A third party is listening in on the conversation. The two young men must be lawyers, only lawyers would be dressed like that, like TV presenters. It seems incredible that someone could be betting on what’s happening, but they are. Isn’t there always something strange about the interval between the acts, whether it’s at a play or an opera, isn’t there always a distance, a gap, between what’s happening on the stage and in the foyer? Can it be that these people are really
improved by going to the theater? What’s the problem?
Is
there a problem?

These thoughts are interrupted by the second bell. The performance is about to resume.

Avvocato Coco, urban beautification consultant for the city of Frigentini, suddenly feels faint and sinks down onto the red carpet that adorns the stairs.

This is Noto, capital of the Sicilian Baroque, inside the Teatro Vittorio Emanuele II, a nineteenth century jewel, a precise, smallerscale replica of the majestic Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania.
Jewel
and
majestic
: there you have two terms that
La Voce della Sicilia
, the daily newspaper of eastern Sicily, is especially partial to.

The police hustle over in tight formation, hands on their guns. Several arrogant-looking youths in designer tuxes with pointy, shiny black shoes also hurry to Coco’s side, with reassuring words to the police. “It’s okay, it’s nothing. We’re friends, isn’t that right, Avvocato?”

Coco, flat on his back, nods yes.

The young tuxes help him up and show him to the men’s room under the wary gaze of the police. It had been a false alarm but that didn’t mean the state of emergency was over.

“Move along, move along, everything’s under control.”

After a few minutes, Coco, very pale, comes out of the men’s. “Nothing, fine,” he says to the police. “I feel much better … much better.”

In the pit and in the boxes, the usual cheerful chatter has been replaced by a low hum, broken now and then by slightly hysterical laughter.

Avvocato Coco, paler than ever, takes his seat in the rows reserved for the local notables: mayors, commissioners, consultants, all of them nervous and tense, glancing back at their families lodged in the seats behind. Some bite their fingernails, some lie back in the red velvet seats as if awaiting takeoff on a charter flight of some Balkan
airline. This is Sicily, and no matter how ready the police are, if something is supposed to happen it is very likely that it will.

The lights go down.

The chorus comes on, peering out curiously into the dimness of the pit. They begin chanting, without much conviction; it’s obvious their minds are elsewhere:

CHORUS
Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie,
And young affection gapes to be his heir.

The theater is totally silent.

Rarely has Shakespeare enjoyed such concentration.

Then someone in the audience begins to recite the text in a low voice, as if he knew it by memory or was trying to read it in the dark.

“Where are we now?” the voice says, not so low now.

“Shhh …”

Everyone wants to pay the closest attention at the point where the tragedy will reach its climax: Act Two, Scene Four. Whatever the author’s intentions, it has become, as some of the ladies wearing their best jewelry would say, the
high point
of the evening.

BENVOLIO
Here comes Romeo, here comes Romeo.

The audience quivers.

Mercutio, played by Cosimo Cosentino, fifty-eight years old, looks around.

Both he and Romeo, played by sixty-year-old Jano Caporeale, are genuine stage animals. A lifetime spent pounding the boards of the dialect theaters, up against real audiences, not intellectuals.

Nobody’s laughing tonight at their skimpy costumes, at their tights.

Both pause now here to emphasize what everyone is asking himor herself: Will it happen again tonight?

MERCUTIO
(
Looking toward the public, half squatting, with a screwing motion thrusts up his arm and then follows through with his whole body, rising off the stage in a little hop
) Nay, I am the very
pink
of courtesy.

ROMEO
(
Covering his crotch with both hands, then spreading them out slowly as if something were swelling in his undershorts
)

Pink in the sense of something that flowers? That explodes with the joy of springtime? Or pink like something that pricks? That swells and stands up? Stands up like a turret? Pointed like a mountaintop? (
He joins the five fingers of his right hand and thrusts it upward.
) Or are you not speaking of an uphill struggle through nettlesome bushes?

Pause.

Cosentino-Mercutio has to admit, not without some annoyance, that Caporeale-Romeo is in superb form tonight.

A voice in the audience whispers, “Holy shit, he’s over the top. In the English text here, it just says ‘pink for flower.’”

“Shhh …”

MERCUTIO
(
Bouncing on his knees while he moves his arm back and forward like a pendulum, a pendulum that culminates in a finger pointing toward Romeo
)

Thou hast most kindly hit it.

ROMEO
(
Brief pause while he seems, though no one can be sure, to wink at the audience, then he moves his arms in a circle and positions his hands once again on his crotch, which he clutches meaningfully
)

You want to hear my reply? It’s this great, big, pointed, sweet-smelling, flowering explosion of my great, big, hotheaded, crazy dick!

It is in that moment that Chartered Accountant Intelisano begins to fly.

At first, and from that point of view (Intelisano’s, that is), it is the stage which appears to descend below the horizon line of his bifocals. Then, for about a tenth of a second, he feels his head is spinning. Finally, objective reason gives no further room for doubt: Intelisano has gone into orbit.

There is a boom like a giant rocket taking off, the same noise you can hear during the feast of St. Agatha in Catania, if you push through the crowd and get right up near where they’re setting off the fireworks.

And from behind the scenes, the unmistakable voice of Rosanna Lambertini (that night as in every preceding hot-blooded night the body and soul of Juliet), with an angry, almost offended howl, pronounces the following words, “Fuck, no—not again!” while Intelisano takes flight toward the richly decorated ceiling with its plaster angels and friezes and frescoes of freshly minted gold.

After a few minutes the lights come up on the confusion.

The next day the
Mirror
of London will carry a little item.

Under a photo of an ancient map of Sicily kept in the Vatican Museum, the one with the island upside down as if seen directly by the eye of God, the headline is unequivocal:

A SICILIAN TRAGEDY

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