The Sun and Other Stars
Page 25
By one o’clock, all that’s left of the hindsaddle is spread over the back table, and the vacuum-pack machine is running at full blast, the rifle shot and hiss at the end of each cycle setting the rhythm.
My phone lights up. Zhuki this time.
WE’RE AT THE BEACH.
I HAVE TO FINISH UP IN THE SHOP.
COME OVER WHEN YOU’RE FINISHED.
Papà seems to read my mind. “It’s all right, Etto. You’ve done enough for today. You can go.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure. Go.”
Mimmo is sitting inside the entrance hut, reading. The beach is mobbed, the umbrellas cluttered with wet swimsuits flung across their backs. Yuri is sitting on a chaise in the front row, surrounded by a group of men, most of them in street clothes.
“I don’t see any deliveries in your hand today, Etto,” Mimmo says.
“Not today.”
He wags his eyebrows at me. “She’s over there.”
“Thanks.”
The sand shifts as I step down from the boardwalk. I feel like I’m walking in slow motion and everyone is staring at me, like my skin is transparent and they can see the folds in my brain and the blood pumping through my arteries.
I find Zhuki knee deep in the water, holding Principessa’s hand while Little Yuri and a couple of other boys jump into the crests of the waves as they roll in. I stop at the edge of the dry sand, just out of reach of the bubbling surf.
“Ciao.”
She turns around, squinting. “Ciao.”
The sun is heavy on my forehead. I wish I’d brought a pair of sunglasses, a hat, something to block it. A monster wave comes in, washing over my feet, eroding the sand beneath them and knocking me off balance. Zhuki laughs. I look up, and there are her eyes pulling me forward.
She picks Principessa up and goes out to where the boys are. The water splashes around my ankles, and I look down at my feet, pale and glowing, distorted by the water. I imagine the flecks of Mamma’s skin cells swirling around with the bits of seaweed and sand. One drunken winter night, I finally pressed Fede into telling me where they’d found her body. He said it was concealed in the sand and murkiness between the piers, and the divers had to unhook her from the pipes that lie flush on the sea floor. I don’t even know what those pipes are for. Fede said she’d taken one of the hooks from the shop and attached it to her weight belt. I look up at the chair. Fede is watching me, and he smiles and gives me a thumbs-up. My stomach churns.
“Are you okay?” Zhuki calls back to me.
“Fine. Why?” I try to force myself to relax. What is it they tell you when you’re seasick? Look out at the horizon, as far as you can until you forget the sickness and get your balance back. So I look out at Whale Island rising like a rocky wart from the smooth skin of the sea and let my eyes float to the horizon. It doesn’t help. I still have the awful feeling in the pit of my stomach that if I make any sudden moves, the equilibrium of the sea will be upset and Mamma’s bloated body will come floating up from the bottom.
Zhuki wades farther out, Principessa clinging to her shoulder. She jumps with every wave, shouting with the boys. I shuffle my feet until the water is up to my calves and the waves splash at the edges of Luca’s shorts.
I stop. I can’t do it.
Zhuki turns around and motions again for me to follow, but I shake my head. They jump into a few more waves before the whole group turns around and comes back toward me in slow motion, Zhuki’s legs fighting the water. I can hear her explaining the tides in both Ukrainian and Italian, how the sun and the moon pull the water up and down. Like getting in and out of a bathtub, she says. She sets Principessa down on the sand and turns her attention to Little Yuri, who’s pulling at her arm.
“I told Little Yuri we would jump off the molo. Do you want to come?”
“No, no,” I say, trying to play it cool. “No jumping for me.”
“I’ll save you if you drown.” She makes a little diving motion with her hand, and I force a laugh.
“I don’t feel like the beach today. How about a hike?”
She looks at Principessa and Little Yuri. “I don’t know. I think Little Yuri and Principessa want to stay on the beach for now.”
“I didn’t mean Little Yuri and Principessa. I meant you.”
“But who will watch them?”
“Their parents?”
She pulls at the bottom of her suit and runs her fingers through her hair. She studies my face, and I try to erase the fear and anxiety.
“Wait here,” she says.
She goes over to Yuri, parting the crowd, Little Yuri and the other boys following behind. She sets Principessa down on the chaise, and they talk in Ukrainian while the men wait patiently. Finally, she emerges from the crowd.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s go.”
“Let’s go.”
I stick my legs under the spigot as Zhuki rinses off under the shower. She slips on her shorts and her T-shirt, waves to Mimmo and Franco and a few others, and in a minute we’re alone on the passeggiata.
“So,” she says, “a hike. Where to?”
“Up?”
“Where else?”
* * *
We end up on a bench in the English gardens overlooking the harbor. They were planted a century ago by women who carried parasols and jumped into the sea fully clothed. You can see half the hill and the town from here, as well as the harbor on the back side, the boats lined up and tucked away.
“You are so lucky to live here,” she says.
“I guess.”
“What do you mean, ‘I guess’? Look at this.”
