by Peter Robb
Cutolo was finished, though allowed the special privilege of a wedding in jail. Ice Eyes Rosetta eluded the police for another ten years, but she too was finally taken. The New Family then broke up again into warring clans. This kept the killing at a respectable rate. Between 1980 and 1988 there were over fifteen hundred violent street deaths in the Naples gang wars. As the nineties began the killing figures were up again to hundreds a year. Some in the winning families wanted to end heroin trafficking on their own turf. They’d realized rather late what junk had done to their children. There was a prolonged shooting war in the Spanish quarters over this. A group of mothers in the devastated Spanish quarters started to fight the drug camorra on its own ground. By then the camorra was making more money from public works contracts than it ever had from drugs. And anyway, the damage was done.
* * *
I WOKE with the earliest light, on the sofa of a friend’s smoky attic flat. The flat was atop a huge and decaying sixteenth-century palazzo, whose monumental stone entry arch was at the blind end of a dank alley too narrow for cars to penetrate. The alley had once been a thoroughfare. It was never wide enough for cars, though, and now it was walled off altogether at the far end because the buildings that defined it were about to collapse. It was 1995 and I was back in Naples and it was time to leave again. I had to get a taxi at seven in the piazza, under the even more formidably monumental gateway to the archbishopric. The archbishopric was part of the cathedral complex, whose marble depths held the rich and elaborate frame that held the phials that held the congealed blood of San Gennaro. The fate of the city depended on the regular liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood. Getting to the archbishopric at dawn meant dragging stuff down the countless crumbling and cracked irregular steps. On one of their many wide landings I had lately seen a six-year-old boy already trained in the ways of his world respectfully kissing the hand of a petty boss. At the end of those dim passages running off the landings the corner of my eye would ever catch some door just barely open or clicking shut, some ankle disappearing around a corner, and my ear would pick up the sound of other feet, unseen a couple of turns ahead or behind on the majestic crumbling staircase.
Then across the courtyard, past the scooters and the washing and the rubbish and the improvised sunless gardenette, under the eyes of the Virgin gazing out complacently from her large and handsome recess, brilliantly lit by fluorescent tubes and bright fake flowers massed around her. Then down the dark and slimy alley under the further ever-watchfulness of street-level dwellers, they too staring at all hours out of their airless lightless boxes, over the bottom half of their horizontally divided front doors, like horses from their stalls. And into the handsome space of the largo, where a more public and more modest shrine to the Virgin, high in a corner wall, was being renovated and remodelled the day before by masons and plasterers perched on ladders and watched by some of the same old ladies who gathered in the cathedral twice a year to revile their saint and insult him until his blood liquefied and flowed again, and where at almost any hour of day or night a knot of boys would be scuffling for control of a football.
What woke me was a sound. Not an early stirring of life in the vast tenement below, but a noise gradually defining itself from above as the shape faltered into view. By now I was out on the tiny terrace with its row of dead cactus. It was a helicopter, hovering low in the grey light just before dawn and hugging the roofline and passing very slowly overhead in the direction of Forcella. Even on foot, Forcella was only a minute away down an alley behind the cathedral called Scassacocchi because it too was narrow enough to scrape and smash the wheels of a seventeenth-century carriage. Forcella’s main artery was a street that ran on from the narrow thoroughfare marked out thousands of years ago by the Greeks and fell steeply into a tiny piazza at the foot of an architectural canyon and then forked. Forcella the casbah of Naples. They were raiding the Giulianos again.
The last time there were raids on the Giulianos and I was around, the family was seriously inconvenienced and so was I. The Giulianos were the strongest camorra family in Naples and for a few years they’d been displaying their domination of the neighbourhood, and by extension the city, more and more flauntingly. They’d set up a system of twenty-four hour floodlighting of the piazzetta. This was at once a staking out of the territory, a blazing intimidation by display and a warning system against incursions by police. Nothing passed unseen by the family, who looked down on the little forked piazza from their hideously renovated and fortified properties. The blaze of light was backed up by an elaborate system of video surveillance and powered at public expense by hooking into the electricity grid. Neither the electricity corporation nor the police had felt up to doing anything about it.
