by Peter Robb
The real embarrassment to the memory of communist austerity and struggle was Guttuso’s vast wealth, his twenty-year affair with the flamboyant countess Marzotto and some of the friends who’d gathered around him in the wake of Berlinguer’s disastrous historic compromise with the right. One of these friends was monsignor Angelini, a sleek and worldly cleric, an intimate of His Holiness and shortly to be raised to the purple. Another was the past and future prime minister Giulio Andreotti. For all these reasons, probably, Alberto Moravia kept his eulogy short and notably light on ideology, and as the politicians stood wrapped in their expensive overcoats he spoke tersely of the Mediterranean expressionist from Sicily who’d been his friend. When an artist dies, Moravia said, something of the world dies. The tall corpulent prime minister Craxi and the slight hunched foreign minister Andreotti both listened impassively and the communist party secretary buried his face in his handkerchief.
Then, to the intense surprise of many, the coffin with Guttuso in it was whisked off to the nearby church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, where a second funeral was held. A mass for the dead was celebrated by monsignor Angelini. The perplexed mourners watched the coffin disappear into the church and made their personal choices. Prime minister Craxi stayed true to his lay principles and refused with due respect to the dead to enter the church. Others of those present, like the past and future prime minister Giulio Andreotti, attended both funerals. Andreotti had been one of the tiny group of people admitted to Guttuso’s magnificent apartments in the last months of the painter’s life and would now see things through to the end. He was, moreover, a truly devout catholic who went to mass at six every morning of his life. Monsignor Angelini was Andreotti’s personal confessor and he’d been another of the tiny group of visitors admitted to the dying painter’s presence.
Monsignor Angelini spread himself more widely in his homily for the smaller gathering in the church than Moravia had outside. Reaching for comparisons in remembering Guttuso he evoked among others the names of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Dürer. If monsignor Angelini went a little over the top in this, he had his reasons. What many of the startled lay mourners outside didn’t yet know was that monsignor Angelini had drawn Italy’s most famous painter and most famous living communist into the bosom of the catholic church. He had, he announced to the press immediately after Guttuso’s death, administered the extreme unction and heard the dying painter’s confession. He died praying to the Madonna and invoking the holy face of Jesus, he told the media. Even in that moment of loss and mourning, monsignor Angelini must have felt it quite a coup for the mother church. Monsignor Angelini insisted that it wasn’t in any case a conversion, but a return to the fold.
Andreotti wrote an article in a national weekly to argue that it would be crude to see any contradiction between Guttuso’s communist life and his catholic death. He added suavely that Guttuso’s religious production testifies to a faith and a spiritual delicacy that are perhaps more than a prayer. And monsignor Angelini, for his part, added of Guttuso that Andreotti … was his best friend. Some of Guttuso’s other best friends hadn’t been present at all during the last months of the painter’s life. They hadn’t been allowed in. One was Alberto Moravia. Another was Guttuso’s lover and model of twenty years, the subject of dozens of paintings and hundreds of drawings and the woman without whom, he’d many times said, he wouldn’t be able to paint, Marta Vacondio, the countess Marzotto. Marta Marzotto was distraught and enraged.
I’ll never forgive them for making me hear Guttuso was dead from the radio. I’d sworn I’d never leave him alone, that I’d hold his hand to the end … They’ve erased me, kept me away like a plague bearer. I never existed …
The countess Marzotto had been a daily visitor for twenty years. Three months earlier she’d been stopped from seeing him. Angelini and Andreotti were later to testify before a judge that the dying Guttuso hadn’t wanted to see Marta Marzotto. Andreotti had even remarked, perhaps unaware the two were lovers, I find it quite logical that he shouldn’t want to see her any more. She was his model, but now he no longer paints. The countess said the locks had been changed on the doors at the palazzo del Grillo, so her keys no longer fitted. A strongbox she shared with Guttuso in a Rome bank she’d found emptied. It’d contained their love letters, jewels, erotic drawings by Guttuso of the countess, gold ingots and paintings by Picasso and Magritte. The value of Guttuso’s estate was given variously in the press as something between one hundred and three hundred million dollars. All went to his newly-adopted son. Guttuso’s sole heir was his secretary, a young man from Palermo named Fabio Carapezza. The son and heir and former secretary was described in the press as having black curls and blue eyes like a cherub’s in a church.
