by Petra Reski
Shobha calls Salvo, who is clearly in the middle of his siesta, because it takes him ages to answer. He suggests that we go in the direction of Ucciardone prison, where he’ll pick us up to take us to Mondello. First he has some things to do for one of his ladies.
“Madonna,” says Shobha, as she puts the telefonino away again, “they’ve really got him over a barrel.” So that we don’t have to wait too long for Salvo, we walk through the Borgo at a leisurely pace, as slowly as tourists, past the piles of trash from the market stalls, through air that smells as if it’s fermenting. The green of artichokes lies next to burst watermelons and shimmering gray fish scales. Not a single car drives past; nothing stirs around here before five o’clock. A deep silence prevails in the street, on the artichoke-green, on the fly-curtains of the balconies. The silence of paused time. The sacred southern Italian lunch break is even respected by the dogs in the street, which lie snoring in the shade on the pavements. Beside them, fat women sit spread-legged on plastic chairs outside the front doors of their houses. The women sleep open-mouthed, hands folded on their bellies.
The plastic chairs aren’t the usual white ones that pollute the world, but chairs stretched with strips of plastic, old chairs that look almost beautiful next to the omnipresent white plastic stacking chairs. It’s not just traditions that last longer in Sicily than elsewhere, chairs do too. They remind me of Rita Atria’s mother’s chair. It was in their living room, made of white and yellow plastic strips, with an old sofa cushion on the seat.
Rita Atria was a Sicilian girl, about whom I wrote my very first book. She was eleven years old when her father, a Mafia boss, was murdered. She was sixteen when her brother was killed. She took her own life at seventeen. She had grown up in the Mafia. Rita wanted to avenge her father and brother by collaborating with the judiciary and telling them what she knew about the Mafia in her village. Since then her mother had rejected her.
Rita lived in Rome under a series of assumed names—with her sister-in-law, her brother’s widow, in an apartment that the Ministry of the Interior had rented for the two young women. They were filled with hope for a new life beyond the Mafia, until public prosecutor Paolo Borsellino was murdered. A week after the assassination Rita Atria jumped from the seventh floor of a block of apartments in Rome. She would have turned eighteen four weeks later.
A state prosecutor gave me a photocopy of Rita Atria’s diary. In it she wrote:
No one can understand the emptiness that Borsellino’s death has left in my life. Everybody’s scared. But the only thing I’m scared of is that the Mafia state will always win, and the few poor idiots who tilt against windmills will be murdered too. Before you start fighting against the Mafia you have to test your own conscience—it’s only when you have defeated the Mafia within yourself that you can fight against it in your circle of friends. Because the Mafia is us and our twisted way of behaving. Borsellino. You died for what you believed in. But without you, I’m dead.
Rita’s mother didn’t come to her daughter’s funeral. Eight women from Palermo carried Rita’s coffin on their shoulders: they were the women from the committee of “Women Against the Mafia,” and one of them was Letizia. Rita Atria’s grave was marked with a small headstone with the inscription The Truth Lives. Rita’s sister-in-law had had this gravestone erected—the sister-in-law who had lived with her until her suicide. It was only months after her daughter’s death that the girl’s mother visited the grave—and shattered the gravestone with a hammer that she had hidden in her handbag. She went on striking the stone until only a few splinters remained of Rita’s photograph and the inscription The Truth Lives.
To understand Rita’s story, I had driven alone to Partanna, the village in the Belice Valley, southeast of Trapani. A taxi driver from Palermo had brought me to Partanna and promised to pick me up again when I called him. I stood in the road and watched his car disappearing into the distance, and felt as if I had been dropped off on an alien planet. I felt even more abandoned when I moved into my room at the only inn in the village, a narrow room with a metal fly-curtain outside the window, which rattled gently when the trucks drove by on the through-road below my window.
