The Brewer of Preston (16 page)

. . . and as concerns the company of mounted militiamen employed by H. E. the Prefect Bortuzzi to implement illegal measures of repression, my opinion cannot help but concur with that of the majority of the Sicilian people, who consider this military unit to have been from the start in league with the Mafia and the organized criminal groups of the countryside. Given the already delicate situation, the intervention of the mounted soldiers further stoked the passions of the Vigatese, who regarded it as an additional abuse of power, especially as neither the army, as clearly ordered by yourself, my lord Lieutenant General Casanova, nor the regular police Forces of Public Safety, represented in this town by police lieutenant Puglisi, a man unanimously deemed of unimpeachable conduct, much less the Royal Corps of Carabinieri, who for three days had been confined to barracks as a precautionary measure by Major Santhià, their commander, took part in the police operation deemed indispensable by the prefect.

It is not my place to express any judgment whatsoever concerning the methods of His Excellency Bortuzzi either before or after the distressing events that occurred that night in Vigàta.

I cannot, however, refrain from calling to your attention that during the entire time in question there was a certain person in the company of the prefect, one Emanuele Ferraguto, whom the carabinieri have several times recommended should be considered for legal internment, only to be prevented from proceeding by the express will of the prefect himself and the local magistrature.

I also call to your attention, although the question does not fall within the jurisdiction invested in me, that this same Emanuele Ferraguto was granted permission to bear arms by the direct intercession of the prefect with the commissioner of police.

Respectfully yours,

Colonel Armando Vidusso
Royal Army Commander for Montelusa

To H. E. Vincenzo Spanò, Esq.
President of the Court of Montelusa

Were you aware that the impresario of the opera
The Brewer of Preston
, which will be performed the day after tomorrow at Vigàta, is Signor Pilade Spadolini, son of a sister of the prefect Bortuzzi's brother-in-law? Just so you know, so that the proper measures may be taken.

A group of loyal citizens of Vigàta

To His Excellency the Prefect Umberto Bortuzzi
Prefecture of Montelusa

Personal and confidential

When I came to Vigàta this morning for reconnaissance concerning the disposition of the forces of order tomorrow evening, I had occasion to notice that a number of walls of the buildings giving onto the Corso had been defaced with the following words, written repeatedly:

T
HE PREFUCKT DON'
T KNOW WHEN TO QUIT

L
ET'S MAKE HIM SINK
IN HIS OWN SHIT

I deduced from the curious noun in the first line that the offensive words were directed at Your Most Excellent person.

I have thus given orders that these shameful writings be covered with whitewash.

I remain Your Excellency's most devoted

Villaroel

To the Commissioner of Police
Dr. Cavaliere Everardo—Montelusa

Your Excellency,

This morning I received a message from you in which you asked me for a precise and detailed report concerning the events that occurred last night in Vigàta. In order to conduct a serious and thorough investigation, I shall need at least one week. As you yourself probably know, the number of confirmed deaths is three (two as a result of the fire, one by firearms). The wounded number twenty-five between burn victims and those suffering contusions from the riot in the theatre. In my humble opinion, however, what is presently at issue is not so much the investigation itself as the manner in which it should be presented to the public. I shall need, therefore, prior instructions from you on how to proceed, since the matter seems rather complicated to me and of such a nature as to risk being prejudicial to the high authorities of the state.

Ever faithfully at your service,

Lieutenant Detective Puglisi

To Lutenant Puglisi
Comander of the riffraff coppers of Vigàta

Your a shit of a man who takes advantage of women

To Totò Pennica—Vigàta
the fisherman who lives by the school

Totò, your sister-in-law was a slut who burned to death on top of a man who also burned up in her house. Your wife, who now and then you give a good hiding to, and for good reason, is a slut just like her sister. A case in point: the morning she went to her sister's place and found her burnt up with a man in her room, why didn't she scream and faint like all the women in the world instead of staying up there in that room all quiet for an hour with the police lieutenant?

“O
h, what a beautiful day! What a fine spring sky!” Everardo Colombo, police commissioner of Montelusa, said aloud as he opened the bedroom curtains.

For most of the nine months since he had moved to the island, it had been raining, sometimes pouring as in the time of Noah's ark, sometimes sprinkling as though shaken from an aspergillum. And this had annoyed him no small amount, even though rain, in Milan, was like one of the family. That, indeed, was the problem: in Montelusa water from the sky seemed utterly foreign. The houses, the landscapes, the people, even the animals, all seemed like they were made to bask in sunlight.

He glanced over at the bed where Signora Pina was still asleep, savoring with a lustful eye the hills and valleys his wife's body formed under the blanket. He decided to give it a try. If by some miracle the attempt succeeded, he did have half an hour at his disposal before going downstairs, where his office was. He sat down beside the bed, on a level with his wife's face, and caressed her cheek ever so lightly, as if his finger were a feather or a breath of wind.

