Malavita

by Tonino Benacquista

  Warren had almost shouted. What on earth had made him talk about the exploits of Luciano himself, his greatest idol after Capone? How many times had Quintiliani exhorted them to avoid sensitive subjects, whatever the circumstances? They had been expressly forbidden to mention the Mafia, or its American affiliate that originated in Sicily, the Cosa Nostra. Just for the sake of showing off in class, Warren had probably condemned his family to take to the road again only a month after their arrival.

  “I gather your father’s a writer, and he’s come to Cholong to work on a book about the Second World War? Did he tell you all this?”

  The boy grabbed the lifeline that was being held out; his father had saved his bacon. A father who didn’t know a single date, not those of the Second World War any more than his children’s birthdays, a father who would be incapable of drawing a map of Sicily, or even of being able to say why Luciano was called Lucky. But his status as a self-proclaimed author had pulled his son out of an awkward moment.

  “He tells me some things, but I don’t remember it all.”

  “What became of Luciano after that?”

  Warren realized that there was no escape.

  “He started the great heroin pipeline that still pours into the United States.”

  *

  At the beginning of the afternoon Maggie began gathering her strength to embark on preparations for the barbecue to which Fred had invited the whole neighbourhood. What better way to get to know them, eh, Maggie? To blend in, get accepted? She was forced to agree – going out to meet the neighbours would spare them a lot of mistrust and create a good atmosphere. But all the same she was suspicious that what her husband really wanted was to live out his new fantasy in public – the fantasy of being a writer.

  “Maggie!” He yelled again from the end of the veranda. “Are you making me that tea, yes or no?”

  With his elbows resting on either side of his Brother 900, his chin on his crossed fingers, Fred was pondering the mysteries of the semicolon. He knew about the period and the comma, but the semicolon? How could a sentence both come to an end and carry on at the same time? It was creating a blockage in his mind, this idea of an end that could continue, or an interrupted continuity, or the opposite, or something between the two, who knew? Was there anything in life that corresponded to this idea? Blind fear of death mingling with metaphysical hope? What else? A good cup of tea would have helped him to think. Against all probability, Maggie had decided to humour his demand, but only because she wanted to sneak a look at the pages that he had been covering all day. On the whole Fred’s crazes never lasted long and usually vanished as fast as they had appeared; this performance he was enacting to himself was different. Fred decided to try out a semicolon.

  To see an enemy croak is much more agreeable than making a new friend; who needs new friends?

  On reflection, he found the semicolon so unclear, so ambiguous, that he tried to remove the comma with his Tipp-Ex, without touching the period.

  Then he heard Maggie’s terrible scream.

  He got up, knocking his chair over, and tore into the kitchen, where he found his wife standing, horrified, with the kettle in her hand, staring at a thick gush of water from the tap – a brown and muddy liquid, which spread a graveyard stink into the basin.

  *

  At five o’clock exactly, Maggie completed her list of salads and accompaniments for the barbecue. She only had the coleslaw left to do, and the tureen of ziti, without which no barbecue in Newark was worthy of the name. She stopped for a moment, feeling guilty, looked at her watch, and then glanced over towards the house at number 9, directly opposite theirs. An immobile figure stood silhouetted behind the first-floor window like a papier mâché trompe l’œil. She grabbed an aluminium container and filled it with marinated peppers, put a couple of balls of mozzarella in another, and the whole lot into a basket, along with a bottle of red wine, a country loaf, some paper napkins and some knives and forks. She left the house, crossed the road, made a discreet sign to the figure in the window, and went in by the garden entrance. The uninhabited ground floor smelt disused, not having been properly aired by the three new tenants who had moved in at the same time as the Blakes. There was a bedroom for each of them on the first floor, a bathroom with a shower cabinet, a useful laundry room with washer and dryer, and a very large sitting room, which was the centre of operations.

  “You must be hungry, boys,” she said.

