A Pimp's Notes (3 page)

The laws that govern society are a line drawn in the dirt by a fairly unsteady hand. Some cross that line, others respect it. I believe that I float a hairsbreadth above that line, never setting foot on either side of it. I don’t worry about it, because the world I live in doesn’t worry about it.

Like it or not, that’s who I am.

2

If it was you, I’d do it for free …

The girl’s words ring in my ears as I zip along the Nuova Vigevanese, heading for home. I can see her eyes. To rid myself of sounds and visions and desires, I cover them with Daytona’s mottled red face and all the predictable words he will grunt as he takes her to bed. I picture her, hastily peeled of clothes like an orange by his pudgy hands, the white flesh of his fingers dotted with dense black hair. I know the impatient way he must have pulled down his trousers and shoved her head between his legs. I know what’ll happen afterward, or maybe what’s already happened. Sex the way sex happens, dulled by the effects of the cocaine, the girl’s indifference, the shabby anonymity of the motel.

But Daytona’s not the kind of guy who notices certain things. He lacks the sheer power to be a predatory animal, and the girl is no shy antelope, for that matter. It’s nothing but a transaction, a contract involving an offer of consideration and a delivery of goods. There are people who care more about the anticipation of the act than its actual performance. This is one of those cases. In other ways, for other reasons, the same thing applies to me.

A traffic light blinks from yellow to red; I come to a stop and light a cigarette. While we were pretending to live the good life, for the rest of the world a Sunday turned into a Monday. All around me, morning traffic is beginning to weave itself into a tangle that half an hour from now, more or less, will harden into an inextricable knot. But by then I’ll be safely hidden at home. There’s nothing glamorous about being a creature of the night, there’s no glory to it. Sometimes it’s all deception and fabrication, because darkness blends everything together, beliefs indistinguishable from truths. Documentaries show us scenes of lions feasting on prey while packs of hyenas circle, waiting to fight over the remains. As often as not, it was the hyenas that actually brought down the kill. The lion showed up afterward and by the law of kings took first choice without lifting a paw, forcing the ones who did the dirty work to settle for his leftovers. That image is projected into the real world, upside down, making it hard to tell who’s the lion and who’s the hyena.

Alongside me, in a gleaming new Mercedes, some guy opens his mouth in an involuntary yawn.

I focus, trying to make out which kind of animal he is.

He doesn’t have the wrecked facial features of a sleepless all-nighter; rather, his face bears the stamp of an alarm clock that always rings too soon. An ordinary everyman, classifiable as a “not-not.” He’s not young and he’s not old, not handsome and not ugly, not rich and not poor. And so on and so forth. He’s probably got a wife and kids at home, and he bought himself a Mercedes because he’d made up his mind that life owed him one, the same way that, sometimes, he’ll buy a few hours with one of the girls that I handle. He must be a small businessman; he probably owns one of those warehouses that snake along the road leading to Vigevano. In his warehouse, maybe they machine-tool structural aluminum or they sell footwear at cost.

The traffic light turns green and simultaneously a horn honks behind me. So predictable that I don’t even waste a go-fuck-yourself. The sky has veered from colorless to blue and with the sunlight the shadows have put in an appearance. Other shadows are vanishing. It’s the law of the city and its daily buzzing drone, rising and falling according to the time of day. For those who can’t stand that drone, it’s almost time to cover your ears and burrow your head under the pillow.

When I reach the intersection at the Metro stop, I take a right, follow the service road for a short distance, and then turn into the Quartiere Tessera, where I live. The quarter is filled with five-story apartment buildings, sheathed in dark brown tile, wedged inside a metal fence to convey the idea of order and ownership. Between one building and the next, open spaces covered with sickly grass and the occasional pine tree or maple serve as vegetation. The buildings belong to the RAS insurance company. They’re just part of the reserve fund of real estate holdings that all insurance companies are required to establish by law. Before long, when the buildings start to deteriorate and maintenance costs rise to levels that become a drag on the balance sheet, the company will sell them. Then we’ll see which tenants were born to be homeowners and which will just spend a lifetime paying rent and be forced to migrate to some other part of town.

