Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna

by Mario Giordano

  Death positively quailed under Poldi’s tirade. He seemed unable to endure friction and emotional outbursts. Poldi wondered what actually qualified him for his job. “But,” she thought, “perhaps it was just that, there too, someone wanted to do a favour for the brother-in-law of a cousin of a good friend and find an addled member of his family a cushy job where he couldn’t harm anyone.” She chuckled to herself.

  “Can I send you back now?” Death asked. “Are you through?”

  Poldi was bracing herself in readiness to utter a curt “Like hell I am!” when she thought of something else—something that ought to occur to any dissatisfied customer.

  “Just a minute, not so fast, my lad. What about compensation?”

  This seemed to catch Death on the wrong foot. “Uh, what?”

  “Com . . . pen . . . sation! You know, for the shock, the emotional upset, the post-traumatic stress. I’m not budging an inch without compensation. You can thrash it out later with your accounts department. I mean, read your Job. He didn’t get an apology either, but he did get some compensation in the end. So don’t go telling me it’s unusual.”

  Death sighed. “What sort of com . . . pen . . . sation did you have in mind, Poldi?”

  She put her face close to his.

  “Don’t be so cheeky, my lad. A really juicy clue, that’s what I’m asking for. A really solid lead. Who is the Hedgehog?”

  Death just rolled his eyes.

  Hey presto, Poldi was in her bedroom. Or rather, a replica of her bedroom, floating in the darkness complete with all its appurtenances. She was standing in front of her corkboard and looking at all the results of her investigations. Death was standing beside her.

  “Well, so what? Am I supposed to work it out for myself again?”

  “It’s all there, Poldi. Just look closely.”

  Poldi scrutinised the corkboard until her eye lighted on the mysterious slip of paper Signora Cocuzza had purloined from Madame Sahara’s house.

  Easton Ros

  Rena Sotos

  Stan Roose

  Astor Enos

  Santos Roe

  Rosa Stone

  And at that moment everything became clear to her.

  Two days after her accident, therefore, Poldi regained consciousness in a foul temper but feeling thoroughly relieved at her return to life. Life, to which she was so attached despite melancholia and advancing years, heartache and minor ailments. The darkness around my aunt lifted, and she was soaring over a misty landscape that turned out, when the mist finally dispersed, to be a sickroom. A sickroom, however, that resembled a greenhouse, because the windowsill and every other flat surface were covered with vases holding luxuriant flower arrangements, each more splendid than the next.

  Poldi made out Aunt Caterina and Aunt Luisa seated on two plastic chairs beside the bed and talking together with Totti lying at their feet. Seated on the other side of the bed, likewise deep in animated conversation, were Uncle Martino and Vito Montana. My aunt was particularly touched and pleased by the sight of Montana, who kept glancing anxiously at an ECG machine.

  The bed, of course, was occupied by none other than herself, eyes closed and hooked up to a drip and the ECG machine. Poldi saw that her head was bandaged, her right eye bruised and swollen, and her left arm in plaster. Some sympathetic soul had not only perched her wig on top of her bandaged head but had even backcombed it a little. For all that, thought Poldi as she floated overhead, she didn’t look good. Not good at all, but at least not dead. It was time to demonstrate this.

  “Right, let’s get cracking,” she told herself firmly, returning to her less than youthful but familiar and stout-hearted body, which had experienced so much joy and sorrow and was eager to experience more.

  Since Poldi knew how to make an entrance, she kept her eyes shut for a little longer and listened to what was being said all around her.

  Caterina and Luisa were quietly discussing their sons and their sons’ current girlfriends. The gist: too skinny, too temperamental, too needy, too Scandinavian.

  Martino, mounted on his hobby horse, was telling Montana how, after Sicily had been liberated in the Second World War with the aid of Lucky Luciano, who was serving a life sentence in the United States, the CIA had permanently reinstalled the Mafia there. Changing the subject at breakneck speed, he expounded another pet theory of his: that after the Battle of Trafalgar, Lord Nelson had been gifted the small castello at Bronte, where he joined the Templars in planning a new world order (the origin of the founding of the CIA), and where Nelson’s nieces, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, often spent their summer holidays and subsequently adopted the place name Bronte as their nom de plume. This was strongly disputed by Montana, who unexpectedly turned out to be a Bronte expert and insisted that the sisters had never set foot in Sicily.

