At twelve thirty, I close up and go upstairs. I dig around in the back of the wardrobe for my trunks and put them on, but they look like something a little kid would wear, with orange crabs floating in blue life rings. I pull on a pair of Luca’s shorts and some of his flip-flops.
“You’re dressed for the party today,” Mimmo says as I stand at the entrance hut, scanning the beach. “Unfortunately, the party’s already migrating.” He points to the scrum of men surrounding Yuri, slowly moving toward us. Papà is there at Yuri’s side, and Zhuki is hurrying behind, hastily packing up Little Yuri and Principessa, putting on T-shirts and making them rinse their feet under the spigot.
“Ciao,” she says. “You’re just in time. We’ve decided to hold practice today.” She’s wobbling a little, loaded down with a giant beach bag and a kid on each hand.
“Do you want me to take the bag for you?”
“I can get it.”
I reach for it, and I instantly regret it. It’s got to be twenty kilos.
“What do you have in here—a third kid?”
“I can get it if it’s too heavy.”
“I’m joking. It’s fine.”
But only looking at the hill makes my lungs wheeze and my back hurt. If I have to talk the whole way up, I’m done for.
“So, tell me another story about Ukraine,” I say.
“What about?”
“I don’t know.” I spot Mykola and Ihor walking up ahead. “How does Yuri know Mykola and Ihor?” And I silently hope it’s a long and convoluted story.
“He met Mykola at the academy,” she says. “Strilky was too far, and our family was poor, so sometimes Yuri would spend the holidays with Mykola’s family. Mykola’s surname is Shevchenko. You know it?”
“No.”
“Oh, it is very famous in Ukraine. He has a cousin in the Premier League, and his father was one of the great gymnasts, traveling the world and training with foreigners. At the academy, they were still using the old ways, so Mykola and his father were always telling Yuri what the foreign calcio players did—eat this way, tie your shoes this way, train this way, run on this part of your foot, don’t let the other boys make psychological games with you. . . .”
“Why didn’t Mykola end up playing for a team?”
“Ach. It is a sad story. Both of them were going to be signed by Kiev Dynamo. But then Mykola, he injured his knee. He tried to rehabilitate it, but his career was finished. When Yuri signed the contract with Dynamo alone, he wrote Mykola in as his trainer. Almost for a joke. But Yuri was so good, they accepted this condition. Each time he was transferred, Mykola was always in the contract. Now he is like family.”
“And Ihor?”
“Ihor is the biggest boy we knew from school. So when Tatiana said, everyone I know has a bodyguard, we need a bodyguard, Yuri looked this boy up, and he was only working in a factory, so he agreed. And now Ihor is part of the family, too.”
“Strange family.”
“All families are strange.”
I drop the bag as soon as we reach the field, and Principessa and Little Yuri run off. Yuri has gone up to the villa for the SUV, and he dumps a pile of cones and balls in the middle of the field. The men who stopped at their houses along the way are pulling on their socks and cleats.
“Attention!” Yuri shouts, waving his arms in the center of the field. “Attention!” For the next hour, they practice, first in shaky rows, kicking balls back and forth, then in snaking lines and crisscrossing patterns in front of the goal. Yuri has Zhuki demonstrate from the penalty spot, and she hits the same piece of net over and over, the arc of her shot perfect every time. I watch from the sidelines. It’s in-cazz-ibile to me that these men who argue back and forth at Martina’s, too stubborn to listen to anything but their own opinions, are suddenly obeying the staccato of a whistle and following meekly in the steps of a woman half their age.
“Etto, get out here, you lazy bum!”
“Yeah. Get off the sideline before it fuses to your culo!”
“Too late,” I shout back.
Papà takes his turn and misses, and Yuri claps a hand on his shoulder and talks to him for a while, twisting and contorting his body, making Papà repeat a series of kicks at an imaginary ball before allowing him back into the line. Zhuki sits down on the sideline next to me and takes off her cleats.
“Yuri seems to be doing better,” I say.
