’s army and navy had finally put down their archenemy Pisa for good. The curses of the defeated and humiliated Pisani still ring out to this day. Symbols of Genoa’s power are worked into the pavement in mosaics made of uneven pebbles. I’m the only person about at this time of day. The green shutters on the houses are closed. The wine bar won’t open until the evening. In the distance I can hear a goat bleating, or a ferry honking.

Vico Superiore del Campo Pisano is a dead end, but Vico Inferiore del Campo Pisano isn’t. Or the other way round. It depends which day it is. One of the two of them is a new wormhole, not back to Genoa and the present, but to America and yesterday’s future. The road curves gently downhill to the left and leads to a grotto. Dampness and vegetation seep from moldy walls. These are the vaults of the bridge that links Piazza Sarzano with the Carignano quarter. The high priest lives under the last arch. His skull is older than the city. High above him, the people of Genoa go in search of parking spots and bargains. Closer to the sea the fast traffic races along the Sopraelevata, the raised motorway along the coast.

The grotto opens out into a post-apocalyptic landscape, or to be more precise: this is the perfect location to film an old-fashioned science fiction film, preferably in black and white. Its official name is Giardini di Baltimora, but people know it as Giardini di Plastica, the plastic garden. It’s a gigantic dog-walking spot that also serves as a shooting-up area for heroin addicts and a kissing zone for young couples without places of their own. It looks like a 1960s or ’70s version of the twenty-first century. Desolate green with charmingly gray mega-office-blocks. Above-ground nuclear bunkers in a field of stinging nettles. Pre-war spaceships that have crashed in a forgotten hole in the city and gradually been reclaimed by nature.

All kinds of pathways go back up to the Middle Ages from here, or to Piazza Sarzano or Via Ravecca. But you can also walk under the supports of the rusty behemoths, across the underground car park beneath which the motorway runs to the sea, past peeling bars and clubs with unimaginative names, under the skyscraper, to Piazza Dante. The city will reveal itself to you there once again, with an ironic smile. Yes. After your epic journey, you’re simply back on Piazza Dante. Thousands of Vespas, Porta Soprana, Columbus’s house, the cloisters of Sant’Andrea, in the distance the fountain on Piazza de Ferrari and, on the other side, Via XX Settembre. You know every street here. It’s just a three-minute walk to your favorite bars. You burst out laughing in surprise. But how am I ever going to write about this, my friend? How can I ever make people believe that a city makes me happy?

11.

Religion is the opiate of the masses. Although Italy has flirted more often and more intimately with Marxism than most other Western European countries, it is one of the most drugged up countries I’ve ever seen. The Holy See actively gets involved in politics. The pronouncements of the Holy Father are even widely reported in progressive and left-wing newspapers. Not a week goes by without a public debate that is only a debate in that the Vatican has regurgitated one of its anachronistic opinions in a press release. There are few politicians who have the courage to commit electoral kamikaze by distancing themselves from the dictates of the Holy Mother-Church or casting doubt on the authority of the old right-winger who believes himself Christ’s terrestrial locum.

Genoa is a civilized, northern, and even explicitly left-wing city, where money is earned, where people can read and write, and where all the old people go to church. Or they take communion at home if they live on the seventh floor, with their fluid retention and their walker and the lift’s out of order again. The tabloids scream outrage. In Genoa, a salesman’s healthy skepticism is the norm, just as the pleasant shadow in the alleyways doesn’t evaporate under any amount of sun. Jesus said that Peter wanted to build his church on a rock. Peter’s church in Genoa is on Piazza Banchi and it is built on shops. The foundations of trade still lie under the church’s foundations. But even here, the mayor only has to come up with the idea of organizing a Gay Pride parade for the archbishop to put a stop to it the next day.

Being a Catholic doesn’t have to be a conscious choice, not like the existential struggles in Dutch Protestantism that go with being doubly, triply, quadruply Reformed or Restored Reformed. In the fatherland, conversion to Catholicism is for men of my profession worthy of a press release, guaranteed fodder for an endless series of discussion nights in community centers. In Italy, it’s something you’re born into, just like being born a supporter of Genoa or Sampdoria, and just as you’re born someone who eats trofie al pesto and not egg foo young with noodles. God isn’t someone you search for on a hopeless path with your hands cramped into a begging bowl, but someone like the coach of a football team or the chef in a restaurant: he’ll be there, and no doubt he’ll do his best, because that’s how it’s always been. So you get baptized and you marry in a church, not because you particularly want that, but because it makes Granny happy and because that’s the way it’s always been. Catholicism is the default, the standard setting, and too many complicated downloads and difficult processes are needed to deviate from it. Most people won’t go to all that trouble.

But this wasn’t what I intended to talk about at all. Religion is a bit of a woman’s thing after all. The men in Italy celebrate their own holy high mass every Sunday at three o’clock on the dot. Since time immemorial the year has unfolded around the cycle of friendly duels and preliminary rounds that lead to the championship and the final position. The religion is called Serie A. Mass is each team’s weekly match. At three o’clock on Sunday afternoons, millions of Italian men sit in their regular parish to be flagellated for ninety minutes by the live coverage on Skynet or some other subscription channel. Sampdoria’s church is the Doge Café on Piazza Matteotti; Genoa’s church is Capitan Baliano, diagonally opposite. At halftime during the service, everyone smokes a fraternal cigarette together on the same square before returning to their own temple at exactly four o’clock for the second half and another forty-five minutes of suffering, hell, and damnation.

Nobody enjoys it, as befits a religion. I’ve watched a football match in a bar a few times back home. You have to drink a lot of beer and do the cancan together, and by the second half getting beer down each other’s throats becomes more important than watching the match. In Italy, on the other hand, it’s a deadly serious matter. The men drink coffee and swear.

There isn’t a single Italian male who doesn’t know about food. He can’t cook, his wife does that, but he knows better. It’s his job to deliver negative comments about each course in an indignant manner. And there isn’t a single Italian male who doesn’t know about football. He’s incapable of sprinting fifty meters, but he knows better. Each Sunday it’s his job to give an indignant and scornful commentary of every move made by the top athletes in the stadium.

But Italians don’t know a thing about football. They don’t understand it and they don’t even like it. Every time a player loses possession it’s the referee’s fault for not spotting a foul. Each goal conceded is proof of the scandalous inferiority and the appalling ignorance of the opponent who has gone and gotten it into his thick skull to score against their team. They cheer if a player on their team brings an adversary down with a violent tackle and jeer when the referee penalizes this action. And, in general, even with the best will in the world, no one can understand how, these days, the best-paid top players constantly make the most basic fuck-ups. The game is mostly unwatchable, because when Italian clubs compete with each other, they never take a single risk, and their lineups only have half a striker.

It’s the same every Sunday. No one takes any pleasure in it. But they wouldn’t miss it for the world. It’s ritual. The week exists by the grace of Sunday afternoons. It wouldn’t surprise me if the same match had different results in different parts of Italy. On the Genoese subscription channels, Genoa beat Palermo 4-0, after which an orgy of pretty things you can buy if you’re happy explodes onto the screen. Palermo probably won the same match 4-0 on the Sicilian subscription channels.

Like every religion, Serie A has a gospel. But it’s much better than those four books in rotten Greek the Vatican’s had to make do with for centuries. It’s printed on pink paper and appears daily with new messages of salvation every time: the Gazzetta della Sport makes it possible to lose yourself in fantasies about Sunday afternoon all week long, with retrospectives that are updated daily, prognoses, statistics, and charts. You don’t need any other newspaper if you want to be an Italian among the Italians. Tutto il rosa della vita is its slogan—everything pink in life. The world’s fucked, hundreds of thousands of poor bastards are landing on Lampedusa, the government has declared a state of emergency, there are soldiers in the streets, and people are dying of poverty, but if you read the Gazzetta dello Sport, none of that has to bother you. There, it’s just about the things that are really important, like the percentage of risky passes from the left wing in comparison to the 1956–57 season.

Italy lives in its imagination. The opium of its people is pink.

12.

I often thought back to my short and confusing relationship with the leg, or rather with the girl I’d fantasized onto it. I was ashamed. But I had to get over that. In a certain way, it had been perfect love. Because I’d dreamed her up myself, she was the woman of my dreams. And yet she was concrete, material and physical enough to have me believe that I wasn’t dreaming. I could actually touch her, stroke her, feel her, and she moved, sighed, and groaned exactly as I imagined in my loveliest fantasies.

The problem with complete women is that they can interfere with your fantasies. There’s a good amount of body to grope, but in fact you do exactly the same thing as when there’s only a single leg available to you. You quench yourself with her skin, while her melting thoughts become your thoughts. You moan sighs into her mouth. You create an image of her and expect her to live up to it. The more she manages to match your unspoken fantasy, the better she is.

Good sex is the illusion that the other finds your lovemaking good. Love is like a mirror. You see your own countenance in the delighted face of the other. You hope the other sees herself reflected in you, while you project your own longings onto the emptiness of her astonished eyes. I mean: everyone finds true love sooner or later. But there are at least six billion people on earth. How probable is it, statistically speaking, that the collection of limbs lying next to you in bed happens to be the one unique person who makes your existence complete? How likely is it that “The One” should drop onto your lap like a snow-white dove who has died in midflight right above your beseechingly outstretched hands? True love is the decision to start believing in the fantasy at hand, instead of fantasizing. My love for the leg was exactly like that. All things considered, it was exactly like that. Do you understand?