Both the flamboyance and the sense of territory were pure eighties camorra. In the absence of stable political cover on the Sicilian pattern, and a stable structure like Cosa Nostra’s Cupola, camorra families were obsessive about control of their home turf and theatrical in the Neapolitan manner about displaying it. The boss in Gava’s town of Castellammare, having to report daily to the carabinieri, arrived daily after a procession through the city on the back of a thousand-c.c. motorbike. The bike’s rider, and the riders of the identical bikes that preceded, followed and flanked the boss’s bike, all wore identical helmets and leather jackets. Others of his escort had previously cleared the route of traffic and pedestrians. In nearby Torre Annunziata, the ruling clan took over a huge old palazzo in the town centre and turned it into a fortress with secret internal tunnels and walled-up windows, protected by armoured doors and window shutters, dozens of closed circuit TV cameras, with armed guards at the entrance and a pack of German shepherd dogs on the roof.
When the world’s greatest footballer Diego Maradona arrived from Argentina in the mid eighties and a couple of years later Naples won the Italian football championship for the first time ever, the press spoke gravely of a cultural rebirth in Naples and the Giuliano family appropriated Maradona. He spent a fair amount of time partying with the Giulianos, and it was in their company that he developed the coke habit that brought him down. I was, am, and will always be an addict, said the player who was once the greatest, back in Argentina, his career in ruins. People talk a lot about drugs but not about what drives people to drugs. I took the drug on purpose. I had to get away from Naples. You knew what he meant. Maradona was photographed often, in earlier and happier days, at Giuliano weddings and other festivities, and was once snapped with a young male of the family inside a huge and costly new bath in the form of a giant scallop shell that the family had bought itself. Both were clothed. When Nunzio Giuliano’s seventeen-year-old son died of an overdose, an army of the clan’s guaglioni marched into the hospital and overpowered the personnel and marched out again with the boy’s body for a family wake. A Giuliano and his death were going to be handled as the family saw fit, not the public health authorities. The Giulianos were always good for a little intimidation, a little display.
There had in the end to be an official response to the humiliations the Giulianos were heaping on the representatives of civic order. It came in the form of several police raids on a military scale. Helicopters hovered in the air and directed an army of carabinieri on the ground. Houses were raided. Fugitives were arrested. The floodlights and the surveillance cameras were disconnected. The raid discovered a newly completed private casino and brothel complex hidden in the web of alleys. It was a very secret establishment of several storeys that comprised gambling facilities for the foot soldiers below and luxurious dalliance arrangements for more senior members of the family above. Among the fittings was the scallop shell bath.
The carabinieri found a secret escape route. It started in a hidden trapdoor in the floor of the entrance to the home of a prominent Giuliano and ended, via a rope drop, in the office of a cultural circle operated by an obscure religious order of the catholic church. The Neapolitan curia denied all knowledge of this order and its cultural association. This wasn’t the only
escape path from the casbah. One of the buildings raided was at the end of an alley that went off the left-hand fork. This building had a stone staircase leading up to the roof above the fifth floor, though access to the roof was barred by an iron gate that was heavily chained and locked. From here the roofs of other buildings, even some distance away, could be quickly reached on foot by anyone who knew the route. The offices of the local administration could be reached this way. The carabinieri must have been particularly anxious to get to the roof, because they knocked a great hole over the staircase, in the substantial wall by the gate, to reach it. I could see it from the front door of the desolate room I rented on the top floor.
