Ontreto

by Peter Crawley

  Ric is soaked through, but finds the rain curiously comforting; it is warm, it holds no menace.

  He is up past the Piazzetta when he hears someone shout after him.

  “Hey, Gallese, wait for a moment.”

  Ric turns. It is Sandro.

  The escurzionista hurries after him, grabs him by the arm and leads him into the narrow vico Tindaris, where they are sheltered from the rain.

  “I thought you weren’t talking to me, Sandro.”

  “Talking, my friend? No, I am talking to you. Why should I not be talking to you? We are friends, eh?”

  “Sure, Sandro. If we are friends, what can I do for you?”

  “For me?” He wipes the excess of rain from his curly hair and peers up at Ric. “I know you always think I want something from you, Gallese, but this time it is what I can do for you.”

  “Surprise me.”

  Sandro looks about, nervously. “I am told that this policeman, Commissario Talaia, has been to visit you at your house again. I ask you the other day if it is true and you did not answer me straight. Now I am told he did.”

  Ric does not need to reply.

  “This is not good, my friend. When policemen like this take an interest in you, the people round here will not look kindly on you. I want to tell you to be careful. There are many who think you are helping the police; this makes you a very unattractive person.”

  Ric smiles, “I think I know what you mean by this, Sandro, but I don’t think it’s got anything to do with my looks.”

  Sandro frowns.

  Ric puts a fatherly arm around the sloping shoulders of his harbinger of doom. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve already come to the conclusion that whatever I do I’m going to upset someone. Doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it. But, thanks for the warning. I’ll keep my eyes peeled and my ears pinned back,” he says, thinking of what Talaia has just said about the citadel having eyes and ears.

  Sandro is offended and the furrows on his forehead deepen. “This is not funny my friend. Why do you always have to make a joke of what I tell you? What I say, you know it is for your own good. If you know better, then–”

  “No, I don’t know better,” Ric interrupts, adopting a more serious tone and expression. “Listen Sandro, I am very grateful to you for your concern; really I am. If you’ve got any suggestions as to how I’m supposed to get out of the mess I’m in, then I’d like to hear them.”

  “Er, no. I don’t think I can be of any use to you…”

  “What? In case you end up with the same Saint Antony I’m being touted for?”

  “Saint Antony? What is this?”

  “Oh, never mind. What I mean is I appreciate you putting yourself at risk to warn me. Thank you.”

  Sandro smiles a shade sheepishly. “Okay! You are welcome. You know, I like you, Gallese. I would hate for you to have any trouble. Why don’t we go back to your place and play Scopa.” He digs in his pocket, “See, I have my cards.”

  “Nice idea, Sandro, but I need to pay La Strega a visit before the evening closes in.”

  “La Strega? But today is Wednesday,” Sandro says, dismayed. “She will be at the ‘ospital in Messina.”

  “Saturday today, I think you’ll find.”

  “Oh, yes, I have my days wrong. It is always difficult to tell which day it is when it is raining.”

  “Tell me, Sandro, Valeria doesn’t like people to know about her going to the hospital, how is it that you know?”

  “Oh, my friend Angelo. With the taxi. He picks her up from Milazzo and takes her to Messina. Crazy thing this: when she goes in to the hospital, she looks like she is about to die and when she comes out she looks like she will live forever. Must be some magic, eh?”

  “Must be,” Ric agrees.

  “You sure you don’t want play Scopa? I teach you.”

  “No thanks, Sandro. As I said, I appreciate the offer, but another time.”

  “Okay, okay. Another time, yes, perhaps. Ciao, Gallese. Be careful, eh? Don’t go looking for any trouble. Ciao.”

  “As if I need to look for it,” Ric mutters. He stands and watches Sandro dodge the puddles as he scurries back down the Corso Vittorio.

  The wind rushes as Ric hesitates at the entrance to the vicos which lead him back to the monolocale. He knows he ought to change, but figures he’ll be just as wet by the time he reaches La Casa dei Sconosciuti, whatever he’s wearing.

