Anno XXXIV, n. 2 RIVISTA DI STUDI ITALIANI Agosto 2016 408

Anno XXXIV, n. 2
RIVISTA DI STUDI ITALIANI
Agosto 2016
CONTRIBUTI
THE ROLE OF THEATRICALITY IN ANDREA CAMILLERI’S
CRIME FICTION
JACK D’AMICO
Canisius College
A
ndrea Camilleri, a “gran tragediatore” by temperament, education and
profession, brought a unique appreciation for the connection between
theater and crime to his prolific commissario Montalbano series 1 .
Melania G. Mazzucco develops a theatrical analogy to describe Camilleri’s
ability to generate variety from a fixed narrative scheme: “Camilleri allestisce
romanzi come il capocomico del teatro all’antica italiano metteva in scena
commedie, pastorali e tragedie”2. Additionally, one might say that Camilleri’s
detective Montalbano functions as a capocomico, lead actor and director, whose
character and methods are inherently theatrical. As Mazzucco suggests,
Camilleri created a crime squad made up of types performing like a theatrical
troupe3. Drawing on the masks of the commedia dell’arte whose clearly defined
1
See Marcello Sorgi, La testa ci fa dire: Dialogo con Andrea Camilleri
(Palermo: Sellerio, 2000), pp. 30-69. On tragediatore, the trickster and put-on
artist, see Barbara Pezzotti, The Importance of Place in Contemporary
Italian Crime Fiction (Madison, WI.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press),
pp. 131-32.
2
[Camilleri sets up novels much as the leading actor/director of traditional
Italian theater staged comedies, pastorals and tragedies]. “All’ombra dell’ulivo
saraceno”, Preface to La gita a Tindari (Palermo: Sellerio, 2014, 2000), p. xii.
See also Nunzio La Fauci, “Prolegomeni ad una fenomenologia del
tragediatore: saggio su Andrea Camilleri” in Lucia, Marcovaldo e altri
soggetti pericolosi (Rome: Meltemi, 2001), pp. 151-52 and Nino Borsellino,
“Camilleri gran tragediatore,” Introduction, Storie di Montalbano, ed. Mauro
Novelli (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), p. xli.
3
Similarly Antonella Santoro comments on Camilleri’s “attitudine da uomo di
teatro, portato a proiettare nella scrittura il mondo buffo della commedia”, in
Camilleri tra Montalbano e Patò: Indagini sui romanzi storici e polizieschi
(Naples: Alfredo Guida, 2012), p. 58. And George Gella relates the traditional
character types of detective fiction to the humors characters of “Roman,
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traits set up expectations in the spectator/reader, Camilleri sustains the comic
tone of his crime fiction by varying set routines, or lazzi, such as Catarella’s
slapstick entries and Fazio’s family histories. Individual traits, such as
Montalbano’s rudeness, find their place within the set exchanges played out
between the commissario and his team4.
Montalbano is the lead but not the only performer. Mimì Augello exhibits a
talent for impersonation, particularly with women, as when he plays the lawyer
Diego Croma in Una lama di luce (p. 215). But even Fazio can perform, as he
does at the end of Montalbano’s extended, improvised interrogation of
Costantino Morabito in Le ali della sfinge where, on cue, he asks the question
that breaks Morabito (p. 211). Later Mimì congratulates Montalbano on what
Fazio called one of his best performances (p. 220). The commissario improvises
his way around the fine points of jurisdiction and political sensitivity and, with
few exceptions, his team follows their leader. Whatever the relative success or
failure of any given investigation, by returning the reader to the humor and
vitality of that troupe, and to Montalbano’s regular breaks for a good meal,
Camilleri balances his critique of social violence and political corruption with
the appealing humanity of the fixed cast of characters. In a world of false
identities, illusions and studied deceptions, Montalbano must by indirection
find direction out (to paraphrase one of the commissario’s favorite authors).
And though Montalbano thrives on improvisation, his objective is never selfpromotion. As Nino Borsellino observes, as a tragediatore Montalbano
conceals his professional intelligence and acumen from his superiors (p. xli).
The otherwise flamboyant commissario goes pale and mute in front of a camera
and steadfastly refuses to be promoted (see Il cane di terracotta, chapter 7).
