The Four Corners of Palermo

by Giuseppe Di Piazza

  He thought about his brother, Giovannuzzo, his mouth pursed in a whisper on the front page of the newspaper: he felt like throwing up. He’d handed him over to his murderers; he’d betrayed him without thinking twice, bending his knee when Salvatore “Salvo” Incorvaia had made his demand, in the face of his brutal and ferocious extortion: “Castrenze, my darling boy, we know that he was the one who stole the necklace, the fences in the Borgo told us so. Bring him to us, and we’ll beat him black and blue. You can go back to travagghiare with your tuna roe. And he’ll have paid his debt to my cousins, the Pecoraino family. It’s better for you to do it this way, believe me.”

  My darling boy. Those three words came out flat from between the thin grayish lips of Salvo Incorvaia. Castrenze was afraid of that man—so young, so evil. He answered yes with his eyes as he looked down. The next night he used some excuse to persuade Giovanni to come down to the fish market, behind the Cala. And there Giovanni found Salvo waiting for him, with an armed escort: two picciotti. Giovanni looked at his elder brother in bewilderment: he couldn’t understand. Castrenze took two steps back, arched his eyebrows as if to say, “What can you do about it?” Castrenze knew that Giovanni was about to take a beating, that he was about to pay his debt in the coin of physical pain: but in Palermo, it’s better never to leave a debt unpaid.

  What can you do about it, Giovannuzzo?

  He went home, certain he’d have to explain the next day that he’d done it for Giovanni’s own good. A beating, a pounding, a clubbing, and then you’re done. Anything, everything, but not a severed head on the front page of the newspaper, whispering over and over again: You betrayed me, and you’re my brother.

  His assistant left for the day. They’d replenished the salt on all the tuna roe. He washed his hands, picked up a pad of graph paper, and wrote a couple of lines in off-kilter block print, in a hybrid language all his own: IT WAS BEEN THE INCORVAIAS, DOWN AT THE SEEFOODE MARCKET. He folded the sheet of paper, slipped it into a yellow envelope, the kind you use to send certified letters, and wrote the address of the newspaper and the name of the reporter who’d written the articles about Giovannuzzo’s murder, stamped it, and mailed it.

  People in Palermo pay their debts.

  A certified letter from an illiterate. There it sat, on my desk, tossed there by Saro as he was distributing the morning mail: in the name, address, and city, I counted five misspellings. I opened it. And my theory was confirmed: illiterates know everything.

  I reread those two lines in block print. The Incorvaias: exactly. The Pecorainos’ cousins. It was them, down at the seafood market.

  I checked in with the news editor; we decided to turn the anonymous letter over to Gualtieri. I was looking for his direct number when the phone on my desk rang. The switchboard informed me that there was a girl who wanted to talk to me.

  “Who is it?”

  “She wouldn’t say.”

  “All right, put her through.”

  I’d guessed who it was.

  “Ciao, Rosalia.”

  She said nothing. I could hear her breathing.

  “I have to talk to you. Could you come to Da Cofea, right away?” There was a mournful tone to her voice.

  “I’m on my way.”

  I put the anonymous letter in my pocket, grabbed my cloth jacket, and galloped downstairs.

  Eight minutes later I was pulling up outside the shop that sold the finest brioche con gelato di caffè ever produced in Palermo. Pastries filled with coffee-flavored gelato.

  Rosalia was in the back, sitting at a little table. She wore seventies-style sunglasses with oversized lenses, in black plastic frames, and her gray overcoat; an appearance that overall seemed hardened, if that was possible. I sat down with her, and we ordered mineral water.

  “You have to stop writing.” Just like that, without preliminaries.

  “Ciao, Rosalia. What’s this all about?”

  “You have to stop, you have to stop.” Her voice broke, and she was sobbing.

  “What’s happened?”

  She lifted her sunglasses, and she had a black eye, her left eye—bruised and swollen shut.

  “A man, last night. He was waiting for me by the bus stop. He told me that if I wanted to know the truth, he’d be glad to tell me all about it. The way they’d told my father. I tried to run away, and he gave me a tremendous punch. I flew to the pavement. And he strolled away, in no hurry, lighting a cigarette.”

  I took her hand in mine. It was icy cold. She put her sunglasses back on, squeezed my fingers, and I saw a tear make its way past the barrier of the sunglass frames and streak its way down her cheek.

  “I promised to help you, to find the truth so you could get your life back,” I told her.