  61

  As he treads carefully down the slippery path to the cottage, the wind surrenders its spite. The sea, however, remains in full voice, blowing dense breakers onto the rocks below and dragging the seabed beneath it as it breathes in, readying for its next assault.

  It takes Valeria a while to get to the door and when she pulls it back, she shades her face with her hand.

  Valeria lets him stand, dripping in the rain for a few seconds before opening the door wider and stepping back to allow him in. “I am not at my best, Ric, and I was not expecting visitors so late in the evening. You will have to excuse my appearance.”

  “Only if you’ll excuse mine,” he replies.

  When she turns round to face him, Valeria drops her hand away from her face. Her complexion is mottled with brown and white patches, and the skin around her eyes is so lacking in pigment that it assumes the pale hue of the alabaster walls of the mausolea in the cemetery.

  “Yes,” she says, “this is how a woman looks when youth deserts her.”

  Ric is embarrassed. He has walked in on the movie star pre-makeup and searches for a response that will alleviate her awkwardness. Sadly, nothing appropriate comes to his rescue.

  “There’s a bottle of Amaro Averna on the sideboard, Ric. Be a good fellow and pour us both a good measure. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He pours two generous measures and sits at the kitchen table. His thoughts are punctuated by the thump of the waves as they crash against the stone wall outside.

  Valeria comes out of the bathroom. Her headband gone and hair brushed back, she works hand cream into her long, elegant fingers as she sits down opposite him. She has concealed the flesh around her eyes behind large, oval sunglasses.

  “So, to what or to whom do I owe your presence, Ric? Please don’t think I am not pleased to see you, but a woman of my age likes a little warning so she can at least soften some of the lines time has sought to engrave in her countenance.”

  “I apologise for arriving unannounced and uninvited. I thought that I would stop by and see if you were alright. That’s a pretty unpleasant storm.”

  Her eyes flash a brief defiance. “Thank you, Ric. I am grateful for your attention, but I can assure you the storms of April are far less forgiving. This gale will blow through before midnight.” She raises her glass, “To your good health,” she says.

  “And yours,” he replies. The chestnut brown liqueur is sweet and yet bitter with herbs.

  “I like a glass before bed; it is a digestive and helps me sleep. But tell me, how has your day been, Ric? Touched though I am that you have come to enquire after my health, I think there may be other reasons which have brought you to my door on such a rainy evening. Have you found out any more about your relation, Antonio Sciacchitano?”

  “Some,” he replies a little enigmatically.

  “How exciting, Ric!” Valeria smiles and leans forward in anticipation. “Tell me, please. On such a dull day as this, good news is always welcome.”

  Ric tightens his mouth and wonders, “Trouble is, I’m not sure whether this kind of news will be welcome. Somebody said something the other day about letting sleeping dogs lie. You know the saying.”

  “Of course, but unless they are dead, all sleeping dogs wake eventually. So, what have you found out? What extravagant tale has Old Nino come up with this time?”

  “I asked him if he could remember any more about the night his father smuggled your mother and Antonio Sciacchitano to Baarìa, and he did. He remembered that the girl’s name was Katarina Maggiore and that she was
running away because she was pregnant. He also recalled his mother telling him that Vincenzo Maggiore had betrayed the three deportees to the Fascists, because one of them had been having an affair with Katarina. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he remembered who it was Katarina Maggiore had been seeing.”

  The smile falls from her lips and is replaced by a thin crease of abject indifference.

  Whatever reaction he had expected from her, whether eager expectation or nervous dread, Ric is confused. Then Old Nino’s voice leaps into his head: “For what is Valeria, if she is not an actress.”

  “Christ, Valeria, you’ve known all along.”

  But Valeria maintains her indifference, as though waiting for the director to shout “Cut”. She reaches for her pack of long white cigarettes, passes Ric her lighter, and waits.

