by Petra Reski
When Fava thought of Palermo, his nostrils were filled with the scent of the fried-food stalls in the Piazza della Kalsa, the smell of seething oil bubbling away in big aluminum pots, the aroma of panelle, chickpea fritters, of roasted calves’ feet. He remembered picking the panelle out of their paper and saying hello to the fat man who always sat outside the church of Santa Teresa alla Kalsa in the rectangular shadow of a pollarded tree, cleaning olives and peeling potatoes to make croquettes. He remembered how there were always snails there on a Sunday, snails in garlic, from eleven in the morning till eight at night. And the fact that he would never again walk through the Kalsa with his two sons. Sometimes he consoled himself with the fact that at long last he no longer smelled of fear, fear of the police, of an undercover agent, of traitors in his own ranks, of a mission that he couldn’t refuse. Bringing a friend to his executioner.
All his brothers worked in his family’s butcher shops in the Ballarò market, not far from the police headquarters. Fava had worked there as well; no one had asked any questions when he disappeared from time to time, for an hour, for half a day. His younger brother, Giuseppe, was in Cosa Nostra as well. He was arrested ten days after Marcello. And he has kept his mouth shut until now, as befits a man of honor.
When Fava’s brothers found out that Marcello had become a turncoat, they closed up the iron shutters of their butcher shops and laid chrysanthemums outside them. Above them they hung a sign: Per un crasto, For a castrated billy goat. Nothing dishonors a Sicilian more than this jibe. “We have no turncoat brother,” they said, “we have only a dead brother.”
I haven’t told my children anything about my past. You can imagine what our first meeting in jail was like, after my family had been taken out of Palermo and brought to a strange city where no one knows us. The two boys cried, they wanted to go back to Sicily, to their grandmother, to their cousins. My children have always been spoilt rotten. It was terrible for them, suddenly feeling they were all alone in the world. Then when I talked to them I made them understand that they would never have seen their father again if he hadn’t taken this step.
When Fava talked about committing murder, he sounded like a car mechanic explaining the problems that arise when he takes out an old gearbox and puts a new one in. He smiled with a mixture of embarrassment and superiority, the way car mechanics smile when they’re talking about torque-to-weight ratios, knowing that the customer won’t have the faintest idea what they’re going on about. But when he talked about his family he seemed to lose his composure, his voice trembling, as if what he regretted was not the murders but the shame he had brought on his family. There were eighty relatives in his family, counting only the closest blood relations. His children had no relatives now; they would never celebrate weddings with their family, or baptisms, or first communions. All because their father had wanted only the best for them. And had turned into a worm. Into less than nothing.
I remember what it was like when I learned that my godfather had become a turncoat. It was a Sunday when I got the call. Men from my clan rang me up: “Get on your motorbike right now and come and see us!” They sounded very agitated. I remember arriving at the meeting place outside Palermo half an hour later, where a lot of men of honour had already assembled and were waiting for me, stony-faced. They said, “Sit down.” At that moment I knew nothing except that my godfather had been arrested two days previously. I thought, maybe they’ve killed him up at police headquarters. Because he’d tried to escape. Something like that. But then they told me: “Your godfather has become a turncoat.” And I started laughing like a lunatic. “That’s why you had me almost kill myself driving through Palermo on my bike? To tell me some crap like that?” “What do you mean crap,” the others said, “it’s true.” And then I really did have to sit down. It was the disappointment of my life. A myth collapsed for me. My godfather was—something like that. Someone who had been like a visiting card for me: if you thought about it, people were always mentioning the fact that he was my godfather. And now—a nobody. They all went underground for a while. As for me, I stayed quietly at home and waited. All around me men were being arrested, I was the only one who was spared the investigations. And I said to myself: my godfather’s forgotten about me.
For the blink of an eye, I had the impression that Fava’s face had been set in motion: his eyelids were flickering, his cheeks trembling, and his freckles twitching. But then his cheeks turned pink and relaxed again, and he fell silent. The woven straw seat of the chair he was sitting on creaked. It was as if the straw were betraying his insecurity. For a long time there was no sound to be heard but the squeaking of the woven straw and the officer sitting by the door making a rustling sound as he turned the pages of his John Grisham novel. Some noise filtered up from the street, car doors slamming and the roar of a passing bus.
