Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  It occurred to me later that the finicky obsessive play with spoons and powders and flames that coffee and sugar taught may have been part of heroin’s charm for young Neapolitans in the getting-to-know-her stage. There’s a great deal yet to be written about the arrival of heroin in Italy, which happened while I was there. History’s time lag meant heroin reached certain layers of Neapolitan society along with such other manifestations of late capitalism as television and consumer durables, but it worked faster because with heroin there were no controls. Heroin was like a firestorm. There was an aptness in modernity’s arriving in Naples through the agency of a delightful drug, in solitude and alienation’s coming directly through that intense and fleeting pleasure that enslaved. Neapolitans had always been susceptible to fleeting pleasures.

  Heroin wrecked an intricate society of crowded urban spaces and a promiscuous mixing of classes, a culture that made a great deal out of the immaterial, the precarious and the ephemeral, whose highest arts were music and theatre, whose distinctions were rhetorical, erotic, comic, baroque, carnal, metaphysical, a sensibility that was lazily sensual and austerely abstract by turns, choral and instinctive, solitary and systematic. Naples gave the world ice cream, pizza, opera buffa and transvestism as an art form. Naples ravished Virgil, Boccaccio, Stendhal, shocked and disgusted Sade, Ruskin, Sartre. Naples filled the paintings of the visitor Caravaggio and the operas of the visitor Mozart. Naples was the motherland of the polymorphous perverse, and parts of it still recognizably the Greek city of Petronius’s Satyricon in the dire late twentieth century. Until heroin and the earthquake and all their consequences.

  One day a new Braudel will survey the Mediterranean world of the late twentieth century and see and show how heroin changed the patterns of life as sugar had five centuries earlier. The changes wrought by the later white powder that came west from Asia and went on to the Americas were on a similar scale. They also involved a lot of the same places. Heroin started in the south, for all the old reasons of Mediterranean geography, and that’s where it destroyed most. One of the people who understood first and registered most acutely what was going on, not the drug business itself but the enabling politics behind it, was Leonardo Sciascia. And Sciascia took the image of the caffè ristretto, the very short and very strong black of the south, to express in 1961 through a character in his first novel his intuition of what was going on.

  Maybe all of Italy is becoming a Sicily … A thought came to me, when I was reading in the papers about the scandals of the regional government: scientists say the palm tree line, that is the climate favourable to the palm tree form of vegetation, is creeping northward at the rate, I think, of five hundred metres every year … The palm tree line … I prefer to call it the short black coffee line, the line of the really strong coffee, of scandals: onward and upward through Italy, and it’s already past Rome …

  It was a suggestive and prescient image and the notion of the palm tree line gained some currency twenty years later, in the early eighties, among commentators who denounced the civil woes of Italy, the idea of a creeping mafia-ization like a spreading sore, a corruption of manners slowly and inexorably overwhelming Italy. It was, of course, a libel on the palm trees and the coffee of the south.

  * * *

  COLLAPSE OF some kind would’ve come anyway. Naples in 1978 was, after nearly three millennia, showing her age. The unutterable scenic beauty of the bay and the city hardly bore a closer look. A lot of it was a filthy, pullulating slum standing on the foulest sea in Christendom. Twelve rats for every human, someone had calculated. Its schools, libraries, hospitals, universities, museums, prisons must have been the worst in Europe. Visits to a bank, a post office, the town hall were hallucinatory experiences. The res publica, taken to include health, education, transport, politics, communications, entertainment, sport, personal safety, was a lost cause. By the usual measures of social well-being Naples was a disaster area. Five years earlier there had been an outbreak of cholera. The incidence of hepatitis was the second highest in the world, as I found when I became infected myself. A wave of infant deaths panicked the poorer districts for much of my first year. There was a lot of talk about a mystery illness but there was nothing mysterious about the squalor that bred infection. The third world begins in Naples, people used to say, and a lot of the statistics were third world.

