The Chemist of Catania

Chapter One

Chapter One

The Quarter known as Purgatory lay close to the centre of Catania, not very far from the Via Etnea in one direction, or the railway station in another, and only a short walk away from the Cathedral and University squares. It took its name from the church at its centre, which was dedicated to the Holy Souls in Purgatory. This once gracious building, rebuilt in grand style in the second half of the eighteenth century, was the property of a confraternity of medieval foundation, whose purpose was to pray for the souls of those in purgatory. The Ancient and Noble Confraternity of the Holy Souls had prospered under the Bourbons of the Two Sicilies, and been lucky enough to escape suppression under the various anti-clerical regimes that had replaced them. The Church, like the rest of the quarter, was in need of repair; the apartment blocks in the quarter all of suffered from leprosy of the façade, and some were in a state of partial ruin; and yet there was something beautiful about the little quarter of a few streets and one principal square, for those few adventurous outsiders who dared to visit. In the square, after the daily market was packed away, boys played football; in the bar, the older men would play board games under the shade of the solitary tree that grew near its door, a large spreading Mediterranean oak. It was here, in a flat not far from the square, that Calogero di Rienzi grew up, with his mother and his father, with his two sisters, and with his younger brother, Rosario, who was four years his junior.

By the time he was twelve, Calogero was a big child, almost able to pass for an adult. He dominated the football players of the square, who deferred to him, and if they did not, paid for it. He won every fist fight he entered, and he was not squeamish in administering punishment to those who offended him. One boy, in an incident that everyone remembered, had his nose broken against the front step of the Church. That sealed Calogero’s reputation as a boy no one should contradict.

By the time he was twelve, his mother, who was deeply religious, was in awe of her son; Rosario, then eight, simply feared him. His father viewed him as a promising character. This man, who was later known only by the name of ‘The Chemist’, for he was a former science teacher, specialising in chemistry, like many Sicilian fathers, worked abroad, and came home from time to time. The Chemist would come and go irregularly, and his wife never asked him about his work. He would take the train north, and disappear for a week, sometimes two, sometimes three. His work would take him to Turin, or Milan, or Rome, it was assumed, or further afield, to Belgium or to Germany. This was the way things worked in Sicily. The father of the house was absent, and no one asked where he went, though it was clear that his work was remunerative. The family owned the flat they lived in, which was relatively spacious. Moreover, signor di Rienzi carefully invested his earnings in other properties around the quarter. By the time Calogero was twelve, he had already persuaded the owner of the not very profitable bar to sell up; and the owners of other run-down properties he had his eye on were always open to persuasion. Calogero’s father hardly ever spoke at length, and he certainly never smiled, or so Calogero noticed whenever he accompanied his father on his rounds. He had an aura of authority that made people want to co-operate, and which Calogero envied. With his father, the boy would go and collect the rents once a month, and he watched people pay up with alacrity, not wanting to offend the Chemist. Some of the properties were dingy single rooms on ground floors, with doors open to the street, which he realised were rented by prostitutes, women no longer young with ruined faces for the most part, and in a few cases teenage males only a few years older than himself, whom his father treated with pronounced disdain. Those who did not pay on time were evicted without any warning, their possessions and themselves thrown into the street, amidst the general curiosity of neighbours and indifference of passers-by. Calogero helped with these evictions whenever they arose. He noticed when still young that no one ever intervened to help the victims; no one liked unfortunate; they were the sort of people who made others instinctively turn away, reminding them perhaps of the bad luck that could befall anyone. And such bad luck! To end up on the pavement weeping, your face stinging from the Chemist’s slap, surrounded by your possessions and your clothes, with the Chemist’s son looking at you with wry triumph.

Calogero learned his lessons well, and by the time he was fourteen he acted as his father’s rent collector, while his father concentrated on his work abroad, and invested the profits in an ever-expanding list of properties. Purgatory, during these years, was still a slum, awash with uncollected and stinking rubbish, a place with a reputation for danger, a place that the guide books to Catania warned you to avoid. The Chemist, however, gradually evicted many of his old tenants and replaced them with a better class of person who could pay more and who required less management. Also during these years, the years before the second Berlusconi government, the Confraternity, which owned the Church of the Holy Souls in Purgatory, began to finance a complete restoration of the exterior and the interior, saving the building from possible collapse, and bringing it to the attention of those who loved architecture. The Confraternity was feeling the benefit of the economic revival of the city, reliant as it was for its income on the rents from several buildings along the Via Etnea.

