Translated by Ann Goldstein
It all began right in the middle of that endless season that went down in history as “the Great Summer.” Suddenly, without knowing how, I found myself in Vietnam. I was watching American soldiers fighting and dying in the jungle. Above me helicopters roared amid clouds of napalm. Then I looked up and saw the fan that hung from the ceiling of my room in the Hotel Excelsior.
It was only a dream and I was still in Rome. But it felt like a jungle in the tropics. The fan blades fluttered through the oppressive air of the room without providing any relief. They turned uselessly, like my life.
I was dripping with sweat; I had slept more than eight hours but I was still exhausted. It was an effort to get up. I ate breakfast listening to the same things the radio had been repeating every day for I don’t know how long. The daytime temperature never went below 110 degrees. The health department recommended not going outside before sunset.
I looked out the window as I finished drinking my coffee. It was getting dark, and throngs of foolish Chinese had begun to invade Via Veneto. I observed the rows of red lanterns and the signs crowded with ideograms whose meaning I didn’t know. Another torrid night of hell awaited me in the city of the apocalypse. Hardly the Dolce Vita. Now there was only summer, and Rome had become a world upside down, an enormous Chinatown where the heat forced people to live like vampires, sleeping by day and working by night. I should have left like everyone else when I still had the chance.
I went back to the bedroom and discovered that, just as they say, the worst has no limits. A girl had appeared out of nowhere and was lying motionless in my bed. She was half-naked and lay inert, on her stomach, her legs slightly spread, her arms extended along her sides, palms turned up, her face sunk in the pillow. She certainly looked dead. I hadn’t the slightest idea who she could be; it had been quite a while since I’d been intimate with a woman.
When I tried to turn the girl’s head I made another crazy discovery. Her face seemed to be stuck to the pillow. I tried several times. I finally took her by the hair and pulled her head, pressing the pillow against the bed. Nothing, the face wouldn’t come free. And in continuation of this theme that the worst has no limits, just at that moment someone knocked on the door.
With a corpse in the room it would have been wiser to pretend not to be home. What in the world would I have said if I had found myself facing the police? But I opened it anyway. Something compelled me to. Don’t ask what because I don’t know. Luckily it was Signor Ho, the manager of the hotel.
“I have the bill for the overdue rent,” he said. I glanced at the papers and gasped. He had nearly doubled the rent, holding me responsible for, among other things, the air-conditioning. I protested. The increase was robbery. As for air-conditioning, the system had never worked. Almost nothing worked in that lousy hotel.
“There are new rules now,” said Signor Ho. “Everyone pays for the cool air now. If your system broken, my worker fix it. If you don’t like new rules, you out. If you don’t pay, you out.”
It was pointless to argue, that Chinaman had a head harder than an anvil. Not to mention the business of the dead girl in the bed. I certainly couldn’t risk having him call his lackey in to repair the air-conditioning. So I tore the papers from his hand and told him not to worry, I would take care of everything as soon as possible.
“When is as soon as possible?”
I told him I didn’t know, but before he could reply, I said, “Tomorrow.” Then I slammed the door in his face. I went back to the bedroom with the hope that the corpse had disappeared. Maybe I’d had a hallucination. Unfortunately, the girl was still there. So I lay down on the bed next to her. I realize that lying down next to a dead woman may seem depraved. But I was exhausted from the heat and the stress. I needed to stretch out to get my ideas in order, and that was the only bed available. I spent several minutes staring at the girl’s hair. It was smooth and long. The shiny black made me think she was Chinese or one of the many other Asians who hung out in the neighborhood. Suddenly it moved. The hair, I mean. At first I thought it was the fan. But when it rose, and began to wave in the air like tentacles, I realized that there was something alive in it. The tentacles became an enormous octopus wrapped around the girl’s body. The whole room was now immersed in a blood-red ocean.
The thought that I was still dreaming barely surfaced; fear had gotten the better of me. I would have liked to get up and flee. Go I don’t know where. But I was paralyzed. I don’t mean metaphorically. I couldn’t move in the literal sense of the word. It was terrible being present at such a spectacle while having to remain as still as a statue. Then everything went dark and when I reopened my eyes the girl had disappeared.
There are people who give dreams a lot of weight. They believe all dreams have a meaning. They waste time analyzing them, thinking they’ll discover something or other about themselves or even their future. Nonsense. For me, dreams are only dreams, images that the mind seizes randomly in sleep, like the numbers that blindfolded children pick out of a lottery wheel. This has always been my opinion, at least. And, in fact, that night I got up without attaching too much importance to the strange nightmare I had woken from. I went to the bathroom as if nothing had happened and washed my hands and face. I avoided meeting my gaze in the mirror as I stretched my arm out for the towel. I knew I didn’t look good, I almost never do when I wake up. The deadly heat of the Great Summer didn’t help; it made me seem at least five years older, and, considering that I was no longer a boy, this bugged me.
