The Sun and Other Stars (3 page)

I look back toward Martina’s, but nobody’s coming after me. I take another drink and look in the other direction, down the stone-and-metal curve of the passeggiata that follows the natural arc of the beach below. In the distance, I pick out the security gates of our shop and the darkened shutters of our apartment above. I could go home and wait for Papà. I could sit on the sofa and let him turn on the light, look at my face and peruse Luca’s features buried somewhere between the skin and bone. I could, without a single word, ruin the whole night for him, snap him out of his glorious fandom and remind him of his awful reality—that instead of a championship calcio player for a son, instead of a woman he loved, he’s left with me.

A woman walks by, and out of the corner of my eye, she looks exactly like Mamma. I watch her pass. From the back she has the same broad shoulders and sloppy ponytail, but the laugh and the walk are all wrong. This is something they don’t tell you when someone dies, that a few times a month, at least for a second or two, you’ll swear you see them, and whenever it happens, you’ll feel the need to ballast your mind with all the sanity you have in order to keep yourself from tipping into crazy.

I take another drink and look up at the curved wall of terraces, cupping San Benedetto like a giant’s hand. The sun is setting behind them, flattening into a disk like an Ufo, and I imagine it crushing a flock of sheep somewhere in the valleys, some half-wit shepherd crawling out from under it, toothless and resolute that he has seen God. I lean back into the railing and listen to the shush of the waves behind me, the metronome that has kept time my entire life. The darkness will come quickly now, any life left in the land breaking apart and scattering into stars.

I head to the back of town, where the crowds drop away and the sound of clanking dishes becomes a distant tinkling. I pass the playground of our old asilo and cross the railroad bridge to the hill. Twenty steps up the incline, I’m already huffing and puffing, cursing and sweating, my thighs working against the hill. Vaffanculo, gravity. Vaffanculo, stony path. Vaffanculo, weakling legs and shallow lungs. The shadows spread into darkness, and the streetlights blink on.

I stop at Via Partigiani and set the bottle on the flat rock the nonne use as a bench to wait for rides. I sit down and light a cigarette. Vaffanculo, American tobacco companies and your crack marketing teams. I exhale and look through the cloud of smoke to the town, the buildings and cars shrunk to Lego size. There’s another round of shouting from the villas around me, echoing across the hill. Another goal. Genoa takes the lead, 3–2. Cheers, Griffins. Salute. You have made Papà proud, not an easy feat.

I hold the bottle of vodka up to the light and swirl it around. It shimmers a little, an entire world of winds and currents inside a bottle, and I start to imagine the people who must populate it, sloshing around, holding on for dear life. I take another drink, stamp out my cigarette, and keep moving, higher and higher, through the tunnel of foliage. The pavement gives way to cobblestones, and finally a dirt mule track, studded with rocks that have been washed down and embedded by the spring torrents. I can feel my breath squeezing in and out, my heart flopping against my rib cage like a dying moth, and I imagine flipping a switch and opening a panel of gills all the way up my side. The mule track closes in on me, and I scrape my hands along the rough walls, combing the weeds that grow out of the cracks between the stones.

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself in a dark wilderness,

for I had wandered from the straight and true.

How hard a thing it is to tell about,

that wilderness so savage, dense, and harsh,

even to think of it renews my fear!

It comes into my head, light and bubbly like a nursery rhyme. The first week of liceo, Charon tried to scare us by making us memorize the entire first canto. Casella and I stayed up all night, high on espresso, singing it to different songs to make ourselves remember. First the national anthem, then a stupid Lùnapop song that I won’t even try to remember the title of because I don’t want to get it stuck in my fottuto head. Then that bella-ciao-bella-ciao-bella-ciao-ciao-ciao song.

Shit. Now that’s in my head.

I keep walking. I catch a whiff of an unearthly stink, and I know I’m close to Mino’s house. The last thing I need right now is to wake up his stupid attack dog di merda. I try to creep by slowly and quietly, but a set of small yellow eyes appears in the path ahead. I freeze, and so do they.

“Go away!” I whisper.

It’s a cat, and through the darkness, I can hear it digging in, hissing and spitting at me.

“Go on. Shoo! Go!”

She gives a rolling yowl, filled with all the desperation of the world, a heat that will never be relieved. You will not get through here, she hisses at me, not if I have anything to say about it. No chance. Turn around and go back. And she punctuates it with another yowl.

“Come on, you fottuto cat. Move! Go! Via! Shoo!” I whisper.

