The Break Page 8

  “There it is,” another man in a waistcoat and rosette said, pointing behind Dino with his chin.

  Dino turned, and there before his very eyes was a splendid, brand-new table, which if it hadn’t been for the green baize would have been as shiny as crystal.

  “Thanks,” Dino said, still feeling that sensation of cold.

  At the end of the table, over towards the side where the terraces were, standing next to a large scoreboard, was another man in a waiter’s jacket, although this one was white. “Card, please,” he said.

  “Of course,” Dino said digging the piece of card out of his pocket.

  On the other side of the table from the scoreboard, a man in a waistcoat and rosette was screwing together a strange faded yellow cue made from some weird material that Dino didn’t recognise. Dino had often seen people come into the billiard parlour with these cues that were in two pieces, and when you talked to them they were ready to swear to you that they were perfect and it didn’t make any difference. Dino always nodded and said of course, even admiring in a way these objects which had to be assembled and which were in cases like violins, ready to play God alone knew what kind of music, but he always wondered how it was possible to get inside that dense forest of geometries as hard as oaks with a broken cue.

  The man who was screwing together the cue had a funny round paunch and a huge black moustache that stuck out from the sides of his face like wings.

  “Hello, Handlebar,” another man in a waistcoat and rosette said, giving him a slap on the back on the way to the next table.

  “Hi,” the man with the moustache said, turning his head just a little and slightly raising his chin. He must be famous, a man with a reputation, maybe the kind of player who might even win the tournament, so well-known that everyone called him by his nickname. What had Dino been thinking? What had been going through his head? Did he really think he could play with professionals like these and hope to get anywhere? True, Cirillo was good, and in his way even famous, but you had to face up to the fact that even he had never played an official tournament. And even so, Dino had never beaten him.

  As the man with the moustache turned back to his cue, his eyes fell on Dino, who was standing there staring at him. The man looked him up and down, with a half-smile, then held out his hand.

  “Hello,” he said, almost chuckling, without even introducing himself.

  “Hi,” Dino said, shaking his hand with what little confidence he had left.

  The man who had given Handlebar a slap on the back approached again from behind him, also screwing on his cue, and, looking Dino in the eyes with a sarcastic little smile, said, “Are you sure you haven’t come to the wrong place, with that stick?” Then he laughed and walked back to his own table.

  The man with the moustache also stifled a laugh and lowered his head again.

  Dino looked down at his Arlecchino, which looked more beautiful to him than ever. A stick? This was an Arlecchino, every player’s dream. It wasn’t a cue, it was a sword, a king’s sceptre, a magic halberd. For a moment, Dino had a strong desire to grab it from the end with both hands and hack his way through that forest of ungodly waiters and out of this repulsive, gastritic stomach.

  “Here,” the waiter in the white jacket said.

  “Thanks,” Dino said almost angrily, pocketing the card.

  Then the man in the white jacket opened a cardboard box, inside which were three billiard balls, cleaner and shinier than any Dino had ever seen.

  “If you want to do a few practice shots … ” the man in the white jacket said, placing the balls on the table with a red cloth.

  “Thanks,” the man with the moustache said, placing the tip of his cue on one of the balls and tapping it slightly to get it into position.

  Dino turned, propped his cue next to the scoreboard and started slowly taking off his jacket. He had no desire to see how the great Handlebar played. He would take off his jacket calmly, and very slowly start to roll up his shirtsleeves. If that wasn’t enough, he would take a piece of chalk and rub it a little into the hollow between his thumb and his index finger, as he had always done ever since he had started playing, and would continue to prepare himself as best he could, listening to the clicking of the balls behind him without turning to look at them.

  “I’m fine,” Handlebar said after a while.

  Dino finished tucking his shirt inside his trousers, and when he turned with his cue in his hand Handlebar was watching him from the other side of the table with that half-amused, half-curious expression people have when they watch a child trying to cope with something bigger than him.

  “If you like, you can do a few practice shots before you start,” the waiter in the white jacket on his left said.

  Dino looked at him as if suddenly remembering he was there and trying for a moment to recollect what he had said, then he frowned and shook his head. “No thanks,” he said. He wasn’t sure he grasped the point of practice shots. As if, after all the games he had played, three or four shots could make any difference!

  The man in the white jacket gave a puzzled frown, and on the other side of the table Handlebar laughed a little and lowered his eyes.

  “Are you sure?” the man in the white jacket asked.

  “Pretty sure,” Dino said.

  The man frowned for a moment, then, almost imperceptibly, he raised his chin and held out his hand in the direction of the table. “Then get ready to start,” he said, regaining his pride.

  Dino nodded slightly, and went round to the other side of the table, again using his cue like a walking stick.

  “White or yellow?” Handlebar asked Dino with affected politeness.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Dino said.

  Handlebar frowned, and the sides of his big moustache went down. “Then I’ll take this one,” he said, resting the tip of his cue on the white ball in front of him and moving it into position.

