La Superba (14 page)
Authors: Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer
Of course I invented Genoa. In some ways, the city also exists without me, at least I'd be happy to assume that. You can go there yourself. It has an airport named after Columbus, who supposedly came from Genoa. He's the man who invented America. His dream was to reach India by going west and get rich. He reached Haiti and saw people in funny clothes. “Oh, you must be Columbus,” they cried elatedly. “Hooray! We've been discovered!” His fantasy was that he'd reached India and that's why he called
them Indians. And that's where the fairy tale that cowboys have to shoot Indians comes from. In the meantime, Genoa had become rich off the silver from the wilderness now called Argentina. But when the cowboys had well and truly won and built skyscrapers, tens of thousands of destitute Italians left from the Port of Genoa, following in Columbus's footsteps, chasing the dreams of wealth and a new life. But flights to Christopher Columbus Genoa International Airport are rather expensive at the moment. I'd advise you to fly to Pisa or to MilanâMalpensa. Then you'd arrive late at night to Brignole station or Palazzo Principe. From that second station, you can easily walk along Via Balbi past the budget hotels to Largo di Zecca, Via Garibaldi, and Piazza de Ferrari. But you can also go straight from the station to Africa, to sailors, whores, and danger. The best way to arrive is by boat from the south. Then the city looms up like an impenetrable wall of overconfidence. Genoa, La Superba. Of course you can come here. But of course I invented it. You'll never see it the way I see it, until I tell you how to.
I've also made up the fact that this is my city, the natural home of my true soul, where I will be truly happy for the first time, as I'd previously made it up that Leiden was that place and, before that, Rijswijk in Zuid Holland, and as Casablanca, Tunis, Zanzibar, or Gotham City could very well be in the future. Not that I'll ever leave this place, but it's about the principle. I watch the ships every day. And if, on a windy morning, a large ferry from foreign climes docks in the distance behind Darsena, and the labyrinth fills with fresh strays, then, on a morning like that, in my city, at walking distance from Capitan Baliano, Piazza delle Erbe, and the Bar of Mirrors, as the fishermen curse and the whores want
to love me, as dark clouds gather about the fortresses on the hills, then I feelâ¦strange to say itâ¦then I feelâ¦strange to believe in your own fantasiesâ¦but then I feel truly happy at the same time.
As I write this, a tramp who looks like a tramp shuffles by. He is wearing a kind of alien costume made of
objets trouvés
and junk. Bedraggled teddy bears dangle from his suit of armor. He has a magic mask made of compact discs. He uses a found stick to rhythmically beat an empty Coca-Cola can as he walks by. He is a shaman. He is God in the depths of thoughts. He sees nothing and nobody. He makes us up when he needs us. He lives entirely in his own fantasy. He looks completely happy. I feel very much akin to him.
42.
“What do you think my biggest problem is?”
She didn't answer. She didn't look at me, either. She took a sip of her cappuccino, slowly lit a cigarette, and stared across the square. Her gaze was cold. She didn't look like a person pondering a difficult question but like someone demonstratively ignoring the questioner in annoyance at the fundamental lack of understanding the question testified to. She exhaled her smoke, but it was as though she was sighing. She didn't move, but it was as though she was shrugging. She was beautiful. She was even more beautiful than normal. She had changed from an Italian girl into a sculpture of an Italian girl. She was a Madonna in the Doge's private chapel, sculpted from the finest Carrara marble. He delighted in the fine features of her immobile, silent face each morning during
prayers and once again at vespers. He kneeled, hands clasped, and was amazed at the way her nose, her chin, her jawline could be both angular and soft at the same time. She was noble. During his prayers, he imagined what it would be like to kiss her. And her wrists and ankles looked so breakable. It was incomprehensible that she could exist in marble like a featherweight fantasy of spun sugar. And in real life, in real lifeâhe imagined how her hands, her arms, her whole body would succumb like a snow-white butterfly to his embraces and caresses. The statue had become more precious to him than his own wife. It was to her he prayed. He had ripped off the artist with a budget price for which the Doge couldn't even organize a banquet.
