Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  The boy … stands calmly and confidently. The right leg is bent at the knee, the right thigh thrust forward, the shank placed slightly to the side and to the back, so that the displacement of the weight on to the left leg is also expressed in the upper part of the body and the relation between the axes is shifted a little. The upper arms were drawn back, the left rather more than the right; the forearms were slightly raised from the elbow. The head is turned to the right. The eyes, which were inlaid with coloured material, gazed ahead self-confidently. The hair lies on the head in fine waves running from the crown of the head, and is taken up over a circlet. The down on the nape of the neck is arranged in alternating curls and straight wisps. The modelling of the body is extremely lively …

  The boy marked the moment when Greek sculpture became alive, when the frontal, rigid, upright smiling archaic kouros had become an observed living figure, not an idea of the young male but a real young athlete, distributing his weight and flexing his muscles as a living creature does. It was the moment of realism. The statue’s nudity was realistic too. The statues of the fifth century showed athletes and warriors, and its gods as athletes and warriors, as they were in life in a society where the rituals of sport were supplanting those of war. The nude male’s beauty was realistic and ideal at once.

  The armless boy of Mozia departed more radically still from the at-attention stance of the statues of a few years earlier. His head was turned distinctly to the left, his left hand planted firmly on his hip. The right arm was raised high at the shoulder and must have carried a spear or a victor’s wreath. Weight was thrust on to the tensed and straight left leg, leaving the right relaxed and half bent. His chest was thrust forward and the left cheek of his bum, the side taking his weight, jutted out prominently under his resting hand. Though the arm was missing, the thumb and two fingers of his left hand remained, pressing into the flesh of his hip. The whole body was slightly twisted around its vertical axis and the effect was of a lazy uncompleted movement quite unlike the Kritios boy’s eager directness. It was quite different too from the exultance in the bodies of the two stupendous bronze warriors fished from the sea off Calabria seven years before the Mozia boy was found, two warriors who may have been contemporary with him. The Mozia body was splendid, muscular, shapely, but it didn’t have the warrior’s or the athlete’s ideal tension.

  The face was obliterated in the extremities of nose, mouth and chin and around the right cheek bone, but as you stared it seemed oddly intact and distinctive and undamaged by this blurring of its features. It wasn’t unlike the Kritios boy’s, artistically of that period, with a trace of the archaic stasis, but the oblique gaze made it more distinctly focused and more beautiful. The mouth seemed to have been rather large. Three rows of tight curls ran across his forehead, above his ears and lay longer on the back of his neck. The rest of the head was more or less smooth, and this and the presence of two bronze plates, and holes for three more, showed that it must have been set with a wreath or crown, some kind of head covering. He was a metre and eighty-one tall without his feet, larger than life.

  The relaxed and sensual stance, the almost Hellenistic softness and subtlety of the modelling under that austerely beautiful head, was only part of the story. The uniqueness of the boy of Mozia, his baffling anomaly in the history of Greek art, was that he was clothed. He was wearing a long soft light sleeveless dress fastened, millennia ago, by a tight wide band around his chest, just under his arms, maybe some kind of bronze plate, and thereunder flowing loosely and lightly almost to the ground. The tunic was rendered as an ultralight fabric, I imagined a cotton, that puckered together in long narrow folds that became, in the sculpture, countless sinuous nearly vertical grooves. It was sleeveless but otherwise rather like a garment a friend of mine had worn on a trip up the Nile one summer, hot weather wear, floating and aerating with the slightest movement, clinging as if wet where the body pressed against it.

  Its lightness and grace were modelled with incomparable fineness, but the most remarkable effect was the sensuousness of the cloth clinging to the bum and groin, the utter antithesis of that open vigorous nonsensual nudity of nearly every other extant Greek sculpture of a young male. The modelling of the hand pressing through the thin cloth into the flesh at the hip, the emphasis of the round buttock flattening the folds of the fabric where it protruded, the prominence given the genitals by the sense of the fabric flowing over them, revealing and not revealing, made them the focus of an erotic attention quite absent in the nudes. Modelling, posture, the teasing play of the gossamer fabric, were extraordinarily sensual, an erotically charged body under a strong and nearly archaic face. Nothing else remotely like this body would come out of Greece for hundreds of years, and when it did the tension, the strength that were also present here had been lost. Dario, who was studying art history at school, was baffled. He thought it was late, Hellenistic, until I pointed out the form of the head and, more persuasively, cited the authorities. His bafflement over style and dating concealed a deeper bafflement at this rendering of the male as erotic object.

