“Winner!”
Odi shouts. “This guy is killer. He is an absolute shark. You can see the power, the control, the swagger in his looks, in his stride, in his aura.”
Now it’s Jack’s turn.
He takes a first bite out of his croissant, washes it down with the Coke, looks out the window.
Nothing.
Oh, wait, here comes someone. It is a mime, one of those commonly seen street performers who are most abundant at the Pompidou Center, in Montmartre, and in the sixth, near St.-Germain des Prés.
The mime’s face is painted white, and it is by no means clear whether it is a male or a female. It is wearing a white toga and sandals, positions itself on top of a wooden box on the sidewalk, and begins to move various body parts almost imperceptibly, but just enough to let passersby know that they are looking not at a statue but at a human being pretending to be one.
“Winner!”
Jack yelps. “That guy is amazing! He is hardly moving, but he
is
. That must be so hard to do!”
“Wrong again, Einstein!” Ira corrects. “This guy, well,
if
he’s a guy, is a real loser. First of all, d’ya see that pan by his feet? That’s the way he makes his living. He’s basically a beggar. He’ll make maybe ten, twenty bucks today, even if he stays here until the sun goes down. Second, he’s basically a poor slob actor who can’t earn a decent, honest living, so he’s asking people to support him and his wonderful talent of being able to move an inch an hour. Third, he’s pathetic. He can’t even support himself or get ahead or have a title or a staff working under him or run a division or be anyone’s boss. Got no ambition, no drive, no thirst for success!”
Jack Spade listens patiently to his father’s rant and smiles weakly and nods his head in agreement and his father smiles back but has no clue about what is going on under the table, where Jack is clenching his left fist so tight around his hot chocolate spoon that its bowl snaps off cleanly, leaving the stem alone in his quavering hand.
* * *
It is Sunday, May 28, 2045, the day before the opening round of the French Open Juniors. After an invigorating two-hour hit on a rich red clay side court at Roland Garros between young superstar and coach, Giglio, Gioconda, and Ugo enjoy an inspiring walk through the Left Bank, starting from the hotel, continuing past the Odéon theater and the sixth-century church of St.-Germain des Prés—the oldest in Paris—then the Rue Bonaparte and the Rue Jacob past the charming Place du Furstembourg and through the open-air market at the Carrefour de Buci, down the Rue Dauphine to the Pont Neuf and the green Henri IV equestrian statue, along the Seine to the Musée d’Orsay, up the Rue de Bellechasse, then a right on Rue de Varenne, where they arrive, senses filled with the smells and sights of the sixth and seventh arrondissements, at their final destination, the diminutive yet awe-inspiring Musée Rodin.
After a stroll through the immense rectangular formal gardens behind the museum, the three climb the wide, sweeping marble staircase inside, enter one of the rooms filled with sculptures, separate, mill around.
The eyes of the fifteen-year-old light upon a white marble piece that, like the Gaudí church in Barcelona, stops him dead in his tracks.
La Main de Dieu!
As with the Gaudí cathedral, Ugo Bellezza says a silent prayer of thanks that he is deaf and not blind. He walks around the spectacular sculpture of God’s hand once, twice, eight times, and still he cannot believe his wide, bewildered eyes.
As with the Gaudí cathedral, there is so much to take in, but this time it is on a much less grand, and more intimate, scale.
Ugo gets it that this is something special. He knows nothing about Rodin’s life, his training, his art, but he is feeling something visceral, a kind of shudder that is strong and palpable. He may not be an art history major, but he gets it. Totally.
He is looking at this amazing vertical white marble hand of God emerging from a rough, unfinished mass of marble as its base and wondering how Rodin ever got this massive hand to look so strong and yet so loving. He is looking at the back of the sculpture, at the back of God’s hand extruding smooth and gentle and yet powerful from the mass of rough marble, and wondering how Rodin ever accomplished that. He is looking at the front of the statue, at Adam and Eve in a loving caress, he in her lap and cradling her head with his hands and their lips meeting tenderly and all the while the loving, miniature couple is being cradled themselves in this amazing, oversize hand of their awesome Creator, and Ugo is wondering how the artist was ever able to make such a sensuous scene so innocent and glorious.