“Yes. This is exactly what he needed. A very good distraction.”
They stop the drills and organize into a scrimmage, Yuri and Mykola squatting on the other sideline.
“Look up! Look up!”
“Don’t think! Shoot!”
“Read the fake! Read the fake!”
“Attack, attack, attack!”
I’m feeling bold. “So how about coming to Camilla’s with me tonight?”
“Oh, I can’t tonight. Yuri wants to go to the bar, so I must stay at home with Little Yuri and Principessa.”
“What about Tatiana?”
“She went to Milan for the week.”
“For what?”
“She’s going paparazzi hunting.”
“Really?”
“She does this every few weeks. Even when we are in Genoa, she must go to Milan or Rome for shopping and to see her showgirl friends. Genoa is not sophisticated enough for her, she says.” Zhuki laughs. “This from a girl who grew up in Cherkassy.”
“Where?”
“Exactly.”
“So why did you come to San Benedetto, then?” I ask. “You could have gone somewhere exclusive, to one of the Portos—Porto Cervo, Portoferraio, Portofino . . .”
“Yuri does not want to go to the celebrity resorts. Prisons, he calls them. He still does not want to believe he is a celebrity. Even the villa as big as a shopping center, that was a compromise with Tatiana. He does not like us living alone, high up on the hill, always looking down. If it were only his decision, he would stay in a small flat next to the sea.”
“And you?”
She pulls her knees up to her chest and looks at me intently. “I am a lot like my brother.”
* * *
When I walk into Martina’s at six, the flat-screen is on Miss Italia nel Mondo, mercifully with the sound off so we don’t have to hear the interview portion and the serious tones these girls have been practicing for a month in the mirror. The noise in the bar is deafening, the same as it always is during the high-summer season, everyone coming to escape the tourists and the heat. Only tonight, it sounds like a hospital ward.
“I think I did something to my ankle.”
“My back feels like someone has been trampolining on it.”
“My back is fine, but my thighs. Porca miseria, my thighs!”
“My calves.”
“My feet.”
“My neck.”
“My culo.”
“I think even my scalp hurts.”
You’d think none of them knew they had a body until today. And after they’ve made a thorough inventory of every muscle and ligament, they go into the endless recaps and heckling. Some of these men could heckle for the Olympics.
“Silvio, I haven’t seen you run that fast since you were trying to chase that rapist down the beach last summer.”
“Ciacco, I haven’t seen you run, period.”
“Only from his wife,” someone says, and everyone laughs.
“You should get your wife out there on Sunday.”
“They were talking about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“All the wives. They were talking about making a picnic of it next week.”
“A picnic? This is a serious match, not a picnic.”
“What’s the matter? You don’t want any witnesses to your weak dribbling?”
“Perhaps you didn’t notice, but I scored a goal on Sunday.”
“I’d be surprised if you didn’t. You never pass . . .”
“We’ll see who scores the goals next week.”
&nbs
p; “We’ll see.”
They start to plan, ignoring even the swimsuit competition flashing behind them, and before long, there’s a league of twelve teams, complete with a double-elimination tournament on the weekend of Ferragosto, even uniforms that Signor Cavalcanti is going to try to get for cheap from his brother-in-law in La Spezia.
Martina comes out of the kitchen and plunks two bowls of trofie with pesto on the bar in front of me.
“If you want it, Carlo, it’s over here,” she calls to Papà. “I’m not going to be your waitress today.”
Papà stands up slowly and makes his way over to the bar. He sits down next to me and gives me a look of mock alarm. Martina makes another trip to the kitchen and brings back a rack of clean glasses, which she bangs on the bar and starts putting away with violence.
“Martina?” Papà asks. “Martina, is everything okay?”
But she doesn’t look up, so I try.
“Martina? Is something wrong?”
She only thins her lips and shakes her head. The door opens, letting in the passing noise from the passeggiata, and I feel the sea air skittering up my back like the first time Zhuki stepped into the bar. I turn to look, just as everyone else does.