“Well, it’s not bad if you come here for a few months and you don’t know all the stuff that goes on, but after a while it gets tiring, you know, everyone knowing your business all the time. Sometimes it’s like you can’t sneeze in the morning and not hear about it later in the afternoon.”
She laughs. “Calcio is the same.”
“Really?”
“Sure. The same players and players’ wives moving from Serie A to Premier League to Bundesliga to La Liga. And the paparazzi. They are like the grandmothers in my village, following everyone around, reporting every little thing anyone does.”
“At least they have more interesting things to report on.”
“Ha!”
“You’re telling me you don’t meet any interesting people in calcio?”
“I meet a lot of women like Tatiana. And a lot of men who want to be with someone like Tatiana. And then there are the people who only want to get to know me in order to get access to Yuri.”
“Why do you think I’m here?”
She laughs and gives what I think is supposed to be a playful shove, but it nearly knocks me off the bench. “You didn’t even know who Yuri was.”
“Sure I did.” And I rattle off the statistics I’d heard Papà cite a hundred times before.
“But you didn’t care who he was.”
“Not really.”
She smiles. “So . . . do you think you know the business of everyone who lives on this hill?”
“Almost everyone.”
“I will quiz you. Who lives in the house right up there?”
“Which one?”
“The one on the next terrace. The one that looks like Disneyland.”
“That’s the Cavalcantis’ house. You remember Guido, the one who runs Le Rocce?”
“White suit? Lots of girls?”
“That’s him.”
“He makes so much money from the club?”
“No. It’s his father. He went to Milan when he was young, made a lot of money in the stock market, retired at forty, and moved back here.”
“It is such a big house. It looks like it might fall into the sea.”
“People were angry for a while because they tore down an old, classic villa and put that up. But the Cavalcantis, they are very nice people. Not snobs.”
“And this one?”
“Signora Sapi
a’s. She lives there with her son and his wife.”
“Ah, I know her from church. She’s a very nice lady.”
“Now. She used to be a complete . . . witch.”
“Really?”
“Especially to her daughter-in-law. She didn’t think she was good enough for her son. And then one year she went blind. Suddenly. And now her daughter-in-law is the one to lead her around and do everything for her.”
“What about that one?”
“Signor and Signora Semirami.”
“Anything interesting about them?”
“Where do I start?”
We keep walking up the hill, through the crooked paths and mule tracks that knit together every villa and rustic hut. I listen to her footsteps behind me as they tread over rocks and grass, the percussion changing, but always maintaining the same steady grace. We end up on the field, which even in this drought is green and lush. Zhuki takes the ball from Luca’s grave, slips off her flip-flops, and flings them in the direction of the sidelines.
“Are you in?” she says, and I kick mine off, too.
There are no rules today. No whistles, no experiments, no penalties, no scores, no defense. We run through the soft grass in our bare feet, dodging and weaving, laughing our heads off, scoring goal after goal. Is this what it was like for you, Luca? Did your muscles become liquid, responding to even the slightest bump in the grass? Did you feel like you could run from here to Rome, with leaps and bounds over the tops of the trees?
I score a goal, and I imitate Vanni Fucci, thrusting figs in the air, then falling down on the field in an exaggerated face-plant. Zhuki runs to fetch the ball and dribbles it back.
“Half-time,” she says, and she sits down next to me, leaning back on her arms. I flip over, and I can practically hear Luca hissing at me across the terrace. Kiss her, you idiot, kiss her.
“Etto?”
“Yes?”
“Is the reason you won’t jump from the molo because of your mother?”
“Who told you that?”
“The nonne.”
“Well, the nonne should probably mind their own affairs.”
“Like that will happen.” She laughs. She picks up the ball and twirls it around in her hands. “It is true that she killed herself in the sea? After your brother?”
“What else did the nonne tell you?”
“That she was American.”
“Yeah, she was from California.”
“Did you ever go there?”
“Once. When we were about twelve. She didn’t really get along with her parents so she only went back every few years. They thought she was stupid for staying here. They kept calling it a phase.”
“Even by the time you were twelve?”
“Even by the time we were twelve.”
“And where is her grave?”
“Over there. In California.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know exactly. My papà called her parents up when she . . . when it happened and they . . . well, they said some pretty awful things. They’re both lawyers,” I say, as if this matters. “Anyway, they demanded that he send her back.”
“And your papà did it.”
“I don’t know why. I think he didn’t want to argue.”
“Maybe he felt guilty? Like it was his fault?”
“Maybe.”
She picks up the ball and tosses it to me. I bat it back to her like a volleyball, and we try to keep it up until it drops and we have to start all over again.
“So what was she like?”
I hesitate.
“If you don’t want to talk about her, it’s okay. I’ll stop interrogating you.”
“Actually, it’s kind of nice to talk about her. I’ve just never had to explain her to anyone, that’s all. Everyone I’ve ever known knew her, too.”
Zhuki tosses the ball to me, and I catch it. I lean back into the grass and prop it under my head like a pillow. The sun is white-hot today, the shreds of cloud igniting like tinder as they pass over it.
