The Sun and Other Stars (17 page)

“We must go. Tatiana wait for us,” Yuri says, pulling me up off the ground. “Maybe paparazzi are sleep now.”

“There are paparazzi?”

“Only one tonight. He came from Rome in the afternoon. A little guy, skinny, with six senses. No matter what, he always know where we are. It is strange, very strange.”

“How did you leave the villa?”

“Oh, we know how to systemize the paparazzi. Easy. I tell Tatiana, wear the bikini and go on balcony. Then we go out back door. It is my hope, this little paparazzo, he will not be here for long time. Many people say Ilary will be have Totti’s baby.” He scoops a pregnant belly out of the air in front of his own flat stomach. “If is true, all paparazzi will be in Rome from this weekend. If we are lucky, they will be marry and there will be wedding. Then paparazzi will be in Rome whole summer, and everybody will forget about stupid Ukrainian striker.”

Zhuki says something to Little Yuri, takes his hand, and heads toward the path. “Ciao,” she throws over her shoulder in my direction, and I lap it up.

“Ciao!”

Yuri heads toward one of the floodlights. “We will see you again tomorrow. Same time.”

“We’ll see.” I try not to sound too eager. “I’m not sure if I can.”

“Ah, but I am sure,” Yuri says, laughing. “I am sure we see you tomorrow.”

The floodlights go off. I hear the rustling as they climb up to the next terrace, and suddenly, I’m alone again. I sit down next to Luca and light a cigarette.

“Did you hear that? She said ‘ciao.’ Clearly to me. She wouldn’t have been saying it to anyone else. And that smirk.” I twist around, and the photo stares back at me, cold and unblinking.

I rest my back against the stone as I listen to the midnight bells and watch the lights blink out across the hill. I catch a flicker of light coming through the row of cypresses. Shit. I must have left one of the lights on in the aula the other night. I heave myself up from the grass and push through the second line of cypresses that divides the field from the liceo. I fumble with the keys and pop each of the three locks in turn.

“Anybody there?” I call into the corridor, and my own nervous laugh echoes back to me.

When I was little, I was always the last to get ready for bed, and when we watched movies together on a Friday or Saturday night, sometimes I was too scared to go upstairs on the commercials to brush my teeth or put on my pajamas. So Mamma started a system, calling to me at regular intervals from her seat on the sofa, like the pinging of a submarine.

“Are you there?”

“I’m here!”

“Are you there?”

“Here!”

“Are you there?”

“Here!”

She would keep it up for as long as I was away, until I was safely tucked next to her on the sofa again.

I walk down the corridor, past the rows of class portraits, white with dust, shrinking with each graduation year. Nonno had forty or fifty classmates filling the frame, dressed smartly in jackets and skinny ties. Papà’s is down to twenty-five, squeezed into tight sweaters and flared pants. In my class, there were only eight of us fourth-years in the classical program, only six in the class below. I guess we should have known it was coming, but the closing of the liceo caught everyone off guard. They posted the letter from the regional education office in August, right before our fifth and final year was supposed to start. The letter said it would be temporary, one year, maybe two, until they could figure out the funding to open it back up. For the rest of the week, everyone was red-faced and waving their arms around, planning strikes and tax boycotts, but in the end, they just shrugged their shoulders and forgot about it. That’s how everything happens in this fottuto country—depth charges of outrage and then apathy stretching as far as the eye can see.

In the end, we were taken in by the schools in Albenga, the classical and scientific students to the liceo, the hospitality students to the institute. The teachers, who once seemed to us an indivisible unit, were unceremoniously disbanded. Charon had qualified for retirement eons ago, so he moved back in with his mamma in Rome, and Professoressa Gazzolo went to Milan, where to the torment of every boy at school, she had a muscly boyfriend with a Ferrari. Et tu, Professoressa Gazzolo? The rest of our teachers went directly from their vacations to jobs teaching other delinquents in other backwaters of the empire, with no interruption in pay.

I walk past the bathrooms and more classrooms, down to Charon’s aula at the end of the corridor. I stop at the doorway and reach up to touch the frame, where someone in some previous class had scratched a message with a sharp knife or a pen nib.

“Abandon all hope, you who enter here . . .”

And for the first time I notice that the quote has been finished, only the second part isn’t carved in the jagged gouges of some high school kid. It’s written in sharp pencil, in the restrained loops that once crowded out the margins of my essays. Charon always wrote in pencil, he told us, in order to emphasize the permanence and infallibility of words themselves.

“. . . for you have lost the gift of understanding.”

I read the words again and I can’t help laughing, imagining old Charon up on a chair, vandalizing his own doorway for a joke only he would get. It was hard to see Charon doing anything for a joke. He had wispy white hair that looked like it was leaping away from his skull in sheer terror, and he was so old, he talked about ancient Rome with the same affection the other teachers had for their childhoods in the sixties and seventies. I think the other teachers were even a little scared of him. None of them were allowed to use his chalk, his chair, his books, or his aula. Pete the Comb Man could go in there to clean and do maintenance, but no one else.

I open the door and it’s dark. My brain, my logic, whatever, tells me it must have been the reflection of the moon I saw, bouncing off the windows, but something else inside nags at me. I sit down in my old seat. For four years, we begged Charon to change us out of alphabetical order. For four years, we stared at Sima’s bra straps and Claudia’s smashed culo that miraculously re-formed when she stood up, and we made the same joke of kneeling on our seats, pretending Aristone’s head was too big for us to see past to the chalkboard. For four years, every time we had a test, we would take turns whistling softly from the second row until Charon looked up from his book with those burning embers of his eyes and said, plainly and calmly, “Stop it.”

I let the silence sink into me.

“Mamma, are you there?”

My own voice echoes down from the vaulted ceiling.

“Did you see me tonight, running around out there? I’ll bet you couldn’t believe it.”

No answer.

“You would like her,” I continue. “She’s not like Luca’s floozies. Remember that one who stalked him all the way from Milan? She was a masterpiece, eh?”

If I could have only one thing back, it would be her voice. The way she put the accent on the wrong syllable in Italian or amputated all her
g
’s in English, and the mix of both that only the four of us could ever completely comprehend. She and Luca are probably up there right now, floating around, laughing and talking in La Lingua Bastarda. Sometimes if I think about it too hard, I feel like a chump. I thought we were a team, I really did. Me and Mamma. Papà and Luca. That’s how it was supposed to be. When we followed Luca to his matches on the weekends, Papà would go to the stadium at the first light of dawn. He could spend the whole morning there, talking to coaches and scouts and scrutinizing Luca as he trained. Mamma and I would spend those mornings at one of the art museums. That was our thing. Mamma used to be as passionate about art as Papà is about calcio. It was the reason she came to Europe in the first place, because she said she was tired of learning art history from slides, and tired of being in California, where there was nothing older than she was.

She could make any museum interesting, even when I was a kid. She would take me around to each sculpture or painting as if she was introducing me to old friends. She taught me how to tell the difference between a Greek statue and a Roman one and how to crack the code of the Dutch still lifes. She told me endless stories about the sculptors who had a competition to the death over some commission, or the painter who was stone blind but chose colors by tasting them. When I got tired, she would hide behind some old caesar’s bust and make him talk to me as I passed, or she would attach us to a tour and pretend I didn’t speak Italian or En­glish, translating everything to me in some babbling, made-up ape language while I nodded my head and tried to keep from laughing.

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.