The Honored Society

by Petra Reski

  Few men in Sicily are as sought after as mafiosi on the run. Matteo Messina Denaro met up with ladies from the highest echelons of Trapani society at a hotel in Selinunte—and a short time later had its owner murdered because he didn’t feel he had treated him with sufficient respect. The boss enjoyed himself at the elegant spa of Forte dei Marmi, adorned himself with Rolex watches, fell in love with an Austrian woman, whom he visited and whose telephone is probably still tapped today, and spent part of his time on the run from the police in Bagheria, not far from Palermo, staying with a woman who wrote him pages of love letters: “I have loved you, I love you, and I will love you all my life.” She went to jail for acting as his accomplice. When Messina Denaro hid at this woman’s home, his pursuers were so hot on his heels that they came close to catching him, except that one of the carabinieri had turned off the hidden cameras and given the boss the tip he needed.

  Salvo says: “I don’t know what you women see in this song.” And I can’t give him an answer.

  “What kind of a story are you doing this time?” Salvo asks. He asks more out of politeness than interest; basically, he thinks a preoccupation with the Mafia is a waste of time. On the one hand. On the other, it fills him with a curious sort of pride that I should come here specially from Venice to tell the Germans what’s happening in Sicily. As if the island’s inhabitants were a people at risk of extinction, of interest to a very few, highly specialized anthropologists. People whom he meets daily in the hall of his building, and whom he otherwise considers overrated. Salvo still lives with his mother, in the district between the Piazza Indipendenza and the Capuchin Crypt, where tourists shudder at the sight of the mummies. It’s a normal district of Palermo, which lives equally normally off the drug trade. Salvo loves describing how the customers meet by the statue of Padre Pio, because the goods are hidden under the saint’s feet. A neighbor on Salvo’s floor has already been arrested four times for membership in the Mafia, and each time he got out of prison he rose a bit higher in the hierarchy. First he committed break-ins, then he collected protection money—that is, he picked up the envelopes that were laid out ready for him, and if there was nothing ready he squeezed superglue into the locks of the shops that hadn’t paid—and now you only ever see him in a suit and tie.

  “I’m writing a portrait of Letizia,” I say.

  “Letizia?” Salvo asks in amazement, because he knows Letizia, and because he thinks I write about people who are either famous or dangerous, and in his eyes Letizia is neither famous nor dangerous, but just the mother of the photographer Shobha.

  “Letizia Battaglia is perhaps your most famous woman photographer,” I say, “your most famous anti-Mafia photographer.” A Sicilian Cartier-Bresson, I’m about to say, if Letizia wouldn’t have taken offense at being compared to someone else. And if Salvo knew who Cartier-Bresson was.

  “Minchia,” Salvo says. “I drove her only yesterday, and I didn’t know she was so famous.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. When Sicilians say “minchia” they’re really impressed. Minchia means “cock” in Sicilian. In fact, Sicily has tried its damnedest to forget Letizia. There is no exhibition in her honor, no archive of her work, nothing. “They pretend I don’t exist,” Letizia always says. “As if I were guilty for the things I’ve seen.”

  There are no reminders of her—and she was always more than a photographer: Letizia was a theater director, city councillor and member of parliament for the anti-Mafia party La Rete. Her surname Battaglia means “battle”—her life’s manifesto.

  “And why are the Germans interested in Letizia right now?” asks Salvo.

  “Because of Duisburg,” I say.

  Because, when there are no corpses, people are inclined to suspect that the Mafia doesn’t exist. Before six Calabrians were murdered in Duisburg, a lot of editors saw my interest in the Mafia as a personal eccentricity, a whim—as if I’d become obsessed with some absurd topic like the life of the giant anteater—to be treated with a degree of indulgence. Okay, if she’s absolutely desperate to write about the Mafia, then for God’s sake let her get on with it; on the other hand, next time get her to write us something about Tuscany.

