La Superba. Ilja Leonard PfeijfferЧитать онлайн книгу.
there is no system. And if there were one, nobody would believe in it. Or circumnavigate it for a joke. Out of habit. Or to gain some minute advantage. Or not even. In the perpetual opera buffa of daily life, the simplest of actions, like buying bread at the bakery, or picking up a parcel from the post office, can come complete with the most unexpected complications. This entire country called Italy depends on improvisation. That’s why Italians are the most resourceful, resilient, and creative people I know. I enjoy that. It awakened me. That’s why I’m here. Is that an answer, Rashid?”
He didn’t say anything, but finished his beer and stood up. Salvatore walked past with his bad leg but ignored us.
“What is it, Rashid? Have I said something wrong?”
“Is there poverty in your country? Have you ever gone hungry there? Is there a fucking civil war? Are you being politically persecuted? And how did you get here—in an unreliable inflatable dinghy without any gas, or by EasyJet?”
“Sit down, Rashid, please. I only told you my story because you asked for it. Let’s talk about your story now.”
He went to the toilet, came back, picked up his bucket of roses and walked off without saying anything. Without even thanking me for the beers. But that was fine, I understood. Maybe he had just enough time to walk all the way to Nervi and sell part of the contents of his bucket. When I finished my Negroni and went inside to pay, it turned out he’d already paid the entire bill.
16.
Before disembarrassing myself of her for the second and final time, I wanted to see her again. I got the plastic bag out of the wardrobe and began to open it. It was difficult. I’d knotted it really well. And that turned out to be no bad thing because when I finally managed to open the bag such a foul smell wafted out I almost vomited. Holding my breath, I quickly re-knotted the bag even more tightly than before. And when I remembered that I’d stroked and caressed that dead, rotting piece of human offal, I really did throw up.
If I ever reworked these notes I’m sending to you regularly, of course I’ll take out that shameful fumbling with the leg. That stays between us, my good friend, you’ll understand that. But that would be a bit of a shame because I’d be leaving out an opportunity to exploit the affair as a striking metaphor for that misunderstanding we call love. You love a woman with the passion of a man who, against his better judgment, decides to believe in a forever—which, once you’ve realized that she only exists in your fantasies, is yet again surprisingly brief—upon which you dump her; and when you think back later to that umpteenth best time of your life and re-read the diary in which your sensitive caresses reverberate in the blistering blindness of your delusions, a smell of decay rises up that almost or actually does make you throw up at your own naive romanticism. Something like that. I’d put it less crudely so as not to scare off too many readers. And I’d invent an affair to breathe life into the metaphor. For example, I’d take a character like myself, too often disappointed and, more often than that, too disappointing in love to still believe in fairy tales, a cynic and an avowed bachelor who only ever has meaningless one-night stands these days, and not even that often, and put him in a position like mine: an immigrant in a new, sunny country; and against his wishes and against his better judgment, I’d let him fall completely, utterly, hopelessly in love again with a sizzling southern woman, the most beautiful girl in the city. And then of course I’d have it all go wrong. Something to do with cultural differences. Something about a fundamental lack of understanding. Something about his fantasies being quite different from hers. So that his deeply engrained cynicism is once again painfully justified, and when he looks in the mirror after that he feels sick. And then the metaphor of the leg. That might work, don’t you think?
But no. It was a pity, but hey. I washed the outside of the garbage bag with a sponge scourer. The leg inside felt disgustingly soft. It was decaying. All of a sudden I could no longer take it. I had to get rid of it as quickly as possible. I decided washing would no longer be necessary if I just threw the bag in the water. Somewhere far away. And of course not in the sea. I wasn’t that stupid. The package would be politely returned to sender by the languid summer waves. I needed fast flowing water. I needed the river. I walked toward the Bisagno.
17.
There wasn’t much water in the Bisagno. It was summer. The river, which can swell in the autumn to present a serious threat to the area around Brignole Station, had shrunk to an impotent trickle in a bed of dried-up rocks. Traffic raced along behind me along Via Bobbio. I saw the Marassi football stadium in the distance. Behind it was the prison, and behind that the graveyard.
There I stood with a garbage bag containing a rotting woman’s leg. Yep. Well done, Leonardo. It would take an Olympian throw to even reach the water. A police car with siren and flashing light raced past. I could go to the bridge. And then I could drop it from the middle…Do you believe this yourself? The package would get stuck in a stupid little bush at the second bend, if it didn’t immediately get stranded on the stones. And then what? Climb down. I could picture the whole thing. Mr. Poet descending corpulently from the embankment to pick up a garbage bag from the riverbed. And what do you think you’re doing, Sir? Do the contents of said garbage bag look familiar to you? And might you find it a good idea to accompany us to the nearby station so you can explain in peace and quiet and greater detail what exactly we’re dealing with here? Or words to that effect. Or not to that effect at all, because unlike the dust-busting brigade in my homeland whose daily work involves getting cats out of trees, the Italian carabinieri are an army that have been fighting organized crime for decades. Blind eyes are sometimes turned in their prison cells. They know how to get a person to confess. They have plenty of experience.
I had to go to the sea. Nervi. High cliffs. No beach. I should weigh down the bag with stones, but I didn’t want to open it another time and smell what I never wanted to smell again. I should have put another bag around it and put the stones in there. But there was no way I was going home again. I had to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Maybe I could try to throw stones onto it. Or something like that.
I took the train from Brignole Station. It stopped at Sturla, Quarto, and Quinto before it reached Nervi. It seemed to take forever. Commuters wrinkled their noses. Yes, I’m sorry, I’m aware of it. I’m sitting here with a rotting leg in my bag. And as a matter of fact, everything you have in your briefcase is probably much worse. I don’t even want to know. No, I really don’t.
Nervi’s station is on the seafront. By now, I’d really had it up to here with the whole business, so much so that I couldn’t summon up the energy to look for a special, secret, well-chosen place and just dumped the bag into the sea from the platform. The waves were on my side. Pure luck. The bag floated away. There were black clouds above the mountains on the other side of the city. Forest fires. A yellow fire-fighting plane maneuvered above the bay. Tomorrow was going to be hot again. I used the same ticket to take the train home.
18.
Sunday had descended upon Genoa. The city lay like a woman with a bad cold who’d decided to spend the day in bed. The pillows were damp, the bottom sheet damp, the duvet twisted in its cover, but she didn’t have the strength to change the sheets or make the bed. Bright sun shone through the window onto her snotty face. She turned over and closed her eyes. Yesterday’s dirty dishes were still piled up on the counter. Her risky evening dress lay in a corner of the room. She wouldn’t be swishing and swirling before the hungry eyes of the night this evening. She reached with a sigh for the half-empty packet of cigarettes on the bedside table and the lighter. After two drags, she extinguished the cigarette on the saucer under the cup of her now-lukewarm tea. Everything tasted funny today. It was hot, unbearably hot. She kicked the duvet half onto the floor and fell asleep. She didn’t dream about anything in particular. She dreamed gray, lingering dreams like a boring, tacky film, and would remember nothing of them. When she awoke it was the evening. But she didn’t feel better.
I shuffled through the empty streets of my new city. The shutters had been lowered in all the alleyways. The hawkers’ raucous arias were nowhere to be heard, and nowhere to be heard was the fierce barking or scornful throat-clearing of life. Even the beggars had taken the day off. Scattered about were a few bars that were reluctantly a little bit open, yawning behind