Hunting Season: A Novel Page 14

  “I was called to Rico Peluso’s bedside as he was dying. I immediately noticed that his right hand was covered not only with scratches from brambles; there was also the typical triangle left behind by a viper’s bite. I simply let Dr. Smecca give him antidotes to mushroom poisoning, but not to viper’s venom. Nothing more.

  “Donna Matilde would have died anyway, since she refused to go on living. The powders I dissolved in water for her consisted of pulverized valerian, which suppresses hunger. But I doubt she would have ever recovered her appetite, anyway.

  “The marchese I killed myself. In the little box of pills I gave him for his stomach acidity I included one of belladonna. But I granted him the time to find happiness and have the baby boy he wanted. That is why I didn’t kill him sooner; I liked him, even though he maintained that his daughter’s groom had to be a nobleman.

  “Nettie the maid used to come to the pharmacy to ask me for the strangest things. One day I sold her some poison, telling her it was a special seasoning for spaghetti. It swept away the lot of them.

  “No, the strychnine pills I prepared for Impiduglia were the right medicine. What need would I have had to kill him? In the best of cases, he would have been found guilty of four counts of homicide and spent the rest of his life in jail. And ’Ntontò would have forgotten about him. No, I think he died of a diabetic coma.

  “The reason I am telling you everything I did is of no interest to anyone. In any case, my wife the marchesa has never known anything about any of this.”

  “How the hell can he claim that ’Ntontò never knew anything about it?” Father Macaluso burst out. “After every other Peluso had been wiped off the face of the earth, she came to confession only to convince me that her soul would be forever damned if she couldn’t have the pharmacist. She took me for a ride and screwed the holy sacrament of Confession into the bargain. The timing was perfect. But knowing the right moment, and choosing the right means, could only be the result of an understanding between the two.”

  “But, Father, what are you going to do, report to the inspector what she told you in the confessional?” asked Signora Colajanni.

  “Yeah, you’re right, I can’t. But it’s eating away at me.”

  “I’m not so sure there was an agreement between the two,” said Signora Clelia, recalling the day the pharmacist had cleaned her clock inside and out. “With a love so powerful as the pharmacist’s, it’s possible ’Ntontò felt it from afar. What do we know about the powers that man has?”

  “We would have to ask ’Ntontò,” concluded Signora Colajanni.

  But it wasn’t possible to ask ’Ntontò. When Barone Uccello, to whom fell the task of telling the marchesa everything that had happened, had finished speaking, his moustache and beard wet as pastina in a soup of tears, ’Ntontò did not open her mouth except to say: “Thank you for taking the trouble, Zizì.”

  Cool as a cucumber, she sat down at table at noon on the dot and drank her broth directly from the bowl, without using the spoon, getting it all over her dress.

  Later Peppinella, who didn’t let her out of her sight, found her playing with two little balls of crumpled paper, lying facedown on the floor. The following day, whining and stamping her feet, and stammering in a faint, high-pitched voice, she let Peppinella and Mimì know that she wanted the attic opened up. Finding her little childhood bed up there, she lay down in it, wet herself, and fell asleep sucking her finger. Summoned by Peppinella, Barone Uccello went to talk to her in the attic. Upon seeing him, however, ’Ntontò ran and hid behind a trunk, screaming that she didn’t want any doctor and that she didn’t have any boo-boos. The baron tried to make her recognize him, but it was no use. Then, bewildered, he asked Peppinella for a glass of water, and the servant went downstairs to fetch one. At that moment, ’Ntontò came out from behind the trunk and looked at him hard and straight in the eye. And the baron, returning her gaze for what seemed an eternity, discovered that there was no madness in those eyes, no return to childhood. They were the eyes of a woman almost thirty years old, full of suffering and awareness. He shuddered.

  “What a hideous story, eh, Zizì?”

  But when Peppinella returned, she crouched back down behind the trunk. Then something which was not a doubt, but an icy blade—because there could be no more doubt after that look and those words—sliced through the baron’s brain, leaving a wound that he would carry with him for the rest of his days.

  In vain the defense counsel climbed the slippery slope against all odds. In the face of Fofò’s full confession and lack of remorse, the sentence could only have been what it was.

  “Now we’ll put in an appeal,” said the defense lawyer.

  “No,” said the pharmacist, decisively.

  “So, by putting up no opposition, he sent all the lieutenant’s numbers to hell,” said Postmaster Colajanni. “According to those calculations, Fofò should have croaked sixty-four months after the death of Totò Peluso and company.”

  “When is the execution to take place?” asked Fede the surveyor.

  “In one week.”

  “So it adds up. The lieutenant is right. He will die exactly ten months after he was arrested.”

  “Would you please explain?”

  “Certainly. It only means the numbers decided to change direction and take a different path. Sixty-four months, you say? This time, it’s a simple question of addition: six plus four equals ten.”

