The Honored Society

by Petra Reski

  We ignored the nun’s baleful looks. When the Madonna left the church under her sky-blue baldachin, the priest, who still has a certain standing here, tried to fan the hostility through his loudspeaker by ordering disbelievers to leave the procession. Then he walked ahead, followed by white-clad acolytes, like a pop star leading his fans. Many women in the procession walked barefoot. As the Madonna was carried, swaying on a bouquet of roses, past the houses, the people waiting on their balconies fell to their knees. One man kissed the hem of the Madonna’s robe, and an old woman in a red dressing gown ran onto the balcony to greet the Madonna with loud, smacking kisses. The priest was still playing with his rosary.

  And we walked along with the others. Driven by bull-headedness and boundless amazement at how it’s possible to kiss the hem of the Madonna’s robe and at the same time turn a blind eye to the Mafia. Only a few yards away from the church there stood a charred bookshop with the carabinieri seal on its door: clearly the owner had refused to pay protection money.

  When we left Locri and drove back along the coast road to Reggio Calabria the night had swallowed everything, the ruined buildings and the sea, and even the wreck of the illegal tugboat rusting away on the beach. Suddenly a car braked sharply in front of us, and we saw something flying through the air. It was an Indian migrant worker who had been riding his bicycle and was now lying in a pool of blood. When I bent over him, he asked: “Are you my mother?” Then he lost consciousness. So he wasn’t aware of the car that had just knocked him down suddenly driving away. A man watched the disappearing car and said by way of exculpation: “Maybe he was just scared.” Certainly, it could have happened somewhere else. But still.

  Seven months later I would read in La Repubblica that the carabinieri had managed another devastating strike against the ’Ndrangheta of San Luca: nine suspects had been arrested, including the head of the Pelle-Vottari clan, Giuseppe Pelle, who had, according to the Ministry of the Interior, been one of the thirty most dangerous Mafia fugitives in Italy. Later, on the news, when I saw him being led away and cursing the journalists as they watched, I recognized him: he was one of the men who had run out of the Pelle-Vottari house and threatened us. Giuseppe Pelle was the oldest one—the one in the padded waistcoat who had looked like a shepherd coming back from vespers. I wondered why the carabinieri hadn’t come up with the same idea as we had, only earlier: just dropping in at the Pelle-Vottari house. Perhaps if they had done so, they’d have been able to catch Giuseppe Pelle, one of the thirty most dangerous Mafia fugitives in Italy, while he was having his midday snooze.

  It’s nighttime and we’re still sitting in the Fresco in Palermo. The floodlight from the prison opposite darkens the sky so that we can’t see any stars.

  “I’m never going back to Calabria,” says Shobha. “You can do what you like.”

  Our couscous has gone cold by now. The waitress brings us the bill and starts impatiently clearing the tables while we’re still wondering where to take a picture of Shobha’s mother. In Mondello? Too pretty. Outside the Palace of Justice? Too melodramatic. At the Vucciria market? Too folksy. In the end, we put off the decision until morning. The pianist gets his scores in order and shuts the lid of the piano. “Let’s just get out of here,” says Shobha. “Otherwise he’ll want to come with us.”

  I bring Shobha to her front door and then walk back to the hotel. Past the jacaranda trees of the Piazza Politeama, past the Piazza Olivella, past rotting walls that are just held together by faded posters advertising singers called things like Mimmo or Pippo, with their shirt collars turned up. The cobbles look as if they’re sweating. It smells, as always, of damp warmth. Of petrol. And of the dark soil of Africa.

  LETIZIA

  I’M SITTING IN THE BREAKFAST ROOM OF THE CENTRALE, TRYING in vain to order some tea. The old maître d’ stands in the corner like a monument that comes to life only intermittently, and all the other waiters are chatting so excitedly that I don’t dare to disturb them. Because as they stand in front of the stucco rosettes, with their slicked-back black hair and blood-red brocade waistcoats over white shirts, they look like figures from novels, as if their thoughts, longings, and goals were somehow sublime, extraordinary, perhaps even heroic, even if in reality they’re only talking about when they can finally get around to dismantling the breakfast buffet.

