The Brewer of Preston (5 page)

At the third Mass he finally bent his index and middle fingers and touched his chest.

Me.

His fingers mimed a man walking.

I'll come to your place.

Her fingers formed the
cacocciola
.

How?

He raised his eye to the sky, kept it there a moment, then pointed his index finger upward.

From the roof.

Surprised and frightened, she made the
cacocciola
again.

How will you get up there?

He smiled, stiffened his left hand horizontally, and the index and middle fingers of his right hand mimed the motion of a man walking on it.

With a plank.

She looked dumbfounded and he smiled again. He was calm and resolute.

She formed a small circle with her forefinger and thumb, to indicate a clock, then gathered the fingers together again
a cacocciola
.

When?

He raised his open hands chest high, moving them lightly forward and back.

Wait.

“One of the parts that make up the hull,” her dear departed had once explained to her, “is the bilge, a dark and smelly place where all the ship's filth ends up.”

Then why, if it was a stinky, nasty place, was he trying to force his way in there?

Finally, on a recent Sunday, his index and middle fingers had mimicked a man walking.

I'm coming.

And without giving her time to respond, he held up three fingers.

In three days.

Again without pausing, he brought his two clenched fists together, then spread them outward and forward.

Open the French door to the balcony.

Once outside the church, she didn't have the courage to tell Agatina about all the conversations she'd been having each Sunday with the young stranger. She only asked:

“Do you know the young man we've been seeing in church, the one with only one blue eye?”

“Yes, he's one of the Inclima family. I think his name is Gaspàno. He's unmarried.”

And they carried on talking about the young man until they got to Concetta's front door. As she was about to leave, Agatina said to her:

“Gaspàno is a wonderful boy. He'd be quite a catch for you.”

Back at home, Concetta raced to the balcony of her bedroom to look outside and suddenly understood Gaspàno's audacious plan. Right behind her building, rising as high as the eaves, was a mountain of salt in the courtyard used as a depot by the Capuana firm. It would be relatively easy to lay a plank at the top of it, cross over to the tiled roof, and then ease oneself down into the double window.

She went back inside to make herself something to eat, but was unable. In the pit of her stomach was a sort of iron-hard stone. For the rest of the afternoon she dawdled about, not knowing what to do, fussing with things of no importance, such as sewing a button onto a shirt or adjusting the wick on a lamp. But everything she did she botched: her mind just wasn't in it.

She went to bed when it was still light outside, but couldn't fall asleep. All at once, when she least expected it, a waterspout began to form in a specific part of her body. At first there were little ripples on the water's surface brought on by a hot wind, hotter than the scirocco; then the gusts grew stronger and started spinning like a drill, with the point of the drill stuck to the same spot, turning and turning while the upper end of the waterspout broadened and invaded her body, which lay on the bed with arms and legs spread, making it shake all over.

Her dear departed had once told her that a waterspout can be made to deflate like a punctured football. One need only have the courage to approach the base of the twister with a caique, stick an oar through it, and mutter some mystical mumbo jumbo which, unfortunately, her dear departed had not revealed to her.

And so the caique that was her right hand bravely put out to sea and began to head south, pulled up alongside the cavity in the middle of her abdomen, skirted close round its edge, then proceeded to descend along a precise course, reached the center of the gulf created by her open legs, and cast anchor at the exact point where the waterspout rose up. As the caique rocked back and forth in those rough seas, she raised an oar—her index finger—and directed it carefully towards the tiny spot giving rise to all the agitation and, having found it, started striking it with the oar, harder and harder. Since she did not know the required mumbo jumbo, other perhaps more appropriate words came to her lips:

“Oh Gaspàno, oh Gaspàno, oh my dear Gaspàno . . .”

And all at once the waterspout collapsed and fell back into the gulf, turning into a dense, sticky froth.

He was no longer boat nor sea, but only a man, a bit tired, breathing heavily. Concetta licked his perfectly hairless chest, which looked like a little boy's. It tasted of salt, like that of her dear departed. He shut his eyes and squeezed her a little harder.

“Do you even know my name?” asked Concetta, whose eyelids were also getting heavy and starting to droop. It had been a long and tiring journey. Gaspàno did not answer her. He had already fallen asleep.

“G
et me Emanuele!” enjoined His Excellency the prefect of Montelusa,
Cavalier
Dottor
Eugenio Bortuzzi, handing the bailiff a voluminous folder of documents he'd finished signing.

“He's already here; he's been waiting outside for the last half hour.”

His Excellency frowned.

