Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions

by Mario Giordano

  Like the ambient temperature, the argument with the janitor quickly grew heated, and the more heated it became the more adamantly the old man stood his ground – quite why remained his own dark secret. He barred admittance to the cemetery like the Spartans defending Thermopylae. It went without saying that my Auntie Poldi could not idly stand by.

  “My good man,” she told the janitor, “there must surely be some sensible way of resolving this issue.”

  The old man stared at her as if he was the nymph Galatea being wooed by Polyphemus the Cyclops, but he may simply have been thrown by her German accent.

  “I’m sorry,” he said testily, “I have to observe the regulations.”

  He tried to turn on his heel, but Poldi simply hung onto him. The mourners had in the meantime formed a circle around him anyway, so escape was almost impossible.

  “Look, signore,” Poldi went on, “I can understand your point of view. I come from Germany, where people would back you a hundred per cent. You’re doing a great job here. No, seriously. Regulations are regulations, after all. The thing is, though, Germany is a cold country. Where burials are concerned, a day or two’s delay doesn’t matter there, whereas here in Sicily the sun beats down on us unmercifully, which is why Frederick II praised the Sicilians for being the inventors of humanitarianism. We in Germany can only dream of that. Look, we’re all hot. I’m hot, you’re hot, Valentino’s poor parents are hot – and Valentino, who’s waiting in his coffin to be laid to rest forever, is also hot. I dread to think what a high old time the putrefactive bacteria are having in his body right now. You don’t really want to cross swords with us. You’re only doing your job and we haven’t paid the full fee. We’re the problem that’s spoiling your well-earned lunch break, and the last thing we want is to keep you from your pranzo, so help us not to be your problem any longer. Do we really want to go on bickering until we fry our brains and the sewage gas in Valentino’s coffin explodes, or do we find a kind, humane, practical solution such as the Germans would envy?”

  Silence reigned for a moment. Everyone stared at Poldi. One or two people nodded, brows were mopped and cries of “Ecco” or “Brava” could be heard.

  The janitor seemed puzzled by Poldi’s rhetoric, but he eventually succumbed once more to whatever had been bugging him that day.

  “No,” he said. “You’ll just have to wait until someone turns up with the missing stamp, and that’s that.”

  This drew cries of indignation from the assembled mourners, but the old man, seemingly unmoved, elbowed the crowd brusquely aside. That was when Poldi blew her top. She hurriedly fished a fifty-euro note out of her handbag and grabbed the janitor’s arm again. “Now listen to me,” she snarled at him in Bavarian, thrusting the money into his hand. “I know exactly what you’re after, you old fox. Here, take this and pipe down, all right?”

  Bavarian and a bribe – it ought to have been a surefire combination, but it completely missed the target. The obdurate janitor uttered a cry of rage, flung the note to the ground, stamped on it and treated Poldi to a tirade in Sicilian. Hurt, offended, insulted, profoundly sullied and humiliated, he eventually turned his back on her and forged a path through the crowd. It was all over. Diplomatic relations were severed for good. Not even mass indignation and threats to storm the cemetery could change his mind. He simply locked the cemetery gate and disappeared into his lodge.

  It was almost noon by now. The sky resembled polished steel; the air above the car park was shimmering. Poldi groaned beneath her veil and waited for the dam to burst – for a revolt to break out and the janitor to be lynched. Instead, the mourners were merely overcome by fatalistic resignation. Valentino’s mother might have been turned to stone, the padre mopped his brow, the last indignant voices fell silent. Perhaps it was simply too hot. The Sicilian midday sun was reducing rage to fatalism. After a brief consultation it was decided to deposit the coffin and wreaths in the shade of a eucalyptus tree beside the cemetery gate and wait for the missing administrative sticker to arrive.

  Poldi sensed that she had gone too far, that she might have made a mess of things. She was about to hurry after the old man when a strong hand caught her by the arm.

  “Leave it, Signora Poldi.”

  Montana seemed to have materialized like magic, once more wearing his creased grey work suit and aviator sunglasses. Poldi was so taken aback by his sudden appearance and so electrified by his touch that she was briefly lost for words.

