The Four Corners of Palermo

by Giuseppe Di Piazza

  When we woke up, any remaining barriers of hypocrisy were gone. I asked the most useless question possible: “Why, Sophie?”

  “Just because.”

  “It’ll kill you.”

  “I don’t give a shit. I just want to feel okay right now. Do you have a problem with that?”

  I asked a few other questions, of a more technical nature: who, where, when. She decided to tell me what I wanted to know, in a remote tone of voice, as if she were talking about someone else.

  “That Salvatore gives it to me, but I also get it from a guy I met the first few days I was in Palermo. He’s an aristocrat, and aristocrats always have baggies of smack. I met him through a friend of Elena’s. I was already shooting up in Paris, with that photographer I ran away from. He lived to shoot up. I wanted to know if there was another possibility: Brussels, Elena. I was sure I’d be able to do it.”

  “But then you started it up again. Why, Sophie?” I asked, sticking with the theme of pointlessness.

  She shrugged.

  “That’s just the way I am.”

  She stopped talking. She prepared her bag for the day’s work. I stopped asking questions. She didn’t say goodbye, just closed the door behind her. She didn’t have a set of house keys; she’d never asked for them, I’d never offered.

  That afternoon I had a long talk with Fabrizio. I told him about my conversation with Sophie, her confessions. And that guy, Salvatore, and the nobleman whose identity we were able to guess.

  We decided that the summer was over and, whatever else we did, we needed to take a holiday. A long rest from Palermo, a vacation from death and heroin. September was the month for travel, just him and me. We’d taken our first trip together when we were eighteen, after finishing high school. That very afternoon we decided where we’d go: Amsterdam. For a month.

  “What about Sophie?”

  We agreed that we couldn’t leave her alone in the apartment. We knew what drug addicts were like. At that moment, I took a few more steps down the ladder that leads from worthy to worthless. And they were not to be the last.

  “I’ll make some phone calls. I’ll see if there’s someone who can take her in.”

  Fabrizio considered that a wise idea.

  That night, Sophie came home. She barely said hello.

  She went into the bedroom and lay down.

  Almost everything between us was broken. I was afraid of that girl, I wanted to get rid of her, get her far away from me, from my life, her and her syringes, like a handgun aimed at me with the safety off. Then I felt her heart against mine, I’d look at her face, her eyelashes, the lips I would have been glad to dive into and drown. She was still essentially a woman in danger, a Guinevere among Guineveres, and that fact summoned me imperiously back to my duty. I couldn’t. I shouldn’t.

  Lancelot syndrome.

  I went into the living room and I called Vittorio. I’d met him at more than one party: he was a skinny, wealthy man, much older than me, born into an excellent family, with plenty of real estate to spare. I told him about Sophie, about the fact that I was leaving, and asked him if he could take her in for a month or so.

  “We’ll come get her as soon as we get back.”

  I neglected to tell him about the heroin. Vittorio had seen Sophie at a dinner party with Elena, and during our phone conversation he’d referred more than once to her as that “bellissima francese.”

  He agreed to take her in.

  I hung up the phone.

  Lancelot had just shot himself in the head.

  There was something inexplicable there, just as there is in any self-destructive gesture. In the years that followed, I tried to review the cowardice of that period, the decision to get rid of Sophie as if I were flicking a speck of fluff off a navy-blue blazer. I was a conflicted young man, capable of witnessing an autopsy impassively, or evaluating the effects of a .357 bullet on a human cranium, but incapable of talking to an addict whom I loved, or at least I thought I loved. A drug addict who, at that very moment, was the most defenseless young woman on earth, a tiny creature glimpsed on open terrain by a bird of prey: life. I wasn’t indulgent with myself in the months that followed. Then, after a number of years, I grasped what I ought to have understood then and there: I was just a kid immersed in a reality that nowadays would have been a bloodthirsty video game. An avatar moved by the joystick of chance, incapable of decisions and actions guided by a sense of justice.

