For Bragonzi, the only beautiful thing in the sad life of the boarding school in Quarto dei Mille was the soccer matches. And yet even that beauty was anguished. He realized it as early as the first match, when he saw that, once the moment came to shoot, even the best, even the oldest players suffered a kind of muscular contraction, as if forcing themselves to hold back; and, in fact, what emerged was a weak, uncertain shot, which the goalie blocked with ease. And to think that a second earlier that same forward had seemed full of confident vigor, impetuously swooping down onto the ball, defending it, rushing with long strides toward the goal area—but then . . . but then that feeble shot.
Only at the third match did he make up his mind to ask, after he’d happened to give a hard kick and the ball, flying upward, just barely missed going over to the other side, beyond the wall that constituted the end of the schoolyard: “Aaaah . . .” all the little boys groaned in chorus, covering their eyes with their hands, and when the ball fell back down into the schoolyard, rather than rejoicing, they rebuked Bragonzi bitterly. “But why? What did I do wrong?” he asked Paltonieri as they went back inside for snack time. “And even if the ball did go over, why make such a big deal about it?”
And so Paltonieri explained. He said that on the other side of the wall lived a Mr. Kurz, whom no one had ever seen but who must have hated all the boarding-school children, because whenever the ball ended up on his side he never gave it back (as is civil and urbane custom: you’ve sent it hurtling over there and now you anxiously wait, speculating by the wall, and, lo, by silent miracle it returns, tracing its trajectory in the sky, returning, returning—and with your heart overflowing with gratitude you give resounding thanks: “Thank you!” you say, you don’t know to whom, but you say it. Or else the miracle is delayed, and you walk away uncertainly, saddened by the game’s forced end; but when you come back the following morning the ball is there in the yard, for how long you don’t know, and so your “thank you” is all the more heartfelt, because you only think it, addressing it to the past). Not only that, but vain would have been any attempt to get the ball back; at least this was what was claimed by the young Instructresses, who, a long time ago, caving to universal insistence, had gone over to speak to Mr. Kurz. “Mr. Kurz is well within his rights,” they apparently relayed with an air of annoyance, “and can keep whatever makes its way into his yard.” Such a response, noted Paltonieri, who had heard the story from Morchiolini, sent the message that the Instructresses hadn’t put much of an effort into their mission: if only the boys could have gone themselves, just once, to speak to that man, maybe they would have convinced him, maybe he would have yelled at them a little, sure, but in the end he would have given back all the balls confiscated that year and, who knows, even in previous years. But nothing could be done, the rules barred the boys from leaving the school, and, besides, what would be the point? Mr. Kurz had said no to them, and they were schoolmistresses—never mind a bunch of snot-nosed kids! For that matter, the Instructresses had added, from that day forward they would not be going back to see that man. They had a sense of dignity, they did, and they weren’t interested in being humiliated by someone who—they stressed with a hint of sadism—happened to be correct!
Of course, Paltonieri continued, if the school had been endowed with an ample supply of soccer balls, there would be nothing to get upset about in all this; if they lost one they could requisition another, and Mr. Kurz could do as he pleased. But the reality was that an endowment of balls not only wasn’t ample but wasn’t even provided for, and the boys had to make do with the odd privately owned ball. “Do you understand what this means?” Paltonieri pressed Bragonzi, now thoroughly worked up. “It means having to keep tabs on the new kids, the ones who’ve just arrived with a suitcase full of toys, and hope that they have a ball, and, if they do, persuade them to lend it to us, giving them gifts, which is already enough to make them suspicious, maybe the ball is new and so they guard it jealously, and if you try to take it away from them they squeal and then the Instructresses come running, understand? And when you’ve finally convinced them—you’ve given them heaps of trading cards and comics, promised them they’ll also get to play, even if they’re so little they don’t have a clue what a soccer match is—when finally it’s all worked out and the game begins, pow!, some idiot kicks the ball over the wall, and we’re ruined. And it’s not even possible to get our parents to buy balls when they come to see us and take us to Genoa, because visiting days are on Sunday and everything’s closed . . . You know today’s ball, the one you almost sent over to the other side? It’s Randazzo’s, and to get it he had to write to his dad a month ago, telling him to bring it last Friday, and his dad lives in Messina and only comes twice a year, understand?”