I tried not to think of the heat or of the years gone by and wasted. I tried not to think at all. It wasn’t difficult; with the weather I had become quite good at emptying my mind. Not that I didn’t have things to think about. Money, for example. I was drowning in debts that I couldn’t pay. Someone else might have gone crazy. Not me. I took bills, requests for payment, injunctions, and all the other papers in which money I didn’t have was claimed from me, and I stuck them on one of those gadgets you used to see in trattorias. They’re called check spindles, I think. Or something like that. They consist of a big metal pin fixed to a wooden base, and you feel an almost sexual pleasure in sticking a bill on them. Don’t think badly of me, but it was like deflowering the economy. For me, there’s never been much difference between the economy and a woman. In the sense that I have never understood either one.
Yet I was very fond of my pin. I kept it in plain sight on the table in front of the window. I still have it, in fact. Only now it’s on the night table. If I spoke in the past tense it’s because I wish I had thrown it away. Things would have gone differently without the pin in the picture. On the other hand, not necessarily. Basically, the fault is not the pin’s but mine and the dream’s. Why in the world did I go around telling it? To Yin, in particular. I knew very well that there’s nothing to joke about with girls like her. And yet … Wait, I’m going too fast. I should begin at the beginning. Yes. But is there really a precise moment at which things begin? Like the Big Bang, so to speak.
I knew a guy years ago. I’ll spare you the details, but I saw him go downhill overnight. Let’s say he went to shit. I was surprised, because he had always seemed to me one of those people who know what they’re doing. I asked him how he’d gotten into such a state, how it had happened. “The way everything happens,” he answered. “Little by little at first. Then all of a sudden.” I wasn’t sure I understood. But now I know. Now it’s clear to me. Little by little at first, then all of a sudden. It’s like the Great Summer. Now it seems normal. The heat was infernal, the Romans had all escaped to the north, and here there were only Chinese and Bedouins. Plus some unlucky jerks like me. If I look at Rome now, it seems as if it was always like that. But when I think back to how this city was before the famous summer, I wonder if maybe I’m crazy. It seems to me that I live in a nightmare. And yet no. It’s all true. It was all true before and it’s all true now.
I remember the beginning of that famous summer very well. I decided to stay in Rome. I liked the deserted city, liked not having to wait in line at the post office or the supermarket. During the day I worked and at night I went to see the films that were shown in Piazza Vittorio. Coming home, I smoked a joint and fuck the rest. I wasn’t rolling in dough but I had a peaceful life, without bumps.
It began to get hot. But really hot. You, too, will remember. Old people died. The newspapers and television said that such a heat wave had never been recorded before. Every day they interviewed some expert who went on and on about climate change, pollution, melting glaciers, and emissions standards. We all nodded our heads yes, but we weren’t really listening. It was something in the future. In less than fifty years there will no longer be annual snowfall even on the highest mountains, said the experts. And what did we care about what would happen in fifty years? The only thing we were interested in was when the heat wave would pass. We waited for the storms of late August.
August passed. Then September passed, and October. Of the storms, no trace. The heat increased. When Christmas came, the temperature hovered around a hundred degrees. Not knowing what to do, people went to the beach. They thought that after New Year’s winter would finally come. Instead, the fires began and at that point people began to get seriously pissed off. They demanded answers, wanted to hear that sooner or later everything would go back to the way it was before. The experts said that such a phenomenon had never been recorded. But this was not an answer or reassurance.
In the end, people began moving to the north. More or less in the same period the first waves of Chinese arrived. People sold their houses and the Chinese bought them for cash. After a year it seemed like Shanghai in the days of opium smoking and bordellos. It was fascinating, from a certain point of view. So although I no longer had a job, I figured I’d stay.
My boss had decided to shut down operations. Business was getting worse and worse, and without ceremony he gave me my walking papers. In retrospect, it seems to me he behaved rather badly, but right then I didn’t care. The job had always been shitty, I wasn’t at all sorry to lose it. I took the severance pay with the firm intention of scraping by. It wasn’t a huge sum, but, thanks to the Great Summer, prices had tumbled. With a little economizing I could afford not to work for several years. If I moved to the north, that money would be gone in a few months and I’d have to start seriously slogging. I had no desire to do that.
Every so often my mother called, worried. She said that sooner or later the money would run out. “And then? What do you intend to do then?” she asked. A good question. Only I had no intentions. I told her I would think about it at the proper moment. According to my mother, I should join her in Lambrate, outside Milan. It seems there is a lot of work in that area. I was in Lambrate once. You have no idea what a god-awful place we’re talking about. Total desolation. “I’ll think about it, Mama,” I said. Then I hung up and rolled a joint or drained a couple of cans of beer. Not infrequently I did both together.
At the time I was not yet living on Via Veneto. I had taken a studio not far from Piazza Vittorio, in the middle of the historic Chinatown. I led a peaceful, orderly life. I got up, ate breakfast, and leafed distractedly through a book, waiting for the temperature to go down. Around midnight I went out. I wandered through the neighborhood, ending up inevitably at the market, and, with no real goal, struggled to make my way among shouting vendors and old Chinese women examining the greens displayed in the stalls. Often I stopped in front of a shop selling tropical fish and killed time watching those strange creatures circling the aquariums. I ate around 2 in the morning, usually noodle soup. Soon afterward the Forbidden City opened.