What he didn't know was that the destitute sculptor had modeled the Madonna on his great love, the daughter of the baker on Piazza Fossatello. He dreamed of her every night. Every morning, he went to the bakery to catch a glimpse of her. She never showed the slightest bit of interest in him. She never even gave him a second glance. For her, he was just another bum from the alleys. But for him, just seeing her was enough. A day that began with the sight of her was a beautiful day with golden yellow sunshine on the palaces of Genoa. A day that began without her, because she was ill or had been sent on an errand that morning, was as black as the night with bitter rain in the dark alleys. He worshipped her. Oh, if only she knew who he was. If only she could come with him to the Doge's Palace and see how he had caressed her into existence with his hammer and chisel. But how could a baker's daughter ever gain access to a Doge's private chapel? His own access to the palace had been blocked the day he'd completed his
masterpiece and received what he saw as a very generous payment.
But one day the baker's daughter did enter the Doge's Palace. She'd been sent on an errand that morning. She had to deliver baskets full of focaccia for the banquet being held that evening. She happened to come out of the kitchen just as the Doge was coming down the stairs. She'd taken the wrong door, and to her horror, found herself in the large stairwell used by the noblemen and women. He saw her. She was the spitting image of the love of his life. She had the same angular and soft lines in her face. There was the same flimsiness to her ankles and wrists. Her hands looked like fragile confectionary concoctions.
“You live in your fantasies too much.”
She still wasn't looking at me. But she'd replied. She had actually deigned to give me an answer. Although it was intended as a reproach, it was still an interesting answer. I heard three deep blasts of a ship's horn. In the harbor, a large ship was about to set sail for Barcelona, Tunis, Jerusalem, or La Merica. Of course I live in my fantasies too much. It's my job. Every day I have to reinvent Genoa and populate it with the people I see and bring to life the thoughts they have. I have to caress Genoa into existence each day out of the meaningless, rough blocks of marble from the palazzi with my hammer and chisel, and model them to fit the image of my imaginary beloved. I have to fantasize myself in her arms and invent that I am at home in her embrace, and happy. I have to fantasize myself into a Genoese. I have to blow the salty sea wind from my lungs into the alleyways. I have to make the shutters rattle and every baker's daughter or fishmonger curse. I put the
stoccafisso
, the
cima
, the
trippe,
and the pesto on the shelves
of all the stinking shops in Via Canneto Il Lungo, in Macelli di Soziglia and in the Sottoripa arcades. I have to paint the whores black and make the knife shop on the corner glitter. I have to construct the terraces and the roofs, the corners and the cracks, the squares as big as a Fiat Cinquecento and the alleys as wide as a handcart. I have to spit out the dirt, the stench, and the rats into the labyrinth. I have to make the Moroccans and the Senegalese suffer, eleven to a room.
“But is that bad?”
She didn't answer. With a snow-white cappuccino in a snow-white cup on a snow-white saucer, she stared across the snow-white marble square in front of the Doge's marble palace.
“You think you're a good man,” she said. She took a drag of her cigarette and stared into the distance. The tourist train from Porto Antico to Porta Soprana jingled past. “But that's just your imagination.”
And how things turned out with the baker's daughter and the Doge is something you can come up with yourself, my friend. Did they get married? What do you think? And when nine months later her disgrace saw the light of day and she said he was the Doge's son, do you think they believed her? And what if they didn't? Just fantasize, my friend. Unfortunately, as is generally the case, your darkest fantasies will turn out to be the truth.
43.
I hadn't seen Rashid for quite a while. Other rose sellers had taken over his neighborhood. They were even less successful than he had been. I would be lying if I said I'd thought of him often.
From time to time I thought of him, but I didn't go to any trouble at all to try and track him down.
And then all of a sudden I saw him at the end of the Via del Campo, close to the Porta dei Vacca. He had visibly gained weight and was wearing a nice suit with an Italian cut and a pair of sophisticated shoes. I greeted him. He didn't see me. I greeted him again.
