‘How many misfortunes, how many tragedies in the south have been caused by women, especially the ones who become mothers,’ said the Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia. As in Cosa Nostra and the Camorra, in Calabria the women pass on the Mafia culture from generation to generation; it’s the mothers who call for vendetta, who keep thoughts of the dead alive and prepare their sons for life in the ’Ndrangheta. In Calabria the clan chief arranges for the newborn child to be paid a visit at which a knife and a key are set down by its side. If the child touches the knife first, it has a future as an ’Ndranghetista, but, if it touches the key first, it becomes a ‘flunkey’, as the police are called here. And to keep this from happening, the key is set down too far away for the child to be able to touch it. The boss also cuts the baby’s nails for the first time: that means the child has been accepted into the organization. And the mother understands the symbolism of these gestures.
Father, uncle, brother-in-law, brother, son. The Mafia sits in the living room. It lies in bed, it eats at the table, it comes home with its boots bloodied. And the wives? You can accuse Mafia women of all kinds of things, of concealing things and lying, of turning a blind eye. But you can’t accuse them of not knowing anything.
‘The only really important woman for a mafioso is, and must be, the mother of his children. All the others are “just tarts”. A mafioso who has been married more than once, or who is known to have had affairs, is a wild card – incapable of controlling himself sexually and emotionally. So he isn’t “professionally” trustworthy either,’ wrote Giovanni Falcone.
The women are the foundation of the Mafia. When he’s accepted into the organization, the mafioso must swear not to chase after other people’s wives and always to lead a blameless family life. The reason is less moral than pragmatic – a suspect family life, or even a volatile mistress, represents a threat to security. The men of honour play along with the game. They enjoy the respect that is paid to them. They know what they are worth. But they also know that rules are there to be broken. Even in Cosa Nostra. Of course you have mistresses, very discreetly. But the wife is consoled by the certainty that she takes precedence. She must be protected. Because she provides an assurance that the foundations of Mafia society are unshaken.
Formally, a woman can’t be accepted into Cosa Nostra, but even without the formalities she’s part of it. Giusy Vitale, the first female boss in the history of Cosa Nostra, and, later, a turncoat, didn’t just advance the businesses of the clan in the absence of her brothers, passing on messages, taking part in meetings with bosses, she also bribed politicians and gave orders for murders to be committed. Even at the age of six she knew what it meant to belong to the Mafia, Giusy Vitale said. That is the educational goal of a Mafia mother – she rules over the blood family, the core of the Mafia family itself.
It’s the mothers who pass on Mafia values: honour and shame, loyalty and betrayal. It isn’t the husband who brings up the children in blind obedience to the Mafia, it’s the wife. Even if she and the boss don’t actually have a marriage certificate. When the boss Bernardo Provenzano was finally arrested after forty-three years of invisibility, he said, when asked if he was married: ‘Where my conscience is concerned, yes.’ But wiretap records reveal that, even while the godfather Provenzano was living underground, he didn’t have to give up the chance of a church wedding. Or the usual customs of a good Sicilian family life. A linguist who was presented with excerpts from wiretap records could tell from the accent of Provenzano’s sons, Angelo and Francesco, that they must have gone to school in Trapani. When investigators went to Trapani, some schoolchildren identified the faces of the two Provenzano sons as those of their former schoolmates. Provenzano’s wife was recognized by some of Trapani’s parish priests when they were shown photographs of her. But unfortunately they couldn’t say where the signora might have been living with her two sons.
The God-fearing godfather felt bonded, merged, allied with his wife and family – as everyone in Cosa Nostra knew, and as was revealed by the pizzini, the little notes with which Provenzano communicated with the world, and in which he always invoked God’s blessing. His wife sent him warm socks along with washing instructions – You can wash them in cold water or in the washing machine – and she wrote to him in the tone of a wife whose husband has gone to war:
My life, I end my letter with the blessing of the Almighty, that the light of the Lord may shine on you and help you, as it may give us the power and the faith to endure all this. My life, I hug you very, very tightly. My love, if I should have forgotten anything, please let me know.
