Ilja Pfeijffer - La Superba

Genoa’s old nickname is La Superba. You can interpret the name in two different ways and you understand this best when you approach the city from the south, across the sea. All of a sudden there she is: a beautiful piece of scenery with towering palazzi in a mountain basin. But while you are enjoying it, you realize that the pomp and glory form an impenetrable wall. She is beautiful and heartless. She’s a whore who beckons but whom you can never make your own. She is alluring and reckless. She seduces and destroys. Like the rats lured into traps with poison that tastes like honey. In that sense, Genoa, La Superba symbolizes Europe as a whole. Behind her impenetrable walls of border checks, asylum procedures, investigators, and forced expulsions, she lies there showing off her promise of new Mercedes and BMWs. Anyone managing to force their way in takes this as reason enough to believe they’ve achieved their dream. They’re in paradise. The rest will follow as a matter of course. And then they’ll wither away in a leaky two-room apartment with eleven of their countrymen and be exterminated like a rat.

That’s what it should be about. And about the past. Seven score and ten years ago, millions of destitute, desperate Italians boarded ships in the ports of this very city, dreaming of a better life and guaranteed wealth in La Merica, as they called their wonderland on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. In the place from which millions once set sail, now millions are chased away like rats because they are doing exactly what their hosts did fifty and one hundred years previously: hope. That’s what it should be about, for fuck’s sake, and not about the trivialities I contemplated telling you.

Alright. Of course it also has to be about her, too. You’re much too good a reader not to have picked that up from the first line I wrote to you. Of course it has to be about the most beautiful girl in Genoa, who, as befitting the most beautiful girl, works among mirrors. She is a fairy tale. I’m not sure which role I’m going to invent for her in my final work of art. It depends of course on future developments. If there are any future developments, which, to be honest, I seriously doubt. She was La Superba. And she was the fantasy in which I have gotten more and more lost. This was another good reason for taking a break for a few days and devoting myself to a juicy reality. I’ll tell you about it, my friend. But I’m presuming that you understand that I’m trusting you to keep to yourself what I’m about to tell you.

37.

The story actually began a few years ago. I was at one of those many compulsory literary parties in my homeland, which I always frequented with great displays of bravado and bluster and which I miss like a hole in the head. As I was standing there holding forth on an interesting topic among a group of jealous admirers and jealous rivals, a woman came up to me and introduced herself as my German translator. She was blonde and statuesque, slightly plump, but all in all pretty impressive. She’d just been asked to translate a selection of my poetry. I’d heard about it. Her name was Inge. Maybe I’ve mentioned her to you before.

After that first meeting we saw each other with some regularity to discuss her progress. Generally, I like to have as little contact with my translators as possible, but in her case it was a pleasure. I noticed — or perhaps just fantasized it — that she got dressed up especially for our meetings. Or in any case, she could have chosen to show off a less deeply-cut top at a work meeting with one of her authors. You could put it another way. In complete concordance with my poetics, she accentuated her excesses. On my part, I didn’t have to make any effort at all. I’d already written all my poems. I didn’t even have to spray my armpits to give her the idea that she had the right to flirt with me.

Last week she sent me an e-mail saying she’d like to talk to me because her translation was as good as finished. I replied by e-mail that it would be a great pleasure and that I was keen to see it, but that I was living in Genoa at present. She wrote back saying that, in that case, she’d come to Genoa. I said: OK. And then she came. She’d booked a flight to Milan — Malpensa and reserved a place on an intercity. She texted me a specific time of arrival.

She was married…is still married to an American agent who has been frequenting parties in my homeland with great displays of bravado and bluster since time immemorial and still hasn’t been able to muster the decency to lose his all-American barbecue accent. He’s a bastard. They have three small children. For form’s sake, I’d taken an option in her name on a grimy hotel room in the Doria on Vico dei Garibaldi, the worst hotel in the neighborhood, which she’d certainly want to swap for another after the first night and then it would be a Saturday and all the hotels in the city would be fully booked. But the ruse was completely unnecessary. I waited for her at Palazzo Principe station at her specific time of arrival and she came running up to me in all her flamboyant, un-Italian blondeness. She embraced me like she never would have done in the fatherland, kissed me on the lips, and asked, “Is it a long way to your place?”

And I didn’t have to make up the guest bed that night. She joined me in bed like a sumptuously shaped cloud. She smelled of the north, not of Genoa. I wanted her to undress, but she said I had to dance for her. She watched me as I stroked my own body tauntingly slowly. I looked in the mirror to see the way she was watching me as I watched myself like a pole dancer. Then she said she wanted to see the most beautiful girl in Genoa. Then she said we should undress her together. She began to kiss her. I kissed her while she enjoyed my fantasy. We played with the girl in the mirrors for hours on end, the two of us, and we were given ourselves in return, as shining and clear as our own reflections.

It’s just struck me that it sounds a bit odd when I tell it to you like that. And yet it was exactly as I said. I had soft, sweet lesbian sex with Inge, about whom I’d long fantasized, and with my own fantasy. And then it got even crazier.

38.

The next day it was raining. We went to have coffee in the Bar of Mirrors. The girl was there, but she didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with us. She didn’t greet us, let the other waitresses serve us, and didn’t look at us. When the rain had stopped, I paid her, leaving a big tip. She didn’t even thank me. When we walked out, I saw her watching us in the mirrors. She quickly turned her face away when she saw in the mirrors that I was watching her in the mirrors. But I’d seen it in the mirrors. She was crying.

I took Inge on a long walk through the labyrinth. We walked to Porto Antico and back up via the dirty streets near San Cosimo and Santa Maria in Castello, over the cobblestones I love so much, through the gates and arches so fond to me, past the names which sing so in my ears, downwards along Vico Amandorla to Campo Pisano. The sun broke through. But I had a strange, dark feeling in my stomach. She was crying. I was sure of it. I’d seen it.

Every time I thought about it, I felt a nest of baby rats gnawing at my innards, at my masculinity, and my convictions. But Inge was walking along very obviously enjoying herself. Her blonde hair shone like Saint Elmo’s fire in the night. It was all strolling hand in hand for her. It was all getting lost in a fairy tale to her. It was, for her, like it was for me the first time I got lost. And when we passed the high bridge under Ravasco, which is the bridge to Carignano, and caught sight of the colossal spaceships stranded in the no-man’s-land of the Giardini di Plastica, she said, “It looks like some kind of virtual world, like Second Life. It’s amazing.” She took a picture of me with her mobile phone.