CRAVING U (The Rook Café) (37 page)

“It’s not that I
don’t believe you when you say that.”  Dario’s convictions were melting away.  “It’s
just I thought that maybe you’d gotten over her.”

“Well, you were
wrong,” he replied heatedly.  “For your information, I’ve felt this way for a
long time.  It’s not a simple crush.  Why should I get over her?”

“I dunno,” he
admitted.  “Maybe because you haven’t seen her in a while.  Maybe because you’re
living in a new place, meeting new people... new girls?” he insinuated.

“Listen, life
here isn’t so different, and if I had wanted other girls, I could have had them
back home.  And I’m tired of always having to try to prove to you that I feel
the way I do about her.”

“Fine, fine. 
Take it easy!”  He was kicking himself for having allowed himself to be
conditioned by what Carlotta thought.  “I was wrong.  I’m sorry
....
Really.”

“So, are you
going to tell me what happened or not?”

“You aren’t going
to like it.”  Dario took a deep breath and told Matteo everything, from the
graffiti on the walls, to the rumors, to the humiliation, to the offensive
comments, and finally to Marika’s solitude.  “We haven’t seen her at
The
Rook
in weeks.  She’s been skipping school, and yesterday, as she was
leaving school, some asshole pushed her up against the wall to try to kiss her,
like an animal.”

Matteo felt his
lungs stop working and an intense heat flow throughout his body as his muscles
flexed impotently against a situation he had no control over.

“Nothing
happened, I swear.”  Dario stumbled over his words.  He was trying to get them
out as quickly as possible in order to end this torture for his friend.  “I was
right there and got between them immediately, but he started insulting her in
front of everyone and I didn’t know what else I could do.”  He felt guilty for
not having done more, for not having been able to do what Matteo certainly
would have done.  “That dickhead is a total tool, but he’s big.  I wasn’t
afraid of getting beaten up, though, you’ve got to believe me.  But I couldn’t
do anything against him.”

Matteo knew that
his friend had done everything he could, and that Dario was hoping for a word
of encouragement from him, but his mind was clouded by anger.

“Hey.  Matt.  You
still there?”

“Yeah.”

“You gotta believe me!  I tried to....”

“I know, I believe you.  I’m not mad at
you,” he reassured him.  His teammates continued their rowdy game of FIFA.  “I’m
mad at myself.  I fucked up when I went through that whole charade with
Lucrezia, and I fucked up even more when I pushed Marika away from me.”  He
knew it was all his fault.  “Thanks for doing whatever you could.”

“I would have liked to beat the shit out
of him, but Marika was holding me back, and besides...,” he trailed off.  “Maybe
they won’t be calling me
Dario the Lionheart
, but I wouldn’t have backed
down either.”

“Oh cut it out!  You don’t have to prove
anything to anyone, certainly not to me.”  Matteo waved listlessly at some new
arrivals in Ninho’s room who had joined in the video games.  “I would have done
the same thing if it had been Carlotta,” though he couldn’t be so sure that he
wouldn’t have reacted more violently to defend Marika’s honor.  “You just can’t
win with some assholes – they don’t understand anything if you talk to them,
and by fighting all you get is a black eye and a bigger problem.”

“I’m so frustrated by the way everyone is treating
her, though.  It’s so unfair.  I mean, what a ridiculous situation!”  His voice
still carried the regret of not having been able to defend her better.  “But,
you know, I’m not the most popular guy in school, and sometimes I think I do
more damage than good when I get involved.”  All of his frustration came
pouring through the phone.  “It would be different if you were here.  They
respect you, and you’d know what to do.”

Matteo’s throat was too dry to respond. 
He was trapped in his darkness, and the conversation was getting lost in a
Kafkaesque maze of blind alleys.

“Now you know everything,” Dario said.

“OK.  Thanks.”  His breath came in short
gasps in the early evening air of Milan.  He hung up the phone as a thousand
city lights came on and a sense of claustrophobia gripped him.

The sound of the sliding door caught the
attention of his teammates, who were hotly contesting the video game.  “Oba!”
Ninho cheered, telling the others to make room for Matteo.  “Aqui, Matteo.”

“No, thanks.  Put in a sub.  I’m beat.” 
He yawned theatrically and stretched his back.  His aqua eyes squinted in the
bright artificial light.  “I’ll give you all a reprieve tonight from my
superior FIFA skills.  Next time.”  It wasn’t easy for him to appear normal
after what he had heard, and when all he wanted to do was pound his fists
against the wall.

