The Brewer of Preston (8 page)

The old scarecrow's right
, Don Memè suddenly thought with a shudder.

Seeing how things were going, the prefect might think it was he, Memè, who had pulled the wool over his eyes, proposing a lecture that was starting to look like a dirty trick, since it was entirely in agreement with those opposed to
The
Brewer of Preston
.

After eyeing Don Memè a good while, always maintaining his grin, the marchese withdrew to go and talk to other guests. The lecture, in fact, was being held in the music room of his own palazzo in Montelusa, just as Ferraguto had explicitly asked him. And the marchese had not let him down. The only time he did deny a favor to Don Memè, some two hundred Saracen olive trees on his property had, by curious coincidence, gone up in flames.

Don Memè looked around. Not a single Montelusan aristocrat had shown up. The cornuti. And perhaps, given Carnazza's drunkenness, it was better that way. There was a surplus of bourgeois, of course, and many public employees, but most were already leaving, especially the churchgoing ladies, scandalized by the headmaster's language and dragging their husbands behind them. Who, it must be said, acquiesced rather reluctantly, as they would rather have stayed to see how the farce would end. Some thirty people remained.

Not knowing what to decide, whether to go and kill Carnazza or let himself sink blissfully into the shit pile he had helped to create, Don Memè started staring at the frescoes on the ceiling. At a certain point he gave a start and shook himself from his torpor, worried. How long had it been since Carnazza left the room, anyway? He hadn't had time to answer his own question when the marchese reappeared before him.

“I beg your pardon,
carissimo
Ferraguto, but don't you think Professor Carnazza is taking advantage of my guests' patience and mine?”

Fucking marchese
, thought Don Memè.
He wants to savor my ruin to the very end!

There was no sign of Carnazza in the little toilet chamber. Indeed, a servant who was planted in front of the bathroom door declared that Headmaster Carnazza had not availed himself of its services. Don Memè asked another servant standing at the end of a long corridor if he had seen Carnazza pass that way, but the domestic said no. He opened a door or two and found nothing. Cursing, he returned to the music room and approached the marchese, who was now laughing in his face disrespectfully and with no restraint.

“I can't find him,” said Don Memè.

The marchese promptly assembled all servants, family members, and guests who wished to take part in a sort of game. For the headmaster must certainly have got lost somewhere inside the palazzo, since the doorman swore by all that was holy that he had seen no one leave the building. They searched for hours and hours, equipped with lamps, candles, and lanterns. They descended into the cellars, went up into the attics, and spent the entire night searching, in part because around midnight, the marchese had the good idea to call for a recess and send for a round of spaghetti with pork followed by four roast suckling goats. They fell to with gusto, but never did manage to unearth Carnazza. He had vanished the instant he walked out the door of the music room.

“When he gets over his bender, he'll resurface,” the marchese said at the first light of dawn.

He turned out to be a bad prophet. Headmaster Antonio Carnazza never resurfaced. Someone ran into him, or thought he saw him, years later in a seedy tavern in Palermo, reciting verse by Horace to a crowd even more wine-soaked than he. The Baroness Jacopa della Mànnara swore she had seen him among the ruins of the Greek theatre at Taormina, wearing a crown of vine leaves on his head and noisily declaiming verses of Catullus. The only sure thing was that a few years later, his wife had a declaration of presumed death drawn up and was thus accorded the status of widow. After duly waiting out the period of mourning, she remarried a nephew of Prefect Bortuzzi who happened to be in Sicily for a hare-hunting party.

(A slight digression is in order here, not because the narrator so wishes, but because the story itself imperiously demands it. In 1942, during the war, Montelusa, unlike Vigàta, which was repeatedly bombed by the Americans, suffered only one bombing, but it was a devastating one. In the course of this act of war, Palazzo Coniglio was half destroyed. Once the all-clear sounded, the rescue squads—not to mention a handful of people with serious intentions of getting their hands on some of the treasures that according to local lore were in that palazzo—scattered in every direction to look for possible dead and wounded. In the attic of the west wing, which was miraculously left standing, a skeleton of a man in formal dress was found inside a trunk, surely dead of natural causes, since there was no visible trace of violence.

It was a special sort of trunk that opened on the outside but which, once closed, released a spring that made it impossible to reopen from the inside. Anyone who might climb into it, even as a joke, could never come back out again without outside help. Beside the remains were found some sheets of paper with some barely visible, incomprehensible writing on them. With great effort one could make out a name that looked like Luigi Picci or Ricci.)

T
uriddru Macca, son of Gnà Nunzia and a stevedore who worked at the port, had gone to bed at nightfall, after the Angelus bell, as he had done for years, aching all over from the toil of loading more than two hundred full sacks a day onto his shoulders and carrying them from wharf to boat. He had slept barely six hours when he was awakened by a loud knocking on the door of the hovel where he lived with his entire family, a single room some twelve by twelve feet on the ground floor with one small window, beside the door, as the sole source of air.

