Back in those days, I lived near the station, a place of arrivals and departures in every possible way, and I worked in a bar down there, at the Murazzi, in one of those places overlooking the river banks, and those days were the years between the nineties and the noughties and they were still days when I wasn’t like I wanted to be but I wanted to be like I believed I could become, or at least that’s what I kept telling everyone. Because down there at the Murazzi, everyone knew me and I knew everyone, and some were closer friends, others much less, but at the end of the day every single one of them had to talk to me, as it was me working behind the bar when they ordered, and it was hi, Manu, how’s it going, Manu, two G&Ts, Manu, everything alright, Manu, and anyway, lots of people used to come to that place but I don’t think many knew it because to know a place you need to know its ghosts, otherwise you see only what we were taught to see, only what we learned to believe that place contained. Those who really knew it, on the other hand, understand that at a certain point a war broke out in that place, not in the daylight but by moonlight, and I’m talking about those years when you could still drive down onto the banks and when the North Africans had started invading them and, after a certain time of the day, down at the Murazzi you could only hear the drug dealers yelling and only smell the stinking smoke from the barbecues and there were fights every day and every night ended with people being hurt, and some nights ended with people being seriously hurt and some nights ended with someone dead, even if no one seems to remember any more.
Now, I don’t really want to go down the path of I was there and you weren’t, or I might end up sounding like one of those groupies like Pamela Des Barres or Marianne Faithfull when they talk about how they were there, with The Rolling Stones, and who had the biggest dick, Mick Jagger or Keith Richards—I’d assume Richards, of course—and stuff like that, but the thing is I was there and you weren’t. Back in those days, I worked as a bartender at the Murazzi, like I’ve already said, but what I didn’t say is that I tended bars down there for years, from when the banks were still a place only populated by a bunch of revolutionaries to when it felt like being on the main drag during the Sanremo Music Festival and then later still, that is, when the rocket scientists who run this city and pass judgement on it closed down the Murazzi, which is absolute nonsense, like shutting down Las Ramblas in Barcelona or Temple Bar in Dublin or the Bairro Alto in Lisbon: basically, these guys shut down Turin’s most famous place in Europe, may they be shrouded in boundless shame until the end of times.
The truth is that the river has never stopped running and the only reason we forget things is because the river has never stopped running and the only reason some things come back is because the river has never stopped running, and in the nineteenth century it used to run so violently that, to contain it and protect the city, they erected these imposing embankments—the Murazzi—with storerooms and boathouses hidden inside every arch, and in front of them they built long banks for docking—in the waiting room at my dentist’s there’s a vintage print that explains everything very clearly—and, anyway, the arches lay there, full of boats and goods, under the warm belly of the city, and I remember that the self-proclaimed President of the Free Republic of the Murazzi, old Peppo Parolini—“a man of a thousand stories, almost none edifying”, as my friend Max used to say—knew everything about the place and used to talk about how, until the fifties, the Murazzi were full of fishermen, washerwomen, boatmen and layabouts and that the washerwomen could be found past the Vittorio Emanuele I bridge, offering a curious and charming sight as they bent down to rinse the clothes, which they then stacked in expanses of white but maybe it wasn’t Peppo, and it wasn’t the fifties, maybe someone else told me this story and, at any rate, it isn’t easy to describe the scene as it was back then, especially since I wasn’t there.
