The Sun and Other Stars

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For Kang and Kodos

I
n the beginning, God created the Azzurri and the Earth.

Or at least that’s how Papà used to start the story.

1982. The genesis of all order in the universe, the Alpha with no Omega in sight, the Tigris-and-Euphrates, the Watson-come-here of all years.

Anno Domination.

And if you’re sitting there scratching your head, trying to figure out what the cazzo happened in 1982, you must’ve been either living under a rock or in America—one and the same when it comes to calcio. And that would not be calcio to you, or even football, but “soccer,” or as most people here say it when they’re trying to speak English, SO-chair, with a little roll on the
r
and a couple of kilograms of reverence in their voices.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against people who live under rocks, play sports where the clock stops, or otherwise escape, deny, and ignore reality. Believe me, if I could, I’d hide myself under a nice, big rock by the sea, order in a week’s worth of pizza, and shut off my phone. But that is impossibile here, or in-cazz-ibile, as my friend Fede likes to say, because the only way he can expand his vocabulary is by wedging vulgar words into it. In-cazz-ibile to escape, deny, or ignore this fottuto town, this attractive, charming, concentric circle of hell smack in the middle of Liguria, which has conspired to peck at me with a thousand idiotic conversations a day and bury me one obligation at a time.

But. Before the victory of entropy, before the descent into hell, before the Brazilians dominated every calcio field whether it was theirs or not, before the French pilfered the 1998 World Cup one suspicious call at a time, before the
shame
of the 2000 Euro Championships (this is still Papà telling the story), there was 1982—a small, glimmering miracle of a year that flared like a match before burning the cazzo out of the fingers that held it. Because not only did the Azzurri win the World Cup that year, the planets also aligned to allow a college art history major from California to meet a butcher’s son from Liguria in the nosebleed seats of Estadio Balaídos in Vigo, Spain, during the first round, a union sanctioned by FIFA and witnessed and consecrated by tens of thousands of half-sober fans.

And this is where Mamma used to interrupt Papà and break into the story, at the point when she found herself sitting in the row right behind Papà and his friends. Mamma was with some Scottish guys who were staying at the same hostel as she was, and one of them was trying to hit on her. This, of course, annoyed Papà to no end because for Papà, every match is sacred, but talking while the great Dino Zoff was wiping his nose, much less defending against a corner kick, was the equivalent of telling a joke during the consecration. So as much as he tried to block it out, by the second half, the constant flirting, even though it was going on in English—­especially because it was going on in English—had really started to squeeze his coils. If they’d been Italian, there would’ve been a simple “Non rompere le palle, tu aborto di puttana,” accompanied by the appropriate hand gestures, and there may have been some additional shouting and mumbling under the breath, but the matter would have been more or less closed. In this case, however, Papà had to think of the correct insult in English, which up to that point he’d passed in school only thanks to his best friend, Silvio, and the Hand of God (which, for those of you who call it soccer and not calcio, is a sharp allusion to an Argentinean soccer player named Maradona that I will not go into right now). Suffice it to say that Papà’s English was terrible, and every time they told us the story, I could practically hear the scolding voice of Charon, the English and classics professor for generations of San Benedettons, and the smack of his ruler ringing in my head.

“And what are you going to do when you need to speak English someday and Silvio is not there to help you?” Charon would always ask Papà.

Which was a ridiculous question because besides Papà’s honeymoon, he and Silvio have never passed a day of their lives when they didn’t see each other. And that day at Estadio Balaídos, Silvio was in fact sitting right next to Papà, and Papà consulted with him several times before finally turning around and saying to the Scottish guy, “Do not take my balls with your chat, you abortion of prostitute.”

“Break!” Silvio hissed.

“What?”

“Do not
break
my balls.”

“Do not break my balls with your chat, you abortion of prostitute,” Papà repeated to the Scottish guy, but with less conviction than the first time because by then, he’d gotten a glimpse of Mamma, tanned and smiling and twenty years old, the lines at the corners of her eyes swooping skyward from years of squinting into the California sun. Which is how I like to think of her now.

Anyway, Mamma, the Scottish guys, and Papà’s friends immediately started laughing at Papà’s English, and nearly set off an international incident when they were shushed by the Spaniards in the row in front of them, who were shushed by the Peruvians in front of them, who were shushed by the Cameroonese or Cameroonians or whatever in front of them, who were shushed by the Poles in front of them. In the end, Papà’s entire section was so distracted, they ended up missing the Azzurri’s goal completely, and the Italian fans had no choice but to blame themselves for lack of focus when the Cameroonians scored the equalizer.

