“Listen, I’m a police inspector.”
The woman got scared.
“What?! Has something happened?”
“No, nothing’s happened. I just need to give Signora Cristina a message. Is she here?”
“Of course she’s here.”
“I sort of need to talk to her. Would you take me to her?”
“And what am I supposed to do with the children? You can go by yourself. It’s the second door on the left, after you enter. You can’t miss it.”
The house was tastefully furnished and orderly despite the presence of the grandchildren. The second door on the left was ajar.
“May I come in?”
No answer. He went in. The old woman lay sprawled out in an armchair, asleep, warmed by the sun bursting through the windowpanes. Her head was thrown backwards and from her open mouth dripped a shiny string of spittle, as her labored, raspy breathing broke up moment by moment, only to restart with increased effort. A fly passed undisturbed from one eyelid to the other, which had become so thin that the inspector feared they might cave in under the insect’s weight. Then the fly slipped inside one of her transparent nostrils. The skin on her face was yellow and so taut and close to the bone that it looked like a layer of color painted on a skull. The skin on her inert, gnarled hands was instead wizened and discolored by large brown splotches. Under a tartan blanket her legs shook with a perpetual tremor. There was an unbearable stench of rot and urine in the room. Was there still anything to communicate with inside that body so obscenely deformed by time? Montalbano doubted it. Worse yet, if there was still something there, would it be able to stand the knowledge of the truth?
Truth is light, the priest had said, or something similar. Right, but might not a light so strong risk burning the very thing it was supposed to illuminate? Better not to disturb the darkness of sleep and memory.
He withdrew, went out, and was back in the garden.
“Did you talk to the signora?”
“No. She was sleeping. I didn’t want to disturb her.”
Notes
Settimana Enigmistica: An immensely popular Italian weekly magazine of puzzles and rebuses that was first published in 1932.
polipetti alla strascinasale: Baby octopus simmered in water and salt.
“Ibis redibis non morieris in bello”: This was traditionally said to be the phrase uttered by the oracle to the soldier about to go off to war in ancient Rome. The sentence’s syntax is so conceived as to create a perfect ambiguity between opposite meanings. Depending on where one inserts commas—or pauses, since Latin had no commas—the statement changes meaning. If you read it “Ibis, redibis, non morieris in bello,” it means “You’ll go, you’ll come back, you’ll not die in war”; if you read it as “Ibis, redibis non, morieris in bello,” it means “You’ll go, you’ll not come back, you’ll die in war.”
napoletana: The traditional espresso pot of Naples, formerly made of aluminum. When the water boils, one must turn the pot upside down to let it filter through the coffee grounds in the middle.
touching the lobe of his right ear with the tip of his index finger . . . we had to become gay to understand the malaise of our young people: One of the ways to say “homosexual” in Italian is orecchione (“big ear”), sometimes communicated nonverbally by touching the lobe of one’s ear repeatedly. As it has generally a negative connotation, it has recently fallen into relative disuse.
Valley of the Temples: Probably the finest group of ancient Greek ruins in Sicily (and there are many), the Valley of the Temples is just outside Agrigento, the city on which the fictional Montelusa is based.
“You only like the first part of your name? Rosa?”: Rosa means “pink” in Italian.
cavatuna: Hollow tubes of pasta, rather like rigatoni or, when larger, cannelloni.
Andiamo a mietere il grano, il grano, il grano: A 1966 song by Louiselle, the nom d’artiste of Maria Luisa Catricalà (Vibo Valentia, born 1946). The title means “Let’s go harvest the wheat . . .”
Amore amor portami tante rose: A 1934 song covered in 1967 by I Camaleonti (“the Chameleons”), a pop-rock band.
“La donna è mobile, qual piuma al vento”: “Woman is light, like a feather in the wind.” The famous canzone from act 3 of Verdi’s Rigoletto, sung by the Duke of Mantua after he has ravished Gilda, Rigoletto’s daughter.
a small octopus, ever so soft, a strascinasale, followed by a little fried nunnato: Nunnato are tiny baby fish, just born. The word is Sicilian for “newborn” (neonato in Italian).
he concluded on a questioning note, bringing both hands, cupped like artichokes, to his forehead, and agitating them: This is the common Italian hand gesture intended as a question. In Sicilian it’s called cacocciola, dialect for “artichoke.” Bringing the cupped hands to one’s forehead is for emphasis, as if to say that the thing in question is so incomprehensible that one can’t get it through one’s head.