Though his father trusted Calogero, he never confided to him what he did when he went abroad. Calogero had become a skilled thief by the age of ten. His curiosity about how his father made his money led him to search for whatever evidence he might find. But his father’s wallet revealed nothing at all, and his father’s unpacked suitcases on his return revealed nothing either. Nor did his father have a mobile phone or a computer. This in itself was highly suspicious: after all, everyone had a mobile phone, nearly everyone had a computer. And many adults had plastic cards in their wallets – but not his father. On one occasion, he had accompanied his father to a travel agent in the city and watched him buy a train ticket to Naples with cash, and cash, he knew, was untraceable.

Again, he was intrigued to know just whom his father worked for; but there was no one he could ask. Accompanying his father on his rounds, he paid attention to whom he met. Most of his calls were of a commercial nature, to collect rent, to check up on tenants. But one or two did not fit into this category. There were several trips, for example, to a hardware shop in the Via Vittorio Emanuele, where the rather tired and sad proprietor was one signor Vitale; a man a few years older than his father who seemed wedded to terminal discretion. Vitale and his father would discuss very little:  a consignment of this fertiliser had come in; there was a shortage of nails or screws; it was as if they were speaking in an elaborate kind of code. And his father usually left, after a prolonged visit, without buying a thing. Given that he did not have a garden and never did anything of a practical nature in the house, it was never quite clear what business he might have had with signor Vitale. But signor Vitale was some sort of link to the outside world, the world beyond Catania. And he got his much younger friend Turiddu to follow his father, and see where he went. Turiddu confirmed that the hardware shop was a frequent calling place.

It was hard to discern a pattern, but by the time he was sixteen or so, Calogero had the distinct idea that the visits to the hardware shop in Via Vittorio Emanuele were co-ordinated with his father’s trips to the other side of the straits of Messina. In other words, Vitale was the one who arranged and directed his father’s work, or passed on messages and directives from those who did. But what was that work? Naturally he noted the dates of his father’s absences, and he scoured the newspapers and watched the television news for unusual events that might coincide with the Chemist’s trips abroad.  

In the end, as he progressed through his teenage years, he developed several theories as to what his father did, and did so secretly. First of all, he imagined that his father might be working in some capacity for the government, perhaps as an undercover policeman. When he walked through the city with his father, the Chemist often stopped to talk to certain policemen, whom he spoke to as to old friends. Was he himself a secret policeman, a secret bodyguard for some important politician? But this seemed too fantastic to be true. Moreover, he knew that his father, like himself, disliked and distrusted authority of any kind. By the time he himself had discovered the pull of sex, he began to assume that his father led a double life and that somewhere in Italy there was another family, another wife, another set of children, and that his father was a bigamist. Given that he was away more than half the time, this seemed an attractive theory.

Was there a parallel family? Was there someone like himself, who imagined himself to be an eldest son, in some place like Reggio, or Bari, or Rome? Every man needed a wife, it was part of his status as a man, but could his father be one of those unusual men who needed two wives? And if that were the case, would he keep them unknown to each other? Wouldn’t one have been the wife, and the other the mistress?

In the end, he thought his father an unlikely bigamist. For a start he knew that his parents were properly married, as he had seen the marriage register in the Church of the Holy Souls in Purgatory. Don Giorgio had shown it to Rosario, when Rosario was just starting out as an altar server, at the age of eight, and when he heard this, Calogero had asked Rosario to show it to him too. There it was, clearly set out, that Renato and Maria di Rienzi were married in church, and one could not do that unless one proved that one were single first. But that really did not prove anything more than a putative second marriage was second in time as well.

