The Brewer of Preston_A Novel Read online

  At that point she had become convinced that, with all the mayhem—whose cause escaped her—he would not dare come that night, and thus she could set her heart, and another part of her body, at rest. Resigned, she had undressed and gone to bed. Then, just as she was dozing off, she had heard a soft sound on the roof, then his slow, cautious steps over the tiles, followed by the muffled thud of his leap from the roof to her balcony, which she had left half open as agreed. Yet when she realized he had kept his word and in a few moments would enter her room, she felt overcome with shame. She couldn’t remain lying on the bed half naked like some cheap whore, in her nightgown with nothing underneath. So she had bolted out of bed and hidden behind the great swath of tarlantana.

  From there she heard him enter in darkness and close the French door to the balcony. She realized he was heading towards the bed and sensed his surprise at not finding her there, after feeling around with his hand several times. He began fidgeting beside the bedside table, and then she clearly heard him strike a match. She saw the wan light through the dense screen of the tarlantana, and finally the entire room was illuminated. He had lit the double candlestick. Only then, seeing him against the light, did the widow Lo Russo notice that he was completely naked—but when had he taken his clothes off? as soon as he’d entered? or had he walked over the tiled roof in that state?—and that between his legs hung some twelve inches of mooring rope, the kind used not for small boats but for steamships, a veritable hawser fastened to a curious sort of docking bollard with two heads. At that sight, a stronger wave swept over her and brought her to her knees. Despite the fog that had suddenly clouded her vision, she saw his silhouette turn sharply, sail straight to the spot where she was hiding, stop in front of the mosquito netting, crouch down to set the candlestick on the floor, seize the netting, and raise it abruptly. She, the widow, didn’t know that his compass had not been his sight but his hearing, drawn by the plaintive, dovelike cooing she had begun to emit without even realizing it. He saw her kneeling before him, opening and closing her mouth like a mullet caught in a fishing net.

  But her apparent shortness of breath did not prevent the widow from noticing that the mooring rope was changing form, slowly becoming a sort of rigid bowsprit. He bent down and, without a word, picked her up by her sweaty armpits, and hoisted her high over his head. She knew she was a rather heavy load for his shrouds, but he did not lose his balance and only lowered her slightly so that she could brace her legs around his back to anchor herself. Meanwhile the bowsprit had changed form again, becoming now a majestic mainmast, upon which the widow Lo Russo, firmly fastened thereto, began to quiver, flap, and pulsate like a sail full of wind.

  Her husband had once told her a story he’d heard from a sailor who had gone a-whaling. In the cold waters of the North, the sailor said, there exists an extraordinary fish called a narwhal. Three times a man’s size, it has a great ivory horn over three yards long between its eyes. Whosoever finds such an animal grows rich, because a pinch of the powder of that horn enables a man to do it fifteen times in a single night. At the time Signora Concetta hadn’t believed the story. Now, however, she realized that it was all true, and that in her arms she was holding a little narwhal with scarcely twelve inches of horn, which was more than enough.

  The whole story had begun one Sunday, when she and her sister Agatina arrived late to Mass. The church was full, with not one of the wicker chairs the sacristan rented at half price untaken, and in front of them was a dense array of rough-looking men whom it would have been impolite to ask to step aside. The two women had no choice but to remain standing, far from the altar.

  “We can just stand back here,” Agatina had said to her.

  Then the inner door to the church opened, and he entered. Concetta had never seen him before, but one look at him and she knew that for the next few minutes her ship would no longer answer the helm. He was beautiful, beautiful, an angel from heaven. Tall with thick blond curls and very lean, but only so lean as was proper in a healthy man, with an eye as blue as the sea and the other, his right eye, not there. That eye lay hidden under an eyelid that was sort of stuck to the part below, walled up. But this was not offputting; on the contrary, all the light of his extinguished eye poured into the other, making it gleam like a precious stone, a beacon in the night. She later learned from Agatina that he had lost the eye when he was stabbed with a knife during a scuffle. But this mattered little. She realized, at that exact moment, that all her navigational parameters had changed: he would, of necessity, become her port, even if she had to sail around Cape Horn. And he, too, had felt it, to the point that he turned his head to meet her eyes and dropped his anchor in their waters. They gazed at each other for a minute that lasted forever. Then, since by now the die was cast, he brought the fingers of his right hand together, a cacocciola, artichoke-like, and shook them up and down repeatedly.

  It was a precise question:

  What shall we do?

  Concetta slowly stretched her arms away from her body, letting them hang down at her sides and turning the palms of her hands outwards, with a disconsolate look on her face.

  I don’t know.

  It was a brief, rapid dialogue, expressed in minimal, barely sketched gestures.

  The violent jibbing maneuver he decided to make at one point took her by surprise. But she raised no objection and quickly obeyed. Having now become a boat, a lateen-rigged fisher, Concetta found herself with her prow on the pillow and her stern raised high to catch the wind blowing indeed astern, making her bounce from breaker to breaker and driving her irresistibly out to the open sea without compass or sextant.

