La Superba (33 page)

18.

I denied this most emphatically.

“Can you maybe lend me fifty euros, Ilja?”

“Why don't you go back, Djiby?”

“Are you listening to what you're saying?”

“That's not the way I meant it. I…”

“I know you didn't mean it that way. No one who says that kind of thing really means it. That's the problem with us black people. The whole time everyone keeps saying stuff about us that they don't mean. But they do say it. And you're a good person, Ilja, I'm sure you know it. You're not a racist, no more than those hundreds of shop, bar, and restaurant owners I've asked for a job are racists. They simply don't have any work for me. And you're paying for my beers because I'm telling you my story, but you'd never lend me fifty euros. We'll never be real friends. You're too afraid for that, you think I'll ask you for another fifty euros then and you won't be able to refuse because we're friends. Some people are afraid of me because I'm black, but there aren't actually that many of them. Most are afraid of me because I'm poor. They can tell because of my black skin. And if a person's poor, you're better off keeping your distance. Everyone knows that, even in Africa. It doesn't have anything to do with racism, even though the fact you're rich or poor has everything to do with the color of your skin. But it's the same in Africa. The way a white in our country is rich by definition, a black man here is by definition poor.”

“Do you really want to borrow fifty euros?”

“I know you're only asking so you can write down that you've
asked me. That's the only reason you're talking to me anyway, so you can write me down. And as soon as you have enough material, we'll smile for the camera one more time and after that, we'll never see each other again. You won't avoid me, but you won't look for me, either, or invite me to your table. But don't feel guilty. It's fine. I want my story to be told.”

He smiled. “Order me another beer. Make it a big one because all this talking has made me thirsty. What did you ask again? Why I don't go back? To Senegal? Are you kidding me? I'll tell you exactly why, but first more beer.”

19.

“Do you know how much it cost to get me to Europe? And by that I don't mean everything I went through and the fact it nearly cost me my life several times. What I'm talking about here is money. I worked it out. Everything added up would be about three thousand euros in your currency. Three thousand. Do you know how much money that is? For a boy in Africa? For a boy in Africa with his family? My uncle has a good job. He works in a steel factory just outside of Dakar. It works out to about a hundred euros a month. In Senegalese terms, that's a good income. He's the richest in my family, anyway. My father has a barbershop and my mother works as a seamstress. Maybe combined they make it to a hundred euros a month. And my mother's work is drying up because the Chinese do it even cheaper. A good friend of mine runs a shop for used mobile telephones and spare parts, but he doesn't have many customers and the margins are narrow.
Apart from that, there's nobody in my family with a regular income. I didn't have any work myself and neither did my two brothers. From time to time, I helped in my friend's shop and occasionally I had temporary work. The same goes for most of my good friends. Can you imagine how big a sacrifice it was for my family and friends to get together the three thousand euros necessary for my journey? And they all contributed. My father even took out a loan and two of my friends did the same. They got into debt for me, Ilja. But they did it with conviction. They saw it was an investment that would pay out ten or a hundred times. It was guaranteed I was going to be rich, after all. By contributing to the costs of my travel, they bought the right to a share of my immeasurable riches.

“And then you just coolly ask me why I don't return to Senegal? Do you think I'd still have friends? Do you think my family would welcome me into their arms like a prodigal son? They'd see me coming, their mega investment for whom they'd gotten themselves into major debt, returning penniless, empty-handed, without cars, gold bars, washing machines, luxury yachts, smartphones, diamonds, or even a dishwasher, come to explain that alas, nothing worked out, that he slept surrounded by rats, with eleven fellow countrymen, was able to find no other work than carrying heavy things from time to time, and that the whole idea that you automatically get rich in Europe was a misunderstanding as far as he was concerned.”

“But…”

“Hang on Ilja, I'm still talking. Because on top of that, I'd be the first.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone in Senegal knows that it's a long way to Europe, fraught with danger, which only the strongest survive, making it an investment accompanied with large risks, so the family has to choose the best candidate to undertake the journey. But everyone also knows that every Senegalese who has actually managed to reach Europe has become rich. If I were to admit I hadn't managed it, I'd be the first one not to manage it. Can you imagine what kind of shame it would bring upon me?”

