Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions (24 page)

Poldi couldn't take it in. “But for God's sake, why did you never say anything?”

Embarrassed shoulder-shrugging. “You never asked.”

That was true, too. Pragmatism was the only answer. My Auntie Poldi had never been one to fret for long over mistakes, faux pas or missed opportunities, because she knew a thing or two about coming unstuck, tripping up, making a fool of yourself and getting a bloody nose, just as she also did about starting afresh, picking yourself up, laughing at yourself and standing for no nonsense. I sometimes think that her only blind spot is not letting go.

She briefly vented her feelings with a characteristic obscenity, then spread out her map of Sicily on the table. “All right, Martino, where are all these Femminamortas?”

Uncle Martino vaguely tapped various places in the east and centre of the island.

“Can't you be more precise?”

He scratched his head uneasily. “It's been a while.”

“
Amore
,” Aunt Teresa said sternly. “Concentrate – don't let us down.”

Us.

Poldi beamed.

Half a packet of MS later, Uncle Martino had made five red squiggles on the map. They were scattered all over the island and well away from towns.

“Is that the lot?” asked Poldi.

He raised his hands defensively. “They're as many as I can remember, and as I say, they're unofficial place names. Landed estates, small villages, sometimes just an old bridge described as such by the local peasants.”

Poldi eyed the map morosely. “They're far too scattered for us to visit them all.” She firmly drew a line through two red squiggles in the north and south of the island. “Too far away.”

Teresa and Martino said nothing.

Poldi compared the remaining sites with the photo she had taken in Taormina of the topographical map in Russo's transparent folder. The details did not correspond, but she tried nonetheless, turning the map this way and that. Unable to find a match, she angrily thrust it aside.

“Hell and damnation.”

“
Beh
.” Uncle Martino stubbed out his cigarette and looked at his watch. “Nearly midday. I'll just nip over to the fish market in Riposto.”

“You're staying here. I won't be a moment.”

Uncle Martino and Aunt Teresa looked at each other. Teresa almost imperceptibly shook her head, probably hoping that the situation would resolve itself and that Poldi's addiction to the thrill of the chase would gradually subside.

No such luck.

Poldi fetched her father's magnifying glass from the chest of drawers in the living room and used it to study the three remaining squiggles. She traced roads with her finger, deciphered place names, discovered churches, monasteries, archaeological sites and ruins, estimated distances, sighed, muttered to herself, and denied herself a beer. At the edge of a squiggle which Martino had made near Piazza Armerina, near Enna, and almost obliterated by red ink, she eventually made out a cartographic symbol: an inverted miner's kit consisting of two crossed hammers.

“What does that mean?”

“An abandoned mine.”

Poldi considered this. An idea took shape in her mind. Only a crumb of an idea, it detached itself from the depths of her subconscious and headed for the surface. Sluggishly borne upwards by the magma of molten memories, it got stuck halfway and made no further progress.

“What sort of mine?”

Uncle Martino glanced at the map. “An old sulphur mine, I should think.”

Poldi could almost hear the pop as the little plug of an idea came adrift, shot into her consciousness and crystallized there. Jumping up, she dashed to the corkboard in her bedroom and returned with the photograph she'd taken in Valentino's room of his little collection of minerals. She tapped the yellow crystal at the edge of the print. “Could something like that be found there?”

Uncle Martino put on his reading glasses. “Certainly. Sicilian sulphur mines contain the finest sulphur crystals in the world.”

Poldi triumphantly folded up the map.

“Let's go, then.”

13

                  
Tells of sulphur, kisses and unresolved trivialities, and of what Poldi found at Femminamorta with the aid of radar-beam technology. What matters is finding something, not looking for it, and who knows that better than Inspector Chance? Totti tries to look good and succeeds brilliantly, but so does Montana. There is coffee and marzipan, good and bad news, and an unexpected visitor.

“The history of sulphur mining in Sicily is a ballad of superabundance and wealth, greed and suffering,” Uncle Martino told me once.

