Sicilian Tragedee

ACT ONE
The Birth of Comedy
CHAPTER ONE
Two Months Earlier
Two months earlier.
An explosion of loud yellow and red.
Pinwheels and whirligigs.
The scene widens between flashes of intarsia. A man is lying flat on his back in a piazza: a crime in a public place, as befits the seriousness of the offense.
A red stain is spreading over his white shirt.
Another man, dressed like the first (white shirt, black trousers, white stockings up to the knee with red pom-poms, red sash knotted around the waist, black beret), holds up an enormous knife in victory.
Eyes widening in a furious grin.
A woman runs from the piazza, clad head to foot in black, a shawl over her hair, a hand on her breast. You can tell she's running by her skirt, the way her speed lifts it up and makes it stick to her legs.
The woman is screaming.
Her hair's a mess.
Her features are blurry but they give force to her expression, they spell out passion and murder just as we imagine them to be.
Jano Caporeale and Cosimo Cosentino, two pillars of the Catania dialect theater, are looking, perplexed, at the scene. It's painted, as tradition would have it, on the side of a Sicilian cart. The death of cumpare Turiddu in Cavalleria rusticana.
Both are wearing heavy wool jackets (Caporeale's in brown, Cosentino's in a blue and orange check) and threadbare gray flannel trousers. They wear no neckties and under their shirt collars the raveled edges of flesh-colored underwear can be seen.
Caporeale straightens his jacket with one clumsy hand, then looks around.
The waiters, in worn-out white cotton jackets, black trousers shiny with age, and well-scuffed shoes, are hastening from one room to another of Palazzo Biscari, getting the tables ready for lunch. Chairs squealing as they are pushed over the floor, the clink of heels, flatware, and glasses echoes in the reception room empty of all decor. Memories of old-fashioned grandeur just good enough for catered events these days.
Caporeale looks at Cosentino.
Cosentino looks at Caporeale.
"What time is it?" asks Caporeale.
Cosentino doesn't move a muscle. He continues to allow Caporeale to stare at him. "Why? You don't have a watch?"
Caporeale raises his eyebrows. "If I ask you what time it is, it means I don't have one."
"At the pawnshop?"
"I asked you what time it is."
Cosentino turns to look at the Sicilian cart once again. "I hocked mine too."
Caporeale nods, also turning to stare at the cart.
"I'd say it's past noon," says Cosentino.
"And at past noon the only thing here that's ready to eat is this fucking fruit painted on the cart?"
"What, you think they're all retirees like us who eat at the stroke of noon? Me, seeing as how they invited us for lunch, I even ate a light meal last night."
"Light, huh?"
"Light."




Outside on the sidewalk, a North African selling pirate CDs and DVDs pushes the play button on a huge radio, out of which comes "No Roots" by Faithless.
This is the Civita quarter of Catania, in Via Archi della Marina. Traffic here flows slowly, dammed up between the arches of volcanic rock in the shape of an ancient aqueduct over which the train tracks pass, and Palazzo Biscari.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, the arches nuzzled up against the sea, Via Archi della Marina didn't exist and Palazzo Biscari didn't open onto a street draped with sidewalk salesmen and upholsterers' workshops, but directly onto the water. Beside the main door there were still iron rings once used to tie up the boats.
The arches of the marina are the principal subject, à la Magritte, of the oil paintings that adorn the many trattorie serving fish in the quarter. What you usually notice in these paintings is a certain disproportion of dimension: Mt. Etna in the background is always too big or too small compared with the mullet laid out on the fishmongers' slabs.
Later, tons of landfill were thrown into the sea to build the port, and the arches were swallowed up by the city. Now, under the vaults, tiny parking lots, improvised and illegal, alternate with the carcasses of automobiles that have been stolen and dismantled, garbage bins, street peoples' homes of cardboard and plastic, fruit and vegetable stands, flower-sellers, vendors of Chinese and African merchandise, a kiosk selling beer and seltzer with lemon and salt.
Across the way, on the other side of the street and the noonday traffic, is the Baroque Palazzo Biscari, and behind that, the Duomo of Catania.
It's a beautiful day and Etna looms over the landscape.
Mister Alfio Turrisi, at the wheel of his Aston Martin—wheel on the right—is stuck in traffic. He looks in the mirror to see if his Brylcreem is holding everything in place (hair that was once thin, curly, and white, but which now, thanks to the admirable services of a barber in Ognina, is straight and black). Mister Turrisi would have liked to wear it thick and combed back, but the barber (who was totally bald) told him he had yet to master miracles, and so he had to content himself with a style that swept rightward from a left parting, covering the necessary.
He wets the tip of his little finger, with its diminutive signet ring, and smooths the tips of his pencil mustache and his eyebrows, watching two punk kids as they cut in front of him carrying a swordfish a couple of yards long.
The crushed ice man (ice for the crates of fresh fish at the fishmonger's next to Porta Uzeda, where Via Etnea, Catania's main street, begins) is sitting thoughtfully on a straw-backed chair smoking a cigarette while he watches a block of ice melt in the July sun.
Turrisi turns the air-conditioning up to the max: he hates sweating but it's a habit he's unable to break. One time he had problems with the hair dye and it began to drip down his forehead. He looks at his watch. Turrisi has a lot of business in England and he likes to be on time.
On the sidewalk, organized by size from the smallest, about four inches high, to the largest, about five feet, stands a row of wooden elephants. They all have their trunks pointing to the sky. Turrisi cranes his neck to see the elephants better.
Behind him, someone honks.
Turrisi, annoyed, shifts into first.
All around him is the midday crowd, old guys who are wending their way home from a morning spent on a park bench in the sun at Villa Pacini, getting a good look at the asses of the female students waiting for the bus in front of the Bar Etoile.
Turrisi notes that the old folks and the young girls are dressed identically. In London they call it vintage.