  What Naples still had going for it in the seventies, apart from its decaying heap of incomparable art, was the popular urban life that went back, directly if tenuously, to the city’s ancient beginnings. It was unique in Europe and enabled by the very fact that Naples became a backwater at the beginning of the industrial age. In the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, as Goethe and Stendhal found and vividly testified, Naples was one of the three great capitals of Europe. Stendhal wrote in 1817, To my eyes it’s without compare the most beautiful city in the universe. It was as big as London and Paris and as splendid. Paradise and hellfire, said Gibbon, thinking of Pompeii’s fate and Vesuvius still smoking ominously outside the city’s perimeter. Marginalized by the shift of power to the north when Italy was unified, Naples went into the economic decline that spared it, at the cost of its decay, the destructive renewals of modernization and development. Urban renewal was fragmentary, sporadic. A wide straight street was ploughed through the port slums late last century after a cholera epidemic. Some land was reclaimed at Santa Lucia. Mussolini later bulldozed another patch below via Toledo in the centre for the Bank of Naples, the police headquarters, the post office in fascist modernist monumental style, the city’s only decent new buildings in the last hundred years. Otherwise Naples was left alone. The centre still teemed with people and it still presented in a degraded form a continuity of culture long gone elsewhere.

  In a way it seemed enchanted, in those days before the drugs and the killings. That this howling, passional hedonistic life, this art of arranging yourself, was possible in the middle of the modern world. The city’s choking traffic and the encroachments of TV felt almost irrelevant. The mad centripetal energy of Naples seemed in the world but not of it. Their shared outsider-excluding language defended Neapolitans from Italy and beyond and gave people a sense of relatedness, of family, that was stronger than their differences of social class. The indolence in practical matters, a shared intense preoccupation with small things, infinitessimal amounts of money, the nuance of a plate of pasta, tiny points of social decorum, marked a society adrift and turned in on itself. Yet the huge expense of passion and energy on the utterly ephemeral gave life a shared imaginative intensity I don’t expect to find again. Naples was a theatre, and Neapolitans further offered a newcomer the vast consolation of a people who’d seen it all. They’d learned to live not as the makers of history but as choral onlookers. History in Naples as in Sicily meant two and a half millennia of foreign occupation. The mild moist fug of the climate enhanced a dream-like state in which food, sex, and getting by till tomorrow were the major concerns. I thought I saw the past and it worked. These were the survivors of the ancient world. I was enchanted too. I abandoned my plans and the world to stay in Naples. I thought it’d go on forever. After several thousand years and in the middle of late capitalism, why not? Like the Neapolitans I’d arrange myself. Three years later it was all gone. The people’s Naples had vanished.

  When the contrabbandieri of Santa Lucia were still into cigarettes, they kept their fleet of blue drab speedboats moored in the boat harbour of the borgo, under the ancient castel dell’Ovo. The boats were big, formidably fast and manoeuvrable and capacious, boats for collecting Marlbóro outside territorial waters. When they’d done a run the contrabbandieri liked to eat well, and there was a seafood place called da Ettore, which disappeared around the time the fleet of speedboats did and the blue-jumpered daring sailors. It used to stay open to all hours, grilling fish and king prawns and serving spaghetti con le vongole. Good food and no nonsense. Sometimes they’d unload the cigarettes in broad daylight, with a line of sentries posted along the waterf
ront within shouting distance to warn of ’a finanza. There was no danger of a blitz in the Neapolitan traffic flow. Kids on Vespas would stick a carton of Marlbóro between their legs and rocket across four lanes of traffic and into the impenetrable maze of the Pallonetto. There’d be major skirmishes at times with the financial police, who had their own speedboats and helicopters too, and crowds would line the foreshore above the water to watch the drama. Some contrabbandieri were going to take me out one night on a job, but it fell through and then they were gone. It seemed romantic in the seventies, though the contrabbandieri were already in Riina’s hands. The other place to eat was in one of the bent lanes that twisted up into the stronghold of the Pallonetto, where you feasted on pasta and frutti di mare out on the footpath, using your hands like in the photographs from the last century.