  He reaches over and lights her cigarette, holding her gaze as he does so, “That’s why you don’t want me to tell Marcello. You don’t want him to know you’re cousins, because if he did, he’d know how much of a grudge you have to bear against the Maggiore family.”

  Again, her expression holds firm.

  “Unless of course Marcello knows as well and the two of you want to keep Massimo Farinelli’s skeleton permanently locked away in the Maggiore closet? What is this, some kind of code of silence you’ve been sworn to; a kind of filial Omertà about a wrong that can never be righted because it’s already written in stone up in the cemetery; an episode in the family scrap book made all the more unpalatable because your grandfather was responsible for your father’s murder?”

  He is inclined to shout to ram home the weight of his disbelief, but he speaks as softly as the wind and the crashing of the waves permit.

  “Is that why you live out here in this haunted old house? Are you waiting for your father’s ghost to walk out of the water and forgive the Maggiore family, your family, its sins?”

  When Valeria doesn’t respond to his gentle taunt, Ric sits back. He isn’t sure whether she is leading him on with her silence or whether her silence is meant to suggest she thinks him impertinent for poking his nose into her affairs.

  “There’s something I’m missing here, isn’t there Valeria; something I’m not seeing?”

  Still, nothing; she simply sits and smokes and sips her drink.

  Ric studies the swirling grain in the surface of the wooden kitchen table: “It’s got to have something to do with Girolamo Candela, hasn’t it? Somehow he’s tied up in this thing with you and Marcello. But how? I don’t see the connection.”

  At last, Valeria leans forward to tap the ash from her cigarette. “There is nothing more to see, Ric. As we say, what you cannot see does not concern you.”

  “Concern me?” he replies, as though she’s just prodded him with a skewer. And now Ric feels it is time to release all the uncertainty and frustration which has built up in him over of the past few days. He knows Valeria is fragile and may not withstand the rage of his pent-up emotion, but he cannot hold it back any longer.

  “Right at this moment, Valeria, what I cannot see concerns me a hell of a lot,” he growls. “I’ve got a policeman threatening to lock me up because he’s got a body in his morgue which he thinks I put there. He’s got a gun which he believes to be mine, because it’s got my fingerprint on it. And, the only people who I can be sure know I didn’t shoot Girolamo Candela are Marcello and whoever shot him.

  “Now, either Marcello lifted the gun from my boat or your chum Salvo did. I get the feeling it doesn’t much matter which of them did it, because they seem to be playing for the same team. That is,” Ric pauses and wonders if he isn’t about to make an even bigger fool out of himself, “unless you stole it, Valeria.”

  He waits.

  She watches.

  Perhaps it is the actress without her makeup, the mottled skin around her grey eyes, or the way her thin, scrawny arms project from her voluminous towelling robe. Perhaps, he thinks, it is both: but she looks to him small and vulnerable and, peculiarly for a woman in her eighties, so strangely childlike. Yet, however hard he tries to provoke her, he cannot seem to draw a response from her. Valeria is like a beautiful oyster, closed tight-shut to defend her pearl. And Ric knows that if he cannot prise it from her, he is lost.

  Ric wonders what kind of illness she has that her trips to the hospital can rejuvenate her so. “What type of blood cancer do you have, Valeria?”

  She drags on her cigarette and lowers her eyes. “Does it matter?”

  “Sometimes,” he replies.

  She smiles a brief, hopeless smile. “The curious part of it is that it is not the dying I am frightened of; it is more the invasion of my body that troubles me.

  “You see, Ric, I have always believed that a person is free to do with their body as they please. When I was young, there were times when I used my body in an infelicitous way; let us say to achieve my own ends. However, in later years, when one’s body is no longer such… such a marketable asset, one is prone to rely on it for more basic functions, such as walking or talking. But this illness? It is like sharing your heart with a stranger who you do not love and who you cannot be rid of. This illness has reminded me of everything I hate in this world.”

  For the want of any more comforting reply, Ric says, “I’m sorry to hear that, Valeria.”

