Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

but by Guttuso invested with a quite dangerously blazing vitality, for this artist even the straw round the neck of a wine flask is unravelling itself in a manner positively threatening in its purpose and intensity.

  Elizabeth David was as good a critic here of drawing as of cooking. Her book matched its illustrations. Italian Food was a great hymn to the intensity of everyday eating pleasures and a sustained denunciation of Englishness in food, a denunciation whose fury seemed to intensify in each new edition’s revisions. Forty years after Elizabeth David’s book appeared, its author was lately dead and Italian Food was still in print and still made an exhilarating read. The 1995 edition still included Elizabeth David’s passionate praise of Guttuso, but the object of her praise was now gone. The new edition eliminated his illustrations. Only the brilliant lemons remained, in colour on the Penguin cover. The others had been replaced by plates from a sixteenth century cooking manual. Another tiny step had been taken in Guttuso’s progress toward oblivion. Twenty something years ago he’d been at the height of his fame and painting The Vucciria.

  That first blazing summer vision hadn’t been my only sight of Palermo before 1995. There’d been other visits in between. The second was five years after the first, at the end of the seventies, a wet winter’s fag end when I started seeing the shadows in Palermo. By then I’d been living in Naples for a couple of years, and Naples then was terminally decrepit but intact. The old capital of the Bourbon kingdom belonged to the people who lived in it. By virtue, it had to be said, largely of neglect. Naples was lived in, and densely, all through its centre. It was a city whose people possessed their streets, stayed out in them until the early morning. It was a city whose days and weeks and seasons were strongly marked for everyone by meal hours and holidays and the sea. If it were March the nineteenth, for instance, it was San Giuseppe and that meant zeppole, huge grooved shells of choux pastry baked or fried, flattened in the centre by a splodge of yellow pastrycook’s cream and a fleck of bitter cherry conserve and dusted with icing sugar, would be on sale hot and fresh every few yards. It meant that the street where I lived, a main street of the business centre, would be given over, inexplicably, to an animal market, and full of goats, turtles, ducklings, goldfish, puppies, monkeys.

  I returned to Palermo at the end of the seventies with a certain feel for the resources and shadings of city life in the Mezzogiorno, and by comparison with Naples Palermo was desolate. The streets were closed and shuttered outside business hours, and empty of pedestrians. I saw for the first time the extent of the ruination in the centre, the rubble, the abandon, the places you couldn’t see if they were lived in or not. Rain sharpened the sour smell of rotting masonry. Life after dark was silent files of cars along the main arteries. What spooked most was the newer area, the smart part of town I hadn’t seen before, stacked with rows and rows of big apartment blocks along the via della Libertà, in place of the art nouveau villas and the parks of the belle époque. In the sinister quiet of Palermo, I realized, there was a lot of money, as there wasn’t in Naples. Ingenuously, I asked a couple of people about the mafia. I remember the polite, puzzled blink, the inquiring gaze and the slightly cocked head before my interlocutor vanished. Mafia?

  That first summer day in the Vucciria, everything above market stall level had been hidden by the lowered canvas awnings. It wasn’t until a wet and miserable evening of the second visit when the canopies were furled that I saw that the building on one side of the little space had a kind of open verandah at first floor level, from which you could look out over the marketplace. This was the Shangai. It was an eating place reached through a poky door in a side alley and a narrow flight of stairs: you emerged into the kitchen space and thus to the verandah. The rudimentary and rather slovenly cooking there was done in an oven that was also out on the verandah. There was nothing Chinese about it except the name. I couldn’t remember if the name came back from a distant port of call in the proprietor’s seafaring days. I ate that rainy, gusty night on stuffed squid, the only customer on the dimly lit verandah, while the proprietor, who was whitehaired, exuberant and a tad intrusive, read aloud from his collected poems, which were written out in an exercise book. He had a loud voice and it rang out from the verandah over the dark and empty market square.

