by Edoardo Nesi
He pointed at the tarpaulin-covered Ferrari, and the boys ran over to it as Pasquale shouted to them not to touch anything — for the love of God! He lifted the tarpaulin with a flourish like an illusionist, and voilà, there shone that marvelous automobile, red like fire, and everyone’s hearts skipped a beat, even Pasquale’s. As the boys walked around it with their mouths open, whispering “308 GTS,” he explained that once he had heard the sound of the engine, and it was like a cross between thunder and a lion’s roar. Tonino said that he wanted to work hard in life and earn lots of money and buy himself a Ferrari and drive around the Green Zone with his father next to him, leaving tire marks just like Barrocciai.
Then Pasquale covered the Ferrari and they left the warehouse, and as soon as they were in the forecourt, Dino hugged him, and Tonino did the same, and said how that factory really was a cathedral, and Dino added that he wanted to work there too, first as a manual worker and then as a designer. Maria watched them in silence, full of unspeakable admiration and pride for this husband who had had such an important part in that titanic enterprise.
All of a sudden she understood all of Pasquale’s bad moods and headaches and stomachaches and cramps and sleepless nights, and wanted to apologize for not asking to see the site sooner, but then she decided to keep quiet so as not to ruin the moment, and fought hard to hold back the tears that were already gathering in her eyes, crybaby that she was.
Pasquale apologized for the fact that not all the walls were painted, and he explained how he had fallen behind with his work because he had to check that everyone else was doing theirs properly. He said that he was very sorry about this because he didn’t want them to think he was work-shy.
When he saw Maria and the boys start laughing, he joined in, but he really meant what he had just said, because he didn’t like seeing the factory with its walls half-gray, half-white — not at all — and he added that he would start painting them outside of work hours, because there was so much to paint and he didn’t want them to bring in assistants, or worse, another painter, that damned Cicisbei who wanted to take his work.
In fact, he proclaimed, he would start that very afternoon, and when the boys protested that they couldn’t even spend a Sunday with their father, Pasquale cut them off and decreed it was his duty and that there would be no discussion.
But Maria looked at him tentatively, and when he saw those long faces in the only sad moment of an otherwise perfect morning, Pasquale decided that he couldn’t take them home yet, so he told them he had another surprise.
He escorted them back into the offices, got them into the elevator, and told them to close their eyes. Then he led them by the hand to the swimming pool, which stood immense and shimmering and empty.
Pasquale couldn’t help but smile, dazzled by the force of that vision: the night wind had blown away the clouds that had been floating over the city for days, revealing an empty, impossibly tall sky which was of the same color as the tiles in the pool, and beyond the pool there was the bright carpet of dozens and dozens of little factories that had now invaded the plane, reaching as far as the eye could see, brusquely interrupted by hills that were so far away as to be whitened by the distance, and beyond those hills lay Pisa la bellissima, and then the Mediterranean.
Pasquale told them they could open their eyes.
HIS FIRST THING
VITTORIO RETURNED TO THE SEASIDE at the end of his second August without Milena, who had been unfairly sequestered to Calabria by her parents for a holiday filled with study because she had failed Italian and Latin due to all the time she had wasted — so they said — with him.
His father had sent him to a college near Wimbledon for a fifteen-day English course, but Vittorio had ended up sleeping during the morning lessons, spending the afternoons writing and rewriting passionate letters to Milena, and consuming his evenings and nights in the company of an enthusiastic group of his peers from all over Italy, so he hadn’t learned or spoken English that much.
It had been a wonderful holiday, though. He had fallen in love with London, and traveled the length and breadth of the city on the Underground and the double-decker buses, always alone, free and undisturbed. He had played tennis on grass, touched the sacred lawn of Centre Court at Wimbledon, slept in the same room with a girl, seen punks, eaten porridge, escaped death twice at pedestrian crossings because of evil cars incomprehensibly coming straight at him from the right. On the train to Victoria Station he had been awestruck to discover that the huge power station with four chimneys that graced the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals did exist, but he couldn’t see the flying pig.
One Saturday afternoon he got off the Underground at Covent Garden and found himself in the midst of a crowd of teenagers more or less his age, and they were laughing and shouting for some reason, and he was infinitely moved by the idea that he too could join that ferment. He had bought himself a tartan scarf, a pair of Nikes, a Union Jack T-shirt, and a pile of albums, trying to familiarize himself with Genesis and Van der Graaf and instead discovering King Crimson—“Confusion will be my epitaph,” he kept repeating like a raving lunatic as he walked the halls of that small college invaded by Italians. And on his last night, which everybody decided to spend outside, in the park of the college, under a gigantic oak tree, he almost received a definitive lesson in sex education from an eighteen-year-old Milanese who was infatuated with him.
Once he returned to Italy, he realized with horror that his mother had thrown away the 501s Milena had given him with the excuse they were all worn out after the uninterrupted wear he had subjected them to over the winter. He didn’t tell her that she had ruined everything, nor he did he confess how long it had taken him to get them into that very desirable state. He said nothing, and decided to buy a new pair, immediately, on his own. That would teach his mother a lesson.
