The Sleeping Mountain

by John Harris

  ‘Well, why don’t you?’

  ‘I can’t afford to. Fortunately, I’m reassured by the knowledge that if anything does happen I am near enough to the mole to be among the first to get on a ship.’

  Hannay leaned forward. ‘Look, I want to go and see Pelli. I want someone to come with me. Why won’t you?’

  ‘Signor Capitano, it might make trouble.’

  ‘Trouble?’ Hannay snorted. ‘What sort of trouble?’

  Emiliano flapped his hands and tried to explain. ‘Suppose it gets to the sulphur workers that people are complaining down here. You know what they’re like. They’d start complaining, too. And then work would stop. I don’t want to be the cause of that. Trouble in the Porto always starts trouble among Forla’s people. And Forla owns this land. Forla owns this property. Forla owns my bar. On Anapoli there aren’t enough of us and there’s too much of Forla.’

  ‘What about all the other shopkeepers?’ Hannay demanded loudly. ‘Surely there’s a traders’ association?’

  Again there was that nervous fluttering of Emiliano’s hands. ‘Of course there is, Signor Capitano. And who do you think is the biggest trader on Anapoli?’ The whirling hands grew nearer. ‘Forla belongs to the small traders’ associations because he owns small businesses. He belongs to the big business associations because he owns big businesses. Forla’s reached out and touched everything.’

  ‘But surely–’

  Emiliano’s hands came up again and Hannay grabbed them angrily in his own and held them down.

  Emiliano sighed and submitted with a heavy despair.

  ‘Do you think, Signor Capitano,’ he said slowly, releasing himself, ‘that the shopkeepers want everyone to expect danger on Anapoli? The mountain hasn’t erupted yet and if we tell everyone it’s going to, what would happen to all the money that comes here in the shape of tourists? The season’s not far away and we need the season. This is not Capri. This is a poor island. Pelli says it’s safe. He told you it was. I’ve got to believe somebody.’

  He tapped his forehead significantly and gestured again with his bunched fingers. ‘We don’t believe in danger,’ he concluded, ‘because we don’t want to believe. We’re masters at putting off until tomorrow the worries that trouble us today. Let’s leave it at that.’

  It was as he turned away in disgust from Emiliano that Hannay became aware of Patch standing alongside them.

  ‘Hah!’ He pounced immediately. ‘There you are. Where’ve you been? I’ve been looking all over for you. What about it now, eh?’

  Patch lit a cigarette, unmoved by his excitement. ‘What about what?’ he said. ‘I can see your soul’s stirred to cataclysmic proportions and you’re about to blow a gasket.’

  ‘I suppose you were sleeping like an ‘og in your bed,’ Hannay snorted. ‘The bloody mountain blew off a fine old fart in the night.’

  ‘I know. I heard it.’

  Hannay seemed surprised that Patch had been so alert. ‘It was dead grim,’ he said. ‘It was fizzing wicked. ‘Annay was listening.’

  ‘As it happens, so was Patch.’

  ‘Well’ – Hannay was stirred to the point of hoarseness – ‘are you still going to be ’og-tied by your bloody brains and intellect and still not do anything? You said you’d try if the English people asked you. Well, they asked you. Last night. I know, because they came to see me afterwards. And I’m asking you now. I want to know what’s on and so does everybody else. But nobody’ll do anything. They’re all scared. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow.” That’s all they say. Well, tomorrow’s no good for me. I’m going to see Pelli now.’

  ‘I don’t think it would do much good,’ Patch said quietly.

  ‘Why not?’ Hannay was bursting at the seams with eagerness, his whole body quivering with the desire to get on with something. ‘Go on, tell me. Why not?’

  Patch shrugged. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I’ve just been to see him myself.’

  Thirteen

  As Patch spoke, the crowd turned to face him. The word of what had happened seemed to fly round immediately. Mamma Meucci, who had been engaged in an argument with a fruit vendor, immediately broke it off and drew nearer. The group of men in the barber’s shop came out with the barber and the little man who sold coral rings in the dark room next door.