Unlike the Mafia, the Italian judiciary has always had a less than flattering view of a woman’s capabilities. As if she is someone incapable of acting or thinking independently. Even if a wife is in hiding for twenty years with a documented murderer, she doesn’t count as an accomplice, she isn’t even guilty of being an accessory. A wife can’t be forced to give evidence against her husband. That’s the law. And that’s what makes her so valuable to the Mafia: wives are inviolable. They bring messages to their husbands, whether they are imprisoned or in hiding, and during their husbands’ frequent absences they keep the businesses going: drug deals, money laundering, property transfers. The few Mafia wives who have ever ended up in court have been acquitted; many Italian judges have fallen victim to their own unshakeable faith in the patriarchy: women couldn’t be held responsible for their actions, they must have been forced to act on their husbands’ instructions. Only slowly have they become aware that the image of the innocent wife with no idea of her husband’s murderous activities is a myth, and one that the Mafia at least has never believed in.
When the gate of Ucciardone prison opens at last and the women push their way through for visiting hours, Salvo drives up, his Fiat sits, indicators blinking, by the side of the road, unmoved by the furious beeping of the other cars behind it. As soon as we’ve closed the car door behind us, we talk about the women standing next to us outside the prison. Women you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night, as Salvo says.
We drive past the jetty where people stand waving after the departing ferry, then Salvo turns off towards Mondello. As always, he looks as fresh as a daisy, his collar is turned up, his hair combed and gelled; he plainly had time to shower after his siesta, and he smells of aftershave. When we stop at a traffic light, he looks at his watch until Shobha finally asks him if it’s new. With a mixture of relief and embarrassment he admits that his brother gave it to him, a first-class imitation Rolex, because it was Salvo’s birthday last week, which none of us knew.
‘You remember the Rolex in Corleone?’ Shobha asks and laughs. The ‘Rolex in Corleone’ is a phrase I just have to hear to smell again the scent of a rainy morning in Corleone, the scent of the wet paving stones, the smell of my damp leather jacket, the smell of wet cardboard. The water trickled down us in little streams and flowed along the gutters, dragging paper and rubbish with it.
We wanted to talk to the women of the town, to hear something about the ones who were spoken of in secret as the first ladies of the Mafia. Not the easiest thing in the world. And certainly not when the weather’s bad. Because in Corleone, even when it’s fine, you only ever see the old men sitting by the side of the road; it’s only thought seemly for women to appear in church, at the cemetery and in the supermarket. It was too late for church, too early for the supermarket and too wet for the cemetery. We walked gloomily along the alleyways. In the window of a haberdashery there was a display of coppole, the flat caps worn on the island. Because my hair was already drenched through, we stepped inside the shop to buy one. Inside stood two old women dressed in black, asking advice about buying thread. I noticed that one of them held her left arm at so stiff an angle that it looked as if it didn’t belong to her. Then I saw a gold, diamond-encrusted Rolex sparkling on her wrist.
A short time later we bumped into the two women again in the Iannuzzi patisserie, which has the best cannoli in Corleone – the Sicilian pastries made
of cream cheese and candied fruits. The Rolex glittered in the shop’s fluorescent light, and pastry-man Iannuzzi hovered around the two black-clad women like a hummingbird: ‘One more marzipan cake, Signore? Try one of my delicious cannoli, tender as peach blossoms!’ When Shobha asked the two women if she could take a picture of them, they just clicked their tongues dismissively. Plainly we weren’t worth an answer. The two signore were used to being treated with exaggerated respect. They condescendingly gave their orders and quickly left the shop.
Who were those two black-clad women? Signore Iannuzzi shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said, and we could see that he was lying. We bought two cannoli and decided to go to Totò Riina’s house on Via Scorsone so that we could at least take a picture of the place where his wife Antonietta had lived with her children since her husband’s arrest. When Antonietta came back to Corleone, she didn’t move into the house with the gilded taps, with the walnut doors and the Carrara marble. The police had impounded it. Instead, she moved in with her two old, unmarried sisters, Emanuela and Maria Matilde. A narrow-fronted, two-storey house on a street barely wider than a Fiat Panda.