  And then the massacre in Duisburg happened, and my phone started ringing nonstop. Everyone wanted to send me to Calabria. News Web sites, weekly papers, monthly magazines. “Haven’t you got a mafioso at hand that you could interview?” one editor asked me. Suddenly everyone wanted to know all about the Mafia, to what extent Cosa Nostra differed from the Camorra and whether it was actually imaginable that something like the Duisburg massacre could happen more often. I heard myself lecturing and doling out definitions—that the word Mafia actually referred only to the Sicilian Cosa Nostra; while the Calabrian Mafia was called ’Ndrangheta and was at the moment the most successful criminal association in Italy; alongside the Neapolitan Camorra, which, unlike Cosa Nostra with its strictly hierarchical vertical organization, was organized horizontally, which also explained the constant gang wars, everyone wanting to be the boss, and you can’t have that without corpses; and the Apulian Sacra Corona Unita, the youngest Mafia organization in Italy, which only came into being in the 1980s. And at the end of the phone calls I turned down all the commissions because at the time I happened to be in Poland covering a story—which was a source of relief to me. It was only several months later that I traveled to San Luca, and by that time all interest had subsided again.

  “The Germans must have been really shocked when that thing happened in Duisburg,” Salvo says with concern. And also some worry. “Che brutta figura,” he says—what an ugly image we’ve given of ourselves. As if he were personally responsible for his Calabrian compatriots. For the ’Ndrangheta massacre. He looks crestfallen and turns the music up slightly.

  There’s dense traffic on the motorway; the whole of Palermo’s coming back from the weekend. As if impelled by a death wish, the cars dash down the tunnel. The sea shimmers like blackish-blue metal, with a strip of pale moonlight. Up by Carini you can’t see the sea anymore, it’s hidden behind a settlement of shacks that stretches all the way to Palermo and looks like a poor district in Calcutta. The rubbish from the weekend is piled up alongside the motorway. The buildings are mostly one-story houses with rough brick walls, no plaster or cement anywhere; rusty metal rods stick out of the concrete on the roofs. These are Palermo’s holiday homes. They’re all illegal, and they have been for thirty years. In Sicily they call this “surveyors’ architecture.” It has ravaged the island. In Sicily everyone knows a surveyor who will draw up an illegal building plan for a bribe.

  And then we get to Capaci. For a while, there was always a pause when we drove past this place. It didn’t matter who I was with; all my friends, taxi drivers, interviewees fell silent. Not anymore. Now everyone just goes on talking. Before, the only reminder of what had happened was a bit of red crash barrier. Five hundred kilos of explosives on a skateboard in a sewage pipe. Set off by remote control.

  Now, two red marble steles stand here with the names and the date: 23 May 1992, Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo, Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro, Vito Schifani. One marble stele in each direction. War memorials for a lost battle, as red as the Sicilian soil. Sometimes there’s a faded wreath with a sash that’s already slightly faded: in Sicily things deteriorate very quickly.

  I’d only seen Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino once, from a distance, in the Palace of Justice. Like a lot of other people in those days, I, too, thought they were immortal. When they were murdered, it was felt in Palermo that the killing of the two public prosecutors wasn’t a murder like the previous ones. Not a small death that the city could have shaken off, denied, and forgotten again the following morning, but one that clung to the city in front of everyone’s eyes. “È andata oltre,” people said, things have gone too far. For the first time, Sicily could no longer dispute the existence of the Mafia, and the reaction was one of catharsis. Temporarily.

  “The mafiosi will pay for it,�
� Rosaria had said. We were sitting in a bar not far from the Teatro Politeama, at a white marble table that had been scrubbed till it had lost its sheen, when Rosaria suddenly grabbed my wrist and said: “They’ll pay for it, on the earth and in the hereafter.” What other point would there be in their going on living after committing those murders? Were they never to be punished? Then life in general would have no point, no point at all. “There must be something, after all, don’t you think?”

  And I said: “Yes, sure.” Because she was looking at me so piercingly with those black eyes of hers. And because I didn’t have the courage to rob her of her hope. Hope of the divine plan. When I was sitting in the bar with Rosaria, her husband Vito Schifani, Giovanni Falcone’s bodyguard, had only been dead for six months.

  “They only showed me his hands,” she said. “His hands. They were the only bits undamaged. He had such lovely hands.”

