The Sun and Other Stars

by Brigid Pasulka

  I try to calculate how long I might have to wait here until they leave the villa of their own accord, and I realize that with a villa this size, it could be days. At least until the morning, and I will surely die of anxiety by the morning. Is it better to die of rejection or anxiety? Better to have the blade fall right on your neck or be pricked to death by a second hand on a clock? Maybe she’s awake anyway. Maybe the lights are hers. Maybe like me, she hasn’t been able to sleep since Ferragosto.

  I open my phone and stare at the screen. Oh, humble cell phone, controller of the world, mover of continents, creator and destroyer of love, please tell me what to do.

  But it doesn’t even blink.

  So I look up at the faint light striping the shutters and try to channel the great Chuck Norris. I try to imagine my cells compacting and coating themselves in steel courage, superhuman strength, and lightning-fast competence. I examine the intercom and imagine it’s a nunchuck or a lead pipe, and that I am about to make a perfectly executed ninja move. But my hands are shaking.

  Chuck Norris’s hands shake. In fear of Chuck Norris.

  I buzz and wait. After what feels like a lifetime, I finally hear the click and gasp of the button.

  “Chi è?” The vowels are heavy, weighing down the words. Ihor.

  “It’s Etto.” I smile sheepishly into the security camera and imagine my bulbous head in the fish-eye lens.

  “Etto!” He mumbles something in Ukrainian, then, “Vieni! Vieni!”

  The gate opens, and I walk into a lush garden invisible from the street, filled with knobby old trees and flowering bushes. I hear the locks bang in the ancient door, and I hold my breath as it creaks open.

  “Ihor?”

  Silence.

  “Is anybody there?”

  I peer into the dark shadows of the entryway, and Ihor jumps out at me from behind the door. “Aah!”

  “Aaaaaaaaah!”

  He laughs, steps into the doorway, and puts me in some kind of python-wrestling hold that I think might be a hug. “Etto! Surprise,” he says in Italian. “Why you here?”

  “I’m sorry it’s so late. I really need to talk to Zhuki. I mean, only if she wants to see me.”

  Ihor looks confused. He motions me into the cool, dark hall and shuts the door behind me. “I no understand.”

  “Is Zhuki here?”

  He shakes his head. “America. Chicago.” And with his hand he makes a slow, swooping arc over an imaginary ocean.

  “Oh. So what are you still doing here?”

  “Eh?”

  “Why are you here? You.” I point at his chest. “You. Here. Why.” I imagine Bocca and his caveman face.

  “Aha,” Ihor says. “Bodyguard no so important in Chicago. I go . . . September . . . no. October. October I go America. Now I watch villa.” He spreads his arms wide, and the dark entryway begins to take form, with frescoes of angels on the ceiling and stone griffins and gargoyles peeking out into the hallway ahead.

  Ihor furrows his eyebrows, big as hairbrushes. “Why you go Genoa? Very far, no? Why you no telephone she?”

  “We had a fight.” I knock the knuckles of my fists together.

  “You fight? You? With Zhuki?” He scowls and knocks his fists together, only when he does it, it seems like a threat.

  “No, no, no. I didn’t hit her. We had an argument.” And I turn my hands into puppets, talking back and forth. “Argument.” Shit, this is humiliating. “I want to apologize. I want to say I am sorry.”

  “Only sorry?” Ihor cocks his head.

  “Sorry’s not enough?”

  “Say me, Etto. You love she?”

  “I don’t know, Ihor, that’s a really hard question to ask a man, you know. How does somebody know if they’re in love? And who knows exactly what love is anyway?”

  Ihor furrows his brow. “I no understand. You love she? Yes or no?” And he looks down at me with the same tenderness as he did at the guitar onstage at the festa.

  “Yes.”

  Ihor grins in relief, as if this is a question that’s kept him up at night, and it releases a flurry of words. “She love you also. I know. She love you. I see she cry. I know she love.” He points to his forehead, and I imagine him as a Ukrainian Cyclops, the tiny body parts of Ulysses’s crew dangling from his mouth.