Antonietta Bagarella had known her husband since childhood. It was a classic Mafia marriage: Ninetta was from an old Corleone family, her brother was rising through the hierarchy. He had the honour of being murdered by his future brother-in-law. Ninetta only found that out when she was already married to Riina. One thing is certain, though: it wouldn’t have got in the way of the marriage. Business is business. A woman like Ninetta, who comes from old Mafia nobility, isn’t prone to sentimentality.
Unlike her husband, who didn’t get beyond primary school, Ninetta studied and gained her teacher’s diploma. Among all the mafiosi who haven’t even got a proper command of Italian, Ninetta’s education is an invaluable advantage; for a long time she was the only one capable of reading a case file and negotiating with the lawyers. The young Mafia wife also attracted the attention of the investigating magistrates. In 1971, at the age of twenty-seven, she was the first Sicilian woman to be accused of Mafia membership. She was suspected of working as a courier for the bosses who were living in hiding. Ninetta played the part of the innocent, persecuted wife to perfection: she wrote pleading letters, collected the signatures of mothers in Corleone, and even appealed to the Human Rights Commission in The Hague. She told the court: ‘I am a woman, and I confess that I am guilty of loving a man that I trust. I have loved Totò Riina since I was thirteen and he was twenty-six. Since then I have borne him in my heart; that is my only crime, your Honour.’
The judge passed a lenient sentence and placed her under police supervision – which she soon escaped by going into hiding.
The Riinas’ family life was flawless, even during the years when the family was in hiding. The Mafia saw to it that they had every possible comfort: a priest to marry the couple, a honeymoon in Venice, a place in the obstetric ward, well-guarded villas in the middle of Palermo, holiday homes by the sea. Antonietta taught the children their times tables, while at the same time hit men were recruited and assassinations planned. Hear everything, see everything, just don’t say a word.
When journalists dared to ask her a question at the end of a day’s trial, she said only: ‘My husband isn’t what you think he is. He’s an elegant man. I wish everyone was like him, an exemplary father. He is too good, and he fell victim to circumstances.’
I was thinking about that as I stood in front of her narrow house and noticed that there were white lace curtains over the windows and a rubber tree on the tiled balcony. Suddenly I heard cries. At first I didn’t even notice that the cries were aimed at us. ‘Whores, wretches, damned souls,’ came the shouts from the window, ‘you’ve been running after us all morning. Clear off, or you’ll be sorry.’
Plainly the two black-clad women were the sisters of Ninetta Bagarella. Shobha blanched, lowered her camera and said: ‘Let’s get out of here.’
We ran back to our car, which was parked only a street away. I drove off as quickly as I could, towards the slip road for Palermo. Shortly before I got there I noticed that we were being followed by a white Fiat Uno. As I turned off towards Palermo, I saw a heavily guarded security van driving in the distance in front of us. I tried to follow it. I stayed glued to its back bumper all the way to Palermo. At some point the white Fiat Uno turned off.
Shortly after our visit to Corleone, Giovanni, the eighteen-year-old son of Totò Riina, was arrested, for fighting, perjury, blackmail and Mafia membership. And murder. His mother saw him as a victim. Again she sat down and, in her even, schoolteachery handwriting, wrote an appeal which she sent to La Repubblica – a masterpiece of Sicilian maternal love. ‘As a mother, I have decided to open my heart, overflowing with grief over the arrest of my son,’ she wrote, and accused the judiciary and the public of condemning him simply because of his family. ‘My children are being found guilty of being born the children of father Riina and mother Bagarella, an original sin that cannot be erased. Why can my children not simply be seen as young people like any others?’
Later, Giovanni Riina was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of four people. His younger brother, Giuseppe, who had also been arrested, was charged with Mafia membership and extortion – and got out of jail on a technicality in 2008. After six years’ imprisonment he returned to the narrow house in Via Scorsone, keenly awaited by his mother, his sisters and his aunts. That’s what I can’t help thinking of when I see a Rolex.
