The Sun and Other Stars (31 page)

B
ack when Luca was playing in the regional youth leagues, Luca and Fede used to do this thing where Luca would make a complete idiot of himself. He would dribble the ball down the field, doing every fancy move he could think of, and the defenders would be in a panic, triple-teaming him, trying to guess the next of his antics. And then, in the middle of the chaos, Luca would give one imperceptible flick of his foot and kick it to Fede, who’d be shuffling around like a homeless guy somewhere in the periphery, no one watching him. And of course Fede would shoot it straight into the goal. They called the play Keep Your Fottuto Eye on the Ball. And that’s exactly what happens in the next week. I keep my fottuto eye on the ball, and I’m left gaping into an empty space where it used to be.

There are four matches on Saturday, and we win ours handily against Mimmo and Franco’s team, thanks to a goal I squeeze out in the last few minutes of the match. Vanni and Yuri’s match is next, and they go at it like schoolboys, chasing each other around the field, locked in combat. Maybe this refusal to lose is the characteristic above everything else that has allowed them to become the giants of this world, their faces on billboards as big as buildings, the vibrations of their footsteps felt around the globe. Except in America, of course.

Papà wants some time to practice and strategize for the semifinals and the finals on Sunday, but as soon as the last whistle blows, Martina is on the field giving directives.

You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it—a whole festa created out of nothing in a few short hours. The furniture truck is too big to pull up on the service road, so they have to park it on Via Partigiani and chug everything up the hill on human steam. Martina and Silvio stand in the middle of the field splitting the deliveries into two piles—edibles and nonedibles. Chairs: Silvio. Chicken: Martina. Generator: Silvio. Box of eggplant: Martina. We crawl up and down the mule track like ants, then back and forth across the terrace, moving the tent, the folding tables, the grills, and a generator into formation for Martina, then fitting the pieces of boardwalk together to make the dance floor. Guido, Bocca, and Aristone are busy building the stage and setting up the speakers and the soundboard, and the Turks from the Truck Show struggle to inflate the bouncing castle in the far corner. Nicola Nicolini has been appointed the subchair of “atmosphere,” and he stands in the middle of the field, his hands on his hips like a traffic cop, supervising us in how to aesthetically scatter the tables and chairs, string the lights in the trees, and set the candles on the tables.

“Allora . . .” Martina says, standing over the mountain of food as Mimmo and Franco light the grills. There are five of us officially conscripted to the cooking tent—Zhuki, me, Fede, Fede’s Mamma, and Martina, but twice as many nonne appear and insist on helping. We attack at once, following Martina’s orders. We season the chicken, cut up the bread, grate the cheese, chop up tomatoes and artichokes for salads, and make fresh pesto out of a pile of basil the size of a small tree. Mamma used to be part of the cooking team, too. She wasn’t nearly as good a cook as Martina, but I have an image of the two of them standing side by side under this very tent, laughing until they were both sore.

“Etto, maybe you can help Yuri get started with the shashlik.”

Yuri convinced Martina that this summer, there should be something Ukrainian served at the festa, and he’s volunteered to make a special kind of Ukrainian shish kebab. I find him in front of the liceo, squatting over a homemade barbecue fashioned from bricks and a shiny oven shelf that must have come from some ten-thousand-euro oven inside Signora Malaspina’s villa.

“Ciao, Etto,” he says.

“Martina told me to help you with the shashlik.”

At his side are a heap of sharpened sticks and an industrial bucket that looks like it could be plaster or paint. He pulls the top off, and inside is a pile of beef, neatly cubed and nestled in chunks of onion. The aroma puffs up in a cloud under my nose, and it rivals anything I’ve ever smelled in Martina’s or Nonna’s kitchens.

“Normally we use pig, but your father does not sell pig.”

I start building the shashlik with meat and pieces of onion, leaning them against the sides of the bucket, anchored in more meat. Yuri meticulously stacks branches under the oven rack until it starts to look like art. He finally lights it, the smoke curling up in thin ribbons.

