“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.”