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1. everybody's talkin'
They got found out. In London. A tabloid got its claws into them after Zlatan said some things to one of their journalists that she wouldn't forget in a hurry, after he had broken the journalist's camera. In hindsight, it had been a bad idea for Sandro to come out in the evening, Zlatan asleep in the room upstairs, to shoot some pool in the lobby of the motel they'd checked in to, never imagining for a moment that there were Englishmen who cared about the actual identity of a random Italian in a tatty hoodie and faded jeans.
"You didn't think they'd know?" Zlatan asked incredulously after the whole thing came out. With several pictures.
Someone said, in an op-ed on the (latest) scandal that shook world football (again), that Alessandro Nesta's not-so-surreptitious appearance in public – and there was cameraphone evidence, six foot three inches of Roman athlete sticking out like a sore thumb amidst the beer drinkers and dart-throwers of the London populace – during a secret tryst was so textbook Freudian in its desire to destroy the wall of lies and secrecy they had built up around themselves that it almost didn't merit remarking upon. Sandro would have been impressed by the analysis if things hadn't been so fucking hard for him at that point. They got fired, of course, although the contract termination was couched in somewhat different terms by the PR drones. Sandro didn't think he'd reached breaking point until someone shoved a square of newsprint covered with mud about his daughter's well-being under his nose. Then he did reach breaking point when Zlatan suddenly upped and left, and no one could find him. Gabriela was sympathetic, but adrift herself. His parents refused to speak with him.
Life got unbearable.
And then, unexpectedly, it went on.
The weather turned shitty, but it went on. People sent letters. They wrote a lot of things in the papers that were helpful and hurt and angry and supportive about what had happened. He got a phone call from a lawyer asking him to say one word, just one, to sue the tabloid for enough money to paper the world. There was – there was mobility. Things moved. Things changed. He didn't go out to meet the people camped on his lawn with placards, afraid he would do something stupid, but he slipped out for a sandwich with friends, late one night, and ran right into a bunch of college kids who hugged him and bought him coffee and made him sign their tee-shirts. It was ridiculous.
And then Zlatan returned, a wolf on the fold, driving a large, roiling campaign in front of him, and Sandro tore out of Europe, because suddenly he – they – were everywhere. Zlatan politicised. It was maddening and a little awe-inspiring. Then an MLS club based in Wisconsin, which Sandro would need serious directions to find on a map, came forward and publicly offered both of them contracts. It would be an honour to have the world's best striker and the world's best centre-back play together on the same team. The franchise would be perfectly happy to accommodate players of any sexual orientation, in a bid to prove that their league and that American sport in general was ready to actively send out a strong message against homophobia.
Sandro stopped taking phone calls. Then he stopped reading the newspapers. Then he stopped watching television. He spilled his guts at the first few videos he came across on YouTube, (there was even one set to Celine Dion) and then he couldn't watch any more.
Someone called him up to tell him that some English talk show had asked Zlatan if he loved Sandro, and Zlatan had said it wasn't anybody's business but his own. Sandro almost laughed at how wrong Hollywood had gotten the whole public declaration of love thing.
He didn't open the door to anyone until, one day, he heard a faint, furious bellow from four floors below, threatening to kick his ass unless he unlocked the door at once.
"Bastard," Zlatan said. "Where the fuck have you been?"
Sandro slammed the door in his face and kicked the door furiously.
"I promised myself I would kill you if you had the fucking nerve to ask me that," he said.
"Miami's too hot," Zlatan said. "Let's go home."
Sandro opened the door again.
"Home," he asked.
Zlatan shrugged. "Wherever you say."
They stayed on for a while. Sandro bought a motorbike and two helmets. Their heads bobbed like Darth Vader lollipops when he sped along the bumpy roads laid out by the beach. He got into exactly one fight with a traffic policeman, who let him go without a speeding ticket once Zlatan took off his helmet and entered the conversation. He was snapped once in a convenience store buying Band-Aids, but no one else came after them. The local Blockbuster salesperson started to treat him like a trusted customer. She made recommendations in sign language and loud, grating English and smiled a lot, even when Sandro made a face at 'Moulin Rouge' and conveyed to her that he had been unable to watch 'Casablanca' in full.
