Chapter 11 Enzo
The text is waiting when I wake up.
Not the one-word kind. A real one, sent at six forty, which for a man on a tournament schedule is a declaration of intent all by itself.
Walk today? Beltline, eleven. Daylight. No pretext. I checked the schedule twice.
I read it three times. Then I make one coffee, on purpose, and drink it standing at the window before I send a thumbs up. The sting of the single cup is different this morning. Hope is heavier than the wanting ever was and ten times as dangerous.
Davide pads in wearing the face of a man who slept through nothing.
“You came in late from somewhere,” he says, neutral as a referee. “Or somebody left late. The stairs have opinions.”
“The stairs exaggerate.”
“Mm.” He pours his coffee black. He complains about it and drinks it anyway. “After the tournament. The whole thing. That’s still the deal?”
“That’s still the deal.”
“Then I’m not counting stairs until then.” He salutes me with the cup. “Whoever it is, tell them the stairs squeak on the third step. For everyone’s dignity.”
Gianna texts while I’m lacing my shoes. No meme this time, which is how I know she’s paying attention.
Mamma lit a candle at San Gennaro yesterday. She says it’s for the quarterfinal. It’s not for the quarterfinal. Answer honestly, are you okay?
I answer honestly, three words, which from me at eight in the morning is a voice note’s worth.
Better than okay.
The Beltline at eleven is joggers and dogs and strollers and nobody who cares about football.
He’s waiting by the entrance in the cap that fools no one who has spent five years trying to get past him, holding two coffees from the bar with the good roaster.
He’s holding them level, like the job matters.
It’s eleven in the morning and he is exactly on time, which he has always been, to everything except the only thing.
In full sun the grey of his eyes goes nearly silver. Two years of nights, and I’m only learning that now. It’s the first fact daylight has ever handed me about this man, and I file it the way he would file it. Permanently.
“Double, short, no sugar,” he says, handing me one. “And the water’s in my pocket. You’d want the water.”
“You promised two words last night. I counted one.”
“The second one wasn’t allowed out yet.” He produces the water bottle from his pocket and hands it over unasked. “For later. You talk with your whole body. You’ll need it.”
“Five years of scouting and that’s the report?”
“The report has appendices.” He falls into step beside me, and for four blocks we walk like men who have all day, which neither of us has, which makes it a spent thing, chosen. “It’s why I asked for the walk.”
The sun is high and hot and completely indifferent, and we walk through it in the open, past strangers, past a man selling water from a cooler, past a woman with a dog named something she yells twice. Nobody looks at us. Everybody could.
“So,” I say. “The second word.”
He takes a breath like a man at the top of the stairs with a heavy box.
“In Rome there’s a restaurant I’ve been… not-going-to, for five years. The chef knows me from the market, keeps saying come, bring someone, I’ll cook off the menu. I never went, because it’s the kind of place you take somebody, and taking somebody was never in the system.”
He watches the path instead of me, but his voice stays level and he keeps going.
“In November, after the break, I want to book it. Under my name. For two. I want to sit in a room in my own city, at a table, with you, where anyone I know could walk in. That’s the second word, Enzo. It took eleven hours because I had to be able to finish it standing up.”
We walk maybe ten steps while that sits in the air between us, getting realer.
“And the noon?” I say. “The witnesses. ?íma? Tomá??”
“Not yet.” He says it plainly, no flinch, which I respect and hate at the same time.
It lands the way a stud lands, low on the shin.
The kind you walk off in front of the bench and feel all night.
“November is what I can lift today. I’m telling you the truth instead of promising you the world and dropping it on your foot in a corridor at midnight.
You said the sentence had to survive daylight.
” He gestures at the sun, the joggers, the whole indifferent morning. “This is me walking it around outside.”
I understand what he means. I also understand what he is not saying. The sun is full of strangers. Strangers are practice. The witnesses I named are people who would still know tomorrow, and he has not brought me to them yet.
He’s trying. That’s the thing I have to stand still inside of.
Something in my chest sits down slowly, as if it’s been standing for years.
Years of doors and twenty-second exits, and this man researched a restaurant reservation like a dossier.
I can feel him trying. And because he’s trying, because it’s real now and not a wish, I finally have to say the thing I’ve been keeping.
“Marek. Stop walking.”
He stops. A jogger parts around us and rejoins herself further down the path.
“I need you to understand something.” I keep my voice level.