  Then old Leonardi, who had remained behind to clear up some point which had held his attention, came flying out in a sort of hop-skip-and-jump movement, all flying arms and bony legs, and sailed straight into Patch without any preamble.

  ‘What did he say?’ he asked eagerly. ‘They’ve appointed me to watch the mountain? They realise it’s dangerous? They agree to provide a gravimeter?’

  Patch took a deep breath, conscious of all their eyes on him.

  ‘He says there’s no danger,’ he said heavily, and at once a sigh seemed to rustle round the circle of people about him.

  ‘No danger!’ Old Leonardi rose on his tiptoes and pointed dramatically at the sky, clicking indignantly. ‘No danger. But I’ve seen danger for weeks. For years. And now it’s come.’

  Emiliano moved back to his bar, but he was shaking his head, and old Leonardi chased after him, an agitated scare-crow figure, to persuade him to protest. The crowd began to split up into arguing groups and it occurred immediately to Patch that no one was very satisfied.

  Hannay let them go before he spoke. He had been standing silently in front of Patch, his eyes narrowed, the redness of his face fading.

  ‘You’ve been to see him?’ he said eventually. ‘Already?’

  Patch nodded.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have come too.’

  Patch shrugged. ‘Would it have helped much?’

  Hannay scowled and ignored the question. ‘What did he say? I mean, why did he say there was no danger?’

  Patch thought about it for a moment. He had entered Pelli’s office unwillingly, feeling he had been caught up in something he had no wish for. The anger generated in him by the despair of the Givannos had already been dying and he had begun to feel foolish, wondering how to say what he had to say without appearing neurotic and nervous. Pelli had been so engrossed with the election the anxiety of the Givannos had seemed mere hysteria brought on by grief.

  ‘He was amused and very tolerant,’ he said.

  ‘Tolerant!’ Hannay exploded.

  ‘He was very sorry about the dust-fall,’ Patch went on. ‘Chiefly, I think, because it makes people leave the island and reduces the number of his voters. Then he went on to blame the old man’s death on the shortage of houses.’

  ‘Shortage of houses!’ Hannay seemed unable to do anything but repeat the more outrageous points from Patch’s description of the interview after him. ‘What’s he think this is? An election stunt?’

  Patch smiled. ‘He might at that,’ he said. ‘He’s pretty cute. He didn’t give much away. He read me a lot of statistics on disease and ill-health. I think he was trying to blind me with science. That rabbit Tornielli was there, disliking me even through the back of his neck while he sorted out facts for his lord and master.’

  ‘Go on.’ Hannay hurried him over the personal details.

  ‘He told me I represented only a handful of people – which is right enough – and that thousands on the island were still going to work in the normal way, which again is right enough. He also told me some story I didn’t quite catch about the Communists starting a similar scare in Calabria by blaming the flooding at Vicinamontana on the authorities, and ended up by pointing out that everything I had in my mind was merely supposition.’ Patch shrugged. ‘And again, he was right. Dead right. It is.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell him everybody thought it was important?’

  ‘Certainly. But he didn’t think it was as important as winning the election. He even explained how they hoped to do it, and scaring voters to the mainland wasn’t one of the ways.’

  Hannay followed Patch across the square in silence and sat down with him as he lowered himself into one of the bright li
ttle chairs outside Emiliano’s. He seemed staggered by Patch’s news.

  He had never really expected Pelli to do much, but to discover that he intended to do nothing at all seemed to have cut the ground from under his feet.

  Then his crusading spirit revived abruptly and he sat up, prepared to dispute until nightfall if necessary Pelli’s decision.

  ‘How’s he know the mountain’s not dangerous?’ he demanded. ‘Has he got God-given information? Does he have the ear of the Almighty or something? He’s no special pal of God’s.’

  ‘Come to that, neither are we,’ Patch said urbanely. ‘He said he got his information from Forla’s observatory.’

  ‘You told me it was a garridge.’

  ‘Of course it is. It was an excuse. He wanted to get rid of me. God’s truth, man, if anyone should know the mountain, the islanders should.’

  ‘They do.’ Hannay indicated the chattering groups in the square. ‘Ask Meucci. Ask Cristoforo. Ask this lot. Look at ’em. You’d hardly say they was curling up of laughing, would you?’