Salvo drives slowly along the twists and turns of Monte Pellegrino. Palermo stretches out below us in a veil of heat haze, endless rows of houses, satellite dishes and a sea that blurs with the horizon. Every time Shobha and I work in Palermo, we make a pilgrimage to Santa Rosalia, as if we were obeying an inner voice. And this time is no different, in spite of the mild protests of Letizia, who accuses us of heresy. For a moment we immerse ourselves in the view of the Bay of Palermo, transformed into the Conca d’Oro, the golden seashell, then we pass through a tunnel and we’ve arrived at the top of Monte Pellegrino, up by Santa Rosalia, the patron saint of the city, buried here under mountains of gold and precious stones.
As usual, I get the urge to splurge at the stall set up by the bearded dwarf-woman beside the steps below the pilgrimage church, and buy a bag full of devotional objects: Santa Rosalias supine and haloed, light-up Madonnas, oversized, glow-in-the-dark rosaries and, of course, Santa Rosalia candles as thick as your arm. Thus equipped, we climb the steps to the chapel, and notice a woman, who has plainly climbed Monte Pellegrino barefoot, now throwing herself to the ground and sliding up the steps to Santa Rosalia on her knees. She’s young, perhaps less than thirty. Somehow her fanaticism strikes us as weird, so Shobha and I run past her, giving her a wide berth, clutching our candles as if they were amulets to ward off the evil eye.
What does the barefoot woman of Santa Rosalia wish for? Her husband’s release from prison? A child? An illness healed? The chapel is full of votive gifts: silver calves and eyes, wax hearts and legs, dangle from the walls. Every time we come here there are different gifts hanging in the chapel. This time we spot a steel-boned corset with a note that says: For the mercy you showed, Mimma. Hanging beside it is a plastic bag containing a ponytail, and beneath it children’s shirts and bibs, and a rubber ring decorated with blue baby ribbons.
The chapel is in a cave in Monte Pellegrino, so cool that it makes you shiver even on the hottest days. Here two Rosalias wait for the faithful: one dressed in black, holding a death’s-head in her hand, her right arm reaching combatively into the air; and a lasciviously draped Santa Rosalia lying in a glass coffin, a Santa Rosalia who lies in her shrine full of precious objects, on a bed of rings, pearl necklaces, armbands – a sleeping beauty who has just fallen into a deep slumber.
Apart from us and the barefoot woman, there is no one in the chapel, no faithful sitting on the pews, no sexton collecting the burned-out candles – no one. Not a sound but drops of water falling from the ceiling on to metal runnels, from
which they are guided to the floor. The moisture creeps not just into the silver calves but also into the countless notes bearing wishes and expressions of gratitude; the paper is curled and mottled, and I wonder who actually reads the notes.
As we stand by the saint’s glass coffin, the young woman comes sliding along on her knees. She kneels next to us, prays with her head lowered and starts crying. She sobs till her back shudders.
Carla Madonia
Letizia is still captivated by the sight of the weeping woman beside the glass coffin as we drive down from Monte Pellegrino towards Mondello. She looks out of the window and doesn’t notice the ash falling from her cigarette. Perhaps Letizia is thinking about the photograph that she herself once took here, showing the bare feet of a woman sliding up to Saint Rosalia on her knees. Maybe she’s also thinking of the photograph of the widows whose faces were reflected in the windscreen of a hearse; maybe she’s thinking of the picture of the men peeing against a wall. Or maybe not. Although even her photographs of shredded corpses, mouths gaping in death, and hysterical widows always look as meticulously composed as if a neo-realist film director had organized the horror, her first concern was always the struggle; art came second. She fought for women and for the insane. Against men and against the powerful. She opened a theatre for women, edited and continues to edit a magazine for women, published books for women. She was the leader of a revolution, because when Letizia took charge of her own life divorce wasn’t even possible in Italy. In its place, there was the crime of honour killing: a man who killed his unfaithful wife to restore his honour could, until 1981, expect mitigating circumstances. From that point of view, in the 1960s it took a lot of courage to leave your husband and lead your own life.
Honoured Society, The Page 16