I pull a weed from the wall and throw it at the eyes of the cat. The dirt explodes off the roots, and the cat screams, its lean body leaping away into the ether. Mino’s stupid attack dog di merda wakes instantly and starts barking its head off. I throw a clod of dirt at him, too, and I can hear him smacking his lips as he eats it. I throw another one in the same direction, and he’s finally quiet. I hurry up the last stretch of the mule track, feel for a gap in the wall of cypresses, and push my way onto the field. It’s dark now, and the faint outline of the vegetation takes shape around me.

I take another drink and wait a minute for my eyes to adjust. This is the only flat spot above town large enough for even a three-quarter-sized calcio field, but nobody but me really comes up here anymore. The grass is so long, it could wrap itself around my ankles, and I stumble and high-knee my way toward the goal, the shadow of the old liceo looming behind a second row of cypresses. I haven’t been inside in three years, but that’s a story for another time, and after I tell you about the Hand of God and the Great Woman Famine, I will tell you that one, too. I reach into my pocket for my phone and shine the light on the ground, cutting a narrow swath through the grass until it finds the headstone. Luca’s photo smirks back at me from the laminated frame, his face scrubbed, his uniform ironed, his cleats immaculate.

“Ciao, stronzo. Happy anniversary. Tomorrow, eh?”

I’m not sure exactly how Papà convinced Mamma to bury Luca in the goal.
Convinced
is probably not the right word. After Luca died, Mamma was just a husk, and maybe all he did was plow her under. All I remember was that there was a lot of crying (Mamma) and yelling (Papà).

“I coached him in chickadees on that field! He scored his first goal on that field! He will be buried on that field!” And he had Silvio make a strong recommendation to Gubbio, the mayor, who signed a piece of paper that said Papà could be leased the field for one euro per annum plus responsibility for the maintenance.

But even after that, nobody believed it would actually happen. I mean, being the mayor is all well and good, and Gubbio can sign whatever piece of paper he wants, but there’s nothing like a bunch of old women with loosened tongues and long memories to maintain order in a society, and everybody knows things in San Benedetto are ultimately approved or vetoed by the nonne. I think maybe that’s why everyone sat back, because they expected the nonne to step in, but in the end, they only crossed themselves and called Papà matto for it. Crazy. Behind his shoulders and not even to his face.

I sit down next to Luca’s headstone. I comb my fingers through the grass and tease apart the knots. I’m supposed to be the one mowing it, and maybe it’s just my guilt, but I can practically hear it growing and proliferating in real time around me, the roots sucking up the water, the chloroplasts filled to bursting, the cells madly dividing. A testament to life, and yet tall enough to bury me. I pick up the calcio ball Papà left here two years ago instead of flowers. It’s soft and damp, and I roll it between my hands.

“Genoa’s leading,” I tell Luca. “Three to two, but Yuri Fil left the match early. Something about his ankle. Then again, you probably know that already, don’t you?”

I lie down and let myself sink beneath the surface of the grass. For a while after Luca’s accident, I’d try to get him to talk to me. I’d look over at his empty bed on the other side of the room and complain to him about Papà or tell him how depressed Mamma was. Because that’s what Father Marco and everybody else kept saying to me: now he’ll be watching over you, blah, blah, blah, you’ve got another angel praying for you in heaven, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. I’d wait for him to answer, give him plenty of time, but there was nothing. Niente. Only a rushing sound around my ears. I guess in heaven they have better things to do than worry about us—making out with cherubim or playing Quidditch or whatever you do when you don’t have to lug your body around anymore.

The shouts of the end of the match rise up from the villas on the hill.

“I guess they won, eh? Papà must be happy.” I sit up and take another drink, then pour a generous shot where Luca’s feet must be. Magic feet, they called them. He was perfectly two-footed, and over the years he’d learned a litany of feints so the defenders could never tell which foot he was going to use until the ball was already past the keeper. He had his first tryout when he was twelve, went away to the academy in Milan at fifteen, and worked his way up the junior leagues. At his funeral, the assistant coach they sent said they were going to call him up to the first team in the fall, though he could have just been saying that. I wonder if Papà watched the match tonight thinking about Luca running back and forth across the flat-screen.

I get up and walk over to the edge of the terrace. People are pouring out onto the streets now, chanting and cheering, cars honking and air horns blasting. Someone is shooting fireworks off the end of the molo, and the car headlights respond, blinking in some fottuto Morse code I’ve somehow never learned. Nonno’s got the 2CV down there, and it honks like a dying goose. He actually won it from a French guy back in 1960-something after the Italians beat the French in a match that was so important, evidently people were betting their cars on it. I don’t know what color it was originally, but Nonno painted the front blue and red—Genoa colors—with a yellow griffin spread across the hood. The back half of the car is painted in red, white, and green, with “VIVA L’ITALIA!” scrawled across the rear window. Below it, on the flat of the trunk, he put a skull and crossbones with the words “AND DEATH TO FRANCE!”