For the most part, the apartments are occupied by commuters, men dressed in suits they bought in a department store somewhere, with shirt collars always a shade too loose or a little too tight; men who go to work every morning, leaving behind a wife who’s always a day older when they come home at night; men who never know or wonder what made her age that day. I have to say that in my comings and goings I’ve run into more than one married woman who looked at me with interest and sent me a glance of urgent and unmistakable SOS. I’ve always lowered my gaze and walked on by. I have nothing to offer and nothing to receive. This place and this life make colors wither and it does no good to mix gray with gray. It might come out darker or lighter, but all you’re ever going to get is more gray.

I steer the car deftly into one of the herringbone parking spots, a space that another car has just vacated. The man driving away is young, but he already has an air of resignation. His expression turns him into a living, breathing white flag of surrender. It’s incredible to see how fast some people give up. They’re not losers, they’re people who never even put up a fight. And that gives them starring roles in something much worse than mere defeat.

I know lots of people like that.

There are times I think I see one every time I look in the mirror. I swing open the car door, get out, and lock this cloud of all-nighter depression inside my parked Mini. I turn and head for home, walking with one shoulder practically brushing the enclosure wall.

On my left, two hundred yards farther on, is public housing. That’s another world, fly-by-night and sedentary at the same time. Rough and continuously evolving. A patchwork of people live there, factory workers and small-time crooks, undifferentiated manpower that feeds into a larger and more complicated system. Fleeting instants of glory, a bundle of easy cash that gets shown off at the local bar along with a new car, and then a couple of Carabinieri squad cars pull up early the next morning. Plenty of room in jail for another inmate, plenty of room in society for another criminal. Come to think of it, it’s just another way of commuting.

The topography of the Milanese hinterland tells us that we’re in Via Fratelli Rosselli, number 4. I say that I’m in the place that I call home for a few hours every day. On the far side of the yard, there’s a lady walking her dog. The dog is a German shepherd, and he runs out and back and leaps happily around his yawning owner. The animal seems to have a higher opinion of that green space fertilized by smog than most of the residents.

I swing open the glass front door and climb the steps to the second floor without meeting a soul. I insert my key in the keyhole, click the lock open, and a voice catches me off guard.

“The click of the lock of a man returning home sounds different from the click of a man going out for the day.”

I turn and the silhouette of Lucio emerges from the doorway across the landing. The direction of his gaze is slightly off-kilter with respect to where I’m standing. He’s wearing a pair of black sunglasses. I know that when he’s alone he doesn’t wear them, but a blind man’s understandable sense of modesty demands that he cover his eyes, veiled with an unsettling white film, when someone else is around.

I sketch out a smile that he can’t see, only hear.

“You’ve got the ears of a cat.”

“I’ve got the ears of a musician. Keys are one of my fields of expertise.”

He hastens to disavow the joke.

“Questionable wisecrack. I could never do stand-up. I’m afraid I’m going to have to settle for being the Italian Stevie Wonder.”

Lucio plays acoustic guitar, and he’s incredibly good at it. In my apartment I often hear him practicing. That sinuous musical instrument, broad-hipped, accommodating, and womanly, represents his emancipation from darkness, his personal freedom. He gets by pretty well with his music. He alternates periods of playing in clubs in the Brera district with stretches of playing in the city subways. I imagine he does it to create a sort of variation between day and night, since as far as he’s concerned it’s all just permanent nighttime. He could have more if he wanted, but he’s satisfied with what he’s got. I’ve never asked and he’s never told me. For every man alive there’s a part of life that lies within the sacred boundaries of his own fucking business. The hardest thing to understand, for every individual, is just how big that area is.

“You want a cup of coffee?”

I stand there, motionless, with the door open. He shrugs his shoulders.

“Wipe that doubtful expression off your face. I know it’s there. Nobody can refuse to join you for a cup of coffee. This time is no exception. I can’t see a reason it would be.”