  “But they might have!” Martino brazenly retorted, unashamed at being caught out in a minor historical distortion.

  Poldi could easily have joined in the dialogues to left and right of her and repeated them in unison, they were so familiar to her, and she rather resented them, considering that she had just returned from the realm of the dead. She would have welcomed a bit more concern and anxiety. High time for a reprimand. She opened her eyes with a jerk, like Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula.

  “God Almighty, am I hungry! I could also use a beer.”

  My Auntie Poldi certainly knew a thing or two about dramatic entrances and resurrections.

  She discovered after the initial brouhaha—the tears, hugs and cries of joy—that one of Russo’s lorry drivers had found her in her Alfa half an hour after the crash. The car was upside down and practically a write-off. The roll bar on the big-engined old hot rod was all that had saved her life. She had been unconscious for two whole days. For two whole days, her sisters-in-law, Martino, Totti, Signora Cocuzza, the padre and Montana had kept vigil beside her bed and feared for her life, had straightened her wig and washed her, had prayed and talked to her. When Poldi heard that, she herself had to fight back the tears.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly. “I love you all.”

  “I had a look at the car,” Montana said sombrely. “It’s a goddam miracle you survived.”

  Poldi endeavoured to sit up a little, but she felt so giddy, she promptly abandoned the idea.

  “It was the Hedgehog,” she whispered.

  “No, there was no hedgehog on the road, Poldi.”

  “I don’t mean that. Elisa Puglisi knew who her murderer was, and she called him the Hedgehog. He had all the money. It was the Hedgehog! It’s all in the diary.”

  “I think you’re still confused, Poldi. We’d better leave you to sleep.”

  “Shut up and listen to me, Vito. Where’s the Alfa now?”

  “At a police pound for confiscated vehicles.”

  “Is it secure?”

  “Of course. Fenced in and supervised. Why?”

  “That’s good. You must go and get the book from it, Vito. Right away, preferably.”

  “What book?”

  “Madame Sahara’s appointments diary. That’s why I was coming to see you. It’s all in there. The diary must still be inside the car.”

  “What the devil . . . ?”

  “I’ll explain everything later, Vito, but please go and look for it. Please! Then you’ll understand.”

  Seeing that she really meant it, Montana rose and turned to the aunts. “I’ll be back in an hour. Make sure she stays in bed. If necessary, knock her out again.”

  “You can rely on us,” Caterina assured him.

  The handsome commissario had scarcely left the room before Aunt Luisa bent over Poldi. “He was sick with worry. You should have seen him. He even held your hand.”

  “He what?”

  Poldi was quite touched by this notion. Being a child of the hippie generation, she found sex a natural and indispensable form of self-expression. Whatever was involved—a one-night stand, a quickie on the beach, a fleeting affair or a regular g
entleman visitor—Poldi made little of it and had left nothing untried. Sex was fun and as much a part of life as good wine and the first sunburn of summer. Sex could be pleasurably taken and given, after which the man could be casually dismissed. Wham, bang, thank you and goodbye.

  Holding hands, by contrast, was an altogether different matter. Holding hands was the most intimate form of contact my Auntie Poldi could permit. Holding hands was reserved for love affairs. Poldi had often held hands with my Uncle Peppe, and had felt truly loved. The same had applied, not so long ago, to John. With Montana, on the other hand, it had so far been a line she was unwilling to cross for fear of heartbreak. And now Montana had sat beside her bed and held her hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world. At the moment, though, she didn’t have time to decide whether she ought to emit a blissful sigh or snort with indignation.

  Why not? Because first she had to consume two huge, ragout-filled arancini di riso provided by Aunt Luisa. She could have killed for a beer as well, but Luisa and Caterina refused to bring her one.

