Rome Noir Read online

  It was pointless to argue, that Chinaman had a head harder than an anvil. Not to mention the business of the dead girl in the bed. I certainly couldn’t risk having him call his lackey in to repair the air-conditioning. So I tore the papers from his hand and told him not to worry, I would take care of everything as soon as possible.

  “When is as soon as possible?”

  I told him I didn’t know, but before he could reply, I said, “Tomorrow.” Then I slammed the door in his face. I went back to the bedroom with the hope that the corpse had disappeared. Maybe I’d had a hallucination. Unfortunately, the girl was still there. So I lay down on the bed next to her. I realize that lying down next to a dead woman may seem depraved. But I was exhausted from the heat and the stress. I needed to stretch out to get my ideas in order, and that was the only bed available. I spent several minutes staring at the girl’s hair. It was smooth and long. The shiny black made me think she was Chinese or one of the many other Asians who hung out in the neighborhood. Suddenly it moved. The hair, I mean. At first I thought it was the fan. But when it rose, and began to wave in the air like tentacles, I realized that there was something alive in it. The tentacles became an enormous octopus wrapped around the girl’s body. The whole room was now immersed in a blood-red ocean.

  The thought that I was still dreaming barely surfaced; fear had gotten the better of me. I would have liked to get up and flee. Go I don’t know where. But I was paralyzed. I don’t mean metaphorically. I couldn’t move in the literal sense of the word. It was terrible being present at such a spectacle while having to remain as still as a statue. Then everything went dark and when I reopened my eyes the girl had disappeared.

  There are people who give dreams a lot of weight. They believe all dreams have a meaning. They waste time analyzing them, thinking they’ll discover something or other about themselves or even their future. Nonsense. For me, dreams are only dreams, images that the mind seizes randomly in sleep, like the numbers that blindfolded children pick out of a lottery wheel. This has always been my opinion, at least. And, in fact, that night I got up without attaching too much importance to the strange nightmare I had woken from. I went to the bathroom as if nothing had happened and washed my hands and face. I avoided meeting my gaze in the mirror as I stretched my arm out for the towel. I knew I didn’t look good, I almost never do when I wake up. The deadly heat of the Great Summer didn’t help; it made me seem at least five years older, and, considering that I was no longer a boy, this bugged me.

  I tried not to think of the heat or of the years gone by and wasted. I tried not to think at all. It wasn’t difficult; with the weather I had become quite good at emptying my mind. Not that I didn’t have things to think about. Money, for example. I was drowning in debts that I couldn’t pay. Someone else might have gone crazy. Not me. I took bills, requests for payment, injunctions, and all the other papers in which money I didn’t have was claimed from me, and I stuck them on one of those gadgets you used to see in trattorias. They’re called check spindles, I think. Or something like that. They consist of a big metal pin fixed to a wooden base, and you feel an almost sexual pleasure in sticking a bill on them. Don’t think badly of me, but it was like deflowering the economy. For me, there’s never been much difference between the economy and a woman. In the sense that I have never understood either one.

  Yet I was very fond of my pin. I kept it in plain sight on the table in front of the window. I still have it, in fact. Only now it’s on the night table. If I spoke in the past tense it’s because I wish I had thrown it away. Things would have gone differently without the pin in the picture. On the other hand, not necessarily. Basically, the fault is not the pin’s but mine and the dream’s. Why in the world did I go around telling it? To Yin, in particular. I knew very well that there’s nothing to joke about with girls like her. And yet … Wait, I’m going too fast. I should begin at the beginning. Yes. But is there really a precise moment at which things begin? Like the Big Bang, so to speak.