This essay will focus on Camilleri’s use of the theatrical analogy to develop
a variation on the traditional contest between master detective and master
criminal. Camilleri often sets up a contest between Montalbano, who does not
hesitate to manipulate a crime scene to satisfy his own sense of justice, and a
criminal who operates behind the scenes 5 . La forma dell’aqua of 1994
introduces both Montalbano and the inherently theatrical crime scene that
Renaissance and Restoration comedy”, in “Murder and Manners: The Formal
Detective Novel” Novel 4, n. 1 (1970), p. 40.
4
See Annick Paternoster, “Inappropriate Inspectors: Impoliteness and Overpoliteness in Ian Rankin’s and Andrea Camilleri’s Crime Series”, Language
and Literature 21, n. 3 (2012), pp. 315-317.
5
See Gianni Bonina on Camilleri, the writer as director: “Lo scrittore in
sostanza è al servizio del registra che organizza e armonizza le parti del
spettacolo, dalle luci alla messinscena, dalla usa interpretativa ai costumi”, in
Il carico da undici: Le carte di Andrea Camilleri (Siena: Lorenzo Barbera,
2007), p. 143. Alberto Sironi, the director of the TV adaptations, conveys a
sense of reality as theater by setting up his location shots to look like sets.
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THE ROLE OF THEATRICALITY IN ANDREA CAMILLERI’S
CRIME FICTION
informs Camilleri’s contribution to the genre of crime fiction. Camilleri
conceives of the crime scene as a theatrical space that might reveal an
unintended meaning (the clue of the tradition clue-puzzle crime story), or send
an intended message of the kind favored by the “old” mafia6. An example of
the latter occurs in Il campo del vasaio where Filippo Alfano’s body is cut into
thirty pieces as a sign of betrayal (p. 255) and this spectacle (’sto tiatro) is then
repeated when his son Giovanni gets the same treatment to falsely implicate the
mafia boss don Balduccio (p. 177). The biblical allusion works on the metatheatrical level when Montalbano rereads Camilleri’s La scomparsa di Patò (p.
102) where the protagonist disappears after performing as Judas in a Passion
Play.
To this basic semiology Camilleri adds Montalbano’s ability to interpret and
improvise. In La forma dell’acqua we are introduced to the crime scene at the
mànnara, a once pastoral field where Montalbano’s childhood friend Gegè
oversees a brisk prostitution trade tolerated by the authorities and taxed by the
mafia. Camilleri’s title alludes to the fluidity of the corpse discovered at the
mànnara, a corpse whose meaning takes on the form of its container, the set.
Camilleri moves his narrative between two sets ‒ the disreputable public space
of the mànnara, where the body of the prominent business man Silvio Luparello
has been discovered in a compromising state of undress after an apparent
assignation, and the exclusive private space of the Capo Massaria, where
Luparello actually expired in the even more compromising arms of his young
nephew Giorgio Zìcari (p. 183). The lawyer Pietro Rizzo (p. 85), a figure drawn
from the political theater of Italy in the 90’s, tries to manipulate both sets to
advance his interests and the interests of the ambitious and unscrupulous
Angelo Cardamone.
Summarizing the events over the phone for Livia, Montalbano refers to the
scene staged at the mànnara as a horrible pantomime (“dell’orrenda pantomima
dentro la macchina”, p. 184). The pantomime includes props, evidence planted
to incriminate Ingrid Sjostrom (the daughter-in-law Cardamone has been
abusing), as well as a supporting role for the homosexual Marilyn enlisted to
play the companion who will be misidentified as Ingrid. While the actual death
scene would create insurmountable problems, the staged death by orgasm with
an over-sexed Swede can be used to discredit Luparello and thereby advance
the interests of Cardamone and Rizzo.
Camilleri’s first novel in the Montalbano series pits his commissario against
the decidedly amateurish manipulator Rizzo whose scenografia does not
6
See Il cane di terracotta where Alcide Maraventano (p. 166) and Farid
Rahman (p. 224) school Montalbano in the semiology of murder. The signature
mafia killing, the corpse with a bullet in the head left in a burnt-out car, is used
as a red herring (or depistaggio) in Una lama di luce (p. 229, 255).
