The Sun and Other Stars (20 page)

O
n Monday morning I wake up to the sound of a door slamming.

“Papà?” I call downstairs.

Nothing. I look over at Luca’s bed and listen to the silence. Papà still has our cleaning lady, Rahab, change the sheets, so they’re always perfectly smooth, pulled tight like a drum. When Luca first went off to the academy, sometimes I would sleep in his bed just so it wouldn’t look so abandoned.

I go downstairs. There’s a nice breeze circulating through the apartment. Papà is a big believer in fresh air, so he always leaves the windows and shutters flung open. I make a coffee and stand out on the balcony. The beaches are empty this early in the morning, the sea so flat, I could fold it up into an envelope. I remember when I was a kid and I used to look at the spread of the sea and pretend I was Marco Polo or Christopher Columbus, imagining all the possibilities. Now all I see is a vast, unending boundary.

“Ciao, Famoso!”

I look down, and there’s Mimmo waving at me from the beach.

“I said, ciao, Famoso!”

“Are you talking to me?”

“Who else?” He grins. “Your papà is looking for you!”

The front door of the shop is open. The banco is already set up, and Papà is standing in front of it, waiting for me, his arms crossed like a barricade. I go to the back, grab a clean apron from the crate, and put it on.

“You’re here early,” I say.

“I’m here early? It’s my shop.”

“I’m just surprised to see you this early.”

“Surprised?
You
are surprised? I’ll show you surprised.” He pulls out a magazine, gripping it in front of him like a hooligan he’s collared on the street. He thrusts it in my face, and it takes me a second to refocus. It’s a tabloid,
Gente
or one of those, folded open to a spread of photos, and my eyes scan the page: one of Cristiano Ronaldo’s girlfriends walking and drinking coffee from a paper cup. Francesco Totti and Ilary Blasi leaving some mall near Rome, the imperceptible bump circled in red ink. And then I see it. The bottom right corner of the page. Tatiana the Showgirl, her golden breasts eclipsing most of the frame. But down in the corner, my hair is unmistakable, the sliver of my profile, my pale hand reaching up to take the hundred-euro note, which is circled and magnified to five times its size with the caption “One hundred euros! What kind of meat is he delivering?”

“Well? What is this? What?”

I look at Papà. There’s no point in trying to talk to him now. He has the entire arsenal out. The Contrapposto of Impatience. The Small Pupils of Accusation. The Eyebrows of Disdain.

“It’s a delivery,” I say, as quietly as I can.

“Do you know who this is?”

“No.”

“No? How can you not know who this is? It is the wife of Yuri Fil!”

“Oh.”

“And you are taking money from her? Please tell me that is not you taking money from the wife of Yuri Fil.”

“It was a tip,” I mumble. “I tried not to take it, but she made me.”

“She made you? She made you?” he says. “She is a woman! How can she make you do anything?”

“I’m sorry, Papà. It happened so fast. I didn’t know who she was. Some woman called for a delivery and I said, of course.”

“You didn’t know who she was? The wife of Yuri Fil and you didn’t know who she was?” I consider changing my plea to temporary insanity on account of the breasts.

“Well,” Papà continues, “even if, as you say—and I doubt it—that you did not know who this is, it does not matter who she is. We do not do our jobs for bribes.”

“It wasn’t a bribe. It was a tip.”

“Bribe . . . tip . . . respectable people don’t take either. If you want tips, go and work for Benito.” He hangs his head. “I am so ashamed. So ashamed.”

“I’m sorry, Papà.”

And then he says something he has never said before, not even in his worst bout of anger, not even when I came home the night of my sixteenth birthday, completely drunk with the front of my pants wet.

“Go.”

“What?”

“Go.” He steps behind the banco and gestures to the portraits. “I can’t even look at you. I certainly cannot force your nonno and bisnonno to look at you all day long.”

“I said I’m sorry, Papà.”

He points to the door. And there it is—the Head Turn of Disownment. “Go.”

