Rolling over, Mario called out drunkenly, “Wake me when dinner’s on the table.”
The exact words he used to describe his adventures—without any intention to amuse—were parroted, and his turns of phrase became part of the public parlance. Everybody talked about how he’d once run over a drunk when driving his brother’s car. The car jolted and bumped, but Mario went right on driving because he was drunk, too. Later on, he found a bloody hunk of flesh on the bumper of his Fiat 101, a piece of the bump he’d run over. More precisely, a piece of the rump. He said, “Hell, when I saw what it was, I threw that piece of ass as far as I could into the corn.”
Later people always said, when somebody threw something really far, that they’d thrown it like a piece of ass into the corn. Nobody showed the slightest interest in the fate of the poor man who’d been run over. Mario’s brother, Boris, was the one who went to the police.
The sexual energy around him seemed to know no age limit, and perhaps no gender limit, either. An older woman in the village named Mika Kukec was skilled at clearing foreign objects out of people’s eyes with her tongue. Mario went to her when a speck of concrete got lodged in his eye at a construction site. Later he told the guys at the soccer game, “First she wiggled around with her tongue—that was nice, warm-like. Then she started licking my neck. Well, I reckoned she was still treating me, right? What do I know about witch doctors and their magic… When up pops my johnson.”
Ultimately, even Mario’s digestion became public knowledge. “Pišta, help, this is going to tear my guts to shreds,” and “Mom just made some donuts, and I puked them all back up. It’s the damn booze,” and, charmed, people repeated whatever he said.
The only man in the village who was cool toward Mario was his brother, Boris, a year older and Mario’s polar opposite. He was always serious and spoke with inexplicable contempt. At the same time, he strove to be liked by everybody. He’d talk about how he was always lending a helping hand, or how hard he worked. But while his younger brother managed without the slightest effort or intention, Boris was never forgiven for anything. One Christmastime, Mario collected twice as much money as God-fearing Boris when they and the other altar boys accompanied the priest on his visits to bless the villagers in their homes. When Mario smashed a beer bottle at a soccer game because of the jerk ref, he was met with howls of approval. When Boris did the same, they called him a fool because somebody was sure to cut themselves on the glass. When Boris talked about how he’d fucked, or puked, or taken a shit, they stared at him as if he were crazy. While Mario had worked occasionally as a mason after his classes at the commerce high school and barely scraped by, Boris was pathologically ambitious—he intended to make something of himself. As a kid, he knew he’d either go into the seminary or work at the gas station in Mursko Središće. Once he’d realized acne was not an insurmountable obstacle and that he had a taste for women, Boris chose the gas station, and in church he served only as sacristan. However, some part of his seminary dream stayed with him. He filled the cars with gas as if offering communion. Conceited and misunderstood. I occasionally seemed to see in his eyes the righteous conviction that nobody cared for him—he who had been so decent and fair to everybody his whole life—while his brother, Mario, who didn’t give a shit, was the village sweetheart. Folks talked about Mario but never Boris, and that’s all there was to it.
Franz spoke of Mario with admiration ten days or so after we didn’t sign up for soccer. Every day we dribbled a beat-up leather ball around and talked about how Mladen Horvat was going to show us goalie moves, and then we’d play for the neighboring village’s team and trounce the Miners the first chance we got.
“Mario said, ‘Come on, Franz, come on, you’ll play for us’—Mario said that, really, he came right over and invited me…” Franz kept repeating this, making it sound like Mario himself had invited Franz, and I kicked our ball harder and with greater and greater anger. I’d be alone again, now that Franz was playing with the older boys. It was going to be me and dumb old Bacawk and Chickichee for the rest of my life. Fantastic. He said they told him he was terrific at defense, and they weren’t even playing games anymore, just shooting penalty kicks. Franz never lied, I knew that. He didn’t understand that others couldn’t tell when you were lying. They told him he could come every day, and Mario especially had praised him. The happier damned Franz was, the angrier I got.
“Matija, come down there with me today, hey, Matija, will you come? Come watch how I defend, hey, Matija…”
“I’ll come, but just shut up,” I said sourly.
“Maybe they’ll ask you, too, maybe Mario will say how good you play, maybe he’ll tell you to come…”
“Sure, sure, fine.” This didn’t sound likely to me.
As soon as I got to the field and sat on a damp tree stump, I regretted my anger and envy. Franz stood in the goal, and the guys kicked balls at him brutally hard, laughing and shouting about what a terrific job he was doing defending and that not a single ball could get past him. He glanced over at me with a proud smile that even his pain-filled eyes couldn’t spoil. The blows followed one after another, and during every time-out he’d rub his ribs. When Franz started to lose steam, Mario piped up and reminded him he’d never seen a finer goalie in all his days.
I looked up to those guys. They were between eighteen and twenty, and we little kids hung on their every word with reverence. We listened when they gathered around a fence in the evening and talked about women, soccer, and which was better for wine: the local fox grapes or the imported varieties. We thought they knew what they were talking about because they smoked cigarettes, said, “Honest t’ God,” and swore, spitting to the side, ignoring us, talking shit about women, and laughing.
“What about Jadranka? I heard she’s up for it.”
“At first she held back, but I…”
“Smacked her?”
“Naw, just said, ‘Bitch, why won’t you, why won’t you. Gimme head!’ Y’shoulda seen how glad she was to go for it, how sweet she moaned.”
When I listened to them talking, I wanted to be just like them when I grew up, but now all I wanted was for them to be gone. My legs shook with how fiercely I hated them, most of all Mario Brezovec. He went to the well of a nearby house now and then to slurp down big gulps of water from the bucket, and as time passed he went more and more, as if he couldn’t get enough. I wanted him to die because he didn’t feel bad about hurting my dumbass friend. After Franz was hit twice really hard in the head, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t dare say anything to the older boys, but I hollered to Franz: “Franz, let’s go home!”
He replied, still happily taking the blows: “You go, I’ll play a little longer with the guys.”
Mićo, Goran Brezovec’s older brother and Mario’s cousin, spat to the side and called to me, “Hey, Dolenčec, you go home and tell that sister of yours to come to the field,” at which point they all burst out laughing, except Mario Brezovec. He climbed groggily onto his bike and called over his shoulder to say he was going home.
I sat back down. Why my sister, I wondered. I was pulled away from my thoughts when a ball—I don’t know who kicked it—hit Franz’s head really hard, much harder than before. They all froze, silent, and Franz’s hands flew to his mouth, and he fell to his knees. At first I thought the ball had knocked out his teeth, but I froze on the spot when I saw thick blood seeping from his mouth. As if a piece of him had fallen to the ground. Franz groaned softly, probably so he wouldn’t bother anyone, and with one hand he picked up the piece of him from off the ground, putting the other hand into his bloody mouth as if groping to see whether something was missing in there. What was missing was a chunk of his tongue.