August Heat
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Page 32 — (1 don't want the media finding out — heaven forbid that this should turn into another Vermicino' — Montalbano is alluding to the harrowing three-day ordeal of Alfredino Rampi, a six-year-old boy who fell into an artesian well only ten inches wide and ninety yards deep in the township of Vermicino near Rome in June 1981. The event was covered non-stop for eighteen hours by the three national RAI television stations and ended in tragedy. After two failed attempts at rescue in which Alfredino fell further down into the well, he was found dead at the third attempt, probably from injuries sustained in his repeated falls.
page 40 — this government has granted amnesty after amnesty' — the fire chief is alluding to certain policies of the government of media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, which granted amnesty on a variety of fiscal and other violations, including those of tax dodgers who parked vast sums of money in financial havens abroad and those of builders who had ravaged much of the landscape, especially in the south of Italy, with illegal constructions in violation of zoning codes.
Page 41 — ... said Gallo in perfect Italian — the reader should bear in mind that much of the dialogue in this and other of Camilleri's books, and some of the narrative, is in Sicilian dialect or a blend of Sicilian and Italian. In this particular context the use of Italian serves to alert the peasant to the fact that he is dealing with figures of authority, namely the police.
page 85 — Don't you pay for protection?' — that is, Mafia 'protection'. In the original, Camilleri uses the word pizzo (which literally means 'point' or 'tip'), the Sicilian term used for the pay-off required of businesses operating on Mafia turf. There is perhaps a little irony in the author's also calling the district in which the illegally built house is situated Pizzo, which in this case refers no doubt to the promontory or 'point' on which it stands.
page 106 — the period of co-operation between all the different commissariats regardless of territorial boundaries' — in the Italian police bureaucracy the administrative term for a police department the size of that under Montalbano's direct authority is commissariato, and the various commissariati fall under the authority of the questura, here represented by the commissioner's office in Montelusa. Normally the chain of command and jurisdiction is determined territorially, but during the period alluded to by Fazio, the commissariati of different jurisdictions were supposed to 'cooperate', leading, Italian-style, to a great deal of confusion.
page 113 — Ah, servile Italy ... a brothel! — Purgatorio 77, 6; my translation.
page 113 — Italy was still servile ... thanks to a helmsman whom she would have been better off without — The 'helmsman' being, of course, Silvio Berlusconi.
page 116 — Lupus in fabula — Latin: literally, 'a wolf in the story'; the figurative meaning is the same as 'speak of the devil'.
page 123 — 'But tomorrow is the fifteenth of August!' — 15 August is Ferragosto, the biggest holiday of the summer.
page 136 — 'Better sunstroke than looking like somebody going to the Pontida meetings' — Montalbano is referring to the politicians of the secessionist extreme-right Lega Nord (Northern League), who stage their political summits at Pontida in northern Italy and are fond of wearing baseball caps.
page 236 — ‘Vocumpra?' — a common refrain recited by foreign street pedlars in Italy, usually of North African or sub-Saharan origin. The word is a corruption of the phrases Vuoi comprare or Vuole comprare, which mean, 'Do you want to buy?'
page 171 — ... a quatrain by Pessoa: Fernando Pessoa (1888—1935) was Portugal's greatest modern poet.
page 194 — ... he was behaving like the soldier who doesn't want to go to war — a reference to the Sicilian expression fari u fissu pri nun iri a la guerra, which means to feign ignorance to avoid doing something unpleasant. Literally, the phrase means 'to pretend to be stupid to avoid going to war'.
page 211 — 'Maybe we ought to use little folded-up pieces of paper, like Provenzano' — Montalbano is referring to the famous pizzini of Bernardo Provenzano, the Mafia 'boss of bosses' arrested in 2006 after forty-three years on the run. Provenzano used these little folded-up messages to communicate his orders to the various agents of his crime network. In an 21 April 2006 op-ed in the New York Times, written on the occasion of Provenzano's arrest, Camilleri stated:
The authorities said that Mr Provenzano would transmit his orders — regarding such matters as who should be rewarded with government contracts, whom one should vote for in local and national elections, how one should act on specific occasions — by means of pizzini, little scraps of paper folded several times over, which his trusty couriers (mostly peasants with spotless records) would pass from hand to hand along lengthy, circuitous and seemingly random routes. These were necessary precautions to reduce, as much as possible, the risk of interception. One pizzino, for example, took more than forty-eight hours to travel the mile between the boss's cottage and Corleone. Others could take weeks to reach a nearby destination. The telephone was out of the question. In every pizzino, there was always a mention of God and his will and protection [...]
In 2007 Camilleri published a book on Provenzano's pizzini entided Voi non sapete ('You don't know') in which he explains, in the form of a dictionary, some sixty of the Sicilian words most frequently used by the crime boss. The book's title refers to Provenzano's statement to the authorities upon arrest, in which he was alluding to the Mafia war that he thought would break out after his removal from power. All proceeds from the book go to a charitable organization founded to help victims of Mafia violence.
Notes by Stephen Sartarelli
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