Everything on the Line (13 page)

It is a city where even getting lost is romantic. Where walking down a dark, narrow
calle
, or street, is not a harrowing experience but an exciting adventure (Marco Polo also called Venice home), the pedestrian never knowing what to expect around the corner, then discovering this quaint bridge or that charming square or perhaps a sleek gondola silently slicing through the ripples of a tranquil canal and wiping his or her imaginary screen that is projecting the film titled
Venice Is for Lovers
.

Ugo Bellezza and hometown girl Antonella Cazzaro, seventeen and very much in a love that is more than just a puppy, have cameo roles in this timeless movie. They are here, this August of 2047—with Giglio, Gioconda, Antonella’s
mamma
, Pia, and Lorenza Sceneggiatrice, Antonella’s coach and hitting partner—training for the upcoming U.S. Open in a brand-new hard-surface tennis complex on the nearby glassblowing island of Murano.

The group has rented two courts at the spiffy Sporting Club della Isola di Murano for the four players and two spectators, and at 9:30
A.M.
are on their way in a rented motorboat.

As they cruise to the north of the city through the Canale delle Navi and past the small island of San Michele that is dominated by a cemetery and a church, the sun shines brilliantly down on the sextet, warming their cockles, while a salty sprinkly spray from the
canale
bedews their faces.

Laughter fills the Canale degli Angeli in Murano as the lone vessel approaches the tennis club, located on the Calle del Cristo.

The laughter stops when the practice starts.

On one court, Coach Lorenza is putting Antonella through her paces: alternating backhand and forehand groundies, bringing her up to net, backing her up for overhead smashes, then back again to the baseline.

On the adjacent court, Ugo is a 78 rpm record to Antonella’s 45. Giglio is as impressed by Ugo’s speed, quickness, endurance, and court savvy as when his charge first began taking lessons as a ten-year-old. Multiplied by about three thousand.

Ugo has developed physically into a young man with the perfect proportions of a tennis champ. A male Goldilocks with a racquet. Not too tall. Not too short. Not too chunky. Not too slight.
Just right.

He has, mostly thanks to his beloved Giglio, accrued the most extraordinary combination of skills and has become the amalgam of the ideal player, possessing in one beautiful package the serve of Gonzalez or Sampras, the forehand of Johnston or Vines, the backhand of Budge or Rosewall, the volley of Newcombe or McEnroe, the strength of Hoad or Vilas, the mental toughness of Hewitt or Nadal, the consistency of Lendl or Wilander, the return of Agassi or Connors, the athleticism of Noah or Monfils, the coolness of Borg or Federer, the champion’s pedigree of Tilden or Laver.

After forty minutes of intense hitting, Giglio signs to Ugo that it’s time to take a blow, and he and his charge meet at the net for a powwow. This is still the part Ugo enjoys most, listening to the enlightening perceptions about tennis and life that his coach always shares with him.

As Giglio begins his didactic little spiel, the girls stop hitting, too, and saunter over to listen to his pearls.

“Ragazzo,”
Giglio begins, then corrects himself when he realizes his audience is now not one, but two young persons. “
Ragazzi
, I want to talk to you about
strength
,” he says, signing and speaking simultaneously.

Ugo flexes his right bicep manfully and giggles.

“No, not
that
kind of strength, but the kind that both of you have inside yourselves, the kind that is a big part of why you have both accomplished so much so early so far.”

Antonella looks first at Giglio, then at Ugo, and her face turns the color of a robin’s breast.

“Well, you guys are what I’d call ‘strong’ players inside. But you both can do some improving.

Antonella’s gorgeous periwinkle eyes flash. Ugo listens raptly and smiles inside himself.

“Ad esempio,”
Giglio continues, offering the example, “at one point during your hits, both of you gave up on retrieving drop shots when you were behind the baseline. Now, I know this is a difficult situation, and most players would weigh the pros and cons of trying for a shot where they have less than a 10 percent chance of success, in the process sacrificing valuable energy, and they, you know, they just couldn’t be bothered. Well, guess what.
You are both not
most players
.”

