Ilja Pfeijffer - La Superba

Don took a big sip of his gin and tonic. “Cheers, big ears.” He fell into a coughing fit. When he’d finished coughing, he said, “I can still do it. I’m one of the great coughers of my generation. Didn’t Oscar Wilde have a clever quip about that? Anyway, it was a close call.”

A group of teenagers walked by. They found it important to greet Don, one by one. To ask his opinion about Sampdoria, which had been on a losing streak for weeks. He stood up and hugged them all, while getting all their names wrong, which he made up for by singing the Sampdoria club song. That was the way it always went.

“What was a close call?”

“Almost getting kicked out in my first year.”

“Tell me.”

“No, Ilja. I’ll tell you tomorrow. Otherwise you’ll put it all in the same chapter.”

“Since when have you worried about my novel’s structure? You’re a character, try to remember that!”

“And what a character! Ha-ha! Let’s drink to that. But I do want a bit of space for my story. I can’t write it all down myself anymore. So I’m using you for that. And make sure you don’t make stuff up. I’m much better at that than you. Ha-ha! We all live in a yellow submarine.”

9.

When I bumped into Don the next day on the Piazza delle Erbe he looked radiant. He was glowing. I was almost worried. “Don, what happened?” He removed a newspaper from his inside pocket with a triumphant gesture. It was the Sampdoria club paper. “Page eight,” he said. There he was. A full-page photograph. With the caption: Don, one of Sampdoria’s biggest supporters . I congratulated him on this corroboration of his fame. He dismissed the compliment, beaming. “Oh, well, Ilja. I’ve been in this city for so long. I know them all. Vialli and the rest. I’ve given them all English lessons. Gullit, too. But to be honest I thought he was an arrogant bastard. I don’t go to the stadium these days. I’m too old. And I suffer from dizzy spells. But I used to go to every home match. The last time was on my birthday. Four or five years ago, or maybe even six. And they knew. At a certain point the entire stadium was singing, ‘Happy Birthday to Don.’ It was moving. The referee held a two-minute silence. All the players came to the gradinata sud where I always sat and applauded me. It was the nicest birthday present I ever had.

“All my friends are Doriani . You know, there are three sounds I cannot bear: breaking glass, the sound of shutters going down in the bars at closing time, and ‘ Forza Genoa. ’ You are a Genoano, I know. Even though you seem like an intelligent man. But there are other things about you I don’t understand, either. For example, why you carry on drinking those disgusting cocktails instead of becoming a member of the Gordon’s Club, whose chairman, secretary, and treasurer you have before you.

“I was there at Wembley, too, when Sampdoria played in the Champions League final against Barcelona. Simon arranged it, a friend of mine who was working at the aquarium as a dolphin trainer at the time. He called me a few days before the match. ‘I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I’ve found cheap flights. The bad news is that we’re flying via Amsterdam with a four-hour transfer.’ Yippee! We went to a coffee shop and got as high as a kite. After the match, they gently broke the news to me that Sampdoria had lost. The entire match had passed me by.

“And on the return journey, too — the same coffee shop. Or another, I wouldn’t be able to say. They all look terribly similar, don’t you think? When it was time to go to Schiphol to catch our flight back to Genoa, we still had a big chunk of hashish left. ‘Don’t take it with you, Simon. Think about it. Give it to those two boys at that table.’ ‘You’re right, Don, that would be a better idea. But I’ve just flushed it down the loo.’

“At Genoa airport, the sniffer dogs lunged at us. They jumped all over Simon. ‘Fuck, Simon,’ I said, ‘you didn’t…?’ But they couldn’t find anything. ‘It’s on our clothes,’ we said. ‘We’ve spent the entire afternoon in a coffee shop in Amsterdam. The smoke’s on our clothes. That’s what the dogs can smell.’ And they let us go because they couldn’t find anything.

“In the taxi from the airport to Piazza delle Erbe, Simon said, ‘Do you fancy a joint, Don?’ He had shoved the hash up his arse. In a condom. He’d gone to the loo in the coffee shop in Amsterdam to get a condom out of the machine and put the hash up his arse. Can you imagine? And that’s without even mentioning whether I still felt like smoking it once I knew where it had been for the entire flight.

“And this brings me to something completely different. Do you remember accusing me of meddling with the structure of your novel last night? You might have forgotten it, you drunkard, but I haven’t. Because what do I still have to tell you? Well? Exactly. Why I almost got sent down from Cambridge in my first year. And that didn’t have anything to do with hashish. But everything to do with a condom.

“Back in those days we still had servants in college. Kind of butlers for the students who made their beds in the mornings. We called them ‘bedders.’ One of the bedders found a used condom in my bed, something which didn’t surprise me at all, by the way. I was summoned by the dean. He pulled a face and got it out of an envelope with the tip of a pencil. He dangled it in front of my nose. ‘Is this yours, Perrygrove Sinclair?’ I put on my glasses to get a better look. I studied the condom carefully. And do you know what I said? The dean laughed so much he had to let me off. You should be able to guess. I just said it. If I’m interfering with the structure of your novel, I’m doing a good job.”

He took a formidable sip of gin and tonic and gave me a triumphant look.

“They all look terribly similar, don’t you think?”

10.

Don could be irresistible at times. He had a talent for making himself lovable and used this to gain personal favors, which he then considered his right and a legal basis for further favors. Catering staff were his main victims. He used his charm to take advantage of them. What began as an extra ice cube would imperceptibly morph over the space of a few weeks into his own glass of maximum volume, a personal chair, permission to stay on after closing time, and liters of free gin. And whenever a bar owner was brave enough to move Don’s process of appropriating the bar back a step, he’d explode. When a self-created privilege was taken away from him, he could be unusually unpleasant. Like a spoiled child not getting its own way.

And he lost control completely when his drink supply was stopped; for example, when the barman concluded, after he’d fallen over three times, that he’d had enough. Even if he didn’t have any money left to pay for his next gin and tonic, he’d consider it a universal human right to be allowed to drink one more, and anyone disagreeing was a fascist or much worse.

A lack of attention was also catastrophic. He could have an angry outburst when a group had collected at his table and didn’t consider him the cornerstone of the company — for example when no English was spoken or when English was being spoken, but he was being ignored because he was too drunk to say anything sensible. During an angry moment, he’d wake up out of his stupor and call them every name under the sun.

But worst of all was when he felt his pride had been injured. He disgraced himself on a daily basis, but when he got the impression that someone else was trying to do that, the piazza was too small for the both of them. He cracked the jokes, including the jokes about himself, and anyone getting it into his head to make him the butt of one became an arch enemy, at least for as long as he remembered, and that was never very long, and in any case never longer than until the next morning.