The Honored Society

by Petra Reski

  When the gate of Ucciardone prison opens at last and the women push their way through for visiting hours, Salvo drives up; his Fiat sits, indicators blinking, by the side of the road, unmoved by the furious beeping of the other cars behind it. As soon as we’ve closed the car door behind us, we talk about the women standing next to us outside the prison. Women you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night, as Salvo says.

  We drive past the jetty where people stand waving after the departing ferry, then Salvo turns off toward Mondello. As always, he looks as fresh as a daisy, his collar is turned up, his hair combed and gelled; he plainly had time to shower after his siesta, and he smells of aftershave. When we stop at a traffic light, he looks at his watch until Shobha finally asks him if it’s new. With a mixture of relief and embarrassment he admits that his brother gave it to him, a first-class imitation Rolex, because it was Salvo’s birthday last week, which none of us knew.

  “You remember the Rolex in Corleone?” Shobha asks and laughs. The “Rolex in Corleone” is a phrase I just have to hear to smell again the scent of a rainy morning in Corleone, the scent of the wet paving stones, the smell of my damp leather jacket, the smell of wet cardboard. The water trickled down us in little streams and flowed along the gutters, dragging paper and trash with it.

  We wanted to talk to the women of the town, to hear something about the ones who were spoken of in secret as the first ladies of the Mafia. Not the easiest thing in the world. And certainly not when the weather’s bad. Because in Corleone, even when it’s fine, you only ever see the old men sitting by the side of the road; it’s only thought seemly for women to appear in church, at the cemetery, and in the supermarket. It was too late for church, too early for the supermarket, and too wet for the cemetery. We walked gloomily along the alleyways. In the window of a haberdashery there was a display of coppole, the flat caps worn on the island. Because my hair was already drenched through, we stepped inside the shop to buy one. Inside stood two old women dressed in black, asking advice about buying thread. I noticed that one of them held her left arm at so stiff an angle that it looked as if it didn’t belong to her. Then I saw a gold, diamond-encrusted Rolex sparkling on her wrist.

  A short time later we bumped into the two women again in the Iannuzzi patisserie, which has the best cannoli in Corleone—the Sicilian pastries made of cream cheese and candied fruits. The Rolex glittered in the shop’s fluorescent light, and pastry-man Iannuzzi hovered around the two black-clad women like a hummingbird: “One more marzipan cake, Signore? Try one of my delicious cannoli, tender as peach blossoms!” When Shobha asked the two women if she could take a picture of them, they just clicked their tongues dismissively. Plainly we weren’t worth an answer. The two signore were used to being treated with exaggerated respect. They condescendingly gave their orders and quickly left the shop.

  Who were those two black-clad women? Signore Iannuzzi shrugged. “No idea,” he said, and we could see that he was lying. We bought two cannoli and decided to go to Totò Riina’s house on Via Scorsone so that we could at least take a picture of the place where his wife Antonietta had lived with her children since her husband’s arrest. When Antonietta came back to Corleone, she didn’t move into the house with the gilded taps, walnut doors, and the Carrara marble. The police had impounded it. Instead, she moved in with her two old, unmarried sisters, Emanuela and Maria Matilde. A narrow-fronted, two-story house on a street barely wider than a Fiat Panda.

  Antonietta Bagarella had known her husband since childhood. It was a classic Mafia marriage: Ninetta was from an old Corleone family, her brother was rising through the hierarchy. He had the honor of being murdered by his future brother-in-law. Ninetta only found that out when she was already married to Riina. One thing is certain, though: it wouldn’t have got in the way of the marriage. Business is business. A woman like Ninetta, who comes from old Mafia nobility, isn’t prone to sentimentality.

  Unlike her husband, who didn’t get beyond primary school, Ninetta studied and gained her teacher’s diploma. Among all the mafiosi who haven’t even got a proper command of Italian, Ninetta’s education is an invaluable advantage; for a long time she was the only one capable of reading a case file and negotiating with the lawyers. The young Mafia wife also attracted the attention of the investigating magistrates. In 1971, at the age of twenty-seven, she was the first Sicilian woman to be accused of Mafia membership. She was suspected of working as a courier for the bosses who were living in hiding. Ninetta played the part of the innocent, persecuted wife to perfection: she wrote pleading letters, collected the signatures of mothers in Corleone, and even appealed to the Human Rights Commission in The Hague. She told the court: “I am a woman, and I confess that I am guilty of loving a man that I trust. I have loved Totò Riina since I was thirteen and he was twenty-six. Since then I have borne him in my heart; that is my only crime, your Honour.”

