The Brewer of Preston (9 page)

“I pray to you, O bulls of the holy sites!” she jabbered in dialect. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, drive the fire away!”

“Vat's de olt lady doingk?” Hoffer asked in amazement.

“Nothing. Those are the papal bulls of the holy places that the friars of Terrasanta sell for money. They're supposed to keep away fire and water.”

The engineer gave up seeking further explanation.

“Mamà!” cried Turiddru.

Again the old woman appeared neither to see nor hear him.

“Patre Virga said the theatre was the work of the devil! He said the theatre was straight out of Sodom and Gomorrah! He's a holy man, is Patre Virga! He said there'd be fire, and fire it is!”

Having used up the bull, Gnà Nunzia went back inside. Turiddru noticed that, somehow or other, Hoffer's machine had managed to tame the flames a little. Without a word, he broke into a run, went through the front door, and shot up the stairs.

Not five minutes later, Turiddru Macca emerged from the smoke with Gnà Nunzia draped over his shoulder, immobile.

“Did she faint?” inquired Puglisi.

“No, sir. I punched her in the face.”

“Why did you do that?”

“She said she didn't want to come down in her nightgown with all these wicked men about.”

“The fire in dis haus ist kaput!” said engineer Hoffer, practically singing for joy. “Who eltz liffs upshtairs?”

Puglisi looked up.

“There's a widow lives on the second floor, Concetta Riguccio. But there's been no sign of her. With all this commotion at this hour of the night, she would have asked for help if she was at home. I know the lady. She probably went to sleep at her sister's house tonight.”

O
nly the young have such feelings
, thought Don Pippino Mazzaglia with a touch of envy and another of commiseration while listening to the speech of Nando Traquandi, the young man who had arrived from Rome under cover of secrecy and whom he'd been hiding at his country house for the past week. Slender, with reddish, curly hair and small spectacles behind which flashed a pair of wild eyes, the Roman raised his left hand to his chin every now and then to scratch, tic-like, a thin beard, while every four or five words his right hand brought a small handkerchief to his lips to wipe away the little white spot of condensed spittle that formed at each corner of his mouth.

Traquandi had arrived in Sicily with two letters of recommendation, one from Napoleone Colajanni and one from the Honorable Pantano, member of parliament, asking their Mazzinian friends to provide refuge, assistance, and sustenance to the young man, who, they said, had been entrusted with a mission as dangerous as it was secret. Pippino Mazzaglia had obliged him, but from the very first words he exchanged with him, he had formed a precise idea of the whole matter: that nothing but trouble would come of the outsider's presence in Vigàta. The youth saw the light of only one truth: that white was white and black was black. He hadn't lived long enough to understand that when black comes very close to white, close enough to touch it, a middle line forms, a line of shadow, where white is no longer white and black is no longer black. The shade of that line is called gray. And inside that line, where the colors, in marrying, give birth to a third, it is difficult to name things precisely and see them in clear outline. It's like when the evening advances and the darkness, which is not yet complete, not yet night, makes you mistake a person for a tree. But the young man had none of these concerns; it was clear that he knew where to put his feet when the light faded.

What an unpleasant fellow!
Mazzaglia said to himself, as the Roman talked on and on.
I feel like I'm seeing myself, thirty years ago, before the Bourbon court, about to take it up the ass with ten years of hard labor. My pride was eating me alive. That must mean that, at the time, I was as big of an asshole as this guy
.

“I have some documents here that show just how extreme the situation has become,” the youth said without pausing to catch his breath. “I'm going to read you a few passages from a report to the minister that we managed to get our hands on, though I won't say how.”

He adjusted his small eyeglasses, slipped his hand into a satchel full of papers, and started looking. At that moment Ninì Prestìa, who hadn't taken his eyes off the Roman since they had all gathered there, spoke up for the first time.

“Well,
I'm
certainly not going to ask you
how
, since I don't give a shit
how
you got it.”

The young man gave him a confused look, surprised by the violence in those words.

“I didn't quite understand,” he said.

“May I ask a question that has nothing to do with anything you've been saying?”

Traquandi's eyes narrowed to two slits. Realizing he had better be on his guard, he automatically responded in Roman dialect.

