by Petra Reski
Of course that had been useful, said Padre Fasullo. A useful indignation. But. But it’s a long time ago. And Pope Benedict XVI hadn’t voiced nearly as much indignation against the Mafia. Even today there isn’t a single official church anti-Mafia document for public reference.
“In fact, the church, paradoxical though it may sound, has become the Mafia’s ethical point of reference,” Padre Fasullo said bitterly. “Over time an almost blind relationship of trust has established itself between them. You might even say, church and Mafia have, for various and contradictory reasons, found one another in their common desire for conservatism.”
When, on the pavement in front of the church, I tell Salvo about my fainting fit in the company of Padre Frittitta, I am careful to add: “And even today Shobha believes that Padre Frittitta put a spell on me.” I can’t persuade her otherwise, however convincingly I point out that it had been very sultry a moment before, that I have a tendency toward low blood pressure anyway, and have even fainted in the cinema, in the middle of The Silence of the Lambs.
“Ma,” Shobha says once more, as soon as she’s standing in front of Frittitta’s church. A ma which, in this case, means “you can say what you like.” And as if to ward off a curse, she decides to take Letizia’s picture not outside the church but a few yards farther on, in front of the tufa stone of the Porta Felice.
Luckily, Padre Frittitta is nowhere to be seen. We step inside the church for a moment, but neither inside, among the figures of the saints, nor outside, among all the Sicilian baroque of the Kalsa, where fish tails spill from the stone, dwarfs ride along on fanciful horses, and centaurs stick their tongues out at visitors, is a trace of his brown Carmelite habit to be seen. I wonder what the old men sitting in the shade of a bar not far from the Porta Felice think about him? As we approach them they are staring as steadfastly at the passing traffic as if it were about to bring them eternal salvation. Until Letizia appears and embroils them in a conversation, just as she used to when she was city councillor for quality of life and talked to the people about their town—which many Palermitans found almost impossible to believe. She looks at the holes in the pavement and tells the men that when she lived abroad she always took pictures of things she wanted to see in Palermo: beautiful pavements, public toilets, museums. “Strange, isn’t it?”
The old men giggle as if Letizia had said something salacious. One of them flicks through a copy of La Repubblica, which shows a photograph of Giuseppe Riina, the son of the Mafia boss Totò Riina, in a cashmere sweater and down waistcoat, wearing his shirttails fashionably outside his trousers, leaving prison, getting into an S-series Mercedes, and, accompanied by his sister and mother, going back to Corleone as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Even though he had been sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, he was able to leave prison because too much time had elapsed between the judgments of the first and second instances. As soon as he arrived in Corleone, this son of the Mafia announced that he would shortly be taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights and bringing proceedings against the Italian state for the excessive length of his sentence.
Letizia watches over the men’s shoulders, points to the picture of the S-series Mercedes and says: “So, bearing in mind that in theory the entire property of the Riina family should be confiscated. . . .”
“Only in theory,” says one of the men.
In Corleone the children of the bosses now have the final word: they ensure continuity. A continuity that has continued for centuries. Every time I go to Corleone I look for changes and find none. The very first time I came to the city, in 1979, I was disappointed. I was a student and had driven straight from the Ruhr to Corleone in a rusty Renault 4 because I’d been such a fan of The Godfather. And then I saw a town that looked like a meteorite hurled by a giant into a rocky landscape. Grey, bare stone houses, electric wires leading nowhere. Suspicious glances behind fly-curtains. A town without a soul. Not a hint of Mario Puzo. Not a trace of that flaming lion heart promised by the Italian name Corleone.