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include the street sweepers Pino and Saro who find the body. Their names,
occupation and language might suggest Sicilian clowns, but Camilleri gives
them a quite different role when they inadvertently upset Rizzo’s plan by
deciding to report what they have found not to the authorities but to Rizzo
himself because they know who pulls the strings in the puppet show of politics
and government (p. 17). Additionally, Saro disturbs Rizzo’s set by picking up
a necklace planted to incriminate Ingrid and Pino, a student of theater (“Ci piaci,
a me figliu, fari u triatru”, says his mother, p. 67), notices that Rizzo displayed
no emotion when informed that his dear friend and associate was just found
dead, pants down, in the mànnara. As Pino tells Montalbano, speaking as a man
of the theater (“parlandone da omu di teatro”, p. 76) such a response would not
play on the stage: “No, commissario, è tutto sbagliata come commedia, il
pubblico si metterebbe a ridere, non funziona” (“… it’s all wrong as theater, the
public would laugh it off the stage, it doesn’t work”, p. 77). It works for
Montalbano because he begins to suspect that Rizzo staged the scene and, not
being omu di teatro, was unable to improvise a simple “Oh dear!” over the
phone.
Camilleri continues to weave theatricality into the investigation at both ends
of the social spectrum, as we see when Luparello’s wife, familiar with her
husband’s excesses and his fastidious manners, studies the CSI pictures of his
corpse and notes that the underpants he didn’t have a chance to pull up after his
orgasm and before his death were put on back to front and inside out, something
her husband would not do. A problem of costuming, one might say, a clue that
the body was hurriedly dressed before being transported to the mànnara.
In an important deviation from the tradition of crime fiction, Camilleri
launches his detective into his first case as a counter-director who alters the
circumstantial evidence at both scenes. He assists Saro and his family by
forcing Rizzo to invent another version of how the necklace was lost (and to
pay a finder’s fee for its return), and literally deep sixes the purse Rizzo’s
accomplice planted to incriminate Ingrid. He conceals her connection to the
Capo Massaria “love nest” where Luparello died and then, to protect the
nephew’s family, puts her back when he reports to the questore. Livia,
suspicious of Montalbano’s heroic efforts to protect the beautiful Ingrid, is
genuinely offended when the commissario describes how he altered his reports
and removed all signs of Ingrid from the Campo Massaria but left a gun that the
distraught and unstable Giorgio uses to kill Rizzo before committing suicide by
driving off a cliff. She accuses him of having promoted himself to god, a fourth
rate god, but a god nonetheless: “‘Ti sei autopromosso, eh?’…‘Da commissario
a dio, un dio di quart’ordine, ma sempre dio’” (p. 186). Camilleri reverts to this
scene at the conclusion of Il campo del vasaio where the aging Montalbano,
having pulled all too many strings to solve a murder and protect Mimì, sees
himself as a weary puppet master struggling to bring yet another
rappresentazioni to a close (pp. 272-273).
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THE ROLE OF THEATRICALITY IN ANDREA CAMILLERI’S
CRIME FICTION
The analogy between the “case” a detective solves and a theatrical
representation, of whatever kind, combined with Montalbano’s often
adversarial relationship to the state, raises obvious questions about the ethical
value of his work. In his classic essay on crime fiction, W. H. Auden used an
analogy to Greek theater to observe that in the detective story the audience does
not know the truth, the murderer does and “the detective, of his own free will,
discovers and reveals what the murderer, of his own free will, tries to conceal”7.
Montalbano reveals and conceals according to his personal sense of justice.
Though the commissario never becomes a post-modern who abandons the truth
as he interprets and alters crime scenes, Camilleri often introduces the metaphor
of mirrors or multiple perspectives to describe the confusion Montalbano faces
and at times creates (La forma, p. 107). As Livia implies, Montalbano willingly
faces the consequences of being a very human stage-manager playing god.
Anna, another woman in love with Montalbano, questions his relationship to
Ingrid after she catches him in what appears to be fragrant delight and asks
pointedly whether he is honest. Montalbano answers equivocally that he is not
honest, but not in the way she assumes (La forma, p. 188, cf. pp. 149-150). His
dishonesty is more professional than sexual. Montalbano lies or puts on an act
to protect the innocent and pursue the guilty and seems content to answer to
himself for his choices, as in La pazienza del ragno where he informs Susanna
Mistretta that he knows she staged her own abduction but allows her to leave
for Africa, trusting that the money she and her uncle have in effect extorted will
go to charity (pp. 248-253)8.