He watched 'Midnight Cowboy' once, sometimes twice a week, until he didn't need the subtitles anymore.
Sandro and Zlatan turned out for the same club, some time later. The stadium was packed for the season's first game. They were playing against a bunch of minnows, many of them young enough to be Sandro's kids – if he'd done something incredibly stupid at the age of twelve, sure, but the point stood. They gawked a little, then fled when their manager strode down the line.
"Psst," one of them said. Sandro turned.
"Can I have your shirt after the game?" the kid asked. "I'm asking now because, like, the others might get to it first."
Someone smacked it over the head and yelled, "You can't do that! That's not fair!"
Zlatan cracked his gum loudly and jogged on his spot, then turned and waggled his eyebrows.
"I don't know if we deserve this," Sandro said to him as they lined up on field.
"We will at the end of this game," Zlatan replied, not turning to look at him. As he sped off to position he was already smiling, and Sandro had to bite his own cheek.
It wasn't an easy game, which possibly made it simpler to forget that there were relatively few benign eyes being cast upon them around the pitch, and maybe around the world. They won it, and the next, and the one after that, and then Sandro relearned that to drop out of publicity pages you merely had to treat them like they weren't there.
They never got around to asking each other again if they deserved it.
2. heroes
"I am so fucking tired of this," Zlatan said, the day the ultras of the San Siro acted up again by throwing live flares on to the pitch. No one had been hurt, although Ambrosini had to hop to it, and they all just stood there, twenty-two men and a referee, waving his arms above his head and looking like a small-scale god of thunder, watching the smoke puff and crackle round them, little Catherine-wheels of smog rising up from the charring grass in schizoid little spirals.
It was a little more serious than usual. For Zlatan the case was more or less what people who imagined professional sport as the province of single-minded, lonely people thought it was. There was no audience once the first few minutes were up and the game was underway. Unless it was one of those rare no-brainers when you happened upon the kind of team that thought losing 4-0 to yours was a sign of bigger things to come, it took a real effort to remember that a world existed beyond behind the signboards. We can't do without our supporters, people like him said. They are our breath of life, our voice, our strength, our tifosi. But it took a real effort.
A real effort: coins, spit, a flare or two. Or words. There were always words. He had seen it happen often, seen someone on his team or the other raise their heads, almost like they'd caught a scent in the air before the chants or the songs or the banners penetrated their consciousness, always a second or two before it hit him.
They were singing now, and it wasn't pretty. In fact, it was terrible. The police, in a corner of Zlatan's eye, were beginning to press and heckle. The San Siro was a dungeon at the best of times, but tonight it was like being in a horror film where the windows were all thronging with bloodthirsty ghosts clawing their way frantically towards your flesh. It was getting hotter, closer, more urgent, and all wrong. Zlatan had been at games before when the tension pressed a sweat into the nape of his neck, where the air was raw and boiling, like the afternoon before a tribal war. Very primitive. Nobody cares, Zlatan wanted to shout often. Nobody in the world outside gives a fuck about your north and south and big club and small club and your melodramatic shit. Shut up and watch the football. Or go home. They never went home. These people needed homes to go to.
"What the fuck, Nesta?" someone behind him said, and the next thing Zlatan saw through the smoke and sparks was Sandro, arms crossed, looking more annoyed than Zlatan had ever seen him. He'd zoned out for a moment. There were people on the pitch. Officials and club representatives and two people Zlatan thought were from the curve, dressed in team jerseys, well-agitated and pleased with themselves.
"I'm not going," Sandro said, and looked at the scary bald m – looked at Adriano Galliani.
"What's going on?" Zlatan asked Stankovic as discreetly as he could.
"Nesta's refusing to stop play," Dejan said.
"Ah," said Zlatan. "Why is Nesta supposed to stop play?"
"They want us to cancel the match," Dejan told him. "The ultra men."
"Well, fuck me," Zlatan said. "I thought we'd left Yugoslavia behind for good."
Dejan seemed unamused by the quip. At the half-line, Zanetti was now arguing with Sandro.
"They'll kill us," he said, fully audible to the potential murderers. "You know they almost did Totti and Mihajlovic. Don't be stubborn."
