Chapter 9 Enzo
On the bus to the stadium for training, Ricci takes the seat beside me with the face of a man preparing a request.
“You’ve played him twelve times,” he says. “The right-back. Give me one thing.”
“Don’t pass backward near him. He eats hesitation.”
“And forward?”
“Forward, you’re somebody else’s problem.”
He chews on that. Then he writes it down. He actually writes it down. Behind us, Gallo is explaining that his group-stage socks are coming to the quarterfinal, and two rows of professional athletes are debating whether luck survives a wash cycle. The consensus is no.
“Luck is a system,” Gallo announces to the whole bus. “You don’t wash a system.”
The socks remain unwashed. This is the sport at its highest level.
The walkthrough is light, more for the cameras than the legs. The mister pulls me aside at the halfway line.
“They’ll double you when it matters,” he says. “Two shirts, all day. You know what that means.”
“Ricci’s alone at the far post.”
“So make the company expensive.” He taps my shoulder once. “And Enzo. Tonight, sleep.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Then lie there believing. It’s the same muscle.”
My press slot comes after the walkthrough. Full room. Quarterfinals do that.
“Enzo. The Czech right-back. He’s kept you quiet in club football. What makes this match different?”
“He hasn’t kept me quiet. He’s kept me patient.
There’s a difference, and you’ll see it on the pitch, and so will he.
I’ve spent five years learning what he takes away.
Next match, I find out what he’s willing to give up to keep taking it.
That’s not a threat. That’s the job description, his and mine.
Two men, one touchline, ninety minutes, and one of us goes home. ”
They write fast. A man in the third row wants to know if I fear the Czech defense.
“I grew up with two older siblings and one bathroom. Fear is for people with options.”
Laughter. A woman near the front: “You’re staying with Rossetti instead of the team hotel. Who cooks?”
“I cook. Davide provides the address and the applause. It’s a fair division.”
“Is staying with Rossetti why Italy looks so relaxed?”
“Italy looks relaxed because Italy is good. Davide’s address is why I look well-fed. Next question.”
“Ková? said this week that nobody stops you, they only delay you. Reaction?”
My thumb finds the watch band under the table and turns it once. He said that in a press room. Out loud. On the record, with cameras running, in the building where his entire team could hear it.
“Then we agree,” I say. “We’ll find out how long a delay costs.”
The corridor happens just after five.
I’m coming back from the interview zone with a water bottle, a media officer half a step behind me on her phone. The Czechs are filtering toward the pitch in warmup kit, single file past the equipment crates. The building being what buildings are, the file comes down my corridor.
?íma first, nodding the way professionals nod. Two more I know by shirt. Then him.
He slows. The file goes on around him the way water goes around a stone, and there we are, in a service corridor, seventy thousand seats overhead being vacuumed.
“Enzo.”
“Ková?.”
He looks at me, and I know every version of that look. I have a catalog. This one is the doorway look with something new behind the jaw, a sentence trying to get itself in order. His mouth opens.
“Wednesday,” he says. “After. Whatever happens in the match, there’s a thing I want to…”
Everything in me leans toward the end of that sentence.
An entire year, one table, one bed I let him back into, and all I have to do is stand still and let him finish.
And this is the moment I finally understand something about my own rule.
Wanting him was never the dangerous part.
The dangerous part is how easy it would be to make it cheap for him, to let the sentence live here in a service corridor under the vacuums, where a man can say anything at all because nobody is watching him say it.
I choose the line. On purpose. In the middle of the sentence I’ve wanted for years.
“Stop,” I say, and he stops, because he has never once not listened to me.
“Not here. Not now. Look at where we are. A service corridor in a quarterfinal week, both of us full of a match that hasn’t happened yet.
Whatever you say in this hallway, tomorrow you get to call it nerves.
I’m not giving you the exit. Finish that sentence at noon, on a day you picked because it was hard.
If it’s real, it survives the wait. If it only lives in dark vacant corridors, I’ve already heard it. ”
I don’t wait for his face to finish what it does, because if I watch it, I’ll take all of it back. I walk. My legs do it. The whole way, something pulls back toward the tunnel doors. I keep walking. Behind me, the file of red and white moves on toward the pitch.
