TE23 Double Feature

A Conspiracy of Talkers

Gaetano Savatteri

stay single and even in America there was the Depression so it might’ve been better if his grandfather had emigrated to Americazuela or Argentina cause there you just had to find some piece of open land, build a house on it and say this is mine, maicauntri , but instead his father went back to the old country and married a woman who, with all due respect, Signor Lieutenant, was no good for my father, who’d returned from America and maybe forgot how things worked back home, so she had a son seven months after the wedding, they said he was born premature but even my father knew he was the son of a whore, sonnovibich , he got depressed and didn’t want to go back to America with a son who, realli , wasn’t his son so he stayed in Sicily but Semino and his brother Charlie, his real brother, were always called Americans and then when the war ended and you guys arrived which was the save for la Sicilia , knowing the language, he worked for the Americans in Palermo, so good that once even General Poletti asked for his help on a sensitive matter, a serious thing which he did so well that General Poletti, a true gentleman, told Semino that he was a real american man , it is a great honor to America and to Sicily that we are like brothers, closer, even, duiuandersten , Lieutenant?” Sure, of course. Adano understood less than 322

half of the speech, that garble of Sicilianized English, of Sicilian in swing americano . But mostly what he understood was that he had misled Semino from the beginning, when he disclosed that he knew Italian. He’d studied at City College, painstakingly sounding out Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. Nights of reading and rereading, savoring the sonorous language, musical and full, “the gentle hue of oriental sapphire,” so different and so distant from the Italian of his aunt Cettina, gloomy and muddled, mournful and drawling. Now that mournfulness, even more unhinged, was churning, churning in Semino’s words, in this November evening, in the driving rain, in the road that twisted and turned, turning away even from the feeble lights of distant towns and plunging again into the blackness of the countryside, and in the shadows of the men on mules who fled to the side of the road “ Innotime , Signor Lieutenant. Past that rock.” The rock spur rose before them, white in the dark, wet night. “ Chi passa dalla rocca e non è rubato, o il brigante dorme o è malato ,” Semino chanted. If you get past the rock with no gun to your chest, then the bandit is sick 323 at the sight of headlights. “How much longer, Semino?”