IM11 The Wings of the Sphinx (2009)
Page 20
4 . . . the government was thinking about building a bridge over the Strait of Messina: This has long been a pet project of Silvio Berlusconi, past and present prime minister of Italy and a business tycoon in his own right. The bridge project is one of several grandiose public works by which Berlusconi would like to monumentalize his dubious stewardship of the Italian nation.
9 Matre santa . . . !: “Holy mother” in Sicilian dialect.
30 . . . immediately started firing blindly, feeling perhaps empowered to do so by the recent law on self-defense: On January 24, 2006, in a highly controversial move, the right-wing Berlusconi government passed a reform of article 52 of the Constitution, easing the restrictions on justifiable self-defense. The reform followed the relaxation of the requirements for the right to bear arms and has led to a number of apparently needless and avoidable deaths.
79 “. . . The ragioniere Curcuraci”: Ragioniere is a largely meaningless title given to accountants whose specialization does not go beyond that provided by vocational school. A fully certified accountant is called a contabile.
97 Nuttata persa e figlia femmina: Literally, “a wasted night and it’s a girl,” the expression means “a lot of time wasted and nothing to show for it.”
98 . . . little street called Via Platone. Given that he was in a philosophical neighborhood . . . : Platone is Italian for Plato, and Empedocle is, of course, the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, who was a Sicilian from Agrigentum, the ancient name of Agrigento, Camilleri’s model for the town of Montelusa. The model for Vigàta is Porto Empedocle, Camilleri’s hometown.
104 “. . . to combine benefit and delight”: Montalbano is alluding to the famous dictum articulated by Horace (65-8 BC) in his Ars Poetica: “Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae / aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae,” (ll. 333-34), according to which poetry should both benefit and delight the reader.
109 “. . . cululùchira” . . . A buttock tattoo?: Culu in Sicilian (culo in Italian) means “buttocks.”
132 “. . . I just thought of another cavaliere who uses his younger brother as a front man for himself. It’s become a widespread practice.”: Montalbano is referring to the fact that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, commonly known as il cavaliere, has very often used his younger brother Paolo to represent his interests in order to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest. Among other things, Paolo Berlusconi has run newspapers for his brother (Il Giornale and La Notte) and sat on the board of a number of major concerns (Mediolanum Assicurazioni and Standa).
132 “Even a homicide, with these new laws, can prove ‘unactionable.’ ”: See note for page 30.
154 But why, in 2006, would a mayor still want to name a street after Atilius Regulus?: Marcus Atilius Regulus was a general and consul in the First Punic War (256 BC).
166 “I did. I noticed a strong burning smell, and—”“I smell it, too”: The original text has a double entendre here: In Sicilian, to “smell something burning” (sentire feto di bruciato) means “to smell a rat.”
167 . . . the quotation of Mussolini: On October 2, 1935, from the famous balcony in Palazzo Venezia in Rome, from which he normally addressed the throngs, Mussolini virtually declared war on Ethiopia in saying: “We’ve waited forty years, and that’s enough!” He was referring, in substance, to the fact that Italy had had to repress her imperial ambitions and destiny for forty years, beginning with the first stirrings of foreign conquest in North Africa in the 1890s.
206 “. . . one of ’em called 118”: The emergency telephone number, the Italian equivalent of 911.
224 “Maybe there is still a judge in Berlin”: A reference to the famous anecdote, immortalized in a poem by Andrieux, in which Frederick II of Prussia, wishing to extend the domains of the Sans-Souci, his country château, asked a miller whose property abutted the royal domain to sell it to him. When the miller refused, the king said he would seize the land outright. To which the miller defiantly replied, “Yes, if there are no judges in Berlin!”
Notes by Stephen Sartarelli