This is not a thing I’m going to perform.
“Wanting me in the dark is not the same as choosing me. You want me. I’ve never doubted it, not even the morning you disappeared.
You wanted me the whole two years, and you wanted me from Rome, and you probably wanted me in the stairwell with your shoes in your hand.
I knew it even then. And none of that wanting ever once chose me. ”
A dog walker passes. The world stays ordinary on every side of us.
“I lived on wanting, and I’m telling you, as the only living expert, it nearly finished me.
After that last night, I set a table for one man and ate alone every time, and the wanting sat there with me like a guest who never touches his plate.
It nearly finished me, Marek. Not the leaving.
The wanting that wouldn’t turn into anything. ”
He doesn’t look away. He takes all of it standing up, in the sun, which the old version of him could never have done. That’s exactly what makes it worse. Now I can see how close he is.
“So here’s where we are,” I say. “You can’t go back. I won’t let you, and I don’t think you want to. And you can’t go forward yet, you just told me so yourself, which is the first honest measurement you’ve ever given me. So we’re standing in the one place I swore I’d never stand again. Between.”
“Between,” he says.
“I hate between. Between is where I lived for the last year. Between has furniture with my name on it.” My voice stays even.
My hands stay still. This is not an ultimatum.
Ultimatums are for people negotiating, and I’m done negotiating.
“So understand the terms of between, this time. I’m not waiting as a service.
I’m not holding the line to keep it warm for you.
The line is where I live. If you get to November and you book that table, I’ll sit at it.
If you get to November and the system wins, I will survive that too.
I’ve done it before. But the choosing, Marek, all of it, every gram, is yours now.
I’ve carried my half the whole way here. I’m putting it down.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. Somewhere behind, the woman yells the dog’s name twice more, and the ordinary world goes on being ordinary a meter from the most important conversation I’ve had standing up.
“You’re right,” he says finally. “I knew what daylight cost me. I didn’t let myself think about what the dark cost you.”
“Now you know.”
“Now I know.” He looks at me, level, taking the weight the way he takes a striker’s shoulder, set low, braced. “And the table you set for one man.” He says it carefully, like he’s handling somebody else’s tools. “Was I invited?”
“There was never anyone else, Marek.”
He nods once, slowly, a man signing for a delivery he can’t return.
“I’m not going to promise you the noon today.
I’m going to go win a quarterfinal against the best winger in the tournament, and I’m going to keep walking the sentence around in daylight until it can stand on its own and I’m not afraid of it. ”
That’s the point of no return, right there, in the middle of a public path in the sun.
Not a kiss, not a promise. Two men who can finally see the whole board, and neither of them can pretend anymore that the game isn’t real.
“That’s what makes this the worst place we’ve ever stood.
I can see the table from here. So can you.
And neither of us can sit down at it yet. ”
A stroller rolls past. The cooler man calls his price twice. The world keeps not noticing us, which used to be the whole strategy, and today just feels like being early to something.
We walk back, and it isn’t heavy, which surprises me. He tells me about the chef and the market, the whole small Rome life he built and never let anyone into, and I understand he’s not making conversation. He’s opening drawers. Look, this one. This one too.
“The vegetable man,” he says. “Every Saturday he tells me my basil choices shame my mother. He has never met my mother. He is very confident.”
“I like him already.”
“You’d be unstoppable together. It keeps me up at night.”
It’s clumsy and specific, and it’s the most he’s ever given me. I take all of it and want more and say so, and he laughs and opens another one.
At the entrance to the park, he stops. Public, bright, strangers everywhere.
“Wednesday,” he says. “On the pitch. Nothing gets easier.”
“Nothing gets easier,” I agree. “Off it either. That’s the deal.”
He walks off toward his hotel with his empty cup and doesn’t look back, and I stand there in the sun until he’s out of sight, and then I stand there a while longer.
On the way home, I stop at the market and buy nothing. I just walk through it once, both directions.
Davide is at the table when I come in, eating my leftovers without shame.
“Good walk?”
“Long walk.”
“Those are the good ones.” He pushes a plate toward me, my own food served back to me in my own kitchen.
I eat mine too, and it’s enough, and it isn’t, and I’ve decided to live with both of those for as long as it takes.
November has a shape now. That’s new. Between now and then is the place I swore I’d never live again, and I just signed a lease. That’s not enough for a Friday. It’s what Friday gets.