The Sun and Other Stars (12 page)

“So, do you want to dance?” I ask her.

“I’m not a very good dancer,” she says.

“Please?”

“All right.”

I push off the stone. It gives way like an unanchored boat, and as I walk up the stairs, each step is in motion, sinking under my feet. Zhuki takes off her warm-up and ties it around her waist. She’s wearing a white polo underneath, and under the freckles, her skin is lightly tanned. We reach the top of the cliff, and the full volume of the music hits me. It’s actually a not-bad song by the White Stripes, regrettably ground down by Roma and Azzurri fans into a one-word calcio anthem chanted over and over in stadiums around the world.

Po . . . po-po-po-po-po . . . po . . .

Po . . . po-po-po-po-po . . . po . . .

Luca used to tell me that when I danced, I looked like a fish on the line. He and Fede tried to teach me, but I never improved. I flail. I thrash. I flap. I flounder. But Zhuki is smiling at me, and I don’t care anymore. I reach out, and my hand fits easily at her waist. I try to pull her close, but she spins away from me.

I’m gonna fight ’em off . . . a seven-nation army couldn’t hold me back.

I play it cool for a while and dance my fishing-line dance from a safe distance, waiting for my moment. My eyes drift to her chest. Her bocce are only the size of anthills, but her small shoulders and her rounded hips make her look feminine even with the short hair. I force my eyes up to her face. The whole crowd behind her is jumping up and down and shouting, and I get dizzy watching them. I shut my eyes, but my head starts to spin.

Po . . . po-po-po-po-po . . . po . . .

Po . . . po-po-po-po-po . . . po . . .

She’s smiling again. I take my chances and pull her into another collision, and for a split second, I can feel her weight against me.

Po . . . po-po-po-po-po . . . po . . .

Her face is flushed now, and her lips are saying something, but I can’t hear over the music and the crashing of the waves between my ears. Kiss her, the voice inside my head tells me. Go for it. I squeeze my eyes shut like I used to do in chickadees when the ball was anywhere in the vicinity of my face. I grab her around the waist, press her against me, and feel her body go rigid in my arms. Open your eyes! Open your eyes! Papà used to shout at me, and I do, just in time to see her face pinch into a look of panic. Her hands push at my chest, levering me backward. Hard. The dance floor is spinning. Sorry, sorry. I hear the words echoing inside me, and then . . . thud.

Po . . . po-po-po-po-po . . . po . . .

Po . . . po-po-po-po-po . . . po . . .

I open my eyes, and she’s gone. There’s a circle of people bending over me, including Aristone’s Austrian girl, whatever her name was, whose cleavage finally takes pity on me and gives me a little glimpse behind her swinging drapes.

“Shit.”

“Shit is right.” Fede pulls me up off the ground and puts my arm around his shoulders. “Come on, stronzo, you’re going home.”

They end up putting me in a Jeep with Cangrande and his pock-faced girlfriend from Ceriale. Shit, I don’t know what happened to her, but her whole face looks like it’s been quilted, stitched down to the bone, and it’s all I can do not to ask her why her face is such a mess. I drift back to the dance that’s still going on in my head, my hand following the bump of Zhuki’s hip.

“So, champion.” Cangrande leans back from the front seat. “You going home to your papà like this?”

“No chance. To my nonna’s,” I say. “Better yet, drop me off on Via Partigiani and I’ll walk.”

“I don’t think you want your nonna to see you like this. Better to go home.”

“No. To Nonna’s.” I start rambling, something about how Nonna always forgives and forgets, and isn’t it ironic that she’s lost her mind but she’s the only one who understands me. Cangrande and his girlfriend are only half listening to me, instead discussing between themselves what to do. You can tell by their voices it’s a monumental decision, and in the back of their minds, they’re probably thinking about what good parents they’ll make someday. We stop on Via Partigiani, right next to the nonne’s rock.

“You sure you’re going to be okay up the paths, Etto?”

“Sure.”

“Be careful, eh?”

“I’m fine. No worries. Thanks. Ciao. Ciao-ciao. Ciao-ciao-ciao.”

I slam the door hard, and the whole Jeep shakes.

They sit idling with the brake lights on as I start up the path. I try to make a straight line so they won’t come back for me, and finally, I hear the motor rumbling down the road. The homemade lights up the path have already been shut off for the night because no respectable person would be wandering around at this time, and I stumble a couple of times and curse more than a couple of times. I stop to light a cigarette, but the match gets blown out by a breeze that sneaks out of nowhere. And if it can’t get any worse, Mino’s stupid dog crashes against the iron gate to my left, snarling and barking.

“Shut up, you stupid dog.”

But he just keeps barking. Always barking. Always on the attack.

“Serby!” I hear Mino’s wife calling through the darkness. “Serby! What’s the matter, a bunny scare you? Come here, my little puppy!” The dog’s collar rattles as it runs off toward the house.

