The Sun and Other Stars (37 page)

O
ne of the last comics Casella and I drew together was about a bunch of Japanese tourists from Hiroshima who fanned out over the world with their cameras around their necks, seeking retribution. They would smile and nod. They would compliment their subject’s beauty and politely ask to take a picture. But when they clicked the shutters of their cameras, everyone in the frame disintegrated into a heap of ashes and dust. I drew four full-page panels of the news being broadcast throughout the world, the dust storms and panic spreading through the Champs-Élysées, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, and Times Square. People tried to save themselves by flooding into places like Bishkek and Nome, Alaska—wherever there were no five-star hotels or three-star restaurants—but the Japanese tourists found them anyway, and they were no match for Japanese courtesy and flattery. In the end, only the Amish survived.

That’s what it feels like in San Benedetto at the end of the summer when the tourists leave. No matter how long I live here, I will never be used to it, this sudden exodus and the complete stillness that follows. In one day, the beach is cleared of cabanas, gates, boardwalks, chaises, and umbrellas, the carts rumbling back and forth to the storage spaces under the passeggiata. The restaurant and shop owners pile their chairs and tables and racks onto the sidewalk and give everything a good scrub. The vicos fill with long shadows, and the voices of my neighbors echo against the stone walls. San Benedetto is ours again, and the intimacy will last all winter long.

In the shop, there’s less work, and we’re not open at all in the afternoons, so after lunch with Papà, I go up to work on the aula. The seventh panel becomes Mamma scooping and pushing apart the water and the land, and I give Luca the one next to hers, the one with the planets, only the planets morph into giant soccer balls, Luca’s feet cocked under him, his leg muscles rippling as he goes to kick the sun. I start filling in the ancestors and prophets over the windows, and I draw Nonno and his lemon tree.

On Tuesday mornings, he still comes by and works the banco while Papà and I do the butchering, and sometimes we stop our work to listen to him joking with the nonne about things that happened fifty years ago, or telling Regina’s kids that the calf’s head is really the chupacabra, caught in the light of the last full moon.

They scream with delight.

“Now, who would like some chicken feet?”

“Me! Me!”

Papà and I watch through the beaded curtain as Nonno hands each of them a chicken foot, toes up, and the kids wave them in each other’s faces, making lightsaber noises as they swish through the air.

This is the way I remember the shop when Luca and I stopped by on our way home from school—full of life, Nonna or Mamma chatting with the customers, keeping Papà and Nonno in the loop of gossip as they worked in the back room.

Sometime in October, I break down my first vitello. The cuts are not the clean, preschool shapes that come from Papà’s hands, and a few of them are so ugly they will have to be ground up. But Papà and Nonno seem proud. One day I come in to find Yuri’s jersey moved to the back, and my portrait hanging at the end of the line. And even though my days look pretty much the same as they ever were, I find out that there is a difference between turning on the lights of your father’s shop and turning on the lights of your own. As Yuri would say, I’m not playing the catenaccio anymore. As Fede would say, it’s my fucking choice.

Martina’s is finished by the time the cold weather comes. At first Papà and Silvio insisted on waiting for her to come back and host the grand reopening, but the postcards kept coming from every corner of the world. Besides, it seemed a shame to let the new flat-screen stay dark while the calcio season was already under way. So they all started taking turns opening and closing the bar, and as a result, there are probably ten sets of keys to Martina’s new door. Papà makes me an eleventh, so at least a few times a week, I can let myself into the bar at midnight, sit in the glow of the computer, and find Zhuki waiting on the other end, the parallelogram of afternoon sunlight on the wall behind her shifting slightly each day.

One thing they never tell you when someone close to you dies is that it will change every relationship you have. Even with the person you’re mourning. Since you will be different, you will see them differently, and what you had together will morph into something new. The same goes for the living. I thought I’d gotten to know Papà over the months of working side by side at the back table, breaking down the meat, or watching him play calcio or become friends with Yuri off the field. But it turns out the way I really get to know him is in those late nights talking to Zhuki, when I discover how Papà must have felt in Vigo so many years ago. I start to see the man who would try to drive a Vespa all the way to Piedmont. The man who had so much love for a woman, it was enough to stretch to another continent, and even another realm.

