Honoured Society, The

by Reski, Petra; Whiteside, Shaun

  And I hear Salvo, my taxi driver, saying to me, ‘Ciao, Petra. Still carrying that same old battered suitcase?’

  Rosaria Schifani

  Salvo makes that remark about the suitcase every time I come to Palermo, it’s a solicitous ritual of his. Because Salvo can’t understand why I’m devoted to this battered suitcase even though I could easily afford a new one. A neat, smooth Signora suitcase. Not this old aluminium thing covered with stickers which he’s now stowing in his taxi with an indulgent expression on his face.

  Salvo always drives me when I’m in Palermo, he’s done it for years. I’ve known him for so long that he’s got through three fiancées in that time. Now he’s got another one, and this time it’s serious. Salvo’s very thin, with a profile like a mouse. A mouse with alert, black eyes that seem to consist entirely of pupil. Even in jeans and trainers, Salvo always tries to look smart. When he puts his hands on the wheel he sticks out his little finger, the way other people do when drinking tea. It’s not as if he’s scrambling to drive me around Palermo, it’s more that he’s doing me a favour – because for some time now he’s become the regular driver for a group of old ladies who play scopa, the Sicilian game played with cards that look like tarot cards. These old lady card-sharps meet every afternoon, which is why they represent a secure source of income for Salvo: the ladies always have absolute precedence.

  I tap in a text to Shobha: ‘Where are we eating?’ And she answers: ‘Everything’s shut on Sunday evening. Except Fresco.’

  Fresco is Shobha’s local, a kind of vegetarian hippy restaurant opposite Ucciardone prison. They serve up a passable couscous, with piano accompaniment on Sundays. The pianist has been wooing Shobha, in vain, for years.

  ‘OK, Fresco,’ I reply, and Salvo asks me why I still haven’t got a new phone. He proudly shows me his new superthin Samsung. Of course, he has two telefonini, like any self-respecting Italian: one for private conversations, one for business. The private one’s reserved exclusively for his fiancées. And his mother.

  We drive silently along the motorway. Cinisi. Carini. Capaci. Each sign represents a case file, a police operation, a raid. Against the Alcamo clan, against the Castellammare del Golfo clan, against the Cinisi clan. Some trials have the names of the places the clans come from, others bear names like film titles: they’re called ‘Storm’, or ‘Golden Market’, or ‘Akragas’. And behind the film titles lurk mafiosi who look like janitors. Or bank clerks. Every time I come from the airport and see the sign for Cinisi, I can’t help thinking about the boss in hiding, Matteo Messina Denaro – and his submissiveness to Don Tano Badalamenti, an old boss who came from Cinisi and preferred to let his life trickle away in an American jail rather than be disloyal to Cosa Nostra. He spent almost twenty years in a prison in Massachusetts.

  Messina Denaro is seen as the new boss of the Sicilian Mafia: young, brilliant and on the run. In Sicily the phrase ‘on the run’ sounds as normal as a description of someone’s marital status. Single, married, on the run. I wonder whether the brilliant Messina Denaro would maintain his loyalty to Cosa Nostra even in an American high-security prison. Perhaps he’d be readier to come clean than people might imagine.

  To do me a favour, Salvo puts on Biagio Antonacci’s CD and ‘Sognami se nevica’, ‘Dream of me if it snows’. In Sicily, the metaphor par excellence for unrequited love.

  Few men in Sicily are as sought after as mafiosi on the run. Matteo Messina Denaro met up with ladies from the highest echelons of Trapani society at a hotel in Selinunte – and a short time later had its owner murdered because he didn’t feel he had treated him with sufficient respect. The boss enjoyed himself at the elegant spa of Forte dei Marmi, adorned himself with Rolex watches, fell in love with an Austrian woman, whom he visited and whose telephone is probably still tapped today, and spent part of his time on the run from the police in Bagheria, not far from Palermo, staying with a woman who wrote him pages of love letters: ‘I have loved you, I love you, and I will love you all my life.’ She went to jail for acting as his accomplice.When Messina Denaro hid at this woman’s home, his pursuers were so hot on his heels that they came close to catching him, except that one of the carabinieri had turned off the hidden cameras and given the boss the tip he needed.