Sicilian sulphur formed on the Messinian Plateau when, over five million years ago, the waters of the Mediterranean evaporated and left behind vast deposits of sulphurous gypsum. The Greeks and Romans, who already knew of these immense deposits, extracted the yellow element from numerous mines near Agrigento and in the Enna–Sciacca–Gela triangle. Miners burrowed into the local mountains for many centuries, perforating their interiors like a sponge. The mountainsides are covered with heaps of spoil, and among them are the primitive, mounded furnaces in which sulphur was melted out and cast into rectangular slabs.

In the nineteenth century came the boom. Budding industrialized countries needed sulphuric acid, and Sicily could supply it. The island was then the world's leading supplier of sulphur with a market share of eighty per cent, which gave it a near monopoly in sulphur production.

But working conditions in the mines were murderous. The miners, who worked naked because of the heat underground, seared their lungs with sulphur dust and the poisonous fumes given off by melting and “roasting” sulphur ore. Thousands of children, the so-called
carusi
, had to tote sacks and baskets filled with iron pyrites up the steep shafts that led from the mines to the furnaces – for twelve hours at a time, day after day. Few of them even reached puberty. Tens of thousands of miners perished, either underground or from tending the furnaces or from starvation in their homes. The poverty must have been unimaginable, for the mine owners, who belonged to the Bourbon nobility and were becoming ever wealthier thanks to their monopoly, paid starvation wages and had absolutely no concern for their miners. Blinded by their monopoly position and inexhaustible deposits, they saw no reason to improve working conditions or invest in new technologies. On the contrary, greed impelled them simply to carry on regardless – the “Sicilian disease”, as Uncle Martino always calls it – until the boom abruptly came to an end. Why? Because the Americans soon invented a cheaper process for extracting sulphur, large quantities of which were obtained as a by-product of petroleum processing. By early in the twentieth century, one mine was closing after another, and today there is not a single active sulphur mine left in the whole of Sicily.

I picture Uncle Martino telling Poldi all this on the drive to the sulphur mine near Piazza Armerina. I picture Aunt Teresa sitting in the passenger seat, cheerful and rather excited, behaving as if she had heard it all a hundred times before – which she undoubtedly had. However, I'm sure her face glowed with pride at her husband's encyclopedic knowledge of Sicily, any little gaps in which he liberally and imaginatively papered over. I picture Poldi sitting in the back with Totti's heavy head on her lap, stroking it thoughtfully and filled with dark forebodings.

Beyond Catania, Uncle Martino turned off onto the A19, direction Palermo, a motorway that runs straight through the heart of Sicily past hills mantled with wheat fields and sun-baked relics of antiquity, past ruined bridges leading nowhere and illegal rubbish dumps, across expanses of desert and through magical variations in light.

Midway between Catania and Palermo lies Enna. Visible from a long way off, the city is situated high up on a plateau, and the outlying buildings break off flush with its edge, almost as if they had sprouted from the mountain itself – like an impure mineral, thought Poldi, who of course knew that Enna was still regarded as a stronghold of the Mafia. But they weren't bound for Enna.

Uncle Martino left the motorway and turned off south in the direction of Armerina, which is noted for its late Roman luxury villa with a wonderful mosaic floor depicting – among other things – ten girls wearing a kind of bikini. But they didn't want to visit the bikini-clad girls; they were bound for Femminamorta.

The abandoned mine lay a good mile outside the town, beyond a small hill and pinewoods. Access was barred by a rusty metal pole with a prohibitive notice attached to it, so they had to leave the car. Totti, who enjoyed long road trips with Uncle Martino as little as I did, leapt out in relief and disappeared into the woods. A rutted sandy track led through the trees. The air smelt of resin and herbs and sulphur.

