We stacked boxes of jackets, raincoats, Windbreakers, cotton sweaters, and umbrellas. It seemed a strange choice in the height of summer to be stocking up on fall clothing instead of bathing suits, sundresses, and flip-flops. Unlike the warehouses for stockpiling merchandise, these storage apartments were for items that would be put on the market right away. And the Chinese businessmen had forecast a cloudy August. I’ve never forgotten John Maynard Keynes’s lesson on the concept of marginal value: how, for example, the price of a bottle of water varies depending on whether it is in the desert or near a waterfall. That summer Italian enterprises were offering bottles by the falls while Chinese entrepreneurs were building fountains in the desert.
A few days after I’d started working, Xian spent the night at the apartment. He spoke perfect Italian, with a soft r that sounded more like a v. Like the impoverished aristocrats Totò imitates in his films. Xian Zhu had been rebaptized Nino. In Naples, nearly all the Chinese who have dealings with locals take Neapolitan names. It’s now such common practice that it’s no longer surprising to hear a Chinese introduce himself as Tonino, Nino, Pino, or Pasquale. Nino Xian didn’t sleep; instead, he spent the night sitting at the kitchen table making phone calls, one eye on the TV. I’d lain down on my bed, but I couldn’t get to sleep. Xian’s voice never let up, his tongue like a machine gun, firing through his teeth. He spoke without inhaling, an asphyxiation of words. His bodyguards’ flatulence saturated the house with a sickly sweet smell and permeated my room as well. It wasn’t just the stench that disgusted me, but the images it evoked. Spring rolls putrefying in their stomachs and Cantonese rice steeped in gastric juices. The other tenants were used to it. Once their doors were closed the only thing that existed for them was sleep. But for me nothing existed except what was going on outside my door. So I went and sat in the kitchen. Communal space. And therefore also partly mine; at least in theory. Xian stopped talking and started cooking. Fried chicken. All sorts of questions came to mind, clichés I wanted to peel away. I started talking about the Triad, the Chinese Mafia. Xian kept on frying. I wanted to ask him for details, even if only symbolic ones—I certainly didn’t expect a confession about his affiliation. Presuming that the criminal investigations were an accurate reflection of the reality, I revealed my familiarity with the Chinese underworld. Xian put his fried chicken on the table, sat down, and said nothing. I don’t know if he thought what I was saying was interesting. I never did find out if he belonged to the Triad. He took a few sips of beer, then lifted one buttock off his chair, took his wallet out of his pants pocket, flipped through it, and pulled out three bills. He spread them out on the table and placed a glass on top of them.
“Euro, dollar, yuan. Here’s my triad.”
Xian seemed sincere. No other ideology, no symbols or hierarchical passion. Profit, business, capital. Nothing else. One tends to think that the power determining certain dynamics is obscure, and so must issue from an obscure entity: the Chinese Mafia. A synthesis that cancels out all intermediate stages, financial transfers, and investments—everything that makes a criminal economic outfit powerful. For the last several years every Anti-Mafia Commission report has highlighted “the growing danger of the Chinese Mafia,” yet in ten years of investigations the police have confiscated only 600,000 euros in Campi Bisenzio near Florence. A few motorcycles and part of a factory. Nothing compared to the economic force capable of moving the hundreds of millions of euros in capital that American analysts kept writing about. Xian the businessman was smiling at me.
“The economy has a top and a bottom. We got in at the bottom and we’re coming out on top.”
Before he went to bed Nino Xian made me a proposal for the following day.
“You get up early?”
“It depends …”
“If you can be on your feet at five a.m. tomorrow, come with us to the port. You can give us a hand.”
“Doing what?”
“If you have a hooded sweatshirt, it’d be a good idea to wear it.” Nothing more was said. Nor did I insist, eager as I was to take part. Asking too many questions could have compromised Xian’s invitation. There were only a few hours left to rest, but I was too anxious to sleep.
I was ready and waiting downstairs at five on the dot, along with the others: one of my housemates and two North Africans with graying hair. We crammed into the van and headed to the port. I don’t know how far we went once inside the port, or what back alleys we took; I fell asleep, my head against the window. We got out near some rocks, a small jetty jutting out into the gorge, where a boat with a huge motor—it seemed too heavy a tail for such a long, narrow craft—was moored. With our hoods up we looked like members of some ridiculous rap group. The hood I’d thought was to hide my identity turned out instead to be protection against icy sprays, an attempt to ward off the migraine that nails you in the temples first thing in the morning on the open sea. A young Neapolitan started the motor and another steered. They could have been brothers they looked so much alike. Xian didn’t come with us. After about half an hour we drew up to a ship. I thought we were going to slam right into it. Enormous. I could barely tilt my head back far enough to see the top of the bulwarks. Ships in open water let out iron cries, like felled trees, and hollow sounds that make you swallow constantly, your mucus tasting of salt.
