From Round Here: Lays of a Sicilian Life Told to Andrei Navrozov. By Manlio Orobello / Fiction / Untitled Books

Not a leaf stirred; the dogs lay sleeping; the morning sun blinded the passer by like a blazing strip of magnesium.

Photograph: © Mauro D'Agati from the book Palermo Unsung published by Steidl

From Round Here: Lays of a Sicilian Life Told to Andrei Navrozov. By Manlio Orobello

I. On Being Thorough

One day I got myself lost in what was a very small town. It was an afternoon in late spring, and the sun was beginning to bake. I walked through a labyrinthine part of the town, having followed a twisting road that was taking me nowhere. There was not a living soul in sight. Just then, as I stood in the middle of the roughly cobbled road wiping my forehead with a handkerchief, I saw the door of a house opening.

A well-dressed middle-aged man emerged into the light, turned on his heels, extracted a bunch of keys from his pocket, and proceeded to lock the door. Click, turned the bolt, click, click, three times in the noonday stillness. It sounded like he was making quite a job of it. He then took hold of the door handle and shook it - whoever has owned a house will recognise the gesture - to check how thoroughly it had locked. Then he crossed his front garden and eased himself out of the gate, which again he set himself to locking. Again it was three turns for a well-oiled bolt, and at the sound of the last I approached him.

"I was looking for Via ---" I said in polite Italian, naming the street I had hoped to find. The man looked at me with what I thought was something like interest. He was in no hurry to reply. When he finally did, his reply was this.

"I'm not from round here."

II. On the Uses of Discretion

Some years later I found myself in the same town, this time in the high heat of late July. Not a leaf stirred; the dogs lay sleeping; the morning sun blinded the passer by like a blazing strip of magnesium. I noticed some workmen, maybe five or six, on the scaffolding attached to a large brick house, painting and plastering away under the direction of a man who was evidently the foreman on the site. I wished him good morning.

"Good morning," the man replied.

Then I turned my back on him and his building site, but as I had to wait for a friend who said he would be meeting me, I remained well within earshot, strolling up and down the narrow street's shady side to pass the time. At length I saw an elderly man, of average height, with a reddish face and a protruding stomach, wearing the clothes of a prosperous farmer, who approached the building site and wished the foreman good morning same as I had.

"Good morning," replied the foreman.

"Hard at work, are you?" said the farmer in dialect. Though visibly peeved at the mention of work, the foreman hesitated. Yet to say nothing in reply would have been an unwarranted breach of courtesy, and he chose a middle road: "If God be willing," he said in dialect. This meant, in more or less certain terms, that he hoped the conversation would end with this qualified affirmation of a fact that was obvious enough anyway.

"Why, of course," said the farmer, with a nod at the cloudless sky. "With this kind of weather!" He had taken the foreman's hint, it seemed, and this time avoided a direct and quite possibly tactless reference to work; yet equally he wished for the conversation to continue, and thought he was well within his rights to press on in this roundabout way.

The foreman glanced at the sky. The workmen, meanwhile, had begun to interest themselves in the ongoing exchange, moving their brushes and trowels ever more slowly as one by one their faces turned to the visitor. The discussion was on the verge of becoming collective. "Eh!" said the foreman, trying once more to put an end to it without offending him.

But the stranger would not relent. "The weather's fine just now," he said after a short pause. Then, philosophically, with another sharp nod at the brilliant vault above: "Though it could always change." Then, after another moment's thought: "Which would do quite a lot of damage, I reckon."

He really ought not to have said that, I reflected, because once again his interlocutor had been made to consider the travel-brochure idea of Siculian azure in late July. Without a word to the stranger, and turning to the gang that had long been transfixed, standing in various attitudes of astonishment all round him, the foreman commanded: "Pack it in, fellows. Looks like rain. Who knows what a lot of damage that might do."

The stranger watched them pack up. Evident as it was that their work for the day had been irretrievably scuttled, I decided to risk it and pass by the site once more, though this time I figured I had better not say anything by way of greeting. Not so the apparently hamfisted farmer, who, now visibly satisfied with the progress he had made, let fly of a common salutation in dialect: "Godspeed, then." "Godspeed to you," muttered the foreman, without turning his head to look at him.

A few minutes later the site was empty. I did not hang about to see why the stranger had wanted it that way.

III. On Feeling Small

We were at a funeral. The deceased, a small businessman who was also a small-time politician representing a smallish town in the province, had been gunned down the night before last. Among those attending, friends, family and relations, were a number of people from the dead man's Party, including one deputy who had been Mayor of a nearby village. He was a clever fellow, and he ought to have known better than to ask the embarrassing question there and then, on the steps of the church, just before the little crowd began dispersing.