Livia and Anna are not the only characters to criticize Montalbano’s
theatrically devious methods. In one of his sarcastic comebacks, Dr. Pasquano
calls Montalbano a great actor whose skill allows him to screw the unfortunates
who fall into his hands: “È un bravo attore! È accussi che piglia per il culo i
poveri disgraziati che capitano tra le sò mano?” (Un covo di vipere, p. 56). From
a slightly different perspective, in La forma dell’aqua the questore Burlando,
adopting the theatrical terms of the circus, says Montalbano performs a high
wire act without a net (p. 179). We enjoy Montalbano the performer, just as
readers came to enjoy Camilleri’s inventive mixture of Italian and Sicilian
within the narrative, a linguistic high wire act that seemed risky at first but has
proven remarkably successful. How do we evaluate the more serious side of
Montalbano’s balancing act, his maneuvers between the criminal world and the
corrupt social and political establishment of Italy (abetted by what Camilleri
and his commissario see as the negative pressure exerted by America and the
Church)? Is the seriousness of that critique compromised by the theatrical
7
“The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict”, Harper’s,
May, 1948, p. 407.
8
See Le ali della sfinge for a similar finto sequestro, p. 224.
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humor, or is that theatricality essential to a genre that seeks to instruct and
delight?
Montalbano’s remark to Anna about being dishonest in his own way speaks
to his independence and to his paradoxical ability to function in unconventional
ways because his brand of honesty earns him the trust of those on the other side
of the law who respect this born cop (sbirro nato). I want to consider two
investigations where that trust is tested when Montalbano finds himself drawn
into someone else’s theater. In Il cane di terracotta Gegè serves as the link
between Montalbano and the fugitive mafia killer Tano u grecu who asks
Montalbano to stage a raid that will save him from a younger generation of
mafiosi who want to throw him under the bus, or cart (p. 23). Because of, or
despite, the three to five murders on his resume, Tano needs the theater because
he can’t lose face by simply turning himself in: “Stavo dicendo che io mi faccio
arristari, ma mi neceessita tanticchia di triatro per salvare la faccia”, p. 24).
Keeping his men in the dark about the nature of the raid, Montalbano directs a
keystone cops arrest that subsequently turns serious when Tano and Gegè are
killed and Montalbano seriously wounded. The publicity stirred up by his coup,
combined with the work of a mole within the anti-mafia, trips up the
commissario. Once the word gets back to the clan, he becomes the “cornuto
d’un tragediatore” who will pay for “quel triatro” he staged with Tano (p. 71).
Montalbano finds himself in a hall of mirrors, betrayed by the mole within the
anti-mafia and pursued by the mafia for assisting Tano. His energy eventually
turns to the mysterious scene discovered within the crasticeddru, to a form of
theater literally and figuratively sealed off from the deadly game he was drawn
into by Tano9.
The danger of entering into someone else’s theater also appears in La gita a
Tindari, which opens with Montalbano’s recollection of one Carlo Militello (p.
4), nicknamed Carlo Martello by his fellow students for his uncompromising
desire to hammer the opponents of revolution. Though Carlo has become a
well-connected banker, Montalbano reflects that he didn’t really change
because he, and many like him, had merely performed as student
revolutionaries, “perché nel ’68 avevano solamente fatto teatro, indossando
costumi e maschere di rivoluzionari” (p. 5)10. Montalbano’s conscience reminds
him that he too serves that state the eighteen year old once fought to change and
he will learn by the end of the investigation that playing in someone else’s
theater, whether the state’s or the mafia’s, means that he can do little more than
bear witness to the slaughter of both the guilty and the innocent.
Montalbano’s meeting with the 90 - year - old Don Balduccio Sinagra takes
place in a garden where the mafioso, flanked by the Jesuit priest Sciaverio
Crucillà, after much indirection repeats a theme we have heard from Tano. He
9
On the crasticeddru investigation see below page 419.
Page references to 2014 edition.
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THE ROLE OF THEATRICALITY IN ANDREA CAMILLERI’S
CRIME FICTION
would like to see his beloved grandson Japichinu arrested in order to save him
from a worse fate in a world where the old lines of respect within the clans are
being crossed by a new generation of paradoxically lawless criminals (pp. 116117). Montalbano understands the unstated theater of the meeting ‒ the priest,
expecting to be tailed, will lead them to Japichinu. As Montalbano says to
Fazio, the carefully staged encounter was all theater, a puppet show, “Teatro,
mi spiegai?...Calmati, assomigli a una recita dell’opira dei pupi” (pp. 128-129).