He is looking at the whole piece, at what a magnificent and sacred statement is being made from so few elements, how the very birth of humankind and of love on earth could possibly have been expressed so simply and majestically by the sculpting of a single hand and the two vest-pocket creatures cradled by it and in it. He is looking for yet a ninth time at the awesome divine hand and the embracing bodies within and suddenly Ugo Bellezza understands really and truly what a metaphor is and how powerful it can be when it simplifies and clarifies and concretizes something very abstract and otherwise nearly unfathomable, just like Giglio always told him. And he is realizing suddenly, on this day before his biggest tennis test yet, what else
The Hand of God
is telling him, that you can create something out of nothing in life, that you can make something smooth and beautiful and powerful out of rough, formless material. And, it finally hits him, the material Rodin is using for his sculpture is marble, but the material God is using for
his
beautiful creation is…
clay
!
Arm in arm, Giglio and Gioconda join up with Ugo, see the love and the inspiration in his eyes. The three look at the masterpiece together, walk around it once, twice in wonderment. And as they look at one another, they all smile and, in unison, form precisely the same four syllables with their lips.
Sprez-za-tu-ra!
* * *
“Loser!”
Ira Spade bellows in front of the dead man’s grave.
He and Jack have been strolling through, and getting lost in, the celebrated and labyrinthine Père-Lachaise cemetery in the eastern twentieth arrondissement and have finally reached their destination: the tomb of The Doors’ Jim Morrison.
“That poor bastard, what a
loser
!” Ira repeats to his son. “First of all, he was a crazy sonuvabitch. No control, no discipline, no ambition, no goals. Second, he died, what, at twenty-seven? And in a bathtub in Paris? Whatta waste! They say he was ingesting heroin, thinking it was cocaine. And he wasn’t even buried in the good ol’ U.S. of A.!
And talk about
losers
? Look at these other dead people, all around you! I mean, all these poets, artists, actors, musicians, writers, scientists—famous Frenchies like Apollinaire and Balzac and Bernhard and Bizet and Delacroix and Gay-Lussac and Marceau and Molière and Piaf and Proust and Seurat—and who d’ya think is by far, and I mean
by far
, the one dead person who gets the most visitors, the most crap thrown on his grave? Jim Morrison, an American!
Losers, all of you!
” Ira, whirling around 360 degrees, shouts at the collective deceased.
A beret-wearing passerby gives Ira the dirtiest look imaginable.
A Xanax tablet burns a hole in the pocket of Jack Spade’s jeans.
* * *
Twenty-eighth of May, 2045, spring, evening,
8
o’clock, dinnertime, Paris, back room, La Gueuze restaurant, 19, rue Soufflot, Paris, 75005. The exact time and place when and where Ugo Bellezza first lays eyes upon the wondrous face of the rising Italian tennis star from Venice
,
Antonella Cazzaro.
The moment strikes Ugo with the same precision and intensity as it did the great Italian poet Francesco Petrarca when he first gazed upon his unrequiting love, Laura, in sonnet LXI of the
Canzoniere
:
Benedetto sia ‘l giorno, e ‘l mese, et l’anno,
Et la stagione, e ‘l tempo, et l’ora, e ‘l punto,
E ‘l bel paese, e ‘l loco ov’io fui giunto
Da’ duo begli occhi che legato m’ànno…
Blessed be the day, and the month, and the year,
and the season, and the time, and the hour, and the point,
and the beautiful country, and the place where I was joined
to the two beautiful eyes that have bound me here…
Fifteen-year-old Antonella’s gorgeous periwinkle eyes twinkle and flash across the table at her new acquaintance, contemporary and compatriot Ugo Bellezza.
A button should be so lucky as to be as cute as Antonella Cazzaro.
The two youths are sitting with Giglio, Gioconda, and Antonella’s mother, Pia, in the back room of La Gueuze, a roomy, festive brasserie in the fifth arrondissement in the shadow of the Panthéon that specializes in the three permanent members of Belgium’s culinary pantheon: ale, mussels, and fries. Antonella and Pia Cazzaro are in Paris for the French Open Girls Juniors, and Pia and Gioconda know each other through common friends, although the two youngsters have never met.
Giglio Marotti gives a brief demonstration of the proper way to eat mussels by placing an empty shell in his right hand and using it as a pincer to extract the meat out of another, inhabited shell held by his left hand.