You’d think this would squeeze Papà’s coils even more. But after that first glimpse of Mamma, Papà—to everyone’s great surprise—ceased to care about the match, the Scottish guys, Dino Zoff, and everyone else in the world. Instead, he pushed Silvio to negotiate a truce between the two rows and a celebratory drink after the match, and he spent the rest of the evening trying to impress Mamma with his English and his ability to hold his liquor, only to be carried back to the beach at midnight, blathering past participles.

Drink. Drank. Drunk.

When he woke up the next morning, Papà thought he would never see Mamma again, but when he turned out his pockets, he found a small scrap of a receipt with the name of her hostel scribbled on it. He and Silvio spent hours walking up and down the streets of Vigo looking for it, and more hours waiting for her to come back that night. But it was worth it, because Silvio somehow helped Papà convince Mamma to spend the rest of the week camping out on the beach with them, cooking meals over an open fire and hitching to Barcelona and Madrid once the matches moved there.

How they managed to communicate at first is one of the divine mysteries of the universe. Silvio says their conversations sounded like the traffic circles in Naples, with cheating-schoolboy English, phrasebook Italian, California Spanish, and bad charades all weaving and blaring and cutting each other off. When there was a pause, it was almost always punctuated by “Te lo spiegherò domani,” or “I will explain it to you tomorrow.” Or next week. Or next month, depending on how complicated the subject was. When Mamma took Papà to see
Guernica
, newly installed at the Prado, and tried to explain Picasso and the fascists, the murder of the innocents, and the splintered planes, it was such a mess, she had to tell him she would explain it to him next year. And by the time Dino Zoff hoisted the cup for the Azzurri, Mamma and Papà knew there
would
be a next year. Because Mamma had indeed taken Papà’s palle with her chatting, along with everything else he ever had or wanted.

When Luca and I were very little, we would demand to hear The Story of 1982 at least once a week instead of Pinocchio or Chupacabra or old Brady Bunch episodes. If we pressed them, they would keep going and tell us about the winter after that, when Mamma quit her college in California and started working as a maid in a ski lodge in Piedmont, and Papà would visit her on her day off every week using various, borrowed rides: the shop Ape one week, Silvio’s Turbo Spyder or Nonno’s 2CV the next. One week, Papà could only arrange a Vespa, and he made it as far as Cortemilia before a sympathetic truck driver took pity on his 150cc engine trying to buzz its way up the mountains, loaded the Vespa and Papà into his truck, and drove them the rest of the way.

When we didn’t have school the next day, we could convince them to tell us about the following spring, when Papà managed to find Mamma a job in the hills above San Benedetto, preparing vacation homes for absent Germans, and how, by Christmas, she was already taping paper snowflakes to the window of the shop, married to Papà, estranged from her parents, and pregnant with Luca and me.

Mamma especially loved telling the story, her hands swooping in the air, free like gulls, her homemade bracelets jangling on her tanned wrists. She was like a magpie the way she collected everything in her life on her wrists—a charm bracelet with all of her swim team pins since she was five, an uneven string of shells I made for her in asilo, a length of turquoise fishing net from the beach they camped on in Spain. Mamma was also very good at impersonations, and she would do all the characters in the scene—the Scottish guys and their accents, Papà answering back in English, and Silvio hissing corrections at him.

Papà would interrupt and tell his version, and they would laugh and talk over each other, weaving the story together with the language they had created during those first weeks in Spain, the language our friends used to make fun of and Charon had christened “La Lingua Bastarda,” but that was only because he was jealous that Luca and I spoke better English than him.

“Better English than
he.
” Mamma had a good impersonation of Charon, too, which she would reprise every time he gave it to our nerves at school. “Hhhhhonestly, Etto, a-what are you a-going to do-a when you need to speak-a English e don’t-a have your mamma to help-a you?”

And Luca and I would have tears in our eyes we were laughing so hard, Luca’s magic calcio feet kicking the table legs, my voice hitting the falsetto octave that is the enemy of every mid-pubescent boy in the world.

“You shouldn’t talk about their professors like that, Maddy,” Papà would say sternly, the white, untanned lines between his eyebrows disappearing into the creases. “Professors are to be respected.”

But Mamma was already bent from laughing and could only manage to wave him away.

That was probably the thing I loved most about Mamma. She didn’t live by shoulds and shouldn’ts, and she didn’t try to paper over the world with fake rules. No, if there were any rules Mamma lived by, it was the natural order of the universe—food chains and tides, the brushstrokes in paintings, the armature of birds and buildings, and the psychology of why people do what they do. And if there was one single rule she lived by, it was “Puro vivere.” Simply, to live. And even that one, she ended up breaking in the end.