December 26, 1998

Saint Stephen's Day

     If Amerigo had known how to play cards, he might not be drinking quite so heavily, but his short-term memory had never been strong enough to remember every card that each person been played in every hand. Razor sharp recall was the key to enjoying snipe: hearts with a forty-card deck. Everybody who played snipe well not only silently registered what each person had played in the first two hands, they also consequentially knew which cards each person was holding from the third hand on. Each player at the table was just waiting for the opposing couple to make a mistake so they could take advantage of the luck of their draw. Amerigo had never managed to store that much calculated malice in his heart.

     After a big midday dinner at his sister’s house in Faenza, he had driven across the greige landscape back to Boncellino. Gnarled peach trees clung to rusted wires in hieratic dance against the backdrop of the flat plain. It was so cold and foggy he drove straight to the osteria and didn’t bother to park his car at home and get on his bike. He wanted another glass of wine. It was Saint Stephen’s Day, after all.

     On the other side of the steamy panes on the doors, a small knot of friends always sat at the 12-foot table near the entrance. Today they greeted him with the ironically cheerful Romagnolo man’s greeting of “May you get a tumor!” and wishes for a Happy Saint Stephen’s. Amerigo smiled gently and lifted to his lips one of the glasses of wine offered him, before taking off his coat to sit down.      There was Vittorio from Trieste. A certain air of the Ottoman Empire clung to him with his white hair slicked back and three gold rings, he was always the best-groomed man in the osteria. Vittorio’s friend Giannino had offered Amerigo the wine. Giannino used to work at the market selling vegetables and his wife was only too glad to have him out from under her feet for the three or four hours a day he spent at the osteria. Finally, there was Nedo who was starting to lose his mind. Indeed, the only thing that kept Nedo lucid at all was a round of snipe, at which he was infallible. Thirty years of winning at cards after his first twenty years spent losing money to cards, had taught Nedo something about gaming. A newcomer called Gennaro was playing with them, a long-haired young man from Naples in a baggy sweater who was waiting for friends to arrive at the osteria d’la Gramadora.

     The Gramadora was the least expensive place (and only place) you could get wine in the tiny village. Good wine, too. Not something refined that needed to breathe: just hearty Sangiovese which was never around long enough to accumulate sediment, tangy Trebbiano that smelled like the farmyard when it was really genuine, and the occasional soft glass of sweet Albana, just right for a piece of ciambella, the homemade cake which the Florentines turned into cantuccini. The men never left the osteria in the evening without a rubber corked, two-liter bottle of wine to put on the kitchen table and have with dinner. The wine was like them, nothing fancy and no pretences, neither divine nor devilish, but good enough for government work. 

     After the welcomes died down Amerigo sat and stared at his glass of Sangiovese while the four men at his table flung their cards on the table, dragged them to the center of the game, and rapped the rough, wine stained wooden table with their knuckles. What was the use of cards anyway? You just lost and lost or won and lost.   What was the use of any of it, anyway? It was all just luck. Luck!   What a stupid word!

     It had been three years since Amerigo’s Sinhalese wife Violy had passed away; they’d been married for just six months. At sixty-two, Amerigo had finally found a woman he wanted and he just as promptly lost her. Everyone said it was just bad luck, and although Amerigo couldn’t reconcile himself to luck, he couldn’t imagine what could have been the possible cause. He couldn’t wrap his brain around what had happened to them.

     In the decades previous, Amerigo had never found a wife because he had never really looked very hard. He’d started cooking during his military service and when he was discharged, he kept cooking and worked his way up from one restaurant to another and thence to the grand seaside hotels where the real money was to be made and women swarmed like bees around wisteria. In the last thirty years Amerigo had presided over the kitchens at every major event held in the better seaside hotels, grilling meat, adjusting sauces, preparing fish. His healthy red cheeks were the result of the kitchen flames, and though he had never been a real looker, Amerigo was a handsomely soft-spoken man who wouldn’t be rude to a chicken. He had given up chasing after the waitresses about twenty years ago, when he hit forty. He used to catch them and when he was finished with them, he didn’t know what to do with them. He certainly didn’t want to get married back then.