  The break shot would decide who started the game, all you had to do was send the ball across the table to hit the opposite cushion and get it to come back as close as possible to your own cushion. The closest ball was judged the winner and opened the game.

  Handlebar, like most players, put his ball more or less in the centre of his own half of the table, so that he got a good stretch across the table and was able to shoot as comfortably as possible. Dino, on the other hand, placed his ball very close to his own cushion, thinking this was a good opportunity to play one of those break shots he’d practised so much and bring the ball back to the same position from which it had started.

  “All right?” the man in the white jacket asked, when Dino, too, looked ready to shoot.

  “Yes,” Dino said with a nod.

  Handlebar turned his head towards him for a moment, nodded, threw a quick glance at the man in the white jacket, and then moved his eyes back to the ball, shaking his head a little as he did so.

  “When you’re ready,” the man in the white jacket said.

  Dino and Handlebar moved their cues backwards and forwards a couple of times, slowly, and then almost at the same moment hit their respective balls, which moved away as if of their own accord and started to travel towards the opposite cushion.

  Dino straightened up a moment before Handlebar, then both stood watching to see which of the two balls would get closest to the cushion, with that unusually close attention common to gamblers.

  The first ball to touch the opposite cushion, of course, was Handlebar’s, which had had less distance to travel, but Dino’s seemed to be chasing it as if eager to overtake it. By the time the two balls were nearing the end of the journey, almost at their own cushion again, they were almost level.

  Handlebar’s ball gradually slowed down and, as if someone had breathed on it, stopped just a couple of centimetres from the cushion. Dino’s ball, on the other hand, still had a touch of inertia, and not only went past the point from which it had started but hit the cushion, rebounded off it and travelled another few centimetres before it finally
stopped.

  “White wins,” the man in the white jacket said. “Ball to Giannini.”

  Dino looked at his own ball, a few centimetres from the cushion, but in relation to the position from which it had started actually about ten or twelve centimetres, and nodded to himself. He would have to be careful—the fresh cushions and the new baize, and perhaps even the different air in that gastritic stomach, made the ball go a bit faster than normal—not much, but just enough to shift the trajectories worryingly in a more complicated shot.

  The man in the white jacket walked to their side of the table. “Will you take the white?” he asked Handlebar.

  “Yes, thanks,” Handlebar said.

  The man in the white jacket picked up the ball in his red cloth, cleaned it, and put it back down on the table in front of Handlebar, then went to the yellow ball, cleaned that one, too, and put it in its place with a weird wooden stick with a hole in the middle.

  “All right,” the man in the white jacket said, when everything was ready. “You can start.”

  Handlebar tapped the ball, moving it until it was just in front of the middle of his own part of the table, more or less where he had started his break shot, but a lot closer to the castle. Then he stopped for a second, took what seemed a deep breath, stretched across the table and placed the cue on his bridge hand. Dino hadn’t noticed it immediately, but Handlebar, like many of the players at the other tables, was wearing a strange small shiny glove which covered only three fingers, obviously to help the cue move more easily. It seemed to Dino that all these players took a lot of care over details, and once again he felt terribly out of place. Handlebar touched the cue to the ball, which set off determinedly towards the opposite cushion. It grazed Dino’s ball, which moved to the left, and came back towards the bottom right-hand corner, but slightly too fast.

  When both balls were still, Handlebar raised his eyes to Dino, who looked first at the table then at him. Handlebar walked to the end of the table with a barely concealed smile hovering over his lips, wondering what his opponent was going to do.

  Dino stood there for another second without moving, wondering what Handlebar was smiling about, wondering above all if his leg was being pulled. The balls were both in cover, but both quite a distance from where they should have stopped. It was awful. Dino couldn’t remember anything more awful. He had always been used to seeing almost perfect trajectories and lines on that damned green baize, cathedrals and classical sculptures with geometries so impeccable as to be quite moving. Seeing those balls so far from where they ought to have been was like hearing a pianist skip three chords in a sonata.

  It must have been a deliberate tactic, Dino told himself, and for a moment he felt even more insecure than before. Cirillo had always described the great players as sly, untrustworthy people, ready at any moment to trick you, to stab you in the back and steal your wallet. That was how it had to be in this case—Handlebar must be putting on a mask to distract Dino and play the decisive shot at the most opportune moment. Dino would have paid any sum of money to be more ruthless, to have enough experience to see his way in these blind alleys and find a more effective method than the only one he could think of—to play as simply as he knew how, not think too much, and hope that everything went well.

  Dino went close to his ball, stroked the tip of the cue a couple of times with the chalk, then bent and placed the cue on his bridge hand, just in front of the ball. It was a straightforward shot—across the table diagonally, hit two cushions then the opponent’s ball—the kind of shot where it wasn’t worth spending too much time sizing it up, because he had shot so many of them that he had the points of reference without even looking. Once, he had even tried to shoot one with his eyes closed, and all things considered it had gone quite well.

