The Honored Society

by Petra Reski

Rosalba has a pragmatic view of her job: she isn’t supporting monsters, just defendants. A moral problem would arise only if someone who had already been sentenced brought guns into jail. But until a sentence is passed, she assumes that she is standing by saints in their martyrdom trials. She looks at me ironically and draws on her cigarette.

  Every time I leave Rosalba’s chambers I have the feeling of being under anesthetic. This has to do on the one hand with her extreme cigarette consumption, and on the other with “mafiology,” that self-referential area of study that has blossomed into an art form in Palermo, and in which Rosalba is an expert. Sicily is a world of interpretation, in which you read things into silences, into the pauses in the wiretap notes, into raised eyebrows, into the way someone lifts his coffee cup. Where you puzzle over what is hidden, could be hidden, should be hidden, behind each tiny gesture. As if reality were only a question of interpretation. As if the truth could constantly change like the sky in springtime.

  Regardless of the apricot-colored wedding dress and the ribbon of bliss, Rosalba didn’t allow the merest hint of solemnity to appear at her wedding. She talked as she always talks. As if she were sitting behind her glass desk in her chambers, amid yard after yard of files tagged with the names “Vittorio Mangano” or “Borsellino,” in the middle of a menagerie consisting of a cloth swallow that sits on the desk lamp, a cloth snake that serves as a backrest, a horned computer with a leather cover, and a fire-red rubber stiletto in which she usually rests her telefonino. Since she’s used to talking to her secretary in the outer office, Franco in the side room, the wife of a jailed mafioso on the phone, and the legal intern in the armchair opposite her all at the same time, Rosalba talked away nineteen to the dozen to the whole wedding party, witnesses and bridesmaids included. She whooped, cooed, growled, and cursed. As if what was at stake was not the cupid’s bow of her lips, the curve of which everyone praised, but paragraph 41b, the one that prescribes high-security detention for mafiosi—which Rosalba fought against tenaciously and successfully and anticonstitutionally, on the grounds that it contravened human rights.

  Defending mafiosi as a lawyer is no longer the exception in Sicily but the rule, although it is an unusual career for a woman. So far Rosalba is the only one. She originally wanted to study medicine, but then it was law—for her mother’s sake. Her father died when she was sixteen and, as the only daughter of a single mother, Rosalba wanted to do everything particularly well.

  Her timetable has always been dictated by the destinies of the Mafia. At the time of the maxi-trial she met her present husband, Franco. When the first turncoats appeared as witnesses in the trials, they started going out together. After the assassination of Falcone and Borsellino, they became a couple. Two years after the murders, Franco was indicted for favoring the Mafia. Ten years after the murders, they married. Rosalba doesn’t take holidays, she doesn’t participate in Palermo’s mondanità; she is so much a lawyer, to the exclusion of everything else, that all question of a life outside her job is forbidden. What a child’s first tooth might be for other people was, for Rosalba, an appeal or a reform of the code of criminal procedure. The maxi-trial of 1985 was a milestone in her life: on the one hand, because she and Franco, her former colleague in chambers and future fiancé, were defending a dozen mafiosi in the trial; on the other, because it was the first spectacular trial led by the anti-Mafia chief investigator Giovanni Falcone, who had whole clans arrested. For the first time, the Mafia was forced to experience what it was like not to have a trial “adjusted,” aggiustato, as they say in Palermo: sentences weren’t quashed in the subsequent instances, as they traditionally had been, but were confirmed in all instances—and for Public Prosecutor Giovanni Falcone that meant a death sentence. Of the mafiosi defended by Franco and Rosalba, however, only one received a life sentence.

  Rosalba’s actual life is played out in chambers. When she comes back from her days in the courtroom, she often sits in her office until after midnight, preparing defense papers—below the oil painting in which horses loom in pink and turquoise, and also below a small icon. She knows what’s right and proper. After all, her clients are devoutly religious. Then, if she can chat with the court reporters, with blond Lirio from the Ansa agency, or little, round Enrico from La Repubblica who always breathes “Sei bellissima” and kisses her hand, or the reporter from Radio Capital, and can make a few mocking remarks about some public prosecutor or other, then Rosalba is in her element. Where, between the rows of files and the red rubber stiletto, she draws up strategies that might be useful to her clients.

