She flinches. Maybe this is your first instinct if you live with a guy like Nello. Maybe it’s because of the word kill. People will go around entire verbal mountain ranges to avoid particular words with me now. Kill. Death. Drown. Crash. Even Fede with all his cazzate and vulgarity will never say a curse that has to do with mothers or brothers even though it castrates half his usable vocabulary.
“You know, signora . . . Pia,” I say, “if you ever need me to bring you anything from town . . . if you ever need anything else, anything at all . . .”
Her dark eyebrows twitch above her sunglasses, slashing my sentence out of the air like Zorro.
“If I need anything, Nello will get it for me,” she says sharply.
“Sorry. I was only offering. . . .”
She stays silent, and as I leave through the gate, I can feel her eyes trying to follow me out. Everyone in San Benedetto knew Pia was doomed even before she herself knew it, but Mamma was one of the only women to befriend her. One time when Luca and I were ten or maybe eleven, she even convinced Pia to leave Nello, and Pia stayed at our house for a few nights while Mamma sorted something else out for her. I remember, as a bribe, Mamma told Luca and me we could stay up and watch television if we gave Pia our room, so we were downstairs watching Supercar in our sleeping bags when the intercom rang.
I think Mamma and Papà were expecting it, but they both went immediately quiet, so all you could hear was KITT’s fake voice saying, “One man can make a difference, Michael,” or whatever it was he used to say. Mamma and Papà whispered for a minute, until the intercom rang again. But instead of answering it, Papà went out through the other apartment, which belonged to Nonna and Nonno back then. We heard their door bang, and then Nello’s and Papà’s voices out on the street, arguing so loudly that lights started to go on in the palazzo next to ours. And just when we thought Papà was winning, Pia came floating down the stairs like a ghost, as if the heavy jacket and small suitcase she’d come with were her only mass.
Mamma, of course, started to argue with her, and pretty soon it got to be like an opera—tenors on the street below, sopranos above, Mamma pleading with Pia to stay. Just one more night and she’d see how much easier it was. Luca and I turned up the volume and tried to keep our attention on the TV, but it was no use. Mamma’s voice rose over it, her Italian splintering under the stress. In the end, Pia floated right out the door, and Mamma threw herself on the sofa next to me and started to cry. I remember Luca and I looking at each other and using that twin telepathy thing to decide to turn the television down and give her a hug because Mamma didn’t cry that often, at least not back then, and it was an episode of Supercar we’d both seen before.
Anyway, ever since then, Nello has been a complete stronzo to all of us. To Papà and me, I mean. But in her single act of defiance, Pia continues to buy our meat.
I must have gone on autopilot down the hill because instead of the paths leading me back to the town and the beach, they’ve delivered me like a chute to the field and the old liceo. After the liceo shut down, it took me a while to reset my routines and shift the center of my world first to the liceo in Albenga and then the shop, but the muscle memory is still there somewhere. I wade through the grass and sit down next to Luca, the lizards scurrying out of my way.
“Ciao, stronzo.”
I lie back in the goal and stare at the blue sky rippling through the net. Nothing in San Benedetto ever changes. Especially in the summer. The sun is always shining, the temperature hovering in the same range. They rarely ever lose a day on the beaches. Maybe every few weeks there’s a squall out at sea that will bring in some fog or a light rain at night, and once a decade, we’ll get a dusting of snow, leaving a few dwarfed and dirty snowmen that quickly melt into the sand.
My phone lights up. Fede, of course.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING SATURDAY?
MY LONG-LOST FAMILY IS ARRIVING FROM RUSSIA.
YOU HAVE FAMILY IN RUSSIA?
IT WAS A JOKE.
BOCCA AND I ARE GOING TO LE ROCCE WITH THE AUSTRALIANS.
HAVE FUN.
YOU’RE GOING TOO.
I’LL THINK ABOUT IT.
COME ON. DAI.
MAYBE.
NO MAYBES.
LEAVE ME ALONE, FEDE. I’M UP HERE MOWING THE FIELD.
FINE. BUT SATURDAY. LE ROCCE. YOU’RE COMING.