By the age of fourteen Calogero was an adult in his own eyes and in the eyes of the rest of the quarter. He had had his first sexual experience with Anna the Romanian prostitute, who was one of his father’s tenants, the previous year. He had noticed her as the most beautiful of all the women, prostitutes or not, in the quarter, and thought her a useful conquest with which to begin. She had a young son, and had only arrived in Catania a few years previously.  He had met her when collecting rents on behalf of his father. At first, she had refused his advances, which had only made him more insistent. Finally, she had given in, and in the dingy ground floor room she rented from the Chemist, allowed him to have what he wanted in return for the unspecified goodwill of her landlord’s son. Everyone else had to pay fifty euros.

He kept up with Anna for some time, and was a regular visitor. He liked the cachet that she brought him, the fact that he did not pay, was not even asked to pay, that he was in a different class to the rest of the quarter. He liked the transactional nature to the encounters, their lack of emotion. He even enjoyed the way Anna clearly resented him, found his visits an imposition. It reinforced his sense of power. As for the other boys and men of the quarter, they were jealous, which pleased him.

Of course, Anna complained to his father about his attentions, and his father had ignored her. Or so he supposed. He guessed his father knew, for from that time onwards, because he was now a man, his father stopped beating him.

On one occasion, walking through the square Turiddu, the younger boy had drawn his attention to the child with curly dark hair, who was Anna the Romanian prostitute’s son. The child, knowing them both, had looked up from where he sat on the church steps. Turiddu had gestured towards Calogero and said to the boy: ‘Yesterday he fucked your mother.’ Calogero had seen from the boy’s expression – he was only seven – that he understood what this meant. He shrugged, and then gave Turiddu a slap in rebuke, a hard one too; he noted that the little boy realised that in Turiddu he had an enemy, but in Calogero a possible friend.

While he kept up his relationship with Anna, he also began to pursue a girl called Stefania, who also lived in Purgatory. She was the most attractive girl of his age group, and her family was of a slightly higher social status than his own, he knew. Her father had regular employment, and her mother had social ambitions. Of course he liked her, but what particularly amused him was the way her family and she herself were torn by the prospect of him becoming her young man. They clearly sensed that he had a future, an interesting future, but they wondered about the risks this future might involve. She was keen, and they were keen, though keen to hide it as well, lest they give the indecent expression of pushing their daughter into his arms. As he saw more of Stefania, he visited Anna less; his sense of propriety dictated that when he started sleeping with Stefania, he should stop sleeping with Anna.

He did have a sense of propriety. He recognised what was due to Stefania when she became his official girlfriend. She added to his prestige and the respect in which he was held. The idea that he should have two women at the same time seems to him not just extravagant, but unnecessary, and he doubted his father had ever thought in such extravagant terms either.

His relationship with Stefania, more than his experiences with Anna the Romanian prostitute, marked his entrance into the real world, the adult world. Not only had all corporal punishment ceased by the time he had become Stefania’s young man, but his father was markedly more generous to him financially when Stefania arrived, and gave him a car, whereas previously he had made do with a scooter. He drove it for two years before passing his test. By this time too, he had ceased to go to school (he was never officially expelled, but the school was grateful for the absence of so impossible a pupil) and he certainly never went to Mass, not even at Christmas and Easter, following his father’s example. His father exercised no restraints on him; his mother had long ceased to imagine that she ever could.

His mother, a devout woman, was saddened by the way he had grown up so quickly, but this, she felt, was the usual fate of mothers, or so she reasoned. He was an eldest son. With Rosario, for whom she had always felt markedly less affection, it would be different, and it was different. And with the girls, Assunta and Elena, too. She would have been dismayed had she known just how her eldest son passed his time when he wasn’t collecting rents for his father, or fornicating with Stefania, which is what she imagined he was up to at night. However, most nights when he was not at home, he was with Turiddu, committing robberies.

He had long had a natural aptitude for locks. This was something his father had taught him. He was able to pick any lock – sometimes there were locked cupboards and rooms left behind by evicted tenants, which had to be opened. Sometimes tenants thought they were clever and changed the locks. But he could get through virtually any lock, car locks the easiest of all. Car radios were simple to steal, and there was a market for them, for petty local criminals were always on the lookout for them, and would ask the local boys from Purgatory if they had any to sell. The next best thing were wallets, and here Turiddu, who started out on this career just after his First Holy Communion, was invaluable at distracting tourists in the Cathedral Square while Calogero lifted their wallets. This resulted in a profitable harvest: there was ready cash, which the boys kept for themselves, while selling the wallets and the cards onto the same men who bought the car radios.