It costs. Let the record show it costs. Nobody tells you that holding your own line feels less like winning and more like walking out of the one shop in the whole city that sells the thing you came for, with your money still in your pocket and the entire walk home a hollow reminder of what you saved.
Davide finds me at the far end of the players’ lounge an hour later, eating almonds I don’t remember picking up.
“Good presser. The bathroom line’s already clipped everywhere. Your mamma texted me about it. Me, not you. You should know your mother has my number.”
“Everyone has your number. You give it out like bread.”
“She asked if you’re sleeping. I said like a baby. I lie beautifully on your behalf.”
“You lie terribly.”
“For you I improve.” He drops into the chair and puts the almonds between us. The Czech session plays mute on the lounge screen in a wide shot, and at this distance the players are only shapes. One of the shapes runs its channel up and down, up and down, tireless, exact.
“You watching?” he asks.
“No,” I say, watching it.
“Course not. Two guys, one television, not watching.” He settles in. “You want to tell me why the not-watching has a face on it tonight?”
“Davide.”
“Fine. Then I’ll say my piece to the television and the television can do what it wants with it.
” He eats an almond and addresses the screen, conversational.
“A man cooked a six-hour dinner in my kitchen this week. My kitchen smelled like his father’s restaurant for two days.
I’ve known him since we were seventeen, and in all that time he has cooked like that for exactly two reasons.
Family. And once, years ago, for somebody he never introduced me to, a period when he kept going quiet on Sundays, and on Mondays acting like the calendar had personally wronged him.
” He eats another almond. “The television can draw its own conclusions. I’m just here for the almonds. ”
The shape on the screen finishes its channel and starts again.
“Davide.”
“Mm.”
“After the tournament. Whichever way it goes. I’ll tell you the whole thing.”
“I know you will,” he says. He hands me the rest of the almonds and doesn’t move for an hour.
Gallo wanders through with a plate of everything and asks the television whether the Czechs mark zonal at corners.
Nobody answers him. He nods anyway, satisfied, a man conducting his own private presser, and drifts on.
That’s the whole evening. It’s enough, and it isn’t, in exactly the proportions I’ve decided to live with.
I listen to Mamma’s voice note. Four minutes, eleven seconds.
The restaurant flooded a little, not badly, don’t worry, your brother fixed it wrong and then Papà fixed the fixing, and now the two of them communicate exclusively through the dishwasher.
She and the cat have reached an arrangement regarding the planter, which means the cat won.
Gianna is bringing an engineer to Sunday lunch, we’ll see.
Then, with no gear change at all, the way she does it:
“The neighbor asked if you’re bringing somebody to Assunta’s in August. I said who knows, Enzo. Who knows?”
I stand at the window with the phone at my mouth and the stadium glow over the roofline, and I record the reply.
The flood, noted. The cat, congratulated.
The engineer, to be investigated personally in ways Gianna should be warned about.
Then, “Tell the neighbor August is far away. Tell her Enzo is bringing his appetite. Kiss Papà. I love you.”
Who knows. Not me. That’s the honest answer, and I didn’t give it.
Gianna texts at ten.
The engineer is nobody, relax. Also, you did the watch thing during the Ková? question. Only I would notice. I notice.
I text back a photo of the breakfast table, set for one, no caption, because she’s the only person alive who gets the whole sentence from the picture. One word comes back.
Testardo.
Stubborn.
From her, it’s almost a blessing. Almost.
Here’s the fear, since it’s late and nobody’s listening. I know how to hold this line. I could hold it for ten more years. I come from people who hold things. Pans and grudges and dinner tables and doors. Holding is a skill like any other, and it improves with use.
That’s exactly what frightens me. I’m twenty-four years old and already this good at it.
Somewhere out there is a version of me who held the line perfectly every day and got very old being completely right, alone, in a kitchen that only ever needed one plate.
I met him tonight in a corridor, for a second, when I heard my own voice say stop.
He sounded strong, and he sounded exactly like me, and I couldn’t tell whether he was the one saving my life or the one spending it.
I lay out tomorrow’s kit the way I’ve done since I was nine.
Shirt, shorts, socks, boots checked twice.
I text Ricci a photo of the boots. He replies with a flexed arm and the wrong emoji for the occasion, which is somehow also the right one.
The phone goes on the nightstand. The apartment does its machine hum.
Across the roofline, a stadium sits in the dark, holding Wednesday.