They were lying together in Poldi’s bed in her darkened bedroom. Friday night. The air conditioning was scooping out fug and injecting cool air. Etna growled in the distance, palm trees rustled under a shower of ash, and somewhere across the street a quiz show presenter’s hysterical voice rang out, mingled with canned laughter and applause, as if a studio audience were following and commenting on every erotic climax, every sigh, every whispered word that was uttered in No. 29 Via Baronessa.
Poldi stopped winding Montana’s chest hair round her finger, pulled the bedclothes over her bosom and sat up. “What exactly are you implying, Vito?”
Montana said nothing, just rolled over and, with great deliberation, lit a cigarette.
Feeling exhausted and mellow after her eruptions of passion and the confluence of two volcanic streams of mature libido, Poldi eyed Montana’s hirsute back and wondered if it wouldn’t be better to squelch this conversation, which seemed to be taking an unwelcome turn, by applying some gentle massage. However, she was not only curious but spoiling for a fight.
“Well?”
“You’re sticking your neck out again,” Montana growled. “You’re only asking for a heap of trouble.”
“You mean you don’t see the bigger picture? The conspiracy?”
Montana dragged at his cigarette before replying. “What conspiracy? Look around you. You’re popular with everyone.”
Poldi looked at him searchingly. “Everyone?”
“I mean, why not enjoy it? You solved a murder. With my help, of course. That always gives one a kick, I know, but then one falls into a trough.”
“A trough? What on earth are you talking about, Vito?”
“Don’t get me wrong, Poldi, I know the feeling. One wants to keep going, one wants the next kick right away.”
Contentedly, Poldi turned over on her back. “Maybe I’ll set up a little detective agency. Everyone keeps sounding me out about it. Agenzia Investigativa Oberreiter, how does that sound?”
Montana stubbed out the cigarette he’d only just lit in Poldi’s heavy glass ashtray, looking as if something had spoiled the taste of tobacco, and gazed at her. “There won’t be another murder case, Poldi. There won’t be another case of any kind. Face facts. You aren’t the police and you know it, so your subconscious is trying to fabricate a murder.”
“Oh, is that what it’s doing?”
“And you’d better drop it.”
“So you think I’ve lost touch with reality? That I’m cracked? That I scent conspiracies everywhere?”
Montana clicked his tongue and gave a slight jerk of the head, the elemental Sicilian equivalent of an offhand negative or a less offhand “Nonsense, that’s not what I meant.” He reached for her under the bedclothes. “You’re a person with a lot of imagination, Poldi, that’s all.”
He was right, but he definitely hadn’t struck the right note.
Poldi thrust aside that nice, warm, beloved hand and sat up straight in bed, giving vent to a barrage of Bairisch.
“Couldn’t you please speak Italian, Poldi? I don’t understand why you’re being so touchy.”
With an indignant snort, Poldi quit her satin-draped pleasure island. Naked and perspiring, sans make-up and wig but utterly unashamed, or so I imagine, she confronted him like a living Stone Age Venus of Willendorf.
“I’m not being touchy, I just think you should leave.”
A positively Hanseatic display of serene self-control.
“Oh, come on, Poldi, you know what I—”
Before he could complete the sentence, his shirt and suit came flying through the air towards him.
“Right now, what’s more. You may take that tone with that Alessia woman of yours, but not with me.”
Although rather mean of Poldi, this was emotionally quite understandable. Whether calm or stormy, every relationship, even the longest and most enlightened, brings with it a sediment composed of unspoken expectations, minor wounds, petty fears and unanswered questions. All is well as long as the flow remains unobstructed, but if the sediment forms a sandbank, it divides the river, creates dangerous eddies and, if worse comes to worst, causes a total blockage. Alessia was the sandbank in the river of Poldi’s love for Vito Montana. She was Montana’s girlfriend. Twenty-five years younger, Alessia was beautiful and clever and temperamental and a hundred other things Poldi worried about whenever she was once more contending on her own with depression and the urge to get blind drunk. Alessia was Montana’s convenient emergency exit, but Poldi remained tolerant. I often wondered why she didn’t simply go mad with jealousy.
