The Brewer of Preston (4 page)

“Care to tell me just what sort of bloody priest you are?” Cavaliere Mistretta asked testily.

“Easy, gentlemen, easy,” said the commendatore, and in the silence one didn't hear even the flies.

“On the other hand, Cavaliere, you're right,” the canon continued. “There is plenty of beautiful music around. And yet we get the music of this Luigi Ricci, whom we know nothing about, shoved down our throats willy-nilly, simply because the authorities say so! It's sheer madness! We're supposed to let our ears suffer simply because the prefect orders it!”

The patristics scholar was so indignant that he threw down the cards of a game of solitaire that, by dint of cheating, he was actually about to win.

“You know what, gentlemen?” intervened Dr. Gammacurta, the physician. “Apparently this Ricci who wrote
The Brewer of Preston
has composed an opera that is a patent rehash of a work by Mozart.”

At the sound of that name they all recoiled in horror. Merely mentioning the name of Mozart, inexplicably despised by Sicilians, was like uttering a curse or a blasphemy. In Vigàta, the only person to defend his music—which in everyone's opinion tasted neither of fish nor fowl—was Don Ciccio Adornato, the carpenter, but apparently he did so for personal reasons of his own which he was loath to discuss.

“Mozart?!” they all said at once.

But although they all spoke at the same time, they were not a chorus. Some said the name with disdain, some with pain, some in shock, some in astonishment, some in resignation.

“Yes, indeed, Mozart. I was told by someone who knows a thing or two. Apparently, about thirty-five years ago, at La Scala in Milan, this blockhead Luigi Ricci staged an opera called
The Marriage of Figaro
, which was an exact replica of a work by Mozart of the same title. And when it was over, the Milanese shat all over him. So this Ricci started crying and in tears went to seek consolation in the arms of Rossini, who, God knows why, was his friend. Rossini did what he was supposed to do and cheered him up, but he also let it be known to one and all that Ricci got what he had coming to him.”

“And we're supposed to inaugurate our new Vigàta theatre with an opera by this mediocrity just because our distinguished prefect is besotted with him?” asked Headmaster Cozzo, menacingly touching the back pocket in which he kept his revolver.

“Oh Jesus, blessed Jesus,” said the canon. “Mozart alone is a funeral, so we can well imagine what a bad copy of a bad original is like! What on earth was the prefect thinking?”

Since no one could answer this question, a thoughtful silence ensued. The first to break it was Giosuè Zito, who began to sing, very softly, so he wouldn't be heard in the street below:

“
Ah, non credea mirarti . . .
”

The Marchese Coniglio della Favara then followed:

“
Qui la voce sua soave . . .
”

And Commendator Restuccia, in a basso profondo, cut in:

“
Vi ravviso, o luoghi ameni . . .
”

At this point Canon Bonmartino got up from his chair, ran over to the windows, and drew the curtains to make the room dark, while Headmaster Cozzo lit a lamp. The men then gathered in a semicircle around the light. And Dr. Gammacurta, in a baritone voice, intoned:

“
Suoni la tromba e intrepido . . .
”

The first to join him, as if written into the score, was the commendatore. One by one, all the others followed. Standing round, hands linked as in a chain, looking one another in the eye, they instinctively lowered the volume of their song.

They were conspirators. They had become so at that very moment, in the name of Vincenzo Bellini.

The Brewer of Preston
, the opera by Luigi Ricci imposed on them by the prefect of Montelusa, would never play.

W
ould he try to raise the mosquito net?
the widow Concetta Lo Russo, née Riguccio, asked herself with trepidation, hidden behind the gauzy
tarlantana
, which in summer was spread around and over the bed to protect her from gnats, mosquitoes,
pappataci
, and horseflies.

At that moment the netting, with its light, veil-like mass, looked like a ghost hanging from a nail. The widow's generous bust was in the throes of a force-ten storm, with the portside tit drifting leeward to north-northwest, while the starboard one strayed in a south-southeasterly direction. The wife of a sailor who had drowned in the waters off Gibraltar, she was unable to think in any other terms than the nautical ones her husband had taught her after she married him at age fifteen only to don the widow's weeds at age twenty.

Good Lord, what pandemonium! What a night! What rough seas! Because of what had been arranged and was about to happen, her blood was already in motion, now receding and turning her pale, now rising up and spilling over the deck, turning her not so much red as purple. And, to top it all off, earlier that night she had listened in terror to loud cries coming from the new theatre that had been built opposite her building, then heard the blast of a trumpet, followed by a mad rush of people and horses, and a few gunshots to boot.

At that point she had become convinced that, with all the mayhem—whose cause escaped her—
he
would not dare come that night, and thus she could set her heart, and another part of her body, at rest. Resigned, she had undressed and gone to bed. Then, just as she was dozing off, she had heard a soft sound on the roof, then his slow, cautious steps over the tiles, followed by the muffled thud of his leap from the roof to her balcony, which she had left half open as agreed. Yet when she realized he had kept his word and in a few moments would enter her room, she felt overcome with shame. She couldn't remain lying on the bed half naked like some cheap whore, in her nightgown with nothing underneath. So she had bolted out of bed and hidden behind the great swath of
tarlantana
.