“And the eleven other Senegalese sleeping among the rats with you? And all the others on the Via di Pré? It's a fairy tale.”

“It's a fairy tale everyone in my home country continues to believe because none of us has had the courage to be the first to admit that it's a fairy tale.”

“But sooner or later they'll realize that their investment hasn't paid out?”

“What do you mean, Ilja?”

“That no money's coming.”

“But of course money's coming.”

“How then?”

“I send a couple hundred euros a month. Through Western Union. I have to.”

“And that's how you sustain the fairy tale.”

“I don't have a choice. That was the deal.”

“How do you get the money?”

“I borrow it. We all do.”

“And how are you ever going to pay it back?”

“I came here with a dream of a better life. In the meantime,
I got lost in that fantasy. That's my story. That's what I had to say. Funny, isn't it?”

20.

A few months later, I was sitting on Caffè Letterario's terrace on my own, thinking about things I've already forgotten, when I saw my Senegalese friend again. He saw me, too, and came over. It seemed like he'd been looking for me. It worried me because it could only mean he wanted something from me. What was his name again? I should be more careful about making friends with those kinds of people. At the end of the day, they all expect you to help them. Of course, I hadn't really made friends with him, don't worry. I was simply curious about his past. Let's call it research. My interest was less in him than his horror stories about his hellish journey to the Promised Land, Europe, which I hope I'll be able to use in my novel, where discrimination against immigrants will be a major theme. But professional interest is all too often confused with friendship in those cultures. He had a desperate look on his face. What was his name again? Djiby. What does it matter. But, well, I think it was Djiby. He always looked desperate, but now more than usual. I prepared myself for the worst and resolved to be nice to him but not to give him money under any circumstances.

“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.

PART THREE

The Most Beautiful Girl in Genoa (Reprise)

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.

In the meantime, the Genoese shut themselves away in their palazzi. They have their own rituals. They turn their backs on the city before ostensibly dedicating themselves voluntarily to demanding members of their family. For them too, Italy ceases to exist for a couple of months. Or they leave for their lodges in the mountains where there's supposed to be snow, where each year they ski for an hour between lunch and the aperitif, with similarly minded people who are all dressed in the latest ski fashions.

And so the labyrinth becomes a grim and impassible place. The smooth, pitch-black, threatening paving stones gleam in the darkness that has descended early. A short walk is a survival trek past closed doors and shuttered windows. It's like in Dickens or those Anton Pieck Christmas cards, but then not picturesque. The snow isn't warm, white, and fluffy but dirty and wet and gray. And the friendly, smiling beggars in their special Christmas tatters who tap hopefully on the windows receive no alms. They can fuck off.

Yesterday a homeless man froze to death in the passage under the Carlo Felice opera. It was in the papers today. The story is all the more cruel because there was a grand opening ceremony taking place for the opera's symphonic winter season five meters above his head, with the mayor and all the Genoese magistrates in attendance. His name was Babu. I knew him. An African boy. He often came past the terraces begging. I never gave him anything. Today I walked to the passage under the opera. His fellow homeless had set up an altar for him in the alcove where he perished. Genoese wearing fur coats came by to leave offerings and assuage
their guilty feelings. The alcove was full of flowers, packets of cigarettes, and bottles of gin. And so Babu got everything from his new fatherland he had ever desired.

3.

The flowers were still there today. The packets of cigarettes and bottles of gin had gone. Babu's homeless friends were nowhere to be seen, either. Mediagenic tragedy and strokes of luck have often made uneasy bedfellows.

That last line will have to be cut when I rework these notes into a novel. Much too pretentious. One of those sentences where you, as a vain writer, openly stand there posing with your unique ability to grasp reality with a telling analogy. Linking the concrete to the abstract. Normal people don't see those deep kinds of connections. The momentary pleasure of a cigarette is a reconciliation with the transient nature of life. Those kinds of profundities. X=y. I can just toss them off. Perhaps my pen's hesitation above the paper was a harbinger of the slowly dawning realization that I was on the wrong track. Pleasure is nothing more than forgetting everything ahead of us after the moment of pleasure is gone. There was another paradox in that, did you spot it? And another, I'll make one with rum and Coke. Rum and Coke is the music of the night that sounds like a cacophony in the morning. And do you know that really happens, too? I'm actually drinking rum and Coke as I write this, and right away an Italian girl comes over to ask what I'm writing. I say I'm writing about her. She doesn't believe me.