  Salvo says: ‘I don’t know what you women see in this song.’ And I can’t give him an answer.

  ‘What kind of a story are you doing this time?’ Salvo asks. He asks more out of politeness than interest; basically, he thinks a preoccupation with the Mafia is a waste of time. On the one hand. On the other, it fills him with a curious sort of pride that I should come here specially from Venice to tell the Germans what’s happening in Sicily. As if the island’s inhabitants were a people at risk of extinction, of interest to a very few, highly specialized anthropologists. People whom he meets daily in the hall of his building, and whom he otherwise considers overrated. Salvo still lives with his mother, in the district between the Piazza Indipendenza and the Capuchin Crypt, where tourists shudder at the sight of the mummies. It’s a normal district of Palermo, which lives equally normally off the drugs trade. Salvo loves describing how the customers meet by the statue of Padre Pio, because the goods are hidden under the saint’s feet. A neighbour on Salvo’s floor has already been arrested four times for membership of the Mafia, and each time he got out of prison he rose a bit higher in the hierarchy. First he committed breakins, then he collected protection money – that is, he picked up the envelopes that were laid out ready for him, and if there was nothing ready he squeezed superglue into the locks of the shops that hadn’t paid – and now you only ever see him in a suit and tie.

  ‘I’m writing a portrait of Letizia,’ I say.

  ‘Letizia?’ Salvo asks in amazement, because he knows Letizia, and because he thinks I write about people who are either famous or dangerous, and in his eyes Letizia is neither famous nor dangerous, but just the mother of the photographer Shobha.

  ‘Letizia Battaglia is perhaps your most famous woman photographer,’ I say, ‘your most famous anti-Mafia photographer.’ A Sicilian Cartier-Bresson, I’m about to say, if Letizia wouldn’t have taken offence at being compared with someone else. And if Salvo knew who Cartier-Bresson was.

  ‘Minchia,’ Salvo says. ‘I drove her only yesterday, and I didn’t know she was so famous.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. When Sicilians say ‘Minchia’ they’re really impressed. ‘Minchia’ means ‘cock’ in Sicilian. In fact, Sicily has tried its damnedest to forget Letizia. There is no exhibition in her honour, no archive of her work, nothing.

  ‘They pretend I don’t exist,’ Letizia always says. ‘As if I were guilty for the things I’ve seen.’

  There are no reminders of her – and she was always more than a photographer: Letizia was a theatre director, city councillor and MP for the anti-Mafia party La Rete. Her surname Battaglia means ‘battle’ – her life’s manifesto.

  ‘And why are the Germans interested in Letizia right now?’ asks Salvo.

  ‘Because of Duisburg,’ I say.

  Because, while there are no corpses, people are inclined to suspect that the Mafia doesn’t exist. Before six Calabrians were murdered in Duisburg, a lot of editors saw my interest in the Mafia as a personal eccentricity, a whim – as if I’d become obsessed with some absurd topic like the life of the giant ant-eater – to be treated with a degree of indulgence. Okay, if she’s absolutely desperate to write about the Mafia, then for God’s sake let her get on with it; on the other hand, next time get her to write us something about Tuscany.

  And then the massacre in Duisburg happened and my phone started ringing non-stop. Everyone wanted to send me to Calabria. News websites, weekly papers, monthly magazines. ‘Haven’t you got a mafioso to hand that you could interview?’ one editor asked me. Suddenly everyone wanted to know all about the Mafia, to what extent Cosa Nostra differed from the Camorra and whether it was actually imaginable that something like the Duisburg massacre could happen more of
ten. I heard myself lecturing and doling out definitions – that the word Mafia actually referred only to the Sicilian Cosa Nostra; while the Calabrian Mafia was called ’Ndrangheta and was at the moment the most successful criminal association in Italy; alongside the Neapolitan Camorra, which, unlike Cosa Nostra with its strictly hierarchical vertical organization, was organized horizontally, which also explained the constant gang wars, everyone wanting to be the boss, and you can’t have that without corpses; and the Apulian Sacra Corona Unita, the youngest Mafia organization in Italy, which only came into being in the 1980s. And at the end of the phone calls I turned down all the commissions because at the time I happened to be in Poland covering a story – which was a source of relief to me. It was only several months later that I travelled to San Luca and by that time all interest had subsided again.