  “I know you did. But now I’m afraid.”

  My mind went to the anonymous note in my pocket. The truth was written on it, and maybe I’d just have to keep it to myself. Maybe.

  I moved my chair over closer to hers.

  “Rosalia, you need to go away. You’re a smart, beautiful, proud girl. Go on, get out of here, run away.”

  “I’m a daughter: I’m not going anywhere.”

  She let go of my hand. She stood up, adjusting her overcoat.

  “But do me this favor: stop writing about what happened to my father.”

  I said yes, with the immediate rush of guilt that comes when you’re a bad liar: I’d stop writing, but the police wouldn’t stop investigating.

  We said goodbye with a single kiss on the cheek, the way we do in Palermo. Then I watched her go. She didn’t turn around. She’d given up.

  In the late afternoon I went to see Gualtieri. I gave him the anonymous letter and told him about the threats and the violence targeting Rosalia. I asked him to take it easy. To keep it all under wraps. He asked me why.

  “That girl would like to have a future,” I tried to explain.

  He eyed me curiously.

  “If you ask me, the only future she can hope for is one where we catch the people who murdered her father and say just how things went. What do you say to that, young investigator?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Antonio, you ought to know: in Palermo there’s never a full yes, nor is there ever a direct no. The way we say things is a trasi e nesci, in and out, enter and exit. Forward and back, start and stop: never clearly in one direction.”

  “So what are we supposed to do, arrest a little bit and a little bit not arrest?”

  “No, I’m just asking you to be discreet. Don’t let the press write the whole truth about the beheading of her father.”

  “I don’t know the whole truth yet.”

  “You’ll find it, trust me. You start the way I did from the ex-voto to Saint Rosalia and this anonymous note. I could have thrown it away, but I brought it to you precisely because I want the truth to be told, but discreetly.”

  He was a Turinese cop in Palermo; but then and there he felt like a human being, the only human being, on Mars.

  “Fine. I’ll protect the girl.”

  I smiled gratefully. We chatted for a few more minutes about the soccer player Zbigniew Boniek and the coverage he got in France Football, and then I left.

  The night sky was dark; there was a storm on its way. In the street, I felt the first few drops hit my face. I chained the Vespa to a lamppost near the door to my building. I needed a sense of safety.

  Lilli was in the kitchen; Serena and Fabrizio were in their bedroom. Cicova rubbed his back against my left calf. I heard the slow notes of “Us and Them” from the living room, the intertwining voices of Gilmour and Wright. I’d landed back on my own happy planet, I was breathing the air of my own generation, there was shared DNA in our cells.

  “Welcome home, mio amore,” Lilli said, as I walked toward her down the hall. I hugged her so tight it took her breath away.

  “I love you,” I whispered, letting her catch her breath. She, too, was a daughter; I, too, was a son. We all wer
e, in a place where the meaning of the word “family” is love today, horror tomorrow.

  The evening slipped away peacefully, over a bowl of spaghetti and a few LPs of progressive rock. I did my best to forget about Rosalia’s tears. I suggested we play a game of Trivial Pursuit. Two hybrid teams: Fabrizio and Lilli against me and Serena. We were quickly beaten: they knew everything, they were intolerable.

  Lilli yawned and Serena and Fabri said buona notte. We went to bed, too.

  I couldn’t get to sleep. It wasn’t the adrenaline; I’d exhausted that with Rosalia and Gualtieri. It was a sense of inadequacy with respect to my working days: I did my job, I dealt with death, I talked to policemen, women, little kids. I searched, I found, and I wrote. But I understood nothing. I couldn’t see a reason why. A reason why there was another world, so different from the one I know that surrounded me, outside that apartment, a world that was “plus fourteen” away from Palermo. All it took was a train, a night in a sleeping car, and I’d see in the rest of Europe how different the late twentieth century was.

  Lilli had fallen asleep with her arms around me, a sweet ball of wool, a tiny island of meaning.

  I didn’t turn off the lamp on the nightstand. In my hands I was holding a copy of The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I kept rereading the same two lines without registering a word. I decided to get up and do what I ought to have done at the end of the afternoon: write my piece about the death of Giovanni Neglia.

  I pulled my pistachio-green Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter out of its case, took out a sheaf of millimeter graph paper, and went into the dining room to keep from awakening Lilli. I sat down at the dinner table.

