Read Online La Superba by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer - Free Book Online Page A

life into the metaphor. For example, I’d take a character like myself, too often disappointed and, more often than that, too disappointing in love to still believe in fairy tales, a cynic and an avowed bachelor who only ever has meaningless one-night stands these days, and not even that often, and put him in a position like mine: an immigrant in a new, sunny country; and against his wishes and against his better judgment, I’d let him fall completely, utterly, hopelessly in love again with a sizzling southern woman, the most beautiful girl in the city. And then of course I’d have it all go wrong. Something to do with cultural differences. Something about a fundamental lack of understanding. Something about his fantasies being quite different from hers. So that his deeply engrained cynicism is once again painfully justified, and when he looks in the mirror after that he feels sick. And then the metaphor of the leg. That might work, don’t you think?
    But no. It was a pity, but hey. I washed the outside of the garbage bag with a sponge scourer. The leg inside felt disgustingly soft. It was decaying. All of a sudden I could no longer take it. I had to get rid of it as quickly as possible. I decided washing would no longer be necessary if I just threw the bag in the water. Somewhere far away. And of course not in the sea. I wasn’t that stupid. The package would be politely returned to sender by the languid summer waves. I needed fast flowing water. I needed the river. I walked toward the Bisagno.
    17.
    There wasn’t much water in the Bisagno. It was summer. The river, which can swell in the autumn to present a serious threat to the area around Brignole Station, had shrunk to an impotent trickle in a bed of dried-up rocks. Traffic raced along behind me along Via Bobbio. I saw the Marassi football stadium in the distance. Behind it was the prison, and behind that the graveyard.
    There I stood with a garbage bag containing a rotting woman’s leg. Yep. Well done, Leonardo. It would take an Olympian throw to even reach the water. A police car with siren and flashing light raced past. I could go to the bridge. And then I could drop it from the middle…Do you believe this yourself? The package would get stuck in a stupid little bush at the second bend, if it didn’t immediately get stranded on the stones. And then what? Climb down. I could picture the whole thing. Mr. Poet descending corpulently from the embankment to pick up a garbage bag from the riverbed. And what do you think you’re doing, Sir? Do the contents of said garbage bag look familiar to you? And might you find it a good idea to accompany us to the nearby station so you can explain in peace and quiet and greater detail what exactly we’re dealing with here? Or words to that effect. Or not to that effect at all, because unlike the dust-busting brigade in my homeland whose daily work involves getting cats out of trees, the Italian carabinieri are an army that have been fighting organized crime for decades. Blind eyes are sometimes turned in their prison cells. They know how to get a person to confess. They have plenty of experience.
    I had to go to the sea. Nervi. High cliffs. No beach. I should weigh down the bag with stones, but I didn’t want to open it another time and smell what I never wanted to smell again. I should have put another bag around it and put the stones in there. But there was no way I was going home again. I had to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Maybe I could try to throw stones onto it. Or something like that.
    I took the train from Brignole Station. It stopped at Sturla, Quarto, and Quinto before it reached Nervi. It seemed to take forever. Commuters wrinkled their noses. Yes, I’m sorry, I’m aware of it. I’m sitting here with a rotting leg in my bag. And as a matter of fact, everything you have in your briefcase is probably much worse. I don’t even want to know. No, I really