Genova

Genova is the turning point in Didier Levy’s account of his life: the city where an adolescent exile found affection, intellectual awakening, and a sense of belonging, and where, years later, he confronted the cost of having betrayed that bond. Its significance lies less in a sequence of public events than in the two private encounters that Didier’s memory joins—the meeting on a beach and the silent sighting on the same coast years afterward.

Arrival and a second beginning

Didier was born in Marseilles, but describes Genova as the place where his heart and soul were born. He arrived there by chance at sixteen, after leaving his father’s house, city, and country. His departure followed a childhood shaped by his mother’s early death, his father’s violence over his poor performance at school, and repeated truancy; before his thirteenth birthday, he had spent two years in prisons for children. Against that history, Genova marks a break from a home defined by fear and punishment.

The beach and Rinaldo

On a beach in Genova, Didier met Rinaldo, then forty-eight, who opened a different life to him. Rinaldo lived in a magnificent house on the cliffs but, despite his family’s old noble lineage, did not behave with the pretensions of rank. A scholar with wide-ranging interests, he taught Didier antiquity, art history, poetry, and music. Didier remembers Rinaldo’s silver-white hair and sad grey eyes, but gives particular weight to the contrast between his father’s brutal hands and Rinaldo’s warm, expressive ones. In Rinaldo’s care, Genova becomes a place of both education and tenderness: Didier says he learned to love with mind and body and was, in a sense, born in Rinaldo’s arms.

The return to the same shore

The relationship ended after Rinaldo let Didier discover where he kept a large amount of cash, intending the temptation as a test. Didier took the money and ran. He later reflects that Rinaldo mistook love for something that could be tested, while Didier’s theft made affection and betrayal part of the same history. Almost fifteen years afterward, another turn of fortune brought Didier back to Genova. He walked along the same sandy boulevard where Rinaldo had taught him to read Rimbaud and Verlaine and saw him seated among men of his own age, watching two elderly men play chess.

Recognition withheld

Rinaldo was now over sixty, his silver hair nearly gone, his face hollowed and discoloured as if by serious illness. Didier noticed him coughing violently into a white handkerchief and thought he saw blood. Instead of approaching, he averted his gaze, changed his walk to disguise himself, and hurried away in terror. Genova thus holds both the beginning of Didier’s attachment and its unresolved aftermath: the city lets him find the person who formed him again, but not bring himself to face that person. In recounting the return to Lin, Didier presents the city as a landscape of memory where love persists even when shame and fear prevent reconciliation.