Ugo looks at Giglio and then at Antonella, and Antonella looks at Giglio and then at Ugo, and both
ragazzi
get it.

“Have you ever heard of Aesop’s fable of the wind and the sun?”

The two adolescent heads shake in unison.

“
Allora
, the wind and the sun are having this argument about which one is stronger. Well, they see this guy down there walking along, and the sun says, ‘I see how we can decide our argument. Whoever can make this guy take off his coat will be declared the stronger. You begin.’ So while the sun hides behind a cloud, the wind blows as hard as he can, but the harder he blows, the more tightly the guy down there holds onto his coat, until finally the wind has to give up. Then the sun comes out and, effortlessly, shines as bright as he can on the guy, who before long becomes so hot that he removes his coat.”

Ugo thinks about the way his principal foe, Jack Spade, plays tennis, with all his bluster, and then he thinks about how powerful poetry is and how well the fable expresses the point about bluster versus inner strength.

Antonella smiles and looks into Ugo’s eyes and points to him with her index finger, then places her right hand on her chest, then places both hands on her shoulders and projects them forward toward Ugo, turning them into fists.

You
are
…
my
…
strength
.

On the sidelines, Gioconda puffs her chest out, not in a boastful way, but the way a mother eagle would upon seeing her chick leave the cliff’s edge and take flight for the very first time. She looks at Antonella’s
mamma
, Pia, who is happily sitting beside her, and smiles her Mona Lisa smile.

* * *

Ugo Bellezza, Antonella Cazzaro, Giglio Marotti, Gioconda Bellezza, and Pia Cazzaro are standing in the corner of a dimly lit room in the Galleria dell’Accademia, gazing intently at Giorgione’s haunting masterpiece
La Tempesta.

It is a painting whose diminutive stature belies its gravitas. Although it has evoked many interpretations, symbolic and otherwise, the five viewers are all experiencing the same internal reaction. As they look at the central figure of the nude mother lovingly nursing her baby—a woman oozing innocence and purity through her uninhibited nakedness and bathed in light against a dark, stormy sky—the painting imbues each of them with a deep sense of silence. Their ten eyes move naturally from the nursing mother to the eerie natural background and then again to the mother, and the maternal figure looks back at them all, as if her stare were being captured by a hidden camera and frozen in time as she gazes out silently from within the frame.

The Tempest
is encased in silence, and the room, with no one else in it but the five viewers, is silent, and no words are needed to express their collective feeling of peaceful awe.

Utter silence is always with Ugo, but it is now also with his four companions, who are intensely feeling Ugo’s lifetime sentence, this eternal and internal prison of
silenzio
.

And the five experience the painting, and at this very instant the profound nature of soundlessness, as one.

* * *

A person who cannot hear misses a great deal less of Venice than of nearly any other city on earth. This is due to the absence of ground and underground transportation, noisy central marketplaces, bustling department stores, and tourist-ridden parks, zoos, and megamuseums. Aside from the hyperactivity in the Piazza San Marco, Venice is a haven of tranquillity and quietude.

From the Galleria dell’Accademia, the walk to the Osteria Galileo restaurant is a pleasant one, and Ugo is enjoying Venice’s tranquillity and quietude no more than his four traveling companions.

Ugo and Antonella, walking hand in hand through the narrow
calle
s and lagging behind Giglio and their
mamma
s, are in their own little private world where not a sound can be heard, aware of nothing other than the noticeably accelerated lub-dub of their two hearts.

The Osteria Galileo is situated near the center of a modestly sized but charming square, the Campo San Angelo, best known for its leaning
campanile
. Twenty outdoor tables, in rows of four, sit under a large white cloth canopy, and the one occupied by Giglio, Gioconda, Ugo, Antonella, and Pia distinguishes itself from the rest by its excessive liveliness and goodwill.

On their table are strewn bowls and plates and platters that brave the constant assault of utensils that jab, clamp, scoop, scrape, and spear their contents. Namely, a colorful array of indigenous dishes of the Veneto region: prawns and squid and octopus, and risotto and polenta and
risi e bisi
(rice and peas) and
castraure
(fried purple baby artichokes grown locally in Sant’Erasmo), and savory main courses like
bisato su l’ara
(eels roasted with bay leaves),
fegato alla veneziana
(calf’s livers with onions),
baccalà
(dried salted cod), and
seppie nere
(cuttlefish stewed in their own ink).