  Sophie continued along her way through the shadows, doing her best to escape the swooping talons of life for as long as she could. I hurried away from the clearing, in search of a small salvation in the distance that separated me from her. These were natural acts, dictated by the instinct for survival: she had hidden from me the fact that she was a heroin addict, and I had concealed from her the fact that I still wanted the future that was mine by right.

  We said our hasty farewells. I borrowed Fabrizio’s Renault 4, did my best not to look her in the eye, and put her suitcase in the back. Sophie let herself be transported as if she were a package, putting up no resistance, final recipient unknown; she knew she’d made a mistake, that she surfed through life and had taken another spill. The wave of that Palermo summer had washed over her, knocking her down hard: she didn’t expect her weakness to be punished so harshly by the same young man who had described the Baedeker of the stars to her, who kissed her on the eyes and read her Verlaine, the boy in whose arms she had curled up and snuggled. She, the little French girl tossed here and there by the wind.

  I delivered her to Vittorio on an afternoon in early September. She was wearing a white tank and linen Bermuda shorts, with a pair of Converse All Stars on her feet. She’d made up her face, red lipstick, mascara to lengthen her eyelashes. She was heartbreakingly beautiful. I was ashamed of myself, of my lack of courage. Sophie entrusted me with one last commiserating glance. I tried to kiss her on the cheek, but she turned her face away. I drove off staring into the rearview mirror: I saw Vittorio picking up her bag as she trailed along after him. Then she turned for a moment to watch my car as it vanished into the distance. The sun picked out the red of her lips.

  Nine years later, in 1992, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were killed in Palermo. I worked on both massacres without uncovering anything interesting. Then, over a dinner one night, I discovered another murder; the victim was a fragile and touchingly beautiful young woman killed in Paris by a heart attack: Sophie.

  VITO

  A Marriage

  MILAN, DECEMBER 2010

  Blood ties are stronger than a scirocco wind, deeper than the abyss: they are something primordial, something that comes out of nature. A Sicilian knows it from birth, from the first time that, without really understanding it, he experiences the sacred quality of a mother’s touch, a father’s voice. Of course, everyone else knows it, too, whether born farther north or to the south. But many Sicilians, in all their charming conceitedness, are convinced that the world’s most dominant blood type is type S. Not type O, type A, type B, or type AB, but type S: “S” as in Sicily. Their diversity, their imagined supremacy, often makes Sicilians easily recognizable wherever they live. There’s an old statistic that said that there were 5.5 million Sicilians living on the island, but there were 15 million more scattered around the world. A great many more than the Irish.

  These days, I feel that tie myself, perhaps because I’ve lived far from Palermo for almost thirty years now. Or else because on certain foggy mornings I feel a yearning for that original light, for wind and the smell of salt water: I have drops of seawater in the double helix of my DNA.

  Life takes us elsewhere, we chase after dreams and then, one day, we dream of life. In 1958 Leonardo Sciascia described a Sicilian office worker who was told that he was being transferred: he’d leave his job in a small town and move to a city. But, the official hastened to tell him, he’d make sure the man was transferred to a city nearby. “No,” said the office worker, “I’d prefer if it was a city far away: somewhere
outside of Sicily, a big city.” “Why do you want that?” the official asked in astonishment. “I want to see new things,” said the office worker.

  Vito’s family didn’t want to see new things, because it was sealed in an emotional sarcophagus: a grave-like existence made up of rigid borders, dull anger, and misguided loves.

  PALERMO, OCTOBER 1983

  “City newsroom?”

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  “A man named Vito Carriglio ha fatto scomparsi—has disappeared—his three children.”

  “Who’s speaking?”

  “Makes no difference. You write that down?”

  My pen was scratching spastically across the notepad. First I wrote Carriglio. Then, under that, Vito. With my doctor’s handwriting, the words looked like a sketch by Jackson Pollock.

  “So, you wrote it down?”

  “Yes, but …”

  Click.

  The man had a voice like a dried walnut: hard and wrinkled.