I shut my phone off. I’m not mowing the field today. It’s too fottuto hot, and I have no desire to die from gasoline fumes as I creep behind the mower like a Vietnamese farmer yoked to a water buffalo, stopping and starting every time the blades choke on a fist of grass. Nobody comes up here anymore anyway. And it’s the afternoon break. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Nonno complain about people eroding the national identity by not observing the break. I’m just doing my part.
I take off my glasses, and everything turns green and soft, set in gentle motion around me. The sun spins and throws off sparks. I close my eyes, listen to the breeze through the cypresses, and drift off into that pleasant limbo between sleep and wake.
I hear the laughter of a girl, and I bolt upright.
“Who’s there?” I pat the grass until I find my glasses. “Who is it?”
“I am sorry for waking you,” she says in Italian.
The girl is about my age, dressed in a green T-shirt and shorts that look like they came from a school gym class, and there are two guys flanking her like her fottuto guardian angels. They’re both older than she is, one dressed like her, and the other like one of the devil’s minions—black shorts, black shirt, black Adidas, and a black tattoo swirling up his arm.
“This is your field?” the girl asks. She’s obviously not Italian. Her accent is off, the middles and ends of her words sharp like elbows.
“Mine? No.”
“Is this . . . somebody’s field?”
I don’t want to stare at her legs, but I can’t help it. She’s got great legs, muscular thighs and calves, tapering down to delicate ankles.
“Well, it used to be the field for the liceo,” I say. “But the liceo was shut down, so I think it became the general property of the comune. But then the comune leased it to my father for one euro a year—well, the mayor, actually, who was doing my father a favor, leased it to him . . .” Her forehead is straining under the weight of this information, her eyes squinched shut like flower buds in the sunlight. “And we’re supposed to be responsible for the maintenance, but nobody really comes up here anyway . . .”
One of the men asks her something, and she answers him in some other language.
“Do you speak English?” she asks me.
“Yes.”
“We are new in town. Can we play calcio here, or not?”
I shrug. “Hey, it’s a free country. The field’s not in great condition, of course. No one’s played here in a while. There’s another field in town that’s much nicer than this. Right behind the Standa. Astroturf. Painted lines. No horrible walk up the hill.”
The two men turn to her, and there’s a short conference, after which she turns to me.
“Thank you. You are very sympathetic. We are sorry to disturb your nap. We will come back later.”
The three of them turn around and disappear into the tangled weeds and scrub, as quickly and completely as they appeared. I sit spooked for a minute, the afternoon cicadas screeching around me.
“Who the cazzo was that?” I ask Luca, but he only stares back at me and gives me his mysterious smile.
When I open the door to Martina’s, it sounds like the roar of the sea. The flat-screen is turned up to full volume, with prosecutors and publicists looming like mountains and booming like cannons, each man in the bar trying to overlay his own commentary. Most of them have been here since Sunday night going over the forensics of the Genoa-Venezia match in minute detail. Charon used to call them the “small-souled,” these men who have been blessed or cursed with early pensions from the railroad or sons to run their businesses. They are permanent fixtures
at Martina’s, subsisting on a constant drip of coffee and grappa, their days spent doing a dead man’s float over their newspapers, their evenings spent shouting at the flat-screen.
“Do not be sucked into the vestibule of their apathy,” Charon would bellow at us. “Look and pass.” He would pause a moment to allow his voice to travel the length of the aula. “Look and pass.”
And Casella and I would nearly get sinus infections from holding back our snorting.
“Ciao, tesoro,” Martina says. I take my seat at the bar, and she leans over and kisses me on the cheeks. The flat-screen flashes shots of a few players and managers shading their faces and ducking into doorways, then stock clips of courtrooms.
“What’s all this?”
“You haven’t heard about the scandal?”
“Still?”
“It’s only just begun. They’ve announced that there’s going to be an official investigation. Your papà is beside himself.”
I pick him out in the crowd of men, his face heavy with anxiety.
“Anyway, I’m sorry, tesoro, but they started coming early this morning, and I haven’t managed to cook anything all day. I called Belacqua. He said he would be over with a pizza for you, but that was an hour ago.”
I make the silent calculations in my head. Belacqua’s uncle’s pizzeria is at the other end of the passeggiata. He’ll stop and have one joint down on the rocks, maybe two, and by the time he gets here, the pizza will be cold as stone.
