Class

by Francesco Pacifico

  Here, in the middle of the new living room, you find yourself moved: “Thank you God for what you’ve given me.” You think about that breakfast with Ludovica, back in America. You imagine yourself moving her next to Berengo’s kitchen counter: you bend her over, and after slipping her pajamas down, you start pressing on her perineum with your index finger and your thumb before you slide these two fingers into the two crevasses on either end. (I’m forced to know this, and I can’t not know it. I’m forced to know, though I’d rather not. I remember you pressing on my perineum, your old fixation: the woman’s tender zone, where her darkness falls, the place from where you can control her mind, or my mind, or, in the current fantasy, Ludovica’s mind—Ludovica, who now comes to your home to beg at the gates of your heaven of cookies, your temple of Bibles and curfews.)

  In late January Ludovica called your old landline and talked to Maria, who told you about the call a few minutes later. “Is this really in everyone’s best interest?” you asked. Tullio doesn’t even want his children to hear Ludovica’s name. (She’s a confused woman, and he had breakfast with her, and they were both wearing pajamas, which no one must ever know.) “If that’s not the case, we’ll discuss this later.” Later, on the phone with Ludovica Vozzi, Tullio was curt: “Talk to my wife, listen to what she has to say, I’m sorry, I’m going into a meeting…” She did. She asked Maria for some baby-sitting work: yes, she said, she had baby-sat for the whole neighborhood as a kid, and even though it felt funny to do it again at thirty-one, she needed pocket money due to a family issue she didn’t seem especially eager to elaborate on.

  So Maria has disobeyed her husband. Babysitters are supposed to be kids, barely teenagers, possibly the children of some Brothers and Sisters at the Comunità, or relatives, like Marcello, and they’re supposed to be fat or at least homely. Now, back in bed, he has to endure Maria’s explanation of the event and the transaction. She gave her €30 cash cash cash. (She insists on using the word the way she insists on wearing those old Air Max sneakers whenever she’s gardening on the balcony.) Ludovica helped pack the car with boxes of books and kitchen appliances. “We got a shitload done. She was here on time, dressed totally unpretentiously. She said she was ready to help, unlike Marcello. What a preppy douche. We picked up the kids; she helped us unload; and then left. What’s the problem?”

  “It was unnecessary.”

  She’s content, leaning on two big pillows and holding an old issue of Marie Claire Casa, her knees at her chest, the big, white armoire in the background somehow altering her face’s complexion.

  “And you just put the money in her hand.” He wants her to say cash again, so that he can hate her even more.

  “Thirty.”

  “No envelope. Just three bills in her hand, like she was a fifteen-year-old.”

  “She needs it. At the end of the day, it’s just money.”

  “And how did you feel?”

  “Oh stop it, will you? I needed help, not you. I needed support for my big lazy ass.”

  “You’re not a big lazy ass—you just want to make me fu-ri-ous.” (That’s how I Maschi say it, with emphasis.) Maria laughs. “You getting a kick out of this? You feel good?”

  “It was useful. Yes, I did get a kick out of it, if you mean that I managed to work my ass off in a more efficient way and spare myself the hassle of looking for two parking spots.”

  “It still doesn’t seem like a job for a thirty-year-old. Don’t call her again.”

  “Will you relax? She’s a good person. She’s married, and she’s having some kind of crisis with her dad, which I can totally relate to. Her mother’s just lost her own mother—her grandmother—so she needs the distraction.”

  “She’s from Corso Trieste.”

  “She still needs the money.” Maria must have loved the experience of being waited on by a wealthier woman. “Work is work, and it’s never lowered anyone’s dignity.”

  “Weren’t we going to call Marcello?”

  “He stood me up! He left for New York on a whim on December 26, after I kept reminding him all month that he needed to keep some time free for me in January.”

  Tullio didn’t see Marcello in New York, and he’s not happy that Berengo has now begun to cultivate his own cousin (and worse, I Maschi!). He’s also not happy that Berengo rechristened Marcello Cugino Hitler. That’s what all his friends call him now. But he knows he owes Berengo a makeup call. Berengo is only the last in a line of beggars waiting outside his home, and Tullio can’t confront them all without Maria.

