Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  The courier’s identity let Falcone get his toe in the door. It was Vincenzo Spatola, brother of Rosario Spatola, who’d started his working life as a milkman and was twenty years later Palermo’s richest building contractor and property developer, the fifth biggest taxpayer in Italy. Rosario Spatola, apart from an early arrest in the fifties for watering down his milk, was an unblemished member of the business community. He’d lately offered a campaign dinner for the reelection of the DC minister Ruffini. Tell your friends, and the friends of the friends, he’d said, that they must support this man of integrity and honour. And the friends all had. But Rosario Spatola turned out to be the cousin of John Gambino and to have done extensive business with him across the Atlantic. Falcone was up and running. The identity of the message-bearer Vincenzo Spatola made clear that Sindona’s financial activities and his Italian political alliances built their foundation on Cosa Nostra’s transasian and transatlantic drug trafficking. Sindona had been Cosa Nostra’s financier as well as the Vatican’s, and Andreotti had been his political protector.

  * * *

  1979 WAS the year the magistrate Giovanni Falcone transferred from the bankruptcy court to work with his boyhood friend Paolo Borsellino in criminal investigations. And Falcone’s very first criminal investigation was into the affairs of the Spatolas, the Inzerillos, the Di Maggios and the Gambinos, four families linked on both sides of the Atlantic by a dense pattern of dynastic marriages. 1979 was the year distinguished corpses began to fall. The head of the investigative police in Palermo, Boris Giuliano, was murdered that summer for looking into the transatlantic traffic in drugs and dollars. On the luggage carousel at Palermo’s Punta Raisi airport he’d found a suitcase with half a million dollars in small denomination notes. Two weeks later he’d found four kilos of freshly refined heroin in a Palermo house and a week later he was shot in the back as he took a cappuccino in a city bar. At summer’s end judge Cesare Terranova returned from Rome to investigate the drug traffic and two days after coming home to Palermo he was shot with a kalashnikov after breakfast. What’ll people think? went through his wife’s mind as she flew down after hearing the machine gun and the pistol shots of the coup de grace. A woman in her nightie. They’ll think I’m mad. The chief prosecutor Costa was shot dead the next summer. Uncooperative politicians were going down too. That spring, Michele Reina, head of the DC in Palermo had been assassinated, and the following winter Piersanto Mattarella, DC president of the Sicilian region, was murdered. It was apropos of Mattarella’s killing that Salvo Lima remarked to Andreotti’s factotum, the deputy minister Franco Evangelisti, when pacts are made they’ve got to be respected, not imagining, probably, that twelve years later he too would be slain for not playing by Cosa Nostra’s rules. Four months later Emanuele Basile, the captain of carabinieri who’d taken up Giuliano’s investigation into the drug traffic, was shot as he left a religious festival with his wife and child, falling dead over his unharmed small daughter.

  As for Michele Sindona, it all ended badly. In New York he got twenty-five years for the Franklin crash. In Italy he got fifteen more for the Banca Privata Italiana crash plus life for ordering the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli. Andreotti had the roughest ride of his long career during the parliamentary enquiry into the Sindona affair. He was foreign minister by then, and parliament was about to vote to sack him. The communists saved him by abstaining. Sindona appeared demented toward the end, like a scrawny plucked chook someone said. He never talked, though. He never revealed any of his formidable secrets. His life sentence for murder became definitive in 1986, and Sindona was taken to the high-tech maximum security prison at Voghera, where he was watched twenty-four hours a day by live guards and closed-cricuit television. Two days later he drank an espresso laced with strychnine in his cell. Death was instantaneous. The finding was suicide. The next day La Repubblica printed a cartoon showing Sindona in jail being offered a tiny steaming espresso. The offerer was seen in silhouette. A tiny hunchbacked figure with triangular batlike ears and heavy black-framed glasses was extending the cup and enquiring One sugar or two?

  * * *

  WAS THIS the very table where Sindona and Gambino had sat? I sipped a second marsala and looked gloomily around and thought zero ambience and got a creepy but quite undefined feeling from the new Palermo. But ghosts from the past persisted. I noticed a small brass rectangle screwed into the wall just behind my head. The plate was engraved with a statement to the effect that in the cafe which had previously occupied the premises where the Charleston now stood, Giuseppe Tomasi, duke of Palma and prince of Lampedusa, had written The Leopard. Sindona faded fast. Here the aged aristocrat, last of his line, the great but unknown writer, had sat in the Caffè Mazzara composing his single slender masterpiece, the distillation of an age, a class, a vanished Sicilian culture.

