Andrea Camilleri - The Shape of Water

THE SHAPE OF WATER

ANDREA CAMILLERI

Translated by Stephen Sartarelli

Viking

VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth,Middlesex,England

First published in 2002 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

Translation copyright Stephen Sartarelli, 2002 All rights reserved

Originally published in Italian as La forma dellacqua by Sellerio editore. 1994 Sellerio editore via Siracusa 50 Palermo.

PUBLISHERS NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Publication Data

Camilleri,Andrea. [La forma dellacqua. English] The shape of water / Andrea Camilleri ; translated by Stephen Sartarelli. p. cm.

ISBN: 1-4362-7197-5

I. Title.

PQ 4863.A3894 F6713 2002 853'.914dc21 2001058140

Set in Bembo Designed by Jaye Zimet

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No light of daybreak filtered yet into the courtyard of Splendor, the company under government contract to collect trash in the town of Vig. A low, dense mass of clouds completely covered the sky as though a great gray tarp had been drawn from one corner to another. Not a single leaf fluttered. The sirocco was late to rise from its leaden sleep, yet people already struggled to exchange a few words. The foreman, before assigning the areas to be cleaned, announced that this day, and for some days to come, Peppe Schari and Caluzzo Brucculeri would be absent, excused from work. More than excused, theyd been arrested: the previous evening theyd attempted to rob a supermarket, weapons in hand. To Pino Catalano and Saro Montapertoyoung land surveyors naturally without employment as land surveyors, but hired by Splendor as temporary ecological agents thanks to the generous string-pulling of Chamber Deputy Cusumano, in

whose electoral campaign the two had fought body and soul (and in that order, with the body doing far more than the soul felt like doing)the foreman assigned the jobs vacated by Peppe and Caluzzo, that is, the sector that went by the name of the Pasture, because in a time now beyond memory a goatherd had apparently let his goats roam there. It was a broad tract of Mediterranean brush on the outskirts of town that stretched almost as far as the shore. Behind it lay the ruins of a large chemical works inaugurated by the ubiquitous Deputy Cusumano when it seemed the magnificent winds of progress were blowing strong. Soon, however, that breeze changed into the flimsiest of puffs before dropping altogether,but in that brief time it had managed to do more damage than a tornado, leaving a shambles of compensation benefits and unemployment in its wake. To prevent the crowds of black and not-so-black Senegalese, Algerians, Tunisians, and Libyans wandering about the city from nesting in that factory, a high wall had been built all around it, above which the old structures still soared, corroded by weather, neglect, and sea salt,looking more and more like architectures designed by Gaudnder the influence of hallucinogens.

Until recently the Pasture had represented, for those who at the time still went under the undignified name of garbage collectors,a cakewalk of a job:amid the scraps

of paper, plastic bags, cans of beer and Coca-Cola, and shit piles barely covered up or left out in the open air, now and then a used condom would appear, and it would set one thinking,provided one had the desire and imagination to do so,about the details of that encounter. For a good year now, however, the occasional condom had turned into an ocean, a carpet of condoms, ever since a certain minister with a dark,taciturn face worthy of a Lombroso diagram had fished deep into his mind, which was even darker and more mysterious than his face, and come up with an idea he thought would solve all the Souths law-and-order problems. He had managed to sell this idea to a colleague of his who dealt with the army and who, for his part, looked as if he had walked right out of a Pinocchio illustration, and together the two had decided to send a number of detachments to Sicily for the purpose of controlling the territory, to lighten the load of the carabinieri, local police, intelligence services, special operations teams, coast guard, the highway police, railway police and port police, the anti-Mafia, antiterrorism, antidrug, antitheft and antikidnapping commissions, and othershere omitted for the sake of brevityquite busy with other business. Thanks to the brilliant idea of these two eminent statesmen, all the Piedmontese mamas boys and beardless Friulian conscripts who just the night before

had enjoyed the crisp, fresh air of their mountains suddenly found themselves painfully short of breath,huffing in their temporary lodgings, in towns that stood barely a yard above sea level, among people who spoke an incomprehensible dialect consisting not so much of words as of silences, indecipherable movements of the eyebrows, imperceptible puckerings of the facial wrinkles. They adapted as best they could, thanks to their young age, and were given a helping hand by the residents of Vig themselves, who were moved to pity by the foreign boys lost, bewildered looks. The one who saw to lessening the hardship of their exile was a certain Geg Gullotta, a fast thinker who until that moment had been forced to suppress his natural gifts as a pimp by dealing in light drugs. Having learned through channels both underhanded and ministerial of the soldiers imminent arrival, Gegad had a flash of genius, and to put said flash to work for him he had promptly appealed to the beneficence of those in charge of such matters in order to obtain all the countless convoluted authorizations indispensable to his planthose in charge being, that is, those who truly controlled the area and would never have dreamt of issuing officially stamped permits. Geg in short, succeeded in opening a specialized market of fresh meat and many and sundry drugs, all light, at the Pasture. Most of the meat came from the former Eastern

Bloc countries, now free at last of the Communist yoke which, as everyone knows, had denied all personal, human dignity; now, between the Pastures bushes and sandy shore, come nightfall, that reconquered dignity shone again in all its magnificence. But there was also no lack of Third World women, transvestites, transsexuals, Neapolitan faggots, Brazilian viadossomething for every taste,a feast,an embarrassment of riches.And business flourished, to the great satisfaction of the soldiers, Gegand those who, for a proper cut of the proceeds, had granted Gegermission to operate.

Pino and Saro headed toward their assigned work sector, each pushing his own cart. To get to the Pasture it took half an hour,if one was slow of foot as they were. The first fifteen minutes they spent without speaking, already sweaty and sticky. It was Saro who broke the silence.