  This whole moving scheme is a masterpiece, an exquisite set of arrangements orchestrated by his wife, so if she’s committed a few provocative faux pas along the way, like hiring Ludovica, he has no choice but to treat them as rational externalities. Maria, after all, was the one who came up with a solution to the problem of Tullio’s older brother. He said he could no longer afford the rent on his sixty-square-meter apartment, but he refused to look for a place on the outskirts. So Gustavo Tullio’s parents let him and his twenty-year-old girlfriend stay with them. They put him up in the boys’ old bedroom and let him store his boxes in the basement. The center held for nearly a year, from September 2009 to June 2010, but everyone was growing miserable, and last March Maria presented Tullio with a visionary plan: they could move the Tullios into their own apartment and get a mortgage for a bigger place on the same street in Prato Rotondo. Prato Rotondo was a small neighborhood, but new buildings were popping up constantly. This was their time. “We won’t have to break our necks to visit them. They’ll help us out, and then eventually we’ll get the apartment back, and then we’ll have two apartments in Prato Rotondo, so some of the kids can stay and live near us when we get old.”

  Tullio’s parents’ old apartment, on the sixth floor of a building in Porta Pia, belongs to a different Italy: spacious balcony, wooden floors, warm beams of sunlight. Tullio’s father was born in 1939 and worked as a clerk for the army. He was awarded the apartment by the Fanfani program, a miracle of the Democrazia Cristiana party that built homes for Italy’s many grateful middle-class workers. The apartment sits confidently on the Via Nomentana, where the sycamores carve delicate patterns of light onto the yellow-tinted buildings, where summer is summer and spring is spring, where the groves that loom over embassy walls seduce tired bikers stuck at intersections.

  That apartment has now been transferred to Tullio’s brother, a man undeserving of the security and certainty that the regime democristiano was once able to provide. He spends his time as an inconsistent TV writer, unable to lock down a stable contract at either Rai or Mediaset. Tullio felt bitter about the swap, but for Maria it was transformative: it was both the birth and the fulfillment of their new family project. They still had so many more years left, but she had already managed to confirm which apartment would bear witness to the moment when she and her husband rendered their souls to God. This was her greatness, her triumph. She knew exactly where the mysteries of time would unspool and where the mysteries of blood would reveal themselves, shaping chins, foreheads, small noses, and tight yellow curls and decomposing the bodies that created them. She knew where blood would move back and forth across the elusive line of time. A few months ago, walking along that very street in Prato Rotondo—already her street but now so much more so—she couldn’t help but notice the real estate office in the one-story prefab trailer, its occupants busy filling up two new buildings quickly emerging at the end of the block. Her street: a street that decades from now will continue to find itself enlivened by a flow of Tullian incarnations. Maria has something of the politician in her, a quality that Italy only encountered in its superior, modern form in the years after World War II. His wife shapes the earth, paves the roads, demarcates the neighborhoods; she lines up the tracks in the valleys of time, she places apartment-shaped locomotives on them and populates them with facial features whose consistency can’t help but feel mystical. Ten years ago, Prato Rotondo was covered in barracks; only recently has it attaine
d the density of all the other neighborhoods in Nuovo Salario. There’s been a torrent of construction, and Maria knows what to do with it.

  But in spite of it all, her personal satisfaction is in decline: she’s paying a woman to drive her own car. This isn’t about trying to buy herself a surrogate sister (whom she only talks to once a month, if that). What she wants, instead, are two ugly things: she wants Tullio to hire a Donna Fissa—stable help at home, the old bourgeois myth—and she wants to strip the dignity off a confused woman from Corso Trieste. These are immodest aspirations for a girl from Turin with a Neapolitan mother, a girl who abandoned the hip-hop subculture she loved and has now abandoned herself to the same pettiness her parents loved to indulge in. But Tullio understands; he grew up among people richer than him, and he, too, has a point to make: he was determined to get his salary above €3,000 a month. And it has continued to rise ever since he hit his goal.

