The Sun and Other Stars (26 page)

W
hen Papà, Nonno, and I arrive at the field on Sunday afternoon, there are already a hundred men milling around. Most of them are Papà’s age, men whose legs have been atrophying under one of Martina’s tables for the past twenty-five years, and who I hardly recognize without a drink or a newspaper in front of them. Silvio, Gubbio, Mino, Ciacco, even Nello.

“Where’s Fede?” I ask Bocca.

“Dunno. He was acting really weird at the beach. Said he had something to do.”

I look around at the crowd of men warming up, thunking around dirty and deflated calcio balls and wearing the too-tight shorts and cracked cleats from their glory days, the smell of wet leather and mothballs filling the air. I make my way around the edge of the crowd and wait by the terrace wall until I hear the rustling from above. The faces of the Ukrainians appear one by one, wearing the same blinking, startled expression.

“I don’t believe it,” Zhuki says. “How many people!”

“What is this?” Yuri says. Zhuki starts talking in Ukrainian, and Yuri’s smile spreads across his face.

“What the cazzo is going on here?” Vanni Fucci is the last one down, and he lands less gracefully than the others. “Zhuki, I thought you said we were going to play a match today.”

“We are.”

“This isn’t a match. It’s a bunch of old men.”

“Mister Fucci,” Yuri says, smirking. “These are not old men. These are our fans.”

“Speak for yourself, Yuri. My fans are better looking. And female.”

“Ah, come on, Mister Fucci,” Yuri says again. “We are not in Serie A anymore. We play calcio today like we play in our village in Ukraine. Like you play in your piazza in Pistoia.”

“Forget it. I’m not blowing out a knee for this. One of them could fall on me, or trip me. What if one of
them
goes down and they sue me for all I’ve got?”

Yuri pats him on the cheek and laughs. “No worries, Mister Fucci. Even when your calcio career is kaput, you will still have skin like baby to make your money.”

“Right. I need to find some shade.”

Yuri looks out over the crowd and rubs his hands together. “Now . . . what we will do with so many men?”

Mykola says something, and Ihor laughs.

“What did he say?”

“He says maybe we can do some running and then the few men not dead from a heart attack can play the match,” Zhuki says.

“Where is your father, Etto?”

“I don’t know,” I lie.

“Ah, I see him. Over there.” He reaches a hand up to wave, and the crowd immediately goes silent, turning in our direction like plants to the sun.

Yuri is embarrassed, but he steps up to speak.

“Thank you,” he says in Italian. “Thank you for coming. I am very happy so much people come to play the beautiful game. But is very many people. We must divide team. So, who wants to play first, you stay on field. Other men, go to side.”

There is silence across the terrace. No one moves. Yuri suddenly looks nervous, and Mykola and Ihor say something behind me. I feel a poke in my back.

“Etto,” Zhuki whispers. “Help him.” She pushes me forward.

“Okay. Um . . . if everyone could listen to me for a minute?” I say. “Please.”

The crowd stays quiet, all except Nello, who steps forward, his arms crossed. “Listen to you? And just who put you in charge?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who put you in charge? What gives you the right?”

“I’ll tell you what gives him the right.” Papà steps up next to me. “Because his father leases this field. His brother is buried in this field. And he does all the mowing and cleaning up here. Who invited you anyway? I know I didn’t.” Nello grumbles, shuffling off to the side, and Papà continues. “Okay, we’re going to do nine on nine. Mangona brothers, you’re with me. Guido and Bocca, you go with Etto.” Papà picks four old guys and gives me four, and the Ukrainians split up, Zhuki and Mykola on my team, Yuri and Ihor on Papà’s. “Everybody else, start forming your teams. We play fifteen minutes at a time, each team rotating out to let the next team in. Score accumulates.”

There’s chaos for several minutes as everyone scrambles to get on the best team, and then more chaos when someone realizes there are no lines drawn on the field, and the discarded sweatshirts and warm-up pants have to be stretched along the sidelines.

“Okay,” Papà says. “We are ready. Signor Fil, would you do us the honor?”