Bragonzi understood, and he understood, too, that theirs would never be real matches but monstrosities, unnerving endeavors in which, more than the struggle between the two teams, what counted was the unspoken battle being played between all of them and that cruel man lying in wait. As months passed, this image grew and grew in Bragonzi’s mind, and he became accustomed to thinking of Mr. Kurz as an enormous black spider, motionless in the middle of his yard but lightning fast when pouncing on the balls that fell like fat insects into his web: then, seizing them with his foul legs, horrifically he sucked till there was naught left but the floppy remains . . . This rapacity was the scariest thing of all, because it enveloped the soccer ball even before it went over the wall, beckoning it and infecting it with a bluish leprosy, so that playing with it was a bit like contracting that disease, or like conversing with a man condemned to death; at other times, it seemed to him that the ball was a beautiful woman promised in marriage to a jealous tyrant, and that terrible torments awaited the reckless fool who dared so much as to graze her.
It was but little consolation that he now played on a permanent basis for the Weenies. Dividing all the boys into Champs and Weenies had been thought up by Saniosi, whose intellect, faced with the impossibility of resolving the problem of Mr. Kurz, had at least conceived of a way to transform that nightmarish presence from a paralyzing element into an active part of the game. What he proposed was simple, and founded on the eradication of switching sides at halftime: the Weenies would always shoot at the goal chalked on the dormitory wall, the Champs at the one on the wall separating the schoolyard from Mr. Kurz; that way, Saniosi thought, the fear of losing the ball would hinder the Champs, weakening their abilities and thus levelling the playing field. And so it was—but for the fact that they all wanted to be welcomed into the ranks of the Weenies, and to this end deliberately tripped themselves up, displayed profound shortcomings in technique never previously revealed, spread their legs wide open so as to garner the supreme humiliation of the nutmeg. It became necessary to form a tribunal of memory keepers, who by punctiliously citing past dribbling and counterattacks, crosses and headed goals, forced the Champs to face, with no chance of appeal, their own talent.
So Bragonzi was a Weenie, but this didn’t prevent him from noticing during the games—almost absorbing it from the uncertain looks in the eyes of the Champs—a general sense of distress. This feeling only worsened after the episode with Lamorchia.
It happened as follows: For an agonizingly long week, the boys were left without a ball, to rave, bored, in the emptiness. Then, on Sunday, Tabidini’s dad took his son to Genoa. Seeing him heave a sigh in front of the lowered shutter of a toy store, he questioned the boy and, finding out the truth, gave a good long laugh; then, without another word, he took his son by the hand and pulled him along until they reached the nearest park, where several gangs of children were playing ball. “Which would you like?” he asked, encompassing in a single wave of his hand that entire swarm.
“What do you mean, ‘which’?” gulped Tabidini, who had understood perfectly.
“Don’t you worry about it. There must be a ball here that tickles your fancy more than the others, no?”
Tabidini observed: over here, the children were gratifying themselves with an unsizable rubber sphere, colorful and flabby, the kind for little kids; another group, right behind them, was scrambling around a ball that was more serious but also deflated—you could tell from the noise it made and from its pitiful bounce. Tabidini looked beyond the drinking fountain: over there was the biggest showdown, with at least ten players per side, and the ball was sound, but lightweight, too, made of taut plastic, one of those balls which shoot up bizarrely, almost taking flight of their own volition, no, no, too dangerous, a real shame, though; to their left, in a completely grassless area, enshrouded in an earthy cloud, six desperately lanky dawdlers were playing with a dirt-colored ball of an indecipherable nature; he looked at them more closely—they didn’t have “the goods” and were playing in loafers, their long socks pulled up to their knees, a scraping of soles, a slip-sliding amid expletives. Tabidini waited for the ball to emerge for an instant from the dust cloud to observe it more carefully: huh, it was leather, one of those prehistoric hand-stitched balls, with a wide valve like a ten-lira coin and that nutty color which had been vanquished long ago by black-and-white, weighty and lumpy and somewhat pear-shaped, of a mineral substance that had been chemically enriched over the years with mud and emotions . . . Headaches and blackened nails lay in store for the imprudent soul who opted for that ball, no thank you, better take a look at that other group in the field all the way at the far end; he asked his father for permission to go, then walked through the park until he was close enough to taste this new match—a match into which fathers and sisters had been frivolously mixed, a match that was revolving, alas, around an exceedingly light beach ball, literally lighter than a feather, a complimentary item included with the purchase of sunscreen for the sportily benighted. Disheartened, Tabidini went back to his dad, with one last glance at some other pilgrims who were blissfully delighting—poor fools!—in a felt tennis ball.
