then if you, you know…”
“I’ll be finished early tomorrow.”
“For me, tomorrow’s…I mean…”
“Pick me up here. We’ll go for an aperitif. You can pick a nice place for us. You know Genoa better than I do.”
That night I couldn’t sleep. I’d picked a special place long ago. Walking distance from the sea. A kind of pier in the harbor with a view of La Lanterna and the big ships sailing far away to fairytale destinations like the coast of North Africa, where a purple sunset will be sent back in return. Sorry, I was lying there quite romantically awake. And I could actually see her standing before me in her white dress. While I fully understood that everything was just on the point of beginning…Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, for heaven’s sake. I still didn’t know her name. But we had a date and that was the most important thing.
When I went to pick her up at the Bar of Mirrors the next day, she’d already gotten changed. This was quite an understatement in her case. She’d swapped her waitressing uniform for…for practically nothing. Two boots and then a long stretch of nothing. A kind of short frayed denim skirt. And I can’t even remember what she was wearing on top, perhaps because I didn’t dare look. She was playing the game. She was playing the game with verve.
You have to change your life, is what I thought when I saw her like that. And I realized that that was exactly what I was doing. We watched the sun set that evening. It cost me an arm and a leg because in the special place I’d chosen they know better than anyone that they’re a special place that is chosen, at great cost, to make an impression with their free sunset. We should talk sometime, too—about money. But not now.
And when the moment came that she had to go home, I asked whether perhaps she’d like to go for a bite somewhere. To my astonishment, she said, “We’ll go to the Mandragola. Have you ever been there?”
And when, many hours later, I walked her to her scooter, she said we’d see each other again very soon and kissed my cheek. I finally dared ask.
“What’s your name?”
And she told me her name.
29.
That night I lay awake, even awaker than before, if you can say that. My dreams were keeping me awake. The footage of the evening played a hundred times over in my mind, and it seemed like a film. Everything had happened exactly as it happens in films. I couldn’t find a single fault. We had talked. We’d had long, pleasant conversations about wonderful things. We’d looked into each other’s eyes. Not a cliché had been eschewed. We’d even had recourse to a sunset. And I seemed to remember a soundtrack of sloppy film music with softly swelling violins timed to her slow gestures and her subtle, precise curves. I ran my fingers along her leggy youthfulness in lengthy fantasies and felt the afterglow of her kiss on my cheek like the crimson tinge of a sacred seal.
And we had looked into each other’s eyes. Or did I already say that? I could repeat it a hundred times, as that night, dreaming with my eyes open, I gazed a hundred times into her eyes. And there, through the magnifying glass of her dusky, self-assured gaze, I found myself in a different world, where nothing was sure anymore and everything tottered. Under the gentle force of those eyes, I would deny myself three times before the cock crowed without a second thought. In those eyes, I’d get so drunk without drinking that I’d feel the billowing morass under the crust of civilization that was the gray granite pavement. If I stood up, I’d be weak at the knees. But I didn’t stand up—I swam like any person not able or willing to sleep, and finding it ever harder to separate dreams from reality.
Take me to the underground river with the flaming torches in the medieval cellars of that next-door café and torture me, please, torture me, because nothing can cause greater and sweeter pain than your towering legs of sorrow in your prettiest torture skirt as you look at me with an expression that singes me, gives me hope, and spurns me all at once, and which burns all my hopes and dreams down to a single plea for this to go on. As I re-dreamed the evening in my rickety IKEA bed in my apartment on Vico Alabardieri, I had more and more difficulty believing that this evening had really taken place. The only thing that could convince me that it really had was the fact that the fantasy had been more wonderful than anything I could have imagined. I’d been on a date with the most beautiful girl in Genoa. Just those words: a date. I’d written them down before I’d thought about it. I don’t think I’d ever written those words down before with all their connotations of a neatly orchestrated evening from an aperitif by a sparkling crystal sea to a kiss on the cheek after midnight. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a date with anyone before. Sure, I’ve sat in a pub with a woman on occasion. But that wasn’t a date. That was just boozing and then tumbling into bed together afterward. Or not. But seeking out a romantic place for a girl, somewhere you’d never go to on your own, and making a particular effort to make it a special evening for her—that wouldn’t even occur to me in my home country. But I know how Italian girls think. In my new home, I was changing from a blunt Dutchman into a suave Casanova who could even organize sunsets. One who is attentive enough to even think of doing it. And this transformation was due to her. The most beautiful girl in Genoa had bestowed upon me a full evening—long with her full and uncensored presence. Not bad for an immigrant. And when we’d said goodbye at her scooter, she’d even said we’d see each other again soon. And she’d told me her name.
To cut a long story short, what I wanted to say was that I think your friend is in love. I think I know it for sure. And if earlier I might have jokingly written or suggested that I was in love, I was only joking. Now it’s real. Now it’s finally real. And that’s what was missing. That’s what I’d been searching for all that time. Instead of losing myself passionately in my new life, the first contours of a legitimate reason for me to settle here with passion were finally beginning to take shape. Anyone opting for a new life might find the new life not new enough. This is exactly the adventure I needed because it affected me in a new way.
I know, my friend, the way I’m expressing myself is a little muddled. Or maybe “tentative” is a better word. But in any case, this is precisely the main reason I left my fatherland. Not because anything there drove me away, but because to me the story was old and stale. I needed this so that I could invent myself in a new life. Emigrating is like writing a new novel whose plot you don’t yet know—not its ending, nor the characters who will prove crucial to how the story continues. That’s why everything I write has something tentative about it.
But now that I’ve gotten to know the decor and feel at home, the curtains can go up on the opera. Everything is just beginning. Everything is just on the brink of beginning.
30.
There are two shops on the ground floor of Palazzo Agostino e Benedetto Viale opposite the Bar of Mirrors on Salita Pollaiuoli. On the right at 74 rosso, Laura Sciunnach’s jewelry shop, and on the left, at 72 and 70 rosso, in a property twice the size, a lady’s fashion shop called Chris & Paule. Both are specialist shops in the sense that almost no one ever goes in them. Both look nice with well tended window displays and tasteful window boxes on the wall. These are the things that attract the customers who do flutter into them, without the intent to actually purchase anything. Set against this is the fact that the products in both shops are exclusive and that one or two customers a day are sufficient to keep the business going. The staffing costs are low. Both shops can be easily kept open from early morning ’til late at night by a single store manager; to the right, Bibi; to the left, a beautiful and sad lady of a certain age. They are what I wanted to talk about.
There are some rifts in Genoa that can never be bridged. In the labyrinth alone, there’s an invisible, electrically charged curtain at the level of Via Luccoli separating the Molo quarter
