The Sun and Other Stars (5 page)

“Hey, thanks, Etto!” Ciacco is holding up one of the sandwiches and waving at me from his chaise, his stomach doubled up. “Extra meat. Just the way I like them!”

Ciacco’s voice is faint against the waves, but it’s loud enough to get Fede’s attention, and Fede spins around and starts waving at me, his whole arm sweeping into an arc as if he’s stranded on some fottuto island.

“Ehi! Etto!” he calls. “Come here!”

I shake my head. “I’m not translating for you, deficiente,” I say quietly. “You should’ve learned English in school when you had the chance.”

“Ehi! Etto!” he calls again, still sweeping his arm back and forth.

The blond girls are staring at me now, too, and Bocca twists around in the chair to have a look. Mimmo is taking his time chatting with sunbathers and children as he makes his way back to me with the money. I shake my head with more violence. Fede, if you think I’m coming over there to translate your stupidaggini, well, think again.

Fede finally gives up and jogs over to me, his hand shading the left side of his face. He’s wearing his Terminator sunglasses and those painted-on black trunks with the silver scorpion printed over the crotch. He reaches up to the wooden railing of the boardwalk and gives me the same upside-down handshake the B-boys give each other.

“Why the poser handshake, Fede? And why are you shading your face?”

“Ugh. Medusa’s here.” Medusa is what he calls the Milanese woman who has rented an umbrella at Bagni Liguria for the last forty summers and who insists on going topless as if this is France or something. I look over his shoulder.

“At your own risk, Etto,” he warns. “At your own risk.”

“Whatever, Fede. I feel so sorry for you, having to look at women’s bocce all day. Maybe you can apply for a disability stipend.”

“Listen, I would much rather be staring at raw meat and gristle all day than at that lady’s seventy-year-old cold cuts.” He laughs, grabs the railing of the boardwalk, and leans back, stretching. “Why don’t you come off that boardwalk and talk to these Australian girls I found?”

“No thanks. I think I’ll just laugh at you from here. What are they, nannies?”

“One’s got a German uncle. They’re preparing the vacation homes for him and his friends. You coming over to Camilla’s later?”

“Who’s going?”

“Who always goes? Everybody.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Come on. I’ll buy you a beer.”

“You always say that.”

Mimmo reappears and hands me the money for the sandwiches. “Etto, you should go put on your trunks and come out here. We’ve got extra umbrellas until the end of the week.”

“Thanks, but I have to make some deliveries.”

“When you’re finished.”

“Then I have to mow the field.”

“Ah . . . sì, sì . . . I heard it looks completely abandoned.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“I’ve got to go, Etto,” Fede says. He points at me as if that will pin me down. “Tonight. Camilla’s.”

“Maybe.”

“Listen, I’m tired of these halfhearted ‘maybes.’ You’re coming. End of the story.”

“Maybe.”

He gives me one last glare through his sunglasses. “See you there, Etto. No excuses.”

I walk up the hill to Pia’s, the bag of meat banging against my leg. There are only a few people out walking the terraces during the afternoon break—German hikers mostly, with their ski poles and their vigor and their heavy “Buongiornos” that land on you like a wool blanket. The sun is compact and hard, pounding away at my head like a blacksmith’s hammer. I can’t tell you how much I hate the sun. My eyes hate the sun. My skin hates the sun. My brain hates the sun. By the time I get to Via Partigiani, my shirt is soaked and my breath is chugging in and out of my lungs.

“Ciao, Etto.”

I jump.

“I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t scare me, signora.” It’s Signora Sapia, sitting on the rock under the traffic mirror with her sunglasses and her cane. “How did you know it was me, though?”

“At this time of day, it’s either German hikers or you doing your deliveries.” She laughs. “Then I heard the wheezing and I knew it was you.”

“I wasn’t wheezing.”

She laughs again. “When you’re our age, Etto, you’ll be used to this old hill . . . watch out!” She points with the red tip of her cane, and I step aside just in time. The Mangona brothers come by on their racing bikes, with their stealth aerodynamics and the orange flame helmets they special ordered from the Netherlands.

“Come on, Etto, train with us, you lukewarm piece of shit,” one of the Mangona brothers shouts at me, the backdraft carrying his words. The other one throws his head back and laughs.

