Sicilian Tragedee Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE - Two Months Later

  ACT ONE - The Birth of Comedy

  CHAPTER ONE - Two Months Earlier

  CHAPTER TWO - The Director Tino Cagnotto Is Descending a Plexiglas and Neon Staircase

  CHAPTER THREE - Like the Ballroom Scene in The Leopard, but More Now

  CHAPTER FOUR - Car Theater Elegance

  CHAPTER FIVE - Each New Love Brings Great Tumult

  CHAPTER SIX - Mister Turrisi’s Brylcreem Reflects the Sun of Piazza Lupo

  CHAPTER SEVEN - I’m a Salesclerk, Not an Object

  CHAPTER EIGHT - No, He Can’t Stand Her When She’s Like That

  CHAPTER NINE - O Sometimes Insufferable Pomposity!

  CHAPTER TEN - In Pajamas and Dressing Gown in the Sitting Room of Villa Wanda

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - An Immense Ham Hock Lies on Cagnotto’s Plate

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Betty Is Counting the Toes on Her Feet

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Have You Ever Been in Sicily when the Hot Wind of Love Blows over the Land?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - A Patron, a Piazza, an Amphitheater

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Rosalba Quattrocchi’s Salumeria Is Unctuous

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Contessa Salieri Likes It When They Kill People

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Paino Phones Falsaperla

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Ridi, Pagliaccio …

  ACT TWO - Celebrity as Will and Idea

  CHAPTER ONE - Why, Then Is My Pump Well-flower’d

  CHAPTER TWO - It’s the Story of an Actress Who’s Married and Who’s Being Courted by Tonio

  CHAPTER THREE - Pump Means Shoe

  CHAPTER FOUR - Paino and Falsaperla Are at Each Other’s Throats

  CHAPTER FIVE - The Next Day Turi Pirrotta Is Knotting His Necktie with Care

  CHAPTER SIX - Apart from Caporeale, Everyone’s Tired and Happy This Morning

  CHAPTER SEVEN - God, What a Jerk You Are

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Cagnotto Is Having His Toenails Trimmed by Bobo

  CHAPTER NINE - Betty Is Stretched Out on the Sofa on Her Stomach

  CHAPTER TEN - Shit, Listen to This

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Bruno Pirronello, Photographer of La Voce della Sicilia

  CHAPTER TWELVE - The Summer Sunset Sends Torrid Waves over the Amphitheater of San Giovanni la Punta

  THE SECOND ACT BEGINS

  ACT THREE - The End of Tragedy

  CHAPTER ONE - The Black Silk Sheets of Cagnotto’s Bed Are Unruffled

  CHAPTER TWO - Betty Is in a Bad Mood

  CHAPTER THREE - But Have You Read the Paper?

  SNUFFED OUT BY A SNIPER

  CHAPTER FOUR - Pietroburger Is Crowded with Female Salesclerks

  CHAPTER FIVE - Timpanaro Is Wearing an Earpiece

  CHAPTER SIX - La Voce della Sicilia Is Making His Brioche Go Down the Wrong Way

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Cagnotto Has Had to Turn Off His Cell Phone and Unplug His Landline

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Dawn Comes at Dusk

  DAWN COMES AT DUSK

  CHAPTER NINE - Cagnotto Is Terrorized

  CHAPTER TEN - On the Terrace of the Top Floor of the Una Palace Hotel

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Will You Please Tell Me What the Fuck Is Going On?

  CHAPTER TWELVE - No One Would Ever Dare to Question Signorina Betty’s Virtue and Good Name

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - You Understand?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - And So the Prefect Wants to Resolve the Situation and He’s Asking Me the Favor

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Look, Don’t Even Let Me Think About What Betty’s Thinking About Right Now!

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - SS Really Exists, Nobody Knows About It, Even Though Everybody Knows

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Giacomo Smiles, Looking Curiously at the Mortars

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - It’s a Beautiful Day and Villa Wanda Is Full of Cops

  EPILOGUE

  ALSO BY OTTAVIO CAPPELLANI

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  PROLOGUE

  Two Months Later

  Two months later.

