The Sun and Other Stars

by Brigid Pasulka

  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 th
ing 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.

  “Yes, yes, I will put my name. Zhuki.”

  “Again?”

  “Like ‘zoo,’ except ‘zhoo’ and ‘key.’” She makes a twisting motion, like a key in the lock. “Z-H-U-K-I.” She traces the letters on top of the register.

  “Zhuki . . . ?”

  “Yes, Zhuki.”

  “No, I mean, what’s your surname?”

  “My surname?”

  The blond woman behind her starts to laugh. She takes her sunglasses off with a flourish and stares at me as if I’m supposed to recognize her. “Yuri Fil,” she says, tapping the register with one long fingernail. “Money. Pencil. Yuri Fil.”

  She snatches the hand of the little boy and pulls him out of the shop, leaving the girl, whose face turns bright red.

  “Grazie. Arrivederci.” She tries to say it as smoothly as she can, but she stumbles on every single syllable.

  “Arrivederc’.”

  My hand hangs in the air, midwave, as I watch them disappear beyond the edge of the window, the blond woman and her stroller leading the way, the girl—Zhuki—hugging the package of tortured meat under her arm like a calcio ball.

  It’s probably unnecessary by now to explain who Yuri Fil is. My lack of enthusiasm for the game of calcio aside, he is, I will grant you, one of the greatest strikers out there today, one of those players who can’t be quantified by a simple recitation of statistics or loop of clips replayed on The Monday Trial and YouTube. It would be beside the point, anyway. Because the point is not how much he means to the Dynamo fans, the Tottenham fans, the Celtic fans, the Genoa fans, or the fans of the next team who will inevitably buy him for a sack of euros. The point is Papà’s unwavering devotion to him. I think he would sell me, Nonno, Silvio, the shop, all of us, for an audience with Yuri Fil. After all, this is a man whose photo has earned a coveted place over the grinding counter in back, sharing company only with Dino Zoff, Maradona, and a handful of others. A man whose first three teams have been the only foreign scarves to hang above Martina’s bar. A man whose transfer to the Italian leagues inspired another man who has never been east of Trieste to teach himself the fottuto Ukrainian national anthem and keep singing it over and over until his son learned it involuntarily, through osmosis.

  Shche ne vmerla Ukrayina, ni slava, ni volya.

  When Papà bursts through the door, I’m still sitting on the stool behind the register, my mind digesting the situation. Papà doesn’t even say ciao—he simply continues his perpetual list of things I haven’t done. Grind the bucket of scraps for the sausage. Clean the gunk out of the cracks in the sink. Reorder the vacuum-pack bags. Make the involtini. He counts them off, levering his fingers back so it looks like they might break off.

  “Did you hear me, Etto? Did you hear anything I just said? What’s the matter with you? You look like you’re barely there. Are you drunk?” But he doesn’t even wait for an answer. “I know you can’t be tired. You’ve barely done any work around here. Why are you sitting around like that?”

  And maybe this is why I let the moment pass. Because it’s a rare chance to withhold from the know-it-all the thing he would most want to know, a way to finally torture the torturer for holding me hostage in this shop, for treating me like a slave instead of a son.

  That doesn’t mean I do it easily, of course. The guilt of it hangs over me for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening as I sit on the sofa in our apartment listening to Nicola Nicolini getting ready on the other side of the wall, the darkness collecting in the spaces between the shutters, the footsteps of the crazy divorcée who lives above us clacking back and forth across the floor, back and forth, back and forth, enough to make you go crazy yourself.

  My phone lights up.

  ME AND BOCCA ARE LEAVING IN HALF AN HOUR.

  WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

  YOU’RE KIDDING, RIGHT? THE AUSTRALIANS. LE ROCCE. I’VE BEEN TELLING YOU ALL WEEK.

  I DON’T FEEL LIKE IT.

  YOU DON’T HAVE TO FEEL LIKE IT. JUST COME.

  YOU JUST WANT ME TO TRANSLATE.

  OKAY, WE JUST WANT YOU TO TRANSLATE. COME ON. FORZA. DAI. DON’T BE A FINOCCHIO.

  I never should have taught Fede how to put that fottuto word anticipation on his phone. I should have left him to sweat for every letter like the ten-year-olds and the old people.

  I open the shuttered doors to the balcony and listen to the clinking of dishes as the tourists finish their Saturday-night dinners up and down the passeggiata. The waves are weak tonight, slapping halfheartedly against the pylons all the way down the molo. I stare at the sign on the lamppost between the bagni and the Mangona brothers’ huts. Silvio put it up the week after they pulled Mamma’s body from the water, as if that would have protected her. As if she would have obeyed a fottuto sign.

  VIETATO TUFFARSI—

  PERICOLO: TUBAZIONI AFFIORANTI DAL FONDALE.

  And in English, for the tourists:

  DIVING FORBIDDEN—

  DANGER: PIPELINE EMERGING FROM THE SEABED.

  The morning Mamma disappeared was one of the coldest and rainiest of any June I remember. She came into my room before dawn, a dark shadow perched on Luca’s bed, cupping one of his cleats in her hand. W
hen she stood up, she seemed taller in the darkness, and the thick material of her wet suit pinched her body into an alien shape, her middle spread, her limbs scrawny since the last time she wore it. I don’t remember what either of us said. I only remember her standing there in the dark, pulling the piece of fishing net off her wrist, and leaving it on the dresser. I only remember her hands ruffling my hair and pulling the blanket over me, the rain pinging against the roof outside my window.

  When I woke up the second time, it was already light out, and the rain had stopped. I took my time getting up. It was a Sunday, and when I went downstairs, Mamma and Papà were both gone. I remember thinking maybe they had gone for a walk or to Mass or to get a coffee. But I should have known. Her first swim in months and she took it in the rain.

  My phone lights up again.

  COME ON, ETTO. DAI.

  You have to believe me, the last thing I want to do on a Saturday night is go to a disco and watch a thousand kids on Campari and hormones rubbing up against each other to the “Macarena” or “La Vida Loca” or whatever cazzate the posers are listening to these days. And I have zero desire to stand around and watch as Fede and Bocca bludgeon some Australian girls into submission with their stupid lines and their bad English, dragging them to the back door of the Hotel Paradiso by their thong straps. But I think about Papà coming home, and having to sit in the empty apartment all night with him, staring at the television, my omission squatting on me like a goblin or an imp.

  “Okay, okay. Cazzo, Fede. I’m coming, I’m coming.”

  I put on my Chuck Taylors and tie Luca’s favorite hoodie around my waist. As soon as I step out the front door, I get sucked into the current of tourists on the passeggiata, the faces of my neighbors surfacing like shining fish.