  By the summer of 1995, heroin was now one of the more important commodities traded in the neighbourhood of the Vucciria. A lot more people had moved out. There was bad heroin on the streets of Palermo and junkies were dying like flies. There were killings in the Vucciria and raids every few days. A crowd the day before had rounded on a police patrol and roughed them up. It was lunchtime on a sunny day when I got there and the tables on the Shangai’s verandah were taken by pink and grey couples from northern Europe. There was a TV crew from northern Italy. A couple of listless girls said their grandfather wasn’t well. They knew nothing about the Shangai’s name. They said I’d have to ask him. They didn’t know when he’d be back. And his poetry? I asked. Was he still writing poems? He was too busy drinking wine most of the time, the poet’s granddaughter said acidly, swiping at the laminex with a greasy dishcloth, to think about writing poems. It was the panelle I was really after, in any case, and the Shangai didn’t have them. I went downstairs to the panelleria and filled my stomach.

  * * *

  THE SACK of Palermo sounded as remote as the Sicilian Vespers, but it happened in the fifties and sixties. Most of it happened in four years under two men. Salvo Lima and Vito Ciancimino were two who’d joined early and risen fast when conservative politicians formed the Christian Democracy party, la Democrazia cristiana, at the end of the war in Italy. From 1945 until everything fell apart in 1992, the Christian Democrats were never out of government. Outside Italy the DC had the overt and covert support of the United States, obsessed with stemming the communist tide, and inside Italy it had the support of a Vatican no less obsessed with routing communist atheism. The party’s bedrock, though, was the Mezzogiorno and especially the friends in Sicily. People didn’t talk about the mafia in Sicily but they talked a lot about friends. And through the postwar years the party’s most powerful leader in Sicily was Salvo Lima, and Salvo Lima was more than a friend. He was a made man, a fully-inducted member of Cosa Nostra, bound by a lifelong vow to serve the interests of the mafia. As the most powerful politician in Sicily he was one of the more important people in Italy.

  Salvo Lima was elected mayor of Palermo in 1958, which was when the sack of Palermo began, and after four years in office moved on to greater things. He later became a deputy minister in Rome and a member of the European parliament. Vito Ciancimino was in charge of public works under Lima and later mayor of Palermo himself. Lima and Ciancimino were an interesting pair. Ciancimino was a barber’s son from Corleone who kept his close-clipped Sicilian barber’s moustache and his country uncouthness long after he moved to Palermo at the end of the war and into politics. In 1984 he was the first public figure to be arrested, tried and eventually convicted as a mafioso. Twelve million dollars’ worth of Ciancimino’s personal assets were confiscated at that time. Lima on the other hand was almost too powerful to embarrass. Beyond a certain threshold, power erases embarrassment. He was a white-maned and silk-suited grandee, and when Salvo Lima walked into a Palermo restaurant, silence fell and people came to kiss his hand. The two worked well together in the interests of the friends and the transformation of Palermo in four years was concrete evidence of this.

  In four years of early teamwork, these two released four thousand two hundred permits for new building in the city. Nearly three-quarters of these permits, over three thousand of them, were given to five obscure figures, illiterate or retired, who were fronts for mafia interests. The old centre’s buildings, many of them stupendous palazzi of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were encouraged to decay and their poorer inhabitants to leave for cheap mafia-built blocks on the city’s outskirts. Those with money were urged into the flashier blocks sprung up over the ruins of splendid villas and parks along the more ce
ntral artery of the via della Libertà. In the fifties, sixties and seventies, while the overall population of Palermo doubled, the old centre’s population dropped by two thirds. By 1995 Lima and Ciancimino had both been removed from the scene. Their work remained. When you walked into the new parts of Palermo it was like walking into the mafia mind. The sightless concrete blocks had multiplied like cancer cells. The mafia mind was totalitarian and even on a summer day it chilled you. Italy for decades consumed more cement per capita than any other country in the world and in Sicily construction was in the hands of Cosa Nostra. Construction, property development, real estate had once been the main business for mafia firms. Now they were where the drug money went to the laundry.

