Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  Giampiero Dotti said the only useful testimony now would be from medical experts, and asked that proper medical evidence be given. Dotti was sueing to have Fabio Carapezza’s adoption annulled. Carapezza’s lawyers submitted he had no right to, since he wasn’t claiming the inheritance. A new police raid prompted by Marta Marzotto caught printers in the act of running off a fake Guttuso lithograph, and fake Picassos, fake De Chiricos, fake Chagalls and fake Miròs. The natural son had meanwhile been found, and claimed legal recognition as Guttuso’s son. In April 1987 the investigating magistrates who’d led the adoption inquiry protested against the intention to wind it up and one of them resigned. After what La Repubblica called a silent but stubborn trial of strength inside the prosecutor’s office in Rome, the case was reopened. Carapezza sued the weekly L’Espresso for an article called The Colour of Money. It included Dotti’s description of the four visits he’d been able to make to Guttuso in the last months.

  These visits were always preceded by laborious and humiliating contacts with Fabio, since nobody answered the telephone at palazzo del Grillo … during these visits, which always took place in the presence of the Carapezzas, the atmosphere was very strange. Renato seemed happy to see me but confused and as if afraid. He often said that Mimise was at home [she was dead] … Every time I passed on greetings from his friends to Renato, he was moved to tears and in many cases said he wanted to see them as soon as possible. Several times … Renato asked me to contact Jean Louis Prat of the Fondation Maeght for him, about his exhibition … Until the third of December 1986 I had never heard the slightest reference to this sudden adoption …

  Carapezza also tried to block legal recognition of Guttuso’s natural son, and to this end Trombadori weighed in with the information that the son’s mother had slept around a lot. To her further discredit she was described as having been ravishingly beautiful and uninterested in Guttuso’s art. Three months later the son’s application was nevertheless declared admissible, which meant it would likely succeed. Two days after that Carapezza was exonerated by another court of the suspicion that he’d kept Guttuso isolated from the world and taken advantage of the artist’s physical and mental frailty to get himself adopted. Citing Giulio Andreotti, monsignor Angelini, Antonello Trombadori and the other Sunday friends, the magistrate, one of those who’d wanted to close down the inquiry months earlier, decided that Renato Guttuso had been lucid to the end. Carapezza was confirmed as sole heir. Giampiero Dotti and Marta Marzotto were now put under investigation themselves, for slander. Marta also found herself under investigation by the financial police over the sale of the house of her salon on piazza di Spagna. The magistrate spoke of Marta’s and Renato’s twenty-year relationship as not only artistic but also intimate and judged her amply rewarded for the full range of her services rendered.

  I’m speechless, Marta said when she heard. She’d had no part in starting the law suit. She’d done her best to keep her mouth shut. SERVICES RENDERED? I wasn’t Guttuso’s servant. Or his employee … I feel I’ve been attacked, attacked as a person. And I’m simply furious. She’d wanted nothing out of the whole affair except vindication as a woman and what she’d got was a threatened libel suit, a police investigation of her property dealings and separation from her husband. Dotti was scathing too.

  Why weren’t my witnesses called? The people who saw Renato every day, who’d been his real friends forever? Even if they weren’t distinguished and Roman and weren’t tied to politics … Renato Guttuso’s mental lucidity was decided by witnesses and not by medical or scientific proof.

  He was particularly hard on Angelini—please don’t call him Monsignore—and the curial cynicism of this enigmatic character. I remembered this when Angelini’s evidence was made public two years after he’d testified. He was still Monsignore and his elevation to the purple, described as imminent two and a half years earlier, seemed to be taking an unconscionable time. The magistrate must have got his idea of the countess from Angelini, who’d said

  Marta Marzotto was amply endowed by Guttuso with money, paintings … such paintings were systematically sold off by Marzotto, who in such manner maintained herself, effecting various expenditures … The countess was always polite to me … during his life Guttuso wished to break off his relation with the countess. It was not possible for him due to blackmail in the press. The grave illness and the full consciousness which he soon perceived of a not far distant eclipse of his life gave him the courage … to recover his equilibrium and return to being another self.