It’s there that my life changed forever, there that I met Yichang. The Forbidden City was a go-go bar. There had never been places like that in Rome before the Great Summer—I think because of the Vatican. Usually I stayed almost until closing time. I drank beer, watched the girls dance, waited for dawn. It was my favorite time of the night. Maybe because in my life I didn’t do much, while there it seemed to me that a lot of interesting things happened. I wouldn’t be able to say what things, exactly. Basically it was just a place where men went for whores.
One night Yichang sat down next to me. I had now been going to the Forbidden City regularly for several months and had the impression I hadn’t seen him before. I was wrong, because he knew me. In the sense that he had noticed me.
He asked if I liked the place and I said yes.
“I thought so,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say.
“Where did you come from?”
“Nowhere, I’m from Rome.”
He widened his eyes; I might have said I was a Martian.
“A Roman in Rome—a real rarity. May I buy you a drink?”
I shrugged. I had no desire to talk. I was used to minding my own business. I looked at the girls and my head emptied out in a pleasant way. This man was inserting himself between me and the best moment of my night. But I couldn’t refuse. He was Chinese, we were in a place run by Chinese and frequented by Chinese. Few Italians came to the Forbidden City, and those few were almost all northerners on vacation and often they were down-and-out.
“May I ask why you’ve stayed in Rome?”
I was about to say, No reason, but I stopped myself. The Chinese are busier than ants, they don’t trust idlers. “Business.”
“Ah,” he said, and shook his head as if to consider the answer. After a pause he asked, “And what do you do?”
Another good question. The world was full of people who were concerned with what I did. I said that I was a journalist, the first thing that crossed my mind.
“Really? And who do you write for?”
“A little here, a little there. Reports from the Roman front.” The truth is that I hadn’t the faintest idea how a newspaper works. I’ve never written a line in my life, not even a shopping list.
“I suppose you do well.”
“Not as well as you think. Let’s say I get by.”
He smiled, touched my bottle of beer with his. Then he changed the subject, luckily. I couldn’t go on shooting off my mouth about something I knew nothing about.
“Do you come here often?”
I took a swallow and nodded my head yes.
“You like this place, eh?”
“Yes, it’s not bad.”
He was silent for a while, looking at the girls rubbing their bodies against the steel poles.
I was under the illusion that the conversation had ended there, when he said, “And why do you like it?”
What the hell sort of question was that?
“You know why I’m asking? I’m asking because I’ve seen that you come here every night. You sit down, you have a couple of beers, you stay till closing, but you never ask a girl to your table. And I wonder why.”
“I don’t like to pay for sex.” It was true, but only in part. The real reason is that I couldn’t afford it. A night in itself didn’t cost much then. Thirty euros to the bar and fifty for the girl. Plus another twenty if you needed a room. But I knew how it worked. The girls were experts. Rarely was it a one-time deal, then over. A hundred today, a hundred tomorrow. Not counting gifts. Like nothing, at the end of the month you find yourself poorer by several thousand euros. Those girls could become worse than a drug—once they had hooked you, you couldn’t shake them off.
I could tell you a bunch of stories about people who squandered fortunes at the Forbidden City. Maybe that was why I liked going there. To watch others slowly go to ruin made me feel wise, someone who knows what’s what. I’m not sure if I’m explaining it well, but this, too, was a reassuring dynamic.
Life for me has always been a mystery; in fact, I’ve never done anything very well. At the Forbidden City, however, things seemed clear as daylight: Watch and don’t buy. If you understood this simple rule you could come back whenever you wanted. Every night, even.
“I understand, but then why do you come?”
Can you believe it? I said that it helped me put my ideas in order. Looking at the girls I was able to concentrate, focus better on the pieces that I had to send to the newspapers I worked for. At dawn I went home and typed out on the computer what I had mentally written at the Forbidden City.
“You’re saying that you come here to work?”
“In a certain sense,” I confirmed shamelessly.
“Then my conversation has disturbed you.”
“No problem. You have to disconnect the plug from time to time.”
“Very true.” At that point Yichang introduced himself. He told me his name and I told him mine. We shook hands.
We toasted our meeting with our beer bottles.
“I must confess something to you.” He paused, then: “I’ve studied you closely over the past few months, you know.”
I looked at him. Part of me foresaw that this man had in mind a precise plan.
“Your detachment is admirable. I wonder how you manage not to let yourself get involved in the situation. I mean, many of these creatures would be capable of bringing a dead man to life. What’s the matter, don’t you like women?”
“Oh no, I like them a lot. I told you, I come for other reasons.”
“Yes. You will agree, however, that your behavior is not like everyone else’s.”
I shrugged.
