The Brewer of Preston (6 page)

“No.”

“He said that if the Vigatese accept the opera, next the prefect will feel entitled to tell them what they should eat and when they should shit.”

“But that's absolute rubbish! It's a beautiful opera and they don't know what the hell they're talhing about!”

“Your Excellency, even if the opera had been written by God Almighty Himself with His band of angels—”

“Jesus Christ! We need to do more, Ferraguto! The opera must triumph! It has to behome an historic success! My hareer depends on it!”

“If you'd spoken to me sooner, Excellency, if you'd let me know your plans when there was still time, I could have taken action and given you my humble opinion on a few matters. Now I'm doing everything I possibly can.”

“You must do more, Ferraguto. More. Even if it means . . .” He interrupted himself.

“Even if it means?” Ferraguto asked keenly.

The prefect sidestepped, realizing he was heading down a dangerous path.

“I'm counting entirely on you, on your sense of tact,” he concluded, rising.

O
n the morning of the day he was killed, Dr. Gammacurta was, as usual, at his medical office. He even spent the afternoon there, after a break for lunch and a brief half-hour nap. But he wasn't in his usual mood. Indeed, he was decidedly agitated, showing no patience with red-eyed children, losing his temper over tertian and quartan fevers alike, and flying off the handle when, for good measure, a man with a boil on the back of his neck was so afraid of the scalpel that he would not sit still for the doctor to lance it.

Then, when he was about to close the office and go home, somebody came running for him and told him that the sea had washed a half-drowned foreigner ashore. As soon as he saw the man, Gammacurta started cursing like a Turk.

“God bloody dammit! You call this half drowned?! Can't you see he's been dead for at least a week and that the fish have been eating him up? Call whoever the hell you want to call—the priest, the police, anybody—but leave me out of this!”

The reason for his bad mood—a strange thing in a man known far and wide as polite and well bred—lay in the fact that, come hell or high water, he had to go to the theatre that evening. At the club, he had made a solemn pledge, along with the other members, to make sure that the opera imposed on Vigàta by the prefect would end in boos and raspberries. Being, moreover, little inclined by nature to appear in public, he had contemplated deserting the cause with the excuse that he needed to make a house call on someone gravely ill. But he had forgotten about his wife, with whom he had had a heated argument the previous day.

“But I had a dress made in Palermo for the occasion!” she had said.

The doctor had already seen the dress, and it looked to him like a carnival costume. Actually, even at Carnival, any self-respecting woman would have disdained to put it on. But it was clear that his missus had got it into her head to wear it.

“But the music is completely worthless.”

“Oh, really? And how would you know? Have you suddenly become a music connoisseur? Anyway, I couldn't care less about the music.”

“So why do you want to go?”

“Because Signora Cozzo is going.”

The argument admitted no reply. Signora Cozzo, the headmaster's wife, was Signora Gammacurta's bête noire.

Naturally, nothing went right for him during the laborious process of getting dressed, owing in part to the deafening shouts in the next room, where his wife was getting made up with the help, apparently inept, of Rosina, the maid. The button to his collar refused to fit, falling on the floor three times; he could find only one of his gold cufflinks and spent an hour on the floor with his backside in the air before he managed to unearth the other under the chest of drawers; and his patent leather shoes were too tight.

Now he was finally at the theatre, in the third row of the orchestra, beside his wife, who looked like a cassata—a rustic ice cream speckled with colorful candied fruit—and was smiling beatifically because the dress of Signora Cozzo, sitting two rows behind them with her husband, was not as striking as her own. The doctor looked around. His associates from the club, with whom he exchanged greetings, smiles, and nods of understanding, had all positioned themselves strategically between the boxes and the pit.

The stage décor represented the courtyard of a brewery in the town of Preston, England, according to a small flyer that had been distributed to everyone upon entering the theatre. On the left-hand side was the façade of a two-story house with a staircase on the outside; on the right was a great cast-iron gate; and in the background, a brick wall with a door in the middle. There were wheelbarrows, sacks full of who-knows-what, and shovels and baskets scattered about helter-skelter.

The music struck up, and a man in a gray apron appeared—Bob the foreman, according to the flyer. Looking all cheerful, he started ringing a bell. At once six people wearing the same aprons entered from behind the gate, but instead of getting down to work, they lined up at the edge of the stage in front of the audience. From their faces and gestures they looked even happier than their foreman, who turned to them, opened his arms, and intoned:

“
Friends! To the brewery

we merrily run!”

The workers looked like they were in seventh heaven.

“We merrily run!”

they all sang together, raising their hands.

“With barley and hops

we make our beer!”

The six people in aprons then started jumping for joy.

“We make our beer!”

Bob the foreman then ran in a great circle around the courtyard, showing off the equipment.

“Of all the trades

ours has no peer.”

The six people embraced and patted one another noisily on the back.

“Ours has no peer.”

Then Bob, running from a wheelbarrow to a sack and from the sack to a pile of baskets, sang:

“We make a drink

that brings good cheer.”

“Yeah, cheer for
you
!” a voice yelled from the seats just under the ceiling. “To me it tastes like piss! I'll take wine anyday!”

