“The old bottling plant, you mean?”
Poldi sighed. “I was talking figuratively.”
“The bar?”
“Cento punti,” she exclaimed, and took another swig of her drink.
Poldi had long been a familiar figure in the Bar-Gelateria Cocuzza, of course, because that was where she partook every afternoon of a mulberry granita with cream top and bottom and a brioche on the side. Fragrantly, in a white caftan and gold gladiator sandals plus dramatic eyeliner and plenty of rouge, she used to sail into the bar like a cruise liner visiting a provincial marina – always around five, when the houses opened up after a long, sweltering afternoon and the whole town set off on its passeggiata. Since there were no shop windows to graze on, the promenaders would take a brief stroll along the esplanade before veering off towards the air-conditioned paradise of the bar like comets that have ventured too close to the sun.
No wonder, for wafting out of the bar’s two ventilators from morning to night – except on Tuesdays – came a wonderful polar breeze laden with the promise of vanilla, almond milk, coffee and aromatic substances calculated to arouse ecstasy in anyone not made of stone. Outside in the square the Sicilian summer afternoon shimmered like a mirage, but the interior was dominated by the arctic hum of the ventilators and air conditioning, which dried off your sweaty armpits and made you forget the August heat for the duration of a gelato. Eight varieties of ices were displayed in creamy, glistening mounds alongside fresh cream cakes filled with wild strawberries, almond pastries, cornetti, brioches, and marzipan fruit. Scenting the air at the far end of the counter were golden arancini, pizzette and tramezzini, and slumbering behind it, hidden deep beneath aluminium lids, were granitas and bottles of ice-cold almond milk – guarantees, in short, of a kindly god’s existence.
However, this impression was dispelled as soon as you entered the bar and looked into the face of Signora Cocuzza, who sat behind her till with an expression of such sadness, it almost wrung your heart. How old was she? Nobody knew for sure. Fifty? Sixty? A hundred? She might have been a ghost. Frail and thin, she exuded a faint odour of mothballs and eternity. All Poldi had managed to discover was that her husband had died ten years earlier. By contrast, her two grown-up sons looked the picture of health, their August lethargy notwithstanding, as they lounged behind the bar with their plucked eyebrows, upper-arm tribal tattoos, delinquent buzz cuts and football strips.
Signora Cocuzza never smiled, and seldom spoke. She merely operated the cash register, handed you a voucher, contorted her face into a kind of rictus, and then went on staring into space as if every transaction cost her another vital spark. This couldn’t fail to arouse Poldi’s curiosity, which was why she patronized the bar for more than just its delicious granitas. She had spotted right away that Signora Cocuzza must once have been a very beautiful woman, but she could also tell that the decrepit creature was profoundly miserable – for, as I have already said, Poldi knew a thing or two about mental anguish.
“Forgive me, signora, but have you seen or heard of Valentino in the last few days?”
The question seemed to percolate through Signora Cocuzza’s consciousness very slowly. She was still holding out the voucher for Poldi’s granita.
“You know who I mean,” Poldi persisted, taking her voucher. “Valentino Candela. The boy simply vanished into thin air three days ago. He may have turned up here in the meantime. Not that I’m worried.”
Signora Cocuzza almost imperceptibly shook her head as if that alone cost her a superhuman effort.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
And relapsed into silence. Loath to press her further, Poldi started to take her voucher over to the counter. But Signora Cocuzza wasn’t finished yet.
“Donna Poldina…”
It was almost unintelligible – just a wisp of a voice. Surprised by this unexpected personal invocation, Poldi promptly returned to the till. She saw the sad signora take a ballpoint from the pocket of her apron – effortfully, as though it weighed a ton – and scribble something on a slip of paper. An address in Acireale.
“His parents,” whispered Signora Cocuzza, handing it over.
Poldi thought for a moment. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask how Signora Cocuzza knew the address, but she left it at that for the time being. She merely thanked the woman, handed back the voucher, and changed her order.