The next day, Matteo could think of
nothing else.  His school lessons served only to increase the ball of tension
that he felt in the pit of his stomach, and it didn’t go away even during the
afternoon extra training session, where he was listless and lackluster.  Not
until the evening, when they came back from the
Visconti
, did his
tiredness and sense of powerlessness get the best of him.  He sobbed silently
in the shower, his tears mixing with the water that ran down his face.

He wanted to save his
“Beatrice
”
without whose love his life had no meaning.  She was all that mattered!  But in
order to do it, he had to go home; he had to enter his own dark forest of fears
and settle the score with his own demons.

The means to defeat his enemies came to
him by accident the following day while he listened to his teammates
complaining about the rigid regulations and bureaucracy that governed their
lives at
San Carlo
.  In particular, they were against the list of
nitpicky rules that they had to follow, or risk being expelled from the
program.  Amongst these rules was the strict ban against playing soccer in any
form outside of the authorized practices and competitions organized by the
white
and blue
.

There was his trick, his Trojan horse made
so famous in the epic stories of ancient poets.

The only way to get to the heart of the
dark forest that he could think of meant breaking that rule by organizing a
mini tournament over two days – Saturday and Sunday – at Pellico High.  A
tournament that had the official purpose of promoting sports in schools, but
which would give him a vehicle to have everyone’s attention and make all of
those awful, obscene voices go silent forever.

4 U

The weekend approached menacingly, full of rumors about Matteo’s supposed
return to Orgiano. “They say he’s going to be here on Friday,” was the word
going about Pellico High.  “I heard that, for his return, they’re going to
organize a party in the gym,” went another story.  “I hope he stays for a few
days,” his friends wished, while others who didn’t know him said, “I can’t wait
to meet him.”  “He’s so hot!”  The girls, obviously, knew no bounds. “Can you
imagine being with a professional soccer player and becoming a wag?”  They were
close to a nervous breakdown from impatience.

Marika, on the
other hand, didn’t want to know a thing about it, not even to hear his name,
and made sure that she kept a wide berth whenever they started gossiping about
him, at least until she could no longer ignore Carlotta.  “Did you hear the
news?”  She had tracked Marika down near the exit after last period on
Thursday.  “Do you know what this means?”  She was baiting her.  “He’s going to
be back!”

“Yeah, so I
heard,” Marika barked back.  “I’m not an alien.”  She walked past her
passively.  “It’s just that I don’t care,” she added, hypocritically.  Nothing
could have been further from the truth.  The moment she had heard about Matteo’s
return, an electric shock had run through her body, leaving her breathless and
weak at the knees.

“Do you really
think I’m going to swallow that?”  Carlotta was hard at her heels.  “If I know
you as well as I think I know you, you are absolutely dying to see him again,
but you aren’t brave enough to do it.”

“You’re such a
broken record,” Marika said out of annoyance.  “Like you always say, a
buzzkill.”  Just twelve minutes with Carlotta these days was like running a
marathon.  “Haven’t you gotten over your drama queen syndrome?”  She was using
sarcasm to cover up the tremors in her voice.  “If you’re jonesing for a TV
fix, I’ll satisfy you immediately.”  She turned around, stone-faced, like an
inanimate object.  “I thought that he was my
Stefan
, but behind that
sweet exterior was hiding the damned soul of
Damon
,” referring to the
two brothers from
The Vampire Diaries
, the literary saga by Smith that
had been turned into a television series.  But there were no vampires biting
into her heart, simply life itself.  “I’m scared of the power that he still
holds over me, and I shouldn’t...,” she paused, loading up a Kantian
hypothetical imperative, “I
don’t
want to want him any more.”  She
stopped just before they reached the school exit.  “So, if you’re a real
friend, you’ll forget that I ever knew him.”

“My God, Marika,
you’re so cold it’s giving me the chills.  You can’t just erase him from your
life like that.”

“You bet I can. 
And as soon as I’ve shown myself that I can live without him, I’m going to stop
suffering too.”  She was deceiving herself as best she could, ignoring the
thumping of her heartbeat, while at that very moment, the young man in question
was mobilizing an entire army of friends and relatives in order to organize a
tournament that very weekend, taking advantage of the fact that no one would be
working on Saturday, which was May Day...

