The Sistine Chapel was by far her favorite, and every time Luca had a match in Rome, we suffered the Metro, the long lines, and the souvenir vendors to see it. When I was little, all I remembered was the scaffolding and what looked like worms—a writhing mass of pink, naked bodies pinned to the ceiling like larvae, muscles straining, faces contorted, trapped for all eternity. By the time I was eleven or twelve, I looked up at the same ceiling and saw only breasts. Large breasts, small breasts, full breasts, sagging breasts, lopsided breasts, breasts with nipples like fingers, breasts pointing in opposite directions like signs at a crossroads. London, Paris, New York, Milan, Breasts. Breasts and, briefly, piselli, which I only let myself glance at for half seconds at a time and only for comparison’s sake because God knows I didn’t want to end up a finocchio like Nicola Nicolini.
But I remember the time when it finally made sense to me, and when I figured out why she liked it so much. It was right after Luca moved up to the U16s, and it was the hottest summer ever recorded in Rome. I woke up in my bed in the pensione already sweaty and annoyed, and I only braved the Metro across town to humor Mamma and because the museums were air-conditioned. That day it seemed like we stood in the chapel forever, our necks wrenched back, tour after tour squeezing in on us from all sides, every language in the world piling up around us like the great rubble of Babel.
Mamma had probably explained it to me a hundred times before, and I already knew every story there was about Michelangelo. How the pope forced him into it. How everyone thinks he painted it lying on his back, but really, he was standing up the whole time. How he painted one of his critics into The Last Judgment as a demon with a snake biting off his pisello. Thanks to Mamma, I had long ago learned the strict organization of it all—the ancestors of Jesus above the windows and the hulking prophets anchoring the spaces between them. I already knew the nine central scenes from Genesis by heart and in order. First, there was the creation of everything good—light, sun, water, Adam, Eve—and then the descent: God kicking Adam and Eve out of the garden, God flooding the world, Noah ending up in a pathetic, drunken heap at the end.
But this time Mamma said something new, or at least something I hadn’t listened to before. She said the ceiling was the most human work of art ever created. Human. That was exactly the word she used. Not divine or beautiful or meraviglioso or any of the synonyms we made up in La Lingua Bastarda. No. She called it human. And finally, that day, I saw what she saw, that this great work of art was just people doing human things—crying, blushing, sewing, primping, suckling, reading, playing, lifting, struggling, smiling, grimacing, thinking, and doing those things with wool and weaving that no one knows the words to anymore. All of them intertwined.
Before we went to Luca’s match that afternoon, we had enough time to have lunch in some beat-up caffè in Trastevere, and I remember looking around at the other customers, the waiters joking at the bar, and the pedestrians walking by. And because this was the old Trastevere, before the hipsters and the developers got their hands on it, they were ordinary people doing ordinary things—walking their dogs, carrying their groceries, pushing baby strollers, or humping around on canes. And for that one, perfect hour, the world reordered itself the same way the ceiling had, the vulgar herd separating into individual and noble lives. Husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, customers and clients, friends. For that one hour, everything was as it should be, and it all made sense.
I went home after that weekend and started drawing. Not comics or copies of magazine pages like I was used to doing, but real people from real life. I would sit out on the molo or the balcony during the afternoon break and draw the men fishing or the tourists lying on the beach, the waiters in the restaurants along the passeggiata, or the Mangona brothers leaning out the windows of their huts. I filled notebook after notebook, showing no one, not even Casella. Not even Mamma. Sometimes I wonder what she would have said.
I look up at Charon’s blank ceiling, and the chatter in my head stops. I get a strange feeling, like someone else is doing the thinking for me, and I no longer control my own head. Suddenly I’m on my feet, dragging the heavy tables across the floor with a deafening vibration.
Porca miseria. I see it in a flash and all so clearly.
