Scenarios

La Bellezza Delle Bellezze 1

That Sunday, the day before she died, I went down to Aquatic Park to watch the old men play bocce. I do that sometimes on weekends when I'm not working, when Kerry and I have nothing planned. More often than I used to, out of nostalgia and compassion and maybe just a touch of guilt, because in San Francisco bocce is a dying sport.

Only one of the courts was in use. Time was, all six were packed throughout the day and there were spectators and waiting players lined two and three deep at courtside and up along the fence on Van Ness. No more. Most of the city's older Italians, to whom bocce was more a religion than a sport, have died off. The once large and close-knit North Beach Italian community has been steadily losing its identity since the fifties-families moving to the suburbs, the expansion of Chinatown and the gobbling up of North Beach real estate by wealthy Chinese-and even though there has been a small new wave of immigrants from Italy in recent years, they're mostly young and upscale. Young, upscale Italians don't play bocce much, if at all; their interests lie in soccer, in the American sports where money and fame and power have replaced a love of the game itself. The Di Massimo bocce courts at the North Beach Playground are mostly closed now; the only place you can find a game every Saturday and Sunday is on the one Aquatic Park court. And the players get older, and sadder, and fewer each year.

There were maybe fifteen players and watchers on this Sunday, almost all of them older than my fifty-eight. The two courts nearest the street are covered by a high, pillar-supported roof, so that contests can be held even in wet weather; and there are wooden benches set between the pillars. I parked myself on one of the benches midway along. The only other seated spectator was Pietro Lombardi, in a patch of warm May sunlight at the far end, and this surprised me. Even though Pietro was in his seventies, he was one of the best and spryest of the regulars, and also one of the most social. To see him sitting alone, shoulders slumped and head bowed, was puzzling.

Pining away for the old days, maybe, I thought as I had just been doing. And a phrase popped into my head, a line from Dante that one of my uncles was fond of quoting when I was growing up in the Outer Mission: Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria. The bitterest of woes is to remember old happy days.

Pietro and his woes didn't occupy my attention for long. The game in progress was spirited and voluble, as only a game of bocce played by elderly 'paesanos can be, and I was soon caught up in it.

Bocce is simple-deceptively simple. You play it on a long, narrow packed-earth pit with low wooden sides. A wooden marker ball the size of a walnut is rolled to one end; the players stand at the opposite end and in turn roll eight larger, heavier balls, grapefruit-sized, in the direction of the marker, the object being to see who can put his bocce ball closest to it. One of the required skills is slow-rolling the ball, usually in a curving trajectory, so that it kisses the marker and then lies up against it-the perfect shot-or else stops an inch or two away. The other required skill is knocking an opponent's ball away from any such close lie without disturbing the marker. The best players, like Pietro Lombardi, can do this two out of three times on the fly-no mean feat from a distance of fifty feet. They can also do it by caroming the ball off the pit walls, with topspin or reverse spin after the fashion of pool- shooters.

Nobody paid much attention to me until after the game in progress had been decided. Then I was acknowledged with hand gestures and a few words-the tolerant acceptance accorded to known spectators and occasional players. Unknowns got no greeting at all; these men still clung to the old ways, and one of the old ways was clannishness.

Only one of the group, Dominick Marra, came over to where I was sitting. And that was because he had something on his mind. He was in his mid-seventies, white-haired, white-mustached; a bantamweight in baggy trousers held up by galluses. He and Pietro Lombardi had been close friends for most of their lives. Born in the same town-Agropoli, a village on the Gulf of Salerno not far from Naples; moved to San Francisco with their families a year apart, in the late twenties; married cousins, raised large families, were widowed at almost the same time a few years ago. The kind of friendship that is almost a blood tie. Dominick had been a baker; Pietro had owned a North Beach trattoria that now belonged to one of his daughters.

What Dominick had on his mind was Pietro. 'You see how he sits over there, hah? He's got trouble- la miseria.'

'What kind of trouble?'

'His granddaughter. Gianna Fornessi.'

'Something happen to her?'

'She's maybe go to jail,' Dominick said.

'What for?'

'Stealing money.'

'I'm sorry to hear it. How much money?'

'Two thousand dollars.'

'Who did she steal it from?'

'Che?'

'Who did she steal the money from?'

Dominick gave me a disgusted look. 'She don't steal it. Why you think Pietro he's got la miseria, hah?'

I knew what was coming now; I should have known it the instant Dominick starting confiding to me about Pietro's problem. I said, 'You want me to help him and his granddaughter.'

'Sure. You a detective.'

'A busy detective.'

'You got no time for old man and young girl? Compaesani? '

I sighed, but not so he could hear me do it. 'All right, I'll talk to Pietro. See if he wants my help, if there's anything I can do.'

'Sure he wants your help. He just don't know it yet.'

We went to where Pietro was sitting alone in the sun. He was taller than Dominick, heavier, balder. And he had a fondness for Toscanas, those little twisted black Italian cigars; one protruded now from a corner of his mouth. He didn't want to talk at first but Dominick launched into a monologue in Italian that changed his mind and put a glimmer of hope in his sad eyes. Even though I've lost a lot of the language over the years, I can understand enough to follow most conversations. The gist of Dominick's monologue was that I was not just a detective but a miracle worker, a cross between Sherlock Holmes and the messiah. Italians are given to hyperbole in times of excitement or stress, and there isn't much you can do to counteract it-especially when you're one of the compaesani yourself.

'My Gianna, she's good girl,' Pietro said. 'Never give trouble, even when she's little one. La bellezza delle bellezze, you understand?'

The beauty of beauties. His favorite grandchild, probably. I said, 'I understand. Tell me about the money, Pietro.'

'She don't steal it,' he said. ' Una ladra, my Gianna? No, no, it's all big lie.'

'Did the police arrest her?'

'They got no evidence to arrest her.'

'But somebody filed charges, is that it?'

'Charges,' Pietro said. 'Bah,' he said and spat.

'Who made the complaint?'

Dominick said, 'Ferry,' as if the name were an obscenity.

'Who's Ferry?'

He tapped his skull. ' Caga di testa, this man.'

'That doesn't answer my question.'

'He live where she live. Same apartment building.'

'And he says Gianna stole two thousand dollars from him.'