Things apparently came to a head when Gaspare Pantaleo stormed up the road to the Sciacca place to demand that the hex be lifted — the cheese they’d disposed of, but in such cases the hex, Santuzza assured me, lingers in all who’ve eaten of it. At the time, Miraglia Sciacca was out in the yard, not five paces from the public street, splitting olive wood so he could stack it against the fence for the coming winter. “You’re a fraud and a pederast,” Gaspare Pantaleo accused in a voice the neighbors could hear half a mile away, “and I demand that you take the hex off that cheese.”
Miraglia’s only response was a crude epithet.
“All right then, you son of a bitch, I’ll thrash it out of you,” Gaspare roared, and he set his hand down on the fence post to hoist himself over, and that was when Miraglia Sciacca, without so much as a hitch in his stroke, brought the ax down and took Gaspare Pantaleo’s right hand off at the wrist. That was bad enough, but it wasn’t the worst of it. What really inflamed the entire Pantaleo clan, what drove them to escalate matters by calling in Don Bastiano C. as mediator, was that the Sciaccas wouldn’t return the hand. As Santuzza had it from Rosa Giardini, an intimate of the Sciaccas, Miraglia kept the hand preserved in a jar on the mantelpiece, taking it down at the slightest excuse to show off to his guests and boast of his prowess.
Three weeks passed and the sun held steady in the sky, though by now we should have been well into the rains, and I heard nothing of the feuding parties. I saw Santo R. one evening as I was sitting in the cafe, but we didn’t speak — he was out in the street, along with his two elephantine bodyguards, bending painfully to inspect the underside of his car for explosives before lumbering into the driver’s seat, firing up the ignition and roaring away in a cyclone of leaves and whirling trash. It was ironic to think that snails had been the cause of all this misunderstanding and a further burden to the precarious health of the two men of respect, Don Santo R. and Don Bastiano C., because now you couldn’t find snails for love or money. Not a trattoria, cafe or street vendor offered them for sale, and the unseasonable sun burned like a cinder in the sky.
It was a festering hot day toward the end of November, no rain in sight and the sirocco tearing relentlessly at the withered branches of the trees, when Santo R. next showed up at my office. Business was slow — the season of croup and bronchitis, head colds and flu depended upon the rains as much as the snails did — and I was gazing out the window at a pair of buzzards spiraling over the slaughterhouse when he announced himself with a delicate little cough. “Don R.,” I said, rising to greet him with a smile, but the smile must have frozen on my face — I was shocked at the sight of him. If he’d looked bad a month ago, bloated and pale and on the verge of collapse, now he was so swollen I could think of nothing so much as a sausage ready to burst its skin on the grill.
“Doctor,” he rasped, and his face was like chalk beside the ruddy beef of the bodyguard who supported him, “I don’t feel so good.” Through the open door I could see Crocifissa making the sign of the cross. The second bodyguard was nowhere to be seen.
Alarmed, I hurried out from behind the desk and helped the remaining henchman settle Don R. in the chair. Don R.’s fingers were so puffed up as to be featureless, and I saw that he’d removed the laces of his shoes to ease the swelling of his feet — this was no mere obesity, but a sign that something was desperately wrong. Generalized edema, difficulty breathing, cardiac arrhythmia — the man was a walking time bomb. “Don R.,” I said, bending forward to listen to the fitful thump and wheeze of his heart, “you’ve been taking your medication, haven’t you?” I’d prescribed nitroglycerine for the angina, a diuretic and Aldomet for hypertension, and strictly warned him against salt, alcohol, tobacco and saturated fats.
Santo’s eyes were closed. He opened them with a grunt of command, made eye contact with the bodyguard and ordered him from the room. When the door had closed, he let out a deep, world-weary sigh. “A good man, Francesco,” he said. “He’s about all I have left. I had to send my wife and kids away till this blows over, and Guido, my other man, well”—he lifted his hand and let it drop like a guillotine—“no one lives forever.”
“Listen to me, Don R.,” I said, stern now, my patience at an end, “you haven’t been taking your medication, have you?”
No reaction. I might as well have been addressing a stump, a post in the ground.
“And the alcohol, the cigarettes, the pastries and all the rest?”
A shrug of the shoulders. “I’m tired, Doctor,” he said.
“Tired?” I was outraged. “I should think you’d be tired. Your system’s depleted. You’re a mess. You’re taking your life in your hands just to mount a flight of stairs. But you didn’t come here for lectures, and I’m not going to give you one — no, I’m going to lift up that telephone receiver on the desk and call the hospital. You’re checking in this afternoon.”
The eyes, which had fallen shut, blinked open again. “No, Doctor,” he rasped, and his words came in a slow steady procession, “you’re not going to touch that telephone. Do you know how long I’d last in a hospital? Were you born yesterday? Bastiano’d have me strung up like a side of beef before the night was out.”
“But your blood pressure is through the roof, you, you—”
“Fuck blood pressure.”
There was a silence. The sirocco, so late for the season, rattled the panes of the window. The overhead fan creaked on its bearings. After a moment he spoke, and his voice was thick with emotion. “Doctor,” he began, “Doctor, you’ve known me all my life — I’m not thirty yet and I feel like I’m a hundred. Do you know what it takes to be a man of respect in this country, do you?” His voice broke. “All the beatings, the muggings, the threats and kidnappings, cutting off the heads of the dogs and horses, nailing the cats to the walls…I tell you, Doctor, I tell you: it takes a toll on a man.”
He was about to go on when a noise from the outer room froze him — it was nothing, barely audible above the wind, the least gurgle in the throat, but it was enough. With a swiftness that astonished me, he was up from the chair, the pistol clenched in his hand. I heard Crocifissa suddenly, a truncated cry, and then the door flew open and there stood Bastiano C., one hand clutching a gleaming silver snub-nosed revolver, the other pinned to his gut.
This was the longest moment of my life. It seemed to play out over the course of an hour, but in reality, the whole thing took no more than a minute or two. Behind Bastiano, I could make out the sad collapsed form of Santo’s bodyguard, stretched out like a sea lion on the beach, a wire garrote sunk into the fleshy folds of his throat. Beneath him, barely visible, lay the expiring sticklike shadow of Bastiano’s remaining bodyguard — Bastiano too, as it turned out, had lost one to the exigencies of war. Crocifissa, wide-eyed and with a fist clamped to her mouth, sat at her desk in shock.
And Bastiano — he stood there in the doorway nearly doubled over with abdominal pain, more wasted even than he’d been three weeks earlier, if that was possible. The pistol was leveled on Santo, who stood rigid at the back of the room, heaving for breath like a cart horse going up the side of Mount Etna. Santo’s pistol, a thing the size of a small cannon, was aimed unflinchingly at his antagonist. “Son of a whore,” Bastiano breathed in his wet slurping tones. There was no flesh to his face, none at all, and his eyes were glittering specks sunk like screws in his head.