  Two female English tourists run their fingertips across their street map in search of the Capuchin Crypt; an Italian businessman with an imposing knot in his tie flicks through La Repubblica. I wonder what sort of business he’s going to be doing in Palermo. Selling surgical instruments, maybe? Private clinics are a flourishing branch of Cosa Nostra business, financed by the Italian state. While public hospitals are crumbling, half of the Sicilian domestic budget is flowing into the health service, with 1,800 private practices and clinics recognized by the state and financed by the region. By way of comparison, in Lombardy it’s sixty.

  Many of these state-recognized and regionally financed private clinics are run by Mafia bosses. The mafia has learned that public commissions can bring in risk-free money. Unlike the drug trade, the penalties for misuse of public contracts are extremely low.

  Judging by the knot in his tie, the man could also be a lawyer. Lawyers who come to Sicily for Mafia trials often stay at the Centrale. In fact, it was a lawyer who recommended the Centrale Palace to me, a woman who regularly traveled on Mafia-related business. She traveled from one courthouse to another defending turncoat mafiosi, ten days in Rome, a week in Florence, two days in Venice, a week in Palermo. After she had spent her day in the “aula bunker,” the high-security courtroom where she passed hours listening to how her clients had shot, dismembered, and burned people, she spent her evenings in her room in the Centrale, watching cartoons.

  One of her most famous clients was the Mafia hit man Calogero Ganci: no previous convictions and a hundred murders. One of his victims was his father-in-law. Business is business. When Ganci’s wife found out, she had a nervous breakdown: “Tell me it isn’t true,” she screamed at her husband, “it can’t be true that I’ve slept with my father’s murderer. What am I supposed to tell my children?”

  Calogero Ganci had run a butcher and a drapery shop in Palermo. He had never come to the attention of the authorities.

  “What scares me most,” the lawyer says, “is knowing about the Mafia’s perfect disguise. When I walk down the street, I’m thinking about how the bus driver could be a mass-murderer, or the man who runs the pharmacy next door.”

  I look again at the knot of that tie. And at the two English tourists, who have finally found the way to the Capuchin Crypt and are carefully marking it on their map. And I think: Sicilian paranoia. The man might just be a rep for a travel agency. Or an olive-oil wholesaler. Or a mathematician. And in the breakfast room of the Centrale, Palermo is nothing other than an opulent palace, with red marble columns, capitals and pilasters, chandeliers and mirrored halls, in which the sultry sirocco air and thoughts of the Mafia are kept at bay by an extraordinarily efficient air-conditioning system.

  At last, one of the waiters takes pity and brings me a green tea. He looks at me sympathetically. Anyone in Sicily who drinks tea in the morning must be unwell. Or a foreigner. I flick through my moleskin notebook and try to take notes for my interview with Letizia. It’s hard. I’ve known her for so long that I almost feel as if we’re related. Although it would be wrong to imagine that you know everything about your relatives.

  Letizia is the first person I met in Palermo, in the spring of 1989—which wasn’t just any old spring, but the Palermo Spring. It was a moment of hope; the world was finally stirring, the concrete was crumbling in the east, and even in Sicily the foundation on which the Mafia had built its power for more than a century seemed to be shifting: for the first time Palermo was run by a mayor who sided with the fight against the Mafia. Leoluca Orlando was seen as a shining light, besieged by journalists from all over the world. Letizia was a protagonist of that spring—not a Sicilian Ma
donna, but a breathless subversive, a photographer at the service of the revolution, her revolution. A flame-haired rebel who had reinvented herself at the age of thirty-six. Who had transformed herself from a bourgeois Sicilian housewife into a legend, a chain-smoking legend: the first anti-Mafia photographer in Sicily.

  Leoluca had appointed her as councillor for quality of life, and Letizia had thrown herself into politics with the same passion that she had previously shown for photography. She installed benches in the city, introduced pedestrian zones, and freed the seafront from the barricades behind which the sea lay hidden as if people were ashamed of it. Today, Letizia’s palms are perhaps the only souvenir of that Palermo Spring, which many people, in 1989, thought would go on forever.

  We drove along the seafront in Letizia’s official car and she lit one of her MS cigarettes, which immediately went out in the airstream. Letizia haughtily tried to ignore the fact, because she was too busy talking to the driver about the shortest way from the harbor to the La Favorita park, telling me about the importance of the freshly planted palm trees along the seafront for the rebirth of Palermo, and crying “Amore mio” into the car telephone—it being unclear whether she was referring to her partner, one of the city gardeners under her control, or a fellow combatant in the battle against the Mafia. And every now and again I tried to ask her questions about her calling as a photographer.