If I turned this into a book, I'd have to delete the whole of that
last paragraph. If I ever wanted to turn it into a book. Sometimes you ask yourself whether it's worth all the effort. People don't read anymore. And they're right. They have better things to do. Like surviving, buying Christmas presents for their in-laws, keeping their mistresses a secret, or assuaging their guilt by giving gin and cigarettes to the friends of a tramp who froze to death. People already know how everything is and should be. They don't need a book to teach them. I've always thought that our role as literati was to shake things up. To unsettle fixed values. Even if just for a moment. But now I realize that people don't need that at all. Their daily lives are already challenging and unsettling enough. Thanks to their obligation to continuously fulfill all their obligations, they are continuously on unstable ground. They look for stability in their rituals and routines. They look for consolation, for someone to pin them down and tell them that things always run their course and that it's not their fault that a tramp froze to death in a passageway under the opera, because they are decent people who after a hard day's work for their boss use up their last strength getting to the right shop just before closing time to buy the right kind of
panettone
for their mother-in-law. What more can you do? Read a disturbing book about immigration?
Per carità
. They already have their hands full with their own problems. Do you know how difficult it is to find a garage in this city? And do you know what happens when you simply park your car on the street? The Moroccan and Senegalese rabble know what to do with it, I can tell you. But we're good folks, we vote for the left and take cigarettes and gin to the Moroccan and Senegalese friends of Babu.

And they weren't even his friends. I never saw them together.
Those so-called homeless friends of the homeless Babu live in Via di Pré or the Maddalena quarter. They're burglars and pickpockets. They have to survive, too. They read it in the paper, just like me and all the other Genoese. They understood the rare opportunity, put on their filthiest clothes, chased away the real tramps, and lit candles in the passageway under the opera. They're not there anymore today. Of course they aren't. They'll never be there again, unless there's something new to be had. And you come along with literature? Like a world traveler musing in the hotel lobby? You have to feel the despair of the wet gray snow and lose yourself in a dream that gets watered down under your increasingly unsteady tread to understand anything at all. You don't need to read books, you need to try to survive outside where you get screwed, fucked over, and robbed.

X is never y since it depends completely on what you want to achieve with x and y. The abstract is always concrete. Friendship is always about fifty euros. Mourning a so-called friend who froze to death reaps multiple rewards. Everyone cons everyone else, that's what it comes down to. That's what I've learned, my friend. Tomorrow I'll write something more cheerful again.

4.

Sometimes, in the dark pit of the night after closing time at the end of that thieves' alley San Bernardo, at the furthest tip of the labyrinth, in the neglected and forgotten part after Via delle Grazie, where you can smell the fish market and the rotting waters of the port, there's a nightclub. Sometimes. Because just as often it's
closed or you can't find it. It's where there's a drain for the dregs of the night: actors, transvestites, Moroccans, and the clientele they have to accompany to the toilets every five minutes in order to snort drugs, suck cocks, or both. It smells of smoke, piss, vomit, and hash, and those smells are freshly produced all around you continuously. Fights regularly break out, arising from conflicts that none of those involved can remember the next day, and mostly ending with someone slipping in a pool of vomit, smacking his chin on the bar, and being carted off.

The proprietor, Pasquale, is just standing there mixing cocktails in plastic cups; if requested, he'll explain that he has a permit to run an arts club. Cocaine is sold in his toilets, kilos at a time, but Pasquale pretends not to notice. He avoids trouble that way. Both the Mafia and the Moroccans protect him because they need him, or at least his arts club, or at least its toilets.

That's the mistake Fabio made with his bar in the same neighborhood. He tried to keep it clean. He got the police involved and threw the Moroccans out. They smashed his bar to bits and since then Fabio's been missing an eye and his walking has gotten a lot worse. And they also seem to have found out where he parks his car and where he lives.

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.