Papà wants some time to practice and strategize for the semifinals and the finals on Sunday, but as soon as the last whistle blows, Martina is on the field giving directives.
You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it—a whole festa created out of nothing in a few short hours. The furniture truck is too big to pull up on the service road, so they have to park it on Via Partigiani and chug everything up the hill on human steam. Martina and Silvio stand in the middle of the field splitting the deliveries into two piles—edibles and nonedibles. Chairs: Silvio. Chicken: Martina. Generator: Silvio. Box of eggplant: Martina. We crawl up and down the mule track like ants, then back and forth across the terrace, moving the tent, the folding tables, the grills, and a generator into formation for Martina, then fitting the pieces of boardwalk together to make the dance floor. Guido, Bocca, and Aristone are busy building the stage and setting up the speakers and the soundboard, and the Turks from the Truck Show struggle to inflate the bouncing castle in the far corner. Nicola Nicolini has been appointed the subchair of “atmosphere,” and he stands in the middle of the field, his hands on his hips like a traffic cop, supervising us in how to aesthetically scatter the tables and chairs, string the lights in the trees, and set the candles on the tables.
“Allora . . .” Martina says, standing over the mountain of food as Mimmo and Franco light the grills. There are five of us officially conscripted to the cooking tent—Zhuki, me, Fede, Fede’s Mamma, and Martina, but twice as many nonne appear and insist on helping. We attack at once, following Martina’s orders. We season the chicken, cut up the bread, grate the cheese, chop up tomatoes and artichokes for salads, and make fresh pesto out of a pile of basil the size of a small tree. Mamma used to be part of the cooking team, too. She wasn’t nearly as good a cook as Martina, but I have an image of the two of them standing side by side under this very tent, laughing until they were both sore.
“Etto, maybe you can help Yuri get started with the shashlik.”
Yuri convinced Martina that this summer, there should be something Ukrainian served at the festa, and he’s volunteered to make a special kind of Ukrainian shish kebab. I find him in front of the liceo, squatting over a homemade barbecue fashioned from bricks and a shiny oven shelf that must have come from some ten-thousand-euro oven inside Signora Malaspina’s villa.
“Ciao, Etto,” he says.
“Martina told me to help you with the shashlik.”
At his side are a heap of sharpened sticks and an industrial bucket that looks like it could be plaster or paint. He pulls the top off, and inside is a pile of beef, neatly cubed and nestled in chunks of onion. The aroma puffs up in a cloud under my nose, and it rivals anything I’ve ever smelled in Martina’s or Nonna’s kitchens.
“Normally we use pig, but your father does not sell pig.”
I start building the shashlik with meat and pieces of onion, leaning them against the sides of the bucket, anchored in more meat. Yuri meticulously stacks branches under the oven rack until it starts to look like art. He finally lights it, the smoke curling up in thin ribbons.
“This is ultimate secret for shashlik,” he says. “Green wood, good fire, not so hot. My sister teach me this. She is very good cook, you know. She worked in fancy restaurant in Kiev.”
“She told me.”
“She is very good woman, my sister. My children are lucky to have her for aunt.”
“They’re lucky to have you as a papà,” I say.
“Eh.”
He squats across the barbecue from me, his eyes fixed on the glowing wood, and we work in silence, the aroma from the meat making my stomach growl. He’s dressed in ordinary shorts and a T-shirt with a plain blue baseball cap and some beat-up brown sandals, completely stripped of his endorsements and his Serie A. He bows his head, tending to the shashlik in silence for a few minutes before he looks up at me.
“Etto, I tell you something,” he says. The smoke and the waves of heat distort his face. “Etto, I am not innocent man. I knew about the fix. The sporting judges, they give me punish I deserve.”
“But, Yuri, you got off the field.”
“But I knew. And I did not say nothing.”
“I’m sure you couldn’t have been the only one on Genoa who knew.”
“Of course. Everybody knows. The managers, they tell me everybody do this. This is business as usual in Italy, they say. And if prosecutors find out, they will fix. They will fix so nobody will get the ban.” He shakes his head. “But these are excuses. I knew and I did not say nothing to nobody. And I will have to tell Little Yuri someday. This is most terrible.”