The fact that his own godfather had become a turncoat hadn’t persuaded him, he said, to switch to the other side. There was still no need. Plainly his godfather had covered for him, in spite of the obligation to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He had simply hushed up the fact that Marcello Fava had belonged to Cosa Nostra since he was twenty years old. So why should Fava have crossed over to the other side? There was no need to. No feelings of guilt. He only experienced those later on, toward his wife. For twenty years he had cheated on her with the Mafia. His wife had never known anything, he said, she had never doubted him for a moment. If I say a horse is flying, my wife will believe it.
But she wasn’t as naive as her husband imagined. No Sicilian woman is naive. She walked to police headquarters when she heard that her husband had been arrested again. She knew that he hadn’t been a victim of the judiciary, innocently persecuted on suspicion of being a thief and a bank robber, but someone who had had the end of his prison sentence sweetened by his bosses when they had paid for the baptisms of his two sons—four hundred guests, very Cosa Nostra. Lobsters and champagne. She knew that when he went with her to mass on Sunday he was only waiting for a sign from his boss. A slight nod of the head, and already he was getting up from his pew to discuss a few matters outside—protection money, money from public contracts, bribes, new supermarkets and bingo halls for money laundering, money for mafiosi in jail. The clan’s money was never enough. After communion he sat back down in his seat. She knew he ignored her when she said: “I don’t like those people you talk to.” She said nothing more than that. She knew what it meant when he begged her to go with him to lunch at the boss’s villa. To a christening in Palermo cathedral. To a wedding feast in Mondello, in the Palace Hotel, with real swans swimming in the pool. It would have been a deadly insult to appear without his wife.
His wife’s dislike of Cosa Nostra didn’t stop her from following him in his flight from the police. A life that Cosa Nostra made as pleasant for him as possible. His brother found him a little villa outside Palermo and a few lads to act as bodyguards, who checked that the coast was clear, who went with him on his motorbike, because that’s the easiest way for a wanted mafioso to get around Palermo. The full-face helmet was his disguise, that and the wigs, the stick-on beards—which didn’t keep the “flunkeys,” as he still called the police in those days, from storming the villa. Shots rang out, and his wife thought he was injured. While she was looking for him in all the hospitals of Palermo, she didn’t know that they had just been warning shots and he was already in handcuffs at police headquarters. She was pregnant at the time. And lost the child. After a week in solitary, he decided to do the unthinkable. His wife said only: “Whatever you do, I’m with you.”
I have no daughters. That’s something I’d rather not talk about. It’s an open wound for me. Because when I was twenty, I was given a daughter. Who died at birth. I have three dead children. They all died at birth. That’s something my wife is always reminding me about. Because they’re buried in Palermo. And my wife constantly thinks of them, of those dead children. I hope I’ll bring her back to me one day. So that I can do my duty at
last.
When he talked about his three dead children, his eyes welled up with tears. He looked awkwardly in his briefcase for a handkerchief, bent down to hide his face, and blew his nose noisily into it. He saw the miscarriages as a curse from God. As a punishment for his blasphemous life. Perhaps he was thinking about the people who had wept like children before they were strangled. Perhaps he was thinking of the ones who had died standing up, which is what the men of Cosa Nostra call it when a man of honor doesn’t plead for his life. Perhaps he was thinking about how he had taken part in the funeral of a victim, about how he had straightened the sash on the wreath, looked the family in the eyes, and shaken their hands to express his sympathy. Perhaps. And perhaps not. Had he not acted like a soldier?
I was always very devout. As a child, I was an altar boy for the Salesians. After that, I drifted away from the church a little, I committed my first burglaries—but I’m still devout even today. As my son is, too. He loves religious processions. When we were still living in Sicily, he wouldn’t miss a procession. Sometimes he copied them at home, he wore a veil and a train like the saints in the procession. He has three hundred figures of the saints at home. He’s taken them all over the place. And he does that even now that he’s eighteen years old and has a girlfriend.