     A last-minute, reduced fare trip to Sri Lanka changed his destiny.

     Vittorio had just won the hand and was beaming.

     “Amerigo! When are we going to get together and cook us all up a big meal? How about New Year’s Eve? We can invite our wives and have a big fish grill, what do you say?”

     Amerigo drained his glass and smiled. “Well, if someone else’ll do all the marketing, I think I could do that.” He really wasn’t interested. All he wanted was Violy back. Violy, poor thin dark-skinned Violy whom he had watched waste away down to 39 pounds in the hospital. Her Singhalese brothers came and bore her body away from him to a sepulcher by the sea in Colombo. He didn’t even have a tomb to visit. Amerigo could still see Violy’s eyes looking at him, imploring him for compassion while he was giving her all the devotion and assistance possible. For months he slept on a cot beside her bed at the hospital. He spent hours talking with the doctors and nurses, and then hurried minutes on expensive phone calls with her brothers. Their lives had been a vale of tears. Now, what was he left with?

     Nothing. A monthly pension check, a house of his own, a car, and a bicycle. They weren’t enough. All Amerigo could think about was Violy.

     A group of twenty-somethings suddenly opened the door and piled into the room, taking off their coats and ordering wine. They were brash and loud and there were girls with them: Gennaro’s friends. In most other situations with old men, they would not have been welcome, but not here. Osterias were one of the few places in Romagna where social interaction was free and uninhibited: this ongoing community of people (almost exclusively men,) was founded on respect for your fellow citizens, and it was one of the few places in Italy where such a system worked. Everything was above board. You could see people take money; you could see people put money in. You could see who paid the utility bill and who bought the wine. When you came in the door, you were welcome on just one condition: you spoke with consideration for other people’s opinions and acted with courtesy for other people’s presence. The whitewashed wall of the room had but one sign painted in blocky black letters: “Courtesy and respect are the pilasters of civility.”

     The old men sitting around playing cards looked up at the knot of people and smiled. They liked having a little bit of life in the osteria, and looking at the pretty girls didn’t hurt their eyes, either. Two young men were observing Vittorio and Nedo and Giannino and Gennaro’s current card game and Amerigo poured them two glasses of wine from his carafe. In no time, everyone was talking and drinking, people were asking for food (and there was none because no one had bought any and the kitchen was not kept stocked). It was only five pm however, and really a little early for dinner especially after eating all those leftovers from Christmas. A piadina with some ham on it would have done everyone fine, but there was none to be had.

     “Why don’t we play a round of Saint Stephen’s bingo?” asked Gennaro.

     “Bingo? There’s a set of boards and numbers back between the kitchen and the bathroom if you want to get it out and organize it.”

The two girls giggled. They’d take care of everything with the help of another old man sitting there with his half liter of wine in front of him and his hat on his head; the girls came back into the room with the numbered boards and pebbles in a big jar with a ballpoint picture of skull and crossbones taped across it. Valeria grabbed the cash box and then went around the whole osteria asking people how many bingo cards they wanted. Each person took one to five of the numbered cards and threw some coins into the cashbox. Then, based on the number of cards they had taken, Flavia scooped out a handful of pebbles and laid it on the table in front of them.

Valeria came to Amerigo: “Well, how many cards do you want?”

     “Oh, thank you, poor girl, but I don’t play cards.

     “Well, it’s not exactly cards. It’s just a game of Bingo.”

     Vittorio turned to him and said: “Oh Amerigo, come on. You can play this game, we’ll all play it. It’s St. Stephen’s Day, and who knows, you might lose! The winner pays for everyone to drink: you know how we do things here. Come on!”

