Don Ciccio struggling with the blurred boundaries between good and evil
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It is not easy to understand who is the real protagonist of this novel. Maybe the feelings. That provincial humanity that at certain latitudes is the invisible glue that holds the stories of men together. Even those apparently more distant, such as a priest and a killer, the widow of a suicide and a mangy marshal, an overzealous bank manager and a bishop who does not give up being a good pastor.
The ingredients of “The priest and the killer” by Vitaliano D’Angerio are well mixed. The result is an “atypical”, Mediterranean noir, a novel which, trespassing on the narrow path of the genre, pushes its way onto the front of “social denunciation”, touching different thematic registers and resembling more the short story than the committed narrative.
A suicide
It all starts from the suicide of Stefano D’Onofrio, the butcher, friend of the priest Francesco D’Empoli, known to all as Don Ciccio, and of the inhabitants of Santa Giulia, the imaginary town resting on Mount Somma, the “good cousin of Vesuvius”. From the homily given on the occasion of the religious function for that death, which would not have been foreseen for a suicide, the priest launches an “anathema” against the bank which has denied the extension of the loan to Stefano. In short, the whole story starts from the pulpit, but the trigger is earlier. Stefano is a good man who helps those who cannot pay the delicatessen bills. But he is also a man overwhelmed by debt, unable to ask for help from the many friends who would not abandon him, especially since his money was used to save the life of his son suffering from a rare disease. A man who, perhaps, due to an excess of dignity, decided to put an end to his life, leaving his wife Angela to lift the shutter – which “gets heavier every day” – of that small family business.
Polycentric history
In this polycentric story, where the flow of a human story runs parallel to that of the others, violence and love are reunited, failed attempts at salvation – of a villain who would like to “end” with his life as a killer – and succeeded. There is death, but also posthumous redemption, because in the novel there is also an invisible plot: that of those who try to do the right thing. Sometimes with success, other times out of time. There are no hard-boiled or metropolitan police atmospheres, there is no place for perspicacious or stubborn investigators. The air you breathe between D’Angerio’s pages makes the story bend towards De Gregori’s “The bandit and the champion”, of the relationship between Sante Pollastri and Costantino Girardengo who, between truth and legend, fascinated the chronicles of the first decades of the twentieth century. In Santa Cecilia, which “seemed like a town with no stories to tell”, the news prevails over the myth. In these parts you have to get your hands dirty with real life and the epilogue swings from the tragic to the comforting, because the “good guys” sometimes have to win (thanks to the sacrifice of others).
Even the figure of Don Cicco has nothing “metropolitan”. He is a courageous priest from the suburbs rather than the border, he has his origins from illustrious witnesses of the true news, who every day do not stop talking, denouncing, fighting, precisely between the provinces of Naples and Caserta, rather than from literary predecessors. But, all, good and bad, have in common the desire to change. As Carminiello ‘o ncaccaglio would also like to do, a killer of the underworld, a childhood friend of Don Ciccio who finds himself tragically involved in a story of revenge and friendship. Because from the pages of this novel we understand how good and evil at certain latitudes have blurred, confused boundaries, as if they were lines that sometimes overlap. The novel is easy to read, flows smoothly (this is its strength but also its weakness), as well as the plot – a little too obvious – which however never gets lost in useless complexities that would shift the reader’s attention from its “center”. Perhaps the characters, above all Carmine and don Ciccio, needed to be exploded a little more, digging deep inside and trying to understand the reason for diametrically opposed life choices. But, overall, the novel has done well and humanity – the true protagonist of the story – emerges from the first to the last page.
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