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.”
<
br /> “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.
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