  This great and almost unknown work, not a whit less amazing than the bronzes of Riace, had been placed, in this little museum the size of a two-car garage, in a kind of fairground booth made out of unfinished packing-case pine boards nailed together to make a little waist-high platform on which the statue had been placed on a sheet of tin, and closed in by raw wooden walls at the back and each side and a roof just above the head. For the sake of a little finish, a scalloped fringe in burgundy cloth had been nailed along the front of the roof and a rope on stands covered with burgundy velvet had been placed in front. The statue was in deep shade and except from the front, totally hidden by its wooden box. The caretaker was chuffed when I asked about the box. The roof was leaking, he said, and we wanted to put the statue somewhere nice, somewhere appropriate … He was beaming that his thought and care were so appreciated. With the caretaker’s permisssion I stepped over the velvet rope and hoisted myself on to the dusty tin. I could see details but it was impossible, without ripping down the box, to see the boy in the round from a distance. You could only make mental elaborations and remember photos from the time of the discovery.

  What did it represent, this anomalous Greek masterpiece imprisoned in its little booth? How had it come to Mozia? Nobody knew. The boy seemed too young to be a priestly figure, too languid to be an athlete or a warrior. The marble he was made of had come from Anatolia in Turkey and time had turned it pale gold. The alternatives seemed to be that the statue had been war booty taken by the Carthagians, maybe from Selinunte when they destroyed it, or that it had been commissioned from a Greek sculptor by a Carthaginian. That the amazing tunic was the Carthaginians’ style of dress made the latter more likely. I had a fleeting vision of a sleek Phoenician businessman who’d known what he liked and had money to spend on art. A sculptor who’d entered into the spirit of the commission. Who’d found, even, that it drew from him resources of skill and daring he hadn’t known he possessed until he was freed of the usual constraints … The little historical fancy evaporated. It dispelled none of the enigma. It was hard to believe the truth about the sculpture would ever be known. And now the boatmen wanted to leave, so the dogs escorted us dancing back to the jetty.

  In Palermo I returned later to the archeological museum whose best treasures were the carved panels from the temple at Selinunte, the city not far from Mozia the Carthaginians had destroyed. I was wondering whether the boy might have been carried off from there. The weather-ravaged panels were still wonderful, especially the carving of Actaeon savaged by his own dogs as he turned into a deer, but offered no stylistic clue. There was a statue in the same hall, a small one, that I’d forgotten, and this set me firm against the idea the Mozia boy could have come from the same place. This was another fifth-century ephebe, but a bronze one, pretty crudely proportioned, almost a caricature, not without a certain bug-eyed charm, though the head was far too big. The youth of Mozia belonged to no known worl
d.

  A bunch of barely pubescent schoolkids in rainbow leisurewear were trailing dreamily around with their teachers. It was a very warm day. But the little man in the tweed jacket from the museum staff made up for all of them in his bustling enthusiasm. He swamped the question and answer format by providing his own responses to every query. When the kids spoke he cut them short. It was the little bronze Ephebe of Selinunte that raised him to his greatest eloquence. He hymned the glories of the male nude in art, underlining its essentially ideal nature. The kids were taking a languid full frontal view, but he ushered the girls and boys to the rear. Look at those buttocks, children. See that modelling. There is no vulgarity in those buttocks. The contemplative silence was broken only by the muted explosions of bursting bubblegum.

