Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna

by Mario Giordano

  Poldi hesitated. Then her hands shot out like children who know they must obey instructions. The celebrated clairvoyant squeezed and kneaded them, flexed the fingers and checked their shape and skin texture before concentrating on the palmar creases. Poldi was becoming apprehensive.

  “You’re very strong-willed and dislike being hampered by trifles. You’re happy to take on responsibility. You’re also inquisitive.” Madame Sahara looked at Poldi. “Very inquisitive.”

  “Mah!” Poldi exclaimed in Italian, implying that she couldn’t help it.

  “You’re a very old soul.”

  That was no news either.

  “Which is why you also enjoy your own company.” Madame Sahara’s fingernail traced the creases in Poldi’s palm like the needle of a record player. “You should take care of your liver and your heart—those are your weak points.”

  Still no news.

  “Many changes of location, many farewells,” Giuliana went on. “The most recent one about a year ago. In a far-distant place . . . in Africa. Someone cheated on you. It broke your heart, but you’ve reinvented yourself. I sense a great deal of phoenix-like energy in you. You’re strong. You experience powerful emotions, not always pleasant ones, but you prefer to keep them to yourself rather than burdening other people with them.”

  Poldi wanted to leave it at that and tried to withdraw her hands, but the clairvoyant wasn’t finished with her.

  “You had a difficult childhood. You were often ill, on one occasion gravely so. You’re a very spiritual person with a connection to the other side. Exalted ideals, but enough of a realist to know that life has many disappointments in store.”

  “You don’t say!”

  Madame Sahara ignored this dig. “You’re like a pendulum with a wide trajectory between optimism and gloom. It almost cost you your life not long ago. No . . .” she amended, gazing into Poldi’s eyes, “you tried to kill yourself.”

  Poldi was now feeling thoroughly uneasy. Tipsy Enzo, who was seated beside Madame Sahara, had broken off his introspective musings and was now listening intently to her analysis. Poldi saw that Doris had left her place and stolen up behind her so as not to miss anything.

  By now, Poldi really did want to retrieve her hands, but Giuliana still wasn’t finished.

  “We want to take at least a little look into the future, don’t we?”

  Focusing her attention once more on Poldi’s palms, the clairvoyant compared the left with the right and turned pale. Poldi distinctly saw this. A little start, a momentary widening of the eyes that suggested she’d opened a door and was unexpectedly looking at a crime scene.

  “What is it?” Poldi asked in alarm.

  Giuliana released her hands. She was already smiling again.

  “A lot of good things. There are some major tasks ahead of you. Another change of location. You’ll have a difficult decision to make, but happiness awaits you thereafter.”

  Poldi found this a bit too airy-fairy, but it was rather unnerving when a fortune-teller turned pale with fright.

  “The thing is,” she told me later, “fortune-tellers, clairvoyants and charlatans all subscribe to the same code of honour: never say anything negative when you look into the future. No one pays good money for bad news, or lousy novels.”

  Poldi nonetheless wanted to know the nature of the bad news affecting her immediate and longer-term future, but Madame Sahara’s mobile phone rang.

  Instinctively, as if she’d been expecting the call, she answered it. “Pronto?”

  The magic of the moment was over and the spell broken, dispersed by the authoritative voice of a telephone call. Another look of alarm flitted across the clairvoyant’s face—Poldi clearly detected it. Possibly a kind of professional tic, she surmised. Excusing herself with a smile, Madame Sahara rose and left the table. She spoke in a low, urgent voice, gesticulating as she did so. Clearly not a pleasant conversation. Maybe a business matter, thought Poldi.

  “At our age we should beware of looking into the future,” Doris whispered confidentially over her shoulder in a thick German accent.

  “Thanks for the tip,” Poldi grunted. She rinsed out the bad taste in her mouth with a swig of wine.

  “Would you like to come with us? We’re going to visit another winery now.”

  “Enjoy yourselves.”

  “It wouldn’t cost you anything. Evelyn’s got gastric flu, so there’s a vacancy.”

  “Thanks all the same.”

  Poldi once more sensed the searching and ever-disapproving expression with which the Dorises of her life had always scrutinised and then discarded her.