  The judge passed a lenient sentence and placed her under police supervision—which she soon escaped by going into hiding.

  The Riinas’ family life was flawless, even during the years when the family was in hiding. The Mafia saw to it that they had every possible comfort: a priest to marry the couple, a honeymoon in Venice, a place in the obstetric ward, well-guarded villas in the middle of Palermo, holiday homes by the sea. Antonietta taught the children their times tables, while at the same time hit men were recruited and assassinations planned. Hear everything, see everything, just don’t say a word.

  When journalists dared to ask her a question at the end of a day’s trial, she said only: “My husband isn’t what you think he is. He’s an elegant man. I wish everyone was like him, an exemplary father. He is too good, and he fell victim to circumstances.”

  I was thinking about that as I stood in front of her narrow house and noticed that there were white lace curtains over the windows and a rubber tree on the tiled balcony. Suddenly I heard cries. At first I didn’t even notice that the cries were aimed at us. “Whores, wretches, damned souls,” came the shouts from the window, “you’ve been running after us all morning. Clear off, or you’ll be sorry.”

  Plainly the two black-clad women were the sisters of Ninetta Bagarella. Shobha blanched, lowered her camera, and said: “Let’s get out of here.”

  We ran back to our car, which was parked only a street away. I drove off as quickly as I could, toward the access road for Palermo. Shortly before I got there I noticed that we were being followed by a white Fiat Uno. As I turned off toward Palermo, I saw a heavily guarded security van driving in the distance in front of us. I tried to follow it. I stayed glued to its back bumper all the way to Palermo. At some point the white Fiat Uno turned off.

  Shortly after our visit to Corleone, Giovanni, the eighteen-year-old son of Totò Riina, was arrested, for fighting, perjury, blackmail, and Mafia membership. And murder. His mother saw him as a victim. Again she sat down and, in her even, schoolteachery handwriting, wrote an appeal that she sent to La Repubblica—a masterpiece of Sicilian maternal love. “As a mother, I have decided to open my heart, overflowing with grief over the arrest of my son,” she wrote, and accused the judiciary and the public of condemning him simply because of his family. “My children are being found guilty of being born the children of father Riina and mother Bagarella, an original sin that cannot be erased. Why can my children not simply be seen as young people like any others?”

  Later, Giovanni Riina was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of four people. His younger brother, Giuseppe, who had also been arrested, was charged with Mafia membership and extortion—and got out of jail on a technicality in 2008. After six years’ imprisonment he returned to the narrow house in Via Scorsone, keenly awaited by his mother, his sisters, and his aunts. That’s what I can’t help thinking of when I see a Rolex.

  Salvo drives slowly along the twists and turns of Monte Pellegrino. Palermo stretches out below us in a veil of heat haze, endless rows of houses, satellite dishes, and a sea that blurs with the horizon. Every time Sho
bha and I work in Palermo, we make a pilgrimage to Santa Rosalia, as if we were obeying an inner voice. And this time is no different, in spite of the mild protests of Letizia, who accuses us of heresy. For a moment we immerse ourselves in the view of the Bay of Palermo, transformed into the Conca d’Oro, the golden seashell, then we pass through a tunnel and we’ve arrived at the top of Monte Pellegrino, up by Santa Rosalia, the patron saint of the city, buried here under mountains of gold and precious stones.

  As usual, I get the urge to splurge at the stall set up by the bearded dwarf-woman beside the steps below the pilgrimage church, and buy a bag full of devotional objects: Santa Rosalias supine and haloed, light-up Madonnas, oversized, glow-in-the-dark rosaries, and, of course, Santa Rosalia candles as thick as your arm. Thus equipped, we climb the steps to the chapel, and notice a woman, who has plainly climbed Monte Pellegrino barefoot, now throwing herself to the ground and sliding up the steps to Santa Rosalia on her knees. She’s young, perhaps less than thirty. Somehow her fanaticism strikes us as weird, so Shobha and I run past her, giving her a wide berth, clutching our candles as if they were amulets to ward off the evil eye.

