Sicilian Tragedee

by Cappellani, Ottavio

  Another hard-to-decipher gesture from Pirrotta.

  Falsaperla laughs again.

  “No, no,” says Pirrotta, “let’s certainly hope nothing goes wrong. With all those people!”

  Falsaperla tilts his head to one side and raises his eyebrows as if to say, Am I or am I not a genius? “Things in a public place, as you know, there have to be people. If there’s nobody, then nobody will go around talking about it, and the thing doesn’t have any meaning.”

  “Sure, otherwise what meaning does it have?”

  “That’s what I say,” says Falsaperla.

  When he gets back home Wanda asks, “Well? How did the meeting with Falsaperla go?”

  “If the guy’s a jerk it’s not my fault. Is there any almond milk in this fucking house?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Cagnotto Is Having His Toenails Trimmed by Bobo

  Cagnotto is having his toenails trimmed by Bobo. He’s stretched out on the zebra-striped sofa with an ice bag on his head. “I can’t bear Caporeale anymore. That ingrate! Oh, God, my head, what time is it?”

  Bobo puts down the nail file. “Three-thirty. Polish?”

  Cagnotto leaps up. “Are you crazy? It’s late! How do I look?”

  Bobo, seated on the ottoman, looks up at him with admiration. “You look gorgeous.”

  Cagnotto’s wearing a black silk dressing gown lined with red over red silk pajamas.

  Around his neck is a pink feather boa.

  Cagnotto smiles. “I’d better take this thing off or they’ll think I’m gay.” He takes it off and hides it under one of the sofa cushions.

  “Idiot,” says Bobo, smiling.

  Cagnotto touches Bobo’s nose with the tip of his index finger, then pulls back quickly. “Hunk.”

  This morning they had called from La Voce della Sicilia asking if they could send a reporter for an interview about his new play. Cagnotto had gotten the call on his cell phone while they were at the Matador. If only they were giving him fewer problems, the actors, he would have invited the reporter to come directly to the rehearsal. He would have had her talk to Caporeale, to Cosentino, to Lambertini. But they were still thinking out the interpretation and Cagnotto was afraid the actors would say something dumb. And so he had said into the phone, “At home?” as if on the other end of the line they were asking to come to his house. “Fine, then, if that’s what you want, at my house.” Cagnotto had repocketed the phone, spreading his arms as if to say, They insisted on coming to my house.

  The doorbell rings.

  Cagnotto throws himself on the sofa.

  Bobo gathers up the pedicure equipment into a towel and runs to hide it away, yelling, “Get the door!”

  An aging retainer wearing white livery crosses the sitting room. He walks kicking his legs forward as if he can’t take another minute in this house full of crazies.

  “Yes?”

  The old guy pushes the buzzer and then opens the apartment door to wait for the elevator.

  Bobo comes running back in shouting, “Get the door!”

  The old guy’s look is impenetrable.

  Bobo, very nervous, asks, “Did you open?”

  The old guy, in front of the elevator, nods slowly, twice.

  “Baby!” Bobo runs over to Cagnotto.

  Cagnotto is imitating Paolina Bonaparte as sculpted by Canova in the style and posture of Venus.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Huh?” says Cagnotto with a start.

  “What’s this look?”

  Cagnotto doesn’t understand. He checks to see that the dressing gown and pajamas are in place.

  “Sit up!” Bobo orders.

  Cagnotto stares at him.

  “Sit up!”

  Cagnotto sits up.

  “Cross your legs.”

  Cagnotto crosses them. He puts his hands together on one knee. He looks up.

  Bobo runs to a table, grabs a book, runs back, and slaps it into Cagnotto’s hand.

  Cagnotto nods, takes the book, and begins to read with his elbow on his knee. Then he makes a funny face, looks at the cover, Madame Bovary, a look of horror crosses his face, but once again he fakes an interest and begins to read.

  Bobo races to the other end of the sitting room, where there’s the “musician” setting with the piano. He leans on the piano.

  He hears the door of the elevator open.

  He hears the reporter say “Good afternoon,” to the old guy.

  Bobo springs.