...and all just
for her, betting his whole destiny on one spin of the wheel of fortune!

The principal of
Pellico High, even though he had been given very little notice about Matteo’s
plans, was more than happy to offer his school as the location for the
tournament, and he pushed through all of the paperwork as quickly as possible,
using the name of
AC San Carlo
to help grease the wheels, even though
neither Matteo nor anyone else had ever made any reference to the
white and
blue
.

At a breakneck
pace, then, and in an atmosphere of frenetic preparations, Friday morning
arrived, plastered with brightly colored flyers advertising the event, and
informing students how to sign up their teams for this single-elimination
competition.

All of the towns
of Berici Hills were abuzz with talk of nothing else.  Everyone knew that
Matteo would be arriving that very evening from Milan and that he would be
playing the following day.  Marika alone kept her distance from the delirium by
staying home from school yet another day.

She wasn’t ready
to confront the consequences of his long absence, nor did she want to hop back
onto that streetcar named Desire.  She was paralyzed by the idea that he might
treat her coldly, or distantly, or indifferently after she had rejected him. 
She knew she didn’t have the strength to bear that, at least not yet.  But she
was working on it.  All the better reason to keep away from school; she didn’t
know if she would even have the strength to fight her ridiculous desire to see
him.  And the mainmast to which she would tie herself so as to resist giving in
to that fatal temptation presented itself as a walled city in which she could
spend the entire weekend.

On the opening
day of the tournament, Matteo got into his car early so as to be on site in
time to organize the last details before the competition got started at 10 in
the Pellico High School gym.  Racked by memories and homesickness, he drove the
back streets of his town, which were littered with graffiti for the upcoming
Giro d’Italia road race against a mosaic backdrop of deep red earth and emerald
green grape leaves under a bright, motherly sun.  This was where he had his
roots, far from where his talented feet had taken him.  This was where he was
born, and where he hoped to live and die.

When he got to
Lonigo, he was astonished to see how many kids were already waiting in line to
sign up for the tournament, and he decided to find a discreet parking spot on a
side street rather than immediately face the throngs of people who were there
to challenge him on the playing field.  He didn’t feel like facing the groupies
either, who were all dolled up to try to catch the eye of a future superstar. 
It was like being on an episode of
Next
.

“
Today’s lucky
man is Matteo!  For you, Matteo, we have your first contestant: Lucrezia
!” 
And there she was, coming out of the van, shaking her hips and wearing
dangerously high stiletto heels.  “
Don’t like her?  Then how about Livia
?” 
And there was contestant number two, pretty in pink and gushing with words.  “
Ciao
everyone!  Hi to the principal, to the teachers, to my friends, and to all my
fans
!”  But the list of contestants was inexhaustible:  “
Matteo, we also
have
Sabrina, Erika, Alessia, Giovanna, Francesca, Valentina
....
”

He wanted none of
that sideshow, feeling less than nothing for any of them.

Almost everyone
who he had asked to be there was, from the students of Pellico High to the crew
of
The Rook
, from his classmates from his own former school to his
teammates from
Brenta Soccer Club
.    Even Carlotta was curious to see
him again, and anyway, Dario would never have forgiven her if she didn’t come.

When the moment
arrived to give the official opening to the tournament, Matteo waited in the
wings, next to the crowd that had filled the stands, while the principal of the
school, Dr. Cazzaniga, walked out to the center of the court to read the rules
of the competition.

“Please, if I can
have the attention of all the participants: all players must have officially
signed up before playing and cannot wear any dangerous objects such as chains,
bracelets, rings, and watches...
Quiet!
  Only sneakers or rubber soled
indoor cleats will be allowed...
People!
”  The principal called everyone
to order.  “Use of shin guards is mandatory...
Would you all please be
quiet!
”  But no one was listening to him.  All eyes were on the champion of
Brenta Soccer
, the new recruit of the
Corsairs,
and the great
hope of Serie A.

“Yoo-hoo, Matteo!” 
All of his closest friends, the ones he needed the most right now, had gathered
near the gym entrance.  “I’m so glad to see you!”  Carlotta kissed him
affectionately on his cheek, surprised by how excited she was to have him near
her, while Dario gave him a high five.