  After the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano in April 2006 and his successor Salvatore Lo Piccolo in November 2007, aftershocks were expected on planet Mafia. The power had to be redistributed. Backgrounds had to be clarified. Because in Sicily people don’t believe in chance, they believe in prophecy. They believe in the divine plan and the urgency of fate. And fate decreed that Bernardo Provenzano’s game of hide-and-seek would end, thirty-four years later, where it had begun, in Corleone. And on the day after the parliamentary elections. Not one day before. What would have happened if the godfather, the capo di tutti capi, the one everyone called “Professor,” had been arrested the day before the elections? Would Cosa Nostra have filled in their voting slips for Forza Italia even then? As it has done since the day Berlusconi’s party put itself up for election for the first time. And no one thinks it’s a coincidence that it should have been a bag of laundry—tracked by the police from his family to his hideout—that sealed his fate.

  Since the statements of the turncoat Antonino Giuffrè, every child in Sicily knows that in 1993, after the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, and after the arrest of his predecessor Totò Riina, Bernardo Provenzano negotiated a pact with Forza Italia. The Mafia boss offered his support and a renunciation of further violence and demanded guarantees in return: an end to criminal prosecution of and political pressure on the Mafia, an end to the confiscation of Mafia property, and the abolition of the state witness regulations for turncoat mafiosi. This has been on record since the Mafia trial against Berlusconi’s right-hand man Marcello Dell’Utri in November 2004, when he was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment in the first instance for supporting a Mafia association.

  That Provenzano should have been arrested regardless of his connections meant only that he was no longer of use—either to the Mafia or to his political friends. Now the way was open for a power struggle in the Mafia: the young, ambitious Mafia is waiting outside, while in jail the old Mafia is sitting around Totò Riina, spending years hoping their trials will be subject to appeal. The next generation is greedy for power: Matteo Messina Denaro, for example, the boss of an old Mafia family from Trapani, once a devoted ally of Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, later their competitor. Messina Denaro has been wanted since 1993 and is deemed to be the boss with the political intelligence required to lead Cosa Nostra into the modern age: when money no longer comes just from the drug trade and protection money, but from public funds—tenders on behalf of the Mafia.

  Since the arrest of Salvatore Lo Piccolo and his son, Messina Denaro has been the undisputed number one in Cosa Nostra. Until then, Cosa Nostra had been led by both in a kind of cosovereignty—a leadership that came to an abrupt end during the hours of the morning in November 2007 when investigators arrested Lo Piccolo and his son. They had met up with other mafiosi for a business discussion, when forty officers surrounded the house and fired warning shots. Lo Piccolo tried to flush down the toilet the pizzini he was carrying, the little notes by which mafiosi communicate in these times of eavesdropping. But he didn’t get the chance to push the handle.

  And yet Lo Piccolo must have been relieved to realize that it was only the police who had lain in wait for him, and not the hit man who had been waiting for months to get rid of the Mafia boss at the behest of his enemies. In times of changing allegiances, Lo Piccolo had made himself unpopular. He had facilitated the return to Palermo of the Inzerillo family, who had fled to America
in the 1980s. This had brought upon him the wrath of Totò Riina, who had tried to eradicate that same family in a bloody Mafia war. Lo Piccolo hadn’t wanted to leave the drug trade in the hands of the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta and the Neapolitan Camorra any longer and hoped to use his American connections to bring back the glory days of the mid-eighties when Sicily had, through its alliance with its American cousins, risen to become the hub of the international heroin and cocaine trade.

  And then Berlusconi had triumphed in the parliamentary elections and moved into parliament and the senate with fat majorities. Those are the themes that stir Rosalba; those are the scenarios that she likes to think about in peace—much more than taking part in the social life of the city. Much more than drinking a turquoise aperitif in the middle of a wedding party—even her own.