“This is ultimate secret for shashlik,” he says. “Green wood, good fire, not so hot. My sister teach me this. She is very good cook, you know. She worked in fancy restaurant in Kiev.”

“She told me.”

“She is very good woman, my sister. My children are lucky to have her for aunt.”

“They’re lucky to have you as a papà,” I say.

“Eh.”

He squats across the barbecue from me, his eyes fixed on the glowing wood, and we work in silence, the aroma from the meat making my stomach growl. He’s dressed in ordinary shorts and a T-shirt with a plain blue baseball cap and some beat-up brown sandals, completely stripped of his endorsements and his Serie A. He bows his head, tending to the shashlik in silence for a few minutes before he looks up at me.

“Etto, I tell you something,” he says. The smoke and the waves of heat distort his face. “Etto, I am not innocent man. I knew about the fix. The sporting judges, they give me punish I deserve.”

“But, Yuri, you got off the field.”

“But I knew. And I did not say nothing.”

“I’m sure you couldn’t have been the only one on Genoa who knew.”

“Of course. Everybody knows. The managers, they tell me everybody do this. This is business as usual in Italy, they say. And if prosecutors find out, they will fix. They will fix so nobody will get the ban.” He shakes his head. “But these are excuses. I knew and I did not say nothing to nobody. And I will have to tell Little Yuri someday. This is most terrible.”

“Why wasn’t everybody else banned, then?”

Yuri’s face gives a shrug his shoulders don’t follow through on. “Because the investigators, they take me into little room. They ask me questions, and I say the truth. The others, they go into little room and they say lies.”

“That’s so unfair.”

“Not fair? How? I did wrong. I was punish. All is fair. For me at least.” Yuri stands up in the column of smoke and breathes in deeply. “Anyway, do not feel sorry for me. Feel sorry for the little boy I was twenty years ago, the little boy who runs around field in Strilky and dreams of becoming calcio player. Do not feel sorry for me now.”

I wait for him to say something else, but he only bows his head and tends to the shashlik. Martina calls me back to the food tent. The pace is quicker now, with only half an hour until the ticket sales start. I find myself elbow to elbow with Zhuki, coiling and skewering sausages and stacking them into an enormous foil tray. We haven’t talked much since yesterday. The words we said are still teetering precariously on top of one another, and I think neither of us wants to be the one to pile on the wrong word and upset the balance.

“So where are the kids?” I finally ask.

“Over by the bouncing castle with Tatiana and Vanni.”

“I’m surprised she came down for this.”

“Me too. Too many peasants down here.”

I laugh.

“It’s true. She uses that word. Peasants.”

“Ouch.”

“Testing, testing.” Guido is at the microphone. “Testing, one, two, three.”

He starts to croon a Frank Sinatra song, and the lifeguards putting together the boardwalk load him with whistles until he gets off the stage. Zhuki laughs. I look out over the terraces and onto the sea. It’s been cloudy all day, the sea below a dense, glossy green, like hard candy poured into a mold.

The ticket sales start at six, and the people come streaming up from the town and from all over the hill. The first wave is the nonne whose husbands have passed away, and who come straight to the food tent to help or at least hover. They reach over the folding table and pat our cheeks.

“So cute you two are.”

“The babies would be beautiful.”

My face turns red. I glance sideways at Zhuki, and she’s embarrassed, too.

After the nonne with no husbands come the nonne with husbands, who sit across from each other at the small tables, holding hands like teenagers. Then the middle-aged couples, who split into camps of men and women, gossiping and complaining about each other just as they did in school. We start dishing up the antipasti: tomato, roasted pepper, and olive salads; vegetable fritters; tiny artichokes sprinkled with parmesan, oil, and salt. Then the trofie, gnocchi, and farinata for the adults, focaccia for the children. Camilla is set up selling tickets at a table to the side, and soon, there are so many people in line, Fede has to go over and help. When the Communists were running the festa, all the money went to the cause; now it goes to fireworks.

