Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna

by Mario Giordano

  “All we need is the foundations,” I recall him saying. “We’ll do the whole thing ourselves. We’ll hire a van and fill it with all the things you can get in a proper German DIY store, because they’re unobtainable in Sicily, and then we’ll drive down there. And in four or five years we’ll have ourselves a regular jewel of a house. A jewel, I tell you.” Somehow, I was always put off Trecastagni by the idea of spending five years reanimating the corpse of a house there. Wrongly so, because I would now own a home of my own in Sicily and I’d have got to know my father better.

  Trecastagni is an idyllic place midway between earth and sky. Airily deposited by a friendly god among some old secondary craters on the east side of Etna, it is one of the twenty or so small towns that ring the volcano like a carelessly strung necklace, largely unspoiled and enjoying mild summers and dank winters. Trecastagni is a place where one gazes out over the distant sea as if it were a cheque to a better future one would never cash. Where Sant’Alfio is revered. Where senior citizens can still chill out in the piazza with their cronies, bemoaning moral decline and their own virility. Where the traffic cops are mustachioed, the girls approachable and mobile phone connections fickle. Where vines flourish, as do the church, mulberries, figs, peaches and all manner of other things. Where gorse has patiently crumbled the volcanic soil for centuries. Where Etna’s principal peak looms over the town like a cathedral. Where no Asian tiger mosquitoes whine and no murders occur.

  That, at any rate, was Poldi’s initial impression when she dismounted from her Vespa in the piazza, relishing the glances of the traffic cop, and treated herself to a coffee in the nearest bar. One of the local senior citizens told her the way to the Avola vineyard, and less than ten minutes later she had pulled up outside a big grey wrought-iron gate. There wasn’t much to be seen in any direction. Lava stone walls flanked the road, with cypresses visible beyond them and, farther away, serried rows of vines climbing up the slope to a small secondary crater. Through the iron gate Poldi could make out some vehicles parked beneath the cypress trees, among them a minibus bearing the name of an Acireale travel agent and an old pickup truck adorned with the Vivi Avola logo. No sign of life.

  Poldi revved her two-stroke engine and sounded the horn. Once. Twice. Beep! Beeeep!

  “If Italian engineers have understood anything,” she told me once, “it’s the significance and construction of the horn. Because the horn is the voice and the heart and soul of any vehicle. The vehicle wants to cut a good figure, wants to sound good without being intrusive or making anyone look foolish. A German horn, by contrast, is always a declaration of war—it suggests that invading troops are already massing on the frontier, so to speak. An Italian horn sounds like a friendly clearing of the throat, a gentle ‘Permesso?’ or ‘Oh, signore, would you mind waiting? I’m afraid I have the right of way, grazie, molto gentile.’ With an Italian horn you can compliment a traffic cop on his beautiful eyes. You can even—don’t laugh!—make a proposal of marriage with an Italian horn. And the loveliest horn in the world is still the Vespa’s, which defies comparison. If Romeo had had a Vespa, he’d be bound to have hooted something to Juliet below her balcony, and it wouldn’t have been any less romantic.”

  Beep-beep! Poldi’s Vespa cleared its throat and uttered a hoarse “Permesso?” But no one answered, no one appeared. So she climbed off and experimentally rattled the gate, and lo, it was open. Even my Auntie Poldi knows that an unlocked gate isn’t an invitation to trespass on private property—in fact, in Texas you can be shot with impunity for doing just that. In the first place, however, Poldi told herself that this wasn’t Texas. Second, she was engaged in a murder inquiry and thus semi-authorised. Third, she was already there, and fourth, she was wearing a dirndl, which really wasn’t the attire of a burglar or car thief.

  It was hotter now that she was stationary, so she removed her headscarf, mopped her brow and thought for a moment. Then, having resolutely pushed the gate open, she got out her mobile phone, closely examined the interior of each of the parked vehicles and photographed their licence plates. She took a particular interest in the white Avola pickup truck. It contained some full wine cartons bearing the same design as the label, together with plastic tubes, tools and an untidy stack of official-looking documents and bank statements. The red plastic baskets in the back were smeared with drying wine must and gave off a sourish smell. Poldi took photos of everything, just in case.