“Pina! My bright little star!”

The wife, who had been eyeing him through half-closed lids for the past fifteen minutes, pretended to wake up with studied slowness. She opened one eye, stared at her husband a moment, curled her lips in a pout that would have made a dead man hard, and turned away without saying a word. Because of that movement, and the rising and falling of the blanket, the commissioner got a whiff of female effluvia strong enough to make him start sweating.

“Get up, my little piglet!” said Everardo, with the appropriate bedroom voice.

“
Lendenatt!
” she said in Milanese.
1

The commissioner was not deterred by the insult.

“Come, darling, move your
coo
!
2
Didn't you hear the grandfather clock? It's chiming nine and you're still in bed!”

“
Cagon!
”
3

Again the commissioner took it in stride and bent over, letting his lips graze her ear. This time his wife turned her head slightly towards him.

“
Coppet
, you stupid man!”
4

Despite the lady's manifest opposition, Everardo decided to give it one last try. He began caressing his wife's ample buttocks, which offered themselves to him in all their glory, his hand moving first very gently, then ever more clingingly, slow as a snail.

“Oh, my soul!”

“That's my bottom, not your soul,” Signora Pina said frostily, casting the hand off her crupper with a thrust of the hips.

“That's what I deserve! That's what I get for marrying a washerwoman's daughter!” said the commissioner, indignant, standing up. And for good measure, he added:

“I'm going to go pee!”

He went out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind him. In the privy, finding himself cramped, his rage increased in inverse proportion to the amount of space around him. He began punching the wall. The problem with his wife had been going on for some ten days now, ever since he had told her they would not be attending the inauguration of the new theatre of Vigàta.

“And why not?” she had asked.

“What the hell do you care? I have my reasons.”

“What? I had a dress made for the occasion! Did you hear me, you wretch?”

“We have to be sensible, Pina. I don't much like all these problems the prefect has with the people of Vigàta. Enough of his persecution and intrigues! Bortuzzi is a madman! With him, the way things are going, we'll end up between the shit house and the sewer. Forget about the whole thing.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes. And that's enough.”

The commissioner's wife, who had been polishing her nails, then stood up very slowly. With her right forefinger, she had pointed to the part of her body where Everardo Colombo, twice a week, found gold, incense, and myrrh.

“This is mine,” Donna Pina had said, standing tall and stern and terrible as an oracle. “And I'm never going to give it to you again. From now on you can let your balls flap in the wind, as far as I'm concerned.”

And she had kept her word.

The commissioner's anger began to subside as he descended the great staircase that led from the fourth floor of the Royal Police Commissariat to the third. True, further headaches awaited him there, but so did the tangible symbols of his power, of what he had managed to achieve in the space of only a few years.

“Good morning, Cavaliere,” police officer Alfonso Salamone greeted him. Salamone had been assigned to guard the commissioner's private apartment for two reasons: first, because his legs had been shattered by several shots from the carbine of a fugitive, and second, because Signora Pina, some six months earlier, had stubbornly insisted that she wanted him and only him. The lady claimed, in fact—though it was anybody's guess why—that with Salamone she could feel certain that no malefactor would ever succeed in penetrating her living quarters.

“But who do you think would ever come up here?” her husband had asked at the time. “A thief at the commissariat? Imagine that!”

But she would not be dissuaded. She wanted Salamone, and she got Salamone.

“How are the legs today, Salamone?”

And how are your horns?
the guard wanted to say, but restrained himself.

“Better today, sir,” he said instead.

At the landing, the commissioner turned right, where the antechamber, the secretariat, and his enormous office were. Some five or six people, who had been waiting since dawn to talk to him, rose and bowed the moment he entered.

“Good morning, Your Excellency,” they said in chorus.

Colombo raised a hand, showing three spread fingers—either in greeting or paternalistic benediction, it wasn't clear which—then went into the secretariat, where there wasn't a living soul, and threw open the half-closed door of his office. He was engulfed by a burst of light, the curtains of the great window having already been opened, allowing the sun to pour in.

“What a splendid morning!”

“If it doesn't turn, Cavaliere.”

The tone of voice and phrasing of his first secretary, Dr. Francesco Meli—who always dressed in black and always wore an expression as if his entire family had been wiped out the day before by an earthquake—stopped him from continuing his paean to the day. Was the secretary, standing beside the desk looking like an effigy of the Day of the Dead, referring only to the weather, or was he alluding to a bit of bad news?

“What's wrong?” the commissioner asked, changing expression.

