Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  * * *

  ANDREOTTI HAD arrived in Palermo the evening before. He’d flown down from Rome on an ordinary Alitalia flight, because, as he’d said, it would have been inopportune to use the aeroplane I had a right to as former prime minister. He’d packed with his pyjamas the works of Saint Teresa of Lisieux, the catholic visionary who’d seen her name written across the heavens. He’d brought The Way, by Escrivà, who’d founded Opus Dei, and I wondered on learning that whether this mightn’t have been a little hint to His Holiness. Coming south for his trial, Andreotti had consoled himself with a passage from this book.

  Tongues have loosened and you have suffered insults that have wounded you the more because you did not expect them. Your reaction must be to pardon and even to ask for pardon and draw profit from the experience to detach yourself from creatures.

  He’d toyed aloud with the idea of reading it in court before his accusers, wondering what the effect might be. It was inevitable, as he flew south, that Andreotti should have reminisced about Sicily, the island he’d first visited as a catholic student leader in 1942 and where he’d spent at most, he’d said, a total of twenty days in his whole life. A lot of things are dangerous in Sicily, he’d said. He was talking about the baffling social rituals, the humid heat and the dust and the hand kissing and the food.

  I found myself with my stomach full of marvellous but terrible food, the pasta con le sarde, the cassata, and not only did I not understand a thing there but I was ill too. I wonder whether there’s a connection between food like this and the growth of the mafia.

  He talked about the art too, and the abandoned museums of Sicily.

  And yet it’s a region so rich in art, perhaps that’s the very reason they don’t take too much care of it. I often thought I’d like to make a tour, a proper tour of Sicily. Just as well I didn’t. I’d be in jail by now for sure.

  As politicians will, Andreotti had started running through names on the flight toward Palermo, people he’d known in Sicily, Sicilians he’d known elsewhere, names that might have reflected well on his own. He’d touched only briefly on Sciascia, we chatted a few times, because Sciascia was rebarbative even with his friends, but he’d let himself flow more freely on Guttuso. How amazed he’d be today to know his old friend Giulio is the chief of the mafia … I was a great friend of Renato Guttuso. I met him soon after the war … He’d remembered the Sunday friends,

  all communists except me and monsignor Angelini. We never talked about politics. We were great friends. Guttuso especially. He often came to my place, he was a family friend. I remember he so insisted he wanted to paint my portrait. But I didn’t want to seem over-keen and I kept putting him off …

  The old fox was establishing his credentials, his friendships. I recalled Montaigne. Who can we trust when he speaks about himself?… Truth for us today isn’t what is, but what others can be brought to believe …

  Andreotti had been playing for pathos with some effect, and calling in his credits where he could. Andreotti had been alluding at the airport to the fact that he might well be dead before his years in court were over. He’d been spending a lot of time at prayer in the better-known churches of Rome. There’d been a flurry of pretrial chat show appearances, in which brave, stoic, tiny hunched Giulio Andreotti displayed flashes of his old wit. The publicity had had some startling spinoffs. Colonel Gheddafi was touched enough by what he heard to offer the next day to pay Andreotti’s legal costs, which might have been unwise. You wondered whether he knew what he was letting himself in for, and whether the offer extended to the costs of the Pecorelli murder trial that was also about to open in Perugia and would be running concurrently with the mafia trial in Palermo. The life senator hadn’t mentioned the Pecorelli trial on the plane south. He hadn’t mentioned it at all. The Pecorelli trial was certainly related to the mafia trial but it lacked the political colouring, the historical patina, the cast of thousands. The Pecorelli trial was unpleasantly specific and circumscribed in its circumstances and logic. There’d been one clear beneficiary from Pecorelli’s death. There was less to reminisce engagingly about.

