The Day of the Owl (4 page)

Negative reports on Paolo Nicolosi were brought back by Sergeants D'Antona and Pitrone from the Magistrature and the Records Office - no charges outstanding, no previous convictions. The captain was satisfied, but impatient; impatient to hurry over to S. and talk with Nicolosi's wife, with some of the missing man's friends, with the sergeantmajor; to question the people at Fondachello and then, should circumstances warrant, have a word with the two men named by the informer, La Rosa and Pizzuco.

It was already midday. He ordered his car and hurried downstairs, feeling like singing from mounting excitement, and actually humming as he made his way to the canteen. There he ate a couple of sandwiches and drank a hot coffee, a coffee made specially for him by the carabiniere-barman, with the right amount of coffee and all the skill of a Neapolitan trying to get on the right side of his superior.

The day was cold and bright, the country limpid: trees, fields and rocks gave an impression of gelid fragility as though a gust of wind or an impact would shatter them with a tinkle of breaking glass. The air, too, vibrated like glass to the engine of the little Fiat 600. Overhead large black crows flew around as if in a glass maze, suddenly wheeling, dropping or circling up vertically as though between invisible walls. The road was deserted. In the back seat Sergeant D'Antona held out of the window the muzzle of his sten-gun, his finger on the trigger. Only a month before on this road the bus from S. to C. had been held up and all the passengers robbed. The bandits, all minors, were already in San Francesco Prison.

The sergeant, watching the road uneasily, thought of his income and his expenses, of pay and wife, pay and television set, pay and sick children. The carabiniere-driver thought about a film,
Europe by Night,
which he had seen the evening before, and of his surprise at Cocinelle being a man, a man indeed! Behind this thought, which was more vision than thought, lay a worry, deep down and hidden lest the captain guess it, at not having eaten in barracks and if they would be in time to get anything with the Carabinieri of S. But that captain -what a man! - did guess and told the two of them, sergeant and driver, that they would have to scrounge something for themselves at S. and that he was sorry for not having thought of it before leaving. The driver blushed and thought, not for the first time: 'He's a kind man, but he reads my mind.' The sergeant said that he was not hungry and could go without eating till next day.

At S. the sergeantmajor, who had not been warned, came out with his mouth full, his face red with surprise and mortification. He'd had to leave a plate of roast mutton; cold, it would be disgusting; heated up, worse; mutton must be eaten hot, swimming in fat and savoury with pepper. Oh, well, it's a penance; let's hear the news.

News there was. The sergeantmajor nodded his approval; though, to tell the truth, not altogether convinced of a link between the shooting of Colasberna and Nicolosi's disappearance. He sent for the widow, a couple of Nicolosi's friends and the man's brother-in-law. 'Widow' was the word he used as he sent the carabiniere to fetch her, for he had no doubt the man was dead. A quiet-living man like Nicolosi only vanishes for so long for that one simple reason. Meanwhile, he invited the captain for a bite; the captain declined, saying that he had already eaten.

'So you've eaten, have you!' thought the sergeantmajor, his resentment chill as the fat on his mutton chops by now.

She was pretty, the widow; with dark brown hair and jet black eyes, fine features, and a serene expression, but a vaguely mischievous smile on her lips. She was not shy. Her dialect was comprehensible so the captain did not need the sergeantmajor to act as interpreter; he himself asked the woman the meaning of certain words and sometimes she found the right Italian equivalent or explained by a phrase in dialect. The captain had known many Sicilians, during his partisan period and, later, among the carabinieri. He had also read Giovanni Meli with Francesco Lanza's notes and Ignazio Buttitta with the facing translation by Quasimodo.

That day her husband had been up just before six. She had heard him get up, in the dark, not wanting to wake her. He had been a very considerate man - 'had been', just like that - for evidently she shared the sergeantmajor's opinion. But she woke up as she did every morning; and, as usual, told him that the coffee was ready in the sideboard - all it needed was heating up; then she had got back to sleep; not quite asleep, though, but dozing. She heard her husband moving about in the kitchen, then go downstairs to open the street door of the stable. In five or ten minutes, by the time he had got the mule ready, she had again dropped off to sleep. A clink of metal woke her; it was her husband, come up again to fetch his cigarettes and, fumbling on the bedside table in the dark, had knocked over a little silver Sacred Heart, given to her by an aunt who was Mother Superior at the Immacolata Convent. Almost wide awake, she asked her husband what was the matter. 'Nothing,' was his reply, 'go to sleep. I've forgotten my cigarettes.'