What do Zhuki and I talk about? We talk about the future sometimes, but mostly we squander our time on stupidaggini. Because once you see a tomorrow and a next week and a next year, you can afford to. We talk about Yuri and Papà, Little Yuri and Principessa, and all the people in San Benedetto who ask about them. We laugh about Yuri’s old dream of melting right into the American pot and walking the streets unrecognized. Instead, he went on one talk show and instantly became a star. The Americans, they love his footwork and his jokes, his Scottish-Ukrainian-Italian English, his single-father pathos, and his philosophizing about calcio. He’s invited to all the talk shows, fund-raisers, and red carpets, there are several sponsorship deals in the works, and even rumors of television and movie roles. Yuri has clearly won the breakup. Vanni Fucci moved on from Tatiana to steal another teammate’s girlfriend, and by Christmas, Tatiana has skulked back into the kick line with the other blond, scandalized former WAGs.

It is the comedy of life, no?

W
e are near the end now, and I know there are many of you who call it soccer and not calcio, who—like I once did—will still try to argue that calcio is not a real sport. How it takes more skill to play baseball or more courage to play American football or how basketball’s high scores and ticking clock are so much more exciting. You complain about the tie games and the vagueness of injury time. You compare the Italians dropping on the field in agony to opera, and laugh about how all the Europeans make it seem as if calcio is a matter of life and death.

It isn’t, of course. It’s much more important than that. It’s a matter of hope.

People dedicate themselves to calcio, season after season, for the same reason they keep getting married even though they’re tripping over their friends’ divorces wherever they go. For the same reason Regina Salveggio is pregnant again with another brat even though she can’t handle the first two. For the same reason the tourists come to San Benedetto every summer even though they go straight back to the same sweaty offices and boring jobs. Because the rim of a calcio stadium, the railing of a baby’s crib, and the line between sky and sea are the few places on earth where the firmament cracks open and shows the hope of the world.

Or maybe just the deep longing for it.

Either way.

Maybe this is why I keep going on the aula even though I know I will never finish. As it turns out, all those annoying thirteen-year-olds who’ve been hanging around are going to be entering high school next year, and enough of them aren’t screwups so that the liceo can reopen. Father Marco says Charon heard the news and can’t wait to get back from Rome and whip them into shape. I would just like to be there for the moment when he walks into his aula for the first time. Will his mouth gape open? Will he finally be speechless? He’ll probably have Pete the Comb Man paint over it immediately. Then again, maybe he won’t.

Papà’s hope is the San Benedetto Calcio League. Papà and I play on the same team now, the San Benedetto Fire, named after Yuri’s team in Chicago, and on Saturday afternoons, I help Papà coach the five-year-olds on our developmental team, as he likes to call it. The San Benedetto Sparks. For three hours a week, he clutches his forehead as he watches them run around the field in a cluster, kicking the ball with their cleats like they’re hacking away at a block of ice.

“Play your position! Play your position! Where are my defenders? Where did my defenders go? That’s it, pass it! Pass it! No, no . . . the other way! The other way!” He shouts with as much passion as when he watches the matches at Martina’s, but whether they win or lose, he buys them ice cream and tells them that one day they will be stars in Serie A. And as assistant coach, I try to pass on all the things Yuri, Mykola, Ihor, and Zhuki taught me. Look up. Keep an eye on your teammates. Don’t be afraid. Shut off your brain once in a while. And for God’s sake, stop playing the catenaccio, this silly game of defense.

Maybe twenty years from now, they’ll know what I mean.

*   *   *

In June, almost a year from the day I first set eyes on the Ukrainians, the world stops spinning, and six and a half billion people on every continent but America sit paralyzed in front of television sets, watching the World Cup finals. Whatever poverty, disease, war, scandal, or terrorism plagues their country, it is all forgotten for a few weeks. Because calcio is the panacea, the pill, the tincture, the balm for every ill. In fact, maybe this is why the Americans don’t understand it. Because they already live in the promised land, where hard work is rewarded, people fall in love in sixty minutes minus commercials, and scandals, if they happen at all, are roundly denounced and swiftly punished.

By mid-June, Italy is again mired in them. Match fixing, steroids, illegal recruiting, affairs—all of it this time.

