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CHAPTER 1

The only pleasant thing to do, at exactly two in the afternoon on a day in mid-August, when the air you're breathing is liquid and you're trying not to think that it's still six or seven hours to dinner time, is go to a bar and have a drink with a few friends.

You sit down at one of the tables outside, adjust your pants — the crotch of which is so wet it needs wringing — cool off for ten seconds, and magically become yourself again. Whoever in your group is feeling in good form goes inside to order from the counter, because when the barman saw you he glared at you and is now washing glasses (or rather, one glass — the same one for the past five minutes ) and if nobody goes inside to order, forget it.

The important thing, though, is that there's a bit of a breeze.

That wisp of wind, just strong enough to lift your shirt away from your skin a little, gently count your vertebrae, and cool the gaps between your toes — to which your plastic flip-flops have given very little relief thus far — but not so strong as to ruffle the hair you've brushed over your bald spot. The iodine smell of the sea breeze unblocks your nostrils and persuades you to breathe, and by the time the hero who has taken on the job of a waiter returns with the drinks and the cards, you're feeling in a good mood again and the afternoon has suddenly gotten a hell of a lot shorter.

Such things are pleasant at the age of twenty. At eighty they are the salt of life.

The little group outside the Bar Lume, bang in the middle of Pineta, consists of four sprightly old-timers of a type common in these parts. The two other once common types, old men with walking sticks and grandchildren and old women knitting in doorways, cannot compete numerically and are thus seen with decreasing frequency.

On the much reviled threshold of the twenty-first century, Pineta became, to all intents and purposes, a fashionable seaside resort, and so the associations promoting the locality have been inexorably extinguishing the above-mentioned categories, turning the very architecture of the town against them. Where there was once a bar you could play bowls at there is now an open-air disco-pub, an open- air gym has materialized in the pine wood to replace the playground where you used to take your grandchildren, and it's impossible to find a bench, only stands for motorcycles.

The four men must be quite good friends, to judge by the way they are arguing: three of them sitting with Papal dignity on plastic chairs, one standing with a tray bearing a pack of cards, a Fernet Branca, a beer, and a Sambuca with a couple of coffee beans. One of those sitting is writhing on his chair as if bitten by a tarantula.

Clearly, something is missing.

* * *

"What about my coffee?"

"He didn't make one."

"He didn't make one? Why?"

"He says it's too hot."

"What do I care if it's too hot or not to drink coffee? As if it isn't bad enough my daughter counting the cigarettes I smoke, now the barman starts worrying about my health? Let me deal with him!"

Ampelio Viviani, 82 years old, retired railroader, decent former amateur cyclist and uncontested winner of the cursing competition held (unofficially) as part of the Unità festival at Navacchio from 1956 for twenty-six consecutive years, gets proudly to his feet with the help of his stick and heads boldly for the bar.

"Look at him go, he looks like Ronaldo!"

"It must be the way he holds his stick!"

Reaching the counter, he aims his stick straight at the barman. "Massimo, make me a coffee."

Massimo has his head bent over the sink. He is slicing lemons, and seems totally absorbed in the operation, like a Buddhist monk meditating. In the same ascetic fashion he replies, "No coffee. Too hot now. Later. Maybe."

"Horseshit! Listen to me, I fought in Abyssinia and you think it's too hot here for me to drink coffee?"

Still with his head bowed, Massimo retorts, "It isn't too hot to drink it. It's too hot to make it. You really want me to stand here in this Turkish bath, sweating like an ox? All for a lousy coffee that wouldn't even come out right, with all this humidity? Have an iced tea, on the house."

"Iced tea! If I'd wanted to feel sick I'd have stayed at home with your grandmother and watched the TV news! This is the last time I set foot in this bar."

At last, Massimo raises his head. He's about thirty, with curly hair and a beard. There's something vaguely Arab about his appearance, accentuated by his loose, knee-length pirate-style shirt miraculously devoid of patches of sweat. He has a sulky, sidelong way of looking at people. He raises his eyes to heaven for a moment, briefly, untheatrically. Then, with his eyes once again on the lemons, he says, "Look, Grandpa, this is the only bar in the whole of Pineta where anyone can stand you, and that's only because it's mine. So if you want a coffee, just wait a few hours, you don't have a job to go to."

"Give me a grappa, and to hell with my daughter!"

By the time Ampelio gets back to the table, Aldo, the owner of the Boccaccio restaurant, is shuffling the cards.

"Scopa, briscola, or tressette?" he asks.

The other two regulars sitting at the table raise their heads. The first to open his mouth is retired postal worker Gino Rimediotti, who looks all of his seventy-five years, and who now says, as he usually does, "I'm fine with anything. As long as I don't play in a pair with him there."