  A subtler or a less enraptured observer than I was might have picked up more signals earlier on, might have given more weight to the complaints of the Neapolitans themselves about the degradation of their way of life. Looking back, it’s impossible not to see that things were ready to fall apart, that they’d been falling apart for a considerable time and any further tightening of the social screws would lead to a general collapse. A visitor more alive to the interplay of social and economic forces might have seen that criminality was bound to make a qualitative leap from the homely arts of bag snatching, cigarette smuggling, whoring and a mutually acceptable level of protection racketeering to a higher, more industrial plane of activity. The great industry of cigarette contraband had in any case been a partnership between mafia and camorra for four years by the time I arrived, and in the summer of 1979, my first full summer in Naples, Riina and the Cosa Nostra commission were in Naples to renegotiate it. The Neapolitans had been cheating. In the end cigarettes were left to the open market because at Riina’s urging Cosa Nostra that year was throwing itself into heroin.

  Politics were shifting too in the seventies. A few years earlier the mayor had been Achille Lauro, called the comandante, monarchist, demagogue and shipping millionaire, the former cabin boy from Sorrento who’d shipped so many poor Italian migrants to Australia. The Americans who’d arrived in 1944 were still there. Naples had become a cold war bastion, home to the US sixth fleet and the biggest NATO base in southern Europe. Under the American umbrella, Lauro had secured his re-elections as mayor by distributing packets of pasta and shoes. The matching shoe of each pair to be collected after votes were in. The speculators’ housing boom in Naples didn’t touch the city’s heart, unlike the mafia’s job on Palermo, but it ruined the suburbs and the buildings were even worse.

  When a reforming city administration came to power in 1975, all the communists were able to do was lay bare the social wounds of a city where in the early seventies nearly half the houses lacked a shower or bath and nearly a fifth an indoor toilet. The dreadful gimcrack flats of the speculators’ boom in the fifties were already collapsing. Fourteen buildings fell down in three months at the end of 1977 and three thousand people lost their homes. There were almost no qualified administrators. Lauro and the DC had spent the budget filling local government with dustmen and doormen and ushers, their electoral clients. These were away from work most of the time at their real jobs. In hospital with hepatitis, I found the ward’s chief paramedic ran a discotheque that was patronized by military personnel from NATO. He used to roar up to the hospital from time to time in a red sports convertible and was fleetingly interested in me as a potential source of new clients. Looking down from a window in the ward, I’d see the kitchen staff driving home with cases of food on the roofs of their baby Fiats. The window itself blew out one night during a spring storm, flooding the ward and showering beds with broken glass. One wing of the hospital, which had been built in the sixties, was out of use and seemed to be falling to pieces. Several camorristi were in the hospital, guarded by carabinieri, and drugs circulated freely. I saw the ward director chasing and grappling with one pyjama’d patient, wrestling for control of a little plastic envelope.

  All the positions of economic power in Naples were held by the DC and the efforts of the new left-wing council were blocked. Two thirds of those posts were held by Antonio Gava’s people and Gava was an Andreotti man. In the eighties Gava was the real boss of Naples, and he became a minister in two Andreotti governments. People jostled with each other to get to kiss his hand. He was the Salvo Lima of Naples, and in more, it turned out, than manner. As Andreotti’s minister for the interior in the late eighties, Gava headed Italy’s fight against organized crime, an appointment which was for most Italians an exquisitely insulting signal of how invulnerable Andreotti felt at that time. In the end Gava fell almost as far and hard as his master. He was arrested in September 1994. His first trial was for ordinary corruption, like those of the other Andreotti government ministers from Naples who were also tried and convicted, De Lorenzo and Scotti and Cirino Pomicino. In Gava’s corruption trial the most eloquent testimony against him came in the moment when his former bagman remembered a day he’d delivered Gava a third of a million dollars in cash. It was Gava’s rakeoff from a hospital construction contract, and the court heard how Gava’s face darkened in anger when he saw the modest sum, how he growled in that expressive Neapolitan dialect he affected in his dealings with local politicians and crime bosses, These are crumbs. Before he was convicted of corruption, Gava also went on trial in Naples for organized crime. There was a mass of detailed evidence against him, and his eighty-one codefendants included crime bosses and killers of the camorra, as well as other former members of the political establishment, a DC deputy minister, a DC senator. I was back in Naples for the opening of Gava’s camorra trial at the end of November 1995, but Gava didn’t show up. He sent word he’d suffered a stroke and was charged with contempt.

