“I don’t understand,” Nonno says. “It’s been a week. If he didn’t do anything, why doesn’t he come out and declare his innocence?”
“Only the guilty man declares his innocence,” Papà says.
“But he doesn’t even show his face. Where is he? All he has to do is go out for ice cream with his family and give a little wave to the paparazzi.”
“He’s Eastern European. They don’t wave. They don’t eat ice cream.”
Nonno takes a long drink of wine. He makes it himself, a few liters at a time, then siphons it into cloudy green bottles. “Well, what are you standing around for, Etto? Pull up a chair.”
My nemesis, the sun, is out in full force now, beating down into the yard. I take Luca’s hoodie off and wrap it around my waist, pull the third chair under the shade of the lemon tree, and join their inner sanctum.
“Now what was that story I said I was going to tell you, Etto?” As if he has forgotten.
“The one about the girl who was late to her grandfather’s deathbed.”
“Ah, yes.” And Nonno starts grinding into the story he’s probably been working on since he saw me this morning, about a girl who was chronically fifteen minutes late to take her grandfather to his chemotherapy appointments, those critical fifteen minutes allowing his cancer to take root.
None of this would happen during the thirty-eight weeks of the calcio season, of course. By this time, Papà and Nonno would’ve already taken their last piss of the day and arranged themselves on the matching recliners pointed at Nonno’s flat-screen, listening to the pregame commentary in reverential silence, the only noise the squawking of the leather every time they shifted their weight. But this is the thirty-ninth week, and they finally have the time to sit outside under the nonlemon tree and instruct me about my failings.
“. . . but the granddaughter, she eventually got her due because the old man died without being able to say good-bye, and”—here Nonno leans forward and pauses dramatically—without being able to tell her where the safety deposit box was. Because the granddaughter”—he holds his finger in the air like Charon used to hold his pointer stick— “. . . was ten. Minutes. Late.”
He stabs these last three words with his finger, pinning them to the air, where they hang between us. I look over at Papà, but he only nods gravely.
I’m used to Nonno’s parables. When I was younger, I thought it was a coincidence that he knew so many people who possessed the same defects in character and made the same bad choices as Luca and I did. When Papà told him Luca was thinking about getting a tattoo, all of Nonno’s navy friends suddenly got horrible, skin-rotting diseases from their tattoos, often rendering them impotent. When I was sixteen and mentioned that Casella and I were thinking about going to the animation institute in Milan, he spontaneously remembered all the children of his friends who had gone to the city and become prostitutes, drug addicts, or liberals. When I wanted to take a beach vacation down south after graduation, he remembered everyone he knew who had been murdered, dismembered, or sold into slavery by Camorra or Cosa Nostra.
“What was the name of the girl, Nonno?” I ask. “The one who was late.”
“Oh, you don’t know her.”
“You never know.”
He takes a drink of his wine. “Why don’t you go see if your grandmother needs help?”
I follow Nonna’s faint humming into the house, where she’s hovering over a tray of zucchini flowers, stuffing them and lining them up. There’s still a corner of her brain that knows how to cook. Just like how paralytics can have erections on pure reflex, Nonna’s rotted mind instinctively knows what moment to flip a frittata or check on a roast.
“Can I help you with anything, Nonna?”
But she only looks up at me and smiles, as if I am nothing more than a distant but pleasant memory.
We eat dinner at the old wooden table that is probably from my bisnonno’s bisnonno or even before. Nonna has made a feast, the same as every Sunday, and Papà and Nonno silently eat their way through the zucchini flowers, the pasta, and the roast, too much talk being bad for the digestion. I poke at my food as I watch them across the table, their heads bobbing up and down above their plates like birds keeping time, and my mind goes back to Zhuki’s frozen face as she stared at me in the courtyard. After last night, she will probably never come to the shop to buy meat again. She will settle for the meat in the freezer case at the Standa, or at Benito’s, the other butcher in town, who brandishes his knives like swords and belts out Dante and Puccini to the tourists. It’s probably for the best. What would I say if I saw her anyway? I’m sorry. I was drunk. I was a stronzo. See, I have this medical condition . . .