  Soon the ward doctor came toddling in after his lunch break. He examined Poldi briefly and told her what she already knew: that she had got off with a black eye. Her arm had sustained only a hairline fracture and would, like the laceration on her head and the shiner, be healed within a few weeks. Her giddiness, too, would soon subside. However, said the young medic, who smelt of cigarettes and whose affected little goatee Poldi considered less than confidence-inspiring, he wanted to keep the signora under observation for another few days and carry out tests for possible neurological damage. Despite her giddiness, Poldi promptly construed this as a form of cold turkey.

  “Out of the question,” she snapped. “If I can go, I’ll go. Basta! I’ve a murder to solve.”

  That was when the faces of Aunt Caterina and Aunt Luisa hardened like concrete.

  “No, Poldi,” Caterina said firmly. “You’ll undergo these tests. If not, we’ll put you on the next flight back to Munich. That’s enough. You’re ill, and now you’re going to get better.”

  “I’m not spending another day in this hellhole!”

  Hospitals were one of the few things my Auntie Poldi genuinely detested—especially Italian hospitals, because, as a young woman, she had almost died of undiagnosed blood poisoning in a hospital in Rome. To her, Italian hospitals were the last stop before purgatory. Giddy or not, she sat up in bed and would have plucked the cannula from her arm if the doctor hadn’t restrained her just in time.

  “Please, signora. Calm down!”

  But his plea was redundant, because vertigo had already laid my Auntie Poldi low once more. Whimpering and nauseous, she lay back on her bed like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa and wished that the cosmic accounts department had never noticed the error in her date of death.

  “Do what you like to me, but take me home,” she gasped.

  Caterina and Luisa glanced at each other. Their answer was brief and to the point: “No.”

  By the time Montana returned, Poldi was feeling a little better, bar her raging thirst. She felt like begging him to bring her a beer or a grappa, but she just managed to summon up enough self-respect not to.

  “Did you find it?”

  “No. There wasn’t any diary.”

  Poldi groaned. “Did you look everywhere?”

  “Several times. Believe me, Poldi, there was no sign of it. It’s time you told me what you’re talking about.”

  Poldi shut her eyes and thought.

  “That’s why the Hedgehog rammed me. He was after the diary.”

  “Who is this hedgehog you keep talking about?”

  “The murderer of Madame Sahara and Elisa Puglisi, it’s obvious. He found out that I . . . I mean, that I happened to get hold of Giuliana’s appointments diary. Two people had to die because of it, and I escaped death by a hair’s-breadth.”

  “What are you driving at, Poldi?”

  “He rammed me! Several times, that’s why I went off the road. He wanted to kill me and get his hands on the diary.”

  Montana shook his head. “Listen, Poldi. Nobody rammed you. You simply crashed into the wall head-on and overturned. We examined your car.”

  Poldi felt too weak to argue. Her memory had often played tricks on her recently, and she could hardly expect Montana to believe that Death had been sitting beside her just before the accident. Realistically, she had to admit that she might well have caused the accident herself.

  Yes, if it weren’t for the missing appointments diary.

  Poldi opened her eyes, feeling suddenly quite lucid and in command of herself again. Death might have been a hallucination, but the big SUV had been thoroughly real.

  She looked at Montana. “It doesn’t matter, Vito, I have photocopies of the diary you must look at. You must find out who the Hedgehog is.”

  “Let me have them, then.”

  She feebly shook her head. “Oh no, my dear Vito. You aren’t getting away as cheaply as that.”

  My Auntie Poldi had to spend a full week in hospital. No matter how much she cursed and swore, the other aunts weren’t having any. They made an agreement with the doctors and nurses: Signora Oberreiter was to be chained to her bed if need be. She was also to be strictly denied any alcohol, because opportunities for an official ban were few and far between.

  Although Poldi accused her sisters-in-law of deprivation of liberty and torture, she eventually gave up—especially as, like all good jailbirds, she soon found a loophole in the system through which an occasional drop of something could be smuggled.

