The florist had come to Letizia’s house on Saturday. He’d rung the doorbell, and her mother had leaned out the window.
“Are you delivering a bouquet of flowers?”
“No, signo’.”
“Then why did you ring?”
“Because I’ve brought you the whole vanload.”
Nicolas was certain that this would mend the quarrel of a few days earlier, and in fact, when he woke up on Sunday, what he found on WhatsApp was a photograph of Letizia wearing the fuchsia panties that drove him crazy, her hair unbound over her breasts to conceal them, but only a little, and the Hello Kitty oven mitt. Along with the photo, an invitation surrounded by hearts: “Sunday lunch with your kitty cat?”
The fall through the trapdoor still smarted, and going to lick his wounds in Letizia’s arms was a comforting prospect. But since what hurt worst, more than the fall in and of itself, was the insult that Don Vittorio had leveled against his neighborhood, his rione, he brought a can of black spray paint and, along the way, revving the engine of his TMAX, grabbed the spray can and left a fast, flowing message on the asphalt, his signature, a love note: “F12.” Where the F in Fiorillo was also the F in Forcella, and it fused together, in the same destiny, his own name and the streets he commanded. The 12 represented the position of N in the Italian alphabet, and what’s more, it stood both for ’o surdate, the soldier in the Neapolitan card game of smorfia, and for the twelve apostles. A proper self-respecting signature, he thought, and nodded with satisfaction. Then, as long as he was at it, he shook the can again and added, beside it: I love you, Lety.
Tucano, rolled up in his sheets, opened a single eye, the other one still glued shut by sleep dust. Someone was twisting his big toe. It was Sunday, what the hell was happening?
“Piece of shit,” his father shouted, smacking his foot, “you got a D-minus in math, and a D-plus in Italian. Are you seriously going to make me work as hard as I do for no good reason! And what the hell is this new tattoo on your forearm?”
“It’s Michael Jordan,” Tucano mumbled.
“Who? It looks to me like a triangle with a dot.” Fucked-up Sunday, Tucano thought to himself.
Tucano had decided that he wouldn’t quit school, for one simple reason: it was a good way to rest up from the effort of running a piazza and a good cover ever since he’d been a member of the paranza. But it also meant he had to put up with the furious outbursts of his father, a violent man who was fixated on academic achievement. He was a mailman, but he wanted more out of life, so he tried to redeem himself through his son’s education. And Tucano let him.
Fucked-up Sunday, thought Lollipop. He’d woken up with a hunger in him that he would have had to go to a wedding banquet to satiate, but on the kitchen table all he’d found was a pitcher full of some greenish liquid and a few flat buckwheat cakes. His mother was on a diet again and the beverage was her celery-ginger-orange centrifuged drink. His whole family was there, father, mother, and two sisters, and the conversation was revolving around the same topic: the gym they all ran together. Nothing much, a room with treadmills and exercise bikes, another room for running, and the third room crowded with barbells and weights and a couple of full-body training machines. Then there were the showers, a mini-sauna that could hold two people at the most, and the locker rooms. It had been an old investment of his father’s with the unexpected money from an inheritance, and now that gym was struggling to stay afloat, just to make ends meet.
“What time did you get home, Vince’?” his mother asked. She was wearing an Adidas tracksuit that highlighted her butt, rock-solid from hours of pilates. Everyone else in the family was in Adidas, too: his father called it their family uniform.
“Ma, please,” said Lollipop.
“Vince’, you know that Ciro Somma got Fabrizio Corona to come to his gym?”
“I know that, Pa,” Lollipop replied, grateful to his male parent for sparing him the umpteenth sermon from his mother. “Corona goes there because Somma paid him!”
His father was fixated on the idea that to make the great leap forward, what he needed was to attract a VIP clientele, ideally soccer players.
“The reason those guys don’t come is that they have gyms of their own. And after all, you have to pay them three times as much. The price to get them to come and also the price for the competition you represent for their own gyms. They’re filthy pigs.”
“But we need … we need some event! If you can get an event, then you exist! And if you exist, then people want to come see you! It’s because of the event that they know you exist.”
Lollipop rolled his eyes, and when he lowered them again they met his mother’s. She picked up where she’d left off: “So that’s why you want to live, eh? I wish I knew how you can stick those things on you that you wear! You and that gang of friends of yours … but if I find out that you’re working for someone on the street, with the Strianos or, even worse, with the guys from San Giovanni, your life is over, I’ll shoot you before they can.”
