It's Like You Know I Um What Yeah
by cheryl_bites
Note: Timeline jumps about.
*
"What is this, exactly?" said Paolo, patting the tattoo on Ezequiel's backside. "It looks sort of like a roll of barbed wire."
Ezequiel, whose Italian seemed limited to "Buongiorno", didn't reply.
Paolo cocked his head and half-shut his eyes. "It might be a little man with six arms," he decided, and, when he received no response, acted this out for Lavezzi's benefit.
Ezequiel's lips slowly formed a resentful moue. Somewhere under the top twenty centimetres of hair, it was possible he was frowning.
"Magpie? Catherine wheel?" Paolo pantomimed as he hounded Lavezzi through the empty showers. The lank, lengthy hair was beginning to irk him. There might be an amusing indignant response going on under there, and if there was he was missing it.
When Ezequiel hunched over more than usual to open his bag, Paolo decided to take action. The hair at the nape of Lavezzi's neck proved to be aromatic, and the buttock under the mystery tattoo delightfully squashy. "Mmmm," said Paolo. "All this hair… you're like a girl."
A surprised Lavezzi observed, "My dick is hard."
"I bet it is," purred Paolo, nuzzling the girl/person with a dick and gently ensnaring the organ in question. It had a pleasing solidity.
"No, no, look, my dick's hard."
"Yes, yes," said Paolo, getting his historic first inkling that the new guy might not be 100% compos.
Having lugged around the family curse for the past decade, Paolo knew it was best not to try to put it into anyone without a great deal of prior planning. Bending Lavezzi over a massage table, he rubbed it between the squashy cheeks until he obtained relief.
While he was mopping up for the benefit of the next player who needed a massage, Lavezzi sat on the edge of the table, feet dangling, and noted, "My dick's hard." He was staring at the errant object in clear astonishment.
Paolo was becoming sick of this monologue, which was similar enough to the Italian to be comprehensible. He said, "You didn't expect that, eh?"
"It's hardly ever hard," observed Pocho absently, and apparently liked the sound of this phrase, because he sat under his hair mumbling it over and over to himself. He looked remarkably like one of those mushrooms Smurfs live in, Paolo thought. Or a penis. Digging out a condom, he repaid Lavezzi for his amenability with one of the finest blow jobs in Napoli, to which Pocho responded with astonished shrieks as if he'd never had one before, fingers in their death throes on the edge of the table.
*
"Pocho Lave-zzi. Pocho Lave-zzi. Po-po-po-po-po-po-po-po-cho."
"Yes, yes."
*
Paolo's pride and joy was a little difficult to manage, even after experiments with dildos and a river of lube. Pocho started with his head pillowed quietly on his arms, but soon he started grimacing, then gasping. Paolo had always thought pillow-biting was a figure of speech until he saw Lavezzi grab one between his teeth and pull until the cotton creaked. After that, he gnawed savagely at his forearms. His cock remained flaccid, and Paolo began to twig that that was its general state.
Lavezzi didn't seem to resent the damage done to his perigee. Afterwards they lay inert and tangled and Paolo felt fingers stroking his stubbly scalp. They seemed very interested in the way the hair grew, rubbing first with and then against it. Paolo reached gently into the aether and eventually found a love-lock. There was a minute of shared serenity and absence of thought, then Lavezzi said, "Paolo," and more softly, "Paolito."
"Won't your wife ask who bit you?" Paolo asked when the pink pastry-cutter shapes didn't fade, and Ezequiel looked at him blankly and said, "I did." Paolo supposed the average person would actually find this reasonable.
*
"Nobody asked you!" shrieked Deborah, impaling Paolo on the end of a bayonet-like fingernail. "You're not a part of this family, you jumped-up rent boy! Did I tell you you could lay a hand on Ezequiel? Did I?"
Paolo kept his face impassive, folded his arms and tried to look as if Deborah was ranting and raving like a lunatic (which was true) and he was cool and tough and not all bothered (which was not quite true, because having a lunatic scream in your face at a hundred decibels was an unnerving experience).
"And another thing! Why didn't you friend me back on Facebook?!"
Paolo supposed "Because you're a psychopath" wasn't a proper reply.
"Sausage jockey!" she finished, and slapped him painfully in the face, which was awkward, because he now had to act cool when he was not only unnerved but also angry. Fortunately, poker face was his greatest attribute, well, apart from that. "I am going back to Argentina," and she marched out of the room. Lavezzi, who was attempting to hide under his eyebrows, clutched his Labrador for comfort. The dog was looking worriedly between his two masters, unsure which he was supposed to follow. Lavezzi was doing exactly the same thing.
The next time Paolo saw Deborah she waved at him and beamed. That was equally unnerving.
*
At half-time, the medic shone a pencil torch in Lavezzi's eyes and frowned when they remained serenely dilated.
"What's your name?"
"Pocho," Ezequiel said brightly.
"Your address?"
Lavezzi looked expectantly at Paolo.
"Remember where your house is, Pocho?" he said gently. "You remember what it's called, don't you?"
"No."
Paolo had a hard time persuading Reja there was no need for a substitute.
*
Pocho's attitude changed after the first few confrontations with Deborah (and later with Yanina; the switch was a mixed blessing). He looked at Paolo with new respect; awe, perhaps. Paolo, he seemed to think, had established his captainly credentials far better by facing down the wife than Montervino had by leading Napoli out of Serie C1; he was a giant-slayer, even if the giant had never knocked down a single castle nor eaten a peasant. (No doubt she regretted that.)
Paolo was dissatisfied with this development. You were supposed to respect your captain because he was good at football, not because he refused to flee from hot-headed birds. Also, what if the wife decided Lavezzi should play for Barca, or Chelsea? Their Pocho's position was precarious. He tried to feel angry. He failed, because Lavezzi kept wearing those open-necked shirts with the rosary that led your eyes dooooooooooown, and he made high-pitched discordant noises when he laughed. After practically every match he took his shirt off and twitched his shorts down to a near-pornographic height, confident they would remain there because of his enormous bum... Paolo had a huge arse himself, so he could sympathise. As for the hair, he had defeated it with horizontality and discovered there was a face underneath, and the face had huge solemn eyes and even huger eyebrows. Since Paolo was similarly blessed in the eyebrow department, this too gave him a feeling of solidarity, and the rest of Lavezzi gave him a feeling of solidity that Pocho seemed happy to satisfy at any given time.