"Don't be scared," Sandro said, lip curled in such disdain that Zlatan choked down a hysterical threat of laughter. "And don't give me any lessons on Rome derbies, okay, Javier?"
"Nesta," Zanetti said desperately. "Nesta. I'm already sorry about Maldini's retirement. Don't make me wish it was Rino in your place, please."
"It's not a unilateral decision!" someone shouted. "We can't have a match just because you say you will."
"I say I will," Sandro said, talking even faster, as if this would allow his opponents to comprehend what he was saying. "And my team will play this fucking game if it's the last one we play."
"That's what it will be, you imbecile!"
He turned around to the waiting ultras and advanced on them with such purpose that they took an involuntary step back.
"Whatever you're thinking of," Sandro said to them, "don't even dare."
"Alessandro," one of them began.
"Don't even," Sandro said. "Anything that flies out of these stands is going to end up lodged in your heads, okay?"
"Oh, is that so?" one of them said. Sandro loomed over him.
"Oh," he said, looking tantalizingly close to slapping this man. "Believe me."
"We're not playing?" Vieira, who looked like he would welcome the extra hour or so of sleep, wandered up to ask.
"I am," Zlatan said, and walked up to Sandro, nudging one of the ultras out of the way with his shoulder. The man opened his mouth to protest, saw it was Zlatan, and melted away into the shadows as best as he could.
"Don't leave," Sandro told him.
"You're a crazy bastard," Zlatan said. "Of course I'm not leaving."
Zanetti froze, and turned around.
"Even if I'm the only man to play against your guys," Zlatan said, "I'll do it."
"I've never liked you, Ibra," Zanetti said with some feeling.
They played for a full match time, in the end, to an ominous, eerie silence from both curve. Sandro shut him down so gracelessly and completely that he was forced to devise ways to get him to give away corners until the end, and was more than ready to throw him bodily into the Curva Nord for forcing a goalless draw. On the sidelines, Gattuso was hopscotching here and there on his bad ankle, yelling, "Get the fuckers! Get the fuckers!" He waited for the referee to blow the whistle before striding up to Sandro, just as the bottles began to fly into the ground, and the teams began to run back to the tunnel.
"I'm going to kill you," he shouted over the din.
"Swap," Sandro shouted back. "Swap shirts with me."
Zlatan whipped his jersey off and threw it at his head. Sandro grinned.
"I don't think I can walk," he shouted into Zlatan's ear. "My legs won't carry me."
Zlatan grabbed his neck, and then he crushed Sandro's ribcage in his arms.
"You're such a drama queen," he yelled, and propelled them both forward. "You need to go home. I'm taking you home."
"Nesta and Ibra refuse to back down to ultra demands!"
They were in the papers the next day, bare-chested and joined at the hip, as the architects of football's victory over violence.
"Typical," Sandro remarked. "Show up at the last minute, open your big mouth, take all the credit."
"You got at least half the credit," Zlatan said. "And the benefit of the big mouth."
The phones hadn't stopped ringing. The media people called, then their agents had called. Nike called. Platini called. Henrik Larsson called. Sandro's mother called and gave him a thoroughly nasty piece of her mind. Then the Prime Minister called. Then the Prime Minister of Sweden called.
The TV channels all ignored Zanetti's arguments and ran footage of the half-time exchange between Sandro and Zlatan, employing expert lip readers to decode what they said to each other. It was wonderful, marvellous, a courageous action, the hallmark of true champions. All of them left out the bit where Zlatan called Sandro a crazy bastard, for some strange reason.
"Maybe it looks like 'I love you,' to them." Zlatan said.
"Fucking shit lip readers," Sandro said, and started to laugh.
3. downtown train
In a shocking turn of events, Zlatan fled Italy.
Or at least, he would. Soon. Every day he dreamt of making such an occurrence a spoke in a chain of life-incidents that had lost its power to shock or change direction. He was horrified by Italy. He was horrified by how much he hated it. The football, the fans, the culture, the language. Even the weather was chaotic. To make matters worse, he realised within days of coming to Juventus that there was only one thing that allowed the club to present a bigger, better, more successful façade than a place like Ajax, and it was not the quality of its football.