  Lieutenants Richard Di Cicco and Vincent Caputo welcomed her with grateful smiles. Neatly dressed in grey suits and blue shirts, they hadn’t spoken a single word for the last two hours. The living room, which was entirely given over to the surveillance of the Blake house, was equipped with a listening table, two pairs of 80/20 binoculars set on tripods, a separate telephone for communication with the United States, and several parabolic microphones of varying strength. There were also two armchairs, a camp bed and a trunk with a locked bolt, which contained a machine gun, a telescopic rifle and two hand guns. Richard, woken up by Maggie’s arrival, had been sipping cold tea all afternoon, not thinking about anything, apart from his fiancée, who would now, given the time difference, just be arriving at her airfreight control office at Seattle airport. Vincent, on the other hand, had numbed his fingertips playing his video game. And yes, if it encouraged their visitor, yes, of course, they were hungry.

  “What goodies have you got in that basket, Maggie?”

  She pulled open the container with the peppers, which was on her knees. The boys were suddenly silent, overcome by foolish emotion. The smell of the garlic-laden olive oil on the peppers took them straight back to their native land. Maggie’s gesture reminded them of their mothers. Di Cicco and Caputo clung on to such moments in order not to feel entirely orphaned by having accepted this overseas mission. For the last five years, they had had three weeks’ rest and recuperation every two months, and the further they were from the next leave, the more miserable was the expression of homesickness in their faces. Di Cicco and Caputo had committed no crime, had done nothing to deserve such an exile and so little prospect of going home for good. To Maggie they were victims rather than spies snooping on her daily life, and she felt it was her duty to nurture them in the way that only a woman could.

  “Marinated peppers just the way you like them, with plenty of garlic.”

  Maggie took care of them as though they were her nearest and dearest, which in a sense they quite literally were; they were never more than thirty steps from the front door, and took it in shifts to watch over them at night. They knew the Blake family better than the Blake family knew themselves. One Blake could have secrets from another Blake, but not from Di Cicco and Caputo, and least of all from Quintiliani, their boss.

  They shared the food out and ate in silence.

  “Did Quintiliani tell you about the barbecue later?”

  “Yes, he liked the idea – he may come by at the end of the evening.”

  Unlike his agents, Quintiliani was constantly on the move. He went to and fro to Paris, made regular visits to Quantico, the headquarters of the FBI, and sometimes a quick trip to Sicily to coordinate anti-Mafia operations. The Blakes knew nothing about his movements – he would just appear and disappear at moments when they least expected it.

  “We should have had a barbecue in Cagnes, got all those nosy people together and got rid of them once and for all,” said Di Cicco.

  “Try and come too,” Maggie said. “I’ve made ziti and Fred’s in charge of the steaks and salsiccia.”

  “You’ll have a lot of people, the whole neighbourhood knows about it.”

  “There’ll always be enough for you two – you can count on me.”

  “Is it still the same olive oil? Can you get it here?” Vincent asked, mopping up the pepper juices.

  “I’ve still got a tin from the little Italian in Antibes.”

  There was a short silence at the
thought of the shop, La Rotonda, in the old town.

  “If anyone had ever told me that one day I’d end up in a country where they eat cream,” said Richard.

  “It’s not that it’s not good, I’ve got nothing against it, but my stomach isn’t used to it,” his colleague added.

  “In the restaurant yesterday they put it in the soup, then on the escalope and finally on the apple tart.”

  “Not to mention the butter.”

  “The butter! Mannaggia la miseria!” Vincent exclaimed.

  “Butter’s not natural, Maggie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The human body wasn’t made to absorb such fatty substances. Just thinking of that stuff on my stomach lining makes me sweat.”

  “Try the mozzarella instead of talking rubbish.”

  Vincent helped himself, but continued on his theme.

  “Butter impregnates the tissues, it blocks everything, it hardens, it forms a sediment, it turns your arteries into hockey sticks. Olive oil only touches on your insides and slides through, just leaving its scent.”

  “Olive oil is in the Bible.”

  “Don’t worry,” Maggie said. “I’ll go on taking care of you with my home cooking. We’ll hold the line against butter and cream.”