“Well, then?”
Tabidini was about to reply that he wasn’t exactly spoiled for choice when he was distracted by the simultaneous arrival of four cars, then of two more right after. Out of them came twenty or so older adolescents in tracksuits, loaded with gym bags and duffelbags. It was enough for one of them to tweak his hamstring muscles, tenderizing them a bit, for Tabidini, melting with emotion, to understand: yes, he didn’t need to see over it to know what was behind the park’s high gray wall, the group’s clear destination. A real soccer field! A real match! he thought, now liquefied, just as one of the last adolescents, having rested his duffel on the ground, pulled out a plastic bag, which he opened and then put back down, laying bare its contents: shimmering in the morning light of the sun, so new and untouched as to appear enamelled, flawlessly round, soft and taut at once, planet of glory, the most beautiful soccer ball Tabidini had ever seen. Propelled by an irrepressible impulse, he slipped his chubby hand out of his father’s and started to run toward the player, who had remained behind his companions and was now meticulously closing his duffelbag. As soon as he was close enough to make out the words, Tabidini stopped, and he read, “World Cup.” Oh! His heart skipped a beat. And then, right below, in a different pentagon, “Official Soccer Ball—Patented—Licensed—Tested,” and slightly lower still, “No. 3.” But what made Tabidini’s eyes bulge out of his head was the signature, the fluttering signature stamped along the length of two other pentagons (at first glance he didn’t want to believe it, looked more closely at the squiggle—but, yes, it was true, beyond a shadow of a doubt): “George Best.” Best! Best’s soccer ball! The greatest player of them all! The legend who was invoked after every intoxicating mazy run! At school, they’d only ever had one ball with a name on it: “Totonno Juliano,” it was called, it even bore Juliano’s picture, though the product was made of plastic, brought back from Naples by Fiorillo—a good ball, but nothing more, and, in any event, after just a few days it became the prey of Mr. Kurz. But this one! And Best’s, to boot! Desperately he turned toward his father, who started to walk over. Meanwhile, the adolescent, giving a shout to his companions, sent the ball their way, essentially inviting them to have a taste. Tabidini was no stranger to that weakness, that yielding to the temptation to try out a new ball while still off the field and out in the street, despite knowing full well that the rough concrete would leave a mark on its lustre—as if the owner, unable to bear so much perfection, wanted to artificially dirty and age the ball in order to finally recognize it as his own.
Mr. Tabidini knew his son. Without saying a word, he trotted over to the youngsters, whom he reached right at the little iron gateway in the wall. At a distance, his son watched them talk: his father on one side, the others curved around him in a semicircle, their bags placed on the ground. They were shaking their heads, gesticulating nervously. Then his father took his wallet out of his jacket and started sliding out bills. The players shook their heads some more; then, seeing that he was still pulling out bills, they started to discuss the matter among themselves. One of them moved off, gesturing as if to tell another to go to hell, though he soon came back. Now Tabidini’s dad was standing there in silence; one guy came right up to him, shaking his fists, but three others grabbed him and shoved him out of the group. The discussion continued until Tabidini’s father finally stuck his fingers back into his wallet. When Tabidini saw one of the players pick the ball up and hand it to his father, he thought he was dreaming. Kissed by the sun as he walked back (the adolescents, behind him, went on gesticulating and arguing), Tabidini’s father looked like a paladin returning with the Grail.
That evening, in a jubilant riot of oohs and ahs, Tabidini was greeted as a hero by the entire boarding school, and every boy, before falling asleep, fantasized in his bed about the match announced for the following day. So radiant was the image of George Best that, for one night, there was no room in their heads for Mr. Kurz.
