La Superba (36 page)

It was called La Superba, and even though you weren't inside
its walls yet, you understood exactly why this was. You stand in front of the Porta Soprana, the tall, elegant city gate flanked by two tall towers. The whole thing is so perfectly in proportion it looks more like the façade of a cathedral than an impregnable bulwark. It is said that the dimensions and proportions of the gate were calculated by a secret order of monks and that the magic of their mathematics protects the gate and paralyzes enemies of the city. Banners bearing the religious insignia flutter from the proud towers, the blood-red cross, as fiery as the burning belief in the holy cause, on lily-white ground, as white as the pale innocence of pure intentions. You are part of the holy army and you've finally reached the holy city, which is the gate to the holy land. The powerful army of crusaders has returned home to the crusade's most powerful city so that it can finally sally forth. In Genoa, it will board thousands of galleons with billowing sails to head east in the name of the one true belief with the flaming swords of the only true God to free Jerusalem from the dark hordes with their scimitars, kneeling before a false prophet. Good will defeat evil. God will triumph over the devil. And you, a simple shield-bearer, will be part of the holy mission to steer the history of the cosmos onto the right path.

The golden king of France and the English king with the heart of a lion line up on their horses between their troops and the closed gate. The golden king recites each of his hundred honorary titles and greets the city. His horn blower gives the signal. His drummers beat their biggest kettledrums. The doors to the mighty gate swing open. The two kings give the order. The biggest army the world has ever seen enters the city.

Hundreds of thousands of knights on horseback, followed by a seething horde of foot soldiers, lancers, archers, chaplains, servants, and shield-bearers goes through Porta Soprana along Via San Lorenzo, past the cathedral, and down toward the port. The sound of hoofbeats, tinkling metal, footsteps, drums, and trumpets echoes between the city's high buildings. You can't believe your eyes. The streets are made of stone. You've never seen anything like it. The towering marble palaces are decorated with the most blinding ornaments. They have large windows of transparent glass. There are banners with the holy insignia all over the place. You can hardly take in the cathedral for all of its beauty. It's the biggest building you've ever seen. It is built of different colors of marble in white and gray stripes. The façade is an overwhelming display of sculptures, columns, mosaics, and ornaments in different colors. A people capable of building a thing like that must be the richest and wisest on earth. The last palace before the port is decorated with a towering mural, so colorful and true to life that you're almost afraid of it. It is of Saint George. He is dressed in a suit of armor and seated on horseback, wearing a cloak, and carrying a shield with the holy insignia. He is the patron saint of the crusaders. His lance pierces the throat of a terrifying dragon, exactly like this army's swords will pierce the black throats of Satan's monster with its hundreds of thousands of heads, the Moors, worshippers of the false god, in Jerusalem.

But the people make the greatest impression, the city folk who have gathered along the route to see the army with their own eyes. You might think that such a large army might instill fear, even with its good intentions. But there's not a trace of fear to be seen
in Genoa's eyes. The people exude something impenetrable. They recognize no superior. Dressed in tasteful costumes made of the finest and most expensive fabrics, they look lofty, haughty almost. It is as though they know that the mightiest army the world has ever seen is nothing more than a temporary guest and will have to pay for its sojourn in this eternal city with many chests filled with silver. But the women make the greatest impression. You can see them hanging out of the windows of their palaces or on their marble balconies. The women you have known in your life were farm girls or shepherdesses. They had coarse hands, coarse tongues, and two udders you could squeeze for a farthing. The women of Genoa are aristocratic and as slender as princesses, as finely cut as an ivory trinket, with large knowing eyes, their gazes fiery and arrogant. They know no superior. When they speak, they sing, and when they are silent, they recite poetry.

And then all of a sudden you see her. For the first time in your life you see the sea. A big blue reflective surface that reaches out cool and impenetrable to the horizon. You feel like you are going to faint, but luckily you manage to stay on your feet.

12.

