Patience of the Spider
Page 20
If anyone should find some reference to real events, I can assure you this was not intentional.
A. C.
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N OT ES
5 he couldn’t bring himself to go see the notary: In Italy a notary (notaio) performs functions of probate and contract law, among other things.
7 The poor man, not knowing how much he’d bled, keptb> on fighting when in fact he was dead: Il pover’uom, che non se n’era accorto,/ andava combattendo ed era morto. Two lines from a tradi-tional Italian song.
16 a triumphant member of the party in power: I.e., the party called Forza Italia, the right-wing political entity created by media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, who was still in power when this book was written.
19 “Go see if it was the traffic police!”: In Italy the jurisdiction of the Vigili Urbani (the “municipal police”), which includes the traffic police, is separate from that of the Commissariato di Pubblico Sicurezza (“Commissariat of Public Safety”), the branch of the police for which Montalbano works. The Carabinieri (the national police), the Guardia di Finanza (here translated as “Customs police”), and the Polizia Stradale (or “road police”) also have separate jurisdictions, which often leads to petty rivalries and bureaucratic confusion.
32 Matre santa!: Holy mother! A Sicilian invocation of the Blessed Virgin.
38 “will be handled by Inspector Minutolo, who, being a Calabrian . . .”—What? Minutolo was from Alì, in Messina province—: Messina is in Sicily, not Calabria. The region of Calabria, across the Strait of Messina from Sicily, is notorious for its kidnappings.
38-39 “that would make him the Po, whereas I would be the Dora, the Riparia or the Baltea . . .”: The Po is a major river in the north of Italy, of which the Dora, Riparia, and Baltea are tributaries.
39 the Valley of the Temples: Probably the finest group of Ancient Greek ruins in Sicily (and there are many), the Valley of the Temples is just outside of Agrigento, the city on which the fictional Montelusa is based.
39 The number you have reached does not exist: The recorded response for nonworking numbers in Italy indeed says “Il numero se-lezionato da lei è inesistente.”
61 cornuto: Italian for “cuckold,” cornuto is a common insult throughout the country, but a special favorite among southerners, Sicilians in particular.
78 the private television station where Nicolò Zito worked: In Italy there are three state-owned television stations, Rai Uno, Rai Due, Rai Tre and their local subsidiaries, and countless private stations.
82 a cacocciola: Sicilian expression used to denote the interrogative gesture, common throughout Italy, where one holds the hand palm-up, fingertips and thumb gathered together and pointing upward, and shakes it lightly. Cacocciola is Sicilian for “artichoke” ( carciofo in Italian).
85 Totò and Peppino: Totò was the stage and screen name of Antonio de Curtis (1898–1967), perhaps the most celebrated comic actor of the twentieth century in Italy. Also a poet and writer of Neapolitan songs, he was born a marquis and later granted a whole series of noble titles, including Count Palatine, Exarch of Ravenna, Duke of Macedonia and Illyria, and Prince of Constantinople. He was known affectionately as the Principe della Risata, or the “Prince of laughter.” Peppino de Filippo (1903–1980) was a Naples-born comic actor of the screen and stage and brother of comic playwright and actor Eduardo de Filippo. He teamed up with Totò in the early 1950s on a series of madcap comic films that became wildly popular.
91 spaghetti all’aglio e olio: That is, with “garlic and oil,” and usually a bit of hot pepper and parsley. Because it’s considered a light dish, spaghetti all’aglio e olio is often served to people who aren’t feeling well.
91 aiole: Aiola is the Sicilian name for a kind of sea-bream ( Pagellus mormyrus or Lithognathus mormyrus) common to Sicilian waters. In Italian it’s called mormora.
99 Madonna biniditta!: Blessed Virgin! (Sicilian dialect).
103 “he’s liable to have us searching all the way to the Aspromonte”: The Aspromonte (literally, “harsh mountain”) is in Calabria, the last stretch of the so-called Calabrian Alps, which are a continuation of the Apennine chain that runs down the Italian penin-sula. Augello’s quip is predicated on the commissioner’s confusion of parts of Sicily with Calabria (see note to page).
114 “that class of shopkeepers who think a thousand lire’s the same as a euro”: To the great dismay of many consumers, when the Italian currency was changed from the lira to the euro in 2002, many shops, restaurants, and other small businesses began charging a whole euro for what had previously cost one thousand lire, which in fact was equivalent to barely more than half a euro. Thus a hotel room that had previously cost 100,000 lire (about $50) now cost 100 euros (about $100, at the time of the conversion), and a plate of pasta that had gone for 12,000 (about $6) suddenly went for 12 euros. By merely moving the decimal point over three places on their prices, many businesses ended up charging their customers twice as much as before.
