Free La Superba by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

Rashid too. I don’t feel like pre-digesting it for you. It’s Sunday. I’m alone.
    Out of boredom, I try to remember the Sundays of my childhood. They had to do with paving stones and ants that had taken up residence in the strips of sand between the paving stones without a permit. I considered that illegal occupancy and tried to chase them away with spit and sticks and, when that didn’t help, warmyellow piss. In the olden days, it was always hot on Sundays.
    In Genoa, the pavements were as gray and solid as the walls of her palazzi. Big blocks of sagging stone. You’d need three men to lift one of those boulders and set it straight. The cracks between them were the city’s ashtrays. There wasn’t a single ant that would dare start a family here. In many places, there was barely enough space between the stones for a rat’s nest. In Genoa’s glory years, from above, it must have looked like a stone floor of gray palaces with cracks and crannies between them where rats could come and go as they pleased. In their glory years, God tried to fight them with spit and sticks and, when that didn’t help, warm yellow piss. The city still looks like shit. But God is no longer who he used to be and he’s given up. La Superba beat God by blocking his view of the alleyways. Every kind of dirt and decadence can run rampant in the cracks and cavities of this city. There are even transvestites here, it seems. I haven’t found them yet. I mean, I haven’t run into any yet.
    I’d invented a game, and also come up with an official name for it. You’re either a celebrated writer or you aren’t. It’s called “girl surfing.” The rules are simple. You pick out a random girl as she walks by and start to follow her. If you tend to go on aimless walks anyway, you might as well walk after a random girl. As you follow her, you fantasize about her. About what she’s like up close and under all those clothes, about how she’d sigh and reach for a half-empty packet of cigarettes on your bedside table. You keep on doing this until you see a prettier girl. Then you swap and carry on following her until you see an even prettier girl. The game becomes more and more satisfying the longer you play it.And in the meantime you get to know the city. To add a didactic element to the game, I invented the extra rule that I had to fantasize in Italian. I would learn the most by doing so out loud, but I realized I’d better be careful with that. I caught a fantastic wave during the week, one of the best since I arrived in Genoa. She was small and olive-colored with a nonchalant miniskirt and racy boots. I got to follow her all the way from Maddalena, past Molo, to Portoria. My fantasies became ever more colorful and explicit. I was able to express them beautifully in Italian. But at a certain point, I was standing close to her in a herd of commuters waiting for a traffic light to turn green, and I’d forgotten that, for autodidactic reasons, I was speaking out loud. I decided to switch then, even though my fantasies at that very moment were about what I would do when she reached the heavy door to her house and rammed the big key with conviction and force into her lock.
    Not much surfing to be done today. Even for the waves it was Sunday. Here and there, a tired tourist in Bermuda shorts was encouragingly patted on her fat rolls by the skinny man of the moment carrying the map and the rucksack containing important things firmly strapped to his back. “Where are our international travel insurance papers? Have you seen our international travel insurance papers?” And she didn’t even recognize me. I was alone.
    What had I achieved up to now?
    19.
    â€œYou’ve made a big impression in Centro Storico. Everyone knows you.”
    Her name was Cinzia. She was a young, pretty girl with a long face. I recognized her as the waitress from Caffè Letterario on Piazza