  “Because,” she pontificated when telling me about her trip to the vineyard, “the same rule applies to love and criminology alike: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. That’s particularly true of the preliminary attack.”

  “The preliminary attack?”

  “That’s what we call the initial investigation when you visit a fresh crime scene and secure any clues. Everything matters, you see. The smallest thing can be crucially important.”

  “Why did you think of it as a crime scene?” I demanded. “I mean, it wasn’t one at that stage.”

  “I was speaking metaphorically,” she back-pedalled. “However, I did grasp that I was hot on the trail of something, and that’s when I can’t help myself. The hunting instinct takes over when I’m in the zone.”

  Which was why she failed to see the dogs. All she heard was a kind of hoarse rattle behind her, and by the time she had spun round they were already upon her: a pair of dark brown, pure-bred German shepherds. With genetic programming like theirs, they should have torn my aunt limb from limb, but curiously enough they didn’t. They merely menaced her, baring every fang and barking fit to burst.

  Poldi screamed and staggered back against the pickup, but her wig, in obedience to the laws of inertia, mass and momentum conservation, described a graceful arc over the dogs’ heads and landed in the dirt.

  The German shepherds rose on their hind legs and pinned Poldi against the truck like two bad-tempered cops. She smelt the pet food on their foul breath, stared in horror at their chops and tartar-encrusted teeth, and suddenly grasped that she was dealing with two old acquaintances. That broke the spell.

  “GERROFFMEYOUFILTHYBRUTES!”

  There followed some choice items from her thesaurus of Bavarian swear words. Poldi hurled them at the dogs with fervour and, miraculously, they backed off, merely uttering a few dutiful woofs.

  Beside herself with fury, Poldi lashed out at them with each foot in turn. “Piss off, you brutes! Get lost! Hop it or I’ll skin you alive!”

  Hans and Franz knuckled under.

  Bending down, Poldi swiftly retrieved her wig and replaced her headscarf with equal speed. Just in time, it must be said, because approaching from the direction of the vineyard was a man in jeans and a lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A tall, slim figure in his mid-fifties, he had a full head of hair, albeit grey, and bushy eyebrows. Poldi registered every last detail, even at long range.

  “The thing is, I’ve got an autofocus where men are concerned,” she explained to me with a sigh. “I clock them with all my senses, my whole body, know what I mean? Even Bob said that was true.”

  She inserted a brief pause for me to ask which of her celeb friends she meant this time, but I didn’t indulge her.

  “Well,” she went on eventually, frowning, “I got the whole picture in an instant. Those big hands . . . that splendid Adam’s apple—like a second nose or a second . . . Oh well, never mind, you know what I mean. That five o’clock shadow, which gives you some idea how raw your face will look the next morning. Those full lips—well, need I say more? Yes, and those mournful eyes, which cry out for consolation. And the weather-beaten, typically Sicilian olive-wood complexion of a smoker with good genes. I couldn’t help visualising him in a police uniform.”

  In short, the man who came towards her and called off the dogs looked the way Poldi sometimes imagined my Uncle Peppe would have looked at that age. No wonder she caught fire—in spite of Hans and Franz, who were still holding her at bay.

  “Everything all right, signora?”

>   Poldi tweaked her wig straight. “No. Does it look like it?”

  The man came closer. Poldi’s knees became weaker and the temperature rose with every step he took, though this might have been the effect of post-traumatic stress. The man shooed away the dogs, which promptly trotted off in high dudgeon.

  “Those aren’t your dogs, are they?”

  “No, but I own this property. What are you doing here?”

  “The gate was open.”

  The man gave her a searching look. “You aren’t from around here, signora, are you?”

  “I’m from Munich.”

  “So in Germany an unlocked gate is an invitation to trespass on private property?”