And unlike an un-fabricated girl with a mouth in a face on a head atop shoulders that has a mind of its own, my mistress could say nothing that impeded the illusion. She was perfectly identical to the image I’d made of her. And so she remained a concept, a work of art, the snow-white dove I could catch wherever I wanted her to fall. When I had sex with her, I had sex with my own fantasies, and so the sex was perfect. Because that’s how things are. Because every encounter is accompanied with wild assumptions about what the other is thinking, with her trembling little shoulders and her eyes so brown in the headlights of your rampant lust. At night, the other looks like the unlit motorway to the embodiment of your unclear dreams, but you haven’t realized that as you honk with your dimmed headlights, she is driving even faster toward an uncertain destination behind you. And after the head-on collision, once perfect limbs dangle off sharp edges of broken glass. I know you understand me. You’re not like the others.

And after having spewed out all of my so-called wisdom, you’ll also understand how stupid I was. It’s all about the garbage bag, dummy. You can fantasize as much as you like and have a nice shower, but if you go and casually wrap an accommodating, pristine, gray piece of plastic around her leg with your desirous sweaty fingers, you’ll leave impeccable fingerprints behind. She was still there. I carefully lifted her out of the garbage can and brought her back home with me.

13.

The butcher was a redheaded girl. She was wearing a white apron and sky-blue clogs as she pulled up the shutters. The metallic rattle spread like whooping cough through the neighborhood. The hours of the pranzo and siesta were over. The city went about its business, hawking and sighing. A street-cleaning vehicle from the sanitation department drove through the narrow streets with a noisy display of revolving brushes, sprayers, and vacuum cleaners, streets that were impossible to get clean after all those centuries. The vehicle was driven by a woman with a generous head of black curls and a formidable hook nose. Maybe she had an excellent sense of smell and that was why she’d been chosen for the job. She couldn’t get through. A beggar was lying on the street, refusing to get up; of course it was the dirtiest place in the greatest need of a clean. She got out, swearing. She was small, wearing a baggy green uniform. And when the tramp still didn’t react, she gave him a nasty kick. Yelping like a dog, he retreated under an archivolto.

“This is a city of women,” the signora had said to me a few days previously. “You have to understand that.” She’d appeared out of nowhere, as usual, around the San Bernardo in a long elegant dress and with a thin cigarette between her fingers. “A city whose menfolk are always at sea is ruled by women.” I said it was better that way, but she disagreed with me in no uncertain terms.

The cleaning truck carried on, leaving behind a trail of slime made up of half-aspirated, wet trash. A drunk Moroccan smashed a beer bottle. Someone threw a garbage bag onto the street from the fourth floor. At night, the rats have the place to themselves, but they’re not only around at night. This is Fabrizio De André’s street, which he sung about as la cattiva strada, the shit street, Via del Campo. With bright red lipstick and eyes as gray as the street, she spends the entire night standing in the doorway, selling everyone the same rose. Via del Campo is a whore, and if you feel like loving her, all you have to do is take her by the hand.

“Maestro, how are things? Terrible as usual?” It was Salvatore, the one-legged beggar. He’s from Romania, but he’s become welded to this city. Everyone knows him because there’s no escaping him. He knows how to find everybody. He speaks a kind of universal Romance language—a mixture of Romanian, Italian, Spanish, a couple of Rhaeto-Romance dialects, and a handful of Latin words. “One-legged” is the wrong word. He has both his legs, but when he’s begging, he rolls the left leg of his trousers up to his thigh to expose an impressive scar and then he struggles around with a crutch, as though that rolled-up leg no longer worked. I’ve seen him after work in the evening with both his trouser legs down and the crutch under his arm, running to catch the last bus. But from time to time I give him a coin. He’s a street artist. He amuses me.

“I’m sorry, Salvatore. I don’t have any change today.”

He gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry, maestro. You’re my customer. You can pay me tomorrow instead.”

It’s two hundred meters from Via del Campo to Africa. I walked through the Porta dei Vacca, crossed the road, and was all of a sudden in the Pré. Hundreds of Internet cafés and call shops of barely a door’s width across were packed with Kenyans and Senegalese. In the meantime, their wives were earning the money selling tinkling gilt items on the street—phone cases, paper handkerchiefs, CDs, rubber plungers, and elephants hand-carved from tropical hardwood. They sat there majestically spread in traditional robes. Numerous greengrocers had squeezed themselves in between the phone centers like narrow, man-sized caverns. They had Arabic or Swahili lettering and price lists. And in some mysterious way, there was still space left for hairdresser’s shops specializing in African hair, which is totally different from other hair. You can get your frizzy hair straightened and then buy Afro wigs in all the colors the Maker didn’t dare think of. I suspect you could also get a spell cast on your husband’s mistress in there. Why else would they be so full of excited, shabby-looking black women, not having anything hairdresser-y done to them? In a corner behind the dryer hoods, the village elders gathered to discuss the situation that had arisen and the measures to be taken. Dotted around the place were a few people having their hair cut. Muslim brothers strolled sternly along the street. Prostitutes were conspicuously inconspicuous in the alleyways. Further down at the seafront, fishermen returned to sell their catch and mend their nets. High up on Via Balbi, tourists and Interrailers with rucksacks and bottles of Fanta were emerging from Palazzo Principe’s train station to make their way bravely to their hotels.

I was drunk on the city, crazy and confused and much too happy for the circumstances. Or much too depressed. It changed by the minute. Everything spun around me with a commotion of noise, stench, and impressions that were poured out faster than I could swallow them. The streets were too slanted, too steep, too twisted, too crooked, and too uneven. I felt like I was about to fall.

14.

Rashid smiled when he saw me. But he looked terrible. He had lost weight. His eyes looked tired. It was relatively late in the evening, and he was still carting around an impressive number of roses. It would be difficult to sell them all before closing time.

“How’s business?”

He responded with a helpless smile. I invited him to join me, and ordered a small beer for him. He put his bucket of roses down on the ground. He sighed.

“Why did you come here, Ilja?”

I took a sip of my Negroni and pondered the question.

“You come from the north, Ilja. There’s so much rain there the fields are green and the roses flower on their bushes for free. There’s free money for everyone who goes to the counter. You’re given a clean house in a safe neighborhood bordered by grassy pastures and there are windmills, cheese farms, and pancake restaurants, and after a while you can pick up your Mercedes from Social Services. Am I right or am I right?”

I smiled.

“Well?”

I ordered another Negroni for myself and a small beer for him.

“You’re an intelligent man, Rashid, you know you’re talking bullshit.”

“That’s not what they think in Africa.”

A beggar came to ask for money. I automatically waved him off. Rashid spat in his face.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Why did you come here, Ilja?”

“And you?”

“I asked you first.”

“I came here to write a book.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Why shouldn’t that be an answer?”

“Because you don’t listen to a woman until you’ve looked her in the eye.”

“Is that a well-known Arabic saying then?”

“No, I made it up myself.”

“And what do you mean by it?”

“That you don’t start writing about something until you’re already fascinated by it, which implies that you already know it, and so you came here for other reasons at the start, and after that you decided to write a book about the city to give yourself an alibi.”

“Do you really think that, Rashid?”

“Yes, I really do.”

“You’re too intelligent to be selling roses.”

“I know that.”

15.

“I’ll tell you the truth, Rashid. That northern paradise of yours, where the grass is always green because it’s always raining, that’s where I was born and where I spent my whole life. In a way, it really is a paradise. It’s a peaceful, multicolored country. The trains are blue and yellow and run on time through the tulip fields. The tax forms are blue or pink and easy to fill in. If you have to pay something, you don’t have to try to be clever or come up with a plan because you won’t get out of paying it, and when you get a rebate, you get it back that very same month. Blonde girls spray their stolen bikes pink. Policemen smile. They tell you to clip on a red backlight next time and hand out stickers against racism. The waste is separated and goes in containers of various bright colors. There are special offers at the supermarket that everyone can take advantage of and if you take advantage enough, they give you free little multicolored fluffy creatures that you can stick to your dashboard with their sticky feet, or to your windowsill, or wherever you want. But you know what the thing is, Rashid?”

“What?”

“Exactly that.”

I ordered myself another Negroni and a small beer for him. We clinked glasses. “To looking women in the eye, then.”

“But what exactly?”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t finish your story.”

“In a way, I did. In a way, I’ve said everything, Rashid. In my homeland, I had it easy all my life and lived well. But it was too easy and too good. I knew the way from my house to the station like the back of my hand, from the supermarket to my house and from one bar to the other. Do you have that expression in Arabic too? Like the back of your hand? I fell asleep even before I went to bed, in a manner of speaking, and didn’t even wake up in the meantime. I knew everything already. I knew the story already. And at the end of the day, I’m an artist. I need input. Inspiration is what they call it, but I hate that word. The challenge to wake up in a new city where nothing is obvious and where I have the freedom to reinvent myself anew. The challenge of waking up. Got that?