  The aged aristocrat in his overcoat, actually not yet sixty, wrote a summum of his dynasty which reads now as if composed among the dying magnificence it celebrated, but it was all in the prince’s mind. What Tomasi di Lampedusa was doing, sitting here in the ugly Caffè Mazzara day after day in the last two and three quarter years of his life, with an exercise book and a ballpoint pen, was amusing himself. He told his wife this, Alessandra Wolff, the Freudian psychonanalyst, a Latvian baron’s daughter driven from her Baltic castle by the war. She read the first chapter and said it showed talent. He said the same thing to his uncle, who was also his wife’s stepfather, the former ambassador to St Petersburg and London. He was playing it down.

  It was his cousin Lucio’s doing, really. The greatest modern Italian poet Eugenio Montale had received by mail in early 1954 a handful of barely legibly printed lyrics in an envelope with insufficient stamps on it from an unknown Sicilian. The great poet usually ignored unsolicited material, but he looked at these to see whether they were worth the hundred and eighty lire he’d had to fork out in extra postage. He found he was reading the work of a real poet. That summer Montale was invited to a literary conference near Milan where he and other prominent writers would each introduce a young unknown. Montale decided that his unknown would be the Sicilian poet. Like everyone else who’d gathered to meet the youthful revelation, Montale was stunned when his young protegé Lucio Piccolo turned out to be an intensely shy Sicilian baron as old as himself, formidably erudite, astronomer, mathematician and musician as well as poet, learned among other languages in Greek and Persian, a distinguished but taciturn presence dressed in a dark formal suit at the height of summer. Lucio Piccolo was awarded a prize at the conference for his 9 Lyrics. Montale later remembered that he came and went without saying a word.

  The poet had been accompanied by his cousin the prince of Lampedusa, even less forthcoming than himself and more heavily dressed, wearing that summer a hat and a buttoned overcoat and using a heavy stick; and by a bronzed and sturdy servant who attended the two cousins everywhere. The novelist Giorgio Bassani remembered that he too, remained silent throughout the conference, and when introduced would bow without saying a word. The two were silent because they’d had little contact with others, even at home in Sicily. Together in Palermo or on Piccolo’s family estate at Capo d’Orlando, they spoke torrentially. The prince too had read vastly in history and the literatures of five languages. Lampedusa and his cousin kept up a flow of discussion, quotation, improvisation, allusion and absurd jokes that amazed visitors who heard it. When Piccolo sent off his handful of poems to Montale, with a covering letter that was actually written by Lampedusa, it was their first opening to the larger world.

  This was the origin of The Leopard, in Lampedusa’a own account. The silent observer at the summer conference was not overwhelmed by the famous writers he found there, and he later wrote to a friend in Brazil that if his cousin Lucio could win a prize,… certain I was no more foolish, I sat down and wrote a novel. The real origin and impulse behind Lampedusa’s one and incomparable book are inaccessible. The fat, silent boy who didn’t like outdoor games contemptuously remembered by his cousin Fulco di
Verdura had grown into a bulky, pale and silent man who’d spent an entire life reading. Passing from a dominating aristocratic mother to a formidable aristocratic wife, he hardly impinged at all on the society in which he moved. After his death at sixty and his amazing posthumous fame, the little world of the Palermo aristocracy struggled to account for what the book revealed and could remember only the prince’s silence, his bulk, his pallor. He usually had lunch at the Pizzeria Bellini … he would catch the bus home in the afternoon … he spent his evenings reading while his wife worked on her cases. Lampedusa eluded his biographers and his book largely eluded his critics.