     Valeria looked down at Amerigo. His eyes were watery but he had a good head of hair and a healthy, florid complexion. Melancholy wandered around his blank stare over the wine glass he was drinking from. She sat down beside him and put her hand on his shoulder. He looked clean enough, and a little sad.

     “Oh, come on, you can play one card, can’t you?” She smiled at him, winked at him, and squeezed his shoulder. “What’s your name?”

     Amerigo looked slowly at the girl. She really wasn’t very pretty, big at the hips and with frizzy red hair and freckles. However, when she smiled and winked at him, he answered: “Amerigo.”

     “Vespucci? Well, I can’t imagine someone who named the New World isn’t adventuresome enough to play bingo. Now, how many cards?” Valeria fanned out the remaining twenty cards and Amerigo reached up and pulled out two. He dropped some money in her box and when Flavia placed the pebbles on the table in front of him, Valeria squeezed his hand.

     “Well, let’s just hope you have to buy us all a round of Sangiovese!”

     “Well that might not be the case; after all I’m not lucky at cards: that’s why I don’t play.”

     Vittorio turned to Amerigo and said: “Well, you got someone’s attention! There’s some life left in the old dog, yet.”

     Amerigo turned and smiled weakly. “Not much.”

     Gennaro took up a space at the end of the table started to shout:

     “Now, let’s begin.”

     The guys and girls and men sat at the long tables with their wine glasses and cards laid out in front of them. Flavia was the prettiest girl, with long blond hair and a good figure; she spun the little cage of numbered marbles around and extracted them one by one. Her boyfriend Gennaro read out the numbers and illustrated them verbally according to the Neapolitan Book of Dream Interpretation: an image or a concept was associated with every number from 1 to 90 and Gennaro knew them all by heart. Valeria nudged her way between Amerigo and Vittorio and laid her five cards out in front of her.

     “This is going to be fun!”

     “Eighteen! Blood! The Blood of Saint Giovese, poured out for all who drink red wine.”

     “Forty-Three. The Lady at the Balcony looking for … we know what!”

     Amerigo thought of the first time he had seen Violy standing on the rooftop terrace of his hotel, looking down at him as he walked into the lobby. He didn’t see the 43.

     “Amerigo, aren’t you going to block off your 43? Fourth line down.”

     Valeria reached her hand over to put a pebble on the 43 for Amerigo.

     “Sixty-seven. The Squid in the Guitar. That’s one I have never figured out”

     “Nineteen – Laughter. Time for a joke. There are three ways men learn. Some learn by reading. Some learn by listening. But most of us learn by pissing into the electrical outlet.”

The whole osteria burst into laughter, number nineteen on the board. Even Amerigo forgot about Violy for a minute, and downed his glass of red wine.

     “Sixty-three: The bride.”

     It all came back to Amerigo. Violy standing there in the outdoor chapel in Colombo, her petite body in a lovely white linen dress with a matching jacket she had embroidered herself. It was the same dress she wore in the coffin he closed at the mortuary chapel two years ago.

     “Eleven: Rats, Big Black Mother fuckin’ rats, with titties this big! There ain’t no swear word or dirty word that begins with “R,” so I just have to do my best to keep things lively.

     “Twenty-five Christmas – just 364 days to go”

     “Ninety.” Gennaro was hushed for a moment. Then he slowly bent down to the floor and suddenly jumped up screaming at the top of his lung: “Fear! FEAR! FEAR! That’s the last of the numbers: Fear! But what are we afraid of? What will the oracle of the numbers tell us tonight?”

     At this, Gennaro reached into the cage with the numbered marbles in it himself, closing his eyes. When he opened them, he laughed and announced:

     “Thirty-eight: a drubbing! Yeah, well that’s a good reason to be scared shitless! So, everyone be careful when you leave the osteria together this evening ’cause we don’t want no one getting beat up on Saint Stephen’s day, now do we? Or even worse, we could get stoned, with real stones! That would be a piece of work.”