I stand rooted for a few seconds and give him a chance to take it back, but I can feel the lump rising in my throat, and I almost strangle myself trying to pull the apron over my head. I fling it toward the back, and it hits the beaded curtain, which shivers as if to say, “Aya. You’re
really
in trouble now.” But I don’t care. After everything—all the hours I’ve stood behind that stupid banco just so he could sit at Martina’s and talk about calcio and other stupidaggini, all the deliveries and walking up that fottuto hill. Maybe if
he
were here to answer the phone once in a while, maybe if
he
made the deliveries once in a while, well, maybe it would be
him
in
Gente
, maybe it would be
him
making the acquaintance of the breasts of the wife of Yuri Fil.

As I step out onto the passeggiata, the sun strikes me across the nose.

“You okay, Etto?”

I hurry past Chicca and everyone at Bagni Liguria, who must have heard the whole thing. I put my head down. I just want to disappear.

“Hey, Etto, you okay?” Fede calls out.

I don’t stop. Even if I did, they would all tell me the same thing. Don’t worry about it. That’s just how he is. He’ll cool off by tomorrow. As if he is the only one allowed to get pissed off, the only one allowed to lose his straps and say whatever he feels like saying, whenever he feels like saying it.

I can feel my legs pumping through Via Londra, my breath emulsifying in my lungs, weighing them down. Yes, Papà, I took a tip from Tatiana the Showgirl. And you know what else? I play calcio with the man himself every night. And one of these days, I might even have the palle to try with his sister again. Suddenly, I feel strong, like a steam locomotive charging through the gauntlet of tourists and busybodies, sweeping them out of the way with my cowcatcher.

“Ciao, Etto, what’s the hurry?”

“Nice picture in
Gente
!”

“Ciao, Famoso.”

“Ciao, VIP.”

“Etto! I just saw it.”

“What kind of meat
were
you delivering?”

I light a cigarette and puff away at it up the hill. The sun feels like a firebrand in the sky, pressing itself into my forehead.

“Etto, is everything all right?”

“Sì, Signora Sapia.”

“You sound like you’re stumbling.”

“It’s only the heat.”

“I know. Awful. And no rain. Heard about your picture in
Gente
. Everyone is talking about it.”

“Sì, signora.”

“I hear they caught you looking awkward.”

“Who said that?”

“But you always were an awkward-looking boy. Since you were little.”

When I get to the aula, I lie down on the floor, but the cool wood does nothing to calm my anger. I look to the ceiling, but the drawings seem weak and impotent, the bodies limp, the expressions pinched and cauterized.

“Vaffanculo, Papà,” I say through my teeth. You’ll see how hard it is to do it by yourself, to work the entire day alone, to be chained to that banco like a dog to a tree and have to ask Chicca to watch the shop when you have to run upstairs just to go to the toilet. He has never done it alone. First there was Nonno. Then Mamma. Then me. I don’t think he’s worked a full day in three years, ever since I finished liceo.

The anger courses through my veins, and then I hear the words of Yuri Fil in my head. No afraid, no afraid. Enough of the catenaccio. Attack! Attack! Attack!

I move swiftly up the ziggurat of tables, a few sharpened pencils gripped between my teeth. I imagine tripping on a loose nail in one of the tabletops and taking a fall, hanging in the air for a couple of seconds before dropping like an anvil and crashing through the floor of Charon’s aula, leaving a perfect outline of my body. As the camera hovers over the hole, I would climb out, stars and birds swirling around my head, the pencils having knocked out a few teeth, splitting my mouth into a smile like the Joker’s.

I boost myself up on the top table and stand up, holding my hand against the ceiling until the coolness fills my pores. I know exactly what I will draw today. Right on the ceiling—no paper or pinholes to buffer the anger or slow me down.

The sixth panel.
The Tree of Life.