  Lima and Ciancimino had more in common than mafia. They were both Andreotti men. Giulio Andreotti was a Roman who’d had the most stunning rise of all in the DC after the war. Andreotti was a clever, scrawny little hunchbacked figure with heavy-lensed spectacles, thick black hair and triangular ears projecting batlike from his head. He was a sacristy rat who’d emerged from a war spent in the Vatican and catholic student organizations to rise in the shadow of the party’s founder to become a cabinet minister in 1947 when he was only twenty-eight. Although he’d been a member of pretty well every Italian government thereafter, Andreotti had never, in the fifties and sixties, been prime minister. His faction in the DC was too narrowly based. He lacked a wide electoral base and so he lacked clout in the party and if he stayed that way he would never head the government. It was natural that a figure so wholly consumed by the hunger for power as the tiny ascetic Andreotti should want to enlarge his electoral base and it was natural that he should look to Sicily to do it.

  So when Salvo Lima was elected to parliament in Rome in 1968, massively, Andreotti did a deal with him. Before their alliance was formalized, Lima advised Andreotti to check him out first with the Italian parliament’s antimafia commission, in whose report he was later to figure so largely. I knew I was talked about, he said later, and didn’t want to cause him problems. Giulio asked and told me, It’s OK. And so, for years and years, it was, although the parliamentary commission shortly afterward identified Lima as a central element of the mafia power structure in Palermo. Lima’s clout in Sicily secured Andreotti the first of his seven prime ministerships a little over three years later. Sicily, from then on, was Andreotti’s power base. Lima was eleven years later elected, overwhelmingly again, to the European parliament, but he found little time to spend in Strasbourg. He was needed in Rome. He was needed in Sicily. Andreotti in those days was the god Giulio and Lima was Giulio Andreotti’s proconsul in Sicily. He was for decades reckoned the most powerful man in Palermo.

  It was as such that Salvo Lima spent the warm spring morning of 12 March 1992 in his claret coloured villa near the beach at Mondello. Lima was receiving allies and clients in the drawing room, which had a valuable sketch by Renato Guttuso on the wall, a preliminary for his painting of The Vucciria, that celebration of the market and its neighbourhood that Lima as mayor had bled almost to death. The sketch hung next to a photo of Lima with the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby and Teddy. Lima that morning was discussing prospects for the Italian elections. They were due within three weeks and looking good. After heading the last two consecutive governments, Giulio Andreotti had decided to go to the polls.

  There was an engagingly personal logic behind Andreotti’s decision to go to the people, into which the people entered not at all. An ugly corruption scandal had broken out in Milan the month before and a determined magistrate called Di Pietro was pursuing it. The thing could only get bigger and uglier for the governing parties. It was a good moment for Andreotti to leave the fray for higher things. President Cossiga was about to cut short his increasingly bizarre term as head of state, to everyone’s relief. Repository of a great many demochristian secrets, the president had lately been given over to bouts of redfaced public rage and the delivery of long and weirdly free-associating harangues that had his party colleagues on edge. They never knew what he was going to say next. Whether Cossiga was now jumping or being pushed, his retirement meant that the Italian prime ministership and the presidency were coming up for grabs at the same time. Bettino Craxi, the socialist who’d enjoyed two highly lucrative terms in office during the eighties, was anxious to try his hand as prime minister again. The highly public secret deal was that he could have it, the quid pro quo for the DC being Giulio Andreotti’s final apotheosis as head of state. The president may have had less power day to day than the prime minister, but he made and unmade governments in a country that usually saw at least one new government a year. The Italian president had clout. This was the way things went in Italy and a normal margin of error in the popular vote would have changed nothing. A direct line to the president would be interesting, Lima doubtless thought.

