Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions (2 page)

“But was the house for sale?”

“Are you joking? Haven't you been listening?” Uncle Martino clasped his hands together as if in prayer and shook them vigorously. “A
ruin
. Needless to say, there was an old ‘
Vendesi
' notice stuck to the wall complete with phone number. The owner couldn't believe his luck when Poldi called him. The rest you know. She paid too much for that ruin, if you ask me. She'd have done better to invest in a better bathroom for you on the top floor.”

I don't know if my Auntie Poldi paid too much for the house in the Via Baronessa, nor do I care in the least. Generous people can't be conned, and Poldi is the most generous person I know. She has never expected something for nothing or tried to beat someone down. Everyone who helped her got well paid, including the builders, the dustman and Valentino, and she always left a decent tip in the restaurant. It wasn't that she had money to throw around – she wasn't that well off – but it simply wasn't that important to her.

Anyway, the fact is, she scored a bullseye in buying that house. This was confirmed by my cousin Ciro, who's an architect and ought to know. In the course of the next year he restored the Via Baronessa house exactly in accordance with Poldi's wishes and her modest financial means. It was a narrow but genuinely handsome house situated one row back from the sea. Neither too small nor too big, it had three floors, a baroque balcony, a small inner courtyard and the aforesaid roof terrace with spectacular views of the sea and the volcano. Wedged into a shady side street behind the esplanade, it was painted bright violet and sunny yellow, with green shutters and a big brass plate announcing the name of the person who resided at No. 29 Via Baronessa: Isolde Oberreiter, my Auntie Poldi – plus, up in the attic every few weeks, her nephew from Germany. Like her ebony African idols and her pair of life-sized china poodles, I kind of belonged to the decor from the outset.

A year later the house was ready to move into, the Munich apartment empty save for a few wraiths of memories and the removals van bound for the Alps, the Apennines and Etna. In the meantime, Poldi's old Alfa Romeo was parked on Westermühlstrasse, tanked up and fully laden, waiting to set off on its last long trip. Waiting for me, too. Poldi was scared stiff of flying and couldn't be expected to drive that far on her own while sober, so the aunts had browbeaten me into chauffeuring her from Munich to Torre Archirafi.

“Your time will be your own,” I was told on the phone by my Aunt Caterina, the voice of reason in our family. “You'll be independent, and you can write just as well down here with us, maybe even better.”

Her subtext: since you're unemployed and work-shy anyway, and you don't even have a girlfriend although other men your age have long since acquired a wife and kids, you might just as well loaf around here. Who knows, maybe something will come of it.

Which it eventually did.

Between Munich and Torre Archirafi, however, I was faced with a thirty-four-hour drive in Isolde's overpowered 1980s Alfa equipped with roll bars, which she flatly refused to exchange for a more practical Panda and seldom drove anyway because you had to be certifiably sober to do so.

“We could always drive to Genoa and take it easy on the ferry over to Palermo,” I suggested timidly, but Poldi just eyed me with scorn. My mistake. I should have known. If there was one phrase she detested from the bottom of her heart it was “take it easy”.

“Well, if it's too much for you…”

“No, no, it's all right,” I grunted, and we puttered off, never doing over sixty miles per hour as we slunk across the Brenner Pass and trickled down the whole of the Italian boot past Milan, Rome and Naples, keeping to the autostrada all the way to Reggio Calabria. We devoured our first
arancini di riso
on the ferry between Scylla and Charybdis and got lost in Messina, where Poldi insisted on driving the final stretch to Torre herself. She revved the asthmatic Alfa and stepped on it. When we got to Torre I kissed the ground and thanked the Mother of God for my salvation and resurrection.

“Many happy returns,” I sighed, because it was the very day my Auntie Poldi turned sixty.