  At Mass on the following Sunday she did everything human and divine in her power to arrive late, to the point that her sister Agatina had become impatient and called her a dawdler. Yet the moment she entered the church, the heavenly-blue beacon lit her, warmed her, and filled her with contentment. In its light and heat she felt rather like a lizard sunning itself on a rock.

  Then he pointed his index finger at her.

  You.

  And then turned his index finger towards himself.

  Me.

  He clenched the same hand into a fist, brought the index finger and thumb together, then made a turning motion.

  The key.

  She shook her head from larboard to starboard and vice versa.

  No, the key, no.

  Indeed she could not give him the key to the house, because on the ground floor lived Mr. and Mrs. Pizzuto and upstairs, Signora Nunzia, who never slept. It was too risky. Someone might see him climbing the stairs.

  He spread his arms, cocked his head to one side, smiled regretfully, then let his arms fall.

  I guess that means you don’t like me.

  She felt as if she were sinking; her legs began to shake, her rosary fell to the floor. She bent down to pick it up and kissed it once, twice, letting her lips linger a long time on the crucifix and looking him straight in his one eye, which seemed to redden with fire, its blue turning to flame.

  What are you saying? I’d like to have you on the cross so I could kiss you all over the way Mary Magdalen did to Christ.

  Now they were sailing close-hauled and smooth, the sea flowing softly as it rocked them like a cradle, with nary a wave to shake them up. They were a deckless coaster, he the sails and she the keel.

  At the third Mass he finally bent his index and middle fingers and touched his chest.

  Me.

  His fingers mimed a man walking.

  I’ll come to your place.

  Her fingers formed the cacocciola.

  How?

  He raised his eye to the sky, kept it there a moment, then pointed his index finger upward.

  From the roof.

  Surprised and frightened, she made the cacocciola again.

  How will you get up there?

  He smiled, stiffened his left han
d horizontally, and the index and middle fingers of his right hand mimed the motion of a man walking on it.

  With a plank.

  She looked dumbfounded and he smiled again. He was calm and resolute.

  She formed a small circle with her forefinger and thumb, to indicate a clock, then gathered the fingers together again a cacocciola.

  When?

  He raised his open hands chest high, moving them lightly forward and back.

  Wait.

  “One of the parts that make up the hull,” her dear departed had once explained to her, “is the bilge, a dark and smelly place where all the ship’s filth ends up.”

  Then why, if it was a stinky, nasty place, was he trying to force his way in there?

  Finally, on a recent Sunday, his index and middle fingers had mimicked a man walking.

  I’m coming.

  And without giving her time to respond, he held up three fingers.

  In three days.

  Again without pausing, he brought his two clenched fists together, then spread them outward and forward.

  Open the French door to the balcony.

  Once outside the church, she didn’t have the courage to tell Agatina about all the conversations she’d been having each Sunday with the young stranger. She only asked:

  “Do you know the young man we’ve been seeing in church, the one with only one blue eye?”

  “Yes, he’s one of the Inclima family. I think his name is Gaspàno. He’s unmarried.”

  And they carried on talking about the young man until they got to Concetta’s front door. As she was about to leave, Agatina said to her:

  “Gaspàno is a wonderful boy. He’d be quite a catch for you.”

  Back at home, Concetta raced to the balcony of her bedroom to look outside and suddenly understood Gaspàno’s audacious plan. Right behind her building, rising as high as the eaves, was a mountain of salt in the courtyard used as a depot by the Capuana firm. It would be relatively easy to lay a plank at the top of it, cross over to the tiled roof, and then ease oneself down into the double window.

  She went back inside to make herself something to eat, but was unable. In the pit of her stomach was a sort of iron-hard stone. For the rest of the afternoon she dawdled about, not knowing what to do, fussing with things of no importance, such as sewing a button onto a shirt or adjusting the wick on a lamp. But everything she did she botched: her mind just wasn’t in it.

  She went to bed when it was still light outside, but couldn’t fall asleep. All at once, when she least expected it, a waterspout began to form in a specific part of her body. At first there were little ripples on the water’s surface brought on by a hot wind, hotter than the scirocco; then the gusts grew stronger and started spinning like a drill, with the point of the drill stuck to the same spot, turning and turning while the upper end of the waterspout broadened and invaded her body, which lay on the bed with arms and legs spread, making it shake all over.

  Her dear departed had once told her that a waterspout can be made to deflate like a punctured football. One need only have the courage to approach the base of the twister with a caique, stick an oar through it, and mutter some mystical mumbo jumbo which, unfortunately, her dear departed had not revealed to her.

  And so the caique that was her right hand bravely put out to sea and began to head south, pulled up alongside the cavity in the middle of her abdomen, skirted close round its edge, then proceeded to descend along a precise course, reached the center of the gulf created by her open legs, and cast anchor at the exact point where the waterspout rose up. As the caique rocked back and forth in those rough seas, she raised an oar—her index finger—and directed it carefully towards the tiny spot giving rise to all the agitation and, having found it, started striking it with the oar, harder and harder. Since she did not know the required mumbo jumbo, other perhaps more appropriate words came to her lips:

  “Oh Gaspàno, oh Gaspàno, oh my dear Gaspàno . . .”