A net filled with boxes dropped jerkily from the ship’s pulley. Every time the bundle knocked against our boat, it pitched so severely that I was sure I would fall into the water. The boxes weren’t that heavy, but after stacking thirty or so in the stern, my wrists were sore and my forearms red from the corners jabbing them. Our boat took off and veered toward the coast just as two others drew up alongside the ship to collect more boxes. They hadn’t left from our jetty, but all of a sudden there they were in our wake. I felt it in the pit of my stomach every time the bow slapped the surface of the water. I rested my head against the boxes and tried to guess their contents from their smell, to make out what was inside from the sound. A sense of guilt crept over me. Who knows what I’d taken part in, without making a decision, without really choosing. It was one thing to damn myself intentionally, but instead I’d ended up unloading clandestine goods out of curiosity. For some reason one stupidly thinks a criminal act has to be more thought out, more deliberate than an innocuous one. But there’s really no difference. Actions know an elasticity that ethical judgments are ignorant of. When we got back to the jetty, the North Africans climbed out of the boat with two cartons each on their shoulders, but I had a hard enough time standing without wobbling. Xian was waiting for us on the rocks. He selected a huge carton and sliced the packing tape with a box cutter. Sneakers. Genuine athletic shoes, the most famous brands, the latest models, so new they weren’t yet for sale in Italy. Fearing a customs inspection, Xian preferred unloading them on the open sea. That way the merchandise could be put on the market without the burden of taxes, and the wholesalers wouldn’t have to pay import fees. You beat the competition on price. Same merchandise quality, but at a 4, 6, 10 percent discount. Percentages no sales rep could offer, and percentages are what make or break a store, give birth to new shopping centers, bring in guaranteed earnings and, with them, secure bank loans. Prices have to be lower. Everything has to move quickly and secretly, be squeezed into buying and selling. Unexpected oxygen for Italian and European merchants. Oxygen that enters through the port of Naples.
We loaded the boxes into vans as other boats docked. The vans headed toward Rome, Viterbo, Latina, Formia. Xian had us driven home.
Everything had changed in the last few years. Everything. Suddenly and unexpectedly. Some people sense the change without understanding it. Up till ten years ago, bootleggers’ boats plowed the Bay of Naples every morning, carrying dealers out to stock up on cigarettes. The streets were packed, cars were filled with cartons to be sold at corner stalls. The battles were played out among the Coast Guard, customs, and the smugglers. Tons of cigarettes in exchange for a botched arrest, or an arrest in exchange
for tons of cigarettes stashed in the false bottom of a fleeing motorboat. Long nights, lookouts, whistles warning of a suspicious car, walkie-talkies ready to sound the alarm, lines of men quickly passing boxes along the shore. Cars speeding inland from the Puglia coast, or from the hinterlands to Campania. The crucial axis ran between Naples and Brindisi, the route of cheap cigarettes. Bootlegging was a booming business, the Fiat of the south, the welfare system for those the government ignored, the sole activity of twenty thousand people in Puglia and Campania. It was also what triggered the great Camorra war of the early 1980s.
The Puglia and Campania clans were smuggling cigarettes into Europe to get around government taxes. They imported thousands of crates from Montenegro every month, with a turnover of 500 million lire—roughly $330,000—on each shipment. Now all that has broken up. It’s no longer worth it for the clans to deal in contraband cigarettes. But Antoine Lavoisier’s maxim holds true: nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. In nature, but above all in the dynamics of capitalism. Consumer goods have replaced the nicotine habit as the new contraband. A cutthroat price war is developing, as discounts mean the difference between life and death for agents, wholesalers, and merchants. Taxes, VAT, and tractor-trailer maximums are the deadwood of profit, the real obstacles hindering the circulation of merchandise and money. To take advantage of cheap labor, the big companies are shifting production to the east, to Romania or Moldavia, or even farther—to China. But that’s not enough. The merchandise is cheap, but it enters a market where more and more consumers with unstable incomes or minimal savings keep track of every cent. As unsold merchandise piles up, new items—genuine, false, semifalse, or partly real—arrive. Silently, without a trace. With less visibility than cigarettes, since there’s no illegal distribution. As if they’d never been shipped, as if they’d sprouted in the fields and been harvested by some unknown hand. Money doesn’t stink, but merchandise smells sweet. It doesn’t give off the odor of the sea it crossed or the hands that produced it, and there are no grease stains from the machinery that assembled it. Merchandise smells of itself. Its only smell comes from the shopkeeper’s counter, and its only endpoint is the buyer’s home.