“However that may be, it’s good for you. No offense, you Italians risk being stung by those creatures. You’re not used to a certain type of woman. You let yourself be fooled by their childlike behavior, by their tender, defenseless ways. But they’re not at all defenseless. They’re whores. I’ve seen many Italians like you come here sure of themselves, they choose a girl, and take it all as a game. They end up badly. Then there are those who fall in love and end up worse. They get it in their heads to take the whore away, they think that underneath they’re good girls. They couldn’t make a more serious mistake. There are no good girls here. Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian. All the same, all whores. And whores are like scorpions. You know the story of the scorpion, I imagine.”
“Of course,” I said distractedly, trying to convey that all this talk was starting to annoy me.
“With these girls it’s the same. You can’t expect them to change their nature. It’s something that you Italians tend to forget because of appearances. You know what some of them are capable of doing?”
“Cutting off your dick,” I said brusquely. I couldn’t take it anymore. The little lesson on the traps of the Forbidden City was really too much.
Yichang felt the blow, or at least so it seemed to me. “I see that you are informed.”
What had he taken me for, one of those fools who came down from the north in search of exotic adventures? I didn’t speak Chinese, but certain stories reached my ears anyway. Stories of girls who castrated clients because they hadn’t paid, or maybe simply because they’d begun a relationship with another whore, as if a man can’t have all the girls he wants. When they established that they had to break it off with you for good, they took you to bed without letting anything show—Asians are masters of hiding their rancor. Between one caress and another they gave you something to drink, and within a few minutes you were paralyzed.
It seems incredible that concoctions like that exist, and yet it’s true. I don’t know where they get it, but these girls have a kind of drug that immobilizes you. You’re conscious but you can’t move a finger. And while you’re in this condition, they … well, you understand, they reserve you a front-row seat so that you can enjoy the show.
I got up, intending to go home. The night was ruined.
“You’re leaving?”
“Yes.”
He detained me by resting a hand on my arm. “I hope I didn’t bother you with my conversation.”
“No, I’m just a little tired. Besides, I have an article to finish for tomorrow.”
“I understand.” Then, as if it were an afterthought, he asked me, “Do you live far away?”
I thought he would continue to bore me with his talk as he walked me home, so I told him the truth. “No, just around the corner.”
“You live in this neighborhood?”
“Yes, why?”
“Nothing, it’s just that a journalist … This is a poor neighborhood, dirty, noisy. Not exactly elegant.”
“It’s convenient,” I said.
“Convenient for what?” He didn’t give me time to answer. “Sit down. I have a proposal to make that might interest you. What would you say to living on Via Veneto? You know the Hotel Excelsior?”
Of course I knew it, a luxury hotel far beyond my reach.
“It’s no longer a hotel, and I’m sure that a professional like you can afford to pay a hundred euros for a suite.”
I was open-mouthed—it was less than half of what I paid for the one-room apartment, three hundred square feet, in Piazza Vittorio. Yichang explained that the Excelsior, after having been closed for several months, had been bought by a friend of his who had converted it into apartments. Almost all the apartments were already rented to very fashionable Chinese people. There was one, however, still free. Yichang’s friend was having difficulty finding a tenant because years ago a famous person had killed himself there. “One of those rock stars with long hair and torn jeans. I don’t remember his name.”
“You mean Kurt Cobain?”
Yichang snapped his fingers. “That’s right. You know, we Chinese are a superstitious people. Many of us believe in ghosts and don’t like to sleep in a room where someone took a gun and blew his brains out.”
I avoided explaining to him that things hadn’t gone exactly like that. It was more convenient that he and his Chinese friends continue to believe that Cobain had killed himself in the Hotel Excelsior.
“So do you think it might interest you?”
It might, yes. The prospect of moving to Via Veneto, of living in the city where I was born like a Russian prince in exile, attracted me quite a lot. And for only a hundred euros a month!
Yichang said he would introduce me to the manager of the Excelsior as soon as possible, maybe the following night. I didn’t know how to thank him. I wanted to repay him in some way, but Yichang waved his hands and shook his head, he wouldn’t even speak of it. He ordered another beer, made some comments about a girl, then wrinkled his forehead as if he had suddenly remembered something.
“There might be one thing,” he said. “Would you like to play a little card game?”
“Cards?”
“Yes. You know how to play poker?”
Obviously I knew the rules of poker, but I wasn’t at all the typical player. To tell the truth, cards had always bored me. But Yichang insisted, and when I tried to demonstrate my indifference to games of chance, he said, “What a lot of big words. I’m just proposing a little game among friends to pass the time. Nominal bets, just small change, enough to add some excitement. Come on, you can’t say no.”
Little game, big words. His way of speaking in diminutives and augmentatives made me uneasy. But he was right, I couldn’t refuse. Not if I really wanted to move to Via Veneto.
I returned home at 9 in the morning. I lay on the bed and, staring at the blades of the fan rotating above me, I thought over the bizarre events of the night. Or rather, the events that I should have found bizarre but that at the moment appeared to me only manna fallen from heaven.
