his arm, running to catch the last bus. But from time to time I give him a coin. He’s a street artist. He amuses me.
“I’m sorry, Salvatore. I don’t have any change today.”
He gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry, maestro. You’re my customer. You can pay me tomorrow instead.”
It’s two hundred meters from Via del Campo to Africa. I walked through the Porta dei Vacca, crossed the road, and was all of a sudden in the Pré. Hundreds of Internet cafés and call shops of barely a door’s width across were packed with Kenyans and Senegalese. In the meantime, their wives were earning the money selling tinkling gilt items on the street—phone cases, paper handkerchiefs, CDs, rubber plungers, and elephants hand-carved from tropical hardwood. They sat there majestically spread in traditional robes. Numerous greengrocers had squeezed themselves in between the phone centers like narrow, man-sized caverns. They had Arabic or Swahili lettering and price lists. And in some mysterious way, there was still space left for hairdresser’s shops specializing in African hair, which is totally different from other hair. You can get your frizzy hair straightened and then buy Afro wigs in all the colors the Maker didn’t dare think of. I suspect you could also get a spell cast on your husband’s mistress in there. Why else would they be so full of excited, shabby-looking black women, not having anything hairdresser-y done to them? In a corner behind the dryer hoods, the village elders gathered to discuss the situation that had arisen and the measures to be taken. Dotted around the place were a few people having their hair cut. Muslim brothers strolled sternly along the street. Prostitutes were conspicuously inconspicuous in the alleyways. Further down at the seafront, fishermen returned to sell their catch and mend their nets. High up on Via Balbi, tourists and Interrailers with rucksacks and bottles of Fanta were emerging from Palazzo Principe’s train station to make their way bravely to their hotels.
I was drunk on the city, crazy and confused and much too happy for the circumstances. Or much too depressed. It changed by the minute. Everything spun around me with a commotion of noise, stench, and impressions that were poured out faster than I could swallow them. The streets were too slanted, too steep, too twisted, too crooked, and too uneven. I felt like I was about to fall.
14.
Rashid smiled when he saw me. But he looked terrible. He had lost weight. His eyes looked tired. It was relatively late in the evening, and he was still carting around an impressive number of roses. It would be difficult to sell them all before closing time.
“How’s business?”
He responded with a helpless smile. I invited him to join me, and ordered a small beer for him. He put his bucket of roses down on the ground. He sighed.
“Why did you come here, Ilja?”
I took a sip of my Negroni and pondered the question.
“You come from the north, Ilja. There’s so much rain there the fields are green and the roses flower on their bushes for free. There’s free money for everyone who goes to the counter. You’re given a clean house in a safe neighborhood bordered by grassy pastures and there are windmills, cheese farms, and pancake restaurants, and after a while you can pick up your Mercedes from Social Services. Am I right or am I right?”
I smiled.
“Well?”
I ordered another Negroni for myself and a small beer for him.
“You’re an intelligent man, Rashid, you know you’re talking bullshit.”
“That’s not what they think in Africa.”
A beggar came to ask for money. I automatically waved him off. Rashid spat in his face.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Why did you come here, Ilja?”
“And you?”
“I asked you first.”
“I came here to write a book.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Why shouldn’t that be an answer?”
“Because you don’t listen to a woman until you’ve looked her in the eye.”
“Is that a well-known Arabic saying then?”
“No, I made it up myself.”
“And what do you mean by it?”
“That you don’t start writing about something until you’re already fascinated by it, which implies that you already know it, and so you came here for other reasons at the start, and after that you decided to write a book about the city to give yourself an alibi.”
“Do you really think that, Rashid?”
“Yes, I really do.”
“You’re too intelligent to be selling roses.”
“I know that.”
15.
“I’ll tell you the truth, Rashid. That northern paradise of yours, where the grass is always green because it’s always raining, that’s where I was born and where I spent my whole life. In a way, it really is a paradise. It’s a peaceful, multicolored country. The trains are blue and yellow and run on time through the tulip fields. The tax forms are blue or pink and easy to fill in. If you have to pay something, you don’t have to try to be clever or come up with a plan because you won’t get out of paying it, and when you get a rebate, you get it back that very same month. Blonde girls spray their stolen bikes pink. Policemen smile. They tell you to clip on a red backlight next time and hand out stickers against racism. The waste is separated and goes in containers of various bright colors. There are special offers at the supermarket that everyone can take advantage of and if you take advantage enough, they give you free little multicolored fluffy creatures that you can stick to your dashboard with their sticky feet, or to your windowsill, or wherever you want. But you know what the thing is, Rashid?”
“What?”
“Exactly that.”
I ordered myself another Negroni and a small beer for him. We clinked glasses. “To looking women in the eye, then.”
“But what exactly?”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t finish your story.”
“In a way, I did. In a way, I’ve said everything, Rashid. In my homeland, I had it easy all my life and lived well. But it was too easy and too good. I knew the way from my house to the station like the back of my hand, from the supermarket to my house and from one bar to the other. Do you have that expression in Arabic too? Like the back of your hand? I fell asleep even before I went to bed, in a manner of speaking, and didn’t even wake up in the meantime. I knew everything already. I knew the story already. And at the end of the day, I’m an artist. I need input. Inspiration is what they call it, but I hate that word. The challenge to wake up in a new city where nothing is obvious and where I have the freedom to reinvent myself anew. The challenge of waking up. Got that?
“Maybe I should apologize for my choice of words. I wouldn’t ever put words like ‘input’ and ‘challenge’ in my writing. I just wanted to say that a comfortable life also has its disadvantages. Comfort is like a lullaby, a drug, an antidepressant that numbs the emotions. You can see it on the faces of the people in my homeland. They have the limp expressionlessness of people who no longer have to fight for anything and aren’t particularly pleased about it because it’s become normal for everything to function perfectly. Or sometimes the sensation takes the form of a kind of unspoken complacency that looks down on the world pityingly from the top of a tall, gangly body with the expression of someone who doesn’t have to have seen everything to fully grasp everything that’s different and automatically consider it inferior. Although there are more poets than tax inspectors, my homeland isn’t a very poetic country.
“Here in Italy nothing goes