Anyway, starting from the sixties, fishermen and boatmen and washerwomen disappeared, the storerooms were emptied, and practically nothing at all happened down there at the Murazzi for years, until Fiore, who left decades ago and now lives in Morocco and deals in fossils, well, Fiore took an old tram and put it into an alleyway, as you’d push the plunger into a syringe, and that’s how Doctor Sax was born, a place that since then—it was 1979—has changed hands I don’t know how many times, but it’s still there, almost the same, and its essence is still the same, and, after Doctor Sax, Giancarlo opened and then the CSA and little by little all the others and eventually there was a bar practically in every arch of the Murazzi—and this was way before Turin became the city with the most bars, restaurants and clubs per capita in the whole of Europe, as legend has it—while at the same time something else was also erupting in the city, like everywhere else in Italy, and I mean that historic transition from the three or four North Africans selling knock-off Ray-Bans under the porticoes in front of the station to a sweeping horde, and San Salvario—where I used to live back then, before yoga mats and Aperol spritzes took over the area—was the neighbourhood where they’d settled because it was dilapidated, dark, dirty and nobody wanted to go there, apart of course from the likes of me, who had moved there exactly for the same reasons as the North Africans: because rent was a quarter of what it was in the rest of the city and because it was a nice neighbourhood, full of beautiful old buildings, well connected by public transport, close to the Porta Nuova station and with a huge and lovely park like Il Valentino right next door. At the time, I was coming out of a long relationship with this guy from Taranto that everyone called Quentin and he’d gone to work the summer season in Riccione or Ibiza or wherever, and I’d moved into a flat with Elena, aka Nenne, also an illustrious bartender at the Murazzi, who was recovering from yet another heartbreak caused by yet another dude in his forties—since Nenne only liked men of that age and said they had much more to give her than younger men and she had a whole theory on the subject, an absolutely bonkers theory—and our flat overlooked the northern edge of San Salvario, on Corso Vittorio Emanuele, that same huge boulevard you have to cross, coming out of the Porta Nuova station, to reach the beginning of Via Roma, and we lived right opposite one of the largest pubs in the city. That night, we were back from a very dull night at the Murazzi and we’d had a couple more beers at the pub and there was a group of English hooligans wearing just T-shirts, despite it being November, they were totally pissed but weren’t being aggressive at all, and one came over to tell us that England was playing in Milan the following evening but they’d found much cheaper accommodation in Turin and the next day they’d get to the San Siro stadium in no time and “Come on England” and “We won a World Cup and two World Wars!” they said eagerly. The most congenial of them was a bald ogre almost two metres tall who the others called Little John, like the character in Robin Hood, he was wearing a T-shirt saying “OI!” and rolled-up jeans and shiny brick-red Dr. Martens, he looked like the singer from Bad Manners, a ska band from the eighties that my older brother loved, I preferred The Specials, and, anyway, Little John and his friends basically only talked about football and shoved the words faith and honour into every sentence, two words that, for someone like me, usually only meant that someone was pulling your strings like a puppet and without even having to brainwash you. (Years later, when I happened to be dragged along to see a match in the Maratona end, I realized that football stadiums have this all-encompassing energy that’s impossible to understand unless you’re in it, but at the time I didn’t see it that way, and anyway that’s another story.) Anyhow, these hooligans were treating us with remarkable respect, even with gallantry, but then something happened: while we were all outside smoking, two North Africans who were passing by shoved one of the drunkest of the Brits and nicked his phone. The two pickpockets were pushing their luck because, no more than a few steps away, they came face to face with the rest of the hooligans and, having been smacked around something awful, they immediately returned the phone and ran away. However, from a distance, the two then started threatening the Brits and the bigger one of the pair seemed to fly into a rage, his hair was dyed but the dye job hadn’t exactly been successful and now he had a mat of short curls the colour of rust on his head, and he was passing his thumb under his throat, he was shouting in Arabic, but you didn’t need an interpreter to catch his meaning. Nenne and I took the opportunity to run home, which was right opposite, you only needed to cross the Corso and there you were, so we went up to the second floor. Once inside, since we’d made a pact not to smoke in the house, we rolled a spliff with our big coats still on and then went out onto the tiny balcony, where we had two iron chairs that, at that time of the day, were icy cold. We started smoking, leaning against the ledge, and were looking across the street, where Little John and his friends, some fifty metres across from us, kept drinking and laughing and joking, it was half past four at that point and the bar was about to close and they were still out there, with their last beers in plastic cups, bawling out “God Save the Queen” and other songs, I assume football anthems, that I’d never