In Sicily

by Norman Lewis

  Our project for our second day in Palermo was to visit these and several other buildings threatened with closure, but this had to be postponed due to a major dislocation of the city’s traffic. A demonstration had been announced by employees of the municipality in protest over wages and working conditions, and a long and slow-moving column of protesters had taken to the streets. Such demonstrations were frequent and their organizers had become masters of the art of imposing total inertia in those parts of the city centre where traffic congestion was at all times an insoluble problem. Experience had taught us that on such occasions excursions could only be undertaken on foot.

  In reality this involved no more than a minor change of plans, for in this beehive of human activity many places of great interest within walking distance of the hotel waited to be explored. The pleasant muddle of this great city invites spur-of-the-moment investigation in any direction. Nothing is easier than to make a start up the nearest main street, then branch off into the first side-turning leading inevitably to a great building or a leafy square.

  This was clearly the time to step down the nearest alley-way leading to the Ballaro market. We were there in a matter of minutes, plunging into what might have been a corner of Dickensian London. Space is rare in Palermo and wherever it is to be found is put to maximum use. People crammed themselves into cellars at night, and slept on the stair-landings of the old palaces and even in the more capacious cupboards. Recent collapses had provided the Ballaro with a little extra space, now crammed with stalls. All Sicilian towns have their resident magicians, as in the instance of Francesco Gambino of Corleone, in which a substantial minority of the population place their trust. Here small-scale operators were in action with remedies and spells identical in some instances to those employed by the Carthaginians and ancient Greeks, and a whiff of incense cones and burnt offerings came through, mingling comfortably with the special odour of poverty. The sick still swallow down powdered amber, and the dust of St Rita’s bones. Where a little space could be claimed a pair of elderly men sat facing each other at small tables playing the card game called scopo. On certain feast days, we were told, custom allowed women to gamble in public for small sums of money in this game, although otherwise male and female players are always separated.

  The great social reformer Danilo Dolci, whom I had met many years before with James McNeish, mentions that in his time teams involved in the clandestine trade in horse manure roamed the streets at night collecting all they could of this sought-after commodity for use in basement gardens. This was illegal, as the manure was the property of the municipality, and could only be secured on payment of a bribe. Now the last of the thousand or so coaches of the aristocracy are no more and with their loss the trade is at an end.

  Hope in such places as this has always been a shallow affair, and visiting the nearby Cortile Cascino back in 1959 Dolci had noted that 498 persons lived in 118 rooms, some 200 yards from the cathedral. Only one family had a lavatory. The others cooked, ate and defecated in their one room, although, as elsewhere, ‘decently behaved’ males relieved themselves on the railway lines.

  Of the city of Palermo it would be fair to say that it is a place of limitless excitements. The newspapers are glutted with sensations. Three leading politicians out of four are generally exposed as corrupt, the death rate by violence is twice that of Rome, a palace falls down every year, State processions are held up by continual funerals, and in 1998 the postal authorities disposed of an accumulation of undelivered letters by burning them or throwing them into the sea. In the poor areas, such as the Albergheria, more people are treated by magicians than by doctors. About one half of the prostitutes are black, of these Nigerians being preferred, ‘for the sincerity of their beliefs’, and also for their expertise in ‘African tricks’. It is generally agreed that the best coffee in the world is served, in semi-slum surroundings, by Tunisian immigrants, who are possessed of huge charm.

  Next day - and apparently this was often the case on a Monday - the week’s news opened on a note of frivolity. A paper had carried out a detailed investigation into the changing sexual attitudes of the people of Palermo as illustrated by what went on in its famous Parco della Favorita, a pleasure garden extending for a mile or so along the north-western outskirts of the city. This once secluded area, famous until well into this century for the number and frequency of the duels fought there, had also always been seen by the romantically-minded as exceptionally suitable for the conduct of al fresco amours. Much as the Sicilians might have adhered to their other customs, in matters sexual the change in attitude as described by newspapermen who surveyed the park with their pocket telescopes was spectacular.

  Whatever the encroachment of foreign liberalism, the Sicilians are still inclined by custom to shut away vulnerable females after dark. This is perhaps all to the good if thereby they are assisted in their studies for careers. Nevertheless the new generation was stalwart in its defence of sexual freedoms. The Giornale della Sicilia reported that many trysting couples now made for the park in their cars when the sun was still high in the heavens. They were encouraged, the newspaper thought, by the fact that the occupants of so many other cars were clearly there for the same reason. There was one very small drawback. The park authorities had suddenly enlisted uniformed wardens to police the situation, but these were only empowered to impose small fines for damaging the bushes in the course of whatever the cars’ occupants were doing.

  It was evident even to a visitor like myself that many lovers, unable to find time to drive out to La Favorita, had found substitutes for its leafy environment nearer to home. These included the Via Filangeri, until recently a quiet dead-end down by the port, which had become so crowded that cars were queuing until a parking space became vacant.