The dark path closes in on me, and the foliage pulls low and tight like a cordon between me and everybody else in the world. Branches and vines reach out to finger my throat and claw at my face, and I lose track of where I am. All I know is to keep going up. When I get to the field, I lie down on Luca’s grave and sink into the grass.

“Shit, Luca, I’m so fottuto drunk.”

In the light of my phone, his photo sparkles above me. Luca never drank or smoked. When he was at the academy, he ate, drank, slept, and pissed calcio. His only vice was girls, and never in Milan because he said they took his power, like Samson. But when he came home on weekends or holidays, he more than made up for it. He and Fede would go out on sprees, like serial killers, Luca pulling his “home from the academy” routine, bedding girls all over Liguria and, apparently, even into France.

“I’ll bet if it was you trying to kiss her, she probably would have gone for it.” The light on my phone goes out, and his photo darkens. “Stronzo. You always got the girls. Even Mamma in the end, eh?”

I let this thought marinate with all the other hundred-proof toxic shit sloshing around in my head. I can feel the self-pity squeezing up my throat and out my eyes, so I pull myself off the ground and grab the ball off his grave. I jog back to the penalty spot and take a couple of shots. Bend it like fottuto Beckham, right? But I’m so drunk, I can’t keep the ball under control. Luca and his headstone block the first seven. Shit. He’s dead and he can still beat me. Finally on the eighth, I manage to bounce one off the post and into the net.

“Gooooooooooooooooooool!” I whisper to the trees, and I take a couple of victory laps around the field, the damp night air splashing my face.

“Goooooooooooooooooooool!” I say, a little louder this time.

The cypresses bow to me and I flip them off. I flip off Luca’s headstone. I flip off death. I do it with as much vigor as the Mangona brothers in their huts. Ha-ha! Vaffan’! Victorious!

“Goooooooooooooooooooool!” This time I shout it for real, not caring who hears. “Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool!”

And then I toast them all with my middle finger, rattling off a litany of their wrongs.

Vaffanculo, you Austrian slut with your curtain shirt.

Vaffanculo, Aristone, with your trilingual begging and your university Wiener schnitzel.

Vaffanculo, Fede and Bocca, for guilting me into going to Le Rocce in the first place.

Vaffanculo, Zhuki, for making me feel like a stronzo for just wanting to kiss you.

Vaffanculo, Papà, for not caring where I am right now.

Vaffanculo, Mamma, for leaving me.

Vaffanculo, Luca, for taking her with you.

Vaffanculo to you all.

I take a long bow to the universe.

Bravo.

Grazie tante.

Salute.

Cin-cin.

Good night.

I
n the morning, I wake up bathed in sweat and shivering against a hard floor, the remains of a nightmare fleeing my head. My whole body is stiff, with something barbed embedding itself into the small of my back. I crack open my eyes, and the sharp point of light through the window starts stabbing away at my eyeballs.

“What the . . .”

I’m lying on the floor of Charon’s aula, staring up at the plaster vault, the five globe lights suspended down the arch, still on from the night before. I haven’t been in here for four years, ever since the liceo closed down. In the weeks before we started school in Albenga, they indentured Casella, Aristone, and me to clean and pack the teachers’ supplies in boxes, which most of them never bothered coming back for anyway. Casella, in a flash of brilliance, copied the master key. I extract my key chain from my back and sit up.

Shit.

The room starts spinning, slowly at first, then picking up speed. The vein on the side of my head is like a pipeline pumping champagne, vodka, and bile, and the contents of my stomach start to creep up. I swallow hard and pull myself over to the wall.

Ahh. Relief. The solid wall does the trick, cool against my back. This is how they used to build, Nonno would say. Not these shoddy affairs nowadays that can be put up in an afternoon and destroyed in a year, but thick stone walls covered in lime wash, with soaring ceilings and arched windows that would have made the Romans proud. Charon’s aula is the only room in the school like this. All the other classrooms got redone in the seventies with dropped ceilings and the calming turquoises and aquas of mental institutions. Charon alone insisted that his walls remain the same stark white, the ceiling curving into an infinite nothingness so when he talked, it was like God’s voice echoing down, and when you gave an answer, it felt like it hung suspended under the great arched ceiling forever, like a clay pigeon waiting to be shot down.

Oh, he had such high hopes for us. It makes me laugh when I think about how annoyed he used to get when the other teachers would take us to the art museums in Genoa or the aquarium for the day. To make up for it, he would rush through his lectures and pile on the homework, as if he was in a race to impart all the fottuto secrets of the universe. Even now you can see it, the walls crammed with pull-down maps, etchings of the Divine Comedy, and charts of Latin conjugations and English irregular verbs.