  “I’ll deal with this.”

  Poldi saw Montana speaking to the old man through the window of the lodge. The janitor kept shaking his head until Montana showed him his ID and asked him something. Then the old man visibly knuckled under and, with a look of bitter resignation, ended by opening the gate. Amid applause from the mourners, Montana spoke briefly to Valentino’s parents and the padre, and Valentino could at last be carried to his final resting place.

  “Like a knight in shining armour,” said Poldi, when she had caught up with Montana in the graveyard.

  He grinned at her and looked around to see if they could be overheard. Then, casually, he said, “We found some money in Valentino’s room.”

  “How much money?”

  “Nearly ten thousand euros. In a plastic bag behind his wardrobe.”

  Poldi stared at him in disbelief. “So you took my theft theory seriously.”

  “I’m thorough, that’s all. His parents say they knew nothing about it. I’m inclined to believe them, because the money certainly wouldn’t have been there any longer if they had.”

  “Ten thousand euros?”

  “Mm.”

  “Maybe Valentino saved it.”

  “That’s one way of putting it. All new, consecutively numbered notes in four batches, none of them containing less than two thousand euros.”

  Poldi resorted to her native tongue. “Well, I’ll be buggered.”

  “Eh?”

  “Hearty congratulations, my dear. And all because I went on at you like that. What do you say?”

  No response.

  She nudged him. “Well, go on, say it – say the magic word. Dai. It’s not hard.”

  Montana sighed resignedly. “Thanks.”

  Poldi beamed. “You owe me one.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “And now you’re going to look around to see if Valentino’s employer turns up for his funeral.”

  “Or the person he owed that money to. Who knows?”

  “Anyone here you suspect?”

  Montana grinned at her again. “Was it true, that business about Frederick II and what he said about the Sicilians?”

  Poldi made a dismissive gesture. “No, but I’m sure dear old Fred would have agreed with me.”

  “So you were lying.”

  “In a good cause. Besides, it wasn’t a lie, strictly speaking, it was oratory.”

  “You lied to a public servant – you tried to bribe him. I could take that personally.”

  “Are you flirting with me, commissario?”

  Montana looked at her through his sunglasses. He wasn’t grinning any more. All at once, his face looked as hard and impenetrable as the midday sky.

  “Don’t do it again, Poldi. And never lie to me. Never.”

  Without waiting for her to reply, he strode off in search of a better view of the mourners. Poldi cursed herself for having interfered.

  Valentino’s last journey ended in a wall containing three tiers of burial niches. In the top row gaped a rectangular aperture which would be sealed with a stone slab as soon as Valentino’s coffin had disappeared into it for good. The few wreaths included one from “Piante Russo” on behalf of the entire workforce. Poldi felt that the whole ceremony passed off far too cursorily and with insufficient solemnity, as though Valentino couldn’t be walled up and forgotten quickly enough. Although she knew this wasn’t the case, the thought suddenly depressed her. Piqued by Montana’s harsh words, she began to weep and gave her tears free rein. She wept for Valentino, who had deserved something
better than such a death and such a funeral. She wept for my Uncle Peppe and all the people in her life who had left her undeservedly and far too soon. And she also wept a little for herself.

  Having recovered her composure and given her nose a good blow, she noticed a tall, red-haired man who hadn’t caught her eye before. He added a small bunch of flowers to the other floral offerings, then hurriedly withdrew and made for the exit. He was sunburnt and wearing dark glasses. Not a Sicilian, Poldi surmised, and in his late forties. She would have liked to take a photograph of him, but felt it would be inappropriate. However, she saw that Montana was following him.

  “Who’s that?” she asked an aunt of Valentino’s, who was standing beside her.

  The woman shook her head. “Never seen him before.”

  Poldi thought for a moment, then followed Montana to the exit. When she emerged into the car park, the commissario was standing beside his car, lighting a cigarette.

  “Who was that?”

  “No idea,” he grunted.

  “Did you get his licence number?”

  Montana shook his head. “He drove off in a taxi.”