“A bunch of stronzos they are, these Azzurri.”

“If they lose the World Cup this time, they deserve it.”

“All they care about is their bonuses anyway.”

This is what I hear all June as the tourists start to fill the streets. It’s a smaller crowd this year because many of the Germans have decided to stay in their own country to watch the action, either in the stadiums or at the fan fests.

WHEN ARE YOU COMING OVER?

I TOLD FEDE I’D WATCH THE PREGAME AT CAMILLA’S.

IT’S ALREADY PACKED OVER HERE.

SAVE ME A SEAT.

The Ukrainians came for Christmas. I mounted an all-out campaign. Everyone in town was in on it, trying to make me look good. I knew I’d made great progress when Yuri, Mykola, and Ihor sat me down and told me if I broke Zhuki’s heart they would come after me and the police wouldn’t be able to find the pieces.

At the end of January, she was back with all her things, and they put her in charge of Martina’s.

I know. It’s a miracle. And do you know how when you see something once, you get the pattern in your eye and you start to see it all over? That’s exactly what happens, and I realize the world is full of miracles.

Like Fede not talking about any girl but Camilla for ten months and counting.

Like Signor Cato going out to the molo to fish again.

Like Nello walking into Martina’s distraught because Pia finally left him.

Like Guido and Nicola Nicolini inviting their parents over for dinner, and their parents accepting.

Like the multiplying photos of the four of us around the apartment, at least as many as the years we were together.

Like Yuri getting tickets to the World Cup for Papà and Silvio, and both of them flying to Germany for two weeks.

Like Ukraine—
Ukraine
, for God’s sake—making it to the final eight teams, and the Azzurri
finally
throwing away the catenaccio.

“How can you tell?” I ask Zhuki.

“See the backs? They’re usually well behind the line.”

“Which ones are the backs?”

“See . . . right . . .” Her index finger floats in front of the screen, but her voice trails off. Unbelievably, the rounds have worked out so Ukraine is playing the Azzurri in the quarterfinals tonight. Zhuki’s blazing yellow shirt is bobbing in a sea of azure, and I imagine Papà in the stadium in Germany, his hands clasped to his mouth, barely breathing as he sorts out his loyalties.

At Martina’s, the tables have been stacked at the edges of the room, and rows of chairs are lined up in front of the flat-screen. For the past three weeks, there has been a strict seating hierarchy, the regulars and the old guys up front, the overflow sent to Camilla’s, any perceived violations sorted out by Mino.

A cheer goes up on all sides. Zhuki hunches on her elbows, sputtering jagged consonants and raggedy vowels. Mamma was the same. She loved speaking Italian, but whenever she was upset or moved or passionately arguing about something, she would revert back to English, and not just English, but an almost incomprehensible stream of California slang.

By the fifth minute, I stop asking for explanations. Zhuki and Nonno and everyone else are caught in the same trance, their concentration never wavering, even when Vanni Fucci heads it into the goal in the sixth minute, even when Luca Toni scores the second and third goals in quick succession. The bar explodes. Signor Cato stands up, spreads his arms wide and kisses the screen.

“I love you, Luca Toni! I want to make love to you!”

“Come on, Yuri,” I hear Nonno whisper on my left. “Let’s at least make it a real contest.”

But Cannavaro has been clinging to Yuri like a barnacle, and he’s been unable to get a pass, much less score a goal. Zhuki’s neck and shoulders soften, and as the minutes line up and the massacre continues, she sinks lower on her elbows. Behind us, the crowd is calling for blood.

“Get those sonofawhores, get them!”

“No mercy!”

“Kill them!”

But there’s a close-up of Yuri, and suddenly the shouting is muffled, the cursing tamped down to half of what it was. Out of respect. Not for the Yuri who’s running around the field in a yellow jersey, making a run at our own Gigi Buffon, but for the Yuri who ran up and down the field at the liceo, the Yuri who passed the ball even to the weaker players, the Yuri who would politely wave whenever he scored a goal, but shout at the top of his lungs when anyone else did.

The match runs into injury time, and it’s clear that the Ukrainians are done for. It’s then that I hear it start in the back, a low, quiet rumbling. One voice, then two, then five.

