“Thirteen.”
“Thirteen! Cazzo! If that were my sister I’d lock her up!”
“Why? You’re the only vampire she needs protection from.”
“Yeah, you’re the only vampire, Fede.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes it is.”
Now, I don’t like to make a habit of defending Fede, because everyone knows that’s a slippery slope, but Fede is far from the only vampire in San Benedetto. And while right now, I don’t feel like telling you the whole tragic history of desperate men in our region, I will say it’s mostly a supply-side problem, and if I can be bothered, I’ll tell you all about it later, along with the Maradona Hand of God story if you haven’t already googled that by now.
“What about that one, then, the one in the black leather coat?”
“That’s a trans, Fede.”
“A what?”
“A trans . . . you know, a girl with a surprise.”
“In-cazz-ibile.”
“It’s true.”
“That is one hundred percent woman.”
“Fifty percent, maybe . . .”
“No . . .”
“Yes. It’s Alessandro-Alessandra-Whatever. Works over at the Hotel Paradiso. He-she-whatever has been taking the hormones for two years now.”
“I guess they’re working,” Fede says. “Who’s that one, then?”
“Which one?”
“That one, in the black pants. The one whose culo is practically singing my name.”
“That’s Forese’s cousin. She’s going into the novitiate.”
“The what?”
“She’s going to be a nun, Fede.”
“She is not. Whoever saw a nun with a culo like that?”
“Deficiente. They don’t cut off body parts when you join.”
“They might as well.”
I look over to the bar again, and this time, I catch Signora Semirami staring straight at me. She gives me her pathetic two-second blink that’s supposed to be seductive, I think, like fifteen minutes with her would be granting my every fottuto wish.
“Hey, Etto,” Bocca says. “Remember that little man from Naples that Professoressa Gazzolo used to tell us about in biology class?”
“With the tail?”
“Yeah, what do they call that again?”
“Vestigial.”
“Yeah, a vestigial culo, that’s what she has.”
“Whatever,” Fede says. “I’m sure whatever can be nunned can be un-nunned.”
“Fede, you’re a pig.”
“Oink.”
“Fede, did you just oink?” Sima’s thumbs are twitching against her phone, her face tilted toward the soft, blue light, Madonna-and-Child-style. The only time I ever see Sima smile is into her phone, and the only time any of us ever hear from her is when she SMS-es us. When she’s actually with us, she’s SMS-ing her university friends in Genoa. I think she thinks she’s keeping up with the conversation, but her timing is always a half second off.
Fede puts on a serious face. “I was just telling them how my cousin got attacked by a wild boar. He made it to the hospital, but . . .” He hangs his head.
Sima looks up. “That’s terrible!”
We all laugh.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
The second half starts, and a reverent hush drops over the bar. Another forty-five minutes and it will all be over. Well, maybe not over, because calcio is never, ever, really over, but at least it’s the end of the regular season, a break until the Champions League and the Coppa UEFA start up again, an annual air pocket that the ten stations, the fifty calcio shows, and the thousands of commentators and journalists try to fill with cycling, Formula One, and the leftover scraps of the calcio season that they have to exaggerate to make them sound important—wild speculations about transfers, praise heaped on the teams who experienced “salvation” and shame on the ones who were demoted, eulogies of the washed-up players sent to America, and endless superlatives about the Juve dynasty, who won the Scudetto yet again this year.
I can’t take any more calcio this season. Not even another forty-five minutes.
“I’ll be right back,” I say.
“Bring me another beer, eh?”
“Get it yourself.”
I walk around the scattered tables, trying not to look at Signora Semirami as I pass.
“Ciao, Etto.” I can feel her eyes molesting me as I walk past the bar and the computer alcove, back through the kitchen, and into the bathroom. I pull the accordion door shut, lock the latch, and sit down on the seat, but I can still hear Signora Semirami’s cackling laugh as clear as if she were in here with me. I put my hands over my ears and press hard. Mamma showed us this trick. It sounds exactly like being underwater. I used to do it all the time—cover my ears, close my eyes, and dream of diving to the bottom of the sea, of disappearing as completely as Mr. Mxyzptlk when Superman makes him say his name backward and he gets sent back to Zrfff.