But soon you grow to hate the city. There was no space to erect the tents at the port. The knights slept on satin cushions in the many palaces in the city, while their craggy, silent hosts arranged girls to waft coolness over their well earned resting beds with their rustling fans for a small surcharge. They were in less and less of a hurry to leave. You slept with the foot soldiers on the quayside
using your empty knapsack as a pillow. You felt yourself being fileted and pickled by the burning sun. It was an enormous operation, embarking such a large army. Troops were regularly rowed over to the black, heaving galleons in the distance, but there were so many of you. You began to do the math. At this rate, it would take weeks, not to say months, to get everyone onboard. By now you were hungry. But the impenetrable, superior Genoese who had admired your entrance into the city turned out to be even more arrogant and shrewd than you thought. They perceived your hunger as merchandise. With thousands of starving foot soldiers on their doorstep, they raised the price of bread by three cents. Dried fish were sold by auction. By now the sanitation was inadequate. To put it mildly. There were outbreaks of illness. Good men died of coughing or blackfoot. The Genoese implemented a ban on leaving the overheated quays and placed soldiers in the shadows to stop you going into the cool alleys to steal water from the fountains. The warm, salty water at the port didn't taste nice, not even in combination with soup made from shoe soles and horse droppings. The silent Genoese folk didn't even smile. They took no malicious pleasure in this, that much you'd understood. They stood and watched. They silently raised their prices. Rats scratched around your improvised bunk. You began to wonder what they'd taste like. One evening you tasted one and what you vomited up in disgust was greedily scooped up by your bedmate.

It wasn't much better onboard the ship. At least on the Genoan quay you'd had fresh air, however relative that concept was in close proximity to hundreds of thousands of sweating, dying foot soldiers from the biggest army the world had ever seen. The smell of sulfur
left by Lucifer himself permeated the galleon's hold. Lucifer, the prince of utter darkness, who tried to suffocate the soldiers of the army of angels with their own breath. Thin shit streamed along the joists. The planks creaked.

13.

The disembarkation in Palestine was coupled with a great display of power. Above deck, the flags were raised and the trumpets blown, while below deck, you lay in your own vomit and shit, green with misery, among the stinking bodies of your comrades-in-arms. Your lord and master was the first to jump ship in his shining suit of armor, just like all the other lords and masters in their shining suits. It wasn't until their empty words had died away in the wind that you could stagger, more dead than alive, up the beach. And while, at a full gallop with a drumroll and a fanfare of trumpets, an immediate advance was made on the holy city of Jerusalem, which had fallen into Muslim hands, the biggest enemies of your God and of civilization, you needed a moment to recover from the journey. There were palm trees and shade. There was a sea breeze. You managed to get away from the others. You needed a little rest before fighting the soldiers of evil and spitting in the face of Satan himself, sword raised. Just a moment. Five minutes of rest. You fell into a deep sleep.

When you woke up, it was quiet. There was no sound of hoofbeats, drums, or trumpets. You cautiously opened your eyes. You looked into the eyes of a black woman. “Black” wasn't the right word. She was as smooth and dark and shiny as an olive. Her skin
gleamed with sweat, power, and truth, and her coal-black eyes could turn entire legions to ashes. She was holding a glittering knife to your throat. She said something in her tongue, which you accurately interpreted as a threat. You felt yourself grow moist with fear. And fearfully, because you were in such a panic you might have done anything, you rose slowly to your feet. She kept her knife to your throat but didn't cut. You moved upwards to her lips and kissed her and you were sure you were going to die. But she didn't cut.

“Why?”

She replied in that scraping dry language you didn't understand. She spat in your face, kissed you passionately, hit you, and put you on a mule. “Hee!” she screamed. “Hee!”

Months later you were sitting next to her father in the blue tent. He held the holy scepter tight as he begged the new god and the new prophet to keep you both safe. There were tears in his eyes during the final prayer. She touched your hand for a moment. After the sword dance, you talked in their language about everything she'd taught you. You spoke of water and fire, harmony in mathematical proportions, the philosophy of submission to the truth, and your love of your new wife. The applause bubbled over like water in a desert.

And that night, still enjoying the afterglow of the honey and the lukewarm, salty sea of her unconditional surrender, you heard hoofbeats outside the camp. You pushed aside the books by Arabic philosophers, grabbed your sword, and went outside. But there were many of them. They wore the cursed sign of the flaming red cross of revenge on the off-white ground of hypocrisy. There was nothing you could do with your scimitar. You got yourself and her
father to safety. There wasn't a trace of her. The encampment was massacred and burned. The books by the wise men were burned as repellant heresy. The women were raped, time and time again, until someone was merciful enough to ram a sword in their bleeding cunts instead of taking them again. You saw her die that way.