So, in a glowing afternoon, Vittorio arrived in front of the only jeans shop in the small town embraced by the smallest mountain range of the world, leaned on its kickstand the new Vespa PX 125 his father had just given him, and turned off the motor.
He hated the idea of having to go in, greet the shop assistants, submit himself to their stares and questions, explain that he wanted a pair of 501s and nothing else without giving off vibes that he might be open to trying on another style from Levi’s or another brand like Lee or Wrangler or even an Italian brand, negotiate the issue of size without entering into a discussion on the percentage of shrinkage after the first wash, and disregard any attempt to question his desired length because Vittorio believed jeans should rest precisely on his malleolus.
But he had to do it, all of it, so he took a deep breath, steeled his nerves, and went into the shop. He was immediately taken aback by the unexpected double ring of the bell above the door, which covered for a few seconds the beginning of “Bette Davis Eyes,” the languid song by Kim Carnes that he adored and had already heard a thousand times that summer.
He looked around: stacked all over were dozens and dozens of piles of jeans of every brand, model, and color, and he was certain that he would never be able to find the 501s on his own. He could recognize them at first sight when he saw them worn by his friends, but distinguishing them in the midst of dozens of other similar jeans, all piled up together with their labels covered, was quite a different matter.
So he had to wait for an old shop assistant — even older than his mother — to make her way slowly toward him, her red lips half open in a smile. She was wearing 501s, too. She greeted him with a slow, satisfied “Hi,” and stopped half a meter from him, so close that he could smell on her breath the mint-flavored chewing gum she was chewing to cover the smell of the cigarette she had just smoked. Vittorio made his request, specifying both waist and length, and she searched briefly in a pile and handed a pair to him — they were right there, in front of his eyes — with another prolonged smile.
Here they were, finally, his Levi’s 501s, with their button fly and their white stitching and the red label on the pocket
with the word “Levi’s” written in white. Dark blue. Hard as cardboard. Made with the cotton that grows in the fields of Georgia and Alabama, dyed with indigo. Vittorio smiled, and the shop assistant led him to a changing room, lightly brushing his arm as she opened the curtain. She closed it, but it left a gap as fabric curtains always do, and Vittorio saw her throw him a furtive glance.
She was not old at all, the shop assistant. At thirty-seven — which made her two years younger than Arianna — she had just entered that magical age in which certain women become absolutely irresistible to anyone with eyes to see. Her name was Marianna, she had just come out of a disastrous marriage and was thinking that if there weren’t other clients in the shop, or the manager, she would have screwed that kid on the spot, right there in the changing room, while the hoarse voice of Kim Carnes promised all the better just to please you.
Vittorio, however, was just a boy, and did not understand the potential of that glance. He pulled on the jeans as fast as he could, to minimize the time he spent half naked and visible through that gap in the curtain. They fitted him perfectly. He had guessed exactly the right waist and length, and so he didn’t even have to leave the changing room to be examined by those ravenous eyes that would have finally been able — legitimately, dutifully — to come to rest on his body. He put his shorts and espadrilles back on and left the changing room with his 501s in hand, announcing that they were fine, thank you.
She gave him another slow smile, said “Come with me,” and sauntered toward the till. Vittorio followed her, handed her four ten-thousand-lire notes, asked for a discount as he had been told to do, and received it. The till opened with the ring of a bell, and Vittorio found himself with a two-thousand-lire note in his hand, featuring Galileo contemplating the stars. With studious attention, the shop assistant placed the jeans in a plastic bag bearing the shop’s name and handed it to him with another smile and a final, languid ciao.
Vittorio left the shop triumphant. He had done it. He had managed it all without a single problem. He had even been given a discount! Then he remembered something very important and went back into the shop, catching Marianna talking to a colleague.
— Where were you? There was just a gorgeous young guy in here, with long curls!
Vittorio pretended not to have heard, and asked for a felt-tip marker. The shop assistant’s fingers brushed against his own as she handed it to him, her nails painted a bright red. He lay the jeans on the cashier’s desk and, in front of her, wrote his name inside them, next to the pocket. In uppercase letters: VITTORIO. He had sworn to himself that he would sign his first pair of jeans.
— What a lovely name, Marianna chirped as he said goodbye with a brief, sunny seventeen-year-old smile, thus unknowingly, involuntarily, and fruitlessly completing the list of all the things he had to do to be liked by her.
A few minutes later, as he was driving his Vespa on the waterfront, Vittorio found himself thinking about having sex with that shop assistant: he couldn’t help noticing the uniform tan on her cleavage, and wondered if she was one of those women who sunbathed topless. He imagined going back to that shop, being taken by the hand, led to that same changing room, undressed, and passionately fucked. His dick immediately stood up, painfully contorted between the shorts and the seat of the Vespa, and he had to stop the scooter in order to regain control of the situation inside his Bermudas, but he soon realized it had already gone well beyond any immediate solution and was entirely impossible to mask, so Vittorio set off slowly, smiling, with his young dick pointed toward the zenith of the sky.
