Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

At the Rialto the traveler goes ashore. An elderly British woman with checkered stockings and a blue face is daubing a colorful piece of canvas; it is intended as a painting of the Rialto. A boy is stoking a charcoal fire under her feet to keep them from freezing. People become blurred in the fog, coughing and hiding away half their faces in their capes. May God have mercy.

In the Merceria the man buys a thick scarf, which he winds around his neck twice. He rides up the Campanile, 316.7 feet high. The curator says, in a hoarse voice, “Signore, Lei è fortunato, perché oggi il panorama è meraviglioso, vedrá tutte le Alpi e tutto l’Adriatico.”* A whole system of binoculars is set up, but our man doesn’t even see Café Aurora, let alone the Alps and the Adriatic. He spends a full three hours making the rounds of the churches, the Doge’s Palace, ten museums, and Pietro Lombaro’s clock tower, his feet freezing the whole way. He spends a little while watching the photographer hopping from one leg to the other, blowing into his cupped hands and holding them over his ears, and looks at the man selling corn. Japanese tourists have just bought three bags of grains from him and are scattering them on the ground for the pigeons.

The traveler gives a beggar a lira. The old man points to his hat, brimless and full of holes where moths have eaten away at it, then points to the pigeons tussling over the corn and states emphatically: Yesterday a pigeon dropped something onto his hat, which essentially means that there will be a full seventeen more days of fog, rain, and cold.

Brr, the traveler thinks, and goes into Café Florian. Americans are bent over newspapers as big as bedsheets, a newlywed couple is eating whipped cream with a spoon, young Venetians with wavy hair are playing Briscola, two others are playing Italian billiards, with two large balls and one small one, pins and holes in every corner.

The man orders tea. And the railway timetable.

Then he packs at the hotel, damns the ridiculous tiled stove to hell, takes two aspirin, and dreams of doges in ermine furs skating on the frozen Canal Grande.

Die Stunde, March 3, 1927

This Is Where Christopher Columbus Came into the Old World

Genoa, in February

NULLA DOMUS TITULO DIGNIOR

HEIC

PATERNIS IN AEDIBUS

CHRISTOPHERUS COLUMBUS

PUERITIAM

PRIMAMQUE JUVENTAM TRANSEGIT*

This inscription is on the marble slab mounted over two windows where, about 480 years ago, Christopher Columbus’s diapers were hung out to dry.

I don’t know whether Christopher Columbus had brothers and sisters, or whether he was an only child. No matter: the Columbus family seems to have lived in cramped quarters; this house, with windows and a marble slab—a hundred steps from the Piazza di Ferrari Ponticello—is barely thirteen feet wide, twenty-three feet long, and sixteen feet high: stone, dark gray, flat roof, and cracked walls.

The houses to the left and right have all been torn down, thus freeing up the historic stone structure in which the man who discovered America was born, and forming the corner of a little garden surrounded by a high iron lattice in which wild grass is strewn with twisted tin cans and broken bottles, a few rotted trees, and an extremely odd edifice: a poorly restored ancient Roman portico, the parts of which were dug out of the ground eighteen years earlier during work on the Banca d’Italia. It appears to have been there since the birth of Christ and served young Columbus and his friends as a fort when they played cops and robbers.

The aforementioned marble slab and the two windows are the only adornments on the little house apart from two heavy iron doors, just recently painted dark green, and a wreath hanging under the flat roof, which is already so withered that only an expert can establish the genus and species of the flowers. The three other façades are bare.

A curiosity-seeker finds the two iron doors locked. It is still quite early in the day, with rain on and off, and a strong wind tears at the few dusty leaves that climb up the little house. A girl in clogs is walking across the street with a milk jug.

“Always closed?”

“Si, signore.”

“Who has the key?”

“Why, Sir?”

“Because Columbus was born here.”

“And who’s Columbus?”

The girl doesn’t wait for the answer but keeps on walking, swinging the milk jug, and disappears into a side alley.

A Genovese taxi driver who seems to drive foreigners every once in a while is better informed: “Columbus’s house is open during the summer. Two rooms with Columbus’s antique furniture.”

In the house across the street, which doesn’t seem much newer, there is an inn, with Pierrot costumes upstairs, one yellow, one black, the display of a company that rents out masks; a veterinarian has his practice next door, and a music school promises anyone a brand-new mandolin for free if they pay a monthly fee of twenty-five lire for half a year of lessons in advance.

Twenty buildings lean against one another, crooked and crumbling, derelict and deserted, full of holes, atria, and spiral staircases, and blind alleys all leading up to the Porta di St. Andrea, which was built around 1000. Relics of city walls adhere to it. Christopher Columbus is sure to have stood under it to play biglie, the game with colorful balls that boys played back in Babylon and is still played in Metropolis.

Over tea in Hotel Miramare a stocky, chubby-cheeked American man offers me Camel cigarettes. We fall into conversation, and after half an hour the man tells me:

“A stroke of luck brought me from San Remo to Genoa, a stroke of luck, I tell you. One should not reveal one’s business plans, but hmm, hmm … I trust you. Listen, I have discovered the house where Columbus was born here. And this discovery can bring in millions of dollars, hahaha. Do you know what I want to do? Form a consortium