The Bank Manager

The housekeeper was keeping a careful eye on the carpenter at his work. Not so as to ensure he didn’t steal anything, as the carpenter assumed his current employer had instructed her, but rather to gauge the amount and severity of mess he was likely to leave behind. In fact Agnese had received no instructions from Mr Piras regarding the visit of the carpenter – he had simply informed her of his impending arrival and left it at that. It had been a brief exchange, on the front steps as he walked briskly down them and she padded heavily up (due more to a morose disposition than stiff joints).‘Carpenter’s coming this morning. Parquet in the living room.’

There was little in the way of greetings – a nod to acknowledge her presence from him and a grunt from her to acknowledge his acknowledgement. In no way did this offend the housekeeper; Agnese was even more terse in words and nature than her notoriously aloof employer. Less said, less nonsense spoken was Aggie’s adage. She kept her own tongue-flapping to a minimum and barely tolerated those who were less frugal in their communications. (Quite apart from her locally renowned cleaning skills, it was Agnese’s equally well-known intolerance of prattle, and most of all gossip - which she viewed as the most evil prattle of all - that had secured her the position; her employer was a very private man.)

Parquet in the living room. Aggie appreciated, and if she were honest with herself, even admired Mr Piras’s precise brevity. They both knew that the floor near the hearth had become pocked with burn holes and scorch marks from spitting logs and the odd escaped ember, and they both knew that they both knew it. Why babble on with needless explanations? Waste of breath, thought Agnese, who didn’t even think theA. A waste of time to her employer, the local bank manager, who didn’t even bother to register the thought at all – the car door had already slammed behind him, a split second before the key slid into the ignition and he was gone. Agnese shuffled in and took off her coat, hanging it on the rack in the hallway. Her first destination was the kitchen which she knew she would find little altered since her last visit three days earlier – she came Mondays and Thursdays, and it was Thursday. Just as she had known, little of the damage (as she saw it) of ordinary living had been inflicted on the kitchen; the marble surfaces and top-of-the-range appliances could use a little light dusting more than scrubbing.

Carpenter’s coming this morning. Again, all the necessary information had been supplied with impressive economy. The carpenter would doubtless be Sam, a local fixture. Had it been anyone else it would have been mentioned. And that scally Sam would turn up in his own good time, she was sure. No pinning that boy down.Sam was certainly a leisurely type, and infinitely more garrulous than both Mr Piras and his housekeeper put together, and indeed, quite the ‘boy’. The carpenter’s mother had named her sunny baby son Samuele but he was Sam from the day he was brought home from the hospital to capture hearts around the village. Initially his tactics had consisted of the usual gummy grin and unsteady gait, but soon progressed to unshakeable friendliness and unassailable good humour.

Within a few years of leaving school and making a name for himself as a capable woodworker and odd jobs man, his popularity had his celebrated ‘availability’ to add to it. Sam always had a little extra time, usually just before dinner, to throw up a wall of shelving or replace a window pane. His work was good and his rates reasonable and often black. Perhaps one because of the other.People never minded Sam showing up at seven, just as the potatoes or pasta or polenta or whatever was due to be thrown into boiling water. Some form of aperitivo was normally dredged up, and an extra place shuffled in at the dinner table. Most people were unquestioningly grateful that Sam had managed to squeeze their warped window frame into his busy schedule, but if truth be told, Sam often cadged his meals in this way, more because he liked to eat in company than because he couldn’t or didn’t want to cook.

While Mr Piras – manager of the local bank - stood out from the rest of the villagers on account of his physicality, being unaccountably very blond, Sam also was noteworthy for his physicality, but in a different sense. He liked to slap shoulders, hug one-armed or two, and his greeting always went to the third kiss on the cheek, too French for some. But even if some village matrons weren’t entirely sure how they felt about a squeeze on a podgy upper arm, or if some weathered farmer felt a little invaded by a back slap hearty enough to loosen catarrh, well, that was just Sam.

Mr Piras instead was known for his ’hmmm’s, delivered without eye contact while scanning loan or overdraft requests.

It was with his friend Kitty, barista of the only local bar, and largely for her amusement, that Sam had planned a ‘poke’ around the Piras place. What might he find, he had asked her.‘Nazi memorabilia in the basement,’ she had replied.‘Or S&M sex toys in the dishwasher.’‘Demented wife in the attic, definitely.’Sam and Kitty had one-upped each other in this fashion innumerable times since the bank manager had called a few days previously about his living room floor. And they had not yet become at all bored of it. Even now, having stripped away all the parquet tiles with the offending disfigurements, he paused to text her: corpse under the floorboards.

It had been a blow to find Aggie so watchful. He had quite convinced himself there would be something juicy to discover, and he had been looking forward to delivering his report at the bar at lunchtime. But the housekeeper was proving too nosey, he thought hypocritically. Oh well, he would just have to make something up. Animal porn under the mattress! Oh Rosie Piras, you beast!