I had no sense at the time that I was in Corleone at the precise moment when the village was striving for higher things. In the 1980s it was the boss Luciano Liggio who, along with Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, first brought the Corleonesi to the top of Cosa Nostra, which had traditionally been reserved for the Mafia of Palermo. Until then, Corleone had been a little Mafia village like many others—one that, apart from its walk-on role in The Godfather, had no remarkable features whatsoever. But this would soon change, in accordance with the will of the bosses. For almost thirty years, the Mafia of Corleone would lead Cosa Nostra, with Totò Riina ruling violently both at home and abroad, becoming responsible for what was probably the most bloodthirsty era of Cosa Nostra, which would reach its climax in the assassinations of the public prosecutors Falcone and Borsellino. Ruling along with his brother-in-law, Leoluca Bagarella, and with Bernardo Provenzano, the diplomat who succeeded in allowing Cosa Nostra to slip back into its cloak of invisibility. Who staunched the hemorrhage of turncoat mafiosi and reestablished a social consensus. Because the secret of the Mafia’s survival lies in the fact that it hasn’t fought against the state and society but has lived in and with them.
Even today, I wonder about Corleone’s piety—not least, perhaps, because I know that Corleone is the town of a hundred churches. The Chiesa Madre right next to the town hall is so big that I lose my way in it. There is said to be room for all of the inhabitants of the town inside it.
As Shobha and I walked through Corleone in search of godliness, we relied on chance, as ever. We simply strolled through the alleyways, stepped inside the churches, and hoped to fall into conversation with a priest. In the Chiesa Madre we met Father Vincenzo Pizzitola, the parish priest. Grey-haired, bent, and with sagging features, he dragged himself down the passageways and took refuge, so to speak, in an endless evocation of Corleone’s saints, the blessed and the anointed: San Leoluca, Corleone’s patron saint, keeping guard in a niche; the Capuchin monk Fra Bernardo in the nave aisle, one of the best sword-fighters in Sicily, who entered the monastery because he couldn’t get over the death of an opponent; San Martino, the church’s titular saint; San Placido, the martyr, also in bits—rotting away in a glass sarcophagus, a piece of his skull, his arm, his heart. Along with dusty pink plastic flowers.
Corleone. City of saints. The priest didn’t mention the doctor Michele Navarra. Michele Navarra wasn’t just a physician in Corleone; he was also president of the farmers’ association, a trustee of the farmers’ union, and supervisor of the region’s health insurance body. Even today, one of the front pews bears his nameplate. The godfather of the postwar period. His name was once uttered in Corleone with the same respect as that of San Leoluca. They called him u patri nostru and crossed themselves.
One of the adversaries of Michele Navarra was the trade unionist Placido Rizzotto. Navarra commissioned his foster-son Luciano Liggio to remove the trade unionist. Liggio made his victim kneel and shot him three times in the head. The only witness to the murder was little Giuseppe Letizia, who had been watching sheep nearby. Dr. Navarra had no qualms about personally killing the child with a fatal injection.
Day in, day out, the priest walked past that pew. “I don’t know which pew you’re talking about,” he croaked. “Navarra, Navarra, I don’t even know who that Navarra was, there are countless Navarras here, and anyway I wasn’t even here when this pew was made.
“The Mafia! The Mafia! As if there was nothing else in Corleone. I don’t want to comment on the subject, but there’s one thing you should know: the anti-Mafia can become a form of Mafia too!”
He gasped for air and for his words, which had escaped from his mouth so quickly. He wouldn’t hear a word about the Riinas, the Provenzanos, the Bagarellas, all the butchers who had sprung from Corleone’s womb and whose wives still say their Ave Marias here.
On Sunday Bernardo Provenzano’s wife goes to early mass in this church. Una signora. A Sicilian jour
nalist once asked her if she feared the judgment of the courts.
“I acknowledge only divine justice,” she snapped back. “I no longer believe in justice on earth. I am answerable only to God. He alone will judge us, and he will do it impartially. He alone knows everything, he alone sees everything.”
Shortly after the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, in 1992, she had come back to Corleone, along with the two sons to whom she had secretly given birth, at the same time as Totò Riina’s wife, Antonietta, and her four children. Riina had been arrested and Bernardo Provenzano had taken over the business of Cosa Nostra as the new godfather. The women and their children arrived out of nowhere in a taxi and moved back into the house where they had lived before. Corleone welcomed them both without raising an eyebrow.