Around seven o’clock, the people our age start showing up, skipping the food tent for the drinks table. Guido takes the canned music off, and the first band warms up. It’s Belacqua and his band, a bunch of kids two classes below us in liceo who have piercings and flannel shirts and only play American music. In the end, everyone but the tourists will be here. And the thirteen-year-olds. Well, the thirteen-year-olds will pretend they’re too cool to come, though toward the end of the night, they will start appearing, beers hidden under their shirts, hovering at the edges of the dance floor.

“Bone down nana dead man town, fur hid a took when ah hidda gra-a-a.” Belacqua tries to make his voice gravelly like Bruce, and I imagine Charon cuffing him upside the head and telling him to go back and study his English.

“Tesoro,” Martina calls from the other side of the tent, where she’s already frying the frittelle for dessert. “Why don’t you two start taking the chickens off if they’re ready?”

There are four grills put together, two of them tented with half barrels for the chicken, and two with the nautilus-shaped sausages. Yuri is still tending the shashlik, and every once in a while appears with a handful of smoking skewers. I make myself some towel mitts and lift the half barrels off the grills, and Zhuki and I start an assembly line, me popping the chicken off the skewer and breaking it down, her spraying the pieces with a mist of white wine and wrapping them in tinfoil. When the chicken is finished, we cut the sausage spirals into links and stuff them into a dwindling pile of rolls, start a new shift of sausages, and put the anchovies on. In the meantime, Martina and Fede’s mamma are working furiously on the desserts, dipping the fritters in and out of an oil bath balanced between two or three burners, cutting apart squares of grape focaccia, and slathering crepes with Nutella. The crowds surge, exchanging tickets for plates as fast as the nonne can pass them over the counter, and the second band starts—Casella, Mimmo, Claudia’s papà, and some of the others, playing all the old favorites. The young people clustered around the stage dissipate, and the dance floor fills with couples and smooth dancing.

“Ciao.” Claudia comes around to the side of the cooking tent. The grills have been packing the tent with heat all evening, but finally, the breeze off the sea is starting to pick up.

“I heard the good news.” Martina wipes her hands on her apron and leans over one of the folding tables to give Claudia a kiss. “Congratulations. You two make a wonderful couple.”

“Thanks, Martina.” But I see Claudia throw a nearly imperceptible glance in Fede’s direction. I’m the only one who seems to notice, and at first I think I’m delirious from too much time spent under this fottuto tent, but no, it’s definitely there. I watch the back of Fede’s head at the ticket table. There’s a steady line, and Fede and Camilla are working faster than we are, tearing the tickets off the roll and collecting the money in a lockbox Camilla balances on her lap.

“Are you having anything to eat?” Martina asks Claudia.

“Maybe a little later. Got to fit into the dress, right? Everything looks great, though, Martina. You’ve really surpassed yourself this year.”

“Thank you, dear.”

Claudia goes off to find Casella, and Martina leaves her station at the back of the tent and hovers behind us.

“Etto, Zhuki, why don’t you two take a break?”

“It’s okay, Martina, we can stay.”

But Martina takes the knife out of my hand. “Go on. Get out of here for a little while. Eat. Dance. I’ve got plenty of help now. Go.”

She loads us down with paper plates and bowls of food and sends us off to the drinks table, where Franco and Bocca are lining up cups of wine and lemonade.

“Where are your tickets?” Bocca demands.

“Your auntie has them.”

Franco laughs. I take two plastic cups of wine and hand one to Zhuki. All of Nicola Nicolini’s careful planning has gone to hell. The café tables are bunched together against the wall of the next terrace, where the men are clustered around Yuri and Vanni Fucci. Zhuki and I sit on the grass at the edge of the dance floor and stare at the San Benedettons drifting and twirling by. Mimmo’s leading the band, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist, and when the bridge of the song comes, he starts calling out to people by name.