Ilja Pfeijffer - La Superba

I’m exaggerating a little. I’m acting out my fantasies. Let’s call it an exercise in style. But the fact I’m exaggerating doesn’t mean that what I’m saying is untrue.

And don’t blame me for only being able to talk about one thing since I moved to Italy. That’s just like the joke about the student who is so sexually frustrated they send him to a shrink. He does a test. He draws a square and asks the student what he sees in it. “A square room full of naked women.” Then he draws a triangle. “A triangular room full of naked women.” Then a circle. “A round room full of naked women.” “I’m terribly sorry,” the shrink says, “but you really are horribly sexually frustrated.” “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black with all those filthy drawings of yours!” And that’s what it’s like. That’s exactly what it’s like. I’m doomed to live in a city where half-naked nymphs parade past me like doe in a wildlife park, and you blame me for being frustrated? That comparison with the joke isn’t entirely accurate, but it is like that.

But in a different way, you do have a point. When I rework these notes into a novel, I’ll need to pay attention to the balance — you’re much more aware of that than I am. On the one hand, I need a large dose of southern sensuality, partly to do justice to my fantasies, and partly to do justice to the clichéd image that readers in my home country have of Italy. Clichéd expectations deserve to be frustrated, but it would be a pity to go that way on this subject. On the other hand, I shouldn’t let this reach an orgiastic mess, though many of my readers would have no objections to that. It has to have a minimum of thematic relevancy, let me put it that way. But I’ve already thought of something for that. One of the main themes will have to be that the various characters, including the first-person narrator, disappear into the fantasy of a new, better life in various ways, like tourists getting lost in the labyrinth of the alleyways. By giving my own fantasies free rein, or if necessary exaggerating them, I’m underpinning this theme. It would be nice if something else could be added. If the self-conscious machismo of the first-person narrator in such passages could stand in contrast to something else, for example, the increasing effeminacy of another character, leading to his ruination. I haven’t met a character like that yet. Perhaps I’ll have to make him up.

3.

There was a TV crew on the piazza this evening.

Back home, I’ve had plenty to do with them, I don’t need to tell you that. There’s always the interviewer who has left everything to the last minute and thinks his lack of preparation gives him the right to insult you. He brings a cameraman with an enormous camera. His status comes from the size and weight of the camera. He sighs before he’s even over your doorstep. This is related to having had to lug his enormous camera up all those stairs. And he blames me personally for that. His gaze accuses me of having got it into my head to live so far up and having made my home only accessible by way of a medieval torture device called a stairwell, while, given my status, I should have known that camera teams would be constantly coming to visit. Cameramen are always fat too. It doesn’t help. And while they are still sighing on the stairs, they start to complain in advance because what they finally encounter on the top floor after their long journey up the stairs doesn’t meet their high artistic and professional standards in any way. The light is wrong. They’d seen that when they parked in front of this goddamn building you took it into your head to live in. And given the shitty light, the arrangement of your furniture is downright catastrophic. They start to drag around your sofa, your dining table, and your bookcases, still panting from the stairs, without even taking off their jackets. “Would you like some coffee perhaps?” you try. The interviewer does fancy a coffee but doesn’t dare say so because the cameraman has made it quite clear in both word and deed that he wants to get this over with as soon as possible because such horrific amateurism hinders his work, and, anyway, he should have picked a different career. The final interview is usually conducted in shy whispers under the evil eye of a person who had this pegged as hopeless in advance and whose every unfortunate hunch is confirmed on a daily basis. Why does no one ever listen to him? His bosses at the station, oh, the station. If only he were a freelancer, he’d be better off. There’d be none of this bullshit for a start.

An Italian camera crew has a different makeup. The cameraman is a shy working student who gets down on his hands and knees and thanks God for every small job he gets; he’s had to buy his own equipment, which he has scraped together over the years with the help of a friend who gave him discounts on outdated models and a competitor who wanted rid of all of his stuff for too much money because he could afford better now. The Italian cameraman is an invisible slave who would descend, panting, into the deepest underground vaults to do his utter best to film something in the impenetrable darkness, all while muttering his humble apologies.

The team is completed by at least three female editors. They walk around with factsheets and storyboards. It’s what gives them their importance and the fact that no one sticks to them afterward doesn’t matter. But the true star of the team is the interviewer. She is a priori Famous with a capital F. Even when no one knows her, she’s Famous. Because she acts that way. When, after a lot of fuss, everyone’s finally ready for the interview, she’s disappeared without a trace. She’s in the bathroom putting on lipstick and waxing her bikini line. She’s had the broadcasting company pay for her plastic Barbie legs and the surgically pointed breasts under her lacy blouse. When she interviews someone, the interviewee is rarely in the shot. All the cameramen in the country know the rules. And although the questions she asks may sometimes seem naive, everyone knows that the point of the questions is her divine smile when she poses them.

The camera team that unexpectedly made its appearance on the Piazza delle Erbe this evening was only from local TV. You could tell from the stickers. But they ticked all the boxes. The bright red interviewer who was almost as tall as I and, at the most, a quarter of my weight, asked random people on random terraces of random bars questions about their experiences of this or that. I sat quietly writing at my table on Caffè Letterario’s terrace; I observed it all from a distance and I have to say, my good friend, that I was amazed they didn’t ask me anything. Not disappointed but amazed. That was alright by me, I didn’t need them to pay attention to me, but let’s face it: a camera crew chancing upon me in the wild and then not immediately pouncing on me, is a bit… let’s say, strange. It might sound somewhat arrogant, but that’s not how I mean it. I know you understand what I’m trying to say.

And you’re right, of course. This is exactly the reason I decided to leave my home country and domicile myself in the labyrinth in all anonymity. Rather than forcing myself to conform to an invented image that media pressure and my celebrity kept forcing upon me in a caricatured way, here in Genoa I’ve re-earned the freedom to be and become who I am. In my home country, I’m Ilja who knows about the composition of a camera crew; here in the labyrinth, I’m Leonardo, who has taken leave to get lost in his imagination without that immediately having to be coupled with a witty justification in one of the national talk shows. That’s the way I wanted it, you’re completely right. But then actually being passed over by a camera crew from local television, however desirable that might be, is still an unsettling experience.