Gennaro read out each number and the players scoured their cards and placed pebbles on the numbers they had. People were soon looking at each other’s cards and mumbling about what they needed. It was one of the rare times when Romagnols would actually converse with people they did not know.

     “Three in a row! We’ve got three in a row!” yelled Valeria. She smoothed down the front of her cashmere sweater so that her shapely plump breasts popped up as she read out the numbers Amerigo had:

     “Twenty-five, forty-three, thirty-eight!”

     “That’s it. Okay Valeria. You have to pay for a liter of sparkling wine.”

     “Not me, Amerigo does. Shall I do you the honors?”

     Amerigo stared out of his depression and said yes.

     Valeria walked up to the box, took some money out, and went over to the man who tapped the wine from casks into the carafes. She took the bottle from the man and gave him the money, which he promptly put back into the box she had taken it from and handed the bottle back to her. She walked over to Amerigo and Vittorio, filled their glasses, and then placed the carafe on the table and went back to her seat and continued the game.

     “29 – The Father of the Family: Pappy, Babbo, whatever you want to call him.”

     Amerigo teared up. Violy, Violy had wanted children, children by him. Amerigo had wanted a son too and despite his somewhat advanced age, his own fertility had not been a problem. Violy stopped menstruating soon after reaching Boncellino and when she was into her second month, she claimed she felt something deep within her womb. Amerigo had gone out and bought her a beautiful delicate gold bracelet, and they went to the doctor together. But Violy was not pregnant. The hormones indicated that she was still ovulating. What was the matter?

     “62 – The Murdered Corpse”

     Amerigo completely lost track of the game of Bingo. He saw     Violy’s corpse, a wizened scarecrow lost in the folds of white linen she had worn on their wedding day. Amerigo could not stop looking at her, he could not blink, and he couldn’t even think that she was dead. But she was.

     57 – The hunchback

     The weight of the grief bowed him over that day.

     81 – Flowers

     The white lilies she had asked for, the white lilies she had carried on their wedding day. The white lilies he had given her with the bracelet the day he thought she was pregnant. Life, life was so awful.

     “Five in a row!” Valeria screamed again. “Amerigo, you’re lucky I’m here to keep an eye on your cards. Here are the numbers: thirty-eight, forty-three, sixty-two, eighty-one, ninety. It looks like you’re going to pay for us to drink again Amerigo. What will it be this time?”

     Amerigo smiled wanly and said: “You go ahead and pick whatever you want. I’m sure that’ll do me fine.”

Valeria went to the cash box, withdrew a sum, and gave it to the man at the taps who poured out two carafes of Trebbiano this time. Valeria came right up to Amerigo and poured out a glass for him to start with. Then she handed the carafe to Vittorio who helped himself and passed it on around the room.

     Gennaro began with the numbers again.

     Seven– the vase.

     Valeria had this one. A vase for flowers and Amerigo thought about the vase on Violy’s empty tomb at his family’s plot at the cemetery in Faenza. He put fresh white chrysanthemums in it each week.

     Fourteen – the drunkard

     General hilarity ensued from this. “Let’s all put a pebble on our heads! We can just go ahead and concede this one to everybody. This game must be written in the stars. Valeria looked at Amerigo and raised her glass: “We can at least drink to the others, now can’t we?” Amerigo smiled piteously and knocked back his Trebbiano.

     “Fifty-five – the old man,” shrieked Gennaro.” None of them here, that’s for sure.”

     Valeria reached over and placed a pebble on Amerigo’s 55. “You’ve not missed a single number he’s called out! I can hardly believe it.”

     “Well, I suppose it would be ironic if I didn’t have the old man since that is what I am, isn’t it?” This time Amerigo did smile at his own irony, because it was his irony and not someone else’s at his expense.

     Seventy-two – Wonderment

     “And you’ve got that one, too! It is a wonder.”