  “Suit yourself.” Looking piqued, Doris turned away and marshalled the deliziosi and the tour guide around her.

  Madame Sahara had meanwhile ended her phone call and returned to the table. She was looking somewhat paler than before, but she gave Poldi a broad smile and handed her a business card.

  “Come to see me sometime, my dear, and we’ll do a regression.” Still standing, the clairvoyant picked up her half-empty glass and raised it to Poldi. “To love and life!”

  “Namaste,” murmured Poldi, mopping her brow.

  Madame Sahara was clearly pressed for time. A mwah-mwah for Avola, a quick wave to the rest of the table, and she hurried down the mountainside to her car.

  As if in response to an abracadabra, the party now broke up. The harvesters picked up their baskets and their sticky secateurs and plodded off to garner the last grapes of the year, Doris and the deliziosi hurried off to their next wine-tasting, Enzo tottered into the house to throw up, and Russo took his leave of Avola. The two men exchanged chummy slaps on the back, but to Poldi it looked forced. Russo shot her a glance she was too far away to interpret, then whistled to his dogs and set off down the hill.

  Avola received a phone call. He listened for a moment, and his face hardened like cooling lava.

  “Okay, I’ll deal with it.”

  “What must you deal with?” Poldi asked when he rang off.

  “The mash pump is acting up and the men don’t have the right spanner. I must nip into Trecastagni and get one.”

  “I could come with you.”

  Avola smiled at her. “I won’t be long. Just wait here, if you don’t mind. As soon as I’m back I’ll have all the time in the world for you.”

  He touched her gently on the arm, far from perfunctorily or accidentally this time. Then he too walked off. Poldi felt depressed by all the comings and goings around her. She had been left alone and was sitting there as though glued to her plastic chair, as useless as an ill-fitting spanner, her heart overshadowed by memories and presentiments and a second glass of wine in her hand. Depression and thirst—always a dangerous combination for my Auntie Poldi, who was now reminded of her original life-ending plan, her private arrangement with death. She had once more reached a stage where things lost their colour and she herself lost her will to live.

  “The rest of the world can kiss my ass!”

  She knocked back her second glass and refilled it. A brief check revealed that all the bottles on the table were at least half full. Poldi drank a third glass and reached for them. First she assembled them around her in a semicircle, like an audience. That was too intimate, however, so she paraded them in front of her in single file. Parade all the bottles—a nice idea. She toasted it with another glass.

  And another.

  Eventually she stopped counting and ceased to savour the Polifemo’s delicate scent of almonds. It became no more than a red wine in which shame and contrasts and memories and the shadows clouding her heart dissolved into something better. At length she rose and went back to her Vespa, meaning to end the day comfortably at home with the shutters closed, and get totally plastered.

  But down beside the gate, where she’d left the Vespa, she saw Avola again. Avola, whose whole manner and every gesture reminded her so painfully of Peppe, and who smelt so good.

  He was arguing fiercely with a man who looked like his spitting i
mage—in fact, Poldi had to concentrate quite hard to tell them apart. Avola, who caught sight of her as she slowly approached them, said something to his clone and then dismissed him with a brusque gesture. Clearly annoyed, the second Avola got into an old Fiat Panda and slammed the door. When the Panda turned, Poldi sighted another man in the passenger seat: the peculiar dowser with the triskelion tattoo.

  “So you have a twin brother,” said Poldi, trying hard not to sway or slur her words.

  “Er, yes.” Avola seemed to have to pull himself together. “Surely you aren’t going already, Poldi?”

  “It’s getting late.”

  “I won’t hear of it. I’m all yours now.”

  In response to those words—who wouldn’t have welcomed them!—Poldi allowed Avola to take her arm and escort her back up the hill. While he was busy making wine in the shed across the way, Poldi finished off last year’s Polifemo in front of the house. And when evening descended on the flanks of Etna, gentle as a goodnight kiss, she found herself alone with Avola at last and also quite blotto. In other words, smashed, zonked, plastered. Avola told her how wine is made, and he still smelt so good, and he ended by refusing to let her ride home in her condition.