  The firing squad lined up in formation, the first row on one knee, the second one standing. Emiliano di Saint Vincent approached the condemned man, a black cloth in his hand. As he blindfolded him, he whispered, his voice cracking: “I am truly sorry.”

  “I, truly, am not,” said Fofò La Matina.

  Author’s Note

  There is a famous British film about a man, a member of the cadet branch of a noble family, who gets it in his head that he must, at all costs, become the bearer of the title. And thus, with a little help from chance and a little help from his own brilliance and a rich variety of weapons, he sets about eliminating every one of the successors to the title who stand in his way.

  Keeping the family tree always at hand, to remind him of the tasks already accomplished and the challenges that still await, he manages, with a stubbornness typical of saints and scientists, to climb branch after branch like a monkey, until at last he can sit at the top. But a careless mistake, in the end, does him in.

  Those who might think my novel grew out of this film would, however, be wrong. The idea for the book came to me twenty-two years ago when reading the two volumes of the historic study Report on the Social and Economic Conditions of Sicily (1875–1876), reprinted by Cappelli Publishers in 1968. Hidden in the one thousand four hundred and forty-eight pages (I say “hidden” because I no longer feel like finding the exact place) of this study, there is a two-line dialogue between one of the members of the research committee and a representative of the law in a small town:

  “Have there recently been any violent crimes in your town?”

  “No, with the exception of a pharmacist who killed seven people for love.”

  And there you have it. From that moment on, I began to think about this story. And when, together with my friends Suriano and Passalacqua, I scripted a very short story by Leonardo Sciascia for television, titled Western about Things of Ours (Western di Cose Nostre), with a heavy heart I gave the protagonist, a pharmacist, a number of the traits of “my” pharmacist.

  It seems to me truly a waste of breath to declare, as I must, that the names and situations presented here are in no way related to real people or real events, aside from the story at the origin of the tale. They are, instead, related to me and my memory of my land.

  This novel is dedicated to Rosetta, my wife. I don’t think she likes it so much; not because of the way it’s written, but because of what it means. If so, may she accept this dedication as a new tribute to her more than th
irty years of patience in my regard.

  [1990]

  Notes

  Madonna biniditta: A Sicilian expression of surprise, shock, or alarm, equivalent to something like “Oh my God!” in English. Literally, it means Blessed Madonna!

  the horns on his head were so tall that they could have been used as lighthouses: In Italy, the fact of having or wearing horns means that one is a cornuto— that is, a cuckold.

  Marchesina ’Ntontò . . . Marchesino Rico: The Italian nobility has the custom of calling the offspring of a titled parent by the dimunitive of that same title. Thus the son of a marchese (Eng. Marquess, Fr. marquis) is a marchesino, the daugher of a contessa is a contessina, and so on.

  “A ricò! Cu a voli a ricò!”: Sicilian dialect. Literally: “Ricotta! Who wants ricotta?”

  field watcher: In Sicily, major landowners often resorted to the use of private guards, called campieri, to protect their lands and crops from bandits.

  “The cuckolded bastard,” . . . “Do you mean that in a manner of speaking, or is it true?”: In Italy, especially Southern Italy, the word cornuto (“cuckold”; see note to p. 17, above) is a common insult that doesn’t necessarily imply that its target is actually a cuckold.

  Sicilian nobles customarily signed with an X. . . . Reading and writing were for miserable paper pushers and clerks: By the nineteenth century a fair part of the Italian nobility, particularly in the South, was uncultured. One may recall that Fabrizio del Dongo, the young aristocratic protagonist of Stendahl’s novel The Charterhouse of Parma, was similarly uneducated, though from the north of the peninsula.

  They were playing briscola: An Italian card game.

  Fùttiri addritta e camminari na rina, portanu l’omu a la rovina: “Fucking while standing and walking on sand will lead a man to his ruin” (Sicilian proverb).

  The marchese touched his balls dramatically: A superstitious gesture for warding off bad luck.

  the Piedmontese officer decided to uphold a tradition of his people and show his courtesy: There is an Italian saying that the “piemontese è falso e cortese”; that is, “the Piedmontese is false and courteous.” Thus the young lieutenant shows his courtesy here by being false—i.e., pretending to miss his quarry.

  a distant relative of Vittorio Alfieri and had a natural bent for such things: Like Emiliano di Saint Vincent, Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803), the famous poet and dramatist considered the father of Italian tragedy, was a Piedmontese nobleman from Asti. His life and work were full of troubled love affairs, usually involving the nobility.

  There is a famous British film about a man, a member of the cadet branch of a noble family, who gets it in his head that he must, at all costs, become the bearer of the title: A reference to Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), directed by Robert Hamer, starring Dennis Price in the central role, and Alec Guinness playing no less than eight different roles, including Lady Agatha.

  Notes by Stephen Sartarelli