Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions Read Free

never expected something for nothing or tried to beat someone down. Everyone who helped her got well paid, including the builders, the dustman and Valentino, and she always left a decent tip in the restaurant. It wasn’t that she had money to throw around – she wasn’t that well off – but it simply wasn’t that important to her.
    Anyway, the fact is, she scored a bullseye in buying that house. This was confirmed by my cousin Ciro, who’s an architect and ought to know. In the course of the next year he restored the Via Baronessa house exactly in accordance with Poldi’s wishes and her modest financial means. It was a narrow but genuinely handsome house situated one row back from the sea. Neither too small nor too big, it had three floors, a baroque balcony, a small inner courtyard and the aforesaid roof terrace with spectacular views of the sea and the volcano. Wedged into a shady side street behind the esplanade, it was painted bright violet and sunny yellow, with green shutters and a big brass plate announcing the name of the person who resided at No. 29 Via Baronessa: Isolde Oberreiter, my Auntie Poldi – plus, up in the attic every few weeks, her nephew from Germany. Like her ebony African idols and her pair of life-sized china poodles, I kind of belonged to the decor from the outset.
    A year later the house was ready to move into, the Munich apartment empty save for a few wraiths of memories and the removals van bound for the Alps, the Apennines and Etna. In the meantime, Poldi’s old Alfa Romeo was parked on Westermühlstrasse, tanked up and fully laden, waiting to set off on its last long trip. Waiting for me, too. Poldi was scared stiff of flying and couldn’t be expected to drive that far on her own while sober, so the aunts had browbeaten me into chauffeuring her from Munich to Torre Archirafi.
    â€œYour time will be your own,” I was told on the phone by my Aunt Caterina, the voice of reason in our family. “You’ll be independent, and you can write just as well down here with us, maybe even better.”
    Her subtext: since you’re unemployed and work-shy anyway, and you don’t even have a girlfriend although other men your age have long since acquired a wife and kids, you might just as well loaf around here. Who knows, maybe something will come of it.
    Which it eventually did.
    Between Munich and Torre Archirafi, however, I was faced with a thirty-four-hour drive in Isolde’s overpowered 1980s Alfa equipped with roll bars, which she flatly refused to exchange for a more practical Panda and seldom drove anyway because you had to be certifiably sober to do so.
    â€œWe could always drive to Genoa and take it easy on the ferry over to Palermo,” I suggested timidly, but Poldi just eyed me with scorn. My mistake. I should have known. If there was one phrase she detested from the bottom of her heart it was “take it easy”.
    â€œWell, if it’s too much for you…”
    â€œNo, no, it’s all right,” I grunted, and we puttered off, never doing over sixty miles per hour as we slunk across the Brenner Pass and trickled down the whole of the Italian boot past Milan, Rome and Naples, keeping to the autostrada all the way to Reggio Calabria. We devoured our first arancini di riso on the ferry between Scylla and Charybdis and got lost in Messina, where Poldi insisted on driving the final stretch to Torre herself. She revved the asthmatic Alfa and stepped on it. When we got to Torre I kissed the ground and thanked the Mother of God for my salvation and resurrection.
    â€œMany happy returns,” I sighed, because it was the very day my Auntie Poldi turned sixty.
    My Uncle Martino and the aunts came to Torre every few days to see how Poldi was getting on. The thing was, my aunts had a project: to keep Poldi alive for as long as possible, or at least to help raise her spirits. For Sicilians, joie de vivre rests on two