His agents generally tended to treat him as something delicate, simultaneously a coalition of form, function and insanity, but their eyes bugged out of their heads before they began to laugh when he told them to get him out of there. Then Zlatan realized exactly what he had become embroiled in when he was left on the bench for three weeks as a gracious, subtle reaction to that seemingly private conversation. Things didn't seem capable of getting worse, but Zlatan knew that going back to Sweden was definitely lower on the scale than being on the Juve payroll, so he kept his hands and mouth to himself, and began to look through things and people to avoid having to look at them.
He sublimated and started travelling around Italy instead.
He first took a car and raced southwards down the autostrada each day after training. This quickly became a non-starter after he realised that traffic in Italy was best marvelled at from a distance, and that road rage did not help his game any. So he started to ride the local trains instead.
Weekday afternoons were a good time. Hot, but good. The trains were empty because everyone was indoors, sleeping. The countryside around Torino was beautiful, intimate and lush and vast all at once, in the way Zlatan imagined his parents' hometowns had once been. He folded himself into his beanie and glares, huddled in between his large headphones, and sat near the doors. On Mondays he got as far as Perugia before he got off and took a return. He did this three, sometimes four times a week.
The first time he saw a hand held out for a ticket check, the rain was coming down in solid ropes of needle-grey outside. He looked up from his newspaper at the ticket examiner.
"Hurry up," he told Zlatan. "Some of us haven't got all day."
"There's no one else in the compartment," Zlatan observed to him. The other man raised an eyebrow, opened his mouth to say something unflattering, and shut it again.
"Do you have a ticket?" he asked, with that mixture of weariness and petty authoritarianism that public service personnel all over Italy seemed to have down pat.
Zlatan remembered having a ticket when searching his pockets for change at the magazine stand.
"Fine," the examiner said. Zlatan read his name off his badge, black against his black uniform. A. NESTA.
"Thanks," Zlatan said and looked down at his sudoku.
"Fine," the ticket man said. "You have to pay one."
Zlatan was really not in the mood to argue. "I had a ticket," he said. "I got on the train with a ticket. Don't be unreasonable. Uh, please."
"Don't be ridiculous, please," the man said curtly. "Rules are rules."
Zlatan considered taking his cap off and using the do-you-know-who-I-am card as an escape route, and then snapped and settled for swearing in the general direction of Italy and all that had led unto it.
"I tend to agree," the ticket man said unexpectedly. "It's all kinds of fucked-up." He snapped his fingers, long and brown and conspicuously attractive, and stuck his hand out, palm upwards.
"For example," he continued, "I read just the other day that forty-five percent of all Italians are Juventus supporters."
Zlatan looked up at him warily. A. Nesta's mouth curved in a not-entirely pleasant smile.
"Fortunately for this country," he said, "the other fifty-five percent of us still have a modicum of sense. Apart from the romanisti. Your fine, sir, now."
Zlatan paid up silently.
"And an extra for a new ticket."
"How typical," Zlatan said. "Laziale, are you? All this, and a little extra for the Fascist Party?"
"Actually, I'm still paying the bills for my sister's cancer treatment," Nesta said. "And the fact that you're accusing me of corruption takes me one step closer to handcuffing you and handing you over to the railway police for lawlessness. Are you going to waste more of my time?"
Zlatan handed over the last of the lire in his wallet. Nesta counted it twice, returned two notes back to him, and leaned against the opposite seat. He was almost as tall as Zlatan. Dark, neat, unruffled, except about the mouth. Bit of a fancy piece for a railwayman.
"Boy," he said to Zlatan. "You're really exactly like you are when you're playing."
"That's a compliment," Zlatan said. Nesta huffed.
"You would take it so, wouldn't you," he said. "It's aggravating. Once Lazio might have had enough money to buy you. Water?"
Zlatan took the proffered bottle and took a sip, before he gulped down half its contents.
"That was a compliment," Nesta said. "We used to be somebodies." He shrugged, and then smiled absently.
"Everyone in Italy thinks that," Zlatan said. "Unless you're Silvio Berlusconi, in which case you still think you're somebody."