Lucio inserted a brief pause before uttering that last phrase, and he emphasized it ever so slightly with his voice. A self-deprecating irony is, I think, just one more of the screens he sets up between himself and a world that is invisible to him. Putting himself on an equal footing; making sure that he can’t be seen by a world he can’t see.

“Sure, let’s have that coffee. You’re such a pain in the ass.”

He hears my door click shut again and my footsteps coming across the landing. He swings his door open a little wider and steps back from the threshold to let me by.

“And you’re an ungrateful turd. I’m going to make you a shitty cup of coffee, just to teach you a lesson.”

We walk into his apartment. No concession has been made to the visual. The fabrics were all chosen for their tactile qualities and the colors are haphazard at best. Not the furniture. When we first met, a year ago, Lucio told me that he took that apartment because the layout was very similar to the place he used to live. The furniture was arranged exactly the way it was in the other place, and the routes through the apartment were memorized without difficulty.

Or almost.

As he likes to say, in his situation, there’s always an almost.

I go to the table next to the French doors. I look out the curtainless windows. The woman with the German shepherd is gone. There’s no one in the street.

We’re alone, outside and in.

Lucio moves as if he can see, in his little private domain, free of corners and sharp edges. He vanishes into the small galley kitchen, and I hear him clattering around, with the cabinet doors and the espresso pot. His words drift out to me as I take a seat.

“Here’s an easy one, since you haven’t slept all night.”

“Shoot.”

“
Agriculture in remote Chinese dynasty
. Three and four equals seven.”

It’s a cryptic clue. You’ve got to work from that definition to find two words that, when joined together, create a third word that is the sum of their letters. For this one, I don’t even have to think it over for a second.

“
Agriculture in remote Chinese dynasty
: Far Ming. Farming.”

This time, I’m the one who can hear the smile in his voice, even without seeing it.

“Well, that one really was
too
easy. Or else I have to say Bravo because it’s your name and because you deserve it.”

It’s a routine that we’ve developed over the months, the two of us. We invent and trade cryptic clues instead of confiding in each other. Someday, one of us will invent an especially intricate clue and the other one will guess it. Maybe that day we’ll be able to say that we’re friends. But for now, we’re just a couple of people well aware that we’re only sharing a couple of hours of prison yard time.

The coffee announces its arrival with the throaty gurgling sound of the espresso pot. Lucio emerges from his little kitchen carrying a pair of mismatched demitasse cups and a sugar bowl. I don’t help him because I know he wouldn’t want me to. All the confirmation I need is the fact that he’s never asked.

He sets them down on the table and vanishes again. When he comes back he’s carrying a two-cup espresso pot and a couple of demitasse spoons. He sets them on the table too, and then sits down across from me.

“All right, Hazel. Go ahead and pour the coffee.”

“Is that a cryptic clue?”

“No, it’s an order.”

This is the one concession that Lucio makes to his blindness. I’m no longer doing him a favor, I’m performing a task. I pour coffee into the two cups, then I add sugar. Two spoonfuls for him, half a spoonful for me. I set his cup in front of him, making sure he knows where it is from the sound. He extends his hand, grips the cup by the handle, and savors it unhurriedly, while I empty mine in two gulps, even though it’s scalding hot. That’s why Godie calls me Asbestos Mouth, for once without relying on the relentless fishtailing zigzags of his personal jargon.

I light a cigarette. Lucio smells the smoke. He turns his head to a point that my bad habit has identified for him.

“Marlboro?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I used to smoke. But I quit.”

He takes his last sip of coffee.

“You might not believe it, but there’s no pleasure in smoking a cigarette if you can’t see the smoke pouring out of your mouth. Evidently there’s a bigger aesthetic component to bad habits than you might think.”

Once again, his voice is veiled in a layer of irony.

“That could be a cure for smoking. Take someone and blindfold them until they lose the urge.”

He smiles.

“Or until they have to get plastic surgery to fix the nose they’ve scorched by trying to light cigarettes with their disposable lighter.”