Everything on the Line (2 page)

So. Is this what I, the Lord Almighty, really want to do? Settle this thing once and for all? Is it worth flushing everything I have done for man—all I have created, all I have sustained—right down the commode? And what if—what if it turns out that the Monarch of Hell is right after all, that man is inherently…

After an excruciating three minutes, God responds. “Okeydokey, Mr. Big Shot, you got yourself a deal. So what exactly did you have in mind?”

“Well,” Satan answers, “how ’bout if we have this humongous showdown between the two opposing forces, say, in a winner-take-all athletic competition?”

God furls His bushy right eyebrow and places His chin between right thumb and forefinger, the two pudgy digits burying themselves deep into His milk-white Monty Woolley beard. “Yes, I think that could work—”

“So, let’s say you handpick your player and I’ll handpick mine, and we shall see which one prevails,” the Devil says with a wicked grin.

“Sounds good to Me,” God says. “Let us make Our picks and let nature—
man’s
nature—take its course—”

“Yes,” Satan cuts in, “and whichever force wins, that will be it, once and for all. And—”

“I get the picture,” God says, “so it’s a bet, and good luck, and may the best man win—”

“Or the
worst
,” Satan corrects, inhaling a giant gob of smoke from his post-appetizer eleven-inch Cohiba Esplendidos Cuban cigar and expelling it toward his adversary’s face in the form of three perfect rings shaped like inverted pentagrams.

“You are
so
competitive!” God says, destroying the smoke rings with one violent swipe of His mighty right hand.

“
Damn
right!” Satan snortles through a yellow smile.

“But We haven’t decided on a mano a mano sport, a perfect battleground on which this ultimate struggle shall be contested,” God says.

“Right you are. How ’bout chess?” the Devil suggests.

“Naaah, way too boring. And besides, it was already used by Bergman in—”

“Oh yeah,
The Seventh Seal
,” Satan agrees. “Well, how ’bout pool—”

“
The Hustler
—”

“Righto. Newman and Gleason. Ummm…bowling?”

“Nope,” God says. “First of all, Barack ruined it for everyone during that 2008 campaign stop fiasco in Altoona. And We also need to choose a sport that tests all of man’s physical and mental abilities, and, most critical of all, that requires him to draw on everything that is inside of him—”

“
Golf!
” Satan exclaims.

“Getting warmer,” God says, “but we need something more active, a sport with lots of movement and running and that requires that our combatants break a sweat.”

“Boxing!” Beelzebub yelps. “The sweet science!”

“Wrong again, My horned one,” God says, “
way
too violent.”

A petulant Satan sulks, takes another long puff from his Havana stogie, lets a thin billow trickle off his forked tongue.

“Let Us see,” God continues. “It must be a sport that tests man to the max, a sport that pits him against an equally worthy opponent in a pitched battle of which Papa Hemingway would be proud, a sport that requires every human skill imaginable—stamina, speed, quickness, creativity, resourcefulness, resilience, anticipation, technique, power, finesse, mental agility, physical strength, patience, flexibility, cunning, intelligence…”

The two antagonists look at each other and come to precisely the same conclusion at precisely the same instant.

“Tennis!”

As they swallow their last bites of dinner and shake hands in a symbolic gesture that seals the deal, the bombshell slinks up to the table with the check.

“Let Me take that,” God offers.

“Not a chance in hell,”
Satan hisses with his best Vincent Price impression, whipping out his Purgatory Club credit card. “This one’s on me.”

The Devil smiles lustfully one last time at the busty server, signs the check with his little goat-head scribble, and he and God exit the establishment together.

“You realize,” God says, looking upward, “that if—that is,
after
—I win Our little bet, whenever We dine together there will be no Purgatory or Hell, so We shall be supping at one of My favorite places in the Heavenly Realm, perhaps
Thy Gill Be Done
or
Blessed Are the Leek
.”

“I fear that you’re mistaken,” Satan contradicts. “For it is I who am going to win, and thereafter there will be no Purgatory or Heaven, so we’ll be dining at one of my favorite haunts in the Dark Kingdom, maybe
The Cloven Hoof
or
Pants on Fire
.”

After bidding each other
adieu
and
audiable,
Satan takes the down elevator and God the up.