  Following a little ritual established two or three years earlier, Maggie broached the subject of the neighbours. For security reasons, the FBI had the records of almost all the residents of the Rue des Favorites and surrounding streets. Maggie couldn’t resist asking questions about one or two of them – she was curious about the lives of the people she passed in the street every day; she wanted to get to know them without having to associate with them. Was it just the curiosity of a busybody? The fact was that no other busybody in the world had such technical expertise at her disposal.

  “What’s the family at number 12 like?” She asked, pointing a pair of binoculars towards their house.

  “The mother’s a kleptomaniac,” Di Cicco said. “She’s not allowed into the shopping mall at Evreux. The father’s having his third bypass. Nothing much to say about the children, except the little one’s going to have to repeat his year.”

  “Life has been hard for them,” she said, with a little sadness in her tone.

  Fred, who was in the cellar looking through the window onto the street, could guess at the scene taking place opposite. It drove him mad, seeing his wife being so civil to those two dung beetles, and even feeding them. Despite all these years living alongside one another, those two would never be on the same side as him, and for as long as he lived he would make sure they were reminded of it, and keep them at a good distance.

  “Tell them to get fucked, Maggie . . .”

  Malavita, lying amongst her pillows, seemed to be wondering why her master was making such a racket in the basement. Fred was holding an adjustable spanner and experiencing one of those moments when a man finds his virility being put to the test. He had the preoccupied, pouting expression of someone obliged to peer into the engine of a car, or pretending to understand what he is looking at as he gazes at a fuse box. He was poking around the pipes and the water meter, trying to find some explanation to give his wife about the foul water that had been gushing into the kitchen sink. Like many others before him, he had hoped to solve the problem on his own, and thereby perform a small domestic miracle that would earn him the respect of his family. In the same way as one might kick a tyre, he banged the spanner against the pipe, scratched off a bit of rust, and tried to make some sense out of the spaghetti of pipes disappearing into the moss-covered stonework. He considered cooking as an activity to be a lot less degrading than DIY, even though he had spent a lot of time in hardware shops for other reasons – in the past he had found drills, saws and hammers a great deal more useful for destructive rather than constructive purposes. He returned to the kitchen, where Maggie was back at work, spoke the words he had dreaded having to say (“Have we got a number for a plumber?”), and then helped himself to a plate of peppers, which he took away with him to eat on his veranda.

  As soon as the children got back from school, Maggie gave them jobs to do: the younger one chopped vegetables, and the older one took charge of the garden, the table setting and general decoration. She was expecting more than thirty people, which was about a third of the number of regular guests at the barbecues in the old days in Newark – one a month, from April to September, and nobody would dream of missing them. On the contrary, there, new faces kept turning up – people who saw an opportunity of getting their foot in the door.

  “What do Normans put on their barbecues?” Warren asked.

  “I’d say lamb chops,” his mother replied. “With potato, radish and fromage blanc salad on the side.”

  “My favourite!” Belle said, as she passed through the kitchen.

  “If you tried giving them that, it would be a disaster,” said Warren. “We have to give them the sort of American barbecue they expect.”

  “What’s that?”

  “American swill. Big fat American swill. We mustn’t disappoint them.”

  “That sounds delicious, my son. Makes me really want to try it.”

  “What they want is pornographic food.”

  Maggie stopped dead with her cheese grating and, unable to think of a comeback, forbade him to use that word.

  “Mom,” Belle said, “your son isn’t using the word pornographic in the sense that you think.”

  “The French are fed up with refinement and healthy eating,” Warren continued, “that’s all they ever hear about. Steaming, boiled vegetables, grilled fish, fizzy water. We’re going to free them from guilt, Mom, we’re going to give them fat and sugar – that’s what they expect from us. They’re going to come and eat here as if they were going to a brothel.”

  “Watch your language, boy! You wouldn’t dare talk like that in front of your father.”

  “Dad agrees with me. I caught him playing the stupid American in Cagnes, and people were begging for more, he made them feel so clever.”