heard before. Then, all of a sudden, the man with the rusty hair reappeared, together with a dozen mates, from the corner with Via Madama Cristina, a block away. Since Little John and his friends weren’t as many, just six or seven, and seemed totally drunk, Nenne and I immediately panicked on their behalf and I screamed from the balcony “Warning, danger, warning” because I was too stoned to remember how to say it properly and the only English left in my head came from the standard notices you find near train windows, and in any case they didn’t hear me. What was surprising was that, when Little John and his friends finally noticed rusthead and the dozen other people about to jump them, rather than running away or trying to defend themselves by looking for shelter in the pub, they started running towards the North Africans, who were so dumbfounded they booked it towards Via Madama Cristina. Now I need to make a huge effort because I’m one of those people who, when walking down a street, only notices the most meaningless details, the billboards, the dead leaves, a biro cap on the pavement, I’m no cartographer, put a map in my hands and I don’t even know which way to hold it, but I need to describe the setting of the scene, hence the effort; the battlefield was the section of the Corso, at that time completely empty, that covered the entire block occupied by the pub, a section that was made up of a rectangle divided into six parallel strips: the outer lane in front of the pub, the herringbone parking bays, the tram tracks, the two central lanes of the Corso and then again, in a mirror image, the tram tracks in the opposite direction, the herringbone parking bays and the outer lane in front of our house. To paint a full picture, I also need to add two rows of horse chestnuts, a bunch of cars parked in the bays and a news stand that stood on the corner opposite the pub, interrupting the parking bays . . . To cut a long story short, Little John and his friends seemed to be studying the situation, which was exactly what Nenne and I were doing too, and they continued to do so until the giant gave an order to his friends and three of them quickly crossed the Corso and, being careful not to be seen, reached the news stand and hid behind it, waiting for their opponents to come back. Or at least that’s how we understood it, because there was actually no indication that the enemy would indeed come back, but maybe Little John and his friends, despite all the beer they’d downed, had been in a similar situation often enough to know exactly what to expect and what to do. And, as a matter of fact, the North Africans did come back. There were still a dozen of them, but now they were all holding broken bottles and feeling so confident that, coming from Via Madama Cristina, they turned onto the main Corso, between the rows of trees, as if marching in a parade. When they went past the news stand, the Brits hiding behind it, who we could see very clearly from our vantage point as we stood speechless, simply sneaked slowly behind the other corner of the stand, staying out of sight of the group. There was no one around, not even a car, just the Brits and the North Africans, and then us, as if we were at the movies, dumbfounded, so wired up that Nenne said, holding the cordless phone: “Come on, we need to call the police,” but I shrugged, it’s a shame that, back then, phones didn’t take pictures or videos. When the man with the rusthead and his friends were about fifty metres from the pub, walking nonchalantly and shouting and waving their bottles around, Little John once again did something I would never have expected: he rallied the three who had stayed behind with him and they all broke into a run towards the North Africans, who of course were even more confused than before: some stopped, others backed away, only the man with the rusty hair stood his ground, waiting for the Brits. Then, just like in a duel in a western, Little John loomed up in front of him, unarmed, and, with a speed that should have been impossible in a body of that size, moved as fast as I’ve ever seen in my life: with a jerk, he put his arms together and thrust them forward, as if diving, and then suddenly opened them, pushing his opponent’s arms outwards in one move while, at the same time, lunging forward with his entire body to headbutt him something awful. Rusthead hit the back of his head on the ground, like a felled tree. Then the other three Brits threw themselves on the group waving their belts around, sending the rivals into a panic so that they started running away, only for the second group of Brits, the ones hiding behind the news stand, to then come out into the open, trapping the North Africans, who, despite being more in number, started running towards the only possible escape route, the outer lanes, but those who weren’t quick enough were hit by a crazy volley of punches and kicks and lashes, and a minute later the Brits were gone, leaving behind on the field half a dozen wounded, who slowly trudged away, some limping, some bleeding, some holding their heads or their arms, but three of them remained down—and in fact three ambulances arrived later on the scene—and Nenne was crying, horrified—“Why can’t we look away?” she asked in tears—while I’d realized something strange, something I’m a bit ashamed to admit but don’t want to deny: the thing is, I was attracted to these men fighting, I was captivated, and all that violence had given me a sort of pleasure and, now that I think about it, if it hadn’t been for this episode with the hooligans perhaps, some time later, I wouldn’t have given someone like Florian the Albanian the time of day.
