'It's all right,' the owner explained. 'She doesn't understand Italian, only dialect.'
Zen eagerly seized this opportunity to talk.
'What happened to her?'
The young man shook his head and sighed.
'I wasn't around then, but people say she just disappeared one day, years ago. She was about fifteen at the time. The family said she'd gone to stay with relatives who'd emigrated to Tuscany. Then a few years ago her parents died in… in an accident. The son was away doing his military service at the time. When the police went to the house they found Elia shut up in the cellar like an animal, almost blind, covered in filth and half crazy.'
Reto Gurtner looked suitably horrified by this example of Mediterranean barbarism.
'But why?'
The young man sighed.
'Now, you understand, this village is just like anywhere else. Televisions, pop music, motorbikes.'
He waved at the teenagers in the corner.
'The young people stay out till all hours, even the girls.
They do what they like. Twenty years ago it was different.
People say that Elia was seeing a man from a nearby farm.
Perhaps she stayed out too late one summer night, and…'
He broke off as the door banged open and three men walked in. The beggar woman sprang to her feet, staring at them like a wild animal about to pounce or fiee. One of the men spat a few words of dialect at her. She flinched as though he had struck her, then ran out. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
The three newcomers were wearing the local heavyweight gear, durable, anonymous and mass-produced, but there was nothing faceless or conventional about their behaviour. They took over the pizzeria as though it were the venue for a party being given in their honour. The leader, who had obviously had quite a lot to drink already, threw his weight around in a way that seemed almost offensively familiar, going behind the counter and sampling the various plates of toppings, talking continuously in a loud raucous voice. Zen could understand nothing of what was being said, but although the owner kept smiling and responded in the required jocular fashion, it seemed an effort, and Zen thought he would have been happier if the men had gone away.
Having done the rounds, chaffed the owner and his wife and grabbed a plate of olives and salami and a litre of wine, the trio seated themselves at the table next to Zen's.
Once their initial high spirits had subsided, their mood rapidly turned sombre, as though all three had immense grievances which could never be redressed. The leader in particular not only looked fiercely malcontent, but was scowling at Zen as though he was the origin of all his troubles. His bristly jet-black beard, curly hair and enormous hook nose gave him a Middle Eastern appearance, like a throwback to the island's Phoenician past. He reminded Zen of someone he had seen earlier, although he couldn't think who. From time to time, between gulped half glassfuls of wine, the man muttered in dialect to his companions, bitter interjections which received no reply.
Zen began to feel alarmed. The man was clearly drunk, his mood explosive and unpredictable, and he was staring at him more and more directly, as though beating up this stranger might be just what was needed to make his evening. To defuse the situation before it got out of hand, Zen leaned over to the three men.
'Excuse me,' he said in his best Reto Gurtner manner.
'Could you tell me if there's a garage round here?'
'A garage?' the man replied after a momentary hesitation. 'For what?'
Zen explained that his car was making a strange knocking noise and he was worried that it might break down.
'What kind of car7'
'A Mercedes.'
After a brief discussion in dialect with his companions, the man replied that Vasco did repairs locally, but he wouldn't have the parts for a Mercedes. Otherwise there was a mechanic in Lanusei, but he was closed tomorrow, it being Sunday.
'You're on holiday?' he asked.
As Zen recited his usual explanation of who he was and what he was doing, the man's expression gradually changed from hostility to sympathetic interest. After a few minutes he invited Zen to join them at their table. Zen hesitated, but only for a fraction of a moment. This was an invitation which he felt it would be decidedly unwise to refuse.
Three quarters of an hour and another flask of wine later, he was being treated almost like an old friend. The hook-nosed man, who introduced himself as Turiddu, was clearly delighted to have a fresh audience for his long and rather rambling monologues. His companions said hardly a word. Turiddu talked and Zen listened, occasionally throwing in a polite question with an air of wide-eyed and disinterested fascination with all things Sardinian. Turiddu's grievances, it turned out, were global rather than personal. Everything was wrong, everything was bad and getting worse. The country, by which he appeared t~› mean that particular part of the Oliastra, was in a total mess. It was a disaster. The government in Rome poure.i in money, but it was all going to waste, leaking awai through the sieve-like conduits of the development agencies, provincial agricultural inspectorates, the irrigation consortia and land-reclamation bodies.
'In the old days the landowner, he arranged everything, decided everything. You couldn't fart without his permission, but at least there was only one of him. Now we've got these new bosses instead, these pen-pushers in the regional government, hundreds and hundreds of them!
And what do they do? Just like the landowner, they look after themselves!'
Turiddu broke off briefly to gulp some more wine and accept one of Zen's cigarettes.
'And when they do finally get round to doing something, it's even worse! The old owners, they understood the land. It belonged to them, so they made damn sure it was looked after, even though we had to break our bums doing the work. But these bureaucrats, what do they know? All they do is sit in some office down in Calgliari and look at maps all day!'
Turiddu's companions sat listening to this harangue with indulgent and slightly embarrassed smiles, as though what he was saying was true enough but it was pointless and rather demeaning to mention it, particularly to a stranger.
'There's a lake up there in the mountains,' Turiddu continued, striking a match casually on his thumbnail. 'A river used to flow down towards the valley, where it disappeared underground into the caves. The rock down here is too soft, the water runs through it. So what did those bastards in Cagliari do? They looked at their maps, saw this river that seemed to go nowhere, and they said,
"Let's dam the lake, so instead of all that water going to waste we can pipe it down to Oristano to grow crops."'
Turiddu broke off to shout something at the pizzeria owner in Sardinian. The young man came over with an unlabeld bottle and four new glasses.
'Be careful,' he warned Zen with humorous exaggeration, tapping the bottle. 'Dynamite!'
'Dynamite my arse,' Turiddu grumbled when he had gone. 'I've got stuff at home, the real stuff, makes this taste like water.'
He filled the four tumblers to the brim, spilling some on the tablecloth, and downed his at one gulp.
'Anyway, what those clever fuckers in Cagliari didn't realize was that all that water from the lake didn't just disappear. It was there, underground, if you knew where fp look for it. All the farms round here were built over caves where the river ran underground. With that and a bit of fodder, you could keep cattle alive through the winter, then let them loose up in the mountains when spring came. But once that fucking dam was built, all the water – our water -went down the other side to those soft idle bastards on the west coast. As if they didn't have an easy enough life already! Oh, they paid us compensation, of course. A few lousy million lire to build a new house here in the village.