First of all, it should have seemed bizarre that a Chinese guy was so expansive with a stranger, and, furthermore, a Westerner. Then there was Yichang’s perfect Italian and the business of the suite at the Hotel Excelsior. Even a child would have been suspicious. But as I said, at that time I had a tendency not to think too much. In a single stroke, while drinking beer and looking at whores, I had found a new place to live and won two hundred and fifty euros: I confined myself to thinking this.
Yes, because between one thing and another the little game had gone on for hours and, in spite of the fact that the bets were limited, I had left the Forbidden City with a tidy sum in my pocket. I may not have been a great player, but Yichang showed himself to be even worse. Above all he was obstinate. In the sense that he seemed purposely to do his utmost to lose. And this was the thing that should have made me suspicious. But I was intoxicated by the ease with which I was winning money.
Yichang kept his word. That night we went together to the Excelsior and he introduced me to Signor Ho. There was no problem. After a few preliminaries and a handshake, the suite was officially mine. For a deposit I left the two hundred euros that I had won at cards. With a warm smile, Yichang said that I couldn’t refuse him the right to recoup.
I couldn’t, as a matter of fact. We decided to meet at the Forbidden City at 3 in the morning. I won that night, too, but a little less, because Yichang succeeded in taking a few hands himself. I discovered that losing, rather than worrying me, increased my desire to keep playing. For reasons that in time I understood but which were then completely obscure to me, winning a hand after having lost one made me feel stronger. So that I even considered losing some on purpose, a little out of vanity and a little out of pure enjoyment. In spite of the money I won, however, cards still essentially bored me. I never changed my ideas on the subject. For me, there’s nothing more tedious or foolish than poker. Maybe that’s why I remained a terrible player.
You understood perfectly, I said terrible. Little by little, I don’t even know how, I began to lose. And the more I lost the more I raised the stakes and the more I wanted to keep playing. Every night I went to the Forbidden City, I sat at a secluded table, and I played. I played and lost. From time to time, raising my head from the cards, I’d find my eyes meeting those of a girl who was dancing, and for an instant I’d feel nostalgia for the time when drinking a beer and looking at whores had been the crowning moment of my daily routine.
But it was really just an instant. In less than a second I was plunged back into the idiotic questions that assail the mind of a cardplayer. Pass, bluff, stand. All bullshit, and the moral of this bullshit was that I lost and Yichang won.
Yichang and his friends. Because a couple of other players always joined us, and none spoke a word of Italian. They won, too, but less than Yichang.
In the space of two months I accumulated debts of nearly two hundred thousand euros. A sum I had never seen in my life. Yichang seemed to take it lightly. We played with chips and when, at dawn, the accounts were settled, Yichang wrote everything down in a notebook, but he never asked me for a cent. In fact, he told his friends that he would be my guarantor. He said that there was no problem. That I was an established professional who wrote for the papers. When he said that, I trembled inside.
Then came the crash, the devaluation, or I don’t know what. As I said, I’ve never understood anything about the economy. The fact is that prices began to rise, including the rent on the suite at the Excelsior. So my debts spread like an oil spill, and with that we finally come to the time when I had the strange dream of the dead girl in the bed.
Later that night, Yichang asked me if by any chance I could lend him a thousand euros. I had gotten to know these people a little and I am well aware that when a Chinese person circles around a problem, it means that he’s presenting the bill. He had said “lend” but in effect he meant pay. And not only a thousand euros but also the rest of my debt, or at least a considerable part of it. I had no idea where to go to get fifty, let alone a thousand and the rest. I told him that he must excuse me but I was a bit short.
“A bit short in what sense?” He couldn’t understand how a journalist like me didn’t have enough to lend a friend a thousand euros.
I had to tell him the truth. I would have been better off making up some more nonsense, but I saw no way out. And then I’d had it up to my ears. The situation was tearing me to pieces. I wanted to go back to my old life and stop playing, stop losing, stop fooling a friend. Because Yichang had behaved like a true friend, he had shown that he trusted me. And how had I rewarded him?
I would have liked to see him outside of the poker game. Have a few beers and talk about this and that. Yichang was in fact an amiable companion, a cultivated person. While we played, he often recounted interesting details about the history of Rome. He was a real expert. He had read Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire five times. Before meeting Yichang I didn’t even know the names of the seven hills, but thanks to him I learned a lot of things. For example, that the greatness of Rome consisted above all in its eternal decadence.
I wonder if my life went as it did because I’m a Roman. It’s consoling to be able to convince ourselves that our ruin is a kind of predestination, something genetic, or some such nonsense. It relieves you from the obligation of being sorry for all you have not done or could have not done. Like telling Yichang the truth.
I didn’t expect him to take it so badly. I imagined that he would be pissed off, of course. I owed him a boatload of money, basically, and maybe he had already made plans for how to spend it. But what happened caught me off balance. He made me understand that I had understood nothing, excuse the wordplay.