  —

  HE GOES TO the vicar for confession. Don Luca is also a lawyer at the Sacra Rota, where Catholic weddings are annulled in expensive, arduous proceedings. He is a man, in other words, with whom you can discuss your conjugal problems. His standard joke, when he prepares young parishioners for marriage, is that 80 percent of Catholic weddings should be annulled. But though they have a good relationship—Tullio went out of his way to help Luca invest his inheritance from his father, so that the vicar’s mother could retire comfortably in Molise—he doesn’t trust him enough to confess that his kids’ babysitter and the woman he had breakfast with in his pajamas and the woman whom he fantasized having anal sex with are all the same person. Maria sees Don Pablo for confession, so no priest can square the couple’s accounts. This is liberating, but it also means that Tullio cannot confess the horrible thought he’s been nursing about his wife: that she is intentionally treating this woman, the babysitter, in a way that can’t help but provoke tenderness and affection in him and that the attraction is thus her fault, her responsibility. “I’m going to use her as a caretaker for my mother-in-law,” Maria joked the other day, after mother and babysitter took Sara and Betta to the Cinciaolin, the co-op where the girls take percussion lessons.

  As penance for the sins Tullio has managed to confess, Luca orders him to pray the rosary on his way to work and to go a whole week without putting on a tracksuit at home, to facilitate conjugal attraction. Also, the following Saturday, he has to treat his wife to breakfast in bed. Gustavo Tullio doesn’t tell his vicar that just then, as they’re sitting in confession, the babysitter is somewhere in the parish with Maria. Ludovica, Maria says, is “wrestling with God.” Her husband is in the U.S., and she’s trying to get him to come back. It’s a sorry predicament, a crisis: her brother talks God to her nonstop, and her grandma has just died…

  You’d nail her to a wall in her husband-less house in Mandrione, wouldn’t you? Your thumb stuck in one of her holes and an index finger in the other, the two holes separated by that thin piece of flesh. You’ve always found your soul adrift in that space between two holes. When you think about her you think about me, and you think about Nicolino, who can still know me, though you can’t. You’ll be damned, Gustavo Tullio.

  —

  LATE MARCH, WEDNESDAY, five p.m. Ludovica drops Marco and Luca off at football practice. Their father will pick them up at seven, so all she has to do is hand the boys off to the coach in the locker room, but she decides to stick around. She sits on the small wooden bleachers that divide the two fields—one for the younger kids, one for the older ones, five boys to a team—and watches the game.

  Gustavo Tullio hurries to get to the Futbolclub a little early; they have three PlayStations by the entrance, and he wants to play a few minutes of Pro Evolution Soccer. He won’t buy a PS3 for his children, even though he’d love to own one himself, so the only time he plays is here, at the club, under the canopied roof that connects the little office structure to the bar, the restaurant, and the gym. The game has evolved radically since the early versions he knew well, back when he let himself have a PlayStation. He isn’t able to pick up the kids more than once a week, so he always tries to show up early, to have time for a game.

  You saw her well after she saw you, after she’d already descended from the bleachers. She stands at the top of the stairs that lead out to the fields, at the edge of a walkway dimly lit by the glow of TVs in the bar on the other side of the windows.

  “Now you know my horrible secret,” you joke as you put the controller back in its holder. It falls off immediately and dangles from an antitheft cord.

  “Are you any good?” She picks up the controller and hands it back to you, brushing your fingers.

  “I was, what, ten years ago? Don’t tell I Maschi that I play; it’d make them really fucking mad.”

  “Right. You won’t buy them one.”

  “I got them the Wii, but it came with all these little kids’ games they hate.”

  “So what are they complaining about? They’ve got a father who’s cool enough to play PS3 games. I Maschi idolize you.”

  Nobody has called you cool since your senior year of high school. You go back to the game, stand in front of the screen in your trench coat. You’ve loosened your tie. You’re playing to try to forget what you can sense: Ludovica in a skirt, black leggings (you still call them fuseaux, the old eighties term), black Clarks, white blouse, cardigan, orange canvas jacket, unbuttoned, hair up, emerald eye shadow. You can’t stop playing Barcelona–Man United, you can’t tear yourself away from this series of passes you’re trying to get Xavi, Iniesta, and Messi to make.

