Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  Out of the city the sun was flashing off the sea and the leaves of the orange trees. As the director, who was a woman, came to greet us effusively, Letizia’s mood suddenly changed. She became vital, passionate, enthusiastic, a devotee of the real Guttuso in his early expressionist years and graciously attentive to the details of the director’s curriculum vitae. I was transformed into a distinguished critic and art historian from overseas. Every assistance was promised. Noting this change in my status and his boss’s temper, the surly driver lost his frown. The local politician in charge of culture was also there, and after her brief display of enthusiasm for what could be seen of the paintings and what could be imagined of the renovated villa, Letizia went into a power huddle with him. The interior was indeed being altered and replastered, though not that day, and the gallery really was in disarray. The paintings were mostly stacked on the floor. I started going through them while Letizia networked in the other room. Then, in the radiance of her bella figura, she was off, the driver trotting at her heels. The Vucciria wasn’t in the collection and I had to postpone satisfying that curiosity. Some of the early paintings were good. After looking at them I peered under its bubble plastic at the enormous Women come and go, leaning against a wall.

  It was a huge unfinished canvas, over four metres by three, of eight female figures, and Guttuso was working on it up to the moment of his final isolation in 1986. Two of its figures are nude, one dressed, two more in body tights, a couple more in stockings with slips pulled up over their rumps and one in a fur coat and frilly garters. All are wearing vertiginously high stiletto heeled shoes. The faces of five are hidden by their hair, and of the other three, only the standing nude on the right has preliminary facial features sketched in. She’s the clue, though, to the others, who are all variants on the manifold splendours of Marta Marzotto’s body. A telephone and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label were the only other details.

  * * *

  THE GIRLS of piazza San Domenico were hardly up to Helmut Newton fur, and in any case that wasn’t their style. At the most a little black leather and even the leather was rigorously utilitarian. It was no joke spending hours in the dark, holding an umbrella in the autumn rain, your bottom resting on a street seller’s sodden wooden bench. Transsexual dress and manner maintained, moreover, the rigorous public decorum of Sicily. Hair was well teased up and out, on the whole, not permed or lacquered but a little wild. A hint of wildness never went astray. Makeup tended to be emphatic and a trifle approximate, quickly touched up in poor light between clients I imagined, heavy pancake over traces of stubble and mouth strongly drawn in very dark red. The girls popped in most nights to the Sant’Andrea, nipping down the alley to the tiny ruined piazzetta, or coming straight from where they received their clients in the same old tenement. The kitchen staff always knew how business was doing from the footsteps on the stairs, and business was usually brisk. The girls’d say hello and have a glass of water or something and cast a quick eye over the diners. They were staking out their territory, just in case the Sant’Andrea started getting uppity and started getting ideas about quality. The girls refused to be confined to the nether world.

  Sometimes they had a bite and a beer, confusing the tiny Tamil child who sold single roses for the ladies. Did they count or not? More often they came to share a cognac with the kitchen staff when the restaurant was finally empty. One night the girls were, frankly, a little stirred up. Enzuccia, who’d had the operation and was All Woman and all real, including the abundant breasts she made me palpate under her lightweight casual autumn lambswool, to show there was no silicone in them at all, had just come back with Flavia and Fiammetta from the mafia trial in Caltanisetta. She’d been to keep them company and provide a bit of moral support. Flavia and Fiammetta, nevertheless, felt so ravaged by their day in the witness box that they hardly knew whether they were up to a full night’s work. Not having had the operation, the girls had been brutally presented in court as homosexuals under the legal names they’d long since shed, as if they were those distant strangers whose names they heard being called out in court, while their real womanly names were recited between inverted commas. So they were still feeling a little fragile and shivery that night after this rough handling, and it was to Enzuccia that I turned to get the story. Enzuccia not only hadn’t had to undergo the rigours of cross-examination, but she had that extra self-assurance of knowing she was All Woman. It took more than one night at the Sant’Andrea to get the story from Enzuccia. Apart from the fact that a girl had to work for a living, and Enzuccia turned out to work to an industrial rhythm, she was actually a lot more interested in recounting the history of her coming to consciousness and her self realization as a woman. But I persisted and at last I got the story.