Etto. Etto. Etto. Otte. Otte. Otte.
Then I remember.
I open the cabinet behind the toilet. Martina keeps her inventory here. I pull a bottle of vodka out, break the seal, and take a drink.
Cheers, Mamma. Cin-cin, Luca.
The bar erupts again. Another goal for Genoa. 2–1. Everyone is screaming and hugging, and jumping up and down. I slip out of the bathroom and walk right out the door. And you know what? No one notices. Not Papà or Fede or Martina or Signora Semirami. Not even Mino.
“Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool!!!!!!!!”
The door of the bar closes behind me, the heat and noise immediately replaced by the salty sea air and the polite murmurs of the tourists taking their after-dinner walks along the sea. It’s mostly Germans in June—one giant, pale, scrawny-legged, poorly tipping flock, arriving every year like the transumanza of the sheep from the Alps to the plains. The families from Milan will start coming thick and fast in July, bloating our little town of five thousand to something like fifty thousand by Ferragosto, then draining again like a burst blister come September. If you live here long enough, though, you learn to ignore the tourists, to walk past them like the benches and the palm trees. So even though the passeggiata is packed to the railing with people tonight, they ignore me and I ignore them, and it’s almost as good as being alone.
Venezia comes back and scores another goal. 2–2. I can hear the wailing and moaning from the open windows, and the quieter yelps of pain coming from the waiters and bartenders huddled around small screens along the passeggiata.
I look back toward Martina’s, but nobody’s coming after me. I take another drink and look in the other direction, down the stone-and-metal curve of the passeggiata that follows the natural arc of the beach below. In the distance, I pick out the security gates of our shop and the darkened shutters of our apartment above. I could go home and wait for Papà. I could sit on the sofa and let him turn on the light, look at my face and peruse Luca’s features buried somewhere between the skin and bone. I could, without a single word, ruin the whole night for him, snap him out of his glorious fandom and remind him of his awful reality—that instead of a championship calcio player for a son, instead of a woman he loved, he’s left with me.
A woman walks by, and out of the corner of my eye, she looks exactly like Mamma. I watch her pass. From the back she has the same broad shoulders and sloppy ponytail, but the laugh and the walk are all wrong. This is something they don’t tell you when someone dies, that a few times a month, at least for a second or two, you’ll swear you see them, and whenever it happens, you’ll feel the need to ballast your mind with all the sanity you have in order to keep yourself from tipping into crazy.
I take another drink and look up at the curved wall of terraces, cupping San Benedetto like a giant’s hand. The sun is setting behind them, flattening into a disk like an Ufo, and I imagine it crushing a flock of sheep somewhere in the valleys, some half-wit shepherd crawling out from
under it, toothless and resolute that he has seen God. I lean back into the railing and listen to the shush of the waves behind me, the metronome that has kept time my entire life. The darkness will come quickly now, any life left in the land breaking apart and scattering into stars.
I head to the back of town, where the crowds drop away and the sound of clanking dishes becomes a distant tinkling. I pass the playground of our old asilo and cross the railroad bridge to the hill. Twenty steps up the incline, I’m already huffing and puffing, cursing and sweating, my thighs working against the hill. Vaffanculo, gravity. Vaffanculo, stony path. Vaffanculo, weakling legs and shallow lungs. The shadows spread into darkness, and the streetlights blink on.
I stop at Via Partigiani and set the bottle on the flat rock the nonne use as a bench to wait for rides. I sit down and light a cigarette. Vaffanculo, American tobacco companies and your crack marketing teams. I exhale and look through the cloud of smoke to the town, the buildings and cars shrunk to Lego size. There’s another round of shouting from the villas around me, echoing across the hill. Another goal. Genoa takes the lead, 3–2. Cheers, Griffins. Salute. You have made Papà proud, not an easy feat.
I hold the bottle of vodka up to the light and swirl it around. It shimmers a little, an entire world of winds and currents inside a bottle, and I start to imagine the people who must populate it, sloshing around, holding on for dear life. I take another drink, stamp out my cigarette, and keep moving, higher and higher, through the tunnel of foliage. The pavement gives way to cobblestones, and finally a dirt mule track, studded with rocks that have been washed down and embedded by the spring torrents. I can feel my breath squeezing in and out, my heart flopping against my rib cage like a dying moth, and I imagine flipping a switch and opening a panel of gills all the way up my side. The mule track closes in on me, and I scrape my hands along the rough walls, combing the weeds that grow out of the cracks between the stones.