Lollipop turned serious: “No gang, Ma. We don’t work for anyone else. If we need something, we just take it, full stop.”
“What do you mean, you just take it?”
Lollipop pretended a sudden stomachache had come over him, and he took shelter in the bathroom. The text from Tucano had come in just two minutes earlier.
Tucano
Before-dinner drinks, no girlfriends.
Piazza Quattro Colonne at 6.
See you there.
Lollipop emerged from the bathroom shouting an “all’s good” to his mother, who was worried that his constant stomach troubles were a result of the garbage he ate when he wasn’t home, and then headed down to the garage to get his scooter. Under the seat, he’d already prepared all his necessities. In the meantime, Tucano was doing the same thing.
Tucano’s and Lollipop’s piazzas were in a state of crisis. Micione was evicting them, inundating the peddlers with a waterfall of narcotics. According to Nicolas, it was a sign that Micione was shitting his pants and felt obliged to show off his muscles. No doubt true, thought Tucano and Lollipop, but in the meantime they felt helpless, and to make up for the shortfall in their piazzas’ revenues, they had turned to shakedowns and extortion.
Lollipop arrived first and rode the traffic circle of Piazza Quattro Colonne while he waited for Tucano. Everytime he passed through there, he gave a glance at the statues that seemed to be holding up those stout palazzi. He was going to be famous one day, but he wasn’t going to sweat and toil like those losers.
He steered the scooter with just one hand, legs crossed to one side, as if he were perched on a stool. Tucano’s idea was a good one, he had to admit, even if he didn’t understand why he’d asked him to show up unarmed—or, as he’d put it in their rudimentary code, “no girlfriends”—for that before-dinner drink, and therefore, for the shakedown they had in mind.
He saw him arrive, aerodynamically reclined, from the avenue leading to the station. Without bothering to glance at the traffic, Tucano cut straight across the traffic circle and pulled up next to his friend, extending his fist.
“Wait, so, have you ever fucked a femminiello in the ass?” Lollipop asked after returning the greeting.
“No, but one time I let one suck me off.”
“But if you have sex with a femminiello, a tranny, does that make you gay?”
“It’s not like we’re having sex with them, we just need to take their money. If they don’t pay us, we break their legs. We kick them good and hard in the face.”
They were riding along side by side, chatting as they putted slowly, 5 m.p.h., circling under the stern gazes of the Telamons, the mighty atlases holding up the balconies, and the indifferent glances of the motorists.
“Did you make the maces?” Tucano asked.
Lollipop nodded. The day before, he’d stolen two barbell shafts from his folks’ gym and he’d wrapped the banners of the S.S.C. Napoli team around them. That way, if the Falchi—the cops—spotted them, they’d just be heading to the stadium. Diego Armando Maradona was in the city. His tour had begun a week earlier, in the TV studio of a talent show where he’d danced with a professional ballerina, and that tour was going to conclude that evening, at the San Paolo stadium, in a farewell to his fans and his old teammates.
“This is the queer that’s in charge in the neighborhood,” said Tucano, “so if he starts to pay us…”
“But if you ask me, queers, even if they’re paying us,” said Lollipop, “even if they’re paying us, they need to be beaten. I mean, why the fuck are you going to be gay?! You were born a man, so be a man! If you’re sick—”
“What’s that have to do with it! Look, they use their ass to make money! My father always says that the femminielli give the best blow jobs.”
“For real?”
“Sure, because they have a dick too! So they know, you get it, what to do with a dick … how to treat it, but women don’t have dicks, so they have to learn.”
“I don’t know, it’s gross. Would you let guys stick it up your ass for money?”
“That depends on how much money they’d give me.” Tucano laughed. “And after all, people are free to do what they want, I mean, if you’re a femminiello, you’re a femminiello! That’s how God Almighty made you!”
“Are you serious?” asked Lollipop, giving the finger to a Toyata Yaris that had honked at them. “God Almighty made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Ja’, what bullshit!”
“Ha ha, at the very worst he made Eve and Eve.”
“Ua’, Eve and Eve! Now, I don’t mind that! Once in the gym my mamma caught two women in the shower licking each other off!”
“Really? Ua’, I’m getting a hard-on!”
They drove out of the traffic circle. Via Duomo, in the direction of Nuova Marina. A couple of cross streets and then a right turn. They’d already arrived. The building was elegant, with a doorman greeting the respectable tenants as they walked out to go to Mass. He asked no questions of those two young men carrying the Naples soccer team banners on their shoulders: even envied them a little bit.
Esterina was receiving customers on the sixth floor, and the boys took the stairs to avoid the residents as much as they were able. On the second flight, Tucano was already huffing and puffing, pulling the T-shirt with the Mexican skull on it away from his sweaty chest. Lollipop, on the other hand, clambered up the stairs, light-footed, defiant of his mother and her refusal to feed him pasta.
Esterina’s door stood ajar, an old habit of hers to put her clients at ease, especially the green ones who were there for the first time: it meant they didn’t have to ring the bell twice and give themselves time for second thoughts. That door was the first step to perdition.
Tucano and Lollipop entered in silence, walking down a dimly lit hallway. There was just one door, at the end of the hall, with a panel of pebbled glass. Behind it was a shadow and then there she was, Esterina. She wore a purple peignoir trimmed with lace, loosely fastened to keep from revealing entirely what nonetheless remained just visible. A pair of enormous, perfect tits. Esterina sashayed forward, her face turned slightly downward, doing her best to imitate the walk of Belén Rodríguez. Perhaps that’s why she failed to notice the barbell shafts sticking up from behind the backs of Tucano and Lollipop.
“Hey, queer,” Tucano burst out, all in a single breath. “From now on you’re giving us five hundred euros a week. Five hundred for this week and five hundred euros for last week, which you haven’t paid us yet. The paranza will come around to collect the money. If we hear that you’re telling other queers like yourself not to pay, you’re dead. You see this club? We’ll split your skull with it!”
Esterina finally looked up, and, before her face twisted in rage, Tucano and Lollipop were both able to admire it, the way her many clients had previously done. It was a gorgeous face. Smooth, diaphanous skin, with just a hint of makeup, and those deep, dark eyes, enhanced further by the kohl. She’s a fairy princess, thought Lollipop, enchanted, but then he noticed the Adam’s apple dancing up and down and he was liberated from the enchantment of those eyes.
“I’ve never paid anyone,” said Esterina. Her voice came out especially shrill, heightened by fear. “I’ve never had a pimp,” she went on, “I work for myself, and only for myself. I don’t come around asking for money from you, and you shouldn’t come around asking for money from me.” What Esterina was displaying wasn’t courage, it was just a quirk of her profession: aggression pays off.
“You see, she isn’t Eve!” Lollipop said to Tucano. “Take a look at the piece of apple that stuck in her throat!”
“Listen, slut,” said Tucano, “we’re saying it for you. If you pay us, then you’re authorized to work here; if anyone gives you any trouble, then you’re authorized to call us.”
“Authorized to work here? I was born here, what the fuck are you talking about? Who do you think you are, the mayor of Naples?”
“That would be nothing, we’re the paranza, and the paranza gives the orders!”
“Even when the Strianos were in charge, they didn’t make us pay.”
“The Strianos are dead now, they don’t exist anymore. We’re in charge now. And you queers have to pay just like everybody else, because you don’t exist unless we say so.”
“Well, well, well, now the runts of the litter have decided they’re lions!” said Esterina. Her shrill voice had given way to a baritone timbre. She whipped around, in a fluttering cloud of perfumed fabrics, and strode briskly toward her bedroom door. Cinnamon, Lollipop decided, she smells of cinnamon. Then, having stripped the barbell shafts of the banners, he hurried after her, and Tucano was right behind him.
Esterina threw herself onto the bed, using the pillows to fend off the blows, while the two members of the paranza wrecked everything in the room, smashing lampshades, perfume bottles, breaking pieces of furniture, and ripping down curtains and shades. Only the mirror was left intact, because nobody is ever intentionally looking to tempt bad luck.
“That’s enough, please, stop now!” Esterina shrieked, but those weren’t words that Tucano and Lollipop were interested in hearing.
The timer on a tropical aquarium hidden behind a torn-down curtain caught Lollipop’s attention.
“No, not the fish!” Esterina squawked. “Forget about those fish and let me see your fish.”
