The Sect of Angels Read online

  By four o’clock that afternoon, absolute calm reigned in Palizzolo.

  At half past four, Captain Montagnet had an idea: to send his men into the countryside to inform those who had run away that there was no danger of cholera and they could therefore safely return to town.

  “I don’t think your soldiers will have any success convincing them,” said the mayor.

  “Why not?” asked Montagnet.

  “Because they’re carabinieri,” replied the mayor.

  “Shall we make a bet?” said the captain.

  Then, turning to a reed-thin lieutenant by the name of Villasevaglios who was always at his side, he said:

  “They’ll be under your command. And don’t make me lose that bet.”

  “Yessir!” said the lieutenant, snapping to attention.

  And he left the room. The captain turned towards the mayor, lighting a cigar.

  “I’ve heard a report that this morning there was an attempted attack on the home of a lawyer whose name I can’t remember . . . ”

  “Teresi.”

  “Yes, right. Apparently this lawyer, along with a relative of his, fired on the attackers. Is that true?”

  “Well, in a sense . . . ”

  “Mr. Mayor, is it true or not?”

  “It’s true. But, you see, this lawyer—”

  “Is it also true that the attackers were led by a priest brandishing a large cross?”’

  “So I’ve been told. But, you see, for quite some time, this lawyer—”

  “Would you please be so kind as to tell me this priest’s name?”

  How was he going to lie to him? By telling him he didn’t know his name? This captain was jovial and polite, but he seemed to have a chip on his shoulder the size of Mount Etna. If he didn’t answer the man’s question, he was liable to be made to “suffer the consequences” like that poor wretch ’u cani. The mayor took a deep breath.

  “Don Eriberto Raccuglia, priest of the parish of the Mother Church.”

  “Listen, I would like to avoid any malicious gossip or speculation . . . Could you summon this priest here to City Hall at nine o’clock tomorrow morning?”

  “Could I summon him? Why me?”

  “Don’t you see? If I have him taken to the carabinieri station, who knows what kind of reaction that would unleash.”

  The captain was right.

  “All right.”

  “Thank you. And now would you please tell me who spread the rumor that there was cholera about, and why?”

  Mayor Calandro broke into a cold sweat. If they started dragging the town’s big cheeses into this mess, there could be serious complications.

  “Apparently . . . it was all a very big misunderstanding.”

  “You think? So the public unrest was not, in your opinion, intentional?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “That would be the second part.”

  The mayor felt flummoxed.

  “I’m sorry, Captain, but the second part of what?”

  “Of my question. You didn’t answer the first part.”

  “And what was that?”

  “The name of the person who started the rumor.”

  “To be honest . . . a few names were mentioned and until I am absolutely certain, you must understand that I—”

  “We’ll discuss this again in the morning,” said Montagnet, rising to his feet. “Would you please tell me where this lawyer Teresi lives?”

  This captain, the mayor thought bitterly, will end up doing more damage than the nonexistent cholera.

  But the captain found no one at home at Teresi’s.

  After three full hours of discussion with his nephew, the lawyer had decided to go to Palazzo Lo Mascolo, to talk to the baron. He wanted an answer to a specific question: Was it Antonietta who had named Stefano as her lover, or was this just an idea don Fofò had got into his head? Stefano, who’d wanted to see the girl again, took him there in the tilbury.

  But they never reached their destination.

  To save time on their way into the center of town, they avoided the main road and took a sort of country trail that shortened the distance. There were no buildings or farms along this track, and hardly anyone ever took it. At the exact point where the trail crossed a road of beaten earth leading into the main square of the town, Stefano saw a large, fat sack in the middle of the path. He pulled on the horse’s reins to avoid running over it.

  “The sack is moving!” shouted Teresi.

  Indeed, something inside the sack seemed to have shifted. They climbed down to have a look. The sack was closed with string wrapped several times around. Then they both heard, very faintly, a catlike sort of wail.

  “There must be a cat in there,” said Stefano.

  “A cat the size of a tiger?” Teresi asked doubtfully.

  Then he made up his mind. Pulling a hunting knife out from a pocket of his coat, he cut the string and opened the sack to empty it. Out came the blond head of a young man of about twenty, with his face so battered from punches and whacks that his eyes were little more than two fissures. Blood was running from his nose and ears. His lips were so swollen that his mouth looked like an open pomegranate. And past them they could see that his blood-filled mouth was missing three teeth. Clearly the young man had also been kicked in the face.

  Teresi lowered the sack a bit more. The shoulders appeared. The young man was not a peasant. The clothes he was wearing, though tattered, were made of fine fabric.

  “Do you know him?” Teresi asked his nephew.

  “I think so.”

  “And who is he?”