“If it's got nothing to do with anything, why ask it?”

“Because I feel like it.”

“Well, then, go ahead.”

“There are four of us here, not counting you, sitting around this table. Pippino Mazzaglia, me, Cosimo Bellofiore, and Decu Garzìa. If you were to find out, let's say, that one of us was planning to report you to the police, what's the first thing you would do?”

“I'd shoot him in the mouth,” Traquandi said without hesitation.

“Without even asking why?”

“What the hell do I care why? That's his damn business. But, pardon my asking, why did you want to know?”

“Never mind; it doesn't matter.”

Pippino Mazzaglia felt a surge of heat in his chest so strong and intense that it brought tears to his eyes. There was Ninì Prestìa, forever his true friend, the person with whom he could always wear his heart on his sleeve, who had shared with him more than thirty years of fear, persecution, escapes, ambushes, prison, and rare moments of joy. He remembered the touch of Ninì's warm hand on his own as the Bourbon judges read out the sentence and cut the roots out from under their youth, cancelling all the books they might read, words they might say, women they might love, children they might caress. And now Ninì had expressed the same feelings as his about the young Roman, as if he had said them out loud. Mazzaglia looked at his friend, keeping his eyes half closed so as not to let any tears show. Ninì had grown old, his hair white, his eye slightly milky. In a flash he realized he was, in a way, looking at himself in the mirror. And so he grew angry, and took Prestìa's side.

“Please bear with us another minute, Signor Traquandi, because I myself would like to ask you something, since you seem to know everything.”

The Roman outsider took his hands out of his satchel, laid them on the table, and, without a word, assumed the position of someone ready to listen. But he did it with condescension, and Mazzaglia's antipathy towards him increased.

“What I want to ask you is not simply a waste of time, as you might be inclined to think. Ever since this whole business over
The Brewer of Preston
began, I've been losing sleep asking myself why the prefect of Montelusa got it in his head to inaugurate the Vigàta theatre with an opera that nobody wanted. I found out there's no monetary interest involved, that the composer is not a relative of his, and that he's not sleeping with one of the sopranos. So why, then, did he do it? In order to get the results he wanted, he forced two of the theatre's administrative councils to resign until he found the right sheep to go baaahhh in tempo at the wave of his baton. Why?”

“I couldn't care less why.”

“No, I'm sorry, but if this whole business is supposed to provide us with a pretext for staging a demonstration of protest, surely we need to know the real motives of our adversary.”

“In that case, I say the prefect wanted to make a show of his own power, and, indirectly, to demonstrate how powerful the government he represents is.”

“That's too easy.”

“You see? If you keep asking yourself why this and why that, you end up immobilized and unable to act. The truth is that any attempt to understand the adversary is a negotiation with the adversary himself. Talking, discussing, understanding, that's all stuff for—”

“For old folks?”

“I'm sorry, but that's the way I see it.”

He lowered his head, pulled a sheet of paper out of his satchel, and showed it to the others.

“This is a secret report from Palermo police commissioner Albanese to Minister of the Interior Medici. These are therefore the words of a fierce adversary of ours.”

“No,” said Ninì Prestìa, simply and succinctly, still staring at Traquandi, keeping him in his sights.

“What do you mean, ‘no'?”

“I mean that
my
fierce adversaries, as you call them, are not people like Albanese, because Albanese is not part of the human race but part of the shit that the human race produces each day.”

“Explain yourself.”

“Let me give an example, my good friend. Four years after the Bourbons' hangman Maniscalco—with whom my dear friend Pippino Mazzaglia and I had various dealings—went off to Marseille to croak, his wife had the gall to ask the Italian government for a pension. The Accounting Office requested some information from Isidoro La Lumia, director of the Sicilian archives. La Lumia, who was an honest man, began his reply as follows: ‘I, the undersigned, am honored to convey the following information concerning the wicked scoundrel who went by the name of Salvatore Maniscalco, and who for ten years was the scourge of Sicily.' So wrote La Lumia. But on that occasion, your enemy, my fine young Roman—Police Commissioner Albanese, that is—took care to make it known that he was not of the same opinion as Don Isidoro. ‘The widow should get her pension,' he wrote, ‘because'—and I'm not changing so much as a comma—‘because Maniscalco, aside from his excesses, which were justified by circumstance, and aside from the misdeeds he committed by the bushel, had nevertheless been a loyal servant of the state,' and it didn't matter which state. Understand? Two turds, even when shat by different anuses, still have the same smell, and sooner or later end up understanding each other.”