  His shirt was unbuttoned far enough for Poldi to see the mat of grey hair on his chest, and although he was almost anorexically slim, his arms looked powerful. His forearms especially, and there were few male attributes Poldi liked better than muscular forearms. His awkward but self-assured movements, the way he cocked his head a little when speaking, the crow’s-feet around his eyes—they were all such painful reminders of Peppe that Poldi almost felt sick.

  “I called out,” she said defensively, quite faint with shock and desire. “I’m . . . I’m a journalist.”

  “Never at a loss for a lie, even in an emergency,” I commented when she described the scene to me later on.

  “Well, why not? I was there undercover.”

  “But . . . I mean, you might have known it would blow up in your face in two minutes flat.”

  “I’m more the spontaneous type, unlike you.”

  “I get it. You Epimetheus, I Prometheus.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You Tarzan, me Jane.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “Never!”

  “Pity, and I thought there was some hope for you. May I go on now?”

  “Forza Poldi!”

  “I’m from Wine and Women,” Poldi swiftly improvised. “We’re a new wine magazine for women, and I’m doing a series on Sicilian wines and wine growers.”

  This seemed to amuse the grey-haired man.

  “Do they have to be photographed with their clothes off?”

  “Just your shirt off will do,” Poldi blurted out. “I mean . . . no, of course not.” She extended her hand. “Isolde Oberreiter. Please call me Poldi.”

  She felt transfixed as the man clasped her hand and looked deep into her eyes. “Achille Avola. Would you like to see our winery?”

  “I don’t want to detain you.”

  “Not at all.”

  He led her round the slope between rows of harvested vines. The two dogs went on ahead to report.

  “You’re in luck,” said Avola. “Today is the last day of the grape harvest.”

  “Really? How will the vintage be?”

  “We’re optimistic. Spring was too wet, but summer didn’t let us down.” He took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tapped one out and proffered the packet to Poldi.

  The same brand, the same instinctively casual gestures as Peppe. His hands were stained with grape juice.

  “Do you?”

  She nodded. They paused to smoke, all alone in the midst of the vines, as if the rest of the world had disappeared and they alone existed. A wonderful idea, Poldi thought. She watched Avola smoking. A gentle breeze blew the smoke from his lips. He pointed up the slope.

  “We’re standing in an ancient crater—the geologists estimate it’s twenty thousand years old. Wine was made here back in the Greeks’ day. These are Carricante grapes, by the way.”

  Poldi remained silent—another rarity. To avoid continuing to stare at Avola, she averted her head a little and noticed that they were not alone after all. A muscular, middle-aged man in a baseball cap was slowly approaching them through the vines. He was holding a metal divining rod out in front of him and looked entirely self-absorbed. Poldi suddenly felt cold.

  “What’s he up to?”

  Avola heeled his cigarette butt into the ground. “I don’t have the least idea. Someone must have brought him.”

  When the dowser got to them, he looked up and beamed. Or rather, bared his teeth. It was a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

  “Oh, hi, how ya doin’?”

  An American, Poldi surmised, judging by his accent, his pallid complexion and his physiognomy, which incorporated a snub nose and a cleft chin. An athletic type in jeans, polo shirt and New York Yankees baseball cap. Possibly an ex-marine. Mid-forties, she estimated. He would have looked utterly unremarkable but for the spiral tattoo on his left forearm.

  He was about to walk on when Poldi laid a hand on his arm. “What on earth are you up to?”

  He turned and glanced at her for a moment, as if satisfying himself that she could cope with his answer. “I’m looking for positive energies. I travel the world in search of them. My name is Sean, Sean Torso, from Newton, Iowa.” He shook hands with Poldi and Avola, in that order.

  Poldi could now identify his tattoo. It was a triskelion composed of three linked spirals. An ancient Celtic symbol, it stood for the Trinity and was also the emblem of Sicily.

  “Well,” she asked, “have you found any?”

  “You bet! This whole area is a positive-energy hot spot. I’m stunned!”

  Poldi didn’t believe a word the man said. “So what are you going to do with all this lovely positive energy? Bottle it and sell it to Coca-Cola?”