The scaffolding that takes shape over the next couple of hours is a marvel of engineering and a testament to Professoressa Gazzolo’s physics class. I pull extra tables from the other classrooms, levering and heaving them, two by two, layer by layer, with some invisible strength. In the end I build what looks like two fortresses, three layers high, one taking up the front half of the aula and the other, the back. I tear apart the boxes in the art room that were left in limbo, and I collect every pencil, every brush, every can of paint and roll of paper. I find three posters of the Sistine Chapel, rubber-banded and forgotten, and I take the best one and climb the scaffold of tables, crouching and contorting until I’m at the top. I look down at the floor. My knees rubberize, and I start to feel a little sick. My fingertips cling to the plaster, digging in, looking for a handhold.
“Easy there,” I say. I steady my legs and have a good laugh at myself. I stretch my arms out like in Titanic when they are at the front of the ship, Kate and Leonardo DiCraprio, as we used to call him just to annoy the girls in our class. I look down the length of the aula, the globe lights dangling a meter from the ceiling.
“I’m the king of the world!” I shout. “The king of the world!”
I laugh. The echo fades and a sober silence sets in. I dig the pencil out of my back pocket and wrap my fingers around it. It feels gigantic, like when the nuns first taught us how to write our names back in asilo. I roll it around between my fingers and stare up at the vast, blank space. I look back and forth from the poster to the smooth ceiling, and I plot out the first of the nine central panels in my head. I’ve decided to start with the last one, suspended over Charon’s desk at the front of the aula. The Drunkenness of Noah.
I haven’t drawn anything in two years. My hand shakes as it follows the curve of Noah’s back and thigh as he lies slumped on the ground. I draw and redraw the pockets in the cloth as it falls and bunches beneath him. I try to copy his sons’ young muscles as they stand around pointing, deciding what to do. It takes me all night just to get the basic outline down, and trust me, it’s no masterpiece. The sons end up looking like a bunch of bickering women with curlers piled on their heads, and the lines of the drapery are a mess—smudged and wobbly, some of them feathering out into false ends like a frayed wire after several attempts to get the curve right. Michelangelo himself would have thrown me out onto the stones of the piazza with all his other assistants. But I have a strange feeling of satisfaction, and as I look down the clean, white arch, I can see the other panels emerging from the plaster on their own.
I will give her a resting place as beautiful as the tombs of the Roman emperors or the popes in the Renaissance. Not some flat, anonymous stone in a nondescript cemetery next to dead relatives in a country she never loved. But here, surrounded by her favorite painting and overlooking the sea. And, Mamma, wherever you are out there, you will finally see how much I loved you, and how much you threw away.
I know, I know. You are probably shaking your head, thinking, what kind of deficiente thinks he will be able to paint a copy of the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of a classroom? What kind of arrogant stronzo? What kind of naive child? Believe me, it’s nothing I don’t ask myself as I walk down the hill in the early morning light. Papà is already leaving for Martina’s.
“Where have you been all night?”
“Out with Fede.”
“I thought you and Fede had an argument.”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody has to tell me anything. I am your father. I know what you are thinking before you even think it.” He looks at his watch. “When you and Jimmy are finished unloading the truck, send him over to Martina’s. I need to talk to him about the July orders. And of course, if you hear anything about Yuri
Fil, anything at all . . .”
“I know, Papà.”
“Try to get it out of that niece of Signora Malaspina if you see her.”
“Yes, Papà.”
I go upstairs and change my clothes, make myself a coffee, and bring it down to the shop. I drink it staring at the portraits on the wall—my bisnonno, Nonno, and Papà, lined up like a firing squad. I grip an imaginary cigarette between my lips and shut my eyes beneath an imaginary blindfold. Pow. I slump against the banco, and the imaginary cigarette falls to the floor.
My phone lights up. Fede, from the beach, ten meters away.
HEY, STRONZO. YOU LOOK LIKE HELL.
This is Fede’s way of apologizing.
YOUR AUNTIE.
And that is mine.
The wall phone rings just before eight. It’s Papà, calling from Martina’s.
“Did you forget what I said about Jimmy?”