  I knew a guy years ago. I’ll spare you the details, but I saw him go downhill overnight. Let’s say he went to shit. I was surprised, because he had always seemed to me one of those people who know what they’re doing. I asked him how he’d gotten into such a state, how it had happened. “The way everything happens,” he answered. “Little by little at first. Then all of a sudden.” I wasn’t sure I understood. But now I know. Now it’s clear to me. Little by little at first, then all of a sudden. It’s like the Great Summer. Now it seems normal. The heat was infernal, the Romans had all escaped to the north, and here there were only Chinese and Bedouins. Plus some unlucky jerks like me. If I look at Rome now, it seems as if it was always like that. But when I think back to how this city was before the famous summer, I wonder if maybe I’m crazy. It seems to me that I live in a nightmare. And yet no. It’s all true. It was all true before and it’s all true now.

  I remember the beginning of that famous summer very well. I decided to stay in Rome. I liked the deserted city, liked not having to wait in line at the post office or the supermarket. During the day I worked and at night I went to see the films that were shown in Piazza Vittorio. Coming home, I smoked a joint and fuck the rest. I wasn’t rolling in dough but I had a peaceful life, without bumps.

  It began to get hot. But really hot. You, too, will remember. Old people died. The newspapers and television said that such a heat wave had never been recorded before. Every day they interviewed some expert who went on and on about climate change, pollution, melting glaciers, and emissions standards. We all nodded our heads yes, but we weren’t really listening. It was something in the future. In less than fifty years there will no longer be annual snowfall even on the highest mountains, said the experts. And what did we care about what would happen in fifty years? The only thing we were interested in was when the heat wave would pass. We waited for the storms of late August.

  August passed. Then September passed, and October. Of the storms, no trace. The heat increased. When Christmas came, the temperature hovered around a hundred degrees. Not knowing what to do, people went to the beach. They thought that after New Year’s winter would finally come. Instead, the fires began and at that point people began to get seriously pissed off. They demanded answers, wanted to hear that sooner or later everything would go back to the way it was before. The experts said that such a phenomenon had never been recorded. But this was not an answer or reassurance.

  In the end, people began moving to the north. More or less in the same period the first waves of Chinese arrived. People sold their houses and the Chinese bought them for cash. After a year it seemed like Shanghai in the days of opium smoking and bordellos. It was fascinating, from a certain point of view. So although I no longer had a job, I figured I’d stay.

  My boss had decided to shut down operations. Business was getting worse and worse, and without ceremony he gave me my walking papers. In retrospect, it seems to me he behaved rather badly, but right then I didn’t care. The job had always been shitty, I wasn’t at all sorry to lose it. I took the severance pay with the firm intention of scraping by. It wasn’t a huge sum, but, thanks to the Great Summer, prices had tumbled. With a little economizing I could afford not to work for several years. If I moved to the north, that money would be gone in a few months and I’d have to start seriously slogging. I had no desire to do that.

  Every so often my mother called, worried. She said that sooner or later the money would run out. “And then? What do you intend to do then?” she asked. A good question. Only I had no intentions. I told her I would think about it at the proper moment. According to my mother, I should join her in Lambrate, outside Milan. It seems there is a lot of work in that area. I was in Lambrate once. You have no idea what a god-awful place we’re talking about. Total desolation. “I’ll think about it, Mama,” I said. Then I hung up and rolled a joint or drained a couple of cans of beer. Not infrequently I did both together.

  At the time I was not yet living on Via Veneto. I had taken a
studio not far from Piazza Vittorio, in the middle of the historic Chinatown. I led a peaceful, orderly life. I got up, ate breakfast, and leafed distractedly through a book, waiting for the temperature to go down. Around midnight I went out. I wandered through the neighborhood, ending up inevitably at the market, and, with no real goal, struggled to make my way among shouting vendors and old Chinese women examining the greens displayed in the stalls. Often I stopped in front of a shop selling tropical fish and killed time watching those strange creatures circling the aquariums. I ate around 2 in the morning, usually noodle soup. Soon afterward the Forbidden City opened.