“That's fine with me, my friend. So, what should I do, not read it?”

“No, no, go ahead and read it,” Mazzaglia said curtly.

“I'll skip around as I read. ‘The public spirit in general'—these are Albanese's words—‘and particularly in Palermo, is hostile to the government—there is no point in deluding ourselves—or at least accuses those in the government of levying heavy taxes, creating financial disorder, and preventing any growth of industry or commerce.'”

He paused, wiped his lips with his handkerchief, adjusted his spectacles, and continued.

“‘Not a single new industry'—this is still Albanese speaking—‘has been developed or has created any demand for labor, nor have any large-scale public works provided any bread to workers. And the problem here is mostly bread and jobs. People are beginning to think that the cause may lie not in single individuals but in the institutions themselves; whence it follows that while, on the one hand, the enemies of the monarchy are sharpening their knives and the Mazzinian federalists are thinking of federalism and regional government, there is no lack of people calling for dictatorship. And more new taxes will generate still more discontent.'”

Having finished reading from the document, he put it carefully back inside his satchel and pulled out another.

“This instead is a report from the commanding officer at Caltanissetta. He writes as follows: ‘Everyone in this land places his hopes in the anarchy that would follow the momentary triumph of the Mazzinian and socialist sects.'”

“What I would like to know—” said Cosimo Bellofiore, who until that point of the meeting had been completely silent.

“Just another minute,” the Roman silenced him, already brandishing another document, “while I read a statement by the prefect of Montelusa, and I quote: ‘The discontent has now reached its peak. It has permeated every level of the citizenry, because no advantage, after more than a decade, has come of the many, very exacting sacrifices that Sicily has suffered for the sake of the unity of Italy, unless one excepts the moral and abstract gain of becoming part of a great nation—meagre consolation for those who have no more bread to appease their own or their families' hunger.'”

He put the document back, removed his spectacles, and ran a hand over his eyelids.

“I'm done, but I could go on and keep citing the words of our enemies, which are exactly the same words we might ourselves use. Let's make no mistake: Italy is a volcano ready to explode. And they know it and are scared. They put our comrades in jail, they find our weapons caches, they confiscate them or burn them up, but the next day new ones crop up, as many as were destroyed. And if we Mazzinians, here in Vigàta, don't take advantage of the opportunity provided us tonight, we're fools.”

“What opportunity?” asked Cosimo.

“The opportunity we were given tonight, one hour ago, just as I said. When the people of Vigàta revolted against the prefect.”

“Some revolt!” said Mazzaglia. “That was just an act of spite by certain people, a momentary thing.”

“Anyway, ‘the people,' as you call them, stayed home,” added Prestìa. “They didn't go to the opera. The folks attending the opera were professionals, merchants, boat owners. The people, the ones who work in earnest, had already gone to bed.”

“You may well be right. But we must take advantage of the situation, make it bigger, make it irreparable. Let me explain. If things are left as they are, you can say all you want, but two days from now it will all be forgotten by everyone. But if we make this thing really big, everyone will be forced to talk about it, and not only here in Vigàta. Do you see what I mean? It has to become a national incident.”

“How?” asked Decu Garzìa, suddenly attentive. Any time there was trouble to be made, he was always ready to rush to the front of the line, even if he didn't give a damn why the trouble had arisen in the first place.

Traquandi wiped his lips and looked at each of them, one by one.

“We're going to burn down the theatre.”

Mazzaglia jumped out of his chair.

“Are you joking? Anyway, look, the wind is blowing hard tonight, even assuming we were in agreement about burning down the theatre.”

“What do you mean, the wind is blowing?”

“The flames could spread to other buildings, where people are sleeping.”

“What the fuck do I care who's sleeping? If somebody has to die, so much the better. It'll create an even bigger stir.”