Lollipop froze with the barbell shaft in midair and turned to look at Tucano. In the meantime, Esterina had gotten out of bed, turned her back to them, and with a shimmy of her ass, let her robe slide to the floor. Then she slipped off her panties, which were silky black and translucent, and tossed them behind her without looking.
She had grabbed her sex in her hand and was hauling it upward, displaying the dark patch between her testicles and her anus.
“Ja’, come fuck me here.”
Tucano furrowed his brow, squinted, and darted his neck forward like a turkey.
“Lollipo’, this girl doesn’t have a dick!”
“You’re right,” said Lollipop, drawing nearer. “It looks like a pussy!”
“You see? Come on, come fuck me, ja’!”
“But then will I turn gay?” asked Lollipop.
“Only if you take it up the ass are you gay,” said Tucano.
“That’s right, yes, I’m the only one who’s gay, because I take it,” Esterina confirmed.
Tucano dropped his pants, frantically, and almost tripped over them, but immediately recovered his balance and grabbed his penis, heading straight for Esterina.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked, and handed him condoms.
Lollipop waited his turn, watching the intercourse, secretly relieved that it had been up to Tucano to dance the first dance. Once his friend was done, Lollipop stripped from the waist down.
“Ah, now I understand why they call you Lollipop,” said Tucano, wiping himself off with a hand towel that Esterina had given him. “Your cock looks like a stop sign.”
Lollipop grabbed his long, skinny penis and waved the oversized head of it in the direction of Tucano, who burst out laughing while Esterina rolled her eyes.
They screwed her twice apiece, and then, after pocketing the thousand euros, on their way out of the apartment, Tucano told Esterina: “You can tell all the other femminielli that you’re the mayor of the femminielli! Then maybe we’ll give you a discount.”
“So you see, you’re already falling in love,” Esterina replied, blowing him a farewell kiss.
It was a Sunday like any other. Dull and overstuffed with lunches, soporific and seemingly endless. A time for homework done with uncommon diligence. Biscottino was writing furiously, without much interest in whether he was answering the questions correctly, because all his mother required was a sufficient display of effort.
He’d concealed his smartphone under his butt. His mother had already confiscated one phone, but he’d immediately arranged to procure another one, to keep an open channel of communication with the paranza. When Tucano’s text made his testicles vibrate, his face split into a beaming smile that she, sitting across from him, had no idea how to interpret.
It was a Sunday of bitter quarrels, like the one between Drone and his sister, Annalisa, who refused to abandon her standpoint: that boy was too intelligent for the friends he spent his time with, as well as a computer genius. She didn’t know anything about the tech field, but still she realized that her brother was genuinely talented. And then those guys had come into his life, and what happened had happened, and now he’d even stopped attending school. She looked at him, bent over his iPad, though she took care not to ask him where it had come from.
Drone could feel his sister’s eyes on him, but he had no time to return her look. Just yesterday a restaurateur who was under the paranza’s control had complained to him because, in spite of all the money he gave them, he was still getting terrible reviews on TripAdvisor. “Then that just means that the food you cook is disgusting,” Drone had replied. The TripAdvisor scam was a technique he’d come up with to maximize his revenue. It was based on the principle that these days, no one bothered to go to a restaurant anymore without first checking the reviews and the average rankings given by users in terms of number of bubbles. Four and a half bubbles? Why not five? The difference between a profitable bar and one on the verge of bankruptcy was a matter of a few decimal points. And so Drone had decided to exploit them, those bubbles, and it was a win-win for everyone: the customers in the piazza where Drone dealt narcotics, who got their drugs at a 5 percent discount in exchange for at least twenty favorable reviews for the restaurant indicated by the paranza; the proprietor of the restaurant who saw an increase in customers; and the paranza, who pocketed a percentage from the restaurateur without lifting a finger.
“Will you stop reading that damned thing?” asked Annalisa. Now she was on the offensive, her face beet-red: at least they could be a family on Sundays, couldn’t they?
“Shh,” he silenced her, “this is important,” and he proceeded to read the message from Tucano that had just appeared on the screen of his iPad.
Sunday is a day of preparation for the coming week. You go to the barbershop, to the beautician’s, to the curator of your image, as Briato’ liked to call Santino, the paranza’s hairdresser. Every Sunday evening, he’d force Santino to open his parlor just for him. A nice haircut, a hot towel, his sideburns. Now and then, five minutes under the tanning lamp, just to tone his skin. When Briato’ read the text, he turned to Santino: “I’ve just found you another customer.”
