Who is Lou Sciortino? (3 page)

*   *   *

It's dawn on an October day in Catania Civic Hospital. The young man has just opened his eyes, and can see his distorted reflection in the metal rail of his bed. He moves his feet to make sure he's alive. A toothless old man with a bowl in his hand, wearing a coarse pair of pajamas, is looking at him and smiling.

“What happened?” the young man grunts, in English, shaking himself out of his lethargy.

“Eh?”

“What happened?”

The old man goes on smiling. “
Minchia,
that's all we needed—
inglese.
”

The young man switches to Sicilian. “You know,” he says in a weak voice, “I can speak Sicilian better than you.”

The old man can't stop smiling, he's so happy. “Tea!” he says, pointing to the cup, with an expression in his eyes that suggests he's never drunk tea at home.

“How long have I been here?” the young man asks.

The old man doesn't answer.
Why should I tell you?
he seems to be thinking.

The young man stares at him. The old man stares back and sips his tea.

The young man shakes his head, then says, “I don't know how long I've been in this hospital, but I do know one thing. I usually carry a gun, sometimes I put it in my shoulder holster, you know what that is, don't you? The kind you put under your armpit, it keeps the gun nice and warm. But sometimes I carry it on my holster belt … you know, near the back, so the handle sits right in the hollow of the kidneys. That way you can wear a tight jacket and nobody sees you got a gun. Well, not exactly nobody, because if you got a trained eye you can tell. But you couldn't tell, old man. Then there are ankle holsters, you know what I'm saying? Ankle holsters are for shit, they're uncomfortable, you walk like you got a limp, you can't cross your legs when you sit down, in other words, a waste of fucking money. You know something, old man? It's doing me a lot of good, talking to you. You really need somebody to talk to once in a while … Anyway, like I said, I don't know how I ended up here, I don't know who took my clothes off, I don't even know if I was dressed when they brought me here, but … listen carefully here … I
usually
pack a piece. Are you following me?”

The old man says nothing. He thinks the young man is delirious.

“Now, it may be when they take you to the hospital and take your clothes off they also take your gun away, I don't know, this is the first time I ever came into a hospital unconscious, and I don't know the rules. But do you think there's a remote possibility my clothes are in that dresser—you see that dresser?—my clothes and my gun? I doubt it, but what do
you
know? Are you sure? Of course you're not. In other words: we don't know. And that's the point: neither of us knows. Now, here's the deal. I get up, I open the dresser, and I see if my gun's there. If my gun's not there, I'll have to be patient: I'll go back to bed and find somebody else to ask. But if my gun is there, I swear on my honor I'll take it and cap you in the knee if you don't tell me right now when they brought me here. Is that a risk you want to take?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Yesterday afternoon. Very good.”

NICK IS ON HIS WAY HOME

Nick is on his way home. His face and jacket are stained with blood, he walks quickly but cautiously, his pants falling down over his hips, the hem caught under the heels of his moccasins.

He's carrying a guitar case. He feels cold, and he's just reached the street where he lives: a street of identical little villas off a busy highway. Across the highway, vacant lots, clumps of grass yellowed by the sun between dark masses of volcanic rock.

The neighborhood isn't downtown, it isn't a residential area, and it isn't a suburb: it's all of these things, depending on how the street is lit. Right now there's not much light, but there's a huge billboard advertising a company that makes wedding dresses, and his neighbor Tony's garden is all lit up for a party …

Nick picks up speed. He's limping. He must have sprained his ankle somewhere. He hopes nobody sees him. He walks even faster.

Tony, who's holding a huge steak impaled on a carving fork, sees him, and his face lights up. “Nick!” he shouts. “Nick! The barbecue!”

Fucking barbecue!