*
An afternoon in August, as already mentioned. This meant, first, that it was hot, and, secondly, that Poldi wasn’t really sober. Nevertheless, she gallantly piloted her Alfa to Acireale with, on the passenger seat, a kilo of gelato in a polystyrene tub prettily wrapped in floral paper and adorned with a bow. Acireale wasn’t far – practically round the corner – but the winding, narrow Provinciale, enclosed on either side by high old walls of volcanic stone, proved a sore trial to Poldi in her condition. She had to keep swerving to avoid the lemon transporters that came thundering towards her. Just before Santa Tecla a lorry laden with mature palm and olive trees shot out of the gates of a big market garden. Poldi just managed to slam on her brakes in time. The lorry driver tooted her furiously, turned out onto the road and roared off. Poldi pulled up on the verge for a moment, breathing heavily, and stared at the big gateway with the neon sign beside it. It read:
PIANTE RUSSO
Damn nearly squashed by a load of palm trees, she thought, shaking her head. Some mess that would have been.
Although she didn’t know her way around Acireale, Poldi found the address on the outskirts in double-quick time. She always found her way around wherever she was, from Jakarta to Lima, because she had an infallible trick: she kept asking directions. Regardless of the horns blaring behind her, she would pull up every hundred yards and question the first person she saw. This procedure was proof against misinformation from practical jokers, and Poldi always wound up at her destination with the precision of a satnav.
Maria and Angelo Candela were both under fifty but looked older. Unemployed for the last four years, they lived on social security and the little money Valentino brought home. Their small apartment smelt of cigarettes, onions and despair, but Poldi was quick to notice the flat-screen TV. Valentino’s parents didn’t even look surprised when she turned up on their doorstep so unexpectedly.
“Valentino has told us a lot about you, Donna Poldina,” said Maria, hurriedly spooning the gelato into three sundae glasses. “I feel like we already know you quite well.”
“Where is Valentino now?”
The Candelas exchanged a worried glance that wasn’t lost on Poldi.
“We don’t know,” Angelo said in a low voice. “We haven’t heard from him for three days.”
“Does he often do this sort of thing?”
The Candelas shook their heads and spooned up their ice cream before it melted completely. Or, thought Poldi, to avoid having to reply.
“And you’ve absolutely no idea where he might be?”
Heads were shaken again and spoons tinkled against sundae glasses. Poldi didn’t believe them. Meditatively, she licked her spoon. The chocolate and pistachio ice creams had run into each other; they tasted sweet and bitter and salty. Like tears and unfulfilled hopes, she thought. All at once, too, as usual in this country.
“Please don’t misunderstand me,” she said, mustering her best Italian. “I don’t mean to interfere in your private affairs, but I can see you’re worried. I’m worried too. Because… well, he may be in trouble.”
They both winced at the word “trouble”. Something deep inside Maria seemed to break adrift. It came bubbling up to the surface in the form of an anguished sigh.
“It was when I heard that sigh, if not before,” Poldi told me later, “that I knew Valentino was really up the creek in some way. I’m an expert on trouble and sighs like that, that’s why. Red alert, know what I mean? I guessed his parents had already given him up for lost, and that they wouldn’t tell me anything more. Omertà and so on. That was when this idea popped into my he
ad: that I had to find him – Valentino, I mean – and find him in a hurry. And that was the only reason why I pinched that little bit of mosaic.”
Poldi resolutely laid her spoon aside and looked Maria in the eye. “Might I see his room?”
“Many thanks for the ice cream, Signora Poldi,” Angelo said formally, “but it would be better if you left now.”
Maria glanced sharply at him and rose to her feet. “But first, of course you can see the boy’s room.”
Valentino’s room resembled that of any young man who still lives at home. An unmade bed, clothes scattered around, an ancient laptop hooked up to a game console, Ferrari posters and pin-ups on the walls. The place smelt of mothballs and weed. A magnificent cannabis plant was thriving in a pot on the window ledge.
While Poldi was looking around keenly, Maria lingered in the doorway as if afraid of disturbing the spirits that inhabited the room.
“That’s a variety of cannabis you can’t smoke,” she said. “He only keeps it for decoration, because it’s so pretty.”