The stolen goods were kept in Turiddu’s bedroom, which was his exclusive domain, being the only boy in his family, and where Calogero had free access. Bit by bit, the two youngsters graduated onto better things. Calogero, though intelligent, had learned very little at school apart from an appreciation of art. It did not take long for him to realise that the city’s churches were poorly guarded. He was not so unsophisticated to look with longing at the contents of the poor box. He preferred the sight of the silver candlesticks on the gradine of the altar. Most churches had a custode, whom one of the boys could distract, while the other filched the candlesticks, or dipped into the sacristy and took a silver chalice.

All this might have come to an end when Turiddu was ten and Calogero fourteen, and Turiddu’s father discovered the stash of stolen goods in his son’s bedroom. The boy was given a terrible hiding. Calogero found him the next day, snivelling and bruised on the steps of the Church of the Holy Souls in Purgatory. He soon extracted from the boy what had happened, and marched Turiddu up several flights of stairs to the family home and rang the bell. Turiddu’s father answered. He was not a small man, but he was not much bigger than Calogero. Calogero floored him with a punch to the jaw, and then administered a good kicking, without a word being said. The boy’s mother rushed out of the kitchen screaming. She pleaded with him to stop, but Calogero continued until the man was unconscious and his own shoes were covered with blood. Turiddu watched knowing that his father would never hit him again. Then Calogero left.

He returned the next day. The battered and bruised father opened the door and Calogero was pleased to see the fear immediately apparent in his eyes. Turiddu appeared in the background.

‘Turi,’ said Calogero, ‘Get your father’s keys.’ The boy did as he was told. ‘Take off the cellar key, and makes sure you get me the spare ones as well.’

Calogero took the keys. He was now master of the storeroom in the basement, which had a secure metal door. Moreover, he had sealed the humiliation of Turiddu’s father, who would never dare mention to anyone how he had lost his cellar to a mere fourteen-year-old. The cellar was now his, and with it a place to keep the stolen goods. He already knew what he had to do next. The greatest trophy of all awaited him.

He shared a room with his brother Rosario, who was used to him coming in late and had even trained himself to pretend to not wake up when Calogero came in at two or three in the morning. The ten-year-old Rosario knew better than to antagonise his older brother in any way. A child of little interest to their father, the matter of disciplining Rosario was farmed out to Calogero. The slightest complaint – such as at being woken up in the middle of the night – would win swift retribution. This was not because it was wrong to complain or because the boy had to be taught a lesson; it was rather because it delighted Calogero to see his younger brother live in the fear of saying the wrong thing, and consequently live saying virtually nothing at all. To further terrify and discomfort the boy, the physical cruelty was interlaced with moments of extravagant affection, so that the ten-year-old boy never quite knew where he stood or what to expect. Every time Calogero came into the room, Rosario would be beset by an agony of uncertainty.

That night, a night he would remember, the night that followed the day on which Calogero stole the cellar storeroom from Turiddu’s father, he sensed that Calogero had entered their shared bedroom quietly without turning on the light. He heard him undress, as he pretended to be asleep, with his face turned to the wall. He had to get up early the next morning, because he was serving Mass at the Church of the Holy Souls in Purgatory at 6.30am, and it was his job to open the Church for don Giorgio, the priest, and get everything ready for the Mass. He had to get up in time, and get up quietly, without waking his brother, which was always stressful. Then Calogero got into bed; but not his own bed; rather he pushed his supposedly sleeping brother nearer to the wall, and got in next to him, something he had a habit of doing from time to time. Rosario felt his brother’s arms around him, and his breath against his neck, and he knew he would not sleep for hours until his brother left him alone.

‘Go to sleep, go to sleep,’ said Calogero, who had felt him stiffen.