  Nothing ever ended cleanly, especially in Italy. The story dragged on, the court cases multiplied and were never concluded. Would the maestro’s tomb be opened to make a DNA test possible and definitively establish the identity of the natural son? The maestro’s remains had been transported in 1989 to Bagheria and entombed in a hideous cylindrical sarcophagus of mauve marble by the sculptor Manzù, surrounded by a shallow moat and adorned with four gilt pigeons, the Stalinist peace doves probably, that the maestro used to draw so prolifically during the cold war years, and set among the weeds in the grounds of villa Cattolica. The natural son by now had disappeared from view as rapidly and silently as he’d emerged into the public gaze. What had made him lose interest in the estate, I wondered, which he’d said he wanted for his young daughters? Three years after Guttuso’s death, Carapezza’s libel suit against Dotti was still under way. Dotti, having lost the first round of his battle to have Carapezza’s adoption annulled, because not wanting the money he was judged unqualified to raise the problem, pointed out that he’d always been denied access to the adoption documents. The Carapezza adoption file seemed to have disappeared.

  The Guttuso Foundation, the only alternative to Carapezza’s total control of the Guttuso inheritance, was by now on the verge of extinction. Only Dotti was struggling to keep it alive. Without funds or plans, the other members of the board had voted to dissolve it. The foundation that Renato and Mimise had established together was meant to be housed on the handsome Dotti estate, where Guttuso had had his summer studio, near the northern Italian city of Varese. The death blow was a proposal to open a Guttuso Room in the Varese art gallery. This idea came from the mayor of Varese, a close friend of Giulio Andreotti and a member of his faction in the DC, and a bishop who was also a close friend of prime minister Andreotti’s. Andreotti himself seemed to have engineered this coup de grace between speeches at the Bagheria commemoration. The mayor of Varese, who was there for the ceremony in January 1990, confided happily to the press that Andreotti is a kind of advisor to Carapezza. The country estate too was now all Carapezza’s. After that I lost track.

  * * *

  THE CARAPEZZA adoption file turned out not to have been the only thing that had disappeared inside the justice building in Rome. Someone had anonymously forwarded to the investigating magistrates, a couple of months after the painter’s death, a letter from Guttuso addressed to Marta Marzotto. The letter took more than eight years to reach its destination. It lay for most of that time in a closed file on the shelves of the prosecutor’s office in Rome. Marta Marzotto discovered its existence by chance in November 1994. I wept in pain and anger when I read it, she said. The letter was written on a single page of fifteen shaky lines in Guttuso’s hand.

  Dearest Martina.

  I hope to get this letter to you through the good Aldo, even though I know it’s going to be difficult. I’m very sick and I’d like to have you near me and I can’t understand why you haven’t come back yet.

  The crows surround me and my lucid moments are getting rarer and rarer. They won’t let me use the telephone … I’m sorry to tell you these things, but if you were with me I might even be able to get better.

  I’m always waiting to see you come in through the door, why don’t you come my soul. Come. Come, I’m waiting for you anxiously, I hug you and kiss you.

  Your

  Renato

  PS At least call me on the phone.

  Marta Marzotto was silent for a moment
now. She tucked her bare feet under her on the white divan. Even the telephones had stopped ringing now. She was convinced it’d been the good Aldo who’d sent the letter on. And now he’s vanished. I can’t find him anywhere. Even the ambassadress lost her composure for an instant. Her mouth dropped open. The doorkeeper has disappeared? breathed the ambassadress. The countess nodded. The good Aldo has vanished. Without trace.

  The ambassadress looked at me in silence. I wondered what went on in the justice building in Rome, that cases, files, documents could disappear like this. I was about to turn my attention to the murder of Mino Pecorelli, the journalist who was shot dead in the street in Rome as he delved into scandals involving Andreotti. That investigation too had been swallowed up in the darkness of the Rome procura for years and years. Marta Marzotto would have had a pretty good idea, I thought. She’d remarked, coming out from one of her interminable interrogations about Guttuso, that she was starting to feel quite at home in the justice building. Even Marta Marzotto, though, was probably as surprized as I was when a few months after our meeting, in the Italian spring of 1996, one of its leading judges was arrested on very serious, not to say massive, corruption charges involving the Berlusconi financial empire, and that other senior judges in that office were under investigation. But now the countess was working the phones again.