“I'm busy, Ilja.”
I apologized. “You look well, Rashid. Did you find a job?”
He nodded.
“As an air-conditioning installer? The same work you always did back in Morocco?”
“Sorry, Ilja. I have an appointment.”
After that I saw him a couple more times, mainly on Piazza delle Erbe, toward the end of the evening. He had stopped greeting me. He avoided my eyes. He usually installed himself at the yellow tables of Bar Gradisca. He waited for others and when they appeared, he went into the labyrinth with them. Sometimes he came back later to wait for other clients, sometimes he didn't. He had become a businessman and didn't deem his old friends worthy of a second glance.
And after that, he disappeared completely. I asked Oscar, the owner of Gradisca's, whether he knew anything. He shrugged. When I continued to ask, he walked away. I asked Mustafa, a fellow Moroccan who put the tables out in the morning for Oscar, whether he'd heard anything. He said that all his friends were Italians, that he didn't know a single Moroccan, and certainly no one called Rashid.
A few days later, Oscar took me aside. He didn't say anything. So that I could never say he'd said anything. He put his index finger
to his lip to emphasize the point. After that he closed one nostril with the same finger and made a snorting noise with the other. Then he put both of his wrists together in a gesture that suggested handcuffs. “Marassi,” he whispered. And I'd been in Genoa long enough to realize he didn't mean the stadium but the prison in the same neighborhood.
44.
And one evening, when I came home, I found a letter. It wasn't in an envelope. It was nothing more than a single, folded sheet that had been shoved under my front door.
“Dear Leonardo, I'm so sorry things turned out the way they did. Like I said the last time we saw each otherâyour problem is that you live too much in your fantasy. You think you understand things, but everything you understand you only understand in your own thoughts. If you paid more attention to reality, none of this would have had to happen.
“I was in love with you, Leonardo. I loved you. But those feelings were so strong and so new, they confused me. That's why I needed time. That's why I asked you to leave me alone for a couple of weeks. And do you know what? I had a really good think. I began to understand that the things you said about Francesco were right. Or didn't say but thought. I began to understand that I wasn't obliged to stay with someone who pushed me down the stairs. I began to understand that I had the right to make my own choices and that I could also choose adventure. Nobody could stop me.
“And you know what, that very day, two days before the derby, I had made up my mind. I had decided to choose you. And I broke up with Francesco, however difficult that was. I dreamed of being with you and maybe even going to your country one day. I dreamed of learning your language, being able to read your poems and beginning a new life in the north with you one day. I couldn't wait to tell you.
“And the next morning you turned up with her. With that blonde girl who was the opposite of me in every sense. And I saw the two of you talking in your own language and looking at each other. You paid absolutely no attention to me. You seemed to have completely forgotten me. Or you were deliberately ignoring me. And during the derby I saw the way you laid your hand on her shoulder. And after that on the Piazza delle Erbe, I saw how you were talking like two people in love. I saw you kiss. And after that I followed you. I watched you walk back to your house, hand in hand, that same house where I lay in the moonlight in your hands and where in my dreams I had wanted to live with you until we went to your country. How could you be so heartless, Leonardo? How could you forget me so quickly?
“Well, that's what I wanted to say. Now you know.
“And, oh yes, one more thing. Feel free to go to the Bar of Mirrors. I don't work there anymore. I handed in my notice this morning.”
We All Live in a Yellow Submarine
1.
It was Don's birthday and there was no way we could forget it. He was turning seventy-three. That morning I saw him sitting with Boarâthat's Elio's nickname, the manager of the Schooner, a restaurant on Salita Pollaiuoli, you go past the Bar of Mirrors and it's a bit further along, toward Via San Bernardo and San Donato. Boar has a simple strategy. No one can smoke in his restaurant unless it happens to be empty. That's why the restaurant is closed pretty much all day. Boar stands there in his dirty wife-beater, puffing away behind the counter under the no smoking sign. Sometimes the door is open to let in some fresh air. Unsuspecting, high-spirited tourists, wandering in for a bite to eat in the world famous Schooner restaurant, are bundled off by the Boar.