Dottor Montalbano: In Italy anyone with a university degree is considered a “doctor,” or dottore, and anyone who rises to Montalbano’s rank of Commissario di Pubblica Sicurezza must have a university degree.
lupara: The Sicilian term for sawed-off shotgun, a former favorite weapon of the mafiosi and bandits of the island. It is so called because it was once used by shepherds to defend their flocks against wolves (lupi).
Bonpensiero: Bonpensiero literally means “good thought” or “good idea.”
that dense atmosphere of palpable desolation and visible despair, which filled the compartment with a rotten yellow smell: As the reader of the novels in this series will know, Montalbano has a synesthetic sense of smell: that is, he sees odors as having colors.
Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali: An aria from act 3, scene 2 of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The phrase means “You who spread your wings to God.”
fifty billion lire: At the time, this was worth about twenty-five million U.S. dollars.
vo’ cumprà: A reference to the ambulant foreign vendors, usually from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa, whom one encounters on Italian streets and beaches. The phrase “Vo cumprà?” is a corrupted form of Italian meaning “Do you want to buy?” Since the vendors repeatedly utter this question, they are known as such in common parlance in Italy today.
with a logic worthy of Monsieur La Palisse: A reference to the legendary Jacques de La Palisse (1470–1525), a French nobleman and military officer active in Francis I’s Italian campaign, during which he was killed in 1525. His epitaph reads: Ci gît Monsieur de La Palice: S’il n’était pas mort, il ferait encore envie (“Here lies Monsieur de la Palisse: Were he not dead, he would still be envied”). This was originally misread—by mistake, presumably—as “S’il n’était pas mort, il serait encore en vie” (“Were he not dead, he would still be alive”), due perhaps to the potential confusion between f and s in serif script. The misreading gave rise to a whole tradition of burlesque song variants, with similar tautological plays on words (such as Il n’eût pas eu son pareil / S’il avait été seul au monde [“He would have had no equals / Had he been alone in the world”]). The many variants were brought together into La chanson de La Palisse by Bernard de la Monnoye in the early eighteenth century, though other versions exist as well.
Being unmarried, Mimì: This story was written before Mimì Augello got married.
over two hundred million lire: At the time, over one hundred thousand dollars.
Via Giovanni Verga: Giovanni Verga (1840–1922) and Federico De Roberto (1861–1927) are two Sicilian authors of national and international renown, particularly Verga.
“With cream? Or corretto?” One way of taking espresso coffee in Italy is with a shot of strong alcohol added, in which case it is called a caffè corretto, or “corrected coffee,” presumably because the alcohol, being a sedative, is supposed to offset the stimulant effect of the caffeine. A c
affè corretto is usually cut with brandy, cognac, grappa, or one of the herbal digestivi popular in Italy.
pasta in Trapanese pesto sauce: Pesto alla trapanese, like its cousin, pesto alla genovese, is a sauce for pasta using ground or finely chopped basil as its foundation. The Trapanese version (from the Sicilian city of Trapani), however, uses finely chopped and toasted blanched almonds instead of pine nuts, as well as several finely chopped, uncooked tomatoes, which are ground into the blend with garlic, olive oil, and black pepper. Finally, after serving it on the pasta one adds a sprinkling of toasted bread crumbs in place of cheese.
“Don’t you know what Arquà rhymes with? Quaquaraquà”: In Sicilian, a quaquaraquà is a worthless person of no account, treacherous, and a snitch who talks too much.
not even two hundred thousand lire: At the time, about a hundred dollars.
large sums from fifty million lire on up: From about twenty-five thousand dollars on up.
smaller loans, from one hundred thousand lire up to twenty or thirty million: From about fifty dollars to ten or fifteen thousand.
amounting to figures in the billions of lire: In the millions of dollars, divided by two.
over three hundred thousand lire: Over $150.
old issues of Topolino covered the floor: Topolino is Mickey Mouse in Italian. Starting in 1932, the Topolino comics periodical became an Italian industry in its own right, with stories featuring Disney characters but written by Italian comic book writers and illustrated by Italian comics artists. It started first as a newspaper and then became a twice-monthly book-sized “review” of sorts. It still exists today.
