CRAVING U (The Rook Café) (7 page)

“That’s what everyone says when they are
caught with their hand in the cookie jar,” Marika continued, mocking her mother’s
viewing habits and examining an almost empty jar of Nutella.

Caught in the act, Paola steamed the last
shirt in the pile and launched into a discussion of world events: “On Friday
when I was at the hairdresser’s, I read in one of those gossip magazines that
that famous soccer player has left his wife,
through a text message
, and
run off with one of these dancers here.”  She pointed at the TV screen.  “That
one from Guyana.”

“What a
gentleman!” Marika took offense.  “Though I suppose it’s only fair that the
rich and famous hook up with other rich and famous, though famous for
what
is still not clear.”  She sat down next to the ironing board and helped her
mother fold clothes.  “It’s like a soap opera, you know, where everyone sleeps
with everyone else and there doesn’t seem to be another soul in the world
outside those two rich families of imbeciles.”

“Maybe for them, we’re the weird ones,”
Mrs. Vendramini commented, always trying to be fair.

“Who knows.  After all, one is born to be
a showgirl,” she muttered, matching her father’s socks.  “They can’t sing, they
can’t dance; they speak badly and can’t act; sometimes they’re so stupid that
you wonder if they even speak Italian, or any language for that matter!?”

“Marika!” her mother scolded her, always
far too naive for having been a child of the ‘60s.

“There are people who call them much
worse, Mom,” Marika replied, laughing.  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she sighed.
“You can’t compete with them.”  She raised her eyebrows and shook her head.

Ding-Dong!

“The door.”  Paola smiled at her
daughter.  “Would you please get it?”

“Sure,” she said happily.  “It’s Carlotta
anyway.”

In fact, it was her cousin, who was
already giddy about her imminent evening in the company of Jude Law in rural Surrey
in south-eastern England.  She said a quick hello to her aunt and uncle and the
girls quickly plopped down onto the comfortable, wide couch with a bowl of ice
cream in one hand – Marika decided that if she was going to splurge, she might
as well go whole hog – and the remote control in the other.

“Turn it up!” Carlotta demanded, savoring
the first scenes.

“Hold on!  You know these pirated DVDs are
always a bit low,” Marika said, pressing as hard as she could on the remote
control, which probably had low batteries as well.

“Enjoy the movie,”
her mother said, leaving the room just as the opening voice-over by Kate
Winslet began, quoting the famous Shakespearean line, “
Journeys end in
lovers’ meeting.
”

***

“This weekend, the
weather will be sunny and stable for the entire peninsula, with the exception
of some clouds forming in the Upper Tyrrhenian that may bring some light rain. 
The temperatures will remain much the same as last week, above the average for
this time of year.  It’s summer’s last gasp, and the first cooling winds will
begin to blow in the late afternoon.”  Thus spoke the weatherman.

“Ferdinando, call your daughter, the food’s
getting cold!” Marika’s mother ordered her husband while she finished ladling
lunch onto their plates.

Ferdinando danced over to the staircase,
prey to his ever optimistic and happy-go-lucky personality.  “Marika, it’s
ready!  The early bird gets the worm, and if you aren’t quick there won’t be....”

Before he could even finish his
good-natured threat, Marika was sitting at her place, cell phone glued to her
ear.  “Perfect!  I’ll run by the mechanic’s and get my scooter and then meet
you at the field.  See ya,” she tailed off, already munching on a piece of
toasted bread.

“The phone, Marika!” her father grumbled,
pouring some Merlot in his glass.

“I’m done, I’m
done,” she said, flipping the phone closed and smiling mischievously.  “
What
a grouch
!”

“Eat while it’s hot,” her mother urged
them.

“I’m going to the
Brenta
soccer
game today,” she mumbled, her mouth full.  She almost choked, though, when she
heard what her father had to say.

“I was thinking about coming myself....”

