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.