The Sun and Other Stars (2 page)

M
artina keeps the Missing poster of Mamma in the front window of her bar. It’s yellowed from the sun and rippled from the damp of the sea, turning Mamma into a shimmering mirage, an angel in a wetsuit, her hair slicked behind her ears, her face backlit and glowing.

Tomorrow it will be exactly a year—two since Luca’s accident—and while everyone else has moved on, for me it feels like two dark shadows stalking behind me. Wherever I go, they follow. Whatever I do, they’re there. I can’t hide from them or outrun them. It’s only when I flick my head to have a good look that they disappear, like someone playing a trick.

“You’re late,” Mino growls as soon as I open the door to Martina’s. He’s hovering in his usual spot, keeping track of everyone who comes and goes. “It’s almost the half.”

“Ciao, Mino.”

“Your degenerate friends are standing over there in front of the windows.”

“Thanks.”

I slip in next to Fede and try to follow the ball on the flat-screen.

“Ehi. About time, Etto,” Fede says. He puts me in a headlock and gives my hair a rub, his eyes still riveted to the screen.

The bar is filled with smoke, noise, hot air, and the stink of humanity, everyone oriented around the flat-screen like zombie yogis doing a sun salutation. Sky Sport, the true magnetic north. Calcio, the one true religion. At least if you ask anyone else in this country. If you ask me, it’s Kabuki for Europeans. One big, six-continent, multi-billion-euro charade, all so people can pretend the reason their lives are shit is because someone won a match or didn’t. It’s even worse here than in other places. In the big cities, at least people actually have lives between the matches, and there are only two teams to root for. In Turin, you are either for Torino or Juventus; in Milan, for Inter or Milan; in Rome, for Roma or Lazio. And depending on your allegiances, once a week you either sip imported beers with your university friends or put on your brass knuckles and your best Mussolini scowl and turn whichever bar into a smoldering wreckage. Maybe even shed some blood depending on who gives the order and how thick their chin is. Anyway, it only lasts a few hours, and you’re done for the week.

But here in San Benedetto? The matches are the only thing happening, and thanks to cheap satellite TV, a steady stream of migrants from the south, and our GPS coordinates in the middle of fottuto nowhere, everyone is for a different team: Roma, Lazio, Inter, Milan, Torino, Juve, Genoa, Sampdoria, Fiorentina, Bologna, Bari, Palermo, Napoli, Parma, Udinese, the scarves hanging like a line of dirty laundry across the top shelf behind the bar. All day Saturday and Sunday and sometimes Wednesday, there’s a constant babble of matches at Martina’s, of coaches giving postgame eulogies, young guys in ten-thousand-euro suits and wet hair droning on about teamwork, and women who could be showgirls straining the buttons of their shirts as they make predictions about the World Cup in Germany next year.

“What’s the score?” I ask. Not because I care, but because once in a while you have to fake interest in calcio or risk being called a finocchio. A fairy.

Fede keeps his eyes on the screen, tapping his words out like a telegraph. “One–nothing. Venezia. Yuri Fil. Injured and off. Ankle. Something.”

Yuri Fil is Papà’s favorite player, a thirty-two-year-old, two-footed Ukrainian striker who split the first ten years of his career between Kiev, Glasgow, and Tottenham, wherever that is, and who was traded to Genoa only at the beginning of this season. I look over at Papà, who’s sitting at the bar between Silvio and Nonno, all three of them looking stricken. Nonno only comes down the hill for the big matches, and this is definitely one of them, the kind they put all the cardiologists on call for. It’s the thirty-eighth and final week of the season. All the teams’ fates for next year have been sealed except for Genoa. And since Genoa is only a hundred kilometers away, guys like Papà and Silvio and Nonno, the poor saps who grew up without cable channels and twenty-four-hour calcio coverage, the ones who were born here, who will die here, who will come back and haunt the place, they are all for Genoa—the Griffins—who have not had a prayer of moving up to Serie A in at least a decade.

Until tonight.