On the table were the cards, the bottles of beer, a couple of ashtrays full of butts, and the piles of chips. Yichang raised his arms, held them suspended a moment, then pounded his fists down violently. The objects tottered, tipped over, fell to the floor. The two other Chinese guys gave signs of smiling. I bit my lower lip and hung my head.
“Look at me,” said Yichang.
I did.
His face was a mask of tension. He was breathing hard through his nostrils. He stared at me for moments that, it seemed, would never pass, then he pointed at me with his index finger and uttered my full name.
“Tommaso Pincio. You … you … you…”
He never said what he was about to say. He got up abruptly and went off somewhere. The other two Chinese sat motionless in their places, staring at me. I thought it was best not to move, either.
At the Forbidden City, no one noticed a thing. All was proceeding as usual. The girls’ bodies swayed lazily to the rhythm of the music. One of them came down from the stage to sit on the knees of a client, an Asian man of around fifty.
I recall that at that moment they were playing a remix of “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” The one by the Global Deejays, you know it? A rather silly tune, but then the Chinese are not very sophisticated. Every so often in the song you hear a female voice saying the names of various cities. Paris, London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and a bunch of others. Even Baghdad. And I would have liked to find myself anywhere, including Baghdad, but the Forbidden City.
Then Yichang returned to the table. He gathered up the cards, lit a cigarette, and said, “Okay, let’s get back to the game.”
The expression on his face was indecipherable. He seemed to have calmed down, but I glimpsed a light in his eyes that I didn’t like. I tried to say that I would rather not play. I wanted to go home. I felt like a shit. I had lied. I had accumulated a mountain of debts that I would never be able to pay.
“Nonsense.”
“No, seriously. I lied to you and I can’t forgive myself.”
“It’s true, but for that precise reason you can’t withdraw.”
I didn’t understand.
“You see, if you withdraw now I’ll be forced to have your dick cut off by one of the girls.” He stared at me for a few seconds, then: “I was joking, obviously.” But he didn’t have the tone of someone who was joking. I tried to show a hint of a smile. We played. Every so often I glanced at the other two, but they gave no sign of having understood what Yichang had said, and he hadn’t uttered a single word in Chinese. I had a lot of ugly thoughts. I think it was then that I began to use my brain again, a little. However, I promptly got into another one of my usual messes.
Incredible to say, but I had started winning again. Yichang didn’t seem at all disturbed by this. In fact, he began to make some jokes and he told a story about the origins of Rome, as if nothing had happened. I felt tremendously embarrassed and wanted to contribute to the conversation. Since I was short of subjects, I had this bright idea of recounting the strange dream I’d had the night before.
Yichang listened attentively but said nothing. He continued to lose. When we stopped playing he was down by almost three hundred euros. It wasn’t much compared to the two hundred thousand I owed him, but at least it was something. He took his notebook and updated it, saying that we would see each other the following night at the usual time.
I don’t know if it had something to do with telling Yichang my dream, but the following night there was something new. Sitting to one side, near our table, was a girl. Yichang introduced her. Her name was Yin. Like all the girls in the Forbidden City, she was very pretty. I didn’t remember having seen her before, but that didn’t mean much. Ever since I had thrown myself body and soul into cards, I had stopped paying particular attention to what happened on the stage.
Yichang said that she was there to serve us. He asked if I had anything against it. All this was rather odd. Usually, when we finished our beers we raised a finger and immediately more were brought. Our needs were always limited to this. I didn’t see how this girl could serve us. But could I make an objection?
The first few nights slid by smooth as glass. I continued to win big. I had recouped almost half my debt. Within two weeks I found myself ahead by a hundred euros. From the stable to the stars.
“You see, Yin brings you good luck,” Yichang said every so often, smiling in that strange way he had on those nights. And when Yichang made these remarks, Yin smiled too, staring at me with a look full of meaning.
I shielded myself, embarrassed. I had discovered that I was not at all immune to Yin’s charm. She was beautiful, but there was something else. I don’t know how to explain it. Maybe it was the fact that she sat near our table the whole time without saying anything. She didn’t even bring us the beers, as I had imagined she would. She was just a presence. She seemed to be there only to be looked at, and, indeed, I looked at her. I couldn’t help giving her furtive glances. And every time I did so, I found that her eyes were on me.
I felt good. I was winning, and having a girl gaze at me the whole time made me feel … how to put it? Stronger, more of a man.
The cards had extinguished in me any desire, and so it had been an eternity since I’d been with a woman. But now it was different. I felt reborn and was beginning to have thoughts about Yin.
This didn’t escape Yichang. At the end of one night, in Yin’s presence, he said, “Why don’t you take her home?”
I pretended not to understand.
“Yes, you should celebrate. You’ve started winning again. You’re ahead by seven hundred euros. It’s a whim you can satisfy. I’ve seen how you look at her, what do you think? And I bet Yin wouldn’t mind. Right, Yin?”
Yin smiled without saying anything, as always.
I, however, felt different. I told you, I felt as if I’d been reborn. So the words came out of my mouth by themselves: “You would really come with me?” Only an idiot would ask a whore a question like that.
