Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino felt for the travails of the pentiti they dealt with, respected mafia values and understood that turning against Cosa Nostra was not mere expediency. The men of honour had begun to turn in the eighties because the primitive and ferocious mafia ethic was breaking down. Ordinary life began to offer, even in Sicily, something more than the rewards of blind clan loyalty. The colossal wealth brought by the drug trade brought no improvement to the lives of those who risked their necks for it. The furtive enjoyment of a fast car or a gold Rolex or expensive clothes was cold comfort in a life of hiding, sexual misery, mistrust, the constant fear of betrayal and death. The old mafia reward hadn’t been wealth but power. Giving orders is better than fucking was an often-heard mafia saying. Francesco Marino Mannoia told the magistrate Roberto Scarpinato, A lot of people think you join Cosa Nostra for the money … You know why I became a man of honour? Because before in Palermo I was Mr Nobody. Afterward, wherever I went people bowed their heads. No money could have got me that. The choice, wrote the sociologist Renate Siebert, who came from the Frankfurt school, was now between eros and thanatos, the contrary impulses of love and death, and in the long self-explainings of such complex and intelligent pentiti as Buscetta and Antonio Calderone what struck you were the claims of feeling. It was one thing to be a member of Cosa Nostra, as only a man could, and another to be a woman who shared the deadly ethos and the anguish but not the limited autonomy of the man. Outside the mafia, women like Letizia Battaglia might repudiate the old subordinate roles they inherited. For a woman inside that world it was a lot harder.

  It was Shobha who told me about Rita Atria. The morning I met Shobha she was sitting in the sun in the village of Scopello and the sun flashed off her dense long golden hair as it did off the sea in the bay of Castellammare below us. Shobha had a fat black leatherbound diary with thousands of names and addresses and telephone numbers in it. It had fallen in the sea at some point. Now it was dry again but most of the numbers were illegible. We made an appointment to meet in the bar Roney a few days later. The bar Roney was one of the key meeting places of Palermo, and a place to observe the interplay of senile aristocracy, mafia of the second level, the business level, and wannabes. Shobha, by weird chance, was one of Letizia’s marvellous daughters, and she too turned out to be a photographer. She’d been in India, where she’d taken a Hindu name and the Hindu religion. She’d been in Cuba, and done reportage on Che Guevara’s children and Fidel’s rebel daughter. She’d caught rows and rows of Palermo aristocrats and pinned them up as photo butterflies. She did stories on the mafia and that was how she met Piera Aiello. People didn’t normally meet Piera Aiello because she was in hiding, under witness protection. Piera Aiello was Rita Atria’s sister-in-law.

  * * *

  THE ATRIAS were a mafia family from Partanna, where a war was going on between two clans. The father Vito had been killed in 1984. His son Nicola grew up and dealt in drugs and said he’d avenge his father’s death. Nicola had a sister Rita, ten years younger, who adored him. He used to play with her when she was little and later, when their father had been killed and Nicola got involved in men’s business and their mother forbade Rita to see him, they used to meet secretly in another town. Nicola had a girlfriend, Piera, whose family weren’t mafia. She was a tough girl, though, and a tough woman later. My name is Piera Aiello and my life can be soon told. At fourteen I got engaged, married at eighteen, I was a mother at twenty-one and a widow at twenty-three. Piera was ten years older than Rita and remembered Nicola cuddling the little girl when she was six years old. Later Piera wanted to leave Nicola and his mafia life. But I hadn’t taken the honour of the Atrias into account. They forced me to marry him. She was working, though, on getting Nicola to turn when he too was shot down in front of her, in the bar slash pizzeria she ran in town. I loved Nicola, he was the father of my daughter … my daughter mustn’t ever be ashamed of being an Atria or of being Sicilian. Piera went to the magistrates. She was going to speak. The women of the mafiosi always know everything. If they speak, it’ll be the ruin of Cosa Nostra … I was on the point of convincing Nicola to collaborate … a woman can take her own man where she wants. Even if the man’s a superboss. A few months later, seventeen-year-old Rita decided to speak too. Together Rita and Piera Atria drew Paolo Borsellino a map of mafia power in Partanna.

