Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna by Mario Giordano

Author:Mario Giordano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

9

Tells of existential issues, of disappearance and discovery, of inspiration, grammar and gold coins. Poldi gives her subconscious a leg up, learns how to make a lake vanish and enlightens her nephew on the connection between the passato remoto and Sicilian eroticism. Padre Paolo has some small but useful secrets, and Signora Cocuzza has to keep watch again, and because everything, but everything, in life is connected, Poldi has every reason to be grateful to her father.

I had in the meantime gone back to Germany to spend a joyless month slaving away at my novel and my job at the call centre, filled with nostalgia for granitas, involtini di pesce spada, pasta al nero, Cyclopean dreams and the machine-gun chatter of Sicilian dialect, not to mention evenings on the sofa with my Auntie Poldi. Whenever I had to help customers reset their mobile phones or listen to their angry tirades, I pictured Poldi putting a suspect through the mill or sitting in the garden with Valérie. Discounting a few fun nights with my cousins in the newsgroup, I heard nothing from Sicily for four long weeks. Poldi was naturally too busy, and my other aunts still regard phoning Germany as a “long-distance” call, to be made only when someone is dying, war has broken out, or at Christmas. I knew it all too well. Sicily lives so much in the here and now that it forgets you as soon as your plane takes off. However, it remembers you just as quickly when you emerge from the airport, to be told to pick up your cousin’s daughter from nursery school and deliver her to Aunt Caterina. This family silence annoyed me, I must admit. However, since I don’t like to impose and was, alas, too broke to book myself a flight, I waited eagerly for an invitation. It came in the middle of November, by way of a call from Aunt Luisa.

“Can you come, tesoro? It’s urgent.”

Her voice sounded tense.

“No problem,” I said as coolly as I could manage. “Has something happened?”

“You’ll see,” Aunt Luisa prevaricated. “She’s been . . . a bit unstable, and she asked for you. Could you come tomorrow?”

I certainly could. I didn’t even need to pack a bag, because I’d left all the essentials in my stuffy Sicilian attic in the Via Baronessa, which had by now become a second home. Exultantly, I ditched my part-time job at the call centre.

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