  “There’s a guest room here in the house. It’s no problem.”

  “No problem!” whispered Poldi, and she kissed him.

  “Whaaat?” I broke in when she told me this. “I don’t believe it!”

  “That’s because you’re such a tight-ass, such a control freak. Where was the harm?”

  I struggled for words. “Where was the harm? I mean, it was totally unprofessional of you!”

  Direct hit.

  Poldi hummed and hawed. “I’m the emotional type, that’s all, and I was feeling a bit weak. God Almighty, as if I need to justify myself to you!”

  “So what happened then?”

  “Well, ‘it,’ if you know what I mean.”

  “I’ve no idea. Can’t you be more specific?”

  “I’d only embarrass you again.”

  “It doesn’t bother you as a rule. So what happened next?”

  Poldi shuffled around uneasily on the sofa. “I don’t remember.”

  “Surely not? A mental blackout, you mean?”

  She nodded contritely. “It was most unprofessional, I know, but what can I say? It just happened. The next thing I remember is lying beside Achille with the dawn light in my eyes.”

  “Very nice. And then?”

  “Then fate sent me a sign.”

  She handed me a small, curved fragment of pottery with an inscription on one side. A single word in Greek capitals, scratched long ago into the fresh clay of a fair-sized amphora: OΥTIΣ.

  “Meaning?”

  “Outis,” she said, “means ‘no one’ in ancient Greek. Vito explained it to me. Homer made Odysseus use that cute bit of wordplay to trick Polyphemus. You know: when the giant asks him his name, Odysseus, being the cunning devil he is, replies ‘No One.’ In other words, Outis, get it? So later on, when the blinded Cyclops flips and is hunting for Odysseus and calling to his buddies to help, he yells, ‘No One has blinded me, No One is escaping from my cave!’ And so on.”

  “I understand,” I lied. “But what does this piece of pottery have to do with your mental blackout?”

  “You’re always so impatient!”

  My Auntie Poldi, it must be said, had experienced quite a shock on surfacing beside Achille’s sleeping form, naked and unbewigged and without the faintest idea how it had come to this—if it had. At all events, she had to get out of there sharpish, before Avola woke up.

  She slipped out of bed, hurriedly snatched up her wig and her belongings and crept out of the room like a cat that has smashed a vase and knows there’ll soon be hell to pay. Avola was snoring softly. Having pulled on her clothes in the kitchen, she went outside. Below her in the distance, the sea resembled burnished metal; nothing around her but silence and cool, moist air. Poldi briefly debated what to do. She was still rather unsteady on her legs, but after a few deep breaths she felt strong enough to totter down the hill to her Vespa and ride it home. She was wearing her red-and-green dirndl and grape-adorned headscarf, so she virtually melted into her surroundings.

  Still a trifle woozy, Poldi picked her way through the vines, whose golden ranks stood arrayed in the light of the rising sun—quite a beautiful sight, she thought. After a few metres she had to sit down and catch her breath. While hunkered down among the vines, she saw something glint amid the volcanic ash and picked it up. A fragment of pottery, it bore an inscription scratched in ancient Greek lettering: OΥTIΣ. It meant “no one”—not that she knew that at the time. She simply liked the look of it, so she picked it up. All that broke the silence among the vines was Etna, relatively near now, whose periodic rumbles made the morning air vibrate. Between the rumbles it was quiet enough for Poldi to hear her own shallow breathing and the thud of her big, sad heart, which, though lost so often, was still beating. The heart that was persevering like a gallant comrade who staunchly, and with only a grumble or two, fights on to the bitter end—the heart that was so inflammable. All alone among the vines with herself and Mother Nature, groaning because her knees ached and perspiring beneath her wig, my Auntie Poldi reflected on the strangeness of a life which, after washing her up like jetsam on many a distant shore, had finally landed her in the bed of a previously unknown wine grower.

  Boom! Etna again. Half a million years old—exactly the age Poldi felt at that moment. Remembering what Doris had said to her and Madame Sahara’s dismay on looking into the future, she realised that this strange life of hers might really be finito sometime soon, and was filled with dread. Which promptly reminded her that she could use a drink right now. Which in turn triggered another sensation—an inopportune one, she thought.

