The Sun and Other Stars (38 page)

It comes down to a shoot-out, just like in ’98. Man vs. Keeper. Man vs. Himself. The goalkeepers, Gigi for the Azzurri and Barthez for the French, have both been here before, and they embrace each other before the firing squad begins.

Pirlo. Gol.

Wiltord. Gol.

Materazzi. Gol.

Trezeguet. Miss.

De Rossi. Gol.

Abidal. Gol.

Del Piero. Gol.

Sagnol. Gol.

Grosso. Gol.

And it’s Grosso who wins it this time, or rather, Trezeguet who muffs it. Trezeguet, hero of the last time, who now takes his turn in the tragedy.

And it’s Gigi spreading his Mickey Mouse hands wide as he streaks across the field, and Barthez, the French keeper, sitting against the post, paralyzed from the loss.

And it’s Zidane sitting in the clubhouse missing it all. Zidane, who came in a hero of France and a gentleman foreigner of the Italian leagues, who goes out a head-butting rogue. And Materazzi, who comes in a rogue and goes out a hero for saying whatever it is the lip-readers say he said to Zidane, forcing the French to play with ten men.

I know that you who call it soccer instead of calcio will have trouble keeping track of these unfamiliar names, so go back now, and substitute the name of anyone you know. Maybe even your own.

The Azzurri leap across the field and lie on the ground in piles of disbelief. Clean-cut gray-haired men in suits jump up and down like little boys. French players stand around in a daze, stroking their chins as fireworks light up the Berlin sky. A snowstorm of ticker tape and toilet tissue covers the field, the white blotting out everything but the Rai announcer’s voice.

“It is finished! It is finished! It is finished! It is finished!”

Everyone at Martina’s is shouting and hugging and jumping up and down, and I imagine the vibrations shaking the foundation of the building clear down to the center of the earth, to the cavern where they say the devil sleeps, his muscles shifting and twitching under his matted fur, the tremors from hundreds of millions of reconstituted hearts disturbing his sleep.

Outside, fireworks and flares whistle and boom over the sea. People are already flooding the streets, jumping into their cars and blaring horns, running down the passeggiata chanting, singing, and waving flags. The Band emerges one instrument at a time, adding notes to the cacophony.

The rest of the summer will be more chaos. Martina will be reunited with her postcards and be so moved by the reconstruction of the bar that she and Zhuki will start serving food. Zhuki will travel back and forth from San Benedetto to Chicago to Strilky. The German tourists will return for the second half of the summer. All of Italy will be engulfed by the demotions, penalty points, and fines drifting down the boot like a poisonous gas. Juventus will be stripped of the Scudetto, Milan, Fiorentina, and Lazio cowed.

There will be a hundred hopeless endings, and these will be written clearly across the expressions of the suited men who fill the flat-screen every night. Even though they try to set their jaws and fix their stares, I can see the shadows of resignation and regret. They know what I know now, that it is impossible to go back to the beginning. You can’t go back to the big bang or the primordial swamp any more than our family can go back to the nosebleed seats of Estadio Balaídos in Vigo, or these scandalized players can go back to being little boys running through dusty streets, kicking a peeling calcio ball.

Instead, you have to cobble together your own beginnings where you can, out of imperfect clay. Messy synthesis instead of clean separation this time around. The sky cleaving to the earth, the sea lapping up on the land, the light infiltrating the darkness. And God is up there doing his part, too, throwing down terraces for us to train on and people to wander into our crooked paths—Ukrainians and French, calcio players and soccer players, little boys with dreams they will never accomplish and old men with foggy memories of the past. Paparazzi, showgirls, fathers, mothers, brothers, sons. And nonne. Lots and lots of nonne.

Zhuki and I, we escape to the end of the molo. We watch the steady streams of headlights and cell phone screens, the explosions of sparklers and sprays of fireworks in the sky. I think about Papà and Yuri and Silvio in Berlin, and I pull the fishing line into an orbit around my wrist. I imagine that it connects me not only to Mamma but Papà and Luca, too, and that we can all feel each other’s gentle tugging as we move around the universe.

Nonno has brought the 2CV of course, and he leads the procession down the passeggiata, the griffin finally rearing up in victory on the hood. Nonno is behind the wheel, sitting tall like a Roman emperor, and Nonna is by his side, her white hair blown into messiness, her arm leaning out the passenger window.

“Viva l’Italia! Viva l’Italia!” Nonno shouts at the top of his lungs as he blares the horn. “And death to France!”

Young guys leap onto the running boards and cling to the sides so that the little 2CV looks like a monster sprouting heads. I spot a few girls from the class below me holding the screens of their cell phones high in the air, their faces striped with red, white, and green, and flags trailing off their shoulders like the capes of superheroes. I watch the faces going by and they all look familiar, even the tourists who’ve been swept up into the crowd.

Zhuki and I sit out on the molo the whole night, watching the celebrations. Midnight comes and morning follows.

The next day.

And the next.

And the one after that.

And I look around, and I see that it is good.