“Turiddru Macca!”

He sat up in bed, scared, and set his hand down on the mattress, but only ended up crushing the face of his son Pasqualino, who moaned in his sleep. The knocking grew louder.

“Turiddru Macca!”

Turiddru stretched his legs in order to get up and in so doing kicked his daughter Annetta, who fell out of bed but, being accustomed to falling, climbed back in without even opening her eyes. The knocking continued, leaving Turiddru no time to collect himself. He slid out of bed, stepping directly on the liver of his son Minicuzzo, who was sleeping on the floor. Staggering blindly towards the window, he stumbled and very nearly fell on his son Antonino, who was asleep on a straw pallet.

“Turiddru Macca!”

His wife, Carolina, opened one eye and sat up, careful not to suffocate her six-month-old daughter Biniditta, who had fallen asleep still attached to one of her tits.

“Whoozat?
Madonna santa
, who could it be at this hour?”

“I dunno. Shut up and sleep,” Turiddru ordered her, feeling nervous.

When he opened the window, a blast of frigid air assailed him. The night had taken a turn for the worse.

“Whoozat?”

“Iss me, Turi, Gegè Bufalino.”

“What the hell do you want at this hour? What's going on?”

“Wha'ss going on is your mother's house is on fire. Hurry up and get dressed.”

Gegè Bufalino was someone who was never to be trusted, whether his belly was full of wine or he hadn't drunk a drop.

“Gegè, I'm warning you: if it turns out you're making this thing up, I'm gonna bust your ass.”

“I swear it on my own eyeballs! Lemme die by murder if I's lyin',” Gegè vowed. “Iss the holy Gospel truth.”

Turiddru got dressed in a hurry. The night was pitch-black, but every now and then a flash dispersed the darkness. Towards the center of town, around the new theatre, and right behind it, where his mother Gnà Nunzia's house was, a great big red glow lit up the sky. Fire, no doubt about it. Turiddru started running.

Once past the cordon of mounted soldiers arrayed in a circle around the area on fire, Herr Hoffer decided, at a glance, that there was nothing more to be done for the new theatre. Fire had already eaten up half of it. He ran behind the building: a small alley not three yards wide was all that separated the theatre from a two-story house that itself was ablaze.

“
Uber hier!
Dis way!” Hoffer cried to his men, who arrived in a flash with the fire-extinguishing machine.

A man approached holding a wet handkerchief over his nose to protect himself from the smoke.

“I'm Lieutenant Puglisi, police. Who are you, and what are you trying to do?”

“Mein name ist Hoffer, I been ein engineer. Minink engineer. I haff a machine I infented to outputten fires hier. Will you helf me?”

“Yes, of course,” said the lieutenant, who'd given up hope when he'd seen the damage. He was quick to accept anything, even chickenshit, that might be of use.

“Goot. You must ko und make a chain of men vit buckets von hier to the sea. They take the sea vater and put it in the machine. The machine alvays neets new vater.”

“All right,” said Puglisi, who ran off to organize the effort.

As his men stoked the wood fire under the boiler to create the pressure necessary to force the cold water out, Hoffer noticed that behind him stood a group of motionless, almost statue-like people, consisting of a man of about fifty, a woman of about forty, a youngster of about twenty, and a girl of about sixteen. The two males were wearing woolen undershirts and undershorts. Apparently they had given their clothes to the women, who, being dressed only in nightgowns, were in fact covering their pudenda with men's trousers and jackets.

“You liff in dis haus?” the engineer asked the motionless group.

The group came to life.

“We're the Pizzuto family,” the four said in unison.

The fifty-year-old man took half a step forward and spoke.

“I'm Antonio Pizzuto,” he said in a drawling, whiny voice. “We live on the ground floor of this house. When it caught fire we were sleeping with the windows closed.”

“With the windows closed,” echoed the others.

“Because earlier the place had turned into a shithouse,” Antonio Pizzuto continued.

“A shithouse,” repeated the others.

Engineer Hoffer was dumbfounded, being rather unfamiliar with classical studies. He didn't realize that the Pizzuto family was essentially composed of a coryphaeus and an accompanying chorus.

“Exkuse me?” he said.

“Yessirree, a shithouse. With all this bullshit about inaugurating the theatre, carriages started arriving, dozens of them, from Montelusa, from Montechiuso, from Cavàra, from Fela, and wherever the hell else they came from.”

“Wherever the hell else they came from,” the chorus chimed.

“Fact is, the servants and coachmen, whenever nature called, would come behind the theatre to shit and piss in the little alleyway. And it got to stinking so bad that we had to close the windows.”

“We had to close the windows.”