Chiuso
. Closed. Shut. No, no restaurant today. Because otherwise he'd have to get changed, clear the ashtrays from the tables, look for the menus, work. He'd rather close the door again and turn up the music. Ella Fitzgerald. Listen to this. Sarah Vaughan. And then something with a sousaphone solo. His vest turns as yellow as his fingers, steeped in nicotine. Wine. Beer. Gin and tonic. Don. And anyone else in there has to be a friend of either Boar's or Don's.
Even at eleven in the morning.
Italian humor mainly consists of laughing very loudly after you've told a joke and then raising your voice and re-telling the same joke three times over. Sarah Vaughan sang a song called “You Are My Honeybee.” Boar, who, unlike the rest of them, understands a bit of English, translated the line into Italian. “She sings, âYou are my honeybee.' That means he comes along and pricks her, know what I mean?” He accompanied this with a vulgar gesture. While there was laughter around the bar, he raised his voice, clearly as pleased as punch with his minor success, and continued, “You are my honeybee. Get it? He has a stingâ¦He pricks her with hisâ¦you know. And then she sings that he's her honeybee. Get it? Get it?! You are my honeybee. Unbelievable. That's what she's singing. And he's pricking her⦔ Again and again he made the same obscene gesture. And if anyone else tried to chime in, he defended his personal success by repeating the same thing even more loudly. An Italian party consists of telling as many jokes as possible, as often as possible, and drowning out any others trying to do the same.
And among it all, Don floated, flourished, triumphed, and warbled like a jamming device. He danced along on a giant woolly cloud of gin and tonic. It was his birthday for sure. He had been in Genoa for more than twenty years by now, and he still hardly spoke any Italian, but he knew the obscene gestures as well as the next person. And as soon as the next girl came tripping in to wish him a happy birthday, he spread his arms and sang, “You are my honeybee,” to Boar's great amusement and that of all the other Italians at the bar. Don knew how to make friends in Genoa,
or anywhere else in the worldâhe didn't care, as long as they served gin and tonic with as little tonic as possible, and as long as he was given special dispensation to smoke with the barman in a bar where you couldn't smoke. He slapped women's bottoms, squeezed their breasts, and laid his head on their laps. Clearly, a seventy-three-year-old alcoholic with an English accent could get away with a lot.
“We're just as scoundrelous as all those Italians,” he said to me in English.
“We're anthropologists,” I proposed.
“Here's to anthropologists! Let's drink to that! Cheers, big ears!” And then he began to dish up a long, priceless anecdote about an anthropologist he'd met in Burma or Malaysia. I'd heard this anecdote ten times already, but each time I'd been denied the punch line because of the arrival of yet another woman needing to be serenaded, hugged, or felt up.
At the time, Don was my dearest friend in the labyrinth. He was the only one who, by getting profusely lost every day, never got lost. His world had shrunk to a handful of bars near his hotel on Salita Pollaiuoli and although he regularly couldn't find his way back to his hotel from the Piazza delle Erbe, which his room looked out on, in his unbroken delirium, he was the most constant, stable, reliable, and most realistic of all the people I knew. And I don't mean that as a funny way of saying that he was predictable and easily locatable at any given moment of the day. He was the only one who understood. He didn't live in a fantasy world; because in all its modesty, he had made a beautiful fantasy come true: drinking himself to death, laughing and dancing among
cheerful sweet nothings, smiling Italians, and a few bottoms to slap and tits to squeeze. He no longer had any illusions. Instead, he had decided that every day was a party. Every day was Don's birthday for Don.
Grande Don
.
2.
His real name was Donald Perrygrove Sinclair, but because he was the godfather of the square and, on a busy night, hundreds came by to kiss his hand, he was called Don. He was the English Professor. The little Italian he spoke he pronounced with such a heavy Oxbridge accent that he turned himself into more than one English Professor: the way he said it, it sounded like
Il Professori Inglesi
. And everyone copied him, because it seemed to fit. He was too magnificent to make do with the banal singular.