“You, Orlando, have always been a proper blockhead. You should have told me at once. Go.”

No sooner had Orlando the bailiff walked out the door than Emanuele Ferraguto—better known in the province as Don Memè or, more simply,
u zu Memè
(that is, “Uncle Memè”) especially by those not related, even remotely, to him—materialized in his place, blotting him out. It looked like a conjuring trick.

Fiftyish, tall, just the right amount of lean, and fairly well dressed, Don Memè, a broad, cordial smile on his face, made a slight bow, waiting for the prefect to signal to him to come forward.

Rumor had it that Don Memè had never stopped smiling in his life, not even when the police lieutenant lifted the sheet, five years back, to show him the tortured, mangled body of his son Gnazino, who hadn't made it to the age of twenty, stretched naked on a slab of marble. When, after the autopsy, Don Memè, still smiling, had politely asked the coroner to explain, the doctor informed him that, in his opinion, the young man's killers, before strangling him, had cut off his tongue, sawn off his ears, gouged out his eyes, and removed his dick and balls. In that order. And Don Memè had taken careful note of this order on a sheet of paper, using a copying pencil that he wet from time to time with the tip of his tongue. The message borne by that corpse in the very manner of its death was clear. Whoever killed the boy thought he talked too much and was a little too quick to bed the members of the fair sex, regardless of their tender age or marital status.

In the two months that followed, Don Memè had devoted his energies to a complicated business transaction at the end of which, having ceded to others the rights to the Cantarella estate, he received in exchange, at his country house, his sons' two assassins, in such a condition that they could not lift so much as a finger.

Still according to rumor, Don Memè had wanted to see to the two men personally, having first donned some overalls so as not to stain his suit with blood. Taking out the sheet of paper on which he had written after speaking with the coroner, he hung it from a nail, and then proceeded to follow his notes blindly, showing not a whit of imagination. All the same, after cutting off their cocks and balls, he did have a burst of creative originality and strayed from the script. That is, he took the two dying men, laid them both across the back of a mule, and went and impaled them on the branches of a Saracen olive tree that stood on the now-ceded Cantarella estate.

When the corpses were discovered, by then eaten by dogs and crows, the police lieutenant, after a quick investigation, was convinced that two plus two equaled four and had Don Memè promptly arrested. That very same day, however, ten individuals, all above suspicion, from the town of Varo some thirty miles from Montelusa, had come running to testify that on the day of the double murder Don Memè was in their town celebrating the feast of San Calogero. Among those furnishing the alibi were the 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.

“
Ah, how splendid our unified Italy is!” Don Memè had exclaimed with a smile more cordial than usual, as the prison doors opened up to let him out.

Having completed his bow, Emanuele Ferraguto approached the broad prefectorial desk with some difficulty. In his right hand he was holding his English-wool cap and a packet, and in his left, a large parcel.

“Come in, come in, my good man,” the prefect said jovially.

Having closed the door behind him with his shoe, Don Memè continued to walk with a slight limp in his right leg.

“Did you hurt yourself?” His Excellency inquired solicitously.

Don Memè managed to gesture “no” with his right forefinger without dropping his cap or the parcel.

“It's the roll,” he whispered mysteriously, looking around himself as he said it. He set the package on the desk. “These are cannoli from Sfiacca, the kind your wife likes so much.”

Then it was the big, heavy parcel's turn.

“This, on the other hand, is a big surprise for you, Excellency.”

The prefect looked at the parcel with eyes suddenly bright and hopeful.

“You don't say!” he said with a quaver in his voice.

“Oh, yes, indeed I do say!” Ferraguto said triumphantly.

“Is it
The Archaeological History of Sicily
, by the Duke of Serradifalco?”

“You're right on the money, sir. The books you've been looking for.”

“And how did you ever find them?”

“I noticed that Scimè, the notary, owned a copy, so I politely asked him for them, and he gave them to me free of charge, as a gift to you.”

“Really? I must send him a note of thanks.”

“Better not, Your Excellency.”

“And why not?”

“That might be rubbing salt into the wound. It took some doing to persuade him, you know. The notary was rather fond of these books. I had to, well, to force him a little, to show him what was in his best interests.”

“Ah,” said His Excellency, running a loving hand over the parcel. “You know, Ferraguto, I'm going to tell you something. Books with dense writing bore me.
They honfuse me. I understand images much better. And fortunately, Serradifalco's books are full of images.”

Don Memè put an end to their cultural interlude.