  “I think he’s the son of a cousin of the Marquise Cammarata. He’s not from around here, though he’s often at the marquis’s house. I met him at the ball on—”

  “Fine, fine,” said the lawyer, cutting him off. “Help me put him back in the sack.”

  “What?! He’s a relative of the Cammaratas! We should take him to their palazzo and tell them how we found him and—”

  “—And they’ll just thank us and finish him off.”

  Stefano was dumbstruck.

  “C’mon, give me a hand,” said his uncle. “We’ll take him to our house and then decide what to do.”

  “But let’s at least take him out of the sack!”

  “Not on your life. If we run across the carabinieri, they’ll just think it’s a sack of potatoes. Actually, let’s do this. While I’m taking him home, you go and get Dr. Palumbo.”

  Teresi did not want to let this opportunity slip away. This kid was a relative of the Cammaratas. His lordship the marquis must surely know the reason for this brutal beating. His lordship! The great big son of a bitch who’d first supported his request for membership and then just dropped him. No, this was an opportunity not to be missed.

  The very same people who were first to run away—the inhabitants of Vicolo Raspa, Giseffa included—got back into town around seven that evening, and Giseffa returned to the Buttafava home.

  “You see? I won the bet! We managed to persuade them!” Captain Montagnet said in triumph to the mayor.

  The carabinieri had indeed used the most persuasive of arguments: blows with the flat of their swords, lashes of the riding whip, and threats of arrest, all tactics in the subtle dialectics of the forces of order.

  “May I come in? Am I bothering you?” asked Dr. Bellanca, poking his head into the mayor’s office.

  “No, quite the contrary, please sit down!” said Calandro.

  “I’ve come to tell you how, in my opinion, don Anselmo was misled.”

  “You’ve come just in time.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I believe that Captain Montagnet wants to charge him with disturbing the peace.”

  Bellanca couldn’t hold back a curse
.

  “We really don’t need this ball-busting captain at the moment!” he said.

  “I agree,” said the mayor. “And so, you wanted to tell me . . . ”

  “Could we close the door?”

  “Is it a delicate matter?”

  “Rather.”

  “I’ll get it myself.”

  Before closing and locking the door, Calandro told the usher, who’d returned about an hour earlier after running away with two municipal policemen:

  “Pippinè, I’m not here for anyone.”

  “Not even for the captain?”

  “Especially not for the captain.”

  He went and sat back down in the armchair behind the desk and waited for his interlocutor to begin talking.

  “Let me preface by saying that I am speaking to the mayor in my capacity as the municipal doctor.”

  “And so? What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that I, as an ordinary doctor, would never tell you what I am about to tell you. But in my capacity as municipal doctor invested with an official responsibility, and faced with what happened in town today, I am forced to speak to you.”

  “So speak, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Three days ago,” the doctor began, “I was summoned to an emergency at the home of Baron Lo Mascolo, when his daughter fell ill.”

  “Antonietta? She’s the very picture of health! So what was she suffering from?”

  “Maybe from too much health.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “Pregnant?!”

  “Two months pregnant.”

  “Two months pregnant?!”

  “Antonietta.”

  “Antonietta?!”

  “Would you please stop repeating everything I say? You’re starting to get on my nerves.”

  “And do we know who the father is?”

  “Antonietta didn’t want to say. And I won’t even go into what happened when I was forced to tell the baron and his wife that their daughter . . . Swoons, fainting fits, the baron going out of his mind and breaking chairs, vases, and anything else he could get his hands on . . . The following day, Sunday, I had to go back to give the baron some tranquilizers and the baroness some stimulants. But on my way out, I ran into don Anselmo. And that’s when the trouble began.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I couldn’t very well tell don Anselmo the real reason I’d gone there. And so I answered his questions rather vaguely, and he ended up thinking I was treating something contagious.”

  “But that’s a huge leap, from ‘something contagious’ to cholera!”

  “Wait, I haven’t finished. Right after leaving the baron’s, I had to go back to Palazzo Cammarata.”

  “Go back to? You mean you’d been there earlier?”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “When?”

  “The day before.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Their eldest daughter, Paolina, had taken ill.”

  Just from the doctor’s expression, the mayor understood everything. He was in shock. He sat there for a moment with his mouth agape, then asked:

  “Pregnant?”

  “Pregnant.”

  “She too?”

  “She too.”

  “Jesus bloody goddamn Christ!”

  “I concur,” said the doctor.

  “How long?”

  “Two months. Just like Antonietta.”

  “And Paolina doesn’t want to say who the father is either?”

  “She won’t say a word.”

  “But how about these girls, anyway! All church and home and hearth, and suddenly they’re all getting pregnant like nobody’s business!”

  “And, unfortunately,” the doctor resumed, “as I was about to knock on the front door of Palazzo Cammarata, don Anselmo saw me and asked me whether somebody was sick in there. I said yes, and that was when he must have concluded that it was cholera.”