What followed was something horrific, and each boy found himself suddenly older. Bragonzi was left with the special sorrow of having failed to touch the ball even once. It was only a minute into the game, the Champs were on the attack, when the ball rebounded and went soaring into the air like a sublime bird: in everyone’s consciousness it came back down in slow motion, while below a roaring, elbowing melee raged. In the general confusion, no one noticed Lamorchia—only Bragonzi saw him getting ready to kick a volley: “No! No!” he shouted, or maybe he merely thought it, while the ball descended with unreal slowness, and already that kid was slanting, twisting his upper body and rearing back his right leg, already he was bending his knee as he lifted his shoe off the ground, “No! No!” not like this, not in the air, let it bounce, but Lamorchia couldn’t hear him, it was as though he were being drawn heavenward, ankle first, every sensory faculty now transferred to that ascending ankle, into that outward thrust that is called an instep. Abandoning the man he was marking, Bragonzi dived into the melee toward Lamorchia, imploring him all the while, sending him messages, and then, in a flash, everyone realized, and froze as if turned to stone, limbs caught and tangled, and, unable to give voice, each one thought inside himself, Don’t do it, don’t do it, no one daring to look at Lamorchia’s ankle, looking only at his swooning eye, captivated by his bliss and at the same time horrified . . . Pow! went the ball as it was struck from too low and from the side, rising once again, though no longer vertically, rather in an excruciating, mournful trajectory: Best’s soccer ball fell precisely on the flat top of the wall, taking everyone’s breath away, and then, after an imperceptible stasis, it plunged down definitively on the other side, and became the property of Mr. Kurz.
No one did Lamorchia any harm, because the harm was locked in their hearts. Lamorchia himself, for that matter, was never the same after that day, nor did he ever again wish to play soccer: he could be seen off at the edge of the field, sitting like a pensioner warming himself in the afternoon sun, and when the ball wound up in his vicinity, and shouts of “Ball!” were directed at him from the field, he would pick it up, but, not having the courage to kick or throw it, he would carry it all the way to the center of the field, squeezing it to his chest, and, once there, set it down with care.
Six months had passed since that day, during which at least twelve balls had made their way to Mr. Kurz. Then, tired of so much heartache, the boys ceased to play except with balls of knotted rags, which had the advantage of never leaving the ground: monstrous turbans that kept up the fiction of sphericality for no more than half an hour before starting to unravel, coarse comets dragging a tail of dusty tatters. After four months of this punishing humiliation, Bragonzi stopped one fine fall day in the middle of a rightward attack, and amid general protest grabbed that simulacrum of a ball in his hands.
“Companions, friends,” he would have said if he had been an ancient tribune, “consider who we are, who we have been, and, gazing upon yourselves in this ignominious rag as in a mirror, may you hence derive sufficient shame to spur you to redeem a life perhaps not yet lost to the cause of Soccer. Think of those who, scorning danger, preceded us on this selfsame field, and let it conjure within you those Greats in whose shadow all of us, in regrettably distant days of yore, sought to shape ourselves: Tumburus, Fogli, Mora, Pascutti, Bobby Charlton, Chinesinho, Del Sol. They are watching us—and do we not shudder? And yet we hesitate?”
His words were not these, naturally, but this was the spirit, and the result—judging by the gritting of teeth—was no different from the one such a speech would have inspired. And so war was declared, but for the moment, needing also to fight on the internal front with the Instructresses, and not knowing what they would find on the other side of the wall, they limited their actions to the launching of a reconnaissance mission. In the insanity of the hour, everyone volunteered, but it was unanimously decided that if there was one among their number to whom the honor of that mission was rightfully owed it was Bragonzi. To decide who would join him, they proceeded to draw lots, from which emerged the names of Tabidini and Sieroni.
At two o’clock that night, Bragonzi slid out from under his covers and, feeling his way along the walls in the dark, came to the end of the hallway, where their Instructress’s bedroom lay. He knocked three times, and when she opened the door, dishevelled and furious and searching in the shadows for whoever the pest was, he said in one breath, “Quick, come, Tabidini is unwell!” While she ran to the afflicted, though not before covering her shoulders with a shawl, Bragonzi infiltrated her room and rummaged through everything (resisting the distraction of stockings and lace) until he found the coveted bunch of keys. Then, after hiding them in a carefully selected spot in the bathroom, he went back into the dormitory, giving the agreed-upon signal to Tabidini, who promptly ceased his stertorous gurgling.
An hour later, when silence reigned anew, Bragonzi and Sieroni got dressed and slipped like thieves to the bathroom, and, with the keys retrieved, were now masters of the boarding school. First, they opened the janitor’s closet, grabbing a flashlight and a handsome collection of screwdrivers; then, after unlocking two other doors, they exited onto the field, and suddenly (or was it only a shiver from the freezing air?) it was as though Mr. Kurz could see them. One last door, to the gardener’s shed, and they came into possession of a long ladder. Bragonzi tried his best not to think about what he was doing, and, actually, thanks to a hint of fever, he was aware of it all as though he were already remembering it, as though it were a thing of the past: the ladder, which was slightly shorter than the wall; the struggle to stand it upright like an Egyptian obelisk; Sieroni hesitating, owing to an onset of second thoughts, which resulted in a necessary rebuke; his own frightening ascent, rung after rung, with the terror of spotting over the top of the wall the first of the eight hairy legs; his precarious balancing act up at the top followed by the work of lifting the ladder and lowering it on the other side, first pushed from below by Sieroni then held solely with his own strength; the cold air on his face and the impossibility of seeing anything whatever on Mr. Kurz’s side; Sieroni’s whimpering invitation to turn back; and, at last, his descent into the darkness below.
