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.