  “Fifteen euros?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Deal, twenty.”

  The two shake hands.

  “Hey, wait,” says one, “only if it happens when he grabs his dick.”

  “Right, okay … right when he grabs his dick … Romeo goes for his crotch and … pow!”

  “Perfect.”

  A third party is listening in on the conversation. The two young men must be lawyers, only lawyers would be dressed like that, like TV presenters. It seems incredible that someone could be betting on what’s happening, but they are. Isn’t there always something strange about the interval between the acts, whether it’s at a play or an opera, isn’t there always a distance, a gap, between what’s happening on the stage and in the foyer? Can it be that these people are really improved by going to the theater? What’s the problem? Is there a problem?

  These thoughts are interrupted by the second bell. The performance is about to resume.

  Avvocato Coco, urban beautification consultant for the city of Frigentini, suddenly feels faint and sinks down onto the red carpet that adorns the stairs.

  This is Noto, capital of the Sicilian Baroque, inside the Teatro Vittorio Emanuele II, a nineteenth century jewel, a precise, smallerscale replica of the majestic Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania. Jewel and majestic: there you have two terms that La Voce della Sicilia, the daily newspaper of eastern Sicily, is especially partial to.

  The police hustle over in tight formation, hands on their guns. Several arrogant-looking youths in designer tuxes with pointy, shiny black shoes also hurry to Coco’s side, with reassuring words to the police. “It’s okay, it’s nothing. We’re friends, isn’t that right, Avvocato?”

  Coco, flat on his back, nods yes.

  The young tuxes help him up and show him to the men’s room under the wary gaze of the police. It had been a false alarm but that didn’t mean the state of emergency was over.

  “Move along, move along, everything’s under control.”

  After a few minutes, Coco, very pale, comes out of the men’s. “Nothing, fine,” he says to the police. “I feel much better … much better.”

  In the pit and in the boxes, the usual cheerful chatter has been replaced by a low hum, broken now and then by slightly hysterical laughter.

  Avvocato Coco, paler than ever, takes his seat in the rows reserved for the local notables: mayors, commissioners, consultants, all of them nervous and tense, glancing back at their families lodged in the seats behind. Some bite their fingernails, some lie back in the red velvet seats as if awaiting takeoff on a charter flight of some Balkan airline. This is Sicily, and no matter how ready the police are, if something is supposed to happen it is very likely that it will.

  The lights go down.

  The chorus comes on, peering out curiously into the dimness of the pit. They begin chanting, without much conviction; it’s obvious their minds are elsewhere:

  CHORUS Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie,

  And young affection gapes to be his heir.

  The theater is totally silent.

  Rarely has Shakespeare enjoyed such concentration.

  Then someone in the audience begins to recite the text in a low voice, as if he knew it by memory or was trying to read it in the dark.

  “Where are we now?” the voice says, not so low now.

  “Shhh …”

  Everyone wants to pay the closest attention at the point where the tragedy will reach its climax: Act Two, Scene Four. Whatever the author’s intentions, it has become, as some of the ladies wearing their best jewelry would say, the high point of the evening.

  BENVOLIO Here comes Romeo, here
comes Romeo.

  The audience quivers.

  Mercutio, played by Cosimo Cosentino, fifty-eight years old, looks around.

  Both he and Romeo, played by sixty-year-old Jano Caporeale, are genuine stage animals. A lifetime spent pounding the boards of the dialect theaters, up against real audiences, not intellectuals.

  Nobody’s laughing tonight at their skimpy costumes, at their tights.

  Both pause now here to emphasize what everyone is asking himor herself: Will it happen again tonight?

  MERCUTIO (Looking toward the public, half squatting, with a screwing motion thrusts up his arm and then follows through with his whole body, rising off the stage in a little hop) Nay, I am the very pink of courtesy.