  I’ve just had a call from Licio Gelli, she announced. Spoke to him this morning. You ought to speak to him. Like to? HE could tell you things. Want his number? She knew she was being naughty, and laughed. It was like being invited to have a cup of tea and a chat with Heinrich Himmler, whom Gelli also rather resembled. Maybe the young Gelli had known Himmler, when he was starting out. He’d fought for Franco in Spain, fought for Mussolini under the republic of Salò. He’d known a lot of movers and shakers over the years. The countess was daring me. This was a test. Yes, I said faintly. The countess started rummaging in her folder of telephone numbers. That man is SO CLEVER, she said. Not only has he got his passport back. He’s got a two-car police escort everywhere he goes. With sirens. He has INFLUENCE. The Vatican, she added distractedly, has put him up for the Nobel Prize. Where did I put that damn number? For Literature. They’re putting pressure on the South American embassies. He could tell you a lot. I was sure he could. I’d also heard something about Gelli’s creative writing, I suddenly remembered, a long time ago. In the early eighties, Tullio Pironti in Naples, the publisher of The True History of Italy, had wanted to publish Gelli’s memoirs. The Venerable was in the news back then. It was in 1981, when he’d just inadvertently brought down the Italian government. A raid on his villa discovered the membership list, or a membership list, of the secret and illegal P2 masonic lodge, one of whose purposes may have been to lay the ground for a right-wing dictatorship in Italy. The raid was Sindona’s fault, part of the fallout from the failure of his secret blackmailing expedition to Sicily in the summer of 1979. Gelli’s financial advisor and Cosa Nostra’s, as well as the Vatican’s, had lost them all billions. After his arrest in Switzerland, where he’d fled in a wig and false moustache like Sindona’s, Gelli made a helicopter prison escape to hiding in south America.

  I could tell you about Sindona, said Marta Marzotto, reading my thoughts. I know everything. I could tell you about them all. The membership list of the P2 included the names of five past and present government ministers and thirty-eight members of parliament; fourteen judges; eleven police chiefs; ten bank presidents; two hundred high officers in the armed forces, carabinieri and the financial police and most of the heads of the secret services. It also included the owner and the editor of the Corriere della Sera; a businessman of obscure origins and sudden wealth called Silvio Berlusconi, who a dozen years later would be prime minister and later still one of three former Italian prime ministers simultaneously facing quite different criminal charges; and the very chat show compere who’d just banished the talking head with AIDS.

  The list did not include the name of Giulio Andreotti. This absence gave rise to a number of theories. The minimalist position was that the members’ register was simply incomplete and the real one held elsewhere. The maximalist was that Gelli himself was merely a front and that the real venerable grand master of the Propaganda 2 lodge, the real orchestrator of its plans for the coup it amusingly called democratic renaissance, was the little man his admirers called the god Giulio and others Beelzebub. There was no evidence for these speculations. It was just that for many years in Italy people found it hard to conceive of any signifcant dealings that weren’t secret, or of any secret dealings that weren’t orchestrated by Andreotti. Nobody had ever been able to decide whether Gelli was a power in himself, or just a go-between, a blackmailer, an agent for others, and the P2 list epitomized the dilemma. Gelli had a lot of friends in South America.