Beyond the wood, a steep slope strewn with spoil led down to the mining site. Poldi made out the ruins of a pithead frame, dilapidated buildings with drystone walls, the collapsed, round-arched entrances to the mine shafts in the hillside opposite, and the old, grass- and gorse-covered smelting furnaces, which reminded her of prehistoric barrows. Everything was covered with a film of dust, dirt and oxidized sulphur compounds. The sand had a reddish tinge in places, Poldi noticed. She could still smell sulphur. Sharp and evil-smelling, it stung her nose, irritated the mucous membranes, and seemed to shout a warning to her to be gone. This wasn't what Poldi had expected. She could see no sign anywhere of a country mansion, or even of an ordinary house. Valérie's Femminamorta was a miniature paradise, whereas this one was the forecourt to hell. Or had been in the past.

“What an eerie place,” Aunt Teresa said uneasily.

“And so utterly remote,” said Poldi. “You can't hear a thing. No traffic, not even a bird. Would you two prefer to wait in the car?”

“Are you crazy?”

Uncle Martino lit another cigarette as if this were one of his usual sightseeing trips and led the way down a winding track just wide enough for a single vehicle. Poldi noticed that Totti, who had reappeared, was staying close beside him. The dog seemed to feel that nothing good could come of this excursion. Neither wagging his tail nor barking with excitement and the spirit of adventure, as he usually did, he looked as if he would have preferred to be invisible. He kept sneezing, and Poldi did likewise. It occurred to her that the stench of sulphur was the best protection against uninvited visitors, but there could be no question of turning back.

“So where is Femminamorta?” she called to Martino.

“This
is
Femminamorta,” he called back over his shoulder. “It's the name of the mine.”

“Oh, so you've suddenly remembered that, have you?”

Martino tapped his forehead. “It's all in there, all filed away. It sometimes takes a while, but everything comes back to me sooner or later. I was shown this mine by the branch manager of the local Banco di Sicilia, who had got out of a tricky situation with my help. Must be over twenty years ago. He'd planned to convert it into a sort of sports centre for young people, but the owner squelched the idea.”

“Who was the owner?”

“A certain Count Pastorella di Belfiore.”

Poldi wasn't even surprised. Having reached the mining site, she looked around. It formed an elongated L flanked by wooded hills and mounds of spoil covered with scrub. Invisible from outside, it was a place without shadows, dazzlingly bright in the afternoon light, a dead, forgotten place that seemed to have been carved out of the world. The air was fraught with heat, dust and the memory of multitudinous suffering. Sweating from every pore, Poldi pictured what life must have been like for the miners and the
carusi
. She half expected the ghosts of the dead children to come shuffling out of the mineshafts at any moment.

“What are we looking for?” asked Teresa, who was clearly feeling ill at ease.

Poldi hadn't the faintest idea.

“I'm not looking, I'm finding,” she declared, and strode boldly off through the dust and the smell of sulphur.

“That's what Picasso said,” she explained to me in September. “That's the way he worked: simply take the plunge and see where you end up. You might bear that in mind for that novel of yours. You've got to find, not look. Stay open, be receptive, be ready for anything, know what I mean? Take things as they come, make hay while the sun shines —”

“Thanks, I get the picture,” I broke in rather irritably. “Perhaps you'd also explain how it works, this finding business?”

“Of course I will. It's dead easy – even you could master it with a bit of practice.”

The prime essential was a roving eye. Like a bushman in the Kalahari, Poldi swept the site with her gaze, back and forth, to and fro, because concentrating too hard on individual objects blinds one to the rest. Hunters, mushroom pickers, professional photographers and tour guides all know this. Poldi's gaze traversed the site like a radar beam. One step forward – radar beam. One step sideways – radar beam. Teresa and Martino did likewise, step by step – cautiously, like skaters on thin ice.

It was an evil place, that was beyond doubt. Not even animals wanted to live there, it seemed. Not a bird to be heard, nothing rustling in the gorse bushes that had conquered the whole area despite the contaminated soil. Perhaps, thought Poldi, because yellow plants fare better in sulphur dust.