  Letizia drew on her unlit cigarette and thought it was too banal to talk about her photographs. Basically it had all been quite easy! When she was thirty-six, she had separated from her husband, moved to Milan, and started writing for the communist Sicilian daily newspaper L’Ora as cultural correspondent. And she’d only started taking photographs because stories with photographs sold better than stories without. Art can be as simple as that. Shortly afterward she had moved back to Palermo, where she was appointed photographer-in-chief at L’Ora. Letizia was forty at the time and had just fallen in love with a skinny twenty-two-year-old boy, Franco Zecchin, with whom she was to spend almost twenty years, breathing, taking photographs, sleeping, eating, drinking, dreaming, arguing, and fighting. And talking on the phone. Every two minutes. “Amore mio.”

  At last, Letizia and I were invited to lunch by the city gardeners, in the city nursery, near La Favorita park. We ate bread with olive oil and drank red wine, and Letizia moved among the men like a mother, distributing praise and, every now and then, a bit of blame. They chucked around remarks and references that I didn’t understand, and I think Letizia felt a bit sorry for me because I knew so little about that Sicilian planet that she had made it her business to revolutionize. She’d already forgotten that I’d actually come here to write an article about her: it was far more important for her to bring my knowledge about the Mafia up from zero to 100 percent within a week. She bombarded me with names, murders, Mafia connections; she smiled at me if there was something I didn’t understand; she showed me street corners where policemen had been shot down, public prosecutors shredded in a hail of bullets, and unfortunate Mafia bosses executed by their opponents, and explained to me that the reason the city consisted of such endless stretches of road and faceless tower blocks was because the palazzi of the aristocracy, along with their knot gardens, pergolas, and fountains, had been stamped into the ground overnight by the Mafia. In the 1970s, when the Mafia boss Vito Ciancimino was mayor of Palermo, he had issued 4,200 building permits in four years—3,300 of them to a street trader, a night watchman, and two bricklayers, all four of them illiterate and straw men for the Mafia—in an unparalleled building speculation known even today as Il sacco di Palermo, the looting of Palermo—as if marauding mercenaries had passed through the place. And what sounded to my ears like a piece of Sicilian puppet theater was nothing but the absolute, total, submissive capitulation of the city.

  Letizia dragged me to the headquarters of a legendary Mafia investigator who had been transferred sideways because of his success and now sat gloomily at an empty desk. The investigator was called Saverio Montalbano. He had Nordic blue eyes and a half-bald crown, because at that time it wasn’t yet fashionable to shave your head. In those days Andrea Camilleri hadn’t yet invented his Commissario Montalbano, and he would certainly have been unsettled to watch this Montalbano being guarded by two bodyguards who drove him around in an armored limousine. I still remember thinking: What a strange country! The policemen need bodyguards!

  Saverio Montalbano had been active in Palermo’s mobile task force, where he had been responsible for tracking down Mafia fugitives. He had uncovered the “pizza connection,” the heroin link between America and Sicily. He had, when he was running the mobile task force in Trapani, revealed the connections between Freemasons, leading Christian Democrats, the vice prefect, and the local police chief—and by way of reward the Ministry of the Interior had ordered him to leave Sicily because they could no longer guarantee his safety. After that, he was transferred to the commissariat in San Lorenzo. I found it bizarre that successful policemen in Sicily were rewarded with a disciplinary transfer, but I imagined that soon this would definitely be a thing of the past—after all, we were in the spring of 1989, and everyone had this amazing faith in the future. Everyone except Montalbano. Two of his predecessors had been murdered: Boris Giuliano and Ninni Cassarà. We were sitting in the courtyard of the commissariat, which had once been a monastery, with no sound but the lapping of the fountain and the faint crunch of gravel under the feet of the odd stray cat. And Montalbano clicking his tongue when Letizia asked him if he still believed in the future.