  He had lit his pipe and was puffing smoke rings furiously. ‘How about the Communists?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Will they help? I’ll go to anybody who does things instead of sitting on his fat little embongpong.’

  Patch grinned, beginning to enjoy his discomfiture. ‘You’re too late again,’ he said. ‘I’ve been there, too.’

  Hannay seemed to bounce upright in his chair. ‘You’ve what?’

  ‘I went there while I was still mad at Pelli. Bolshies don’t go in for love and kisses. They prefer a boot up the backside to a bouquet of violets and I was in just the right frame of mind.’

  Hannay had taken the pipe from between his teeth and was sitting with his mouth open now. Once more he seemed staggered by Patch’s initiative – and vaguely cheated, as though he had missed all the excitement.

  ‘What did they say?’ he asked at length.

  Patch grinned. ‘The same. Bosco’s no fool. A fool wouldn’t have organised the resistance group here that he did during the war. The Germans had a torpedo-boat base on the island, but Bosco had ’em licked even before the Americans landed. Bosco knows how many beans make five. That’s why he dresses like a street-corner boy and shares his cigarettes. He knows it’s good for business.’

  ‘What was his excuse?’

  ‘He didn’t offer any. Commissars don’t. I think he’d like to blame it all on Pelli or the priests.’

  ‘Did he offer to do anything?’

  Patch shook his head. ‘He’s not getting mixed up in anything he can’t wriggle out of. He prefers to watch Pelli fall by his own inertia, instead of pushing. He gave me a lecture on the appeal they’re making to the middle classes – together with a short jeremiad on Forla. You’d be surprised how much I’ve learned about politics this morning.’

  ‘Is that all he did?’

  ‘Not quite. He said he’d produce a poster. A nice Pelli-baiting poster – enlarging on the danger and on Pelli’s refusing to do anything about it in case it lost him votes. He knows damn’ well Pelli intends to do nothing – from the very fact that I’d gone to see him.’

  Hannay seemed to resent Patch being able to see a funny side to his own frustration. ‘Fat lot of good a poster’ll do anybody,’ he growled. ‘It’ll only scare people away.’

  Patch held up one finger. ‘Not Bosco’s voters,’ he said ‘For the most part, they can’t leave the island even if they want to. They can’t afford to. He doesn’t give a damn about his own supporters reading it. It’s Pelli’s voters he’s hoping to attract. They can afford to go. If it scares anybody away, it’ll be Pelli’s supporters. Bosco can’t lose.’

  Hannay snorted. ‘It’s a dirtier game than Pelli’s playing.’

  Patch nodded. ‘Pelli will be after my guts for this.’

  Hannay seemed stunned with disappointment. ‘Is that the best you could do?’ he asked.

  Patch sat up angrily. ‘The best I could do?’ he said. ‘It might interest you further to know that I telephoned the newspaper on the mainland. But they’re not interested, either.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they’re busy with the election, too. They’ve got their own axe to grind like everybody else. Besides, old Leonardi’s already rung them up. Three times. They’re sick of Anapoli and its bloody volcano. They even told their correspondent here to drop it. It’s old news. It’s as dead to them as Queen Anne until it goes off pop.’

  Hannay seemed repentant but not abashed. ‘I thought we might have done more,’ he said.

  Patch slouched down in his chair and made himself comfortable. ‘I once swore I wouldn’t play with political parties again as long as I lived,’ he said. ‘Now I’ve done it. And you can bet Bosco will make fine political capital out of it, too,’

  Hannay was staring at the bulk of Amarea, his expression thwarted.

  ‘OK,’ he said heavily. ‘I’m sorry. Only – well, an old man’s been suffocated.’

  ‘Maybe he’s the last.’

  ‘Aye’ – Hannay was still unsatisfied – ‘and maybe he’s only the first.’

  Fourteen

  With Patch’s visit to Pelli and Bosco, all attempts to do anything about Amarea seemed to come to a stop. Even the mountain itself ceased to encourage any untoward anxiety. The small plume of vapour continued towards the east but there were no other manifestations of its activity in the area of the Porto and there was no further word from the Haywards, so that it seemed they had let the matter drop too.