His life was dominated by sex. With the help of third-rate skin flicks shown on late-night television and the punctual, exhaustive consultation of the pages of Playboy, his masturbatory pantheon had grown exponentially. During the long winter months in which he had secretly accumulated the forty thousand lire he had just spent on the 501s, Vittorio had seriously considered the possibility of spending part of that money on a blow job, which he had always heard described as the path to terrestrial beatitude. But he soon found out his incapacity for that dishonorable transaction: he would have never been able to overcome his embarrassment and approach a prostitute, agree on a price, and go off into a field or a bedroom.
Instead, a related yet more refined idea had grown in his mind during that season of fervid wanks. He toyed with the foolish idea of offering the money to one of his female schoolmates, or to that friend of his mother’s who was always paying him compliments, or to some stranger who for some reason he always imagined he would meet on a train, in exchange for a blow job. But he had never found the courage to take that first step, and so the idea had vanished miserably while the problem remained before him, urgent and unresolved, and continued to torment him to such an extent that, after a thousand false starts, trembling and babbling like a madman, one evening he decided he had to find the courage to overcome the unspeakable nature of the act and talk about it with Milena — not about paying for it, good God no, but about the possibility that she might one day be the one to perform that task.
It was the day before she left for Calabria, the only one her parents had allowed them to spend together all summer. She had gone to meet him at the beach and they had swum together in the sea, embracing and caressing under the water, and then they had shut themselves in the shower room to kiss as they had never kissed before, and when he dared to touch her tender pussy, she showed no resistance, and so Vittorio slipped in the tip of his trembling finger and she closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip hard and held his wrist tight and moved it just as she wanted, and after a while she gave first a hiccup, then a brief moan, and reached orgasm. She started laughing out of sheer joy and emotion, and her eyes sparkled as she moved to touch his penis, which had grown so erect that it protruded from Vittorio’s swim trunks, and she started to rub it clumsily until he kissed her hard and he came, too, and his legs gave way, leaving him almost to fall to his knees while giving off the brief wild-boar-like grunt that — when they left the shower with their eyes lowered, wrapped in the towels belonging to Arianna, who was tanning herself in blissful ignorance — earned them scandalized looks from the three matrons in flower-print suits who had been waiting to take a shower for the last ten minutes.
That evening, while they were in Vittorio’s small bedroom in the lemonary and were kissing endlessly and listening over and over to “Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits and repeating with Mark Knopfler, “I love you like the stars above, I’ll love you till I die,” Vittorio summoned up all of his courage and asked her in a tiny voice what she thought of the idea of maybe giving him — not now, of course, some other time — a blow job.
Bathed in the pinkish light of an astounding sunset, just a few minutes after having sworn him eternal love, Milena wasn’t expecting that question and replied dryly that if they had to do something more, then she would prefer to make love with him. And so, while Dante Zucchi, parked in the street outside, started to honk to speed up the proceedings, Vittorio and Milena agreed to lose their virginity to one another at an unspecified moment in the future, but certainly within a year of that evening, before the end of next summer.
When Vittorio finally arrived on the beach, the jubilation of sunset was so intoxicating that even he had to notice it. His dick still erect, the bag carrying the jeans held tightly in his hands, all he could see around him were three far-off lifeguards combing the fine sand and two old men walking in silence with their hands behind their backs like two big, pensive storks intent on traveling along the beach all the way to France, and then to Spain.
The sea sparkled. No one paid him any attention. In a heartbeat he took off his espadrilles, removed his shirt and Bermudas and underpants and put on his new jeans despite the complication of his still half-erect penis, realizing instantly how his body could be at the same time hard, soft, and delicate.
Vittorio stood in front of the sea for a few seconds, wearing only his 501s, then he waded in. It wasn’t cold at all. As he walked, the sea fi
ltered in between him and the rough cotton of his jeans, which instantly wrapped around him. His new skin.
He wondered whether he would leave the water with blue legs. Maybe only then the 501s would be truly his, staining him, changing him. Tomorrow he would lay them out in the sun and they would become hard again, rock hard, only slightly faded. From that moment on, he would wear them every day. They would take all of his wounds, and would rip when he fell off his Vespa, and would be stained by blood and sweat and tears and all the other fluids jeans are always stained with. And they would finally be his.
Vittorio stayed there, with the sea up to his waist and his dick finally bending downward as if it had been admonished. He just stayed there, motionless, until the sun plunged into the sea.
BLUE
— PASQUALE! PASQUALE! PASQUALE!
— Hey! What is it?
— Come up here!
— What’s wrong?
— Holy Mary, I said get up here!
— Is there a problem, Barbugli?
— Nooo! Get up here! What are you doing in that courtyard?
— What’s wrong? I’ve got to paint a last coat on one of these walls!
— Come up here one moment, for the love of God!
— Tell me what for, Barbugli!
— Nooo, I can’t. You need to see for yourself.
— Okay, I’m coming.
— Look.
—…
— Can you see?
— Good God…
— It’s just finished filling.
—…
—…