If only they can win this one match.

The clock ticks toward the half, Genoa still losing, Yuri Fil out for good. On the flat-screen, the stadium is all colors, chants, songs, and flares, banners waving and smoke rising from the stands, but in the bar, it’s silent, white despair coating every face. The usual clever banter, the tactical analysis, even the vulgar and personal insults against the referees, some of them containing the only glimmers of our national creativity since the Renaissance—all of that is over. No one dares to speak for fear of rupturing the collective concentration.

Finally, just before the half ends, the announcer’s voice rises, and grunts and gutturals leap up from the crowd.

“Oh!”

“Sì!”

“Euh!”

And then:

“Goooooooooooooooooooollllllllllllll!!! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Goooooooooooooooooooooooool!!!!!!”

The room explodes. I duck out of the way of Fede, who’s bear-hugging everyone he can get his paws on. Grown men jump up and down, screaming like Japanese schoolgirls, slapping fives over my head.

“Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The dance-party music pumps through the flat-screen, shaking the walls, the deafening roar rising and falling again and again as they show the replay.

“Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Goooooooooooooool! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Goooooooooooooooool!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Finally, after ten or fifteen replays, the commercials come on, and Martina turns the volume down. The room fills with chatter and relief, and Fede defaults into scanning for girls, his eyes in constant motion since puberty. You’ve got to admire his persistence. I’ve given up. I look over toward the bar. Papà, Nonno, and Silvio have their heads together in a heated discussion, and Martina gives me a little wave from behind the tap. She raises her eyebrows at me and mimes eating, and I gesture over my shoulder to tell her I already ate. Luca and I used to have this when we were young, before he went off to the academy. We could hold a conversation clear across the room with the smallest twitches of our faces and hands.

“Etto. Oosten to Etto. Etto, come in please. It is Ooston.”

“It’s ‘Houston,’ Fede.
H
. Hhhhouston. Learn English.”

“Fine,” Fede says. “Hhhhouston. Whatever. Who’s that girl in the denim jacket over there?”

“That’s Sima’s little sister, you pedophile.”

“That’s my little sister, you pedophile,” Sima repeats without looking up from her phone. The usual group is here tonight—Sima, Claudia and Casella, Bocca—everyone except Aristone, who’s still off at university.

“Really. How old is she now?”

“Thirteen.”

“Thirteen! Cazzo! If that were my sister I’d lock her up!”

“Why? You’re the only vampire she needs protection from.”

“Yeah, you’re the only vampire, Fede.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes it is.”

Now, I don’t like to make a habit of defending Fede, because everyone knows that’s a slippery slope, but Fede is far from the only vampire in San Benedetto. And while right now, I don’t feel like telling you the whole tragic history of desperate men in our region, I will say it’s mostly a supply-side problem, and if I can be bothered, I’ll tell you all about it later, along with the Maradona Hand of God story if you haven’t already googled that by now.

“What about that one, then, the one in the black leather coat?”

“That’s a trans, Fede.”

“A what?”

“A trans . . . you know, a girl with a surprise.”

“In-cazz-ibile.”

“It’s true.”

“That is one hundred percent woman.”

“Fifty percent, maybe . . .”

“No . . .”

“Yes. It’s Alessandro-Alessandra-Whatever. Works over at the Hotel Paradiso. He-she-whatever has been taking the hormones for two years now.”

“I guess they’re working,” Fede says. “Who’s that one, then?”

“Which one?”

“That one, in the black pants. The one whose culo is practically singing my name.”

“That’s Forese’s cousin. She’s going into the novitiate.”

“The what?”

“She’s going to be a
nun
, Fede.”

“She is not. Whoever saw a nun with a culo like that?”

“Deficiente. They don’t cut off body parts when you join.”

“They might as well.”

I look over to the bar again, and this time, I catch Signora Semirami staring straight at me. She gives me her pathetic two-second blink that’s supposed to be seductive, I think, like fifteen minutes with her would be granting my every fottuto wish.