  It’s there that my life changed forever, there that I met Yichang. The Forbidden City was a go-go bar. There had never been places like that in Rome before the Great Summer—I think because of the Vatican. Usually I stayed almost until closing time. I drank beer, watched the girls dance, waited for dawn. It was my favorite time of the night. Maybe because in my life I didn’t do much, while there it seemed to me that a lot of interesting things happened. I wouldn’t be able to say what things, exactly. Basically it was just a place where men went for whores.

  One night Yichang sat down next to me. I had now been going to the Forbidden City regularly for several months and had the impression I hadn’t seen him before. I was wrong, because he knew me. In the sense that he had noticed me.

  He asked if I liked the place and I said yes.

  “I thought so,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Nowhere, I’m from Rome.”

  He widened his eyes; I might have said I was a Martian.

  “A Roman in Rome—a real rarity. May I buy you a drink?”

  I shrugged. I had no desire to talk. I was used to minding my own business. I looked at the girls and my head emptied out in a pleasant way. This man was inserting himself between me and the best moment of my night. But I couldn’t refuse. He was Chinese, we were in a place run by Chinese and frequented by Chinese. Few Italians came to the Forbidden City, and those few were almost all northerners on vacation and often they were down-and-out.

  “May I ask why you’ve stayed in Rome?”

  I was about to say, No reason, but I stopped myself. The Chinese are busier than ants, they don’t trust idlers. “Business.”

  “Ah,” he said, and shook his head as if to consider the answer. After a pause he asked, “And what do you do?”

  Another good question. The world was full of people who were concerned with what I did. I said that I was a journalist, the first thing that crossed my mind.

  “Really? And who do you write for?”

  “A little here, a little there. Reports from the Roman front.” The truth is that I hadn’t the faintest idea how a newspaper works. I’ve never written a line in my life, not even a shopping list.

  “I suppose you do well.”

  “Not as well as you think. Let’s say I get by.”

  He smiled, touched my bottle of beer with his. Then he changed the subject, luckily. I couldn’t go on shooting off my mouth about something I knew nothing about.

  “Do you come here often?”

  I took a swallow and nodded my head yes.

  “You like this place, eh?”

  “Yes, it’s not bad.”

  He was silent for a while, looking at the girls rubbing their bodies against the steel poles.

  I was under the illusion that the conversation had ended there, when he said, “And why do you like it?”

  What the hell sort of question was that?

  “You know why I’m asking? I’m asking because I’ve seen that you come here every night. You sit down, you have a couple of beers, you stay till closing, but you never ask a girl to your table. And I wonder why.”

  “I don’t like to pay for sex.” It was true, but only in part. The real reason is that I couldn’t afford it. A night in itself didn’t cost much then. Thirty euros to the bar and fifty for the girl. Plus another twenty if you needed a room. But I knew how it worked. The girls were experts. Rarely was it a one-time deal, then over. A hundred today, a hundred tomorrow. Not counting gifts. Like nothing, at the end of the month you find yourself poorer by several thousand euros. Those girls could become worse than a drug—once they had hooked you, you couldn’t shake them off.

  I could tell you a bunch of stories about people who squandered fortunes at the Forbidden City. Maybe that was why I liked going there. To watch others slowly go to ruin made me feel wise, someone who knows what’s what. I’m not sure if I’m explaining it well, but this, too, was a reassuring dynamic.

  Life for me has always been a mystery; in fact, I’ve never done anything very well. At the Forbidden City, however, things seemed clear as daylight: Watch and don’t buy. If you understood this simple rule you could come back whenever you wanted. Every night, even.

  “I understand, but then why do you come?”

  Can you believe it? I said that it helped me put my ideas in order. Looking at the girls I was able to concentrate, focus better on the pieces that I had to send to the newspapers I worked for. At dawn I went home and typed out on the computer what I had mentally written at the Forbidden City.

  “You’re saying that you come here to work?”

  “In a certain sense,” I confirmed shamelessly.

  “Then my conversation has disturbed you.”

  “No problem. You have to disconnect the plug from time to time.”