When they find Japichinu with his throat cut, the full the extent of Don
Balduccio’s teatro becomes clear. Montalbano was being set up to discover the
body and alert the authorities so that Balduccio could play the bereaved
grandfather and use the fact that he tipped off Montalbano as an alibi. He
screwed them, as Montalbano said to father Crucillà, but only to a point (“Glielo
ho detto: ci ha pigliati per il culo. Ma fino a un certo punto”, p. 214). Because
he suspected from the start that something was not right (“non quatrava”, p.
217) the commissario exits without notifying any of his superiors, leaving Don
Balduccio to dispose of his beloved grandson.
The face-to-face meeting full of innuendo, lies and apparent revelations
resembles the conventions of professional theater and operates alongside the
strategies employed by the mafia, the police and the ruling class to manipulate
the media, as Montalbano himself does when he uses his journalist friend
Nicolò Zita of Retelibera. The understood conventions of police interrogation,
like those used to break Dr. Ingrò, also play like theater, or a scene improvised
straight out of an American film (“Si taliarono negli occhi, s’intesero. E il tiatro
pincipiò”, p. 289). La gita a Tindari ends with a reference to the mysterious
little Greek theater at Tindari (p. 290) because the mysteries of theater, the
masks of Carlo Militello, Don Balduccio and Nenè Sanfilippo draw
Montalbano into the interlaced performances he seeks to understand and then
control. George Gella sees a direct connection between the restoration of a
highly conventional order at the conclusion of the typical comedy of manners
and the structure of British detective fiction (Gella, pp. 44-47). We can draw a
similar analogy between the provisional restoration of order at the end of
Camilleri’s fiction and a Pirandellian comedy of theatrical ambiguity. In the
crime stories where Montalbano follows the lead of a Tano, a Don Balduccio,
or a seductive woman, the provisional order restored at the conclusion reflects
the ambiguity created by the masks of idealists and would-be revolutionaries,
the mafia and the anti-mafia, women who perform with Montalbano and those
who deceive him.
Il giro di boa opens with Montalbano’s rant against the government for its
abusive and illegal actions in response to the demonstrations that accompanied
the G8 meeting in Genoa (2001) and for its excesses in Naples (p. 13, 17).
Initially determined to resign, Montalbano pulls back when Mimì tells him such
an act would be an offense to his decent, honest colleagues (p. 21). Two
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different but equally theatrical scenes serve as the catalysts for his recovery.
The first motivates him to stand up for the integrity of Sicilians and the second,
which recalls his attachment to the boy Francois11, provides the opportunity to
pursue justice outside the system he no longer trusts, though it traps him in
someone else’s theater.
A farcical scene captured by a photographer plays out on the beach where
Montalbano has dragged a dead body he literally bumps into while swimming.
There he encounters an elderly couple from Treviso equipped with binoculars,
an ancient pistol and abundant prejudices. Camilleri heightens the farce when
Montalbano loses his bathing suit, having used the string to pull the body
ashore. But the comedy restores some of Montalbano’s equilibrium when he
resolves to teach these northerners not to exaggerate (as he had done) and to
learn that even in Sicily the law exists: (“che macari in Sicilia c’era tanticchia
di legge. Tanticchia, ma c’era”, pp. 33-34). The tragediatore gets knocked cold
by “la signora Pina Bausan” but the farce returns Montalbano to the space
between the law and improvisation where the commissario is at his best.
The more serious episode develops when Montalbano observes a chaotic
scene at the port where desperate extracomunitari are being brought ashore (“E
ogni volta, tragedie, scene di chianti e di duluri”, p. 57) 12 . The scent of
desperation recalls the corpse of the first scene because that desperation has
reached the point where the only hope left is death (“di disperazione arrivata a
quel limite oltre il quale c’è sulamenti la spiranza della morti”, p. 57). Camilleri
draws on his theatrical experience to stage the scene where Montalbano leads a
boy back to what appears to be his family and the boy directs a look of appeal
toward the stranger Montalbano rather than the mother who falls and is hurried
off in an ambulance with what appear to be her children (p. 61). He fails to see
the woman for what she is, a bit player not just in the teatro of illegal entry (p.
86) but of child trafficking (“Il commercio di bambini extracomunitari”, p.
203). The subsequent murder of the boy sends Montalbano on a deeply personal
investigation that leads him to the painful realization that his instincts failed at
the crucial moment of the boy’s mute plea (p. 190). Later when Montalbano
mentally replays the scene he understands that both the “mother” and the
ambulance nurse, Gaetano Marzilla, were playing roles designed by a skilled
director, later identified as Baddar Gafsa (p. 209): “Quella era stata una scena
di tiatro predisposta con molta intelligenza” (p. 120).
