Ilja Pfeijffer - La Superba

“I don’t need anything today, Djiby.” I shook his hand. I’d have been better off not doing so because it gave him permission to sit down at my table.

“You have to help me, Ilja.” There we had it already. I tried to put on my strict but fair face.

“I’m sorry, Djiby. These are difficult times for everyone. I mean…”

“I mean…Ilja, listen. Do you know what happened?”

“It’s terrible, Djiby, but I really can’t help you.”

“There were four of them. It was about one in the morning. Maybe a bit later. I was on my way home. I was walking along just near here, there, on Salita del Prione. They cut me off. A car with bright headlights. Slamming doors. They forced me to the ground.”

“ Carabinieri ?”

“Four Italians. Not in uniform. They said they were from the police. One of them showed me his ID. But I didn’t see anything, it all happened so fast. They asked for my papers. They took them from me. After that, they searched my pockets. They stole everything. Even the six hundred euros I had on me.”

“Six hundred euros? How did you get hold of six hundred euros?”

“And the four of them kicked me all over. In my belly, in my face, in my…I had to go to hospital, Ilja. I was lucky it wasn’t a lot worse.”

“You were attacked on the street and beaten and robbed by Italian policemen?”

“You don’t get it, Ilja. They pretend to be police. They show you a fake ID and then they rob you and beat you up. And sometimes they don’t even do that. This happens in Genoa if you have a black face.”

“Did you report it?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

Djiby sighed. He stared into the distance, right through the centuries-old houses, across the sea to a continent where he’d never been free, either, but where the authorities that had mistreated him had been just as black as he, although that didn’t necessarily mean it was any better. If you’re beaten up because the color of your skin is different, at least there’s some kind of reason. But what does it matter? These are my thoughts, not his. I’d have looked right through the houses in a northerly direction, in any case, just as I’d once daydreamed myself away from my home country with its dark gathering clouds when I still skulked around there, as he’d once daydreamed himself away from Africa to the north where everyone got rich without trying. It’s all the same romanticism. Djiby probably wasn’t gazing at a meaningful horizon like me, but just taking a brief pause to reflect on the best way to get money out of me with his wretched story.

“They asked for my papers. I’ll have to tell it a different way. I was sent from one police station to the next. When I got to the police head office and was finally able to tell my story, they asked me whether I knew the four men. Of course not. But did I want to report it anyway? Of course I did. They asked for my ID to do so. But my papers had been stolen, that’s exactly what I’d just explained. They gave me a look of reproof. And do you know what they said then?”

“What?”

“If you don’t have any papers, you’re an illegal. Being an illegal is a crime in Italy. If you disappear now, we can pretend we never saw you. Otherwise we’ll be forced to arrest you.”

“But why did you have six hundred euros on you?”

“What it comes down to is that the Italian law allows you to assault and rob a black man as long as you remember to steal his papers. Then he can’t report you.”

“I don’t believe your story, Djiby.”

“It wasn’t my six hundred euros. It was my friends’ money. I was supposed to give it to the man who arranged their travel and our accommodation. He’s a businessman. He has little patience with clients who don’t meet their financial obligations. He won’t believe my story. And neither will my friends. I’m fucked, Ilja. I’m fuckeder than fucked. But I’m not asking you for money. I just want you to tell my story. Because you were such a good listener last time when I told you about my journey. For your book. I want you to tell it to the people in the north. That’s the only thing I’m asking. Promise me you’ll do that, Ilja?”

He didn’t wait for my reply. He stood up and walked away. Then he changed his mind. He came back and said, “Do you know what the best thing was? It was my birthday. But it seems like every day’s my birthday in this beautiful city in the fairyland of Europe.” He laughed. He kissed my forehead and left. “ Fatou yo ,” he sang quietly as he went. It was the last time I saw him.

1.

