The Brewer of Preston

by Andrea Camilleri

  Turiddru Macca, son of Gnà Nunzia and a stevedore who worked at the port, had gone to bed at nightfall, after the Angelus bell, as he had done for years, aching all over from the toil of loading more than two hundred full sacks a day onto his shoulders and carrying them from wharf to boat. He had slept barely six hours when he was awakened by a loud knocking on the door of the hovel where he lived with his entire family, a single room some twelve by twelve feet on the ground floor with one small window, beside the door, as the sole source of air.

  “Turiddru Macca!”

  He sat up in bed, scared, and set his hand down on the mattress, but only ended up crushing the face of his son Pasqualino, who moaned in his sleep. The knocking grew louder.

  “Turiddru Macca!”

  Turiddru stretched his legs in order to get up and in so doing kicked his daughter Annetta, who fell out of bed but, being accustomed to falling, climbed back in without even opening her eyes. The knocking continued, leaving Turiddru no time to collect himself. He slid out of bed, stepping directly on the liver of his son Minicuzzo, who was sleeping on the floor. Staggering blindly towards the window, he stumbled and very nearly fell on his son Antonino, who was asleep on a straw pallet.

  “Turiddru Macca!”

  His wife, Carolina, opened one eye and sat up, careful not to suffocate her six-month-old daughter Biniditta, who had fallen asleep still attached to one of her tits.

  “Whoozat? Madonna santa, who could it be at this hour?”

  “I dunno. Shut up and sleep,” Turiddru ordered her, feeling nervous.

  When he opened the window, a blast of frigid air assailed him. The night had taken a turn for the worse.

  “Whoozat?”

  “Iss me, Turi, Gegè Bufalino.”

  “What the hell do you want at this hour? What’s going on?”

  “Wha’ss going on is your mother’s house is on fire. Hurry up and get dressed.”

  Gegè Bufalino was someone who was never to be trusted, whether his belly was full of wine or he hadn’t drunk a drop.

  “Gegè, I’m warning you: if it turns out you’re making this thing up, I’m gonna bust your ass.”

  “I swear it on my own eyeballs! Lemme die by murder if I’s lyin’,” Gegè vowed. “Iss the holy Gospel truth.”

  Turiddru got dressed in a hurry. The night was pitch-black, but every now and then a flash dispersed the darkness. Towards the center of town, around the new theatre, and right behind it, where his mother Gnà Nunzia’s house was, a great big red glow lit up the sky. Fire, no doubt about it. Turiddru started running.

  Once past the cordon of mounted soldiers arrayed in a circle around the area on fire, Herr Hoffer decided, at a glance, that there was nothing more to be done for the new theatre. Fire had already eaten up half of it. He ran behind the building: a small alley not three yards wide was all that separated the theatre from a two-story house that itself was ablaze.

  “Uber hier! Dis way!” Hoffer cried to his men, who arrived in a flash with the fire-extinguishing machine.

  A man approached holding a wet handkerchief over his nose to protect himself from the smoke.

  “I’m Lieutenant Puglisi, police. Who are you, and what are you trying to do?”

  “Mein name ist Hoffer, I been ein engineer. Minink engineer. I haff a machine I infented to outputten fires hier. Will you helf me?”

  “Yes, of course,” said the lieutenant, who’d given up hope when he’d seen the damage. He was quick to accept anything, even chickenshit, that might be of use.

  “Goot. You must ko und make a chain of men vit buckets von hier to the sea. They take the sea vater and put it in the machine. The machine alvays neets new vater.”

  “All right,” said Puglisi, who ran off to organize the effort.

  As his men stoked the wood fire under the boiler to create the pressure necessary to force the cold water out, Hoffer noticed that behind him stood a group of motionless, almost statue-like people, consisting of a man of about fifty, a woman of about forty, a youngster of about twenty, and a girl of about sixteen. The two males were wearing woolen undershirts and undershorts. Apparently they had given their clothes to the women, who, being dressed only in nightgowns, were in fact covering their pudenda with men’s trousers and jackets.