  Rosaria had been widowed at the age of twenty-three and had become an anti-Mafia icon. Her son, Antonio Emanuele, was only four months old. Even today, everyone in Palermo remembers Rosaria haltingly trying to read out a text at Giovanni Falcone’s funeral, supported by a priest who kept encouraging her to go on reading—until Rosaria threw aside the pages of her prepared text and cried out her true feelings: “They’re even here in the church, the mafiosi.” And: “Too much blood, there is no love here, no love of anything or anyone.” And: “I forgive you. But you must kneel.”

  Everyone sensed that this wasn’t the usual forgiveness, that empty ritual of absolution that everyone in Italy always has to defer to; before the corpses are even cold, the first television reporter has asked the victims about forgiveness. Only very seldom does anyone have the courage to step aside from this sale of indulgences. Like Rita Costa, the widow of the public prosecutor Gaetano Costa, shot by the Mafia in the center of Palermo. “I forgive no one and nobody,” she said. “I could kill my husband’s murderers and then calmly go off and have an espresso in a cafe.”

  I had first seen Rosaria when Margarethe von Trotta was in Palermo introducing her film The Long Silence, a film that paid tribute to the women widowed by the Mafia. Rosaria wore a sand-colored blazer, sat next to Rita Costa on the podium, and looked as if she’d rather have been a million miles away. Far from the widows, far from having to set an example, far from Palermo. She almost crept to the microphone as she said: “When I talked about forgiveness in church, that sentence was my personal affair. Whether a person can forgive is, of course, a matter for each individual.”

  Then she said nothing all the way through the panel discussion. She later told me how angry her mother had been when Rosaria had insisted on being seen in public in a sand-colored blazer and not in black.

  We had met at the regional administration, her new place of work. As is generally the case with victims of the Mafia, a job had been hastily found for her to supplement her meager widow’s pension. But she hadn’t been given any actual work, just a reason to leave the house in the morning. Her office was empty. The phone was out of order, the desk hadn’t been used for ages, the shelves were bare and dusty, and Rosaria talked about the profound shame she felt at never having taken an interest in what Mafia really meant. “Even two days after my husband’s death I didn’t know who Totò Riina was!” she exclaimed. After the murder she had approached the public prosecutor, Paolo Borsellino. Once she had asked him if he was scared, and Borsellino had replied: “I’m only scared for my wife and children.” Fifty-seven days after the assassination of Falcone, he too was dead.

  After her husband’s death Rosaria became a driven woman: one who wanted to know what was happening around her, how it had come to this, how it could have been prevented. “Tell everyone what happened to you,” one widow advised her. “Shout it out. Everyone must know, go into the schools and speak to the children. Headlines aren’t enough to reach the hearts of the children.”

  And Rosaria followed her advice. She took part in demonstrations and panel discussions, she visited schools and juvenile institutions, and she published a book of her talks, dedicating it to her little son. In her open letter to the mafiosi, Rosaria wrote: “You are murderers. Let’s say it out loud, so that your sons can look you in the eyes and see what murderers’ eyes look like.”

  Perhaps that was the moment when Palermo became strange to her. She was a diva, people said, only interested in getting on television. And she was a lunatic. An attention-seeking lunatic.

  Even if her husband had been killed by the Mafia, a Sicilian widow has to deal with her pain in silence. Fatti gli affari tuoi e campi cent’anni. Mind your own business and you’ll live to a hundred.

  Soon Rosaria stopped taking part in panel discussions, in memorial services, demonstrations, and candlelight processions. I still heard from her from time to time. I heard she’d left Sicily. That she’d married again. That she’d had another child. She never wrote another open letter. The mafiosi who murdered her husband have been sentenced in the meantime. Some of them have repented. None of them has bent the knee.

