The Brewer of Preston (25 page)

That leaves us to speak of the fire itself. It occurred, as has been established, at least two hours after the performance ended, when people had long returned in peace to their late-evening domestic concerns. The principal question is therefore the following: What caused such a violent fire to break out?

As the flames were still besieging the theatre, it became common belief that the disaster had been unintentionally triggered by a still-lighted cigar butt that had been carelessly dropped near something (like a curtain, armchair, or carpet) that might easily catch fire. And the two intervening hours appeared reasonably to be the perfect amount of time needed to pass between the dropping of the cigar, the slow process of combustion, and the outbreak of flames. Not content with this explanation, dictated by common sense, some wanted at all costs to insinuate another that lent itself better to the purposes of those who wanted to take advantage of the situation to call into question the actions of the established authorities. People spoke, for example, of the presence in town of a dangerous affiliate of the Mazzinian faction, and we must not, moreover, forget that at the time, republican tremors were running through the island, to the point that Mazzini himself was arrested a few months later while attempting a clandestine landing at Palermo. Be that as it may, no trace whatsoever was found of this mysterious revolutionary's passage through Vigàta, neither at the Royal Police Commissariat of Montelusa nor at the Constabulary of Vigàta. Officer Catalanotti, right-hand man of the notorious Puglisi, asserted for good measure that his superior had never so much as mentioned to him that he was aware of the presence in town of any violent agitator or presumed arsonist.

The book by the Honorable Paolino Fiannaca, titled
Sicilian Battles
, gives, moreover, generous credit to the republicans of Vigàta, who were nevertheless his political adversaries, and deems them above any suspicion of scurrility. The thesis of arson was, however, put forward (without anyone specific being assigned responsibility for the reprehensible act) by a young employee of the Property Insurers' Assocation, according to whom the fire had been started when two ceramic piggy banks filled with kerosene and made to explode with lighted fuses were thrown under the stage of the theatre. The utterly fanciful nature of this reconstruction was demonstrated shortly thereafter by Dr. Meli, who had taken over the investigation following the violent death of Lieutenant Pu-glisi, having been assigned the task by Commissioner Colombo. Dr. Meli (who was to conclude his career in brilliant fashion by serving a high function at the Ministry of the Interior in Rome) irrefutably proved that those two piggy banks had belonged to the two young sons of the theatre's custodian, who, with typically childish mistrust, had hidden them under the stage. Ultimate confirmation was at last established when investigators found, near the shards of the piggy banks, a number of small coins earlier overlooked due to the damages caused by the fire.

Directly and indirectly, this fire caused the painful, excruciating loss of three human lives.

And here I am forced to look ahead to an episode upon which I should rather not have dwelt, both for the gravity of the matter and for the ignoble stench emanating from it. In brief: the flames emitted by the blaze reached a small three-story building standing directly behind the theatre. Two people in it died, a young widow and a man who, at first glance, appeared to have lost his life in a generous attempt to save her. This, at least, was what might be inferred from the positions of the two bodies. In reality, however, the whole thing was a macabre, indeed ignoble, scene staged by Lieutenant Puglisi. The young widow had died in her sleep, asphyxiated by smoke, like the man, who was her lover and with whom she had enjoyed illicit sexual congress until a few moments before. Suborned by his mistress, who was the widow's sister, Puglisi moved and manipulated the bodies in such a way as to make it seem as if the widow was alone in her bed and the man had tried to enter from the balcony to save her. Officer Catalanotti, however, became immediately aware of the obscene charade and, a few hours later, having fully established the facts confirming his correct hypothesis, drafted a memorandum, a report to Dr. Meli that unequivocally reestablished the truth.

One who did, on the other hand, lose his life in a generous attempt to save the young widow was Dr. Salvatore Gammacurta, one of Vigàta's two medical doctors. Realizing that the flames were threatening the building behind the theatre, the doctor remembered that the widow, a patient of his, lived on the top floor, and tried to save her by climbing up a small mountain of salt that had been deposited almost directly against the rear wall of the dwelling. His attempt was cut short by a heart attack that struck him in the midst of his heroic, altruistic act. The wounds found on his body can be attributed, according to the autopsy conducted by the official physician of the commissariat, to the countless obstacles Gammacurta encountered in his ill-fated journey.

But we shall have ample opportunity to discuss this and other as yet unknown episodes in the chapters that follow.