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wilderness,
for I had wandered from the straight and true.
How hard a thing it is to tell about,
that wilderness so savage, dense, and harsh,
even to think of it renews my fear!
It comes into my head, light and bubbly like a nursery rhyme. The first week of liceo, Charon tried to scare us by making us memorize the entire first canto. Casella and I stayed up all night, high on espresso, singing it to different songs to make ourselves remember. First the national anthem, then a stupid Lùnapop song that I won’t even try to remember the title of because I don’t want to get it stuck in my fottuto head. Then that bella-ciao-bella-ciao-bella-ciao-ciao-ciao song.
Shit. Now that’s in my head.
I keep walking. I catch a whiff of an unearthly stink, and I know I’m close to Mino’s house. The last thing I need right now is to wake up his stupid attack dog di merda. I try to creep by slowly and quietly, but a set of small yellow eyes appears in the path ahead. I freeze, and so do they.
“Go away!” I whisper.
It’s a cat, and through the darkness, I can hear it digging in, hissing and spitting at me.
“Go on. Shoo! Go!”
She gives a rolling yowl, filled with all the desperation of the world, a heat that will never be relieved. You will not get through here, she hisses at me, not if I have anything to say about it. No chance. Turn around and go back. And she punctuates it with another yowl.
“Come on, you fottuto cat. Move! Go! Via! Shoo!” I whisper.
I pull a weed from the wall and throw it at the eyes of the cat. The dirt explodes off the roots, and the cat screams, its lean body leaping away into the ether. Mino’s stupid attack dog di merda wakes instantly and starts barking its head off. I throw a clod of dirt at him, too, and I can hear him smacking his lips as he eats it. I throw another one in the same direction, and he’s finally quiet. I hurry up the last stretch of the mule track, feel for a gap in the wall of cypresses, and push my way onto the field. It’s dark now, and the faint outline of the vegetation takes shape around me.
I take another drink and wait a minute for my eyes to adjust. This is the only flat spot above town large enough for even a three-quarter-sized calcio field, but nobody but me really comes up here anymore. The grass is so long, it could wrap itself around my ankles, and I stumble and high-knee my way toward the goal, the shadow of the old liceo looming behind a second row of cypresses. I haven’t been inside in three years, but that’s a story for another time, and after I tell you about the Hand of God and the Great Woman Famine, I will tell you that one, too. I reach into my pocket for my phone and shine the light on the ground, cutting a narrow swath through the grass until it finds the headstone. Luca’s photo smirks back at me from the laminated frame, his face scrubbed, his uniform ironed, his cleats immaculate.
“Ciao, stronzo. Happy anniversary. Tomorrow, eh?”
I’m not sure exactly how Papà convinced Mamma to bury Luca in the goal. Convinced is probably not the right word. After Luca died, Mamma was just a husk, and maybe all he did was plow her under. All I remember was that there was a lot of crying (Mamma) and yelling (Papà).
“I coached him in chickadees on that field! He scored his first goal on that field! He will be buried on that field!” And he had Silvio make a strong recommendation to Gubbio, the mayor, who signed a piece of paper that said Papà could be leased the field for one euro per annum plus responsibility for the maintenance.
But even after that, nobody believed it would actually happen. I mean, being the mayor is all well and good, and Gubbio can sign whatever piece of paper he wants, but there’s nothing like a bunch of old women with loosened tongues and long memories to maintain order in a society, and everybody knows things in San Benedetto are ultimately approved or vetoed by the nonne. I think maybe that’s why everyone sat back, because they expected the nonne to step in, but in the end, they only crossed themselves and called Papà matto for it. Crazy. Behind his shoulders and not even to his face.
