The Sun and Other Stars (7 page)

“What?”

“Get out.”

“Why me?”

“You know what you said. Get out. Go. And don’t come back until I send for you.”

Nello stands up with a grunt and brushes himself off. He looks around for allies, but no one speaks up.

“Oh, is that how it is?” He waves his hand dismissively at the entire bar. “Cowards. Well, vaffanculo, all of you.” He puts his hand in the crook of his elbow and thrusts his fist into the air. “Vaf-fan-cu-lo.”

It’s only as he leaves that I notice the girl from the field this morning standing in the doorway next to Signora Malaspina’s ugly niece. Silence blows through the room, like everyone taking a breath at the same time.

“We didn’t mean to make such an entrance,” Signora Malaspina’s ugly niece says, cackling, clutching the girl’s arm like they’re best friends.

“Come in, girls, come in.” I don’t know how Martina does it, but she somehow manages to give fifty grown men the evil eye at the same time, and like schoolboys, they start picking up chairs and fetching brooms.

“Carlo, you’re a mess,” she scolds Papà. “Go to the toilet and clean yourself up.”

“Did you hear what he said?” Papà protests. “Did you
hear
what he
sai
d
? You can’t let that stronzo in here ever again.”

“Let’s get one thing clear, Carlo. I saw two stronzos. Grown men fighting like teenagers, tearing up my place, my
parents’
place, peace to their souls. Go on.” She pushes him toward the bathroom and turns to the girls. “Sometimes I wonder why I even bother.”

The girls look at the whole scene and shrug, like they expect no less from our gender. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the niece, but I know she lives with her aunt, spinster-style, in an apartment in Albenga, taking care of her and helping to rent out the villa.

“We wanted to use your Internet, Martina. The cable guy was supposed to be at the villa today, but he never showed up.”

“Go right ahead. Signor Cato was just logging off.”

“I was?”

“Yes, you were.” Martina shows the girls back to the alcove, and Signor Cato wanders out into the main room and sits next to me at the bar, grumbling about how all he wanted was a little peace in his golden years, and instead, he’s being forced to sit and keep company with a bunch of sons of whores.

“What you got there tonight?” he says in dialect, leaning over my plate. I get a good look inside his ears, the hair so prolific it’s like small, arctic animals hibernating in there.

“Pizza. You want some?”

“Nah.”

“I’ll have some.” Ciacco appears on the other side, but Martina shoos him away.

“Would you let the boy eat in peace?”

The girl sits down at the computer, and Signora Malaspina’s ugly niece leans against the arch of the alcove, facing the rest of the room like a guard dog. I try to glance generally in the direction of the computer, but every time I try, I only manage to catch the eye of the niece. The conversations around me resume at a low, buzzing tone, but no one turns up the volume of the flat-screen. I can tell they’re waiting for them to leave so they can start gossiping about who the girl is. After all, you can’t expect to show up at Martina’s and remain a nobody, a nonentity, when the rest of us are forced to stoop under the weight of everything we and our fathers and our fathers’ fathers have ever thought, said, or done in the region.

The girl gets up from the computer and moves toward the bar, and I can feel the eyes in the room silently tracking her. Signor Cato scurries back into the computer alcove, and they fill in his space at the bar, the girl resting her hands on the edge of the wood. She’s wearing a light scarf looped around her neck like a nest for her head, and a green warm-up jacket, the sleeves pushed up, the brown freckles on her arms chasing each other into the sleeves. Signora Malaspina’s niece stands on the other side, trapping me in between.

“Ciao, Etto,” she says. She tries to hand Martina a euro, but Martina brushes it away.

“Don’t worry about it. She was on there less than five minutes.”

“You sure?”

“Sure. Believe me, it’s just nice to see some women in here once in a while.”

“Amen,” someone at the bar says, and there is some restrained laughter.

“What are you eating, Etto?” Signora Malaspina’s niece asks.

“It’s this new thing called pizza,” I say, and she laughs. She’s our age, but I don’t really know her. She was in the hospitality program with Fede and Bocca. They say she always aspired to be the puttana of the class, but nobody would sleep with her.

“Is this your uncle’s pizza, Belacqua?” Signora Malaspina’s ugly niece asks, and Belacqua gives her a lazy smile in return.