"Sicily certainly is full of whores," says Caporeale, to pass the time while they wait for lunch.
"Huh?"
Caporeale, his hands joined behind his back, points with his chin toward the wooden cart. "Lola, shit, what a slut. She gets cumpare Turiddu killed." Caporeale nods to himself. "And now that I think of it, his wife is a great big bitch too, spying on cumpare Alfio."
"Me, I really like the carts where they show the puppet theater, with the plume of colored feathers on the helmet that makes a fashion statement with the plume of feathers that they put on the horse's head."
Caporeale looks at him. "What do they do?"
"Make a fashion statement," says Cosentino, putting a hand up over his forehead like a plume of feathers and reciting, "Sing to me, O Goddess, of Achilles son of Peleus."
"What the fuck does the goddess have to do with it?"
"It's a theater lunch, isn't it? There are always goddesses."
It's a commemorative lunch in honor of the 350th anniversary of the birth of Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli. Born in Sicily, founder, in 1686, of the famous Café Procope in Paris, across the street from which the Comédie Française was installed. Obviously no one knew when the fuck Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli was born, and nobody knew where he was born either—some said Palermo, some said Messina, some said Acicastello in the province of Catania. But in order that the commemorative lunch, the pet project of the commissioner for culture of the Sicilian regional government (a regional government proudly autonomous from the rest of Italy), not end in strife, the commissioners for culture of all the Sicilian provinces came to an agreement to mutually forgo any parochial claims to his birthplace, and so on the invitation it was just written Sicilian. The celebration had also had the official blessing of the national minister of culture, thanks to a deputy minister from the nearby town of Avola, who, when he learned that French theater had been invented by an Italian, was emboldened to give national visibility to the event, commenting, "Let the French try to bust our balls with their wine."
"Apropos of goddesses," said Caporeale, "that queen of bitches Lambertini, who's usually the first one to arrive because God knows she doesn't want to miss any compliments, isn't even here yet."




Rosanna Lambertini had put on her Giorgio Armani suit that curved around her ass like a mandolin, and with that mandolin she was playing a serenade to Via Etnea that would have stopped all the traffic if the street weren't pedestrians only at this hour. She was wearing high heels too, obviously, which on the basalt pavement were keeping up a percussion beat with her ass like a mandolin, while the whistles of the boys completed the music—violas, violins, and contrabassoons, depending on age and style of whistling.
Every so often she would stop and look in the windows of the shops, but the show, the real show, was when she leaned over to check the price tags, and the construction workers up on the scaffolding restoring the Baroque facades of the palazzi would fake passing out and plunging to the pavement.
With her Farrah Fawcett blond hair and those Dolce & Gabbana shades she looked like Paris Hilton's mother, God bless the whole family.
Copyright © 2007 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano Translation copyright © 2008 by Frederika Randall