“You mean Kurt Cobain?”
Yichang snapped his fingers. “That’s right. You know, we Chinese are a superstitious people. Many of us believe in ghosts and don’t like to sleep in a room where someone took a gun and blew his brains out.”
I avoided explaining to him that things hadn’t gone exactly like that. It was more convenient that he and his Chinese friends continue to believe that Cobain had killed himself in the Hotel Excelsior.
“So do you think it might interest you?”
It might, yes. The prospect of moving to Via Veneto, of living in the city where I was born like a Russian prince in exile, attracted me quite a lot. And for only a hundred euros a month!
Yichang said he would introduce me to the manager of the Excelsior as soon as possible, maybe the following night. I didn’t know how to thank him. I wanted to repay him in some way, but Yichang waved his hands and shook his head, he wouldn’t even speak of it. He ordered another beer, made some comments about a girl, then wrinkled his forehead as if he had suddenly remembered something.
“There might be one thing,” he said. “Would you like to play a little card game?”
“Cards?”
“Yes. You know how to play poker?”
Obviously I knew the rules of poker, but I wasn’t at all the typical player. To tell the truth, cards had always bored me. But Yichang insisted, and when I tried to demonstrate my indifference to games of chance, he said, “What a lot of big words. I’m just proposing a little game among friends to pass the time. Nominal bets, just small change, enough to add some excitement. Come on, you can’t say no.”
Little game, big words. His way of speaking in diminutives and augmentatives made me uneasy. But he was right, I couldn’t refuse. Not if I really wanted to move to Via Veneto.
I returned home at 9 in the morning. I lay on the bed and, staring at the blades of the fan rotating above me, I thought over the bizarre events of the night. Or rather, the events that I should have found bizarre but that at the moment appeared to me only manna fallen from heaven.
First of all, it should have seemed bizarre that a Chinese guy was so expansive with a stranger, and, furthermore, a Westerner. Then there was Yichang’s perfect Italian and the business of the suite at the Hotel Excelsior. Even a child would have been suspicious. But as I said, at that time I had a tendency not to think too much. In a single stroke, while drinking beer and looking at whores, I had found a new place to live and won two hundred and fifty euros: I confined myself to thinking this.
Yes, because between one thing and another the little game had gone on for hours and, in spite of the fact that the bets were limited, I had left the Forbidden City with a tidy sum in my pocket. I may not have been a great player, but Yichang showed himself to be even worse. Above all he was obstinate. In the sense that he seemed purposely to do his utmost to lose. And this was the thing that should have made me suspicious. But I was intoxicated by the ease with which I was winning money.
Yichang kept his word. That night we went together to the Excelsior and he introduced me to Signor Ho. There was no problem. After a few preliminaries and a handshake, the suite was officially mine. For a deposit I left the two hundred euros that I had won at cards. With a warm smile, Yichang said that I couldn’t refuse him the right to recoup.
I couldn’t, as a matter of fact. We decided to meet at the Forbidden City at 3 in the morning. I won that night, too, but a little less, because Yichang succeeded in taking a few hands himself. I discovered that losing, rather than worrying me, increased my desire to keep playing. For reasons that in time I understood but which were then completely obscure to me, winning a hand after having lost one made me feel stronger. So that I even considered losing some on purpose, a little out of vanity and a little out of pure enjoyment. In spite of the money I won, however, cards still essentially bored me. I never changed my ideas on the subject. For me, there’s nothing more tedious or foolish than poker. Maybe that’s why I remained a terrible player.
You understood perfectly, I said terrible. Little by little, I don’t even know how, I began to lose. And the more I lost the more I raised the stakes and the more I wanted to keep playing. Every night I went to the Forbidden City, I sat at a secluded table, and I played. I played and lost. From time to time, raising my head from the cards, I’d find my eyes meeting those of a girl who was dancing, and for an instant I’d feel nostalgia for the time when drinking a beer and looking at whores had been the crowning moment of my daily routine.
But it was really just an instant. In less than a second I was plunged back into the idiotic questions that assail the mind of a cardplayer. Pass, bluff, stand. All bullshit, and the moral of this bullshit was that I lost and Yichang won.
Yichang and his friends. Because a couple of other players always joined us, and none spoke a word of Italian. They won, too, but less than Yichang.
In the space of two months I accumulated debts of nearly two hundred thousand euros. A sum I had never seen in my life. Yichang seemed to take it lightly. We played with chips and when, at dawn, the accounts were settled, Yichang wrote everything down in a notebook, but he never asked me for a cent. In fact, he told his friends that he would be my guarantor. He said that there was no problem. That I was an established professional who wrote for the papers. When he said that, I trembled inside.
Then came the crash, the devaluation, or I don’t know what. As I said, I’ve never understood anything about the economy. The fact is that prices began to rise, including the rent on the suite at the Excelsior. So my debts spread like an oil spill, and with that we finally come to the time when I had the strange dream of the dead girl in the bed.
Later that night, Yichang asked me if by any chance I could lend him a thousand euros. I had gotten to know these people a little and I am well aware that when a Chinese person circles around a problem, it means that he’s presenting the bill. He had said “lend” but in effect he meant pay. And not only a thousand euros but also the rest of my debt, or at least a considerable part of it. I had no idea where to go to get fifty, let alone a thousand and the rest. I told him that he must excuse me but I was a bit short.
“A bit short in what sense?” He couldn’t understand how a journalist like me didn’t have enough to lend a friend a thousand euros.
I had to tell him the truth. I would have been better off making up some more nonsense, but I saw no way out. And then I’d had it up to my ears. The situation was tearing me to pieces. I wanted to go back to my old life and stop playing, stop losing, stop fooling a friend. Because Yichang had behaved like a true friend, he had shown that he trusted me. And how had I rewarded him?
I would have liked to see him outside of the poker game. Have a few beers and talk about this and that. Yichang was in fact an amiable companion, a cultivated person. While we played, he often recounted interesting details about the history of Rome. He was a real expert. He had read Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire five times. Before meeting Yichang I didn’t even know the names of the seven hills, but thanks to him I learned a lot of things. For example, that the greatness of Rome consisted above all in its eternal decadence.