She strove to concentrate in spite of her mounting uneasiness and an almost overwhelming urge to quit the place as fast as possible. She saw ruins, rusty machine parts and weather-worn refuse on the hillside, together with a covered cistern and, in front of it, some brightly coloured plastic toys. Two cars had evidently driven in and out of here since it last rained, or within the last two months, one with wide tyres with coarse treads and the other with narrower ones. There were footprints everywhere, too, but Poldi couldn't detect how many people had been walking around here. Not that all of this meant anything, because the site appeared to be unguarded. Anyone could come here, but the longer Poldi surveyed the place the more certain she became that no one visited it willingly. No wonder the sports centre had come to nothing, she reflected.

Her thoughts strayed. They yielded to the urge to flee before her legs did, but her legs followed suit, surreptitiously retreating. When she noticed this – when she sternly called herself to order and refocused her radar beam on the ground – she spotted the little fragment of pottery.

It was lying beneath a gorse bush and might have continued to lie there for all eternity: one small, blue, insignificant particle in the infinity of all things. But Inspector Chance had evidently just come on duty, conducted a brief review of the progress of the investigation, cleared his throat, said a few words, and then withdrawn from the proceedings to get himself a coffee.

Poldi did not make the mistake of picking up the potsherd or even touching it. She had instantly recognized its blue glaze, which glinted at her in the afternoon sunlight. She merely took a photograph of it and made a note of the spot.

“Valentino was here,” she called to Teresa and Martino.

“Why, have you found something?”

“A piece of glazed pottery. It probably fell out of his pocket.”

“So we'll call the police, right?”

Aunt Teresa couldn't wait to leave the place.

“No, we aren't finished yet.”

Poldi was quite sure now. Absolutely no urge to flee now; on the contrary. She whistled through her fingers for Totti, whose nose she now needed.

“You can whistle through your fingers?” I broke in, when she told me this weeks later.

“Of course. Can't you?”

“Show me.”

“My, how suspicious you are,” she sighed. Sticking her thumb and forefinger between her teeth, she produced a whistle that nearly punctured my eardrums. “Convinced? May I go on, or are you tired or bored or something?”

“
Forza
Poldi,” I told her.

Totti pricked his ears and came scampering up, obviously relieved that they didn't intend to abandon him there. He had something in his mouth which he proudly presented to Poldi: a dog's toy in soft yellow plastic, rather chewed and the worse for wear.

“Ugh, what have you got there?” Poldi exclaimed, trying to relieve Totti of his find. “No, drop it. It's mucky.”

Totti reluctantly released his treasure and wagged his tail, preparing to retrieve it at once if the nice lady with the deep voice would please, please, consent to throw it for him. But she didn't. She tossed it carelessly aside and held him back by the collar when he tried to dash after it.

“Be a good dog. Look, my pet, I know it's asking a lot of you, but you've got to concentrate, you hear?”

My aunt dragged the unhappy and bewildered Totti to the spot where the potsherd was lying and gently applied his nose to the ground. “There, smell anything? Can you smell Valentino? Go on, sniff.”

Totti squinted at his treasure one last time, then gave up and dutifully sniffed the ground around the gorse bush, periodically sneezing. When Poldi was kind enough to release him at last, he stared up at her uncertainly for a moment.

“Well, go on. Seek.”

Poldi wasn't very hopeful. Suspecting that Totti had specialized too exclusively in Etna mushrooms, she was doubly gratified when he eventually trotted off and sniffed the ground here and there, giving at least the impression that he was a tracker who knew what he was doing.

In the knowledge that artists and detectives must not be disturbed at their work, Poldi and Uncle Martino followed Totti at an appropriate distance, urging him on with cries of encouragement. Aunt Teresa, by contrast, had sat down in the shade of the pithead frame and was hoping that they would all be able to leave this sinister place before long.

Despite his professional manner, Totti seemed to find it hard to pick up Valentino's scent anywhere. The longer she criss-crossed the site in Totti's wake, the more convinced Poldi became that this had been a thoroughly daft idea. She looked over at Aunt Teresa, who raised a limp hand in her direction, and took out her mobile phone. “That's it; I'm going to call Montana. Not even the best-trained sleuthhound could find anything in this stench.”