Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions Read online

  “Your time will be your own,” I was told on the phone by my Aunt Caterina, the voice of reason in our family. “You’ll be independent, and you can write just as well down here with us, maybe even better.”

  Her subtext: since you’re unemployed and work-shy anyway, and you don’t even have a girlfriend although other men your age have long since acquired a wife and kids, you might just as well loaf around here. Who knows, maybe something will come of it.

  Which it eventually did.

  Between Munich and Torre Archirafi, however, I was faced with a thirty-four-hour drive in Isolde’s overpowered 1980s Alfa equipped with roll bars, which she flatly refused to exchange for a more practical Panda and seldom drove anyway because you had to be certifiably sober to do so.

  “We could always drive to Genoa and take it easy on the ferry over to Palermo,” I suggested timidly, but Poldi just eyed me with scorn. My mistake. I should have known. If there was one phrase she detested from the bottom of her heart it was “take it easy”.

  “Well, if it’s too much for you…”

  “No, no, it’s all right,” I grunted, and we puttered off, never doing over sixty miles per hour as we slunk across the Brenner Pass and trickled down the whole of the Italian boot past Milan, Rome and Naples, keeping to the autostrada all the way to Reggio Calabria. We devoured our first arancini di riso on the ferry between Scylla and Charybdis and got lost in Messina, where Poldi insisted on driving the final stretch to Torre herself. She revved the asthmatic Alfa and stepped on it. When we got to Torre I kissed the ground and thanked the Mother of God for my salvation and resurrection.

  “Many happy returns,” I sighed, because it was the very day my Auntie Poldi turned sixty.

  My Uncle Martino and the aunts came to Torre every few days to see how Poldi was getting on. The thing was, my aunts had a project: to keep Poldi alive for as long as possible, or at least to help raise her spirits. For Sicilians, joie de vivre rests on two pillars: good food, and talking/arguing about good food. Uncle Martino, for example, went to his temple, Catania’s fish market, every day. Not a very entertaining place, more a kind of stock exchange where men lounge with tense concentration, checking the quality and price of the fish on offer and speculating on tuna belly meat or on whether a belated fisherman will turn up with a swordfish when everyone else’s needs have been met and they can buy it more cheaply and fresher than fresh. This can take hours and isn’t much fun, either. Alternatively, Uncle Martino will take Aunt Teresa mushroom-picking on Etna. He once drove all round the volcano to buy bread, and for eggs he goes to a car repair shop near Lentini whose owner’s mutant hens lay eggs with two yolks. Granita is only to be consumed at the Caffè Cipriani in Acireale; cannoli alla crema di ricotta can only come from the Pasticceria Savia on Via Etnea in Catania. Once, when I praised the Pasticceria Russo in Santa Venerina for its marzipan, my uncle merely growled disparagingly – then drove there with me at once to check on the matter in situ and subsequently commended me on my palate. Cherries have to come from Sant’Alfio, pistachios from Bronte, potatoes from Giarre, and wild fennel from one particular, top-secret old lava field where – if you’re in luck and the Terranovas haven’t got there first – you can also find oyster mushrooms the size of your hand. Arancini di riso have to be eaten at Urna in San Giovanni la Punta and pizzas at Il Tocco, beneath the Provinciale and just beyond the Esso garage. The tastiest mandarins come from Syracuse and the tastiest figs – whatever their ultimate provenance – from the street vendor in San Gregorio. If you ever eat fish outside your own four walls, the only place to do so is Don Carmelo’s in Santa Maria la Scala, which also serves the best pasta al nero di seppia. Life is complicated on an island imprisoned in a stranglehold of crisis and corruption, where men still live with their parents until marriage or their mid-forties for lack of employment, but no culinary compromises are ever made. That was what Poldi had always liked about Sicily, being inquisitive and sensual by nature. All she considered execrable was my uncle’s taste in wine, for neither he nor the aunts were great drinkers. Sicilians in general drank little – a glass with their meals at most. This initially presented Poldi with a problem, until she discovered the HiperSimply’s wine department and, later on, Gaetano Avola’s vineyard in Zafferana. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Poldi’s day always began with a revivifying Prosecco. Then came an espresso with a dash of brandy, followed by a slug of brandy without the espresso. Sometimes, when in a more than usually melancholy frame of mind, she would walk to Praiola, a remote little pebbly beach. An enchanted place with water as clear as liquid cobalt, it was sprinkled with lumps of lava sculpted into black and rust-brown dinosaurs’ eggs by the ebb and flow of the sea. She usually had it all to herself. In high summer it wasn’t until later in the day that families came with their radios, picnic baskets, cool boxes, rubber rings and sun umbrellas and strewed the little beach with litter until, by October, it resembled a rubbish dump until it was scoured clean again by the winter storms. My Auntie Poldi would sometimes dip her feet in the limpid water, toss a particularly handsome dinosaur’s egg into the sea in memory of my Uncle Peppe, fold her hands, and say, “Namaste, life.” Followed by: “Poldi contra mundum.”