*
From the hotel bathroom he could hear a voice saying "Pocho Lavezzi," and "No, no, that one!" and "Yeah, I'm looking good today." Not again; who was it this time, a teammate, a fan, a random stranger? Praying it wouldn't be those twenty blonde women, Paolo opened the door sharply and found Ezequiel standing alone on a towel, praline eyes large and apprehensive.
"Sorry," he said vaguely. "Thought I heard something," and retreated to a place where he could heal his embarrassment. As he closed the door, he heard Lavezzi resume his conversation with himself.
*
Things that were like going out with Ezequiel Lavezzi: catching clouds; collaring a butterfly; caging a ghost. He didn't mean to be unfaithful. He just didn't know what it meant. If he saw a buttock he liked, he squeezed it, even if it happened to be Cavani's. (The result was noisy, but much less antipathetic than expected. Faced with Pocho's guileless smile, Edi could only giggle and simper as if they were making Easter baskets together, which pretty soon they were. Lavezzi's basket was horrible.)
Inler, of course, could be found nearly naked in front of the mirror after every training session, bringing out his muscles as if he was unfolding the blades on his Swiss army knife, examining each one with the same frowning intensity a blacksmith would bestow on a rusty blade. It was probably on Page 88 of the Swiss Mechanic's Manual, in fact: "Perform a visual examination to ensure the body is still perfect." (It was.)
Lavezzi watched this procedure with befuddled awe, then moved in and contemplatively squeezed a biceps. Inler looked up in irritation, smiled patronisingly and ruffled Lavezzi's hair. As he went back to his meticulous flexing, Paolo decided this one was safe.
The perfect Swiss, though, had been greatly outnumbered over the years by merry South Americans from whom Lavezzi was impossible to extricate or distinguish. When Paolo was roped in to bake torta caprese with the kids, they always got to that step where it said "Separate six eggs", and could he stop them breaking? Could he bollocks. In no time whatsoever the bits of ovum were mingling and the kids reporting his profanity to his wife. Attempting to police Lavezzi's friendships was a similar situation. The zamba squad appeared to spend more time together than apart, nipping home regretfully to sleep and shit before enthusiastically reuniting. Their existence was a raucous medley of prearranged parties, ad hoc parties, asado, cumbia and naming dogs after each other. Paolo never had any idea whether Lavezzi was gaming with Campagnaro, drinking with Gargano, dancing with Zuniga or all three at once. If he had been able to find him (which he couldn't) he wouldn't have been able to stop him, and the mushy part of him he tried not to use didn't want to, because stopping the Latin Americans hanging out would be like kicking a puppy or something. They were a glorious natural phenomenon, like flowers and sunshine, and obstructing them would be a waste of precious happiness.
Accordingly, he tried not to worry about who or what Lavezzi might be doing. When Pocho gave Cavani his number, or Hamsik his car, Paolo turned a blind eye; didn't matter; nothing to do with him. He was moderately successful; it helped that the market for insane, impotent men was small.
*
There were times, staring at the ceiling after one of the bairns had had a bad dream, when Paolo wondered if he hadn't taken on a bit too much. Two kids to look after, another one on the way; did he really need another one that was also a man friend? He'd never planned to have, like, a relationship with a man at all. Sex was no problem because it was quick. Women, in his experience, were generally pleased to have the load lightened. They were less pleased when you didn't come home, offered vague excuses about a night out with Lavezzi and smelt of illegal substances, but then there was waking up next to Pocho (who was invariably still asleep and looking like a particularly grotty angel) and oh.
The hotel room mornings were the best part of, well, of a lot of things, really. Pocho was full of heat and comfort and, when he woke up, of slow, sleepy sex. Paolo had never dreamed he'd be so happy to wake up next to a man. Through his embarrassment he wondered whether the post office had cocked up and delivered contentment to the wrong recipient.
*
During the international break, Javier Zanetti called from Argentina. Pocho, it seemed, had succeeded in setting fire to his genitalia. No permanent damage had resulted, but Zanetti was charging Paolo with preventing any reoccurrence. The call was short but memorable.
*
Exactly how many people were in this relationship was never clear, but Paolo knew his main rival and knew it was green or brown or sometimes white. Ezequiel smoked it and swallowed it and sometimes injected it, counting the days to his next match (and possible drugs test) with meticulous mathematics that had clearly been requisitioned from every other area of his life. Heroin was much better than cannabis, he explained to Paolo, because it was out of your system within a day. Paolo wasn't sure this was a good thing, but nodded and said "You know best, Pocho," because telling Ezequiel he didn't know drugs was like telling Cavani he didn't know God, and also because a man who names his son after Adrian Mutu cannot be a man with good judgement, and Paolo Cannavaro was such a man.
When Lavezzi had arrived in Napoli with his ten words of Italian, the Italians had found him odd. He laughed at inappropriate moments, failed to make eye contact and had a whole host of strange mannerisms that everyone attributed to his incomprehension of their language. They shrugged it off; probably they were saying something hilarious in Spanish by accident, or something; and before long Lavezzi had scored so many goals that everyone loved him regardless.
Paolo had his suspicions. Eventually he managed to secure a video clip of one of Pocho's odder outbursts: a training session, nothing unusual, except that as Maggio moved in for the goal Pocho started shouting excitably and reducing all the Hispanophones to hysteria.
This excerpt was duly played down the phone, after which there was a long silence and Cannavaro One said in puzzlement, "He's frightened because of... llamas?"
Paolo cornered Gargano during a water break and demanded, "Does Ezequiel make sense when he's talking Spanish?"
Gargano looked sweetly puzzled. "Of course he does. He's Argentine."
"No. No. What I mean is, when he talks Italian he sounds like a crazy person. In Spanish is he normal?"