The voice drowned out even the music. But the chorus didn't let it bother them and continued singing.

“That brings good cheer.”

At this point somebody got angry in earnest. It was Don Gregorio Smecca, a trader in whole and slivered almonds, but above all a pig-headed man.

“Why are these six assholes always repeating the last lines? What do they think, that we're a bunch of savages? We can understand whatever there is to understand at the first go, without any repetition!”

Lollò Sciacchitano, who was sitting in the gallery but far from his friend Sciaverio, the one who had declared his dislike of beer, seized the moment.

“Hey, Sciavè, why are they all so cheerful?” he asked in a voice that would have been audible at sea during a squall.

“Because they're going to work,” was Sciaverio's reply.

“What bullshit!”

“Go ahead, ask them yourself.”

Sciacchitano stood up and addressed himself to the seven people on stage.

“I beg your pardon, gentlemen, but would you please give me a straight answer? Why are you so happy to be going to work?”

This time there was a certain confusion on stage. Two of the chorus shaded their eyes with their hands to shield them from the stage lights and looked towards the gallery, but the conductor's baton immediately called them back to order.

In the royal box, Bortuzzi, the prefect, noticing that things were taking a bad turn, felt his blood rising. Gesturing angrily to Police Lieutenant Puglisi behind him, he said:

“Arrest those hooligans! At once!”

Puglisi didn't feel like obeying the order. He knew that the slightest incident might trigger an uprising.

“Look, Your Excellency, I'm sorry, but there's absolutely no ill will or intention in what they're doing. They're not troublemakers. I know every last one of them. They're good, law-abiding people, believe me. It's just that they've never been in a theatre before and don't know how to behave.”

It worked. The prefect, who was drenched in sweat, did not insist.

Meanwhile, from the left-hand staircase appeared Daniel Robinson, the owner of the brewery. He was even jollier than the others and in the end declared that day a holiday, because he was about to marry a girl named Effy. This news made the others practically faint with joy. Bob intoned:

“What better choice to make than she?

Who more virtuous and pretty?”

The six clad in aprons once again did not fail to repeat:

“Who more virtuous and pretty?”

Don Gregorio Smecca could no longer contain himself.

“Bah! What a bore! I'm leaving, good night!”

He stood up and left, leaving his wife in the lurch.

Meanwhile the people on stage were describing Effy as a “most precious gem” and as the “emblem of love.” And so Daniel Robinson started handing out money to everyone, ordering them to have a big celebration.

“Look for instruments, look all around,

let flutes, timbals, and horns resound.”

“
No need to look anywhere for horns. They grow all by themselves,” said a voice again from the gallery. A few people laughed.

“But isn't a timbal that thing you make for me with rice, meat, and peas?” Dr. Gammacurta asked his wife in all seriousness.

“Yes.”

“So what the hell has it got to do with flutes and horns?”

At last the theatre fell briefly silent. The workers had all gone off in search of instruments and people to invite to the celebration. Daniel Robinson, though there was nobody beside him, started gesturing mysteriously towards Bob as if wanting to tell him a secret. Bob drew near, and the boss revealed to him that before the day was over, his own twin brother, George, who hadn't been seen in those parts for two years, would arrive. George was a military man and not a very peaceable sort. Bob looked doubtful.

“And he's coming here?”

Daniel turned pensive then replied:

“I hope so,
with his unpleasant vocation

of living by the balls . . .”

Hearing of the twin brother George's rather peculiar job, the male contingent of the audience held its collective breath. Some thought they hadn't understood correctly and sought clarification from the person beside them. Daniel, as the music required, repeated the declaration of his brother's occupation in a higher register:

“With his unpleasant vocation

of living by the balls . . .”

This time the laughter burst out immediately, spanning the entire hall from rows A to U and featuring throat-rasping chortles, sneezing guffaws, gurgling giggles, smothered hiccups, starting motors, piglike squeals, and other similar manners of laughing. And, as a result, the sung explanation of George's odd vocation was completely lost.

“. . . of living by the balls of the cannon.”

The laugh that Cavaliere Mistretta tried to suppress turned out to be the most clamorous of all. As the cavaliere was asthmatic, he found himself gasping for air, and in his attempt to recover his breath, he inhaled so deeply that it came out sounding exactly like a foghorn. And yet in spite of the blast, he did not recover his breath but began to flail about, wildly grasping and slapping at the people around him. His wife got scared and started shouting, others came running, and one of them, a little more alert than the rest, hoisted the cavaliere onto his shoulders and carried him into the lobby with Signora Mistretta trailing behind him and wailing like one of the three Marys.

At first Dr. Gammacurta congratulated the cavaliere in his mind, thinking that the whole thing was an act Mistretta was putting on to disrupt the musical performance, in accordance with their agreement. But then he realized he was acting in earnest.

On the stage, meanwhile, Effy, the fetching bride-to-be, popped out, a great big woman at six foot six with hands that looked like shovels and a nose you could grab on to in high winds. Under this nose was the dark shadow of a mustache that a generous application of makeup was unable to hide. She moved about, moreover, in long strides, heels clattering noisily behind her.