  Some have even managed to get college degrees, like the boss Pietro Aglieri. And they hope for their sentences to be overturned. Perhaps not entirely without justification. In the years following the assassinations, the anti-Mafia laws were gradually abolished. There is effectively no longer such a thing as high-security detention, no life imprisonment, and anyone who has been sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment for drug dealing can expect to be out of jail again in seven years. The last president of the Sicilian regional assembly, Salvatore “Totò” Cuffaro, was sentenced in the first instance to five years’ imprisonment, which he celebrated with a little communal drink and a tray full of cannoli, that traditional sweetmeat that every Sicilian emigrant devours until the day he dies. Cuffaro was celebrating because he knew that he would never have to serve his sentence; by the time it was confirmed by the supreme court, it would have lapsed. But he was wrong: in January 2011, Cuffaro went to prison. You never know what’s around the corner.

  Today, even the commemoration of the victims is too much. The former president of the Sicilian regional assembly, Gianfranco Miccichè, has demanded that the name of Palermo airport be changed as a matter of urgency: Aeroporto Falcone e Borsellino smacks too much of the Mafia.

  Perhaps Rosaria was right after all, and all that remains is hope of a divine plan.

  SAN LUCA

  “MA,” SAYS SALVO, AS IF HE COULD READ MY MIND. MA means “but.” In Sicily, though, the word ma has many more meanings than that. According to emphasis, ma can mean: “Everyone here has gone mad,” or “If you think so,” or “Do what you like.” And if the m is particularly protracted, mmma means: “The longer you think about life, the more you reach the conclusion that everything is in vain.”

  We’ve left the bypass, and we’re very close to the Piazza Indipendenza. And we’re in a traffic jam. There’s always a traffic jam in Palermo; the traffic is in a constant unforeseen state of emergency. A state of emergency that lasts from eight in the morning till midnight. Four-lane bypasses end up in one-way streets. Or nowhere. In the Palermo suburb of Mondello there’s a four-lane road that looks as if it could be somewhere in Los Angeles. It comes from nowhere and peters out as a dirt track half a kilometer farther on. A boss wanted it.

  Salvo opens the window a crack. A hubbub of voices enters from outside, scraps of music, exploding firecrackers, the wail of a burglar alarm. Faded blue saints glow in the wall of a house, promising two hundred days of absolution to anyone who says the credo before them. Finally we’ve arrived in Corso Vittorio Emanuele, outside my hotel. The Centrale Palace is my home in Palermo, a home that has survived even extensive renovation unharmed. Where hotels are concerned, I fear nothing more than alterations. That’s why I love the familiar faces at the Centrale all the more. The head porter wears a pair of glasses that sit on his nose like a pince-nez; his center parting looks as if it’s been drawn with a ruler. The Tunisian hotel servant has frozen into a statue, and the old maître d’ s
erves the breakfast tea with distracted dignity. Anyone who stays at the Centrale Palace is living not in a hotel but in a nineteenth-century Sicilian novel.

  As soon as I enter the lobby, the receptionist bows in greeting. He purses his lips as if to kiss my hand and scatters a few compliments: “Time simply doesn’t pass as far as you’re concerned, Dottoressa!” he says.

  Since the day I was picked up by the lawyer defending the Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, the receptionist has respectfully addressed me as Dottoressa. The lawyer was pleasantly touched not to have had to introduce himself. The receptionist obviously knew his name.

  I have my case brought to my room and rejoin Salvo in the car. To get to the restaurant, we have to turn onto the Via Roma. As it is every Sunday, the Via della Libertà is closed to through traffic. The Sunday evening stroll from the Teatro Politeama to the Teatro Massimo is one of Palermo’s sacred rituals. Wives are dressed up in outfits that look like suits of armor. They hold their handbags pressed under one arm and their husbands under the other. And by the boutique window displays the women sink into a dreamlike state—until their husbands drag them away.

  Shobha is already sitting on the terrace of the Fresco when I get there. Her blond hair flashes in the darkness. Piano music drifts from the restaurant, and sitting on the terrace you look down on the yellow volcanic walls of the Ucciardone prison, an old Hohenstaufen fortress with floodlights and sentries behind armored glass. The mafiosi called the prison Grand Hotel Ucciardone; they had champagne and lobsters delivered until they were released, usually after just a few months. After the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, a stay in the Ucciardone temporarily became rather less comfortable. Temporarily. Because lately the prison attracted a certain amount of attention when guards were found to have distributed telefonini among the bosses.