me. You’re not like the others.
And after having spewed out all of my so-called wisdom, you’ll also understand how stupid I was. It’s all about the garbage bag, dummy. You can fantasize as much as you like and have a nice shower, but if you go and casually wrap an accommodating, pristine, gray piece of plastic around her leg with your desirous sweaty fingers, you’ll leave impeccable fingerprints behind. She was still there. I carefully lifted her out of the garbage can and brought her back home with me.
13.
The butcher was a redheaded girl. She was wearing a white apron and sky-blue clogs as she pulled up the shutters. The metallic rattle spread like whooping cough through the neighborhood. The hours of the pranzo and siesta were over. The city went about its business, hawking and sighing. A street-cleaning vehicle from the sanitation department drove through the narrow streets with a noisy display of revolving brushes, sprayers, and vacuum cleaners, streets that were impossible to get clean after all those centuries. The vehicle was driven by a woman with a generous head of black curls and a formidable hook nose. Maybe she had an excellent sense of smell and that was why she’d been chosen for the job. She couldn’t get through. A beggar was lying on the street, refusing to get up; of course it was the dirtiest place in the greatest need of a clean. She got out, swearing. She was small, wearing a baggy green uniform. And when the tramp still didn’t react, she gave him a nasty kick. Yelping like a dog, he retreated under an archivolto.
“This is a city of women,” the signora had said to me a few days previously. “You have to understand that.” She’d appeared out of nowhere, as usual, around the San Bernardo in a long elegant dress and with a thin cigarette between her fingers. “A city whose menfolk are always at sea is ruled by women.” I said it was better that way, but she disagreed with me in no uncertain terms.
The cleaning truck carried on, leaving behind a trail of slime made up of half-aspirated, wet trash. A drunk Moroccan smashed a beer bottle. Someone threw a garbage bag onto the street from the fourth floor. At night, the rats have the place to themselves, but they’re not only around at night. This is Fabrizio De André’s street, which he sung about as la cattiva strada, the shit street, Via del Campo. With bright red lipstick and eyes as gray as the street, she spends the entire night standing in the doorway, selling everyone the same rose. Via del Campo is a whore, and if you feel like loving her, all you have to do is take her by the hand.
“Maestro, how are things? Terrible as usual?” It was Salvatore, the one-legged beggar. He’s from Romania, but he’s become welded to this city. Everyone knows him because there’s no escaping him. He knows how to find everybody. He speaks a kind of universal Romance language—a mixture of Romanian, Italian, Spanish, a couple of Rhaeto-Romance dialects, and a handful of Latin words. “One-legged” is the wrong word. He has both his legs, but when he’s begging, he rolls the left leg of his trousers up to his thigh to expose an impressive scar and then he struggles around with a crutch, as though that rolled-up leg no longer worked. I’ve seen him after work in the evening with both his trouser legs down and the crutch under his arm, running to catch the last bus. But from time to time I give him a coin. He’s a street artist. He amuses me.
“I’m sorry, Salvatore. I don’t have any change today.”
He gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry, maestro. You’re my customer. You can pay me tomorrow instead.”
It’s two hundred meters from Via del Campo to Africa. I walked through the Porta dei Vacca, crossed the road, and was all of a sudden in the Pré. Hundreds of Internet cafés and call shops of barely a door’s width across were packed with Kenyans and Senegalese. In the meantime, their wives were earning the money selling tinkling gilt items on the street—phone cases, paper handkerchiefs, CDs, rubber plungers, and elephants hand-carved from tropical hardwood. They sat there majestically spread in traditional robes. Numerous greengrocers had squeezed themselves in between the phone centers like narrow, man-sized caverns. They had Arabic or Swahili lettering and price lists. And in some mysterious way, there was still space left for hairdresser’s shops specializing in African hair, which is totally different from other hair. You can get your frizzy hair straightened and then buy Afro wigs in all the colors the Maker didn’t dare think of. I suspect you could also get a spell cast on your husband’s mistress in there. Why else would they be so full of excited, shabby-looking black women, not having anything hairdresser-y done to them? In a corner behind the dryer hoods, the village elders gathered to discuss the situation that had arisen and the measures to be taken. Dotted around the place were a few people having their hair cut. Muslim brothers strolled sternly along the street. Prostitutes were conspicuously inconspicuous in the alleyways. Further down at the seafront, fishermen returned to sell their catch and mend their nets. High up on Via Balbi, tourists and Interrailers with rucksacks and bottles of Fanta were emerging from Palazzo Principe’s train station to make their way bravely to their hotels.
I was drunk on the city, crazy and confused and much too happy for the circumstances. Or much too depressed. It changed by the minute. Everything spun around me with a commotion of noise, stench, and impressions that were poured out faster than I could swallow them. The streets were too slanted, too steep, too twisted, too crooked, and too uneven. I felt like I was about to fall.
14.
Rashid smiled when he saw me. But he looked terrible. He had lost weight. His eyes looked tired. It was relatively late in the evening, and he was still carting around an impressive number of roses. It would be difficult to sell them all before closing time.
“How’s business?”
He responded with a helpless smile. I invited him to join me, and ordered a small beer for him. He put his bucket of roses down on the ground. He sighed.
“Why did you come here, Ilja?”
I took a sip of my Negroni and pondered the question.
“You come from the north, Ilja. There’s so much rain there the fields are green and the roses flower on their bushes for free. There’s free money for everyone who goes to the counter. You’re given a clean house in a safe neighborhood bordered by grassy pastures and there are windmills, cheese farms, and pancake restaurants, and after a while you can pick up your Mercedes from Social Services. Am I right or am I right?”
I smiled.
“Well?”
I ordered another Negroni for myself and a small beer for him.
“You’re an intelligent man, Rashid, you know you’re talking bullshit.”
“That’s not what they think in Africa.”
A beggar came to ask for money. I automatically waved him off. Rashid spat in his face.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Why did you come here, Ilja?”
“And you?”
“I asked you first.”
“I came here to write a book.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Why shouldn’t that be an answer?”
“Because you don’t listen to a woman until you’ve looked her in the eye.”
“Is that a well-known Arabic saying then?”
“No,