“In Fela a man nobody recognized entered the local social club and shot and killed Nunzio Peritore, a land surveyor by profession with a clean record, who was playing
tresette
and
briscola
with three other people.”

“Are you telling me the others didn't recognize the man who stood there and killed him?”

The first secretary heaved a long sigh before answering. He looked afflicted by an even greater suffering than usual.

“Cavaliere, one of them was under the table because one of his shoelaces was untied; the second, also under the table, was picking up a card that had fallen on the floor; and the third, at that precise moment, got a
muschitta
in his ear.”

“A what?”

“A mosquito, sir.”

“All Sicilians, these cardplayers?”

“No, Cavaliere. The man tying his shoe was Giulio Vendramin, a Venetian. He's a traveling salesman.”

“Anything else?”

Meli let out another anguished sigh.

“Lieutenant Puglisi of Vigàta has brought to our attention the presence of a dangerous Roman republican by the name of Nando Traquandi. The Ministry of Justice has a warrant out for his arrest.”

“That son of a whore Mazzini has been spotted in Naples. Apparently he wants to come here to the island and meanwhile is sending scouts ahead to get a feel for the place. Has Puglisi found out who's sheltering Traquandi?”

“Yessir. He's staying at the home of Don Giuseppe Mazzaglia, who's someone that certainly doesn't hide what he thinks.”

“Tell Puglisi to arrest them at once, Traquandi and Mazzaglia. Let's get them out of our hair.”

Meli seemed to plunge into an abyss of despair.

“What's wrong, Meli?”

“Well, you see, Cavaliere, Don Pippino Mazzaglia is not just anybody. He's loved by everyone in Vigàta. He's a man who's always ready to give everything he has to help others. If we go after him, all of Vigàta will turn against us. And there's an ill wind blowing these days in Vigàta, thanks to Prefect Bortuzzi. Do we want to add fuel to the fire? We could start by arresting only Traquandi.”

“Seems we're in quite a pickle,” the commissioner said pensively.

He got up, put his hands in his pockets, went up to the window, and basked in the sunlight.

“Let's do this,” he said, turning around. “Tell Puglisi to arrest Traquandi the day after the opera performance in Vigàta. The day after, is that clear?”

“Perfectly,” said Meli. “But, if I may, sir, why the day after? That might be too late. By then the man may have gone to another town and we will have lost track of him.”

“Too late, blockhead? The Vigatese are like rats. Give them a second chance, and they'll make even more mayhem. So, repeat: What did I just say?”

“To arrest Traquandi the day after the opera performance in Vigàta. But not to touch Don Pippino Mazzaglia.”

“Very good. Is there anything else?”

“Yes, Cavaliere. Forgive me for insisting, but why arrest Traquandi three days from now?”

“You haven't understood a blasted thing,” the commissioner cut him off.

At about ten o'clock that same morning, Tano Barreca, a young representative of La Parisienne, a Palermo perfume and cosmetics house, appeared before Salamone the guard.

He came once every fortnight, and had been doing so for the past six months.

“Can I go up? Is the lady at home alone?”

“Go ahead, she's at home.”

“And don't forget: at any sign of danger, whistle.”

“Oh, I'll whistle, don't you worry about that.”

The prearranged whistle from Salamone, for which Signora Pina paid him handsomely, would spare both the commissioner's wife and young Barreca an embarrassing scene, to say the least.

Their biweekly encounter always unfolded in the same manner. Without knocking on the door, Barreca would enter Signora Pina's bedroom, where she lay ready for him in bed, naked, legs spread. Barreca would carelessly drop on her dressing table the perfumes and creams he had brought with him, take off his shoes, socks, jacket, shirt, jersey, and underwear, and, in a single bound, plunge into the tight, firm flesh of the commissioner's wife. They would go the first round, which lasted two minutes, in silence, and in his mind Barreca would devote those minutes to his father, Santo Barreca, arrested some twenty times by people like the husband of Signora Pina, whom he was fucking at that moment. Then he would lie down beside her, breathing heavily and holding his hand over her crack, all the while letting that hand fidget about without respite, and he would count to two hundred, settle back in between the lady's thighs, and go the second round, which lasted three minutes, this time devoting his exploit to his brother Sarino Barreca, who was killed while trying to escape from La Vicaria prison by people like the husband of Signora Pina, whom he was fucking at that moment. Then he would lie down beside her, breathing heavily and holding his hand over her crack, all the while letting that hand fidget without respite, and he would count to three hundred, then settle back in between the lady's thighs, devoting the third coupling to himself, since one day or another he would surely end up being sent to prison by people like the husband of Signora Pina, whom he was fucking at that moment. And the third round was long, unrelenting, and breathless. Then came the moment when Tano would begin to ask respectfully: