The Four Corners of Palermo

by Giuseppe Di Piazza

  “Nothing. But Vito’s always been afraid of my father. He left then and there, without a word of farewell; let’s just say that he took off running.”

  “Do you know where the children go to sleep on Saturday nights?”

  “At my sister-in-law’s place. In Passo di Rigano.”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “Certainly.”

  She looked daggers at me: stupid question, icy answer.

  That adverb rang out like a gong. Round over. I thanked her for the Idrolitina and said goodbye, knowing full well that I’d never write a line. That conversation, she’d told me with a glance, as she saw me out, had never taken place.

  Judging by appearances, Cosa Nostra has never offered women a particularly important role. It entrusted women to their men, and those men, in turn, entrusted their wives with their own offspring. A silent matriarchy, which inspired even Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: the role of Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, so central to the plot and to historical analysis, is strictly secondary once the front door of Casa Salina swings shut. And his wife, Maria Stella, is the real head of the family. She knows everything about her husband, all about his weaknesses, and she lets him play, the way you do with a pet cat. Meanwhile, it is she who runs everyone’s lives.

  Ninetta Bagarella, the younger sister of a bloodthirsty mob boss, Leoluca, was engaged in 1974 to Totò Riina, the best friend of another of her brothers, Calogero. It was a way of strengthening relations, sealing a bond between families, as well as creating a more powerful military force. Signora Bagarella Riina, described in online encyclopedias as “an Italian schoolteacher and criminal,” is a perfect reflection of Sicilian matriarchal pragmatism. She was well aware of her own role, she married the capo di tutti capi while he was on the run from the law, she gave birth to four children, some of whom are currently guests of the Italian prison system, she was ordered to pay restitution to Judge Borsellino’s family of 3,365,000 euros, and before every judge she spoke to she always described herself as a woman in love.

  Cosa Nostra never applied hiring quotas when it came to women. Cosa Nostra never had to.

  “Ciao, journalist. Tonight the apartment is a no-man’s-land.”

  “Where’s Fabri?”

  “Playing soccer. Don’t you remember that your friend is an athlete first and a man second?”

  Serena was barefoot, wearing a blue-and-white striped man’s shirt and white shorts, and her forefinger was marking a page roughly two-thirds of the way through The Red and the Black.

  “Busy day?”

  “We went to Mondello: bread and panelle and a stroll on the beach. A seagull followed us, scavenging the crumbs we dropped on the sand. Fabrizio talked to me about next summer. Do you really want to spend a month in France?”

  “Paris, more than France. There’s a girl …”

  “And I’ll come with you.”

  “Is Fabri okay with that?”

  “He wants me.”

  “So do I.” I corrected my phrasing: “So do I, want you to come with us to France.”

  She smiled and set down the book, dog-earing the top right corner of the page.

  “Do you know what time he’s coming home after soccer?”

  “Late: a match and then a pizza with the team. Are you going out?”

  “No. I wanted to read, watch TV. Listen to music. I don’t know.”

  “Shall we eat?”

  “I can make spaghetti with tuna roe. I bought some just the other day at the Vucciria market.”

  Serena grabbed me by the hand and dragged me into the kitchen, as if it was an emergency.

  “All right then, get to work, journalist. And work quickly, I’m hungry. I want roe, tuna spaghetti, whatever you’ve got.”

  I managed to toss my fatigue jacket on the sofa. I washed my hands in the kitchen sink.

  “You work, I’ll be the DJ.”

  I recognized the first few notes of Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”: piano, string bass, drums. And then the hypnotic sax came in. I loved evenings that emerged out of pure chance and pure jazz.

  In fifteen minutes the water was on the boil. Just enough time to grate some tuna roe, heat up some oil in a small pan with red pepper, mince the parsley, choose the spaghetti, set the table, open a can of cat food for Cicova, and find a bottle of white wine in the fridge to polish off.

  Serena played at being the guest. I found her sitting at the table, her hair tied back in a ponytail. I knew the weight and texture of her hair, and I liked it. I served her deferentially.

  “What did you do today? How many people did you kill?” she asked.

  “I just count the dead bodies. There are other people who do the actual work.”

  “How many?”

  “None. But I talked to a woman who’s trying to find her children.”

  “Where did she lose them?”

  “Her husband took them, a violent man, half a Mafioso. A troubled family history.”

  Serena stopped asking. After the spaghetti, she made me look around the house for some rum: “I want to see what it’s like.”

  “Sweetish,” I told her, “it’s made out of sugar cane. You ought to try some whiskey.”

  “I don’t even like the word. I want something sweet.”

  I found the rum, tucked away behind a bottle of Yoga peach nectar, in the pantry. A friend of my sister’s had brought it one night so he could make us a cocktail that he claimed was described in a book by Hemingway.

  Serena took a sip of rum. She made a face like an orchid and looked at me.

  “What about you, journalist?”

  “The word I like is ‘whiskey.’ ”

  I poured myself two fingers of scotch. I sat down on the sofa; Serena took off Coltrane and put on Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis. The first piece was like an endless question: “So What.” Serena gave me a so what look. Well?

  She sat down next to me. It was nine o’clock on a warm autumn night. She was wearing a shirt of Fabrizio’s and it did little to conceal her naked body underneath. Her breasts weren’t big but they had balance and perfection, qualities that right then were picturesque more than erotic. But still.

  But still, she was curled up next to me, a little too close to me, and we had two, maybe three hours to endanger our senses. I asked her about Stendhal.

  “He teaches you to value love.”

  She admitted that she’d fallen in love with the character of Julien Sorel. I told her that stories made out of paper and words usually end badly. I quoted from memory, and therefore incorrectly, a phrase of Henry Miller’s that I took as a guide in those years: “What doesn’t happen in the open street is false: literature.”

  She smiled, picking up on the sense of reality that I was trying to impart. Then I asked her about seventeenth-century art.

  She grimaced. Miles Davis didn’t go with Annibale Carracci. And just then, she’d chosen “So What.”

  “Well, so?”

  She looked inside me. The place was a mess.

  “So what?” I gulped.

  “I’m talking about you. You and other women. That Simona the other night. What are you doing to yourself? Why are you scattering yourself in all directions?”

  “I didn’t choose. That’s the way I like it, that’s all; all I want is a night’s pleasure, two nights if it’s something that seems to be working.”

  I threw back a swallow of scotch, saying a mental prayer to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. Serena took my hand: her skin was dry. My heartbeat went all syncopated; Bill Evans was setting the beat on the piano.

  “But if I were a girl who’d just come to Palermo on vacation, and if you met me at a party, and if I made you laugh and you made me laugh, and then we came home, here, to this apartment … would you or wouldn’t you go to bed with me?”

  “But you’re Fabrizio’s girlfriend.”

  “Stupid, my question is abstract. Would you or wouldn’t you?”

  “Is my answer supposed to be
abstract?”

  “Yes or no?”

  “No.”

  She shot me a challenging look.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re Fabrizio’s girlfriend. There’s nothing abstract about that.”

  “You really are holding on to reality too hard: a journalist. But you’re sweet.”

  Her breast, poorly concealed by the shirt, seemed to nod in agreement. That breast had to agree. I felt like a fool, but a heroic one. This time, the code of friendship had been honored, which had not always been the case.

  Serena let go of my hand, which was damp from my racing heartbeat, while hers remained perfectly dry. She went back to the record player, took off “Blue in Green,” and put on a singer who’d performed at the Sanremo Music Festival and who wasn’t bad. She chose a track called “Vita spericolata.” She made me get up from the couch.

  “All right, journalist. But at least let’s dance.”

  I tried out a few awkward steps, at a distance from her. I watched the way she moved perfectly, the curve of her hips appearing now and again in the way that her shirt clung to her body, the high, rounded shape of her bottom, framed by her white shorts. She was beautiful, self-confident, dangerous.

  Yes, I’d go to bed with you, I thought. And I ran away, with some stupid excuse, and hid in my bedroom.

  At eleven o’clock, Fabrizio came home. And our friendship was safe.

  I tried to get to sleep, but in vain. I spent a couple of hours tossing and turning, sitting up in bed and reading a book, failing to register a word, tossing the book on the floor. Lights off. Lights on again. One hundred twenty minutes of listening to my own voice, inside my head, telling Serena no. “No. Because you’re Fabrizio’s girlfriend.” A real idiot, and at the same time forthright, heroic. I found Serena far more attractive than Simona or any of the other young women who passed through our apartment during that period. What held me back where she was concerned was a single adversative conjunctive adverb that appeared before my eyes as a gigantic, blinking neon sign, filling my head with its glaring light. A single word, common and everyday: HOWEVER. “I really like Serena a lot, HOWEVER, she’s my best friend’s girlfriend.” I thought about the attraction that could pull a man and a woman together, solid as a porphyry cube, firm to the touch, something you couldn’t live without at any moment of your day, a sentimental amulet you carried with you wherever you went, a physical sensation that ran through your muscles, a thought against which you measured all your other thoughts. I felt an attraction as dense as marble for Serena, the concrete substance of my desire. HOWEVER. However, nothing was going to come of it.

  In that dream state, half asleep, half awake, filled with overlapping memories, mirrors, and reflected images, I saw myself again that afternoon, at the home of that diminutive, sharp-edged woman. I heard her voice as she told me about the “hands raised” against her. A man feverish with cocaine and madness, beating his own wife, the mother of his children. A violent fool, I thought, but still, half of a married couple. Vito and Rosaria. Just like Fabrizio and Serena. Or me and Serena. Like Simona and me. Different types of attraction, variant forms of love. Some of them unhealthy, others literary or obsessive. I suddenly regained a sense of clarity and I switched on the light. I wasn’t sleepy; I was never sleepy in those years in Palermo. A friend of my father’s who was a neurologist, whom I’d gone to see the previous summer after nearly fifteen days without sleep, explained to me—making use of a metaphor—that my sleep problems were caused by “a wrinkling of the cerebral cortex.” A defensive shrinking, I decided; more or less like what an octopus does when it sees an enemy approaching. It contracts its muscles and the surface of its head becomes rough and compact. I was doing it to defend myself from my own life: the life of a young man, age twenty-four, who came home at night and had to scrape human blood off the soles of his shoes at the front door. An uncommon way of life: varied and profoundly sick.

  I turned off the light when I woke up again, at a little after six. I had collapsed under the weight of my own self-pity. In an hour or so I was expected for work at the newspaper. Report everything I’d learned. Make sure that the soles of my shoes left no stains on the linoleum.

  The estimate that the writer Enrico Deaglio makes is ten thousand dead in southern Italy, over the course of a decade or so. A little smaller than the number of dead in Kosovo. But NATO intervened in Kosovo. The forces they sent to Palermo, in contrast, were a few cops and some carabinieri. Thousands of people were shot down in cold blood or “disappeared,” which means kidnapped and killed, during the second great Mafia war, which broke out in the late 1970s and came to an end in 1993. Bodies that have never been found again, a generation of Mafiosi exterminated, the Italian state left in tatters, an endless list of names before which we can only bow our heads: Boris Giuliano, Gaetano Costa, Piersanti Mattarella, Michele Reina, Pio La Torre, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, Rocco Chinnici, Emanuele Basile, Mario D’Aleo, Ninni Cassarà, Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino … judges, honest politicians, policemen, carabinieri. Some of them are well-known throughout Italy, others less so.

  Those were years of an undeclared war. Correspondents for the major newspapers were sent to Palermo every once in a while on the kind of random basis that guides the lives of war correspondents on the front line: today Beirut, tomorrow Belfast, the day after tomorrow Palermo, trying to figure out in the few hours available why the Corleonese were no longer allies with the clan of Passo di Rigano. We young journalists watched as the big names came raining down from above on our daily routines, and we thought they were heaven-sent gifts: someone else cares about Palermo, about the world inside this blood-filled aquarium. They flew in, they tried to understand, they filed their articles, they flew away. Then, for those of us left behind, the daily grind of death started up again. One morning, a little before eight, I was sent out to Via Messina Marine to cover a murder: someone had shot a traveling seafood vendor. His stall was little more than a cart with two wheels and a pair of handles, filled that morning with nothing but jumbo shrimp. The fishmonger’s dead body lay on the sidewalk, surrounded by shrimp and a large puddle of blood. That image of shrimp bobbing in the blood of the man who sold them was emblazoned in my memory. It seemed to me that the complementary nature of the two shades of red were the epitome of some form of refinement. That was just one more morning when the soles of my shoes were smeared with blood.

  The next morning, in the newsroom, I had my first espresso of the day with Matilde, an editor in the entertainment section with whom I’d had a fleeting affair two years earlier. She lived in a two-room apartment on the third floor of a nineteenth-century apartment building overlooking the harbor. The yellow light from the street lamps that lined the waterfront leaked into our nights through the slats of the shutters, casting an egg yolk—hued ladder on the dark wall to the left of her bed. We made love illuminated only by that saffron glow. Then, in the morning, well before seven, we’d leave for the newspaper: she took one route, I took another. We never came in together. At work, we ignored each other. Even at that age we lived undercover, unnecessarily, but driven to it by what the city was teaching us.

  That day, as we sipped our coffee together, we chatted idly about the city’s political situation. Then she told me about a new play that the theatrical director Michele Corrieri was developing with the young actors of Scenikos: it was going to be based on the Mafia war, but transfigured into a Greek drama. I told her briefly about the investigation I was working on. She caressed my face: the stubble on my cheeks made the gesture somehow less intimate.

  I went back to the city newsroom and went into my boss’s office. It was 7:10 in the morning and his adrenaline was already up to afternoon levels. He slammed down the receiver and glared at me as if I was parked illegally.

  “I talked to Carriglio’s wife,” I began.

  “What did she tell you?”

  “That he’s a bastard, that he used to beat her, even in front of the kids, and that
a year ago her father, Tempesta, had the man shot.”

  “Did she say it in those exact words?”

  “As good as.”

  “As good as, my ass.”

  “It doesn’t matter, I can’t write a word: the conversation with Rosaria Savasta was off the record. It officially never happened.”

  At that point, my boss was angry enough to write me a parking ticket. He might even have called a tow truck and had me towed.

  “So now what?”

  “So now I’m going to call the chief of the mobile squad, Gualtieri.”

  I wouldn’t have to. Just then, the guy at the desk next to mine, Roberto Pozzallo, a courts reporter, short, greasy-haired, the son of wealthy farmers, shouted my name, followed by the words: “Hurry! It’s Gualtieri on the phone for you!”

  The chief of the mobile squad said only a few words: “We’ve arrested Vito Carriglio.” Then he added “Ciao,” and hung up.

  Ten minutes later, I was outside his office door.

  “Come right in, the chief is expecting you,” said a patrolman sitting at what looked like an elementary shool desk: the top was slightly inclined, in dark wood, with a groove for pencils.

  Gualtieri was at his desk and he was toying with the Juventus pennant that he used as a paperweight, set on a small flagstaff planted in a small wooden base.

  “We picked up your ‘ugly customer’ at Santa Flavia. He was in a trattoria; we got a tip from an informant who works in the fishing marina. We took him in for kidnapping a minor.”

  “What about the children?”

  “They weren’t there. He wouldn’t say a word.”

  “Have you talked to the wife?”

  “Not yet. First I wanted to hear what she had to say to you. I know you went to see her,” he said, putting down the pennant.

  I’d already guessed that he’d had me followed. That’s the way deals with the police always work: one side adds a few extra terms to the deal, and the other side never knows it.

  “Okay. She told me that he beat her, even in front of the children. That the Savasta family couldn’t stand him and considered him half a man. Concerning last year’s shooting, she made an allusion that as far as I’m concerned was unmistakable: Tempesta ordered his soldiers to injure the man.”