Free Hunting Season: A Novel by Andrea Camilleri

Gulisano,” he said, “would you please do me a personal favor and clarify your attitude for our friend Peluso? That way, we can forget about it and go back to our game.”
    Fiannaca was a good, kind man of few words and sound judgment, but it was known far and wide that it was unwise to deny his requests.
    “Because it makes me angry,” Gregorio Gulisano explained between clenched teeth. “How can this be? For years he’s been boring us with the fact that his difficulty in urination makes him fat as a pig, he tells us in such great detail about the medical examination he got in Palermo that it’s coming out of our ears for two days, he explains how he can only fuck when he’s lying on his back and not like the rest of the human race, and then he comes here tonight and starts pissing every half an hour, so that I can’t follow the game anymore.”
    “And you, Marchese, how do you explain it?” asked Fiannaca, continuing his mediation.
    “It’s all because of four miraculous pears that Santo La Matina gave my father. And now, with your leave, may I?”

    “And there you have it,” Don Filippo concluded. “That was how your father, who worked a parcel of our land as a sharecropper, became known. My father and yours liked each other very much and often talked. And when Santo found out that I was so fat that I had trouble moving, he said he had a remedy for it, and sent me the pears. Then, when I ran out of pears, I went personally to ask for more. And so the two of us set out from your house and rode for two hours, going out past the Crasto mountain and finally up Dead Man’s mountain. It was a desolate spot; even snakes avoided it. We started descending the slope, which was all rocks, and at a certain point the gorge was blocked by a great many boulders. We tied up the horses and slid into a hole. Coming out on the other side, I thought I was in the Garden of Eden. It was barely two acres of land, but it had everything: nectarines, pearlets, sorbs, peaches, oranges, lemons, grapes, sweet almonds, bitter almonds, pistachios, as well as chickpeas still green, tomatoes, fava beans, peas . . . There they were, all these things, one beside the other, in profusion, regardless of the season. How the hell Santo did this, only he knew.”
    “He used to fuck the ground and make love to the plants,” Fofò said calmly, after listening impassively to Don Filippo’s reminiscence.
    “Are you kidding me?”
    “I would never kid you, Don Filippo. I’m telling you something I’ve never told anyone else. I once saw it with my own eyes, when I was pretending to be asleep. He would make an opening in the ground or the trunk of a tree and begin to fuck it. He used his sperm as fertilizer. But he didn’t do it all the time, only on certain nights when a crow he used to talk to would tell him to do it.”
    “He used to talk to a bird?!”
    “Well, as far as that goes, he also spoke to ants, snakes, lizards, you name it. At first my father seemed batty to me; I thought he was talking to himself.”
    “Why is someone who talks to crickets not batty, in your opinion?” asked Don Filippo, polemically holding fast to natural reason.
    “But, you see, Don Filippo, the fact is, those animals would answer him.”
    “They talked?”
    “No, they didn’t actually talk. But they would reply in their own way, with a movement of the body or a sound of their own. But he alone could understand what they were saying. Once, under a scorching sun, he had a three-hour discussion with a lizard.”
    Upon hearing this, Don Filippo felt his head begin to spin. He decided to steer the conversation onto more solid ground.
    “So, I was saying how your father’s name came to be known. And I should mention that that snake Gulisano had secretly followed me. When I came back to town with my pears, Gulisano, with typical cheek, introduced himself to Santo and said and did what he needed to do so that Santo gave him four fennel bulbs to make him