Free La Superba by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer Page A

delle Erbe. The one with the red tables. I often went there since I knew what it was called. But there was something odd about her. I saw her too often during the day, and too often on her own for an Italian girl of her age, especially for an Italian girl that went about dressed in a suggestive top, deeply cut, with an open back, no sleeves, and shorts. She had lovely legs and wore high heels. She wore makeup, but it was subtle and tasteful. Almost every afternoon she sat on her own at a table in the Bar of Mirrors, studying. She came from Sardinia and was studying education in Genoa. She’d been here two years. Sometimes I saw her with Don, an emeritus professor of English language and literature in his seventies who had been living in a hotel room for twenty years with a view of the seven bars on the Piazza delle Erbe. He had a Union Jack hanging out of his window, didn’t speak any Italian, and survived on a sole diet of gin and tonic. “ Capuccino senza schiuma ,” as he called it. But I hadn’t seen him for a few days now, and she was sitting on her own in the Bar of Mirrors, and she came outside to smoke, and because there weren’t any free tables on the terrace, I invited her to join me at mine.
    â€œThat’s what you say.”
    â€œIt’s true. I was sitting at this table yesterday, too, and there were other people sitting here, people I didn’t know, and they were talking about you. About you. They were wondering who you were and what you were doing here.”
    She was attracted to older intellectuals. That must be her problem. You saw it every evening on Italian TV. It didn’t matterwhich program you watched. Whether it was infomercials, which it mostly was, or a talk show, or a quiz, or a sports program, there was always a light blue background with a handful of young, pretty, stupid girls in bikinis and a single older intellectual, sweating in his suit, making jokes about the girls—only they were too thick to understand them: a golden formula, I give you that. The man uses a few subjunctives, one of the girls doesn’t get it and says something ungrammatical, the audience screams, and the girl has to take off her bikini top as punishment, causing the intellectual of the moment to make another cutting remark, causing the audience to scream again.
    All of Italy is made like that. It’s the man’s job to make cutting remarks and the woman’s job to take her top off afterward. In any case, the gender roles are clear. You know who’s who. That’s the way the Church likes it. A man shouldn’t suddenly turn out to be a woman or vice versa. I wondered what it would be like to take off Cinzia’s top.
    â€œThat’s what I like about you. I really appreciate that. You are the first—no, second—man I’ve met who hadn’t immediately wanted to take off my top after we’ve exchanged just a couple of words.”
    â€œMaybe that’s because I’m not Italian.” I smiled in a very mysterious, intellectual manner.
    â€œMaybe.” She fiddled with her top a little.
    â€œI always find Italian men quite—how do you say it in Italian—quite expressive.”
    â€œWomen too,” she said.
    20.
    Before she left, Cinzia gave me a mission: I had to find the Mandragola. I was charmed by the medieval allure of the quest, and I wanted to ask her whether I could wear the silken handkerchief embroidered with her initials beneath my shining breastplate during my long, long journey to traverse sevenfold mountains of sevenfold rivers, and sevenfold woods. I would count upon her snow-white handkerchief to protect me from griffins and seas of fire, witches and dragons that drenched themselves in the dripping blood of druids.
    The Mandragola is a legendary flower which grows in just one place and blooms only once in a hundred years. The magic scent of her blossom could save mankind. “It’s a bar. More like a