*   *   *

Tony's face is as smooth and shiny as a baby's (“It's a gift from the Lord,” he tells his customers. “It's a curse,” says Uncle Sal, who thinks “a man should have a man's face”). One day he started wearing silk shirts with huge collars, soft matching scarves, and pants too narrow even for somebody with a face like his. After a while, the reason became clear: he'd opened a hairdressing salon in the neighborhood, called Tony's, a kind of catacomb furnished like an old-style bordello. (“It ought to be in San Berillo, with the hookers,” Uncle Sal remarked.) When he isn't doing the neighborhood ladies' hair, he's throwing barbecues in his garden, weather permitting. Even in October, when the weather isn't too good: he's got at least four months of abstinence ahead of him and,
minchia,
he might as well put the garden to good use while he can.

Tony liked Nick from the start.

A few months earlier, he'd been worried about the house next door. It had stood vacant ever since the previous occupant, Signor Pulvirenti, left after the last of many arguments over the barbecues. Tony didn't want to find himself with a new Signor Pulvirenti as a neighbor.

The whole thing had come to a head one evening when, after the umpteenth disagreement, Signor Pulvirenti had taken aim with his garden hose and given the barbecue guests a shower. What Signor Pulvirenti didn't know was that one of the guests was Uncle Sal, who that evening was wearing a bespoke suit with a thin light-blue pinstripe he'd just had delivered from Pavone, the Neapolitan he's been using for years.

*   *   *

Uncle Sal likes to indulge a few “weaknesses,” as he says to his friends: made-to-measure suits, strange ideas (“brainwaves,” he calls them), and his niece Valentina, who's at training college, or professional something-or-other institute like they call it these days, studying to be a designer. When the spray from Signor Pulvirenti's hose scrambled the pinstripes on Uncle Sal's new suit, the barbecue plunged into a somber silence.

On the other side of the hedge, oblivious to everything, Signor Pulvirenti had continued shouting.

Dripping wet, Uncle Sal had merely opened his arms wide and smiled, like a Pope saying,
No, I won't absolve you this time, God's will be done.

Articulating his words clearly, he'd said, “Wet new clothes, lucky new clothes,” and left the barbecue. Out on the sidewalk, his driver, head carefully bowed, had opened the door of the black Mercedes.

The following day Uncle Sal had paid a visit to the party in question, and that very afternoon the party in question had moved out. When Tony discovered that the house had a new tenant, he decided to be a good neighbor and make the first overtures.

He found out that the newcomer hailed from Porto Empedocle, that he was studying at the Faculty of Agriculture, and that his name was Nick. One evening he knocked at his door and asked him The Big Question: “Nick, do you have anything against … barbecues? You know … the smoke, the smell … Do they—what's the word kids use these days?—you know, do they bug you?”

Nick stared at Tony's yellow shirt, orange scarf, and baby face. “Not at all.”

When Tony got back home, he said to his wife, “He's a good kid, polite … and real good-looking!”

That was the evening Valentina, who'd come to see her cousin Tony, started to take an interest in Nick, an interest she'd never taken in anyone before.

It was also the evening Nick became a regular guest at Tony's barbecues.

*   *   *

“Nick, Nick!” Tony shouts again. “Come on over!”

Nick hopes the guests won't notice anything. He turns his head, counting on the fact that the lighting is in his favor, and says, walking faster, “Is that a barbecue? Gosh, I can't, Tony … I have to run home and make a call.”

Tony stands there, with the carving fork in his hand, disappointed.

Disappointed and worried.

This is the first time Nick has turned down his invitation.

Really, the first time.

It's not like him.

Uncle Sal looks at Nick, looks at Tony, and nods with a serious expression.

When Uncle Sal nods, it's obvious he isn't thinking nice thoughts.

“That kid's too polite … I told you” (though he never had). Then he delivers his verdict. “He's a snob.”

Meaningless words, a simple opinion, almost a cliché between relatives. But to Uncle Sal,
snob
has a particular meaning. Snob means lack of respect, contempt for tradition … a brazen, conscious arrogance, a sin of pride that nobody, not even the Agnus Dei, can take away from the world. To Uncle Sal, snob means the
Opposite:
the Opposite of everything that's worth living and dying for. In other words, the Opposite of the Family.

Valentina turns pale, and Tony stammers something incomprehensible.

