The Sect of Angels Read online

  *

  Patre Raccuglia, head of the town’s Mother Church, its most ancient, also said during his sermon that Palizzolo was facing a grave danger, that of ending up just like Sodom and Gomorrah, if the sacrilegious ideas of a little lawyer who loved to pretend he was the people’s advocate, when he was in fact the devil’s advocate, continued to spread. This man—if a Godless person who disdained family, religion, and country, and every divinely blessed thing on earth, could really be called a man—this man had written in his newssheet that virginity, that supreme gift of maidens, was merely a commodity for purchase! Something that a man could simply buy for cash with a wedding ring! Blasphemy! Whereas virginity was, in fact . . .

  *

  That Sunday, at the end of the Mass, Giallonardo the notary stopped to talk with don Liborio Spartà outside the church of San Cono, the patron saint of Palizzolo, whose parish priest was Don Filiberto Cusa.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” said the notary. “Why did Teresi request admission to the club when he must have known he would never be accepted?”

  “In my opinion,” said don Liborio, “he wants to brag about it.”

  “With whom?”

  “With the clients he defends. The ragamuffins, shirkers, and subversives who don’t have an honorable bone in their bodies . . . He’ll probably tell them: ‘See? The nobles, the bourgeois, the landowners don’t want me in their club. And that proves that I’m one of you!’”

  “I just can’t imagine what that man’s got in his head,” the notary said pensively. “He let his father, don Masino, who was a very fine person, die of a broken heart. What? You studied to become a pharmacist and that’s not enough for you? Nosirree. He goes and gets that law degree, disowns his family and the class he belongs to, and starts doing what he’s doing now. The guy’s stirring up the riffraff to the point that one of these days, a revolution’s going to break out in Palizzolo!”

  “Well, the man is certainly dangerous, as far as that goes,” said don Liborio.

  “Maybe we should give the matter some thought,” said the notary, seeing Don Filiberto, the parish priest, come out of the church and begin to approach them, waving his hands in the air by way of greeting.

  “I saw you, you know!” said Don Filiberto. “You came late to Mass! Why’s that?”

  “We had a trying morning at the club,” replied don Liborio.

  “Why, what happened?”

  “We voted on whether to accept lawyer Teresi’s request for admission,” said the notary.

  “And how did it turn out?” asked the priest, his jocund face turning suddenly serious.

  “It was considered invalid.”

  “And a good thing too! If you’d accepted it I would have denied you the sacraments! And you know what else? This Teresi, when he dies, will even have trouble getting into Hell! The devil won’t want him!”

  They all laughed.

  *

  Having just come out of the church of the Heart of Jesus, whose priest was Don Alighiero Scurria, Commendatore Paladino and don Serafino Labianca set out, as they did every Sunday morning, on their way to the Gran Caffè Garibaldi to drink their customary glass of malmsey before going to lunch. While don Serafino was certainly a liberal and a Freemason, deep down he feared that God might exist after all, and so, taking the good with the bad, he made a point never to miss a Sunday Mass.

  They sat down at a table and started talking, inevitably, about Matteo Teresi.

  “His request for membership was just a ruse to provoke us,” said the commendatore.

  “That’s clear,” don Serafino agreed.

  “But it would be a mistake to react to his provocations, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I completely agree.”

  “On the other hand, we can hardly put up with this forever.”

  “Patience does have its limits.”

  “And I’m afraid that sooner or later this man will do some damage, some very grave damage. Don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “Don Serafino, at the club you asked an intelligent question but you never gave us the answer.”

  “I don’t remember. What was it?”

  “How is it that two noblemen sponsored Teresi’s candidacy?”

  Don Serafino smiled.

  “But it’s precisely because of what you’ve just finished saying! They’re afraid that lawyer will stir up the riffraff to the point where all hell breaks loose. So, just to be safe, they want to keep him close.”

  The waiter brought the two glasses of malmsey, and the men drank in silence.

  “Maybe,” don Serafino resumed, “we need to discuss this with some other friends of ours. I’d say it’s rather urgent. And then we’ll meet back up at my house.”

  “Sounds to me like a good idea,” said the commendatore.

  Professor Ubaldo Malatesta, superintendent of the local elementary schools—the only schools in Palizzolo—walked into the sacristy of the church of the Most Holy Virgin as the parish priest, Don Libertino Samonà, was removing his vestments with the help of a little boy.

  “Why didn’t you come to serve Mass today?” asked Don Libertino.

  The professor, a shy man, blushed in shame.

  “I’m here to apologize. I was detained at the club, and—”

  “What?! So you’ve come to tell me that your gambling vice kept you away—”

  “No, Father, there were no games this morning. We were voting on whether to admit Teresi the lawyer to the club.”