And he
was
several people, too. He was the rumpled, soiled old age pensioner in the morning with a gin and tonic in his shaking hand. He was Oscar Wilde in the afternoon, a ravishing conversationalist who, while enjoying a gin and tonic, sailed along on the currents of art and literature, sublimely acting out what pleased and rankled him, quoting Shakespeare and his own verse, dishing up priceless anecdotes. He was the Don the Italians loved after sunset, the pissed clown who sang and danced with a glass of gin and tonic in his hand, without a care for decorum or even any recollection of what the word meant. There was no way he could remember the names or faces of the dozens of friends, male and female, who filed past his table after sunset whom he'd undoubtedly met before at some point, but also after sunset.
This was why he hugged and kissed everybody. He resolved painful misunderstandings, which were inevitable, by bursting into song. He had a large repertoire, but his favorite was “We all live in a yellow submarine.” He was the Don who tripped and injured himself after closing time. This was because he suffered from dizzy spells, according to his own diagnosis. He actually went to the doctor once to ask what was causing the dizziness. “And what did the doctor say?” I asked when he returned. “He's an old friend of mine. I can't lie to him. He asked me how much I drink and when was the last time I'd eaten. I'm a very intelligent man but not that clever.”
He was seventy-two when I met him for the first time. He told me he'd come to Genoa more than twenty years earlier to teach English. He had a one-year contract. He never left, not even once he retired. He had lived in the hotel on Salita Pollaiuoli for more than twenty years, close to the Bar of Mirrors. He had four girlfriends who were venomously jealous of each other. He had more than four girlfriends. He kissed, felt up, embraced, and pawed everything with a pair of tits, and then he'd say, “I love you.” And all that about a hundred times a night. “Shot by a jealous husband at the age of ninety-five. That's my ambition. What a way to go.” His greatest mistress was undoubtedly his glass of gin and tonic. He often said it himself, “I've abandoned nine women, but never a glass of gin and tonic.”
Cappuccino senza schiuma
, he called it lovingly. He never emptied his glass, but cherished, adored, and nurtured it the whole day long. Each time he was halfway, he'd ask for extra ice and a
lacrima
âa tear, a shot of extra gin. “Drunk on tears. That would be a wonderful name for a pop group.” Early in
the afternoon, it was already pure gin with a dash of the memory of tonic. “Enough gin to keep the Titanic afloat and enough ice to sink her.” He was a professional alcoholic who didn't spend a single second of the day with an empty glass. And at night, at closing time, there wasn't a barman who knew how much gin and tonic to put on the bill. All things considered, he'd only drunk the one.
“I had my first gin and tonic when I was eleven, with my Uncle George. It was all his fault. He was a great character. The man never uttered a word of sense in his life, until he suddenly came out with: âThey say you live longer if you don't smoke or drink. But that's not true. It just
seems
longer.'”
He didn't like moving around, that much was clear. He liked Genoa. “My hotel room looks out onto seven bars. Eight if you count the Internet café. Please stay. Please stay in Genoa, Ilja. It's heaven. Everything you need is here.”
3.
Apart from gin and tonic, Don only needed one other thing to survive and that was attention. He was the king of the Piazza delle Erbe, where all the tables were crooked. He would install himself, by preference, on the high side of one of the higher tables, because sooner or later a bottle of tonic would topple over and in accordance with the rules of gravity, would land not in his lap, but in the lap of whoever was sitting opposite him on the lower side of the table. He was a professional. He thought of everything. When it came to drink, he didn't leave anything to chance.
Usually he sat on his own on the high side of his high table
and held court. The crowds greeted him and moved on. The two most common words in Genoa were “Ciao, Don.” He sat there like a retired cabaret artist waiting for an audience. Like a sleeping monkey in an old-fashioned machine, the kind you had to put a coin into to wake it up and then it would do a little song and dance. Don was like that, prepared at any moment of the evening to do his act as soon as a grateful audience presented itself. In the meantime, he'd doze off behind his sunglasses with a half-liter of gin and tonic in front of him on his high table.