* * *
GUTTUSO WAS born near Palermo in 1912 and made his name as a painter first in the thirties with his charged and solar Sicilian expressionism. He was already a clandestine antifascist, and when the war began he became a communist and fought as a partisan against the nazis. After the war his careers as a painter and as a communist ran together into big cold war epic canvases. These muted over the years, and Guttuso’s apotheosis as the Italian painter coincided with the ambiguities of the historic compromise in the seventies. Guttuso held the figurative torch high in Italy while abstraction and conceptualism were sweeping the field of international art. He had nothing like the various genius of that other Mediterranean communist Picasso. In the more than three thousand canvases he painted over fifty-five years of tireless facility, he was only prolifically and endlessly himself. But he had a wonderful line, wiry and bounding, especially in the innumerable drawings, and a packed density of form and colour. The great and influential critic Roberto Longhi remarked that Berenson had liked Guttuso’s drawings because they so embodied Berenson’s principle of ideated sensations of movement, and added himself that
the eye doesn’t contemplate these drawings but runs over and over them, following the track of their rapid and provocative course … Guttuso’s line doesn’t draw, it wounds—it’s a sting, a prick, a thorn in the side …
Pablo Neruda, a poet whose work often read like a literary analogue of Guttuso’s art, wrote in 1953
In your homeland, Guttuso, the moon has the smell
of white grapes, honey and fallen lemons
but there is no land
there is no bread.
Neruda continued, rather feebly, You give land and bread in your painting. His Poem for Renato Guttuso got much worse than this before its end, and so did Guttuso’s painting. It was the age of militant art under Stalin’s umbrella, committed art, and this kind of thing wasn’t, in the case of either artist, the whole story. By the seventies Guttuso was a rich man living a very worldly social life and yet was still being hymned, this time by the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, as
painter of burning earth
of stones and scorched harvests
light that palpitates ceaselessly showing the way of Man.
Nostalgia had a lot to do with Guttuso’s appeal. As Italians hurtled into the consumer age, Guttuso reminded them that they were a poor and passionate people with a feel for the simple joys of life. As southern peasants left the land for factories in the north and industrialists socked away their wealth, Guttuso reminded them all that they were close to the earth and the sun and that they would shed blood for what they loved.
This, in a time of transformation and uprooting, was what a lot of people wanted to hear. As Italy changed out of sight, Guttuso’s conventionally harsh images reassured them. And a lot of Italians now had money to spend on paintings, and if not paintings, limited edition lithographs. Guttuso, Pasquale had told me at the mill, had owned a series of shops through which he sold his lithographs. It was through this unusual total control of production and distribution that he made a lot of his money. He was an artist for Italy’s new industrial age and for his industrial production he had a loyal market at the lower end of the price range in the peopl
e of the left.
Rarely was there such a mutually rewarding relation between a party and its artist. Guttuso’s loyalty to the PCI, through all its ups and downs and turns and transformations, lasted to the end of his life. The party assiduously promoted its militant and committed artist, and Guttuso responded with great generosity once his name and fortune were made. He made huge donations to the party and lent it prestige and credibility when other artists had abandoned it. He sat on Palermo city council and served two terms as a communist senator in Sicily. People were often struck by Guttuso’s affinity for the world of power, his feel for the game of politics. Guttuso is a man of power. It’s the Sicilian in him, Alberto Moravia sighed around the time Guttuso’s reputation and his income really took off. Ever the conceptualizer, ever the explainer and ever loyal to his friends and the party of which he was not himself a member, Moravia added that his thirst for money is part of his visual thirst. But Guttuso is an artist. Moravia insisted. Politics pass, art remains.