Everyone looks to Yuri, who’s hovering over one of the beat-up calcio balls and batting at it with his toes. He balances his foot lightly on top of the ball, then does some quick maneuver so it magically ends up in his hands. He rotates it slowly, smiling to himself as if in a trance, as if he is back in Strilky, holding the old ball and picking out the constellations.

“Ready, Yuri?” I say.

He looks up at me and grins. He puts the ball in the center of the field, pats his chest to find the whistle, and looks around at the men one last time.

Bwwweeeeeeet!

The field quickly disintegrates until it looks like the passeggiata during Ferragosto, or the universe after the big bang. But cazzo if I have ever seen a group of men play so passionately. Men with grown children and bad backs attempting Maradona’s evasions, Ronaldinho’s elastico, Totti’s spoon shot, and Cristiano Ronaldo’s Oscar-worthy grimacing and playacting. Pretty soon, between the fake injuries and the real ones, the field starts to look like Monte Cassino, fallen bodies everywhere, the Mangona brothers chugging around lost without their bicycles.

“Over here, Etto,” Zhuki shouts, but my foot has already read the field and sent the ball in her direction. I feel myself charging ahead, passing on instinct and leaping over bodies to receive the pass. After a solid month of training with the Ukrainians, the cords in my body have strengthened, and my veins are wide open, delivering rushes of oxygen. Today, I don’t need upside-down sunglasses to keep me from looking at my feet. I don’t need an iPod to clear my head or a string to tell me where my teammates are. My body somehow knows.

“Pass it here! Pass it here!” Papà calls out. He’s the last old guy standing. One of the Mangona brothers flicks it to him, and he weaves down the field, the ball moving ahead of his feet as if by magnetic force.

“Run, Carlo! Forza! Dai!” Nonno shouts from the sidelines, and then, “Tackle him, Etto, tackle him!”

I give him some trouble, but Papà manages to deliver it directly in front of Yuri, who shoots, faking Bocca out.

“Goooooooooooooooooool! Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooool!”

The sidelines go wild with cheering and shouting, people sticking out their tongues, rocking imaginary babies, and pointing to the stars. Papà charges toward Yuri, the intense concentration of his face breaking into a grin, and Yuri hooks him with his arm and wraps him into a hug.

The whistle blows and we run off the field, Papà sucked toward one side, a thousand hands patting me in the other direction.

“Good job, Etto,” Bocca says.

“Yeah, nice passes out there.”

Vanni Fucci decides to join the next round after all, and Yuri’s off the field, so there’s no one to keep up with him. All the men can do is throw themselves into his path, like revolutionaries in front of an advancing tank. He racks up the score, and the next eighteen men exchange. And the next. And the next. No one wants to go home. Because this is nothing like watching calcio matches or pregame shows or postgame analysis. This is not the calcio market or the calcio variety spectaculars, or the reality shows with the wives and girlfriends of calcio.

This is pure calcio.

Our team is on again. Yuri and Papà have spent the time off the field planning a defense, and for the first ten minutes, we do nothing but go back and forth. I don’t know if it’s the adrenaline or all the training, but I’m not tired at all. Zhuki passes to me and I slip around Ihor somehow. One of the Mangona brothers comes at me from the side, and I slide, kicking the ball hard at the goal, the net absorbing it like an amoeba.

“Gooooooooooooooooooooool! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol!”

The crowd cheers. I can feel the grass burn along the side of my leg, and I roll over onto my back. Zhuki comes by and pulls me up off the ground, and it gives me the momentum I need for the last few minutes. I pass to Zhuki, and she scores another goal. Yuri calls time, and I jog to the sidelines for the next exchange.

“Amazing, Etto!”

“Where’d you learn to play like that?”

“Didn’t you used to be asthmatic?”

“You’re really delivering the meat this afternoon, eh, Etto?”

“Eh.”