  The Gheddafi offer could hardly be seen as a major publicity plus in a country where many well remembered the string of the colonel’s exiled political opponents found with their throats cut in cheap pensioni up and down the peninsula fifteen years earlier, and all the ambiguities of Italy’s foreign policy in the Andreotti years. The Kissinger withdrawal a couple of weeks earlier had been a definite minus. There’d been hints, in the weeks before the trial, that Henry Kissinger would be testifying for the defence in Palermo. Shortly before the trial opened the senior partner of Kissinger Associates had been in Rome and had greeted Andreotti, but there’d been a rather loud silence after their meeting on the question of testimony. Nixon’s Metternich knew a no-win situation when he saw one. A further unpleasantness for Andreotti had been the humiliation of booking Room 102 at the Villa Igiea, with sea view and private terrace, and then being whisked off on landing for security reasons to the Delle Palme which was definitely not the hotel it had once been. I do not understand, he’d hissed in the foyer of the Delle Palme, why they have made me change hotels.

  Giorgio Bocca was there, though, at the Villa Igiea, and we sat and talked on the evening of the trial’s first day amid the faded relics of art nouveau. The Villa Igiea dated, like Fulco di Verdura, from 1900, a beautiful people year in Palermo, when the rich and the royal came in their yachts. Old photos on the wall of the Villa Igiea showed Edward VII, Rilke, the King of Siam and ladies in furs and big hats. There was none of John Gambino or his girlfriend Mixie Ritz. Bocca was smilingly pessimistic about everything. About the trial, about the mafia, especially about Sicily. He came from the far north of Italy, at its cold and mountainous extremity of Cuneo, he’d fought in the snow with the partisans as a boy. He was one of Calvino’s, Sciascia’s, Pasolini’s generation, and in books and articles of commentary he’d charted the course of the Italian republic’s first fifty years.

  Sciascia, he said at the mention of that name. He really did know about the mafia. When I was down here going around for my book I asked him for some introductions. When I went to see these people they were all local mafia bosses. Bocca was openly and simply a northerner in seeing the mafia as an alien growth of the south, and something that contaminated everything. Falcone, he said, had had the mafia mentality. Falcone and Sciascia had both said this about themselves. Falcone made pentiti call him Judge, he insisted on respect. In Milan they wouldn’t give a damn what you called them, they’d just get on with their work. Nothing about the trial surprized him or stirred him or gave him hope. Andreotti always kept bad company, he said. Had a taste for the very worst. Bocca dwelt on the grimness of mafia lives, the losing families locked in their jerry built flats with armoured doors and shutters always closed, scared to go out. And it would, he insisted, be always so. Personally, he preferred the camorristi of Naples. At least they know how to enjoy themselves.

  He’d been the same with Paolo Borsellino in 1992, when Borsellino had given him a brilliant, terse summary of the state of play for Bocca’s book on the Mezzogiorno, the book he then went and called Inferno. Haven’t we got good reasons for pessimism? he’d asked, and Borsellino had given him an emphatic No, recalling the Sicily he’d grown up in, the new consciousness he saw abroad in young Sicilians. Progress is slow, I agree. But no mayor of Palermo before Orlando had ever pronounced the word mafia, and Orlando’s spoken it. Bocca had grumbled in his book that now people pronounced the word far too much. From Borsellino’s house, the judge had given Bocca a lift to the Villa Igiea in his armourplated car, and had stopped a moment at the reception desk to make a phone call. Bocca went to dinner that night with another journalist, who stopped in the pizzeria to speak with someone Bocca didn’t know. When he rejoined Bocca, he told him the other worked for the secret services, and had said, Bocca was seen with Borsellino today. What’s he doing here? The news could only have come from one of the three impeccable
tail-coated doormen at the grand hotel Villa Igiea. One of them was a police informer and maybe the mafia’s. A month or so after the meeting Borsellino was blown up. For the second time that day, I shivered as I walked out into the damp and salty seafront warmth of the night.

