by Peter Robb
It was she who told me about the boy of eleven who’d seen something he shouldn’t have seen. They’d taken him one morning, tied him up and blinded him with a knife used for gutting pigs and sent him home tied up like a salame, gushing blood. And about Don Peppinuzzu, known as sciacquatunazzu, which means handsome in Sicilian. He’d said something he shouldn’t have said. So they killed him with a shotgun blast and cut his balls off and stuffed them in his mouth. Which is how his mother found him when she went off to work in the fields one morning, under a mulberry tree.
This was revenge, punishment and warning in the archaic peasant world. It expressed the rural poverty and violence that had surrounded and sustained Sicily’s islands of art and privilege, such as Bagheria was. Those expressions of violence were rustic antecedents of the culture that now made Bagheria an horrendous unplanned aggregate of apartment blocks built with the profits of heroin sales, and a place of terrible violence. They announced the warnings, deaths and insults of 1995. Kalashnikovs and car bombs came out of the world evoked by those rusty knives in their handcarved case. Cutting a man’s throat, in that world and this, was little more than cutting a sheep’s. Death in the world of the rural mafia survived in that form of murder by strangulation known as incaprettamento. The victim’s hands and feet were tied behind his back with a rope then passed in a noose around his neck, so that he slowly strangled as his muscles yielded. A kid, or capretto, was tied in this way when taken to market. The country art survived in the world of the industrial mafia because it left the human body, as rigor mortis set in, conveniently shaped for transportation in the boot of a car. The oddly intimate link between the mafia’s rural past and its industrial present had tightened since the Corleonesi came to power.
* * *
THE APPROACH to Corleone is deceptive. You potter at first in the blue AST bus through the benign and opulent coastal Sicily of the orchards, taking rather longer than the fifty or sixty kilometre distance from Palermo would seem to warrant because the blue bus takes its time, and when it does start climbing into the hills to that particular promontory five or six hundred metres above the sea where Corleone squats, the roads become narrow and winding. You meet little traffic. The odd farm vehicle, the odd speeding BMW. The day I went to Corleone the blue bus took an inordinate time because the driver had forgotten to drop a suitcase belonging to a carabiniere in Palermo, and pulled off the road at a country intersection to rendezvous with another bus on another route, whose driver would collect the carabiniere’s suitcase and take it to the city. It was a pleasant sunny morning and I sat dreaming in trancelike travel mode, trying to follow the driver’s interminable monologue on his cellular phone.
He was talking a lot about the picciotti, praising them. The Sicilian picciotto was like the Neapolitan guaglione, a boy or lad, embodied male values and loomed large in the cultural landscape of the south. Admiring the picciotto and the guaglione, their youth, energy, grace and daring was one of the ways people recognized that the married man was a diminished and limited figure, unsexed, subordinate to wife and family as the woman came into her own as the fertile mother. The patriarch idea never really caught on in the Mezzogiorno. Southern society being what it was, the picciotto inevitably became invested with the values of the mafiuso and his grace and daring expressed in the activities of the mafia. The organization depended greatly on the qualities of its foot soldiers, and each mafia family needed to recruit the boldest and quickest, the smartest and strongest from the rising males of the neighbourhood. A mafia without prestige, a mafia whose values were not those of the society’s young males, would die. To talk about picciotti was a conservative way of speaking, a rural way and a mafia way, and I sat there in the sun trying to catch the nuance of the driver’s amiable talk. I was in no hurry.
Others were. Something about the carabiniere’s suitcase made our immobility less than easily bearable, and a small wave of restiveness blew through the bus. A woman who looked like a schoolteacher said sharply she had to be at Corleone by half past midday. The driver shrugged her off and called his small daughter on his cellular phone. Riina’s wife, I remembered, had been a schoolteacher. The carabiniere’s suitcase, you felt, wasn’t for these passengers a neutral cargo, but a vaguely charged and dangerous object. A meeting at a country crossroad was a very mafia situation. Nasty things had happened at country crossroads. People grew edgy, and when the other bus at length arrived, and the carabiniere’s suitcase was offloaded without incident and we were away again, there was a gust of relief.