  I stood up and went to see my boss.

  “An anonymous phone tip, called in in a fine Sicilian accent, reports three children gone missing and accuses the father, a certain Vito Carriglio.”

  The news editor was stirring his third espresso of the afternoon in a heavy porcelain demitasse: five stirs, six stirs, seven stirs. He was looking at me but said nothing. Eight stirs, nine stirs. I remember reading once that the stirring motion of a cup of espresso can prove hypnotic to some: an American actor, working at Cinecittà, once stirred his coffee forty-one times, later explaining that the act of stirring had given him a sense of perfection. He drank his espresso cold. The director had been satisfied with the emotional depth of his performance.

  But now the news editor stopped stirring.

  “So?”

  “So what, boss?” I asked, intimidated.

  “Have you checked with the archives? Have you talked to the police?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then why are you standing here busting my balls? Check out the tip and then we’ll have something to talk about. There are crazy people everywhere, never forget that.”

  Good point. Still, that voice like a dried walnut told me that something must have happened.

  I phoned down to the archives. Annamaria Florio answered the phone. She was a Marxist-Leninist militant in her forties, and on her days off she stood outside the lobby door of the newspaper, selling copies of Armare il Popolo, an insurrectional publication that was usually printed out of register. I’d occasionally buy a copy because she was a friend, but I was pretty sure all the same that the revolution was destined to fail because of defective printing.

  “Anna, do you happen to know if we have anything on a certain Vito Carriglio?”

  “Hold on. Carriglio, double ‘r’…”

  I could hear the rustling of the manila folders that contained newspaper clippings and photographs.

  “Caronia, Carotenuto, Carraro … ah, here it is: Carriglio. There’s nothing here but a photograph. I’ll send it up.”

  Five minutes later a newspaper messenger boy set an envelope down on my desk. I pulled out the photograph. It showed an overweight man, about forty, on his back in a hospital bed, laughing as he held up a bulletproof vest for the photographer to see, as if it were a trophy. His right leg and left arm had been bandaged. There was something buffoonish about his face. He looked as if he was trying to ridicule someone or something.

  On the back of the photograph was written: “Vito Carriglio—Ospedale Buccheri la Ferla—October 1982.” Underneath that was the stamped name of the photographer, Filippo Lombardo. And the logo of the newspaper.

  Up on the fifth floor were the offices our photographers worked out of. Filippo was their chief, a man who roamed the city incessantly, bearing witness to the essence of this slaughterhouse of a city of ours with the direct power of pictures. Murders took place in the street, and then they wound up on one of his negatives. Or else they’d never been committed.

  I called his extension.

  “Filippo, my lad, do you remember a guy named Carriglio? You took his picture last year.”

  “Wait, who?”

  “It was at the hospital, at the Ospedale Buccheri la Ferla, he’d been shot and he had a bulletproof vest.”

  “An ugly customer. I remember him.”

  “Then come on down and tell me all about him.”

  Filippo picked up the photograph and tapped the nail of his right middle finger on it.

  “This one is tinto, dark and evil,” he said, “the genuine article.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing. He didn’t want to tell anybody anything, not even the police, but he had no problems with having his picture taken. I asked if he’d show us the bulletproof vest that saved his life. He was laughing and his eyes looked like he was on cocaine: he picked up the vest and I took the picture.”

  “Did they shoot him in the body?”

  “No, they intentionally hit him in the legs and arms. But I did find out one thing: he told a male nurse that for days he’d been wearing that vest around his neighborhood. If I’m not misremembering, he was from Acqua dei Corsari. Can you just see it, someone wandering around on the streets in front of his apartment building, strolling by the seaside, in that getup?”

  “You might take him for a nut.”

  “But then they shoot him, turns out he’s not a nut. Anything but, in fact.”

  “Yeah, but if they’d been out to kill him, they would have shot him in the head.”

  Filippo gave me a look and started fooling around with the focus ring on his Nikon FM2.

  “Legs and arms. That was a warning.”

  He’d focused clearly.