  After the wedding, Rosalba had changed and was now wearing a turquoise dress that matched the aperitif. The wedding guests had driven in convoy to the Villa Giuditta, a restaurant where we sat at long tables under bitter-orange trees in a garden—a garden where nature had been tamed to the extent that it looked like a living room. The bitter-orange trees were drilled never to lose a leaf and seemed to grow not from the earth but from a parquet floor, a gleamingly beautiful parquet, with which the whole garden was laid. Between sea salad on couscous and chicken risotto with green apples, the couple were celebrated. After the three-tiered wedding cake was cut, Rosalba put one leg on the table, her heel among the plates of remnants of cream cake, and hoisted up her turquoise dress. Then she pulled the blue ribbon of bliss from her thigh and threw it among her admirers. A young agency journalist caught it, held it appreciatively under his nose, and closed his eyes. Satisfied, Rosalba got down from the table and straightened her dress. As she did so, the moonlight caught the tattoo on her wrist. The scorpion’s claws were open.

  The same black-blue sky that stretched above Rosalba’s wedding party spreads over us, too—over Shobha, Letizia, Salvo, and me, and over the Piazza Pretoria. The gods and nymphs that stand on the rim of the fountain look heedlessly down on us. Shobha has managed to turn the whole wedding party into a tableau vivant. The parents of the bride, witnesses, and flower girls are in position, the bride has already decided to jump into the fountain—and then Shobha lowers the camera, thanks them politely for their cooperation, and gets back into the car. Letizia is urging us to leave, saying that her dog must feel abandoned by now.

  The smell of fried meat wafts over, along with the smell of the crowd coming from the avenue and now pressing into the bars. Scraps of music fly through the air, Vasco Rossi shrills out of the speaker of an illegal CD seller, “Voglio una vita spericolata.” Salvo joins in at the top of his voice, that hymn to the fearless life: “to the unruly life, a life where nothing matters, a life in which it’s never too late and you never have to sleep, a life like a life in a film. A life, you’ll see, what a life.”

  CARMINE SARNO

  WHEN SALVO DROPS US OFF ON VIA CARINI, NOT FAR from Letizia and Shobha’s house, both his telefonini ring at the same time. One of the calls is his fiancée, the other one of his ladies—and both want to know when he will finally have time for them. While Salvo tries to placate both the lady and his fiancée, we gesticulate to arrange a meeting for the following morning. Then I follow Shobha and Letizia. We’ve decided to have dinner on Shobha’s terrace. The lift creaks its way up to the ninth floor.

  Exhausted by the heat, we slump into the armchairs. Shobha turns on the television, and on Rai Uno we see a report on the death of a Camorrista. In Campania, the father of a turncoat has been shot, the Casalesi clan has wreaked revenge on the renegade. A country lane is shown, a bare stone farmhouse, a barn with bullet holes in the wall, a pool of blood on the ground. Mafia corpses in Italy are as inconspicuous as car-crash corpses. Then life goes on with reports of traffic jams, with people coming back from vacation, with pictures of the beach at Rimini.

  “Ma,” says Letizia, stretching out the m for so long that her ma sounds like “all striving and straining is in vain.” Then she slowly walks down the steps to her apartment. When Shobha calls after her to ask if she doesn’t want to stay for dinner, she declines. She doesn’t want another bite, with all due respect to Shobha’s caponata, but the very thought of aubergines with tomatoes and pumpkin makes her feel bloated.

  Shobha showers, and I turn off the sound when the news returns to the trash in Naples. “Now there’s trash on the elegant Via Chiaia, too!” I see a sea of blue, black, and white trash bags, bursting, fermenting, rotting trash bags—fruit crates, cardboard pasta boxes, detergent bottles, diapers. I don’t want to hear for the thousandth time the commentators describing the trash as some sort of mysterious force of nature that sweeps across the city like a hurricane every few months, leaving behind it a trail of devastation. Each time, politicians wholeheartedly announce an irrevocable victory over the trash: waste incineration units will be put into operation straightaway, the army moves in, special commissioners are appointed and dismissed again, special trains are loaded with trash and sent to Germany—and no one says the evil word: “Camorra.” It makes money out of the waste disposal and landfill, both legal and illegal, with which it has contaminated the whole of the Neapolitan hinterland, with industrial waste that it imports to Naples from all over Europe, and with toxic waste that is illegally burned and which has poisoned the groundwater and the air with dioxins.

  “At least here in Sicily we have no problems with trash,” Shobha says, coming out of the shower with freshly washed hair and pointing to the pictures on television. She adds ironically: “Having the water supply in the hands of the Mafia is quite enough.”