  The mystery of the severed head has been solved: Giovanni Neglia, age 50, was beheaded because he stole a necklace from the home of Ruggero Pecoraino, cousin of a Mafia boss. The necklace had belonged to his daughter, little Filomena, who died of cancer at age 12. The murder was committed by Salvatore “Salvo” Incorvaia, a mob boss with ties to the Corleonese clan and Pecoraino’s brother-in-law.

  In the eighty lines that followed, I gave an account of the murder and its solution, explaining that the beheading had taken place in the Incorvaias’ warehouse, a place normally used for the decapitation of tuna. The head had been severed with a meat cleaver and then left to bleed out, hung up near the fish until it was drained of blood. The killer had then placed the body in the trunk of the car and had left the Ford Escort in front of the station to make the whole thing that much more evident, a clear and unmistakable lesson. I ended the piece with a reference to the suffering of the Neglia family.

  I read it over. I crumpled it up and threw it in the trash.

  I stretched out on the sofa and picked up a book of poetry by Giorgio Caproni that Serena had left on the coffee table. A postcard of the catacombs of the Capuchin monks bookmarked page 81.

  I opened the book and read from the beginning:

  Amore mio, nei vapori d’un bar

  all’alba, amore mio che inverno

  lungo e che brivido attenderti!

  My love, amid the fumes of a bar

  at dawn, my love, such a long

  winter, I shiver as I wait for you!

  It was all too much. Too many different gazes, impossible to meet at that point of the night: Rosalia’s black eyes, once again dark in her unconditional surrender; Lilli’s blue eyes, transparent with gentle sweetness; the eyes, closed forever, of that bodiless head; the ferocious eyes of a man who chops, beheads, and bleeds out a human being. And now the sigh of those lines of verse, the certainty of a different world, far away, in the eyes of a man in love, waiting in a café at sunrise.

  I shut the book and set it down. Cicova slowly came over to me. He pushed his nose against my whiskers. He wanted me to go on reading. I paid no attention to him, but I should have: cats are always right.

  Place Names

  The heart of Palermo is split into four parts by the intersection of two main thoroughfares: Corso Vittorio Emanuele, also known as the Càssaro (from the Arabic “qasr,” “the fortress”), a road first built by the Phoenicians to connect the port to the necropolis; and Via Maqueda, built at the end of the sixteenth century at the behest of the Spanish viceroy at the time, Bernardino de Cárdenas, Duque de Maqueda. The crossroads where the two main thoroughfares met became a piazza commonly known as the Quattro Canti di Città. Each canto, or canton, is the spigolo, or corner, or a mandamento, one of the four historic quarters of the city: Tribunali, Castellammare, Palazzo Reale, and Monte di Pietà. A canto, in Palermo, is a corner.

  But of course, a canto in Italian is also a song, or a section of an epic poem. In the pages that you have just finished reading, the four cantos form a fifth canto, invisible to the eye but unmistakable to all those who have left Palermo: il canto dell’assenza—the canto of absence.

  Acknowledgments

  I thank:

  My father for his silences.

  My mother for her words.

  My sister, Gianna, for the love in her eyes when she looks at me.

  My friends Fabrizio Zanca and Antonella Romano for the feelings we’ve shared.

  I thank:

  Camilla Baresani, Francesca Lancini, Alberto Cristofori, Alfredo Rapetti, Laura Ballio, Alba Donati, Alessia Algani, Roberto Andò, and Roberto Gobbi for their invaluable help; Filippo la Mantia for having taken a picture I’ve kept with me since 1983; Ferdinando Scianna and Marpessa Hennink for their generosity.

  I thank:

  Elisabetta Sgarbi for being the rockingest publisher I’ve ever known.

  And I thank Palermo for my being born there.

  GIUSEPPE DI PIAZZA began his career in journalism in 1979 with the newspaper L’Ora. He has worked for such Italian publications as Sette, where he was director, and for Max as editor in chief. He is currently an editorial director at Corriere della Sera and teaches a master’s course in journalism at the IULM University of Languages and Communication in Milan. The Four Corners of Palermo is his first novel.

  ANTONY SHUGAAR’s most recent translations include Strega Prize winners Resistance Is Futile by Walter Siti and Story of My People by Edoardo Nesi, as well as On Earth as It Is in Heaven by Davide Enia, Romanzo Criminale by Giancarlo De Cataldo, and Not All Bastards Are from Vienna by Andrea Molesini. He is currently writing a book about translation for the University of Virginia Press.