We left the sea behind and headed home. The van barely gave us time to get out before it returned to the port to collect more cartons, more merchandise. I nearly fainted getting into the elevator. I took off my sweatshirt, soaked with sea and sweat, and threw myself on my bed. I don’t know how many boxes I’d carried and stacked, but I felt as if I’d unloaded shoes for half of the feet of Italy. I was exhausted, as if it were the end of a long, hard day. My apartment mates were just waking up. It was still early morning.
ANGELINA JOLIE
In the days that followed, Xian took me along to his business meetings. He seemed to enjoy my company as he went about his day or ate his lunch. I either talked too much or too little, both of which he liked. I followed how the seeds of money are sown and cultivated, how the economy’s terrain is allowed to lie fallow. We went to Las Vegas, an area to the north of Naples. Las Vegas: that’s what we call it around here, for several reasons. Just like Las Vegas, Nevada, which is built in the middle of the desert, the urban agglomerations here seem to spring up out of nothing. And you have to cross a desert of roads to reach the place. Miles of tar, wide thoroughfares that whisk you away from here, propelling you toward the highway, to Rome, straight to the north. Roads built not for cars but for trucks, not to move people but clothes, shoes, purses. As you arrive from Naples, these towns appear out of nowhere, planted in the ground one after another. Lumps of cement. Tangles of streets. A web of roads on which the towns of Casavatore, Caivano, Sant’Antimo, Melito, Arzano, Piscinola, San Pietro a Patierno, Frattamaggiore, Frattaminore, Grumo Nevano, endlessly rotate. Places so indistinguishable they seem to be one giant metropolis, with the streets of one town running into another.
I must have heard the area around Foggia called Califoggia a hundred times, the southern part of Calabria referred to as Calafrica or Saudi Calabria, Sala Consilina Sahara Consilina, or an area of Secondigliano (which means “second mile”) called Terzo Mondo, Third World. But this Las Vegas really is Las Vegas. For years, anyone who wanted to try his hand at business could do it here. Live the dream. Use his severance pay, savings, or a loan to open a factory. You’d bet on a company: if you won, you’d reap efficiency, productivity, speed, protection, and cheap labor. You’d win just the way you win by betting on red or black. If you lost, you’d be out of business in a few months. Las Vegas. No regulations, no administrative or economic planning. Shoes, clothes, and accessories were clandestinely forced onto the international market. The towns didn’t boast of this precious production; the more silently, the more secretly the goods were manufactured, the more successful they were. For years this area produced the best in Italian fashion. And thus the best in the world. But they didn’t have entrepreneurs’ clubs or training centers; they had nothing but work, nothing but their sewing machines, small factories, wrapped packages, and shipped goods. Nothing but the endless repetition of production. Everything else was superfluous. Training took place at the workbench, and a company’s quality was demonstrated by its success. No financing, no projects, no internships. In the marketplace it’s all or nothing. Win or lose. A rise in salaries has meant better houses and fancy cars. Yet this is not wealth that can be considered collective. This is plundered wealth, taken by force from someone else and carried off to your own cave. People came from all over to invest in businesses making shirts, jackets, skirts, blazers, gloves, hats, purses, and wallets for Italian, German, and French companies. Las Vegas stopped requiring permits, contracts, or proper working conditions in the 1950s, and garages, stairwells, and storerooms were transformed into factories. But lately the Chinese competition has ruined the ones producing midrange-quality merchandise. There’s no more room for workmanship. Either you do the best work the fastest or someone else will figure out how to do average work more quickly. A lot of people found themselves out of work. Factory owners were crushed by debt and usury. Many absconded.
One place in particular has been threatened by the disappearance of these midrange industries: Parco Verde in Caivano. Its breath cut short, its growth stunted, it has become the emblem of the outer edge of urban sprawl. Here the lights are always on, the houses full of people, the courtyards crowded, the cars parked. No one leaves. Some people arrive, but few stay. There’s never a moment when the apartment houses are empty, never that sense of stillness after everyone has gone off to work or school in the morning. There’s always a crowd here, the incessant noise of people.