  When Shobha moves, her bracelets jangle. She brings them back by the kilo from India, where she spends the winter. In this way, she escapes not only the damp climate but also Sicilian reality—where people try to change things in such a way that everything stays exactly as it was. Today I sometimes wonder what it would have been like for me if I’d grown up not in the Ruhr but in Sicily. If my first apartment of my own had been not in the university district of Münster, but in Monreale, near Palermo, where mafiosi would have destroyed all my furniture. In that case I’d probably have yearned for India too.

  When Shobha was back in India, I was in Naples. As befits an old married couple, we sent each other text messages and said: “Wish you were here!” Instead of Shobha, I had a bald photographer by my side, which didn’t exactly make my research easier. Men always arouse suspicion in southern Italy. Women, on the other hand, are generally underestimated, particularly if they’re blond. And being underestimated is the best thing that can happen to a journalist on an assignment.

  That’s why Carmine Sarno wasn’t even slightly suspicious when I stepped into his music agency, La Bella Napoli, and asked him about the lyrics of the songs he had composed. Sometimes you can strike up an acquaintanceship as easily as that.

  “You know who I am. You know my name,” Carmine Sarno said softly.

  He didn’t need to say anything more than that. He sat with his legs crossed on a little gilded rococo chair, a dainty man on a dainty chair. Carmine Sarno has very small feet for a man; he’s unusually delicate overall, his waist as slender as a woman’s. His shirt was open to the navel and revealed an almost hairless chest and a heavy white-gold chain from which hung a heart-shaped medallion and a portrait engraved in gold. In his trouser pocket he carried a roll of twenty euro notes, held together with a thin rubber band. With this he was paying a man who had printed up some posters for him for a concert by the singer Antony. “Is that spelled right?” the man asked, pointing at the name “Antonj.”

  “I think that should be a y,” I said.

  And Carmine Sarno said: “That’s how we spell it here.”

  Carmine Sarno belongs to one of the city’s most powerful Camorra clans. The Sarnos rule in Ponticelli, that peripheral quarter of Naples into which neither tourists nor Neapolitans stray: a landscape of containers, forgotten by the world, a district that
consists largely of oil refineries, arterial roads on stilts, warehouses, and potholes. And that is only ever mentioned if another Camorrista is murdered. Or if a gypsy camp is set on fire, as happened that spring, after a gypsy had tried to abduct a child in Ponticelli. For respectable Neapolitans, Ponticelli is a far-off galaxy, its existence known only from the newspapers.

  The Sarnos have ruled in Ponticelli since the early 1980s. Seven brothers and five sisters. Three of the brothers were in jail; altogether, sixteen members of the Sarno family were in jail. The oldest brother is called Ciro; even at the age of thirty he was one of the most dangerous Camorristi in Naples and had been in jail for almost eighteen years, with interruptions—which is why Carmine Sarno had dedicated the song “Ciro, Ciro” to him, lamenting his brother’s lot. Because Carmine Sarno wasn’t just a member of one of the most powerful Camorra clans in Naples; he was also a poet.

  We had only known each other for a few minutes when Carmine awkwardly told me how his first wife had put him in prison. He had stuck the barrel of his gun in her mouth, his wife had told the carabinieri. Shortly after that, they arrested Carmine Sarno. He was behind bars for nine months for attempted murder. When he was released from prison, he really wanted to kill his wife.

  “I’m telling you all this because I see you as a sister,” said Carmine Sarno.

  How had we got on to the story of his wife? Oh, yes, it was all about love. Lots of his songs are about that. In “Ci soffro ancora,” “I’m Still Suffering,” an abandoned man confides in a friend. “Mi telefoni,” “Call Me,” is about a secret adulterous affair. Then there are titles like “Notte d’amore,” “Night of Love,” “Brivido,” “Shiver,” or “Estate d’amore,” “Summer of Love.” Sometimes love is not requited, sometimes it lasts only a heartbeat, sometimes it is a dead end. But it is always heartbreaking. Carmine had composed two dozen songs, at night when he couldn’t sleep because he was nervous or filled with longing, or because inspiration had suddenly come upon him.