T
he
Report on the Social and Economic Conditions of Sicily (1875–1876)
(
Inchiesta sulle condizioni sociali ed economiche della Sicilia
)—not the similar study conducted by Franchetti and Sonnino, but the parliament's own inquest—was finally published in 1969 by Cappelli publishers in Florence and immediately proved to be a gold mine for me. From the report's questions, answers, observations, and quotations were born the novel
Hunting Season
(
La stagione della caccia
) and the essay
The Bull of Reconciliation
(
La bolla di componenda
).

The present novel increases my debt. In a hearing dated December 24, 1875, the researchers conducting the study listened to a journalist named Giovanni Mulè Bertòlo to learn about the attitude of the population of Caltanissetta towards the fledgling national government's policies. At a certain point, the journalist says that things immediately began to improve upon the departure of the local prefect, a Florentine by the name of Fortuzzi who had become particularly despised by the population. He said: “Fortuzzi wanted to study Sicily through the engravings in books. But if a book had no plates, that didn't matter . . . He was always shut up within four walls, with only three or four individuals around him, on whom he depended for advice.”

The last straw came the day when Fortuzzi, who was supposed to inaugurate the new theatre of Caltanissetta, insisted that the opera to be performed should be
The Brewer of Preston
. “He even wanted to impose his music on us, the barbarians of this city! And by paying for it with our money!” Giovanni Mulè Bertòlo exclaimed in indignation. And Fortuzzi succeeded, despite the opposition of local authorities. The best part of all this is that it was never found out why the Florentine prefect was so adamant about the
Brewer
. Naturally, there were numerous incidents during the inaugural performance. Among other things, a postal employee who had noisily expressed his disapproval was transferred the following day (“He had to quit his job because he had an annual salary of only 700 lire and couldn't afford to leave Caltanissetta”), and the singers were overwhelmed by a booing, hissing audience.

Something even more serious must have happened, because the journalist says that, at a certain point, “mounted militiamen entered the theatre with armed troops.” But the parliamentary commission chose to gloss over the rest and moved on to another subject.

This story, however scanty in detail in the report, caught my attention, and I began to develop it. The result is this novel, which is entirely invented, aside from the point of departure, of course.

I thank Dirk Karsten van den Berg for having got hold of the libretto and score for Luigi Ricci's
The Brewer of Preston
.

I dedicate this story to Alessandra, Arianna, and Francesco, who will read it when they grow up and, hopefully, will hear their grandfather's voice in it.

A. C. (1995)

P. S.

Having got this far in the book—that is, to the Author's Note at the end—what readers still remain will certainly have noticed by now that the chapter sequence I have presented here is merely a suggestion. Every reader is invited, if he or she so wishes, to establish his or her own personal order.

It was a frightful night, downright scary
:
A variation on the famous opening sentence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel,
Paul Clifford
: “It was a dark and stormy night.” According to Camilleri, however, his reference here is the book-length comic by Charles M. Schulz,
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, Snoopy
. Schulz first used the quotation in a comic strip in 1965. The reader should note, moreover, that the opening sentence and title of each chapter of the present book either quotes the first line of a famous book or is a variation thereof. Each reference will be duly documented as the story progresses.

an acetylene lamp on some lost
paranza
:
A
paranza
is a small fishing boat with a lateen sail and jib. The acetylene lamp is used to attract fish at night.

zolfatari
:
Sulphur miners.

A spectre is haunting the musicians of Europe
:
A play on the opening line of
The Communist Manifesto
(1848), by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: “A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Communism.”

“the swan of Busseto's”
:
A reference to Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), who was raised in the north Italian town of Busseto.

“
Abietta zingara
 . . . Tacea la notte placida . . . Chi del gitano . . . Stride la vampa . . . Il balen del tuo sorriso . . . Di quella pira . . . Miserere
”
:
The titles and first lines of famous arias from Verdi's
Il Trovatore
(1853)
.

Una furtiva lacrima
:
Aria from Gaetano Donizetti's
L'Elisir d'Amore
(1832).

Una voce poco fa
:
Aria from Gioacchino Rossini's
Barber of Seville
(1816).

“
Ah, non credea mirarti
”
:
Aria from act II, scene 2, of
La Sonnambula
(1831), by Vincenzo Bellini:
Ah!, non credea mirarti / si presto estinto o fior; / passasti al par d'amore, / che un giorno sol durò / . . . / Potria novel vigore / il pianto mio recarti, / ma ravvivar l'amore / il pianto mio, ah no, no non può
.