"Listen to him! As if it's always my fault ... "

"Yes, it is your fault! You never remember what cards have been dealt even if they bite you."

"Gino, listen, I'm fond of you, but someone who winks like he's swallowed gravel the way you do should just keep still, OK? When you're dealt a three anyone would think you're having a heart attack. Even the people inside the bar know what cards you have."

The name of the fourth man is Pilade Del Tacca. He has watched seventy-four springs glide pleasantly by and is happily overweight. Years of hard work at the town hall in Pineta, where if you don't have breakfast four times in a morning you're nobody, has formed both his physique and his character: apart from being ill-mannered, he's also a pain in the butt.

Aldo stops shuffling. The crucial moment has arrived. In a neutral voice, he says it's ridiculous that it's always he or Ampelio who has to choose, and then Del Tacca always complains. "Either you choose, or we do something else."

"I don't mind choosing," Ampelio says, "but if you don't like it we can change the pairs."

"If who doesn't like it?" Del Tacca asks.

"Your whore of a mother!" Gino says. "Who do you think? All of us."

The air has turned heavy, you can't feel the breeze anymore.

In the silence, Massimo comes out of the bar, grabs a chair, and joins the little group.

He lights a cigarette, and takes the cards. "I left the girl to mind the bar," he says. "There's nobody about at this hour. How about a game of briscola for five?"

There isn't even any need to exchange glances. There's a gleam in their eyes now. They empty their glasses, put their elbows on the table, and away they go.

A game of briscola for five is always welcome.

Some six months earlier, Ampelio's voice had rung out as usual over every other noise in the bar, skillfully illuminating the twists and turns of his mind — he was someone who never missed the opportunity to communicate urbi et orbi his opinions on every subject under the sun.

"What I don't get is what people see in it! They shut you up in a big room with the music blaring out, you're all crowded together one on top of the other, you can't dance, all you can do is wriggle about like you had sand in your underpants, and by the time you leave your mind's all befuddled. And they actually make you pay to be treated like that! Now you tell me if that's normal ..."

"Grandpa, first of all, lower your voice and stop making such a fuss. Thank you. Now, what do you care if people want to enjoy themselves that way? Are they hurting anyone?"

Ampelio put down his glass. "I tell you who they're hurting!" he went on. "Themselves, that's who! I say if they want their ears to ring, they should bang their heads a few times with a hammer, at least it's free ..."

Aldo stood up to get his lighter from the pocket of his coat. It was the day the Boccaccio was closed, and being a carefree, gregarious widower, he liked coming to the bar in the evening because he was sure to always find someone there.

"The problem is," he said as he tried to get the lighter out without his overcoat falling off the rack, "so many kids these days only enjoy themselves if what they do costs a lot. Not that there's anything new about that, let's be clear. It's just another way to look cool, to show that you have money. Except that fashions change. Right now, luckily for me, it's fashionable to pretend to know about wine. If only you saw how many kids come in after dinner, take the wine list and then call you over. 'What I'd like is a ...' and maybe they confuse the name of the producer with the name of the wine, or else they want an '87 Chianti, which if they knew the least thing about it they'd know that an '87 Chianti is no good for anything but lighter fuel, and then as if that wasn't enough they eat cheese with honey. The hardest part is to agree with them without laughing."

"You should just tell them they don't understand a damned thing," Pilade cut in with his usual politeness, "and then set them straight on a few matters. That way they'll learn little by little."

"Oh, yes, they'll learn little by little, and then they'll go somewhere else," Aldo replied. "They don't want to drink well and eat well, they just want to show off how cool they are for knowing about wine. Let them do what they like. I sell food and wine, I don't give lectures."

One thing has to be recognized: whenever Aldo asserted that he sold food and wine without frills he was absolutely right. The Boccaccio offered an extensive cellar, with a particular leaning toward Piedmont, and exceptional cooking. Period. The service was good, if informal, and the décor was not especially elegant. Moreover, if anybody ever happened to express any disappointment with the food, this would somehow always reach the ears of the chef, Otello Brondi, known as Tavolone, who, although endowed with incomparable talent in the ancient culinary arts, had not been greatly blessed by the Muses in any other respect, and so the critic would often find him looming over the table, with his thirty-five cubic feet of belly and two thick forearms as hairy as a bear's, asking, "What do you mean, you don't like it?" in a not exactly accommodating tone.