  Patre Samonà was a good six feet tall and six feet wide. Pointing a finger that looked like a cudgel at Professor Malatesta, he asked in a Last-Judgment tone of voice:

  “And how did you vote?”

  “I . . . I voted ‘no.’”

  “Well, you should know that had you voted ‘yes,’ not only would I never again have let you serve Holy Mass, I would have chased you right out of the church with so many kicks in the pants you wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week!”

  1A short-lived, French-inspired and French-supported republican revolution that seized the city of Naples, under Bourbon rule, in 1799, only to be put down later that year.

  CHAPTER II

  THE PASSION AND FLIGHT OF DON ANSELMO

  Don Anselmo, for his part, was unable to attend Mass at the church of Saints Cosma and Damiano, whose parish priest was Don Ernesto Pintacuda, because he’d had to go home to change his singed trousers.

  And so, since there was still a while to go before lunchtime, he decided to pay a call on Baron Lo Mascolo, first of all to find out whether he’d recovered from the touch of flu that he said he’d come down with two days before, and secondly to ask him to explain why he’d supported Teresi’s request.

  Don Anselmo, being a good friend of the baron’s even though don Fofò was a good twenty years his junior, knew him inside and out, and, truth be told, didn’t believe for a minute this business about him having the flu. It was well known that the baron was the picture of good health and had never spent a day in his life in bed, had never had a toothache, never a bellyache, even though he was capable of eating two roast suckling goats with a few kilos of potatoes all by himself.

  And so? What’s two plus two? Clearly don Fofò, after first supporting lawyer Teresi’s request for membership, came to regret it and changed his mind, just as his friend, Marquis Cammarata, had done, and instead of going to the club and voting with a black marble, he decided to pretend he was sick.

  Don Anselmo had just raised his hand to lift the heavy door knocker when a small door cut out of one wing of the great door of Palazzo Lo Mascolo opened and out came Doctor Bellanca, medical bag in hand.

  “I’ve been here all morning, which is why I couldn’t come to the club,” he said, shaking don Anselmo’s hand. “How’d it turn out?”


  “The request was deemed invalid.”

  “So much the better,” said the doctor, and he started to close the small door behind him.

  “Please leave it open,” said don Anselmo.

  “Do you want to go in?”

  He’d asked the question without budging a single millimeter from the doorway, so that don Anselmo couldn’t get by him.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you want to see the baron?”

  What was with all the questions?

  “Yes.”

  The doctor closed the small door decisively.

  “He’s in no condition to receive you, believe me.”

  Don Anselmo balked. So the baron really was sick after all!

  “Is it anything serious?”

  “Well, yes and no.”

  “Does he have the flu? . . . ”

  “No, it’s not the flu.”

  “Then what’s wrong with him?”

  Bellanca seemed a little uneasy.

  “It’s . . . how shall I say? An unusual case.”

  “Oh, well. I’ll just go and say hello to the baroness and—”

  “She can’t receive you, either.”

  “She’s caught it too?”

  “Well . . . yes, in a manner of speaking.”

  “What about Baronessina Antonietta?”

  Dr. Bellanca made a strange face.

  “Well, let’s just say she . . . is the origin of the illness.”

  How could that be? The baronessina was an eighteen-year-old girl as beautiful as the sun and more bursting with health than even her father!

  “Listen, doctor. If this illness spreads so easily . . . ”

  “Please don’t be alarmed, and, most importantly, don’t go spreading the word. You mustn’t needlessly stoke people’s fears. The baron and his family are in a kind of quarantine in there. They need only avoid direct contact with others. In a few days it’ll all be over.”

  Don Anselmo remembered he’d shaken Bellanca’s hand. He shuddered. He was deathly afraid of illness.

  “Er, doctor, did you by any chance wash your hands?”

  Without answering, Bellanca walked away cursing. As he began to head home, don Anselmo turned around to look at Palazzo Lo Mascolo. All the shutters over the windows and balconies were closed. As if the family were in mourning. There was no visible sign of life inside. At one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon? With a sun hot enough to split rocks? What, were they all dead or something?

  To go home, don Anselmo had no choice but to walk past Palazzo Cammarata, which stood all by itself on a street that was also called Cammarata. Nobility dictated that the palazzo mustn’t have any other constructions around it. The great house took up the whole street and had only its private garden, the firriato, in front.

  Reaching the end of the street, which led into Piazza Unità d’Italia, don Anselmo stopped and looked around in bewilderment. Something had unnerved him at Palazzo Cammarata, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

  The silence! That’s what it was!