She nodded her head yes and I brought her home. We made love all day, heedless of the heat and the sweat. At sunset we went out. I asked her if she wanted to have breakfast with me. She nodded. What did I expect her to say? We didn’t speak. We only gazed into each other’s eyes as we ate. We had no need for words, we felt satisfied. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t use the plural. It was I who felt satisfied. She had simply done what she was paid for—something I began to forget, despite the fact that I had always boasted that I knew how things worked at the Forbidden City.
The fact that I’d paid nothing so far had its weight. I supposedly had seven hundred euros available. Yichang scrupulously noted my winnings in his famous notebook, but he had not yet given me a cent and I hadn’t found the courage to ask him for anything. How could I demand that he pay me after what had happened?
Nor did Yin demand anything. When I raised the subject she shook her head and said, smiling, “Me know you many money Yichang. Me not care. Me like you.” I was struck by hearing her speak in the broken English of Asians. I realized that until then I had never heard the sound of her voice. A sound that I would not hear again for a long time. We stayed together. It became a kind of routine. I played, I won some euros, I said goodbye to Yichang and went home with Yin. We made love and then watched television or simply lay on the bed. Without ever saying anything. Or rather: It was she who didn’t open her mouth. I sometimes did. For example, I made comments on the heat or asked if she felt like something to eat. Sometimes I mentioned that I liked her. Whatever I said to her, Yin nodded her head yes. Which didn’t bother me. In fact, I found it relaxing and, in a strange way, I began to fall in love with her. I say strange because I knew nothing about Yin. Where she came from, how old she was, what went on in her head.
In time I began to make grandiose speeches after we made love. I talked to her about myself, about how my life had been and how I would have liked it to be. I told her my opinion on all kinds of things. If there was something after death, if I believed in God or extraterrestrials. Ideas. She seemed to listen because from time to time she nodded. But the truth is that deep down it wasn’t so important whether she really listened. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spoken in Italian. What the fuck, the only words I had heard her say were “Me not care. Me like you.” There was a serious probability that she understood nothing.
One day I felt in a particularly romantic vein and told her the dream. I don’t know why, but it came to mind. Suddenly, I realized that after that absurd dream my life had changed. I had begun to win and I had met her. Maybe dreams had a meaning after all. She nodded yes without saying anything. She didn’t seem at all moved by the fact that the girl in the dream was dead. A detail that I noted only later.
Some more weeks passed during which everything seemed to keep running smooth as glass. I was becoming richer and richer, if only in Yichang’s notebook. Sex with Yin was fantastic and every day I was more in love with her. I was convinced that she felt the same, because from the beginning she had never asked me to pay her. In my screwed-up brain I had conceived the idea that her “Me like you” was worth more than “Me know you many money Yinchang.”
Until one night, after months had gone by, she decided to open her mouth, and she did it to ask for money. In her broken English she said that, between one fuck and another, I owed her something like fifty thousand euros. If I considered the request in purely virtual terms there was nothing to worry about. According to Yichang’s notebook I was nearly a millionaire. But in my pocket I had barely a hundred euros and my bank account wasn’t much better off.
Yin told me I don’t know what nonsense about her family in Cambodia; in other words, she really needed money. She wanted actual money, not numbers written in a stupid notebook, and she wanted it right away. Suddenly I saw her for what she was, a whore from the Forbidden City. Maybe she loved me, in the animal-like way that binds those girls to their source of income. Nonetheless, she was a scorpion, as Yichang put it.
I began to fear for my lower regions and I explained the problem to Yichang. I said that if it had been for myself I would never have asked. And, in fact, for myself I asked nothing. Only a couple of thousand euros for Yin. A laughable sum compared with what he owed me.
“Laughable, you say. Once I asked you for only half that, you remember?”
“I know, I behaved very badly. But so much time has passed. Let’s not dig it up again, please. Now it’s different.”
“You’re right, it’s different. Now I’m the one who finds myself a little short. Actually, I’m very short.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all.”
“You mean you won’t give me the two thousand euros?”
“I can’t even give you a cent.”
“But what do I tell Yin?”
“Tell her you love her.”
“Do you take me for a fool? What’s a whore going to do with my love?”
“Until today I never heard you speak of Yin in those terms.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know. Anyway, I’m afraid there is no other possibility.” With that, Yichang said goodbye, leaving me alone with my problems.
Overnight I had become broke again. There were a lot of Chinese people I owed money to, who had given me credit because Yichang guaranteed me. I understood that from now on everything would be different.
But the more immediate problem was represented by Yin. At least, so I saw it at the moment. Maybe I was getting too paranoid, but that girl’s long silences suddenly seemed to me threatening.
I explained that Yichang was a little short.
“You not have money you?”
I tightened my lips and shook my head. I told her I was sorry.
It was a bad moment but things settled down. I told her that I loved her and that I would stay with her.
“Me big problem now.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You take care me?”
“Of course, Yin.”