Montalbano’s failure to identify a scene as wholly or in part teatro signals
a weakness of some kind, in this instance his general state of frustration
11
See Il ladro di merendine, p. 156.
On the metaphorical title and the political context of the investigation, see
Stephen Kolsky, “Save the Children! Authenticity, Morality and the Traffic in
Children in Andrea Camilleri’s Il giro di boa”, Rivista di Studi Italiani 2
(2009), pp. 119-135.
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CRIME FICTION
combined with his reluctance to act aggressively to save the boy, as he had done
with Francois. But he regains his momentum. Il giro di boa includes the typical
theatrical ploys Montalbano uses to get at the truth, such as the comic scene
played by Ingrid and Montalbano to bait the ambulance nurse (p. 130), Bebba’s
anonymous phone call (p. 194), or the violent bluff used to intimidate Marzilla
(p. 228). And Camilleri uses Montalbano’s theatrical self-awareness to
undercut the action hero, as when he looks in the mirror and says “Mi chiamo
Bond. James Bond” (p. 232), or laughs at himself as a “vecchio bucaniere”
before he approaches the lair of Gafsa’s lieutenant Jamil Zarzis by sea (p. 257).
Camilleri moves between comedy and tragedy and employs shifts in tone
that interrupt the linear direction of the plot as it moves toward the final
confrontation. He prefers variety to unity. His theatrical style, like one of the
better Italian variety shows, mixes levels of high and low culture. On the high
side we have his use of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland (p. 78) to frame
Ernesto Errera/Lococo’s death by water and in the realm of stand-up comedy
the journalist Sozio Melato, re-baptized Ponzio Pilato by Catarella (p. 144). We
know that Montalbano may lose consciousness and fall prey to Catarellisms, as
he does when in the last scene he tells the befuddled Fazio to contact Ponzio
Pilato (p. 266), but he will not resign, wash his hands of injustice, abandon the
helm, or retreat from the wasteland until he suffers his own death by water.
Camilleri’s use of the theatrical Ponzio Pilato gag in the last scene is as much a
part of his take on the detective genre as the more standard action scene that
pits the hero against the villain. While the corrosive power of role playing,
deception and violence within the political establishment and international
crime threaten to overwhelm Montalbano, it is through his talent for theater and
his ability to detect falsehood that he seems uniquely equipped to confront
Baddar Gafsa, as well as Pina Bausan13.
Montalbano’s most serious failures result from a type of theater by no means
new to the tradition of crime fiction ‒ the seduction. On his guard against
Angela in La danza del gabbiano (pp. 185-192) and Liliana in Il gioco degli
specchi (p. 210), Montalbano falls into the seduction trap in both Il sorriso di
Angelica and La vampa d’agosto. Like the hard-boiled detective of American
crime fiction, Montalbano appreciates the beautiful women Camilleri describes
in a formulaic style worthy of the epic. The triangle of Montalbano, Livia and
some “Signorina X” undergoes a number of variations but remains one of
Camilleri’s standard lazzi.
13
On Camilleri’s social construction of immigration, see Alex Mcleod, “The
Contemporary Fictional Police Detective as Critical Security Analyst:
Insecurity and Immigration in the Novels of Henning Mankel and Andrea
Camilleri”, Security Dialogue 45, n. 6 (2014), pp. 524-525.
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The routine changes in Il sorriso di Angelica where Montalbano falls for the
beautiful Angelica Cosulich and allows himself to be played like a puppet.
Camilleri uses a theatrical metaphor to signal the moment when Montalbano
finally understands that the series of robberies directed by the mastermind he
calls “Signor Zeta” has come to an end: “Che era ‘na speci di sipario che calava
alla fini della rappresentazioni” (p. 200). The curtain falls, but neither
Montalbano nor the reader understands the role Angelica Cosulich has played
in the “rappresentazioni”.
Camilleri links the revenge plot (p. 247) directed by Angelica’s cousin Dr.
