Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  The scale of the painting, the sweeping and inescapable grimness of its social message, the overpoweringly didactic intent of it all and the gaunt ugly horse itself inescapably recall the work of Renato Guttuso, and when you see it you can’t escape the idea of its influence. The Guttuso famous for the vibrancy of Sicilian sun and earth and sea was always shadowed by another Guttuso, darker and more violent, a painter of negation. His more perceptive critics always insisted on this. Contrary to appearances, Sciascia once wrote, Guttuso is assailed by fear, anguish, suffering and the sense of death … he ‘unlives’ even as he deeply lives.

  Guttuso painted his own Triumph of Death in 1943, when he was living in hiding through the nazi occupation of Rome, and it had a grey charger in it. His Crucifixion of 1941 has a wild-eyed horse in the foreground, and Battle of 1943 has two horses, one dead, for only one dead human figure. His horses recurred as images of brute suffering in these years. Picasso was always the painter he looked to, and when he was starting out in those early days of fascism and war he carried a small reproduction of Guernica in his wallet like a talisman, an image of art, politics, morality. It was a model he never abandoned. Alberto Moravia remarked on the detritus littering the work of this painter of Indian figs, olive trees, rocky shores and fishing boats … a certain almost obsessive unpleasantness. Even Guttuso’s sensuality was like this, Moravia went on:

  Guttuso’s women are like his starving dogs and skeletal horses: carcasses with ample flanks and thin legs, sagging breasts and swollen bellies, ready to yield to a fuck that is endured rather than desired.

  He described thus a 1959 Nude by Guttuso:

  On a blood-coloured blanket, a woman lies thrown on her back, eyes closed, face upside down. Ribs and hips stand out. Massive splayed thighs taper rapidly to narrow shins. The pubic zone is a triangle of dark shadow … The woman lies on the floor: she has been thrown there … she lies there, mouth half open and eyes half closed, waiting for another, definitive violence.

  The violence of Guttuso’s painting, according to Moravia, goes beyond its content and becomes a compositional principle in his big political works.

  The cement of Guttuso’s composition is violence. Violence among the figures in the picture and the painter’s violence on the figures …

  The violence transmuted into inertness of mind as the political impulse faded over the years. In the last big paintings, when shallowness had closed in, the inertness of the compositions was matched by a crude flatness in the way the figures were rendered. The first work of Guttuso’s I saw was one of these, at the end of the seventies, in reproduction, and I loathed it. It must’ve been the pretentiously allegorical Spes Contra Spem, Hope Against Hope, with its room of disconsolate intellectuals, among them Guttuso and Moravia, the nude woman, the balcony, the running child and the glimpse of the sea. The Walt Disney of Italian Stalinism was how I saw Guttuso at that time. Other paintings were worse. La Vucciria itself was one of them. All the components, the fruit, the vegetables, the fish, that Guttuso so charged with life when he drew them in and for themselves, were diminished in the big canvas, made uniform and marshalled into deadly ranks, elements in a flat pattern broken only by the wooden figure of the standing, staring woman shopper seen from behind. It’s very telling, in the old brochure printed for the painting’s first presentation, to compare the drama and intensity of the preliminary sketches of the market wares with the deadness of the finished whole. Later he went off the painting himself. In 1980 he said

  The Vucciria is a painting I’d been carrying around inside me for years. I come from Bagheria, but I went to high school in Palermo. In the morning I used to go to the market for my lunch, I bought bread and panelle. The market stalls fascinated me, their displays of Sicilian fruit and vegetables. I thought of doing a canvas like a great still life, with a path cut through it like a groove and people buying and looking. The idea took over, and there’s too much still life in the picture. Too many peppers, too many tomatoes, too many eggs. I’d do it again differently now, but I don’t feel up to it. It’s hard to go back to a theme you’ve already dealt with …