“Go, went, gone,” I say, and my voice does a lap around the empty velodrome of a room before returning to me. “Amo, amare, amavi, amatus.” My voice takes another lap.

I’m actually surprised to see that no one has broken in here. I mean, I recognize that the thirteen-year-old B-boys are fundamentally lazy shits, and for them, this hill is too steep to walk up for any reason, especially with a skateboard under your arm and a joint in your mouth. But I’m a little disappointed in the baby-fascists, who talk like they would stomp any head, climb any hill, and break any window just to prove what stronzos they are. In fact, this is one of the things the men at Martina’s talk about on the rare occasions when they are not talking about calcio—the downward spiral of the world, each generation worse than the next. Father Marco wants to build a recreation center to give the kids something to do. Papà and Nonno want to lock them up in the jail for the whole summer and scare the shit out of them.

I stand up and slide my feet slowly across the dusty floor, the pain in my head flaring with any sudden movement. I sit down in the wooden chair behind Charon’s desk and look out at the rows of tables, far more than we could ever fill. And I don’t know if it’s in the room or in my mind, but suddenly I catch a whiff of something. Must or decay. I’m not sure, but it’s enough to bring back the nightmare that has been lurking just out of reach. Slowly, it comes out in pieces from behind the curtain, reassembling itself center stage.

It was horrible. One of the worst dreams of my life. Even worse than the ones I had as a kid that would send me running down the stairs and into my parents’ bed. There was a woman walking toward me from the end of the molo, her skin so wet and pale, it looked pickled. She was cross-eyed, with stumps at the ends of her arms, and she was limping and lurching forward like both her ankles were sprained. I turned to run but it was then that she began to talk to me, or at least open her mouth and gesture. I don’t remember which. I only remember the feeling as I stood there paralyzed, the smell of rotting fish and seaweed emanating from the sea.

I shudder and breathe in deeply to clear my head, but the smell is still there, and my stomach starts inching up my throat for real this time. I manage to keep it down as I run through the corridor and out the front door, the acid stinging the back of my nose. I fall to my knees in the bright sunlight and let it out, watching the grass and weeds slowly absorb it and feeling the relief take over my body. Maybe not relief, but at least emptiness. I breathe in the clean air and listen to the sounds of the terraces—the chirping of the birds, the scuffing of the cicadas, and the church bells pealing across the face of the hill.

It’s Sunday morning.

Shit.

I forgot about Nonna.

I get up off my knees and shuffle toward the path as fast as I can. Nonno and Nonna used to live in the apartment connected to ours, the one Nicola Nicolini now brings his showboys home to. But about five years ago, Nonna’s mind really started to crumple up, and we found her a few times wandering the streets and crying, or jumping into the sea with all her clothes on. So Nonno retired early from the shop, and they moved to a small villa up on the hill with a high fence and a gate, where Nonno could tend his vegetables and keep a better eye on her. Somewhere along the way, it became my job to bring Nonna down the hill to church every Sunday.

I drag myself up to their gate and ring the bell.

“Who is it?” Nonno’s voice is scratchy over the intercom.

“It’s Etto.”

“You’re late.”

“I know. Sorry.”

He buzzes me through the gate, and I stand under their giant, gnarled lemon tree to wait. The villa is named after it—Il Limone—but the tree has been completely barren since the day they moved in. Nonno is always trying different fertilizers and pruning methods, but he says the tree is constipated, and I imagine one day splitting it open and finding the inside flush with blooms and lemons at various stages of development, like the chute of eggs inside a hen.

Nonno eventually opens the front door, Nonna standing behind him. She still wears black every Sunday even though she thinks it’s for her sister, who died ten years ago.

“Where’ve you been? I was about to take her myself.”

Right. He would have just told her it was Saturday.

“Ciao, Luca,” Nonna says, and kisses me.

“It’s Etto.”

She pulls away.

“Luca’s brother,” Nonno says. I offer Nonna my arm, but she eyes me suspiciously. Her mind has elbowed out all memory of me. I try to push the hair out of my eyes and straighten my clothes.

“I’m Etto. Your grandson. Luca’s brother. Carlo and Maddy’s son.”

She relaxes when she hears my mother’s name. She treated Mamma like a daughter from the day Papà brought her back to San Benedetto.

“And where is she today? Where is Luca?”

I used to tell her the truth, but then she would become confused and start to cry, and I would spend the rest of the day consoling her and feeling bad about it, as if I’d killed them myself.

“Mamma’s in California. With Luca.”

“Why is she in California?”

“Because she’s American. She’s from there. And Luca has a tournament there,” I add.

“Oh.” Nonna takes a minute to process this. She searches my face again before taking my arm. She is the bravest person I know, every day to trust in strangers, to take the arm of someone who could be a serial killer. I could not do it.

“We should probably hurry, Nonna. We’re late.”