Ettore Schisa to a particular kind of theater, the medieval tourney, by having
Schisa’s anonymous letter provoke Montalbano’s dream of being defeated in a
tournament by a mysterious and threatening challenger (p. 68, 73). Theater,
poetry and reality then merge when he sets eyes on Angelica Cosulich and sees
in her the incarnation of the Angelica of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso as imagined
by the sixteen year old Salvo (p. 76)14. Camilleri adds another level of artifice
by citing the verses recalled by Montalbano, who would like to play the lover
Medoro to this Angelica, but ends up more the Orlando15. Camilleri uses the
quotations to reflect Montalbano’s state of mind, but also to comment on the
action, as when Angelica joins Montalbano on surveillance (p. 109) and
Camilleri quotes from the scene where Ariosto’s Angelica discards her
invisibility to disingenuously embrace Sacripante 16 . The apparent slip that
occurs when Montalbano recalls Olimpia chained naked to a rock while he
admires the “poppe ritondette” of Angelica Cosulich (p. 77 OF 11.68) reoccurs
at the conclusion when Montalbano sits on a rock along the jetty before going
to arrest the wounded Angelica. Camilleri quotes lines that describe Olimpia,
Ariosto’s northern Ariadne, sitting on a rock abandoned by the faithless Bireno
(p. 253 OF 10.34) when he might have referenced the rock of the grotto
inscribed with Medoro’s love poem (OF 23.111) to parallel Montalbano’s
dejection. By substituting Olimpia for Angelica Camilleri underlines
Montalbano’s predisposition to see Angelica Cosulich as the beautiful victim
rather than the seductive betrayer. Though Montalbano, like Orlando, recovers
from his infatuation (p. 168 OF 23.11), he needs to believe that Angelica never
betrayed him (p. 249). And because he never saw through her performance he
experiences a combination of guilt for not having responded to Schisa’s
warning (p. 220) and the disillusionment that comes to an older man who has
to face the fact that he has become the cornuto d’un tragediatore. The aging
14
In the TV adaptation, the director replaces the dream with a traditional
Sicilian puppet show drawn from the Orlando Furioso.
15
See quotations related to Medoro and Angelica pages 76 (OF 19.34) 95 (OF
19.28) and 98 (OF 19.26) and to Orlando pages 85 (OF 23.128) and 100 (OF
23.127).
16
See pages 106-107 (OF 1.39-40) and page 109 (OF 1.54).
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THE ROLE OF THEATRICALITY IN ANDREA CAMILLERI’S
CRIME FICTION
commissario, left to play the born cop, closes his eyes against that smile and
lets Fazio deliver the line that brings down the final curtain: “Angelica
Cosulich, lei è in stato d’arresto” (p. 254).
Although Camilleri’s narrative follows Montalbano’s point of view, for
dramatic effect he will sometimes pass over or only allude to the commissario’s
intuitions. In Il sorriso di Angelica Montalbano has the vague sense that
something is off for Angelica (p. 215) but not with her. At no point does he
review their relationship to sift out telltale signs of her role - playing, as he does
with Angela and Liliana. We find Montalbano similarly poised between vague
doubts and blindness in La vampa d’agosto where the realization that he has
been played does not fully dawn on him until the concluding moment when he
looks into Adriana Morreale’s eyes and recognizes that her affection has been
faked and that he has been a puppet in her hands: “Era stato un pupo nelle sò
mano. Tutto un tiatro, tutta una finzione” (p. 271).
Camilleri provides no overt hints of Adriana’s ulterior motive as she and
Montalbano move from flirtation to a passionate night of love, aside from the
fact that she is an intelligent and beautiful young woman, blessed as Fazio says
with “palle di ferro” who knows how to shoot (p. 182, 262). Not the type one
might expect to fall for a man thirty years her senior, unless she has a specific
plan, un suo scopo preciso as Montalbano tells Ingrid in Le ali della sfinge (p.
90). She has the motive and by gaining Montalbano’s confidence finds the
opportunity to eliminate Spitaleri, the man who has violated her twin sister
Rina, someone whose corrupt influence shields him from the law. A bonus
comes when Montalbano takes back his gun and assumes responsibility for the
shooting.
Adriana succeeds because, like Montalbano, she can improvise and is totally
independent. Unlike the other seductive women, Adriana does not play a role
in someone else’s tiatro. Her independence allows her to proceed carefully as
she leads Montalbano where his conscience warns him not to go. Her actions,
though obvious in hindsight, are keyed to the moment, as when she stumbles
after their swim, precipitating their love making, or when she suddenly grabs
Montalbano’s pistol as Spitaleri enters the basement apartment and then calmly
delivers the line she has rehearsed to incite her victim: “‘Sono qua, signor
Spitaleri’ disse ’mprovisamente calma, con una voci squasi allegra” (p. 269).