“Maybe I should apologize for my choice of words. I wouldn’t ever put words like ‘input’ and ‘challenge’ in my writing. I just wanted to say that a comfortable life also has its disadvantages. Comfort is like a lullaby, a drug, an antidepressant that numbs the emotions. You can see it on the faces of the people in my homeland. They have the limp expressionlessness of people who no longer have to fight for anything and aren’t particularly pleased about it because it’s become normal for everything to function perfectly. Or sometimes the sensation takes the form of a kind of unspoken complacency that looks down on the world pityingly from the top of a tall, gangly body with the expression of someone who doesn’t have to have seen everything to fully grasp everything that’s different and automatically consider it inferior. Although there are more poets than tax inspectors, my homeland isn’t a very poetic country.

“Here in Italy nothing goes without saying and everything has to be continually re-fought. Because the system doesn’t work. Because there is no system. And if there were one, nobody would believe in it. Or circumnavigate it for a joke. Out of habit. Or to gain some minute advantage. Or not even. In the perpetual opera buffa of daily life, the simplest of actions, like buying bread at the bakery, or picking up a parcel from the post office, can come complete with the most unexpected complications. This entire country called Italy depends on improvisation. That’s why Italians are the most resourceful, resilient, and creative people I know. I enjoy that. It awakened me. That’s why I’m here. Is that an answer, Rashid?”

He didn’t say anything, but finished his beer and stood up. Salvatore walked past with his bad leg but ignored us.

“What is it, Rashid? Have I said something wrong?”

“Is there poverty in your country? Have you ever gone hungry there? Is there a fucking civil war? Are you being politically persecuted? And how did you get here—in an unreliable inflatable dinghy without any gas, or by EasyJet?”

“Sit down, Rashid, please. I only told you my story because you asked for it. Let’s talk about your story now.”

He went to the toilet, came back, picked up his bucket of roses and walked off without saying anything. Without even thanking me for the beers. But that was fine, I understood. Maybe he had just enough time to walk all the way to Nervi and sell part of the contents of his bucket. When I finished my Negroni and went inside to pay, it turned out he’d already paid the entire bill.

16.

Before disembarrassing myself of her for the second and final time, I wanted to see her again. I got the plastic bag out of the wardrobe and began to open it. It was difficult. I’d knotted it really well. And that turned out to be no bad thing because when I finally managed to open the bag such a foul smell wafted out I almost vomited. Holding my breath, I quickly re-knotted the bag even more tightly than before. And when I remembered that I’d stroked and caressed that dead, rotting piece of human offal, I really did throw up.

If I ever reworked these notes I’m sending to you regularly, of course I’ll take out that shameful fumbling with the leg. That stays between us, my good friend, you’ll understand that. But that would be a bit of a shame because I’d be leaving out an opportunity to exploit the affair as a striking metaphor for that misunderstanding we call love. You love a woman with the passion of a man who, against his better judgment, decides to believe in a forever—which, once you’ve realized that she only exists in your fantasies, is yet again surprisingly brief—upon which you dump her; and when you think back later to that umpteenth best time of your life and re-read the diary in which your sensitive caresses reverberate in the blistering blindness of your delusions, a smell of decay rises up that almost or actually does make you throw up at your own naive romanticism. Something like that. I’d put it less crudely so as not to scare off too many readers. And I’d invent an affair to breathe life into the metaphor. For example, I’d take a character like myself, too often disappointed and, more often than that, too disappointing in love to still believe in fairy tales, a cynic and an avowed bachelor who only ever has meaningless one-night stands these days, and not even that often, and put him in a position like mine: an immigrant in a new, sunny country; and against his wishes and against his better judgment, I’d let him fall completely, utterly, hopelessly in love again with a sizzling southern woman, the most beautiful girl in the city. And then of course I’d have it all go wrong. Something to do with cultural differences. Something about a fundamental lack of understanding. Something about his fantasies being quite different from hers. So that his deeply engrained cynicism is once again painfully justified, and when he looks in the mirror after that he feels sick. And then the metaphor of the leg. That might work, don’t you think?

But no. It was a pity, but hey. I washed the outside of the garbage bag with a sponge scourer. The leg inside felt disgustingly soft. It was decaying. All of a sudden I could no longer take it. I had to get rid of it as quickly as possible. I decided washing would no longer be necessary if I just threw the bag in the water. Somewhere far away. And of course not in the sea. I wasn’t that stupid. The package would be politely returned to sender by the languid summer waves. I needed fast flowing water. I needed the river. I walked toward the Bisagno.

17.

There wasn’t much water in the Bisagno. It was summer. The river, which can swell in the autumn to present a serious threat to the area around Brignole Station, had shrunk to an impotent trickle in a bed of dried-up rocks. Traffic raced along behind me along Via Bobbio. I saw the Marassi football stadium in the distance. Behind it was the prison, and behind that the graveyard.

There I stood with a garbage bag containing a rotting woman’s leg. Yep. Well done, Leonardo. It would take an Olympian throw to even reach the water. A police car with siren and flashing light raced past. I could go to the bridge. And then I could drop it from the middle…Do you believe this yourself? The package would get stuck in a stupid little bush at the second bend, if it didn’t immediately get stranded on the stones. And then what? Climb down. I could picture the whole thing. Mr. Poet descending corpulently from the embankment to pick up a garbage bag from the riverbed. And what do you think you’re doing, Sir? Do the contents of said garbage bag look familiar to you? And might you find it a good idea to accompany us to the nearby station so you can explain in peace and quiet and greater detail what exactly we’re dealing with here? Or words to that effect. Or not to that effect at all, because unlike the dust-busting brigade in my homeland whose daily work involves getting cats out of trees, the Italian carabinieri are an army that have been fighting organized crime for decades. Blind eyes are sometimes turned in their prison cells. They know how to get a person to confess. They have plenty of experience.

I had to go to the sea. Nervi. High cliffs. No beach. I should weigh down the bag with stones, but I didn’t want to open it another time and smell what I never wanted to smell again. I should have put another bag around it and put the stones in there. But there was no way I was going home again. I had to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Maybe I could try to throw stones onto it. Or something like that.

I took the train from Brignole Station. It stopped at Sturla, Quarto, and Quinto before it reached Nervi. It seemed to take forever. Commuters wrinkled their noses. Yes, I’m sorry, I’m aware of it. I’m sitting here with a rotting leg in my bag. And as a matter of fact, everything you have in your briefcase is probably much worse. I don’t even want to know. No, I really don’t.

Nervi’s station is on the seafront. By now, I’d really had it up to here with the whole business, so much so that I couldn’t summon up the energy to look for a special, secret, well-chosen place and just dumped the bag into the sea from the platform. The waves were on my side. Pure luck. The bag floated away. There were black clouds above the mountains on the other side of the city. Forest fires. A yellow fire-fighting plane maneuvered above the bay. Tomorrow was going to be hot again. I used the same ticket to take the train home.

18.

Sunday had descended upon Genoa. The city lay like a woman with a bad cold who’d decided to spend the day in bed. The pillows were damp, the bottom sheet damp, the duvet twisted in its cover, but she didn’t have the strength to change the sheets or make the bed. Bright sun shone through the window onto her snotty face. She turned over and closed her eyes. Yesterday’s dirty dishes were still piled up on the counter. Her risky evening dress lay in a corner of the room. She wouldn’t be swishing and swirling before the hungry eyes of the night this evening. She reached with a sigh for the half-empty packet of cigarettes on the bedside table and the lighter. After two drags, she extinguished the cigarette on the saucer under the cup of her now-lukewarm tea. Everything tasted funny today. It was hot, unbearably hot. She kicked the duvet half onto the floor and fell asleep. She didn’t dream about anything in particular. She dreamed gray, lingering dreams like a boring, tacky film, and would remember nothing of them. When she awoke it was the evening. But she didn’t feel better.

I shuffled through the empty streets of my new city. The shutters had been lowered in all the alleyways. The hawkers’ raucous arias were nowhere to be heard, and nowhere to be heard was the fierce barking or scornful throat-clearing of life. Even the beggars had taken the day off. Scattered about were a few bars that were reluctantly a little bit open, yawning behind their façades. The Bar of Mirrors was closed. I felt like a man who had done his best with roses and champagne, had ironed his best suit to the nines and lightly sprinkled his cheeks with his most expensive aftershave, ready for the evening and the rest of his life, and the woman he has a date with fails to show up. She doesn’t send a text until late that night. “In bed with a bad cold. Sorry.” And he replies, “No worries. Better for me too anyway. Get well soon. Hope to see you.” And he throws a wine glass in anger. Then sighs deeply. He gets to his feet to tidy away the broken glass, cutting his finger in the process. A drop of blood stains his suit.

I was alone. Of course I was alone. I’d had that feeling for the past couple of days, but on this Sunday, it broke through like a heavy cold, dampening my desire to do anything at all. I tried to reflect on this, but didn’t feel like it. Loneliness had nestled in my cavities like a gray lump of snot. It made my face hurt. The heat was unbearable, even in the darkness of the narrow alleyways I knew like the inside of my pocket. I didn’t feel like sweating, either, but I was. Maybe I should have stayed in bed. But I didn’t feel like that, either.

What have I achieved up to this point? Back home everyone recognizes me and I’m pestered every day for an autograph or an opinion about something. Not here. I have taken up residence. I carry a key to a real Genoese house. It is a large, real key with a fat bow on a long steel shaft, which has to be forced with conviction into a heavy old door, and you need to use force to turn the key. I didn’t intend this as a metaphor, but in retrospect it could be interpreted as such. Go ahead then, my friend. Invent something beautiful about heavy doors and the large, indigenous keys needed, along with conviction and force. I’m sure you can do it. Think about Rashid too. I don’t feel like pre-digesting it for you. It’s Sunday. I’m alone.

