The Sun and Other Stars (9 page)

“I will, signora.”

“And I may not be in every day next week. You know, Signora Malaspina told me that she would have me over for dinner sometime soon. Bless her, she’s done that once in a while ever since my dear Roberto died. Of course, she can’t do it all the time since she still has that spinster niece to look after.”

“All right, signora.” I look at the clock: 12:35. Yes, yes, signora. Parting is such sweet sorrow. Really. Ciao-ciao. Good-bye.

“Well, then. Until Monday. Arrivederci, Etto.”

“Arrivederci.”

“Ciao.”

“Ciao.”

“Ciao-ciao.”

I lock the door behind her and turn the sign. I empty the banco in record time, and I’m just scrubbing down the block in back when I hear a knock on the window. At first, I ignore it. We are supposedly a literate country now. People have stopped signing their names with
X
s and bringing letters to the parish priest. They should be able to read a simple sign on the door, a sign that has been there since my bisnonno hand-lettered it in the last epoch.

Monday–Saturday 8:00–12:30.

Monday–Friday (Summer) 4:30–6:00.

Fede knows to come around to the back door. If someone is looking for Papà, they should know they’d have better luck going over to Martina’s, or calling Silvio or Nonno, or better yet, convincing Papà to join the rest of the first world and get a fottuto cell phone.

I dry off the block, and there’s a second, more insistent knock, a solid tap that makes the window ring like a heavy bell. I look through the bead curtain. It’s her. The girl from the field. Shit. I try to get out of the line of sight, but she already has her face pressed to the window. Behind her is a blond woman wearing aviators and a pink leather jacket even though it’s a million degrees outside. She’s talking on a cell phone and pushing one of those super, all-terrain celebrity strollers, no doubt the first in a long line of correct parenting decisions that will culminate in a spot at one of the northern universities and a job that doesn’t involve standing behind a banco. The seat of the stroller is heaped with bags, and trailing behind the two women is a boy clearly too old for a stroller.

I observe all of this while hiding in the shadows behind the bead curtain, but the girl must see me because she raises her eyebrows and gives a little wave. She taps on the glass again and points to the banco. Shit. I wipe the sheen of fat from my face and take the dirty apron off. When I go up front, she’s still waiting patiently, her hands cupped around her eyes and pressed to the window. I take a deep breath and open the door.

“Buongiorno,” I say.

“Buongiorno. I’m sorry to make you open,” the girl says in English, “but we came all the way from the top of the hill. We thought in summer the shops might be open through the break.”

“It’s no problem. No problem at all. Come in.”

The blond woman is yapping away in a language that sounds like Russian or one of those other languages made for giving orders, and she doesn’t even look at me. She and the boy stay on the passeggiata while the girl comes inside. I can’t think of the last time I was alone with a girl. My heart starts to hammer away in my chest, and I try to stop it by thinking about the mighty and indestructible Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door. People say, “I was scared to death.” Death says, “I was scared to Chuck Norris.” Chuck Norris’s tears can cure cancer.

Too bad he never cries.

I go behind the banco on instinct even though there’s nothing in it now but the calf’s head. I probably don’t have to tell you that in this country we have a long tradition of smooth talkers whose first nature it is to flirt and who will talk up every girl they see just to stay in practice. Romeo, Casanova, Rudolph Valentino, Francesco Totti, Silvio Berlusconi. Cazzo, Berlusconi has proven his ability to chat up 60 million people at the same time. And then there are all the regular guys like Luca and Fede, the mere mortals who can get the American college girls to drop their panties for the slightest nuzzle against the ear, the most watered-down declaration of love, the most uninspired “ciao, bella.”

I am not one of them.

Luca and Fede used to try to coach me. It’s easy, they’d say. All you have to do is get a girl to share the smallest thing about herself, open up the tiniest crack in her fortress, the most minuscule break in her cell wall, and then you can invade and replicate yourself like a virus until you’ve collected the whole code to her security system. After that, it’s just a matter of pushing buttons. Luca and Fede, they probably would have thought to ask about the English, the accent, the blonde with the cell phone, the little boy dragging behind her like an anchor, and where in Italy she’s been that the butcher shops stay open through the break. They would have at least gotten her name. But I ask you, what in this grand tradition of flirting do I manage to say to her?