  “And now what are we going to tell our ball-busting captain?” asked the mayor. “If he discovers the truth, it’s going to make the Sicilian Vespers look like a picnic!”

  “I have an idea. For the good of the town—and also because I consider myself partly responsible for the misunderstanding—we’ll have to lie.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I could say that both the Lo Mascolo and Cammarata families came down with a particularly virulent form of influenza. And that was how don Anselmo got the wrong idea.”

  “Wait a second. But wasn’t Marquis Cammarata at the club on Sunday morning?”

  “We’ll say that the poor man went just to be a good sport. That he was already sick on Sunday morning, but stubbornly refused to stay home and then got much sicker in the afternoon. As you can well imagine, neither the Lo Mascolos nor the Cammaratas would have any reason to want to contradict this story.”

  “Very well, then,” said Calandro, expecting Bellanca to stand up.

  But the doctor remained seated.

  “Is there something else?” the mayor asked, starting to feel weary from a dreadful day.

  “Yes, but I’m not sure it’s relevant.”

  “To what?”

  “To my public function.”

  “If you think it’s something you should talk to me about, then talk, otherwise . . . ”

  “In short, we could consider even this a kind of epidemic,” the doctor said, as though to himself.

  “No, no,” Calandro interjected, “if you think there really is an epidemic, then it is your duty to fill me in on it!”

  “Do you know who the widow Cannata is?”

  “How could I not? A fine-looking dame like that? And a serious, devout woman as well. Lost her husband three years ago, poor thing.”

  “Her too.”

  “I’m sorry, her too what?”

  With his right hand, the doctor mimed a gesture indicating a large belly.

  “Pregnant?!” the mayor asked in astonishment. “I don’t believe it.”

  “You’d better believe it.”

  “Don’t tell me she’s two months pregnant!”

  “I’m afraid I have to. And that’s not all.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. Do you know Totina, the daughter of ’Ngilino, don Anselmo’s farm overseer?”

  “Her too?”

  “Yessirree, two months pregnant. And, like the widow Cannata, she doesn’t want to reveal the father’s name either.”

  “So, in all, there are four women who are presumably pregnant?”

  “As far as I know. But it’s possible my colleague Palumbo knows of a few more. Though if there are any, he’s not required, like me, to reveal their names.”

  The mayor sat there in thoughtful silence for a moment. Then he spoke.

  “I don’t think you can call it an epidemic. And, even it was one, how would we avoid its spread? Would we send the town crier out to warn all the woman to steer clear of all penises? Separate all the men from all the women? No, I really don’t think so.”

  “I don’t either. Also because nobody’s ever heard of an epidemic of pregnancies,” said the doctor.

  *

  At eleven o’clock that evening, a few of Captain Montagnet’s carabinieri started making the rounds of the town’s streets, announcing that the curfew would begin at twelve midnight sharp, that anyone who was found wandering outside after midnight would “suffer the consequences . . . ”—That captain is obsessed, thought the mayor, who heard the announcement as he was on his way home—and that, in addition, all public assembly was prohibited until further notice.

  Which meant, in plain language, that there would be no Masses, no classes at school, no markets in the square, and that even the Honor and Famil
y Social Club would have to remain closed.

  Finally, with God’s help, at midnight what came to be known in Palizzolo as the day of don Anselmo’s cholera came to an end.

  The mayor got into bed beside his wife, Filippa, who was indeed deaf, but also young and pretty. But he didn’t lie down. He remained sitting up, back propped against the pillows, and started counting on his fingers how many town hall employees were still absent.

  “What are you counting?” asked Filppa. “When the last time we made love was? Well, you can stop counting, ’cause I can tell you myself. The last time was exactly two months ago.”

  And she sighed. The mayor had a troubling thought.

  “Don’t tell me you’re pregnant too!”

  “What do you mean, me too? What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Are or aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not! What’s got into you?”

  The mayor didn’t answer. He just lay down, and five minutes later was already snoring. Signura Filippa stayed up a long time, sighing in frustration.

  CHAPTER V

  THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CHOLERA

  AND OTHER MATTERS

  Dr. Enrico Palumbo was, in a sense, the poor people’s doctor, just as the lawyer was their defender. The difference between the two was that the doctor didn’t do what he did for any political ideal, but just because he wanted to.

  Oftentimes, after examining some sick child from a penniless family, he would leave the mother as much money as she needed to buy medicine or cook up a dish of pasta. He hated priests perhaps even more than Teresi did. The only man of the cloth in town he respected was Patre Dalli Cardillo.

  And the doctor was a man with guts. He never said a word to anyone about any of the things he came to know.

  At dawn on the day after the cholera brouhaha he went knocking on Teresi’s door. The lawyer answered the door himself.