“I’m not afraid,” said Father Pizzitola, when I asked about Provenzano’s wife. His voice was trembling. As if ashamed of his weakness, he corrected himself quickly and said: “Of course, I mean I’m not afraid of journalists’ questions.”
As always, Corleone lay there like an endless Sunday afternoon. Only the old men had been sent into the street. With cautious boredom, they kept an eye out for unfamiliar car number plates. On these cobblestones the bosses accompanied the processions—the Riinas, the Provenzanos, the Liggios—they paid the carriers, those poor devils who earn a few centesimi by lugging the crucifix on Good Friday, the statue of Santa Rosalia on the first Sunday in June, and the glass sarcophagus of the martyr San Placido on his name day on the first Sunday in October. The procession usually stopped outside the house of the boss to give him an opportunity to greet the saints with a barely perceptible nod of the head. And that’s how it is even today. With only one small difference, that it’s the next generation that keeps the ritual going. The women and children of the bosses step out onto the narrow balcony, cross themselves in the presence of the saints, and rain rose petals down on them.
“When I married, I swore loyalty to my wife and the Mafia,” the turncoat mafioso Leonardo Messina told the public prosecutors. “The priest? What was he supposed to say? Do you think he didn’t know who paid for the feasts of the saints?” And then the mafioso added that he had always walked beside Sant’Annunziata in the procession: the meaning was there for anyone who wanted to understand.
There’s no such thing as chance in Sicily. Not an unthought gesture, not an unconsidered word. The procession is a ritual. From the procession, Sicilians read the distribution of power in their town and their community—who is allowed to carry the saint out of the church, who walks in front of the priest, who behind. Who collected the money for the feast of the Madonna del Carmine, who is granted the right to march in front of the baldachin. Who wears an absent expression as the procession advances down the alleyways, who makes a special effort during the cries of “Viva la Maria.” They all know about the sacredness of this ritual for the community. And the costs. Processions are expensive, all those garlands, lightbulbs, gun salutes, brass bands, fireworks—the priests know that the alms of the poor aren’t enough. Neither are they enough for the new stucco frieze, the new organ, the new chandeliers. In the end, one hopes, where possible, for certain concessions. Totò Riina didn’t have to give up the idea of a church wedding even when he was living underground. Don Agostino Coppola, the legendary Mafia priest who died under house arrest, married him to his fiancée, Antonietta, in the spring of 1974, and christened each of their four children.
Those priests who refused to understand the messages would receive a visit from the men of honor during the religious service, contrary to their custom of attending mass only on solemn feast days. Because a boss doesn’t like to make a display of his faith—confession and religious services are women’s business. But if it was unavoidable, they would take a seat in the front row and stare at the priest until he understood and got himself transferred to the missionary program. If he refused to understand, and even fired up the young people against Cosa Nostra, he would be shot in the back of the head, like Padre Puglisi in Palermo.
In 1993 the murder of the anti-Mafia priest Giuseppe Puglisi was arranged by the Graviano brothers. And seven years later his murderer, Salvatore Grigoli, said: “Padre Puglisi’s lips closed. He smiled. Gentle, cheerful, but also resigned. He only whispered a single sentence: ‘I expected this.’ I will never forget his smile.”
By that time Grigoli already had ninety murders behind him and asked for a meeting with the Pope. The beatification process for Padre Puglisi has been going on for years. His murderer’s statement is seen as an important piece of evidence for the process. Some clerics were surprised by the church’s urgent desire to beatify Padre Puglisi, because, just a short time before, the cardinal had shown his violent opposition to an anti-Mafia document: no one wanted an anti-Mafia pastoral letter. But they did want an anti-Mafia saint.
All this is pure show, however. We’d be better off going to the theater, Padre Fasullo had bitterly observed.
Letizia is still standing in the bar beside the old men, reading on in the article about the release of Totò Riina’s son from prison. Shobha takes pictures as her mother reads from the article, standing among the old men. At last, we take our leave and walk a few yards along the seafront. Plastic bags drift among the palm trees planted by Letizia; the flower beds are full of detergent bottles and rotting mattresses.
“I used to feel as responsible for Palermo as a mother feels for a handicapped child,” says Letizia. Used to.