  Only Hannay seemed prepared to go on worrying but, as obviously nothing was going to be done, he contented himself with making life as difficult over the delayed load of sulphur as he could for Orlesi who, with his connections with Forla and therefore with the power that held the islanders in thrall, was a natural enemy to Hannay.

  It seemed, from his protestations at the delayed loading, that he was anxious to be off, but Patch still suspected that had he been presented with his sulphur and told to take his ship away immediately he would have been disappointed to the point of despair. Every time he dragged Patch round to Emiliano’s for a drink or a coffee, he seemed to be dwelling on a bed of thorns, edgy and waiting for the next event that might prove him right.

  When it came, it came not from the Porto but from Fumarola on the north side of the island, and on land belonging to a farmer by the name of Amadeo Baldicera.

  Fumarola was an untidy little village built on the slopes where the mountain fell abruptly into the sea, a collection of crowded houses with a piazza projecting like a pier into the water. It was strung along the black ribbon of the main road that circled the island, in the North the thoroughfare for donkeys more often than cars; and Amadeo Baldicera’s farm lay just above the village, a prosperous little holding that managed to provide employment for two men besides Baldicera and his family. The afternoon was oppressively hot. There seemed to be no air anywhere and the place never seemed to have awakened from its noontide doze. The courtyards were oases of quiet as everyone lingered longer than normally over their mid-day meals, so that it was a matter of pride to Baldicera that he was about, trudging through the shimmering heat in the direction of the little dam he had built on the sides of Amarea.

  His mind was busy with the problems of his farm and it was not until he was on top of them that he became aware of the pathetic feathered shapes lying in the stunted grass of his field, some of them still feebly moving, beating their wings weakly against the ground in an effort to rise.

  He stopped dead and stared down at the starlings, his eyes scared. There had been other occasions recently when he had found a dead bird in his fields. He had even seen one drop out of the sky, struggling to control wings that no longer seemed to function, so that it had hit the ground in a steep glide and a flat bounce that broke bones. At first he had not worried but as other small corpses had appeared he had begun to be anxious, and to find two – more, three–dozen of them lying on the ground, their wing feathers splayed, filled him wi
th alarm.

  For a while longer, he stared at the birds, glancing around him uneasily, then he turned on his heel and walked quickly back towards his home. There, he explained what had happened to his wife and, putting on a jacket, he set off on his bicycle into the village for the home of Don Dominico, the village priest.

  Don Dominico was a withered old man with a face like a wrinkled walnut and the calm dark eyes of the plaster saints in his own shabby church. He listened silently to what Baldicera had to tell him, then he reached for the black shovel hat he wore. Closing the door on his untidy home and taking out his own rusty bicycle, he slogged back with Baldicera to the farm, the skirts of his soutane tucked up around him.

  Parking the bicycle, he walked across the fields with Baldicera and his wife and son and they stood together, all four of them, in a row, and stared down at the lifeless bodies of the birds.

  ‘This is the second time,’ Baldicera said heavily. ‘And often I’ve found an odd one.’

  Don Dominico wasn’t listening. He was staring up at the ash-grey slopes of Amarea and the plume of smoke that hung on the crater, his eyes narrowed against the sun and his own unhappy thoughts.

  ‘What do you make of it, Father?’ Baldicera said, and his next words indicated what he was thinking. ‘You know, of course, that the hot springs in the village have become hotter, don’t you?’

  ‘I do,’ Don Dominico said quietly, thinking of the sweating messenger. who had arrived on his doorstep to put an end to his afternoon doze the previous day.

  ‘The last time was in 1762,’ Baldicera’s son said. ‘And you know what happened then.’

  ‘I know all that, my son.’

  ‘That’s not all, Father–’

  Don Dominico lifted a thin hand on which the veins had begun to stand out, knotted and ugly, as the flesh had dropped away with age. ‘I know it’s not all, Amadeo,’ he said. ‘I’ve ears and eyes myself.’

  Baldicera scratched his head unhappily. ‘Father, my cattle have been restless at night. The horses in the stables–’