I say, in exactly the same tone I reserve for the nonne every morning, “And how can I help you?”

She looks down at the empty case and smiles. “It looks like the shops in Ukraine. During Communism.”

And again, I should laugh at her joke or ask her about Ukraine or the butchers over there. Anything. Instead, I feel myself crouching down, using the banco like a bunker and flattening myself into a cardboard cutout, a vague outline of every other shopkeeper she’s ever met so that if she ever saw me on the street, she would never mistake me for a man.

Her face goes serious, and she clears her throat. “I’d like a filetto, please, and a half kilo of prosciutto.”

“Cotto or crudo?”

“Crudo. The longest-aged you have.”

“I have twelve months.”

“That’s fine.”

“Thin?”

“Extra thin.”

I go back to the walk-in to get the prosciutto, and she watches me intently as I snuggle it against the blade of the slicer. My bisnonno bought the slicer when he started the shop, and it has warped over the years, so when I flip the switch, it sings ever so slightly, metal on metal. I can feel her eyes on me as the slices fall.

“And now for the filetto . . .” I narrate like the deficiente I am. I brush through the bead curtain and into the front walk-in, digging around in the packages. Shit. There it is, vacuum-packed but still white. Papà’s head must be so wrapped up in the scandal, he’s absentmindedly put it away without taking the silver skin off.

I go to the front empty-handed. She squints like she’s bracing herself for bad news, and my insides flinch. The thing about me is that I will say all kinds of cazzate in my head, but I have never been one for telling people what they don’t want to hear, even something as small as an unskinned filetto. Mamma used to call it “sensitivity.” Fede calls it “being a pussy.”

“I’m sorry, but we don’t have one. I mean, we do, but it hasn’t been trimmed up or had the silver skin cut off yet.”

“No problem. I will wait.”

“Maybe you can come back later this afternoon?”

“It doesn’t take so much time to cut the silver skin off a filetto, does it?”

Shit.

“Okay, so I’m going to tell you the truth.” This is also from Luca and Fede’s playbook, making even the smallest things sound like grand confessions, like you have given the girl access to the darkest corners of your soul. “You see, my father, he doesn’t like for me to touch the veal or the beef. Chicken and rabbit, okay. Mop bucket, no problem. But not the veal. Or the beef.”

She keeps staring at me, and my mind records every blink of her eyelashes in slow motion, like the beating wings of a giant, prehistoric bird.

“Not that I’m an idiot or anything,” I continue, trying desperately to fill the silence. “But my father, he is a perfectionist, and he takes great pride in his meat. He would rather not sell it at all than sell it in a substandard condition.”

“Your father is not here now, is he?” She props her arms on top of the banco and balances her chin on her hands, like she has been given lessons in flirt by Totti himself. “I think you can do it by yourself, no?”

I can count on one hand the times a girl has flirted with me, and I always expect it to be a grander occasion, accompanied by a parade or a flotilla, a horn section, and shouts of “Du-ce! Du-ce! Du-ce!” I am unprepared, that’s what I am trying to say. I’m unprepared, and this is what causes me to act like a complete pignolo.

“I don’t know if it’s such a good idea.”

“I won’t tell.” She raises three fingers in a Scout pledge.

“Maybe you can come back for it later this afternoon? After my father has been here? Or I can deliver it to you?”

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Etto.”

“Etto, my brother just arrived an hour ago. He has had a very,
very
hard week, and he needs a good meal. My filetto is his favorite.”

I can feel the droplets of sweat collecting on the surface of my skin, as if they’ve sounded the alarm and decided to jump this sinking ship. I think of what Papà would say, and I look at the clock. What are the chances he will come by in the next five minutes or even realize he packed away the filetto in haste with the silver skin still on it? It wouldn’t even cross his mind that he’d made a mistake.