The inn was actually a pizzeria that also rented rooms—rooms without phones. You could only make phone calls from the dining room, and you could only do that with coins. The only other person staying in the inn was an old man, a Sicilian who had emigrated from Partanna to America in the 1940s and who, since he had retired, came back to his village every summer. He spent his holidays sitting in the front door of the pizzeria and hoping to fall into conversation with someone. He usually waited in vain. Because he spoke only English—and remnants of the dialect that people in Partanna had spoken in the 1940s, which hardly anyone understood now. Sometimes I translated for him from English into Italian. In the evening the old Sicilian waited for me; he sat in his vest on a plastic chair and told me his house had six bedrooms and wasn’t far from Niagara Falls. And I sat next to him and smoked and thought about the day’s encounters—with Rita’s sister-in-law, who had come back to visit her village under police protection; with Giovanna Atria, Rita’s mother.
Everyone in the village knew that I had come because of Rita’s story. I could feel their eyes glued to me as I walked along the street to buy cigarettes in the village’s single tobacconist’s shop, or when I made a call from the only phone box that took phone cards. But when I asked anyone a question, they all acted as if Rita had never existed. Every day I tried to allay the suspicions of Rita’s mother, who didn’t want to talk to anyone about her daughter. At first, she only opened the door a crack and then slammed it shut again as soon as she saw me. But I refused to be discouraged and stood outside her house every day, hoping to persuade her to give me an interview. Until she finally invited me into the living room.
Even though it was light outside, we sat behind closed shutters in the light of a fluorescent strip, in a room that looked as if it had never been lived in, with a walnut vitrine full of liqueur glasses that no one had drunk from, with a sofa that no one had sat on. I sat on one of the dining-room chairs, which had not had its plastic covering removed in all those years. The only piece of furniture that was actually used was the chair stretched with strips of plastic on which Rita’s mother sat. Her favorite place to sit was in a corner behind the living-room window, from where she could see the comings and goings in the street as she sat on her chair, peering out from behind her crooked blinds.
The mother didn’t regret rejecting her daughter, nor did she regret shattering the gravestone. The betrayal of the family had to be paid for. Washed away, scrubbed away, chopped into tiny pieces. Giovanna Atria repeated only that her daughter’s actions had been wrong, wrong, wrong—and that she had been hexed by her sister-in-law, the hated sister-in-law.
The mother spouted her accusations, her breath rattled, and I had difficulty following her through her thicket of accusations and suspicions. I saw her sitting, legs spread, on the plastic-strip chair in front of me and heard her complaining without once using the word Mafia. I dreamed about her at night. The metal chains of the fly-curtain jangled, and she came flying through the window into my room at the inn and tried to strangle me.
By day, on the other hand, she reminded me of my East Prussian grandmother. She too had done everything she could to keep her family together. The family here meaning only blood relations. Also like a Sicilian woman, my grandmother distinguished between flesh by blood and flesh by marriage contract. And my mother was flesh by marriage contract. She had been widowed at the age of twenty-seven, when my father died in a mining accident. When my mother went out dancing for the first time, six years after my father’s death, my grandmother cast her out of the family.
“I thought you’d stay on your own,” my grandmother had told my mother. I thought about that as I walked back along the main street with the villagers’ eyes on my back, and as I had my dinner in the pizzeria in the evening, eyed suspiciously by old men who were, as
always, the only guests. In one corner of the pizzeria there was a television fixed to the wall, turned on all day. In the evening the old men watched soft-porn films, along with the old emigrant in his vest. And when the taxi driver picked me up at last and drove me back to Palermo, I felt as if I was going back to a city of light.
Shobha, Letizia, and I sit on a bench by the yellow stone walls of Ucciardone prison, waiting for Salvo. After dinner a wave of fatigue falls upon us, intensified by the heat. Letizia smokes a cigarette, and Shobha takes her photograph sitting next to some women. The women are waiting for visiting time at Ucciardone to begin. They sit in the shade, fanning themselves and smelling of perfume. No Mafia wife would neglect to visit her husband in prison. One of them looks like a tragic, crazed Anna Magnani. A face like a figurehead with heavy, blue bags around her eyes. Her hair comes down to her waist, and she wears a chain of pearls that falls to her lap. I wonder whether I’ve ever met her before, perhaps in the high-security court at Caltanissetta?