“And that's why we didn't realize in time what was happening. It's a good thing my son, Nenè, got thirsty and went to drink a glass of water. Otherwise we would have been burnt to death, all of us.”

“Burnt to death, all of us! Oh! Oh!” moaned the chorus.

Meanwhile the first buckets of seawater were arriving, as the chain of men had been quickly assembled by Lieutenant Puglisi. Now the work could begin. Hoffer's men took up their positions as if they had trained long and hard. Gripping the pump hose firmly, two of them directed it towards the entrance of the house in flames.

“
Achtung!
” the engineer shouted. “Prepare to extinkuish!”

Looking at his men, he felt a lump of emotion rise up in his throat.

“Open!”

Nardo Sciascia, hearing the order, opened the cold-water valve. At once a violent jet emerged. The two men holding the hose staggered, then directed the stream towards the blaze. In his excitement the engineer started dancing, first on one foot, then the other, like a bear.

By dint of curses, obscenities, and shouts, Turiddru Macca managed to get past the cordon of soldiers on horseback. At once he found himself in front of his mother's burning house, eyes full of tears from sorrow as much as from the gusts of acrid smoke. The fire was still for the most part confined to the ground floor, but evil tongues were rising towards the great window on the story above, where his mother had stood many times and waved at him. Turiddru was crying for fear of the danger his mother was in, but also for the beautiful apartment that was going up in smoke, those three rooms and kitchen where he and his family had hoped to move, out of their hovel and into more comfort and space, after Gnà Nunzia died—at the proper time, of course, in accordance with the will of God.

“Where's my mother?” he frantically asked Puglisi. “Where's Gnà Nunzia?”

“We haven't seen her yet,” said Puglisi.

“But is she alive?”

“How should I know? We would have to enter the building, but as you can see, we can't even get close.”

“Stop! Halt!” the engineer suddenly shouted at his men, and Nardo closed the valve. Hoffer had noticed that the buckets of water weren't arriving fast enough. The amount of water shooting out the hose was far greater than that which was being put in, and thus the pressure gauge was rising perilously. The boiler was in danger of exploding.

“
Schnell!
Qvick! You must verk fester! Vater, vater! More vater!” the engineer kept shouting at the long human chain, and at last the buckets began to move more rapidly.

At that moment the great window of the apartment inhabited by Gnà Nunzia suddenly opened and an elderly woman in a white nightgown appeared. The pale apparition raised her arms to the heavens.

“
Gesuzzu beddru! Madunnuzza santa!
He said there would be fire, and fire it is!”

“Mamà! Mamà!” Turiddru called to her.

The old woman made no sign of having heard him. She vanished into the house.

“
Schnell!
Qvick!” an excited Hoffer cried loudly. “Ve must safe dis olt voman!”

He noticed that the water-level gauge was now where it was supposed to be. Perhaps it would have been best to wait just a little longer, but there was no time to lose. The joy he felt at that moment at being able to save a human life with his invention made him commit a fatal mistake. Indeed, for a brief moment Hoffer forgot he was in Vigàta, Sicily, and lost control of the mechanism in his brain that was constantly translating his thoughts from German into Italian.

“
Schnell! Kaltes Wasser!
” he cried.

Nardo Sciascia, who was about to reopen the cold-water valve, stopped in midmotion and gave him a puzzled look.

“
Kaltes Wasser! Kalt! Kalt!
” roared the engineer.

Now, since the Italian word for “hot” is
caldo
, an inevitable misunderstanding occured.

“He wants the hot water! Pressure!” Sciascia cried to Cecè Consolo, who was at the back of the machine. Cecè turned the pressure knob and jumped backwards. At once a violent jet of steam and boiling water gushed from the back of the boiler. The nearly statue-like group of the Pizzutos, who were still standing behind the machine, was blotted out by a white cloud from which some very loud Greek-chorus-like laments resounded.

“Mistake! Mistake! I vant colt vater! Colt!” Hoffer screamed.

When the white cloud dissipated, the Pizzutos were on the ground moaning and rolling around with burns of varying degrees. Puglisi came running with two of his men.

“Quick!” the policeman said to the men. “Go get some help, put them in a carriage, and take them to Dr. Gammacurta's.”

“Dr. Gammacurta is nowhere to be found,” said one of them.

“Then take them to Dr. Addamo.”

“Addamo is up to his neck with all the ladies in hysterics over the pandemonium that broke out at the theatre, not to mention all the people who got hurt when Don Memè started shooting.”

“Don't give me any crap! I don't want to hear about it! Just take these people to Addamo. He'll understand right away that they're seriously injured.”

Meanwhile Gnà Nunzia had reappeared at the great window. In her hand she held a sheet of paper that she began to shred into many little pieces, which she then tossed as far as she could with the help of the wind.