  The finest sculpture in the Palermo museum was another bronze up on the first floor, the bronze ram of Syracuse, lying down but lifting its forepaw and turning its head with a bleat, caught in the instant before standing, a marvel of animal intensity from the third century BCE. The sitting ram, and a scrawny one to Australian eyes, was given great presence and dignity by the attentiveness of its rendering. It had the strength of realism you often found in animals in art, things done out of delight in their life and not invested with ideal values as human figures were, and lions. Lions, being symbolic and rarely seen by the artists who sculpted them, were usually duds. The ram had been one of two, guarding the port in Syracuse. Goethe had admired the pair of them. The other was destroyed by a cannonball hit in the revolution of 1848.

  * * *

  HEADING NORTH back toward Trapani and Palermo along the road from Marsala, we passed a military airport called Birgi. We were just north of Mozia now, near where the Phoenician road had once joined it to the mainland. All you could see of the airport was a lot of flat grassy ground, a few trees, some asphalted drives joining clusters of green painted military buildings of one or two storeys inside a barbed wire perimeter fence. Pippo remarked that that was where he’d done his military service in the late sixties. Two years’ military service was still compulsory for young Italian males. We drove on. Then I whipped around. Had he said Birgi? He had.

  … a dark coloured armour-plated Alfa Romeo arrived, with tinted windows. In it were both the Salvo cousins and the Hon. Giulio Andreotti. The car belonged to the Salvos … I’d often seen one or the other of them using it. I heard Andreotti had come from Trapani, where he’d arrived on a private plane rented by the Salvos …

  This was on page 107 of The True History of Italy. Francesco Marino Mannoia had stayed in the garden during the meeting with the mafia bosses after Sicilian regional president Piersanti Mattarella’s murder in 1980. I clearly heard shouting coming from inside. This was the meeting where Stefano Bontate had shouted at Andreotti, In Sicily we’re in charge and if you don’t want to totally wipe out the DC you do what we say. Andreotti denied ever coming to Sicily by private plane, but others, like a businessman friend who ran an airline called Air Capitol and the Air Capitol pilot both said he often had. A public servant remembered being sent by Lima to pick up Andreotti from such a flight. The Salvos had private planes. Nino Salvo had used one to bring Tommaso Buscetta and his family to Palermo at Christmas that same year, for his last attempt to mediate between the warring Cosa Nostra families, the mediation Buscetta had seen was hopeless. The Caltagirone brothers had a plane too, talked-about businessmen involved in the Italcasse scandal and friends of Andreotti’s.

  Air traffic was controlled by the military and the civilian offices were out of sight of the landing strip and waiting zone and often the military didn’t tell the civilians what was going on. The magistrates found the arrival records were full of errors and omissions, or destroyed. There was no fixed police presence at Birgi. It was easy, if you had friends, to land at the airport and leave unseen and unrecorded. The civilian airport director and two of the air force people who’d kept the records had all been members of those strange masonic lodges in Trapani that Saverio Montalbano, the police officer who was disciplined and transferred for being too effective an antimafia investigator, had been looking into, mafia lodges. The Salvos were powerful people in Trapani, and Andreotti had been Italy’s defence minister for years and years. He had a little influence in the defence area.

  It was like the secret kiss in 1987. How, Andreotti’s defence had asked, could Andreotti elude his own minders?

  Senator Andreotti is under escort twenty-four hours a day by a carabinieri patrol and a permanent police guard is stationed on the landing of his apartment building … One or two members of his escort follow him outside Rome, including overseas. And moreover, wherever he goes Senator Andreotti, whether in government or not, is greeted and escorted by local security authorities, often double, both carabinieri and police …

  This was on page 185 of The True History. The defence demanded that the records be examined. They were. After wading through a sea of documents from carabinieri and police, the magistrates found that until 1982, Andreotti’s chief minders had been unsupervised and free to organize the escort outside Rome as they wished. They didn’t have to relay details of Andreotti’s movements to their office. The chief minders had always been personally selected by Andreotti himself, and received money and privileges from him. There’d often been last-minute changes in the escort personnel on these trips, when one of Andreotti’s preferred men would take the place of a scheduled guard and the change was never recorded. Andreotti had often dismissed his guards and disappeared. They’d never bothered anyway to note who Andreotti met, and many of Andreotti’s trips and meetings in and out of Italy had left no trace in the records of his escorts.