  At mid morning he left with two of his visitors for the Palace Hotel, where an electoral dinner with Giulio Andreotti was scheduled twelve days hence. Andreotti himself was due to arrive the next day to launch the Sicilian campaign. Lima and friends had hardly moved off when a Honda 600 XL motorbike with electronic fuel injection, straddled by two helmeted youths, overtook their car. Shots were fired from the bike. The car braked and stopped abruptly, and the three dignitaries scrambled out. Lima shrieked, They’re coming back! and struggled out of his green loden overcoat and ran. They were his last words. His glove-soft leather pumps weren’t made for speed, and it was an awful long time since those soft thighs had run anywhere at all. The next thing the other two noticed, from their hiding place behind a garbage skip, was the Hon. Lima lying face down and dead. He’d been neatly shot in the skull from close behind, at a slight angle. The killers ignored the other two DC potentates crouching behind the dumpster, one of whom was a professor of philosophy whose appointment Lima had been arranging to the board of the state railways, and leisurely left. The friends no longer had any respect for him, it was later explained by Gioacchino Pennino, a Palermo doctor, man of honour and DC politician who became the first political pentito. In the indictment of the Cosa Nostra leadership for the killing, the prosecutors described Lima as having been Cosa Nostra’s ambassador to Rome. This was not said immediately. Salvo, said a close colleague, choosing his words of tribute carefully so soon after the actual shooting and exploiting Latinate abstraction to the full, was a man of synthesis. He didn’t say of what.

  Lima’s standing within the DC was nevertheless undeniably such that certain people felt they had to come to Palermo for his funeral, however much they hated doing it, given the questions people were suddenly asking about the government’s relations with the mafia. The president of Italy, still the demochristian Cossiga, at first said this was clearly a mafia crime, nothing to do with the state and that he wouldn’t be coming to pay his last respects. Something or someone later changed his mind, and he came. The secretary of the DC was there too. So was prime minister Andreotti, who’d perhaps had something to do with convincing the others to come. People were struck by the shrunken, terrorized and humiliated figure the prime minister cut when he came down for Lima’s funeral. The minister of justice at that time, Claudio Martelli, remembered two years later how Andreotti looked after Lima’s murder. His face had an even waxier look than usual. He was terrified, either because he didn’t understand, or maybe because he did. Huddled in his heavy overcoat, Andreotti looked like an aged tortoise retracting into its shell. His nerves frayed by the media’s constant linking of his own name with that of Cosa Nostra’s latest hit victim, its most distinguished corpse, prime minister Andreotti snapped a few days later that it was really absurd to divide even the dead into political factions. The presidency was slipping from his grasp, the only thing he’d ever wanted and failed to get. He was made a Life Senator as a consolation prize, for distinguished service to the Republic. Not being president was anyhow no longer even the worst of it. Andreotti can’t have failed to see that killing as a portent.

  * * *

  ONE OF the first t
o arrive on the scene of Lima’s murder was Paolo Borsellino. He stood there looking at the corpse, the deputy chief from the Palermo prosecutors’ office, leader of the Sicilian effort against the mafia, and shaking his head. Borsellino was shaking his head because while others were still wondering which politician in Rome had asked the friends to dispose of Lima in Palermo, he understood the mafia had just terminated its forty-five-year relationship with the DC. It was Borsellino’s lifelong friend and antimafia colleague Giovanni Falcone who put the change into words. The crime hadn’t been ordered by a politician. By the spring of 1992 the politicians were no longer in charge. Now it’s the mafia that wants to give the orders, Falcone said. And if the politicians don’t obey, the mafia decides to act on its own.

  Falcone and Borsellino both had an acquaintance with Lima which went back well beyond the professional interest they’d developed over the previous decade, when they were the most formidable of the team of magistrates tracking the ever-more-fearsome Cosa Nostra in Palermo. Falcone and Borsellino had grown up in Lima’s Palermo, a few streets apart in the old centre, the quarter known by its old Arab name as La Kalsa that lay between the Vucciria and the sea front. Falcone’s family and Borsellino’s had both been forced to leave their homes by zoning regulations in the fifties. Falcone and Borsellino were both sons of the embattled old petty bourgeoisie of the Mezzogiorno. Falcone’s father used to boast that he’d never taken a coffee at a bar and the son was later scrupulous in avoiding those compromising social contacts that most people in Palermo found quite unavoidable. But the boys had grown up among inner-city mafiosi, been to school with them, knew them through and through, and it was this intimate knowledge of mafia culture, mafia values, the mafia mindset, that enabled judge Falcone and judge Borsellino to make human contact later with mafiosi in crisis, to win their respect and persuade them to turn.