  Twenty years before he started writing he’d contemplated some kind of book centred on the figure of his great-grandfather and set in the time of Garibaldi and the unification of Italy. It’d come to nothing. His widow vaguely suggested later that he’d been too busy, with the war … finding a new house, to act on this for several years. Fortunately he didn’t have to look after a family, or earn a living. Even his war, as wars went, went well. Palermo became uncomfortable as the bombing raids began, but Lampedusa spent a lot of time visiting his cousins at Capo d’Orlando and in early 1943 moved there for the rest of the war. In 1942, while most of Europe starved, or nearly, and armies died at Tobruk and Stalingrad, he wrote to his wife of a lunch of lasagne, vol au vent with lobster, crumbed cutlets with potatoes, peas and ham and a tart from Escoffier with cream and candied cherries, all in their usual quantities. A later letter mentions tender and tasty steaks two inches thick and a slice of fresh tuna as large as a car tyre. Later still, a light summer lunch consisted of fettuccine with butter and parmesan, a huge fish with several sauces, and a pâté de lapin made according to the rules of the old game pâtés: liver purée, black truffles and pistacchios and consommé jelly. This was followed by meringues with chocolate ice cream.

  * * *

  AMERICAN SUPERFORTRESSES flew over Palermo on 5 April 1943. It was the bombing raid that destroyed a good third of the old city centre, a prelude to the coming invasion. The palazzo Lampedusa received a direct hit and Lampedusa’s material link to the world of childhood, family and the past was gone. After Lampedusa saw the ruins, he walked twenty kilometres to the prince of Mirto’s house by the sea near Bagheria, at Santa Flavia, where the Salvo cousins would later build their pharaonic Hotel Zagarella. Lampedusa arrived filthy with dust and unrecognizable, and according to count Sarzana, who was there, sat three days without speaking a word. Although Lampedusa mourned its destruction for the rest of his life, the physical loss of his family palace, like the sale twenty years earlier of the palace at Santa Margherita di Belice, where he’d spent his childhood summers, were the necessary events that freed his imagination. The lost palace at Santa Margherita, sold to a hostile family to pay the debts of his socialist uncle, was transformed into the Donnafugata of the novel Lampedusa was to write. The death of his mother, the dominating dowager princess, in 1947 may have been equally liberating.

  Without this violent loss, without this clearing of the ground, his imagination might never have been so deeply engaged. Lampedusa would never have written anything as fatuously chipper as his cousin Fulco di Verdura’s little memoir, or anything that so astutely blended nostalgia and indignation as Dacia Maraini’s short book about Bagheria. But without the loss that drove him into the caverns of the imagination, Lampedusa might have written nothing at all. Oddly, having started at the end of 1954, the year of his cousin’s success in poetry, on the work that would in his biographer David Gilmour’s words provide an escape from the years of disappointment and an opportunity to redeem what he recognized had been a largely wasted life, Lampedusa interrupted it six months later to write a memoir of the places of my early childhood, which he intended at the time to be the beginning of an autobiography. His widow suggested later that the memoir had been her idea, a way to neutralize his nostalgia and get over the loss of his family homes. Alessandra Wolff wasn’t for nothing Italy’s first woman psychoanalyst. Whether her advice was necessary we can’t know, but if it was, it worked brilliantly. After thirty pages or so he returned to the novel, and the novel he wrote never gave way to the yearning pull of the lost world of the past. The more sensuously the vanished past was evoked, the more implacably his intelligence resisted, heightening the tension in the language until the novel transformed itself into an examination of life and death in Sicily, one that closed in a mood of sublime and unSicilian levity. Lampedusa like Proust made sensuous recall the means to understanding and not to consolation. Like Proust, he had a formidable intellect. A group of student friends had been drawn to the pale and taciturn prince, who was described around this time as looking like a retired general. Realizing they knew nothing, as he put it, he’d also delved into his life’s reading and written a series of lectures on English and French writers they read together in the evenings. The man who was old in his fifties, remembered by Bassani for the bitter twist to his lips, opened out to these young people. One of them he adopted, perpetuating his titles, and made The Leopard’s quick, ironic and ambitious Tancredi in his likeness.