Poldi kept her thoughts to herself. On a chest of drawers she spotted some German textbooks, some Japanese mangas, and a row of colourful little tesserae that glittered in the sunlight – bright shards of ceramic glazed on one side, none bigger than a fingertip. Lying at the outermost edge of these was a yellow crystal of the kind one can sometimes be lucky enough to find on Etna. Pretty to look at, it was a rhomboid prism about an inch across and growing on a porous stone. Poldi picked it up, and when she replaced it her fingers smelt faintly of sulphur. She took a picture of the little ensemble with her mobile phone, and whoops, before she knew it she’d surreptitiously snaffled one of the glazed shards. Unacceptable behaviour, but she’d acted on impulse – genetically programmed, as she put it to me. The thing is, there’s something else one should know about my Auntie Poldi: her father had been a detective chief inspector in Augsburg. Homicide. Georg Oberreiter solved the Nölden case, as one or two people may recall, and even though Poldi had spent her life trying to slough off her parents, her parental home and her claustrophobic suburban background like a cat shaking water off its fur, it has to be conceded that blood is thicker than water, Oberreiter blood included. Poldi was simply preprogrammed.
Maria accompanied her to the door. “Thanks again for the ice cream. If we hear anything from Valentino I’ll call you at once.”
“Perhaps you’ll pay me a visit sometime – then we could have a little chat. I’d like that.”
Maria shook her head and sighed again as only a mother can sigh who knows her child is beyond help.
“He used to work for Russo sometimes,” she whispered. “At the vivaio, you know?”
Poldi remembered the lorryload of palm trees that had missed her by a whisker. Piante Russo.
“You mean the big tree nursery beside the Provinciale?”
Maria nodded. “Yes, near Femminamorta.”
Femminamorta…
That triggered another vague memory. Diminutive and already half eroded by oblivion, it whirled around the convolutions of Poldi’s brain and then, silent as a snowflake, drifted down to join her images of the last day Valentino was with her. Images of a nervous Valentino who was toting a half-full sack of cement up the stairs to the roof to patch a leak there. A somewhat dejected Valentino, she now recalled, who smoked too much, activated a brand-new mobile with a TIM card, and spoke of having to go somewhere that evening. Somewhere by the name of Femminamorta.
“Could you tell me where it is?”
Femminamorta wasn’t easy to find, for it was neither a town nor a restaurant, so not signposted, but merely the unofficial name of an estate bordering the Provinciale and right next door to the Russo nursery. Since the lava stone wall beside the road obscured any view of the properties beyond it, and since there was no signpost and Poldi saw no one she could ask, she had to drive back and forth several times before she finally spotted the narrow entrance. From there an almost impassable farm track skirted the nursery’s stone wall for several hundred yards. Beyond it sprinkler systems hummed and diggers roared as they transported mature palm trees to and fro.
Guided by Maria’s description, Poldi sent the Alfa labouring over hundreds of potholes to an old archway wreathed in bougainvillea and flanked by two columns. Enthroned on one of them sat a sullen-looking lion guardant with a coat of arms featuring lilies in its paws. The lion on the other side was missing.
Beyond the archway lay a miniature paradise.
Femminamorta.
A somewhat dilapidated Sicilian country house from the eighteenth century, built of tuff and limewashed pink, almost entirely swathed in bougainvillea and jasmine and set in the midst of a subtropical garden thick with palm trees, oleander bushes, hibiscus, and avocado, apricot and lemon trees. And, not far away in the background, with its flanks outspread like the wings of a dark guardian angel: Etna.
Not a soul to be seen. All the shutters were closed, but one upstairs window beside a sun-bleached sundial was open.
Poldi parked the Alfa and made her presence known.
“Permesso?”
No answer.
Louder, then. “PERMESSO?… Hello?”
Still nothing.
Fair enough, thought Poldi. She went for a brief stroll through the enchanted garden. The wind rustled softly in the palm trees, house and garden were bathed in scintillating sunlight. There was nothing else to be seen or heard, as if the place needed to be roused from its slumbers. By a laugh, perhaps, because Poldi had realized at once that this was a good place – that the ice here was thick enough.