In the midst of the gustatory glee, Giglio Marotti speaks.

“So, has anyone ever heard of the famous telegram that the American humorist, journalist, essayist, and actor Robert Benchley sent from Venice to his editor at
The New Yorker
magazine over a hundred years ago?”

Apparently not.

“Well,” Giglio continues, a largish gulp of local Amarone wine warming his gullet, “he was supposed to have said,
Strade allagate.
Attendo istruzioni,
‘Streets flooded. Please advise.’”

After a pause of two seconds, the auditory equivalent of a facial double take, the other four at the table erupt in collective hilarity.

“Funny thing is,” Giglio continues as the laughter subsides, “it’s not only a hysterical quote, but it’s also
meaningful
. Beyond the fun, I think the guy was actually trying to say that when adversity strikes, you have to take what seems to be a bad thing and deal with what you have and make something good out of it.”

Another pause after Giglio’s explanation, but this time it is more pregnant.

Giglio himself is thinking about how his tennis career was sadly cut short but oh how he wouldn’t trade his life for
anyone’s,
and Gioconda is thinking about the tragic suicide of her husband and how she’ll never know why but had he not committed the selfish act Giglio would
never
have entered her or Ugo’s life, and Pia is thinking about how her husband left her when Antonella was eight and could she ever be a good mother? but how she knows in her heart that she has in fact been a very good one,
and how,
and Antonella is thinking about how she has thrown herself into her tennis so much that she never thought she could
ever
find a really good and decent young man who could truly love her but that was before she met Ugo, and Ugo is thinking about how he has never been able to hear a thing not a bird chirping or a bee buzzing or the canals of Venice rippling or what he imagines is the warm, sweet voice of Antonella Cazzaro but despite all this how is it that his life, filled with his passion for tennis and the love of his
mamma
and his coach and his girlfriend, is
so
unspeakably happy and what did he ever do to deserve it?

9

Rough Town

IT’S HOT AS HELL AND MUGGY AS HECK AND FUSES ARE SHORT,
so
it must be summer in
N
ew York. It is August, 2047, and seventeen-year-old Jack Spade is training like an adolescent possessed for the upcoming U.S. Open in his hometown.

“Goddammit!” Odi Mondheim screams, a large vein filling up and tracing its way southward from the side of his cranium to the corner of his left eye, its winding bluish path simulating a major river on a Rand McNally map.

“Listen up,” he says to a boardroom bulging with top Nike executives, “this is not brain surgery, it’s a goddam hangnail!”

Odi’s assistant in crime, Dick Malberg, lets a creepy, prescient smirk escape from the left corner of his mouth.

“A hangnail,”
Odi repeats. “The apparel in the new Black Jack tennis line will be all black
, period,
and the Nike swoosh will be black and raised slightly from the surface to stand out. Now, I’ve seen all your designs of black apparel with red swooshes, yellow shooshes, blue swooshes, and green swooshes. Very nice, but no dice. The whole point of the Black Jack line is that it is black,
all black
, because black is intimidating and black is strong and black is a winner, just like Black Jack Spade. Do I make myself clear?”

The eight executives sitting around the conference table in the Nike office at 6 East 57
th
Street glance at one another, nod their heads. Crime assistant Malberg’s wicked smirk broadens.

“Oh, and one more thing,” Odi says. “Our boy Jack Spade is the hottest thing since the iMiniTelevideoPhone. And so, I am here representing his father to tell you that your offer of a $20 million, one-year contract for the Black Jack tennis apparel line just ain’t gonna cut it. Are you kidding, for this kind of talent? Man, it only comes your way once in a blue moon. Once in your lifetimes, you’ll get the chance to see a Michael Jordan or a Wayne Gretzky or a Willie Mays or a Tiger Woods or a Gale Sayers. Jack’s the real deal, so it’s $100 million for two years or…
you can cram it where the sun don’t shine
!”