After dinner, I help Nonna with the dishes while Papà and Nonno have their digestivos in the yard. After they decide their postdinner conversation is officially over, I’m obligated to help with whatever projects Nonno has set aside for us. Today, these include cleaning out the second cistern, which for the past two weeks has been belching up an inhuman stench that Nonno swears is an indication of sabotage by one of his jealous neighbors. By the time we’ve finished and washed up, the sun is setting over the terraces and Nonna has already prepared a second meal. And it’s in the middle of the second meal that Papà looks up at me and says, “By the way, I ran into Silvio this morning. He said he went by the field, and it was perfectly clean. He said it looked like a professional mowing job.”
At first I think he’s being sarcastic, but then Nonno chimes in.
“Gubbio said the same.” Nonno clutches his knife in his fist and waves it in my direction. “You see? It just goes to show, a little hard work makes all the difference.”
I don’t believe it even when I see it with my own eyes. It starts as a diffused light rising up from behind the cypresses as I walk up the path, like the landing lights of a spaceship or a second sun resting on the field. I find a spot behind the cypresses and crouch down. It’s incredible. They’ve made an entire calcio field out of light, four floodlights as big as babies sitting at the corners, shining in perfect ninety-degree arcs, creating touchlines and end-lines as sharp as chalk against the dark grass, rolling out like a lush green carpet, the bare spots turfed over and all the dead stuff raked out of it.
And in the middle of the field is Zhuki, her cheeks flushed, her silky shorts fluttering against her thighs like the flag of a mythical country where there is no pain or poverty. She’s dragging the little blond boy around by the feet, his arms flung high above his head, leaving a swirling wake in the shadowy grass. They are going in circles around the enormous man I saw her with the very first time, and the other guy is near Luca’s headstone, kicking a ball back and forth with Yuri Fil himself. They look like dance partners mirroring each other’s movements, the white-and-silver ball darting and hovering between them.
I stay frozen, listening to her and the boy’s laughter, also rising with the light, and I’m only vaguely aware when my thigh cramps up and I shift my weight. A twig breaks beneath my right foot, and the crack resonates across the terrace.
Shit.
The enormous man swings his head like a wrecking ball and stabs a thick finger in my direction. He charges at me, and I run like a wild animal, breaking through the brush to the path. I can hear his voice booming behind me, and he catches up to me in no time, gripping me by the back of my shirt, my arms and legs flailing, like the masked criminals in Batman. He carries me through the cypresses like a shield, the needles and branches scraping the shit out of my face and hands, and he sets me down in front of Yuri Fil like a cat leaving a mouse at the back door. Zhuki’s face changes immediately, from soft flesh into stone, and the little boy tips his head to have a look. There’s a Ukrainian commotion between the three men, lots of shushing and regurgitation of vowels, as Yuri Fil holds the ball patiently against his hip. The little boy cocks his head at me in curiosity. His eyebrows are round like scythes, Zhuki’s flat like plows, her face blank and expressionless, a Closed sign on a darkened door.
Finally, she says something—just a couple of words in Ukrainian—and like magic, the back of my shirt is released.
“So . . . you are the butcher?” Yuri Fil says in English. “Like Materazzi?”
“Who’s that?”
“Who is Materazzi? Materazzi the Butcher? He is your Italian defender who is not nice with his elbows.” His accent in English makes him sound like a little kid. I’ll bet his teammates in Tottenham and Glasgow gave him shit for it in the locker room.
“Actually, I am the son of the butcher,” I say.
“I will be honest,” Yuri Fil says, “we do not care who you are. Only is important for us that you are not paparazzi.”
I try to straighten myself out, smoothing my shirt and raking my hand through my hair. I look over at Zhuki and the hard muscles of her jaw, still set against me.
“Well, I’ll be off, then,” I say.