  * * *

  THE TRIAL’S first day arrived first at a ruling against live television transmissions of the proceedings, which was a point for the prosecution, and then an adjournment for the judges to consider the defence application to move the trial from Palermo. The defence seemed less concerned about where the trial was held, as long as it was out of Palermo. Franco Coppi, Andreotti’s Roman advocate, delivered a tightly argued and subtly modulated speech of an hour and more without notes, strong and elegant, and led the courtroom spellbound through the intricate and compelling architecture of vast Latinate periods constructed to persuade the judges that as minister and head of government during the time of his alleged mafia crimes, Andreotti should be tried in Rome, or in Perugia where he was being tried in the related case of the murder of Mino Pecorelli. For the prosecution, the clerkly Guido Lo Forte insisted that on the contrary the crimes of which Andreotti was accused were commited in Palermo, where Cosa Nostra had its seat, and that therefore he should be tried in Palermo. A trial in Rome would presumably have meant starting again from scratch, given Italy’s complicated territorial divisions, under a different prosecution team as well as a different judge. I wasn’t able to find anyone to clarify this point, so unthinkable was a transfer considered. Nor was I ever able to find out why the Pecorelli murder trial was being heard in Perugia, which seemed to have nothing to do with the ordering, planning or execution of the killing. It was going to take the court a couple of weeks to rule on Palermo as the trial site.

  So there was some time to follow other matters, and one trail I’d been wanting to follow for years led not into the recent past of Palermo and Rome but back down the western coast of Sicily a bit beyond Trapani, and two and a half thousand years into the island’s past. The Greek historian Thucydides wrote in the fifth century BCE that, in Thomas Hobbes’s seventeenth-century translation

  the Phoenecians inhabited the coast of Sicily on all sides, having taken possession of certain promontories and little islands adjacent, for trade’s sake with the Sicilians. But after that many Grecians were come in by sea, the Phoenecians abandoned most of their former habitations, and uniting themselves, dwelt in Motya and Soloeis and Panormus … because also from thence lay the shortest cut over unto Carthage. These were the barbarians, and thus they inhabited Sicily.

  The island of Mozia still lies on the shortest cut over unto Carthage from Panormus. The ferry from Palermo to Tunis passes Mozia as it follows the western coast of Sicily from Trapani to Marsala and beyond, heading south to Africa. Mozia’s hidden on the seaward side by another, larger island. Mozia itself is tiny, forty-five hectares, though it was once the biggest Phoenician settlement in Sicily and the oldest. Seven centuries BCE the Carthaginians surrounded the island with a mile and a half of fortified walls with towers and gates. It was their key base in Sicily in their endless war with the Greeks for control of the trade routes of the western Mediterranean.

  Three centuries later, just after Thucydides wrote, the Carthaginians attacked and destroyed the Greek city of Selinunte in the Belice valley further south. What remained of Selinunte has now been reduced by earthquakes over the centuries to a pile of stones. The great panels from its temple, carved with scenes from the Greek myths, are now in the museum at Palermo. Twelve years later the Greeks struck back, besieged Motya and finally destroyed the settlement after a great naval clash. Warfare made a technological leap here with the first use of catapults. The Carthaginians soon returned, but moved their base to a place they massively fortified, which later became Marsala, a few miles south on the Sicilian mainland. Motya never regained its former importance, and as Motya the little island was soon forgotten.

  It wasn’t until late last century that the island mentioned by Thucydides was identified as San Pantaleo, where the Whitaker family, one of those English families like the Woodhouses and the Inghams that got rich in Sicily from the export of marsala, had built a handsome villa. Giuseppe Whitaker started excavating his island’s remains, uncovering the dry dock carved out of the stone and the ship repair yards, the walls, the towers, the gate that opened on the paved road that once led north to the mainland and was now under water. Pottery kilns were found, houses, a temple, a cemetery and the tophet where the Phoenicians ritually sacrificed small children to their god Baal. A small museum was made in the villa Whitaker to house the finds. In 1995 the museum also held a statue, much more recently uncovered from the rubble on the island. It was found in 1979, lying on its back, without head or arms or feet. The arms and feet were never found, but the head turned up nearby and fitted perfectly. The statue was marble, Greek and for fifteen years I’d wanted to see it. I seized my chance when the moment came to return the couscous bowls to Angelo and Clara.