3

Sprezzatura

ONE GAZE AT ITS INSPIRING PANORAMA is all it takes to tell you why Florence was the city at the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance.

It is not that, visually, it is imposing like New York. Or drop-dead gorgeous like San Francisco or Rio. Or breathtaking like Paris or classical like Rome or stately like London.

Florence, in a word, is
balanced.

From above, this Tuscan jewel is neither a large city nor a provincial town.

Man-made baptistery and bell tower, campanile and cupola, spire and steeple—sprouting up like rogue mushrooms—meld with the natural splendor of rolling hill and grapevine and cypress tree and olive branch.

As the eye descends, the burnt orange of terra-cotta rooftops, a warm baked-earth orange, immerses
Firenze
in temperance and harmony, this neutral, balanced color that lies on the cusp, not too hot and not too cool, this color of transition and mediation that embodies an architectural style known as Mediterranean, a word fittingly derived from the Latin for “middle of the earth.”

At ground level, quaint and narrow streets counterbalance broad and yawning
piazze.
And a vibrant citizenry coexists with the venerable ghosts of its illustrious Florentine forebears, the likes of Dante, Boccaccio, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Leonardo, Galileo, Raphael, and that whole Medici crowd.

Most of the locals, tourists, and phantoms can be found on the more bustling and ostentatious right bank of the Arno. But across the river is the Altr’arno, the left bank, quainter, more laid-back and tranquil. Cross the venerable Ponte Vecchio, continue on the Via Guicciardini, then hang a quick right, left, and right, and you will find yourself on the charming little Via dei Vellutini—tucked cozily between Brunelleschi’s strangely faceless Santo Spirito church and the imposing Palazzo Pitti—and looking up at the modest second-story flat of the widow Gioconda Bellezza and her thirteen-year-old son, Ugo.

Sitting by his bedroom window on this cool October day in 2043, Ugo Bellezza is mesmerized by the sight of a gorgeous little reptile—some sort of lizard or gecko perhaps?—crawling along the railing of the building’s exterior. He watches it for several minutes, lips puckered in awe. Suddenly, from nowhere, a violent flapping of black wings, a large yellow beak emerges, the unwitting reptile is plucked from its perch, and the famished bird—its motions too frenzied to identify it with any certainty—ascends in triumph with its unlucky prey.

It is Ugo’s first memorable encounter with mortality (his father died when he was barely a year old), and the fatal event edits the hyphen his mouth had been forming into a capital
O.

His tummy is feeling icky, mimicking the pain the poor lizard must have felt. But the discomfort vanishes, as if magically, when Ugo comprehends the phenomenon he has just witnessed. He recalls Giglio quoting to him—maybe it was just last month?—a passage from Leonardo da Vinci’s
Notebooks.
All about the perfect balance that exists in nature and how everything happens for a reason. “Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature,” Giglio had recited from memory, as he looked straight into Ugo’s eyes.

Perhaps then this thought had appeared abstract and not entirely clear to Ugo. But now, he totally gets it. Animals are not mean-spirited or malicious or despicable when they kill. They just need to eat.

Virgilio Marotti, Ugo’s beloved “Giglio”—father figure, mentor, best pal, and tennis coach—enters the room and taps Ugo gently on the shoulder. The adolescent turns around and gives his coach a warm smile.

“
Andiamo, ragazzo,
it is time to play!” Giglio says, enunciating each syllable meaningfully. Ugo’s smile, widening, says yay yippee hurray
evviva
!

Ugo throws his tennis bag over his shoulder, and the two jog into the kitchen like excited schoolmarms to say good-bye to Ugo’s mother, who, at the sound of their sneakersteps, whirls around.

Gioconda Bellezza is standing by the sink, her hands dusted with flour and partially caked with clumps of bread dough. Hers are rough hands, toughened by decades of soaking, squashing, squishing, smushing, and sifting, to which she, as a Tuscan
donna
, has committed herself. They are also tender hands, softened by over a decade of love and nurturing, to which she, as a Tuscan
mamma
, has devoted herself.

These hands, dough clumps and all, wrap themselves around her Ugo and squeeze him tight. Gioconda smiles at her son, with her Mona Lisa smile that is just as knowing as but a smidge less mysterious than the one in the painting. She releases Ugo and throws a second smile Giglio’s way.