  “Very true.” At that point Yichang introduced himself. He told me his name and I told him mine. We shook hands.

  We toasted our meeting with our beer bottles.

  “I must confess something to you.” He paused, then: “I’ve studied you closely over the past few months, you know.”

  I looked at him. Part of me foresaw that this man had in mind a precise plan.

  “Your detachment is admirable. I wonder how you manage not to let yourself get involved in the situation. I mean, many of these creatures would be capable of bringing a dead man to life. What’s the matter, don’t you like women?”

  “Oh no, I like them a lot. I told you, I come for other reasons.”

  “Yes. You will agree, however, that your behavior is not like everyone else’s.”

  I shrugged.

  “However that may be, it’s good for you. No offense, you Italians risk being stung by those creatures. You’re not used to a certain type of woman. You let yourself be fooled by their childlike behavior, by their tender, defenseless ways. But they’re not at all defenseless. They’re whores. I’ve seen many Italians like you come here sure of themselves, they choose a girl, and take it all as a game. They end up badly. Then there are those who fall in love and end up worse. They get it in their heads to take the whore away, they think that underneath they’re good girls. They couldn’t make a more serious mistake. There are no good girls here. Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian. All the same, all whores. And whores are like scorpions. You know the story of the scorpion, I imagine.”

  “Of course,” I said distractedly, trying to convey that all this talk was starting to annoy me.

  “With these girls it’s the same. You can’t expect them to change their nature. It’s something that you Italians tend to forget because of appearances. You know what some of them are capable of doing?”

  “Cutting off your dick,” I said brusquely. I couldn’t take it anymore. The little lesson on the traps of the Forbidden City was really too much.

  Yichang felt the blow, or at least so it seemed to me. “I see that you are informed.”

  What had he taken me for, one of those fools who came down from the north in search of exotic adventures? I didn’t speak Chinese, but certain stories reached my ears anyway. Stories of girls who castrated clients because they hadn’t paid, or maybe simply because they’d begun a relationship with another whore, as if a man can’t have all the girls he wants. When they established that they had to break it off with you for good, they took
you to bed without letting anything show—Asians are masters of hiding their rancor. Between one caress and another they gave you something to drink, and within a few minutes you were paralyzed.

  It seems incredible that concoctions like that exist, and yet it’s true. I don’t know where they get it, but these girls have a kind of drug that immobilizes you. You’re conscious but you can’t move a finger. And while you’re in this condition, they … well, you understand, they reserve you a front-row seat so that you can enjoy the show.

  I got up, intending to go home. The night was ruined.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  He detained me by resting a hand on my arm. “I hope I didn’t bother you with my conversation.”

  “No, I’m just a little tired. Besides, I have an article to finish for tomorrow.”

  “I understand.” Then, as if it were an afterthought, he asked me, “Do you live far away?”

  I thought he would continue to bore me with his talk as he walked me home, so I told him the truth. “No, just around the corner.”

  “You live in this neighborhood?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Nothing, it’s just that a journalist … This is a poor neighborhood, dirty, noisy. Not exactly elegant.”

  “It’s convenient,” I said.

  “Convenient for what?” He didn’t give me time to answer. “Sit down. I have a proposal to make that might interest you. What would you say to living on Via Veneto? You know the Hotel Excelsior?”

  Of course I knew it, a luxury hotel far beyond my reach.

  “It’s no longer a hotel, and I’m sure that a professional like you can afford to pay a hundred euros for a suite.”

  I was open-mouthed—it was less than half of what I paid for the one-room apartment, three hundred square feet, in Piazza Vittorio. Yichang explained that the Excelsior, after having been closed for several months, had been bought by a friend of his who had converted it into apartments. Almost all the apartments were already rented to very fashionable Chinese people. There was one, however, still free. Yichang’s friend was having difficulty finding a tenant because years ago a famous person had killed himself there. “One of those rock stars with long hair and torn jeans. I don’t remember his name.”