  She needed to pee.

  Quite badly, what was more.

  “Oh dear,” I said when she told me this later with the appropriate pauses for effect. “What happened then?”

  She shrugged. “Then I hoisted my dirndl and did a little Isar. The only trouble was, I’d failed to notice I wasn’t alone any longer.”

  “Not alone” being a relative term.

  While a little Isar trickled from under Poldi’s dirndl and threaded its way through the loose volcanic ash and she was once more feeling a little less mortal, she noticed that her glittering rivulet was blithely meandering downhill towards a shadowy figure just below her. It looked in the grey light of dawn like someone who was peacefully sleeping off a skinful among the vines.

  Poldi froze, possibly because she was startled, possibly because of the awkwardness of her squatting position.

  “Hello?” she called hesitantly. Then, a little louder in Italian, “Can you hear me?”

  Evidently not. That was when Poldi, inoculated with the genes of her father, Detective Chief Inspector (ret.) Georg Oberreiter of the Augsburg Police, had a premonition that she was heading for trouble again—big trouble. That she would again drink less from now on. That she would make herself unpopular and put herself in danger’s way. And also that she would not yield to her initial impulse, which was simply to turn a blind eye and walk away. Not my Auntie Poldi. So she quickly completed her morning toilette, regained her feet with the aid of a vine and adjusted her dirndl.

  The figure lying curled up among the vines still didn’t move as my apprehensive Auntie Poldi drew nearer. It was a woman in a platinum-blond wig beaded with dew. The wig was askew, and there was a great deal of coagulated blood beneath it. Poldi recognised the clairvoyant at once, despite the look of pain and horror that had convulsed her fine features. She couldn’t help thinking of the pink-and-yellow posters that would soon become weather-worn and bleached by the sun, never to be replaced and soon to be pasted over. At that moment, strangely enough, this thought distressed my Auntie Poldi far more than the sight of Madame Sahara’s dead body.

  4

  In which Poldi converses with nature in the raw and makes a promise.
She launches a first-class “preliminary attack” on her own initiative and rather forcefully hits upon a preliminary clue, puzzling though it may be. Because of the understandable fuss that results, she suffers from another minor lapse in communication. This means that she has to explain her conduct to several official parties and take account of a continental drift.

  My Auntie Poldi was jolted out of her benumbed state by a rattling sound. A buzzard that had landed on a vine just behind her was fluttering its wings and uttering plaintive cries—a youngster with brown-and-white plumage. Although Poldi could have reached out and touched the bird, it betrayed no sign of fear. On the contrary, it looked dignified and grave, like someone accustomed to assessing situations objectively. Clinging to the vine with its talons, the buzzard cocked its head and looked in turn at Poldi and the corpse as if trying to form a preliminary idea of the deceased and the prime suspect. Having evidently come to a conclusion, it stared at my Auntie Poldi and emitted a plaintive cry.

  “It wasn’t me,” Poldi insisted in a low voice, unused to dealing with nature in the raw and overcome by a shyness to which she had seldom succumbed since childhood.

  The buzzard didn’t take its eyes off her and, although it was silent now, she felt it was trying to tell her something. For a while they simply gazed at each other, my Auntie Poldi and the buzzard, while the rosy light of dawn continued to creep over Madame Sahara’s lifeless form. Then everything suddenly became clear to Poldi and the universe opened a crack, allowing her to catch a glimpse of how wonderful life is. Poldi was so overcome by this realisation that it shook her. She sobered up in a trice.

  “I’ll deal with this, I promise,” she said softly.

  The buzzard emitted another plaintive cry, then pushed off and propelled itself into the air with two powerful wingbeats.

  “Bye, Papa!” she called after it.

  “I’m sorry? Hello?” I queried, puzzled, when Poldi told me about this episode. “Why Papa?”

  She was looking dead serious. “It’s obvious: because I’d realised in a flash that the buzzard was the reincarnation of my father. He’d always been interested in birds of prey. I mean, it’s clear what had happened, isn’t it?”