Aldo lit his cigarette. "Personally," he went on, "I hate places where if you order a wine not perfectly suited to what you've chosen to eat, or if you try to bend the rules of Gastronomy with a capital g, they treat you as if you're some kind of hick and say, 'No, no, no, why do you want to spoil that saddle of rabbit off the bone with a green bean and cashew nut flan? If only you'd listen to me ...' or even worse. I know places where there's no middle way, either you're a connoisseur and then the owner loves you and always gives you a star entrance, or you're a piece of shit who doesn't know a damned thing about wines and then they make it pretty clear to you that someone like you should stay at home and not come around there breaking balls, because there are people waiting. They don't mind your money, they just can't stand you."

This speech was greeted with complete silence.

Wednesday was never a very busy day, plus there was a biting wind outside, which every now and again blew the lids off the trash cans and rubbed the branches together and howled under the double- glazed door. Only the noise gave any idea of how cold it must be out there.

Massimo had had enough of standing behind the counter pretending to be a barman, so he came out through the flap and made a timid attempt to get rid of the old-timers — they were nice guys, but they did get on your nerves after a while — so that he could close up and go home.

"It must be more fun anyway, going to the disco than playing cards. Didn't you have a game tonight?" he said, craftily putting the night in the past tense, hoping in this way to make it clear that he was about to close.

"Hey, you're right, we still have time," Ampelio said.

"But there are five of us," Massimo said, cursing himself inwardly. "You're always forgetting I stay open after midnight so you can play cards, but I don't think games for five people have been invented yet."

"You may have a degree, Massimo, but you really are ignorant. Haven't you ever played a game of briscola for five?"

"No."

"You've never played a game of briscola for five? Ampelio, what did you teach your grandson when he was little?"

"To ask his grandmother three times for chocolate and give half of it to him when they had him on rations because of his diabetes."

"What an idiot, your grandpa. Listen, how about giving it a go? I'm sure you'll like it. I've never known anyone who doesn't enjoy briscola for five."

Massimo thought it over. It was bitterly cold outside and the idea of going out there wasn't especially inviting.

That'll teach me to be clever, he thought. But the idea of avoiding the cold for a while longer wasn't a bad one.

He went to get his cigarettes. Outside, the wind was making the shutters whistle, and the street lamps were swaying, lighting the street only in flashes that made it look truly ghostly. He made himself a coffee without asking the others if they wanted any, went to the table, sat down, and stretched his legs. Then he put his elbows on the arms of the chair, lit a cigarette, and said, "Go ahead."

The four old-timers took their chairs and made themselves comfortable at the table without the usual round of cursing. In fact, their whole attitude had changed to a mixture of satisfaction and concentration, as if they were the repositories of a great secret and were pleased to have found someone who could appreciate it.

Pants were straightened, sleeves rolled up, and cigarettes placed religiously on the table, as if to underline to themselves that they were really going to need them. The typical behavior of those savoring something in advance.

Even Massimo's mood had changed. As he watched the old-timers getting ready he had started to feel something. It was like when you're a little kid and the older children ask you to play with them, of their own accord, without their mothers forcing them to do so. You're being allowed to take part in a ritual, whatever dumb thing you get up to you have a lot of fun, and you end up with a day to remember. For a fraction of a second, he wondered if thinking that playing cards with four old geezers was a lot of fun mightn't be a symptom of something strange about him, but he immediately dismissed the thought.

Can I at least decide what I like? he thought, and focused his attention on the High Priest who was about to open the gates of the Temple to him.

"So," said Pilade, who was acting as master of ceremonies, "this is how it works: the cards are dealt, all at the same time, eight cards per player. Then you do the auction. Each person in turn declares how many points he thinks he can win on the basis of the cards he's holding. For example, the auction starts at sixty, the first person says 'I win with sixty-one,' the second says, 'I win with sixty-three,' and so on, until one player fixes a value so high that the others give up. Whoever wins has the right to choose the briscola, like this: let's say you have an ace and a three of a particular suit, do you follow me?"

"Yes, yes, I follow you."

"Then you should call the king of that suit. You say 'king of whatever' and that way you establish two things. One, that the briscola is that suit. Two, that your partner for that hand is whoever has the king of that suit. The other three are against. To win you both have to score the points you declared at the beginning. It's good to win the auction because that way you get to choose The briscola, but you have to play to win while the others play to make you lose. Plus, you're two against three."

"But once the teams have been formed, how do you know when it's your turn?"

"You just go around the table. The nice thing about the game is that you don't know who's playing with you. As soon as you've said the card, all four of you start giving each other dirty looks, and accusing each other of being the intruder, and saying they don't have any cards of that particular suit. One of them is lying. But until that card turns up you have no idea how the game is going, neither you nor your opponents. Only the player who has the king knows the whole situation, and obviously he'll do everything he can not to be found out, he may even lose lots of points to hold off being discovered as long as possible. Did you get all that?"

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Excerpted from "Game For Five"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Sellerio Editore.
Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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