  What does the barefoot woman of Santa Rosalia wish for? Her husband’s release from prison? A child? An illness healed? The chapel is full of votive gifts: silver calves and eyes, wax hearts and legs, dangle from the walls. Every time we come here there are different gifts hanging in the chapel. This time we spot a steel-boned corset with a note that says: For the mercy you showed, Mimma. Hanging beside it is a plastic bag containing a ponytail, and beneath it children’s shirts and bibs and a rubber ring decorated with blue baby ribbons.

  The chapel is in a cave in Monte Pellegrino, so cool that it makes you shiver even on the hottest days. Here two Rosalias wait for the faithful: one dressed in black, holding a death’s-head in her hand, her right arm reaching combatively into the air; and a lasciviously draped Santa Rosalia lying in a glass coffin, a Santa Rosalia who lies in her shrine full of precious objects, on a bed of rings, pearl necklaces, armbands—a sleeping beauty who has just fallen into a deep slumber.

  Apart from us and the barefoot woman, there is no one in the chapel, no faithful sitting in the pews, no sexton collecting the burned-out candles—no one. Not a sound but drops of water falling from the ceiling onto metal runnels, from which they are guided to the floor. The moisture creeps not just into the silver calves but also into the countless notes bearing wishes and expressions of gratitude; the paper is curled and mottled, and I wonder who actually reads the notes.

  As we stand by the saint’s glass coffin, the young woman comes sliding along on her knees. She kneels next to us, prays with her head lowered, and starts crying. She sobs till her back shudders.

  CARLA MADONIA

  LETIZIA IS STILL CAPTIVATED BY THE SIGHT OF THE WEEPING woman beside the glass coffin as we drive down from Monte Pellegrino toward Mondello. She looks out of the window and doesn’t notice the ash falling from her cigarette. Perhaps Letizia is thinking about the photograph that she herself once took here, showing the bare feet of a woman sliding up to Saint Rosalia on her knees. Maybe she’s also thinking of the photograph of the widows whose faces were reflected in the windscreen of a hearse; maybe she’s thinking of the picture of the men peeing against a wall. Or maybe not. Although even her photographs of shredded corpses, mouths gaping in death, and hysterical widows always look as meticulously composed as if a neorealist film director had organized the horror, her first concern was always the struggle; art came second. She fought for women and for the insane. Against men and against the powerful. She opened a theater for women, edited and continues to edit a magazine for women, published books for women. She was the leader of a revolution, because when Letizia took charge of her own life, divorce wasn’t even possible in Italy. In its place, there was the crime of honor killing: a man who killed his unfaithful wife to restore his honor could, until 1981, expect mitigating circumstances. From that point of view, in the 1960s it took a lot of courage to leave your husband and lead your own life.

  As if she can read my thoughts, Letizia now says: “I have a very pronounced sense of family, but I don’t let it cramp me. And I don’t cramp the ones I love. I believe in coexistence, in love, in freedom. I’ve always been very free, even in the upbringing of my daughters, and even if that wasn’t always what they wanted. It’s complicated.”

  Shobha is sitting in front of her, and I see her looking out of the window and then awkwardly cleaning the lens of her camera with a little chamois cloth. And then Salvo turns the CD back on. Antonacci: “Dream of me if it snows.”

  “A woman’s thoughts revolve around flesh,” they say in Sicily. Flesh by contract and flesh of the flesh. Carne di contratto, carne di carne. And husbands often learn the hard way that their wives, when they have to make a choice, will naturally feel closer to the flesh of the flesh. It’s something learned by those mafiosi who have decided, against the will of their wives, to leave the Mafia. Giuseppina Manganaro burned her husband’s clothes when she discovered that he was collaborating with the judiciary. She could no longer stand his smell in the house, she said, and dressed in black. The sister and mother of Emanuele and Pasquale Di Filippo went so far as to call a press conference where they told the news agency Ansa of their contempt for the two traitors. The sister was so ashamed that she attempted suicide shortly afterward, the mother cursed the day she gave birth to her sons, the wives cast out their unholy husbands and cried: “Our sons no longer have fathers.” The mother and mother-in-law of the turncoat Vincenzo Scarantino chained themselves to the railings of the Palace of Justice to declare that he had been forced into becoming a traitor.