Hack!
  His
daughter coughed noisily to expel the bread that threatened to suffocate her.  “
What?
”

“I’m curious to see how much better Matteo
has gotten,” he went on, totally unaware of his daughter’s reaction.  “Everyone
at the agro club keeps talking about how good he is.”  He puffed up with pride,
though he had nothing to do with it.  “Too bad I have to meet with the farmers’
association today.”

“Yeah,” she lied, “a real shame.”  Having
dodged that bullet, Marika focused her mental activity once again on choosing
the right outfit for the soccer stands.  Disaster!  Even once she was in the
privacy of her own room she changed at least five times before choosing the
perfect attire.

In the end, it’s just like shopping: you
can go through a thousand different shops, but it’s a given that you will end
up going back to buy the very first thing you liked.

Mathematical Formula for Choosing the Right
Clothes
:

PV = FV / (1 + r)
to the nth power

Where:

FV = outfit after n changes and store visits

PV = the right
clothes

n = number of changes and store visits

r = rate of
return, or rather, opportunity cost, quantified in terms of personal taste,
attention to and elegance of accessories, time wasted, tired feet, and
psychological stress.

And so, wearing her usual five-pocket blue
jeans, a tapered T-shirt, sneakers on her feet, and a leather jacket tied
around her waist, she hurried off to the garage.

Blind to the fact that nothing is ever
ready on time, she had to wait around at the mechanic’s, and even though
Pederiva is barely 6 miles from Orgiano, she didn’t get to the Pigafetta Stadium
until the teams were already warming up on the pitch.  She rolled into the
first parking spot she could find next to the snack bar and feigned nonchalance
as she walked toward the stands, hugging the sideline and scanning the field
for Matteo.

“You here to
watch the match?” came a voice like a song, a voice that could have been the
inspiration for the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche when he wrote his
famous aphorism, “One must Learn to Love.”

The point-blank question totally caught
Marika off guard.  She turned to find number 7 from
Dogado
smiling at
her from the edge of the field where he was retrieving a ball that had been
kicked out of bounds.  “Maybe,” she replied, embarrassed.  She was saved by the
referee’s whistle calling both teams to take their positions.

“I’m counting on it,” he said, winking at
her and running off, but all the while keeping his eyes fixed on her.

Picking up her pace and keeping her eyes
on the ground like a marching foot soldier, Marika climbed the steps to join
her girlfriends.  None of them had missed the boy’s attempt to flirt with her.

“He’s so cute!  Who is he?” Carlotta asked
her, accusingly.  “Wait, he’s looking over here.  He’s looking over here!” the
others tittered, raising the eyebrows of the other fans around them.

“I have no clue,” Marika said
uncomfortably, trying to watch her interlocutor and co-star of this mini-teen
drama out of the corner of her eye.  “And stop acting like a bunch of ditzes!” 
She was embarrassed, and you could read her inexperience with boys in her body
language, and in the speed with which she had raced up the stairs.  Except for
a single kiss – the first and, for the moment, the last romantic experience in
her life – during a summer trip to the beach with her parents, she had never
had any significant
events
.

“Matteo, you’re gorgeous!” the girls
yelled in unison from the stands.  “Zovigo, just the two of us, for three
nights....”  Lucrezia was leading the cheers.

Matteo seemed unfazed by it all: the girls
had always idolized him, and the habit of it had made him disinterested.

“For the home team, number 1, our very own
nerves of steel, Albanoooooo....” The entire crowd shouted out on cue, “Rigoni!”

Even though the
Brenta Soccer Club
was just a small-time team in a provincial small town, the
blue and gold
– the colors of their Prussian blue jerseys with ochre inserts, polo collar, and
matching shorts and socks – were well-organized and had quite a following. 
They even had a website and a personal announcer, Tricky the Voice, for all the
home games.

“Number 9, the Roman Consul, Marcelloooooo....”

“Bassani!”

“And Number 10, the Brenta Warlord,
Matteooooooo....”

“Zovigo!”  The loudest cry rose from the
stands.