  At eleven in the morning came the first beer, accompanied by Umberto Tozzi belting out the 1979 pop song “Gloria” at a volume that would have driven even Scylla and Charybdis insane. When my cousins came visiting we used to sing the song together, but substituting “Poldi” for “Gloria”. You might say it became a kind of anthem.

  Strangely enough, the neighbours never complained. Strangely enough, they took to Poldi from day one, toted her shopping home for her, carried out minor repairs in the house, accompanied her on her visits to officialdom and invited her to play cards. No matter what had gone wrong in my aunt’s life, everyone felt good in her company. The neighbours called her simply “Donna Poldina”.

  The neighbours: Signora Anzalone and her husband on the left, both elderly. The house on the right belonged to a Dottore Branciforti, a tax consultant from Catania, but he only came on weekends with his mistress or during the summer months with his wife and children, if at all. At the end of the street lived Elio Bussacca, who owned the tabacchi on the corner and eventually found Valentino for my aunt.

  For the first few weeks after Poldi’s move, everything seemed to be going according to plan. Having installed her old furniture, the peasant cupboards, her father’s collection of antique weapons, her ebony African idols and her china knick-knacks, she raised a glass to the sea and the volcano in turn. Before toasting Etna, she always paid tribute to the mighty smoker by firing up an MS – a morto sicuro, or “certain death”, as the Italians call that brand of cigarettes – to go with her brandy.

  The heat seemed to drip off her like dew off a lotus leaf, although the sweat trickled down from under her wig.

  Ah, that wig.

  She had worn one for as long as I could remember. A huge black monster variously dressed in accordance with the prevailing fashion, it loomed above her head like a storm cloud. According to family legend, no one had ever seen what lay hidden beneath it. Even my Uncle Peppe had been vague on the subject. I suspect that Vito Montana was later privileged to peek beneath that holiest of holies, but he too preserved a discreet silence.

  On the very first Sunday after moving in, Poldi invited the aunts, my cousins and me, still recovering in the attic guest room from our drive, to lunch. Roast pork with beer gravy, dumplings and red cabbage. In mid-July. In Sicily. We were welcomed with tumblerfuls of a dry Martini strong enough to send a Finnish seaman into a coma. While Poldi was inside thickening the gravy, alternately adding beer and drinking some herself, we huddled together under the only awning in the little inner courtyard like penguins in a storm. Still, lunch already smelt delicious. When Poldi finally emerged with a monstrous great leg of roast pork, bathed in sweat and explosively red in the face, I jumped to my feet in a panic.

  “For goodness’ sake com
e into the shade, Poldi.”

  But my Auntie Poldi merely – as so often – gazed at me pityingly. “You think I came to Sicily to sit in the shade? I want sun, proper sun, sun with some oomph to it. Il sole. The sun is masculine in Italy, like the sea and the volcano, and they’re what I came here for, so sit down, all of you. I’ll go and get the dumplings.”

  It really was a poem, that roast pork – la fine del mondo, even in a temperature of forty degrees. My cousins, who regarded German cuisine with a certain scepticism, were hesitant at first, but after the first polite mouthful they tucked in. They still wouldn’t touch the red cabbage, but no one was deterred by the heat.