“
Qui la voce sua soave
”
:
Aria from act II of
I Puritani
(1835), by Vincenzo Bellini:
Qui la voce sua soave / Mi chiamava e poi sparì. / Qui giurava esser fedele . . .

“
Vi ravviso, o luoghi ameni
”
:
Aria from act I of
La Sonnambula
, by Vincenzo Bellini:
Vi ravviso, o luoghi ameni, / in cui lieti, in cui sereni / sì tranquillo i dì passai della prima della prima gioventù 
. . .

“
Suoni la tromba e intrepido
”
:
Aria from act II of
I Puritani
, by Vincenzo Bellini:
Suoni la tromba e intrepido / io pugnerò da forte: / bello è affrontar la morte / gridando libertà
 . . .

Would he try to raise the mosquito net?
:
A slight variation on the opening line of
Man's Fate
(
La condition humaine
) by André Malraux (first published in 1933): “Should he try to raise the mosquito-netting?” (translation by Haakon M. Chevalier).

pappataci
:
Phlebotomus papatasi
, an Old-World species of sand fly.

he brought the fingers of his right hand together,
a cacocciola
, artichoke-like, and shook them up and down repeatedly
:
This phrase describes the typically Italian hand gesture that is meant to ask a question. It can variously mean:
Why? What? Where? How?
and so on, or, more specifically,
What do you mean?
or
What's wrong with you?
or
What are you doing?
The gesture is used all around the Mediterrenean, by Spaniards, Arabs, Greeks, etc., but is most often associated with Italians, especially southern Italians.
Cacocciola
is Sicilian for “artichoke.”

Get me Emanuele
:
An oblique reference to the opening to Melville's
Moby-Dick
: “Call me Ishmael.” The reference is more recognizable in the original Italian text, since “get me” and “call me” both translate as “chiamami.” Thus “Chiamami Ismaele,” the start of the Italian translation of
Moby-Dick
, becomes “Chiamami Emanuele.”

Cavalier
Dottor
Eugenio Bortuzzi
:
In Italy, the title of “doctor” or
dottore
is conferred upon anyone with a university degree. “Cavaliere” is an honorific title (“Knight”) conferred on the bearer by the government.

ragioniere
Ilio Ginnanneschi
:
Ragioniere
is a title given those who complete a course of study (usually two years) in
ragioneria
, a sort of low-level accounting degree.

“Ah, how splendid our unified Italy is!”
:
In the wake of the unification of Italy in 1870, government posts in the South were often filled by people from the Italian mainland: “. . . postmaster Ugo Bordin, from the Veneto, the
dottor
Carlo Alberto Pautasso, Esq., of Asti, director of the tax office, and the
ragioniere
Ilio Ginnanneschi, of Prato, an employee at the land registry.” By having these same Northern Italians provide Don Memè with his alibi, Camilleri is wryly pointing to the
national
effort at corruption in the fledgling Italian state, for which Southerners alone are often scapegoated.

“They honfuse me”
:
In accentuating the many cultural differences between the continental Italians and Sicilians in this book, and among the continental Italians themselves, Camilleri has included a great variety of divergences of speech, expressions, and dialect. In addition, to highlight Prefect Borduzzi's pompous Florentine manner, the author has translated orthographically the Tuscan habit of aspirating or sometimes suppressing the hard “c” (or “k”) sound when it falls between vowels or at the beginning of a word. Thus when Bortuzzi says, for example, “We're at the gates with stones in our hands,” the original Italian is written “
Siamo alle porte hoi sassi
,” whereas it would normally be “.
 . . coi sassi.
”
To give another example, a Tuscan will pronounce
la casa
as either
la hasa
or
la 'asa.
To carry over some of the humor and derision created in the original text by these strange orthographies, I have taken the liberty of making Prefect Bortuzzi aspirate almost all cases of hard “c” sounds that fall between vowels. Here, therefore, “confuse” becomes “honfuse.” Perhaps the most absurd instance of this idiosyncrasy of speech in this book is when Giagia, the prefect's wife, pronounces the name of the Italian composer Boccherini as
Bohherini
(see p. 212).

“a
lupara
hidden in your trousers”
:
Lupara
(“wolf-gun”) is the Sicilian term for sawn-off shotgun, formerly the weapon of preference of the Mafia.