  ROMEO (Covering his crotch with both hands, then spreading them out slowly as if something were swelling in his undershorts)

  Pink in the sense of something that flowers? That explodes with the joy of springtime? Or pink like something that pricks? That swells and stands up? Stands up like a turret? Pointed like a mountaintop? (He joins the five fingers of his right hand and thrusts it upward.) Or are you not speaking of an uphill struggle through nettlesome bushes?

  Pause.

  Cosentino-Mercutio has to admit, not without some annoyance, that Caporeale-Romeo is in superb form tonight.

  A voice in the audience whispers, “Holy shit, he’s over the top. In the English text here, it just says ‘pink for flower.’”

  “Shhh …”

  MERCUTIO (Bouncing on his knees while he moves his arm back and forward like a pendulum, a pendulum that culminates in a finger pointing toward Romeo)

  Thou hast most kindly hit it.

  ROMEO (Brief pause while he seems, though no one can be sure, to wink at the audience, then he moves his arms in a circle and positions his hands once again on his crotch, which he clutches meaningfully)

  You want to hear my reply? It’s this great, big, pointed, sweet-smelling, flowering explosion of my great, big, hotheaded, crazy dick!

  It is in that moment that Chartered Accountant Intelisano begins to fly.

  At first, and from that point of view (Intelisano’s, that is), it is the stage which appears to descend below the horizon line of his bifocals. Then, for about a tenth of a second, he feels his head is spinning. Finally, objective reason gives no further room for doubt: Intelisano has gone into orbit.

  There is a boom like a giant rocket taking off, the same noise you can hear during the feast of St. Agatha in Catania, if you push through the crowd and get right up near where they’re setting off the fireworks.

  And from behind the scenes, the unmistakable voice of Rosanna Lambertini (that night as in every preceding hot-blooded night the body and soul of Juliet), with an angry, almost offended howl, pronounces the following words, “Fuck, no—not again!” while Intelisano takes flight toward the richly decorated ceiling with its plaster angels and friezes and frescoes of freshly minted gold.

  After a few minutes the lights come up on the confusion.

  The next day the Mirror of London will carry a little item.

  Under a photo of an ancient map of Sicily kept in the Vatican Museum, the one with the island upside down as if seen directly by the eye of God, the headline is unequivocal:

  A SICILIAN TRAGEDY

  ACT ONE

  The Birth of Comedy

  CHAPTER ONE

  Two Months Earlier

  Two months earlier.

  An explosion of loud yellow and red.

  Pinwheels and whirligigs.

  The scene widens between flashes of intarsia. A man is lying flat on his back in a piazza: a crime in a public place, as befits the seriousness of the offense.

  A red stain is spreading over his white shirt.

  Another man, dressed like the first (white shirt, black trousers, white stockings up to the knee with red pom-poms, red sash knotted around the waist, black beret), holds up an enormous knife in victory.

  Eyes widening in a furious grin.

  A woman runs from the piazza, clad head to foot in black, a shawl over her hair, a hand on her breast. You can tell she’s running by her skirt, the way her speed lifts it up and makes it stick to her legs.

  The woman is screaming.

  Her hair’s a mess.

  Her features are blurry but they give force to her expression, they spell out passion and murder just as we imagine them to be.

  Jano Caporeale and Cosimo Cosentino, two pillars of the Catania dialect theater, are looking, perplexed, at the scene. It’s painted, as tradition would have it, on the side of a Sicilian cart. The death of cumpare Turiddu in Cavalleria rusticana.

  Both are wearing heavy wool jackets (Caporeale’s in brown, Cosentino’s in a blue and orange check) and threadbare gray flannel trousers. They wear no neckties and under their shirt collars the raveled edges of flesh-colored underwear can be seen.

  Caporeale straightens his jacket with one clumsy hand, then looks around.

  The waiters, in worn-out white cotton jackets, black trousers shiny with age, and well-scuffed shoes, are hastening from one room to another of Palazzo Biscari, getting the tables ready for lunch. Chairs squealing as they are pushed over the floor, the clink of heels, flatware, and glasses echoes in the reception room empty of all decor. Memories of old-fashioned grandeur just good enough for catered events these days.

  Caporeale looks at Cosentino.

  Cosentino looks at Caporeale.