An amazing moment came when the bus got away from the coast and started serious climbing. The arid hills we were heading into, the universal terrain of the interior, were suddenly covered by a dense green forest of oaks, quite vast, over four thousand hectares I later found, such as I’d never seen anywhere in the poor stripped Mezzogiorno. For the minutes it took the bus to pass a part of the perimeter of the forest of Ficuzza, where the Bourbons used to hunt wild boar and the mafia hid stolen cattle, I could imagine, as I’d often tried and failed to do, the Sicily that antedated the Roman deforestation, the bush-covered island of Theocritus. For a nanosecond I thought I saw now an interior Sicily of poetry and sex, pipes and panic, light and shade that lingered in a few old poems.
Galatea, why do you treat your lover harshly?
You are whiter than ricotta, gentler than a lamb,
Livelier than a calf, firmer than an unripe grape …
I was merely daydreaming though, and so, probably, was Theocritus. Pastoral art and its staying power in western culture said a lot about the seductive resilience of dreams of simplicity, dreams of escape. History suggested they were always dreams, a dream even when Sicily was wooded and Theocritus was first giving elegant speech to herdsmen. Theocritus wrote his Idylls in the third century BCE, and Peter Green had written in his recent history of the Hellenistic age that
The sheer record of atrocities during the fourth and third centuries, in Sicily particularly, is worse than for almost any other period of ancient history: a grisly chronicle of mass executions, public torture … rape, pillage and enslavement, with the Romans as the worst, but by no means the only, habitual offenders.
Green thought Theocritus might even have been driven into exile by the banditry and unrest in Sicily during his lifetime, which would have made his country Idylls exercises in nostalgia for a Sicily that might never have quite existed, perhaps like the poems of Sicily’s exiled Arabs thirteen hundred years later. Nevertheless, one of Theocritus’s poems, the possibly spurious twentieth Idyll, in which a city girl was repelled by the uncouthness and smell of a country herdsman, had something peripheral to say about the world of Corleone, though sex wasn’t directly the issue.
Corleone might’ve chilled me less if the bus hadn’t got in at lunch time. A sense of movement through the windows as we pulled into the narrow piazza had reduced itself, by the time I actually got off, to a single child running home from primary school with a fluorescent knapsack on its back, running in some alarm because the others had already disappeared, like the lame girl after the pied piper. The place was quite deserted. I set off along a narrow street like a ravine, heading uphill from the piazza. A few metres along the empty street I saw another figure coming toward me, on foot but fast. It was a Capuchin friar in a hooded brown habit with a rope around it. He was young, bearded and barefoot and running for his life. He came flying past me with terror in his eyes, his white feet silently pounding the stones. Nobody followed him. I pushed on, sometimes glimpsing a female figure in black from the corner of my eye, choosing between unappetizing alleys as the main road disintegrated. The houses were poor, mean, crumbling, though some had had a lot of money spent on the inside. I knew the signs from Naples. The place seemed dead but I knew there were people behind the shutters. Corleone got poorer and more decrepit the closer you got to the river.
The river was a milky trickle at the bottom of a deep ravine that the poorest extremity of Corleone seemed about to fall into. Some t
hings already had. A lounge suite, a fridge, a smashed TV set were sitting in the foul white water, by the green slime. Above the ravine and the teetering houses loomed a monolith with what’d been the town jail for three centuries built on top of it. I walked back to the main piazza and went to the bar and there were some people inside. When I opened my mouth half a dozen heads stiffened on their necks then slowly, slowly turned to take an oblique look. The murmured conversations died. I walked out and noticed how conveniently central the cemetery was in Corleone, just a little below the piazza. To make it even more convenient to reach, a little curved road, lined with cypress trees and beautifully paved with white marble, had been lately cut through the patch of waste land that stood between the piazza and the cemetery gates. Corleone’s frequent hearses arrived at the liveliest and most colourful place in town. The cemetery was immaculately kept and populated by bustling groups of women in black and children, who hurried knowledgeably up and down its avenues with bunches of gladdies.