At the end of the interview Fava got to his feet and cracked his knuckles. The police woke from their slumbers; one of them looked through the peephole and nodded to the other officers. He hoped his observations had been useful to me, Fava said sheepishly. He awkwardly put his crib sheet back in the briefcase. When he opened it I saw that it was empty, apart from a book, History of the Mafia from 1943 until the Present. I remembered an old bookseller in Palermo, whose shop wasn’t far from the Via della Libertà, telling me that the bosses from the Borgo Vecchio were among her best customers. As soon as she put a new book about the Mafia in her shop window, it sold out straightaway.
“Is there anything about you in that book?” I asked. And Fava replied: “Yes, on page 568.” He said it like someone who’s managed to get an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Then he took his leave of me, very formally, with a small hint of a bow. He seemed relieved. He said: “There are people who go through life with their eyes open. And those who live with their eyes closed.” At last, four officers flanked him and walked him to the street. I had to wait upstairs in the apartment until the car he was in had disappeared.
The two remaining policemen were curious to know whether I’d found the interview interesting. Whether I’d met other mafiosi, and what differences I’d spotted in their personalities. And what Germans know about the Mafia. Then they offered to take me in their car to the nearest taxi stand. Their car looked like a cross between a minibus and an amphibious vehicle, so I asked them if it could drive in water as well.
“We can’t tell you that,” the policemen said, “because then we’d have to kill you.”
The man in the midnight-blue, double-breasted suit also cracks his knuckles. We’re already preparing to land in Palermo, the tables are tipped up again, the seat-belt signs are on, and I’m still wondering whether I should speak to him for a moment. But what would I say? “Remember me? I’m a journalist and interviewed you once, in Rome.” Because I don’t think he does remember me. Journalists are never perceived as people. We’re nothing but mirrors that people talk into. You speak into them, and in the end an article comes out. You remember the name of the newspaper or magazine. Or maybe not. In Italy, at any rate, I’m rarely remembered. And he would have good reason not to remember me, because in returning secretly to Palermo he is putting his new life on the line. His freedom, his status as a collaborator with the forces of law and order, his livelihood, the protection of his family, everything. When a turncoat mafioso returns secretly to Sicily, it doesn’t augur well. In Sicily everyone remembers the career of Baldassare Di Maggio—mafioso, hit man, and driver to the boss Totò Riina. As a key witness in the Andreotti trial, Di Maggio had been responsible, among other things, for describing the kiss on the cheek between Andreotti and Totò Riina—one of the more spectacular statements about the close relationship between the politician and the Mafia boss. Later Di Maggio had returned to Sicily where, in his hometown of San Giuseppe Jato, he would commit a murder—one that had nothing to do with the Andreotti trial but was a settling of old scores.
When Di Maggio was arrested for that murder, he provided the excuse that was needed to bring about the collapse of the Andreotti trial. The defense wanted above all to prove that the key witnesses whose statements incriminated Andreotti were not credible. If the witness to the kiss on the cheek was not in fact the turncoat mafioso he claimed to be, but a mafioso who was still committing crimes, even though he was in the witness protection program, then it would be a major error even to listen to his testimony against one of the most important Italian statesmen, let alone take it seriously as incriminating evidence.
Di Maggio was arrested and thrown out of the witness protection program. But even then he didn’t deviate from his account of the kiss on the cheek between Totò Riina and Giulio Andreotti.
Below us, the sea glistens as smooth and viscous as pitch. The plane is already flying at a low altitude, and I see the Isola delle Femmine floating in the pitch. The sky is bright with stars, and the mountain, the one I always think we’re going to crash into every time I fly into Palermo, stands out in the moonlight. But before fear can really take hold of me, the plane has already landed.
