La Superba Read online

  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.

  5.

  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 bik
ini-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.

  6.

  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.