When the trials of the murderers of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were being held there, with perpetrators, instigators, and accomplices all in the dock, the wives didn’t miss a single day. Unlike now, when Mafia bosses are usually questioned by video link, the defendants used to be present in person; they sat in barred cages and tried to catch their wives’ eyes. They were men with the air of janitors, men in tracksuits. In front of the cages hung a red cord that was supposed to stop lawyers from getting too close to their clients and passing on messages.
The wives were called the “white widows.” They were the first in the viewing seats in the courtroom in the morning and the last to leave in the evening. It is the duty of every Mafia wife to sit through every day of the trial, from the reading of the names of everyone present to the closing of the last document folder. The crazed Anna Magnani was always first in the gallery in the morning. She always sat down in the same place on the spectators’ bench, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, folded her hands over her belly, and didn’t rest until the end of the session. Later came the young women—with frothy perms, lilac lipstick, and azure, flight-attendant eye shadow. Two weeks’ honeymoon in the Maldives, a fitted kitchen with a microwave, and a video recorder had been enough to buy their silence. The Mafia woos the wives of arrested bosses with a lot of money. They mustn’t want for anything. Because if they are unhappy, they could start giving their husbands the wrong idea.
By half past eight in the evening, when the presiding judge declared the trial over for the day, the air conditioning had turned the women’s lips blue. That was the moment they had been waiting for since morning. Because before their husbands were led back to the cells, they managed to blow kisses from their barred cages. The women blew kisses back, kneaded their handkerchiefs, and swallowed hard. Their eyes welled up. Real Matres Dolorosae—filled with the kind of devotion that women feel only when they’re convinced they’re on the right side.
These women outside the prison walls of Palermo have, in honor of the day, put on their newest outfits, low-cut floral dresses, polka-dot skirts, and bustiers. It occurs to me that in San Luca, back in Calabria, I didn’t see a single woman who had dressed herself up, unless she was seventeen years old. All the married women wore black, or at best a pair of jeans with a black T-shirt. Did they wear the latest designer dresses at home, away from the public gaze? Like Arab women? The smart boutiques of Reggio must have some customers, after all.
The women of San Luca are also sure that they’re on the right side. Wiretap records show that they are by no means the patient, black-clad victims of potentially violent men, but that they actively support their husbands, not only in their illegal deals but also in the planning of revenge campaigns. When she visited her husband in jail, Giulia Alvaro, who would later be arrested herself, asked her husband if she should get weapons out of a hiding place for him and bring them to another clan member. Sonia Carabetta made herself useful as an intermediary between her brother and the hit man Marco Marmo. The women disguise themselves, pass on messages, hide fugitives, prepare murders, and maintain the connection between arrested bosses and the clan—which can even win them the honorific title of a sorella d’omertà, a sister of silence.
“How many misfortunes, how many tragedies in the south have been caused by women, especially the ones who become mothers,” said the Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia. As in Cosa Nostra and the Camorra, in Calabria the women pass on the Mafia culture from generation to generation; it’s the mothers who call for vendetta, who keep thoughts of the dead alive and prepare their sons for life in the ’Ndrangheta. In Calabria the clan chief arranges for the newborn child to be paid a visit at which a knife and a key are set down by its side. If the child touches the knife first, it has a future as an ’Ndranghetista, but if it touches the key first, it becomes a “flunkey,” as the police are called here. And to keep this from happening, the key is set down too far away for the child to be able to touch it. The boss also cuts the baby’s nails for the first time: that means the child has been accepted into the organization. And the mother understands the symbolism of these gestures.
Father, uncle, brother-in-law, brother, son. The Mafia sits in the living room. It lies in bed, it eats at the table, it comes home with its boots bloodied. And the wives? You can accuse Mafia women of all kinds of things, of concealing things and lying, of turning a blind eye. But you can’t accuse them of not knowing anything.