  “What time is it?” asks Caporeale.

  Cosentino doesn’t move a muscle. He continues to allow Caporeale to stare at him. “Why? You don’t have a watch?”

  Caporeale raises his eyebrows. “If I ask you what time it is, it means I don’t have one.”

  “At the pawnshop?”

  “I asked you what time it is.”

  Cosentino turns to look at the Sicilian cart once again. “I hocked mine too.”

  Caporeale nods, also turning to stare at the cart.

  “I’d say it’s past noon,” says Cosentino.

  “And at past noon the only thing here that’s ready to eat is this fucking fruit painted on the cart?”

  “What, you think they’re all retirees like us who eat at the stroke of noon? Me, seeing as how they invited us for lunch, I even ate a light meal last night.”

  “Light, huh?”

  “Light.”

  Outside on the sidewalk, a North African selling pirate CDs and DVDs pushes the play button on a huge radio, out of which comes “No Roots” by Faithless.

  This is the Civita quarter of Catania, in Via Archi della Marina. Traffic here flows slowly, dammed up between the arches of volcanic rock in the shape of an ancient aqueduct over which the train tracks pass, and Palazzo Biscari.

  Until the end of the nineteenth century, the arches nuzzled up against the sea, Via Archi della Marina didn’t exist and Palazzo Biscari didn’t open onto a street draped with sidewalk salesmen and upholsterers’ workshops, but directly onto the water. Beside the main door there were still iron rings once used to tie up the boats.

  The arches of the marina are the principal subject, à la Magritte, of the oil paintings that adorn the many trattorie serving fish in the quarter. What you usually notice in these paintings is a certain disproportion of dimension: Mt. Etna in the background is always too big or too small compared with the mullet laid out on the fishmongers’ slabs.

  Later, tons of landfill were thrown into the sea to build the port, and the arches were swallowed up by the city. Now, under the vaults, tiny parking lots, improvised and illegal, alternate with the carcasses of automobiles that have been stolen and dismantled, garbage bins, street peoples’ homes of cardboard and plastic, fruit and vegetable stands, flower-sellers, vendors of Chinese and African merchandise, a kiosk selling beer and seltzer with lemon and salt.

  Across the way, on the other side of the street and the noonday traffic, is the Baroque Palazzo Biscari, and behind that, the Duomo of Catania.

  It’s a beautiful day and
Etna looms over the landscape.

  Mister Alfio Turrisi, at the wheel of his Aston Martin—wheel on the right—is stuck in traffic. He looks in the mirror to see if his Brylcreem is holding everything in place (hair that was once thin, curly, and white, but which now, thanks to the admirable services of a barber in Ognina, is straight and black). Mister Turrisi would have liked to wear it thick and combed back, but the barber (who was totally bald) told him he had yet to master miracles, and so he had to content himself with a style that swept rightward from a left parting, covering the necessary.

  He wets the tip of his little finger, with its diminutive signet ring, and smooths the tips of his pencil mustache and his eyebrows, watching two punk kids as they cut in front of him carrying a swordfish a couple of yards long.

  The crushed ice man (ice for the crates of fresh fish at the fishmonger’s next to Porta Uzeda, where Via Etnea, Catania’s main street, begins) is sitting thoughtfully on a straw-backed chair smoking a cigarette while he watches a block of ice melt in the July sun.

  Turrisi turns the air-conditioning up to the max: he hates sweating but it’s a habit he’s unable to break. One time he had problems with the hair dye and it began to drip down his forehead. He looks at his watch. Turrisi has a lot of business in England and he likes to be on time.

  On the sidewalk, organized by size from the smallest, about four inches high, to the largest, about five feet, stands a row of wooden elephants. They all have their trunks pointing to the sky. Turrisi cranes his neck to see the elephants better.

  Behind him, someone honks.

  Turrisi, annoyed, shifts into first.

  All around him is the midday crowd, old guys who are wending their way home from a morning spent on a park bench in the sun at Villa Pacini, getting a good look at the asses of the female students waiting for the bus in front of the Bar Etoile.