  Three statement-like questions, or question-like statements: “You’re really getting worked up, aren’t you?” “You like football?” “You know sometimes I come really close to calling you ‘Mr. Tullio.’ ”

  “Oh yeah?” You use Piqué to escape Rooney’s high press and Park’s doubling.

  “Well, I mean, you’re the first person I met in your family, and now I know all of I Maschi’s songs by heart, and we never talk anymore. Maria says you love to consider yourself the capofamiglia. You’re…it’s not that you’re old fashioned but…you’re an old soul.”

  Piqué has passed the ball to Busquets, who sparks a web of short midfield passes that Scholes and Anderson can’t break with shoulder-to-shoulder contact. Messi rushes to catch a pass and frees Villa with a cross on the left. “Which of their songs have you learned?” Villa dribbles around Vidić, gets in the area, squares it to Xavi, who tips it in. To yourself: “Phenomenal.”

  “Supergol! Bravo!” She slaps your shoulder, but with her whole arm, not just her hand, and for a moment she gives you a squeeze. You want to keep playing, but when she sings “Io sono una star del rock and roll forever…forever…forever,” one of I Maschi’s one-chord blues numbers, you’re so secretly moved that you abandon the controller and the game and invite her to the bar.

  “I only understood what rock and roll really was when I heard I Maschi’s songs,” you confess. “How can they get it so right when they’re just kids?”

  At the bar there are many mothers and a few fathers, dressed expensively but not elegantly. One of the latter flirts with a big-breasted waitress. She looks Puerto Rican, but you know she’s actually from southern Lazio.

  “Since you’re taking them home, I’ll have a spritz.”

  “A Coke for me.”

  “Oh come on, papo, have a drink with me.”

  You carry Ludovica’s second spritz and your first to one of the outdoor tables, weaving between the clusters of parents and their little hairless footballers, clad in over-large brand-name shirts. You sit down and face the bleachers. Marco and Luca are playing on different fields, and you see Luca and wave hello. The sun has set. You tell the babysitter about the circumstances of your departure from football over a decade earlier.

  “I was a striker. I was always on a team, but when I finished high school I wanted a real job. I didn’t want to become, like, a third-division player and screw up my life. No way: small-time
tourneys, club level, amateur stuff, till I was thirty. I was ten when Roma won the title, and when we won again twenty years later with Totti and Capello in 2001…I don’t know why I’m telling you all this…”

  “I love listening to you. I know your kids so well…”

  “You like them?”

  “I wish I had my own just like them.”

  “You have to burn down your life to have children like that.”

  “You’re the most intense man I’ve ever met, you know? In New York everybody seemed so dumb and tentative to me. If I hadn’t met you, I’d still be stuck there.”

  “Eh…”

  “No, it’s true. After our breakfast I knew I had to fly back home. I finally found the strength to do it.”

  You frown as you stare at the sugary dregs of your spritz. You picture Ludovica imploring Go easy on me, Gustavo.

  “So, the Roma win?”

  “Two-thousand one was the first year I didn’t go to a single Roma game. I gave up my season tickets when I got married. Football was an idol, and I’m an idolater.”

  “Idolater, idolatress, idol…You and Maria use these words a lot.”

  “It helps you fuck up less. In two thousand, all at once, I stopped playing football and stopped watching Roma games. There’s…No, I shouldn’t tell you. It’s…it’s dumb shit, but it’s dumb shit that’s…precious.”

  She stares at you with her woman’s eyes, her glass unsteady on the bumpy table. “You’ve got unlimited credit as far as I’m concerned.”

  In the summer of 2000, the Catholic Jubilee year, his comunità organized a weeklong prayer retreat at a convent. “The place had a clay football pitch, and we played there every day during our lunch break, baking in the sun. One night, just before dawn, we were summoned to prayer by the deputy vicar. Each of us had to kneel down on the clay, on the dead leaves and the pebbles, and recite the rosary with our backs straight and our arms outstretched. The priest said, ‘If your back begins to give, endure. Endure the pain of staying awake waiting for God with wide-open arms. It’s one thing to wait for Him at church on a Sunday morning; it’s another to stay awake all night, like the wife who waits for her husband, the sailor, to come back from the stormy seas.’ ”