Although quick to take offence, being a Sicilian, Montana sportingly accepted his dismissal. Text messages—irate, conciliatory, wounded, mollifying, irritated, obscene, affectionate—surged back and forth a little later and over the next few days like tides lapping the opposite shores of a stormy ocean, and on the following Friday the couple wound up back in the sack like two teenagers.
Things could have gone on like this forever, if . . . yes, if life were not a state of constant flux and we weren’t powerless against it. Sooner or later every spring loses its resilience and goes limp; sooner or later the air escapes from every balloon and someone needs to blow it up again; sooner or later the wheel of fortune turns, and Montana and Poldi were not exempt from this process. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So Montana and Poldi fell on each other like animals when the following Friday came. Everything went smoothly. The conflagration of lust was followed by a short breather. Montana smoked a cigarette, Poldi fed him with morsels of mortadella. They shared a beer, and she pumped him about his current case. It was only natural, given that Poldi was making no progress with the Lady case, that she should want at least to dip her finger in the honeypot of an ongoing murder inquiry, if only for her inner equilibrium’s sake. And Montana, being no fool either, appreciated this. Besides, he was happy to be able to circumnavigate certain sandbanks—certain awkward questions affecting their relationship—in this way.
“I’m not really allowed to talk about it.”
Poldi nodded gravely. “Of course not.” She gave him a look. “Madonna, come off it. Tell me!”
A female district attorney from Catania had been found dead in her second home in Acireale. Hit on the head from behind with a full bottle of wine. Poldi was instantly galvanised. Wine and murder—right up her street.
“Got any photos?”
Montana hesitated. “It isn’t a pretty sight.”
“Look at me, Vito. Do I look as if anything could upset me now?”
He sighed. “Not here. Not in bed.”
Poldi liked it that Montana respected the dead and wasn’t a cynic, even though he liked to act the part.
They quickly pulled on some clothes. Montana spread out crime scene photos on the kitchen table and fetched himself a beer. Poldi braced herself for a moment, then looked.
The first photo of the crime scene showed the district attorney’s body lying in a pool of congealed blood and red wine and littered with shattered glass. Her name was Elisa Puglisi, unmarried. No husband, no ex-husband, no children. Both parents already dead. A forty-something spinster who had obviously put her career before all else. The cleaning woman hadn’t found her until the day after she was murdered.
“But she was quite a dish!” Poldi said when Montana showed her a photo of Elisa from happier days.
A slim woman with a pale, thin face, she was looking straight at the camera, and everything about her—the slightly aggressive posture, the blue trouser suit, the way she held her briefcase, the compressed lips—conveyed determination and disapproval. Everything, that is, except the wealth of dark, untamed curls that overflowed Elisa Puglisi’s shoulders.
Poldi turned the photo this way and that beneath the kitchen’s overhead light as if this would enable her to see through Elisa’s mask and gain some idea of her backstory wound.
“Because mark my words,” she told me once, “a detective must always work out what
the murder victim is trying to tell them. You, of course, will object that the dead can’t talk, but you’d be wrong, they can say a great deal. You just have to ask them the right questions. Like, ‘What made you a murder victim?’”
“Are you telling me that, fundamentally, murder victims are always guilty of their own deaths?”
“Nonsense, it’s always the murderer who’s guilty, but a lot of things may have happened before a murder takes place. What did the victim say or do or fail to do that caused someone to go and kill them? The backstory, know what I mean? You always have to know that.”
But the severe-looking woman in the photo did not divulge her secret. There were no witnesses—no one had heard or seen a thing. The perpetrator had continued to batter Elisa Puglisi from behind until the bottle broke, but by then she was dead.
“Wine bottles are robust, you know,” Poldi told me in a professional tone. “It’s not like in the movies, where they smash at once and the cowboy shakes his head and all’s well. Forget that. In real life, the second blow usually desecrates a corpse.”
Forensics had discovered neither fingerprints nor traces of DNA on the bottle, and no clues were present on the body or in the apartment.