The reader is left to ask if her description of the empathy that possessed her at
the moment of her sister’s violation (p. 177 & 190) and the trance like state she
exhibits in the basement apartment (p. 195) were also faked. Was it all “finta”?
In the eerie half-light of the basement, faces are like the fright masks of a
horror film, as befits the place where Rina had been sodomized and her throat
cut (“le facci invece erano come maschere scantuse…Precisa ’ntifica a una
scenografia da pellicola dell’orrore”, p. 267). But Camilleri may also be
thinking of theatrical puppets, with Adriana playing the little whore to control
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JACK D’AMICO
Spitaleri (“pariva un pupo meccanico”, p. 270) while Montalbano plays the old
fool rather than the “sbirro nato”. When he instinctively protects Adriana and
then rushes out to lose himself in the sea, swimming and weeping, does he weep
for her betrayal or his folly, her ability to execute the plan or his weakness?
Montalbano seems to have lost his equilibrium in more ways than one in La
vampa d’agosto. The planned vacation with Livia and friends has been a
disaster, she is off sailing with her cousin Massimiliano, “irraggiungibile” (p.
104, 249), the obscene corruption epitomized by Spitaleri recalls Dante’s lines
on “serva Italia” (p. 115, Purgatorio 6.76-79) and the rough tiatro (p. 123)
Montalbano uses on Spitaleri’s watchman Filiberto leaves the commissario
dissatisfied with his methods and himself. His uneasiness concerning Livia
turns out to be justified, as we learn in Le ali della sfinge when Montalbano
tells Ingrid that Livia revealed her “feelings” for one Gianni (her love affair
Ingrid corrects) and that he in turn had to tell her about Adriana (to get back at
her Ingrid adds pp. 88-90). In sum, Camilleri uses the tiatro of seduction as the
outward manifestation of Montalbano’s malaise. If he has lost his grasp of the
theater of life, he is truly in need of a good long swim.
Montalbano’s melodramatic reaction to Adriana’s tiatro needs to be
measured against the puppet master Camilleri’s ideal vision of theater as
something that at its best has the power to redeem and to consecrate the truth.
That ideal he explores most clearly in Il cane di terracotta where Montalbano
discovers the bodies of the lovers Lisetta Moscato and Mario Cunich entombed
in the crasticeddru and begins what is for him the purest form of investigation,
pursued not to apprehend a perpetrator but simply to understand the mystery of
the messinscena of bodies framed by a bowl containing coins, a terracotta vase
and the terracotta dog (p. 121). When Montalbano discovers the scene he in a
sense awakens the lovers, as well as Lisetta’s cousin Lillo Rizzitano, who has
abandoned Sicily but returns to explain their tragic story. Camilleri draws
directly on his experience as a director and teacher to shape Lillo as a student
of theater who uses his thesis on an anonymous 16th century representation of
the Seven Sleepers (p. 232) to consecrate the death scene and provide the lovers
a form of sanctuary. If Montalbano is, as he describes himself to Mimì, a lone
wolf (“una specie di cacciatore solitario”, p. 135), it is in his singular role as
determined, if weary puppet master that he seems most appealing. The elderly
Lillo, after he has relived with Montalbano the traumatic events of 1941, falls
into a peaceful sleep protected by his wallet and coins, the glass of water on the
bedside table, and the little cloth dog Montalbano adds to complete the
scenografia. Playfully evocative, Camilleri’s use of theater in the concluding
pages of Il cane di terracotta parallels what he does in his historical fiction. On
the playful side, the dream sequence set in the Opera House of Cairo (p. 258),
the old one before it burned down Camilleri specifies, recalls the opera house
that burns down in Il birraio di Preston, the lovers overcome by the fumes and
Puglisi, the “sbirro bravo” (p. 110) who finds the bodies and, overcome in turn
419
THE ROLE OF THEATRICALITY IN ANDREA CAMILLERI’S
CRIME FICTION
by lust and concern for the honor of the deceased widow, alters the death scene
(p. 125). And the belief that theater consecrates the mysterious passage from
life to death, from sleep to dreams, foreshadows the last scene in Il re di
Girgenti, where the hero Zosimo rises above the messinscena of this world,
above the palco where his body sways from the hangman’s noose (p. 444).
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420