     “Forty-two – coffee,” and “I could use some of that in about an hour or so.”

     “Eight – The Madonna,” and all the old men reached down and touched their left testicles with discretion, warding off any bad luck she might bring. After all, look what happened to her son!

     “Eighty-six – the shop,” Flavia spun the cage Domemico reached into it again saying he would need something spicy now.

     “Thirty – the lieutenant’s balls! I suppose that might make the girls happy!”

     The girls all booed him in unison and he reached into the cage again, saying: “let's see what kind of ball I get this time.”

     “Fifty-one – the garden!”

       Valeria looked at Vittorio on the other side of her. Although Amerigo was certainly clean, Vittorio was well put together. He was nothing like she would be interested in with his pomaded hair and diamond rings, but he was someone who took care of himself and smiled through his smoke at her.

     “32 – The Sturgeon, and caviar for everyone!”

     Vittorio turned to Valeria and said: “Well signorina, I’ll let you have mine. I never did like eggs of any kind – even in noodles.

     12 - Soldiers

     At this, a groaned hush fell over the older men. They had all been soldiers. They all knew what real violence and hate and tragedy were, something all soldiers in every war have seen. The young lions didn’t pick up on it. 

     Valeria quickly looked at her own cards and then looked at Amerigo’s and kept covering the numbers Gennaro called out with pebbles on the little boards. Gennaro regaled them with little Neapolitan tales for each of the numbers, each with its significance and image. Most of the old men were acquainted each number since their wives used the same book with numbers associated with images from their dreams to play the nationalized numbers game. The old guys were all wearing their hats and laughing jovially, slapping each other on the back and cursing more blasphemously than stevedores. The twenty-somethings were drinking a fair amount and having a good time as well. It didn’t get much cheaper than this for going out in the wintertime. There was also something politically appealing about going to the Socialist Osteria since most of the younger people leaned to the left, to the Communist (or even Republican) party. Smoke rose from the tables as did laughter and an occasional shout.

     Amerigo was lost. Completely at sea in his mind, wallowing in his mourning and misery, unable to come up for air. He only managed to come up for red wine. The succession of numbers and their images at the beginning of the game were unfortunate, for the ones that followed would not have reminded him of Violy in any manner. However, it was too late, the luck of the draw was the luck of the draw, and not all luck is good.

     
     Valeria kept busy covering his numbers and hers and she suddenly jumped up and screamed “Bingo! Amerigo’s won!” She reached over and pulled up his limp arm to indicate he was the victor. The young people chanted “Amerigo! Amerigo! Amerigo! Pay for our wine! Pay for our wine! Pay for our wine!”

     Amerigo was unmoved. What was the use of it anyway? Valeria turned to him and said: “Well, it’s your turn again to pay for everyone to drink with the spoils of your gambling! You’re going to make everybody happy! I can’t believe you won the three in a row, the five in a row and then the whole bingo card on the same card. Do you know what the likelihood of that happening is? Just like a million to one. What luck!”

     “Luck, some kind of luck.” Amerigo responded. “I don’t know what to do with this kind of luck.”

     “Oh, I do. You can pay for all of us to drink!  I’ll help you, don’t worry. You poor thing: you’re so lucky at cards I’ll just bet you’re unlucky at love, handsome as you are.”

     
      Amerigo’s friends’ heads all twitched as he looked up at Valeria. She immediately sensed she had done something wrong but she had no idea what. She bent over Amerigo, smiled, and tried to get him to stand up. A tiny blood vessel burst in Amerigo’s brain and he suffered a minute stroke in the courtesy and respect sector of his cerebrum. It was very small and just enough to stun him for a second. He stood up by himself.

     “Let go of me, you fucking sodden mass of offal-dripping sow!”

     Valeria’s friends gasped. Vittorio tried to change the subject:     “Amerigo. You should go get your winnings. You did win!”