Acknowledgments

I first went to Italy in 1992 at the behest of Christina Hieber, the same friend who dragged me to Poland for the first time. I was so taken with the country that I taught myself Italian and spent the next twenty years traveling to Italy whenever I could. The most significant of these trips was the summer I spent in Alassio as an au pair to the Gazzolo-Ienca family. It was there that I was first introduced to both daily life on the Riviera and the international congregation of calcio. Laura, Massimo, Pietro, and Carlo, thank you sincerely for all of your kindnesses then and since. I would also like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize for teaching Pietro and Carlo to chant “U.S.A.” during the 1998 World Cup; at the time, I didn’t realize how serious an offense this was.

Thank you to the rest of the Ienca, Gazzolo and Bonora families, especially Chicca, Sandro, Camilla and Carolina, as well as Susan Scott Hettleman and Stefania Bucci, who both showed me the magic of their own personal Italys. Thanks to Danielle Bonneau for initial research and Annie Hawes for her book chronicling her and her sister’s adventures in Liguria. For suggesting, checking and rechecking all things Italian, thank you to Camilla Bonora of Alassio, Charlene Floreani of Chicago, and Daniele Minisini of Bologna and Austin, Texas.

I have read several books on SO-chair in the past few years, but Paddy Agnew’s
Forza Italia
and Joe McGinniss’s
The Miracle of Castel di Sangro
were my favorites and the most informative for my purposes. Thank you also to Phil Imm and Michael Borisov for initial research, as well as to the Chicago Fire for access to practice fields and locker rooms. I owe an especially great debt of gratitude to my colleagues, Ian McCarthy and Emily Steffen, who used their calcio expertise and sensitivity to language in reading final drafts. Also, this book would not have been as much fun to write if it weren’t for all the calcio fans out there meticulously chronicling the minutes of matches, the miraculous goals, the fan club chants and the funniest segments of
Have You Heard The Latest About Totti?
I realize now that these are all labors of love and celebrations of life.

For my education in butchering, I am eternally grateful to Antonello Valdora and his parents, proprietors of Macelleria Valdora in Alassio, Italy, for patiently answering all of my questions and allowing me to take photographs of every inch of their shop. Thanks also to Bill Buford and Julie Powell, whose meticulous written descriptions of butchering saved me the time and grist of doing my own apprenticeship.

Dante is, of course, a major influence on this novel. San Benedetto is populated largely with versions of his characters, and I have incorporated some of his imagery as well. I still would not call myself a “Dantista” by any stretch, but for the knowledge of Dante I do have, I am most indebted to Anthony Esolen. His translation of the
Divine Comedy
inspired me and kept me going, and his annotations and explanations were as constant a guide as Virgil was to Dante. I was also fortunate to come across the writings and podcasts of Robert Barron. Without the wisdom of both of these men, Dante’s words wouldn’t have made much sense in either my life or my work.

The creation of this book has itself been a winding plot. Thank you to the students and faculty at the Ukrainian Catholic University in L’viv. It was because of them that in the summer of 2007, I ended up in a pasture in rural Ukraine, where I began to write this book in longhand. Thanks especially to Romcik and The Prince for dumpster-diving and recovering the first five chapters, which were inadvertently thrown away, and to Yuri Fil for inspiring the first chapter and for loaning out his name. The nickname Zhuki was also borrowed from a young woman I met there but have since lost track of.

From the first word of this book to the last, I have continued to teach at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in Chicago, and I am grateful for their continued support as well as the support of the community at St. Clement Church. Thank you to my first readers, Lisa Cloitre, Lizz Graf, and the Petersburg Pig Cooperative, and to JP Fanning for a key detail.

The Hemingway Foundation, the PEN Foundation, and the UCross Foundation gave me the space, time, and courage to fight through the murkiness in the middle of the process, and I can’t thank them—the organizations and the individuals—enough.

Thank you to my friend and agent, Wendy Sherman, who, with her grace and integrity, has helped me navigate this new world intact. Thanks to Anjali Singh, who has without a doubt made me a better writer, and to Millicent Bennett, Wendy Sheanin, Anne Tate, Nina Pajak, and Julia Glass, for showing me their passion for books and being such strong advocates of this book in particular.

I am, as ever, grateful to my family and friends and especially my husband, Will, for his love and understanding, and for being the sturdy molo that I can both dive off and swim back to.

Finally, I would like to remember three of my classmates at Dartmouth—Gary, Dan and Mark—who left this world far too soon. Many times as I was writing this book, I heard each one’s vox clamantis in deserto.

About the Author

© Margaret Pasulka

BRIGID PAULSKA
spent the summer of 1998 as an au pair for a family in Alassio, Italy, where she was first introduced to small-town Riviera life, the Italian obsession with soccer, and the butcher shop that features in her second novel,
The Sun and Other Stars.
Her debut novel,
A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True,
won the 2010 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Brigid currently lives in Chicago with her husband and runs the writing center at a public high school. Visit her website at
brigidpasulka.com
.

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A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
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Copyright © 2013 by Brigid Pasulka

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Interior designed by Ruth Lee-Mui
Endpapers drawn by Charlene Floreani

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pasulka, Brigid.

The sun and other stars / Brigid Pasulka.
p. cm.
1. Self-realization—Fiction. 2. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Italy—Fiction. 4. Soccer stories. I. Title.
PS3616.A866S86 2013
813'.6—dc23 2012030403

ISBN 978-1-4516-6711-0
ISBN 978-1-4516-6713-4 (ebook)