Out of boredom, I try to remember the Sundays of my childhood. They had to do with paving stones and ants that had taken up residence in the strips of sand between the paving stones without a permit. I considered that illegal occupancy and tried to chase them away with spit and sticks and, when that didn’t help, warm yellow piss. In the olden days, it was always hot on Sundays.

In Genoa, the pavements were as gray and solid as the walls of her palazzi. Big blocks of sagging stone. You’d need three men to lift one of those boulders and set it straight. The cracks between them were the city’s ashtrays. There wasn’t a single ant that would dare start a family here. In many places, there was barely enough space between the stones for a rat’s nest. In Genoa’s glory years, from above, it must have looked like a stone floor of gray palaces with cracks and crannies between them where rats could come and go as they pleased. In their glory years, God tried to fight them with spit and sticks and, when that didn’t help, warm yellow piss. The city still looks like shit. But God is no longer who he used to be and he’s given up. La Superba beat God by blocking his view of the alleyways. Every kind of dirt and decadence can run rampant in the cracks and cavities of this city. There are even transvestites here, it seems. I haven’t found them yet. I mean, I haven’t run into any yet.

I’d invented a game, and also come up with an official name for it. You’re either a celebrated writer or you aren’t. It’s called “girl surfing.” The rules are simple. You pick out a random girl as she walks by and start to follow her. If you tend to go on aimless walks anyway, you might as well walk after a random girl. As you follow her, you fantasize about her. About what she’s like up close and under all those clothes, about how she’d sigh and reach for a half-empty packet of cigarettes on your bedside table. You keep on doing this until you see a prettier girl. Then you swap and carry on following her until you see an even prettier girl. The game becomes more and more satisfying the longer you play it. And in the meantime you get to know the city. To add a didactic element to the game, I invented the extra rule that I had to fantasize in Italian. I would learn the most by doing so out loud, but I realized I’d better be careful with that. I caught a fantastic wave during the week, one of the best since I arrived in Genoa. She was small and olive-colored with a nonchalant miniskirt and racy boots. I got to follow her all the way from Maddalena, past Molo, to Portoria. My fantasies became ever more colorful and explicit. I was able to express them beautifully in Italian. But at a certain point, I was standing close to her in a herd of commuters waiting for a traffic light to turn green, and I’d forgotten that, for autodidactic reasons, I was speaking out loud. I decided to switch then, even though my fantasies at that very moment were about what I would do when she reached the heavy door to her house and rammed the big key with conviction and force into her lock.

Not much surfing to be done today. Even for the waves it was Sunday. Here and there, a tired tourist in Bermuda shorts was encouragingly patted on her fat rolls by the skinny man of the moment carrying the map and the rucksack containing important things firmly strapped to his back. “Where are our international travel insurance papers? Have you seen our international travel insurance papers?” And she didn’t even recognize me. I was alone.

What had I achieved up to now?

19.

“You’ve made a big impression in Centro Storico. Everyone knows you.”

Her name was Cinzia. She was a young, pretty girl with a long face. I recognized her as the waitress from Caffè Letterario on Piazza delle Erbe. The one with the red tables. I often went there since I knew what it was called. But there was something odd about her. I saw her too often during the day, and too often on her own for an Italian girl of her age, especially for an Italian girl that went about dressed in a suggestive top, deeply cut, with an open back, no sleeves, and shorts. She had lovely legs and wore high heels. She wore makeup, but it was subtle and tasteful. Almost every afternoon she sat on her own at a table in the Bar of Mirrors, studying. She came from Sardinia and was studying education in Genoa. She’d been here two years. Sometimes I saw her with Don, an emeritus professor of English language and literature in his seventies who had been living in a hotel room for twenty years with a view of the seven bars on the Piazza delle Erbe. He had a Union Jack hanging out of his window, didn’t speak any Italian, and survived on a sole diet of gin and tonic. “Capuccino senza schiuma,” as he called it. But I hadn’t seen him for a few days now, and she was sitting on her own in the Bar of Mirrors, and she came outside to smoke, and because there weren’t any free tables on the terrace, I invited her to join me at mine.

“That’s what you say.”

“It’s true. I was sitting at this table yesterday, too, and there were other people sitting here, people I didn’t know, and they were talking about you. About you. They were wondering who you were and what you were doing here.”

She was attracted to older intellectuals. That must be her problem. You saw it every evening on Italian TV. It didn’t matter which program you watched. Whether it was infomercials, which it mostly was, or a talk show, or a quiz, or a sports program, there was always a light blue background with a handful of young, pretty, stupid girls in bikinis and a single older intellectual, sweating in his suit, making jokes about the girls—only they were too thick to understand them: a golden formula, I give you that. The man uses a few subjunctives, one of the girls doesn’t get it and says something ungrammatical, the audience screams, and the girl has to take off her bikini top as punishment, causing the intellectual of the moment to make another cutting remark, causing the audience to scream again.

All of Italy is made like that. It’s the man’s job to make cutting remarks and the woman’s job to take her top off afterward. In any case, the gender roles are clear. You know who’s who. That’s the way the Church likes it. A man shouldn’t suddenly turn out to be a woman or vice versa. I wondered what it would be like to take off Cinzia’s top.

“That’s what I like about you. I really appreciate that. You are the first—no, second—man I’ve met who hadn’t immediately wanted to take off my top after we’ve exchanged just a couple of words.”

“Maybe that’s because I’m not Italian.” I smiled in a very mysterious, intellectual manner.

“Maybe.” She fiddled with her top a little.

“I always find Italian men quite—how do you say it in Italian—quite expressive.”

“Women too,” she said.

20.

Before she left, Cinzia gave me a mission: I had to find the Mandragola. I was charmed by the medieval allure of the quest, and I wanted to ask her whether I could wear the silken handkerchief embroidered with her initials beneath my shining breastplate during my long, long journey to traverse sevenfold mountains of sevenfold rivers, and sevenfold woods. I would count upon her snow-white handkerchief to protect me from griffins and seas of fire, witches and dragons that drenched themselves in the dripping blood of druids.

The Mandragola is a legendary flower which grows in just one place and blooms only once in a hundred years. The magic scent of her blossom could save mankind. “It’s a bar. More like a kind of nightclub.” “And where is it then?” “I’m not telling you. I’ll be working at the Caffè Letterario tomorrow. Come and let me know if you’ve found it.”

Her handkerchief certainly came in handy. My first hunch was that it would be in the area around Maddalena, which has those kinds of little squares like Piazza della Lepre, Piazza delle Oche, and Piazza della Posta Vecchia—squares as big as a parking spot, which translocate mysteriously each night. There are tiny bars on them but they translocate, too. The art is to catch the streets during their nighttime displacements. But it happens inaudibly and very fast. Or very slowly. I’m still not sure about that. I walked in circles and squares around Palazzo Spinola, Vico della Rosa, Vico dietro il Coro della Chiesa die Santa Maddalena. These are places where the sun never shines. It was nighttime. The shadows had eaten up the sun. The prostitutes and tourists had gone. The alleys were the domain of rats, pigeons, and pickpockets, as they almost always were. Witches hissed at me. A person I didn’t trust asked me for a light. A rogue roared with laughter in an alleyway.

I went off to search the other side of the Via Luccoli, in Sestiere del Molo. I knew this neighborhood better but I realized that there could be streets between Via San Bernardo and the towers of the Embriaci that I didn’t know. It all goes uphill there toward Castello, to the architectural faculty and the Sant’Agostino cloisters, and I don’t like going uphill. So the Mandragola might very well be located there. These paths had not been trodden recently. Or if that wasn’t the case, they’d been shat upon by vermin even more recently. There was a tinkle of glass in the distance. Closer by there was screaming. I strayed until I happened upon the Piazza Sarzano, near the Metro. I hadn’t found the Mandragola. But in any case, I knew where I was again. And that wasn’t good. I don’t feel at home in this neighborhood. During the day Piazza Sarzono is too hot, and at night it’s deserted, while the alleys like Via Ravecca are populated by distrustful elderly Genoese who don’t want to have anything to do with foreigners, not even white ones.

“How’s business, maestro?” It was Salvatore. I felt a two-euro coin in my pocket. But of course I didn’t give it to him. “Sorry, Salvatore.” He came up to me and whispered in my ear, “The man you were sitting on the terrace with yesterday is a Moroccan. Did you know that?” “So what?” He held his finger to his lips meaningfully and hobbled off on his good but purportedly bad legs.

I knew how to get to the Cantine della Torre dei Embriaci. That’s a bar I’ll have to take you to sometime, my friend. It’s in the cellars of one of the medieval watchtowers. The space is amazingly big when you go in and renovated in the best possible taste, preserving all its authentic features. The owner is called Antonio. He’s in love with his own bar. If you’re there, it doesn’t matter whether it’s in the morning, afternoon, or evening, he’ll be busy improving his café by moving a halogen bulb or two just less than two millimeters to the left. Or to the right. When you go in it’s always empty. And if you cautiously ask Antonio whether he’s open as he stands on a bar stool tinkering with his light bulbs, he’ll say, “It was a madhouse.” Or he’ll say, “It was a madhouse yesterday.” Or, “It’s quiet now but tomorrow, pff…It’ll be a madhouse.” Then he’ll get down off his bar stool and ask what you want to drink. No, I’m saying it wrong. First he starts complaining about Italian laws, then he goes outside to smoke, then he comes back, and only then does he ask you what you want to drink. “A beer.” Wrong answer. He has sixty different kinds of beer and likes to serve them with a shot of whisky and a little cocoa powder on the foam. Which whisky would you like? And which beer? If you like, you could also have it with honey, but then it would be quite a different kind of drink. Then I’ll have to add Limoncello, too. Or, on the contrary, something salty. But perhaps he might make another suggestion. A surprise. No, don’t ask. I’ll make you a beer. You can tell me what you think of it later.