She peered at me without saying anything. I knew the meaning of that look. I stuck a hand in my pocket and gave her everything I had.
“Only this? You not take care me if you only this.”
I said again that I was sorry and that I loved her.
She stared into space for a very long time. I saw that her lips were trembling.
“You not good with me. You very bad,” she said finally, her eyes bright. Then she got up and left. I didn’t try to stop her.
I wish this ugly story had ended there. For a while I thought it had. Yin didn’t appear. I stopped going to the Forbidden City and had lost sight of Yichang. I no longer drank, I no longer smoked marijuana. I had even found a job. Not much, but little by little I was able to pay my debts and get back on my feet. I had put the pin with the bills on the night table so that I could look at it before going to sleep and meditate on my past errors. I would become a new person, this was my intention.
Maybe I would even have succeeded if Yin hadn’t knocked at my door one day. She said she wanted to talk to me. I let her in. She came straight into the bedroom, sat down on the bed, and, with her head bent, waited for me to join her.
I sat down beside her. “A lot of time has passed,” I said.
She nodded in her usual way. It wasn’t so long, really. Only a couple of months. But my style of life was so changed that to see Yin again was like diving into a distant past.
“You’re well?”
She nodded again.
“I’ve thought about you a lot.” I don’t know why I said it. Yes, the memory of her occasionally surfaced but only as one of the many things that had happened, one of my many mistakes. It wasn’t true that I had thought of her a lot. Not in that sense, at least.
She said nothing.
I felt embarrassed at having lied to her, and since the silence that fell after my words was unbearable, I asked what she had come to talk about.
She let some more moments pass, as if she had to gather her thoughts, then she raised her head and, looking me in the eyes, said, “Me like you. Think only this very long time.”
We made love as in the old days. The next day neither of us said anything, but to me it was clear that we were together again. Yin moved in with me. Or, rather, that day she stayed in my suite at the Hotel Excelsior and never left.
At sunset I headed off to work and when I came back at dawn I found her where I had left her, lying on the bed. She got up only to take a shower or get something to eat from the refrigerator. She never opened her mouth, just as in the old days.
I didn’t think of asking her what had impelled her to return to me, nor did I ask if she had resolved her problems or how. It was enough to find her there, ready and available only for me. Of course, I wondered what was the sense of a relationship like that. Because the fact is that I no longer loved her as I believed I once had. Yin was now like a bed dog. A kind of domestic animal, something comfortable to have in the house. Maybe my feelings were not very uplifting, but I decided not to beat my brains out. If it was all right for her, why should I have to make a lot of trouble for myself?
The end of this bad story came when I had stopped thinking about it. About the past, I mean. It happened sometimes that I remembered my nights at the Forbidden City, the girls who danced on the stage and the things that were said about them. But it happened less and less frequently, and anyway it was something so distant that it felt alien. It was as if neither Yin nor I had ever been the person of that time.
I began to think of us as a real, if somewhat peculiar, couple. I even considered asking Yin if she would like to have a child. This, because she seemed more and more affectionate. Not that she did anything apart from being silent and lying on the bed. I don’t know, it was something in her habits, in the way she made love. She seemed—how to put it?—really in love.
I felt serene. Until one day I found her sitting cross-legged on the bed waiting for me to come home from work. On the night table, beside the old pin with the bills, there was a bottle of red wine with two glasses. She poured the wine and offered me a glass.
Nothing like that had ever happened. Her proposing a toast, that is. So I asked her if there was something I didn’t know that we had to celebrate.
She shook her head smiling. And then: “You know everything. Me like you.” She touched my glass with hers and drank.
“I love you,” I said. I don’t know if it was true. I was happy that she had made the gesture, and was happy that she was there for me every day, on my bed, waiting for my return. If this can be called love, then I loved her.
I drank the wine, and was about to kiss her, but she moved her face. She grabbed me by the hair and pushed me down, on her breast. I began to kiss her there, then on the neck and behind the ear. I tried again to bring my lips to hers, and again she moved. Suddenly, in a flash, I understood. And in understanding I lost consciousness, with an acid taste in my mouth that wasn’t wine.
I came to as in the dream, paralyzed. And what else can I say? It’s not true that before you die you see your life go by in an instant. This didn’t happen to me, at least. In that final moment, I thought only of how blind and stupid a human being can be. I’m referring to all the things I hadn’t realized in those months. For example, the way I began to win again after telling Yichang that I was in no position to pay my debts.
Then I also wondered if anything would have been different if I hadn’t told her and Yichang my dream. And I almost reached the conclusion that certain things would have happened anyway. I say almost because when Yin took the pin with the bills and stuck it in the pillow, I understood that she was about to do something different from what I thought. She didn’t intend to emasculate me. I saw her sit on my stomach. Then she raised the pillow over her head and stared for a moment at a precise point between my eyes. Everything lasted less than a second, and maybe that’s why I didn’t see any film go by. I thought only that it’s really astonishing how a person can be capable of not thinking things through.