  Back in 1978 Gava’s golden years had hardly begun. The reformists were paralyzed. The steelworks and the car industry were in crisis and the only other area of the Neapolitan economy not terminally stagnant was crime, but it was modest, traditional crime mainly. Cigarette contraband was the only area of large-scale cooperation with Cosa Nostra. The camorra wasn’t organized like the mafia. There were hundreds of neighbourhood crime groups, power might shift overnight, and no hierarchy, no overarching body like the mafia’s Cupola coordinated and controlled Neapolitan crime. Then, as the seventies turned into the eighties, in almost perfect synchrony two things happened to change this.

  * * *

  CASTELLAMMARE DI STABIA is the biggest town in that urban spill that runs down the peninsula from Naples to Sorrento around the foot of Vesuvius. It was also the power base of Antonio Gava and his father before him. I was there at dusk on 29 November 1980 when the ground shook and buildings started to collapse on to the streets, crushing parked cars. It was the earthquake. A few miles away whole towns were collapsing. Later that evening I managed to hitch a ride back through the darkness and confusion to Naples, where I spent the cold night in the open under the cannonball-pocked walls of the Angevin castle, along with the huddled masses of the port district and the Spanish quarters, waiting for the end of the world as we knew it. We were lucky. There were no more big shocks. Nearly three thousand people died in the earthquake, but few in Naples. A block of modern flats collapsed, killing those inside. A few more people died of heart attacks or falling masonry. Some days later a handful of destititute old people were crushed in their beds when a wing of the eighteenth-century poorhouse collapsed, in its day the biggest building in Europe. That was all. Naples escaped the hecatomb by a whisker. It was nevertheless the end of the world as we knew it, though it took a few years for this to become clear. The buildings of Naples were a mouthful of rotten teeth that withstood the jolt only because they were packed so tightly together. Cracks snaked across decaying walls all over the city. We slept out for several more nights, until cold and damp and demoralization won out over fear as the aftershocks ceased and people trickled back to their tottering palazzi. When the presidential Maserati rocketed up Toledo on
its way to the Irpinia disaster zone a couple of midnights later the street was empty but for me. The Spanish quarters and the other ancient slums of central Naples were quickly caged in amazing geometries of tubular steel, dense webs of scaffolding spanning the alleyways to stop the buildings falling into them. Stairwells were propped up with wooden posts, buildings evacuated, alleys closed off with concrete walls. Inhabitants of the collapsing buildings were shunted out to container parks and holiday flatettes as a temporary emergency measure. They never returned. Many were still living in containers a dozen years later. The others found homes on the dreadful periphery. In the space of days the old centre of Naples lost a big chunk of those people, the most defenceless, who’d most made the city what it so extraordinarily was.

  People lost not only their homes. The intricate system of artisan workshops that aerated the old centre, the submerged economy of tiny semi-clandestine businesses employing women and teenagers to work leather, metal, paper, wood, cloth, was choked off by the removal of its workforce and the blocking of the alleys by the steel and concrete buttresses. The only people in Naples making an honest living, if you excluded the public sector employees for the sake, as it were, of argument, were now prevented from doing so. Male and female ladies of the night found it difficult to lure the sailors of the sixth fleet to their cubicles in the Piranesi nightmare the Spanish quarters had become. Pasquale the cook, who ran the Spanish quarters place where I ate in the evenings, was traumatized by the earthquake. None of his wife’s scolding could shake him out of his catatonia. He was no longer open in the evenings. The barbers, mechanics, upholsterers and barmen, the apprentice, fully-fledged and retired prostitutes, male and female, the pimps, transexuals, ex-cons, car watchers and car washers, the retailers of counterfeit Rolex and Omega watches and the traffickers in matériel that had fallen off the back of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, accountants, plumbers, thieves, cooks, waiters and sellers of contraband Marlbóro and Merít, the crowd, in short, with whom I was passing my time in those days, dispersed forever. Heroin was already starting to make the Spanish quarters a waste land at night, and the shootouts that had earlier enlivened dinners at Pasquale’s, when I’d be yanked inside by the scruff of my neck and the shutters slammed down until the gunfire ceased, were soon replaced by the more systematic warfare between the drug gangs. I avoided the quarters at night now.