I take another drink, and the bottle feels light, the vodka plinking against the sides as the tide pulls in and out of my mouth. I lean forward, looking over the edge of the next terrace into the darkness, and I can feel all the gravity of the earth pulling at me, as if at any moment I could drop into the abyss. And I don’t believe in supernatural stuff—really, I don’t—but all of a sudden I feel a shot of cold air hit me from behind, as cold as the air from the walk-in at the shop. I jerk my head around and look up at the shadow of Signora Malaspina’s massive villa rising several terraces above. It was built in the sixties by her ex-husband, a Hollywood movie director, and every third tile on the roof is actually a little mirror. During the day, it sparkles like a piercing set into the brow of the hill—discreet, but enough to change the whole face of it. Now, it’s dark except for one light in one window.

I take another drink and keep staring at it. After about a minute, the light in the window blinks out, and the next window lights up. And the next, and the next. Seven of them, like a band of lights on a spaceship. The last one holds steady for a minute or more before there’s another flash of light, this time on the rooftop veranda, hovering over the whole villa. It stays on longer than the others, maybe five minutes, and there’s something about it that makes the hairs on my neck stand up. I start thinking about the possibility of aliens landing on top of Signora Malaspina’s villa, and my mind drifts to the comic Casella and I started the summer we were twelve. That one was called
Manna.
Pieces of bread mysteriously dropped from the sky, and when people ate it, it turned out to contain alien life-forms, which expanded in their stomachs like those seahorse sponges, eventually taking over their bodies and then their thoughts. Trust me, if we’d been able to finish it, it would have been bigger than
E.T.
Two sequels, kids’ carnival costumes, alien-shaped breakfast cereal, the works.

The entire villa goes dark again, and there’s a great boom of fireworks from the pier. I turn toward the sea in time to see the red and blue flashes of man-made lightning, the embers like stars sinking toward the horizon, the cheers fading in the distance as I stand up and start back down the hill.

E
very morning I hear a sound in my subconscious just before the alarm goes off. It can be anything—a gunshot, an old-fashioned phone ringing, someone laughing, a door slamming. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, or maybe it’s my mind trying to distract me and delay the moment that always comes—the moment when I realize they’re both gone.

On Tuesday morning, I wake up to a great crash of thunder, but when I listen for the rain, there are only the voices of my neighbors floating up from the vico, and Jimmy’s truck idling in the alley. I go to the top of the stairs that separate my bedroom from the rest of our apartment like the crow’s nest on a pirate ship.

“Papà?” I call down.

Nothing.

I pull on a pair of Luca’s jeans and go downstairs. Right after Mamma died, Martina came in and helped Papà clear out all her things, and Nicola Nicolini offered to redecorate our entire apartment for free. Restart from the top and all that. I think Papà must have planted him upright in the middle of the living room and said, “Make it look like no family ever lived here.” There are no photos and no clutter. Only clean surfaces, squared corners, tasteful shades of tan and brown, and a few carefully chosen, perfectly quirky accessories, none of which have anything to do with us.

I get the rubber envelope of small bills and coins from the top drawer of the credenza and go down to the alley. Jimmy is sitting on the bumper, having a smoke.

“Ciao, Jimmy.”

“Ciao.”

I’ve known Jimmy since he was a kid in the passenger seat keeping his papà company on deliveries, but I don’t really know that much about him. I know their farm is somewhere north of Turin and that he plays a lot of video games, but that’s about it. I’m not even sure what his real name is. I don’t think it’s Giacomo or anything close to Jimmy, but Jimmy’s all he’s ever answered to.

“Sorry to make you wait, Jimmy.”

He shrugs. “Not like I have anything better to do.”

I open the back door while Jimmy reaches into the cab and kills the engine. After Luca died, Papà added an alarm to our apartment and floodgates and two extra locks to the shop. Not cheap floodgates, either, but top-of-the-line like they have in Venice, as if somebody had kidnapped Luca or washed him away in the middle of the night and might come back for the rest of us.

Jimmy and I slide the calf carcass off the plastic and carry it into the walk-in. It’s a big one, and I bang my hands against the door frame. Shit.

“So did you see the match on Sunday?” Jimmy asks.

“Part of it.”

“People must have been out of their heads here.”

“Yeah.”

“Your papà, especially.”

“I don’t think he’s slept since Sunday.”