“You have to go there,” she instructs the girl over my head. “Belacqua here may be nothing more than a stoner, but his uncle makes the best pizza in the region, right, Etto?”

“Right.” I can feel my face turning red. I know whatever I say is being recorded by fifty pairs of eyes, the owners of which will play it back to me mercilessly and with commentary every night for the next month.

“We just saw Fede and the rest of them over at Camilla’s. He said you were all going to Le Rocce on Saturday night.”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“You should. It’ll be fun. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even meet you there.”

I can feel the girl looking down at me, but no matter how much I try, I can’t look up at her, like her face is some fottuto solar eclipse and I need a cardboard box with a pinhole.

“What’s the matter, Etto? You forget how to speak Italian?” Signora Malaspina’s ugly niece laughs again. She has one of those hyena laughs, sucking in air.

“With girls, he only speaks Awkward,” somebody shouts, and they all laugh.

Signora Malaspina’s niece steps back from the bar, and I’m about to sigh with relief when the girl taps me on the shoulder and says in English, “Hey. Don’t you remember me?”

Shit.

“The field? This morning?”

I hear the whispers behind me.

“Ah, yes. Sorry, I didn’t recognize you.”

“Did you have a nice nap?”

“Yes, yes.”

“I’m sorry again that we disturbed you.”

“Come on, let’s go,” Signora Malaspina’s ugly niece says, and she pulls the girl by the sleeve like she’s a child. “Ciao-ciao, Etto. We’ll see you Saturday night.”

“I never said I was going.”

She waves vaguely to the room, weaving through the chairs. “Ciao, everybody!”

“Ciao!” the whole room shouts back.

“He has a stable job!”

“And he likes children!”

“And he’s a virgin!” Mino shouts after them, mercifully in dialect, but Signora Malaspina’s niece is laughing her hyena laugh, and I know she will translate everything later. Shit. I bury my head in my hands, and the sea air hits me in the back as they leave. The others start in on me immediately.

“What’s the matter with you, Etto? Cat got your pisello?”

“Porca miseria! Not one but
two
girls trying to talk to you, and all you could do was play the mute.”

“Youth is wasted on the young.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I thought we were going to have to commit a mercy killing!”

“Who is she? Anyone seen her before?”

“Probably one of Signora Malaspina’s renters.”

“She looks a little grubby for that, no?”

“Maybe she’s a nanny. She looked Irish to me.”

“Ha! Etto looks more Irish than her.”

“German, then.”

“Euh. She can’t be German. Germans always travel in packs.”

“Or battalions. Or brigades,” someone calls out, and everyone laughs.

“Maybe she’s American.”

“Not fat enough to be American.”

“Maybe
you
should move to America, Ciacco.”

“This?” Ciacco pats his belly. “All muscle. Feel it. Go on . . . feel it.”

“I’m not touching anything. Who knows where that’s been?”

Around and around they go. Blah, blah, blah. She can’t be English because she was wearing a scarf against the drafts, and the English, especially since Iraq, have it in their heads that they are like the Americans and suddenly above such European principles as drafts and air pressure. She can’t be Canadian, Austrian, or Australian because Canadians, Austrians, and Australians always announce themselves in the first minute so they will not be mistaken for Americans, Germans, or English. Not bitchy enough to be Russian. Not snobby enough to be French. And on and on.

“What’s all this?” Papà is back from the bathroom, his face shiny, the damp clinging to the bristles of his hair.

“Some girl came in with Signora Malaspina’s niece and started flirting with Etto.”

“Just now?”

“Just now.”

“Who is she?”

“No one knows.”

For a second I think Papà might show some interest, but as soon as he sits down, they’re immediately back to the scandal. After every interruption, every argument, every tragedy, it all goes back to calcio. I’ll bet even before the smoke cleared in Pompei, the two surviving goat herders dusted off a skull or a string ball or whatever they used in those days and started kicking it around in the ashes.

“Is everything okay, tesoro?” Martina asks, because she is the queen of all women and has a sixth sense about everything.

“Fine, fine.”

“Do you want some fruit? I have plums.”

“No thanks.”

She clears away my plate. “How about a Coca-Cola, tesoro? Or a chinotto?”