He knew he had no choice but to pretend to be asleep, if that was what his brother wanted.

Round his neck he wore a gold chain which had been given to him for his first Holy Communion, which held a cross; and the brown scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which he had vowed never to take off. He felt his brother playing with the gold chain and the cloth of the scapular, and the third cord around his neck on which he kept the Church key, so that he might not lose it. His brother fiddled with these chains and cords, as if pretending to strangle him; at the same time, he was stifled by the smell of Calogero, which reminded him of liquorice, but was in fact the remains of the perfume that Stefania wore. He realised that his brother had set himself the dare of trying to steal his cross and chain, his most prized possession, or else to remove the scapular, that sign of his dedication to God and the Blessed Virgin. He knew too that there was nothing he could do about it, and that he would have to spend days, weeks, even months, pleading with Calogero to return the treasured items, which would be taken, he was sure, just to torment him.

After a moment, he surrendered, and allowed Calogero to do whatever he wanted. It was easier that way. Later, Calogero left him alone, and he fell miserably asleep.

Dawn came and with it the deepest relief. He had trained himself to wake up at first light, without the help of an alarm clock. He woke, and found that he was mercifully alone. Moreover, the three things with which he had gone to sleep were still round his neck. And so he had run off joyfully to the Church of the Holy Souls in Purgatory, opened the Church with the key with which don Giorgio had entrusted him, and set up for Mass. The Mass, that morning, was being celebrated on one of the side altars, as the main altar was obscured by scaffolding and plastic sheeting, thanks to the restoration project, which involved cleaning the marble and the gilded wooden frame that surrounded the altarpiece, the Spanish Madonna. Indeed, the Madonna was so obscured that it was not for another week that anyone noticed that she was gone; and even then, for a few days the restorers assumed that one of their number had moved the picture from its place in order to facilitate the restoration. Only after an afternoon of raised voices and recriminations, between don Giorgio, the head of the Confraternity, and the restoration people, was it clear that the Madonna had been moved without authorisation and that her whereabouts were unknown. In other words, the picture had been stolen.

The interested parties, the priest, the restorers, the police, the Confraternity, the people of the Purgatory quarter, could agree on virtually nothing at all, except that this was a disaster of the greatest magnitude.

For the police, it was the greatest embarrassment imaginable. The painting was the only Velasquez in Sicily, a gift to the Church by the wife of one of the Spanish Viceroys in the mid-seventeenth century. While not much known outside the city, it was one of the more important paintings in Sicily, and certainly one of the most important paintings in Catania, which, unlike Syracuse or Messina, could not boast a Caravaggio of its own. But there was no clue who could have taken it, no evidence of forced entry, and it could not even be established when the painting had been removed. The high altar had been covered up for weeks.

Don Giorgio was the custodian of the Church, and felt that he was responsible. The Madonna should have had an alarm fitted, or should have been removed for safekeeping; he feared he would be blamed, and in order to cover up his sense of negligence, he blamed the restorers. They came and they went at all hours: they were lax about keys. Perhaps they had left the Church open, perhaps they had tipped someone off, or perhaps they themselves had stolen the picture. There were so many thefts from churches of late, and so many restorations; the two were connected. But there was no proof at all, and all this succeeded in doing was offending the restorers, who quit en masse, and considerably delayed the restoration project in the process.

The Confraternity, who owned the Church and its contents, were mortified in the extreme.  They saw themselves as guardians of the city’s cultural heritage, and now they had lost their most valuable possession, which made them a laughing stock. Moreover, the picture was not insured against theft, thanks to some oversight. The Confraternity met. It had about 600 members, of whom never more than a dozen usually turned up for meetings, but this time several hundred assembled, and vented their rage on the head of the Confraternity, an elderly Duke, who had inherited the position from his father, and who was forced to resign, to be replaced by a middle class but efficient lawyer called Petrocchi, a man who would, it was hoped, make sure things like insurance were taken care of in future.