Jimmy laughs and changes the subject to video games. It’s all he ever talks about. I picture his room back on the farm as a floating mangrove of cords, screens, consoles, and hand controllers. He tells me about an advance download he got of FIFA 2006, then starts taking me through the plotline of this crazy Japanese one where all the monsters have made-up English names like Tramplefrost and Curlybeard, Swinetooth and Dragonsnout, and all I can say is, “Ah . . . sì, sì,” like the old men, by which of course I mean, “Jimmy, you’re such a loser. Why don’t you get a life?”

We get the calf and the side of beef hung up and bring in the chickens, new roosters, rabbits, and non-EU-sanctified eggs some neighbor of his sells us. By the time we’re finished, we’re both sweating, and Jimmy stands next to the grinding counter, runs his hand through his hair, and looks at his shoes like he wants to say something deep. He got the same look both times we reopened the shop after the funerals, and I wonder if by chance he remembered that yesterday was the anniversary.

“Until next week, then,” I say, to save him the awkwardness.

He looks up at me, startled. “Yeah . . . next week.”

He goes out the back, and I smell the smoke of another cigarette before the diesel engine rumbles alive. It’s still only seven fifteen, so I leave the fluorescents off and work by the light of the front window. I turn on the television in back and flip it to one of the morning shows just for the noise. We keep it in the corner of the grinding counter with a white pillowcase over it to protect it from the grist and splatter, but I usually leave the pillowcase on just so I don’t have to look at the news anchor on Rai Uno and her botched Botox job that makes her look like she won the SuperEnalotto. Instead of her this morning, though, there’s the voice of the homelier one—the real news correspondent they save for serious stories—talking on and on about Sunday’s Genoa-Venezia match. That’s all everybody talked about all day yesterday, and probably all they’ll talk about for the rest of the fottuto summer. Serie A, blah, blah, blah. Who cares?

Next door, Chicca rolls up her security gate in one yank, and it sounds like thunder. I put on my apron, wash my hands, and start setting up the banco. If I ever get my eyes gouged out, I can probably set up the banco blind without even smudging the glass. I get the trays from the back for the chicken, the rabbit, and the shish kebabs. The rest goes right on the marble. Meat, splat, card in front of it. Ossibuchi, punta di petto, spezzatino, tacchino, spalla, polpa magra, polpa mista, reale, braciole, lonza, carré con osso. Splat, splat, splat, splat. Then the cold cuts in their own case: Parma ham, salame, prosciutto cotto and crudo, mortadella, and coppa. Papà is a perfectionist, so I must account for every quarter kilo on the inventory and make sure that every surface is as immaculate as the Virgin.

The first knock of the morning plinks against the window, the start of the procession of nonne on their way to Mass. Nonne, nonne, nonne, and more nonne. This is what sociologists call the aging of Europe, and Liguria’s demographics are the most top-heavy of them all, crammed full of nonne, nobody stupid or naive enough to bring more babies into this world. They clutch each other’s arms, crossing the front windows so slowly, you can see the gossip gathering in clouds above their heads. If I ever get that wrinkled and infirm, I think I’ll spare everyone and just stay home, but the nonne take to the streets every morning without fail. After all, they’re in training. They must have strong backs to prop up the 80 percent of us who have stopped hedging our bets with God. They must develop stamina to withstand the barrage of hip-hop music and American movies, and military discipline to protect themselves and their grandchildren against the Muslims and their bombs, even though if you ask me, it’s the Buddhists and their ninja levitation shit we should really be worried about.

Kneel.

Sit.

Stand.

Kneel.

Sit.

Stand.

Uno.

Due.

Hup!

And as the world crumbles around them despite their aerobics, they must have the patience to say the 777 trillion rosaries necessary to pray the hundreds of billions of fallen souls out of purgatory.

“Ciao,” the nonne mouth as they pass by the window.

“Ciao,” I mouth back. I have to wave to each and every one of them every single day or they will talk about me on the church steps and complain to Papà that my hair is too long to be serving food. Mamma used to be friends with all of them, but they never talk about her anymore. After Luca died, it was like a soft fog creeping in, gradually obliterating him from the stories people told, but after Mamma, it was like a door slamming shut. Sure, there were the respectable visits right after, when everyone would come and pat our hands and drop off plates of food, but even then, they always came in pairs and hurried away spooked, like if they looked Death or Suffering or Heartache directly in the eye, it might be contagious. This is another thing you will discover if you lose someone close to you—if you ever want to go out in public again, you’ll have to learn how to treat your grief like a goiter or a great big boil. You’ll have to learn how to camouflage it and tuck it away so as not to scare the living.

“Ciao,” another group of nonne mouth through the window.