"Well, he is," Nesta said. "He's Prime Minister, isn't he? And he owns Milan. I wouldn't vote for the man if there was a gun at my head, but I like Maldini."
"Everyone in Italy thinks that, too," Zlatan said. "I don't know why you fight so much. You're all exactly the same."
"And we're none of us given for you to criticise," Nesta said, a little sharply. "You've been pretty damn lucky here, haven't you?"
"Shows how much you know about football," Zlatan said.
"Shows how much you know about anything else," Nesta said. He pulled himself up as they entered a station.
"Thanks for the water," Zlatan said, unable to identify the source of a sudden bewilderment that tugged at his insides.
"No problem," Nesta said, taking a step down as they pulled into a station. "Just give Francesco Totti a thrashing for me the next time you see him."
"I hope your sister gets better," Zlatan threw out as a coal upon his head as the doors pulled open.
"She died six years ago," Nesta said, springing off the train lightly. "But thanks. Tell Fabio that Nesta said hello."
Cannavaro stopped dead in his tracks when Zlatan, in a wiful decision against his better judgment, reported the salient details of this meeting.
"Nesta?" he said incredulously. "Alessandro Nesta, did you say?" Zlatan laughed as he clutched at his hair. "The hell. He's working for the railways now?"
"His attitude is," Zlatan said, and Canna laughed and shook his head and frowned.
"Nesta," he said. "Sandro. I wouldn't have a job if he was still around. Or maybe Materazzi wouldn't. Jesus, the poor kid. And Katia dead. It's a funny old world, Ibra."
"No shit," Zlatan said. "What are you saying? You really know this guy?"
"We played together in the under-16s for a year and a half," Canna said. "Then something went wrong. Some inflammation, something in his backbone. He grew a little too tall, too fast." His mouth twisted. "And they tried to tell me I was too short to play centre-back. But I used to wonder what happened to him. He never stayed in touch."
"Yeah, because the one thing you want to do when your career is over is stay in touch with the guys who're just getting started," Zlatan said. But Canna just got up, paced around again, and wandered off, still shaking his head.
Zlatan spent three months after that looking for Nesta on the 1515 train out of Turin, and then the 1615 and even, when he could get away early enough, the 1415. Then he stayed in the city after a Roma game and wandered down to the railway offices with an unfocused view towards inveigling a schedule or something out of the clerks. He was never a great success with bureaucracy, but the office seemed to hold more Juve fans than he would have guessed, and he took pictures with a whole bunch of people who seemed capable neither of helping him, nor of questioning his motives. He wasn't particularly pissed off on either front.
Then he turned to shake hands with someone behind him and Nesta walked in through the door in a tee-shirt and jeans, which made him look years younger than his uniform did. Zlatan had a moment to wonder if he really was born under some kind of lucky star before Nesta's eyebrows drew together in surprise as he recognized him.
"You," he said. "Ah. Good show last night."
"I know," Zlatan said. "Were you there?"
Nesta shook his head. "I was working. What are you doing here?"
Zlatan breathed. "Last time I travelled ticketless, some guy just took my autograph and let me go."
Nesta smiled a little nervously. "Come to pay your dues?"
"Come to my game next Sunday," Zlatan said. Nesta frowned. Zlatan bounced on the balls of his feet.
"Mondays are my day off," Nesta said at last, in an odd, tight voice.
"Then come have lunch with me now," Zlatan said. "Let's go eat a sandwich."
"You're really as nuts as you are on the telly," Sandro said. "Why?"
"Because Totti turned blue yesterday when I asked him if he knew you," Zlatan said. "And because I haven't stopped thinking about you for the last three months."
Nesta turned and walked out of the paper-and-dust office abruptly. Zlatan followed him into the sunlight, grinning.
"So," Nesta said. "You're actually crazier than on the telly."
"You may be right," said Zlatan. "Do you still play football?"
"For a minute," Nesta said, "I thought you'd landed up here to tell them that I stole from you."
"Extortion isn't the same thing as stealing," Zlatan said. "I'd have punched you if I felt like it, anyway."
Nesta laughed. "I'd like to see you try," he said. "Lunch, did you say?"
"Yeah," Zlatan said. "I'm hungry."
"Me too," Nesta said. "And yes, I do still play football."