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no.” And this Serie A striker wags his finger at me like one of the nuns in asilo. “You cannot go nowhere. We need a six.”
“What?”
“We need a six. We want to play match, and we have only five.” I feel Zhuki’s eyes drilling through me, and my head feels like it’s swelling, like any second it might pop off my neck and roll down the hill, playing pinball down the path and coming to rest in the English garden.
“No thank you, Signor Fil.” I back away.
“Yuri,” he says, advancing toward me. “Call me Yuri.”
“No thank you, Yuri.” I turn around and head toward the path.
“But why not?”
Because your sister loathes me, I want to tell him. Utterly and deservedly.
“I don’t play calcio,” I say instead.
Yuri Fil laughs. “In Italy? Impossibile.”
I shrug. “Ask anyone. My brother, he was the calcio player in our family.”
“Where is this brother, then?”
I look toward the goal.
“Aha.”
I glance at Zhuki’s face, and I think I see a slight ripple, a break in the defense. Luca’s dead, and he can still soften up the girls.
“Anyway, have fun.” Have fun. A former-Serie-B-now-Serie-A striker, who I’m sure could rip out my eyeballs and swap them for my palle, and two guys who would help him, and his sister, who in one sentence could give them the motive to do it. The five of them are probably about to play the best match this field has ever seen, and I say to them, have fun?
I hear the grunting and shushing of their language behind me, and then footfalls. Shit. I close my eyes and prepare for the fetal position.
“Hey, relax, relax,” Yuri Fil says, putting his hands up. “I am not the man you should worry about. I am your hero. I save you from Ihor. One second more and Ihor was biting your head off . . . biting your head and . . . ptooh.” He spits on the ground and laughs.
Ihor stands off to the side chuckling, a rumbling in his chest that sends aftershocks through his limbs.
“I am sorry,” Yuri Fil continues, “but you have made me curious. You really do not play calcio?”
“I really do not play calcio.”
“You do not like calcio?”
“No.”
“You do not watch calcio on television?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“No fantasy calcio?”
“What a waste of time.”
“And you never even dreamed of becoming calcio player? When you was little boy?”
“Never.”
He thinks long and hard about this, his finger over his lips as if to show me that I have just spoken the unspeakable.
“Play with us,” he says. “One time. One time, and I promise, you will like calcio.”
“It’s kind of late, isn’t it?”
“It is never too late for calcio,” he says. “Half a match. Forty-five minutes.”
I look back at Zhuki, who hasn’t moved either to encourage her brother or to protest. I know I’ve already blown it with her, but maybe if I indulge her brother, she’ll come away thinking that I’m not a complete stronzo. I don’t know why I even care. I just do.
“Half a match,” I say.
Yuri Fil steps forward and shakes my hand like we’re making a deal. He introduces the others. Mykola, his trainer. Ihor, his bodyguard.
“And this is Little Yuri,” he says. “Captain of Ukrainian national team 2024.” The boy gives a salute, as if he’s used to being introduced in this way. “And you already know my sister?”
“Yes,” I say, and then for no other reason than that I am a complete pedant, I add, “from the butcher shop.” I don’t dare look at her.
“Very good.” Yuri rubs his hands together. “So, Etto-Son-of-Butcher, we have three rules.” He says something to Little Yuri, who clamps his hands over his ears.
“Number one . . .” Yuri counts off on his fingers just like Papà. “Do not be a stronzo on the field . . . number two, do not be a cazzone . . . and number three, do not be son of whore. Everything else okay.”
He nods to Little Yuri to release his ears and holds up his wrist to reveal a watch that would put Guido’s and Nicola Nicolini’s to shame. At least fifty thousand euros of metal links and springs.
“I keep time.”
“What position am I playing?”
There’s a storm of consonants, this time initiated by Zhuki.
Yuri Fil turns to me. “You will start here,” he says, taking me by the shoulders and shifting me into place like I’m still in chickadees. “Mykola and Ihor are on your team.”