  ‘The Germans must have been really shocked when that thing happened in Duisburg,’ Salvo says with concern. And also some worry. ‘Che brutta figura,’ he says – what an ugly image we’ve given of ourselves. As if he were personally responsible for his Calabrian compatriots. For the ’Ndrangheta massacre. He looks crestfallen and turns the music up slightly.

  There’s dense traffic on the motorway, the whole of Palermo’s coming back from the weekend. As if impelled by a death wish, the cars dash down the tunnel. The sea shimmers like blackish-blue metal, with a strip of pale moonlight. Up by Carini you can’t see the sea any more, it’s hidden behind a settlement of shacks which stretches all the way to Palermo and looks like a poor district in Calcutta. The rubbish from the weekend is piled up alongside the motorway. The buildings are mostly one-storey houses with rough brick walls, no rendering anywhere; rusty metal rods stick out of the concrete on the roofs. These are Palermo’s holiday homes. They’re all illegal, and they have been for thirty years. In Sicily they call this ‘surveyors’ architecture’. It has ravaged the island. In Sicily everyone knows a surveyor who will draw up an illegal building plan for a backhander.

  And then we get to Capaci. For a while, there was always a pause when we drove past this place. It didn’t matter who I was with, all my friends, taxi drivers, interviewees fell silent. Not any more. Now everyone just goes on talking. Before, the only reminder of what had happened was a bit of red crash barrier. Five hundred kilos of explosives on a skateboard in a sewage pipe. Set off by remote control.

  Now, two red marble steles stand here with the names and the date: 23 May 1992, Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo, Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro, Vito Schifani. One marble stele in each direction. War memorials for a lost battle, as red as the Sicilian soil. Sometimes there’s a faded wreath with a sash that’s already slightly faded: in Sicily things deteriorate very quickly.

  I’d only seen Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino once, from a distance, in the Palace of Justice. Like a lot of other people in those days, I, too, thought they were immortal. When they were murdered, it was felt in Palermo that the killing of the two public prosecutors wasn’t a murder like the previous ones. Not a small death that the city could have shaken off, denied and forgotten again the following morning, but one that clung to the city in front of everyone’s eyes. ‘È andata oltre,’ people said, things have gone too far. For the first time, Sicily could no longer dispute the existence of the Mafia, and the reaction was one of catharsis. Temporarily.

  ‘The mafiosi will pay for it,’ Rosaria had said. We were sitting in a bar not far from the Teatro Politeama, at a white marble table which had been scrubbed till it had lost its sheen, when Rosaria suddenly grabbed my wrist and said: ‘They’ll pay for it, on the earth and in the hereafter.’ What other point would there be in their going on living after committing those murders? Were they never to be punished? Then life in general would have no point, no point at all. ‘There must be something, after all, don’t you think?’

  And I said: ‘Yes, sure.’ Because she was looking at me so piercingly with those black eyes of hers. And because I didn’t have the courage to rob her of her hope. Hope of the divine plan. When I was sitting in the bar with Rosaria, her husband Vito Schifani, Giovanni Falcone’s bodyguard, had only been dead for six months.

  ‘They only showed me his hands,’ she said. ‘His hands. They were the only bits undamaged. He had such lovely hands.’

  Rosaria had been widowed at the age of twenty-three and had become an anti-Mafia icon. Her son, Antonio Emanuele, was only four months old. Even today, everyone in Palermo remembers Rosaria haltingly trying to read out a text at Giovanni Falcone’s funeral, supported by a priest who kept encouraging her to go on reading – until Rosaria threw aside the pages of her prepared text and cried out her true feelings: ‘They’re even here in the church, the mafiosi.’ And: ‘Too much blood, there is no love here, no love of anything or anyone.’ And: ‘I forgive you. But you must kneel.’