  He manages to meet the reporter just as she’s stepping into the apartment, but on the run, as if he were just passing through by chance. “Oh, good afternoon.”

  “I’m the report—”

  “Yes, I know, I know. Follow me. You’ll pardon me then, I’ll be off.”

  The reporter follows him, looking around.

  Bobo sends Cagnotto a look of anguish.

  The reporter is a cross between a harpy and a wife, you can see that she’s just been to the hairdresser because she had an appointment with a director, and you can see that the hairdresser was pitiful. The typical mix of envy and resentment. She walks like a drunk on her high-heeled wedge sandals. Bobo can hear her rolling across the floor behind him. Her sweat stinks of nervousness and rancor. Bobo wishes Cagnotto would lift his head from that book so he could warn him with his eyes.

  Cagnotto continues to read with great interest.

  “The reporter is here …”

  Cagnotto is deep into the book.

  Bobo is standing in front of him.

  Cagnotto lifts his eyes distractedly.

  He sees Bobo’s face.

  He opens his eyes wide.

  Bobo sends him a forced smile.

  Cagnotto remembers to smile.

  Bobo steps back. “The reporter …”

  Cagnotto looks at the reporter.

  Cagnotto looks at Bobo.

  He thinks he’s going to pass out.

  The journalist holds out her hand.

  Cagnotto stares at the hand as if it were a piece of decaying sushi. He says, “Please sit down,” pointing to a chair on the other side of the room.

  The reporter says thanks and runs her hand through her hair, filling the room with the smell of crappy hair spray. She sits down on the sofa right next to Cagnotto.

  The old guy appears. “Would you like something to drink?”

  “A coffee,” says the reporter, wiggling a behind as big as Piazza Europa and settling into the sofa as if she intended to sit there for the rest of her life.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Betty Is Stretched Out on the Sofa on Her Stomach

  Betty is stretched out on the sofa on her stomach, her hand limp on the carpet. “Carmine, will you calm down?”

  Carmine is pacing nervously around the living room. He jumps into an armchair and perches on the edge. “Okay, shit, just tell me what are you up to, why are you up to it, and what made you do it?”

  “Lay off.”

  “No, I won’t lay off because there has to be a reason, people don’t do things without a reason. So what’s your reason?”

  The hand comes to slowly, it rests on the carpet and pushes down weakly. Betty sits up, moving like a tree sloth. Now her two little hands lie limp on the sofa cushions, palms facing up.

  Betty gazes with interest at the arrangement of objects on the table. She looks thoughtful. Laboriously, she leans toward the table, moves a bust of Socrates made of quartz to the right and a Big Ben made of colored glass to the left.

  She falls back on the sofa, lifts her legs, one by one, and places her two little feet in the space she has cleared.

  She looks at Carmine, exhausted. “Carmine, it’s not so complicated.”

  Carmine is still looking at the bust of Socrates.

  “What am I supposed to do? It’s not like Turrisi totally turns me off. And what’s more, if they want me to, I can even marry him, but, like, when I’m old and decrepit, like, I don’t know, thirty. You have to be crazy if you thi
nk that I want to get married at my age, like the little girls down in San Cristoforo.”

  “And you can’t find a way to make this clear to Turrisi, who doesn’t get it?”

  “Carmine, you’re a gay guy, you don’t know about guys. You know about gay guys but that’s different.”

  Carmine looks annoyed, as if he’s about to go down with a hysteric fit.

  Betty, calm, puts the brake on. “If I let Turrisi know I don’t go for him he’ll never stop insisting. He’ll think I’m doing it because I’m a female, and because I’m a female, that I don’t understand.”

  “And actually you do understand?”

  Betty looks down at Carmine from an immense, galactic distance. “My father and Turrisi both want me to get married. They’ve been enemies all their lives. And now that they’ve discovered that there’s oil in Ispica, well, guess.”

  “Oil?”

  Betty nods. “Luckily there’s oil. Because in this business neither Turrisi nor my father can afford to do something stupid. They’re picking up the land at auction.” Betty smiles. “Public auction, get it?”

  “Auctions?”

  Betty nods with an expression that says, Auctions, can you believe it?