  Flavia and Fiammetta had been giving evidence at the trial of the killers of Paolo Borsellino and the five members of his police escort who’d died with him. The killing was ordered, like Falcone’s, by Totò Riina. One of the accused in the via D’Amelio massacre was Enzo Scarantino, who was charged with having stolen the car that was packed with explosive and parked outside the apartment block. He’d become a pentito and was the principal prosecution witness. The defence had mounted an assault on Scarantino’s credibility. He was a liar and an imposter, they said. There was no way Scarantino could have been involved in the attack because there was no way Scarantino could ever have become a man of honour. Scarantino, the defence said, was gay.

  They mounted quite a barrage. His wife and the mother of his children was sent up to recite nervously that she’d always been aware of these tendencies of her husband’s. Flavia and Fiammetta were basically there to confirm the story of Scarantino’s relationship with Margot, accent on the second syllable, whose personal tragedy this trial had become. Enzuccia and Fiammetta and Flavia had all lived with Margot in the same tumbledown place handy to their work when they were young girls thirteen years earlier. Margot, who was now thirty-five, had accepted a lift from Scarantino in those days before her operation. We lived together for nearly two years from that day on. I was in love with him but we never had a total sexual congress. I already felt I was a woman and he acted the man. Enzuccia knew Margot, whose real name was Michela, pretty well. She had a twin brother who also later had the operation. They came from a very good family and trained in classical ballet as children, Enzuccia remembered.

  Taking up with Margot, Scarantino had dumped another, who testified in male attire and was introduced in court as Josephine the Raver. Josephine told the court, I loved him and it hurt when he left me for Margot, who later changed sex. It ended badly for Margot too. He betrayed me with another woman and he had a child by her. Margot still saw Scarantino after his marriage, she said. She saw him during his military service in Taranto and later in Palermo too. He didn’t want me to prostitute myself and I never did. He always gave me money. His family were naturally opposed to our relationship and whenever I called Enzo’s home they told me to get fucked. After her operation, Margot headed north to make a new life. Enzuccia told me she lived in Pisa now. She married a Tuscan small businessman and everything was just dandy until she was called as a defence witness in the via D’Amelio trial. When her husband read in the papers about her relationship with Scarantino, he walked out on her. Margot had distributed photos of herself to the journalists covering the massacre trial. They were done like VOGUE covers, with the title across the top and Margot with her arms folded over her breasts, hair tumbling over one side of her face or streaming in the wind.

  The defence was of course trying to muddy the waters. Everyone knew that in the Mezzogiorno a man who acts the man with a trany in no way compromises his virility. The defence was trying to drag in the red herring of the modern concept of the gay, of men who are sexually drawn to each other, in a region, indeed a country, where everyone knew that the true and only unmanning element was the female. The definitive unmanning was marriage. The cocky unmarried picciotto would be transformed almost overnight into a sedentary, over
weight and faintly epicene husband and father. Marriage and motherhood were the apotheosis of the southern woman, and she was prepared to put up with a lot to attain it. This meant no fucking around on her part before the wedding and a certain formal submissiveness thereafter.

  A husband’s fleeting extramarital flings were ideally catered for by Enzuccia and her friends, to the extent that Italy’s numerous femminielle, to use the Neapolitan name since Naples was the city that raised Italian transexualism to an art form, were unable to match the demand. All through the eighties, Brazilian transsexuals flooded into Italy and headed north to Milan to service the errant husbands of the boom years. A transsexual was less problematic, less challenging for an Italian husband to encounter than another real woman would’ve been and made the whole thing less like a betrayal of marriage and family. The Brazilians were still coming. Even to Palermo, I discovered one night over a very late drink in one of the few places open after midnight. One such young Brazilian was wearing what appeared to be a nineteen-fifties air hostess’s uniform with the insignia removed. She was complaining about her asthma, and said she was flying to Switzerland the next day for treatment. I never saw her again, so maybe she did. Later that night Pippo introduced me to an elegant person named Giulia. Giulia asked me whether I wanted to meet our mayor, and seemed a little crestfallen to hear I already had. Pippo later told me Giulia was Orlando’s press attaché, and I thought the appointment showed guts and gallantry on Orlando’s part.