'Put the light on,' she said, wide awake now. He said there was no need, then asked her whether she had been woken by two shots fired nearby, or by him knocking over the Sacred Heart. That was just like him, she said, capable of blaming himself all day for having woken her. He really had loved her.

'And did you hear the two shots?'

'No. In my sleep I hear every sound in the house, my husband's movements, but outside there might be the fireworks for Santa Rosalia and I'd not wake.'

'What happened next?'

'I put on the light, the little light beside me, sat up in bed and asked him what had happened, what the two shots had been. My husband said: "I don't know, but running down the street I saw ..."'

'Who?' The captain rapped in sudden excitement, leaning across the desk towards the woman. Sudden alarm distorted her features; for a moment she looked ugly. The captain leaned back again in his chair and, in a quiet voice, again asked: 'Who?'

'He said a name I don't remember, or perhaps a nickname. Now I come to think of it, it might have been a nickname.'

She used the word
ingiuria
and for the first time the captain needed the sergeantmajor's talents as interpreter.

'Nickname,' said the sergeantmajor, 'almost everybody here has one, some so offensive that they really are "injuries".'

'It might have been an
ingiuria?
said the captain, 'but it might also have been some odd surname sounding like an
ingiuria.
Had you ever heard your husband use the name or
ingiuria
before ...? Try to remember. It's very important.'

'I'm not sure I'd ever heard it before.'

'Try to remember ... and in the meanwhile tell me what else he said or did.'

'He said nothing else. He just left.'

For some minutes, ever since the woman had shown sudden alarm, the sergeantmajor's face had been frozen into an expression of baleful incredulity. That, according to him, had been the moment to put on the screw, to frighten her enough to force it out of her, that name or nickname. Sure as God, she had it stamped on her memory. The captain, on the other hand, was being kinder than ever.

'Who does he think he is? Arsene Lupin?' thought the sergeantmajor, whose reading days were so far behind him that he mistook burglar for policeman.

'Try to remember that
ingiuria?
said the captain, 'and in the meanwhile the sergeantmajor will be kind enough to offer us some coffee.'

'Coffee too,' thought the sergeantmajor. 'It's bad enough not to give her a proper go over, but coffee ...!'

'Yes, sir,' was all he said.

The captain began to talk about Sicily, at its loveliest when most rugged and barren; and how intelligent the Sicilians were. An archaeologist had told him how swift and deft the peasants were during excavations, much more than specialized workmen from the North. It's not true, he said, that Sicilians are lazy or lack initiative.

The coffee came and he was still talking about Sicily and Sicilians. The woman drank hers with little sips, showing some refinement for a pruner's wife. The captain was now passing Sicilian literature in review from Verga to
The Leopard,
dwelling on a particular aspect of literature,
ingiurie;
how they often gave an accurate picture of a whole character in a single word. The woman understood little of this, nor did the sergeantmajor; but some things not understood by the mind are understood by the heart; and in their Sicilian hearts the captain's words rustled like music.

'How well he talks,' thought the woman and the sergeantmajor. 'Yes, he can talk all right. Better than Terracini,'
^{2}
whom, apart from his ideas of course, he considered the greatest orator he had ever heard at any of the political meetings which he had to attend as a matter of duty.

'There are
ingiurie
which reveal a person's physical characteristic features or defects,' said the captain, 'and others which reflect his moral character. Still others refer to a particular happening or episode. Then there are hereditary
ingiurie
which include a whole family and can also be found on the maps of the register of landed property ... But let us proceed in order. Of the
ingiurie
which deal with characteristic features or defects, the most banal are: "one-eye", "limper", "lop-sided", "left-handed" ... Was the
ingiuria
your husband said like any of those?'

'No,' said the woman, shaking her head.