How wafer-thin must it be, the difference between everything and nothing? Mere centimeters of cracking, sodden wood separate the sailor from his grave. A couple of steel plates make up the difference between hope and despair for tens of thousands on their way to the New World. Something improvised out of plastic brings Africans to Europe or it doesn’t.

I can’t live anywhere. I’m only fooling myself with pavings, walls, and names, places that have something to do with happiness. It’s as thin as tracing paper. When winter comes, I won’t know how I’ll cope because the places you’re allowed to smoke indoors aren’t exactly happy-making. In my home country, everything would be much worse. I drink too much. I need warm, beautiful places where I can drink too much and smoke too much and easily meet friends who admire, worship, cherish, admire, worship, and cherish me. Naked girls who coo when faced with the heft of my celebrity. Frothy girls who automatically plop themselves in my lap because of all of the capital letters in my name.

I can’t live anywhere. I think it’s about places but instead it’s about smoking in bars and restaurants and the time the pub shuts. Everywhere. Doesn’t matter where. Should I go farther south, then? No one will know me there for sure. And how will I get girls, then? What’s there to do in Genoa when it’s raining? What’s there to do in Casablanca when it’s raining? What’s there to do in Cape Town when it’s raining? Tell me how to live and I’ll laugh in your face. Forget it. I’d rather wait for the waiter. And a clean ashtray.

And meanwhile, you spend a while in a city you think you discovered yourself. Genoa — ooh, you think you’re seriously different from your eternal writer friends with their eternal Venice, Florence, or Rome? — real and authentic, with a port, immigration, a labyrinth you can get lost in, problems, transvestites. Fuck that. Do you believe it yourself? Mere centimeters of creaking, sodden wood.

By now I no longer find dying such a bad idea. I used to panic at the thought. Now I understand that it doesn’t matter much how far south I travel. It’ll be the same everywhere. You can do something or not. You can find a city, friends to drink with, and cafés to make your own with renewed, unsuspected passion, but you know that one day you’ll betray it all for a new illusion. And then you’ll write about it. That’s the biggest illusion of all. I only write thanks to the lack of women and drinking pals keeping me, protesting, from my work. If Genoa really were as great as I say it is, you wouldn’t hear anything about it, my friend. Everything I write is fake because I don’t write when I’m myself. It’s an escape from reality on a rickety raft of language, like the boats that went to La Merica, the same as those poor suckers come to Europe, the Promised Land.

The only place I can live is elsewhere. I’m going south, she’s going north. It probably won’t really matter if we die — she of hunger, me of boredom and thirst. It would save us a lot of futile dreams.

2.

There’s no winter in Italy. By that I mean that in the two or three months that it’s genuinely cold, Italy no longer exists, in the sense that it stops functioning. Yesterday a thin layer of snow fell on Genoa. A millimeter that melted away in no time. Normal life was completely disrupted. The buses crawled along Via XX Settembre with snow chains on their wheels. Schools were closed. Shops, bars, and restaurants shut earlier than usual because the suppliers could no longer reach them. The only people still out on the street are weirdos or foreigners. A homeless person or a Senegalese tried in vain to sell umbrellas for five euros to nonexistent tourists. A cold, wet wind drives through the abandoned streets. I notice I’ve switched to the present tense for no reason. It’s because I’m so fucking cold. I’m writing this in the smoking room of the Britannia, a tasteless English pub I only come to for its smoking room. It’s the only place I can go to since the upstairs room at Bar Berto was closed down by the police because the fume extraction system didn’t meet safety regulations. But the owner of the Britannia is a stingy old miser who has never given me a discount and makes a profit by turning off the heating to save on fuel costs. See him standing there behind the bar in two thick jumpers selling cocktails and beer over his reading glasses at extortionate prices. I hate him. Yet I still come here because I don’t know of any better place to go in the winter. Or I’d have to stop smoking, but that would be the other extreme, I’m sure you’d agree with me, my friend. Then they’d have won. The others. Our enemies.