Then he brings a few snacks. My God, does he ever bring the snacks. Cured anchovies with a salt crust. “Made them myself. This afternoon.” A bowl of penne all’arrabiata with extra chili. “I always make a bit of this on Thursdays. For my friends.” Meanwhile you drink English strong ale, pimped up with two measures of grappa and a shot of Benedictine, with cinnamon on top. “I always give my friends a glass of vermouth to go with it. Maybe you’d like one? With or without basil and brown sugar? You know, my friends are the reason I own this bar. I like to give something back from time to time. Shot of Grand Marnier in the vermouth?”

His bar is devoted to the memory of Fabrizio De André, the brilliant poet and singer whom almost no one outside of Genoa knows. I know who he was. He was really brilliant. Antonio has constructed a wall of memorabilia: photos and paintings and a real guitar. Only his music is played in this bar, preferably on vinyl on a crackly record player in the corner. “I knew his mother. Her aunt was friends with my gym teacher and she was his cook. That’s how.”

It was pretty much empty when I went in. “Pfff. It was a madhouse this evening. Look at all these dirty glasses. All friends of mine. But I’m happy to oblige.” There were still a couple of tufts of windswept people. A valiant small girl took the guitar down from the wall and began to play. It was the official sacred guitar but it was allowed. She sang. She sang Fabrizio De André songs. I’ve never heard anything like it. She sang for an almost empty bar and she sang with a voice that gave me goose bumps. She sang very differently from Fabrizio De André, but with deadly accuracy, taking no prisoners. It was also the fact that this was Genoa and that this was all living culture and that a valiant girl was singing all those songs I really love just like that in a bar in the night, so unexpectedly and on the holy guitar and almost solely for me—I sat in the corner and wept. Tears poured down my cheeks. They really did, my friend, I know you don’t believe me. And for one reason or another, I had to think of her, the waitress at the Bar of Mirrors, the most beautiful girl in Genoa, and I thought how wonderful it would be to share this moment with her, which made me cry all the more.

And there I sat in Genoa without a handkerchief. “That girl,” I said to Antonio. “That girl who sang, I’d like to thank her if you see her again. She’s really special.”

“Oh sure, with pleasure.” Then he bent his head over my tear-streaked cheeks and admitted, “She has a lovely cunt that one, it’s true.”

21.

These days I’m visiting the Bar of Mirrors every day for the aperitif, from around five until they close at nine and after closing time I hang around the neighborhood for a bit, and naturally you understand why, my friend. She works there every day during exactly those hours. And when she comes out around ten, after cleaning up, in her normal clothes, carrying a scooter helmet under her arm, sometimes I manage to walk past by complete coincidence and say “Ciao” to her before she goes home. Or to her boyfriend’s flat with his ugly gelled head, the bastard. Or maybe they live together. No, that’s not possible. It’s simply not allowed.

Usually I sit on the terrace on my own. Sometimes the signora drops by, but when Bernardo Massi, the old man with the wild white hair and the wild Hawaiian shirts, rumored to be powerfully rich, is there, she prefers his company to mine. And he’s almost always there. He’s the owner of the entire palazzo which the Bar of Mirrors is part of, it seems. But I like sitting on my own. That way I can watch people undisturbed. I’m afraid she is starting to become a real obsession. I get goose bumps when I see her. She glides before my eyes like a poem written in calligraphy. She’s like an elegant swirl in an art nouveau ornament. I can’t keep my eyes off her. And I time it so that I take the last sip of my Negroni when she comes out of the porcelain grotto onto the terrace so that I can order my next drink from her rather than from one of her nondescript colleagues. I’m as polite and respectful toward her as possible. I never try to speak to her, except to order something. That’s also because I just don’t dare. I know it sounds crazy but I really don’t dare. I’m afraid to ruin the fragile fairy tale by saying something trite. Meanwhile, I’m waiting for the moment when she’ll say something to me.

With this in mind, I always sit writing on the terrace. Almost everything I’m giving you to read has been written there, in that outside space with the dark green tables on Salita Pollaiuoli with a view of her. Maybe that’s the reason I write about her so much. Maybe that’s the reason I write so much, my friend. Just be thankful to her.

Because sooner or later her curiosity will have to be piqued. If you have a customer who comes back every day, polite and irreproachable in his newly-purchased Italian wardrobe, which obviously must have cost a fortune, with a real panama hat, everyone knows how much they cost, a foreigner who has clearly settled here and who sits at a table on his own every evening writing in small, meticulous handwriting in a Moleskine notebook—an artist but also a professional with an income who is probably a celebrity in his home country—then sooner or later your curiosity would be piqued, wouldn’t it? “May I ask what you are writing, sir?” “Oh, just some notes for myself. Actually I’m a poet.” “Really? A poet? I’ve always wanted to meet a poet. Are you famous?” “Ach, what can I say…?” “How exciting! Will you write a poem about me sometime?” “With pleasure. But I’d have to get to know you better first.” Name. Phone number. Date, kiss, and into the sack. And the bastard with the gelled head goes to the back of the line.

But she never speaks to me. And meanwhile I’m falling more and more in love.

22.

The old stones are steeped in the smell of rotting waste, piss, and something else, something acidic, something you taste on the roof of your mouth more than you smell it. Rats dart away and climb into the crevices. Their gnawing sounds like an evil thought. The sea wind brings a heavy salt spray, causing people to pant and groan. They’d love to throw off that last suffocating item of clothing. It is as damp as the forbidden cellars of the secret hunting lodge of a perverse prince. The mold and shadows that rub themselves up against the clammy walls day and night leave behind scent trails. No one need be afraid of anything chivalrous here.

They act like this is their city. They pretend to be walking along the street. But their expressions are too dark for that, their legs too long, their steps too small. No one is going anywhere. No one walks past only once. No one walks past without shining like a gold tooth in a pimp’s rotten grin.

I walk over the curves and between the crannies and gashes of this city I know my way around like no other, where I pretend to be out walking, where I repeatedly and deliberately get lost like a john on his rounds. The pavement yields willingly under my feet. Underneath flows the morass of pus we’ll all plunge into once we find the opening.

They act like this is a city. They act like they’re walking and wearing clothes. But underneath those clothes they are continuously naked. They touch themselves with their hands while pretending to be looking for their keys, a mobile phone, or loose change. Their thighs rub gently against each other as they walk. From time to time someone will just pause for a moment, happy, self-absorbed, as though standing under a hot shower.

I wander in circles around the labyrinth like a corkscrew being screwed into a cork. When it’s freed, a bouquet of tarry, sweet wine with legs like dripping oil, matured on groaning rotten oak, with full notes of earth, decay, pleasure, and piss will rise up. We’re all drunk before we even start, as we screw ourselves deeper and deeper into the cork, into the smell of the cork, into the promise of smell. What do you mean, prejudice? This is no city for a lone male. I have to come up with something. I have to do something about it before I do something, God forbid.

It was a tiny item in the local paper, Il Secolo XIX. I chanced upon it. In the burned forests above Arenzano, a charred woman’s leg had been found. Using DNA testing, the authorities had managed to link the leg to a crime committed some time ago. The victim’s name was Ornella. It was the name she’d used when admitted to hospital. She had never formally reported the crime. Her real name was unknown. She had disappeared without trace.

It slowly sunk in that this was my leg. How many severed limbs could there be knocking around Genoa and its surroundings? But how could it have gotten there? And then I remembered the yellow fire-fighting plane maneuvering above the bay of Nervi. I closed the paper in shock. But then I realized I should be happy. In any case all the traces had been wiped out. I was relieved. For a moment, I toyed with the idea of trying to track down the mysterious Ornella the leg had been attached to. If she was as I’d imagined her, a missing leg didn’t have to be a problem. In fact, if I’d managed to fantasize her onto one of her legs, I’d surely be able to compensate for the lack of a single leg with my imagination. But I knew that wasn’t right. The less reality there is to disturb the imagination, the more effective, attractive, and exciting the fantasy. And what’s more, she’d see right through me. “Hey babe, you won’t remember, but we’ve already met.” I should count my blessings that it had all gone so smoothly. I needed to forget that entire leg, including the Ornella I’d imagined onto it, as quickly as possible.

23.

