The Sect of Angels

by Andrea Camilleri

  *

  Three mornings later, the postman delivered a stamped envelope from the Criminal Court of Camporeale. Teresi opened it. There was a letter dated September 10 and signed by the presiding judge, Gianfilippo Smecca, a man always ready to adjust his sails to catch the prevailing winds.

  Illustrious sir,

  This communication is to inform you that your presence is required on the 15th day of the current month, at 17:00 hours at the Court of Camporeale, via Regina Margherita 10, for a hearing with the Disciplinary Committee pursuant to the charge of professionally inappropriate behavior, as raised against your person by all of the criminal lawyers practicing in the City of Palizzolo.

  The charge stems from the fact that, on the occasion of the well-known case that led to the arrest of Marquis Filadelfo Cammarata, you accumulated unto yourself a series of positions that lead one to conclude the existence of a pre-existing, personal hostility, on your part, towards the abovementioned Marquis.

  They are, in order:

  Plaintiff (presenting yourself as such to the Royal Carabinieri);

  Witness for the prosecution (presenting yourself as such to the Investigating Magistrate);

  Attorney for Plaintiff (as designated by the Chiarapane family, a role accepted by you though later revoked by the same family).

  It behooves us to inform you, moreover, that Signora Albasia Chiarapane sent us, of her own accord a declaration in which she asserts that, to the end of filing together, as one, a denunciation with the Royal Carabinieri, you demanded of her a sum of ten thousand lire in cash, claiming that you would otherwise “wash your hands of the whole affair.”

  We must also remind you that the Disciplinary Committee has the right to proceed even in the absence of the person under disciplinary investigation.

  Regards,

  Naturally, Matteo Teresi had no desire to appear at the hearing. And even if he did appear, what could he possibly say in his defense? The most serious charge was not that of having played three roles in a farce—which was actually true—but of having taken ten thousand lire to go and report the attempted murder of Luigino. The accusation was patently false, but how would he ever prove it? By this point it was clear that they were all in agreement to get him out of their hair, in one way or another. But he still had his newssheet, and as long as he still had the money to publish it, no one would ever succeed in silencing him.

  *

  In the evening after receiving the letter from the Criminal Court, he didn’t feel like eating.

  Clearly, it would turn out one of two ways: either they would impose a long period of suspension on him, or they would strike him from the lists. The second was the more likely.

  He would have to abandon the paupers who turned to him for help, leave them to their fate as the wretched of the earth.

  Not that he’d won so many of his cases on behalf of the poor; the law always came down on the side of the rich. But at least they’d served to give a little hope to those who’d never known any hope at all.

  He felt empty inside, however, and a little confused. The fact was that he was used to fighting out in the open, to going hand-to-hand, even to being insulted, but not to treacherous surprise attacks, stabs in the back in the dark and in secret. They were scorching the earth all around him, and to set it on fire they were using the hands of those who had nothing in particular against him but couldn’t or didn’t know how to say no to those who asked them to light the match.

  He went to bed early, read a bit of Don Quixote, which he always kept on his bedside table, then slowly, little by little, fell asleep with the light on.

  The sound of the front door opening and closing woke him up. He looked at his watch: it was past midnight.

  Where had Stefano been all this time?

  “Stefano.”

  “I’ll be right there, Zio.”

  Seeing the young man come in, he knew at once from the look on his face that he had news.

  “I’ve been with Baron Lo Mascolo. He invited me to dinner.”

  “With the whole family?”

  “No, just me and him.”

  “What did he want?”

  Stefano sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “That baron’s got a real poker face, but in the end he tells you exactly what’s on his mind.”

  “And what’s on his mind?”

  “Zio, it took him at least three hours to explain the whole business to me. He made the most convoluted arguments, going round and round in concentric circles, all the while zeroing in on the point he wanted to make.”

  “And what was that?”

  “The point was sort of a copy of what the Marquis Cammarata did.”

  “Explain.”

  “What’s to explain, Zio? Can’t you figure it out for yourself?” said Stefano, a little irritated.

  “I get it, Stefanù. Antonietta will testify that Patre Raccuglia wasn’t the first man in her life. It was you who got her pregnant. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So Patre Raccuglia wriggles out of the charge of corrupting a minor, just like Patre Terranova. And you take Antonietta, an only child, for your wife, and you get rich. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “And did you start slapping him?”

  “No.”

  “Did you laugh in his face?”

  “Not even.”

  “But, Stefanù, this stuff is straight out of the puppet theatre! Do you realize that?”