"Oh. Right. Well, you know, his Italian is getting better, but Spanish is like his first language and... No, actually he sounds exactly the same as he does in Italian," said Walter with a distinctly uncomforting guffaw. "You know, that's just the way Pocho is."
Paolo resigned himself to life with a loon. This proved to be far-sighted, because Lavezzi remained eccentric even once he'd mastered Italian, or, more truthfully, once Italian had mastered him. If this took a long time, well, that poor language had never seen anything like him before. His gaze still skittered around unnervingly when he was supposed to be looking you in the eye, he shrieked with laughter for no reason and at times, when asked a question, he got lost in thought (or… somewhere) and said nothing at all.
His lack of linguistic competence wasn't entirely his fault, of course. "Your eyes are very blue," Pocho observed tinnily, and Paolo so was so surprised at hearing a comprehensible sentence he could only blink, disconcerted. He suspected Pocho might get quite a lot of this kind of negative reinforcement.
It was interesting to wonder what his personality would be like without the drugs, and if, indeed, he had one. Maybe it had died from lack of nourishment. Paolo wasn't sure anyone would ever succeed in doing anything about this; you can lead a turkey to water but you cannot make it cold. Perhaps it was for the best, anyway. Pocho might declare him a minger and dump him on the spot.
*
Ive just arrived at camp & youre not here. Do you think any of us wanted to get off the beach, leave our wives and kids
I cant
Just saw de laurentiis says you can't be held to the same rules as the rest of us cos youre a child. Well you don't pay children millions of €. We're giving you fuck knows how much to fanny around doing nothing.
She wont let me
Are you suddenly the fittest man in napoli or something? Do you have any idea how hard hamsiks working?
I'm sorry, pocho.
How about you do some training with the rest of us instead of jogging for five minutes, taking smack and fucking around on the beach?
Answer your phone.
Pocho? Answer me.
Walter said it was ok
Did I say it was OK?
Answer me god damn it. Jesus christ.
Paolito,r u angry with me?
Yes, Pocho. Yes. I am fucking angry with you.
*
Ezequiel appeared to get an erection every eighteen months, if Paolo's calculations were correct. Lately he'd started wondering if he should stop keeping count, because if the stiffy overran its allotted hiatus he might begin to get tetchy about it. So far, though, things seemed all right.
The 2008 one came when Lavezzi was with Deborah and Paolo was giving a baking soda bath to a child with chickenpox. He read the enthusiastic and partly comprehensible text, ground his teeth and sent a reply that he hoped would sound encouraging. Presumably Deborah enjoyed it.
Not until the following year did he hit the jackpot. It occurred after the famous Armpit Incident, which proved, unsurprisingly, that Pocho was turned on by the strangest things. His arse was sore, so Paolo knelt behind him on the bed, located another entirely hairless receptacle and slipped his dick in there. (He'd been thinking for a while it looked rather tempting.)
After a few strokes Pocho tensed his pecs, which felt delicious, and gasped. Paolo leant forward until he could see Lavezzi's prick; it was unrecognisable, much as the man himself was whenever he stepped on the pitch, though fortunately he didn't turn that colour. He stopped fucking, and Pocho stared at his organ with stoned reverence and began a celebratory penis-dance. Paolo had to stop him a few seconds into it for a fairly pressing reason.
"Don't you want to see a doctor about your dick?" he asked once as they were lying in a post-coital heap. "Maybe it's something that can be cleared up - drugs or surgery or - "
Pocho was gravely offended. "No!" he roared (well… mumbled loudly), swooping up into the attack position.
"Why not?"
"Then people would know there was something wrong with my cock!"
The resultant compound of confusion and frustration made Paolo's eyes cross so hard he nearly went blind. "Well, there wouldn't be anything wrong with it any more!" he started to reason, then realised reason and Pocho were like oil and water and gave up. Seriously, "people would know"? Did Lavezzi think the dicktor would plaster jubilatory adverts across Napoli?...Then he remembered the toilet thing and had to concede that Pocho had a point. All the rest was surrealism.
*
Paolo and Ezequiel sat restfully under the umbrella as Tomás and some similarly-aged companions screeched and clambered around the enormous pine. Their drinking was abruptly halted when Tomás fell off and landed on his head. Lavezzi got up unusually quickly and flowed across the courtyard, only to tousle his son's hair and hurl him enthusiastically back into the tree.
Once he'd coughed his tongue back up, Paolo managed, "Pocho, you seem to let the kid kind of… run wild?"
Ezequiel gave a lyrical shrug. "Well, you know, man," he said inaccurately. "It's nice being a kid. Kids can do what they like. It's better they have fun; soon they'll be grown, and grown-ups have work, responsibilities…"
Paolo couldn't fathom how he'd come to this conclusion.
*
Shaking hands with Antonio Cassano before the match, Paolo mused how odd it was that Il Bambino was no longer a fat fool but a reasonably sensible man who looked as if he played football, and how fortunate it was that he'd never developed the power of telepathy. Something about the encounter troubled him, but he couldn't think what until he walked back along the line and saw Cassano wringing Lavezzi's hand. To his considerable astonishment, Pocho was no longer Pocho but Tattooed-And-Muscly-o; until he saw those two side by side he'd never noticed… He wasn't inclined to complain (Paolo had no discernment whatsoever concerning tattoos), but it was… odd. Also, unlike Fantantonio, Ezequiel hadn't acquired any sanity. Paolo felt cheated.
He and Pocho loved each other in a strange way. Paolo wasn't given to trusting people, but he found Lavezzi... comforting. Cosy. They had changed to suit each other, mentally and, well, anatomically. (Lavezzi didn't appear to mind; he found the extra space a handy place to keep his stash, as Paolo found out one night in a painful manner.)
Was Pocho his island of sanity? That would be a bit too ironic. Actually, maybe it made sense in an eye of the storm way; maybe if you multiplied insanity you got like a minus figure? At that point the metaphors became so mixed they amalgamated and Paolo had to start again, but he was left with the conviction that a bizarre companion was a good thing to have when the environment was bizarre itself. The restaurant, for example; footballers at a table, a line of guards across the room, then a thousand people. The ones at the back just stood and waited, apparently prepared to stand there all day. A gaggle of people at the front shouted "POCHO!" at irregular intervals, responding to some trigger Paolo couldn't sense. Gargano kept grinning at the floor while casting cautious glances at the crowd as if it was an explosives dump. Paolo didn't bother with the grinning part.