  Goodness yes, said the ambassadress. Huge cattle properties in Uruguay. At a certain point she and her husband the ambassador in Rome had felt unable to accept further invitations from Gelli or his associate Umberto Ortolani, who owned maybe even more of Uruguay than Gelli did. They’d become too, how to put it, too compromised? Gelli later negotiated his return from Brazil to Switzerland, whence he was duly extradited to Italy, but only to face financial charges. A few days after I called on the countess, the supreme court confirmed his conviction as one of the people responsible for the bomb which killed sixteen people on the Naples Milan express train eleven years earlier. Gelli was settled back in Italy but the terms of his Swiss extradition kept him out of jail. Andreotti admitted once bumping into Gelli while visiting the Argentine dictator Juan Peròn at the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires. Before that, he said, he’d known Gelli only as the managing director of the Permaflex mattress factory in Frosinone. I thought to myself, Andreotti said on a chat show just before his trial opened in Palermo, I thought, ‘there’s someone who looks just like the managing director of the Permaflex mattress company in Frosinone’. Others said it was Gelli who introduced Andreotti to Peron. Andreotti told the talk-show host he thought Gelli was an influential figure in South America. Not in Italy, though. Definitely not in Italy.

  It was in Italy, however, that Gelli arranged the banker Roberto Calvi’s payment of many millions of dollars to Bettino Craxi, shortly before he became prime minister. Craxi was now holed up in Tunisia, out of range of his three Italian prison sentences which, were they ever to be served, would have kept him behind bars for a quarter of a century. Calvi, who’d succeeded his early mentor Sindona as the mafia’s and the Vatican’s banker and international financier of choice, was found hanging under Blackfriars bridge in London in 1982, his body disposed according to masonic rites. He’d caused the world’s biggest banking collapse since the war. A Palermo boss of Cosa Nostra then living in London was mentioned in connection with Calvi’s death. Calvi’s widow insisted Andreotti was head of the P2. Soon after I left Marta Marzotto, magistrates at Vico Equense near Naples questioned Gelli about his part in an international traffic they had accidentally uncovered in arms, gold, plutonium and diamonds. He told them,

  I devote several days a week to conversations with people who ask for my advice from Italy and abroad. Advice of a general nature, nothing against the law, no favours and no recommendations. Just advice, because I like human relations.

  Maybe I could ask Gelli about his human relations. Another possibility was on the cards, given that the Venerable was now aiming at the Nobel. Poetry. I remembered now that when Tullio Pironti failed to get a political memoir out of Gelli, he was offered instead a slim volume of verse. But the countess was distracted again before she found the number.

  Heavens, said Marta Marzotto suddenly. It was almost lunch time. Would I like to share a salad? She told the ambassadress to show me round while she whipped under a shower and slipped into something even more comfortable. I’d been casting the odd glance around the countess’s bower all morning, mainly at the Guttusos. The biggest one was on the wall facing me. It was the Night of Gibellina, a grim dark crudely painted scene of bonfire, ruin
and despair that remembered the Belice valley earthquake in Sicily in 1968. It was Guttuso in his earlier peasant tragedy social mode, an instance of people suffering the kind of double violence Moravia had identified, in this case the earthquake’s as well as the painter’s. I felt I’d seen it before, maybe in reproduction or in another variant. It didn’t seem entirely at home in this rococò bower of bliss. There were some small Guttusos too, and one in which Marta Marzotto was recognizable, but under the brisk guidance of the ambassadress I didn’t get to linger on them. We were in a low-ceilinged attic with its old beams exposed, crammed with knickknackery and extravagance and altogether pleasing as a whole. In one corner was the countess’s collection of big gaudy goblets in coloured Murano glass and a lot of gilt.

  A long kind of empire-inspired sofa, upholstered in lolly-pink silk, ran the entire length of a wall of the adjoining room, and its huge undulant back, upholstered in the same silk and studded around the edge, almost reached the ceiling and took up most of the wall. It was a wild thronelike fantasy that might have come from a stage set for Cinderella. What a lot of trouble we had getting that up here, said the ambassadress, eyeing the pink silk bulges. Between these two rooms was a large area of wall that was entirely covered with small drawings in ink and coloured wash. Each was under its own glass panel. Even from a distance I could see they had the vigorous Guttuso line, the shapely blocking, the poised energies, the elegant tension between form and movement that so rarely seemed to survive the construction of his larger canvases. I moved toward them. The ambassadress moved faster. The erotic drawings, she said tersely. Very amusing.