From there she heard him enter in darkness and close the French door to the balcony. She realized he was heading towards the bed and sensed his surprise at not finding her there, after feeling around with his hand several times. He began fidgeting beside the bedside table, and then she clearly heard him strike a match. She saw the wan light through the dense screen of the
tarlantana
, and finally the entire room was illuminated. He had lit the double candlestick. Only then, seeing him against the light, did the widow Lo Russo notice that he was completely naked—but when had he taken his clothes off? as soon as he'd entered? or had he walked over the tiled roof in that state?—and that between his legs hung some twelve inches of mooring rope, the kind used not for small boats but for steamships, a veritable hawser fastened to a curious sort of docking bollard with two heads. At that sight, a stronger wave swept over her and brought her to her knees. Despite the fog that had suddenly clouded her vision, she saw his silhouette turn sharply, sail straight to the spot where she was hiding, stop in front of the mosquito netting, crouch down to set the candlestick on the floor, seize the netting, and raise it abruptly. She, the widow, didn't know that his compass had not been his sight but his hearing, drawn by the plaintive, dovelike cooing she had begun to emit without even realizing it. He saw her kneeling before him, opening and closing her mouth like a mullet caught in a fishing net.

But her apparent shortness of breath did not prevent the widow from noticing that the mooring rope was changing form, slowly becoming a sort of rigid bowsprit. He bent down and, without a word, picked her up by her sweaty armpits, and hoisted her high over his head. She knew she was a rather heavy load for his shrouds, but he did not lose his balance and only lowered her slightly so that she could brace her legs around his back to anchor herself. Meanwhile the bowsprit had changed form again, becoming now a majestic mainmast, upon which the widow Lo Russo, firmly fastened thereto, began to quiver, flap, and pulsate like a sail full of wind.

Her husband had once told her a story he'd heard from a sailor who had gone a-whaling. In the cold waters of the North, the sailor said, there exists an extraordinary fish called a narwhal. Three times a man's size, it has a great ivory horn over three yards long between its eyes. Whosoever finds such an animal grows rich, because a pinch of the powder of that horn enables a man to do it fifteen times in a single night. At the time Signora Concetta hadn't believed the story. Now, however, she realized that it was all true, and that in her arms she was holding a little narwhal with scarcely twelve inches of horn, which was more than enough.

The whole story had begun one Sunday, when she and her sister Agatina arrived late to Mass. The church was full, with not one of the wicker chairs the sacristan rented at half price untaken, and in front of them was a dense array of rough-looking men whom it would have been impolite to ask to step aside. The two women had no choice but to remain standing, far from the altar.

“We can just stand back here,” Agatina had said to her.

Then the inner door to the church opened, and
he
entered. Concetta had never seen him before, but one look at him and she knew that for the next few minutes her ship would no longer answer the helm. He was beautiful, beautiful, an angel from heaven. Tall with thick blond curls and very lean, but only so lean as was proper in a healthy man, with an eye as blue as the sea and the other, his right eye, not there. That eye lay hidden under an eyelid that was sort of stuck to the part below, walled up. But this was not offputting; on the contrary, all the light of his extinguished eye poured into the other, making it gleam like a precious stone, a beacon in the night. She later learned from Agatina that he had lost the eye when he was stabbed with a knife during a scuffle. But this mattered little. She realized, at that exact moment, that all her navigational parameters had changed: he would, of necessity, become her port, even if she had to sail around Cape Horn. And he, too, had felt it, to the point that he turned his head to meet her eyes and dropped his anchor in their waters. They gazed at each other for a minute that lasted forever. Then, since by now the die was cast,
he brought the fingers of his right hand together,
a cacocciola
, artichoke-like, and shook them up and down repeatedly.

It was a precise question:

What shall we do?

Concetta slowly stretched her arms away from her body, letting them hang down at her sides and turning the palms of her hands outwards, with a disconsolate look on her face.

I don't know.

It was a brief, rapid dialogue, expressed in minimal, barely sketched gestures.

The violent jibbing maneuver he decided to make at one point took her by surprise. But she raised no objection and quickly obeyed. Having now become a boat, a lateen-rigged fisher, Concetta found herself with her prow on the pillow and her stern raised high to catch the wind blowing indeed astern, making her bounce from breaker to breaker and driving her irresistibly out to the open sea without compass or sextant.

At Mass on the following Sunday she did everything human and divine in her power to arrive late, to the point that her sister Agatina had become impatient and called her a dawdler. Yet the moment she entered the church, the heavenly-blue beacon lit her, warmed her, and filled her with contentment. In its light and heat she felt rather like a lizard sunning itself on a rock.

Then he pointed his index finger at her.

You.

And then turned his index finger towards himself.

Me.

He clenched the same hand into a fist, brought the index finger and thumb together, then made a turning motion.

The key.

She shook her head from larboard to starboard and vice versa.

No, the key, no.

Indeed she could not give him the key to the house, because on the ground floor lived Mr. and Mrs. Pizzuto and upstairs, Signora Nunzia, who never slept. It was too risky. Someone might see him climbing the stairs.

He spread his arms, cocked his head to one side, smiled regretfully, then let his arms fall.

I guess that means you don't like me
.

She felt as if she were sinking; her legs began to shake, her rosary fell to the floor. She bent down to pick it up and kissed it once, twice, letting her lips linger a long time on the crucifix and looking him straight in his one eye, which seemed to redden with fire, its blue turning to flame.

What are you saying? I'd like to have you on the cross so I could kiss you all over the way Mary Magdalen did to Christ.

Now they were sailing close-hauled and smooth, the sea flowing softly as it rocked them like a cradle, with nary a wave to shake them up. They were a deckless coaster, he the sails and she the keel.