IM11 The Wings of the Sphinx (2009) (30 page)

He put his ear against the door to Livia’s apartment, heart beating so wildly that it risked waking up everyone in the building.
Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom
. His face was all twisted up, perhaps from the emotion, perhaps because of the box of cookies. He couldn’t hear anything on the other side of the door. No television, no sound at all. Absolute silence.

Maybe she’d already gone to bed, tired and angry for having traveled all that way for nothing. So he rang the doorbell with a slightly trembling finger. Nothing. He rang again. Nothing.

In the very first year of their relationship, he and Livia had exchanged keys to their respective homes, which they always carried with them.

He took his key, opened the door, and went inside.

He realized at once that Livia wasn’t there. That she had not been back to her apartment since leaving that morning. The first thing he saw was her cell phone on the console in the vestibule. She’d forgotten it, and that was why she hadn’t picked up for any of his calls.

What now? Where had she gone? How was he going to find her? He felt dejected, overwhelmed all at once by fatigue, which made him weak in the knees. He went into the bedroom and lay down. Closed his eyes. He suddenly reopened them, as the telephone on the nightstand was ringing.

“Hello?”

“I knew it! I knew it! I sensed that you would be so stupid, so imbecilic as to go off to Boccadasse!”

It was Livia, and she was in a rage.

“Livia! You have no idea how hard I’ve been looking for you! You nearly drove me insane! Where are you calling from? Where are you?”

“When I realized you weren’t coming, I took the bus. Where do you think I am? At your place! Don’t you see that every time you insist on doing things your way you end up making such a stinking mess that—”

“Listen, Livia, if you hadn’t forgotten your cell phone here, I would have . . .”

And so began a great big squabble, just like old times.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This novel is made up. What I mean is that the characters, their names, and the situations in which they find themselves have no reference to any real-life persons. There is no doubt, however, that the novel is born of a specific reality. And thus someone may happen to think they recognize him- or herself in a character or situation, though I assure any and all that should this happen, it is merely by an unfortunately and utterly unintended coincidence.

I wish to thank Maurizio Assalto, for having sent me a newspaper article, and his girlfriend, Larissa, for some of the stories she told me.

 

A. C.

NOTES

4 “Garruso” . . . “Garrufo”:
Garruso
is a common insult in Sicilian that means “rogue, rascal.” Literally, it means “homosexual.”

 

4 . . . the government was thinking about building a bridge over the Strait of Messina:
This has long been a pet project of Silvio Berlusconi, past and present prime minister of Italy and a business tycoon in his own right. The bridge project is one of several grandiose public works by which Berlusconi would like to monumentalize his dubious stewardship of the Italian nation.

 

9
Matre santa
. . . !:
“Holy mother” in Sicilian dialect.

 

30 . . . immediately started firing blindly, feeling perhaps empowered to do so by the recent law on self-defense:
On January 24, 2006, in a highly controversial move, the right-wing Berlusconi government passed a reform of article 52 of the Constitution, easing the restrictions on justifiable self-defense. The reform followed the relaxation of the requirements for the right to bear arms and has led to a number of apparently needless and avoidable deaths.

 

79 “. . . The
ragioniere
Curcuraci”:
Ragioniere
is a largely meaningless title given to accountants whose specialization does not go beyond that provided by vocational school. A fully certified accountant is called a
contabile
.

 

97
Nuttata persa e figlia femmina
:
Literally, “a wasted night and it’s a girl,” the expression means “a lot of time wasted and nothing to show for it.”

 

98 . . . little street called Via Platone. Given that he was in a philosophical neighborhood . . . :
Platone is Italian for Plato, and Empedocle is, of course, the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, who was a Sicilian from Agrigentum, the ancient name of Agrigento, Camilleri’s model for the town of Montelusa. The model for Vigàta is Porto Empedocle, Camilleri’s hometown.

 

104 “. . . to combine benefit and delight”:
Montalbano is alluding to the famous dictum articulated by Horace (65-8 BC) in his
Ars Poetica
:
“Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae / aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae,”
(ll. 333-34), according to which poetry should both benefit and delight the reader.

 

109 “. . .
cululùchira
” . . . A buttock tattoo?:
Culu
in Sicilian (
culo
in Italian) means “buttocks.”

 

132 “. . . I just thought of another cavaliere who uses his younger brother as a front man for himself. It’s become a widespread practice.”:
Montalbano is referring to the fact that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, commonly known as
il cavaliere
, has very often used his younger brother Paolo to represent his interests in order to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest. Among other things, Paolo Berlusconi has run newspapers for his brother (
Il Giornale
and
La Notte
) and sat on the board of a number of major concerns (Mediolanum Assicurazioni and Standa).

 

132 “Even a homicide, with these new laws, can prove ‘unactionable.’ ”:
See note for page 30.

 

154 But why, in 2006, would a mayor still want to name a street after Atilius Regulus?:
Marcus Atilius Regulus was a general and consul in the First Punic War (256 BC).

 

166 “I did. I noticed a strong burning smell, and—”“I smell it, too”:
The original text has a double entendre here: In Sicilian, to “smell something burning” (
sentire feto di bruciato
) means “to smell a rat.”

 

167 . . . the quotation of Mussolini:
On October 2, 1935, from the famous balcony in Palazzo Venezia in Rome, from which he normally addressed the throngs, Mussolini virtually declared war on Ethiopia in saying: “We’ve waited forty years, and that’s enough!” He was referring, in substance, to the fact that Italy had had to repress her imperial ambitions and destiny for forty years, beginning with the first stirrings of foreign conquest in North Africa in the 1890s.

 

206 “. . . one of ’em called 118”:
The emergency telephone number, the Italian equivalent of 911.

 

224 “Maybe there is still a judge in Berlin”:
A reference to the famous anecdote, immortalized in a poem by Andrieux, in which Frederick II of Prussia, wishing to extend the domains of the Sans-Souci, his country château, asked a miller whose property abutted the royal domain to sell it to him. When the miller refused, the king said he would seize the land outright. To which the miller defiantly replied, “Yes, if there are no judges in Berlin!”