Ugo, Gioconda, Antonella, and Pia follow suit, their clumsy initial attempts accompanied by giggles, then laughter that eventually subsides as they accrue a level of expertise with the newly learned manual method.
“Delizioso!”
Antonella coos as she plucks a mussel out of its bed and plops it between her perfect lips.
“Ottimo!”
her mother agrees enthusiastically.
Not wishing yet to reveal the secret of his congenital infirmity, Ugo nods in agreement and smiles sheepishly.
This is not like Ugo, who is usually at home in his own skin. But when he meets people he likes for the first time, and this is definitely one of those occasions, he tends to feel nervous and slightly paranoid.
What will Antonella think of me when she finds out that I’m deaf? Will she think I’m stupid? Will she be interested in me, in being my friend? How will we be able to communicate?
Che bella e dolce
, how beautiful and sweet she is. I hope—
A huge smile pasted on her face and her gorgeous Liz Taylor eyes fixed on Ugo, Antonella Cazzaro does something that stops Ugo’s breathing momentarily and leaves a single
frite
dangling goofily from his mouth.
She places her left hand inside her right, then takes her left index finger and circles it around her mouth. Next, she clamps her right hand onto her nose and pulls it outward as if to extend her lovely nose another foot, Pinocchiolike, after which she makes a fist with her left hand, with her thumb sticking out, places it on her cheek, and twists it forward.
Antonella knows how to sign!
The lone Belgian fry drops from Ugo’s mouth and falls harmlessly onto his plate. Ugo’s mind is racing, trying to figure out how she knows sign language and does she have a deaf family member? and if not, how did she get so good at it?
The words Antonella has signed with her hands are “in,” then “mouth,” then “wolf,” then “tomorrow.” In Italian, the first three add up to say, “
in bocca al lupo
,” “in the wolf’s mouth,” a colloquial way of saying “break a leg” or “good luck.” She has just wished Ugo good luck for the opening round of the French Open Juniors tomorrow, and in his native tongue and on his own home court!
Proud mother-hen Pia puffs out her chest and Gioconda smiles that Mona Lisa smile at Giglio, who returns it with the authority and affection of a family member.
Ugo feels a flush of warmth sweep through his entire body, from the top of his
testa
to the bottom of his
piedi
. Recovering from the initial shock, he pulls himself together and with his hands asks Antonella how it is that she knows how to sign.
“I have watched you play with admiration and wanted very much to meet you someday and knew that day would come and I was told you were deaf so I taught myself first the alphabet and then a few words and I began to get fluent and now I can sign pretty much anything I wish to say!” Antonella signs, her gorgeous periwinkle eyes beaming across the table at her new friend.
You could have knocked Ugo over with a strand of spaghettini.
* * *
“Listen up, you sonuvabitch,” Ira Spade shouts to his only child.
Ira and Jack and manager Odi Mondheim are dining at Taillevent, a six-star restaurant, the highest possible fallutin joint in all of the City of Light.
Ira is in his element, happy to be plunking down five, six hundred bucks a head for dinner at this fancy-shmancy establishment and telling himself that if his son does what he’s told and fulfills all his potential, he’ll be able to
buy
the frigging joint.
“I’m gonna ask you one simple question,” Ira continues. “As you know, the following are ten of the greatest champions of all time: Bill Tilden, Ellsworth Vines, Jack Kramer, Pancho Gonzalez, John Newcombe, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg, and Pete Sampras. So how many French Open titles, on the red clay, do you think they won between them?”
“I dunno…fifteen?…twenty?…thirty?” a clueless Jack replies.
“Zero! Zip! Zilch! Nada!
That’s
how many!” Ira spews. “And
that’s
how tough and how important it is for you to get to the finals and beat that little Italian sonuvabitch! Because if you beat him in the Juniors, then when—
and not if!
—you guys eventually play for the men’s title, you’ll be totally in his head, and when you beat him to a pulp, you’ll achieve what none of those great champions ever could!”
A waiter strides up to the table, eager to please and formally dressed in white tie and tails, as in one of those old Fred Astaire movies.
“May I interest you gentlemen in our specialties ziss evening?” he begins.