  “Hey,” my Auntie Poldi said, out of the blue, “how are you getting back to Germany?”

  I shrugged. “You can book me a flight any time soon.”

  She shook her head as if I’d said something extremely stupid.

  “Don’t you like it up there in the guest room?”

  “Er, yes, of course.”

  “Doing any writing?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can I read some of it?”

  The last question I wanted.

  “Well, not at the moment, Poldi. It’s still in a state of flux. Work in progress.”

  I had rashly told her during the drive about my self-destructive plan to write a big, epic family saga spanning three German–Sicilian generations. A regular doorstop of a novel, full-bodied, juicy, masterfully told, full of twists and turns, replete with brilliant images, quirky characters, stubble-chinned villains, ethereal beauties, plenty of sex, amatory entanglements, escapades, scorching days and velvety nights, and abrim with historical strands running parallel to the plot. The only trouble was, I’d made no progress at all. Writer’s block, total paralysis. I felt like Sisyphus within the first few feet. I had told Poldi all this between the Brenner Pass and Messina, and she’d merely nodded, being an expert on failure.

  “I was only thinking,” she said. “If you like it up there you could stay on. Or come here now and then – regularly, I mean, to write and do your research. It’d do your Italian good, too.”

  I sighed. “Thanks. No pressure, then.”

  But for some reason my Auntie Poldi wouldn’t let the matter drop. “I just don’t understand what more you want. Up there you have your own bathroom and your own peace and quiet. You can come and go as you please, and if something turns up on the amore front, you’re welcome to bring her home any time.”

  That was all I needed. My aunts naturally endorsed the idea with enthusiasm – it meant they would have a family member on the spot to keep an eye on Poldi – and when Aunt Teresa invited me to lunch the following Sunday, I knew further resistance was futile. After all, I told myself, even a failure can feast his eyes on the sea – that’s something, at least. And so I flew down from Germany once a month at the aunts’ expense, lodged in the attic at No. 29 Via Baronessa, chafed at my mediocrity during the day, and in the evening, if my Auntie Poldi was tipsy enough, marvelled at her accounts of the progress of her investigations into Valentino’s murder.

  2

  Tells of Valentino, of Poldi’s ultra-private photographic project, of afternoons in Torre Archirafi, and of sad Signora Cocuzza. Poldi becomes anxious and is nearly killed by some palm trees. She snaffles something in Acireale and soon afterwards discovers a small but heavily guarded paradise, which has been bereft of a lion.

  Valentino was a quiet, slim young man of not quite twenty. He was one of those Sicilian types in whom Sicily’s Arabo-Norman heritage shows through: olive complexion, broad nose, generous mouth, blue eyes.

  “A good-looking lad,” was Poldi’s verdict. “Just as sexy as my Peppe used to be. One could really take a shine to him.”

  Believe it or not, despite her sixty years and ample figure Poldi was still in great demand, certainly to judge by the glances she got from the local menfolk. She had always been a hottie and a fan of men in general, especially men in dapper police uniforms. That became clear to me when she showed me the photo albums containing her collection. The fact was, Poldi had a hobby: photographing good-looking traffic cops from all over the world. Having travelled widely in the previous thirty years, she had filled five capacious albums with steam-ironed, uniformed masculinity from Alaska to Australia, Belgrade to Buenos Aires. All the photos were neatly dated and many bore names indicating that Poldi had become better acquainted with the custodians of the law in question. Tattooed Maoris in snow-white shorts posed for the camera, a moustachioed Sikh in immaculate khaki brandished his lathi, and mounted New York cops wearing mirrored sunglasses bared their teeth. It was a proud parade of dapper figures, well-pressed trousers and bristling moustaches. Canadian Mounties in their flaming red full dress uniforms, narrow-hipped Scots in black and white, short-legged Bolivians in olive drab and snappy berets, wistful Siberian youngsters in fur caps – my Auntie Poldi had snapped them all. But her favourite subjects were Vigili Urbani. At least half the photos were of Italian traffic cops in their white gloves and, in some cases, white tropical helmets.