And like every cabaret artist, he was in constant need of new spectators. His repertoire was large, but sooner or later he'd lapse into repetition. The gin and tonic didn't help, either. He was capable of dishing up the same priceless anecdote three nights in a row because for two evenings in a row he'd forgotten he'd told it the night before. Though this wasn't a real problem, because the combination of his antiquarian Oxbridge accent and the gin and tonic made him as good as incomprehensible, so you had to hear the same anecdote at least three times to understand it.
His favorite audience members were the
boaties
. Ah, the boaties. How should I describe them? Genoa is a port city, right? The cruise ships moor to the west of the Centro Storico; further to the west are the ferries for Sicilia, Sardinia, and Africa, and even further to the west from there, kilometers and kilometers of container ship facilities. But all the same, we're talking about the Mediterranean. So there's also a large harbor for yachts. And that's in Porto Antico, right beneath the Centro Storico, at walking distance from the Piazza delle Erbe. That's where you find the luxury motor yachts, the over-forty-meter crew. If the owner isn't there. If he is, they go
to Sardinia, Portofino, Saint Tropez, Saint Tropez, and Saint Tropez. But the owner is only there two or three weeks a year. Aside from that, they also have a few charters, but for the rest of the year the boat stays here. And to maintain a luxury motor yacht of more than forty meters moored in the haven, you need a crew of ten or eleven. There's a German or a Russian captain everyone hates; half are Filipinos, who do the hard work and cook for each other; and the other half come from the Commonwealth. They're the boaties. Australians, Kiwis, and Canadians with much too much money and far too many gadgets, off on an adventure in the Mediterranean, only it's not a real adventure because they hang out together all the time in overpaid luxury. They come along to the piazza from time to time with their iPhones to noisily throw away hundreds of euros on cocktails and leave a stupidly large tip for all the glasses they've broken and all the nuisance they've caused.
They were Don's most appreciative audience. It also meant he didn't have to speak Italian, which he couldn't anyway. Spoiled young men from the colonies found his archaic Oxbridge accent hilarious. Sometimes it seemed as though they expressly sought him out. As though he had been explicitly marked out as a tourist attraction in their travel guides. With three stars. And up he'd pop. As though someone had put a coin in the machine. He'd do all his anecdotes and all his jokes. He satisfied every expectation. And they would buy his next gin and tonic just like you'd throw a new coin into the monkey automat. And at the end of the evening, when he could no longer talk, he'd begin to sing. They already knew the song. “We all live in a yellow submarine⦔
4.
He considered me a new member of the audience, too. He told me stories about his own life. He was a brilliant storyteller. At least, after his third gin and tonic and before his thirteenth, which on average left a window of opportunity of between three and six hours. He told me how he had been expelled from school almost a century ago. Of course with a surname like Perrygrove Sinclair and a father who'd ascended to great heights in Her Majesty's Royal Army, he'd been sent to one of the most prestigious public schools in the United Kingdom.
“In my second to last year, we got this math teacher from India. A brilliant man, I've no doubt about that. But he had a terrible stutter. And I wrote a limerick about it in my exercise book. But he saw it and confiscated my book. He read the limerick. And then there was trouble.
“The next morning I had to go to the headmaster's office. Along with my father. The headmaster had my exercise book lying on his desk. He put on a stern face, opened the book, and read out the limerick. I sniggered. âThere's nothing funny about it, Perrygrove Sinclair. Did you write this?' My father sat motionlessly in his chair, resting his weight on his walking stick. He'd adopted a stern expression, too. âAlthough it might not be perfect in terms of meter,' I said, âI'm not ashamed to admit that I'm the proud author of this poem.' The headmaster slammed his hand on the desk. âThere's isn't a single reason to be proud of this filth.' Then my father stood up. âI agree with you completely, headmaster. My son has sullied the good name of the many generations of
Perrygrove Sinclairs who have been educated here.' He decided to take me out of school and sent me into the army.”