“Jimmy didn’t come.”
“Didn’t come?”
“He must be running late.”
“Running late? When is the last time that happened?”
“I’m sure he’ll be here.”
“Make sure you send him over.” Click.
My mind stays up on the hill and in the aula all morning. The only time I come to is when someone asks if I’ve heard anything about Yuri, and when Papà calls every hour on the hour to see if Jimmy has shown up yet.
“Not yet. Maybe you should call his papà?”
“Yes, maybe.”
The wall phone rings again at noon. “He hasn’t come yet, Papà.”
“Hello?”
“Hello?”
“Hello, is this the macelleria?” She says it in Italian, but her accent is unmistakable.
“Yes.”
“Etto?”
“Yes.”
“There is a problem at the villa today,” she says in English. “Paparazzi. We cannot come down to the shops. Can you bring the meat to us? To the villa?”
“Of course. At your service.” At your service. I sound like a fottuto eunuch.
She wants a whole rabbit, a whole chicken, six steaks, a kilo of ground beef, and six hundred grams of prosciutto, unsliced. I go upstairs and get my rucksack, pack up the order, and start taking apart the banco early. As soon as the last customer is gone, I flip the sign and lock the door, step out onto the passeggiata, and pull the floodgate down. The sun is blinding today, bouncing off the waves, and with no breeze, the hot air stays trapped against the land. I weave through the crammed streets and try to stay in the shade of the awnings and the mandarin trees. As I walk, I feel conspicuous, as if everyone is watching me from their windows and they know exactly where I’m headed.
On Via Partigiani, the Mangona brothers go by in a blur.
“Ride with us, Etto!” one of them shouts as they pass.
“Tomorrow!” I shout back.
“It’s always tomorrow,” and they both laugh.
Sometimes I wonder if Luca and I would have been as close as the Mangona brothers if I’d stuck with calcio. Maybe I should have tried. Maybe at least I would have had more stories about him instead of this awful blank slate of the last five years of his life.
I trudge on under the weight of the rucksack, past Nonno and Nonna’s path, past Mino’s house and the field, the sun now pounding away at me like a spike being driven into the ground. My back is soaked and my legs are tired, but I fight the hill every step, and I push myself as fast as I can go so the Ukrainians will not have lukewarm rabbit and sticky prosciutto. As Papà always says, we are judged on the condition of the meat when it comes out of the package and not only when it goes in.
At the villa, there are four black cars with tinted windows parked on the access road alongside the iron fence. There’s no movement as I walk past the cars, but when I near the gate, I can hear the muffled slamming of doors. The villa rises in front of me with its columns, balconies, and arbors, and as the creeping shadows in my peripheral vision make their way toward me, I try to focus on the front door.
Shit. Stay calm. Keep your hands visible. They are only paparazzi. Then again, maybe it was a lie to protect me. Maybe they are really mafia coming to collect a debt, and I am the collateral damage. Maybe in a few minutes, I will be nothing more than pieces scattered along the road, a few bits of hair and trace that the crime channel will reassemble into a suspenseful, hour-long forensic elegy in my memory. Blessed are the contents of his stomach and the DNA results, blessed the identifiable tool marks from the custom-made nunchucks they used on his face.
The front door of the villa sweeps open, slowly and dramatically. Behind me, I can feel the shadows closing in, the rapid-fire of the camera shutters like lizards flicking their tongues.
“Out of the way,” and they press their lenses through the bars of the gate.
It’s not Zhuki drifting toward me but the woman on the cell phone who came into the shop. She’s wearing a gold bikini and a long, white robe as thin as a spider’s web. Tatiana the Showgirl. Yuri Fil’s wife. I don’t know where she came from, if she’s originally Russian or Ukrainian or what. All I know—all anyone knows—is that she started out as a humble showgirl, a simple vehicle to deliver breasts to the masses, and has graduated to become a calcio player’s wife, one of the sequined blondes floating through the tabloid pages, haunting VIP access areas at the stadiums and dimly lit parties at night. Once in a while I’ll see her in a WAG roundup or an interview, but whatever clichéd musings she might have are immediately eclipsed by her giant and mesmerizing breasts.