While the paranza was still fast asleep, Pesce Moscio had already tried on three different looks for the birthday party being thrown for the octogenarian grandmother of his latest girlfriend, Sveva. Sveva met Pesce Moscio’s standard buxom requirements, but he’d never had a girlfriend quite like her. Born and raised in Vomero, she was the daughter of a psychologist—her father—and a gallery owner, her mother. She loved sailing and she loved Russian novels. They’d met at an Enzo Dong concert.
“Princess,” he had said to her, and then he had lifted her into the air, setting her on the other side of the threshold that marked off the VIP area.
“What are you doing?” she’d asked, but then she’d noticed where she was and the boy with an oversized hockey jersey and a bandanna tied around his head Tupac-style, and she hadn’t thought twice: she’d darted her tongue into his mouth.
“Ua’,” Pesce Moscio had said, recovering his breath, but Sveva had latched on to him like a lamprey again, and neither of them had seen much of the concert. Sveva’s free-spirited approach was the surprising result of years of school with the Ursuline sisters and a family upbringing free of taboos.
Pesce Moscio had discarded his jeans and checkered vest, as well as the dark blue suit from his uncle’s wedding, and had opted for a dress shirt and pin-striped trousers instead. A regular fashion plate. Still, he wasn’t fully convinced, and so he searched for tutorials on YouTube: “respectable young man first time dinner in-laws.” He’d already met Sveva’s group of friends: coddled youth of well-to-do parents dressed up as gangsters, who had welcomed Pesce Moscio the way you pluck a 24-karat-gold brooch out of a bin of costume jewelry. Thug life, just a short walk from their glittering neighborhood. And the fact that he could procure narcotics at discount prices made him even more popular. “Business and love go hand in hand, you see that, Maraja?” Pesce Moscio had explained to Nicolas. “Hai scassat’i ciessi,” Nicolas had replied with an affectionate smack. “You broke the toilets.”
The apartment where Sveva’s parents lived was furnished in an industrial minimalist style. An open space surrounded on all sides, and subdivided internally, by sheets of glass. And so it might well happen that if you walked in the front door, you’d see, in the distance, the lady of the house getting dressed after her shower, because even the walls of the individual rooms were transparent. When Pesce Moscio crossed the threshold, his first question was how Sveva’s parents ever managed to have sex in that place. Then he spotted the birthday girl, the grandmother who, even in the midst of that overabundance of reflective surfaces and statues made with metal wire, commanded pride of place in all her floral decrepitude. Skinny, wan, and angular, she wore a sky-blue dress spangled with daisies. She was smiling and shaking hands, like a woman pope. She shook hands with Pesce Moscio, too, and he introduced himself as Sveva’s boyfriend, but she didn’t even deign to glance at him, just a limp hand that the young man hardly touched. Sveva’s parents, in contrast, were happy to meet him. The tattoos that could be glimpsed peeking out from under the cuffs or the collar of his shirt matched up correctly with their scale of values: you could see them but really you couldn’t, they were transgressively housebroken, a little bit like them, one foot on this side and one foot on the other. All things considered, the evening was enjoyable. Pesce Moscio and Sveva went from one buffet table to the next, hand in hand, as if the party were being thrown for them. Yes, Pesce Moscio thought to himself, there, among those people, perhaps he really could live comfortably. He raised his glass in a toast, joining in the chorus of grandchildren—“Many happy returns of the day, Grandmother!”—almost happy to be there, so much so that he felt free to pull out his cell phone and take a picture.
The last message in the chat was from Tucano.
Tucano
What a damn fuck, with a kiss! But next time, we should get there in the morning, because in the evening femminielli have whiskers.
And the champagne went down the wrong way. He ran into the bathroom, hoping that there, at least, there were four walls.
“Who has whiskers, Luigi’?” It was a Sunday of pure boredom, the kind of day when you leave your phone lying around because you don’t want to talk to anyone. Drago’ told his little sister to give him his smartphone and started to reply, but it died in his throat. On the paranza’s chat, Nicolas, still wrapped around Letizia’s body, had written:
Maraja
Tonight. Lair. Meeting.