  The American’s laugh was more of a bark.

  “Oh no, I’m compiling a global positive-energy map, one that shows all the positive telluric currents that flow around the earth like a great network. Humanity’s last great mystery.”

  Avola straightened up. “Then we won’t detain you any longer, Signor . . .”

  “Torso, but call me Sean.” He tapped his baseball cap in salute and concentrated once more on his dowsing rod.

  Poldi stared after him the way she might have stared after a car that had narrowly missed her. And, like an echo of that unpleasant sensation, the old crown on her top-left canine started throbbing again.

  Avola’s touch recalled her to the present. It was only the gentlest of contacts with her back, but it instantly set her ablaze, and the chill that had overcome her in the dowser’s presence was dispelled in a flash. When Avola was guiding her round a treacherous dip in the ground, she even got the opportunity to stumble a little and bump into him as if by accident—an old trick.

  The winery was a disappointment to her, however. The facilities for producing wine, the presses and steel tanks, were housed not in a picturesque vaulted cellar but in a big, three-sided shed with a concrete floor and a corrugated-iron roof. Grape pickers were wheeling in stacks of crates filled with white grapes, to be stripped by a de-stemming machine and then pressed. The stalks flew out into a basket at one end of the machine while, at the other, the must—a foaming mush composed of grape pulp, pips, skins and juice—went gurgling through a tube into a steel vat.

  “The must is left to rest for a few hours, then put through the wine press—nice and carefully, so as not to squash the pips.”

  “Because of the bitterness.”

  “Ah, as if I needed to tell you that. You know the ropes, of course.”

  Poldi spotted some pink grapes among the white. “Do they go in too?”

  “Try one.”

  Her eyes widened in surprise when she did so. “It tastes like a strawberry! It’s absolutely strawberry-flavoured!”

  “That’s why it’s called a fragolina. Under EU rules we aren’t allowed to grow them as a separate variety. That’s why we blend them with the Carricante. The result is truly wonderful.”

  Poldi believed him at once. She now believed everything Avola said.

  “The thing is,” she confided to me later as we sat on the sofa, “I realised at that moment—now don’t laugh—that the man was an alchemist. An alchemist of sensuality, and I know a thing or two about sensuality.”

  Avola halted the de-stemmin
g machine and checked the condition of the must. He issued instructions, hauled in fresh crates of grapes and moved the full steel containers into the shade with a forklift truck. He looked satisfied when he rejoined Poldi, who had spent the entire time admiring him from a distance.

  “What would you say to a glass of wine and a tasty salsiccia, Signora Poldi?”

  He led the way up the mountainside to an old cottage built of volcanic rock, similar to Femminamorta but much smaller.

  “This is where I stay during the grape harvest.”

  “How romantic.”

  “Well, it’s more to do with caution than romance,” he said. “Two years ago the barrels containing my entire vintage were stolen. Typical Sicily, and you’re welcome to write that.”

  When they reached the house, Poldi saw there was a long table outside, crowded with people seated together over wine and grilled sausages. She also saw that her recent lie was going to present her with a minor problem.

  For at one end of the table, seated among Avola’s grape pickers, she immediately spotted Doris and the German deliziosi. And at the other end, flanked by Hans and Franz, sat Italo Russo. He stiffened in surprise when he caught sight of my Auntie Poldi, and she could have sworn that he grinned.

  3

  Tells of Cyclopes and writer’s block. Poldi gives her nephew a hard time again. She also makes the acquaintance of a neurotic rebel and a famous fortune-teller who refrains from telling her something disturbing. She has to continue a wine tasting on her own, which results in (a) a painful awakening, (b) a hangover, and (c) a dawn encounter she would have done better to avoid.

  Poldi told me all this on my very first night back in Torre Archirafi. It was late by the time she yawned and rose from the sofa with a groan.

  “Can that really be the time already? Well, I’m off to bed. No, don’t get up, stay there and finish off the bottle. I’ve got another.”