“You think in fact there was different reason?”
“Yes. To get some breathing room.”
“Could you explain?”
“I’ll try. You see, Inspector, Michela and Angelo were very close. From what I was able to find out, when their mother was all right, Michela would very often sleep at her brother’s place. She would go out with him, and she knew at all times where he was. She controlled him. At some point Angelo must have got tired of this, or at least he needed more freedom of movement. And so my phony but over-leaping jealousy became a good alibi. It allowed him to get around without always having his sister in tow. He had me write the other two letters before going away on a couple of trips, one to Holland, the other to Switzerland. They were probably pretexts for preventing his sister from going along with him.”
Did this explanation for writing the letters hold water? In its twisted, contorted way, like a mad alchemist’s alembic, it did. Elena’s conjecture as to the real purpose proved convincing.
“Let’s set aside the letters for a moment. Since, in our investigation, we have to cast a wide net, we’ve—”
“May I?” she interrupted him, gesturing towards the letters on the coffee table.
“Of course.”
“Go on, I’m listening,” said Elena, taking a letter out of the envelope and beginning to read it.
“We’ve found out a few things about your husband.”
“You mean what happened during his first marriage?” she said, continuing to read.
Let alone the rug. This girl was pulling the ground out from under him.
Without warning, she threw her head backwards and started laughing.
“What do you find so amusing?”
“The tric-troc! What must you have thought?”
“I didn’t think anything,” said Montalbano, blushing slightly.
“It’s that I have a very sensitive belly button, and so …”
Montalbano turned fire red. Ah, so she liked to have her belly button kissed and tongued! Was she insane? Didn’t she realize those letters could send her to jail for thirty years! Tric-troc indeed!
“To get back to your husband …”
“Emilio told me everything,” said Elena, setting down the letter. “He lost his head over a former pupil of his, Maria Coxa, and married her, hoping for a miracle.”
“What sort of miracle, if I may ask?”
“Inspector, Emilio has always been impotent.”
The girl’s frankness was as brutal to the inspector as a stone dropped from the sky straight onto his head. Montalbano opened and closed his mouth without managing to speak.
“Emilio hadn’t told Maria anything. But after a while he couldn’t find any more excuses for covering up his unfortunate condition. And so they made an agreement.”
“Stop just a minute, please. Couldn’t the wife have asked for an annulment or a divorce? Everyone would have said she was right!”
“Inspector, Maria was extremely poor. Her family had gone hungry to put her through school. The agreement was better than a divorce.”
“What did it entail?”
“Emilio agreed to find her a man she could go to bed with. So he introduced her to a colleague of his, the gym teacher, with whom he’d already spoken.”
Montalbano goggled. No matter how much he’d seen and heard in all his years with the police, these intricate matters of sex and infidelity never stopped astonishing him.
“So, in a word, he offered him his wife?”
“Yes, but on one condition: that he be informed beforehand of the meetings between Maria and his colleague.”
“Good God! “Why?”
“Because that way it wouldn’t seem to him like a betrayal.”
Of course. From a certain point of view, Emilio Sclafani’s reasoning made perfect sense. After all, wasn’t a guy named Luigi Pirandello from around there?
“So how do you explain that the gym teacher very nearly lost his life?”
“Emilio was never told about that encounter. It was … well, a secret encounter. And so Emilio reacted like a husband catching his wife committing flagrant adultery.”
The rules of the game.Wasn’t there a play of the same name by the above-mentioned Pirandello?
“May I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure. I don’t feel so prudish with you.”
“Did your husband tell you he was impotent before or after you married him?”