“You must excuse me, Your Excellency, sir,” he said as he started to unbutton his suspenders. In a single bound the prefect stood up, ran to the door, turned the lock twice, and put the key in his pocket. Ferraguto, meanwhile, extracted a long roll from his right trouser leg and set it down on the table, before buttoning himself back up in haste.

“That's what was making me walk all lopsided,” he said. “I was worried the paper might wrinkle. It's a problem you don't have if you've got
a
lupara
hidden in your trousers.”

He laughed long and hard, alone, as His Excellency was opening the roll. It was the printer's proof of a placard announcing the forthcoming performance of the opera
The Brewer of Preston
to inaugurate Vigàta's new theatre. After reading it carefully and finding no mistakes, the prefect handed the roll back to Ferraguto, who slipped it back into his trouser leg.

“We're at the gates with stones in our hands, my friend.”

“I don't understand, Your Excellency.”

“It's a saying from my parts. It means there's not much time left. The opera will be staged the day after tomorrow—actually, in three days' time. And I'm very worried.”

They allowed themselves a pause, looking one another in the eye.

“When I was a little kid,” Emanuele Ferraguto said slowly, breaking the silence, “I liked to play with black
comerdioni
.”

“Oh, really?” said the prefect, slightly disgusted, imagining some sort of black and hairy spider with which the child Ferraguto amused himself by pulling off its legs one by one.

“Yes,” Ferraguto continued. “What do you call, in your parts, those toys that little kids make—”

“Ah, so it's a game?” the prefect interrupted him, visibly relieved.

“Yessir. You take a big sheet of colored paper, cut it into the right shapes, glue two reeds to it with starch paste . . . then you attach it all to a string and send it up in the air.”

“Ah! You mean a hite!” His Excellency exclaimed.

“Yes, exactly, sir, a kite. I used to fly them around Punta Raisi, near Palermo. Do you know the place?”

“What a silly huestion, Ferraguto! You know very well that I don't like to set foot out of the house. I know Sicily from picture hards. It's better than going there in person.”

“Well,
Punta Raisi's not a very good place for kites. Sometimes there was no wind and neither man nor God could make them rise. Other times there was wind all right, but as soon as the kite got up in the air it ran head-on into a current that would flip it over and send it crashing into the trees. I would dig in my heels and keep trying, but I was wrong. Do you get what I mean?”

“No, I don't.”

Forever the Florentine dickhead
, thought Ferraguto. He replied with a question.

“Would Your Excellency mind if I spoke Latin?”

The prefect felt a bead of sweat trickle down his back. From the very first time he had come up against
rosa-rosae
he had realized that Latin was his bête noire.

“Just between you and me, Ferraguto, I wasn't exactly the head of the class at school.”

Don Memè beamed his legendary smile.

“What did you think I meant, Your Excellency? Here in Sicily, ‘to speak Latin' means to speak clearly.”

“And when you want to speak unclearly?”

“We speak Sicilian, Your Excellency.”

“Go ahead, then, speak Latin.”

“Your Excellency, why do you insist on trying to fly the kite of
The Brewer of Preston
here in Vigàta, where the winds are unfavorable? Take it from a friend, which I'm honored to be—it won't fly.”

At last the prefect grasped the metaphor.

“Whether it'll fly or not, people, in Vigàta, have to do what I tell them to do, what I order them to do.
The Brewer of Preston
will be staged, and it will have the success it deserves.”

“Your Excellency, may I speak Spartan to you?”

“Oh my, what does that mean?”

“Speaking Spartan means using dirty words. Would you please explain to me why the hell you got it in your fucking head to force the Vigatese to watch an opera they don't want any part of? Does Your Excellency want to provoke another forty-eight, perhaps? A revolution?”

“Those are big words, Ferraguto!”

“No, sir, Your Excellency, those are not big words. I know these people. They are good, honest people, but if they're crossed they're liable to wage war.”

“But, good God, why would the Vigatese wage war just to avoid listening to an opera?”

“It depends on the opera, Your Excellency.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Ferraguto? That Vigàta has the best music critics in the world?”

“No, it's not that, sir. Except for two or three people, the Vigatese don't know a thing about music.”

“So?”

“So the problem is that it was you, who are the prefect of Montelusa, who wanted this opera. And the Vigatese never like anything the Montelusans ever say or do.”

“Is this some kind of joke?”

“No. They don't give a damn about the opera. But they don't want it to be the person in charge of Montelusa and its province to lay down the law for Vigàta. You know what the canon Bonmartino—who's a priest everyone respects—said about this?