  Maggie listened to her son holding forth as she continued to put the final touches to her Tex-Mex potato salad, toss the Caesar salad and drain the ziti before dropping them into the tomato sauce. Warren fished one out and tasted it, still boiling hot, from the giant transparent plastic salad bowl.

  “The pasta is perfect, Mom, but it’s going to betray us.”

  “? . . .”

  “They’ll realize that we were Italians before we became American.”

  Fred rolled into the kitchen with an air of abstraction. Warren and Maggie stopped talking. With the same gesture as his son, he picked at the pasta, chewed it carefully, nodded at his wife and asked her where the meat was that he was supposed to be cooking later. Not having chosen it himself, he half-heartedly inspected the merchandise, weighed up a few steaks and examined the mince. The fact was, he had left his study in order to give himself a little time to reflect on a passage he was finding particularly difficult.

  The word I hate most in the world is “sorry.” Anyone thinks I’m sorry, I shoot them on sight. The day I took the oath and shopped everyone, all those lawyers and judges would like to have seen me bow my head and beg for forgiveness. They’re worse than priests, those little judges. Me, regret anything about my life? If it was all to do again, I’d do everything – EVERYTHING – the same, just avoiding a couple of traps at the end. Apparently, for the French, regretting is when the painter repaints his canvas. Well, let’s say that’s what I’ve done, I’ve covered a masterpiece with a new layer and that’s all the regretting I’m going to do. A guy who regrets his life – he’s worse than an immigrant who doesn’t feel any more at home in his new country than in the one he’s left behind. Me, I’ll never be at home again with my brother criminals, and honest folk won’t make space for me anywhere. Believe me, regrets are worse than anything.

  Fr
ed was getting in a muddle with his definition of regrets. He could see how clumsily he was expressing himself, but was unable to change anything. The parallel with his life was all too clear.

  “I’ll start the grill about six,” he said. “I’ve got to finish my chapter.”

  He went solemnly back to his veranda, which, tonight, would not be open to the public.

  “His chapter? What does he mean, exactly?” asked Warren.

  “No idea,” Maggie replied, “but just for the sake of the survival of the human race, it might be better if no one ever found out.”

  *

  Three hours later, the whole neighbourhood was crammed into the garden – no one would have missed it for anything. They came prepared to stay up late, taking advantage of the unseasonable warm weather, perfect for a garden party. And they had made sartorial efforts too, the women in white or brightly coloured summer dresses, the men opting for linen and short-sleeved shirts. The buffet was laid out at the end of the garden, loaded with salads and different sauces, with two little casks of red and white wine at each end. A few yards away, people gathered around the still-cold barbecue, impatient to see it lit. Maggie welcomed her guests with open arms, pointed them towards a pile of plates, answered all the expected questions with prepared answers, and expressed her great happiness to be living in this Normandy which had been so dear to the memory of her parents. She showed them round the house, introduced each new arrival to her two children, whose job it was to divide the guests between them and entertain them as much as possible. She accepted all invitations, including the suggestion that she join an association to protest against a local building threat. She took down a great many telephone numbers. How could they possibly have guessed that soon their private lives would have no secrets for Maggie?

  Belle attracted more attention than her brother. Belle always attracted attention – from men and women, young and old, even from those who were suspicious of beauty, who had perhaps suffered from it at some time. She was good at reversing the roles, and playing at being the guest, allowing herself to be served, answering questions. All Belle had to do was be herself, and imagine that she was addressing her public. Warren, on the other hand, cornered by a small group of adults, was undergoing a grilling. Ever since he had arrived in France, he had been asked a million questions about American life and American culture, to such an extent that he had made a list of the most frequently asked: What’s a home run? What’s a quarterback? Do people really grill marshmallows over a flame? Do all the sinks have grinders? What does trick or treat mean? etc. Some of the questions were surprising, some not, and, according to his mood, he would either deny the clichés or reinforce them. That evening, against expectation, nobody asked him to play this role – on the contrary, he found himself obliged to listen to the interminable stories of those who had been over there. Starting with a neighbour who had just come back from a visit to New York for the marathon.