  Marquis Filadelfo head eight daughters, the youngest being five years old and the oldest eighteen, a wife—Marquise Ernestina—who was vociferous by nature, and two maids. The only man amidst eleven women who were always quarreling one minute, laughing the next, crying one minute, chattering the next, cursing each other one moment, raising hell the next, the marquis would sometimes lose his head, and the nervous agitation from which he suffered even while asleep would become so great that he would go outside dressed just as he was and, to let off steam, pick a fight with the first person he passed on the street. Everything that went on inside the palazzo always became instantly known to whoever happened to be walking along Via Cammarata. The chatter of the eleven women, who habitually spoke loudly, would waft out of the windows, which were perpetually open, rain or shine, bounce off the stones outside and back into the windows through which it had just exited.

  So, why was the palazzo now as silent as the grave? Looking up, don Anselmo noticed that all the shutters over the windows were closed, something he’d never seen before. What could have happened?

  “No, no, no . . . ” he said to himself. “They’re not playing straight with me here, neither the baron nor the marquis!”

  And he turned and went back, determined to knock on the door and demand an explanation. But after he’d taken barely three steps, he froze.

  Breathlessly approaching from the other end of the street was Dr. Bellanca, with his medical bag in hand.

  “Were you going to the marquis’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he send for you?”

  “No, but as I was passing by I noticed—”

  “Please, don Anselmo, just go home.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I don’t think the marquis is in any condition to see you,” said the doctor, knocking at the door.

  “Is he sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I saw him at the club this morning!”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. The . . . er . . . In short, it came on all of a sudden.”

  The explanation dawned on don Anselmo, as sudden and swift as a punch in the stomach.

  “Accompanied by diarrhea?” he asked in terror.

  “Among other things.”

  “O matre santissima! So it’s an epidemic!”

  The great door came open and the doctor went inside. The door then closed again.

  For the second time, don Anselmo asked himself what was two plus two.

  And he answered his own question. And “four,” this time, could equal only one terrible thing: cholera. There’d been a wave of cholera a few years back that had ushered half of the town into the cemetery. He stood there staring at the closed windows for a moment; then, leaning even more on his cane, since his legs were trembling more than usual, he walked quickly home, opened the door, went in, sat down in a chair in the vestibule, and was unable to go any further.

  His wife, Signura Agata, who’d heard the door open, came out into the vestibule and saw her husband there, looking as pale as a corpse and fanning his face with his hat. She got worried.

  “’Nzelmù, what happened? Are you unwell? Why do you look like that, eh?”

  “Just be quiet for a minute and let me catch my breath, dammit!”

  But the signura couldn’t restrain herself.

  “Talk to me, ’Nzelmù, you’re frightening me! Matre santa, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong! And stop buzzing around me like some kind of mosquito! Where’s Girolamu?”

  “The coachman? I don’t know.”

  “Tell the maid to go and find him. I want him to hitch up the big carriage.”

  “Why? Are you going somewhere? May I ask where?”

  “Agatì, you’re coming with me, and we’re leaving straight away.”’

  “What! And where are we going?”

  “To the country!”

  “Back to San Giusippuzzo? We were there less than a week ago!”

  “And now I feel like going back, devil take it all!”

  “All right, all right, there’s no need to curse. But how long will we stay?”

  “I figure about a month.”

  “What! So long? Why?”

  “Agatì, there’s something going on in town I don’t like the look of. Baron Lo Mascolo’s whole family is sick, all of ’em, and everyone in Palazzo Cammarata’s sick too.”

  “The flu’s been going around.”

  “What flu? The main thing that’s going around is Doctor Bellanca! And the bastard won’t tell me anything! But I figured it out all by myself. There’s an epidemic, Agatì! Maybe cholera!”

  “Matre tutta santa e biniditta! I’ll go and start packing the trunks!”

  Th
ey left two hours later, and it took the usual hour to reach San Giusippuzzo. The road was in such bad shape that several times the carriage very nearly fell into a ditch. Finally, by the grace of God, Girolamu halted the two horses inside the enclosure that contained the Buttafavas’ villa, the wine vat, the stables, the carriage house, and the cottage of ’Ngilino the overseer, who lived there with his wife Catarina and daughter of seventeen, Totina. From the window of his coach, don Anselmo noticed that there didn’t seem to be anyone in the house, since the door as well as all the shutters were closed.

  Since the overseer hadn’t been expecting his masters’ arrival, he must surely be out in the fields somewhere. And Catarina and Totina must have gone into town, since it was Sunday.

  Don Anselmo climbed down from the carriage and went and opened the front door of the villa. As his wife was going inside, he said to his coachman:

  “Try calling ’Ngilino. If he’s somewhere nearby, he can help you bring the trunks inside.”

  The master bedroom was upstairs. Don Anselmo lay down with all his clothes on; the journey had worn him out and, on top of that, he hadn’t been able to have his usual afternoon nap.

  “I’m going to have a little rest,” he said to his wife, who was bustling from room to room.