“Why wasn’t everybody else banned, then?”
Yuri’s face gives a shrug his shoulders don’t follow through on. “Because the investigators, they take me into little room. They ask me questions, and I say the truth. The others, they go into little room and they say lies.”
“That’s so unfair.”
“Not fair? How? I did wrong. I was punish. All is fair. For me at least.” Yuri stands up in the column of smoke and breathes in deeply. “Anyway, do not feel sorry for me. Feel sorry for the little boy I was twenty years ago, the little boy who runs around field in Strilky and dreams of becoming calcio player. Do not feel sorry for me now.”
I wait for him to say something else, but he only bows his head and tends to the shashlik. Martina calls me back to the food tent. The pace is quicker now, with only half an hour until the ticket sales start. I find myself elbow to elbow with Zhuki, coiling and skewering sausages and stacking them into an enormous foil tray. We haven’t talked much since yesterday. The words we said are still teetering precariously on top of one another, and I think neither of us wants to be the one to pile on the wrong word and upset the balance.
“So where are the kids?” I finally ask.
“Over by the bouncing castle with Tatiana and Vanni.”
“I’m surprised she came down for this.”
“Me too. Too many peasants down here.”
I laugh.
“It’s true. She uses that word. Peasants.”
“Ouch.”
“Testing, testing.” Guido is at the microphone. “Testing, one, two, three.”
He starts to croon a Frank Sinatra song, and the lifeguards putting together the boardwalk load him with whistles until he gets off the stage. Zhuki laughs. I look out over the terraces and onto the sea. It’s been cloudy all day, the sea below a dense, glossy green, like hard candy poured into a mold.
The ticket sales start at six, and the people come streaming up from the town and from all over the hill. The first wave is the nonne whose husbands have passed away, and who come straight to the food tent to help or at least hover. They reach over the folding table and pat our cheeks.
“So cute you two are.”
“The babies would be beautiful.”
My face turns red. I glance sideways at Zhuki, and she’s embarrassed, too.
After the nonne with no husbands come the nonne with husbands, who sit across from each other at the small tables, holding hands like teenagers. Then the middle-aged couples, who split into camps of men and women, gossiping and complaining about each other just as they did in school. We start dishing up the antipasti: tomato, roasted pepper, and olive salads; vegetable fritters; tiny artichokes sprinkled with parmesan, oil, and salt. Then the trofie, gnocchi, and farinata for the adults, focaccia for the children. Camilla is set up selling tickets at a table to the side, and soon, there are so many people in line, Fede has to go over and help. When the Communists were running the festa, all the money went to the cause; now it goes to fireworks.
Around seven o’clock, the people our age start showing up, skipping the food tent for the drinks table. Guido takes the canned music off, and the first band warms up. It’s Belacqua and his band, a bunch of kids two classes below us in liceo who have piercings and flannel shirts and only play American music. In the end, everyone but the tourists will be here. And the thirteen-year-olds. Well, the thirteen-y
ear-olds will pretend they’re too cool to come, though toward the end of the night, they will start appearing, beers hidden under their shirts, hovering at the edges of the dance floor.
“Bone down nana dead man town, fur hid a took when ah hidda gra-a-a.” Belacqua tries to make his voice gravelly like Bruce, and I imagine Charon cuffing him upside the head and telling him to go back and study his English.
“Tesoro,” Martina calls from the other side of the tent, where she’s already frying the frittelle for dessert. “Why don’t you two start taking the chickens off if they’re ready?”