Lavezzi sat still and occasionally laughed at nothing. That was all. This fame thing was easy, his exterior seemed to say; you just had to wear big glasses and look affable. Paolo wasn't sure. With anyone else a consultant might have been involved, but Pocho probably didn't realise it was odd to have a vast crowd watch you eat a meal. Paolo doubted he found anyone surprising. The staring faces outside shops, outside the training ground; they were just his co-conspirators in lunacy.
Then there was the night when the suite came with complimentary white wine in a bucket of ice, and Paolo decided to surprise Ezequiel by inserting the neck of the bottle into an unusual place. Pocho yelped, and so did the bottle, because the rapid heating caused the end to break off, by one chance in a thousand doing so cleanly and with no damage to anything except the bedclothes, which were swamped with wine. Paolo, silenced, looked at the sharp edges of the glass and then at Ezequiel, who stared back with round placid eyes. Death was a phenomenon he contemplated equably, another bizarre personage among those who ran in and out of his bubble-like world.
*
Four of five penalties converted. Oh, and there was Pocho's. Inter progressed in the Coppa Italia; Lavezzi disintegrated into a blob of syrup.
One arm round the shaking shoulders, Paolo wondered what Yanina's comforting-footballer skills were like. Not good, he decided. He texted Cristina and told her not to expect him back that night. The response hinted that she was pleased about this.
When Paolo made it into the hotel room, Pocho was just a dark lump on the bed. He sat down and was reaching for Lavezzi's shoulder when he laid his palm on the sheets and discovered the wetness, and felt a small shock in the quiet room because there was something about bodily fluids, how a little went a remarkably long way, and when you touched men's tears or women's pants you were actually touching something else, their heart, he supposed. His few brains carried on thinking about this while his hand was turning the lamp on and his voice was saying "Ssshhhh, Pocho," and the other hand, the one with the tears on, caressed Lavezzi's shoulder.
The lump's shaking eventually subsided and it wiped its nose loudly on the sheets. Lavezzi levered himself onto one elbow, stared earnestly at Paolo and whispered, "Am I a bad person?"
The truthful answer would have been "sometimes". Paolo's paternal experience, as so often, came in handy and he said automatically, "No, Pocho. You're not a bad person."
The mattress was attacked gently by a wandering fist. "I'm stupid. I'm bad."
"Remember when you scored against Liverpool," said Paolo, starting to stroke the shoulders rhythmically.
"Um... ugh..."
"And against Milan lying on the ground."
Fresh tears. "But I didn't do that tonight!"
"A good player doesn't turn into a bad player by having a bad game."
Lavezzi's argument degenerated into mumbles of "Stupid" and pillow-filled sobs.
Paolo, still stroking his back, tried to figure out what to do next and discovered he was three-quarters asleep, his left calf hurt like hell and his head felt like graphite. He started a couple of sentences and abandoned them both, and then he started blurting out this disjointed story. It was about kids and their football jerseys. He was pretty sure Pocho already knew how his son had picked out a Juventus shirt, but he told him that again anyway. Then he moved on to the recreation ground near his old house, how he could see the kids playing football there from the window and five years ago they were all red: a few Maradonas, but then Milan, Roma, cos nobody cared about some bunch of Serie C losers even if they did happen to live in Napoli. Nowadays when he drove past the pitch it was blue like a rainstorm: Hamsiks, Cavanis, and the grumpy little lass in goal was Aronica for some reason… but mostly there was this small army of Pochos, because Pocho more than anyone had transformed this city's footballers, even the baby ones, and the way they felt about themselves. He was an odd choice of icon, of course, since he was pretty scabby and weird, but so was Napoli so it fitted. Paolo carried on telling this story, and fell asleep, and woke up to find that he was still arguing and drooling on the pillow and Lavezzi was slumbering peacefully; but he continued, talking about goals, little kids, good looks, madness: he declaimed to an audience of thousands in the floodlit stadium, and even during his wakeful periods the conviction grew that this was a battle worth winning, a personal struggle and a struggle for his hometown. "You see," he told the crowd, "Pocho Lavezzi is Napoli," and the cheers swelled like triumphal music and drowned out the "unfortunately" part, which he decided was good; and he woke on the floor on a mattress of sunlight and Pocho gave him a Buddha-like smile and said, "Paolito."
Fin
Notes
Note: Timeline jumps about.
*
"What is this, exactly?" said Paolo, patting the tattoo on Ezequiel's backside. "It looks sort of like a roll of barbed wire."
Ezequiel, whose Italian seemed limited to "Buongiorno", didn't reply.
Paolo cocked his head and half-shut his eyes. "It might be a little man with six arms," he decided, and, when he received no response, acted this out for Lavezzi's benefit.
Ezequiel's lips slowly formed a resentful moue. Somewhere under the top twenty centimetres of hair, it was possible he was frowning.
"Magpie? Catherine wheel?" Paolo pantomimed as he hounded Lavezzi through the empty showers. The lank, lengthy hair was beginning to irk him. There might be an amusing indignant response going on under there, and if there was he was missing it.
When Ezequiel hunched over more than usual to open his bag, Paolo decided to take action. The hair at the nape of Lavezzi's neck proved to be aromatic, and the buttock under the mystery tattoo delightfully squashy. "Mmmm," said Paolo. "All this hair… you're like a girl."
A surprised Lavezzi observed, "My dick is hard."
"I bet it is," purred Paolo, nuzzling the girl/person with a dick and gently ensnaring the organ in question. It had a pleasing solidity.
"No, no, look, my dick's hard."
"Yes, yes," said Paolo, getting his historic first inkling that the new guy might not be 100% compos.
Having lugged around the family curse for the past decade, Paolo knew it was best not to try to put it into anyone without a great deal of prior planning. Bending Lavezzi over a massage table, he rubbed it between the squashy cheeks until he obtained relief.