  And now Enzuccia was telling me the story of her life. How she was the ninth of eleven children born just around the corner in the Vucciria. Seven boys and four girls and it wasn’t clear where Enzuccia put herself. Her father had been a porter at the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes and her mother had done ironing there in the hotel laundry. There’d been conflict with her mother, though her brothers had been very understanding and lent her a lot of support in the early years. You’re just jealous of me, you cow! Enza had yelled at her mother. You’re jealous of my youth, my looks, my freedom. I’m everything you wanted to be and never were! Life at home was no idyll. Enza’s story got a bit confused when she was recounting the times her brother, who was a junkie, had fought with their mother and smashed the place up and cut her and the police had come. Recollections merged. I wasn’t sure if this was the same brother at different moments or different brothers in the different stories. Enza’s first real step to freedom, the second and culminating one having been getting operated on and becoming All Woman, had been going out to work for the first time at the age of fourteen. Right there in the piazza San Domenico. It was a big step. After that she never looked back. You’ll never guess who my first customer was, Enzuccia said, her eyes glowing fondly at the memory. Who? I said. My brother, she said.

  By now Enza had put on a certain middle-aged embonpoint and as much as anything she liked playing with her little nieces when they came to visit her in her little flat, before she went off to give head of an evening. She had a faintly maternal air with Fulvia and Fiammetta too, though they were no chickens either. Yet they lacked Enzuccia’s solid self assurance, which came perhaps from knowing she was a real woman. Flavia verged on the twitchy, and Fiammetta was given to wild though charming shrieks of laughter through her wildly but charmingly teased hair. Enza owned not only the flat she lived in but another four or five, dotted around Palermo. You’ll be able to retire soon, I said. Live off the rent. Enza looked at me. Retire? she said. I don’t rent them anyhow. I just keep them. I asked her, You wouldn’t rent one to me? and got a very cool response. Not that we didn’t get on. She reached down between her breasts and gave me her business card. ENZUCCIA was printed in big smudgy gothic, and in smaller letters underneath for a touch of class. In the bottom corner was her mobile phone number. If you’re ever at a loose end in the afternoon, she said. Feeling a bit down. Give us a call and come on over. I slipped the card into my pocket and said I sure would. The hotel chambermaid gave me a dark look when she found it the next day.

  * * *

  THE VIA D’Amelio trial exposed the puritanism of Cosa Nostra, which believed in traditional family values. The only woman really important for a mafioso is and must be the mother of his sons. The others ‘are all whores’, observed Giovanni Falcone.

  If a man of honour happens to make the wrong marriage, too bad, because marriage isn’t an essential thing in his life. If he’s married the wrong woman, he can keep her. Just make sure he conforms to the key family values and sees that mother and children are respected and properly looked after. Otherwise he can do what he likes, discreetly.

  The husband went out and refined heroin or collected money or confected bombs or carried messages and the wife stayed home and did the housework and brought up the children and had a hot meal waiting when father came home after a hard day’s work killing people. She went to mass. Above all she kept her eyes and ears and mouth shut. In return, her husband did not conspicuously fuck around. At the upper levels marriage bonds had likely been joined for dynastic reasons, but in any case Cosa Nostra did not believe in divorce for unhappy couples. Only death did them part, though it did that often enough. Tommaso Buscetta’s problem had been his intense and irregular sex life. However much Cosa Nostra had needed him in times of gravest crisis, Buscetta was still, from the organization’s point of view, too passionate a man. He lacked discipline, control, they felt in the Cupola. The interesting thing about that judgement was that events fully vindicated it. It was a deeply emotional sense that the Corleonesi had betrayed a mafia ethic he passionately believed in that made Buscetta tell everything he knew to Giovanni Falcone. As well, of course, as the fact that Riina had had a dozen of Buscetta’s near relatives killed in rapid succession, because they were Buscetta’s near relatives. Buscetta was never a pentito, but, as he saw it, the spokesman for a mafia culture that had been annihilated by the barbarism of the Corleonesi.