From that night on, your only desire was to stop living. Her father nodded. And so your second desire became to take revenge.

“But the warriors of the blood-red cross are always too great in number.”

You nodded. “But they have one weakness.”

“What is it?”

“Their city. The city of Saint George and the dragon. I shall wreak revenge for your daughter on that city.”

“What's the name of the city, my son? Genoa? I've heard that it's the most beautiful city ever built.”

“Genoa,” you said, “is the place I hate most on earth. I promise you, Father, I shall return. Allow me to rob myself of my own life and to haunt it as the spirit of vengeance for the victims of the cross.”

14.

It was nighttime. But I was having trouble falling asleep. Ghosts from my past popped up in dreams that didn't want to become dreams. Specters from my fatherland appeared. My publisher's flabby face loomed dangerously close and gave me an accusing look. He was silent but I knew exactly what he meant. He drummed his fingers impatiently on the table. I tried to hide from him behind a pile of letters, but for some reason or other, you
were loitering there, my good friend, and your face didn't look too friendly. And you were right, too. I'm sorry I still haven't paid back the money I borrowed from you. And I hardly dare to ask, but that whole business with my so-called rich mistress only cost me money. I saw Monia's face before me. I tried to repress it, but then she pushed her scandalously big tits in my face. I jerked awake out of my insomnia because I couldn't breathe. I smelled the sour stench of her cavities. She stank of an amputated woman's leg in a garbage bag. She stuck both her fiery red tongues out and hissed that she was my bride. Her head turned three hundred and sixty degrees. “Is there anything you don't know?” she asked me. “Fuck me. Or are you a vegetarian?” She spread her legs and kicked off one shoe. It was full of vomit. “Oi, oi,” the downstairs neighbor said. “Oi, oi.” The cast iron portcullis halfway down the stairs clicked shut.

I got up and went to the bathroom to wash my face. I didn't turn on the light so as not to make myself any more awake than I already was. I had to throw up. And then when I looked in the dark mirror, I saw her. She could only be seen in mirrors. I leaned forward cautiously to give her a kiss. She responded to my gesture. My lips touched her cool, glassy lips.

“You're the most beautiful girl in Genoa.”

“Do you always say that to your own reflection?”

“What are you doing here?”

“You live in your imagination too much.”

“You've always been the only girl I've ever loved.”

“Step back. Slowly.”

As I slowly distanced myself from the mirror, she did the same, at exactly the same pace, until instead of just her face, I could see
her entire body. She was wearing her uniform from the bar. One of her feet was pink with disinfectant. Her trouser leg was rolled up, probably because the seam would rub too much otherwise and irritate her wounds. I couldn't see her other foot.

“What happened?”

Instead of replying, she began to take her trousers off.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm showing you how real you are.”

She had already undone her belt. She undid the top button and then the zipper. She held on to her trousers.

“Are you ready?” she asked, and before I could reply she had dropped her trousers and stood naked before me in the mirror. She only had one leg.

15.

I turned on the light. She had disappeared. I washed my face again. I involuntarily stroked the mirror in the way a person strokes an eastern lamp in the hope the story's true. But the only genie that appeared was my own naked reflection telling me I needed to get some sleep.

But I couldn't sleep anymore. My hard little IKEA bed felt like the narrow bunk of the lower deck of a creaking galleon on its way to the holy land or like the third-class sleeping quarters of an ocean steamer on its way to La Merica. “
Fatou yo
,” I sang softly. “We all live in a yellow submarine.” Outside there was some noise. Someone shouted something in Arabic. He began to kick and hit doors, including mine. I pulled the sheets over my head. Then he
shouted in Italian that he wanted revenge. The neighbor on the other side of the street knew what to do. She opened her shutters and threw a flowerpot onto his head from the fifth floor. He disappeared weeping into the labyrinth. But the neighbor stayed there, discussing the incident in a loud voice with my upstairs neighbor, who'd clearly also woken up. And that woke up various other neighbors who found the discussion even more annoying than the thing that had induced it, which set off a kind of chain reaction and led to even angrier discussions that in the end pretty much the entire street took part in. Everyone was leaning out of their open windows, screaming that the others shouldn't scream so much. There were people sleeping here, they screamed, who, unlike all the other screaming freeloaders, had to go to work in the morning to earn their keep, for fuck's sake.