  Antonio Manganelli, Chief of Police of Palermo, had written a letter to the press, remarkably liberal in its sentiments. ‘I am a broad-minded man,’ he said, ‘doing my best to move with the times, and I invite my fellow citizens to follow my example. I recommend those who take offence at the sexual antics that have been described simply to look in another direction. Such complaints as have been published are trivial in a city under assault by real criminals, and I refuse to allow my hard-pressed men to be diverted from important duties to attempt to remedy them.’

  The hard news that was to rescue Palermo from the trivialities of the weekend broke next day, and was eventually to draw an excited crowd to the Piazza Ballaro, the area devoted to the food trade under the awe-inspiring silhouette of the ancient and gigantic church of II Gesu. Manganelli had found a case that he could get his teeth into - that of a Mafia feud of the old-fashioned kind nowadays normally confined to unimportant provincial towns. This time it was in the heart of the capital itself.

  A function of such piazzas is to provide a central, traffic-free area where business and pleasure, wonderfully combined, can be discussed in a leisurely and civilized fashion. Here in the Ballaro one of life’s satisfactions was to waste as much time as possible outside a cafe, sipping a tiny cup of the wonderful coffee made by some illegal Tunisian immigrant. Normally by ten in the morning a vacant chair in the Piazza was as hard to find as a parking space in the Via Filangeri, but on this particular Tuesday, 24 March 1998, most of the cafes’ habitues were crowded outside the premises of one Marcello Fava, the island’s leading wholesale butcher. Press photographers pushed their way to the front, followed by a television crew and a number of German tourists shepherded by a guide, and soon it was no longer possible for latecomers such as ourselves to see what was going on.

  Next day pictures appeared in the papers. The shutters had been pulled down over the Fava shop-fronts, and wreaths had been stacked against them on the pavement. Notices on the shutters announced Marcello Fava’s forthcoming funeral, adding that floral tributes would be welcome. At some point someone in the crowd with inside information had broken the news to those standing nearby that the announced funeral was no more than a macabre, theatrical gesture, for Ma
rcello was still alive, but would now be regarded as dead by the members of his family. What had happened was that ten days previously he had been arrested and charged with being the ‘regent’ of the Porta Nuova Mafia family and henchman of Vito Vitale, widely regarded as a future head of the Honoured Society despite being on the run for his numerous crimes. Facing the likelihood of life imprisonment Marcello promptly followed the example of Tommaso Buscetta, a leading mafioso who, finding himself in such a situation years before, had established the historical precedent of collaborating with justice in return for his freedom and police protection.

  On the day when Fava’s decision was made known his wife and four brothers went into mourning; the mock funeral was arranged and the business was to remain closed until this had taken place. It was pointed out in the press that ‘transversal’ vendettas were now the fashion and vengeance was executed on the families and relatives of pentiti, as they were called, who placed themselves beyond reach of punishment from their ‘clan’ by accepting the protection of the police. Hence the spectacular repudiation, the mock funeral, the wreaths - even the sermon by Padre Scordato, the local priest who while skilfully avoiding reference to the empty coffin made a somewhat opaque reference to Marcello Fava ‘passing to a new life’. Nevertheless could it be, the family seemed to have feared, that their fiction of grief had failed to impress? This may have been the case, for shortly it became known that, whether they liked it or not, Marcello’s wife and children had been spirited away by the police and placed out of danger ‘far from Palermo’.

  Manganelli’s prompt and energetic response in this case was undoubtedly due to the belief that the cupola – the mysterious ruling body or council accepted as being in control of Mafia policy - had ordered an all-out attack on the growing number of deserters who had sold out to the police.

  The Fava affair had followed close on the heels of a monstrous vendetta, the bones of which had been picked over even in the international press. This had exploded in the tiny crime-ridden town of San Giuseppe Iato, some thirty miles from the capital in the most poverty-stricken part of the island. The wretchedness of life in this place was complicated by the presence of two powerful and competitive Mafia families, both headed by psychopathic killers. One of these, Baldassare Di Maggio, had finally been arrested on a murder charge, and although unable to read or write, his presence made a deep and disturbing impression in the court. He was described by the prosecution as ‘mysterious’ and referred to as a schemer who not only killed his enemies but enjoyed dabbling in politics. When several years previously the former Italian premier and head of the Christian Democratic party, Giulio Andreotti, had been charged with involvement in the murder of a left-wing journalist, Di Maggio had gleefully described a meeting between the premier and the then accepted head of the Mafia, Toto Riina, reporting that the pair had exchanged kisses in Mafia style. This was dangerous stuff indeed, but Di Maggio had gone on to make things worse for himself by telling the press that he had been offered huge sums of money to retract but had declined to do so.

  Faced with a life sentence in a prison in which overcrowding compelled four tiers of prisoners to tie themselves nightly into their bunks and where inmates sometimes quietly departed this life shortly after a gulp of the prison’s famous ‘morning coffee’, Di Maggio followed Buscetta’s lead and decided to collaborate.

  The reaction of his local opponents, the Brusca clan, was to be foreseen. Di Maggio was held in a police stronghold where he blurted out the secrets of the Honoured Society plus those of a former premier who, although fallen from grace and currently on trial, still had powerful friends. Two months after Di Maggio’s switch of loyalties his uncle and a cousin fell into an ambush. With that, all twenty members of his extended family publicly denounced him as a liar and refused police protection. Di Maggio’s brother Emanuele, on his way back to town in the evening with his flock, was killed by fifteen pistol shots through the head. According to the coroner’s report he ran two metres with at least one bullet in his brain before collapsing.