  “Auctions, what’s so strange about that? That’s how you buy things when there are several people who want to buy them.”

  The immense, galactic distance increases by light-years. “Carmine, let me tell you. You really don’t understand fuck-all.”

  Carmine, puzzled, tries to think about this business of auctions.

  Betty sighs, rolls her head back, and looks at the ceiling.

  Turi Pirrotta comes into the living room and finds his daughter sprawled on the sofa with Carmine on the edge of a chair, looking at her with a puzzled face.

  “Aha!” says Pirrotta. “We’ve now got to the point where my daughter has to be consoled.”

  Carmine snaps around to look at Pirrotta, not knowing what to say.

  Betty slowly turns her head the other way and rests her cheek on the back of the sofa.

  Pirrotta stares at Betty, the way it looks to him his daughter has turned her head to one side so as not to let her father see she’s crying.

  Pirrotta looks at Carmine scandalized. “We’ll see if I let this continue. We’ll see!”

  Pirrotta goes out yelling nasally, “Wanda! Where the fuck are you, Wanda?”

  Carmine is silent.

  Betty, who is trying to work the crick out of her neck, says in a low voice, “There’s fuck-all he can do about it.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Shit, Listen to This

  “Shit, listen to this.”

  The reporter had begun with an architectonic description of Cagnotto’s apartment, a house “designed to be inhabited by the intellect” where “minimalism has been abandoned in favor of ethnic color …”

  “Are you listening Bobo?”

  After this came an overview of his work.

  “Get it, Bobo? They’re doing an overview of my work.”

  An overview that used words like contamination, avant-garde, and experimentation, an artist who wouldn’t be out of place in New York.

  “I certainly wouldn’t be out of place.”

  And then it continued with the interview itself, in which Cagnotto’s words were faithfully reproduced.

  “Good work! Now, this is journalism. Not like those guys that put stuff you don’t want in your mouth. Bobo, has anybody ever put stuff you don’t want in your mouth?”

  Cagnotto had spoken of “theatrical neorealism, capable of bringing the Italian cultural Renaissance to international prominence. Pasolini, De Sica, Pirandello! Romeo is played by a sixty-year-old actor to suggest, in stage terms, the eternal adolescence of the idea.”

  (Caporeale had called up, furious. “I’m fifty-nine years old and if you keep this up you can get Lambertini to grab her prick. Why didn’t anyone interview the actors?”

  “You’re sixty-four.”

  “Fuck if I am.”

  “No, I mean, like Pascoli, theatrical fiction is the genuine reality that can draw the young into the world of culture.”)

  The article went on to say that “Shakespeare’s relevance must be credited not to Shakespeare but to those directors who know how to reinterpret his work.”

  “Shit, did I really say that? Let’s hope the English don’t hear about it. But okay, if the reporter thought it was true, and wrote it in the paper, it must be true. Right, Bobo?”

  Paino had called to congratulate himself for the article. He was proud of the way they had played up the event. He had been the one who got in touch with the paper. Cagnotto had said to Bobo, “The credit is all mine, what does Commissioner Paino have to do with it?” And in fact Commissioner Paino had nothing at all to do with it, the credit belonged to Commissioner Falsaperla and his phone call.

  Paino had suggested he give a dinner. Commissioners like dinners, especially when they’re given by other people. “We’ve got to cultivate the terrain,” he said. Create interest. The article was a starting point. They had to move fast. He was wasting his words because Cagnotto, the idea of giving a dinner, he had already had all by himself, you think he wasn’t going to give a dinner on the day there was a front-page article about his Shakespeare?

  The Contessa had called to congratulate herself for the article. The credit was due to her raccomandazione. She had also asked if she could invite some of her friends. Cagnotto replied that it would be an honor for him.

  In the “Victorian” sitting area, Cagnotto dictates, “So write this, Bobo: ‘Rotten Apples.’ And tell it to the shop down below where they make those candied apples. Next comes ‘Human Kindness Ravioli with Pork Sauce.’”

  “Human kindness?”