I sit down next to Luca’s headstone. I comb my fingers through the grass and tease apart the knots. I’m supposed to be the one mowing it, and maybe it’s just my guilt, but I can practically hear it growing and proliferating in real time around me, the roots sucking up the water, the chloroplasts filled to bursting, the cells madly dividing. A testament to life, and yet tall enough to bury me. I pick up the calcio ball Papà left here two years ago instead of flowers. It’s soft and damp, and I roll it between my hands.
“Genoa’s leading,” I tell Luca. “Three to two, but Yuri Fil left the match early. Something about his ankle. Then again, you probably know that already, don’t you?”
I lie down and let myself sink beneath the surface of the grass. For a while after Luca’s accident, I’d try to get him to talk to me. I’d look over at his empty bed on the other side of the room and complain to him about Papà or tell him how depressed Mamma was. Because that’s what Father Marco and everybody else kept saying to me: now he’ll be watching over you, blah, blah, blah, you’ve got another angel praying for you in heaven, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. I’d wait for him to answer, give him plenty of time, but there was nothing. Niente. Only a rushing sound around my ears. I guess in heaven they have better things to do than worry about us—making out with cherubim or playing Quidditch or whatever you do when you don’t have to lug your body around anymore.
The shouts of the end of the match rise up from the villas on the hill.
“I guess they won, eh? Papà must be happy.” I sit up and take another drink, then pour a generous shot where Luca’s feet must be. Magic feet, they called them. He was perfectly two-footed, and over the years he’d learned a litany of feints so the defenders could never tell which foot he was going to use until the ball was already past the keeper. He had his first tryout when he was twelve, went away to the academy in Milan at fifteen, and worked his way up the junior leagues. At his funeral, the assistant coach they sent said they were going to c
all him up to the first team in the fall, though he could have just been saying that. I wonder if Papà watched the match tonight thinking about Luca running back and forth across the flat-screen.
I get up and walk over to the edge of the terrace. People are pouring out onto the streets now, chanting and cheering, cars honking and air horns blasting. Someone is shooting fireworks off the end of the molo, and the car headlights respond, blinking in some fottuto Morse code I’ve somehow never learned. Nonno’s got the 2CV down there, and it honks like a dying goose. He actually won it from a French guy back in 1960-something after the Italians beat the French in a match that was so important, evidently people were betting their cars on it. I don’t know what color it was originally, but Nonno painted the front blue and red—Genoa colors—with a yellow griffin spread across the hood. The back half of the car is painted in red, white, and green, with “VIVA L’ITALIA!” scrawled across the rear window. Below it, on the flat of the trunk, he put a skull and crossbones with the words “AND DEATH TO FRANCE!”
I take another drink, and the bottle feels light, the vodka plinking against the sides as the tide pulls in and out of my mouth. I lean forward, looking over the edge of the next terrace into the darkness, and I can feel all the gravity of the earth pulling at me, as if at any moment I could drop into the abyss. And I don’t believe in supernatural stuff—really, I don’t—but all of a sudden I feel a shot of cold air hit me from behind, as cold as the air from the walk-in at the shop. I jerk my head around and look up at the shadow of Signora Malaspina’s massive villa rising several terraces above. It was built in the sixties by her ex-husband, a Hollywood movie director, and every third tile on the roof is actually a little mirror. During the day, it sparkles like a piercing set into the brow of the hill—discreet, but enough to change the whole face of it. Now, it’s dark except for one light in one window.
I take another drink and keep staring at it. After about a minute, the light in the window blinks out, and the next window lights up. And the next, and the next. Seven of them, like a band of lights on a spaceship. The last one holds steady for a minute or more before there’s another flash of light, this time on the rooftop veranda, hovering over the whole villa. It stays on longer than the others, maybe five minutes, and there’s something about it that makes the hairs on my neck stand up. I start thinking about the possibility of aliens landing on top of Signora Malaspina’s villa, and my mind drifts to the comic Casella and I started the summer we were twelve. That one was called Manna. Pieces of bread mysteriously dropped from the sky, and when people ate it, it turned out to contain alien life-forms, which expanded in their stomachs like those seahorse sponges, eventually taking over their bodies and then their thoughts. Trust me, if we’d been able to finish it, it would have been bigger than E.T. Two sequels, kids’ carnival costumes, alien-shaped breakfast cereal, the works.
The Sun and Other Stars Page 2