The commercials come on, and someone turns down the volume. This is always a sign of calcio arguments ahead, which you who call it soccer instead of calcio might find hard to keep up with. As long as you understand that this is just an infinitesimal fraction of the pain I suffer having to listen to this cazzate every day.
“It is the ultimate injustice,” Papà thunders. “The ultimate injustice. Yuri Fil didn’t leave the field because of match fixing. He left because of his ankle, an old injury from his Kiev Dynamo days. So they are singling him out for having a disability? Where is the justice in that?”
“Amazing how those old ankles act up when it’s convenient, isn’t it?”
“And what if he left the field because he wanted no part in the match fixing?” Papà presses. “If he went off because he didn’t want to shoot on a keeper who was going to step aside and let the ball go in no matter what? This is called sportsmanship. This is called integrity. What would be wrong with that?”
“What would be wrong with that? It would show that he knew about the fix. That’s called de facto participation.” Cazzo, how they love their Latin when they’re arguing.
“Well, who’s to say that Genoa wouldn’t have won anyway? After all, that new Venezia keeper is so young he’s still trying to find his own balls.”
Everyone laughs.
Waiting for Belacqua to show up with my pizza, I find out more about the scandal than I ever wanted to know: the wiretaps at the hotel, the briefcase of money found in the Venezia manager’s car, and of course, Yuri Fil’s controversial self-substitution only thirteen minutes into the first half. On the surface, it’s the same shouting and waving as on every Sunday night during the season, when they make the weekly reordering of the calcio scarves above the bar—victors and heroes on the left, losers and sons of whores on the right. It’s the same pinching and thrusting of various combinations of fingers, the same insulting of mothers, aunties, first-grade teachers, and ancestors all the way back to the Romans. Only tonight, the room is creaking under the weight of grand abstractions. Integrity. Sportsmanship. Tradition. Honor.
“I don’t care about the technicalities!” Papà shouts to the others, wringing his hands as if he’s making patties out of them. “I still say Yuri Fil did the honorable thing.”
“And I still say that Yuri Fil refusing to play is an admission of guilt,” Nello says. “That means he knew about the fix and didn’t say a word.”
“And what about everyone else? Are you telling me no one else on that team knew?”
Gubbio, the mayor, shrugs. “I don’t see why it’s such a big affair anyway. Genoa needed the win. Venezia didn’t. And so Genoa should get the win. For Venezia to lose the game is the honorable thing to do.”
“If it’s so honorable, why do they need a briefcase full of money?”
“A quarter of a million euros in calcio these days is nothing. A gratuity. A tip.”
“Aha, you see? That is exactly the problem,” Sordello chimes in from one of the card tables. Sordello’s cousin is a second-string midfielder on some Serie C2 team in the south, and he tries to slip in his pedigree wherever he can. “I was talking with my cousin about this a couple of weeks ago, and he agrees with me—calcio has drifted into complete anarchy. A ship without a pilot, a whorehouse where ultras can turn stadiums upside down, players change allegiance every season and will do anything for fame or money. Where is the love of the game, I ask you? The old guys would be ashamed if they could see what has become of calcio in this country. And where is the leadership to right the ship? The teams are all run by tyrant businessmen, by a bunch of bossy peasant clowns.”
“Ah, but if only it were the individuals.” Mimmo takes his turn, and everyone faces him. “It’s the system. It’s this unchecked capitalism eroding everything. Money, the root of all evil.”
“Eh, eh, eh . . . I’m surprised you’re not handing out leaflets, Mimmo.”
“I’m having them printed,” he says, and continues, “Look at the financial doping of calcio, the corruption in the government, the breakup of the family, this tabloid-reality-television nonsense—it’s all related, and there wasn’t any of it back in the old days when a calcio player made the same as his brother in the factory, and they played purely for the love of the game.”
There is a general murmuring of agreement around the bar. “Ah . . . sì, sì . . .”
My phone lights up. Fede again.
WE’RE AT CAMILLA’S. COME ON OVER.
I’M AT MARTINA’S.