Some washing was hanging up behind the house. Poldi was about to call again when she was attacked, out of the blue, by a very angry, very large gander. Hissing, with wings extended, it darted out from under the washing on the line and menaced Poldi, who, in default of a walking stick, held the bird at bay with a barrage of Bavarian invective.
“Piss off, you miserable creature. If you think I’m scared of your antics, think again. Get lost, or I’ll turn your liver into foie gras.”
Hisses on the gander’s part, curses from my aunt. Attack, retreat, more hissing, more cussing.
“Mon Dieu. Who’s there?” a woman’s voice called from overhead in French-accented Italian.
“Moi,” Poldi called back.
The gander instantly calmed down.
A slim young woman had appeared on the balcony. Palefaced, jeans, threadbare roll-neck sweater with the sleeves rolled up, sunglasses, her short, dark hair tousled as if she’d just got out of bed.
“Every chain-smoking French film director’s dream,” Poldi told me later. “If you know what I mean. A total cliché – the quintessence of a nervous, incredibly capricious, unbearably lonely, ultra-sexy, Sartre-reading Gallic beauty.”
“I get it,” I said. “She wouldn’t suit me, you mean.”
“My, aren’t you sensitive.”
“Did you really say ‘Moi’?”
“Yes, of course. I pegged the accent spontaneously. I didn’t have to think twice.”
“Ah, vous êtes française?” the girl called down delightedly.
“No,” Poldi called out in Italian, one eye on the now pacified gander. “But don’t tell your macho goose.”
The girl laughed and came downstairs. The gander withdrew to its lookout post.
“Mon Dieu, he is intimidating, isn’t he? I suspect he even charges the dogs protection money.” She spoke fluent Italian, but with a really strong French accent. Having eyed Poldi for a moment, she laughed again as if that brief inspection had proved thoroughly satisfactory, and extended her hand. “Valérie Raisi di Belfiore. Call me Valérie.”
“Isolde Oberreiter. Poldi for short.”
“What was that funny language you were speaking just now?”
“Bavarian.”
“Ah, you’re German.”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
“I’d never have known it from your Italian. But, mon Dieu, I
’m the last person to judge. I’ve lived here since I was twenty, but everyone keeps telling me, ‘Don’t worry, signorina, another few months and your Italian will improve a lot.’” The girl laughed again – something she did almost as often as she said “mon Dieu”. Impulsively, like an old friend, she took Poldi by the arm.
“But why are we standing around out here? Would you like a coffee? Then you can tell me what friendly tide has washed you up on these shores.”
Valérie led Poldi into the house, which was cool and shadowy and redolent of dust, books, mothballs and the luxuriant sprigs of jasmine she had distributed around the interior in numerous vases. Time seemed suddenly to slow as if compelled to find its way through scented oil. A dog barked somewhere, but that was all that could be heard of the outside world. The interior of the pink house, too, seemed timeless, abraded by the centuries but in almost pristine condition. The floor was tiled with pale terracotta and black basalt. Here and there, colourful mosaics glowed beneath the worn carpets. The ceilings displayed shimmering floral ornamentation, pallid nymphs and their attendant fauns cavorting through tropical scenery, peacocks fanning out their tails, cranes soaring over misty landscapes, and patches of mildew. Huge krakens, dolphins and glittering goatfish cruised a mythical ocean populated by water sprites and sirens, and a lustful Cyclops leered down at my speechless aunt from behind the slopes of Etna.
“Well, tickle my arse with a feather,” Poldi exclaimed in German. And, in Italian, “This house is sheer magic.”
Delightedly, Valérie laid the espresso jug aside and showed Poldi a guest room that had once been the family chapel. Although plaster was flaking off the vaulted ceiling, luminous frescoes depicting the Garden of Eden and the expulsion of Adam and Eve could still be seen between the mould patches.
“Last year I had a dowser to stay,” said Valérie. “A German who said he’d never detected such a charge of positive energy anywhere else.”
Hanging throughout the house were gloomy old portraits of the former residents of Femminamorta. Melancholy youths, old men with spiteful eyes, and powdered belles encased in corsets and silken gowns.
Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions Page 3