La Superba. Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

fact that the products in both shops are exclusive and that one or two customers a day are sufficient to keep the business going. The staffing costs are low. Both shops can be easily kept open from early morning ’til late at night by a single store manager; to the right, Bibi; to the left, a beautiful and sad lady of a certain age. They are what I wanted to talk about.

      There are some rifts in Genoa that can never be bridged. In the labyrinth alone, there’s an invisible, electrically charged curtain at the level of Via Luccoli separating the Molo quarter from the Maddalena quarter. Tourists aren’t aware of it and I wasn’t, either, at first, but the force field gains intensity the longer I’m here. It exists in that special gaze of the signora as I tell her that I had coffee on the other side, in Via del Campo or on Piazza Lavagna. I know every rose seller and every busker in Molo—they don’t venture into Maddalena, just as its beggars don’t dare venture into Molo. The girls there are different, the dogs bigger. Thugs and whores and the old, flaking transvestites from the Vico della Croce Binaci, the middle-aged men with beer bellies and fishnets with two packets of cotton wool in their bras—they all live in Maddalena.

      In the same way, there are two football clubs: Genoa and Sampdoria. One is the best club, the other always wins. As the oldest football club in Italy, one of them fosters tradition, the other has the money. They share a stadium in Marassi and when one is playing home, the other plays away. Their supporters never meet, except at the derby. And everyone in Genoa supports one of the two teams, including the women and children. They don’t have to wear the club’s colors. You can tell from a person’s nose whether they are familiar with the depths of suffering or whether they’ve plumped for success.

      Nor will you ever be able to close the gap between the inhabitants of the labyrinth and the hundreds of thousands of others happy enough to call themselves Genoese—those who occasionally travel in cars or on Vespas to the historic center from their luxurious lives in outlying apartments with sea views ten or twelve kilometers away in Quinto or Nervi so they can poke around in cute little shops like Laura Sciunnach’s or Chris & Paule and carry on like it’s their city—while just twenty meters beyond their shops they’d be hopelessly lost. The store managers come from outside, too. They arrive every morning with a scooter helmet dangling from their wrists and every night, carrying the same helmet, they go back to their sad, ordered lives in the flats of San Fruttuoso, Marassi, or Castelletto without knowing about the rats, the whores, the old transvestites with their beer bellies, and the foul-mouthed fishmongers around the corner.

      Bibi and the beautiful, sad lady traveled in like this in the morning, arriving around nine thirty. Bibi was usually the first. He’d raise the security shutters. He’d put two of the three flowerpots on the pavement outside and then rummage around in his shop. The third flowerpot is kept inside the clothes shop at night and is put out by the beautiful, sad lady. She waters all three of the plants, cuts off the dead leaves, and carefully puts the three pots in the window box. Then she goes back inside.

      At that moment, Bibi comes outside to hang up the tin bucket on the nail in the wall between the two door openings. The bucket functions as a communal ashtray. He inaugurates it by leaning indifferently, not to say expressionlessly, against the doorpost smoking a cigarette. When he’s done, the beautiful, sad lady smokes a cigarette in her door opening. Usually she wears boots, although I don’t know why it’s of interest to tell you that. She throws her stub in the bucket.

      As I said, there aren’t many customers. The entire day—until long after the candles have been put out on the tables in the Bar of Mirrors and the Prosecco twinkles between conversations in the trapeze of art, poetry, and politics—they will smoke lots and lots of cigarettes in their respective door openings—Bibi on the right at 74 rosso, her on the left at 72 and 70 rosso. They’ll carefully aim all of their stubs into the bucket. The yellow flowers in the three flowerpots will look lovely. They won’t talk to each other, not because they don’t like each other, on the contrary, but because there isn’t much to say without candlelit Prosecco. Various girls will call on Bibi; they won’t want to buy bracelets or rings, but each of them believes she is special to him. He will look down on them with scorn. He will hardly speak to them, either. They’ll slink off and you can count on them returning in boots with even higher heels.

      Very rarely, they’ll almost touch, but they don’t realize it—I’m the only person who can see it. From the terrace. Sometimes Bibi will reach for a catalogue on the right of his counter at precisely the same moment she is rearranging the skirt suits on the racks to the left of the register. There’s nothing more than an old medieval wall, twenty centimeters thick, between their two hands.

      They close at seven thirty. The yellow flowers go back inside, two pots in his shop, one in hers. The last thing Bibi does is to get down the tin bucket from the hook. She rolls down the shutters and padlocks them to the marble shop front. She closes the cast iron fence and secures it with a chain lock. Then they exchange a few words. He says “Ciao.” She asks whether he might like to drink a Prosecco on the terrace. He says he’s tired. Then they both return to their own flats with a scooter helmet dangling from their wrists—his with a Sampdoria sticker, hers sprayed in the tragic red and blue of Genoa.

      31.

      I could barely repress the urge to tell all my new Genoese friends about my fairy-tale evening. But it turned out to be entirely unnecessary. Everyone knew about it already. I flattered myself with the thought that she’d gone around telling everyone but realized at the same time I shouldn’t entertain any illusions, because everyone always knows everything already in Centro Storico. “Entertain no illusions,” she said. “You know I had my bathroom redone recently? The work was done by two carabinieri wanting to earn a bit of cash on the side. The day before yesterday I met them in a bar around the corner from my house to pay them. ‘You’ve been hanging out with that foreign poet a lot recently,’ one of them said. And I don’t even live anywhere around here.”

      “Why are you looking at me like that?”

      “Like what?”

      “Like that.”

      She was silent.

      “Aren’t you happy I completed your quest and found the Mandragola?”