“A pro,” Montana surmised.
Poldi knitted her brow and reshuffled the crime scene photos on the table. “What professional killer kills with a wine bottle?”
“Perhaps it was meant to look like a personal matter.”
Poldi was unconvinced, especially as she sensed Montana’s own doubts.
“She’d had sex a few hours prior to death,” he said.
“Who with?”
“We’re working on that.”
Poldi thought for a moment. “A district attorney, eh? They easily make enemies. Have you examined her cases?”
“We’re doing so.”
“Can’t you be a bit more specific?”
Montana sighed. “I shouldn’t tell you this, Poldi.”
She looked at him. “But?”
He drained his beer before replying. “Elisa Puglisi headed the DDA of Catania Province.”
“The what?”
“The Direzione Distrettuale Antimafia, the anti-Mafia public prosecution department.”
“There you are, then!” Poldi said delightedly. “The whole thing’s as clear as daylight.”
“Nothing’s clear until it’s clarified,” Montana growled. “We’re pursuing a number of lines of inquiry, but it’s quite possible that I’ll soon have the case taken out of my hands by some smart lads from the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia in Rome.”
“What a bummer!”
“You can say that again.”
“You need my help, Vito.”
“Forget it, Poldi.”
“I mean, I could—”
“I said forget it!”
He tried to take the photos back, but Poldi wasn’t finished yet. Something about them had puzzled her. Not just the look of the corpse, but a detail that had briefly caught her eye without really registering. She carefully examined one photo after another.
Until she lighted on it.
She almost uttered an exclamation, but she had herself under control. She turned the photo ninety degrees and showed it to Montana. “How about that?”
“What do you mean?”
“The remains of the wine bottle. Have you looked at them closely?”
Montana picked up the photo and scrutinised it. “An Etna rosso,” he said with a shrug. “Nice label. What’s so special about it?”
Poldi wondered for a moment whether to tell him, but she hadn’t cared for his previous tone at all. “Oh, forget it,” she said airily. “A very pretty label, I agree, and such an original idea to use a map of the vineyard. Do you know the Avola vineyard?”
Montana eyed her suspiciously. “What makes you ask, Poldi?”
But Poldi had already stood up. Letting her silk kimono slither to the floor, she went back into the bedroom. “That’s enough detective work, Vito. Namaste, life beckons!”
“Will you at least tell me?” I asked when she recounted the episode to me later.
“You mean you still haven’t caught on?” she cried in amazement. “Why, it’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
“Then please spell it out for the benefit of the unenlightened.”
Poldi disappeared into the bedroom and returned with a photo, which she propped against the wine bottle. It displayed a topographical map that looked vaguely familiar to me. And then I finally caught on.
The label on the wine bottle displayed the same map that Russo and Patanè, who was now under arrest, had been discussing when Poldi was keeping tabs on them in the Valentino case.
“Good for you, Poldi,” I whispered, highly impressed.
“It’s not a bad wine, that Polifemo,” Poldi said triumphantly. “A genuine Etna rosso. Robust, dark and elegant, with good length and oomph, a spectacular finish and soft, mysterious almond notes. Liquid commissario, so to speak. Ninety-four Parker points—you don’t get that sort of stuff in a supermarket. A disgrace, using such a noble wine for such a nefarious purpose. Like to try a drop?”
“No thanks,” I said. “I don’t fancy drinking from a murder weapon.”
“Well, now you can see how obvious the connection was, can’t you? District attorney—Mafia—Russo—murder.”
“But don’t you think that’s a bit . . . I mean, well, far-fetched?”
“Lack of imagination is the little sister of timidity. You’ll never get anywhere with your novel like that.”
It’s true, my Auntie Poldi really did have my best interests at heart.
“But what’s the connection with this man Achille and Montana’s jealousy?”
Poldi tapped the wine label.
“Why, Achille is the owner of the vineyard.”