“Whose fault is that?” Nonno calls after me. “Did I ever tell you the story about the girl who was late to her grandfather’s deathbed?”

“No, Nonno.”

“I’ll have to tell you later.”

Great. “Come on, Nonna,” I say. “Mass starts in fifteen minutes.”

But Nonna can’t be hurried. Down the path, she has the eyes of an En­glish referee, picking out every dropped coin, loop of wire, matchbook, and lotto card along the way and stashing them carefully in a plastic sack that was probably also at one point scavenged. She hums as she does this, different songs every time, so softly I can’t tell the tune. Could be the Miserere. Could be Metallica. But you can tell she’s perfectly content. Even if she forgets who she is and who she’s with, where she’s going and why, she has this internal homing device telling her she will get there eventually. Wherever
there
is.

“Oplà!” Nonna says, reaching out and touching the wall of the path to steady herself. Vaffanculo, it shouts back at her. Raffaella has big tits. Superbang. Fall Out Boy. Fall Out Boy sucks. Ultras suck. Life sucks. Blank-eyed skulls stare out at her. A backward swastika drawn by one of the illiterate baby-fascists. It makes me ashamed of the world that Nonna has to see this. She’s an old lady and has already served her time. She should be able to scavenge the ground and hum in peace.

My blood feels thick and slow as I plod past the graffiti and around the broken bottles and used condoms ground between the stones. I think about last night at Le Rocce, replaying each stupidity in my head, and the nightmare I can’t seem to shake. I think about what a terrible son I am for not telling Papà about Yuri Fil and what a terrible grandson I am for making Nonna late. Each thought makes my head a little fuller and my shoulders a little heavier, until it feels like I’m stooped under the weight of the entire hill.

“Aha!” Nonna turns around, a triumphant look on her face as she holds up a one-euro coin. I smile at her, and she goes back to her search. Sometimes I wish I could be like her—wipe my mind clean and keep moving ahead instead of always throwing down these mental anchors into the past and floating back to them. Nonna doesn’t suffer over Mamma or Luca. She doesn’t constantly replay the outtakes in her head—the one where the paramedics get to the tunnel in time to save Luca, or the one where Mamma is found in the pool of a searchlight, her muscular arms clinging to the rocks of Whale Island, exhausted but alive. Nonna doesn’t slosh all her emotions together like a great toxic lake. When she’s happy, she smiles. When she’s sad, she cries. When she’s angry, she yells. Nonna stops her humming for a minute and puts her hand on my back as if she knows exactly what I’m thinking.

The hill flattens. We pass people Nonna doesn’t recognize, and I answer for both of us.

“Salve.”

“Salve.”

“Ciao.”

“Ciao.”

“Buongiorno.”

“Buongiorno.”

When we finally get to the church, Nonna looks up at the sweeping archway over the entrance to the courtyard. There are two ancient palms on either side, the giant trunks like elephant feet stomping the earth, the bark peeling and curling away.

“Here we are, Nonna.”

Her eyes void just before the moment of recognition. “Ah, yes. Here we are.”

The doors of the church are flung open to the air, and I can hear the other nonne warbling along to the dirge of the organ. “Go in the middle door, Nonna, and I’ll see you after Mass.”

She looks at me, confused.

“Your friends are waiting for you right inside,” I say. “They’ll see you. Go on in.”

“And what about you?”

“I already went to Mass this morning.”

“With Maddy?”

“By myself. Maddy and Luca are in California.”

She kisses me on the cheek. “You’re a good boy.”

And this is probably why Nonna is still a believer. Because in her ravaged mind, Mamma and Luca are vacationing in California, the ground is full of treasures, and I am a good boy.

I sit on the bench just inside the courtyard and pull the hoodie over my head against the blinding sun. We used to go to church together sometimes when Mamma and Luca were still alive, mostly for baptisms and Christmas, but Papà and I haven’t kept it up. It’s not that I’m an atheist. I’m not defending any grand principles or anything like that. There weren’t any nuns who humiliated me in school or priests who messed with me. It just all feels silly to me. Wishful thinking. A childhood fantasy meant to make you feel better, like Superman or Santa Claus, too perfect to be believed. I’d rather be a realist about it now than wake up later feeling like a chump.

I close my eyes and try to clear my head, but the chatter inside won’t stop, and the nightmare, instead of melting away, only grows, looming over every other thought. I try to keep myself from playing it to the end, but it has a momentum of its own. The corpse keeps staring at me and motioning to me, and I stare back, unable to either move toward her or look away. Finally, I recognize that it’s Mamma, or at least the corpse they dragged from the water and never let me see. She smiles as if she can read my mind, and as the minutes pass, she seems to be warmed by my gaze, her skin drying out and turning pink before my eyes. Her feet straighten. Her arms grow hands. And she starts singing this song, one of her favorites by Umberto Tozzi, and dancing around on the molo in her bare feet.