  “You telephone she,” he says again. “You say she.”

  * * *

  It seems so clear when Ihor says it with his ten-word vocabulary, but as soon as I’m back out in the maze of darkened streets, my mind tangles up again. I walk around for an hour or two, and end up sitting on a bench down by the old harbor, watching the cranes load the container ships and the planes landing and taking off from Christopher Columbus Airport. I think about what would happen if I hopped the next plane to Chicago. What Papà would do. Most likely, he would hire an apprentice to help him, and the guy would turn out to be a paragon of hard work and responsibility. He and Papà would develop their own private routines and jokes, and the space between us would only grow wider, our lumpy Pangaea drifting apart until one of us becomes Africa and the other South America, and we can’t even understand the simplest command like “Go.”

  We’re okay, right? he said, but how far does okay reach? Not as far as good or close.

  Then I imagine it the other way. Going back to San Benedetto and waiting for another girl like Zhuki who never comes, letting my heart slowly shrivel up until it fossilizes in the middle of a beat and I have to pluck the useless thing out of my chest, heave it over the terraces, and watch it sink to the bottom of the sea. Maybe I should just move to an anonymous high-rise in Milan. All that concrete and steel to protect and insulate me. I used to believe it was the fear of death that kept me out of the water, but maybe I have the same disease Mamma had. Maybe I’m terrified of life creeping back in, and with it, the guilt of living.

  You telephone she, I hear Ihor say in my head.

  No afraid, no afraid, Yuri says.

  Open your eyes! Papà shouts.

  It’s your fucking choice, Fede adds.

  I hear the steady ringtone of America, a mechanical voice asking me to leave a message, and finally a beep.

  “Hi . . . Zhuki? It’s Etto. From San Benedetto. Well, I’m in Genoa, actually. I was just at your house. I know that sounds a little . . . well, like a stalker. I didn’t mean it like that. Unless you want it to be like that.” Shit. I pull the phone away from my ear and look at it, like there is some button that will make me sound like a rational human being. “Anyway, I talked to Ihor, and he said to call you. I mean, I wanted to call you . . . I’ve wanted to call you since you left. I’m sorry. That’s what I’m really trying to say. I’m sorry and I miss you. And I’m kind of worried I’m going to say something stupid, or even more stupid, so I’m going to hang up now. But I miss you.”

  I hit end, and I imagine the message splintering into gigabytes and zooming through the air, dodging through the cybertraffic like a bicycle messenger and weaving through the clouds of early morning SMS-es leaving the EU—feathery cirrus clouds floating over proper France and thicker cumulous ones over those perpetually awake Spaniards. There it goes, soaring like an eagle, zigzagging through the tiny puffs over the islands in the Atlantic, plunging through the thick smog of night traders in New York, and hovering above Chicago until it spies the house or the high-rise where they live now. There it goes again, zooming down like on Google Earth, finally coming to rest on her nightstand with a soft buzz, like a butterfly landing and adjusting its wings.

  I find Bocca’s truck and squeeze through the narrow city streets until they release me onto Via Aurelia. The sea fans out to my left, the granulated dawn revealing the black wicks of the cypresses, the rounded silhouettes of olive and lemon trees, and the maritime pines arching toward the water. I remember coming back this way from Luca’s matches in La Spezia or Rome or wherever he happened to be playing, Mamma and Papà in the front seat chatting softly as I drifted peacefully in and out of sleep. I remember the ste
ady vibrations of the road beneath me and the certainty of heading toward a fixed pin on the map, of knowing that however long the ride was, when we got there, we would be home.

  I take a deep breath and think about Zhuki. There’s nothing more to do. Whatever happens next, at least I’ve done something. And as I speed down the coast through tunnels and across terraces, I have the sensation that I’m throwing off weight, that it’s bouncing on the road behind me and careening over the cliff. I open the windows to breathe in the sea air and hear the pounding of the waves, and I feel so light, it’s hard to believe I can keep the truck pinned to the curves.