There are four grills put together, two of them tented with half barrels for the chicken, and two with the nautilus-shaped sausages. Yuri is still tending the shashlik, and every once in a while appears with a handful of smoking skewers. I make myself some towel mitts and lift the half barrels off the grills, and Zhuki and I start an assembly line, me popping the chicken off the skewer and breaking it down, her spraying the pieces with a mist of white wine and wrapping them in tinfoil. When the chicken is finished, we cut the sausage spirals into links and stuff them into a dwindling pile of rolls, start a new shift of sausages, and put the anchovies on. In the meantime, Martina and Fede’s mamma are working furiously on the desserts, dipping the fritters in and out of an oil bath balanced between two or three burners, cutting apart squares of grape focaccia, and slathering crepes with Nutella. The crowds surge, exchanging tickets for plates as fast as the nonne can pass them over the counter, and the second band starts—Casella, Mimmo, Claudia’s papà, and some of the others, playing all the old favorites. The young people clustered around the stage dissipate, and the dance floor fills with couples and smooth dancing.
“Ciao.” Claudia comes around to the side of the cooking tent. The grills have been packing the tent with heat all evening, but finally, the breeze off the sea is starting to pick up.
“I heard the good news.” Martina wipes her hands on her apron and leans over one of the folding tables to give Claudia a kiss. “Congratulations. You two make a wonderful couple.”
“Thanks, Martina.” But I see Claudia throw a nearly imperceptible glance in Fede’s direction. I’m the only one who seems to notice, and at first I think I’m delirious from too much time spent under this fottuto tent, but no, it’s definitely there. I watch the back of Fede’s head at the ticket table. There’s a steady line, and Fede and Camilla are working faster than we are, tearing the tickets off the roll and collecting the money in a lockbox Camilla balances on her lap.
“Are you having anything to eat?” Martina asks Claudia.
“Maybe a little later. Got to fit into the dress, right? Everything looks great, though, Martina. You’ve really surpassed yourself this year.”
“Thank you, dear.”
Claudia goes off to find Casella, and Martina leaves her station at the back of the tent and hovers behind us.
“Etto, Zhuki, why don’t you two take a break?”
“It’s okay, Martina, we can stay.”
But Martina takes the knife out of my hand. “Go on. Get out of here for a little while. Eat. Dance. I’ve got plenty of help now. Go.”
She loads us down with paper plates and bowls of food and sends us off to the drinks table, where Franco and Bocca are lining up cups of wine and lemonade.
“Where are your tickets?” Bocca demands.
“Your auntie has them.”
Franco laughs. I take two plastic cups of wine and hand one to Zhuki. All of Nicola Nicolini’s careful planning has gone to hell. The café tables are bunched together against the wall of the next terrace, where the men are clustered around Yuri and Vanni Fucci. Zhuki and I sit on the grass at the edge of the dance floor and stare at the San Benedettons drifting and twirling by. Mimmo’s leading the band, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist, and when the bridge of the song comes, he starts calling out to people by name.
“Zeno, let’s put some more energy into that step! Napoleone, you’d better slow down before Ale needs to take you to the hospital!”
“Did your parents like to dance?” Zhuki asks.
“My papà, no. But my mamma did. She would always dance with the widowers at the festas and sagras.”
“I’m sure they loved it.”
“Some too much. But she would only move their hands away from the target and keep dancing.”
“She sounds like a very kind person.”
“Kind doesn’t even cover it.”
We watch Nonno and Nonna twirl by, Nonna free of her mind for a while, spinning and laughing, each turn making her more beautiful. I can see them as they were when they met on the beach as teenagers, and for the first time it occurs to me that Nonno doesn’t sit around at Martina’s like the other old guys and pass Nonna off to the care of a Polish woman every day. Even now when he’s in the shop on Tuesdays, he makes sure she’s with her friends.
“Etto and Zhuki,” Mimmo calls to us over the microphone, and everyone turns in our direction. “Don’t think we don’t see you over there on the side. Why aren’t you dancing? Are you going to be shown up by your grandparents?”
I shrug for both of us, and everyone laughs.
“Dai, Etto. Hurry, before she gets away,” Gubbio says, laughing, as he and Signora Costanza twirl past. “Forza. Su, su!”
I think there might be nothing worse in this world than old people heckling you.
“Come on,” she says, and we get to our feet.