“Hey, vaffanculo!” I call after them. “Your auntie!” I add.

They disappear around the corner, and I turn back to Signora Sapia. “Sorry, signora.”

“Oh, Etto” is all she says. A few years ago, she would have given me a lecture about cursing and showing lack of respect for the family, and she would have done it swiftly and unapologetically under the statute that allows the nonne to correct the behavior of anyone they are old enough to remember as a child. But nobody ever says a harsh word to me anymore, as if they think I’ve already done penance enough for a lifetime. Sometimes I wish they’d tell me off like they used to. Just once I’d like to hear it.

I keep walking, crossing over to the top half of the hill. On the bottom half are the nicer villas, the ones with iron fences dropped in plumb lines straight from the sky and brick paths swept as clean as the floor in the shop. These are the people who spend most afternoons and weekends cleaning their land, spitting on and smoothing nature’s cowlicks, and waxing the new growth as aggressively as the Eastern European women who work in all the salons in town. It’s not until you get above Via Partigiani that the villas start to get more dilapidated, the people more insane. The walls crumble, the cisterns bubble out of nowhere, and the generators growl. These are the people who train their guard dogs to kill, who loudly refuse the services of the comune, who stockpile gold and root vegetables in their cellars, and talk about the cataclysm as if they can’t wait.

Pia used to live with her parents on the bottom half of the hill until she married Nello and moved above Via Partigiani. Through the rickety gate, I can see her sitting on the edge of the garden hammock with her sunglasses on. She’s trying to pretend she spends the entire afternoon break on this hammock, but I know she only comes outside so she won’t have to answer the door in her sunglasses. Someday I’ll tell her she’s not fooling anyone, that the purple bruise is pooling past the edge of the frames.

“Ciao, Etto.”

“Ciao, signora.”

“What’s this ‘signora’?” she says. “Call me Pia.”

Pia has brought her purse out to the garden, too. She counts out the money and gives me a little tip as if I’m ten.

“It isn’t necessary, Pia.”

“Take it. Please, Etto, for your trouble.”

“It’s no trouble at all.” I hand it back to her. “And you know Papà would kill me if I took a tip.”

She flinches. Maybe this is your first instinct if you live with a guy like Nello. Maybe it’s because of the word
kill.
People will go around entire verbal mountain ranges to avoid particular words with me now. Kill. Death. Drown. Crash. Even Fede with all his cazzate and vulgarity will never say a curse that has to do with mothers or brothers even though it castrates half his usable vocabulary.

“You know, signora . . . Pia,” I say, “if you ever need me to bring you anything from town . . . if you ever need anything else, anything at all . . .”

Her dark eyebrows twitch above her sunglasses, slashing my sentence out of the air like Zorro.

“If I need anything, Nello will get it for me,” she says sharply.

“Sorry. I was only offering. . . .”

She stays silent, and as I leave through the gate, I can feel her eyes trying to follow me out. Everyone in San Benedetto knew Pia was doomed even before she herself knew it, but Mamma was one of the only women to befriend her. One time when Luca and I were ten or maybe eleven, she even convinced Pia to leave Nello, and Pia stayed at our house for a few nights while Mamma sorted something else out for her. I remember, as a bribe, Mamma told Luca and me we could stay up and watch television if we gave Pia our room, so we were downstairs watching Supercar in our sleeping bags when the intercom rang.

I think Mamma and Papà were expecting it, but they both went immediately quiet, so all you could hear was KITT’s fake voice saying, “One man can make a difference, Michael,” or whatever it was he used to say. Mamma and Papà whispered for a minute, until the intercom rang again. But instead of answering it, Papà went out through the other apartment, which belonged to Nonna and Nonno back then. We heard their door bang, and then Nello’s and Papà’s voices out on the street, arguing so loudly that lights started to go on in the palazzo next to ours. And just when we thought Papà was winning, Pia came floating down the stairs like a ghost, as if the heavy jacket and small suitcase she’d come with were her only mass.

Mamma, of course, started to argue with her, and pretty soon it got to be like an opera—tenors on the street below, sopranos above, Mamma pleading with Pia to stay. Just one more night and she’d see how much easier it was. Luca and I turned up the volume and tried to keep our attention on the TV, but it was no use. Mamma’s voice rose over it, her Italian splintering under the stress. In the end, Pia floated right out the door, and Mamma threw herself on the sofa next to me and started to cry. I remember Luca and I looking at each other and using that twin telepathy thing to decide to turn the television down and give her a hug because Mamma didn’t cry that often, at least not back then, and it was an episode of Supercar we’d both seen before.