  Stefano stood up.

  “Yes, I do, but there’s something you don’t realize.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That I actually love Antonietta. But I told the baron I couldn’t accept. Out of respect for you, Zio.”

  *

  The following morning the postman handed him a letter from America.

  Teresi recognized the handwriting. It was his brother Agostino writing to him.

  Two years older than Matteo, Agostino had married an American cousin of his, moved to New York, and made a fortune buying and selling homes. He had three children, all girls. The oldest, Carmela, had married an engineer who worked for her father, and had two children. Agostino and Matteo customarily wrote to each other once a month.

  In the present letter, after giving the usual news about his wife, daughters and grandchildren, Agostino wrote:

  And so, dear brother, chatting the other day with my wife, she asked me a question I had no answer for. She said: “But what’s your brother Matteo doing still hanging around Palizzolo? Since the death of your parents, he’s more alone than a dog. If he came here to live, he would be among family again.” I didn’t know what to say. But I did think that you might have answered the question with a question: “And what on earth would I do in New York?” Dear Matteo, there’s a great deal of things that someone like you could do here. There are so many wretchedly poor immigrants who are treated worse than our peasants in Palizzolo! You have no idea the kinds of conditions they’re forced to live in! And there’s something else, too. I have a great business opportunity within my reach. There’s this big pharmacy, and . . .

  Right, because Matteo had first taken a pharmaceutical degree before studying law. He’d almost forgotten.

  *

  The real blow, however, the kind that lays you flat out on the ground to the point where you can’t get back up, came in the form of seven lines signed by His Excellency the Prefect of Camporeale.

  We inform you that we have ratified the request of the Commissioner of Police to revoke your authorization to publish the weekly newssheet entitled The Battle, printed by Mazzullo & Sons Printworks, granted by the Court of Camporeale on February 12, 1897, and addressed to you, Matteo Teresi, as editor in chief and publisher. This revocation, effective immediately and for an indeterminate amount of time, is dictated by the fact that
you have been distributing seditious tracts and passing them off as special editions of your weekly, without, moreover, the proper authorization for such editions.

  And so, for the first time since the wheel of fortune had changed direction, Matteo Teresi felt his face wet with tears.

  *

  He spent the whole day dawdling about the house. In shirtsleeves, hair disheveled, slippers on his feet, he wandered from room to room, adjusting a book on a shelf or a lamp on a table, straightening a picture on the wall, dusting off some old photos on the living-room bookcase. At half past noon he mechanically set the table for Stefano and himself—even though he knew that nothing had been cooked because it was the housekeeper’s day off, and he hadn’t even lit the wood in the stove. So he just sat there staring at the empty plates.

  But where was Stefano? Why hadn’t he come home? Then Teresi remembered that his nephew had told him the night before that he was leaving for Palermo early that morning to take an exam and would be away for three days. The fact had entirely slipped from his mind. He went upstairs and into the young man’s bedroom. The bed was unmade, the wardrobe was missing a suit, and the suitcase was gone. Yes, he’d gone away to take his exam.

  Then Teresi went into his own bedroom. Feeling a little feverish, he took the thermometer from the nightstand drawer, lay down, and took his temperature. 99.9. He didn’t feel sick, however. It was only the effect of the terrible blow.

  He felt a great weight on his eyes, and closed them.

  When he awoke, the sun was setting. So he got up and went out on the balcony. He needed some fresh air.

  Just some thirty yards past his house, the street he lived on began to descend towards the countryside, and so, at that hour, it was always busy with peasants who had come into town to sell fruits and vegetables and were now on their way home.

  He knew them all, every single one of them, and every evening was a rich exchange of greetings. That evening, however, nobody looked up towards his balcony; it was as if he hadn’t come out.

  “Gnaziu!” he called.

  Gnaziu Pirrera was one of the poor devils he had helped out. A father of five, he managed to eat about every other day, and every so often Teresi would give him a little money to feed his children.

  Gnaziu Pirrera seemed not to have heard, and kept on walking, eyes on the ground.

  *

  Night fell ever so slowly.

  And when it was completely dark he went back into his bedroom, grabbed the cigar box and a small box of matches, went back out on the balcony, and lit the first cigar, keeping the match burning as long as possible in front of his face.

  If he was waiting, hoping, for the gunshot that this time would blow out not the match but his own life, he was disappointed. Nothing happened.

  The night was still. It breathed slowly and restfully, as a scent of straw scorched all day by the sun rose up from the countryside.

