that. It was too rounded to be a beam. It felt strange, and a bit disgusting, too. I tried to use the light of my mobile phone as a torch, but it was too weak. I was almost home. I decided to push the thing behind the builders’ dumpsters and come back the next day to examine it. I was curious. I really wanted to know what it was.
2.
Prostitutes are for lunch. They appear around eleven or half past eleven. They hang around in the labyrinth of alleyways in the sloping triangle between Via Garibaldi, Via San Luca, and Via Luccoli, on either side of the Via della Maddalena, in small dark streets with poetic names like Vico della Rosa, Vico dei Angeli, and Vico ai Quattro Canti di San Francisco. In these alleys the sun doesn’t even shine at midday. They lean there casually against doorposts or sit in clusters on the street. They say things like “amore” to me. They say that they love me and they want me to come with them. They say they want to run their fingers through my hair. They are black. They are blacker than the anthracite shadows in this city’s entrails. They give off the smell of night in the afternoon. They stand there on haughty, towering legs, a flickering glimmer of arrogance in their eyes. They sink their white teeth into men’s pale white flesh. I don’t know how I’d ever get out alive. Civil servants with leather briefcases dart away skittishly.
Later I see them again in the Galleria Mazzini: Genoa’s magistrates in their shirtsleeves, dark blue jackets slung across their shoulders, their calf-leather briefcases filled with the few documents of any real importance in their sole charge. They like to walk on the marble floor, past the antiques on display, enjoying the lofty reverberations of their footsteps under the crystalline roof. Griffins with the Genoese coat of arms on their chests support the chandeliers, their beaks twisted with arrogance. If you walk through the Galleria from the Piazza Corvetto, you come out at the Opera. Where else?
I walked toward the sea. In the distance, a yellow airplane glided over the waves and scooped up water. There were forest fires in the mountains. I know people who can tell tomorrow’s weather from the height at which the swallows soar. But the low flight of a fire plane is the most reliable indication of a blistering summer.
I’ve bought myself a new wardrobe so that I can slip into this elegant new world a new man. A couple of Italian summer suits, tailored shirts, an elegant pair of shoes, as soft as butter but as sharp as a knife, and a real panama hat. It cost me a fortune, but I considered it a necessary investment to give my assimilation a boost.
That evening, I spoke to Rashid. He sells roses. I usually bump into him a couple of times a night. I offered him a drink. He came to sit with me for a while. He was from Casablanca, he said, an engineer who specialized in air-conditioning and refrigeration. In Casablanca, he has a large house but no money. That’s why he came to Genoa, but he can’t get a job because he doesn’t speak Italian. During the day, he tries to learn Italian from YouTube videos. In the evenings, he sells roses. Every evening he does the rounds of all the terraces to Nervi. Then he walks back. To Nervi and back is twenty-four kilometers. He lives with eleven other Moroccans in a two-room apartment. “Of course there are rats, but luckily they aren’t that big. All Moroccans think you can get rich without even trying in Europe. Of course they won’t go back until they’ve saved enough to rent a Mercedes for a fortnight and put on a show that they’ve become spectacularly rich and successful in Europe. It’s a fairy tale that gets better with every retelling. But I’ve seen the reality, Ilja. I’ve seen the reality.”
When I walked home, the flag was fluttering high on top of the Palazzo Ducale’s towers. It wasn’t the European flag, nor the Italian flag. It was a red cross on a white background: the Genoese flag. La Superba. Above the harbor and in the distance, above the black mountains of Liguria, I heard the griffins screeching.
And then it came back to me. The previous night I’d stumbled over an object in the dark on the Vico Vegetti. And I’d hidden the object behind a garbage can. Now the streetlights were working again and I was actually quite curious.
But the thing wasn’t there anymore. There was all kinds of stuff near the garbage cans down on the corner of the Piazza San Bernardo, but nothing you could stumble over. Well, perhaps it wasn’t that important. Besides, I realized that showing so much interest in garbage might look a bit funny to the few passersby. In any case, it wasn’t the image I wanted to adopt as a proud, brand-new immigrant to the city. I went home.
But a little higher up in the alleyway, near the scaffolding, there was a dumpster full of builders’ waste. I remembered clinging onto the scaffolding in the pitch dark when the power cut out. On the off chance, I looked to see whether the thing might be there. At first I didn’t see it, but then I did. I looked back over my shoulder to see if anyone was looking, picked it up, and got the fright of my life.
It was a leg—a woman’s leg. Unmistakably a woman’s leg. And when it had been in the right context, it had been attractive—slender and long, perfectly proportioned. It was no longer wearing a shoe, but it still had on a stocking, the long, old-fashioned kind that only models on the Internet still wore. To cut to the chase, there I was, in the middle of the night, in my new foreign city holding an amputated female leg, and, all things considered, this didn’t seem to me the ideal start to my new life. Maybe I should call the police. But maybe I’d better not. I put the leg back and went off to bed.
But later I awoke with a start, bathed in sweat. How could I have been so stupid? Of course I could tell myself that I had my own reasons—which for that matter many would have found understandable—for not wanting to have anything to do with a chopped-off woman’s leg I’d accidentally discovered in a public place—but I’d stood there holding it in my hands. What I’m saying is I’d stood there groping it twice with my callow, canicular paws. Hadn’t I ever heard of fingerprints? Or DNA evidence? And when the leg attracted the attention of the carabinieri, which sooner or later it was likely to do, would they carelessly toss it to one side as yet another sawn-off woman’s leg found in the alleyways, or wouldn’t they possibly be curious as to whom it had belonged to, who had amputated it, and whether this had happened with the approval of its rightful owner? And wouldn’t they, once that curiosity had taken root, carry out a simple search for clues? And wasn’t an investigation of the neighborhood then quite an obvious next step? Wake up, you dope.
But I no longer needed to tell myself that. I was already wide awake. More than that, I was already getting dressed. It was still nighttime, dark, no one about. I had to act quickly. The leg was still there. I didn’t have any kind of detailed plan, but removing the corpus delicti from the public arena seemed a sensible place to start. I took it home with me and leaned it against the back of the IKEA wardrobe in my bedroom.
3.
I want to be part of this world. When I woke up, I heard the city starting to chew the day between her ancient, rotten teeth. In different parts of the neighborhood, her crumbling ivories were being drilled. Neighbors swore at each other through open windows. On the wall of the palazzo my bedroom looked out on, someone had written that all smiles are mysterious. Someone else had written that he thinks the Genoa football club is better than the Sampdoria football club, but in terms much more explicit than that. Someone else had written that he loved a girl named Diana and that to him she was a dream become reality. Later on, he or somebody else had crossed out the confession. There was garbage on the street. Pigeons pecked around in their own shit.
Today ships will arrive with Dutch, German, and Danish tourists on their way back from Sardinia and Corsica. They arrive dozens of times a day, and the tourists cautiously and reluctantly lose themselves a bit inside the labyrinth for an afternoon. They seldom dare venture much further than the alleys a few meters from the Via San Lorenzo. Others walk along the Via Garibaldi to the Palazzo Rosso and the Palazzo Bianco, oblivious to the dark jungle lying at their feet.
I like tourists. I can watch them and follow them for hours. They are touching in their tired attempts to make something