I’m not cautious with the lines, and they hold nothing back from me, either. As I draw, I can feel the rough bark of the tree rising to the surface, my fingers chasing the fleeing shadows of the pencil, smudging in leaves and branches. I run my hand over the skin of the snake and feel its coil and the ripple of its scales as it twists around the trunk, choking it. I feel the taut muscle giving way to the soft bosom of Tatiana the Showgirl, her chest swelling almost to her elbow, her hand dangling the hundred-euro note between the branches. My feet slide across the table, my neck cocked back at the angle of a man whose throat has been slit. I draw my own hand reaching out to take the tip, bribe, whatever. I fill in my arm, my chest, and my stomach, then stop, leaving my entire torso dangling in the air, holding on to that hundred-euro note for dear life.

The first two panels, I’d drawn everyone as Michelangelo did—mostly naked. And you know, it really is a nice metaphor. Nakedness, purity, vulnerability, whatever. Until you find yourself contemplating the shape and color of your own junk. So I move to the other end of the table and start on the second half of the drawing. The After to the Before. The snake blooms a second head, Papà’s scowling face instead of the angel’s, his boning knife showing me the way to the desert. I draw another version of myself slinking out of the garden, hunched and wrinkled, shadows stamped around my eyes and across my forehead. But again, I can’t get past the waist.

My foot scuffs one of the pencils, and there’s a delay before I hear it hit the floor. I lie down on the table and stare sideways at the tree, from this angle now fallen. Tiiiiiiiiiiimber. Did it really fall if I’m the only one who seems to notice it? I stare at both figures, at the smooth, white plaster below my waist. Half man, half nothingness, hovering in the air. And you know what? I’m tired of being the eunuch, of hearing myself say, “How can I help you?” and “What can I do for you?” and “Yes, Papà,” and “Sorry, Papà.” I’m tired of listening to Fede’s woes of getting too much sex. I’m tired of being the only guy in the region to turn down Signora Semi­rami, instead trailing behind a girl who barely talks to me, like a chivalrous knight on an imaginary quest, pledging my loyalty and waiting hopefully on the sideline. I am tired of being a slave instead of a son.

So in the blank, white space between my legs, I draw the biggest penis anyone has ever seen. Bigger than Luca’s. Bigger than Fede’s, even. Bull-sized.

I will not go back. I will not go back until he asks me. Begs me.

I work the rest of the afternoon in a frenzy, filling in the figures. I try to remember Tatiana the Showgirl’s face—her hollow cheeks and her swollen lips. I spend a lot of time getting the junction right where the scales of the snake melt into Papà’s skin. I fill in the landscape in the background: the cobbled driveway of the villa, the iron gate, and the massive columns.

By the time I climb down, it’s already dark. My eyes burn. When I turn my head, I hear the crack of the vertebrae, and when I pat my stomach, it thumps like a drum. I haven’t eaten all day, and I’ve cycled past the grumbling stomach and the hunger pangs. My body is already starting to hollow out the cells, filling them with adrenaline and lactic acid, speeding up the process of consuming itself.

Eat up, brother. Buon appetito.

My phone lights up. Fede.

MARTINA’S LOOKING FOR YOU.

I don’t answer.

SHE’S BEEN HOLDING YOUR DINNER.

Martina has made dinner for Papà and me almost every night since Luca died, and the thought of her waiting for me and wondering is the only thing that makes me answer.

TELL HER I’M SORRY, BUT I’M NOT COMING.

WHERE ARE YOU?

I’M FINE.

I shut off my phone, go outside, and sit on the fifth-year bench. I take out a cigarette and stare at it in my hands, then put it back in the pack. The stars over the sea are infinite tonight. They say that since the big bang, the universe has been in constant motion, expanding at an accelerating rate, the spaces filled with dark energy and dark matter. And what we can see either by looking through telescopes or formulating equations only makes up five percent of what’s actually out there.

Five percent.

And the rest? No one knows. I was listening to this astrophysicist on TV a few years ago, and they asked him about it—what exactly this dark matter and dark energy was. Now, this guy won a Nobel Prize or something, and he’s supposed to be on TV as an expert, and you know what he said? He said it’s a complete mystery to him, too. And then he shrugged. This Nobel laureate. And it really didn’t seem to bother him. He went on to say that there have always been and will always be things the scientists don’t know, and it’s only the simpletons and amateurs who try to wrap everything into a neat little package, who try to explain away the mystery.