  I went back to my news editor and told him about the shooting and the impressions that Filippo conveyed to me. I repeated his words: “An ugly customer.” My boss told me to talk to the police and keep working on it.

  The first thing to do was find out whether, by any chance, a missing persons report for three children had been lodged in the past few days. I decided to call the head of the mobile squad, Antonio Gualtieri, a cop from up north, Turin, who’d come down to Palermo two years earlier. We—journalists, investigators, medical examiners, press photographers—had achieved a sort of symbiosis: we’d see one another at crime scenes and exchange rapid greetings and remarks, communications in code, comrades in arms swapping minor confidences. Gualtieri was a short, tough man, disinclined to camaraderie, with the manners of a K9 Corps dog trainer. At first glance, a man to be afraid of, not a man with whom you’d want to establish symbiosis of any kind; but shift the topic to the Juventus soccer team, and Gualtieri would melt like a granita in the summer heat on Lipari. And ever since Unione Sportiva Città di Palermo, the city’s soccer team, had sunk out of major league sight and was on the verge of dropping to the depths of Serie C, Palermo had been rooting for the Old Lady, Juventus. As a result, even the grim Gualtieri felt at home. Like a granita on Lipari.

  I checked my watch. There would be time to check out those details later. I threw on my fatigue jacket, kick-started my Vespa, and buzzed home to see Cicova, Fabrizio, and his new girlfriend, Serena, who’d just flown down from Milan that afternoon.

  I opened the door and the scent of pasta con i broccoli arriminati—pasta with cauliflower sauce—washed over me. Fabrizio didn’t cook that often, but when he set himself to it he reminded me that divinity could be found hiding in even a simple sauté.

  Serena came to greet me, throwing her arms around my neck.

  “Ciao, journalist.”

  Her eyes glowed in the dim light of the front hall. They were dark and luminous, a rare case of pure oxymoron, with long lashes. Serena had a physical impact on the world: she touched people, she attracted attention, she looked at people decisively, she didn’t mind people brushing against her. Her voice, made up of broad vowel sounds and a Lombard drawl, was softened by her pseudo-French “r.” She embodied all the best things about a northern Italy that
to us was as distant as Andromeda, far away and mythical. Among its inhabitants, Fabrizio and I were for the most part acquainted with the female offspring, the young women who passed through Palermo on their holidays and often, in those days and in those years, in those half hours, found themselves biting into a cinnamon and Chantilly rice pezzo duro Da Ilardo, under the Passeggiata delle Cattive, some of the finest gelato available.

  We were living the carefree lives of people in their twenties, immersed in a city that was methodically going about committing suicide.

  “Ciao, art historian,” I replied.

  Our embrace dissolved slowly, giving us both all the time we needed to explore each other’s backs and shoulders, inch by inch. I hadn’t seen her for a month. I loved her dearly: she was my best friend’s new girlfriend.

  We had met that summer on Vulcano, on the Sables Noirs, the obsidian beach on the west side of the island. Serena was on holiday with her two girlfriends, while Fabrizio and I were taking a short break during a working August: I was busy describing corpses; Fabrizio was reviewing various subjects in preparation for overview exams.

  The only brunette of the three women was Serena, and she was also the prettiest. With the nicest smile, and the most attractive tan. The finest topless. Valentina and Alba, her two blonde, blue-eyed friends, vied to make friends with me: neither of them was forced to concede defeat. Serena aimed straight at Fabrizio’s heart. She, too, emerged victorious. Those ten days on Vulcano left a decisive mark in the emotional pavement of our lives.

  “Where have you been, girl of the north?”

  “Home. With my folks. But now I’m going to stay with you guys until Christmas.”

  “And your exams?”

  “They’re in February. Seventeenth-century art. Applied arts. Studying down here is like getting extra summer: Fabrizio, you, the warmth in the air …”

  Cicova had come over and was rubbing against my legs. Demanding attention. Serena leaned down to stroke him. He started stretching, his whole body purring.