As for the people of the quarter, they were distraught. The religious ones, who were relatively few, and overwhelmingly female and elderly, were shocked that people should steal from churches. They knew there were thieves about – Catania swarmed with thieves – but these thieves should leave their churches alone, and something bad would happen to them for their sacrilegious profanity. The more superstitious saw the vengeance of God fall not on the thieves, but on the quarter itself, which had now lost its heavenly protectress. All of them had been baptised or married in her presence (the painting was not an it but a her). Her benign oversight had guaranteed their happiness in the past; who would look after them now? The cult object was gone and the temple was empty; now the Church was just a useless building which served no purpose. This attitude, which he heard repeatedly, angered don Giorgio. Did these people not believe in God, and the sacraments, and the scriptures? Did they only believe in a picture, albeit a holy one? Had they forgotten Jesus in their enthusiasm for Mary? And in what sense could the people of the quarter be said to love the Madonna they now mourned, given that they spent their time in fighting, swearing, fornicating, prostituting themselves and thieving, all of which were most repugnant to her heavenly purity?

In the end, said don Giorgio crossly to himself, it was only a picture. A very good one, it was true; a valuable one and a historically important one, but what really mattered remained; but the people of Purgatory by and large did not seem to understand what really mattered. They were children. The idea that God would abandon the Church just because the Velasquez was gone struck him as infuriating, and made him realise just how little they understood the spirit of Catholicism. It depressed him. He was living among pagans.

Eventually, after an interminable and inexplicable delay, the police began to ask who had keys to the Church of the Holy Souls in Purgatory. The answer was not comforting. There were about thirty keyholders: sacristans, altar servers, members of the Confraternity, the cleaners, the restorers. Rosario was questioned, albeit briefly, and he told the truth: he kept the key around his neck and he never took it off.

But of course someone else had taken it off, and that someone was now, the boy could tell, extremely pleased with the theft he had pulled off. Moreover, Calogero had a partner in crime, Turiddu, a boy the same age as Rosario, who now carried himself in the manner of someone much older and much more knowing. This conspiracy of thieves, his fourteen-year-old brother, and his ten-year-old accomplice, was present before Rosario’s eyes, knowing what they knew, and knowing too that he had been used by them and dared not say so.

In the end Rosario saw that he was responsible for the loss of the Spanish Madonna; and yet, how could he have prevented it? What could he have done? His brother had taken him by surprise, and taken advantage of an opportunity Rosario had never foreseen or even dreamed could have existed. And what had become of the painting itself? The newspapers and the television reports were adamant that the painting would soon resurface and be returned, because the thief would try to sell it on, and the police who safeguarded the artistic heritage of Sicily (a job they had not done so very well) would find the painting before it left the country. The Madonna was too immediately recognisable to be sold without detection.

This opinion was confidently stated as fact; and yet, as the months passed, the Madonna did not resurface, and new and insistent rumours arose. It was, it was said, adorning the stateroom of a Russian oligarch’s yacht; it had been burned by a desperate thief who could not sell it on; it had been fed to pigs belonging to a crime boss from somewhere near Palermo. This last supposition became the favoured legend of the police and of the people of Purgatory. The crime had been committed to make them all look stupid. The criminal had taken the painting, not because he wanted it, but to prevent them having it, and to show up the police for the fools they were. Moreover, the theft of the painting was an enduring insult, given that when the restoration of the interior of the Church of the Holy Souls in Purgatory was complete, above the high altar, encased in a baroque effusion of gesticulating angels and fluttering putti, all newly gilded, was a black hole where the Velasquez had been. The whole Church now had no real purpose, designed, as it had seemed to be, to showcase the picture. The sight of that hole filled Calogero with triumph; true, he could not sell the picture on for now, as he realised that would be far too dangerous; but the black hole reminded him of his power to make other people suffer. The same hole filled Rosario with the most tremendous guilt. He knew that pigs had not eaten the canvas and that it was not on the yacht of a rich Russian. He knew his brother had taken it, and he knew too that there was nothing he could say, as he was complicit in his brother’s crime.

Their mother, like the religious women of the quarter, was despondent about the missing picture. Their father, the Chemist, who had been away at the time of the theft, never said anything about the matter, but seemed thoughtful, and sometimes Calogero caught him looking at his eldest son with interest, and wondered if he knew.