The arrests and the confiscations and the dismantling of the floodlights and video cameras caused a lot of distress in the neighbourhood. Shortly after the hole appeared, I realized my room had been entered. The pastrycook’s wife next door was distressed and evasive and I understood from her replies that it hadn’t been the police. Nothing was taken. There was nothing to take. But the room had been searched. It was entered and searched again too. Then the death threats started. They came in two phases, written in pencil on those thick folded foolscap sheets of lined carta protocollo with the wide margins down each side and the handsome space at the head of the page: the sheets that were used with costly tax stamps stuck at their head for all manner of bureaucratic grovelling and sold by tobacconists in single sheets. The paper was my own. I’d been using the room as a writing studio in the mornings. I’m not so sure about the pencil. The camorristi may have brought their own pencil. It was certainly blunt, the one used for the messages, which was unlike me, with a soft lead, which was. The night I found the messages the sheets had been lying blank for quite some time. The notes were written in two hands and one was more literate and more reasonable than the other. It was done in cursive script, more or less, as against the other’s clumsy printing. Compulsory education has always been a flexible concept in Naples. In a fairly terse, syntactically shaky but reasonably polite manner, the first explained that unknown persons were not admitted to the building. The other was more brutal and direct. The other’s became the prevailing tone with the second lot of messages. These expressed displeasure that I hadn’t yet vacated the premises. Morirai, one of them wrote. You will die.
It wasn’t a lot of fun at any time, passing the caged Alsatian snarling in his straw-strewn dungeon under a naked light bulb, negotiating the lookout woman on the corner, swathed in shawls and seated impassively before an upturned carton displaying a single packet each of contraband Merìt and Marlbòro, both accented on the second syllable, ignoring the glances from behind the corner shop’s piles of bread and tins and cheese, brushing past the youths hanging over a scooter under the entrance arch and brazening out the not-quite-closed doors on the intermediate landings. To arrive home with company and find the lock levered open, the front door hanging awry on its hinges and fresh death threats in the reception area really threw in doubt the wisdom of this little luxury. The landlady wasn’t pleased when I told her I was leaving. Our agreement had been rigorously informal. I had obviously, she said down the long-distance line, failed to win my neighbours’ confidence. Didn’t I know about the rooftop escape route? Naturally, she snapped, people were alarmed.
* * *
PALERMO MADE me see in 1995 what I’d failed to see when I lived in Naples. In Sicily the mafia was always an identifiable entity, for those who cared to know it, and always there’d been a pocket of society immune to its threats and blandishments, a nucleus of resistance and renewal. The camorra had been much less entrenched in the institutions of Naples than the mafia was in Palermo but far more pervasively present in society, in the whole Bourbon culture of friendships and protection on which decrepit old Naples still ran. It was seen with indulgence by the very people employed to repress it. Countless times I’d seen a carabinieri car pull up by a seller of contraband cigarettes and a uniformed officer buy several cartons. The cigarettes were, before the heroin and earthquake days, the camorra’s main source of income. I was friends, once, with a whole range of people who in minor ways were part of the camorra network, like old Cchiù Cchiù, the beshawled and toothless crone who sold cigarettes all night on a corner of via Toledo, for whom I’d light fires against the winter cold, or Giacomo, who got drawn into Cutolo’s mob, or the elderly boss of the Spanish quarters who shouted me the Chivas Regal. That courtly old boss was one of the last of his kind. As late as the sixties the great Neapolitan actor and dramatist Eduardo De Filippo could still portray his like as a figure of real authority, an arbiter in a world without social justice. There was a certain humanity in the real-life Pascalone ’e Nola, who gave a wad of cash once to a youth who’d made a girl pregnant. It was a wedding present, he said. If the boy didn’t get married, the cash could be used as a contribution to his funeral expenses. That was how Naples was. At the other end of the scale I found myself taking coffee once in the luxurious house with a view of the bay of a lawyer-financier later convicted of major operations for the camorra; being told once by a friend of Gava’s that I knew who to approach in case of need; meeting aristocrats later enmeshed in the reconstruction contract scandals, the World Cup stadium scandals. At either end of the scale, I doubt that I would have known the mafia counterparts in Palermo. I began to see what Orlando had meant when he talked about the greater political maturity of Palermo, a city whose people had had to make hard choices. Naples in 1995 still seemed an utterly disoriented city whose language and gestures remained what they’d been but no longer referred to reality.