Anyway, ever since then, Nello has been a complete stronzo to all of us. To Papà and me, I mean. But in her single act of defiance, Pia continues to buy our meat.

I must have gone on autopilot down the hill because instead of the paths leading me back to the town and the beach, they’ve delivered me like a chute to the field and the old liceo. After the liceo shut down, it took me a while to reset my routines and shift the center of my world first to the liceo in Albenga and then the shop, but the muscle memory is still there somewhere. I wade through the grass and sit down next to Luca, the lizards scurrying out of my way.

“Ciao, stronzo.”

I lie back in the goal and stare at the blue sky rippling through the net. Nothing in San Benedetto ever changes. Especially in the summer. The sun is always shining, the temperature hovering in the same range. They rarely ever lose a day on the beaches. Maybe every few weeks there’s a squall out at sea that will bring in some fog or a light rain at night, and once a decade, we’ll get a dusting of snow, leaving a few dwarfed and dirty snowmen that quickly melt into the sand.

My phone lights up. Fede, of course.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING SATURDAY?

MY LONG-LOST FAMILY IS ARRIVING FROM RUSSIA.

YOU HAVE FAMILY IN RUSSIA?

IT WAS A JOKE.

BOCCA AND I ARE GOING TO LE ROCCE WITH THE AUSTRALIANS.

HAVE FUN.

YOU’RE GOING TOO.

I’LL THINK ABOUT IT.

COME ON. DAI.

MAYBE.

NO MAYBES.

LEAVE ME ALONE, FEDE. I’M UP HERE MOWING THE FIELD.

FINE. BUT SATURDAY. LE ROCCE. YOU’RE COMING.

I shut my phone off. I’m not mowing the field today. It’s too fottuto hot, and I have no desire to die from gasoline fumes as I creep behind the mower like a Vietnamese farmer yoked to a water buffalo, stopping and starting every time the blades choke on a fist of grass. Nobody comes up here anymore anyway. And it’s the afternoon break. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Nonno complain about people eroding the national identity by not observing the break. I’m just doing my part.

I take off my glasses, and everything turns green and soft, set in gentle motion around me. The sun spins and throws off sparks. I close my eyes, listen to the breeze through the cypresses, and drift off into that pleasant limbo between sleep and wake.

I hear the laughter of a girl, and I bolt upright.

“Who’s there?” I pat the grass until I find my glasses. “Who is it?”

“I am sorry for waking you,” she says in Italian.

The girl is about my age, dressed in a green T-shirt and shorts that look like they came from a school gym class, and there are two guys flanking her like her fottuto guardian angels. They’re both older than she is, one dressed like her, and the other like one of the devil’s minions—black shorts, black shirt, black Adidas, and a black tattoo swirling up his arm.

“This is your field?” the girl asks. She’s obviously not Italian. Her accent is off, the middles and ends of her words sharp like elbows.

“Mine? No.”

“Is this . . . somebody’s field?”

I don’t want to stare at her legs, but I can’t help it. She’s got great legs, muscular thighs and calves, tapering down to delicate ankles.

“Well, it used to be the field for the liceo,” I say. “But the liceo was shut down, so I think it became the general property of the comune. But then the comune leased it to my father for one euro a year—well, the mayor, actually, who was doing my father a favor, leased it to him . . .” Her forehead is straining under the weight of this information, her eyes squinched shut like flower buds in the sunlight. “And we’re supposed to be responsible for the maintenance, but nobody really comes up here anyway . . .”

One of the men asks her something, and she answers him in some other language.

“Do you speak English?” she asks me.

“Yes.”

“We are new in town. Can we play calcio here, or not?”

I shrug. “Hey, it’s a free country. The field’s not in great condition, of course. No one’s played here in a while. There’s another field in town that’s much nicer than this. Right behind the Standa. Astroturf. Painted lines. No horrible walk up the hill.”

The two men turn to her, and there’s a short conference, after which she turns to me.

“Thank you. You are very sympathetic. We are sorry to disturb your nap. We will come back later.”