120 “Operation Clean Hands”: “Clean Hands” is English for Mani Pulite, the name given by journalists to a nationwide judicial and police investigation in the early 1990s that exposed the endemic corruption of the Italian political system as well as the vast web of collusion between certain politicians, business leaders, intelligence organizations, organized crime, and extremist right-wing groups. After a rash of indictments of political and business leaders, and even a few suicides, Mani Pulite ulti-mately led to the demise and dissolution of the Christian Democratic Party, which had governed Italy since the end of the Second World War.
The Italian Socialist and Social Democratic parties were also dissolved before being reconstituted in other political formations. Unfortunately many of the legal reforms institued during Mani Pulite have since been reversed under the rule of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia Party.
123 Then, with the new law, he brought it back in, paid his percentage, and put his affairs in order: Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling party passed a law that allowed money that had been illegally taken out of the country to be repatriated upon payment of a relatively light fine. The law amounted to an amnesty for the sort of corrupt activities that Mani Pulite had attempted to eradicate.
129 It was as if the inspector had spoken to crows: The Sicilian expression parlare con le ciaùle (or ciavule), i.e., “to speak to crows,” means to be privy to information unknown to most people. Ciaùla (or ciavula) can also refer to a very talkative woman.
138 since Peruzzo was a victim of the communist judiciary: In attempting to discredit the many judicial inquiries into his and others’ corrupt business dealings and the conflicts of interest between their private holdings and their public offices, (former) Prime Minister Berlusconi has repeatedly and speciously claimed that the magistrates behind these investigations are motivated not by any desire to enforce the law but by communist ideology and sympathies, which would make them the natural enemies of the free-enterprise system of which Il Cav-aliere presents himself as the champion. Thus any similar investigation into shady financial maneuvers such as Peruzzo’s must have the same motivations behind it.
148 Except that here the odor was denser. [ . . . ] It was, moreover, brownish-yellow in color, with streaks of fiery red.: As seen in many of the prior novels in this series, Montalbano has a synaesthetic sense of smell, whereby he perceives odors as colors.
172 “says he’s the moon”: Luna means “moon” in Italian.
173 “ Pay them no mind, but look and move on, ” as the poet says: Mr. Luna is making the same mistake as many other Italians in attributing this line— “Non ti curar di lor, ma guarda e passa” —to Dante (“the poet”). In fact it is from the Emilio De Marchi transla-tion of La Fontaine’s Fables (in the story of “The Lion, the Monkey, and Two Donkeys”). It must be said, however, that in translating in this fashion the line “mais laissons là ces gens” (which simply means “but let us leave those people there”), De Marchi (1851–1901) was purposely echoing
Dante’s line ( Inferno 3, 1. 51), “Ma non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa” (“Let us talk not of them, but look and move on”).
174 L’Osservatore Romano: The official daily newspaper of the Vatican.
175 Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook: The Junior Woodchucks is a scout organization in the fictional town of Duckburg, the setting for the Donald Duck comic-book and cartoon stories. Donald’s nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie are all Junior Woodchucks, and Scrooge Mc-Duck provides the financial support for the organization. The Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook is the all-important manual that tells them how to proceed in certain difficult situations, such as pulling people out of quicksand, crossing a river full of crocodiles, or using pepper to make dragons sneeze. Only Junior Woodchucks are allowed to use the Guidebook, though an exception is made for Scrooge.
178 a kind of autostrada: The autostrada (like the German autobahn and the French autoroute) is a high-speed superhighway.
178 ninety miles an hour: The Berlusconi government indeed raised the maximum speed on the autostrada to 150 km/hr, roughly 90
mph.
181 Smoking makes you die of cancer: Cigarette packs in Europe have much more dire warnings than their counterparts in the United States, perhaps because Europeans still smoke more than Americans.
186 cavatuna [ . . . ] caponata: Cavatuna are a kind of handmade pasta crushed with a fork or one’s thumb against a grater, so they remain scored on the outside. The crushing makes them concave or hollow on one side, hence the name ( cavato means “hollow” or “carved out”). Caponata is a kind of ratatouille of eggplant, tomato, green pepper, garlic, onion, celery, black olives, vinegar, olive oil, and anchovies. It is sometimes served as a side dish, sometimes as a main course, and here serves as the base for coniglio all’agrodolce.
205 giuggiulena: Sicilian for sesame.
205 Trapanese pesto: Pesto alla trapanese, like its cousin, pesto alla genovese, is a sauce for pasta with ground or finely chopped basil as its foundation. The Trapanese version (from the Sicilian city of Trapani), however, uses finely chopped and toasted blanched almonds instead of pine nuts, as well as several finely chopped, uncooked tomatoes, which are ground into the blend with garlic, olive oil, and black pepper. Finally, after it served on the pasta one adds a sprinkling of toasted bread crumbs in the place of cheese.
231 But I heard, without understanding at first, the sound a phone makes when a receiver on an extension is picked up: In Italy, a phone will give an ever so slight ring when the receiver on an extension is either picked up or hung up.
Notes by Stephen Sartarelli
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