Ilja Pfeijffer - La Superba

Pasquale, on the other hand, has been in business for nearly twenty years — if you can call it a business, getting the drunken outcasts of the night even drunker while pretending not to notice a thing and never cleaning your toilets, no matter how encrusted the shit gets on the walls. I go there sometimes. I like to go there. Being lonely among other lonely people is a sublimated form of loneliness. I sit there at the sticky bar like a silhouette of a midnight cowboy, nursing a much too strong Negroni in my wisdom-clenched fists, and conduct laconic one-line conversations with actors who can no longer get their words out, and maybe because of this or for other reasons they can’t determine, get tears in their eyes and, assuming they’ve made a new friend, sycophantically offer me another Negroni with their last pennies.

And one evening, I kissed the dangerous transvestite Penelope Please with my thirsty tongue, which put up a minutes-long fight against her drunken tongue while I protected the wallet in my back pocket with one hand, and proof that indeed she was no woman took on ever more convincing forms in the other. Not for any particular reason, just because I felt like it. Because the place compels you to do things you wouldn’t do elsewhere. If you’ve sunk so low as to find yourself there, there are no more appearances to keep up and you might as well descend to dissipation and ruin for good.

And that evening, content with the poetry of my existence, as I wandered along the Via San Bernardo like a giant, lonely wraith, I was mugged. I had always thought that I looked too big and strong to be robbed. Muggers don’t want trouble; they look for easy prey, like an unsuspecting tourist or a drunk Erasmus student. I’m almost two meters tall, weigh more than a hundred kilos, have a black belt in aikido, and can look very threatening, even when I’m drunk. But there were two of them and they were professionals. Of course they were Moroccans. I think I’d even seen them earlier in the nightclub. They’d watched me and followed me. They knew exactly which pocket my wallet was in. I managed to throw one of them to the ground, but in doing so I lost my balance, and by then the other had grabbed my wallet. They ran away and disappeared into the dark labyrinth. The whole skirmish had lasted no more than a few seconds. And I hadn’t stood a chance. I didn’t even try to go after them. Hard, intent, and stoic, I went on my way. I was in Genoa. I was no longer a virgin. And I’ll be damned if a smile didn’t appear on my face.

5.

Today, right at the end of Via San Vincenzo, just by Brignole station, I discovered a porn cinema. I must have walked past it hundreds of times, but I’d never noticed it before. There weren’t any suggestive photos in the window, no screaming advertisements for forbidden pleasures. But today my gaze fell upon an amateurish poster, made in a print shop, with the English words “nonstop show.” I had to choose between screen 1 and screen 2. I asked what the difference was. I didn’t understand the answer. Then I asked which show was cheaper. I was intending to choose the more expensive. The price was the same, so I ended up in screen 1.

It was a real cinema with a large screen, rows of tip-up seats, and a balcony with boxes and seating at the sides. It was dark inside. I needed the flesh-colored light of the screen to see that I wasn’t alone. The silhouettes of twenty or thirty men were as widely spread around the room as possible. When we had tests at school, we had to sit a ways apart so that we couldn’t copy each other. Everyone was sitting separately here, too. No cheating.

The show consisted of a French porn film, I guessed from around the mid-1980s. Its dialogue had been dubbed into Italian. They’d left the original sounds intact in the sex scenes. This confirmed my fantasy that Italian girls only acted like they spoke Italian until you stuffed something into them. The film was actually quite good. There were pretty girls with small tits. The scenes proceeded smoothly, without a surplus of soporific gymnastics in close up. There was even a kind of storyline: the man with the long coat and sunglasses commissioned various girls to make their fantasies come true. And they did that. That was what the film was about. And so it might happen that a girl was masturbating in a graveyard at night before being taken by two supposed tramps, until the man with the long coat and sunglasses appeared on the scene to finish things off properly. There was also a remote controlled car that had special hooks that could steal the panties of girls who just happened to have taken off their panties in a public place.

I sat as far apart from the others as I could and wondered whether there was anything like this in my home country. I knew we used to have them, sure. On the day of my eighteenth birthday I’d been to the legendary Cinema Rex. Those were the days. But the whole porn business had been so Youtubed and Youporned and Redtubed over the past few years. A real cinema with tip-up seats and popcorn, velvet, and a silver screen, a counter where you had to pay to be allowed inside, the emotion shared with a room full of like-minded people in the darkness of hidden fantasies that the city didn’t want to know about. And when it was over, stepping blinking out into a daylight filled with shoppers while inside your head you were still in the film. I was grateful to have found a real porn cinema.

But it didn’t really excite me all that much. At least, that’s what I’d decided in advance. The problem with such a lovely old-fashioned porn cinema is, of course, that, despite the relative gloom and spread-out seating strategy, you hardly have any privacy. In some ways, it’s still a public building. That’s why you can’t smoke there, for example. And it’s not really the perfect spot to have a nice long wank. At least that was the way I tended to think about it. But when I took a look around in the skin-colored gleam of the big screen, I saw that pretty much all the paying customers differed from me in that respect.

First I became aware of a jerking off kind of a movement diagonally behind me. I turned my head in such a way as to be able to check out my suspicions. And I was right. It stood out, to give a graphic description, like a sore thumb. An old, dirty Genoese man sat in the seat diagonally behind me unmistakably, convincingly jerking off with ever more frantic gestures.

As you’ll understand, my friend, I was shocked. I was convinced that he was a notorious pervert who, somewhere between now and the next five minutes, would be thrown out of the auditorium for the umpteenth time. A gentleman doesn’t behave like that in a place of public entertainment. But when I very discreetly turned my head to give the corner of my right eye a good view, I saw that the fat man sitting four seats away on the same row as I had his whole fucking trousers around his ankles including his dirty underpants and was sitting there with his stinking, wrinkly member in his fists. I could see the tip of his cock and his scrotum. When I went on and had a less discreet look around, I realized that I was the exception, not them. And not only because I was by far the youngest. All those filthy, squalid phantoms of men were wanking before my very eyes. And then I saw that if they were watching the film, it was only out of the corners of their eyes. From time to time, someone would turn his face to the screen to get some inspiration or to feign artistic interest. But everyone was mainly looking at everyone else. And the privileged ones in the boxes had a fantastic view of the room in its entirety.

My first instinct was to make a quick getaway, but I had to get out on the right side of the row, and how do you ask someone to get up and make way for you when he has his trousers around his ankles and he’s holding his cock? I decided to wait politely until he’d come. But once that had happened, he started all over again. He looked at me with eyes that glistened like a false tooth in the night.