  The difficulty of being a mafia wife was summed up in the sad fate of Vincenzina Bagarella and the intertwined story of her brother Pino Marchese. She was the wife of Leoluca Bagarella, who was Riina’s brother-in-law and, for the two years between Riina’s arrest in 1993 and his own, the effective head of Cosa Nostra. Vincenzina Marchese was married to Bagarella in April 1992, in a quiet and tender moment a month after the assassination of Salvo Lima and a month before the massacre of Giovanni Falcone and his wife and three of his escort. The marriage was ill-viewed from the start by the women of Corleone because the bride was from Palermo, and from the bleak hill town of Corleone Palermo was seen as a seething pit of corruption. Bagarella’s spinster sisters sat doing their embroidery in the Riina house and denouncing the bride as a city whore, in the words recorded by the carabinieri. Riina himself opposed the marriage on more concrete grounds. Vincenzina was from a Palermo family he’d used and destroyed. After the marriage Riina used to say Vincenzina’s brother Pino Marchese was in his heart, which should have been a warning.

  Pino had driven the getaway car in the bungled 1981 Christmas massacre in Bagheria and as a clumsy teenage picciotto had left his bloody fingerprints on it. They’d been identified by the professor of forensic medicine at Palermo university. The professor had rejected a suggestion that he modify his evidence and had to be killed. For Riina, Pino had in 1989 smashed in the skull of his own sleeping boss in the Ucciardone with a cast iron frying pan. When Riina then let him rot in jail, Pino became a pentito. He told the magistrates why Salvo Lima had been killed. Lima had been given very strict orders to fix the maxitrial. They’d told him, ‘stick to your promise or we’ll kill you and your family’.

  Even Pino’s love life had been destroyed by Cosa Nostra, which brought its family values to bear on a matter that didn’t even involve him directly. The father of the girl Pino wanted to marry had divorced his wife to live with another woman, and this would have made Pino’s marriage dishonourable. The stain could be removed if Pino killed her father before he married the girl, his brother-in-law Bagarella and his own brother said, adding that they�
��d do it themselves if he didn’t. For Pino, the only way … was to break off the engagement with the girl I loved, pretending I no longer cared for her. This decision naturally was very painful and my relationship with my brother and with Bagarella were no longer the same.

  Viewed from the start with suspicion and hostility by her husband’s family, Vincenzina must’ve been in an unbearable position when her brother turned less than six months into her marriage. Hidden from the world, trapped by their life of hiding inside an elegant city flat, silent, invisible, alone, hated as a traitor’s sister, Vincenzina must’ve felt crushed. Riina’s arrest and her husband’s growing power would have intensified the pressures. And when Bagarella himself was seized in 1995, the police who burst into the apartment found a saucepan of tripe simmering on the stove, fifty designer shirts in Bagarella’s wardrobe, Vincenzina’s clothes and a bunch of fresh flowers in front of a photo of Vincenzina. But no Vincenzina. They found that Bagarella was wearing her wedding ring around his neck and in a jewel box in the flat they found a note scribbled on exercise paper. All forgiven my dears, my husband deserves a statue of gold. Hugs and kisses for everyone. Luca, the fault’s all mine, forgive me … I didn’t want … kisses … kisses … Vincenzina was dead, and this was her suicide note. She’d hanged herself in the flat, pentiti said later. They’d dressed and combed her body and walked it out of the apartment block into central Palermo, where it disappeared. The magistrates thought for a long time that Bagarella had killed her. Vincenzina had no choice. Such was family life in Cosa Nostra. From the look of a wedding-day photo, where she was pale, unhappy, puffy-eyed, she knew what she was getting into when she married the ambitious killer, always at Riina’s shoulder, eager to take his place.