Then we walk on, toward the Foro Italico, to have an espresso. In fact, the bar is an ice-cream parlor, of the kind that is the destination for the Sunday afternoon family stroll. And perhaps that’s what makes Letizia slide uneasily around on her chair. She hates all the places where the well-to-do of Palermo put themselves on display. Not for nothing has she spent her whole life fighting against that. She fought against the pusillanimous bourgeoisie, against clapped-out moral ideas, and against arrogant Sicilian menfolk. She fought against her own family.
As the daughter of lower-middle-class Sicilian parents who strove for better things, she grew up until the age of eight in Trieste, where her parents had moved for work. When she returned to Palermo, she attended a convent school, and her father locked her in the house in the afternoon because it wasn’t seemly for a little girl to play outside. To escape her father, at the age of sixteen she married the first boy who asked her. She married as a virgin. At her wedding she wore a pink lace hat by the French fashion designer Jacques Fath. Her husband was the scion of a Sicilian coffee-roasting dynasty. She gave him three daughters, one after the other. When she expressed the desire to study, her husband declared that she had gone insane. For fifteen years she led the life of a Sicilian wife, then she suffered a collapse, a psychologically induced heart attack. Her husband sent her to the best doctors in Italy and to Switzerland for a sleeping cure, and, when nothing worked, to a psychotherapist in Palermo. Letizia spent years in psychoanalysis and at the end of it she left her husband, taking her three daughters with her.
“You know,” Letizia says, “my husband could have forgiven me a lover, but not a job of my own.”
When Shobha and her mother sit side by side today, they might be mistaken for sisters: they look very similar, with the difference that Letizia has smooth, strawberry blond hair, while Shobha is a resolutely fake blond.
“I can remember my daughters when they were little,” Letizia says, with a glance at Shobha, “but not my life before I was forty. Strange, isn’t it?”
Shobha sets her camera down on the table for a moment. I wonder if even your own mother is transformed when you look at her through the lens. Whether she becomes a different person, a stranger whom you approach impartially? During the Palermo Spring, Letizia was a heroine to many women. To Shobha, she was always her mother. Although perhaps Shobha is more maternal than her mother. Shobha is solicitous about everyone, whether it be her neurotic cat or the tortoises that live on her terrace. She even mothers me. She calls me Petruccia. And tell
s me to eat more pineapple.
When we’re working together, Shobha can persuade even the most intransigent men and the most circumspect women to pose for her, to smile at her, to give meaningful looks, whatever’s needed. And as she rules with an iron hand—“No! Don’t look into the camera! Mouth shut! Yes, that’s great!”—everyone is so busy trying to please her that I manage to study them all unobserved, to read a raised eyebrow here, notice a false smile there, or perhaps just a trembling of the hands.
That’s how it was in Corleone, where we saw five old men sitting in a row, as if for the Benetton photographer. All wearing the coppola, the Sicilian hunter’s cap, and freshly ironed shirts. At the old men’s feet there stood a basket of pomegranates. From the hall behind them came the murmur of appreciative voices and the slap of cards being slammed down on the table. On the wall there was a sign: A well-mannered person doesn’t swear or spit on the floor. Shobha managed to make them all feel important; shirt buttons were done up and hair combed smooth.
The old men were looking across at the church of Santa Rosalia, jostled by decaying palazzi and new grey buildings. Inside, three young girls were waiting for visitors, to teach them about the art-historical significance of the crucifix, the value of the painting by De Vasco, which depicts St. John the Baptist and was once stolen but returned immediately, thanks to the Mafia. But no one wandered into the unassuming church. The parish priest had gone to Monreale to see the archbishop, so the girls were whiling away their time. They scampered around the church like elves, climbed giggling into the niche where the crucifix was kept, hid behind the choir screens, behind which the closed-order nuns used to sit, startled the doves in the belltower, shared a cigarette up there, and sounded a shrill and weary little bell until the old men of the Circolo degli Agricoltori pushed back their caps and stretched their wrinkled necks to look at the sky.