'Then there's likenesses - to animals, trees, objects ... For example, "cat" for a man who has grey eyes, or something that makes him look like a cat. I knew a man nicknamed
Lu chiuppu,
"poplar", owing to his height and a sort of quiver he had - that was how I had it explained. Objects ... let's see, nicknames due to a likeness to something ... '

'I know a man nicknamed "bottle",' said the sergeantmajor, 'and he really is the shape of a bottle.'

"If I may,' said Carabiniere Sposito, who had sat so still he had become almost invisible in the room, 'if I may, I can tell you a few
ingiurie
which are names of objects. "Lantern", for one whose eyes pop out like lanterns; "stewed pear", for one rotten with disease;
vircuocu
- "apricot" - I don't know why, perhaps for a blank look; "Divine Host" for someone with a white round face like a Host...'

The sergeantmajor gave a meaning cough; he did not allow jokes about persons or things in any way connected with religion. Sposito stopped.

The captain looked inquiringly at the woman. She shook her head once or twice. The sergeantmajor made a sudden violent movement, his eyes like watery slits between their lids, leaning forward to look at her. Suddenly, as if the word had been brought up by a sudden hiccup, she said:
''Zicchinetta?

'Zecchinetta?
promptly translated Sposito, 'a game of chance: it's played with Sicilian cards ... '

The sergeantmajor gave him a glare; now they had the name, the time for philology was past; whether the word meant a game of cards or a saint in paradise was unimportant (and his instinct for the chase roused the sound of hunting horns in his head, making the saint in paradise bump a nose against Sicilian cards).

The captain, on the contrary, had felt a sudden, sombre sense of discouragement; of disillusion, helplessness. That name or
ingiuria
or whatever it was, was finally out; but it had only come out at the second when the sergeantmajor had suddenly seemed to become for her a terrifying threat of inquisition, of condemnation. Maybe she had remembered the name from the very moment her husband had uttered it and not forgotten it at all. Or else her sudden desperate fear had brought it back. Anyway, without the sergeantmajor, without that ominous transformation of his from a fat, jovial man to the incarnation of menace, they might never have got the name out of her.

'Give me time for a shave,' said the sergeantmajor, 'and I'll soon find out whether this
Zicchinetta
is a local or not. My barber knows everyone.'

'All right,' said the captain wearily; and the sergeantmajor asked himself: 'What's up with the man?' Disillusionment, with the captain, had brought on a stab of homesickness; the ray of sun which slanted down on to the table through golden specks of dust, shone for him on throngs of girls on bicycles on the roads of Emilia, on a filigree of trees against a white sky, and on a big house where town gave way to country, a house mellow in evening light and in his memory. He repeated to himself the words of a poet from those parts - 'where thou art missing from our hallowed evening custom' -words written by a poet for a dead brother. In self-pity for his exile, in his disillusionment, Captain Bellodi felt a faint premonition of death.

The woman gave him an apprehensive look, the ray of sunshine falling on the table between them, separating them in a remoteness which, for him, had a sense of unreality and, for her, an obsessive nightmare quality.

'What sort of a man was your husband?' asked the captain; and as he put the question he found it natural to use the past tense.

The woman, in her daze, did not understand.

'I would like to know about his character, his habits, his friends.'

'He was a good man: work, home, was his life. On days he wasn't working he'd spend an hour or two at the smallholders' club. On Sundays he'd take me to the cinema. He had few friends, all very respectable, the mayor's brother, a municipal guard ...'

'Had he ever any quarrels, rows about interest, enemies?'

'Never. Everyone liked him. He wasn't a local and strangers are all right here.'

'Oh, of course, he wasn't a local! How did you meet him, then?'

'At a wedding. A relation of mine married a girl from his village, and I went to the wedding with my brother. He saw me there; and, when my relation came back from his honeymoon, he asked him to apply to my father to marry me. My father made inquiries, then spoke to me. He said: "He's a decent young fellow, with a very good job." "I don't even know what he looks like," I said. "I wanted to meet him first." He came one Sunday, not as engaged, but as a friend; he hardly opened his mouth, just looked at me all the time as if bewitched. Spellbound, my relation said; as if I'd put a spell on him. He was only joking, of course. I decided to marry him.'