For a brief moment, Uncle Sal hesitates, like there's a small doubt eating away at the edifice of his thoughts; then the anger returns, more concentrated than ever.

“A SNOB,” he says again.

*   *   *

Nick reaches his front door.

“Fuck,” he says, “fuckfuckfuck.” Getting his keys out is a problem, it's not easy to slip his hands in the pockets of his pants, because his hands are also covered with blood. Then he says, “Fuck,” again, takes the plunge, and slips his dirty hands in his pockets.

The lock yields abruptly.

Nick hurls himself inside and slams the door behind him. Without even turning on the light, he starts to undress, hopping with one leg still in his pants, gets to the washing machine, and throws everything in.

Then he frantically turns the temperature control.

*   *   *

Via Etnea cuts the city like a whiplash, leading straight up to the volcano. On the right as you climb, about halfway up, there's a dark back alley that links Via Etnea with Piazza Carlo Alberto. In the morning, the piazza is lively, full of merchants with their stalls. In the evening, though, it's empty and deserted, lit only by a pink, ghostly light. A few hundred yards farther down, there are pubs, nightlife, but it doesn't reach this far. A few students going home drunk, now and then. A few sudden shouts that echo and immediately die, nothing more. In the alley, the electric lights shine back from the wet sidewalks and the rivulets left by the October storm. It's the time of year when people are happy to start wearing wool sweaters in the evening.

One bar is still open. Inside, four men are sitting around a plastic table, hanging on Uncle Mimmo's every word.

Uncle Mimmo owns a general store in the neighborhood. He's always been called Uncle Mimmo, no one remembers why.

*   *   *

“Fuuuuuuck,” Nuccio says, stifling a laugh. “I've seen some dead people, let me tell you, but that's the deadest motherfucker I ever saw.”

Tuccio is at the wheel of the beat-up Mercedes. He's driving at high speed. “What the fuck you laughing about?” he says to Nuccio.

“Who? Me? I wasn't laughing,” Nuccio replies indignantly. “But fuck, did you see the way his head exploded? How the fuck did he get a head like that? It burst like a balloon!” And he laughs.

Tuccio looks at him.

Tuccio isn't laughing.

*   *   *

In the bar, after so much has already been said, and everybody's waiting for Cosimo to say, “Closing time,” Uncle Mimmo says point-blank, “If I'd told him about the crossbow, the sergeant might still be alive right now.” He says it like he's expressing something that's been burning him up inside and won't give him any peace.

“A crossbow?” one of the men asks, surprised.

“What crossbow?” another of the men asks.

The conversation revives.

*   *   *

In his general store, Uncle Mimmo sells bars of soap, toothpaste, brooms, dusters, shoe polish, sponges, shaving foam, razor blades, bleach, and toilet fresheners, as well as every detergent on the market. He also sells a few different kinds of eau de cologne and aftershave and, of course, DDT and Flit.

Cosimo's barman Turi says the flies in Uncle Mimmo's store are such survivors because growing up with all these chemical products has made them immortal.

The store is a little less than six feet wide and a little more than six feet long. Because of the metal shelving, two customers can't be in there at the same time, one of them's got to stand aside, and the merchandise is always falling on the floor. To avoid getting up every time to put things back, if there's somebody in the store and a second customer arrives, Uncle Mimmo says, “Please wait outside, I'll serve you next.”

The flies live in the section where the fabric softeners are. They form a tight black cluster that sticks to the bar holding up the metal shelf. They're all over each other, one on top of the other. Eleven and a half inches of flies, as thick as paste, but living and moving. When Uncle Mimmo gets up to check, they scatter in an instant as if they never existed. If a customer passes, though, they keep still and merge into the darkness.

No customer has ever noticed them.

They wait until there's nobody in the store; then they take off like squadrons, even though they give the impression of only ever being
one
fly,
the same
fly. If Uncle Mimmo kills one of them with his newspaper, another comes out of the corner and takes the place of its fallen comrade, perfectly imitating its flight and buzz.

In order not to fall for their tricks, Uncle Mimmo has to keep count of the corpses.