  “You liff in dis haus?” the engineer asked the motionless group.

  The group came to life.

  “We’re the Pizzuto family,” the four said in unison.

  The fifty-year-old man took half a step forward and spoke.

  “I’m Antonio Pizzuto,” he said in a drawling, whiny voice. “We live on the ground floor of this house. When it caught fire we were sleeping with the windows closed.”

  “With the windows closed,” echoed the others.

  “Because earlier the place had turned into a shithouse,” Antonio Pizzuto continued.

  “A shithouse,” repeated the others.

  Engineer Hoffer was dumbfounded, being rather unfamiliar with classical studies. He didn’t realize that the Pizzuto family was essentially composed of a coryphaeus and an accompanying chorus.

  “Exkuse me?” he said.

  “Yessirree, a shithouse. With all this bullshit about inaugurating the theatre, carriages started arriving, dozens of them, from Montelusa, from Montechiuso, from Cavàra, from Fela, and wherever the hell else they came from.”

  “Wherever the hell else they came from,” the chorus chimed.

  “Fact is, the servants and coachmen, whenever nature called, would come behind the theatre to shit and piss in the little alleyway. And it got to stinking so bad that we had to close the windows.”

  “We had to close the windows.”

  “And that’s why we didn’t realize in time what was happening. It’s a good thing my son, Nenè, got thirsty and went to drink a glass of water. Otherwise we would have been burnt to death, all of us.”

  “Burnt to death, all of us! Oh! Oh!” moaned the chorus.

  Meanwhile the first buckets of seawater were arriving, as the chain of men had been quickly assembled by Lieutenant Puglisi. Now the work could begin. Hoffer’s men took up their positions as if they had trained long and hard. Gripping the pump hose firmly, two of them directed it towards the entrance of the house in flames.

  “Achtung!” the engineer shouted. “Prepare to extinkuish!”

  Looking at his men, he felt a lump of emotion rise up in his throat.

  “Open!”

  Nardo Sciascia, hearing the order, opened the cold-water valve. At once a violent jet emerged. The two men holding the hose staggered, then directed the stream towards the blaze. In his excitement the engineer started dancing, first on one foot, then the other, like a bear.

  By dint of curses, obscenities, and shouts, Turiddru Macca managed to get past the cordon of soldiers on horseback. At once he found himself in front of his mother’s burning house, eyes full of tears from sorrow as much as from the gusts of acrid smoke. The fire was still for the most part confined to the ground floor, but evil tongues were rising towards the great window on the story above, where his mother had stood many times and waved at him. Turiddru was crying for fear of the danger his mother was in, but also for the beautiful apartment that was going up in smoke, those three rooms and kitchen where he and his family had hoped to move, out of their hovel and into more comfort and space, after Gnà Nunzia died—at the proper time, of course, in accordance with the will of God.

  “Where’s my mother?” he frantically asked Puglisi. “Where’s Gnà Nunzia?”

  “We haven’t seen her yet,” said Puglisi.

  “But is she alive?”

  “How should I know? We would have to enter the building, but as you can see, we can’t even get close.”

  “Stop! Halt!” the engineer suddenly shouted at his men, and Nardo closed the valve. Hoffer had noticed that the buc
kets of water weren’t arriving fast enough. The amount of water shooting out the hose was far greater than that which was being put in, and thus the pressure gauge was rising perilously. The boiler was in danger of exploding.

  “Schnell! Qvick! You must verk fester! Vater, vater! More vater!” the engineer kept shouting at the long human chain, and at last the buckets began to move more rapidly.

  At that moment the great window of the apartment inhabited by Gnà Nunzia suddenly opened and an elderly woman in a white nightgown appeared. The pale apparition raised her arms to the heavens.

  “Gesuzzu beddru! Madunnuzza santa! He said there would be fire, and fire it is!”

  “Mamà! Mamà!” Turiddru called to her.

  The old woman made no sign of having heard him. She vanished into the house.

  “Schnell! Qvick!” an excited Hoffer cried loudly. “Ve must safe dis olt voman!”