  It’s about five thirty when I roll down Via Londra. The passeggiata is abandoned, and as soon as I park the truck, I head straight for the molo. I walk all the way out, past the warning signs and the benches. My skin pinches into gooseflesh as I strip down to my underwear and climb over the railing. I hang my toes off the edge and play with the spring and the slack in my arms as I bounce my back gently against the railing. I still feel the old fear, but I don’t even bother trying to summon up any courage or to think about what Chuck Norris or Yuri Fil or any of the rest of them would do. I’m scared. But there are some things more important than fear.

  Pronti . . . attenti . . .

  Pronti . . . attenti . . .

  Pronti . . . attenti . . .

  Via!

  I take a deep breath and jump. Shit. I go down and down, falling to the bottom, the sea closing over me, thick like gelatin. I can feel my hair trailing behind me like speed lines, my body slowly losing momentum until I stop, nothing under my feet. I open my eyes and see the dark shapes of the pylons and the remains of Signor Cato’s fishing boat. This is the last thing Mamma saw. My muscles relax. My heart stops. My lungs prick.

  At first I think I’m dying because I start to see Mamma and Luca. But instead of the clips of their last moments, my mind starts to flood with good memories. The summers on the beach. The winter breaks we spent skiing. The smell of pancakes on the weekends. The trip to America. I feel the air inside my lungs buoying me up and the water brushing against me in the other direction. I pick up momentum as I rise, the color through my eyelids changing from gray to pink to bright white as my head bursts through the surface of the water. I gasp for air and blink hard. The water clears from my ears, and I hear the gulls crying again, and the gentle waves unfurling on the shore like lace. I tread water for a minute, turning my body in a slow 360, seeing it all like a tourist in my own town. It’s all here. The molo. The horizon. The hump of Laigueglia. Our apartment. Our shop. Martina’s bar. I swim toward the stairs, buried under the tide. I feel for the edges of the concrete with my toes, lift my dripping weight out of the water, and climb.

  If you ever fall in love, don’t fall in love with someone from Genoa because it will make you dare to hope. And once you open the door to hope, my friend, it’s all over. You can try all you want to slam it shut and pretend you don’t care. You can try to go back to your cynical self, expecting the worst, and living your low, groveling life day by day. But once the door is open, all the possibilities of the world will come flooding into your veins, and you will feel your heart accelerating, trying to keep up with your feet as you run down the molo, chasing the blue light of a fottuto cell phone.

  CALL ME TOMORROW, ETTO.

  Now, I know that maybe compared to you, I’m a very young man with myopic thoughts and small experience, living in a tiny town clinging to a coast very far away from the chair or the bed where you sit right now.

  So who am I to tell you anything?

  But if you’ll listen, please let me tell you just this one thing: you have never felt such warmth as putting on dry clothes and walking into your own house as the sun is rising, of tiptoeing past your father’s bedroom, where he is sleeping like a stone, of twirling a piece of fishing net around your wrist into infinity, of slipping under the covers of your brother’s bed.

  One of the last comics Casella and I drew together was about a bunch of Japanese tourists from Hiroshima who fanned out over the world with their cameras around their necks, seeking retribution. They would smile and nod. They would compliment their subject’s beauty and politely ask to take a picture. But when they clicked the shutters of their cameras, everyone in the frame disintegrated into a heap of ashes and dust. I drew four full-page panels of the news being broadcast throughout the world, the dust storms and panic spreading through the Champs-Élysées, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, and Times Square. People tried to save themselves by flooding into places like Bishkek and Nome, Alaska—wherever there were no five-star hotels or three-star restaurants—but the Japanese tourists found them anyway, and they were no match for Japanese courtesy and flattery. In the end, only the Amish survived.

  That’s what it feels like in San Benedetto at the end of the summer when the tourists leave. No matter how long I live here, I will never be used to it, this sudden exodus and the complete stillness that follows. In one day, the beach is cleared of cabanas, gates, boardwalks, chaises, and umbrellas, the carts rumbling back and forth to the storage spaces under the passeggiata. The restaurant and shop owners pile their chairs and tables and racks onto the sidewalk and give everything a good scrub. The vicos fill with long shadows, and the voices of my neighbors echo against the stone walls. San Benedetto is ours again, and the intimacy will last all winter long.