The years passed and Guttuso went from rich to enormously rich. In the beau monde of Rome, ideology was less important than power and the purest expression of power was wealth. The Roman salons were the frontier of radical chic and very different from the Sicily of bombed party offices and murdered union organizers. Guttuso liked aristocratic women, and had done ever since the thirties when he was a poor and deeply seductive young man on the make. The historic compromise of the seventies lent the final sanction to the habitual presence in Guttuso’s splendid Roman apartments in the palazzo del Grillo of princes of the church and some of the powerful demochristian politicians closest to the Vatican, such as Giulio Andreotti. Everyone was flattered. Guttuso explained
Money is one of the fundamental elements of power. Money gets power. Power gets money. But the power that derives from money is a very bitter thing, because one no longer knows who is a friend and who is an enemy. Power insulates you from the true feelings, even love.
It sounded like a dreadful intimation of what was coming.
* * *
BAGHERIA, WHERE Guttuso was born, is a few miles west of Palermo. He exaggerated his early poverty. It may have been a turn-on for the aristocratic women. He was the son of an agronomist and no worse off as a child than any other member of the austere and cultivated lower middle class in Italy before the first war. His father painted, wrote and played the piano. The fifteen kilometre distance of this small settlement from Palermo was far enough in the old days to be well out of town but still within reach of the city. And Bagheria’s situation, on a pleasant hillside just above the promontory that encloses the bay of Palermo on the east, had been delightful enough for the landowning aristocracy to build their villas there. It was rich coastal country planted with citrus orchards and olive groves, part of Palermo’s golden bowl, the Conca d’Oro. The stately homes doubled as farmhouses. The first great villa of Bagheria was built in the seventeenth century as a country retreat for prince Butera, and others followed over the next hundred years. The one I wanted to visit was built in 1736. Guttuso had given a big collection of his work to his home town in 1973 and the villa Cattolica had been turned into a museum to house it. On a Saturday afternoon I stood at a bus stop in Palermo over the road from the steps leading down to the Vucciria market. A woman shopper was already there, going home to Bagheria with her bursting plastic bags. Our desultory words about the buses became more animated as the time passed. An hour later I walked off. It was too late to visit the place before dark. The poor woman was still there with her bags of weekend shopping from the market.
The next morning I was at the same stop. A taxi cruised past. I told the driver I was waiting for a bus, and the driver said the buses didn’t run on Sundays. The taxi pulled calmly into a cul de sac off the other side of the road. And waited. I continued to stand at the bus stop. I was in no particular hurry. The driver tilted his cap over his eyes and feigned sleep. Gianni had a print of The Vucciria at home. Gianni was the taxi driver. He told me this as we worked our way out of town behind the station. Gianni was more than happy with the round trip fare he’d negotiated and the taciturn Sicilian was getting loquacious. It was understood a certain amount of helpfulness was part of the deal. We took a little detour toward the sea. Gianni nodded toward the general dereliction. Spanò, he said, with a kind of curt reverence.
Where it used to be. Where they had dinner. The famous fish restaurant.
They? I said.
When the big mafia bosses came over from the States, that’s where they had dinner. They say that’s where they had dinner. Spanò. I personally wouldn’t know. I know nothing.
I was impressed that Gianni was speaking to me about the mafia. Fifteen years earlier people looked blank when you mentioned it.
* * *
SPANO RANG a bell. A young mafioso who started out as a man of honour in the postwar days remembered eating at Spanò. Tommaso Buscetta, who was even then a rising figure in Cosa Nostra, because I knew how to talk a little and I had the habit of reasoning, said twenty-seven years later that he remembered being present at a dinner in a private alcove of Spanò in 1957. The dinner started on October the twelfth of that year. The meal began with pasta con le sarde and moved on to grilled fish and by the time the participants had ordered a drop of amaro or limoncello to settle the stomach it had lasted twelve and a half hours. It was perhaps the most important fish dinner in the history of organized crime.