  What seemed of most interest to the press in this case was the use by the assassin of a 7.65mm pistol of a kind unknown in Sicily, where such executions are conventionally carried out with the lupara – a sawn-off shotgun loaded with buckshot. As excitement spread, the general opinion was that this was the work of an agent from overseas. La Forte, the Public Attorney, commenting on the incident, said, ‘It is to be presumed that all of you have heard of Cosa Nostra’s military arm. Rest assured that we have precise ideas on the subject of those responsible for this crime, even if I am not prepared to discuss the subject in the press.’ A profound silence on the subject was to follow.

  In 1993 a low-level mafioso ally, Santino Di Matteo, became yet another pentito and turned against the Brusca clan. Following this his twelve-year-old son, Giuseppe, was kidnapped, held in an underground bunker near the village of San Giuseppe Iato for over two years and then strangled. The corpse was dissolved in acid. It was reported that in accordance with an ancient custom observed in such cases the boy’s executioner bowed to the body before its immersion in the vat.

  7

  IN THE YEARS between my last visit to Sicily and this one in 1998, the excellent newspaper L’Ora had closed down. It had not survived the loss of its editor Mauro Di Mauro who had simply vanished one day, never to be seen again. Gioacchino was now a psychology professor at the University of Palermo, where he was regarded as an authority on the phenomenon of the Mafia. Among his publications recommended to me was a paper in English translation entitled The Mafia Feeling. I read this and learned a good deal from it, but reading it in the original decided that ‘feeling’ might not have been quite the word. Sentire was probably adequate in Italian, but I could not believe that its English equivalent could contain all those undertones of mystery, compulsion, intuition, obsession, frustration, hope and despair simmering under the surface of the original. ‘The Mafia feeling’ was neutral, devoid of rage. When Vito Vitale, Marcello Fava’s boss, heard of the strangulation of Di Matteo’s son, he was said to have shown little but anger that he, in his position, had not been invited to carry out the execution.

  Gioacchino took Lesley and me to see Professor Franco Di Maria, head of department of the Faculty of Social Psychology at the University of Palermo. Both men were students of the Mafia, but extremely modest about the possible effect of their findings upon public opinion. ‘Our hope,’ said Di Maria, ‘is that at least we can help people to understand.’ The future, it seemed, was far from bright, and Procuratore Giancarlo Caselli had recently announced that he was afraid the situation was worsening. ‘At most,’ Caselli said, ‘we are fighting a holding action. No more than that, and I absolutely forbid people to tell me that this criminal conspiracy with which we are faced is approaching extinction. Cosa Nostra has never ceased to be what it is now: strong, rich and organized - as brutal a beast as ever in fact, and it is at our peril that we relinquish the fight against it.’

  Gioacchino’s life on a left-wing newspaper had been ebullient and precarious when we first met, but now his struggle was to be continued on an ideological level together with his fellow professors at the university. The attack on the Mafia enemy was organized on a scientific level and in collaboration they had produced several major books on socio-political themes in which the undiminished Mafia problem was frequently ventilated. A recent paper of their authorship probes into a special mentality prevalent among the Sicilian people largely to be ascribed to the harsh vicissitudes of their past, plus a continuing infatuation with unsatisfactory role models from the West.

  A Sicilian, agree the authors, may take a perverse pride in his Mafia allegiance because it dramatizes the circumstances of an unrewarding life. ‘Here in Sicily,’ Di Maria has written, ‘the Mafia does not grow by forcing but in the most natural way, like a prickly pear which only responds to cutting back by an increased vigour of growth. To oppose it ineffectually only encourages its strength. Obedience to the group has always b
een considered a stronger motivation than any personal advantage, or the acquisition otherwise of prestige, and it is a sinister fact that a form of suppressed sympathy should exist among certain apparently respectable citizens. This results in penalties imposed by the law for Mafia-style offences being frequently less severe than those inflicted for common criminality.’ For both men the traditional family remains the enemy to the evolution of a modern society, since it is so deeply engrained with the social patterns of the far past. A recent star in the dark firmament of the Mafia was asked the frank question as to why he had become a mafioso and replied in a way that was not difficult to understand: ‘Because before that I was nothing, then I looked at my life and took it into my own hands. After that things changed. I went my own way, and now I have become a powerful member of a powerful group.’

  Professor Di Maria told me of an ex-student who was a member of a powerful Sicilian Mafia family who wished to free himself from its control and discovered that this could only be achieved while living on the island by changing himself into a homosexual. By doing this he was able to escape the Mafia’s deeply rooted influence. Most of his life was devoted to professional interests on the Italian mainland, and to recover his normal sexuality all he had to do was to go there. Whereas on the mainland he lived the life of a heterosexual, on returning home to Sicily he assumed an abnormal, but protective, homosexual role in an environment that demands above all omertà (manliness) of a male.