“
A presto, ragazzi
, see you boys for dinner,” she says, returning to her bread.

* * *

Virgilio Marotti chugs up to the parking lot at the Tennis Club Racchetta Novantanove on Via di Brozzi and deposits his beat-up 2026 Fiat 898 Veloce. The jalopy, which Giglio has tenderly named Viola, put-puts to a labored stop. Giglio finds the clunky sound slightly annoying; Ugo does not.

As they jog onto their sumptuous deep red clay outdoor court, reserved for two hours, it is the teacher who is the more noticeable of the two players. He is dashing in his canary-yellow Fila warm-up suit, his bushy brown mustache and virile beard stubble, his wiry physique. Preparing to hit the first practice ball of the session, his strong, long, lithe fingers dwarf the shaved thin grip of his Dunlop racquet just the way his tennis idol Ilie Nastase’s did his.

But as soon as Giglio hits this first ball, something happens that diverts all the focus from him to his pupil. Uncannily, Ugo is running to return the ball at virtually the precise instant that it leaves his coach’s racquet. Not a half second later or even a quarter second, but nearly simultaneously. To Giglio’s delight, Ugo reaches the ball in plenty of time, sets his feet, and cracks a forehand down the line that is unreturnable.

“
Bravissimo!
” Giglio says, initiating a second rally.

Carbon copy.

Looking at his pupil, sports
fanatico
Giglio recalls Armin Hary, the German sprinter who eighty-three years ago was the first non-American to win the Olympic 100-meter dash since 1928. What was so amazing about Hary (Giglio has seen actual video footage) was his ridiculously fast starts, based on his keen sense of hearing, as though he could react perfectly to the sound of the starter gun at the precise instant it went off. Of course, Giglio thinks, Ugo’s genius is due to something different, something God-given that has to do with some sort of heightened visual sense of anticipation that he was, well, just born with.

Coach steps it up, hitting balls closer to the lines to make student increase his effort, but again, Ugo reaches them all in plenty of time.

Giglio steps it up even more, moving young Ugo from side to side, but still the boy’s uncanny anticipation allows him to retrieve each shot with nanoseconds to spare.

I piedi!
Move those feet!
E…piccoli passi!
Little steps!

Giglio is barking these fundamental tenets, but the thirteen-year-old, to whom they are second nature, doesn’t need to hear them.

Giglio continues the rallies uninterrupted for a good hour, working on footwork, strategy, and footwork.

“Piccoli passi!”
Giglio barks, and there are those gorgeous tiny steps of Ugo’s balleting toward the ball.

“Preparazione!”
and Ugo takes his racquet back instinctively as soon as Giglio’s makes contact.

“Fuoco!”
and Ugo, having been taught that the word can mean both
fire
and
focus
, oozes both qualities from his eyes.

“Let’s take a blow,” Giglio says, and the two come together at the net for a moment’s rest. This is Ugo’s favorite part: watching tennis wisdom emanate from his mentor’s lips.

“Well, that was a terrific first half of our practice,” Giglio begins. “Your footwork was perfect, your racquet was back, you attacked your ground strokes, and, most of all, you thought about placement and strategy and really used your coconut!”

Giglio doinks the top of his head with the bent knuckle of his right hand’s middle finger and makes a loud clucking sound by releasing, violently, the vacuum formed between his tongue and the roof of his mouth.

“Thanks,” Ugo responds, bending over in hysterics.

“Now, let me ask you one thing,” Giglio says. “That easy backhand you missed about two minutes ago when you had me on the ropes? What did you think of that?”

Ugo looks sheepish and apologizes.

“
Ascolta
, listen up: You never need to feel ashamed of making a mistake, whether it’s here on the court, or anywhere else. And do you know why?”

Ugo does not.

“Well,” Giglio says, “because we all make mistakes, and no one is perfect.”

Ugo is relieved.

“But do you know what is not good about missing a shot like that if it happened during a match?”

Ugo thinks. “Because I would lose the point?”

“Nope.”

“Because it would look stupid?” Ugo opines, making the point by using his hands.

“Wrong again, I’m afraid,” Giglio says, furling his right eyebrow, pursing his lips, placing hands on waist, and sticking out his right hip foppishly.