  “A taxi?”

  “Believe it or not, we’ve recently got taxis in Sicily. We may even get electric light before long.” Looking irritable, he mashed out his unsmoked cigarette, said a curt goodbye, got into his car and left Poldi standing there.

  “Idiot,” Poldi called after him. Her heart felt as heavy as Etna.

  It didn’t escape the aunts that Poldi was making no progress with the Valentino case and suffering from a recurrence of the blues. Accordingly, Aunt Teresa and Uncle Martino took her mushroom-picking the following Sunday. Their objective: joie de vivre. Their means to that end: beautiful natural surroundings, fresh air, physical exercise, and – of course – mushrooms.

  Aunt Teresa and Uncle Martino went mushroom-picking on Etna nearly every weekend and were normally accompanied by their ground-floor neighbours the Terranovas, with whom they were linked not only by thirty years’ acquaintanceship but also by fierce competition for the biggest and finest mushrooms.

  According to Uncle Martino, nowhere in the world afforded a wider variety of edible mushrooms – or bigger ones, of course – than the infinitely fertile volcanic soil on the slopes of the Mongibello, or Etna, and the mushrooms stored in Aunt Teresa’s chest freezer suggested that he was right. It was said that the Satan’s mushroom, which is regarded as extremely poisonous elsewhere in the world, became excellent fare when grown in that soil. I never tried one, nor did my Auntie Poldi, because she didn’t like eating mushrooms anyway, far less picking them. Poldi wasn’t keen on the great outdoors in general, being more of an urbanite. The most she had ever done was drive out of Munich to bathe and sunbathe with Uncle Peppe beside the Staffelsee, which is as warm as the Mediterranean. Truth to tell, though, even in that sadly remote and closed chapter of her life she preferred to sit in a lakeside beer garden rather than lie on a towel on the sand.

  She had nevertheless allowed herself to be talked into the excursion, especially as Montana still hadn’t called and her depression was growing worse with each passing day like a grain of sand in an oyster shell. Except that the oyster shell was her heart and the pearl a build-up of memories, self-pity and melancholy.

  Aunt Teresa knew this, and she also knew how to dislodge that kind of grain of sand. The mushrooms were merely tasty supernumeraries in a miniseries about the magic of life, and Aunt Teresa and Uncle Martino enacted it every day and weekend of their lives.

  Like any private undertaking in Sicily, the playlet began with a delay of two hours or more. Sicilians can be as punctual as Prussians in the professional sphere, but personal arrangements are subject to an elastic expansion of the concept of time. It is as if those hours must be sacrificed to a demanding god who measures his subjects’ lifetime by the extent to which they waste the lifetimes of others. Besides, every sensible Sicilian allows a margin of at least two hours where private assignations are concerned, but Poldi still hadn’t reached that stage.

  She sat waiting from eight that morning onwards as arranged, fragrantly scented, carefully attired and alcohol-free – not counting a little revivifying prosecchino. Since she was venturing out into the wilds, she wore a khaki linen ensemble in the colonial style: voluminous trousers, leopardskin top and a matching jacket with a uniform collar and ubiquitous pockets, colour-coordinated strappy sandals and, by way of a feminine highlight, a big bunch of colourful ethnic-look necklaces. She was a white Masai, a kind of Bavarian Tania Blixen: she was ready for mushroom-picking.

  By the time Martino and Teresa finally appeared at eleven, however, she was not only sick of the idea of mushroom-picking but had also calmed her nerves with two bottles of beer. Aunt Teresa spotted this at once.

  “I thought you weren’t drinking any more?”

  It was a reproach, not a question.

  “And I thought you were picking me up at eight,” Poldi countered defiantly. “What was the problem this time?”

  Teresa sighed. “He was fetching the newspaper.”

  “For three hours?”

  “Then he took the dog for a walk.”

  “But we’re just about to take it for a walk.”

  “Then he couldn’t find his reading glasses.”

  “You mean one of the hundred and twenty pairs scattered all over your house?”

  “And then he had to take Marco to the airport.”