My Uncle Martino and the aunts came to Torre every few days to see how Poldi was getting on. The thing was, my aunts had a project: to keep Poldi alive for as long as possible, or at least to help raise her spirits. For Sicilians,
joie de vivre
rests on two pillars: good food, and talking/arguing about good food. Uncle Martino, for example, went to his temple, Catania's fish market, every day. Not a very entertaining place, more a kind of stock exchange where men lounge with tense concentration, checking the quality and price of the fish on offer and speculating on tuna belly meat or on whether a belated fisherman will turn up with a swordfish when everyone else's needs have been met and they can buy it more cheaply and fresher than fresh. This can take hours and isn't much fun, either. Alternatively, Uncle Martino will take Aunt Teresa mushroom-picking on Etna. He once drove all round the volcano to buy bread, and for eggs he goes to a car repair shop near Lentini whose owner's mutant hens lay eggs with two yolks. Granita is only to be consumed at the Caffè Cipriani in Acireale;
cannoli alla crema di ricotta
can only come from the Pasticceria Savia on Via Etnea in Catania. Once, when I praised the Pasticceria Russo in Santa Venerina for its marzipan, my uncle merely growled disparagingly – then drove there with me at once to check on the matter
in situ
and subsequently commended me on my palate. Cherries have to come from Sant'Alfio, pistachios from Bronte, potatoes from Giarre, and wild fennel from one particular, top-secret old lava field where – if you're in luck and the Terranovas haven't got there first – you can also find oyster mushrooms the size of your hand.
Arancini di riso
have to be eaten at Urna in San Giovanni la Punta and pizzas at Il Tocco, beneath the Provinciale and just beyond the Esso garage. The tastiest mandarins come from Syracuse and the tastiest figs – whatever their ultimate provenance – from the street vendor in San Gregorio. If you ever eat fish outside your own four walls, the only place to do so is Don Carmelo's in Santa Maria la Scala, which also serves the best
pasta al nero di seppia
. Life is complicated on an island imprisoned in a stranglehold of crisis and corruption, where men still live with their parents until marriage or their mid-forties for lack of employment, but no culinary compromises are ever made. That was what Poldi had always liked about Sicily, being inquisitive and sensual by nature. All she considered execrable was my uncle's taste in wine, for neither he nor the aunts were great drinkers. Sicilians in general drank little – a glass with their meals at most. This initially presented Poldi with a problem, until she discovered the HiperSimply's wine department and, later on, Gaetano Avola's vineyard in Zafferana. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Poldi's day always began with a revivifying Prosecco. Then came an espresso with a dash of brandy, followed by a slug of brandy without the espresso. Sometimes, when in a more than usually melancholy frame of mind, she would walk to Praiola, a remote little pebbly beach. An enchanted place with water as clear as liquid cobalt, it was sprinkled with lumps of lava sculpted into black and rust-brown dinosaurs' eggs by the ebb and flow of the sea. She usually had it all to herself. In high summer it wasn't until later in the day that families came with their radios, picnic baskets, cool boxes, rubber rings and sun umbrellas and strewed the little beach with litter until, by October, it resembled a rubbish dump until it was scoured clean again by the winter storms. My Auntie Poldi would sometimes dip her feet in the limpid water, toss a particularly handsome dinosaur's egg into the sea in memory of my Uncle Peppe, fold her hands, and say, “
Namaste
, life.” Followed by: “Poldi
contra mundum
.”

At eleven in the morning came the first beer, accompanied by Umberto Tozzi belting out the 1979 pop song “Gloria” at a volume that would have driven even Scylla and Charybdis insane. When my cousins came visiting we used to sing the song together, but substituting “Poldi” for “Gloria”. You might say it became a kind of anthem.

Strangely enough, the neighbours never complained. Strangely enough, they took to Poldi from day one, toted her shopping home for her, carried out minor repairs in the house, accompanied her on her visits to officialdom and invited her to play cards. No matter what had gone wrong in my aunt's life, everyone felt good in her company. The neighbours called her simply “Donna Poldina”.

The neighbours: Signora Anzalone and her husband on the left, both elderly. The house on the right belonged to a
Dottore
Branciforti, a tax consultant from Catania, but he only came on weekends with his mistress or during the summer months with his wife and children, if at all. At the end of the street lived Elio Bussacca, who owned the
tabacchi
on the corner and eventually found Valentino for my aunt.

