Ilja Pfeijffer - La Superba

Monia came into the cubicle with me. This was quite normal, apparently. The shop assistant didn’t bat an eyelid or blush. “Cubicle” is actually quite a modest description. It was a spacious changing room with tasteful, dark red carpet and a sofa upholstered in the same colored velvet. There was a large, antique mirror with a gilt frame. Monia sat down on the sofa and looked at me. It was a rather strange moment. Now I was supposed to get undressed in front of her. OK, whatever, I’d just have to do it. I made a game of it, acting as though I was a woman doing a striptease. I accompanied it with a sensual dance. I teased her with my tits and my ass in the big mirror. She smiled. And then I stood there before her in my underpants with a nice big “ta-da.”

She stood up and handed me the jacket. Then she changed her mind. She put the jacket back on the hanger and the hanger on a hook. She copied my dance and slowly unbuttoned her blouse. It wasn’t quite what I’d intended. “Monia,” I said, “your life lesson should be that everything will turn out alright as long as you don’t do what I do.” She had to laugh. She clicked open her bra behind her back.

“Do you need to try on something too?”

“Look at me.”

Of course I’d already seen her tits. But at the time it was all late and dark and drunken. Now I saw them in real life, in daylight in a changing room on Via XX Settembre. They were scandalous. Enormous tits like that are immoral. Or at the least, you’d have to pay a fortune in tax for them. And apart from that, I didn’t think it was such a good idea to be studying them in the changing room of a chic menswear store.

“Wait,” she said. “Don’t move.” She wasn’t concerned with her tits but with her bra. She very slowly and attentively put it on me.

“Now you’re a proper pretty girl at last. Dance for me.” As she said this, she took my cock out of my underpants. “Look at yourself in the mirror,” she said. “You’re the most beautiful girl in Genoa. I’d like to comb your hair.” She worked my penis. “You could be as pretty as a doll. Look in the mirror. I want you to come for me. It’s alright, I have a tab here. Or am I not doing it right? Let me bite your nipples. Let me play with your stiff, hard cunt. I know you get a lot more turned on by young girls with little titties than by me. Admit it. Admit that you’re thinking of someone else right now. A girl like that waitress who used to work at the Bar of Mirrors. Say it. Tell the truth. Look at yourself in the mirror. You’re wearing my bra, you slut. It’s much too big for your little titties. Look at yourself. Your titties are as small as hers. You look like her. You are her. Watch me fingering her for you until she comes.” And as she came for me, I came at the same time as she in the mirror.

Monia licked her fingers. All of a sudden she was all decent and dressed again. She stood there fiddling with my lapel. I was very hot. She grunted in approval. “We’ll make a man of you, Leonardo, a real Italian man. Just leave that to me.”

I was still confused when I got to the register. The August heat was making me feel dizzy. “Leonardo’s a poet,” Monia said. “And he’s a friend of mine. Give him a good price.” Ten percent was taken off and the amount rounded down. I had to pay twelve hundred euros. But the amount wouldn’t really sink in until an hour later. Monia was walking haughtily out of the shop ahead of me. I gave the shop assistant a kind of apologetic nod.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” he said quietly.

16.

What the hell? I was furious the next day. I’d been hoodwinked into buying a suit for twelve hundred euros, about as much as your money order, while the whole idea was that her credit card was supposed to be on the ebony counter, not mine. Investment, you say. Let’s fucking hope so.

“But are you sure…” Walter asked.

“Yes.”

“I mean, do you know how much money that is? She’s investing that in us then, in our project.”

“I think I was the one paying, Walter.”

“But you have to learn to think like the Genoese. She let you spend that much which means she owes us now. More important than that — it’s a sign that she trusts us and that she’ll certainly want to invest more in us in the future.”

“With my credit card?”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point, then?”

“It’s about the network. Everything in this city revolves around knowing the right people. That’s how we need to think, Ilja. If we still want to get our theater off the ground this summer, we have to think like that. And you know it.”

I nodded, although I didn’t agree with him. I nodded because I had made a decision. I was going to get my revenge. I was going to take revenge on Monia. I was going to do everything I could to extort from her the fortune we needed to take over the theater. I nodded grimly.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Alessandro De Santis.”

“Is he that actor?”

“No. He was on the Andrea Doria . He boarded the 24th of May, 1894, and on June 25th, he arrived at Ellis Island, the newly opened immigration center for New York. He’d contracted whooping cough on board, but he still managed to be admitted, mainly because during the journey he’d learned a booklet by heart containing the best answers to give to the authorities in English. He’d never seen any authorities before and never heard any English. He was a farmer’s son, born in a village in Piemonte. What did he know? He knew nothing.”

“What’s this got to do with Monia?”

“I’ll come to that. Listen. Just imagine it. Alessandro arrives in New York. He had no other possessions than the things his family could do without — a woolen blanket, a chicken, which he ate during the crossing, a photo of his mother, and a letter with the address of a distant cousin who’d emigrated years earlier.”

“What was she called?”

“That doesn’t matter. Elena. She was called Elena.”

“And then?”

“Alessandro couldn’t find any work, even though they’d promised him that he’d automatically get rich if he managed to reach La Merica and be admitted. But he didn’t look for his distant cousin. He didn’t want any help. He was an Italian. He had his dignity. He finally got a job as a day laborer on the railways. He and a large group of other Italians were put to work building a new track outside the city. It was incredibly demanding and dangerous work, paid a pittance, and the foremen didn’t like foreigners. They were treated like scum. They were sworn at, spat on, and hit. One day a railway sleeper fell on his foot. He could no longer walk. He was fired.

“After that he had various little jobs around the city as a newspaper seller, garbage man, road worker, and warehouse assistant. None of it added up to much. He could barely survive. The worst thing was that he was ashamed. His mother back in Italy was under the impression that her son was a rich, successful man by now in the Promised Land, where everyone got rich and successful without even trying. He sent the small amounts of money he could do without to her so as not to spoil the fairy tale. But he never wrote to her. He couldn’t bring himself to tell the truth and write that sometimes he had to resort to stealing to stay alive, but neither could he bring himself to lie to her.”

“Did you make this all up?”

“No. Listen.”

“I’m convinced you made this all up.”

“I went to the archives, Walter.”

“Carry on.”

“Years went by in this way. And one day the news reached Alessandro that his mother was dying. He had to go back to Italy. He wanted to go back. He wanted nothing more than to be with her. He hoped he’d be in time. But he didn’t want to disappoint his mother on her deathbed. He wanted her to die with the dream that her son had become a rich, successful man in New York.