The use of the nickname ‘Rosie’ was not an illustration of the affection with which the villagers of Borghetto regarded their leading human financial asset. In fact some believed him to be barely human at all. Rather it was an ironic take on his unsmiling and rather dour nature. Rosario Maria Piras wasn’t a man who lived close to the hearts of his clients.

Admittedly, Mr Piras had either granted or not granted many of the villagers their hearts’ desires. A honeymoon loan refused here, a mortgage okayed there was sure to lead to an ambiguity of feeling toward him. But the bank manager never allowed that to influence his decisions. He took care to remain deliberately oblivious.It wasn’t arduous for him to do so. Rosario Maria Piras was a cold unfriendly man. He found the most mundane of questions prying. His colleagues had long since learned to refrain from such banal inquiries as ‘Nice weekend?’ or ‘Any plans this evening?’. Having been stonewalled times beyond count in the early days of their ‘relationship’ with the bank manager, they had come to assume that these questions were simply too boring for their haughty superior to bother answering. Or perhaps inappropriate between manager and underlings, who knew.

In reality, Rosario had found their early mindless chatter nosey, and the same went no matter who asked him. Just rude intrusive mindless invasions, best ignored. His mother fared no better than anybody else, but unfortunately for the mother-son relationship, she had not learned to withhold her curiosity, which in fairness burned much brighter than anybody else’s. But it was no better satisfied.

Mr Piras stood apart from his fellow villagers in his physicality as well as his taciturn character. His blond hair lying in its short waves and his icy blue eyes were as erratic a feature among the local population as a large boulder standing defiantly upright in an otherwise flat and empty field. Given that Mr Piras’s mother was fervent if not fanatical in her Catholicism, and unmarried, historical local humour had her deflowered by a passing Viking. Everyone assumed that the Viking had been picking seasonal fruit one summer rather than plundering, but out of deference to good Teresa Piras, it wasn’t widely debated. Any more.

Teresa, now in respectable late middle age and still unmarried, held the position of village eccentric, a noble and long held tradition. Immediately before she unknowingly took on the role, a man named Cirio had occupied the post, and one of his final acts of waywardness involved the home production of vast amounts of fragolino, a strawberry flavoured and normally fairly innocuous wine, though when made to Cirio’s recipe, massively alcoholic and more than slightly dangerous. One must say it only involved Cirio’s home industry, because the production of the wine, and its consumption, had been a generational endeavour, passed from father to son, nothing that out of the ordinary. No, the true feat was his cycling to his hearing when finally brought to book. To a courtroom some twenty kilometres distant, and at the age of nigh on eighty. He was acquitted, no-one knows quite how, and cycled quietly home, to enter the village history books. He was not to pay the piper for another twenty odd years.

Teresa’s dottiness tended to keep to the right side of the legal divide. They also seemed to follow the flow of the years and fads that were widely embraced elsewhere but were left solely to the more adventurous and broad-minded of the village – astrology, acupuncture, reflexology, aromatherapy – a whole maelstrom of symbols, smells and pressure points. Lately, she had been investigating her diet and that of anyone else around her who would permit it either out of genuine interest, a willingness to humour, or perhaps, rather cruelly, in order to store up some hilarity for later in the bar.

It wouldn’t be wildly inaccurate to say that a few countenanced her ramblings so as to score a few points with her influential son.Teresa was oblivious to all this of course, and even if she were to become aware of the way in which the village viewed her, she would not have minded. She would have a philosophy tucked away to square away any hurt feelings. And if not, she would just have squared them away by herself.

But if it had ever occurred to her that her harmless bumblings around the village, baggily dressed and under-groomed, caused her son the greatest embarrassment of his life and always had, she would have been devastated, and no new-age therapy or ancient spiritualism would have salved the pain.

Some might say that Mr Piras’s tragedy was that nobody other than his mother burned with curiosity about his private life or the lack of it. (His mother always worried of the lack of it.) A slight spark ignited occasionally, when, as is inevitable in a small community, a scanty flame of gossip wound its way around the houses scattered at the foot of the hill where Borghetto found itself – gossip in which he figured. But invariably it was never true, or even that exciting. And Mr Piras probably never heard a whisper, being as he was, which took all the fun out of it for everybody.

Yes, many would have seen this as a true tragedy of human isolation. Rosario Maria Piras saw it as a triumph, if he saw it at all.He certainly had no inkling now, as he sat at his desk, that a couple of the locals had tirelessly amused themselves for days dreaming up debris of fanciful scandals that lay hidden (badly) in his home.Sam replaced the last of the parquet tiles with a few confident thumps of his hammer and straightened up sighing. He had a last look around the living room – smart and well provisioned, with a large leather sofa and widescreen TV, but somehow sterile, and worse, just not funny at all. He had managed a look upstairs (a trip to the bathroom being justifiable even to the formidable Aggie), but had met no demented wives. Disappointed, he packed up his tools to leave. He didn’t even bother asking for a cup of tea (which he would normally have, in the hopes of getting a full lunch, it being the time of day that it was); the thought of ingesting anything under the baleful observation of the taciturn Aggie was playing tricks with his appetite.

Voodoo paraphernalia under the kitchen sink, he mused as he left.