  And all at once the waterspout collapsed and fell back into the gulf, turning into a dense, sticky froth.

  He was no longer boat nor sea, but only a man, a bit tired, breathing heavily. Concetta licked his perfectly hairless chest, which looked like a little boy’s. It tasted of salt, like that of her dear departed. He shut his eyes and squeezed her a little harder.

  “Do you even know my name?” asked Concetta, whose eyelids were also getting heavy and starting to droop. It had been a long and tiring journey. Gaspàno did not answer her. He had already fallen asleep.

  Get me Emanuele

  “Get me Emanuele!” enjoined His Excellency the prefect of Montelusa, Cavalier Dottor Eugenio Bortuzzi, handing the bailiff a voluminous folder of documents he’d finished signing.

  “He’s already here; he’s been waiting outside for the last half hour.”

  His Excellency frowned.

  “You, Orlando, have always been a proper blockhead. You should have told me at once. Go.”

  No sooner had Orlando the bailiff walked out the door than Emanuele Ferraguto—better known in the province as Don Memè or, more simply, u zu Memè (that is, “Uncle Memè”) especially by those not related, even remotely, to him—materialized in his place, blotting him out. It looked like a conjuring trick.

  Fiftyish, tall, just the right amount of lean, and fairly well dressed, Don Memè, a broad, cordial smile on his face, made a slight bow, waiting for the prefect to signal to him to come forward.

  Rumor had it that Don Memè had never stopped smiling in his life, not even when the police lieutenant lifted the sheet, five years back, to show him the tortured, mangled body of his son Gnazino, who hadn’t made it to the age of twenty, stretched naked on a slab of marble. When, after the autopsy, Don Memè, still smiling, had politely asked the coroner to explain, the doctor informed him that, in his opinion, the young man’s killers, before strangling him, had cut off his tongue, sawn off his ears, gouged out his eyes, and removed his dick and balls. In that order. And Don Memè had taken careful note of this order on a sheet of paper, using a copying pencil that he wet from time to time with the tip of his tongue. The message borne by that corpse in the very manner of its death was clear. Whoever killed the boy thought he talked too much and was a little too quick to bed the members of the fair sex, regardless of their tender age or marital status.

  In the two months that followed, Don Memè had devoted his energies to a complicated business transaction at the end of which, having ceded to others the rights to the Cantarella estate, he received in exchange, at his country house, his sons’ two assassins, in such a condition that they could not lift so much as a finger.

  Still according to rumor, Don Memè had wanted to see to the two men personally, having first donned some overalls so as not to stain his suit with blood. Taking out the sheet of paper on which he had written after speaking with the coroner, he hung it from a nail, and then proceeded to follow his notes blindly, showing not a whit of imagination. All the same, after cutting off their cocks and balls, he did have a burst of creative originality and strayed from the script. That is, he took the two dying men, laid them both across the back of a mule, and went and impaled them on the branches of a Saracen olive tree that stood on the now-ceded Cantarella estate.

  When the corpses were discovered, by then eaten by dogs and crows, the police lieutenant, after a quick investigation, was convinced that two plus two equaled four and had Don Memè promptly arrested. That very same day, however, ten individuals, all above suspicion, from the town of Varo some thirty miles from Montelusa, had come running to testify that on the day of the double murder Don Memè was in their town celebrating the feast of San Calogero. Among those furnishing the alibi were the postmaster Ugo Bordin, from the Veneto; the dottor Carlo Alberto Pautasso, Esq., of Asti, director of the tax office; and the ragioniere Ilio Ginnanneschi, of Prato, an employee at the land registry.

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bsp; “Ah, how splendid our unified Italy is!” Don Memè had exclaimed with a smile more cordial than usual, as the prison doors opened up to let him out.

  Having completed his bow, Emanuele Ferraguto approached the broad prefectorial desk with some difficulty. In his right hand he was holding his English-wool cap and a packet, and in his left, a large parcel.

  “Come in, come in, my good man,” the prefect said jovially.

  Having closed the door behind him with his shoe, Don Memè continued to walk with a slight limp in his right leg.

  “Did you hurt yourself?” His Excellency inquired solicitously.

  Don Memè managed to gesture “no” with his right forefinger without dropping his cap or the parcel.

  “It’s the roll,” he whispered mysteriously, looking around himself as he said it. He set the package on the desk. “These are cannoli from Sfiacca, the kind your wife likes so much.”

  Then it was the big, heavy parcel’s turn.

  “This, on the other hand, is a big surprise for you, Excellency.”

  The prefect looked at the parcel with eyes suddenly bright and hopeful.

  “You don’t say!” he said with a quaver in his voice.

  “Oh, yes, indeed I do say!” Ferraguto said triumphantly.

  “Is it The Archaeological History of Sicily, by the Duke of Serradifalco?”

  “You’re right on the money, sir. The books you’ve been looking for.”