“The only really important woman for a mafioso is, and must be, the mother of his children. All the others are ‘just tarts.’ A mafioso who has been married more than once, or who is known to have had affairs, is a wild card—incapable of controlling himself sexually and emotionally. So he isn’t ‘professionally’ trustworthy either,” wrote Giovanni Falcone.
The women are the foundation of the Mafia. When he’s accepted into the organization, the mafioso must swear not to chase after other people’s wives and always to lead a blameless family life. The reason is less moral than pragmatic—a suspect family life, or even a volatile mistress, represents a threat to security. The men of honor play along with the game. They enjoy the respect that is paid to them. They know what they are worth. But they also know that rules are there to be broken. Even in Cosa Nostra. Of course you have mistresses, very discreetly. But the wife is consoled by the certainty that she takes precedence. She must be protected. Because she provides an assurance that the foundations of Mafia society are unshaken.
Formally, a woman can’t be accepted into Cosa Nostra, but even without the formalities she’s part of it. Giusy Vitale, the first female boss in the history of Cosa Nostra, and later a turncoat, didn’t just advance the businesses of the clan in the absence of her brothers, passing on messages, taking part in meetings with bosses; she also bribed politicians and gave orders for murders to be committed. Even at the age of six she knew what it meant to belong to the Mafia, Giusy Vitale said. That is the educational goal of a Mafia mother—she rules over the blood family, the core of the Mafia family itself.
It’s the mothers who pass on Mafia values: honor and shame, loyalty and betrayal. It isn’t the husband who brings up the children in blind obedience to the Mafia; it’s the wife. Even if she and the boss don’t actually have a marriage certificate. When the boss Bernardo Provenzano was finally arrested after forty-three years of invisibility, he said, when asked if he was married: “Where my conscience is concerned, yes.” But wiretap records reveal that, even while the godfather Provenzano was living underground, he didn’t have to give up the chance of a church wedding. Or the usual customs of a good Sicilian family life. A linguist who was presented with excerpts from wiretap records could tell from the accent of Provenzano’s sons, Angelo and Francesco, that they must have gone to school in Trapani. When investigators went to Trapani, some schoolchildren identified the faces of the two Provenzano sons as those of their former schoolmates. Provenzano’s wife was recognized by some of Trapani’s parish priests when they were shown photographs
of her. But unfortunately they couldn’t say where the signora might have been living with her two sons.
The God-fearing godfather felt bonded, merged, allied with his wife and family—as everyone in Cosa Nostra knew, and as was revealed by the pizzini, the little notes with which Provenzano communicated with the world, and in which he always invoked God’s blessing. His wife sent him warm socks along with washing instructions—You can wash them in cold water or in the washing machine—and she wrote to him in the tone of a wife whose husband has gone to war:
My life, I end my letter with the blessing of the Almighty, that the light of the Lord may shine on you and help you, as it may give us the power and the faith to endure all this. My life, I hug you very, very tightly. My love, if I should have forgotten anything, please let me know.
Unlike the Mafia, the Italian judiciary has always had a less than flattering view of a woman’s capabilities. As if she is someone incapable of acting or thinking independently. Even if a wife is in hiding for twenty years with a documented murderer, she doesn’t count as an accomplice; she isn’t even guilty of being an accessory. A wife can’t be forced to give evidence against her husband. That’s the law. And that’s what makes her so valuable to the Mafia: wives are inviolable. They bring messages to their husbands, whether they are imprisoned or in hiding, and during their husbands’ frequent absences they keep the businesses going: drug deals, money laundering, property transfers. The few Mafia wives who have ever ended up in court have been acquitted; many Italian judges have fallen victim to their own unshakeable faith in the patriarchy: women couldn’t be held responsible for their actions, they must have been forced to act on their husbands’ instructions. Only slowly have they become aware that the image of the innocent wife with no idea of her husband’s murderous activities is a myth, and one that the Mafia at least has never believed in.