WELL, EAT AND GET OVER HERE.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Farinata’s voice booms as he rises slowly from his stool in the corner. He’s the oldest fascist in town, and people call him Il Duce, which I think secretly pleases him. “It’s not the money. It’s not the system. It’s not the lack of leadership. It’s the foreigners. Think about it. We didn’t have any scandals until the foreign players started pouring in. 1980. Liam Brady. That’s where it all began and ended. And so goes calcio, there goes Italy.”
“Euh. Come on!” Papà waves him away. “Are you joking? Liam Brady was squeaky clean. A sportsman and a gentleman. A bella figura if ever there was one!”
“Here, here!”
“And 1980? 1980 you said? Are you out of your mind? Have you forgotten about Totonero, the scandal of all scandals? Pellegrini, Cacciatori, Albertosi, Paolo Rossi!” Papà counts them off on his fingers. “You hear any foreign names in there?”
“Hey, leave Paolo Rossi out of it. He did his six goals of penance during the ’82 World Cup.”
“Ah . . . sì, sì . . .” everyone murmurs again.
The door opens and the scarves flutter above the bar. Signor Cato in the corner reaches for his hair as if for an imaginary hat, his eyes never leaving the computer screen. After his wife died, Mamma and Martina tried to keep him busy by making him take those computer classes for old people. Now he spends every day dredging the Internet for the trash of the world.
Belacqua sets the cold pizza down on the counter.
“It’s about time,” Martina says. She goes to the kitchen and comes back with a plate, a fork, a knife, and a napkin, still fighting the losing battle of trying to civilize us.
“Hey, boss.” Belacqua grins and sits down on the stool next to me. “Sorry the pizza’s a little cold.”
“Have a nice smoke?”
“How do you know I smoked?”
“You’re reeking of it.”
“A guy’s got to rest. What’s that Aristotle said, ‘the soul th
at rests becomes wise’?”
“You must be a fottuto genius, then.”
He grins. “So, what’s all the commotion here?”
“Eh. Calcio, what else?”
“All I’m saying”—Farinata is shouting now—“is that the calcio scandals are only the symptom of an epidemic. I don’t care if you’re talking about Liam Brady or fucking Ian Rush and his fucking baked beans and pudding or these damn Moroccans selling their coconuts on the beach!”
“Farinata!” Martina shouts. “Language!”
He waves her away.
“Don’t you wave me away, Farinata! I’m warning you!”
“Calma, calma, everyone,” Nicola Nicolini says, holding up his manicured hands, his ten-gazillion-euro watch glinting in the light. “It’s only calcio. No reason to string anyone upside down in the gas station.”
“I’ll bet he’d like to be strung upside down,” Signor Cavalcanti says under his breath. “That finocchio.” Laughter ripples down the bar.
But Farinata keeps going. Once he gets onto his fascist shit, he can’t be stopped. “You people are in a constant state of denial. First they took over the stadiums, then they started working in our streets and our piazzas, now they’re buying up businesses and diluting the gene pool! Don’t you see?”
“If we’re still producing people like you, Farinata, maybe we should be trying to dilute the gene pool.” The bar shakes again with laughter.
“That’s it . . . keep on laughing. You’ll see. You’ll see. It’s not their homeland so why should they care what happens to it? And once it stops resembling the Italy we know, the Italy our children and grandchildren know, our young people will stop caring what happens to it, too. And if we, the leadership”—here, half the bar snorts—“aren’t the tiniest bit vigilant, one day we’re all going to be sitting around here drinking Turkish coffee and bowing to Mecca, and Serie A will be nothing more than a fucking third-world, dirt-and-chicken-fence calcio league.”
“Farinata!” Martina shouts, but he ignores her.
“Fari!” a voice from the corner booms. This time, everyone turns in the direction of the computer alcove. Signor Cato’s skin is almost transparent, his face glowing as brightly as the monitor. He glares at the offender across the room, one bushy, white eyebrow cocked above his eye. Like all the other old guys who fought in the resistance during the war, Signor Cato is afforded a long list of liberties, including but not limited to drinking wine in the mornings, calling middle-aged men by their diminutives, and being listened to when he wants to say something. Which should not be underrated.
The Sun and Other Stars Page 5