“Well, she loved life. It sounds like a cliché, I know . . . well, it sounds like a lie now, too. But it’s true. Every morning, she would get up and go for a swim in the sea. It never got old for her, living here. Spring, summer, winter, it didn’t matter. She was always outside, and she talked to everyone on the street. Complete strangers. Tourists. Even people like Farinata and Nello. Sometimes it would take her an hour just to make it down the passeggiata.”
“She sounds like an amazing person.”
“Yeah. When you were with her, you really understood why people gravitated toward her. There was just something about the way she would look at you that made you feel . . . I don’t know, loved. So loved, it was impossible not to love back.”
We lie there in silence for a minute, listening to faraway voices somewhere down below.
“It must be really difficult to live without her.”
“It is. But it’s more than just her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever read the ‘Inferno’?”
“No.”
“We all read it in school. Our teacher used to tell us these different theories of hell, and one of them is that it’s a permanent separation. And you know what? That’s exactly what it feels like. Not just from her, but from everybody else.”
“God, too?”
“Maybe.”
“Is that why you sit outside the church instead of going in?”
I turn my head away from her and spot a lizard hiding out. I pluck a long blade of grass and try to touch the lizard with it, but he scampers away.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I used to pray. That whole year after my brother died, when my mamma was like that . . . I was like a monk, I prayed so hard.”
“But it didn’t work.”
I look her in the eye. “No. It didn’t work. And after that, I just thought, you know, what’s the point of it if you can’t save one person? If you can’t save this one good person. What’s the point?”
Silence settles over us and sinks into the field.
“Now can I ask you something?” I say.
“Sure.”
“Why do you hang out with me?”
She laughs.
“No, I mean, all I ever talk about is depressing stuff, and when I’m not doing that, I’m kind of a pedant anyway. I should be taking you to Nice, or at least to the bars or the disco or the Truck Show . . . telling you jokes, making you laugh.”
She smiles at me. “Etto, all I meet are boys who want to go to bars and talk about stupid things. This is my least favorite part of being the sister of a calcio player. If I want to talk about something important, about the world, about life, they tell me, ‘Don’t be so serious,’ or ‘You should smile more.’ Ugh. I hate that one the most.”
“You should smile more.”
“Very funny.” She tosses the ball at me, and it bounces off my leg in the direction of the cypresses. “See, Etto-Son-of-Butcher? You do make me laugh.”
I reach my hand into the space between us, and I can feel her hand sliding into mine, resting comfortably under my palm. We lie there for a long time, just holding hands, and as the minutes pass, it’s like someone is kneading a soft spot into my side, parting my ribs and making a path.
Friday is the start of the Apocalypse. That’s what we call the first two weeks in August—the buildup to Ferragosto, when the tourists outnumber us ten to one and there is no bagni, no street, no vico, and no mule track where you can go to escape their voices or their children or their giant beach blow-up animals. It can take you half an hour to shuffle down the pedestrian streets, tourists pressing in on you from all sides.
“What I want to know is where the water’s going to come from to flush all these toilets and run all these showers,” Chicca says. Papà, Chicca, and I are standing out in front of the shops.
“Franco said the bagni are calling a meeting about rationing.”
“Rationing?”
Officially, there hasn’t been any rain in San Benedetto since June. Down here in town, it’s easier to ignore, but up on the terraces, Nonno’s garden is shriveling away to nothing and his cistern is so dry, even the stench has abandoned it. For the past couple of weeks, the fire helicopters have been chopping up and down the shore, mesmerizing the kids on the beach as they scoop up seawater in their giant buckets and drop it on the smoking brush. There were two fires last week, one just past Laigueglia, and one not far from the campground in Albenga.
I spend the morning at the band saw and the vacuum-pack machine, cutting and packing ribs while Papà works the counter up front. He steps out onto the passeggiata in between customers, chatting with everyone who passes. Every time the door opens, the banco kicks on, chugging like a locomotive to keep itself cold.
Sawing ribs is one of the simplest tasks you can do in a butcher shop. And one of the most dangerous. If you let your guard down, it’s easy to catch the bone on the blade, which can set off a few nightmare scenarios, including but not limited to flinging the bone into your face, lodging a chip in your eye, or ripping your hand into the path of the blade. If you’re really unlucky, the blade can snap and send two meters of toothed steel whistling and vibrating through the air. But Papà seems to think I can handle the band saw and almost everything else in the shop these days. He doesn’t hover anymore. He doesn’t microsupervise or talk about hairnets or greet me with lists of tasks, and I’ve started to see it not only as his shop but maybe mine one day.
I’m moving the last of the ribs to the walk-in when my phone lights up.
“Papà?”
“Yes?”
“The Ukrainians are on the beach.”
“Are they?”
“You should go over there, Papà.”
“But who will work the counter?”
“It’s not so busy today. And I just finished the ribs. I’ll be fine alone.”
“Well,” he says, “only if you’re sure.” But in the time it takes to say the words, he has already whipped off his jacket and washed up at the back sink, one foot out the door.