  Everyone sensed that this wasn’t the usual forgiveness, that empty ritual of absolution that everyone in Italy always has to defer to; before the corpses are even cold, the first television reporter has asked the victims about forgiveness. Only very seldom does anyone have the courage to step aside from this sale of indulgences. Like Rita Costa, the widow of the public prosecutor Gaetano Costa, shot by the Mafia in the centre of Palermo. ‘I forgive no one and nobody,’ she said. ‘I could kill my husband’s murderers and then calmly go off and have an espresso in a cafe.’

  I had first seen Rosaria when Margarethe von Trotta was in Palermo introducing her film The Long Silence, a film that paid tribute to the women widowed by the Mafia. Rosaria wore a sand-coloured blazer, sat next to Rita Costa on the podium, and looked as if she’d rather have been a million miles away. Far from the widows, far from having to set an example, far from Palermo. She almost crept to the microphone as she said: ‘When I talked about forgiveness in church, that sentence was my personal affair. Whether a person can forgive is, of course, a matter for each individual.’

  Then she said nothing all the way through the panel discussion. She later told me how angry her mother had been when Rosaria had insisted on being seen in public in a sand-coloured blazer and not in black.

  We had met at the regional administration, her new place of work. As is generally the case with victims of the Mafia, a job had been hastily found for her to supplement her meagre widow’s pension. But she hadn’t been given any actual work, just a reason to leave the house in the morning. Her office was empty. The phone was out of order, the desk hadn’t been used for ages, the shelves were bare and dusty, and Rosaria talked about the profound shame she felt at never having taken an interest in what Mafia really meant. ‘Even two days after my husband’s death I didn’t know who Totò Riina was!’ she exclaimed. After the murder she had approached the public prosecutor Paolo Borsellino. Once she had asked him if he was scared, and Borsellino had replied: ‘I’m only scared for my wife and children.’ Fifty-seven days after the assassination of Falcone, he too was dead.

  After her husband’s death Rosaria became a driven woman: one who wanted to know what was happening around her, how it had come to this, how it could have been prevented. ‘Tell everyone what happened to you,’ one widow advised her. ‘Shout it out. Everyone must know, go into the schools and speak to the children. Headlines aren’t enough to reach the hearts of the children.’

  And Rosaria followed her advice. She took part in demonstrations and panel discussions, she visited schools and juvenile institutions, and she published a book of her talks, dedicating it to her little son. In her open letter to the mafiosi, Rosaria wrote: ‘You are murderers. Let’s say it out loud, so that your sons can look you in the eyes and see what murderers’ eyes look like.’

  Perhaps that was the moment when Palermo became strange to her. She was a diva, people said, only interested in getting on television. And she was a lunatic. An attention-seeking lunatic.

  Even if her husband had been killed by the Mafia, a Sicilian widow has to deal with her pain in silence. Fatti gli affari tuoi e campi cent’anni. Mind your own business an
d you’ll live to a hundred.

  Soon Rosaria stopped taking part in panel discussions, in memorial services, demonstrations and candlelight processions. I still heard from her from time to time. I heard she’d left Sicily. That she’d married again. That she’d had another child. She never wrote another open letter. The mafiosi who murdered her husband have been sentenced in the meantime. Some of them have repented. None of them has bent the knee.

  Some have even managed to get college degrees, like the boss Pietro Aglieri. And they hope for their sentences to be overturned. Perhaps not entirely without justification. In the years following the assassinations, the anti-Mafia laws were gradually abolished. There is effectively no longer such a thing as high-security detention, no life imprisonment, and anyone who has been sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment for drug dealing can expect to be out of jail again in seven years. The last president of the Sicilian regional assembly, Salvatore ‘Totò’ Cuffaro, was sentenced in the first instance to five years’ imprisonment, which he celebrated with a little communal drink and a tray full of cannoli, that traditional sweetmeat that every Sicilian emigrant devours until the day he dies. Cuffaro was celebrating because he knew that he would never have to serve his sentence; by the time it was confirmed by the supreme court, it would have lapsed. But he was wrong: in January 2011, Cuffaro went to prison. You never know what’s around the corner.

  Today, even the commemoration of the victims is too much. The former president of the Sicilian regional assembly, Gianfranco Miccichè, has demanded that the name of Palermo airport be changed as a matter of urgency: Aeroporto Falcone e Borsellino smacks too much of the Mafia.