  When the investigating magistrate had interviewed Andreotti’s chief minder from 1974 to 1988, he’d brought along records of Andreotti’s trips to Sicily in the period of the alleged secret meetings with Cosa Nostra. Realizing they’d be needed, he’d prepared them himself. Pressed by the magistrates, however, he’d then admitted that he hadn’t done all of them. For Andreotti’s Sicilian visits in question he’d been given records ready made up by Andreotti’s other chief minder. The magistrates confronted the two minders together. The second broke down, and begging for understanding, admitted he’d in turn been given the records by Andreotti’s secretary. It was to refresh the memory of the other minders in case they’d remembered differently. Andreotti had done a similar thing in the Pecorelli murder inquiry. He’d tried through a go-between to refresh the memory of a crucial witness, reminding him that he’d had certain cheques from others, not from Andreotti. The green airport under the grey sky was silent and deserted now. There was no movement, there were no planes. It was sitting on its secrets.

  * * *

  A LIFE-OR-DEATH situation. A medical emergency. A fit, a seizure, a crisis of some kind inside the justice building. In the stifling heat of Palermo in the dog days, at the height of the Sicilian summer, public offices have skeleton staffs and everyone else is by the sea. Ferragosto is the still point of the Italian year. Everything stopped, everything collapses in the middle of August under the weight of the summer. Palermo’s nearness to the Sahara makes itself felt and ferragosto was not a moment of maximum concentration. Someone would be taken ill. Someone else would call an ambulance. Roberto Scarpinato was inside the Palermo justice building in the summer of 1995. He was one of the few in Palermo with things on their mind in the middle of last August. Things other than sun and sea and lunch. Scarpinato was putting together the last of the hundred thousand pages that made up the criminal indictment of life senator Giulio Andreotti, the final additions to The True History of Italy. The trial was five weeks off.

  The steel gates would open. The sweating soldiers with machine guns would wave the ambulance in. The ambulance would get as close as possible to Scarpinato’s office. Room 50 on the second floor. Roberto Scarpinato was forty-four years old, the youngest of the three pubblici ministeri. Andreotti’s prosecutors. He’d be presenting the case against Andreotti with Gioacchino Natoli and Guido
Lo Forte. For three years they’d worked to assemble it with the the Palermo chief prosecutor Gian Carlo Caselli, who was now the leader of Italy’s judicial war on Cosa Nostra. For years Scarpinato had made a particular study of the mafia’s relations with the world of politics and had been called the ideologue of the prosecution team.

  The ambulance would be packed with plastic explosive. It would be detonated by remote control. It would take out Caselli and Scarpinato. It was Cosa Nostra’s planned answer to Caselli, worked out by Riina’s brother-in-law and successor, the Corleonese Leoluca Bagarella. The Cupola thought Scarpinato was too aggressive. It was headed off when word of the planned massacre came through the pentiti. The ambulance never arrived and the plastic explosive was never detonated. The Andreotti trial started on schedule. A couple of weeks into the trial, just before the decision was announced on whether it would continue in Palermo, I visited Scarpinato in his crowded little Room No 50 in the justice building, hemmed in by industrial-size computers and photocopiers and filing cabinets, files and folders heaped everywhere. Even before he spoke, Scarpinato’s crumpled mop of already-grey curls and the pouchy, seen-it-all eyes told you a lot. Unlike the silver-haired Caselli, with his impeccable dress and slender whipcord figure, who manages to play football surrounded by guards, the chain-smoking Scarpinato had a heavy, sedentary, and deeply melancholy air about him. The justice building itself in Palermo looked like a central American seat of government. A blinding ash grey monolith, set well back from the palm trees of the piazza, a disposition that demonstrated acute strategic foresight on the part of its fascist-period architects, and ringed by a massive steel fence about three metres high. Peering through the black rectangular bars, you could see, beyond the parked cars, the tiny figures of soldiers in camouflage and berets. They stood with machine guns ready and legs wide apart, like toy figures planted on the waste of dazzling steps.