For the first ten minutes, the two teams
played back and forth slowly, studying each other, but then Matteo upped the
tempo, encouraging his teammates to follow him.  Unfortunately, the team couldn’t
always keep up, and he was constantly forced to stop midfield and search for
narrow passing lanes to pick apart the defense and try to make the attack more
fluid.

In the stands, everyone was talking of him
alone.  Number 10 was a real star; he consistently left his defenders behind,
giving his team a numerical advantage; he directed the match by his precise
midfield crosses, his deep overhead passes that unerringly found his forwards’
heads, his footwork under double coverage.  It was more than skill; he had that
natural, innate sense of the game.  Not even his teammates’ blunders could mask
his instinctive talent.

It was in fact one of their defensive
mistakes near the end of the first half that allowed the opposing team to take
the lead.  A
blue and gold
midfielder lost the ball to the
Dogado
playmaker, who quickly found one of his own forwards breaking free down field. 
The
Brenta
goalkeeper, Puccio, even though he had time to come out and
contest the shot, inexplicably stayed put between the goalposts, giving the
opponent time to stop the ball with his chest and fire a rocket into the net.

“Goal by number 7 for
Dogado
,
Federico Brunelli,” Tricky the Voice reported drily.

“Fuck!” Matteo cursed, punching the air
with his fist.

The goalscorer, meanwhile, ran alongside
the stands, celebrating his goal and pointing his finger at Marika, seated
among her friends.

Like falling dominoes, everyone’s head
turned and looked at her.  Her cheeks turned scarlet at being singled out for a
dedication by the opposing team’s player.  She was at the center of everybody’s
attention, not least that of her girlfriends, who were smacking their lips and
making squealing noises all around her.

While number 7 hammed it up in front of
the crowd, the
Brenta
players waited impatiently, the ball already in
place at center field.  “Would you get a load of that asshole!”  Matteo cursed
the good fortune of this
Romeo from Dogado
under the balcony of
Brenta
’s
fans.  He was so upset by Federico’s antics, perhaps in part because they were
directed at the wrong girl, that he stared him down as he took his position.

“Got a problem, number 10?”

“Only with fools like you, number....”  He
ostentatiously looked down at the guy’s chest.  “Seven,” he finished.

Federico smiled wickedly at him,
high-fiving his teammates who had gathered around him.  One of them could be
heard saying, “Aww, the big baby is crying.  Losing 1-0 at home!”

“You wish!” Matteo responded,
challenging.  “You’re not getting any more out of us in
our
house.”  His
eyes met Federico’s.  “You can count on that!”  His eyes remained on his
opponent’s face, heedless of the referee’s whistle telling him to begin play.

“You better watch it,” the ref told him.  “This
is the only warning you’re going to get.  Next time, I’m giving you both yellow
cards.  Understood?”

Fr0m the sidelines, the
Brenta
manager was flinging his arms about like an orchestra conductor in Act I of
La
Traviata
, trying to get Matteo to put an end to his infantile and useless
display of testosterone.  “Matteo, cut it out and get your head back into the
game.  Now!”

The manager, Vincenzo Esposito, originally
and nostalgically from Sorrento in the sunny south, had adopted the
Brenta
Soccer Club
as his baby and his passion.  Short, balding, with thick dark
eyebrows, olive skin, and a stocky build, he was just a few years over forty
and had had been married for fifteen of those to Rosaria.  She had made him a
happy father three times: one daughter, and two twin sons.

To look at him, he didn’t seem like much
of an Adonis, but his sunny disposition, his love for soccer and for “his boys”
in particular, made him attractive in a puppy-dog sort of way.

His real job was in a credit recovery
office, but in his free time he coached the
blue and gold
.  He had taken
over for the former coach when Matteo was still on the age 11-12 team, and he
had grown up alongside them.  Technically and tactically competent, he had a
way with young players, who listened to him with respect and admiration. 
Everyone within the soccer club had believed that he would be the man to lead
the
Brenta
team to a championship in the Junior Elite league, and “his
boys” hadn’t disappointed, having won the title two years in a row, leading the
league in goals scored and with an undefeated record at home, before losing the
title last year due to a serious decline in defense.