Parco Verde rises up just off the central axis of the city, the knife of tar that slices right through Naples. It seems more like a junk pile than a neighborhood, cement constructions with aluminum balconies swelling like carbuncles from every opening. It looks like one of those places an architect who got his inspiration at the beach designed, as if he’d meant the buildings to look like sand castles, the kind made from pails of sand dumped upside down. Dull, featureless buildings. In one corner is a tiny chapel. You almost don’t notice it, but that wasn’t always the case. There used to be a big, white chapel, a full-scale mausoleum dedicated to a boy named Emanuele. Emanuele was killed on the job. A job that in some places is even worse than moonlighting in a factory. But it’s a way to make a living. Emanuele did robberies. He’d strike on Saturdays—every Saturday. Always in the same place. Same time, same street, same day. Because Saturday was the day for his victims, the day for lovers. And Route 87 was where all the lovers in the area went. A shitty road of patched tar and mini-landfills. Every time I pass there and see the couples, I think you must have to really unleash a lot of passion to feel good in such a disgusting setting. It was here that Emanuele and his two friends hid, waiting for a car to park, for the lights to be switched off. They’d wait a few more minutes—to give them time to get undressed—and then, when the lovers were most vulnerable, they’d strike. They’d sha
tter the window with the butt of a pistol and stick the barrel under the man’s nose. After cleaning out their victims, they’d head off for the weekend with dozens of robberies under their belts and 500 euros in their pockets: meager booty, but it felt like a fortune.
Then one night a patrol of carabinieri intercepts them. Emanuele and his accomplices are so reckless that they don’t realize that constantly pulling the same moves in the same location is the best way to get arrested. A chase, the cars ram into each other, shots ring out. Then all is still. Emanuele is in the car, mortally wounded. He’d pointed a pistol at the carabinieri, so they kill him, eleven shots in just a few seconds. Firing eleven shots at point-blank means your gun is aimed and you’re ready to shoot at the least provocation. Shoot to kill first, and think of it as self-defense later. The bullets had flown in like the wind, drawn to Emanuele’s body as to a magnet. His friends stop the car and are about to flee, but give up as soon as they realize Emanuele is dead. They open the car doors, putting up no resistance to the fists in the face that are a prelude to every arrest. Emanuele is bent over himself, a fake pistol in his hand. A cap gun, the kind that used to be called a dog-chaser, good for keeping stray dogs out of the chicken coop. A toy wielded as if it were real; after all, Emanuele was a kid who acted like a grown man, with a frightened look that feigned ruthlessness, and a desire for pocket money that pretended to be a thirst for riches. Emanuele was fifteen years old. Everyone called him Manù. He had a lean, dark, angular face, the kind you picture when you imagine the last kid you’d want to hang out with. Emanuele came from a corner of the world where you don’t win honor and respect merely for having pocket money, but for how you get it. Emanuele belonged to Parco Verde. And when you come from a place that brands you, no mistake or crime can cancel out the fact of your belonging. The Parco Verde families took up a collection and built a small mausoleum. Inside they placed an image of the Neapolitan Madonna dell’Arco and a photo of Emanuele smiling. Emanuele’s chapel was one of the more than twenty the faithful had built in honor of every Madonna imaginable. But the mayor couldn’t stand that this one was dedicated to a lowlife, so he sent in a bulldozer to knock it down. The cement building crumbled instantly, as if it were made out of modeling clay. Word spread quickly, and the youth of Parco Verde arrived on their Vespas and motorcycles. No one spoke. They all just stared at the man working the bulldozer levers. Under the weight of their gaze, he stopped and pointed to the marshal as if to say that he was the one who’d given the order. A gesture to identify the object of their wrath and remove the target from his own chest. Frightened, besieged, he locked himself in. A second later the fighting began. He managed to flee in a police car as the kids began attacking the bulldozer with fists and feet. They emptied beer bottles and filled them with gas, tilting their motor scooters to drain the fuel right into the bottles, and threw rocks at the windows of a nearby school. If Emanuele’s chapel had to come down, then so did all the rest. Dishes, vases, and silverware flew from apartment windows. Firebombs were hurled at the police. Trash cans were lined up as barricades, and everything they could get their hands on was set on fire. Preparations for guerrilla warfare. There were hundreds of them, they’d be able to hold out a long time. The rebellion was spreading, and soon it would reach Naples proper.
Gomorrah Page 2