  Tancredi is the penniless young aristocrat who rises through his wit and a strategic marriage to the beautiful daughter of a newly-rich mafioso. He’s the nephew of don Fabrizio, the prince the novel revolves around, a tall fair idealized alter ego of its writer. The novel’s action pivots on the historical moment of Garibaldi’s unification of Italy. Nothing much happens in The Leopard. The big events are anticipated or looked back on or heard of from afar. Small domestic things refract an image of the big world outside. The prince’s family move to their country estate for the summer. They hold a dinner party for the locals. The prince goes rabbit shooting. Tancredi and his fiancée Angelica wander through the deserted rooms of the palace. Don Fabrizio turns down an invitation to join the Italian senate. There is a ball in Palermo. The prince’s chaplain goes home to his family village. The air of suppressed erotic expectancy that hangs heavy over Angelica and Tancredi in the first part finds no sequel. It elides into the information, thrown as it were over the novel’s shoulder years later, that theirs was not a successful marriage.

  Those were the best days in Tancredi’s and Angelica’s lives, lives that would be so variegated and wayward against the inevitable backdrop of pain. But they didn’t know it then and pursued a future they reckoned would be more substantial, though it later turned out to be made only of smoke and wind. When they’d become old and uselessly wise their thoughts returned to those days with insistent regret. They’d been the days of a desire that was always present because it was always overcome …

  Those days were the preparation for a marriage that even erotically turned out badly. But it was a preparation that seemed a self-sufficient whole, exquisite and brief, like those overtures that survive forgotten operas and contain, merely touched on, their playfulness modestly veiled, all the tunes that were to be developed without skill in the opera itself, and fail.

  The Angelica glimpsed at the end as a corpulent widow with stumpy legs and varicose veins makes her entrance as an incomparable seventeen-year-old at the first dinner at Donnafugata. The food served at this dinner is given some attention. It matters because the local notables have heard ominous stories of French haute cuisine and are afraid they’ll be offered an insipid first course of soup. So when the three liveried and powdered lackeys enter each holding a huge silver dish with a towering timballo di maccheroni on it, a collective Sicilian sigh of relief and anticipation goes round the table.

  The burnished gold of the outside and the fragrance exuded of sugar and cinnamon were only preludes to the sensation of delight released from the interior when the knife slit the crust; aroma-charged steam burst out first, then chicken livers, little hard boiled eggs, fillets of ham, chicken and truffles could all be seen imbedded in the mass of hot and glistening short macaroni, that the meat juice gave an exquisite soft brown tinge.

  The diners then reveal something of themselves in their way of tackling the divine p
asta. The antithesis of this sturdy and exquisite native food is the monotonous opulence of the dishes spread on the buffet tables at the Ponteleone ball toward the end of the book.

  Coral pink the lobsters boiled alive, waxy and rubbery the chaud-froids of veal, steel-glinting the fish immersed in soft sauces, the turkeys gilded by the ovens’ heat, the boned woodcocks reclining on mounds of amber toast decorated with their own chopped guts, the pâtés de foie gras rosy under their gelatine armour, the dawn-coloured galantines and a dozen other cruel coloured delights …

  Under don Fabrizio’s unhungry gaze, the delicacies exude a hint of baroque horror. His survey of the even more gorgeous desserts ends in a vision of Saint Agatha’s hacked-off breasts. I was reminded of the mirage lunch with Orlando at the villa Niscemi. Belatedly I understood that certain traditions were being kept up and a certain notion of quality was staying alive that had little to do with appetite. I’d have been one of those sighing with pleasure at the sight of the timballo di maccheroni.

  In The Leopard’s richly emblematic moments and a series of contrasting dialogues, mainly between the fatalistic prince and various less radically disabused interlocutors, Lampedusa wrote a spare and lucid account of Sicily and its place in history. The book’s dialectical intelligence is the hard and bony structure that articulates its yielding flesh. Without this toughness of mind it might have been like Visconti’s film, whose director had a more formidable aristocratic lineage than Lampedusa and the mind of a window dresser. It might have been more like a novel too. Lampedusa learnt so much from Tolstoy and Stendhal that his book creates the illusion of being a nineteenth century novel. It’s really closer to Plato’s Symposium, a series of conversations, contrasting theories, views and voices on the past, present and future of Sicily. Every word is weighted, he wrote to his friend in Brazil, and every episode has a hidden sense. The original time span of twenty-four hours would have made this clearer, but the story burst its bounds. An illusion of life and movement is created out of stasis and death. The Leopard seems to be a novel, has always been taken for a novel, but is really a great baroque meditation on death.