  The loophole went by the name of Ciccio Pappalardo and was an unkempt old hospital orderly the size of a stunted hobbit, who spent all day mopping the floors in his scruffy blue overalls. This he did with a provocatively anti-capitalistic indolence that Poldi found thoroughly appealing.

  Having made the acquaintance of Ciccio Pappalardo on her first trip to the showers, she had naturally got the picture right away.

  Since then, Ciccio had passed by twice a day during those rare spells when Poldi had no visitors, smuggled a small bottle of beer into her room, scented the air with his miasma of stale sweat and ill-digested garlic, accepted his baksheesh with a mixture of obsequious cunning and dog-like subservience, and stood guard in the doorway until Poldi had slaked her thirst.

  He addressed Poldi as Voscenza, the Sicilian abbreviation for Vostra Eccellenza, “Your Excellency” being the obsolete form of address reserved by common folk for persons of high rank and Mafiosi. He also offered her, in his broad Sicilian dialect, a positively boundless range of services.

  “If you need anything else, Voscenza, don’t hesitate to call on me. Always at your service, Voscenza. No matter what it is, Ciccio Pappalardo can get it. Ciccio Pappalardo has the best contacts.”

  “Thank you, Ciccio,” Poldi always told him graciously, well aware of how to say no in Sicily without offending someone and making a figuraccia of them. “Rest assured, I shall bear you in mind when the time comes.”

  Whereupon Ciccio would kiss my Auntie Poldi’s hand, dispose of the empty bottle and disappear like a puff of wind.

  Poldi seldom got a chance to think that week. The visitors and bunches of flowers kept coming. Italo Russo sent two parlour palms and a strelitzia with “heartfelt” wishes for her speedy recovery. Valérie, Signora Cocuzza, Padre Paolo and the aunts came and went, always laden with fresh lasagne or a parmigiana, potted vegetables, seafood salads, arancini, sweet cannoli alla ricotta, pasta di mandorla, babà al rum, marzipan fruits, pistachio ice cream, and whole gâteaux from the café in Torre Archirafi. Half of Torre filed past my aunt to wish her well, bring her the latest gossip and make un selfie con Poldi. Doris and the German deliziosi had sent her a get-well card, and even Mago Rampulla put in an appearance. He seemed infinitely relieved to find Poldi alive and in good spirits, and he assured her that her aura would soon be shining in all the colours of the rainbow—a clumsy bit of lyricism on the fortune-teller’s part, thought Poldi. The mago declined t
o answer her suspicious inquiry as to whether he’d foreseen the accident, just repeated several times how glad he was to find her still alive.

  Her sickroom soon resembled a baroque genre painter’s idea of the Land of Cockaigne: a jungle of flower arrangements, ornamental palms, scented orchids and other delights, and, holding court in a nest of white sheets at its midpoint, a high priestess of joie de vivre. Although Poldi felt, alcohol-wise, like an unwatered office plant, she was so touched and overwhelmed by the solicitude lavished on her from all sides that it almost compensated for her deprivation.

  She had only a very vague recollection of her near-death experience. She could remember Death and his talk of an error in the accounts department. She could also remember holding the little shard of clay in her hand and standing in front of the corkboard in her bedroom. She could not, however, recall why. She merely sensed that she had discovered something important, only to forget it again when coming back to life.

  Something important.

  About the Hedgehog.

  On that slip of paper.

  But trying to remember made her feel dizzy again, so at some stage she gave up.

  Vito Montana turned up punctually at five every afternoon, bearing flowers and marzipan. As soon as he entered the sickroom, all the other visitors present respectfully withdrew, exchanging meaningful winks. Montana would then pull a chair up to the bed and, if he was a bit less ill-humoured than usual, hold Poldi’s hand.

  To her mingled relief and dismay, he had still made no progress with the two murder cases.

  “I could spit,” he told her on the fourth day after her resurrection. “We released your wine grower today.”

  Poldi pricked up her ears but said nothing.

  “I grilled him a bit and the contradictions came tumbling out. He cracked, of course, and withdrew his confession.”