“Hey, Etto,” Bocca says. “Remember that little man from Naples that Professoressa Gazzolo used to tell us about in biology class?”

“With the tail?”

“Yeah, what do they call that again?”

“Vestigial.”

“Yeah, a vestigial culo, that’s what she has.”

“Whatever,” Fede says. “I’m sure whatever can be nunned can be un-nunned.”

“Fede, you’re a pig.”

“Oink.”

“Fede, did you just oink?” Sima’s thumbs are twitching against her phone, her face tilted toward the soft, blue light, Madonna-and-Child-style. The only time I ever see Sima smile is into her phone, and the only time any of us ever hear from her is when she SMS-es us. When she’s actually with us, she’s SMS-ing her university friends in Genoa. I think she thinks she’s keeping up with the conversation, but her timing is always a half second off.

Fede puts on a serious face. “I was just telling them how my cousin got attacked by a wild boar. He made it to the hospital, but . . .” He hangs his head.

Sima looks up. “That’s terrible!”

We all laugh.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

The second half starts, and a reverent hush drops over the bar. Another forty-five minutes and it will all be over. Well, maybe not
over
, because calcio is never, ever,
really
over, but at least it’s the end of the regular season, a break until the Champions League and the Coppa UEFA start up again, an annual air pocket that the ten stations, the fifty calcio shows, and the thousands of commentators and journalists try to fill with cycling, Formula One, and the leftover scraps of the calcio season that they have to exaggerate to make them sound important—wild speculations about transfers, praise heaped on the teams who experienced “salvation” and shame on the ones who were demoted, eulogies of the washed-up players sent to America, and endless superlatives about the Juve dynasty, who won the Scudetto yet again this year.

I can’t take any more calcio this season. Not even another forty-five minutes.

“I’ll be right back,” I say.

“Bring me another beer, eh?”

“Get it yourself.”

I walk around the scattered tables, trying not to look at Signora Semi­rami as I pass.

“Ciao, Etto.” I can feel her eyes molesting me as I walk past the bar and the computer alcove, back through the kitchen, and into the bathroom. I pull the accordion door shut, lock the latch, and sit down on the seat, but I can still hear Signora Semirami’s cackling laugh as clear as if she were in here with me. I put my hands over my ears and press hard. Mamma showed us this trick. It sounds exactly like being underwater. I used to do it all the time—cover my ears, close my eyes, and dream of diving to the bottom of the sea, of disappearing as completely as Mr. Mxyzptlk when Superman makes him say his name backward and he gets sent back to Zrfff.

Etto. Etto. Etto. Otte. Otte. Otte.

Then I remember.

I open the cabinet behind the toilet. Martina keeps her inventory here. I pull a bottle of vodka out, break the seal, and take a drink.

Cheers, Mamma. Cin-cin, Luca.

The bar erupts again. Another goal for Genoa. 2–1. Everyone is screaming and hugging, and jumping up and down. I slip out of the bathroom and walk right out the door. And you know what? No one notices. Not Papà or Fede or Martina or Signora Semirami. Not even Mino.

“Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool!!!!!!!!”

The door of the bar closes behind me, the heat and noise immediately replaced by the salty sea air and the polite murmurs of the tourists taking their after-dinner walks along the sea. It’s mostly Germans in June—one giant, pale, scrawny-legged, poorly tipping flock, arriving every year like the transumanza of the sheep from the Alps to the plains. The families from Milan will start coming thick and fast in July, bloating our little town of five thousand to something like fifty thousand by Ferragosto, then draining again like a burst blister come September. If you live here long enough, though, you learn to ignore the tourists, to walk past them like the benches and the palm trees. So even though the passeggiata is packed to the railing with people tonight, they ignore me and I ignore them, and it’s almost as good as being alone.

Venezia comes back and scores another goal. 2–2. I can hear the wailing and moaning from the open windows, and the quieter yelps of pain coming from the waiters and bartenders huddled around small screens along the passeggiata.