  “Don’t be,” she replies, her tone hardening. “I have no need of your sympathy and neither do I want it.”

  He is tempted to ask what she does want, but–

  “When the doctors told me I have not long to live, my reaction was probably very typical. At first, I refused to believe this could be happening to me. For a few months I even denied the possibility that it could be happening to me. This illness is surely something that happens to other people, not me. Later, when I realised the affect it was having on my body – my tiredness, my loss of weight, other things – I grew angry at the world for all the wrongs it has done me. And it was at that time I began to wonder, to hope, that if I made some of these wrongs right, then perhaps God would release me from this curse.

  “Of course, he would not; I knew this. But the idea that I could make something right for those who were no longer capable of doing so: this idea was irresistible.”

  “You mean your father, Massimo Farinelli?”

  “Yes, among others,” she replies, dreaming. “But in many ways what happened to my father he brought upon himself. Vincenzo Maggiore’s reaction to finding out his daughter – my mother – was pregnant was, given the period, understandable. I can hate him for it, like I can hate Marcello for being his grandson; for being a Maggiore. And yet, I am a Maggiore too, so to hate Marcello would mean I would have to hate a part of myself also. In this, there would have been only more confusion.”

  “Forgive me for interrupting, Valeria, but does Marcello know about Massimo Farinelli being your father and about Vincenzo’s part in his death?”

  She quiets for a moment before replying, “I don’t know, Ric. Can any truth be found in a rumour that was started so many years ago? Can one know for sure that Vincenzo Maggiore betrayed my father and his companions to the Fascisti? Any one of a number of people could have betrayed them; and for so many different reasons: the snitches, the informers, they were everywhere. People were starving; they had little to hope for and the Carabinieri were not averse to beating confessions out of suspects when they believed they had information that would be of use. To lay the blame for this betrayal at the door of a man who believed fervently in the Resistenza, is to disrespect him. Few would have been brave enough to question his integrity. Who knows? This rumour was probably started by the Fascisti to undermine his position in the community.”

  She thinks for a minute in silence; a silence Ric is not inclined to intrude.

  “My mother told me this story in the days before she died. She also told me that the Maggiore family were una famiglia di integrità – a family of integrity, integerrimo if you like, like the inscription on Antonio Sciacchitano’s grave. My mother wanted to b
elieve her father would never have betrayed Farinelli and the others, but she could not. However, she told me she ran away because she did not want to bring shame on the house of Maggiore. She told me it was her duty as a daughter to run away like this.

  “She carried the knowledge of this secret throughout her life; it weighed heavily in her heart and I sometimes wonder if it was the effort of bearing it that led her to an early grave. On her deathbed, she made me swear never to tell anyone about this.

  “As to whether Marcello knows, I am not sure. We are very similar and find ourselves drawn together. He recognises this in the same way I do. Probably, it is why he looks after me. Marcello and I have talked about our attraction for each other, but I have never told him the truth. Sometimes it is better to let the sleeping dog lie.”

  “So where does Girolamo Candela come into this equation?” Ric asks, hoping that now that she has started talking, she will continue.

  “Candela? Oh yes, Girolamo Candela.”

  “Only I heard he started out in Bagheria, or Baarìa as Old Nino still calls it.”

  “Who told you this? Nino would not have known this.”

  “No, he didn’t. I heard it from one of the escurzionisti down in the Corta. He told me the Commissario, Talaia, was investigating a number of politicians, Candela being one of them. He said Candela had started out in Bagheria before moving on to Palermo.”

  “It is true,” she says, lighting another cigarette, “I knew him when he was a young activist in the local communist party. I did not think he was like the others. He had principles and ideals. He had charisma and a burning desire to rescue the common people from the privations their poverty inflicted upon them.” As she talks, Valeria grows increasingly animated, her eyes begin to glow with a hot energy and she sits up straighter, demanding his full attention.

  To cool the ardour of her political fires, Ric interrupts, “I gather Candela courted the intellectual crowd. Someone told me that was where the funds for his campaigning came from.”