I went for a so-called spontaneous stroll with my hand in the pocket of my trousers. It was beautiful weather, but we all know only too well where I was off to. It was the white hour after lunch, the blank page upon which some secret language could be scribbled in pencil, something that should be rubbed out again instantly as soon as the shutters were raised and life started again in black and white with profits, proceeds, and protests. For the time being, the city lay dozing, her belly bulging into the dreaming alleys, which nonchalantly changed their position with a soft sigh, the way a woman would languidly roll over on the couch she’d settled upon after the digestif. Suddenly, all the alleys led to Maddalena. She lived nearby in Palazzo Spinola four centuries ago, among the glory and splendor of the family she managed to marry into. Portraits of doges and admirals stared down at her body with the dusky glances of age-old lecherousness. Sometimes, at this hour when the palace sleeps and the men are at sea or wherever they are, she undresses in front of the cardinal’s life-sized official portrait. Soon she’ll have to sit and keep quiet again. She doesn’t have anything else to do. She has a lot of servants. She lies on her day bed and stares at the ceiling upon which a scene of half-naked Romans kidnapping naked Sabine virgins has been painted. If only she were a Sabine virgin. Her husband, the Doge, says that they’ll lose everything if they lose the war and that this is why he is often away. “Even my clothes?” she’d asked. “Yes, even your clothes,” he had replied, after which, with a serious expression on his face, he’d gone out to continue his war. Who were they fighting again? She has no idea and she doesn’t care, either, as long as they rip the clothes from her body. Pisa probably, otherwise Venice. They are always having wars against Pisa or Venice. Or perhaps it’s the French. Might the French soldiers also be half-naked when they come to kidnap the Genoese women? It wouldn’t surprise her, she’s heard all kinds of things about the French. Brutish beasts they are, without a jot of respect for a lady’s honor. Her husband has often told her that, adding that she doesn’t understand a thing about state affairs. She understands enough to hope that Genoa will lose a war for once, by preference to the French. Through the open window of her bedroom, she hears a woman screaming like a stuck pig far below her in the alleyway. Brutish beasts they are, oh, brutish beasts.

Suddenly all roads led to Maddalena. I tried to walk from Piazza Soziglia to Piazza Fontane Marose, but in the place where the Via Luccoli was located at other times of the day, there was a dark alleyway which turned back on itself, coming out on the other side of Piazza Lavagna, where grubby men with their hands in their pockets walked along alleys with poetic names that were all called Maddalena, and where darkly-scented women, who were all called Maddalena, said I had pretty hair and that was why I had to go with them. They asked whether I was French. They asked whether I knew the secrets of the jungle where it could be night all afternoon in their hands. They grabbed me by the forearm to go explain it better somewhere else. They twirled my hair around their fingers and said that there was something feminine about me. They stroked the hand in the trouser pocket. Brutish beasts, they were.

She rolls over once again on her daybed. The ebony paneling nauseates her. She gets up to open a window. There’s not enough light in this room in this house, in this much too grand house. There isn’t enough light in Genoa. The biggest problem with women is that they are inclined to expect something from men. The biggest problem with men is that they realize that something is expected of them. This realization scares them. That’s why they prefer the company of other men, men with whom they go rushing around in great seriousness, in the delusion that the city’s future is at stake. And that’s why nothing ever happens. A man wants to possess his wife, but if she wants to be possessed, he flees. It’s so tiring, waiting for the French. She stands at the open window. Far below in the alleyway there is loud laughing and joking in languages her husband won’t let her learn. She hears someone running away. She imagines he has one hand in the pocket of his trousers. She falls back onto her day bed with a sigh. She looks up at the ceiling painting.

We all know damned well where I was going. San Luca is at the end of Maddalena. I turned right there. I walked to Via del Campo. Just before the end, ten meters before the Porta dei Vacca, was Vico della Croce Bianca.

24.

This neighborhood is known as the Ghetto. The name is meant ironically, but even during the daytime, it takes courage to go there. It’s dusky all day in other alleys. Here it’s always night. It gives the appearance of being renovated. And it’s in dire need of that, which you realize the moment you set foot in the area. There’s no pavement and almost everything is crumbling or half-collapsed. But it’s not being renovated. For years, the narrow, tall, impassable streets have been covered in rusty scaffolding that has no other purpose than to deny all pedestrians even that tiny strip of blue sky.

If you look on the map, it’s a question of five or six small alleys: Vico della Croce Bianca, Vico del Campo, Vico di Untoria, Vico dei Fregoso, Vico degli Andorno, and perhaps Vico San Filipa. But the map isn’t quite right. There are also gaps between the walls, and toppled palazzi form new squares without a name. The rats are as big as lapdogs. They know their way around and take to their heels, just like the Moroccans who rub along the mildewed walls as skittish as ghosts. And everywhere I saw the same sticker that was stuck to the pipes on my house:

derattizzazione in corso

non toccare le esche

I still have to look up what that means.

The transvestites live here. The famous transvestites of Genoa that Fabrizio De André sung about as le graziose di Via del Campo. They are men in their fifties wearing high heels and fishnet stockings over their hairy legs, a sexy dress straining over their beer bellies, and a wig. They beckon you into their caverns with their stubble and their irresistible baritone voices, where, for a pittance, you can grapple with their self-made femininity. Muslims who may not deflower a woman before they’ve committed a terrorist attack eagerly do the rounds of the hairy asses on offer. A condom spurted full is worth four dead rats, and four dead rats are a meal. She doesn’t have any tits, her bra’s full of cotton wool, but if you pay extra, you can suck on them. And if you don’t pay, she’ll stab your eye out with one of her stilettos.

I heard a story: in the nineteen-sixties a real war waged in these alleyways. For three days. The harbor was full of American warships. An American marine had broken the explicitly worded rules and ventured into these streets one night. Into the Ghetto. He had fallen in love. To him, she was the most beautiful girl in Genoa. He had the blushing privilege of being able to shower her in cigarettes, chocolate, and fishnet stockings. He secretly wrote poems for her in his diary. It was the most wonderful night of his life. But exploring between her sticky thighs afterward, he discovered the truth. He felt betrayed, swore he would take revenge, and fetched his friends. Forty heavily armed marines invaded the Ghetto. And the transvestites fought back. Stilettos vs. night-vision binoculars. Boiling oil poured from the top floor. Fences falling as soon as the troops reformed. In the meantime, running across the rooftops and the rusty scaffolding. Diversionary tactics with fishnet stockings. And the street you came through, the one guaranteeing your retreat, suddenly doesn’t exist anymore because it seems to have been barricaded with a portcullis. They won. The transvestites won. The neighborhood was declared a no-go zone for American marines.

It’s a place that has an unusual pull on me. Probably partly due to that story. Or because it’s the place that is the furthest away from my fatherland. Or for other reasons. I don’t know. We’ll come back to the subject.

25.

Rashid was limping when I saw him again. He had a black eye as well.

“Come and sit down. I’ll order you a beer. Sorry about last time. And thank you. But what happened?”

“A disagreement,” he said.

“Did you go to the police?”

He tried to giggle but it made him cough, which clearly hurt his ribs.

“Are you here illegally?”

He stared into his beer.

“Sorry, Rashid. Perhaps you don’t feel like talking at all.”

“Could you order a few of those free appetizers for me maybe? What are they called again? Stuzzichini.”

“Of course.”

“Sorry to ask but there are some things here that a foreigner like you gets more easily than a foreigner like me.”

He ate like a dog. He ate like someone who hadn’t eaten for a week.

“I haven’t eaten for a week, Ilja.”

I ordered more free snacks for him under the pretext of ordering them for myself.

“And I’m privileged,” he said with his mouth full. “Can you imagine? Where I live, we live with eleven or nine or thirteen, it’s different every day. Two rooms. Nine hundred and eighty euros a month. Most of them are Moroccans like me. But there are also a few Senegalese. It’s even harder for them than it is for us. But they make it difficult for themselves, I have to say. I’m not a racist but those black people ruin it for all of us. I mean, I came here to work, Ilja. I’m an honest man. Tell me it’s true. I’m a good Muslim, even if I do have the occasional beer. But those blacks have a completely different mentality, you can’t do anything about it, it’s just like that. They steal. They even steal from their own housemates. And if you say anything about it, they kick the shit out of you and give you a black eye. They’re used to taking advantage of others. It’s not even their fault, really. It’s their culture. You have to respect that. You’ll agree with me about that, Ilja, that you have to respect their culture.”

I began to feel more and more uncomfortable about this conversation.

“But to return to your question,” Rashid said. “No.”

“Sorry, I lost the thread.”

“I’m not here illegally. I have a temporary residence permit. Not like those blacks. I have the right to be here. They arrive on rubber boats via Lampedusa, Malta, or the Canary Islands. I came here with a passport. I’m a skilled worker. I installed air-conditioning for work in Casablanca. I’m a good person, Ilja, do you understand?”

“And why did you come here?”

“Do you want an honest answer?”

“No.”

Rashid had to laugh and then cough and then his ribs hurt again. He slapped me on the back.

“Really, you’re my only friend here,” he said. “It’s quite an honor for a white man, me saying that, you should know that. Since you asked, I’ll give you a dishonest answer.”

He took a sip of his beer.

“I came here to write a book and not to earn money. I came here to gather inspiration and to enrich my life with new experiences, like being robbed and beaten by my own housemates, and I didn’t come here to survive. I got bored with my work in Casablanca. It was the same old. I came here to look for a new challenge. Like not even being able to get the most basic job with a name like mine. Here I’m a pariah. But it’s fascinating sharing a two-room apartment with nine or eleven or thirteen others, plus the rats. It makes me resourceful. It makes me creative. It keeps me on my toes.”

“I’m sorry, Rashid. I understand what you want to say. But why don’t you go back?”