  Cagnotto nods. “Human kindness as in ‘the milk of human kindness, ’ Macbeth. We can’t do veal intestines because they give the calves powdered milk now and they don’t taste of anything, so that if we want human kindness we will have to eat ricotta ravioli with pork sauce. Oh, and then we’ll have a cheese course and we’ll call it … um … Mad Cow Lady Macbeth, and on the menu we’ll write, ‘Come to my woman’s breasts.’” Cagnotto makes like he’s offering a woman’s breasts. “Oh, and the menu should be printed, like, on parchment and rolled up with a red ribbon and sealing wax stamped WS. What else? Oh, yes, obviously, Merchant of Venice Ham, sliced thick, and a sparkling wine, I don’t know, a Lambrusco or a Sangiovese, nice and fizzy, and on the menu we’ll write, ‘Toby Belch, from Twelfth Night.’ What else? Oh, yes, our heroine. See that table there?”

  Bobo looks at the table.

  “Okay, that one I want served with Marzipan Juliet and on the menu write, ‘Good thou, save me a piece of marchpane,’ and tough shit for anybody who doesn’t understand the reference. Tell Prestipino that I want the marzipan in the shape of poison vials.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Bruno Pirronello, Photographer of La Voce della Sicilia

  Bruno Pirronello, photographer of La Voce della Sicilia, is bent over his camera bag fiddling with his lenses.

  All around him Casa Cagnotto is bustling with preparations for the party.

  Sitting in silence in the back seat of the Mercedes, Turi Pirrotta looks a lot like Riddu the Cement-Mixer tonight. Even Wanda, who never has anything to say to him except that he should go screw himself, is impressed. He looks younger.

  The driver too is particularly silent.

  Wanda is gnawing at her lip because she doesn’t understand what’s going on, and when Wanda doesn’t understand, her nerves flare up. She wants to have everything under control. But tonight she’s not going to risk overplaying the wife, because she remembers, with rage and with affection, with hatred and with love, with relief and with nostalgia, the days in which, if she said something wrong, Riddu would give her a slap that … Wanda doesn’t like to confess even to herself the unthinkable thought.

  Maybe her daughter Betty also needs a man who would give her a slap. Okay, times have ch
anged, but when you got a nice slap out of nowhere that set your whole face on fire, you did feel like a wife. That is, of course, if you had married for love. And Wanda had married Riddu the Cement-Mixer for love. She used to watch him from the balcony on Via Vittorio Emanuele when he drove by in the cement-mixer and blasted that crazy horn he had picked up in Germany. Tadadadadadada, the theme song of The Godfather. Wanda felt her insides churn around like a cement-mixer.

  But then time had moved on and Riddu turned into Turi, the cement-mixer turned into a Mercedes, the apartment turned into a villa, and Wanda’s hair rollers turned into a beauty salon. Not that Wanda is complaining, God forbid, but sometimes, when there’s a full moon in springtime and a warm breeze that brings you the scent of fried eggplant, Wanda thinks that she wouldn’t mind going back to Via Vittorio Emanuele to hear the sound of the cement-mixer as it butted aside the garbage bin to park, and Riddu stumbling in, half soused, demanding that she do her sacred duty as a wife. He had those pitch-black curls that Wanda stroked all over while he told her, “Now we’ll see if you calm down, you little slut, you slut …”

  The orange lights illuminating the marvels of the Sicilian Baroque shine off Turi’s mute face.

  “Turi?”

  “Chi bboi?”

  Mother of God, when he started talking real dialect!

  “What’s wrong?”

  Turi looked at her and his left eyebrow rose right up onto his forehead. Damn! Wanda was tempted to tell the driver, “Stop the car, stop, we’re getting out here and going to get the cement-mixer. I said stop!”

  Casa Cagnotto is all tarted up for a Shakespeare party that all of Catania will soon be talking about. Cagnotto is wearing his super-tight black jeans, a large white shirt, Hamlet-style, and on top, a skin-tight damask vest, Juliet-style. (“Looks like a bodice, no?”) All in all, he resembles a flute player in a Sicilian folk dance company. He looks at himself in the mirror and feels quite elated.

  He turns to Bobo and pats his cheek. “Bassanio, then do but say to me what I should do that in your knowledge may by me be done, and I am prest unto it.”