  Poldi was beginning to understand. “And on the way back I suppose he dropped in at the fish market and bought some swordfish.”

  “Figs,” sighed Teresa. “There’s no fish market on Sundays.”

  “My, that’s lucky.”

  Martino had parked the Fiat at the end of the Via Baronessa. There Poldi saw herself confronted by the day’s next challenge: Totti, a good-natured mutt named after AS Roma’s legendary international footballer. A typical mongrel of the sort that roams slums and favelas all over the world, dozes beside dusty farm tracks and explores rubbish in backyards, Totti was yellow with a black muzzle, huge ears, huge paws and a heart of gold. He was cheerfully lounging on the back seat behind my uncle, but when he sighted Poldi he went mad with delight, barking and bouncing around the car in a frenzy.

  “You can sit in front,” said Aunt Teresa.

  But Poldi couldn’t bring herself to do that when a living creature was evincing such joy at her arrival on the scene. Submissively, she squeezed into the back beside Totti and allowed herself to be licked and rampaged around on until the dog calmed down and sat on her lap, exhausted by so much jubilation.

  During the drive, Poldi kept seeing dilapidated houses in the midst of the countryside.

  “Who do they all belong to?” she asked.

  “The Bourbons,” Uncle Martino told her, “or the pathetic relics of the Bourbon nobility. But don’t be deceived; they still pull the strings behind the scenes, even though most of them have barely enough money to maintain their splendid mansions and country houses.”

  Poldi already knew this. Thinking of Valérie, she suddenly wondered if she might have been a little too trusting towards her new friend.

  Meanwhile, Uncle Martino had the bit between his teeth and was recounting what Poldi had also known for ages: that whole gangs specialized in breaking into the usually derelict buildings and stripping out and selling valuable mosaics and frescoes, tiled floors and sculptures, so that sundry dentists, nightclub owners and German expatriates could install them in their tasteless seaside villas. Uncle Martino liked to talk himself into a rage about his topic numero uno, the contention that Sicily was going to rack and ruin, whether or not his listeners were familiar with the subject. Aunt Teresa eventually told Martino to shut up, and that he was giving her palpitations, whereupon – in conformity with the immutable scenario that had governed their forty-plus years of marriage – he retorted that he refused to be silenced, either by her or by corrupt politicians or the CIA or by Totti, who had joined in the debate and was ba
rking furiously. Thereafter Martino launched straight into his topic numero due: the Mafia involvements of premiers Andreotti, Craxi, Berlusconi and Co. He continued in that vein until exhaustion reduced everyone to silence, which he broke with a contented “Amore.”

  And all was well.

  Poldi surreptitiously swallowed two aspirin, stared out of the window and strove to ignore brother-in-law, sister-in-law and dog. A thought had flitted past her like a shooting star traversing the night sky; it had flared up and died, leaving only a fine striation on her memory. She suddenly realized that she had overlooked something, possibly something important, but she couldn’t with the best will in the world recall what it was. She fished out her notebook and searched for some pointer hidden among the entries. But nothing. Nothing save the faint skid mark of a brief flash of inspiration that might never recur. This disturbed Poldi beyond measure – so much so that all she wanted to do was go home and concentrate.

  But she could forget about that for the moment, because they had by now reached the target area for mushroom-picking.

  Picking mushrooms on Etna is not hard, because one’s only competitors are the Terranovas and a local peasant or two. The few Sicilians who feel tempted to venture into the oak woods on Etna find it sufficient to park in the shade somewhere beside the road, have a picnic, and leave the place strewn with litter. They never walk more than ten yards into the trees. Nor does my Uncle Martino. Why should he, when he has the car?

  As usual, he simply turned off the road at some point and drove straight through the trees until the Fiat came to rest. Then they all got out. My Auntie Poldi, my Aunt Teresa, my uncle and Totti emerged into the cool, shady hush of the ancient oak trees, stretched their limbs, breathed deeply, and said “Ah” and “Che bello” the way one does when entering an old and almost pristine place. The oaks were widely spaced, their crowns well exposed to the sky, like a tribe of ancient beings convoked by a voice with something important to announce.