As always in Italy, the passengers are getting up and impatiently clearing out the luggage compartments while the plane is still rolling along the runway. When the engines are turned off, everyone crams into the narrow aisle, the two old Sicilians try to push their way to the front with their plastic bags and parcels, the man in the pinstripe suit sticks his unlit cigarillo in his mouth, and the woman with the stockings straightens her skirt. When the plane door opens, damp, warm air pours in, smelling of Africa.
We walk across the runway to the airport building; in the pale glow of the floodlights I see the man who was sitting next to me. I watch him furtively as we wait for our bags beside the carousel. He takes his mobile phone out of his briefcase and switches it on. Our bags arrive at the same time. As we plunge into the sea of waiting Sicilians, I almost lose sight of him. But then I see him walking up to a thin man holding up a sign with a name written on it: Mr. Berenson. Then he is swallowed up by the night.
And I hear Salvo, my taxi driver, saying to me, “Ciao, Petra. Still carrying that same old battered suitcase?”
ROSARIA SCHIFANI
SALVO MAKES THAT REMARK ABOUT THE SUITCASE EVERY time I come to Palermo; it’s a solicitous ritual of his. Because Salvo can’t understand why I’m devoted to this battered suitcase even though I could easily afford a new one. A neat, smooth Signora suitcase. Not this old aluminum thing covered with stickers, which he’s now stowing in his taxi with an indulgent expression on his face.
Salvo always drives me when I’m in Palermo; he’s done it for years. I’ve known him for so long that he’s gone through three fiancées in that time. Now he’s got another one, and this time it’s serious. Salvo’s very thin, with a profile like a mouse. A mouse with alert, black eyes that seem to consist entirely of pupil. Even in jeans and sneakers, Salvo always tries to look smart. When he puts his hands on the wheel he sticks out his little finger, the way other people do when drinking tea. It’s not as if he’s scrambling to drive me around Palermo, it’s more that he’s doing me a favor—because for some time now he’s become the regular driver for a group of old ladies who play scopa, the Sicilian game played with cards that look like tarot cards. These old-lady cardsharps meet every afternoon, which is why they represent a secure source of income for Salvo: the ladies always have absolute precedence.
I tap in a text to Shobha: “Where are we eating?” And she answers: “Everything’s shut on Sunday evening. Except Fresco.”
Fresco is Shobha’s local, a kind of vegetarian hip
py restaurant opposite Ucciardone prison. They serve up a passable couscous, with piano accompaniment on Sundays. The pianist has been wooing Shobha, in vain, for years.
“OK, Fresco,” I reply, and Salvo asks me why I still haven’t got a new phone. He proudly shows me his new super-thin Samsung. Of course, he has two telefonini, like any self-respecting Italian: one for private conversations, one for business. The private one’s reserved exclusively for his fiancées. And his mother.
We drive silently along the motorway. Cinisi. Carini. Capaci. Each sign represents a case file, a police operation, a raid. Against the Alcamo clan, against the Castellammare del Golfo clan, against the Cinisi clan. Some trials have the names of the places the clans come from; others bear names like film titles: they’re called “mstorm,” or “Golden Market,” or “Akragas.” And behind the film titles lurk mafiosi who look like janitors. Or bank clerks. Every time I come from the airport and see the sign for Cinisi, I can’t help thinking about the boss in hiding, Matteo Messina Denaro—and his submissiveness to Don Tano Badalamenti, an old boss who came from Cinisi and preferred to let his life trickle away in an American jail rather than be disloyal to Cosa Nostra. He spent almost twenty years in a prison in Massachusetts.
Messina Denaro is seen as the new boss of the Sicilian Mafia: young, brilliant, and on the run. In Sicily the phrase “on the run” sounds as normal as a description of someone’s marital status. Single, married, on the run. I wonder whether the brilliant Messina Denaro would maintain his loyalty to Cosa Nostra even in an American high-security prison. Perhaps he’d be readier to come clean than people might imagine.
To do me a favor, Salvo puts on Biagio Antonacci’s CD and “Sognami se nevica,” “Dream of me if it snows.” In Sicily, the metaphor par excellence for unrequited love.