  He noticed that the water-level gauge was now where it was supposed to be. Perhaps it would have been best to wait just a little longer, but there was no time to lose. The joy he felt at that moment at being able to save a human life with his invention made him commit a fatal mistake. Indeed, for a brief moment Hoffer forgot he was in Vigàta, Sicily, and lost control of the mechanism in his brain that was constantly translating his thoughts from German into Italian.

  “Schnell! Kaltes Wasser!” he cried.

  Nardo Sciascia, who was about to reopen the cold-water valve, stopped in midmotion and gave him a puzzled look.

  “Kaltes Wasser! Kalt! Kalt!” roared the engineer.

  Now, since the Italian word for “hot” is caldo, an inevitable misunderstanding occured.

  “He wants the hot water! Pressure!” Sciascia cried to Cecè Consolo, who was at the back of the machine. Cecè turned the pressure knob and jumped backwards. At once a violent jet of steam and boiling water gushed from the back of the boiler. The nearly statue-like group of the Pizzutos, who were still standing behind the machine, was blotted out by a white cloud from which some very loud Greek-chorus-like laments resounded.

  “Mistake! Mistake! I vant colt vater! Colt!” Hoffer screamed.

  When the white cloud dissipated, the Pizzutos were on the ground moaning and rolling around with burns of varying degrees. Puglisi came running with two of his men.

  “Quick!” the policeman said to the men. “Go get some help, put them in a carriage, and take them to Dr. Gammacurta’s.”

  “Dr. Gammacurta is nowhere to be found,” said one of them.

  “Then take them to Dr. Addamo.”

  “Addamo is up to his neck with all the ladies in hysterics over the pandemonium that broke out at the theatre, not to mention all the people who got hurt when Don Memè started shooting.”

  “Don’t give me any crap! I don’t want to hear about it! Just take these people to Addamo. He’ll understand right away that they’re seriously injured.”

  Meanwhile Gnà Nunzia had reappeared at the great window. In her hand she held a sheet of paper that she began to shred into many little pieces, which she then tossed as far as she could with the help of the wind.

  “I pray to you, O bulls of the holy sites!” she jabbered in dialect. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, drive the fire away!”

  “Vat’s de olt lady doingk?” Hoffer asked in amazement.

  “Nothing. Those are the papal bulls of the holy places that the friars of Terrasanta sell for money. They’re supposed to keep away fire and water.”

  The engineer gave up seeking further explanation.

  “Mamà!” cried Turiddru.

  Again the old woman appeared neither to see nor hear him.

  “Patre Virga said the theatre was the work of the devil! He said the theatre was straight out of Sodom and Gomorrah! He’s a holy man, is Patre Virga! He said there’d be fire, and fire it is!”

  Having used up the bull, Gnà Nunzia went back inside. Turiddru noticed that, somehow or other, Hoffer’s machine had managed to tame the flames a little. Without a word, he broke into a run, went through the front door, and shot up the stairs.

  Not five minutes later, Turiddru Macca emerged from the smoke with Gnà Nunzia draped over his shoulder, immobile.

  “Did she faint?” inquired Puglisi.

  “No, sir. I punched her in the face.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “She said she didn’t want to come down in her nightgown with all these wicked men about.”

  “The fire in dis haus ist kaput!” said engineer Hoffer, practically singing for joy. “Who eltz liffs upshtairs?”

  Puglisi looked up.

  “There’s a widow lives on the second floor, Concetta Riguccio. But there’s been no sign of her. With all this commotion at this hour of the night, she would have asked for help if she was at home. I know the lady. She probably went to sleep at her sister’s house tonight.”

  Only the young have such feelings

  Only the young have such feelings, thought Don Pippino Mazzaglia with a touch of envy and another of commiseration while listening to the speech of Nando Traquandi, the young man who had arrived from Rome under cover of secrecy and whom he’d been hiding at his country house for the past week. Slender, with reddish, curly hair and small spectacles behind which flashed a pair of wild eyes, the Roman raised his left hand to his chin every now and then to scratch, tic-like, a thin beard, while every four or five words his right hand brought a small handkerchief to his lips to wipe away the little white spot of condensed spittle that formed at each corner of his mouth.

