In Sicily

by Norman Lewis

  There were other aspects of the Mafia syndrome, Di Maria reminded me. Their history has been dominated by an inbred fear and distrust of all those in authority, and above all of the labour recruiters, the agents and officers of the feudal estates, the policemen, the gaolers, the lawgivers and their laws protecting the rich. The current heroes of the Sicilian bourgeois population are Falcone and Borsellino - brave judges who were destroyed by the Mafia, but in the minds of slum-dwellers or ruined peasants still cronies and protectors of the rich. These were no heroes to the adolescents from the slums.

  Our talk turned to Calabria, the poorest of all the regions of mainland Italy. The Mafia code had now spread there too, carried mysteriously as if by proselytizers of a sinister new religion.

  The Mafia had always been seen as a wholly Sicilian phenomenon, imitated elsewhere by minor and unsophisticated criminal associations lacking its organization, history and power. In residential areas of Naples, for example, each street had its saint lovingly housed in a shrine, on watch over the welfare but also the morality of its inhabitants, and thereby supporting a relatively trouble-free existence. The saints were often credited with exceptional powers, and when pushed could produce ‘a miracle’, as when marvelling crowds watched St Gennaro stop the lava flow from Vesuvius entering the city, merely by spreading his arms. Threatened with the wrath of a thousand or so of these protectors of Neapolitan virtue, the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia, was hardly more potent and significant as a criminal organization than a black-market operator who specialized in stealing the wheels off parked cars.

  Further to the south and thus deeper into poverty and isolation, Calabria had its own second-rate criminal organization specializing in kidnappings and a watered-down form of Mafia terror. It had also become notorious for child miscreants - in Italian / Baby Killer - who had learned what they knew of the authentic Sicilian Mafia through a few much-censored and sentimentalized films. They were the victims of the increasing impact of a poverty hardly conceivable elsewhere in Europe - a new version of poverty based on intense unemployment in which the males of a family might spend most of their lives without work.

  A school-leaver with no prospects of any kind might once in a while be given a few coins to clean out a barn, but the hunger of the young is not only for food, but for action other than time spent hanging around the local amusement arcade-cum-bar. For many juveniles their first taste of ‘real life’ in this Calabrian outback is gang membership even while at school. A matter of days before my discussion with Gioacchino and Di Maria news had come through of a gun-battle between schoolboys in the Calabrian town of Cinquefronda in which one boy had been shot dead. His twelve-year-old brother, a witness to the murder, could not be induced by any means to disclose to the police the identity of the killer.

  At the root of the problem, both Gioacchino and Di Maria believed, were the values of the traditional Sicilian or Calabrian family. ‘I give you my support,’ the old-fashioned father is supposed to have intoned, ‘and in return you will give me your loyalty.’ And this, expressed in various ways, was the Mafia’s view of the situation. In the past there was no human being to be discovered anywhere on earth less protected than the peasants who formed a vast proportion of the population of feudal Sicily. In this downtrodden mass, existing only to be exploited, the resolute, silent and implacable leader of a wholly acquiescent family tribe could at least better the prospects, however miserable, for all. If two or three such peasant resisters could sometimes secretly join forces, then so much the better. Thus secrecy, cultivated as a fine art, was key to a measure of success that could even come close to freedom.

  An investigator into the origins of the word mafia was of the opinion that it dates back to the Norman conquest of the island and is derived from ma fia – the ‘place of refuge’ of Arab peasants of the times when they were rounded up for slavery on the invaders’ new estates. If this is so, how strange and sad it is that from peasant resistance of the early Middle Ages Sicily should have inherited a title now applied to such masters of the art of exploitation and self-enrichment as Vito Vitale and Toto Riina.

  If the power of the Sicilian family was the root of the trouble, for my professor friends the sensible remedy was to mount an assault against it that would weaken its grip on the nation. Their remedy was to increase youthful activity in every possible way. It was noted that with the exception of the worst case-histories in Calabria, most young people agreed that their schooldays had been the happiest times of their lives. Therefore, every effort should be made to extend school-leaving age, and to encourage sporting activities along with academic studies. Every plan that had as its goal the lessening of the family’s bonds was worthy of consideration but in particular Gioacchino and Di Maria proposed an original and revolutionary project called the Solarium.

  The Solarium proposed to send young people of both sexes on training courses in skilled labour. What was revolutionary in this case was that unmarried mothers were to be included in the scheme and taught men’s skills. The University of Palermo had acquired two or three acres of abandoned land on the city’s western outskirts where a number of unmarried mothers, doomed in the normal course of things to an unsatisfactory and penurious existence, were to live with their children, in a state of independence almost equal to that of males. This was to be achieved by promoting cheap accommodation for them in socially pleasant and companionable surroundings, but above all by training them to acquire masculine skills. Thus they would enter a market previously wholly under masculine control, and might even expect to receive masculine rates of pay.

  At first glance the Solarium was an encouraging name for a scarred industrial building consisting of little more than four walls set in what had once been a rich man’s exotic garden. Originally a place of rare and even spectacular plants, it had now surrendered to the strangling of weeds. The basin of a fountain was rimmed by moss, and crow-like birds perched in the branches of rare trees and filled the air with their melancholic squawkings.

  In these faintly depressing surroundings, however, the girl trainees and those who had completed their courses came as a surprise. They were already - or were to become - carpenters, joiners, painters, technicians and the rest, and appeared to be tackling whatever job they worked on with energy and high spirits. Instead of smocks and overalls, some of these girls were dressed as if they had looked in on their way to a party. Hairstyles were often elaborate and one girl operating a whining electric saw was festooned in gold chains. But most important of all was the mood of high spirits. Complimenting Gioacchino on the good looks of his operatives, I was overheard, and a cheer went up.

  The atmosphere was wonderfully relaxed. The trainees were paid for their work. They ate cheaply at a restaurant with a permanently roaring television. Gioacchino agreed that to some extent this enterprise was part of a broader campaign to provide Sicilian youngsters with a public existence. At that moment, as if in illustration of his theme, a girl who would have been about the same age as those at work here passed with an older woman, possibly her mother, down the path along the Solarium’s boundary. I could not help noticing that she did not hold herself fully erect but was submissively round-shouldered, as if by custom, like a figure in a shrine.

  Returning once again to the subject of life in the Solarium, I said, ‘At least they all seem very cheerful. Are there any drawbacks?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Having a little money to spend these days may make them more acquisitive. They probably don’t eat as much as they should. The craze now is to save up to buy a mobile phone. They’ll go hungry for a week or two to have one of those.’

  8

  LIFE I N SICILY tends to present itself as one under pressure of extraordinary extremes. The Sicilian is the legatee of an ancient and splendid civilization from which he has inherited human standards of an impressive kind. On the other hand he is also under assault by a species of social disease, the Mafia, for which no cure is yet apparent.

  The Sicil
ians are fond of animals, particularly dogs and cats, for which public fiestas are arranged; there are weekly columns in the newspapers which are devoted to their interests. The writers are concerned with helping to provide their pets the most enjoyable of lives. Animal feast days are increasingly celebrated in the vicinity of the larger towns, and animal cemeteries are cropping up all over the island with arrangements for interments of all degrees of quality with appropriate headstones, inscriptions and floral arrangements. Nowadays cats are frequently cremated, although burial is usually chosen for dogs. The first funeral for a horse has recently been conducted, and more are to take place.

  As well as their pets, Sicilians are interested in the wildlife of the island, much of which, owing to its climate and remoteness from human interference, is rich and strange. Sicily possesses eagles galore, which are greatly admired. Recently a rare species was winged by a sportsman in the north of the island, and, after being in care for several months, the eagle was taken by plane for release over the wild, trackless and entangled woodlands of Ficuzza.

  Wildlife reserves are being created at a feverish speed both in Sicily and on the Italian mainland, where they are now seen as helpful in the drive for tourism upon which the future of many of the remoter areas may depend. Of those already under development none is likely to equal in interest Lo Zingaro - a coastal strip running north from Castellammare del Golfo to San Vito lo Capo - parts of which through sheer inaccessibility were visited, until the last few years, almost exclusively by smugglers. The climate, rock formations and soil composition of this area of western Sicily produce a range of vegetation that is locally unique. There are flowers that grow only on this particular site, and a number of extremely rare birds. Here tall, spare, spindly trees with tiny, scintillating leaves thrust their roots deep among the rocks and the brine-soaked soil at the water’s edge and dangle clusters of wan little blossoms among the strands of mist. It is a place of the softest colours. Human presence is recorded by ruined hutments of great age, and there are vast caves decorated occasionally with vaguely suggestive archaic forms.

  We had arrived during the dry months in which Lo Zingaro is effectively sacrificed to pyromaniacs and this season, alas, had already produced several major fires. On 29 July 1998 an outbreak of fire raging in the central area of the reserve risked its reduction to ashes. But had this been a normal outbreak, of which a few are to be expected at that time of year, or was it a response to a rumoured refusal to contribute funds to the powerful local Mafia clan of Castellammare del Golfo? At the height of the conflagration a former director of the reserve had been charged in court with having received a bribe of 30 million lire for suppressing a contract for the services of two motor boats to collaborate with the fire brigade. From all the evidence offered it seemed likely that there were occasions when it suited the director’s purposes for fire to continue unrestrained. Thus more of the rare trees of the Zingaro would have been burned to ashes.

