I love eating on the street. Given the right conditions-those nighttime walks, for one-it brings back memories of being a child. Intact crystal-clear memories with no regret attached to them. Sometimes I feel a kind of euphoria, as if time had short-circuited and I had become the boy I once was, with an abundance of first experiences still ahead of me. It’s an illusion, but it’s not bad, as illusions go.
I skirted the endless fencing around the harbor and stayed on Viale Vittorio Veneto, alongside the bicycle path. After all that rain, the city looked as if it had been varnished with a shiny black lacquer. No bicycles, no pedestrians, not many cars. It was a scene out of Blade Runner, and this feeling only grew stronger when I turned onto the empty blue-black streets that sprawl in all directions behind the Fiera del Levante, a giant industrial complex that has been abandoned for decades, and the former public slaughterhouse, which has been converted into a national library. Its courtyards look like something out of a Giorgio de Chirico painting. There are no cafes, restaurants, or stores in that part of town. Only machine shops, depots, empty warehouses, garages, dead smokestacks, the courtyards of factories that have been shut down for decades, full of weeds, stray dogs, owls, and furtive urban foxes.
The sense of unease that emanates from those places feels good to me, oddly enough. It seems to drain my own personal unease, drawing it into its own dark vortex. It’s as if the vague fear of an external danger frees me from my fear of internal danger, which is darker and harder to control. After I take these walks in deserted, spectral places, I sleep like a baby, and I usually wake up in a good mood, too.
I was in the middle of the no-man’s land along the boundary between the Liberta neighborhood and the San Girolamo neighborhood when, down a side street, I saw a blue-and-red sign that looked like a neon sign from the 1950s glowing in the damp, slightly grimy dark.
It was a bar, and it seemed to have been dropped among the industrial warehouses, the machine shops, and the darkness from a faraway place and a time long ago.
The sign read CHELSEA HOTEL NO. 2, the title of one of my favorite songs. A dim green light came from inside, through thick, green ground-glass windows.
I walked in and took a look around. There was a nice smell in the air: food, cleanliness, and spices. It smelled warm, dry, and comfortable, the way some houses do.
The club was furnished in an American mid-century modern style that matched the neon sign; the furniture seemed to be arranged quite casually. But as I looked around, I realized that there was nothing random about the place. Someone who knew what he-or she-was doing and who enjoyed that kind of work had spent a lot of time on it. The walls were covered with film posters. Some of the older posters looked original-and expensive.
The music was at an acceptable volume-I hate loud music, with a few rare exceptions-and there were a lot of people, considering the late hour. Something else was in the air, something I managed to put my finger on only as I was sitting down at the bar, perched on a high wood-and-leather stool.
The Chelsea Hotel No. 2 was a gay bar. As that epiphany hit me, I remembered someone explaining to me years before that Chelsea was New York’s most crowded and effervescent gay neighborhood. And so-I said to myself in a mental whisper-the name of this club, in which I was sitting, so deliberately American, was neither random nor (solely) born of a love for Leonard Cohen’s music.
At one table, two young women were holding hands, talking intently, and occasionally kissing. They reminded me of the two Giovannas, friends of Margherita’s, martial arts enthusiasts and sky divers. In fact, for a couple of seconds, I wondered if it was them, but then it dawned on me that the two Giovannas were probably not the only two lesbians in the whole city.
The other tables were occupied mostly, in fact almost exclusively, by men.
Suddenly, I felt as if I had been tossed into the famous scene in the movie Police Academy in which the two stupid cadets wind up in a gay leather bar and find themselves slow dancing with mustachioed, muscle-bound men wearing Nazi trooper hats and black leather. I wondered how many of them I’d be able to knock down before I was outnumbered and I succumbed to the inevitable.
Okay, I’m exaggerating. The situation was totally normal. The music wasn’t by the Village People (while I was thinking those things, “Dance Me to the End of Love” was playing, quietly and respectably, in the background), and nobody was wearing black leather or anything remotely S amp;M looking.
That said, however, my being here might prove to be awkward. I could imagine running into someone I knew-perhaps a fellow lawyer, or a magistrate-and wondered how I’d explain that I’d ended up here due to my habit of taking long walks late at night in the more run-down sections of the city.
I tried to remember all the gay lawyers and judges I knew. I came up with five, and noted to my relief that none of them were in the club.
Then, immediately after this mental screening process, I decided I must be losing my mind. Sure, this was a slightly unusual situation, but it still wasn’t a normal reason for me to look around with a worried and vaguely furtive expression, as if the sign outside read Stonewall Lambda Gay and Lesbian Activist Headquarters, or something like that.
While I was planning a nonchalant exit-from that place and from my own tortured thoughts-a voice drowned out the notes of Leonard Cohen and abolished the possibility that my visit to the Chelsea Hotel No. 2 might pass unobserved.
“Counselor Guerrieri!” I turned to my right, blushing and wondering how I could explain my presence in the club to the person behind that voice, whoever it might be.
Nadia. Nadia, but I couldn’t remember her last name.
She’d been my client, four or five years earlier.
She was a former model, a former porn actress, and a former high-end escort, and she had been arrested for organizing and running a business providing very beautiful and very expensive escorts all over the city. I had succeeded in getting her acquitted in an unexpected way-on what those outside the profession might call a technicality. I discovered a vice of form, an irregularity in the wiretapping. The prosecution’s case crumbled like a cracker.
I have a very clear image of Nadia during the trial. She wore a charcoal-gray suit, a white blouse, very discreet makeup. She looked like anything but a prostitute. The fact that she didn’t fit any of the cliches of her profession had become increasingly clear to me every time I saw her-first in jail, immediately after her arrest, later at my office, and, for the last time, in the courtroom.
That evening, however, she was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a tight white t-shirt. She seemed-I’m not sure how this was possible-both older and younger and, despite her casual dress, she was just as elegant as the last time I’d seen her. I tried to remember if I’d noticed how pretty she was when she was my client.
“Hey there,” I said, and then I realized how flip it sounded. “I mean, hello, good evening. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude, but, well, I’m surprised to see you.”
“And I’m surprised to see you here. Welcome to my club.”
I straightened up and tried to speak properly. “Your club? This is your place of business?”
“And you didn’t offend me at all. I like to think we know each other well.”
“Oh, of course. We needn’t stand on ceremony.”
“What are you doing in this part of town?” She said it with a smile and, I seemed to detect, a hint of amused mischief. The real question, tacit but not all that tacit: So you’re gay? Now I understand why you behaved so properly when I was your client and didn’t try to take advantage of the situation.
No. I’m. Not. Gay. I just happened to walk into the place, because I like to take long walks late at night through the far-flung sections of the city, because I like to walk where there aren’t any crowds. No, I didn’t come here to see who I could pick up, and yes, yes, I realize that it might seem hard to believe, but I assure you that I was just taking an aimless walk. I saw the light in the dark street, and I stepped inside, but I did not know that this was a, well, I didn’t know what kind of club it was, not that I’m prejudiced in any way. Let me make this clear: I’ve always been liberal. I’m open-minded, and I have lots of friends who are homosexuals.