I go back to the walk-in and bring the filetto up to the board. Yes, I admit it, I am going to try to salvage my manhood by showing a girl I can cut the silver skin off a filetto. I take the knife in hand, and I look out at the passeggiata, where the little boy is jumping and kicking at an imaginary ball in the air. The blond woman is holding the phone to her heart, screeching the little boy’s name over and over, wearing it down to a nub. The girl is on her toes now, peeking over the banco at what I’m doing. My hands begin to shake, and I make a silent prayer not to slice my fingers off. At least not in front of her.

“Everything is okay?” she says.

“Fine, fine. Tutto a posto.”

Just so you know, I am not a complete incompetent, and I’ve watched Papà and Nonno take the silver skin off a filetto hundreds of times before. I ease the knife under the white and wiggle it a little to get some room, then pull it down the length. Shit. I’ve made a small gouge in the muscle, so I even it up. And then I even that up. And then I’m not sure what happens, but the board starts to look like Calatafimi after Garibaldi attacked the Bourbons.

“Shit.”

“Everything is okay?”

“Yes, yes. Tutto a posto.”

I keep going. Rome or death. I don’t know why my hands aren’t listening to what I’m telling them to do. Even for battlefield surgery, it’s unacceptable. I can only hope to hide the filetto as quickly as possible, wrap it up and clean the board before Papà comes back and realizes what I’ve done. And while I’m at it, I will communicate telepathically to this girl that she must never, ever come here again and make these absurd requests to buy meat.

“It’s okay,” she says, answering an apology I’m too ashamed to make. “I’ll do it.” And I swear on my nonno’s and bisnonno’s portraits that she
comes behind the banco
and takes the knife out of my hand.

Let me be clear. We do not run some kind of casino operation here. People do not just
come behind the banco.
Since the war, there have only been about ten people back here, all of them either health inspectors or with the same last name printed on the awning outside. But she smiles at me and takes the knife from my hand like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“Don’t worry. I used to work in a restaurant.”

The little boy flings the door open, runs in, and heads straight for the banco, pressing his face and hands against the glass so he can see through to what the girl’s doing. She says something to him, and like magic, he steps away, clasping his hands behind his back. I watch the knife flash in her hands, and I can feel the weight of everything in the shop bearing down on me—the loops of sausages, the scale, the slicer, the stool Mamma used to sit on next to the register, the portraits of my bisnonno, Nonno, and Papà wearing expressions of perpetual disapproval.

“So,” she says, cocking her head and smiling. “You and your friends will go to the disco tonight?”

I swallow hard and try to channel Luca, Fede, Totti, Chuck Norris, and all the rest of them. “Probably. Are you?”

She looks back at the filetto and shrugs. “I will talk to my brother. Maybe.” She holds up the filetto. It looks as good as when Papà does it.

“See?” she says. “Tutto a posto.”

The little boy watches me wrap it up, and the girl walks back to the sink and washes her hands as if she works here. Please, God, don’t let anyone have seen her through the front window. Please don’t let anyone have seen her completely and irreparably emasculate me behind my own counter with a few swift strokes of Papà’s knife.

“So, you are a fan of calcio?” she says, pushing through the bead curtain.

“Oh. The shrine back there? That’s my papà. He’s crazy about calcio.”

She stares at me as I ring up the order, and I can feel the heat creeping into my cheeks. The little boy says something in their language and she answers him. Outside, the blond woman snaps the phone shut and lifts her purse from the seat of the stroller. She wanders in like she’s never been in a butcher shop before, and she looks at everything curiously, as if she’s strolling around a museum. The girl glances back at her, and I can tell they don’t get along.

“It’s forty-two fifty,” I say. The girl hands over a hundred-euro note, and as I’m making change, the two of them go back and forth in some kind of Slavic summit. Finally the girl speaks up. “We would like to make an account. If it is okay? We are here for three weeks.”

“And you are staying in Signora Malaspina’s villa?”

“Yes.”

As I pull the notebook out from under the register, I try to calculate how much rent they must be paying.

“The name on the conto?”

I hold the pencil over the page, waiting. She hesitates. Maybe it’s a mafia thing. Maybe this brother is a godfather or whatever they call it in Ukraine. They say the thugs over there make the Italian mafia look like children on a playground.

“Maybe you want to put your own name on the account?” I suggest.