  Agata Barresi said nothing when the Mafia murdered the first of her five sons. She also said nothing when the Mafia murdered the last of her five sons. She didn’t even open her mouth when the policeman asked her for her personal details. She remained silent until her death.

  The mother of the mafioso Enrico Incognito wept when her son was killed. But what good did it do? The shame had to be eradicated, honor reestablished. Enrico’s brother Marcello had shot him to stop him from going over to the other side, the side of justice. The murder was accidentally captured on video, because at the very moment that his mother and his murderer entered the room, Enrico was recording his statement on tape. “No! Marcello, no!” Enrico cried, begging for his life. In vain. Then the mother left the room so that she didn’t have to watch what was about to happen.

  And Vincenzina Marchese, sister-in-law of the boss Totò Riina and wife of the boss Leoluca Bagarella, disappeared when her husband was arrested. He wore her wedding ring on a chain around his neck, as one would with someone who had died, and put fresh flowers by her photograph. A note was found in her handwriting: “Forgive me, everyone, my husband is worth his weight in gold, it’s all my fault,” read the message on squared paper. Later, the police learned from two turncoat mafiosi that Vincenzina had supposedly hanged herself. Not only was she the wife of a powerful mafioso, she was also the sister of one of the most important state witnesses against the Mafia. Vincenzina had wanted to erase the shame, people said. Her body was never found.

  Those bloodletting times, when the mafiosi had turned state’s evidence in droves, had been the times of the Mafia women. Of the cold-blooded mothers, the wives who were as self-sacrificing as they were vengeful. During those hard times, the Mafia women had become more valuable than ever. After all, no wave of arrests, no law, had done so much damage to the Mafia as the statements of its own men. There were men who talked about how they had strangled a little boy and dissolved his corpse in hydrochloric acid, about a man having his arm chopped off before being killed, about a pregnant woman being throttled. Now the wives were called upon to play their part, to praise the sacredness of the family, to extol the infallibility of the husband, to level accusations against the judiciary—wives who were willing to do anything to make the image of Cosa Nostra shine again. In the end, it was all about their childr
en’s future.

  We drive along the seafront of Mondello, past the pier where the Charleston restaurant stands, looking, with its turrets and curlicues, like a Russian railway station from the days of the Tsars. It smells of oysters and burned almonds. The fish restaurants are on their afternoon break, and people jostle each other at the stalls selling sunglasses and fake Vuitton bags as if there were something to be had for free. The turquoise sea looks like a tourist poster, and lovers lie embracing on the beach.

  We plan to have a coffee in the piazza in Mondello, and I desperately crave some cannoli, regardless of their proven indigestibility, to which Shobha refers once again.

  “I haven’t been to Mondello for ages,” Letizia announces with amazement. She stares at the passing couples, who all look as if they’ve allowed themselves a lunch in Mondello today, with their parents, their sisters and in-laws, their children. As if they’ve had swordfish at Al Gabbiano, preceded by a few oysters and sea urchins and spaghetti with clams. The son-in-law will have chosen the wine, perhaps a light Tasca d’Almerita, for which his father-in-law will have despised him because he himself drinks red wine with fish. Now they’ve taken a stroll along the shore, along the quay to the little white statue of Mary at the end, past the fishing boats and back to the stalls of the Vietnamese street traders selling cigarette lighters in the shape of hand grenades. Exhausted by this effort, they slump onto a chair in the piazza, for an ice cream, or perhaps just one tiny cannolo. In a moment the mother-in-law will say that the cannoli aren’t bad, but not nearly as good as the ones she makes herself, which are as light as a breeze. Then they will all argue about whether the cannoli from Pasticceria Alba on Piazza Don Bosco are really the best ones in the whole city, and the father-in-law will dare to announce that the best cannoli come from Piana degli Albanesi, which will put his wife in such a huff that she won’t talk to him until dinnertime. “That’s what it’ll be like,” says Shobha.