While he was mopping up for the benefit of the next player who needed a massage, Lavezzi sat on the edge of the table, feet dangling, and noted, "My dick's hard." He was staring at the errant object in clear astonishment.
Paolo was becoming sick of this monologue, which was similar enough to the Italian to be comprehensible. He said, "You didn't expect that, eh?"
"It's hardly ever hard," observed Pocho absently, and apparently liked the sound of this phrase, because he sat under his hair mumbling it over and over to himself. He looked remarkably like one of those mushrooms Smurfs live in, Paolo thought. Or a penis. Digging out a condom, he repaid Lavezzi for his amenability with one of the finest blow jobs in Napoli, to which Pocho responded with astonished shrieks as if he'd never had one before, fingers in their death throes on the edge of the table.
*
"Pocho Lave-zzi. Pocho Lave-zzi. Po-po-po-po-po-po-po-po-cho."
"Yes, yes."
*
Paolo's pride and joy was a little difficult to manage, even after experiments with dildos and a river of lube. Pocho started with his head pillowed quietly on his arms, but soon he started grimacing, then gasping. Paolo had always thought pillow-biting was a figure of speech until he saw Lavezzi grab one between his teeth and pull until the cotton creaked. After that, he gnawed savagely at his forearms. His cock remained flaccid, and Paolo began to twig that that was its general state.
Lavezzi didn't seem to resent the damage done to his perigee. Afterwards they lay inert and tangled and Paolo felt fingers stroking his stubbly scalp. They seemed very interested in the way the hair grew, rubbing first with and then against it. Paolo reached gently into the aether and eventually found a love-lock. There was a minute of shared serenity and absence of thought, then Lavezzi said, "Paolo," and more softly, "Paolito."
"Won't your wife ask who bit you?" Paolo asked when the pink pastry-cutter shapes didn't fade, and Ezequiel looked at him blankly and said, "I did." Paolo supposed the average person would actually find this reasonable.
*
"Nobody asked you!" shrieked Deborah, impaling Paolo on the end of a bayonet-like fingernail. "You're not a part of this family, you jumped-up rent boy! Did I tell you you could lay a hand on Ezequiel? Did I?"
Paolo kept his face impassive, folded his arms and tried to look as if Deborah was ranting and raving like a lunatic (which was true) and he was cool and tough and not all bothered (which was not quite true, because having a lunatic scream in your face at a hundred decibels was an unnerving experience).
"And another thing! Why didn't you friend me back on Facebook?!"
Paolo supposed "Because you're a psychopath" wasn't a proper reply.
"Sausage jockey!" she finished, and slapped him painfully in the face, which was awkward, because he now had to act cool when he was not only unnerved but also angry. Fortunately, poker face was his greatest attribute, well, apart from that. "I am going back to Argentina," and she marched out of the room. Lavezzi, who was attempting to hide under his eyebrows, clutched his Labrador for comfort. The dog was looking worriedly between his two masters, unsure which he was supposed to follow. Lavezzi was doing exactly the same thing.
The next time Paolo saw Deborah she waved at him and beamed. That was equally unnerving.
*
At half-time, the medic shone a pencil torch in Lavezzi's eyes and frowned when they remained serenely dilated.
"What's your name?"
"Pocho," Ezequiel said brightly.
"Your address?"
Lavezzi looked expectantly at Paolo.
"Remember where your house is, Pocho?" he said gently. "You remember what it's called, don't you?"
"No."
Paolo had a hard time persuading Reja there was no need for a substitute.
*
Pocho's attitude changed after the first few confrontations with Deborah (and later with Yanina; the switch was a mixed blessing). He looked at Paolo with new respect; awe, perhaps. Paolo, he seemed to think, had established his captainly credentials far better by facing down the wife than Montervino had by leading Napoli out of Serie C1; he was a giant-slayer, even if the giant had never knocked down a single castle nor eaten a peasant. (No doubt she regretted that.)
Paolo was dissatisfied with this development. You were supposed to respect your captain because he was good at football, not because he refused to flee from hot-headed birds. Also, what if the wife decided Lavezzi should play for Barca, or Chelsea? Their Pocho's position was precarious. He tried to feel angry. He failed, because Lavezzi kept wearing those open-necked shirts with the rosary that led your eyes dooooooooooown, and he made high-pitched discordant noises when he laughed. After practically every match he took his shirt off and twitched his shorts down to a near-pornographic height, confident they would remain there because of his enormous bum... Paolo had a huge arse himself, so he could sympathise. As for the hair, he had defeated it with horizontality and discovered there was a face underneath, and the face had huge solemn eyes and even huger eyebrows. Since Paolo was similarly blessed in the eyebrow department, this too gave him a feeling of solidarity, and the rest of Lavezzi gave him a feeling of solidity that Pocho seemed happy to satisfy at any given time.
*
From the hotel bathroom he could hear a voice saying "Pocho Lavezzi," and "No, no, that one!" and "Yeah, I'm looking good today." Not again; who was it this time, a teammate, a fan, a random stranger? Praying it wouldn't be those twenty blonde women, Paolo opened the door sharply and found Ezequiel standing alone on a towel, praline eyes large and apprehensive.
"Sorry," he said vaguely. "Thought I heard something," and retreated to a place where he could heal his embarrassment. As he closed the door, he heard Lavezzi resume his conversation with himself.
*
Things that were like going out with Ezequiel Lavezzi: catching clouds; collaring a butterfly; caging a ghost. He didn't mean to be unfaithful. He just didn't know what it meant. If he saw a buttock he liked, he squeezed it, even if it happened to be Cavani's. (The result was noisy, but much less antipathetic than expected. Faced with Pocho's guileless smile, Edi could only giggle and simper as if they were making Easter baskets together, which pretty soon they were. Lavezzi's basket was horrible.)
Inler, of course, could be found nearly naked in front of the mirror after every training session, bringing out his muscles as if he was unfolding the blades on his Swiss army knife, examining each one with the same frowning intensity a blacksmith would bestow on a rusty blade. It was probably on Page 88 of the Swiss Mechanic's Manual, in fact: "Perform a visual examination to ensure the body is still perfect." (It was.)