For the first few weeks after Poldi's move, everything seemed to be going according to plan. Having installed her old furniture, the peasant cupboards, her father's collection of antique weapons, her ebony African idols and her china knick-knacks, she raised a glass to the sea and the volcano in turn. Before toasting Etna, she always paid tribute to the mighty smoker by firing up an MS – a
morto sicuro
, or “certain death”, as the Italians call that brand of cigarettes – to go with her brandy.

The heat seemed to drip off her like dew off a lotus leaf, although the sweat trickled down from under her wig.

Ah, that wig.

She had worn one for as long as I could remember. A huge black monster variously dressed in accordance with the prevailing fashion, it loomed above her head like a storm cloud. According to family legend, no one had ever seen what lay hidden beneath it. Even my Uncle Peppe had been vague on the subject. I suspect that Vito Montana was later privileged to peek beneath that holiest of holies, but he too preserved a discreet silence.

On the very first Sunday after moving in, Poldi invited the aunts, my cousins and me, still recovering in the attic guest room from our drive, to lunch. Roast pork with beer gravy, dumplings and red cabbage. In mid-July. In Sicily. We were welcomed with tumblerfuls of a dry Martini strong enough to send a Finnish seaman into a coma. While Poldi was inside thickening the gravy, alternately adding beer and drinking some herself, we huddled together under the only awning in the little inner courtyard like penguins in a storm. Still, lunch already smelt delicious. When Poldi finally emerged with a monstrous great leg of roast pork, bathed in sweat and explosively red in the face, I jumped to my feet in a panic.

“For goodness' sake come into the shade, Poldi.”

But my Auntie Poldi merely – as so often – gazed at me pityingly. “You think I came to Sicily to sit in the shade? I want sun, proper sun, sun with some oomph to it.
Il sole
. The sun is masculine in Italy, like the sea and the volcano, and they're what I came here for, so sit down, all of you. I'll go and get the dumplings.”

It really was a poem, that roast pork –
la fine del mondo
, even in a temperature of forty degrees. My cousins, who regarded German cuisine with a certain scepticism, were hesitant at first, but after the first polite mouthful they tucked in. They still wouldn't touch the red cabbage, but no one was deterred by the heat.

“Hey,” my Auntie Poldi said, out of the blue, “how are you getting back to Germany?”

I shrugged. “You can book me a flight any time soon.”

She shook her head as if I'd said something extremely stupid.

“Don't you like it up there in the guest room?”

“Er, yes, of course.”

“Doing any writing?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can I read some of it?”

The last question I wanted.

“Well, not at the moment, Poldi. It's still in a state of flux. Work in progress.”

I had rashly told her during the drive about my self-destructive plan to write a big, epic family saga spanning three German–Sicilian generations. A regular doorstop of a novel, full-bodied, juicy, masterfully told, full of twists and turns, replete with brilliant images, quirky characters, stubble-chinned villains, ethereal beauties, plenty of sex, amatory entanglements, escapades, scorching days and velvety nights, and abrim with historical strands running parallel to the plot. The only trouble was, I'd made no progress at all. Writer's block, total paralysis. I felt like Sisyphus within the first few feet. I had told Poldi all this between the Brenner Pass and Messina, and she'd merely nodded, being an expert on failure.

“I was only thinking,” she said. “If you like it up there you could stay on. Or come here now and then – regularly, I mean, to write and do your research. It'd do your Italian good, too.”

I sighed. “Thanks. No pressure, then.”

But for some reason my Auntie Poldi wouldn't let the matter drop. “I just don't understand what more you want. Up there you have your own bathroom and your own peace and quiet. You can come and go as you please, and if something turns up on the
amore
front, you're welcome to bring her home any time.”

That was all I needed. My aunts naturally endorsed the idea with enthusiasm – it meant they would have a family member on the spot to keep an eye on Poldi – and when Aunt Teresa invited me to lunch the following Sunday, I knew further resistance was futile. After all, I told myself, even a failure can feast his eyes on the sea – that's something, at least. And so I flew down from Germany once a month at the aunts' expense, lodged in the attic at No. 29 Via Baronessa, chafed at my mediocrity during the day, and in the evening, if my Auntie Poldi was tipsy enough, marvelled at her accounts of the progress of her investigations into Valentino's murder.