Perhaps in an impressionable state after my stroll through the rest of town, I found the Corleone campo santo quite festive. The prominent notice at the entrance that it was forbidden for reasons of hygiene to remove material from the cemetery gave pause. One knew about extra bodies secretly buried in family vaults, and weaponry stored there too, but why anyone would want to remove material was far from clear. I wandered up and down, looking for the tomb of Luciano Liggio, latterly landscape painter, Totò Riina’s mentor and predecessor as capo di tutti i capi and the man who might be said to have made Corleone famous. I failed to identify the dead for sure among the same direly familiar names that appeared over and over in the neat flowered rows, but I soon had a brush with the living. It was later, up in the other end of town, where the extensive new building was, the hideous blocks of flats, that a very new and powerful black Alfa Romeo cruised slowly down the hill toward me and rolled past at walking speed. It was driven by a redfaced youth wearing a black leisure suit with green and purple panels and a mean look on his meaty face. I knew the face. I’d seen it in the papers. I’d just been brushed by Totò Riina’s son.
The face would come back to me seven months later. It looked out of Repubblica’s front page announcing Riina junior’s first arrest. He was seized in June of 1996, in his grandmother’s house in Corleone, where he was living with his mother and two sisters and spending all day in the fields, according to his tearful elder sister, leaving home early in the morning to work the land and coming home at sundown, and in the evening, when he wasn’t too dog tired, going to the bar with friends or out to eat a pizza. Nice friends. The mayor of Corleone could bear witness. In the police version, at barely twenty the young Riina was already a made man. He’d first killed at nineteen, his victim a young mafioso who’d offended his uncle Leoluca Bagarella.
The arrest concerned the strangling of a thirteen-year-old child, who’d been kidnapped at eleven and held prisoner for over two years before being murdered. The boy was the son of one of Falcone’s killers, a boss who’d later turned. The young Riina and Giovanni Brusca had ordered the child’s death. He opposed no resistance, reported the boy’s strangler, his strength being already exhausted. The child was killed because his father had been one of the men who’d laid the explosive that killed Falcone and the others, and then turned, in remorse and horror at the Riina apocalypse. The killers of his child said among themselves that if the murder became known it’d cause more trouble than Falcone’s killing at Capaci, acknowledging in their own way that they’d passed a new threshold of infamy. If you talk, they warned their weakest link, who later did, we’ll drink your blood. When young Riina was arrested, his sister recalled their crowded life as children in hiding. Like little chickens, we used to help each other, she said. I know Giovanni and his goodness. His anxious mother called out to the carabinieri who were bundling young Riina into their car, Make sure you treat him well. He’s only a boy.
The young Riina, normally adorned with gold chain, gold crucifix, gold bracelet and gold ring, may have been only a boy, but he’d been causing people some worry for a while. A barman in Palermo whose fried snacks the young Riina hadn’t liked was nearly dusted for it. Journalists at Liggio’s funeral had been chased and insulted by the teenage Riina. Born on the run, as the papers liked to say, and brought up in hiding for a long period in that poetic and pastoral grove of oaks at Ficuzza, he’d plunged his fingers into a jar of gel while the police squad was searching his grandmother’s home and pomaded his hair, ready for the photographers on arrival at the Ucciardone. Like the silk shirts Brusca had packed for jail, it was a sign of the times. The old mafia chiefs had been discreet, austere, even, some of them, personally poor. They’d been more concerned with power than luxury. The idea of young Riina’s working the land from dawn to dusk showed a touching loyalty on his sister’s part, and a sense of culture, of dynastic continuity. Working the land was how it’d all started half a century earlier, and the family’s return to Corleone two days after their father’s arrest in 1993 was a reminder of just how country the Corleonesi had always been. Young Riina’s first act back in Corleone was to pray on the tomb of his father’s father, who’d died fifty years earlier, a peasant labourer blown up in 1943 when he was trying to defuse an allied bomb, a person already noted by the carabinieri as harmful to the person and property of others. Among the Palermo families, the ones they’d basically exterminated, the Corleonesi had always been known as i viddani, which is the villains in the old Shakespearean sense, shading from country people into vile peasants and killers. Even when it described people running a huge multinational business, the word stayed exact. Not even the child murder, when you came to think about it, was new.
