Death in Sardinia by Marco Vichi Page B

Angelo started telling an old story his grandfather Pietro had told him a year before he died. It related to events that had taken place in Bauladu just after the war. To play one of their many pranks on the sexton, some lads from town had brought a coffin to the cemetery with someone alive inside. A little while later the sexton had heard some knocking and opened the coffin to see what it was, only to find a living person inside. Without wasting a second, he bashed the man in the head with his shovel a good dozen times, until he seemed truly dead.
    Then he went to the mayor and said to him:
    ‘Listen, when you bring me a dead person, he’d better be dead, because today you brought me a live one and I had to kill him.’
    Since that day nobody had ever played any more tricks on the sexton.
    They carried on chatting of this and that, from women and old tales of revenge to town gossip and bizarre stories like the one about the sexton. And they ended up talking about the bandits of Orgosolo. Ettore immediately got worked up. He was a bit thick-tongued and had a square head that hardly moved when he spoke.
    ‘Mesina’s right. 11 And anyway, he never kills anyone. Those pricks in Rome made us a thousand promises and then forgot about us. In Italy there’s money for everyone, and here we’re all broke …’
    ‘Play,’ said Angelo.
    ‘There’s poverty everywhere, Ettore, even if they don’t show it to you on the telly,’ said Piras.
    ‘But Mesina’s right, bloody hell!’ Ettore retorted. Piras didn’t feel up to contradicting him.
    ‘Play,’ said Angelo.
    ‘How’s Cadeddu doing?’ Piras asked, to change the subject.
    ‘He’s found himself a wife up in Milan,’ said Angelo.
    ‘Have you seen her?’
    ‘Only in a photo. Pretty girl, but she’s blonde,’ said Ettore, screwing up his mouth.
    ‘You got something against blondes?’ asked Piras, whose girlfriend Sonia was a blonde Sicilian.
    ‘When you look at ’em close up it’s like they got no blood,’ said Ettore.
    ‘You won’t find their blood in their hair …’
    ‘Bravo, Pietrino, now we know your girlfriend’s blonde too,’ said Angelo, sniggering, then throwing two aces down on the table.
    ‘That beats me,’ said Ettore, putting his cards back in the deck.
    ‘Three eights,’ said Piras, laying his cards down and picking up the kitty.
    ‘So she’s a blonde …’ Ettore persisted, not caring that he’d lost the hand. He was the oldest of the three and had arms as big as tree trunks.
    ‘And what makes you think I have a girlfriend?’ asked Piras, feigning indifference.
    ‘We could tell by your face,’ said Ettore.
    ‘Well, I haven’t got one,’ Piras quipped, shuffling the cards.
    ‘Oh, go on, everybody in town knows you do,’ said Angelo.
    ‘Everybody but me,’ said Piras.
    ‘Is she Florentine?’ asked Ettore.
    ‘Hey, what’s with you guys? Are you working for my mother or something?’ said Piras, and as he was dealing the cards he couldn’t suppress a smile.
    ‘Beware of those city girls, they’ll cut you open like a sheep and eat your heart out,’ said Ettore, staring at him. His eyes were as black as wet stones.
    ‘Just cut the crap and play,’ said Piras, looking at the cards in his hand. Three kings, an ace and a nine. The cards were treating him well that evening, but remembering the famous dictum about luck at cards, he wasn’t terribly pleased. Who knew what Sonia was doing at that moment, down in Palermo.
    Ettore and Angelo kept needling him about his mysterious girlfriend but were unable to extract any information. They played another two or three hands, and the luck remained with Piras, who threw his cards down in the end and stretched in his chair. He’d won about eighteen hundred lire.
    ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said.
    ‘The last drop,’ said Ettore, already filling their glasses. He was the one who had to get up at the crack of dawn, but it had never bothered him much to go without