“Punta Raisi's not a very good place for kites”
:
And yet in the modern age it became the site of the airport of Palermo, despite the treacherous winds described in the short paragraph that follows this statement. Indeed, airplanes often encounter the same problems as the kites mentioned here, not to mention that the surrounding terrain is mountainous, making it the most dangerous airport in Europe. Rumor has it that the site was chosen to satisfy the desires of the Mafia.

On the morning of the day he was killed
:
An echo of the opening of
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
, by Gabriel García Márquez: “On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning . . .” (translated by Gregory Rabassa, Knopf, 1982).

“
Friends! To the brewery / we merrily run!”
:
The libretto passages in Camilleri's text are taken directly from the 1847 original of Luigi Ricci's
Il Birraio di Preston
. I have translated them into English to facilitate comprehension of the audience's reactions to them.

“No need to look anywhere for horns. They grow all by themselves”
:
In Italian, “to grow horns” is to be cuckolded.

“
with his unpleasant vocation / of living by the balls
 . . . of the cannon”
:
In this instance I had to take a little liberty in the translation of the original libretto to create a line that would evoke the sort of derision that takes place in the theater. The original states “
Se quel brutto mestiero / di stare tra le palle e la mitraglia
 . . .” Not missing an opportunity to make sport of some infelicitous phrasing, Camilleri has the audience burst into laughter after the phrase “
stare tra le palle
 . . . ,” which is a rather vulgar way of saying “to be in the way” or, in a sense, “to be a pain in the ass.” Literally, it means “to get between one's balls.” In the libretto's context, however,
palle
is intended to mean “bullets” and the whole phrase to mean “that nasty job / of living between bullets and guns.”

“Ladies and, so to speak, gentlemen”
:
The opening line recited by Nyukhin at the start of Anton Chekhov's
On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco
(1886, 1902).

Turiddru Macca, son
:
The opening of Giovanni Verga's “Cavalleria Rusticana” (1884), the short story, later turned into a play, that served as the basis of the opera of the same name by Pietro Mascagni, with a libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci.

Only the young have such feelings
:
An echo of the opening of Joseph Conrad's novella
The Shadow-Line
(1917): “Only the young have such moments.”

“You know how I feel about this”
:
A direct quote of the opening line to Leonardo Sciascia's 1987 novel
Porte aperte
(
Open Doors
).

Piemontese falso e cortese
, as the saying went
:
“Piedmontese are false and polite,” an Italian commonplace that has fallen somewhat out of use in our time.

From the moment Vidusso walked out, the prefect had been sitting with his head in his hands, sputtering curses that grew more and more elaborate as he invented them
:
The Tuscans are known for improvising curses, to the point that some Tuscan villages even have summer contests to see who can come up with the most creative, blasphemous curse. Never having witnessed any such competitions myself, I was once told, however, that one year the winner of a certain village's contest had said: “
Madonna impestata
,” a curse of manifold meanings, perhaps the most immediate being “Syphilitic Madonna.”

The early morning sun hung milky and wan behind layers of cloud
:
An almost exact quote of the opening sentence of “Tonio Krüger,” the story by Thomas Mann: “The early morning sun, poor ghost of itself, hung milky and wan behind layers of cloud . . .” (translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. Thomas Mann,
Stories of Three Decades
. New York: Knopf, 1936).

Late as usual
:
The opening line of a short novel by Aldous Huxley,
After the Fireworks
(1930).

I wish either my father or my mother
:
The opening to chapter one of
Tristram Shandy
(1760), by Laurence Sterne.

the
Meo Patacca
:
The
Meo Patacca
, by Giuseppe Berneri (1637–1701), whose full title is
Meo Patacca ovvero Roma in Festa nei trionfi di Vienna
, is a seriocomic “epic” written in Roman dialect. It remains an important document on the language, customs, and sensibilities of the Romans in the late seventeenth century.

By now everyone knew him as Don Ciccio
:
An almost exact echo of the opening line of
Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana
(
That Awful Mess on Via Merulana
), by Carlo Emilio Gadda, which begins: “By now everyone called him Don Ciccio.”

the Temple of Concordia
:
The Temple of Concordia is the most important and best preserved of the seven Greek temples, all in the Doric style, preserved in the Valley of Temples outside of Agrigento, Sicily, the city that serves as the model for Camilleri's fictional Montelusa.

Dio bonino
:
“Good little God.” Another example of Tuscan creativity in cursing, in this case euphemistically. See note to page 79 on page 241.