The Brewer of Preston by Andrea Camilleri Page B

little acid, that’s all. The suckling goat didn’t agree with me,” the broker replied, wishing that an earthquake, waterspout, or some other sort of natural disaster would stop Carnazza from continuing his talk. But the wine in the headmaster’s veins and head kept following an unpredictable course. In the end, Carnazza did not name his friend.

    â€œBegging your pardon, I shall pick up Ariadne’s thread again—or, actually, the thread of the subject, if you will, which is the same thing. Yes indeed. Ariadne’s thread, which leads one back to the subject, is made up of conjunctions. Have you ever noticed? If you can grab a hold of one and then follow the others that come after, you’ll find your way out of the labyrinth. So, Ricci. Luigi Ricci, after all this, died a few years ago, and in Prague, no less. He made trouble everywhere he went. With a little help from his brother, perhaps. Which brings us to
The
Brewer of Preston
. It was first performed in Florence, in 1847. So here we are again. In Florence. Get my point? You can see how it all makes sense. Luigi’s father is Florentine, the first performance is Florentine, and you-know-who—who happens to govern us—is Florentine. I believe that the man who wrote the libretto, a certain Francesco Guidi, copied it from a French author, one Adolf Adam, who in 1838 had staged a comic opera at—where else?—the Opéra Comique . . . Wait a minute, I’ve lost my train of thought. So, Guidi copies an opera by Adam in French but with the same title. Enough said. And at this point it seems to me we’re talking about copying like there’s no tomorrow, copying lyrics, copying music . . . I’d like to develop a concept here. I need to go to the bathroom; my belly feels like it’s been turned upside down.”

    He went out staggering as if he was on rough seas, rolling one minute, pitching the next. Don Memè then made a desperate decision:
I’m going to go after him
, he thought,
follow him into the lavatory
,
and the moment he sits down on the pot
,
I’ll bash him in the head with the butt of my pistol and leave him there for dead
. As he was getting up to do this, he suddenly found the Marchese Coniglio della Favara planted in front of him.
    â€œThanks, Don Memè,” the marchese said with a grin. “I didn’t know you were on our side, in spite of everything.”
    The old scarecrow’s right
, Don Memè suddenly thought with a shudder.
    Seeing how things were going, the prefect might think it was he, Memè, who had pulled the wool over his eyes, proposing a lecture that was starting to look like a dirty trick, since it was entirely in agreement with those opposed to
The
Brewer of Preston
.
    After eyeing Don Memè a good while, always maintaining his grin, the marchese withdrew to go and talk to other guests. The lecture, in fact, was being held in the music room of his own palazzo in Montelusa, just as Ferraguto had explicitly asked him. And the marchese had not let him down. The only time he did deny a favor to Don Memè, some two hundred Saracen olive trees on his property had, by curious coincidence, gone up in flames.
    Don Memè looked around. Not a single Montelusan aristocrat had shown up. The cornuti. And perhaps, given Carnazza’s drunkenness, it was better that way. There was a surplus of bourgeois, of course, and many public employees, but most were already leaving, especially the churchgoing ladies, scandalized by the headmaster’s language and dragging their husbands behind them. Who, it must be said, acquiesced rather reluctantly, as they would rather have stayed to see how the farce would end. Some thirty people remained.
    Not knowing what to decide, whether to go and kill Carnazza or let himself sink blissfully into the shit pile he had helped to create, Don Memè started staring at the frescoes on the ceiling. At a certain