After landing in Kurz’s yard, Bragonzi stood a long while in silence, until, all being quiet, he finally turned on the flashlight. The yard was small, much smaller than the school’s, and not paved. Here, then, on this earth, was where the balls fell. In front of him, a low house, two stories, its windows shut: Kurz’s house. The yard was bordered on the sides by two walls that were as tall as the one he had just climbed, but along the left wall ran a strange, glimmering structure. Bragonzi approached it and saw that it was made of glass, with leaded panes: Kurz’s greenhouse. He tried to look inside, but the glass offered back only the flashlight’s glow. The perfect place to hide the ladder, he thought, for if Kurz sees it I’m a goner. His next thought was that the screwdrivers would now come in handy, but there was no need for them: the little door to the greenhouse was closed by a latch with no padlock, and that things could be so easy immediately brought back to mind the ghastly mouth of the spider.
Having flung the door wide, Bragonzi dragged and then pushed the ladder inside, making sure to erase the grooves left on the ground: he had seen this done in movies by American Indian women to the tracks of their shining warriors. Now that he was shut inside the greenhouse, he turned the flashlight back on to better conceal the ladder, and he saw them. He saw all of them, all at once, and with them the generations, the jerseys, the hopes, the dashes and dives.
The greenhouse was filled with three long shelving units, two units on the sides and one in the center, like a kind of backbone, resulting in two parallel corridors; each had seven rows of shelves, each row a continuous line of flowerpots, each pot holding a soccer ball. Slightly larger in diameter than the pots, the balls protruded by three-fourths, touching one another at the sides like the segments of a monstrous caterpillar. Stunned, unsure whether to be horrified or to rejoice, his heart rioting in his chest, Bragonzi moved closer and focussed the beam of light on the first ball on the shelf to his left. It was an incredibly old ball, more gray than brown, completely peeled and with several unstitched seams. He touched it: the coarsest thing he had ever felt. There was something written on the pot in black block letters, faded with time: “May 8, 1933.” Bragonzi was trembling. He shone the light on the next ball: this one looked worn out like an old sweater, and, busted, dented, and covered in tarlike stains, it had sunk deeper than the others into its pot; here, too, the pot bore a faded inscription: “November 13, 1933.” It’s a dream, Bragonzi thought, refusing to understand. He slowly went down the corridor, moving the beam of light: February 4, 1934, April 28, 1934, May 16, 1934, June 2, 1934, June 18, 1934, August 3, 1934, September 3, 1934 . . . then eight balls from 1935, six from 1936, ten from 1937, seven from 1938, five from 1939, none from 1940 to 1945, twelve from 1946, sixteen from 1947 . . . Could it be? He turned from the shelves on the left, and, pointing the light at the central unit, immediately read, “July 21, 1956.” This one was a double shelf, each pot corresponding to a pot facing the opposite side; here he ran breathlessly, and read at random, “March 7, 1960,” “August 11, 1961.” And, finally, the shelves on the right, full of orbs from 1963, from ’64, from ’65, from ’66 . . . Overcome, he sped up his pace as he moved down the aisle, toward the back, where he knew what he would find . . . He would find Fermenti’s soccer ball, the very first one he had seen go flying over to the other—to this—side, and Randazzo’s ball, there they were! and the “Totonno Juliano” (there! “March 9, 1967,” yes, that was the day it had happened), and his own, his red-and-black beloved, it was there, too (he was about to take it but withdrew his hand), and all the others up to Best’s, there it was! shining more brightly than the rest in the glow of the flashlight, still unblemished and new-smelling, and then all the lost balls up to the day of the conversion to rags, not one was missing, oh, dearest soccer balls! But what sent a shudder running through his entire body was what he saw after the last ball, even if he could have imagined it beforehand: a line of empty pots, ready to welcome new arrivals . . .