  *

  By one o’clock in the morning, he got tired of staying up. How long had it been since he’d eaten, anyway? He went into the bedroom, grabbed a chair, took it outside, and sat down. He wasn’t thinking about the letter from the Prefect, nor about the one from the Criminal Court.

  Only Stefano’s words were pounding in his head.

  “You don’t realize that I actually love Antonietta.”

  And also:

  “I told the baron I couldn’t accept. Out of respect for you, Zio.”

  So, Stefano needed to lose the respect he felt for him. If he disappeared from Stefano’s life without a word of explanation, maybe the lad would feel betrayed. And that would free him to choose his own destiny. Yes. That was the only solution.

  Little by little, the idea gained strength. When the sky began to lighten in the east, the idea became a firm decision.

  He looked at his watch. Five o’clock in the morning.

  So, if he immediately started packing his bags, then bathed and shaved and put on a nice suit, he could easily catch the coach to Palermo after dropping in at the bank and withdrawing all his money. It would be more than enough to buy a ticket to America on the first ship out.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel purposely distorts real events that took place in a Sicilian town, Alia, at the start of the twentieth century, to the point of rendering them so unrecognizable as to border on sheer fantasy. A priest by the name of Rosolino Martino was arrested for corruption of underage girls. A former local pharmacist turned lawyer, Matteo Teresi—who in the pages of his weekly newspaper, La Battaglia, fought the abuses of mafiosi, landowners, and the clergy—began an investigation of the case and came to the shocking discovery that the priests of Alia had founded a secret sect that “brought together inexperienced, virgin young girls and young brides, deceiving them into believing that sexual relations, and the sexual practices preparatory to the sex act, were a means for acquiring divine indulgences and opening the gates of Heaven,” as explained by Gaetano D’Andrea, ex-mayor of Alia.

  The discovery of the sect and its practices, when publicized by Teresi, sent shock waves beyond the island of Sicily and elicited the indignation of many political and religious officials, including Filippo Turati and Don Luigi Sturzo. The priest Rosolino Martino confirmed what Teresi had written in his newsweekly.

  The clergy, the landowners, and the Mafia, however, closed ranks. On the one hand they attacked Teresi, on the other they forced the population—even the immediate families of the victims of the abuse—to remain absolutely silent on the matter.

  Dismayed by the lack of reaction on the part of his fellow townspeople, Teresi goaded them harshly:

  “The men are now resigned to the religious prostitution of their women, since it is no longer admissible [ . . . ], after what has happened, to plead ignorance. Let us avoid this danger, let us open the eyes of husbands and fathers, and after we speak to them frankly and boldly, things will reacquire their proper names. Divine grace will no longer be a cover for sexual relations; the mystical bride will seem a common prostitute; the husband, amidst the saints with their haloes, will see his horns sprout majestically twisted; the young woman already on the path to perfection, setting aside her saintly mask, if not yet the mother of some scion of angels will be like the half-virgin of the French, who has lost everything and given everything except her supposed honor, which resides in the simple physiological sign of her virginity.”

  The article, which appeared in the August 11, 1901, edition of La Battaglia, achieved the opposite result, eliciting a wave of genuine hatred towards its author. The bishop of Cefalù accused him of blasphemy and held a reparative procession onto which Teresi, from his balcony, dropped flyers further denouncing the misdeeds of the clergy.

  It amounted to underwriting a death sentence for himself. After a warning, Teresi wrote a last article of goodbye in his newsweekly, and took ship for the United States.

  In the town of Rochester, New York, he continued practicing his profession as a lawyer and wrote a tremendous number of articles in support of the Italian immigrant community and on such broad questions as divorce and abortion.

  His “American” writings were published in 1925, by D’Antoni Editori, a Palermo publishing house, under the title Con la patria nel cuore (“With the Homeland in My Heart”). They were republished in an anastatic printing, edited by the Comune di Alia, in 2001, with a preface by Gaetano D’Andrea.

  To repeat: the reader should consider this novel a product of my own imagination. Only two things were drawn from reality: the names of the protagonist and his newssheet (I did this in homage), and the passage from the article by Don Luigi Sturzo.

  Should any reader encounter names or situations reminiscent of real-life names or situations, they should be attributed to chance.

  I dedicate this book to Rosetta, for the more than fifty years of life we have spent together.

  A.C.

  ABOUT
THE AUTHOR

  Andrea Camilleri is widely considered to be one of Italy’s greatest living writers. His Montalbano crime series, each installment of which is a bestseller in Italy, is published in America by Penguin Random House, and several books in the series have been New York Times bestsellers.