* * *
IN THE wild days of hunger and banditry at the end of the war, a zealous young captain of carabinieri from northern Italy was posted to Sicily and put in command of one of the antibanditry patrols. His name was Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, a name that would loom large in The True History of Italy, because many years later his path would intersect fatally with Giulio Andreotti’s. The young captain Dalla Chiesa filed acute and detailed reports on the unremarkable town of Corleone where he was stationed, in which he recorded the birth of that barbaric new mafia that years and years later would kill him. His first reports from the forties described the twilight of the old feudal mafia of the big landowners, and
a decadent society preyed on by those profiteers … still known as gabellotti and campieri. The first are almost always camouflaged ambiguously as estate administrators. The second are hired for their unscrupulousness and their reputation for violence to guard property from thieves and neighbours. Both are key elements on a vast mafia network.
The youngest-ever campiere was Luciano Liggio, who after arrests in his teens for carrying illegal weapons and stealing grain, got the job after the unexplained murder of the campiere whose place Liggio took. Liggio, his real name Leggio thus wrongly spelt in an early police report, was a year younger than Vito Ciancimino, who around this time gave up helping in his father’s Corleone barbershop and moved with his parents down to Palermo, ready to begin his notable career in business and politics. This was the time when the mafia reconstructed itself in Sicily with the help of the American friends, and Corleone made an interesting paradigm of the forces in play. It was a time when the modest town of Corleone saw sixty-odd homicides between the arrival of the Americans in 1943 and the elections of 1948, so closely followed from the US embassy on the via Veneto in Rome and in Washington.
Two Corleonesi who’d fled to America during the fascist repression in the twenties now came home. One was known as Mr Vincent, who’d become close in New York to Frank Three Fingers Coppola, on whose account he now arrived in town. The other was captain De Carlo of the US marines, who’d arranged the trouble-free liberation of Corleone for the Americans. Before he entered the military, captain De Carlo too had been a made man of the American Cosa Nostra. A vicious struggle for power followed between Mr Vincent and captai
n De Carlo. The latter won, in the person of his cousin, Dr Navarra. Michele Navarra was, after the unexplained murder of his predecessor, Corleone’s chief medical officer, director of the local hospital, head of the local DC and for years afterward Corleone’s undisputed mafia boss. Mr Vincent bought a butchery and was relegated to the lower part of the town as its underboss.
I thought of Dr Navarra when I read about that later child murder, and remembered another boy’s death in the Corleone of 1948, in the days when the left was organizing itself as well as the mafia and the peasants were claiming the untilled land of the big estates. He was a shepherd boy, that other thirteen-year-old, out with his animals on the hill above the town on a warm March evening. He came running down into town, sick with terror. In the dark he’d seen a dreadful thing. He’d seen two men take another and hang him on a tree. The boy was in a state of shock as he babbled out his story in the street, but he’d recognized Liggio and among the bystanders were friends concerned enough by what they heard to take the boy to the hospital to be treated and sedated. Dr Navarra attended personally to the minor emergency and injected a calmative. Whereupon the boy died.
That the child’s night vision hadn’t been induced by loneliness and impressionable youth was suggested by the disappearance earlier that evening of a very well known member of the Corleone community. He was a young Corleonese called Placido Rizzotto, a socialist who was the secretary of the local trade union council and an organizer for the farm labourers, the activist behind their claim to take over the unfarmed land of a big local estate. He’d had remarkable success in patiently overcoming centuries of fear and distrust among the rural poor. He’d last been seen at nine that evening walking toward the edge of town in the company of a gabellotto from the estate in question, and the young campiere Luciano Liggio. Mr Vincent had been waiting on the hill for the young trade unionist when Liggio walked him out of town with a gun in his back. Two years later pieces of the unionist’s decomposed remains were retrieved from one of the deep, almost bottomless crevasses with which the bleak eroded hill above Corleone was riven. Everyone had seen in the crowded main street, everyone had known, no one had spoken. It was a chance not taken, a moment that marked Corleone’s history, Sicily’s and Italy’s, for decades. He was our hero, said one who’d been on the street that night, and we let him go. All we had to do, every one of us, was pick up a stone from the street and we’d have been too many.