“Yu-ri. Yu-ri. Yu-ri. Yu-ri.”

It spreads across the rows and fills the room.

“Yu-ri. Yu-ri. Yu-ri. Yu-ri.”

Zhuki finally hears it through her trance. She picks her elbows up off her knees, turns around, and smiles at the rest of the room.

“Thank you,” she says.

The injury time evaporates, and the stadium erupts in cheers and flares. The Azzurri jump on each other and run around the field, shouting and pointing to the heavens or their children at home in their pajamas. They start to peel off their wet jerseys and exchange them with the Ukrainians, along with a pat on the culo or the back, or even a caress of the head. There’s a close-up of Vanni Fucci throwing figs in the air, and another one of Yuri, alone in the middle of the field. He’s on his knees, his hands grabbing fistfuls of grass, his forehead pressed to the ground like a Muslim praying. The bar goes silent.

“Tell your brother sorry, Zhuki.”

Signor Cato is the first to offer his condolences, but pretty soon, they are filing past her like at a funeral, shaking her hand and patting her on the back like she’s one of the men.

“Next time.”

“2010.”

“South Africa.”

“Tell your brother he played a good game.”

Zhuki and I end up sitting on the rocks, leaning into each other, the water washing around us.

“That was his last big match,” Zhuki says. “He’s going to finish the season for the Fire, and then he’s done.”

“Isn’t he too young to retire?”

“He wants to end his career while he still has his legs. Now he feels like the scandal and the divorce are behind him, and he has made Ukraine proud.”

“When does the season end in Chicago?”

“In October. Nearly the opposite of here.”

“And what’s he going to do then?”

“He says he wants to go back to Ukraine, get a house in the country, and start a training institute with Mykola and Ihor. He wants to raise Little Yuri and Principessa near their grandmother.”

“I can’t believe she finally left that guy.”

“I can’t tell when I talk to her whether she left him or he left her. Doesn’t matter, I suppose.”

“And what about Yuri’s Hollywood career?”

“Ach. Yuri says he is too old to fall in love with another country.”

“And you?”

She grins. “I am younger than he is.”

The next day, Yuri makes his retirement announcement a thousand kilometers away, and it’s like a single tree falling in the Bavarian forest, a quiet bump among the crashing fortunes in Serie A that are strewn like postapocalyptic telephone poles across
Gazzetta dello Sport
and Sky News every morning. But this is part of the beauty and mystery of calcio—the inexplicable rise and fall of men and fortunes, and the surprises of fate.

We watch the rest of the quarterfinals. It’s a blood bath, the referees thinning out the teams with red cards. When I ask Nonno who he wants to win each match, he says simply: “Whoever can beat France.” And then for the next ten minutes he mumbles like someone mentally deranged about the 1998 World Cup in France and the cheating-bastard French that stole the quarterfinal from us.

Portugal beats England.

France beats Portugal.

We beat Germany.

“I can’t believe it!” Nonno shouts. “I can’t believe it! We’re in the finals with those rotten-bastard French again. Has there ever been a people so vain as the French?”

I’m sure the French are laughing at us across the border, too. Déjà vu, they say, hunh-hunh-hunh. A replay of the 1998 quarterfinals, of the 2000 Euro Cup, both of which the French won. To make it worse, the final is played in the foreground of the crescendoing investigations in Rome, which will decide the destiny of thirteen of the Azzurri and their teams back home.

*   *   *

It’s a clear July evening in Berlin when the two teams walk out of the tunnel and line up on the field, clutching the hands of children, a show of peace before the bloodletting. “La Marseillaise” and “Fratelli d’Italia” echo across the world. Shakira shakes her hips, and the whole world stares, eyes cast upward, mouths slightly gaped, faces frozen. The human equivalent of a stopped clock.

From the first minute, the match rages. Some of the French players are from the ’98 team, a little slower and a little older, with a little less hair. Zidane was always Luca’s favorite even though he played for Juventus and even though Nonno spent hours trying to convince him not to admire a Frenchman. When the second half starts, the sky turns dark, and I imagine all the people watching across the world, basking in the glow of flat-screens in trendy bars or velvet-choked pubs, huddled in living rooms and church basements, or crouched around a screen as big as a hand, taking turns cranking the generator.