  Letizia lived in the old town. Her apartment was filled to the rafters with archive boxes; proclamations were stacked up on the floor, manifestos spread out on tables. In Letizia’s apartment I was reminded of clandestine meetings I had had with Solidarność activists, and I remember finding that connection rather odd: Wasn’t Italy part of the free West? And wasn’t the Mafia a criminal organization? Rather than part of the state, for example?

  People were constantly going in and out of Letizia’s house: trade unionists, communists, and women dialect poets; bearded men who had written about the Mafia in their own villages and published their books themselves; singers from ethno-rock groups; and mothers of sons killed by the Mafia—activists in a revolution that was plainly just around the corner. Letizia introduced me to everybody; she explained connections, ideas, and plans, never losing faith in my capacity for lifelong learning. She introduced me to her daughter, Shobha, who was a photographer in the service of the cause, the inheritor of Letizia’s poetic legacy, and was carrying on as a photographer the task that her mother now hoped to accomplish in politics. Together they dragged me to the meeting of the city council in the Palazzo delle Aquile. And as I looked down in amazement at the arguing councillors and wondered how many of them might be mafiosi, Leoluca Orlando sent me a note, which was passed to me by a waiter on a silver tray. On it was written: “The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.”

  That small gesture was what won me over to him—that and the trust that Letizia and Shobha placed in him, even though he had once been a Christian Democrat. At the time, the Christian Democrats were irrevocably linked with the Mafia through Andreotti’s connections. Then Shobha and I had waited outside the door of his office until three o’clock in the morning, when Orlando finally granted us an interview.

  When I look up from my notebook, a waiter is standing by my table. He inquires impatiently whether he can clear my table. “The breakfast buffet is closing now,” he says. I quickly drink my cold tea and finally leave the table.

  Salvo is waiting in the lobby. He is hopping agitatedly from one foot to the other because his cardsharp ladies have already called three times to ask him where he’s got to. Then we make our way painfully slowly through the morning traffic along the Via Roma. Armored limousines with darkened windows force their way past us, along with swarms of Vespa riders. The city swims in the blue of the sky. It smells of exhaust fumes and the sea. I would recognize Palermo with my eyes
shut. By its smell, as unsettling as the scent of a strange man. A smell that both attracts and repels. Palermo is always ambivalent. Always beautiful and terrible at the same time. Like a beautiful woman with an eye missing. Like one of those bearded Madonnas sold by the albino below the church of Sant’Antonio Abate. The bearded Madonna can be seen only if you stand at the right angle in front of her picture. If you stand to the left, a bearded Jesus appears. If you look from the right, you see a Madonna with a flaming heart. But if you stand right in the middle you can see them both merging into a Madonna with a beard.

  As we drive past, I see the albino gleaming in the shade of his stall. With his white hair and pale skin he looks very vulnerable, so vulnerable that I have to buy a Madonna from him every time I come to Palermo. And he swindles me every time.

  Letizia and Shobha live on the top two floors of a 1970s tower block which bears a striking resemblance to an air-raid shelter. The lift cautiously jerks its way up, so slowly that you expect to come out at the twenty-ninth floor, not the ninth. I’m still standing in the doorway when I can hear Shobha on the phone, blowing kisses, Baci, baci, baci, dismissing the caller, Ciao, ciao, ciao, “Yes, yes, see you, no time right now, see you tomorrow.” Clutching two phones, she gives me a sign to say that Letizia is waiting on the floor below.

  When I go down the stairs I have to have my hand licked by Letizia’s dog, which she picked up somewhere in Palermo, just like all those foreign journalists she picks up, even now, like orphan children; there’s always someone sitting on her sofa, sometimes it’s a Spanish journalist, sometimes an American—Letizia helps them all, she makes contacts, spurs people on, introduces people, all for the cause. Still. A bit. Sometimes. Often.

  For a short time now she’s been living in this apartment whose walls look like the walls of a stalactite cave, as if it was made as a film set for a 1970s domestic drama. If you stand on the terrace, you can see the Ucciardone prison. She herself feels like a prisoner in Palermo, Letizia says. It’s ridiculous, in Germany she was awarded the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize for her Mafia photographs, and in Sicily they want to forget her. She sits in the breeze from the ceiling fan, clutching an unlit cigarette, and says without much of an introduction: “I was happier back then. In 1989 we thought we could change things, in love, in society. We have lost the battle. On every level.”