  All of Guttuso’s best critics saw the split in his work, between the keenness of his eye and the vigour of his hand, and the deadening force of the organizing will, though they hedged about putting it in words. Moravia was clearly holding back when he talked about his friend’s work. Roberto Longhi identified Guttuso’s masters as Goya, Géricault, Daumier, Delacroix, and after praising Guttuso’s wonderful line, went on to hint, A problem might be how often his graphic flights are at a functional tangent with his painting …

  Though Guttuso left Sicily early to make his way on the continent, he never stopped doing sketches and small oils, in the interstices between his big choral canvases, of Sicilian things, the small things like the fish and the lemons, that had charged his imagination as a hungry Sicilian boy. They may have had a talismanic or a fetishistic value for him too, as touchstones of something he feared losing, emblems of his origins, and painting them may have been a way of staying Sicilian. The Vucciria is the work Sicilians know best. There were prints of it everywhere and it was no surprise that Gianni had one at home. There was another framed on the wall of the Horse Shoe, a clamorous, almost Neapolitan, place near the Vucciria itself with terrific cheap workday lunches and excellent caponata. In it Guttuso assembled some of the Sicilian minutiae he had so often handled in sketches and small oils into a large canvas of social statement. The market of the Vucciria was the locus and the symbol, the concentration of this Sicilianness. When Sciascia spoke about the hungry man’s dream he meant not only the market itself but Guttuso’s interpretation of it in the painting. I found Sciascia’s note among Guttuso’s papers, in the brochure for the first presentation of La Vucciria at Vivi Caruso’s Palermo gallery in 1974. Guttuso’s painting, Sciascia went on to say, wasn’t about the abundance it represented, but about its absence, about hunger. Like the Vucciria market itself, La Vucciria was a hungry man’s dream, but Guttuso by then was too far away to make it real.

  VIII

  A WOMAN’S LIFE

  PHOTOS? SAID Letizia Battaglia. It was the third time I’d sidled up to the matter of the photos in twenty-four hours. This time I wasn’t going to be shaken off. They’re all put away in boxes, she mumbled. It’s such a bore to get them out. I pressed her further, as Pietro urged the tiny white Fiat through the haze-shrouded traffic on a hot Palermo morning. I HATE my photos! Letizia Battaglia cried. They’re HORRIBLE. Her eyes were glinting with pleasure.

  In Sydney once I’d heard about a planned exhibition of work by a woman photographer from Sicily. It was going to be held under the auspices of the Italian cultural institute. The cultural institute’s director worked from a suite forty-five floors above Circular Quay with a breathtaking two-hundred-and-seventy degree view of the world’s greatest harbour. Since the photographer was a woman, a woman moreover from the Mezzogiorno, and seeing that she’d already in 1985 won a very prestigious prize in New York, the Eugene Smith, the institute was thrilled with the idea of promoting Letizia Battaglia as cultural ambassador for Italy. Then shortly before opening time Italy’s cultural representatives got a glimpse of some of the black-and-whites, more black than white and more grey than either, that were going on display.

  Shattered car windows. Rigid figures in car seats. Eyes staring sightlessly from wrenched back heads. Blood trickling from the corner of an open mouth. Bodies face down in a pool of blood beneath some crumbling wall. Feet in expensive shoes sticking out from one end of a blanket hastily thrown on the footpath, from whose other end a rivulet of sticky blood was flowing. Wailing women on their knees. The legs and feet of bystanders, fencing in the central image. Carabinieri with heavy black moustaches, staring into the middle distance. Chalk outlines on the asphalt. Pine coffins. Police cars with flashing roof lights. Each photo different, each photo the same. Each photo a shock, the accumulative effect devastating. Not taken with art, though with strengths that art might ha
ve envied. The perfect reflection of a woman’s face in the pool of still-uncongealed dark blood gathered on the near side of a body under a white sheet, nearer still than the half-collapsed umbrella and the fallen cloth cap beside it. A trinity of mourning women by the body, already in black from some earlier death: the old mother twisting a handkerchief, collapsed on a kitchen chair brought out by a neighbour, the reflected sister, the wife on her knees by the body, raising the sheet above the head.