But anyway, ask it he did. Approaching the brother of the deceased, standing there in his Sunday-best grief, the deputy put forward the view that everybody in the province would remember the person who was in every way excellent, a hard and honest worker and a man of his word, and would up the peroration by exclaiming: "And a wonderful person like that! Whence could have come the treacherous hand that struck him down?"

The brother of the deceased looked round as though to take the measure of the speaker's rhetorical largesse, and while he was at it to make note of who else in the crowd might have heard him. Then the grief-struck brother looked in the general direction of the casket, closed at this stage of the proceedings. And then the shrewd brother replied: "That only he may know."

The deputy later confided that for the life of him he could not say what had made him ask such an awkward question.

IV. On the Logic of Numbers

There was another funeral I remember, this one in a fancy suburb of the capital. I had known the victim reasonably well, and had even contributed an article to the local newspaper decrying the outrageous injustice of it all. As the deceased, like myself, had been in politics, this resulted in a telephone call from the Secretary of the Party. The big boss in Rome commended my sensitive obituary and promised to see to it that the funeral attained symbolic significance at the national level.

When I turned up at the funeral, however, a strange sensation overcame me, and almost at once I resolved to look more closely into the background of the man we were about to beatify. I telephoned the headquarters in Rome, to tell the boss I needed a bit more time, and went out to look for a criminal lawyer of my acquaintance, a man of many qualities who I thought might say something useful about the matter one way or the other. Not about the identity of the killers, naturally - words like killing are not part of polite conversation - but about the business affiliations and social inclinations of the deceased.

My informant knew why I was there as soon as I mentioned the name, and consequently the conversation was brief. After a couple of murmured expostulations and sotto voce demurrers, he promised he would get back to me if he heard anything, which he did the very next day.

"Well?" I said, settling myself once more in the gilt armchair on lion's feet in his private office.

"Well, as I've already explained I haven't any personal knowledge of this," he said briskly. "But there's something somebody told me last night that may be of some interest to you." "And what might that be?" I said. "What the man I spoke with has told me is this: 'Four plus four make eight.'"

I never did get back to the Party headquarters in Rome. What was there to say? Not seven or nine, surely.

V. On Being Famous

When I was arrested, they took me to the newer of the two prisons, which is by far the less comfortable. At the old prison, when an inmate has meetings - with a visitor, a psychiatrist, a lawyer - he is conducted across an inner courtyard, with a kind of lawn in the middle and trees all round it, to a separate building, external to the maze of cells and corridors where the prisoners pass their days and nights. At the new prison, one never escapes detention, neither momentarily nor metaphorically. Everything that happens, happens within the gaol walls.

They brought me there at six in the afternoon, and by one o'clock in the morning I was installed in my cell. The hours in between I passed sitting on a wooden stool in a sort of closet, furnished with a washstand and that single wooden stool. When I finally entered the cell that was to be my home, I knew not for how long, I saw that it held another inmate, who had prepared it for my arrival. He had laid out my bed and made us coffee on a little hotplate he owned. We chatted for a few minutes, and then I fell asleep.

The following morning I woke up feeling I had recovered something of my stamina, intellectual as well as physical. The prisoners were let out for their walk in the yard at nine hundred hours. The yard was a concrete rectangle, about twenty by thirty, with a water hose, for those who wanted to wash themselves after exercise, and an open urinal of grey cement, for visual symmetry. The custom is that when a new prisoner arrives, he is formally introduced to the others, usually by the man who has shared a cell with him on the first night, whereupon all present in the yard, about thirty men in all, shake hands with the newcomer.

Among the prisoners whose acquaintance I made in that way was one who was quite tall, about fifty years of age, and somewhat better dressed than the rest. But what set him apart were his spectacles, which at once I thought rather elegant in the surroundings. "Good morning, Professor," he said, introducing himself. I was too busy being surprised by the apparent fact that he knew who I was to catch his name. Then he turned away from me, addressing one of his companions, who I saw was none other than my cellmate, M--- by name.

"You walk with this here professor?" he said to M--- in dialect, half-affirming, half-asking. "With this here professor I walk," my cellmate replied in dialect, respectfully transposing the speaker's words. "Well, M---, is there anything I should tell you?" he continued. "There's nothing you should tell me, Uncle T---," replied my cellmate. "I tell you nothing then," he concluded. Then he turned to me. "Have a nice walk, Professor."

Later that afternoon there was brought to me in my cell a large cardboard container of fruit sorbet. ·

Monday, 20 July, 2009

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Issue 40 / January 2012

Not a leaf stirred; the dogs lay sleeping; the morning sun blinded the passer by like a blazing strip of magnesium.