She smiles and reaches her hand through the bars as I take the packages out of the rucksack. But like the Austrian girl, she isn’t smiling at me, only over my head, her gold breasts like hovering Ufos, hypnotizing me. She holds out a hundred-euro note, dangling it in front of my face, and I freeze.
“Take,” I hear her say, in English, through her clenched smile.
“Oh, no, no, signora. You have a conto at the shop.”
“Take. You. Euro.”
“But we do not accept tips, signora.”
“Euro! Take!” she hisses, and her gold breasts suddenly look menacing.
I take the bill and slip it into my pocket with as little fanfare as possible, my face burning, the shutters still firing around me.
“Oh! Oh! Paparazzi! Paparazzi!” she exclaims, even though they have been less than a meter from her the entire time. A look of alarm crosses her face, and she covers her collarbone with her hand, knocking her knees in a fake Marilyn Monroe. My eyes finally break from the spell of the gold breasts and are drawn upward to the veranda, and there is Zhuki, laughing at the whole scene, or maybe just at me. I let my hand flap free from the pocket of my jeans in an almost imperceptible wave, and she lifts her hand slightly from the railing before turning and disappearing behind the roofline. It’s only then I realize that Tatiana the Showgirl has gone back into the house as well. The door of the villa closes with the quiet precision of a German car door, and the paparazzi stop taking pictures and leave my side, drifting back to their black sedans. The heat closes in around me, and I come to.
Shit. If Papà sees this, he’s going to kill me, bury me, and then resurrect me, just so he can kill me a second time. For not telling him in the first place. For not calling over to Martina’s and letting him make the delivery. For taking a tip from Tatiana the Showgirl. And for other reasons he’ll make up with the shovel in his hands. Shit.
“Ehi!” I shout to the last of the photographers as he’s about to get into one of the cars. “I’m not going to be in the tabloids or anything, am I?”
And the guy gives me a look like I’m the biggest deficiente he’s ever met, rolls his eyes, ducks into the car, and slams the door.
The next morning, I’m still lying in bed when I hear the truck pull into the alley and shut off abruptly. Usually, Jimmy lets it idle while he smokes a cigarette and waits for me. When I get down to the shop, Papà is there—not with Jimmy but with Jimmy’s papà, who I haven’t see
n in at least a couple of years.
“Sorry about the mix-up yesterday, Etto. It’s been a stressful week.”
“Where’s Jimmy?”
“He didn’t say anything to you?”
Papà looks at me intently.
“Nothing. Why? What happened?”
Jimmy’s papà shakes his head and sighs. “He’s left us.”
“What do you mean, left?”
“I mean, he came down to breakfast on Friday morning and told his mother and me it was going to be his last day of work. He said he and his friend have gotten themselves jobs.”
“Doing what?”
“Who knows. He’s calling himself a consultant. Some company based in America. He said they have conventions to sell video games all over the world, and he and this friend will be going to them and doing demonstrations.”
“That’s going to be their job?” Papà says. “To play video games?”
“That’s what he said . . . I know. What kind of job is that?”
“And where is he going to live?” Papà asks.
“I asked him that, too. I said, if these jobs are all over the world, where are you going to live, and you know what he said?”
“What?”
“Hotels. One night here, one night there. Who would want that? Can you imagine waking up in a different bed every morning only to spend all day in a hall with no windows, staring at a screen? Why would he want to do that when he could be out in the sunshine and the fresh air, working on the land?”
“It sounds fishy to me,” Papà says. “Do you want me to have Silvio investigate it?”
“I don’t know. He showed us the contract, and it looked legitimate enough. Signed. Notarized. Heat stamped. I didn’t even know he had any friends besides me and his mother. In fact, I asked him, and you know what he said?”
The Sun and Other Stars Page 15