  “The handsomest ones are in Rome. By far. No comparison, absolutely unbeatable. Graceful as Nureyev, every last one of them. Their hand movements, their uniforms – perfect. But don’t go thinking they’d ever smile. They never smile until they’re off duty, as I know from personal experience. But here, look, I spotted a prize specimen in Taormina the day before yesterday.”

  On Wednesdays Poldi attended a language school belonging to Michele, a friend of my cousin Ciro’s, so Wednesday was the only day of the week on which she stayed sober. Her Italian was quite sufficient for everyday use, but that wasn’t good enough for her.

  “Why the stress?” I once asked her. “Why bother, when you’re planning to drink yourself to death?”

  Clumsy of me, very clumsy, to voice my other aunts’ suspicion so explicitly.

  “What sort of idiotic question is that?” she barked at me. “Until you’ve mastered the passato remoto, my boy, keep your pearls of wisdom to yourself. Understand?”

  At all events, Poldi had photographed an exceptionally smart Vigile in Taormina and planned to make his acquaintance at the next opportunity. He wasn’t in the first flush of youth, with his neatly trimmed beard and moustache and little pot belly, but he wore his immaculate uniform with the enviable arrogance of a good-looking chump whose mamma still irons his shirts.

  But back to Valentino. He wasn’t a chump – although he still lived with his parents as a matter of course – but he hadn’t managed to land a traineeship or a regular job. He really wasn’t a stupid youth, as Poldi quickly realized. Like many young Sicilians, he coped by doing odd jobs and toyed with the idea of emigrating to Germany. Sicilians find it a cinch to emigrate for decades: bag packed, bacio, addio – and off they go.

  Valentino helped Poldi with the minor repairs that became necessary soon after the renovation of her house. No disrespect to my cousin Ciro, but his builders had made a rotten job of the roof. When I went to change the bulb in the top-floor bathroom, the bowl shade tipped a Niagara of rainwater over me. A miracle I wasn’t electrocuted.

  Valentino could change fuses, put up pictures, repair the air conditioning and go shopping at the HiperSimply. He was a multi-talented youngster, and Poldi soon took him to her heart, in which, as everyone knew, there was plenty of room. She even gave him German lessons, not that the accent he acquired would have made him comprehensible outside Bavaria. But in any case the Germany project came to nothing, because early in August Valentino suddenly vanished without a trace.

  Poldi waited a whole day for him to fulfil his promise to clear a blocked drain. She didn’t take it amiss if someone stood her up once, but when she heard nothing from Valentino the next day and the day after that and he failed to answer his mobile, she became puzzled, angry and worried in turn. It dawned on her only then how little she really knew about him.

  She did know his surname, which was Candela.

  But she hadn’t the faintest idea
where he lived.

  Signora Anzalone hadn’t even noticed Valentino’s disappearance, and Signor Bussacca merely shrugged his shoulders.

  “Boh. Where else would he be. He’ll have hooked up with some girl. He’ll turn up again sooner or later.”

  Poldi was neither reassured nor convinced by this.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  Bussacca thought for a moment. “Yesterday? No, it must have been the day before. Or Monday. Yes, Monday. He bought a packet of Lucky Strike and fifty euros’ worth of credit for his mobile phone.”

  Poldi remembered this. On Monday, after hefting the heavy pot containing the lemon tree onto the roof terrace, Valentino had opened a new packet of cigarettes, scratched a new telephone card and activated the voucher code via his mobile.

  “Do you remember which phone company the scheda telefonica was for?”

  “A TIM. The others had run out.”

  Recalling the blue and red card, Poldi felt puzzled once more, because Valentino had always charged his mobile with a red and white card before. It now occurred to her that he had also been in possession of a brand-new folding mobile that Monday.

  “Why did he change providers?” she wondered aloud, but Signor Bussacca’s only response was another “Boh”, which is short in Italian for “I don’t have a clue.”

  “Where’s the best place to go when you want information?” Poldi asked me later, only to supply the answer herself. “You go to the waterhole, because all the animals always go there, big and small alike. Predators or prey – they’re all attracted to the water and folk are no different. And where, I ask you, is the waterhole in Torre Archirafi?”