  For Rita’s mother the choice was a tragedy. Having lost her husband and her son, she was now losing her daughter to the perfidious influence, she believed, of her daughter-in-law. She called them infami, took legal action against Borsellino’s office for kidnapping Rita. In her desperation she threatened Rita with what happened to her brother. Piera and Rita were taken to a hiding place in Rome. She was a young girl very attached to her mother, a mother who’d never accepted the choice she’d made, Piera remembered. There were angry telephone calls, furious rows that left her in a dreadful state. But it was better than the terrible fear that had surrounded her in Partanna. Rita had kept a diary there.

  Four in the afternoon. When I was outside just now hanging out the washing I saw Claudio Cantalicio go by in his car. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen him … Claudio lowered his head but the other person moved over to get a look at me … Better to be in a cage of hungry lions than face the Accardos’ hatred. I can go off into the smallest hiding hole in the world and hide there for ever, but if they want to they’ll find me there and kill me … One in the morning and I can’t sleep … I’m terribly afraid … this evening at about eleven thirty-five I heard someone knock at the door … they went on knocking insistently … It was Andrea d’Anna … I know he always carries a gun … This evening he wasn’t drunk, he was able to do what they’ve ordered him to do, kill me and my mother … I told my mother everything was OK, I invented some excuse to calm her down but I’m afraid tomorrow they’ll kill me.

  Piera Aiello’s and Rita Atria’s new life in Rome at first was almost fun, almost normal. They went sightseeing and dancing together and met other young people. But they had to keep changing house and their minders forbade them for security reasons to make lasting friendships. Rita was allowed to see a young seaman called Gabriele, but she herself was afraid. She wasn’t afraid of Gabriele but of his family, and what would happen when his mother discovered who she really was. Paolo Borsellino was their one link with life back home. Borsellino had a peculiar gift of intimacy, of friendship, and he stayed close to Rita and Piera long after their usefulness was exhausted and didn’t leave them. His sister remembered that

  Paolo used to talk about Rita with his own daughters because he thought of her as one of them and because he wanted to get a better understanding of the psychology of such a young girl. He used to call her a picciridda [the little girl, in Sicilian] and she was like his own daughter … he was deeply attached to her.

  Borsellino used to tease Rita and she used to call him Uncle Paolo. Apart from Piera, he was all the family she now had. She used to think, in Rome, about becoming a woman. She puzzled about it in her diary.

  I’d be a woman if I were really a woman. What little thing is it that makes the difference between me and a woman? Maybe that I haven’t yet tried the pleasures of the flesh? I didn’t realize how important that was. If that’s the only difference, then take me out in a public place and lay me out on a bed and only then you’ll understand how old I am. I’m younger than you can know, but I’ll give you such immense pleasures that your spirit will enjoy them more than you can ever dream. If there exists an adjective greater than that woman, well, that adjective will be mine.

  She wrote this in 1992, in the last months of her life. On July 26, at the age of seventeen and a week after Paolo Borsellino and his escort were blown up in via D’Amelio, Rita threw herself from the balcony of her safe house in Rome. There’s no one left to protect me, she wrote. She also wrote in her diary

  Before you fight the mafia you have to examine your own conscience and then, after you’ve defeated the mafia inside yourself, you can fig
ht the mafia that exists among your friends, the mafia is us and our wrong way of behaving.