  In the shop, there’s less work, and we’re not open at all in the afternoons, so after lunch with Papà, I go up to work on the aula. The seventh panel becomes Mamma scooping and pushing apart the water and the land, and I give Luca the one next to hers, the one with the planets, only the planets morph into giant soccer balls, Luca’s feet cocked under him, his leg muscles rippling as he goes to kick the sun. I start filling in the ancestors and prophets over the windows, and I draw Nonno and his lemon tree.

  On Tuesday mornings, he still comes by and works the banco while Papà and I do the butchering, and sometimes we stop our work to listen to him joking with the nonne about things that happened fifty years ago, or telling Regina’s kids that the calf’s head is really the chupacabra, caught in the light of the last full moon.

  They scream with delight.

  “Now, who would like some chicken feet?”

  “Me! Me!”

  Papà and I watch through the beaded curtain as Nonno hands each of them a chicken foot, toes up, and the kids wave them in each other’s faces, making lightsaber noises as they swish through the air.

  This is the way I remember the shop when Luca and I stopped by on our way home from school—full of life, Nonna or Mamma chatting with the customers, keeping Papà and Nonno in the loop of gossip as they worked in the back room.

  Sometime in October, I break down my first vitello. The cuts are not the clean, preschool shapes that come from Papà’s hands, and a few of them are so ugly they will have to be ground up. But Papà and Nonno seem proud. One day I come in to find Yuri’s jersey moved to the back, and my portrait hanging at the end of the line. And even though my days look pretty much the same as they ever were, I find out that there is a difference between turning on the lights of your father’s shop and turning on the lights of your own. As Yuri would say, I’m not playing the catenaccio anymore. As Fede would say, it’s my fucking choice.

  Martina’s is finished by the time the cold weather comes. At first Papà and Silvio insisted on waiting for her to come back and host the grand reopening, but the postcards kept coming from every corner of the world. Besides, it seemed a shame to let the new flat-screen stay dark while the calcio season was already under way. So they all started taking turns opening and closing the bar, and as a result, there are probably ten sets of keys to Martina’s new door. Papà makes me an eleventh, so at least a few times a week, I can let myself into the bar at midnight, sit in the glow of the computer, and find Zhuki waiting on the other end, the parallelogram of afternoon sunlight on the wall behind her shifting slightly each day.

  One thing they never tell you when s
omeone close to you dies is that it will change every relationship you have. Even with the person you’re mourning. Since you will be different, you will see them differently, and what you had together will morph into something new. The same goes for the living. I thought I’d gotten to know Papà over the months of working side by side at the back table, breaking down the meat, or watching him play calcio or become friends with Yuri off the field. But it turns out the way I really get to know him is in those late nights talking to Zhuki, when I discover how Papà must have felt in Vigo so many years ago. I start to see the man who would try to drive a Vespa all the way to Piedmont. The man who had so much love for a woman, it was enough to stretch to another continent, and even another realm.

  What do Zhuki and I talk about? We talk about the future sometimes, but mostly we squander our time on stupidaggini. Because once you see a tomorrow and a next week and a next year, you can afford to. We talk about Yuri and Papà, Little Yuri and Principessa, and all the people in San Benedetto who ask about them. We laugh about Yuri’s old dream of melting right into the American pot and walking the streets unrecognized. Instead, he went on one talk show and instantly became a star. The Americans, they love his footwork and his jokes, his Scottish-Ukrainian-Italian English, his single-father pathos, and his philosophizing about calcio. He’s invited to all the talk shows, fund-raisers, and red carpets, there are several sponsorship deals in the works, and even rumors of television and movie roles. Yuri has clearly won the breakup. Vanni Fucci moved on from Tatiana to steal another teammate’s girlfriend, and by Christmas, Tatiana has skulked back into the kick line with the other blond, scandalized former WAGs.

  It is the comedy of life, no?