  Traquandi had arrived in Sicily with two letters of recommendation, one from Napoleone Colajanni and one from the Honorable Pantano, member of parliament, asking their Mazzinian friends to provide refuge, assistance, and sustenance to the young man, who, they said, had been entrusted with a mission as dangerous as it was secret. Pippino Mazzaglia had obliged him, but from the very first words he exchanged with him, he had formed a precise idea of the whole matter: that nothing but trouble would come of the outsider’s presence in Vigàta. The youth saw the light of only one truth: that white was white and black was black. He hadn’t lived long enough to understand that when black comes very close to white, close enough to touch it, a middle line forms, a line of shadow, where white is no longer white and black is no longer black. The shade of that line is called gray. And inside that line, where the colors, in marrying, give birth to a third, it is difficult to name things precisely and see them in clear outline. It’s like when the evening advances and the darkness, which is not yet complete, not yet night, makes you mistake a person for a tree. But the young man had none of these concerns; it was clear that he knew where to put his feet when the light faded.

  What an unpleasant fellow! Mazzaglia said to himself, as the Roman talked on and on. I feel like I’m seeing myself, thirty years ago, before the Bourbon court, about to take it up the ass with ten years of hard labor. My pride was eating me alive. That must mean that, at the time, I was as big of an asshole as this guy.

  “I have some documents here that show just how extreme the situation has become,” the youth said without pausing to catch his breath. “I’m going to read you a few passages from a report to the minister that we managed to get our hands on, though I won’t say how.”

  He adjusted his small eyeglasses, slipped his hand into a satchel full of papers, and started looking. At that moment Ninì Prestìa, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the Roman since they had all gathered there, spoke up for the first time.

  “Well, I’m certainly not going to ask you how, since I don’t give a shit how you got it.”

  The young man gave him a confused look, surprised by the violence in those words.

  “I didn’t quite understand,” he said.

  “May I ask a question that has nothing to do with anything you’ve been saying?”

  Traquandi’s eyes narrowed to two slits. R
ealizing he had better be on his guard, he automatically responded in Roman dialect.

  “If it’s got nothing to do with anything, why ask it?”

  “Because I feel like it.”

  “Well, then, go ahead.”

  “There are four of us here, not counting you, sitting around this table. Pippino Mazzaglia, me, Cosimo Bellofiore, and Decu Garzìa. If you were to find out, let’s say, that one of us was planning to report you to the police, what’s the first thing you would do?”

  “I’d shoot him in the mouth,” Traquandi said without hesitation.

  “Without even asking why?”

  “What the hell do I care why? That’s his damn business. But, pardon my asking, why did you want to know?”

  “Never mind; it doesn’t matter.”

  Pippino Mazzaglia felt a surge of heat in his chest so strong and intense that it brought tears to his eyes. There was Ninì Prestìa, forever his true friend, the person with whom he could always wear his heart on his sleeve, who had shared with him more than thirty years of fear, persecution, escapes, ambushes, prison, and rare moments of joy. He remembered the touch of Ninì’s warm hand on his own as the Bourbon judges read out the sentence and cut the roots out from under their youth, cancelling all the books they might read, words they might say, women they might love, children they might caress. And now Ninì had expressed the same feelings as his about the young Roman, as if he had said them out loud. Mazzaglia looked at his friend, keeping his eyes half closed so as not to let any tears show. Ninì had grown old, his hair white, his eye slightly milky. In a flash he realized he was, in a way, looking at himself in the mirror. And so he grew angry, and took Prestìa’s side.

  “Please bear with us another minute, Signor Traquandi, because I myself would like to ask you something, since you seem to know everything.”

  The Roman outsider took his hands out of his satchel, laid them on the table, and, without a word, assumed the position of someone ready to listen. But he did it with condescension, and Mazzaglia’s antipathy towards him increased.