  For a young girl who’d grown up in a mafia family in a mafia town, it was too much to ask of herself that terrible summer. There were no men at Rita’s funeral in Partanna, apart from the local priest, and no relatives. My mother must on no account come to my funeral or see me after my death, she’d written. Her mother didn’t want to come. She shut herself in her house as the little procession passed and pressed a pillow over her face. There were a few friends from school, a few teachers, a message of condolence from the magistrates of the district. Antimafia women came from Palermo, and they were the ones who carried Rita’s light wood coffin. The old priest, sweating in the summer heat, gave a blessing outside but refused her a church funeral because as a suicide she was a sinner. He called her a flower uprooted by a violent cyclone, chose psalms with a heavy emphasis on sin and referred vaguely in his homily to human wickedness. A year later, when the corrupt industrialist and suicide Raoul Gardini was given a solemn funeral in Ravenna cathedral, Paolo Borsellino’s family remembered this discrimination and recalled bitterly in a statement to the press that the priest of her town refused her a funeral … our grateful thought goes to Rita Atria, dead, like Paolo Borsellino, for love of truth and justice.

  Rita was buried, as she’d wished, away from her father and next to her brother. A photo was fixed to the stone and TRUTH LIVES, words chosen by Piera, engraved on it. On the Day of the Dead three months later Rita’s mother came and smashed the headstone with a hammer and obliterated photo and words. Nobody had the right to put that picture there. Rita should be somewhere else. For months after Rita’s death, her mother had been catatonic, spoon fed by nuns. She managed, in the end, by legal action, to get Rita’s body moved to the family tomb. Piera Aiello never lost her nerve.

  Now and then I go back to Partanna, sure I do. I go to visit the cemetery and pray on Rita’s tomb. I go with bodyguards, so people can see me, everyone sees me but no one can come near. They can only look and I walk with my head high, like a lady.

  This was how Piera looked to one of the women of Partanna when she came back, and how she was remembered:

  In one of the cars Piera Aiello was sitting in the back seat, alone even though she was protected by a lot of bodyguards. She was subdued but smiling shyly, sad at times, not at all overcome, hidden behind her mirror shades. I saw an infinite loneliness in her, a lot more tragic than I ever imagined all those years ago, when we used to go and have a cold beer in the hot summer evenings at her bar at Montevago, the only one that stayed open late. She used to stand behind the bar, silent but uneasy, gentle but suspicious, overwhelmed by her husband’s boisterousness …

  The woman had a message for Piera. Remember, you’re not alone. One woman who’d been particularly angry about Rita’s sinner’s burial was Rosaria Schifani, and she said the same. Rita a sinner? What sin? The sin of speaking out?… we’ll never leave a woman alone again. Rosaria Schifani knew something about speaking out, and being left alone. She was twenty-three years old and two months earlier her husband Vito had been murdered with Giovanni Falcone and Francesca Morvillo and two colleagues in the massacre on the airport freeway at Capaci. There was a fine photo of her by Letizia, fragile and resolute, wide mouth, heavy-lidded eye, high cheek bone, half her face hidden in shadow. The photo reminded me of Antonello da Messina’s great portrait of the Annunziata in the gallery at palazzo Abatellis. Both high-cheeked faces half in shadow, both staring directly at the viewer, the fingers of the Annunziata’s right hand extended, softly commanding attention. But the gaze of both was at the same time somehow inward and unreachable.

  The funeral for Falcone and his wife Francesca Morvillo and the three of his escort was held on a rainy day in May 1992 in the church of San Domenico. The horror of those deaths and the sense of a terrible loss, a betrayal by the state, charged the funeral with a peculiar intensity, which was screwed to its highest when Rosaria Schifano stood and spoke to the authorities of Italy who’d rushed south to render homage. People have never forgotten the moment the young widow of a Sicilian policeman, a delicate and implacable young woman in black, ordered the country’s leaders to their knees. She spoke about her dead husband, more to herself than the mourners crowding the church. He was so beautiful, she said. He had such beautiful legs. She spoke some further words she’d prepared with a priest’s help. In the emotion of the moment they came out loud and clear but in fragments.

  My Vito Schifani

  the state, the state

  why are mafiosi still inside the state

  I pardon you

  but get down on your knees

  but they don’t want to change

  they don’t change

  too much blood

  there’s no love here

  there’s no love here

  there’s no love here

  there’s no love here at all.