I smile, looking at the mismatched three who are left, but no one else on the field seems to think it’s funny.
“We will give you smaller goal to defend,” Yuri says, pointing to Luca’s headstone.
He says a word to Little Yuri, and Little Yuri hustles to the far goal like the calcio players on television. You can tell by how he moves, by how he cocks his knees and shifts his weight, that he has inherited whatever miracle gene his papà has, and he will probably spend the next thirty years of his life under the deafening roars of crowds, the desperate sighs of girls, and the admiring love of not only his papà but papàs everywhere.
Yuri sets the ball in the middle of the field and retreats. Zhuki steps up, one foot tensed behind the other, her eyes dark, two blank circles where the arcs of light will not reach.
Behind me, a whistle blows.
Technically, I did play calcio until I was about ten, but during matches I warmed the bench, and when we did drills I was nothing but target practice for Luca. Even if I had played clear through to the junior leagues, I still would have been no match for Zhuki. When her shoulders fake one way, her hips move the other, as if her feet are disconnected from the rest of her body. I trip over myself trying to gauge which direction they’re headed, but it’s like watching the blades of a fan, and I’m left chasing the breeze. She scores the first goal in two minutes flat.
“You’re really good,” I tell her, my breath already shallow and quick.
“Like I need you to tell me that.” Her breath is coming in little puffs, her face flushed.
“That was supposed to be a compliment.”
“Oh, a compliment. Yes, I am good for a girl, right? Is that what you wanted to say?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Who do you think played with Yuri back in the village for all those years? Who do you think blocked his shots?”
“Look, I’m sorry. And I’m sorry about the other night.”
“Last night,” she corrects me. She steps back, her arms crossed, staring me down.
“Look, I was drunk. I was a stronzo.” She widens her stance. “See, I have this medical condition . . .”
“Come on, come on,” Yuri Fil shouts. “This is not tea party with Alice in the Wonderworld. We are playing match. And you, Etto-Son-of-Butcher, lift your head. You are staring at your feet like if you don’t they are going to disappear.” The whistle blows, and her legs blur.
> I don’t need to recap the rest of it. It’s the longest half ever recorded in the history of calcio. Nine goals. Nine goals she scored on me, the chatter and laughter of Yuri Fil and the others growing louder with each one. Even Ihor grins, though without any movement in the top half of his face. Zhuki doesn’t crack a smile.
“Sixty seconds!” Yuri calls out as Zhuki steamrolls me to another goal.
“And injury time?” Mykola shouts back, laughing.
“No injury time!” Yuri Fil taps at his chest with his middle finger. “Only injury is for ego, right, Etto-Son-of-Butcher?”
We’re near the floodlight in the corner closest to Charon’s aula, and Zhuki dribbles the ball back and forth, alternately blocking the light and letting it hit me right in the face. I think she might be doing it on purpose. She feints and dribbles around me like I’m a stationary object, does the same thing to Ihor, and ricochets the ball off the corner of the headstone and into the net.
The whistle blows.
“It is finished! It is finished!” Yuri shouts like the announcers on TV. I fall to the ground. I wish I could say I do it to make her laugh, but no, I fall to the ground because I feel like I am going to die.
And what does she do? She comes over and stands between me and the corner floodlight, the photons swirling up behind her. I think for a second she’s going to pull me up off the ground in a show of sportsmanship, or at least pity, so I reach my hand out to her, but she leaves it hovering, begging in the air.
“That was for the disco,” she hisses. “Do not fucking touch me again.”
And as if to punctuate this, Little Yuri comes charging across the field at me, yelling, “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.” He takes a running leap and flops across my chest like a cat.
Shit.
“Yurichko!” Yuri Fil shouts, peeling him off me. He says a few stern words to Little Yuri in Ukrainian, then offers me his hand. He pulls me up off the grass like a dead weight. “I am sorry. He watch too much Mexican wrestling. Satellite television. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” I stagger a few steps until I get my balance.
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