“Buona sera.” Yuri’s standing in the doorway, flanked by Ihor and Mykola. The entire bar falls silent. I think you could’ve heard a baby crying on the other side of the world.
“Buona sera,” Papà finally says.
“Buona sera!” the entire bar echoes in unison, like some fottuto elementary school class.
“We come to see if anybody need medical attention.”
The whole bar laughs, but it feels forced, everyone on their best behavior.
“Do you mind if we have a drink with you?” Yuri asks.
“Not at all, not at all.” And there’s a deafening scraping and banging of chairs as fifty men try to make room for them at their tables.
Mykola and Ihor choose a table, but Yuri walks over to the bar.
“Ciao, Etto. Ciao, Carlo.”
“Ciao.”
He nods to the flat-screen. “Miss Italia?”
“Miss Italia nel Mondo.”
“What’s the difference?”
A few words. That’s all it takes to open the room again and resume the chatter.
“It means some Italian guy had a fling on vacation and these are the babies,” Farinata starts. “They’re not even Italian.”
“Who cares, Farinata? They’re in bikinis.”
“What I want to know is how that stumpy Maradona is going to reach any of their heads to put on the crown.”
“They’ll give him a stepladder.”
“Maybe the Hand of God will come down for him again.”
“I will say that Rome diet is working for him.”
“Cocaine?”
“I thought that was the Milan diet.”
“That’s heroin.”
“Who put him on television anyway? Let him rest in peace.”
“It was the only way to make Paolo Bonolis look taller.”
“That’s not Paolo Bonolis. It’s Carlo Conti.”
“Same thing. What happened to that guy anyway? It’s like he got locked inside the tanning bed.”
“Black makes him look taller.” They laugh. The same old jokes, but tonight a strange, new feeling overcomes me. The feeling that I might someday want to be a part of this.
The girls on the screen stay on mute, their mouths gasping like fish when the winner is announced. They do their best fake hugging and I’m-so-happy-for-you faces, and Maradona does in fact have to get on the points of his feet to crown the Filipino one.
“Yuri, would you like a drink?” Papà asks.
“Get them some of that homemade grappa,” someone shouts.
“Good idea. Grappa, Martina.”
“Please,” Martina answers.
“Please,” Yuri says.
“Ah, don’t mind her,” Nello says from down the bar, lowering his voice to a stage whisper. “Menopause.”
Martina looks up and down the bar. She wipes her hands on her apron, unties it behind her and throws it on the counter. “Arrange yourselves. Make sure you lock up when you leave.” She heads for the door.
“Uh-oh. Now you’ve done it.”
“She’s just making a point. She’ll be back.”
“Talk about hot tempered.”
“Her mother was just like that.”
Papà looks at me, then Yuri, then the door. He eases himself off the stool.
“I’ll go, Papà.”
I head for the molo. I don’t know if it’s the molo or the sea that draws people to it, that invites them to stand along the railings and fling their unhappiness into the waves. If they drew samples and counted the emotional distress like they counted the bacteria in the harbors or the cocaine residue in the Po, the beaches would be closed all summer. I pick out Martina’s sloppy bun among the short, hairdresser perms of the Germans and the salon styles of the Milanesi.
“Martina, wait up.” But she either doesn’t hear me or doesn’t want to.
I finally catch up to her at the gates of Bagni Liguria. The bagni are empty at night, the chaises and umbrellas neatly stacked to the side. “Wait up, Martina. You’re faster than half the men.”
She stops, and we let the people on the passeggiata stream around us.
“Go back and finish your dinner, Etto. I left the rest of it in the kitchen.”
“Martina, you don’t have to cook dinner for us anymore. Really. We can fend for ourselves.”
She laughs. “You think I’m this upset about cooking a couple of extra plates every night? God, I need to be around women more.”
“What is it, then?”
“It’s that bastard-of-a-cafone-of-a-husband of mine again.”