Lavezzi watched this procedure with befuddled awe, then moved in and contemplatively squeezed a biceps. Inler looked up in irritation, smiled patronisingly and ruffled Lavezzi's hair. As he went back to his meticulous flexing, Paolo decided this one was safe.
The perfect Swiss, though, had been greatly outnumbered over the years by merry South Americans from whom Lavezzi was impossible to extricate or distinguish. When Paolo was roped in to bake torta caprese with the kids, they always got to that step where it said "Separate six eggs", and could he stop them breaking? Could he bollocks. In no time whatsoever the bits of ovum were mingling and the kids reporting his profanity to his wife. Attempting to police Lavezzi's friendships was a similar situation. The zamba squad appeared to spend more time together than apart, nipping home regretfully to sleep and shit before enthusiastically reuniting. Their existence was a raucous medley of prearranged parties, ad hoc parties, asado, cumbia and naming dogs after each other. Paolo never had any idea whether Lavezzi was gaming with Campagnaro, drinking with Gargano, dancing with Zuniga or all three at once. If he had been able to find him (which he couldn't) he wouldn't have been able to stop him, and the mushy part of him he tried not to use didn't want to, because stopping the Latin Americans hanging out would be like kicking a puppy or something. They were a glorious natural phenomenon, like flowers and sunshine, and obstructing them would be a waste of precious happiness.
Accordingly, he tried not to worry about who or what Lavezzi might be doing. When Pocho gave Cavani his number, or Hamsik his car, Paolo turned a blind eye; didn't matter; nothing to do with him. He was moderately successful; it helped that the market for insane, impotent men was small.
*
There were times, staring at the ceiling after one of the bairns had had a bad dream, when Paolo wondered if he hadn't taken on a bit too much. Two kids to look after, another one on the way; did he really need another one that was also a man friend? He'd never planned to have, like, a relationship with a man at all. Sex was no problem because it was quick. Women, in his experience, were generally pleased to have the load lightened. They were less pleased when you didn't come home, offered vague excuses about a night out with Lavezzi and smelt of illegal substances, but then there was waking up next to Pocho (who was invariably still asleep and looking like a particularly grotty angel) and oh.
The hotel room mornings were the best part of, well, of a lot of things, really. Pocho was full of heat and comfort and, when he woke up, of slow, sleepy sex. Paolo had never dreamed he'd be so happy to wake up next to a man. Through his embarrassment he wondered whether the post office had cocked up and delivered contentment to the wrong recipient.
*
During the international break, Javier Zanetti called from Argentina. Pocho, it seemed, had succeeded in setting fire to his genitalia. No permanent damage had resulted, but Zanetti was charging Paolo with preventing any reoccurrence. The call was short but memorable.
*
Exactly how many people were in this relationship was never clear, but Paolo knew his main rival and knew it was green or brown or sometimes white. Ezequiel smoked it and swallowed it and sometimes injected it, counting the days to his next match (and possible drugs test) with meticulous mathematics that had clearly been requisitioned from every other area of his life. Heroin was much better than cannabis, he explained to Paolo, because it was out of your system within a day. Paolo wasn't sure this was a good thing, but nodded and said "You know best, Pocho," because telling Ezequiel he didn't know drugs was like telling Cavani he didn't know God, and also because a man who names his son after Adrian Mutu cannot be a man with good judgement, and Paolo Cannavaro was such a man.
When Lavezzi had arrived in Napoli with his ten words of Italian, the Italians had found him odd. He laughed at inappropriate moments, failed to make eye contact and had a whole host of strange mannerisms that everyone attributed to his incomprehension of their language. They shrugged it off; probably they were saying something hilarious in Spanish by accident, or something; and before long Lavezzi had scored so many goals that everyone loved him regardless.
Paolo had his suspicions. Eventually he managed to secure a video clip of one of Pocho's odder outbursts: a training session, nothing unusual, except that as Maggio moved in for the goal Pocho started shouting excitably and reducing all the Hispanophones to hysteria.
This excerpt was duly played down the phone, after which there was a long silence and Cannavaro One said in puzzlement, "He's frightened because of... llamas?"
Paolo cornered Gargano during a water break and demanded, "Does Ezequiel make sense when he's talking Spanish?"
Gargano looked sweetly puzzled. "Of course he does. He's Argentine."
"No. No. What I mean is, when he talks Italian he sounds like a crazy person. In Spanish is he normal?"
"Oh. Right. Well, you know, his Italian is getting better, but Spanish is like his first language and... No, actually he sounds exactly the same as he does in Italian," said Walter with a distinctly uncomforting guffaw. "You know, that's just the way Pocho is."
Paolo resigned himself to life with a loon. This proved to be far-sighted, because Lavezzi remained eccentric even once he'd mastered Italian, or, more truthfully, once Italian had mastered him. If this took a long time, well, that poor language had never seen anything like him before. His gaze still skittered around unnervingly when he was supposed to be looking you in the eye, he shrieked with laughter for no reason and at times, when asked a question, he got lost in thought (or… somewhere) and said nothing at all.
His lack of linguistic competence wasn't entirely his fault, of course. "Your eyes are very blue," Pocho observed tinnily, and Paolo so was so surprised at hearing a comprehensible sentence he could only blink, disconcerted. He suspected Pocho might get quite a lot of this kind of negative reinforcement.
It was interesting to wonder what his personality would be like without the drugs, and if, indeed, he had one. Maybe it had died from lack of nourishment. Paolo wasn't sure anyone would ever succeed in doing anything about this; you can lead a turkey to water but you cannot make it cold. Perhaps it was for the best, anyway. Pocho might declare him a minger and dump him on the spot.
*
Ive just arrived at camp & youre not here. Do you think any of us wanted to get off the beach, leave our wives and kids
I cant
Just saw de laurentiis says you can't be held to the same rules as the rest of us cos youre a child. Well you don't pay children millions of €. We're giving you fuck knows how much to fanny around doing nothing.
She wont let me
Are you suddenly the fittest man in napoli or something? Do you have any idea how hard hamsiks working?
I'm sorry, pocho.
