La Superba (19 page)

PART TWO

The Theater Elsewhere

1.

It's like a bath. The plug's in and the tap's on. There's nobody home. The person who turned on the tap has forgotten it. She's gone out. Slowly but surely, the bath gets fuller and fuller. And it's a cast iron certainty that at a certain point that can be calculated mathematically it will overflow, immediately causing a new situation because the apartment will be flooded and so will the downstairs neighbors'. That's August.

The plug is plugged in the early springtime and the warm tap is turned on. Gradually, day after day, week after week, month after month, the city becomes filled with summer until, on a mathematicallycalculable day in August, when almost no one is home, it floods. It's not that it's only a bit warmer than the day before, the same as when a bath overflows, you can't say that it's only a bit fuller than before. The city suddenly becomes white with heat in August. And when the inhabitants return from holiday in September and rush to turn off the tap and pull out the plug, it takes another couple of months to mop up all that summer.

The August heat is aqueous. And I'm not referring to the sweat that pours from your forehead when you feel the urge to raise
a slow hand to mop your forehead. Although it's related to that. The water from the sea evaporates and has nowhere to go. Right behind the city, there are mountains. In other places in the world, you're grilled or roasted at such high temperatures. Here you're steam cooked in the hot vapors. From the mountains it looks like there's mist hanging over the city. But in the city itself the sun shimmers. The mist is the air we breathe. In the city, this goes by the fairy-tale name of
macaia
, a word that can only be whispered, otherwise they'll reach in through your open windows while you sleep and choke you with their soft hands. If the Genoese, who always complain about everything, complain about one thing more than anything else, it's these clammy days and nights of suffocation that paralyze even your thoughts.
Macaia
is made up of the sighs of the Genoese.

The August heat is liquid. You stretch out in it like in a steam bath and immerse yourself in it. You swim through the city's alleys. The heat is tangible. It streams between your fingers and over your skin as you drift on her slow waves. It takes three times as long to reach nearby destinations in the deserted city flooded with summer, such as the
latteria
on the corner, if it's even open. Perhaps it's better not to even try to find out.

I feel like a fish in water in the deserted, liquid city of August. While everyone who can afford it has fled to the coast or to the mountains, I try to survive in this shimmering post-apocalyptic playground, along with the rats and a few similarly minded. Nearly all the attractions are closed. We, the group of survivors, show solidarity and exchange information that could save each other's lives, like the addresses of tobacconists that are still open. There's
nothing to do, but doing something has never been my strong point—it has never been my burning ambition. To be honest, I consider it a rather overrated concept, that whole palaver. And the paralyzing heat is the ideal excuse to dismiss every kind of plan in advance without anyone thinking to criticize you for it. And so I swim small laps in the alleyways, smiling, using minimal physical effort. I don't need to go to the sea to swim.

2.

I'd already sent the previous letter when I realized I'd forgotten to tell you something important. Something that will interest you. Let's not be coy.

Let me put it this way. When everyone's at the beach, parading around in only their bikinis in front of overheated, thirsty eyes that try to melt away the little fabric in the way (even my style is becoming lewder and exhibitionistickier, if that's a word, perhaps you noticed; I'll have to smooth it all into the correct, Calvinistic form when I rework these notes into a novel, but in the meantime I'm enjoying the freedom to speak the truth, to you at least, in overheated terms, the naked truth, we might say, if you'll permit me this lame pun, but all of this between parentheses), then the people left in the city try even harder. So as not to look left out. To make it look like a conscious decision to be in the city in this weather. I guess you don't understand that. But what I mean is this:

I'm sitting there innocently eating my lunch on the terrace of Capitan Baliano. On my own, newspaper in hand, a picture of innocence. It's August. Boiling hot. Somehow this young man is
sitting in the middle of the catwalk. The fashion this summer? As little as possible. There's a financial crisis, right? Economize on fabric. But between us men, they take it to extremes. Just because they're not on the beach doesn't mean they have to wear clothes. In fact, they're wearing even fewer clothes than on the beach because they want to make it clear we don't have to pity them for not being on the beach.

Today. Four long, brown, bare legs in some kind of shorts too small to cover pubic hair that would be freshly budding if it weren't epilated. On top: the suspicion of a vest in which juvenile breasts watchfully wait their chance. Copper thighs as thin as my wrists clasping a roaring scooter. Girls wearing just four things: a drop of Chanel, two high heels, and a fluttering summer dress. A small earthquake would be enough to make them come on the spot. I only have to stick out a finger to find myself in something wet that groans, while at the adjacent table the last transparent nothings are taken off with a sigh because it's so fucking hot.

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.

This brings me to another matter. I received your money order. Many thanks again for that. It makes me feel good to know that there's someone left back home who understands that temporary financial problems can be solved elegantly. My self-sought loss of status in foreign climes comes with certain material repercussions in the short term. I'm no longer available for commercials and I no longer give readings. And that was exactly enough and I'm grateful for your understanding. You're a true friend.

And something else: I've just learned from my accountant how much the tax authorities in the fatherland want from me despite all the things I did for my former fatherland in the past. There isn't the slightest chance I can meet their obligation. But I don't want to bother you with that.

4.

There are women who go somewhere and sit down, and there are others who make an appearance. This second type can be divided into two categories, too. There are those who make a haughty appearance a chic hour and a half late to splice the world with a glance, and there are those who approach with an expansive display of power and forcefully request with a false smile the place she deserves. Film stars and duchesses, that would be an easy way of summing up the dichotomy. The difference between knock-knees
and awe, hope and fear, wet dreams and nightmares. What they have in common is that they are goddesses in the depths of their minds and that every man believes in her because she believes in herself. Whenever she makes her appearance, people stand up spluttering excuses to give her the most comfortable seat, which she'll sit down in with such stunning matter-of-factness without thinking for a second to thank the person who made the sacrifice for her or even deigning to look at him, thereby reducing him to the worm he is while giving the rest of the company ample time to gape at her.