Amerigo walked over to the wooden box, asked how much he had won and Gennaro shouted out twenty-thousand lire from across the room. Amerigo slowly counted out the 1,000 lire bills in his hand and then turned around to face everybody.

     “May you all get tumors. Every one of you. Luck! Huh! Luck! My luck even prevents me from wanting to be nice. Get some nice big tumors on your asses, bleeding tumors on your wives’ faces and deadly crippling tumors in your children’s hearts. Then laugh!”

Amerigo uttered a short chortle, wadded the cash up, and pushed it into his coat pocket. He stopped by the door to put his hat on and walked out into the darkness.  At least, that’s what everyone glibly pretended in the osteria as he closed the door. No one wanted to admit he had been walking in darkness for the last two years.

     Valeria burst into tears. Flavia stood by the bingo pebbles, pouted and motioned to leave. Gennaro walked around the room and collected the bingo cards while one of his friends put the pebbles back into the jar. This part of the afternoon was ruined for the young lions; the old dinosaurs just ordered another carafe of red and sat down to play cards again. Amerigo sat silently in his cold car, slumped across the wheel, tears running down his face. There was no consoling him. There never would be.

     Vittorio tried to calm Valeria down inside the osteria. He explained Amerigo’s story, he explained how she could not have known, and he explained that she should not feel bad, but she felt terrible all the same.

     
     “Isn’t there something I can do?”

     “No, poor thing, there’s nothing to do. You can’t give him back his Violy, and he doesn’t want another woman. That’s the hard luck of hard luck when you’re old. He’ll never get over it. We all got our drubbing tonight; we were lucky it wasn’t a really vicious one.”

Vittorio smiled at her, proudly displaying his two even rows of perfect teeth. “See these? They’re all porcelain. Do you know why? The Nazis pulled them out of my head, one by one when I was twenty years old in Trieste. Because I had been to a Chinese wedding and the bride told me to wear a red boutonniere to the reception, for that is Chinese luck. My luck was that the Fascists interpreted it as a secret symbol of the Communist Party. Combine ignorance with luck and the result is usually pointless and painful. You see, at least I had a lot of future in front of me. The future helped me get over that torture and luck. Oh and don’t ask me anymore about it!”

     “Go on home, poor star. You come back another day and put this afternoon behind you. There’s no use dwelling on your mistakes and pains in the past, when you have the rest of a long life in front of you.”

     Vittorio stood up and announced: “Who wants to play a game of snipe with me? I think we’ve probably had enough Bingo for the year! Bingo! What kind of game is that anyway? For pimps and pussies! Bingo’s all pure coincidence, and the only thing you have to do is pay attention. Luck! Hah! Luck! Now snipe, that’s something different.  There’s a question of luck, but you have to play the hand that’s dealt you, and if you know what you’re doing, you can cut your losses and increase your gains.”

     Vittorio turned to Valeria and finished saying what he had on his mind.

     “But mainly, when you play snipe you pay attention and talk and drink wine and you realize your luck ain’t so bad. Especially if you can keep playing even when your friends wish you real tumors. Now, come on!” 

     Valeria sat down across from Vittorio. “Well, will you teach me? I can play ‘War’ and I can play ‘Hearts’; that should be a start for learning to play snipe, shouldn’t it?”

     Vittorio smiled across the table at her and winked at      Nedo. “Well, this is going to take some patience too, but we’ll give it a try. You’re going need some patience and when we tell you go get buttfucked with a gritty spinning distaff, you have to play out the end of the game before you leave. Do you think you can do that?”

     Giannino who had also sat down to play against Vittorio and Valeria, smiled and looked at her with a slight grimace. This would take a lot of patience. Giannino winked at Valeria, rapped his knuckles on the table, and grabbed Valeria and Vittorio by their elbows.

     “May you both get tumors the size of sugar beets! Now, deal those cards Vittorio and watch me lose my luck with dignity.”