“You don’t understand a thing, Ilja. I’ve already explained it to you. The first time we met. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying. But I’ll explain it to you one more time. If you’ll order me another beer.”

I ordered him another beer with stuzzichini.

“Let’s take one of my housemates as an example. So that it’s not about me but someone else. That makes it easier. He comes from Senegal. He’s black. His name is Djiby. Yes, write that in your notebook: Djiby. Got that, concerned white citizen of the world? Great. He’s a man with a spectacular refugee story. Go and interview him. I’d be happy to introduce you to him.”

“Thank you.”

“But the principle is the same.”

“What principle?”

“My family saved up, too. I have five brothers. And a couple of sisters, but they don’t count. Apart from that, I have about forty cousins. The family picked me out. The crossing and the documents cost a couple thousand euros. The illegals, like Djiby, paid even more. But in Africa, it’s considered a wise investment. Everyone knows how difficult it is to get into Europe. That’s why they choose their best sons or cousins. The people with the best chance of success in Europe. They picked me because of my professional training and because I speak English. And everyone knows the investment is returned. Because if he manages to reach Europe, he’ll automatically get rich and send back money, fridges, and cars to the family members who took out loans to get him there.”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“That’s not an option.”

“But it happens.”

“In almost one hundred percent of the cases. But it’s not an option. Because they’ve invested too much in you. And apart from that, you’d be the first.”

“The first?”

“Not to make it in Europe.”

“And all those others then? All those Moroccans and Senegalese like the ones you’re sharing the house with?”

“The legals get themselves knee-deep in debt so they can return to the homeland in August in a hired Mercedes with a trunk full of Rolexes.”

“And that keeps the fairy tale alive.”

“Fairy tales aren’t fairy tales if no one doubts their being true.”

“And the illegals?”

“It’s a fairy tale paid for with the family’s entire assets. Do you know how much money that is in Africa, a couple thousand euros? In Casablanca, they assume that I’ll immediately start earning that on a monthly basis. Because I’m in Europe. Because I managed to get to Europe.”

“What would happen if you went back and admitted that the project failed?”

“The illegals do the same as us. Except they can’t go home. They spend the whole day sweating in call shops, explaining in their language why the money transfer hasn’t arrived yet. It seems like all of Senegal hangs out on the pavement in front of the Western Union. And they use that money not to buy food or to open a shop or start a business—they buy Rolexes to show their friends they’ve made it because they have a second cousin in Europe.”

“And how much do you earn now, if I may ask?”

“If I returned empty-handed, without fridges and Mercedes for the whole family, it would mean that I, the chosen one, was the first to violate the sacrifices and trust of my kinsfolk. I would be disowned by my family and friends and I wouldn’t have any family or friends anymore. I’d be the ultimate loser, a pariah no one would ever want to have anything to do with. I’d be as good as dead.

“These roses are imported and stripped in the Ghetto. They are sold illegally in the early morning on Via della Maddalena for fifty cents apiece. I take forty on weekdays and a hundred and twenty on Fridays and Saturdays. I sell them for a euro. And I rarely manage to sell them all. I have to pay my rent and in the meantime my family keeps asking where the Rolexes have got to.”

“And so?”

“And so and so and so. And so everyone does what I do. From time to time, I send them fifty, a hundred, two hundred euros.”

“And you borrow that?”

“I borrow it.”

“And how are you going to pay it back?”

“I live in a fantasy, Ilja. And not even one I made up myself.”

26.

An interviewer in my home country once asked me, “Why do you keep falling in love with waitresses?” I have no idea where he got his information from. I didn’t have much time to think about it; I had to come up with a witty response: “Because they can’t escape my gaze.”

I’m writing to you, my friend, because I’m afraid things are about to get out of hand with the waitress from the Bar of Mirrors. I say afraid, and I mean for you, because she is, as I’ve repeated to the point of boring you with it, the most beautiful girl in Genoa. You’ll never see me again anyway, but given the most recent developments, I’m afraid I have to admit the fact with an ever-broadening grin on my face.

To maintain the suspense, I’ll tell you something else first. I found the Mandragola. You’ll remember I told you about my new friend Cinzia and she gave me the romantic or more accurately medieval task of going off in search of it. I used that as a reason to penetrate even more deeply into the alleyways than I usually do when I got lost. This was right at the start of my time in Genoa, when getting lost was one of my main pastimes. Cinzia is an intelligent girl. She understands stuff. I didn’t entertain for a moment the illusion that the Mandragola actually might exist. But still, I went in search of it. Anyone wanting to make their home in a new country can’t ignore orders given by clever, well-meaning local residents. You can’t ignore an order given by any woman, until you’re married to her and can secretly ignore her orders. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Mandragola exists. It’s a restaurant. I went there yesterday. There were tables outside on a square the size of a service court when you’re playing tennis. In front of a blackened Roman church that through the centuries has been grilled, roasted, and burned down so often it has carbonized to its essence and can decay no more. The minuscule, crammed terrace is shared with a café located in the crypts of an adjacent building in medieval cellars that would be an excellent torture spot if only for the reason that the walls are so thick cries for help would never reach the outside world. And you can descend even lower, to the underground river, where there are cushions on the floor and burning torches. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to find this café, this square, or the Mandragola ever again, assuming it would all still exist the next time, if it did exist yesterday and wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. Because the way it exists, it exists in the shadowy net of dark alleyways at the foot of Santa Maria in Castello where even the rats get lost.

I was there with her. No, not with Cinzia, but with her. Really. When I finally found the Mandragola, it was thanks to the most beautiful girl in Genoa.

27.

I broached it in a really smart way, if I may say so myself. I did the unimaginable. I spoke to her.

“But…” I said.

I’m picturing a traditional Italian wedding. With a white dress and a church. Friends who fly in for it and a long table on a piazza. We’ve talked about nothing but the menu for months. Antipasta misti, we agree about that. Sardinian salami and Spanish pata negra was my suggestion. A few ripieni. Courgettes filled with minced meat. And something for the vegetarians, of course. Carpaccio of swordfish, tuna, and salmon with wasabi sauce. And fried melanzana. Acciughe impanate too, breaded anchovies, fileted and opened out so you can eat them with your fingers. But you said that wasn’t an antipasto but a secondo. And those Calabrese meatballs of yours then? You do have a white dress. So in any case we should serve food that doesn’t stain, because I know you. Crudité di gamberoni crudi. And vongole with cozze. Penne al gorgonzola. As a primo. For a wedding? Pears with Parmesan cheese, is that a primo or a secondo? I think it’s a dessert. Or let’s do trout with almonds. But that’s definitely a secondo. Tagliatelli al salmone. But are you sure with your white dress? Duck à l’orange. Not Italian enough. Then we might as well go to the Chinese restaurant. But my father would shoot himself. What, Chinese? No, ducks, you imbecile. The Chinese shoot imbeciles. And then we kiss. But still no menu. Kiss again. We’ll see. No, we have to arrange it. Cheese fondue, then? Good idea! It was just a joke. But it really is a good idea. But it really was a joke. We’ll start at the beginning. We’ll have fave. Broad beans with Sardinian goat cheese. It won’t be the right season. It’s always the right season for goat cheese, what do you mean? But not for broad beans. Not in the greenhouses? Sure, in the greenhouses in your country, maybe. Alright then, no broad beans. Risotto. Risotto? At a wedding? Yes, risotto. How? With asparagus. Brilliant idea. It doesn’t stain. With butter and ham. Are you mad? It’s summer. Then we’ll serve a tomato and mozzarella salad on the side. On the side of what? With the lamb shanks. We haven’t even discussed the secondo, let alone lamb shanks. Kiss. You see? Do I see what? That you like lamb shanks. No, I like kissing.

Go and rent yourself a suit, my friend. We still need to talk about the menu, but the white dress has already been fitted, in a manner of speaking.

28.

“But,” I said, “do you work every single evening?”

“Yes.”

“But then if you, you know…”

“I’ll be finished early tomorrow.”

“For me, tomorrow’s…I mean…”

“Pick me up here. We’ll go for an aperitif. You can pick a nice place for us. You know Genoa better than I do.”

That night I couldn’t sleep. I’d picked a special place long ago. Walking distance from the sea. A kind of pier in the harbor with a view of La Lanterna and the big ships sailing far away to fairytale destinations like the coast of North Africa, where a purple sunset will be sent back in return. Sorry, I was lying there quite romantically awake. And I could actually see her standing before me in her white dress. While I fully understood that everything was just on the point of beginning…Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, for heaven’s sake. I still didn’t know her name. But we had a date and that was the most important thing.

When I went to pick her up at the Bar of Mirrors the next day, she’d already gotten changed. This was quite an understatement in her case. She’d swapped her waitressing uniform for…for practically nothing. Two boots and then a long stretch of nothing. A kind of short frayed denim skirt. And I can’t even remember what she was wearing on top, perhaps because I didn’t dare look. She was playing the game. She was playing the game with verve.

You have to change your life, is what I thought when I saw her like that. And I realized that that was exactly what I was doing. We watched the sun set that evening. It cost me an arm and a leg because in the special place I’d chosen they know better than anyone that they’re a special place that is chosen, at great cost, to make an impression with their free sunset. We should talk sometime, too—about money. But not now.

And when the moment came that she had to go home, I asked whether perhaps she’d like to go for a bite somewhere. To my astonishment, she said, “We’ll go to the Mandragola. Have you ever been there?”