  The day was grey and the area around Trapani and Marsala utterly flat. We passed huge salt pans, and little hills of discoloured salt. The windmills, mostly abandoned, that now dotted the landscape weren’t the only thing that recalled the North Sea, now that the green and sunny look of the earlier visit was gone. A mean, nagging wind whistled in off the sea and heaped clouds tumbled overhead. Everything now looked grey. A small breakwater jutted toward Mozia’s trees and the pink villa partly hidden among them. The water was quite shallow and a couple of stone markers showed where horses could be ridden over at low tide. Nailed to the side of a shed was a notice saying the day’s last boat had gone.

  We moped as the wind whipped up shimmies and scuds of waves. There was nobody else in sight. The water’s surface looked solid, like hammered metal. The sun through the boiling clouds turned the sky and sea pewter and silver, dark and dazzling together. Then our luck changed. A small boat was crossing shortly on an errand. We’d have half an hour on the island, maybe an hour. We chugged across. It was high tide and the wind was sheeting water over Mozia’s little wooden jetty, where a couple of big dogs were ducking the spray and wagging their tails and barking up a frenzy at our approach. The island sprouted a lot of big scarred Indian figs in its dry sandy ground, and someone had hoisted a child’s swing under one of the pines. Further on there were vines and olive trees. The bent and ruddy caretaker, a caretaker’s caretaker, cheerful as you might expect someone to be who lived in such a place and had just had a proper Sunday lunch, took us round the back. The dogs came too, doing festive somersaults. The mean, sawing wind had suddenly dropped and the air was warm and still.

  The museum of villa Whitaker held the results of Giuseppe Whitaker’s amateur archeological potterings from the beginning of the century, and later findings of scientific excavation. Funeral steles and terracotta masks from the tophet, weapons and tools in bronze and iron, rare traces of history’s cancelled Phoenicians, were grouped around dusty old glass cases of coloured beads. Elements of a Punic necklace, said the faded copperplate on one curling card, recomposed by Miss Delia Whitaker. I spent some dutiful minutes on all of these, later. The moment the caretaker opened up I headed for the statue of the Boy of Mozia. It took about two seconds to confirm a feeling I’d nursed for fifteen years, based on a newspaper description and some photos in an archeological review. Instinct had been right. This was one of the greatest surviving works of Greek sculpture. I was standing in front of a thing of unutterable beauty. This was one of the world’s great art works. Skipping lunch left me suddenly weak and shaky. I stood back for a moment and leant on a case of Miss Whitaker’s Punic necklaces.

  * * *

  GREAT ART is always an enigma. Nothing could be so unknown, so deeply and probably forever unknowable as the questions now enclosed by this statue. The Youth of Mozia was carved early in the fifth century BCE. This was one of European history’s more significant centuries, the time of Athens and democracy, tragedy and sculpture. The Athenian democracy had de
feated the invading Persian empire from the east in 480 BCE and in the same year, maybe on the very same day, the Greeks in Sicily had defeated the invading Carthaginians in the west near Panormus, or Palermo. The Carthaginians were forced back on their coastal strongholds of Motya, Panormus and Solunto, near Bagheria. Trade, contact, influence continued between the Greeks and the Phoenicians in Sicily, as the Greek vases found in the tombs of Mozia showed. Greeks lived and worked with the Carthaginians on Motya. Less than a hundred years later Mozia too would be wiped out by the Greeks.

  The Persians sacked Athens and destroyed the Acropolis in 480 BCE, before they were defeated and driven back. Among the rubble of their destruction another headless marble statue of a boy was unearthed in 1865. Twenty-three years later its head was found. The forearms, both feet and the lower part of the right leg were missing, but the marble statue was otherwise intact and eighty-six centimetres high. The statue, now in the Acropolis museum in Athens, was new at the time of the Persian attack and may have been by the sculptor Kritios. The nude boy was a victor in the games. He was one of those works on which the history of art pivots, one of those works after which nothing is ever the same again. In Reinhard Lullies’ description of the figure