“Thanks for
coming.”  Matteo warmly hugged his friends while his eyes scanned about to see
the one person he had come back for.  His heart skipped a beat every time he
thought he saw her face amongst them, but he slowly realized that she hadn’t
come.  As predictable as it was, he had to accept the fact that she wasn’t
there and that in all likelihood he would go back to Milan without having seen
her.  It made him lightheaded, and sent his mood, which had just been so ephemerally
euphoric, into the deepest, blackest hole possible.

“Marika isn’t here,” Dario whispered in
his ear.

“Just as well,” he said, trying to
convince himself and everyone else that it would be easier to do what he had in
mind if she wasn’t present.

“What a gentleman!” Carlotta upbraided
him, jumping to the worst conclusion without having the least idea of what he
was planning, or what he meant.  “
Asshole
!”  After all, she didn’t know
why he was really here.  All she could see was the miserable end of something
that she had begun to doubt ever existed in the first place.

“Hey there champ!  I’ve missed you,”
Lucrezia purred while she hugged him as tight as possible to her body, making
sure that everyone present got a good look at them.  “How’s it going?”

“Good, thanks,” he said, not really paying
attention to her, still stumbling about in his dark delusions.

“You seem strange.”  Lucrezia smiled at
him wickedly.  “Where is she?”

“She who?” he sighed, tired of the same
old games.

“She didn’t come, did she?”  She kept
pressing ahead.  “She’s probably with him.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking
about.”  He pointed to an empty seat in the stands, hoping she would take it. 
“And honestly, I don’t care.”

“They’re about to get started,” Dario
broke in.  “Let’s go.”

“Don’t act dumb.”  Lucrezia gave no sign
of giving up, touching Matteo mischievously to make everyone in the stands
believe in something that wasn’t true.  “Poor thing, she had to settle for
someone else.  She just couldn’t compete with me.”  It was all too much fun to
just leave well enough alone.  “Come on,” she said, pouting coquettishly.  “You
can’t be jealous just because Marika is going out with Brunelli.”

“
What
?” 
It was no longer Matteo speaking, but his alter ego, a digital avatar that
responded to his unconscious needs.

“Didn’t you know?”
she squealed, reveling in her role as evil puppetmaster.

“It’s not true!”
Dario shouted a bit too loudly.

“Marika doesn’t
come to
The Rook
anymore.”  Her innate talent for manipulating was
perverse, and deadly.  “She’s together with Federico Brunelli, the guy who
plays for
Dogado
.”

Matteo tried to
control her hands, which were all over his body, and just stared ahead, showing
no emotion.  Carlotta, meanwhile, put in her own shrill two cents.  “That’s a
total lie!  They’re just friends.”  She shook Matteo’s arm to get his full
attention.  “Just ask Dario if you don’t believe me. 
Darioooo
!” she
called.  “Would you please tell him the truth?”

“Number 7
....
”  Lucrezia
gloated, as heartless as an executioner.  “Come on, you must remember him.” 
Her treachery knew no bounds: she was the fox and the cat all rolled up in
one.  “He scored on you both times you played them this season.”

“Yeah, I know who he is,” he replied
coldly while his best friends’ girlfriend shook him back and forth.

“Matteo, please don’t listen to her, I’m
begging you!”  Carlotta  was floundering in the quicksands of Lucrezia’s
tricks.  “Marika and Federico are just....”

“Carlotta, stop it!” he cut her off,
removing her hands from his arm.  “Don’t you think that before falling for the
first bit of gossip I hear spread by people who are dumber than me, I would
actually find out the truth from the person I trust more than anyone else?” 
Matteo stalked away from the gym entrance under the watchful eyes of everyone
present.  He dragged Lucrezia behind him.  “Just wait a bit longer and you’ll
get what you’ve been waiting for, in front of everybody.  Just the way you like
it.”  He spun away in order to take his place next to the principal, who was
chanting his name along with everyone else in the stands.

In a small loft
far, far away, just outside the center of Marostica, Marika was being kindly
treated to a private banquet.  “What are you looking at?”  Marika rubbed her
big, pearly eyes and noticed Federico staring at her.

“You.”  His voice
caressed his poetic muse.  “I swear that if I wasn’t already at a loss for
words, I’d lose them right now.”  He shook his head slightly.  “It’s
incredible.”

“What’s
incredible?” she asked him curiously while wiping some orange juice from her
lips.

Federico raised
himself on his elbows, using the table for leverage, and brought his face near
hers.  “It’s incredible how you are even more beautiful this morning than you
were last night.”