And when, many hours later, I walked her to her scooter, she said we’d see each other again very soon and kissed my cheek. I finally dared ask.

“What’s your name?”

And she told me her name.

29.

That night I lay awake, even awaker than before, if you can say that. My dreams were keeping me awake. The footage of the evening played a hundred times over in my mind, and it seemed like a film. Everything had happened exactly as it happens in films. I couldn’t find a single fault. We had talked. We’d had long, pleasant conversations about wonderful things. We’d looked into each other’s eyes. Not a cliché had been eschewed. We’d even had recourse to a sunset. And I seemed to remember a soundtrack of sloppy film music with softly swelling violins timed to her slow gestures and her subtle, precise curves. I ran my fingers along her leggy youthfulness in lengthy fantasies and felt the afterglow of her kiss on my cheek like the crimson tinge of a sacred seal.

And we had looked into each other’s eyes. Or did I already say that? I could repeat it a hundred times, as that night, dreaming with my eyes open, I gazed a hundred times into her eyes. And there, through the magnifying glass of her dusky, self-assured gaze, I found myself in a different world, where nothing was sure anymore and everything tottered. Under the gentle force of those eyes, I would deny myself three times before the cock crowed without a second thought. In those eyes, I’d get so drunk without drinking that I’d feel the billowing morass under the crust of civilization that was the gray granite pavement. If I stood up, I’d be weak at the knees. But I didn’t stand up—I swam like any person not able or willing to sleep, and finding it ever harder to separate dreams from reality.

Take me to the underground river with the flaming torches in the medieval cellars of that next-door café and torture me, please, torture me, because nothing can cause greater and sweeter pain than your towering legs of sorrow in your prettiest torture skirt as you look at me with an expression that singes me, gives me hope, and spurns me all at once, and which burns all my hopes and dreams down to a single plea for this to go on. As I re-dreamed the evening in my rickety IKEA bed in my apartment on Vico Alabardieri, I had more and more difficulty believing that this evening had really taken place. The only thing that could convince me that it really had was the fact that the fantasy had been more wonderful than anything I could have imagined. I’d been on a date with the most beautiful girl in Genoa. Just those words: a date. I’d written them down before I’d thought about it. I don’t think I’d ever written those words down before with all their connotations of a neatly orchestrated evening from an aperitif by a sparkling crystal sea to a kiss on the cheek after midnight. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a date with anyone before. Sure, I’ve sat in a pub with a woman on occasion. But that wasn’t a date. That was just boozing and then tumbling into bed together afterward. Or not. But seeking out a romantic place for a girl, somewhere you’d never go to on your own, and making a particular effort to make it a special evening for her—that wouldn’t even occur to me in my home country. But I know how Italian girls think. In my new home, I was changing from a blunt Dutchman into a suave Casanova who could even organize sunsets. One who is attentive enough to even think of doing it. And this transformation was due to her. The most beautiful girl in Genoa had bestowed upon me a full evening—long with her full and uncensored presence. Not bad for an immigrant. And when we’d said goodbye at her scooter, she’d even said we’d see each other again soon. And she’d told me her name.

To cut a long story short, what I wanted to say was that I think your friend is in love. I think I know it for sure. And if earlier I might have jokingly written or suggested that I was in love, I was only joking. Now it’s real. Now it’s finally real. And that’s what was missing. That’s what I’d been searching for all that time. Instead of losing myself passionately in my new life, the first contours of a legitimate reason for me to settle here with passion were finally beginning to take shape. Anyone opting for a new life might find the new life not new enough. This is exactly the adventure I needed because it affected me in a new way.

I know, my friend, the way I’m expressing myself is a little muddled. Or maybe “tentative” is a better word. But in any case, this is precisely the main reason I left my fatherland. Not because anything there drove me away, but because to me the story was old and stale. I needed this so that I could invent myself in a new life. Emigrating is like writing a new novel whose plot you don’t yet know—not its ending, nor the characters who will prove crucial to how the story continues. That’s why everything I write has something tentative about it.

But now that I’ve gotten to know the decor and feel at home, the curtains can go up on the opera. Everything is just beginning. Everything is just on the brink of beginning.

30.

There are two shops on the ground floor of Palazzo Agostino e Benedetto Viale opposite the Bar of Mirrors on Salita Pollaiuoli. On the right at 74 rosso, Laura Sciunnach’s jewelry shop, and on the left, at 72 and 70 rosso, in a property twice the size, a lady’s fashion shop called Chris & Paule. Both are specialist shops in the sense that almost no one ever goes in them. Both look nice with well tended window displays and tasteful window boxes on the wall. These are the things that attract the customers who do flutter into them, without the intent to actually purchase anything. Set against this is the fact that the products in both shops are exclusive and that one or two customers a day are sufficient to keep the business going. The staffing costs are low. Both shops can be easily kept open from early morning ’til late at night by a single store manager; to the right, Bibi; to the left, a beautiful and sad lady of a certain age. They are what I wanted to talk about.

There are some rifts in Genoa that can never be bridged. In the labyrinth alone, there’s an invisible, electrically charged curtain at the level of Via Luccoli separating the Molo quarter from the Maddalena quarter. Tourists aren’t aware of it and I wasn’t, either, at first, but the force field gains intensity the longer I’m here. It exists in that special gaze of the signora as I tell her that I had coffee on the other side, in Via del Campo or on Piazza Lavagna. I know every rose seller and every busker in Molo—they don’t venture into Maddalena, just as its beggars don’t dare venture into Molo. The girls there are different, the dogs bigger. Thugs and whores and the old, flaking transvestites from the Vico della Croce Binaci, the middle-aged men with beer bellies and fishnets with two packets of cotton wool in their bras—they all live in Maddalena.

In the same way, there are two football clubs: Genoa and Sampdoria. One is the best club, the other always wins. As the oldest football club in Italy, one of them fosters tradition, the other has the money. They share a stadium in Marassi and when one is playing home, the other plays away. Their supporters never meet, except at the derby. And everyone in Genoa supports one of the two teams, including the women and children. They don’t have to wear the club’s colors. You can tell from a person’s nose whether they are familiar with the depths of suffering or whether they’ve plumped for success.

Nor will you ever be able to close the gap between the inhabitants of the labyrinth and the hundreds of thousands of others happy enough to call themselves Genoese—those who occasionally travel in cars or on Vespas to the historic center from their luxurious lives in outlying apartments with sea views ten or twelve kilometers away in Quinto or Nervi so they can poke around in cute little shops like Laura Sciunnach’s or Chris & Paule and carry on like it’s their city—while just twenty meters beyond their shops they’d be hopelessly lost. The store managers come from outside, too. They arrive every morning with a scooter helmet dangling from their wrists and every night, carrying the same helmet, they go back to their sad, ordered lives in the flats of San Fruttuoso, Marassi, or Castelletto without knowing about the rats, the whores, the old transvestites with their beer bellies, and the foul-mouthed fishmongers around the corner.

Bibi and the beautiful, sad lady traveled in like this in the morning, arriving around nine thirty. Bibi was usually the first. He’d raise the security shutters. He’d put two of the three flowerpots on the pavement outside and then rummage around in his shop. The third flowerpot is kept inside the clothes shop at night and is put out by the beautiful, sad lady. She waters all three of the plants, cuts off the dead leaves, and carefully puts the three pots in the window box. Then she goes back inside.

At that moment, Bibi comes outside to hang up the tin bucket on the nail in the wall between the two door openings. The bucket functions as a communal ashtray. He inaugurates it by leaning indifferently, not to say expressionlessly, against the doorpost smoking a cigarette. When he’s done, the beautiful, sad lady smokes a cigarette in her door opening. Usually she wears boots, although I don’t know why it’s of interest to tell you that. She throws her stub in the bucket.

As I said, there aren’t many customers. The entire day—until long after the candles have been put out on the tables in the Bar of Mirrors and the Prosecco twinkles between conversations in the trapeze of art, poetry, and politics—they will smoke lots and lots of cigarettes in their respective door openings—Bibi on the right at 74 rosso, her on the left at 72 and 70 rosso. They’ll carefully aim all of their stubs into the bucket. The yellow flowers in the three flowerpots will look lovely. They won’t talk to each other, not because they don’t like each other, on the contrary, but because there isn’t much to say without candlelit Prosecco. Various girls will call on Bibi; they won’t want to buy bracelets or rings, but each of them believes she is special to him. He will look down on them with scorn. He will hardly speak to them, either. They’ll slink off and you can count on them returning in boots with even higher heels.

Very rarely, they’ll almost touch, but they don’t realize it—I’m the only person who can see it. From the terrace. Sometimes Bibi will reach for a catalogue on the right of his counter at precisely the same moment she is rearranging the skirt suits on the racks to the left of the register. There’s nothing more than an old medieval wall, twenty centimeters thick, between their two hands.

They close at seven thirty. The yellow flowers go back inside, two pots in his shop, one in hers. The last thing Bibi does is to get down the tin bucket from the hook. She rolls down the shutters and padlocks them to the marble shop front. She closes the cast iron fence and secures it with a chain lock. Then they exchange a few words. He says “Ciao.” She asks whether he might like to drink a Prosecco on the terrace. He says he’s tired. Then they both return to their own flats with a scooter helmet dangling from their wrists—his with a Sampdoria sticker, hers sprayed in the tragic red and blue of Genoa.

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