  Letizia Battaglia showed the living as well as the dead, in the centre of her native Palermo. Mainly, those who were perversely trying to live in the centre of Palermo, among the ruins of the wartime bombing and the strategic neglect by decades of mafia city administration at the service of mafia developers. A skinny mother, the very image of one of Walker Evans’s Appalachian women from the depression, breast-feeding a baby while two other children play naked in the kitchen. A blackening banana skin lies on the floor and one child’s face is disfigured by fresh rat bites. A young girl washing dishes in a tub next to an open lavatory. A family standing outside their home, now collapsed to a pile of rubble. Children in a bed. Corpses of three children dead from leaking gas. Toothless old people. A small girl bringing home bread. Small boys playing with guns. A wife with two black eyes. A crone holding the portrait of her disappeared son. The interiors are all the same, the crumbling, damp-blotched walls, the gloom, the oilcloth on the table, the photo of the ancestors on the wall, the sour reek rising from the prints.

  The small interior violence of the mainly female domestic images mirrors the larger male violence of the street deaths, but again and again the two overlap. You see it in the female figures curved over the corpses in the gutter, and in the slain prostitute’s interior, she and her two slain accomplices, punished for a drug deal, sprawled over an intricately patterned lounge suite, under a poster of a busty nude woman playing suggestively with a football. The pictures of festivities, too, mirror the working day world. The statue of the saint on her carrying frame, the beaten woman on her stretcher. The bloody hyperrealism of the Easter re-enactments and the bodies in the street. The carnival parade in Corleone where the men come masked as mafiosi, carrying shotguns. The fewer images of high society at play similarly match those of the social reality below. The aristocratic receptions in Palermo might be illustrations of The Leopard, give or take a few minor anachronisms in the dress, and the faded oval photos of the ancestors are not unlike the others on the walls of slum kitchens. The three beau monde males embracing in Palermo match down to the glinting signet rings another photo’s three mafiosi in Trapani. Variety here is less contrast and difference than nuance and interrelationship. It’s the same society, the same culture, the same history.

  The exhibition was cancelled. Patronage withdrawn. Letizia couldn’t now, she claimed, remember anything about it. Some girl had turned up on her doorstep years ago … she remembered vaguely. Southern Italians are people of the here and now, and what might or might not have happened on the other side of the world several years ago was of little interest. The view from the little tin can on wheels was what mattered.

  Disgusting! cried Letizia Battaglia as the tiny white Fiat rocketed along a Palermo back street. Revolting! She gestured at a few glistening black piles of ruptured plastic bags, their household scraps quietly putrefying in the October morning sun. To someone coming from Naples it was hard to see what was upsetting her. By contrast with the Palermo of the Sicilian novelist Vincenzo Consolo’s words a dozen years earlier, written in high summer at the height of the mafia war, it was wonderfully normal.

  Palermo is fetid, infected. This fervid July it exhales the sweetish smell of blood and jasmine, the pungent odour of disinfectant and frying oil. The smoke from the rubbish burning at Bellolampo stagnates over the city, like a great dense cloud … The murdered, tied hand and foot like kids, throats cut, heads severed, gutted, closed in black rubbish bags, in car boots, are already over seventy since the beginning of the year … Behind these cool walls of tufa the trash from the market and the local inhabitants is piled up, the bones from the butchers’ shops. Dogs, cats, children are scavenging through it, rats dancing round it. This is the Palermo destroyed like Beirut by a war that’s lasted over forty years, the war of mafia power against the poor …

  But Letizia Battaglia, the happy warrior, was on a mission, and I’d roused myself at six in the morning to follow her. By seven, still stunned despite a couple of double short blacks, I was rubbing my eyes by the newspaper kiosk at the corner of piazza San Domenico when the dusty little car screeched to a halt. Pietro, Letizia’s driver and right hand man from city hall and my namesake, was a stocky Palermitan with a carefully short Sicilian moustache and some heavy links of gold chain glinting among the chest hairs. Like Letizia he smoked. With some difficulty I folded myself on to a tiny ledge behind their seats and we were off. She did this every morning.