How about you do some training with the rest of us instead of jogging for five minutes, taking smack and fucking around on the beach?
Answer your phone.
Pocho? Answer me.
Walter said it was ok
Did I say it was OK?
Answer me god damn it. Jesus christ.
Paolito,r u angry with me?
Yes, Pocho. Yes. I am fucking angry with you.
*
Ezequiel appeared to get an erection every eighteen months, if Paolo's calculations were correct. Lately he'd started wondering if he should stop keeping count, because if the stiffy overran its allotted hiatus he might begin to get tetchy about it. So far, though, things seemed all right.
The 2008 one came when Lavezzi was with Deborah and Paolo was giving a baking soda bath to a child with chickenpox. He read the enthusiastic and partly comprehensible text, ground his teeth and sent a reply that he hoped would sound encouraging. Presumably Deborah enjoyed it.
Not until the following year did he hit the jackpot. It occurred after the famous Armpit Incident, which proved, unsurprisingly, that Pocho was turned on by the strangest things. His arse was sore, so Paolo knelt behind him on the bed, located another entirely hairless receptacle and slipped his dick in there. (He'd been thinking for a while it looked rather tempting.)
After a few strokes Pocho tensed his pecs, which felt delicious, and gasped. Paolo leant forward until he could see Lavezzi's prick; it was unrecognisable, much as the man himself was whenever he stepped on the pitch, though fortunately he didn't turn that colour. He stopped fucking, and Pocho stared at his organ with stoned reverence and began a celebratory penis-dance. Paolo had to stop him a few seconds into it for a fairly pressing reason.
"Don't you want to see a doctor about your dick?" he asked once as they were lying in a post-coital heap. "Maybe it's something that can be cleared up - drugs or surgery or - "
Pocho was gravely offended. "No!" he roared (well… mumbled loudly), swooping up into the attack position.
"Why not?"
"Then people would know there was something wrong with my cock!"
The resultant compound of confusion and frustration made Paolo's eyes cross so hard he nearly went blind. "Well, there wouldn't be anything wrong with it any more!" he started to reason, then realised reason and Pocho were like oil and water and gave up. Seriously, "people would know"? Did Lavezzi think the dicktor would plaster jubilatory adverts across Napoli?...Then he remembered the toilet thing and had to concede that Pocho had a point. All the rest was surrealism.
*
Paolo and Ezequiel sat restfully under the umbrella as Tomás and some similarly-aged companions screeched and clambered around the enormous pine. Their drinking was abruptly halted when Tomás fell off and landed on his head. Lavezzi got up unusually quickly and flowed across the courtyard, only to tousle his son's hair and hurl him enthusiastically back into the tree.
Once he'd coughed his tongue back up, Paolo managed, "Pocho, you seem to let the kid kind of… run wild?"
Ezequiel gave a lyrical shrug. "Well, you know, man," he said inaccurately. "It's nice being a kid. Kids can do what they like. It's better they have fun; soon they'll be grown, and grown-ups have work, responsibilities…"
Paolo couldn't fathom how he'd come to this conclusion.
*
Shaking hands with Antonio Cassano before the match, Paolo mused how odd it was that Il Bambino was no longer a fat fool but a reasonably sensible man who looked as if he played football, and how fortunate it was that he'd never developed the power of telepathy. Something about the encounter troubled him, but he couldn't think what until he walked back along the line and saw Cassano wringing Lavezzi's hand. To his considerable astonishment, Pocho was no longer Pocho but Tattooed-And-Muscly-o; until he saw those two side by side he'd never noticed… He wasn't inclined to complain (Paolo had no discernment whatsoever concerning tattoos), but it was… odd. Also, unlike Fantantonio, Ezequiel hadn't acquired any sanity. Paolo felt cheated.
He and Pocho loved each other in a strange way. Paolo wasn't given to trusting people, but he found Lavezzi... comforting. Cosy. They had changed to suit each other, mentally and, well, anatomically. (Lavezzi didn't appear to mind; he found the extra space a handy place to keep his stash, as Paolo found out one night in a painful manner.)
Was Pocho his island of sanity? That would be a bit too ironic. Actually, maybe it made sense in an eye of the storm way; maybe if you multiplied insanity you got like a minus figure? At that point the metaphors became so mixed they amalgamated and Paolo had to start again, but he was left with the conviction that a bizarre companion was a good thing to have when the environment was bizarre itself. The restaurant, for example; footballers at a table, a line of guards across the room, then a thousand people. The ones at the back just stood and waited, apparently prepared to stand there all day. A gaggle of people at the front shouted "POCHO!" at irregular intervals, responding to some trigger Paolo couldn't sense. Gargano kept grinning at the floor while casting cautious glances at the crowd as if it was an explosives dump. Paolo didn't bother with the grinning part.
Lavezzi sat still and occasionally laughed at nothing. That was all. This fame thing was easy, his exterior seemed to say; you just had to wear big glasses and look affable. Paolo wasn't sure. With anyone else a consultant might have been involved, but Pocho probably didn't realise it was odd to have a vast crowd watch you eat a meal. Paolo doubted he found anyone surprising. The staring faces outside shops, outside the training ground; they were just his co-conspirators in lunacy.
Then there was the night when the suite came with complimentary white wine in a bucket of ice, and Paolo decided to surprise Ezequiel by inserting the neck of the bottle into an unusual place. Pocho yelped, and so did the bottle, because the rapid heating caused the end to break off, by one chance in a thousand doing so cleanly and with no damage to anything except the bedclothes, which were swamped with wine. Paolo, silenced, looked at the sharp edges of the glass and then at Ezequiel, who stared back with round placid eyes. Death was a phenomenon he contemplated equably, another bizarre personage among those who ran in and out of his bubble-like world.
*
Four of five penalties converted. Oh, and there was Pocho's. Inter progressed in the Coppa Italia; Lavezzi disintegrated into a blob of syrup.
One arm round the shaking shoulders, Paolo wondered what Yanina's comforting-footballer skills were like. Not good, he decided. He texted Cristina and told her not to expect him back that night. The response hinted that she was pleased about this.