  IX

  FRIENDS

  IF YOU head west along the coast from Palermo, past the airport of Punta Raisi and if you skirt the bay of Castellammare, that same wide bay Pasquale’s mill looks down on, after cutting inland past a promontory that is now an untrafficked wildlife reserve, you see the ancient town of Erice. It stands almost hidden above you, high over the sea and the coastal flatlands, contained inside a perfect equilateral triangle at the top of a rocky citadel surrounded by trees. You can feel the temperature dropping in the minutes it takes to wind up the steep sides of the rock, to a place where Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans all maintained a temple to the goddess of fertility. She was Astarte, the whore of Babylon, then Aphrodite, Venus. What you find now is the medieval town, grey, intact, silent in its carlessness, and despite its fame and beauty, its difference and the stream of visitors, closed, stony, withdrawn like all Sicilian hilltop towns; dead and sinister too in this case, living off its past. And starting almost at the foot of this steep outcrop, and extending west along a curved tongue of land that tapers into the sea, is Trapani.

  Trapani is as old as Erice, about three thousand years. Almost forever it was an entrepôt on the Mediterranean sea routes of the Phoenicians and those who followed them. It was part of that chain of toeholds the Phoenicians wedged into the coast of western Sicily. After the Romans destroyed the Carthaginian fleet and took the city in the third century BCE, it went into a long, slow decline. It was brought out of that decline by the Arabs, and the meandering alleyways of Trapani’s old centre are a survival of the Islamic city the Arabs built in the early ninth century. To the city’s industries of work in gold and coral the Arabs added maritime commerce, and Trapani continued to grow long after the Normans arrived in 1077. The Arabs also brought their cookery, and a thousand years later Saracen food is still strongly present in Trapani. The north African couscous is entrenched in Trapani though hardly known in Sicily outside the city. The steamed semolina, with vegetables cooked in the steaming broth, is usually eaten in north Africa with lamb or chicken, grilled separately or cooked in the broth, but Trapani cuscussu is made with fish.

  Which was why, on another fine autumn Sunday when the Sant’Andrea was closed, Pippo and I were making the leisurely sweep down through Castellammare and Erice to Trapani. This time we were on a mission. We were coming to Trapani to borrow some couscous plates. At Scopello, down on a rocky inlet, we saw the remains of the tonnara, the tuna fishing station which had been busy from the beginning of the thirteenth century until a few years ago. The coast was dotted with these abandoned tuna works, which have suffered the decay of the Mediterranean and been replaced by Japanese factory ships working around the globe. For centuries the annual tuna kill in spring, the mattanza, had been a great Sicilian industry and a savage ritual. When the schools of great tuna entered the Mediterranean each spring to breed, as they swam eastward past the coast of Sicily they were met by groups of open fishing boats whose crews might’ve been resting on their oars for days, miles offshore, waiting to sight a school, waiting with their huge asse
mblage of nets, a series of floating corrals into which they would drive the big fish.

  The marquis of Villabianca, who was rowed out four miles off Palermo to witness a mattanza on 26 May 1757, described the floating complex of nets as

  the walls, the columns and the beams that form an atrium of nets under the sea and what would be a marvellous palatial house on land … This maritime house consists of four chambers. The first of these is called the Square Chamber, because of its square shape … Through its door, which is the main entrance to the tonnara, the tuna enter, and they are happy to make their entry there, being unaware of the insidious art by which Man receives them in this ingenious edifice … This chamber leads into the second, which they call the Small Chamber … There follows the third chamber toward the east, whose entrance is called Clear, because it is made with a long mesh, and then the fourth and last and final one called the Chamber of Death … where the solemn festive sacrifice is made.

  When the tuna are finally trapped in the Chamber of Death,

  … the fishermen, who all do the killing in the livery of the owner of the tonnara, raise the nets of the said fatal chamber by means of pulleys to the surface of the water, then throw themselves like so many starving wolves on the fish that have been brought up and hurl sharp spears and harpoons at them and with these they massacre them and take their lives.