It was about a dirty old man of the upper classes who plots to kidnap a beautiful young girl and make her yield to his desires. After a number of vicissitudes, the kidnapping is pulled off successfully, and the dirty old squire can finally contemplate Alba (that was the girl’s name) naked and imploring, in his very own bedroom: This story line is mischievously reminiscent of one of the principal plot threads of the nineteenth-century classic Italian novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), by Alessandro Manzoni.
Inside the cardboard box was eight hundred million lire: About four hundred thousand dollars.
Being Here . . . : Title in English in the original.
the Abyssinian War and the Spanish Civil War: The so-called Abyssinian War was a war that Fascist Italy fought in Ethiopia in 1935–36 to secure colonial control of that country. In the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Fascist Italy fought on the side of General Franco’s far-right Falange. Italian left-wing militants also fought in significant numbers on the side of the Spanish Republic, but it is not clear whether the monument here evoked would include their names among the fallen.
Giuseppe De Robertis: Robertis (1888–1963) was a distinguished Italian literary scholar who taught at the Conservatorio Cherubini in Florence.
319–320 a cross between Giacometti’s melodrama of civil death and certain situations such as you find in Pirandello: Paolo Giacometti (1816–1882) was an Italian dramatist and the author of the play La morte civile (1861); novelist and dramatist Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) wrote many works involving loss of identity, real or imagined, most notably the novel The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal) (1904), which involves a story similar to the present one, in which the protagonist when traveling finds his obituary in the newspaper and decides to assume a new identity.
looking out of his mind, just like Orlando at the puppet theater: The traditional Sicilian puppet theater often interprets episodes from Italian chivalric romances rooted in the Carolingian tradition, most notably Ludovico Ariosto’s Renaissance classic, Orlando Furioso (1532), in which the lovesick Orlando (Roland) loses his mind and becomes uncontrollably violent.
the slut Messalina: Valeria Messalina, empress consort of the Roman Empire from AD 41 to 48, was reputed to be promiscuous by her political enemies.
“Like the ice cream?” Algida is a famous brand of ice cream in Italy.
“We, however, are military officers”: The carabinieri, like the Gendarmerie in France and the Guardia Civil in Spain, are branches of the military.
some ten or so municipal cops: The vigili urbani, or municipal police in Italian cities, are a separate department from the commissariati, the criminal police departments, of which Montalbano’s unit is one.
the sign of a salt-and-tobacco shop: Since salt and tobacco are government monopolies in Italy, they are sold at licensed shops that have rectangular black signs with white lettering, featuring a large white T for tobacco.
Pessoa Maintains: The title of this story, “Sostiene Pessoa,” is a nod to the Italian novel by Antonio Tabucchi (1943–2012) Sostiene Pereira, translated by Patrick Creagh as Pereira Maintains (1994). Tabucchi, a scholar of Portuguese as well as a writer, wrote extensively on the great Portuguese modernist poet and author Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935).
twenty-six thousand lire in bills, and 750 in coins: Just over thirteen dollars at the time.
18,300 lire: Just over nine dollars.
forty-five thousand and fifty lire: Around twenty-three dollars.
eleven thousand lire: About five and a half dollars.
ten million lire in cash: Around five thousand dollars at the time.
“O toreador ritorna vincitor”: Montalbano is conflating the “Toreador” aria from Bizet’s Carmen and the “Ritorna vincitor” aria from Verdi’s Aida.
barely ten thousand lire: Barely five dollars.
ten billion lire: About five million dollars.
worse than Gano di Maganza at the puppet theater: Gano di Maganza is the Italianized name of Ganelon of Mainz, the archetypal traitor who betrays Charlemagne’s armies to the Muslims in La Chanson de Roland. As the archetypal traitor, he appears in many Italian romances in the Carolingian tradition, from which much of the material for the Sicilian puppet theater is derived.
purpi affucati: Or, literally, “drowned octopi.” This is octopus cooked in a Neapolitan-style tomato sauce.
Notes by Stephen Sartarelli
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