When Paolo made it into the hotel room, Pocho was just a dark lump on the bed. He sat down and was reaching for Lavezzi's shoulder when he laid his palm on the sheets and discovered the wetness, and felt a small shock in the quiet room because there was something about bodily fluids, how a little went a remarkably long way, and when you touched men's tears or women's pants you were actually touching something else, their heart, he supposed. His few brains carried on thinking about this while his hand was turning the lamp on and his voice was saying "Ssshhhh, Pocho," and the other hand, the one with the tears on, caressed Lavezzi's shoulder.
The lump's shaking eventually subsided and it wiped its nose loudly on the sheets. Lavezzi levered himself onto one elbow, stared earnestly at Paolo and whispered, "Am I a bad person?"
The truthful answer would have been "sometimes". Paolo's paternal experience, as so often, came in handy and he said automatically, "No, Pocho. You're not a bad person."
The mattress was attacked gently by a wandering fist. "I'm stupid. I'm bad."
"Remember when you scored against Liverpool," said Paolo, starting to stroke the shoulders rhythmically.
"Um... ugh..."
"And against Milan lying on the ground."
Fresh tears. "But I didn't do that tonight!"
"A good player doesn't turn into a bad player by having a bad game."
Lavezzi's argument degenerated into mumbles of "Stupid" and pillow-filled sobs.
Paolo, still stroking his back, tried to figure out what to do next and discovered he was three-quarters asleep, his left calf hurt like hell and his head felt like graphite. He started a couple of sentences and abandoned them both, and then he started blurting out this disjointed story. It was about kids and their football jerseys. He was pretty sure Pocho already knew how his son had picked out a Juventus shirt, but he told him that again anyway. Then he moved on to the recreation ground near his old house, how he could see the kids playing football there from the window and five years ago they were all red: a few Maradonas, but then Milan, Roma, cos nobody cared about some bunch of Serie C losers even if they did happen to live in Napoli. Nowadays when he drove past the pitch it was blue like a rainstorm: Hamsiks, Cavanis, and the grumpy little lass in goal was Aronica for some reason… but mostly there was this small army of Pochos, because Pocho more than anyone had transformed this city's footballers, even the baby ones, and the way they felt about themselves. He was an odd choice of icon, of course, since he was pretty scabby and weird, but so was Napoli so it fitted. Paolo carried on telling this story, and fell asleep, and woke up to find that he was still arguing and drooling on the pillow and Lavezzi was slumbering peacefully; but he continued, talking about goals, little kids, good looks, madness: he declaimed to an audience of thousands in the floodlit stadium, and even during his wakeful periods the conviction grew that this was a battle worth winning, a personal struggle and a struggle for his hometown. "You see," he told the crowd, "Pocho Lavezzi is Napoli," and the cheers swelled like triumphal music and drowned out the "unfortunately" part, which he decided was good; and he woke on the floor on a mattress of sunlight and Pocho gave him a Buddha-like smile and said, "Paolito."
Fin
Notes
- Lavezzi is universally known as "Pocho" (fatty): "By now only my mother calles me Ezequiel."
- It's been alleged that Pocho has tattoos on his bum, but I haven't seen any proof yet. If the work's of the same standard as the rest of his tattoos, it's probably awful.
- He spoke little Italian upon arriving at Napoli; Sosa was apparently his interpreter. His hair was very long; it looked at times like a mushroom and at others a sort of rat's tail thing.
- Here is PCan's penis. (Semi-worksafe, since he's wearing pants and an undershirt.)
- Lavezzi's ex-wife, Deborah, hit the headlines for hitting a motorist over the head with a belt. In 2010 they divorced and he started going out with Yanina Screpante, who also appears to be fairly hot-tempered (she called Napoli "a city of shit", for example, and retracted it a few days later). My apologies to people who feel the portrayal here is too harsh.
- Open-necked shirt with rosary, with bonus PCan and eyebrows. (Thanks to Interleaning.) Dangerously low shorts.
- Some Twitpic examples of the Hispanophones socialising.
- Lavezzi's dog is called Juan Camilo after Zuniga. Edinson Cavani's dog is called Pocho and was a present from Lavezzi. (Interestingly, Lavezzi felt the need to point out this didn't make him gay.)
- Lavezzi gave the number 7 shirt to Cavani when Cavani arrived at Napoli. In early January 2012 he lent his Ferrarri to Hamsik, since he was recuperating in Argentina and couldn't use it himself.
- Alas, I have no specialist knowledge re: the functionality of Lavezzi's cock.
- He invariably talks and acts as if he's stoned out of his gourd. As far as I know there's no evidence he actually is.
- Adrian Mutu, in addition to all the other stupid things he's done, has received two lengthy suspensions for taking banned drugs. Paolo Cannavaro named his second son after him and has “Adrian” tattooed on his arm.
- In summer 2011 Lavezzi went to Sardegna and hung around on the beach while the rest of the team were in preseason training. Mazzarri, the coach, gave him permission and De Laurentiis, who owns Napoli, said that Lavezzi could not be treated the same as the rest of the team because he was like a child. If the other players were pissed off with this situation, they didn't say so.
- Lavezzi's babymother, Deborah, apparently refused to let him visit his son Tomas during this period, but I'm not certain Napoli Magazine is a terribly trustworthy source.
- Pocho's well-waxed armpit.
- "The toilet thing" refers to an episode of the Italian TV programme Scherzi A Parte in which the team took the piss (rather literally) by pretending a bathroom shop was using Lavezzi for its advertising campaign. The whole video is here.
- Antonio Cassano, who plays for Milan, used to be fat and insane and is now neither (we hope). Lavezzi used to have much less muscle definition than he does now.
- Ambushed at a restaurant by a thousand people. (Cannavaro wasn't there.)
- A short piece at Napoli Magazine asserted that Lavezzi doesn't give his son much parental guidance, but I don't regard it as a reliable source.
- In January 2011, Inter knocked Napoli out of the Coppa Italia on penalties. Lavezzi was the only person to miss. (His penalty is visible at 5:20.)
- Taken to a sports shop by his father for the first time, PCan's son did indeed pick out a Juve shirt. Paolo reports that "that day, I cried".