  It was the morning after I finally tracked her down to the little fortress-home she lived and worked in, standing on the corner of two inner-city alleys a few metres, it turned out after lengthy stalking, from my rabbit-warren hotel. How did you get my number? had been her first question when I called. I groped my way into a cavernous dim space and made out a sparrow-figure perched behind a desk, sharp eyes under a full and glossy practical fringe of hair. So what do you want me to talk about? was the question now, coming warily from behind a lengthily-exhaled cloud of blue smoke. About her life, if she didn’t mind. Lives, she corrected. Her first life she thought she was ending when she married at sixteen to escape from the prison of her lower-middle-class family and a jealous, possessive father. But marriage was only a continuation, and after twenty years of it, though she’d raised three marvellous daughters, she still felt trapped. At the age of thirty-six she left her husband to make her own life, and this was the real new start. I don’t want anything from you, she told him. I’m just leaving. I’ll earn my own keep. And she did. She went to report for L’Ora, the time, the Palermo daily that was famous then for its stand against the mafia and mafia interests. L’Ora was now defunct. She didn’t much like reporting, so she went to Milan and reinvented herself as a photographer. From the start she loved photography. Its strength and immediacy were harder to interfere with than words. She was mad in those days on Diane Arbus. Later she learnt a lot from another tough woman photographer, Mary Ellen Mark. Her life was never only photography, though.

  Up north, she met Franco Zecchin in 1974, and brought him back to Palermo in 1975 and they set up as photographers, developing a hard, dark joint style of visual attack in which their work was barely distinguishable. This wasn’t I-am-a-camera stuff. This was the camera as weapon, when weapons were hard to find. Neither was it war photography, the fly-by-night toughness of an observer booked on the next plane out. Apart from her two prentice years in Milan, Letizia Battaglia had lived in Palermo all her life. In the twenty years she wielded her camera, Palermo was being strangled, trampled, dismembered by the mafia. After ten years they gave her the Eugene Smith prize in New York, for social photography. In France and America she was famous, though in Italy no publisher had brought out a book of her work, nor ever would.

  The Eugene Smith prize must have been a kind of peak, a challenge met, because after that photography had to take its place along with other initiatives. They all, of course, overlapped. If you were antimafia in Palermo in those years when the mafia ruled unchallenged, everything you did flowed into the same reservoir. Everything related to the mafia, Letizia said. Making love, eating, shopping. You didn’t go to places where mafia money was. She got elected to Palermo city council as a green, where she fiercely opposed the demochristian mayor Leoluca Orlando. Then we realized Orlando was all right. He was in opposition to his own party, a good man. We managed to get him out of the DC and we founded La Rete together, the network. In 1986 she was one of the founders of a feminist publishing house in Palermo, La Luna, the moon.

  Feminism too had a very particular slant to it in Palermo, con
fronting the grimly all-male Cosa Nostra. If the women of the mafia could break out of their subjugation, the monolith would crack, and it did. Letizia had worked as a photographer with Anna Puglisi and Umberto Santino, who ran the documentation centre in Palermo that was meticulously compiling and analyzing data on Cosa Nostra, its activities, its wealth, its investments, its politics, its culture. The centre was named after Giuseppe Impastato, a young far-leftist in the days when there was a far left, murdered by the mafia. He’d exposed the crimes of Cosa Nostra on a local radio station although he was himself the son of a Palermo mafioso. His fate was to be a paragraph of other news the day in 1978 when Aldo Moro was seized in Rome: Impastato’s body was found by a railway line, blown up by explosives to make his death look like a terrorist accident. Now La Luna published the testimony gathered by Puglisi of women who were fighting their way out of the social prison of Cosa Nostra, and one of them was the mafia wife, Giuseppe Impastato’s mother. Later, Letizia founded her own publishing house, Edizioni della Battaglia, printing finely crafted and somewhat cryptic pamphlets that mixed poetic text with photography. She gave me an armful of them as I left. Meanwhile, she’d been elected to the regional parliament in 1991 as a member of The Network.