A poison was abroad in Naples now. Resentments surfaced quickly. The baroque configuration of the Neapolitan mind was being twisted further into something ugly. Meanwhile you were expected to admire pedestrian zones and open air cafes. The theme park necrosis was taking hold. Sinister forces wanted to embalm the city, create another Venice, a little piece of Tuscany. People were being pushed to the edges, if not out of town. You could see them in the shadows, at the edge of your field of vision. Was it the beauty that blurred my eyes now, or the life gone from the places I’d known? Naples had never seemed more beautiful. I felt like a ghost stalking the streets. The tourists are coming back! Twenty years earlier, Naples had been a dying city that belonged to the people who lived there. It was hardly bearable at best, yet there’d been life in the dreadfulness of life. You seldom heard Neapolitan now. The absurd comedy was gone. Naples broke my heart. And yet, as the city always had, it teased, it led you on to dream of more than it would ever deliver, made you remember why you’d thrown away your life to be there and still, for an instant, if you loved it, think it the most marvellous city in the world. In Naples you remembered being happy and never why. Naples, I consoled myself with thinking, would always be more interesting than other places. Naples would never bore. When Braudel saw Naples at its nadir in 1983, he reflected that
Naples has always scandalized, scandalized and seduced … Italy’s lost a lot from not knowing, out of indifference and also fear, how to use the formidable potential of this city, which is really too different, European more than Italian …
Naples was the only place I’d ever felt at home.
* * *
PASOLINI CAME south to Naples and Campania in the late sixties to make his film of Boccaccio’s Decameron. He came to Naples because Neapolitans have stayed the same. The city stayed in his mind, and among his last writings were a series of letters to an imaginary Neapolitan boy. I prefer the poverty of Neapolitans to the well-being of the Italian republic, I prefer the ignorance of Neapolitans to the schools of the republic … In another piece I could no longer trace, in one of the perverse, hallucinated visions he elaborated not long before his murder, he’d spoken of the Neapolitans as a people who had rejected the modern world. He described them as a desert tribe, camped in their black and red piazzas, waiting for the end, choosing to die. Wrong-headed and brilliant as ever, Pasolini didn’t know the half of what was coming.
VII
/> A REALIST IN ROME
RED BANNERS waved in the winter air outside the Pantheon. A band played the Internationale. The party leader wept. The coffin arrived from the senate where it had lain in state for days while the president and the former president and the prime minister and former prime ministers and the whole nomenklatura and thousands of nameless admirers filed past and paid tearful homage.
Renato Guttuso’s in 1987 was Italy’s last great communist funeral. Berlinguer’s had been vastly bigger, had stopped Rome and the nation. But Berlinguer’s had been a political funeral, and the million mourners on the streets had then produced the party’s greatest and most evanescent triumph, the dreamt-of sorpasso when the communists for the first and last time in history overtook the demochristians and won the largest vote of any party in national elections. Guttuso’s, on a wintry day in January a couple of years later, was a funeral for the past, for the people of the left, for the memory of years of struggle, for commitment, passion and death. It was the funeral of a man who’d matured as an artist and militant when he was a resistance leader against the nazis, military commander for central Rome until the liberation, as I read on a yellowing central committee document among his papers, and author of a savage series of ink drawings done in hiding on butcher’s paper, the Gott Mit Uns, Guttuso’s horrors of war.
A little embarrassment was unavoidable in 1987. The party was hurtling down that trajectory from the illusory sorpasso of 1984 to its autodestruction in the post-wall panic of 1990, and its great artist, painter of the epic canvases of its years of struggle, had too devotedly followed its every twist and turn not to reflect in his expiry something of the current state of play. Unlike all the other artists and intellectuals, Guttuso hadn’t left the party in 1956 or 1968 or in any of the other long years of attrition. He’d stayed and he’d been rewarded. He’d served two terms as a communist senator, been hymned by Pablo Neruda and when in the eighties he’d been challenged by his old friend the writer Leonardo Sciascia to choose between Sciascia and Berlinguer on the substance of a conversation among the three on the origins of terrorism in Italy, Guttuso had chosen Berlinguer and the Party and Sciascia had broken with him. But when Guttuso died Sciascia wept and said I never stopped loving him.