The Brewer of Preston_A Novel

by Andrea Camilleri

  I cited this work not for personal reasons, of course, but because I considered the opera, in its fanciful lightness, its simplicity of word and music, appropriate for the Sicilians’—and more specifically, the Vigatese’s—undeveloped appreciation of the more sublime manifestations of art. It was, I say, a simple, cordial suggestion on my part, but the marchese, a good patriot and noted exponent of the governing party, happened to interpret it, mistakenly, as an order—an order which I, in truth, had neither the power nor the intention to give. Upon learning that the suggestion came from me, a few members of the Administrative Council, Freemasons and Mazzinians in league with Freemasons and Mazzinians in Vigàta, fiercely and prejudicially opposed it, spreading in bad faith the rumor that the idea was not a simple suggestion on my part but a precise order. The Marchese Antonino Pio di Condò, offended by vile accusations that he was a man always ready to bow down to authority, irrevocably resigned. Commendator Massimo Però, a man of sound judgment and good sense, was then elected to replace him. It was at this time that Professor Artidoro Ragona, a member of the council, took it upon himself to recommend the same opera, having meanwhile had the opportunity to appreciate it during a recent sojourn in Naples. This occurred, I am keen to point out, without any intervention whatsoever on my part. And yet, this fact, too, became the subject of malicious gossip, according to which the relationship between Commendator Però’s recommendation and the victory of his son, Dr. Achille Però, in the recent competition for the office of first secretary of the prefecture of Montelusa was hardly coincidental. I must likewise at this point declare firmly that neither was the well-deserved success of the worthy young Achille Però in any way owing to the good offices of one Mr. Emanuele Ferraguto, as some have spitefully insinuated. Mr. Ferraguto, a man of lofty sentiment, of highly civic disposition and generous mind, is . . .

  To His Excillince the Perfict Bortuzzi

  Montelusa

  Dear Perfict,

  Your a grate big sonofabich. Why don you go becka to Florince? Your not a perfict but a big fat stinkin turd enn a jeckass. Tree peple died coz a you inna fire inna teater. Your the biggest crook of all. You got no conshinz.

  a citizin

  To His Ixcillincy Bortuzzi Prephict of Montelusa

  Stop breaking the balls of the Vigatese. The opra you want isna gonna play. Fuhgettabouttit, iss better fuh you.

  The People of Vigàta.

  My children, dear parishioners in the Lord,

  Like the wound of Jesus nailed to the Cross, the wound in my side is losing more bile than blood these days, believe me. An atheistic, blasphemous municipal council has had a theatre built in this upstanding, industrious town and will open it tomorrow with the performance of an opera. Do not go to see it, beloved sons and daughters! For the very instant you set foot inside that building, your souls shall be lost for all eternity! But perhaps you don’t believe what your old parish priest is telling you; surely you think I am joking or have turned senile. And perhaps it’s true that my mind is not what it used to be; but, then, I am not speaking now in my own words, but in the words of people whose minds are far greater than mine and all of yours put together. Thus I say to you, and I repeat: the theatre is the devil’s house of preference! Saint Augustine—who nevertheless was someone who had led a bad, wicked life, who went to brothels and coupled with foul, plague-ridden women and used to get drunk as a monkey—Saint Augustine, I say, tells us that once upon a time in Carthage, which is a city near here, over in Africa, he entered a theatre and saw a performance of naked men and women doing lewd things, and when he went home afterwards, he couldn’t fall asleep all night, so afflicted was he by what he had seen!

  And I would also like to tell you another story, a story told by Tertullian, who is hardly chickenshit but a very great mind. Tertullian tells that once, a devout woman, a respected mother of a family, got it in her head that she had to go to the theatre at all costs. Neither her husband, nor brother, nor mother, nor children could talk her out of it. And so the stubborn woman saw the performance, but when she came out, she was not the same. She cursed, she mouthed obscenities, she wanted every man she passed to mount her right there on the street. Thus her husband and sons brought her back home by force and quickly called a priest. The priest sprinkled the woman with holy water and commanded the devil to come out. And do you know what the devil said?

  He said: “You, priest, get your hands off my things! I took this woman for myself, because she went into my house, which is the theatre, of her own accord!”

  And when the woman died, her soul was damned, because the holy priest could do nothing for her. Do you, my dear parishioners, want to be taken by the devil? Do you want to damn your souls? The theatre is the house of the devil! It is the place of the devil! And that place deserves the same fire that God unleashed upon Sodom and Gomorrah! Fire! Fire!

  Right Reverend Canon

  G. Verga—Mother Church—Vigàta

  Yesterday I went to church and heard your sermon against the theatre. And a question came to mind: the woman you have kept at the rectory and in your bed for twenty years and with whom you even had a son by the name of Giugiuzzo, aged fifteen, what category of whore does she belong to? Is she a woman of the theatre, a woman of Sodom, a woman of Gomorrah, or a simple slut?

  Sincerely,

  A parishioner who believes in God’s things

  . . . 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 build
ings giving onto the Corso had been defaced with the following words, written repeatedly:

  THE PREFUCKT DON’T KNOW WHEN TO QUIT

  LET’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?

  Oh, what a beautiful day!

  “Oh, 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 w
asn’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.”