I flinch. I can’t remember the last time I heard Martina curse. “What did he do?”
“Took out another loan in my name. Fifty thousand euros this time.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Nobody ever asks.”
“What does he need fifty thousand euros for anyway?”
Martina sighs. “His sister told me a few months ago he was buying a house in the Caribbean with that puttana from Calabria. I remember thinking at the time, ‘Where’s he going to get the money for that?’ I’m so stupid.”
“But he can’t do that. He’s not even your husband anymore.”
“Technically, he still is.” And I realize that I know next to nothing about Martina, that she’s never burdened me with any of this.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“Take it. What else can I do? Hope he pays it back someday.”
“What do you mean, ‘take it’? You shouldn’t have to take it. We’ll get Silvio to investigate. We’ll have Dura and the other guys from Naples call their friends and chase him down. We’re here for you, Martina. Anything you need.”
She laughs, shakes her head, and turns to the sea. The waves are calm near the shore, but there are depth charges of spray exploding about twenty meters out.
“You know what I need, Etto? A life. I really need a life.”
* * *
I’m not in the business of getting lives for people or I would get myself one. But what I can give her is a small piece of a ceiling in a defunct liceo in Berlusconi’s Italy. What I can give her is my full attention and concentration as I paint her into the third panel. The Sacrifice of Martina. I draw her first, a background figure, standing in the kitchen and putting another pot on the stove. I put a nimbus around her head and make the kitchen glow. Over the next few nights, I start adding figures—Papà with his finger in the air and Signor Cato staring into the screen of the computer. I paint a flat-screen in the corner and swap in the bar for the altar, the calcio scarves waving above it, almost horizontal, as if in a fierce storm. I work on it every night after dinner, holding the faces of my neighbors in my head as I climb the hill.
“Why are you staring at me?” Ne
llo growls one night at the bar.
“I’m not staring at you.” But I’ve been staring at everyone lately, at their worry lines and their laugh lines, their hollowed eyes and swollen jowls, their expressions and gestures and the hundred ways they slump in their chairs, occasionally lobbing remarks over their shoulders and listening for the detonations.
“Yes, you were,” Nello insists. “You know I’m straight, right? Hey, everybody! Get this! Etto’s trying to flirt with me.”
His cackle seals his fate. I vow to save him for The Last Judgment. I’ll paint him cowering in the boat on the River Styx, being whacked by Charon’s oar, just as he whacks poor Pia in this life.
It doesn’t take long before the Ukrainians are absorbed into San Benedetto like long-lost cousins, and I start to dream about crowds, about living in communes and spectating at calcio matches in two-tiered stadiums, about being wedged between the Germans and Milanesi on the passeggiata or trapped in airplanes, cruise ships, and shopping malls. In each dream, I find myself pawing through people, searching for someone or something that remains just out of my sight.
When I go down to the shop on Tuesday morning, Papà, Nonno, and Jimmy’s papà are already standing around and talking about Jimmy, who’s apparently playing his video games in Japan now.
“He says he is practically a celebrity there,” Jimmy’s papà is saying. “People ask to have their picture taken with him, and when he walks down the street, everyone turns to look. He says everything there is half the size. Women the size of dolls. Hotel rooms as small as a coffin. And so clean. He says it is so clean you could eat off the streets.”
I can tell by how Jimmy’s papà talks that he’s secretly proud to have a son so worldly, but whenever Jimmy’s name comes up, Papà and Nonno get nervous looks, as if they expect me to evaporate on the spot.
“In a month or so, you will be able to break down an entire vitello by yourself,” Papà says as encouragement. “It will be a day to celebrate.”
“Yes,” Nonno adds. “A butcher never forgets his first vitello.”
While we work, I sneak glances at the front window, trying to catch the very moment Zhuki emerges from the crush of people on the passeggiata and crosses to the beach. I know Papà is doing the same, parting the bead curtain every ten minutes or so, pretending to ask Nonno some question he already knows the answer to.
The Sun and Other Stars Page 24