“Ciao.” I put on my fake smile.

When I’m finished setting up the banco, I have a good twenty minutes left, so I get a pair of scissors and tear a sheet of paper off the roll. I pull out the stool and sit in front of the ghost television. The anchorwoman with the botched Botox job is back, babbling on and on about somebody bombing the cazzo out of something somewhere, which is apparently not serious news anymore.

“Deficiente,” I hiss at her shadow, shifting and darkening through the pillowcase.

I decide to do the new German pope today. I cut out the tall hat and the cape, poking the scissors into the middle of each and cutting out crosses like superhero logos. I string the chicken in the case so it stands up on its legs, then wrap the cape around its chicken shoulders, balance the hat on top, and tuck a skewer into its wing. If I had more time, I would soak and bend the skewer into a shepherd’s crook or take some red plastic wrap and make those Prada shoes. Maybe even give him a paper Sancho Panza to keep him company, the way he’s been riding around in the popemobile for the past two months, shaking his staff at windmills and calling Europe back to the faith.

Good luck with that.

I clean up the scraps of paper and snap off the television, cutting the anchor off midsentence. I go out onto the passeggiata and light a cigarette. The sky is clear and the sea a deep blue, painted especially for the tourists.

“Ciao, Etto.” Chicca is dragging her display racks outside, the sand buckets and crab nets wobbling and banging together.

“Ciao, Chicca.”

“Some match on Sunday, eh?”

“Yeah. Some match.”

“I saw your papà this morning on his way to Martina’s. He looks like he hasn’t slept in two days.”

“I know. Genoa in Serie A. It’s like Christmas for him.”

Across the passeggiata at Bagni Liguria, Franco and Mimmo are already outside in their swimsuits and bare feet, sweeping the boardwalks clean and unlocking the cabanas. They’re the same age as Papà, both from the south, both perennially half clothed and almost preternaturally calm and kind. They say Franco’s father was a mafia kingpin in Napoli, and his house growing up was decorated in frescoes and leafed in gold. They say he renounced his father’s life and hitchhiked to San Benedetto with only the clothes on his back. But he never tells any stories from before he came here, as if this is where his real life started. Franco waves to me across the passeggiata.

“Ehi, Etto.” His dog lifts his head from his paws and looks me up and down.

“Ciao, Franco.”

“Just saw your papà this morning. He said to remind you about the band saw blade.”

Shit. Papà has been bugging me about it for a week. I stamp out my cigarette. “Chicca, could you . . . ?”

She waves me on. I jog over to Casella and his papà’s shop in my apron, dodging through the pedestrian traffic. The door’s open even though the sign says Closed.

“Anyone here?” I call to the back of the shop. I edge through the tall, narrow shelves to the counter, the trays of nuts and bolts rattling as I pass.

“Etto, is that you?” Casella calls, a faraway echo.

“Yes.”

“One minute.”

Eventually he appears in a T-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts, his hair tied back, thick like a mop. Claudia likes it that way. Claudia, Claudia, Claudia. Casella and I used to be best friends before Claudia, as close as Papà and Silvio. When we were in liceo, they would call us Troll 1 and Troll 2, like those dolls you rub between your hands until their hair stands up like a flame, mine burned orangish-brown by the sun, Casella’s bleached white-hot.

“Sorry,” he says. “I was in the back room trying to make some space.”

Casella says “sorry” all the time now. Claudia’s conditioned him. It’s become a blanket apology for his existence, an evolutionary adaptation that he will pass on to his children. Like sea anemones curl up or sharks attack when they see blood, his children will say “sorry.” His grandchildren. Their children. And that’s how his lineage will manage to survive—obediently and apologetically. He balances on one foot and reaches behind the counter.

“The blade, right?” he says. “Your papà called yesterday.” He hands me the blade, folded over on itself and pinched with a thick rubber band.

“Thanks.”

He stares at me, and I stare back at him.

“How’s your papà?” he asks.

“Fine. You know, still wetting himself over Genoa.”

“Aren’t they all. And your nonna?”

“You know, the same. No worse. Your parents?”

He shrugs. “They’re fine. They’re in Friuli this week.”

“Visiting your aunt?”

“Uh-huh.”

This is the curse of the drifting friendship, to be close enough to know all the people and details in each other’s lives, but not close enough to really care. I wonder how many more times in our lives we will have this bullshit conversation instead of talking about why we only have bullshit conversations anymore.

“Lots of tourists already, eh?”

“Yesterday was pretty busy.”

“Just wait until Ferragosto.”

“I know, eh?”

He glances back at the storeroom door.

“I better go,” I say.