It’s a fast dance, a polka or something. One-two-three, one-two-three, Zhuki counts off as I try to lead her around the dance floor. The entire terrace blurs, and all I can hear is her voice in my ear. The polka melts into a slow song, and Casella comes off the stage and takes Claudia’s hand.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Mimmo announces, “I want to call your attention to the soon-to-be Signor and Signora . . . Casella.”
Casella takes a mock bow. The couples step apart and applaud for them, then rejoin. The music starts again. Camilla and Fede are out on the dance floor now, too, though Camilla is holding Fede at arm’s length, as any smart girl does with a notorious vampire. We glide past the rest of our neighbors, who, clothed in motion and music and the glow of thousands of Christmas lights, seem like different people. Even I start to feel the grace in my body, my feet skimming the boardwalk, Zhuki’s legs turning at the slightest pressure from my hand.
She tucks her head into my chest and sighs. “Genoa is not so far,” she says.
“Genoa is not so far,” I repeat.
The song winds down, and everyone relaxes. A breeze is picking up, riffling through the highest leaves of the trees on the next terrace up, and I feel a slight change in the air pressure. The pause in the music seems to last longer than usual.
“Look,” Zhuki says. She points to Yuri climbing up on the stage. At first I think he might be drunk, but Mimmo hands him the microphone, and he walks steadily to the center of the stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he says in Italian. The microphone squawks, and Mimmo makes some adjustments.
“Neighbors,” Yuri starts again. “I want to thank you for your hospitality these past two months. I also want to thank FIGC and the sporting judges, who give me such pleasant vacation.”
Laughter runs through the audience, and a gust of wind blows the skirts of the nonne against their legs.
Yuri clears his throat. “We have enjoyed your music very much, and we very much would like to play for you traditional Ukrainian song.” There’s applause from the dance floor, and whistling and hooting from the cluster of chairs as Ihor mounts the steps to the stage. Yes, that’s right. Slab-faced Ihor, plodding up the steps like he’s performing a duty for the motherland. Mimmo hands him his guitar, and for some reason, we all laugh. I look over at Papà, who is red-faced and beaming. I can’t tell if he’s drunk or just happy.
Ihor sits down on a stool, holding the neck of the guitar delicately between his fingers. A trickle of notes falls from the strings, slow and soft, Ihor’s eyes half-lidded
, following their descent to the floor. Everyone stops laughing. The couples on the dance floor and the children playing at the edge of the terrace drop their arms and listen. Ihor takes a deep breath, and no one can believe the voice that follows the notes, the voice that seems to pick up the entire terrace and carry us to some secret forest in Ukraine. Yuri is on the stairs, kneeling on one knee, staring at Ihor with absolute stillness.
“It is about the Karpatsky,” Zhuki says softly. “The Carpathian Mountains. It is about the rivers coming down the mountains to wash the blood from Soviet oppression.” She leans against me, and I try to keep my heart from knocking through my chest and leaving bruises on the back of her head. Genoa is not so far. The wind starts to blow harder, and I look up to the sky. The clouds are piling up, one on top of the other, like extra terraces, but no one else seems to notice. They are too transfixed by this man-child on the stage, who makes them feel like this music belongs to them, the childhood it comes from, and the distant land, too.
“Etto, I need to talk to you.”
I feel Zhuki’s weight pulling away as we both turn to look at Signor Cavalcanti, his face strained. He’s just as stylish as Guido, his shirt perfectly ironed, his titanium watch fitted snugly around his wrist.
“Etto, I need to talk to you,” he says again. He’s so close I can smell his cologne.
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I need to know.”
“Need to know what?”
“Is my son gay?”
“What?”
“Is Guido gay? I need you to tell me the truth.”
I can smell the leaves unfurling, opening to the sky, the roots beneath the ground creaking as they reach farther down into the water table. It’s going to rain. A few people in the crowd look up. The children on the edges grow restless and start to play a game of dodging between the cypresses.
“I need to know, Etto. You’ve never seen him leaving Nicola Nicolini’s apartment?”
“That doesn’t make him gay.”
The Sun and Other Stars Page 28