Like so many things in Sicily, the story of winemaking there is one of superb resources, ignorance, greed, mediocrity, neglect, destruction, deliberation, a fresh start and triumph. No one knows that better than my Uncle Martino, because he knows everything about Sicily and fills in any gaps with figments of his imagination. Like everything in Sicily, wine is very ancient, and grown in the furrows of conquest and occupation. According to my Uncle Martino, the Phoenicians brought the first grape varieties to Sicily, but quality wines were not produced there until the end of the nineteenth century. Well, quality . . . Soulless, mass-produced wine for the English market quickly degenerated into the production of cheap Marsala. Sweet enough to make your teeth itch, it was sometimes spiked with almond syrup. You can still get this stuff in souvenir shops, and you’re welcome to it. The general ignorance and lousy quality are surprising when one considers the importance attached to good food in Sicily, with its paradisal abundance of foodstuffs and ingredients. But Sicilians drink half a glass of wine at most with their meals, and even Uncle Martino, who would never eat any food but his wife Teresa’s, makes do with sour plonk bought in a fifty-litre carboy from a farmer in Randazzo. Yet the conditions for wine-growing in Sicily are ideal, especially on the old terraces on Etna between five hundred and a thousand metres up. The volcanic soil is rich in copper, phosphorus and magnesium, and the ancient drystone walls of lava tuff enclose vines hundreds of years old: Nerello Mascalese, Nerello Cappuccio, Carricante and Catarratto. What with extreme variations in temperature, arduous working conditions, modest profits and occasional volcanic eruptions, local wine growers don’t have an easy life, so it may not be surprising that no one took any trouble with Etna wine for a long time. Not good enough for export, little domestic demand—producing it ceased to pay. Financial crises, bankruptcies, wailing and gnashing of teeth, fatalism, forced sales—the old story. Then, only thirty years ago, came deliberation and a fresh start. Back to basics, so to speak. Viticulturists’ associations gambled once more on native grape varieties, which were grown and tended as bushes, and on quality instead of quantity. Or—who would have thought it?—on EU subsidies. It was a success story, becaus
e Sicilian wine has since forced its way into the world’s premier league and has long ceased to be an insider’s tip. Cherries, mulberries, cloves, cinnamon, orange peel, rosemary, thyme, lavender, woodsmoke, stone, caramel, almonds—a sip of Nerella Mascalese can be a trip to the heart of Sicily, for, like its cuisine, Sicily’s wine is a sensual, baroque celebration, a superabundance of aromas in a single glass.
“It’s a Sicilian wine,” Poldi told me before I sampled my first glass of Polifemo, “so don’t be surprised if it’s a bit awkward and unforthcoming at first. It’ll come through all right once you’ve got to know each other, you can depend on that. It’s overflowing with warmth and life, extravagantly generous, loud and explosive and soft and gentle, know what I mean? And then, bingo, it’s overcome with melancholy once more. It retreats into its volcanic cave and whispers ancient secrets in your ear. This wine is a Cyclops, I tell you. A force of nature—the sort of man every woman dreams of. So drink up and learn.”
No wonder Poldi itched to meet the creator of such a wine.
Achille Avola had inherited the vineyard above Trecastagni from his father. The Avola family had been growing wine up on the slopes of Etna for three generations. It was pretty mediocre plonk until the nineties, when the new ethos and EU money reached the Avolas, and Achille and his wine achieved their full potential.
Poldi found it child’s play to locate the little vineyard. Two clicks of the mouse, a phone call to Uncle Martino, a glance at the road map and ecco pronto! Dressed to go with her surroundings, in a red-white-and-green dirndl outfit with plenty of cleavage and a silk headscarf adorned with grapes, she boarded her Vespa one Saturday afternoon and puttered up to Trecastagni.
Whenever I think of Trecastagni I’m reminded of my father, a DIY junkie who loved to screw wooden panelling into every ceiling in sight. When he started thinking aloud about his retirement, he hit on the daft idea of buying a ruin in Trecastagni and single-handedly turning it into an architectural jewel with the aid of cordless screwdrivers, hammer drills, bricklayer’s trowels, handyman’s enthusiasm and my unskilled but no less energetic assistance.
Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna Page 3