The diners were all Sicilian, but half of them were oriundi long resident in the USA. The American delegation was headed by Giuseppe Bonanno, who was Joe Bananas in Brooklyn. When Joe Bananas arrived in Italy he’d been met at Fiumicino airport in Rome with a red carpet and a fervent embrace by the minister for foreign trade, the Sicilian and demochristian Bernardo Mattarella. Like Joe Bananas, Mattarella was a native of Castellammare del Golfo, just out of Palermo. He was the father of Piersanti Mattarella, that president of the Sicilian region who was assassinated in 1980 for wanting to break with Cosa Nostra. He was also the politician who gave the young Vito Ciancimino his start in life with a job in his parliamentary office. The Sicilian delegation was headed by its capo di tutti i capi don Giuseppe Genco Russo, successor to the late don Calò Vizzini, who’d expired amid great public lamentation in 1952. Nothing has come down to history of what was said during those twelve and a half hours. The one tiny exception was retailed later by one of Spanò’s waiters. Blessed is he who is far away when a hundred dogs fight over a bone, murmured Genco Russo at some point during the meal.
The young Tommaso Buscetta must have been moved by the momentousness of the occasion. Few actual men of honour have been such true believers in the notion of a mafia ethic and a mafia culture as Tommaso Buscetta in his long career. This fourteenth child of a poor Palermo family was mafioso in his walk, his posture and his thinking even before he became a made man in 1945 at the age of eighteen. His finger was then pricked, blood was drawn, he passed a burning religious icon from hand to hand. May my flesh burn like this holy image if ever I betray my vow. The induction of a man of honour is like something out of Tom Sawyer, and Buscetta himself remarked on its foolishness a quarter of a century later. He had his reasons later for diminishing the weight of his early vow, because Buscetta had by then become not quite the first but the most authoritative pentito in the history of Cosa Nostra. It was appropriate that Buscetta should have been present at the long fish dinner at Spanò in October 1957 because it had everything to do with the theorem Buscetta enabled Giovanni Falcone to construct decades later on the unitary structure of Cosa Nostra.
The Grand Hotel et Des Palmes began life as the handsome villa Ingham, became the key hotel of the fin de siècle splendours of Palermo and maintains a certain threadbare and grime-darkened distinction even today. Wagner was painted there by Renoir, while he worked on Parsifal in the opulent suite now called after him. A later guest was Raymond Roussel, the French symbolist author of Locus Solus and Impressions de l’Afrique, who got no closer to Africa than the Grand Hotel
et des Palmes. In 1933, after not coming out of Room 224 for forty days, he died there in circumstances that Leonardo Sciascia found mysterious enough to make the subject of his very slimmest slim volume, a book of twenty-eight pages called Documents Relating to the Death of Raymond Roussel. After the war the Little Red Room of the Hotel delle Palme was permanently screened off for the use of Lucky Luciano and whoever he was entertaining at the time. It seems to have been Luciano’s transatlantic good offices that in 1957 brought together the two groups, the Americans and the Sicilians, for their very intensive four-day encounter in the sala Wagner. From the tenth to the fourteenth of October the two groups were doing serious business and the outing to Spanò on the twelfth was at once a relief and a culmination.
The Americans had come to sell the Sicilians the idea of the Cupola or governing commission, and succeeded. Modern integrated management principles came home to the Sicilian mafia from the United States. The Cupola, on the model of the American commission, became the board of directors that governed Cosa Nostra as a whole. It integrated all the families controlling all the different areas. It decided killings and formalized dealings with the American Cosa Nostra commission on a separate but equal basis. It was under way within months, with the joint-venture elimination of the dangerously psychopathic Albert Anastasia in his New York barber’s chair by a Sicilian commando. The Americans were in trouble at home that year with the heroin business. The Sicilians agreed to take over the importing of heroin into the USA, neither side foreseeing the vertiginous profits that heroin would be earning twenty years later. One version of the summit suggestively had Michele Sindona also present. The two sides agreed that henceforth they were autonomous and distinct organizations, ending the informal family traffic across the Atlantic. Though the Sicilian Cupola was temporarily dissolved in the sixties during the government’s antimafia activity it has otherwise been Cosa Nostra’s governing body ever since. Not even Totò Riina abolished the Cupola. It took the Italian courts thirty years to acknowledge its existence.