He contemplated at length the emptiness of those pots, successively lighting up their interiors, and he wondered where, in that precise moment, the balls destined to fill them were, in what storeroom or window display, and wondered, too, when they would rain down like ripe fruits from over the wall, on what date, a sixteenth of October or a twentieth of March—impossible to say. For now, the boys played with balls made of rags, but someday things would go back to normal, it was inevitable, and on that day Mr. Kurz would be happy once more. What did he think of the temporary suspension of soccer balls? Maybe from the more muffled sound of their kicks he had figured out the truth and was awaiting his hour, as he had since 1933.
Bragonzi returned to the front of the greenhouse and stood before that first ball: looking at it, and thinking that those who had played with it must be older than his father by now, he considered how the balls with which an individual plays in his life get lost in thousands of ways, rolling down countless streets, landing in rivers and on rooftops, torn apart by the teeth of dogs or boiled by the sun, deflating like shrivelled prunes or exploding on the spikes of gates, or simply disappearing, you thought you had them and you look all over but they’re nowhere to be found, who knows how much time has passed since you lost them or since someone swiped them at the park; he considered how all of the balls touched by those children had thus dissipated, and if he were in their presence and asked them, “Where are all your soccer balls?” they would shrug, unable to account for the fate of a single one. That ball alone had been snatched from the clutches of destruction; only that ball, from May 8, 1933, went on being a ball. Oh, he knew all too well how things had unfolded, for how many times had he witnessed the same scene! The ball had shot upward, and even before it went over the wall everyone thought, It’s lost—goodbye, ball. But no, only in that moment was it saved. And many years later, when all those children went down into their graves, that ball would be more alive than them, the last memory of the matches of yesteryear.
Bragonzi passed one more time through the entire collection, observing more closely some spheres that he hadn’t noticed before: a hard and clumpy one resembling a truffle, a still pristine one on which was written “From Grandma, to her sweet pea,” a rubber one with the faces of the players who had died in the Superga air disaster, one with Hamrin’s signature forged by an uncertain juvenile hand. And he noticed something else, which brought a lump to his throat: Mr. Kurz had arranged each ball in its pot so as to look its best, the least dented or unstitched part forward, the part with the faces or signatures, as though he loved those soccer balls.
The glow of the flashlight kept growing dimmer, and so Bragonzi decided to turn it off for a little while. In the darkness, after a few seconds had passed, the silhouettes of the soccer balls began to appear like fluorescent spectres, first the whiter ones, then slowly but surely the rest, and it seemed to Bragonzi that they were quivering, and that they wanted to say something. Concentrated in that luminescence was the first glimmer of morning, as yet imperceptible in the sky. Before long it would be dawn (had he been in the greenhouse for that long?), and Bragonzi didn’t know what to do, whether to turn the flashlight back on and keep looking around, or get out of there, or scope out other areas of the yard. Instead he carried on as before, wandering slowly up and down those two corridors, one moment laying his hands on an orb whose pentagons looked like black fish in a pitcher of water, the next on a globe of gaseous yellow.
The first light of sunrise took him by surprise and convinced him that he should go back. He dragged the ladder to the foot of the wall after being assailed by a gust of freezing air upon leaving the greenhouse. Then, just as he was about to climb the ladder, he noticed something in the middle of the yard, something that had been hidden before in the dark. He moved closer: it was a wooden chair with a wicker seat, turned to face the boarding school. Oh, it didn’t take much to understand what the person who sat in it waited for, and Bragonzi shivered at the thought of him sitting there, motionless, patient, day after day from morning till night, saddened by the fruitless days, weeks, months . . . He immediately walked away from the chair, then he went back; he wanted to try to sit in it, and he did. Opposite, one saw only the wall, and, above, the sky, nothing more. He tried to imagine a match taking place behind that wall, Secerni’s attacks, Saniosi’s feints, Piva’s fouls, Fognin’s drives. He saw the sweaty faces, the dust clouds, the scraped and scabbed knees, he saw the arguments over offsides and the rock-paper-scissors to decide the teams, he saw the rage and he saw the joy. And he saw a ball spring up from the top of the wall like a black moon from the sea, saw it rise, tracing its arc in the sky, and falling to earth on this side, bouncing a few metres from the chair, then stopping meekly in the dust. Hello, ball, he said, tenderly contemplating it in the light of the dawn.