“Thanks, Martina, but I think I’ll go over to Camilla’s.”

“Okay, then. See you tomorrow.”

“Until tomorrow.”

I go over to Camilla’s, where the average age of the small-souled drops at least a generation. It’s only Camilla’s second year running her bar, so she still has a makeshift boardwalk, hammered together out of wooden skids and sunk into the sand, the lights from the passeggiata providing the only illumination. Fede, Bocca, Claudia, and Sima are all sitting in plastic chairs around one of the outside tables.

“Ciao, Etto.”

“You made it.”

Sima looks up at me with the same expression of confusion Nonna has. “Ciao, Etto,” she says, but her voice is like an echo, and before I can answer, she lowers her head.

“Where’s Casella?” I say to Claudia.

“Why are you asking me?” Claudia says. “Casella has his own life. I don’t control him. It’s perfectly feasible that he would be out somewhere on his own.”

“He’s in the toilet,” Bocca says.

“I still can’t believe you let him go to the toilet without asking permission, Claudia,” Fede says. “Who’s going to wear the pants in your family? You can’t just have him up and going to the toilet whenever he feels like it.”

“Very funny.” She crosses her arms and leans back in her chair. “So, Etto, I hear you, Fede, and Bocca have some hot Australian dates at Le Rocce on Saturday night.”

“I didn’t say I was going.”

“Fede did.”

“Maybe Fede thinks if he tells enough people, it will come true.”

“Come on, Etto, don’t be such a downer,” Fede says. “One night at a disco won’t hurt you.”

“You only want me to come and translate for you.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Do they speak Italian?”

“No.”

“And I already know what your English sounds like.”

“English is overrated.” Fede grins, the same grin that gets the girls. “We have the language of the scorpion.”

“Porca vacca.” Claudia rolls her eyes. “Are you still wearing that suit?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Claudia looks out over our heads, down the passeggiata. “Oh, look. Here comes Francesca with her brand-new bocce. I’ll bet she’s still got the bandages on underneath.”

“Those aren’t real?” Bocca asks.

“Of course not,” Fede says.

“How can you tell?”

Fede shrugs. “I just know.”

“I heard she went to Nice and got the two-for-one.”

“Really?”

“Don’t you remember The Nose?” Claudia hisses, then smiles at the girl as she passes by. “Ciao, Francesca.”

“Ciao,” Francesca answers, but you can tell she gossips about Claudia behind her back, too.

“I will never understand how she ended up with Gianni. He’s so ugly.”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘with.’”

“What do you know?”

“Ask Paolo.”

“She’s cheating on him with Paolo? As in, his
brother
Paolo?”

Bocca shrugs. “You didn’t hear it from me.”

“I can’t believe it!” Claudia says, her mouth gaping wide. “I can’t believe it. How did
that
happen?”

“Gianni asked Paolo to tutor her in English before their vacation to London.”

“Tutoring . . .” Fede says. “Why didn’t I ever think of that?”

This is how they will squander the entire night, pretty much like they’ve squandered every night since puberty, on bickering, gossip, and other stupidaggini—who has and hasn’t had work done, who’s gotten together or broken up, what happened at the beach or at Claudia’s parents’ restaurant. Claudia in particular is always pointing out people’s plastic surgery, as if no one noticed when she came back from the “Bahamas” that one Christmas and her nose was half the size.

I watch Claudia’s sister Camilla through the front windows of the bar, which are flung open to the night air. She’s rushing back and forth, pulling out bottles, greeting people, and giving instructions to the bartenders. She bought this bar at nineteen with her own money, and now it’s the most popular one for the under-thirty crowd. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that she and Claudia come from the same parents. I wonder if Luca and I would have anything in common by now, or if his life would be a string of matches, interviews, girlfriends, and parties. Maybe he would still be with the French girl, or maybe he would have found himself a proper showgirl to hang his arm on. Maybe he would be playing for Milan, or abroad, in England or Spain. I wonder if he would still call home like he used to at the academy, or if he would fade away and come back to San Benedetto only when he had a girl to impress or felt some nostalgia for the holidays.

Fede changes the subject to the topless woman at the beach, and Casella finally comes back from the toilet.