Zhuki has been sucked into the crowd farther down the sideline and quickly surrounded by a group of nonne, who are no doubt telling her the dangers to one’s womanhood that can occur with all that exertion. They’ve got her trapped pretty well, but if she wants to get away, she shows no sign. We cycle in three more times. The sun goes down behind the terraces, and the air turns grainy and gray. Over five hours we’ve played, twenty mini-halves in all. I have no idea what the score is when Yuri finally calls the match, but you can feel the disappointment in the air, everyone shuffling around, reluctant to go home. They stand around talking and smoking restorative cigarettes, the red ash like traffic lights in the twilight. I find Zhuki in the milling crowd, talking with Bocca and Silvio.

“I was just telling Zhuki that a bunch of us are going down to Camilla’s,” Bocca says.

“You should come,” I say, hoping Fede won’t be there.

“I can’t. I have to prepare Little Yuri and Principessa for bed.”

“Can’t Yuri do that?”

“I promised Little Yuri I would read to him tonight. But we’ll be at the beach tomorrow. Will you meet us?”

“After I close the shop.”

“Until tomorrow, then.” And all of a sudden, she stretches up and kisses me on the cheeks. It’s not a romantic kiss. It’s the same kiss Martina gives me over the bar, the same kiss I obediently give to the nonne whenever they manage to trap me within arm’s length. All the same, it’s a kiss.

“Tomorrow,” I mumble like some kind of deficiente, and I watch her walk off toward the back of the terrace.

“That looked friendly,” Bocca says, and I shrug like it’s no big deal.

I survey the field to see if anyone else saw her do it, and I spot Papà, standing alone on the sideline, staring at me. He holds my gaze for only a second before jerking his head and looking away. I wish I could tell how long he’s been watching and what he’s thinking. Mamma always joked that he only ever showed three emotions—happy, angry, and hungry—and the burden fell to her to interpret everything in between. She would tell us exactly why he was angry, and precisely how long we had to be quiet until he cooled down. She would tell us when he was too preoccupied with a problem to hear our school stories. And she would let us know when he was proud of us.

The knots of men unravel. Bocca and I head toward the path, joining the slow procession down the hill, the faces and voices of my neighbors appearing and disappearing as we pass.

At Camilla’s, Fede and the rest of them are sitting around a table outside.

“If it isn’t the Azzurri,” Claudia says. We pull over two more plastic chairs and everyone makes room. “How was the match?”

“Etto scored a goal.”

“I don’t believe it.”

And Bocca starts recapping the match, alternating between Vanni’s and Yuri’s best moves and the stumbling old guys trying to vindicate their childhood calcio dreams. When he gets to my goal, he describes it in excruciating detail, and he makes me show the burn on my leg. The entire time, Fede is staring into his beer, and I try to puzzle out his face to see if he’s pissed at me, or if he’s worried that I am pissed at him.

“Why didn’t you play today, Fede?” Claudia asks.

Fede shrugs and takes a long drink.

Camilla comes outside with another tray of beers. “I heard about the match, Etto. How was it?”

“Good. How’s the empire building?”

“Good. Busy.”

“Claudia says you’re taking Internet classes to get a hotel license now.”

“Trying to. How’s the shop?”

“Euh.”

She smiles. I’ve always liked Camilla. She knows exactly what she wants to do in life and doesn’t let anyone tell her differently. I think her parents wanted her to turn out a little more like Claudia—find a husband, take over the family restaurant, that sort of thing.

“Why don’t you stop working for a minute and sit with us?” Claudia says. “Casella, tell her.”

“Camilla, your sister wants me to tell you to stop working for a minute and sit with us.”

“Why don’t you get up on her shoulder, Casella?” Fede says. “Polly want a cracker? Polly want a cracker?”

“Shut up, Fede,” Claudia says. “He was kidding.”

“Polly want a cracker?” Bocca laughs.

“At least Casella knows how to keep a woman happy,” Claudia says.

“Ah, yes, the grand theory of love. Always do what Claudia wants.”

“Oh, and what’s your theory, Fede? Quantity over quality?”

“Not anymore. I’m taking a break.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Believe it,” Fede says. “Who knows? Maybe one of these days, I’ll even start looking for Mrs. Fede.”