“He's not her father,” says one of the players seated on the home team bench.
“She has no father,” says another of the home team players. “Her father left.”
The player named Adelfi limps to the sideline of the school basketball court. She grabs the towel held out by one of her teammates and uses it to wipe her forehead and underarms. Someone mists one of her knees with a medicinal spray.
“I'm not her father,” explains Giraut to the mostly hostile faces that watch him from the bench, the playing field and the portable stands located at his back. “I'm a friend of the family's. I live in the apartment upstairs,” he says, and the faces just look at him with neutral expressions.
“He's not my father.” Valentina Parini looks at the coach with a frown behind her green plastic glasses. “And I don't want to go out. I'm the worst player on the team. I'm the worst player on any team. Every time I go out everyone laughs at me. Adelfi can play better than me even if they cut off her leg.” She shrugs her shoulders. “Why don't you kick me off the team?”
The players waiting on the basketball court cross their arms or put their hands on their hips and spit on the ground or bounce the ball while they roll their eyes and look at each other with bored expressions. The basketball players on the female section of the Italian Academy of Barcelona's Basketball Club are tacitly divided into two categories based on whether they have breasts or not. The players with breasts move with a discreet but firm elegance and modesty as of yet unknown to their teammates without breasts. The breasts of the basketball players with breasts move in directions related to the movement of the ball and the game in progress. They sway vertically in parallel to the ball's bouncing on the ground. They are projected forward when a player with breasts throws the ball forward and they go back in toward her thoracic cavity each time she receives a pass. When a player with breasts jumps to slam dunk, her breasts are projected gloriously up toward the heavens.
“I would love to kick you off the team,” says the mustachioed coach. “I dream about it. But your school psychologist says that you're so nutso that if we kicked you off you'd lose it completely.” She makes a sign with her hand to the referee, who is examining the cuticles of one hand without taking the whistle out of her mouth. “So move your rear end and get into your position.”
The game resumes with Valentina Parini in the left wing position for the home team. A few steps away from where Lucas Giraut is watching the game with his hands in his pockets. Barely any of the players on the downtown team have breasts. The players on the downtown team are smaller in size and some of them are black and have Asian or Latin American features. The center for the downtown team is a tall Chinese girl with chipped teeth. The Chinese player slam dunks into the home team's basket and smiles with a look of true Asian cruelty in her chipped smile. Five minutes later a visiting player slams Valentina with her shoulder in such a way that Valentina and Valentina's glasses fly across the floor in opposite directions. Someone shouts out that someone should step on that retard's glasses. Valentina Parini walks calmly back to the bench.
“Everybody thinks you're my mother's boyfriend.” Valentina sits on the end of the bench closest to Lucas Giraut. The player named Adelfi goes out onto the court again, in the midst of a small ovation from the spectators that fill the portable stands. Mostly players' parents. “And my mother is in love with you. I've been noticing. Analyzing the things she does. I don't care that they say I'm too young to understand these things. And I can see things that other people don't. Like in the books I read, for example.” She takes off her glasses and examines the damage they've suffered with a focused expression that wrinkles up her tiny nose and makes her look even more like a tree-dwelling monkey. “Do you want to marry my mom? This is a serious question.”
Lucas Giraut raises his eyebrows and strokes his hairless chin with two fingers. In someone else, the gesture could pass for reflective or even calculating, but in his face it only seems to transmit a certain distracted perplexity. The rest of the substitute players seated on the bench have stopped paying attention to what's happening on the court and are now openly staring at Valentina Parini and Lucas Giraut.
“She wants to marry you,” says Valentina. “I've known for a long time. Remember the other night? At the end of the party? When that waiter carried her out to the street to throw up and then we stuck her in the taxi?”
Giraut searches through his memories of the trip home after the last of his mother's Unnumbered Birthday parties. The moment in the taxi when Marcia Parini began slapping frenetically on the back window with the palm of her hand. The fact that neither Valentina nor he himself were able to identify said slaps as the universal sign made by all drunks in taxis who need to get out to vomit again. The taxi driver's anger as Valentina pulled her mother out of the back door still drooling vomit and how quickly the taxi driver's anger disappeared when Lucas Giraut opened his wallet and put all the bills it had inside into his hand. And finally the walk home through the dark alleys of the Gothic Neighborhood with their smell of urine, with Valentina and he himself carrying Marcia by the armpits, and Valentina carrying her mother's purse and high heels in her free hand. The three creating a scene that any passerby would naturally assume to be a family scene. And most likely, in the end, it did have some genuinely family element to it.
“The signs are clear.” The girl puts her glasses back on and wipes off the dust that her fall has left on the sleeveless green shirt of her uniform. “She doesn't kiss you. She doesn't grab you by the neck and nibble on your earlobe. With you she doesn't act like she does with all the others. And when we're at home together she talks about you. Not all the time, but a lot.” She shrugs her shoulders. “Those are the signs. So it's up to you to decide if you want to marry her.”
A player in the green shirt of the Italian Academy's Basketball Club is twisting on the floor beneath the visiting team's basket with her hands on her crotch. Beside her a black player from the visiting team has her hands held high in the universal sign for innocence in sports sign language. Someone says something insulting about the defensive style of the multiracial team from downtown and a moment later the visiting player who was insulted has one of the home team players firmly locked in a neck grip. The home team player lets out a moo, her face purple and her eyes open very wide. The rest of the impeccably tricolored players watch the scene with reverential fear. The referee blows her whistle emphatically and gestures a lot with her arms.
“Sixteen days till the worldwide release of Stephen King's new novel.” Valentina takes advantage of the fact that the rest of the players have shifted their focus to the multiracial struggle that is taking place beneath the visiting team's basket. “And I want my mom to let me go to the release party. In that big bookstore downtown. They leave the bookstore open until midnight and fans can go and buy a special edition. The first edition. But so she'll let me go I have to be good and act like I'm an idiot in front of the teachers and show up for basketball games and all that. I don't know how I'm going to stand it.” She makes an impotent gesture. “This is torture. Everybody laughs at me. The teachers more than anybody. I could kill all these stupid girls, like that.” She snaps her fingers. “At least these public school girls know how to fight.”
Giraut stares with a blank face at an overweight girl who seems to have been listening to their conversation from the bench. The overweight girl looks away as quickly as she can. With a slightly offended face. The attitude of Valentina Parini's classmates toward Valentina Parini has been mainly an attitude of distrust and mockery and general lack of respect since Valentina read aloud in Spanish class an essay titled “The Prayer of Those Who Have No Father and No Mother.” Which is to say, since what is known as the Spanish Class Mishap. Since then, the frequency of taunts and nicknames has increased. Along with the good-humored tortures in the school playground. And the comparisons with physically grotesque or insane film and television characters. Valentina Parini has recited The Prayer of Those Who Have No Father and No Mother on various occasions to Lucas Giraut during their meetings at dusk in the courtyard of the old ducal palace in the Gothic Neighborhood.