When he reached the top of the wall, he realized that Sieroni had fallen asleep on the ground, right there below him; he woke him by dropping a shoe on his back. He then pulled up the ladder and climbed back down into the schoolyard. At the first occasion they had to talk about it, his throng of classmates made only a collective impression upon him while—unable to bring any one face or name into focus, surrounded by their disappointed eyes—he told of locked doors and darkness.
It rained the following days, and the schoolyard remained deserted. That Sunday, their Instructress told Bragonzi that there was a surprise in store for him, his dad had come from Milan to see him, he was to run and get dressed, chop-chop! His dad took him to a restaurant and then to the movies to see a Lemmy Caution film, after which they strolled around the port looking at the ships. Toward evening they got in a taxi, but instead of giving the school’s address his father said, “To the train station.” Bragonzi didn’t ask any questions, and he kept silent even in the baggage room, where his father reclaimed a big black bag. They returned to the school in another taxi, and only when they were in front of the gate, with the taxi-driver waiting to head back to the station, did his father crouch down and open it. The first thing to emerge was an issue of Soldino, but already Bragonzi had started to tremble; then came a stick of modelling clay and a little puzzle, and meanwhile the rustling of cellophane could be heard underneath; then there was a balsa-wood model-airplane kit; and then, finally, that transparent bag, which his father gave to him after making him wait longer than for the other presents, as he smiled back in silence and hoped that his tremors weren’t visible. “Thank you,” he said, and he wanted to add something else, but while he was thinking about what this should be his dad had already got back in the taxi. And so Bragonzi hid everything under his raincoat and ran to the dormitory. It was past the hour when boys needed to come back from any outings “already fed,” for the rules barred these temporary escapees from joining the others in the refectory during meals (his father didn’t know this, since Bragonzi had never been brave enough to tell him), and so there was no one around. After putting the other presents in his closet, Bragonzi sat on the bed with the see-through bag on his knees. It was closed with a thin red drawstring and, in addition to the ball, contained the pump and the needle for inflating it, as well as a little box of wax and a small felt cloth with zigzag edges for polishing: once opened, the bag released a delightful leathery aroma, which reminded Bragonzi of the smell of his nicest pair of shoes. The pump was icy cold, the ball less so. He stuck the needle into its valve and began to inflate it with care: some of the air in this room, he thought, is going to end up inside there, and it will never come out again. When every last pentagon had popped out convexly, he removed the needle. He spread his thighs slightly apart to better hold the ball, not wanting it to touch the floor. It was magnificent, a Derbystar “Deliciae Platearum,” even more beautiful than Best’s “World Cup” ball; he couldn’t imagine how hard his father must have had to look before finding it, or how much he had paid for it, its white just slightly pearlier than the rest, with iridescent reflections, and black pentagons framed by a subtle red outline, and a little yellow star right underneath its brand name, a ball even Rivera would kick cautiously, truly like nothing he had ever seen before . . . He fondled it awhile with his fingertips and slid it against his cheeks to take in its smoothness, decided to give it a few more pumps, then went back to caressing it. He looked at the clock: before long, the other boys would all be coming back upstairs, he had to be quick. He put the pump and the bag in the closet, and went down to the atrium with the “Deliciae Platearum” under his arm. From there, he passed through the television lounge before skirting the refectory, crouching down beneath the windows so as not to be spotted by the diners; at the end of the hallway, the door to the schoolyard was open—the Instructresses liked to take a stroll right after dinnertime.
It was not yet completely dark in the schoolyard, and from the sky, now that the rain had stopped and the clouds had been torn asunder, Bragonzi could tell that the next day would be a beautiful one. He avoided the puddles as he moved to the center of the soccer field, which was marked with faded white paint. He looked at the ball in his hands, even more beautiful in the moonlight. He checked that the top of his right shoe wasn’t muddy, looked at the wall in front of him and then above the wall, too, took a deep breath, looked once more at the ball, threw it into the air, waited for it to come back down, and kicked it with his instep when it was roughly thirty centimetres from the ground, and he knew from the sound it made that he had kicked it well, saw it rise quickly into the air, first darkly silhouetted against a cloud whitened by the moonlight, then brightly against the night sky, and it seemed to rest there, suspended in midair, until it descended, and disappeared behind the black horizon of the wall.
Now he could go back, and bury himself in his bed. ♦
(Translated, from the Italian, by Brian Robert Moore.)
This is drawn from “You, Bleeding Childhood.”
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