  The sounds of clicking balls around him faded out, and as happened every time Dino leant over the table ready to shoot, he had the feeling he could hear notes coming from somewhere far away, as well as the deep murmur of his own breathing. A nice turn to the outside, a little push, and away it went. Clack. Thump. Thump. Splat. Flop. Eight points, as clean as music.

  Handlebar’s ball stopped just a few centimetres beyond the castle, just where it was supposed to be, like a mathematical theorem.

  Handlebar was as still as a statue, staring at those fallen pins and that ball a few centimetres from the castle, then, after a few seconds, as the man in the jacket awarded points in a loud voice and walked to the table to stand the pins back up, he raised his eyes to Dino and stared at him.

  “Ah,” he said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE BILLIARD PARLOUR was completely empty and silent, and the only table that was still lit was the one occupied by Dino and Cirillo. Dino had promised his friend that whatever happened, and whatever time it was, he would drop by and tell him how things had gone, and if he did come in maybe lose a game, too. Now they were both in that island of light, both with their cues in their hands, at opposite corners of the table, Dino leaning on the edge and Cirillo smoking a small cigar he had been given by a plump gentleman he had been chatting to at the bar. They seemed like two old soldiers who hadn’t seen each other for a long time, standing there telling each other stories with a smile on their lips and no desire to go to bed.

  “It’s incredible,” Dino said, shaking his head a little, an amused look on his face.

  With two fingers, Cirillo took the cigar out of his mouth and blew out a cloud of smoke, then gave a little laugh, looking at Dino without saying a word.

  “They really don’t have a clue,” Dino said, still with the same amused expression.

  Cirillo gave another little laugh, then took another puff at his cigar and blew out some more smoke. “I told you,” he said.

  Lying there motionless on the edge of the table, not far from Dino, was a shiny gold ingot, which seemed to cast more light than the big green lamps.

  None of the seven people that Dino had had to play against to win the tournament had managed to gain more than fifteen of the fifty points they needed. A tall man, not very old but with prematurely white hair, had scored only three, and then only because, by an unexpected stroke of luck, his opponent’s ball had decided to roll onto the red ball, otherwise he wouldn’t even have scored that much. The only one who had managed to get fifteen points had been Handlebar.

  By the time Dino had reached the quarter-finals, that small handful of journalists who were reluctantly covering the event were already going crazy, looking left, right and centre for information about this strange character who played in his shirtsleeves and with an old, brightly coloured wooden cue which was apparently called an Arlecchino, although none of them were old enough to remember it. Suddenly, that handful of journalists, all of whom would, up until then, rather have been anywhere else than slumped in their seats or dangling a microphone in front of some mediocre player and asking stupid questions, were brought back to life by this incongruous individual who cradled his cue as if it were made of crystal and mowed down his victims like a hero in a storybook.

  By the time he reached the final, Dino was already on his way to becoming a legend. Already, like the great old players, as he approached that last table, the only one still lit, to face his last opponent, he had been greeted with cheers and applause from an admiring public. Apparently, some had even summoned their friends and relatives to come and see the prodigy, and one sick old player had even risen from his bed one last time to see the final, terrified perhaps at the thought that Dino might disappear back into the dark wood from which he had come.

  The other finalist had been an impressive-looking character with a broad forehead that hung over his face like a sea wall, also dressed in a waistcoat and rosette and also with that strange three-fingered glove. He hadn’t managed to score more than twelve points, and then only in the second of the three games they had played in the final.

  When Dino had finished the last game, scoring ten easy points with a straightforward shot he had performed almost ir
ritably, the whole audience in that gastritic belly had risen to their feet and started applauding, whistling, and yelling “Bravo!” No sooner had the chairman said a few words and presented Dino with the ingot than Dino had been surrounded by journalists and photographers bombarding him with questions and blinding him with flashlights.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Where did you learn to play like that?”

  “How did you learn to play like that?”

  “Will you continue?”

  “Why have you never entered any other tournaments?”

  Dino had screwed up his eyes and sheltered them behind his hand, trying to find a way out of that frenzy and get a bit of peace and quiet.

  “At home,” he had replied. “Practising break shots. I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know. I have to go. Excuse me … The baby … ”

  Somehow Dino had managed to escape from that quagmire, clutching his cue step by step until he found a way out.

  When he was out on the street again and walking home alone, he had suddenly felt happy and at the same time dirty, and for some reason it was a sensation he would never again be able to free himself from. It was like discovering from one moment to the next that the perfection of numbers could cross the threshold of everyday life and bring a kind of order to things, and yet, as always, at the very moment when that perfection had entered the world, he had the feeling it had somehow made itself dirty.

  “Yes, you told me,” Dino said, nodding resignedly, as Cirillo, still smiling, took another puff on his cigar. “But I don’t know if I really like it.”