course I’ll see you again. I bump into the same people all day, even though the labyrinth stretches from Darsena to Foce, from the sea to the mountains, from the harbor to the highway, from Principe Station to Brignole Station. I’ve asked myself how that’s possible. You’d expect a maze to have been built so that people would be out of sight of each other, so they wouldn’t bump into each other all the time—a maze of this size ought to reduce the chances of bumping into the same people to zero. But now I understand that it’s the exact opposite. People can avoid each other in a city of straight lines with clear boulevards and avenues between home and office, office and gym, gym and supermarket, supermarket and home, departure and destination. The person who knows where he’s hurrying doesn’t notice a thing and is no longer observed. In a city of straight lines, people are like electrons in a copper wire—fast, interchangeable, and invisible. The stream can be measured, but individuals cannot be observed with the naked eye. A labyrinth is precisely the place to encounter other people. You can never find the same place twice. But because no one can, everyone wanders around those same alleyways all day. Some spend their whole lives wandering around here. Or longer. I’m sure I’ll see you again, my friend. It’s impossible to find the same piazza twice or walk along the same alleyway twice, unless you are trying not to.
5.
Today I thought about all the different kinds of girls in Genoa.
Some women don’t fit into any category, that’s true. Like the girl in the Bar of Mirrors. She’s made of different fabric than other girls—the same stuff smiles are made of: pathos and summer days. Her mere existence makes me as happy as a small child, and I imagine myself sobbing against her soft shoulders. We’ll leave her aside then. We’re talking about girls, not the rare epiphany of a goddess.
I used to think were two kinds of girls: pretty and ugly. But in light of my most recent research findings, that dichotomy is no longer valid, although I fear the simplicity of the model will always retain its charm.
Of course there are pretty girls. That’s not the problem. You’d like to sketch them carefully with a pencil. You’d like to skate over their smooth undulations with precise fingertips. You’d like to briefly taste the perfect balance of their curves, lines, forms, and volume with a connoisseur’s tongue. Even more than that, you’d like them to take their clothes off and then not to have to do a thing. They might be like a photo you’d be all too happy to download—perfectly suggestive, or explicitly spotlighted.
Girls like that are the way Milo Manara draws them: hieroglyphs of promise. They’re never not posing, though they don’t even need to pose since they already fulfill every standard just standing there. You’d never actually be able to smell them, never be able to tease them by playing with a minuscule roll of fat, nor lick the sour sweat from their armpits, if only because they’re imaginary, just drawn that way. There is something artificially innocent about them, something oo-la-la-ish. Of course they end up in army barracks without their panties, but that’s just because they happened to be kidnapped by soldiers when they were in the middle of undressing. You get that a lot. But they’ll never ring your doorbell without their panties asking if they can give you a handjob in the rain because they’ve never done that before. They’ll never sit on your silver candelabra without further explanation, then lick your table clean before disappearing on home without saying a word.
Recently I got one of those celebrity magazines free with Il Secolo XIX, full of photos of real Manara girls in little more than bikinis. In the accompanying interviews, they say stuff like, “I love men who are honest”; “My daughter is the most important thing in my life”; “I’ll never have sex if Love with a capital L isn’t part of the picture”; and “I’ll always have a special place in my heart for God.” Seriously, just give me the ugly girls then. At least they understand they have to do their best. Or the pretty girls, but then without the interviews, for God’s sake. Or just the bikini-less ones, preferably captured on film.
I saw a tourist girl at San Lorenzo with her tourist boyfriend. He had a camera, she had pink high heels, a yellow handbag, and a scandalous denim miniskirt. They were Russian, you could see that. I checked it for you just to make sure, my friend: they spoke Russian. He wanted to take a picture of her in front of the cathedral. She protested. She wasn’t looking her best today. But when he got ready to take a shot anyway, she put her middle finger to her bottom lip and her other hand to her crotch. They took dozens of photographs like that: next to one of the lions, then the other, in front of the big door, on the steps next to the tower, and so on and so on. She adopted a porno pose for every shot. She wasn’t particularly good-looking, more shameless than refined. She was bored but not so listless to not realize she’d have to do something for a sexy result. I watched her, breathless. There wasn’t a spark of humor or fun in her poses, no fiery lust in her eyes. She bent her body mechanically for the predictable desires of the photographer and all those future browsers who’d click the thumbnails into a cliché of lust. And that was exactly what was so irresistibly sexy.
You’ve also got women with spunk lighting up their eyes in anticipation. In a manner of speaking. They’re usually too young for their age. Lacey nothings frame their gym-fed, well-baked muscles. Someone like that is dry and unpalatable. She dresses like an unwrapped mummy, like that woman of indeterminate age somewhere in her late forties, with short black hair and skirts that get shorter by the day—the one who pays a neighborly visit a couple of times a day, smiling mysteriously, to Laura Sciunnach’s jewelry shop in the Salita Pollaiuoli, across from the Bar of Mirrors, because Bibi with all the tattoos works there, the perfect Don Juan, whose scorn for women causes them to swoon. She’s ugly, but she walks along the street as though she’d inserted two vibrators before closing the door and stepping out onto the street. She never double-locks the door when she comes home drunk at night. She’s like a hungry keyhole through which she wants to be spied. If only somebody would ravish her, for God’s sake. Dripping with lust, she’d report it to the disbelieving carabinieri half her age in their shiny boots, their shiny, shiny boots. And she’s not that ugly, really. I tried to make eye contact with her. I try to make eye contact with her several times a day from the terrace of the Bar of Mirrors.
On the terrace of the Doge Café on Piazza Matteotti, I saw a girl who had painted a girl on herself. She was Cleopatra behind her own death mask. Or maybe she was someone completely different behind Cleopatra’s mask, the only people who know that are the ones who wake up beside her the next morning, rub the sleep from their eyes, full of disbelief, and begin the difficult process of reconstructing the night before in an attempt to figure out the identity of this pale, unknown lady who has so obviously nestled herself between their sheets. And it’s not until she has restored her façade for hours in the bathroom that they remember. Women like that cost money. They don’t just need lotions and potions but designer clothing for every hour of the day, in line with the fashion of the moment, and a lot of shoes, in particular, a lot of shoes. All of those clothes and shoes are only bought to take off again. But to achieve that goal, they have to be expensive, everyone knows that. Each morning she turns herself into the woman she thinks a woman should look like—as she thinks I want her to look. It doesn’t matter whether she knows what I want or not. It’s more important that she does her best to satisfy her image of my image of her.
The worst are fat American women who are under the misapprehension that intelligence is more important than looks. That’s such a stupid concept. They talk about immigration laws in slow, clear English. She was on the terrace of the Doge Café in front of Palazzo Ducale, too, but she was a misunderstanding. With her tits like burst balloons in a comfy summer dress like a pre-war tent, she had no right to talk about any subject whatsoever. She should withdraw to a dark sitting room in Ohio and sit at her computer with shaking fingers and send messages to Internet forums for women with suicidal tendencies under the pseudonym FaTgIrL. She was eligible for a postnatal abortion. Her mere existence was bad enough. The fact she wasn’t ashamed, that she marred, insulted the elegance of Genoa’s, of Liguria’s, of all of Italy’s Piazza Matteotti with her pontifical presence, and the fact