  Wildlife always came high in my personal interests and its exceptional endowments in this field always drew me to Lo Zingaro whenever the journey could be arranged. This was often a difficult business, as until recently, in bad weather, the area remained isolated at the end of third-class roads. Partinico, once also rich in rare fauna and flora, was relatively accessible, being only fifteen miles from the capital. Although less spectacular in what it had to offer, it was the next best thing - rich in such wonderful birds as hoopoes and bee-eaters, and in my early days in this region, of easy access to a sea rich in fish. Once there had been a flourishing Roman colony here, of which many traces remained, but in our times it was largely inhabited by poverty-stricken peasants, a prey to a Mafia of the cruellest kind keeping them in subjection through control of the water supplies.

  Gioacchino drove us over to the town through a landscape typical of western Sicily. It gave the impression that it had been fought over many times in the past for it was devoid of isolated buildings, and the few small villages, such as the bandit Giuliano’s birthplace at Montelepre, had been built on the top of steep hills, or clung precariously to their sides.

  ‘When were you last in these parts?’ Gioacchino asked, and I told him that apart from flying visits largely to photograph birds, it had been twenty-five years earlier. ‘A London newspaper wanted a piece about Danilo Dolci, and he arranged to look after me himself for about ten days.

  ‘Partinico was the most awful place I’d ever seen,’ I continued. ‘Someone had been murdered on the night of my arrival and they’d left the body lying all night in the street outside the door of Dolci’s headquarters, in which guests including myself usually stayed.’

  ‘You have a surprise coming,’ Gioacchino said. ‘Some big spenders are living in the area these days. It’s very much in the news.’

  We climbed up into Partinico and for a moment I thought we had missed our way and taken a wrong direction. These were the suburban streets of any satellite town of Palermo: rows of small, newish houses, polished handles on front doors and a pot of flowers here and there on a window-sill. I had hoped to be able to find Dolci’s house, but Gioacchino had never seen it and we found ourselves trapped in a one-way system with no-parking signs until eventually we arrived at what was clearly the main street. At the entrance to this I thought for a moment I might have spotted the converted warehouse in which Dolci had worked - it was the only old building in sight - but a line of cars was following and there was no way of turning back to investigate. We pulled in at the second of two small squares, called (in English) the Fountain Adonis, above which church bells crashed incessantly. The walls of the square’s only building were faced with polished marble and the counter of the cafe it contained was piled with cakes and brightly-coloured snacks. A private house overlooked the square and Gioacchino pointed at the railings of its balcony which even in these times were draped with cloth so as to protect the modesty of girls gathering there in the cool of the evening, and the males passing beneath from impure thoughts.

  In and around the Piazza del Duomo shops sold sports clothes, fishing gear, ceramics and pictures of cottages with thatched roofs to an affluent class who had come there in BMWs and Alfas. Gioacchino mentioned that as soon as people settled down in such a town they invented little habits based on custom and leisure, and here it was the habit to park the car and stroll from one piazza to the other and back a number of times.

  Meanwhile I continued my obsession with the sombre building from the past that seemed to have survived in the surrounding glamour until the brink of the Millennium, convinced now that it was the one in which Danilo Dolci’s pilgrims from all over the world had been lodged.

  I mentioned my conviction to Lesley and told her about the corpse left all night in the street outside, encircled by the police, as was their custom, by a chalked frontier line no one was allowed to cross.

  ‘Would Dolci have been scared?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sure he wasn’t. In Partinico in those days you saw a corpse in the street once a week. It upset him that foreigners who had come to visit him from civilized countries should be exposed to such experiences. A body couldn’t be officially moved until dawn. Sometimes if they could spare a man the police put a guard on it to keep the dogs away.’

  ‘How was he? I mean Dolci,’ she wanted to know.

  ‘In appearance he was tall and strong. A man who smiled continuously. We used to go for walks together. He was always on the lookout for a good hill to climb. Not only was he a friend of the poor but he treated them politely. He used to address beggars as Sir.’

  ‘How did you come to know him in the first place?’

  ‘I met him in 1963 through James McNeish who spent a great deal of time with him and eventually wrote an excellent book about his experiences called Fire Under the Ashes. By the time I first saw him he’d had a lot of probably unwelcome publicity through Aldous Huxley calling him the Gandhi of Sicily.’

  ‘What was his background?’

  ‘He was a middle-class boy from
Milan studying architecture at the university and teaching literature at the night school to students who were largely factory workers. James said he was influenced by religious revivalists at that time, in particular by a Don Zeno who preached total poverty. Dolci, James said, had experienced a personal revulsion against what he called the shallows of intellectualism and set out to devote his life to helping the poor.’

  ‘So why did he choose Partinico?’

  ‘I suppose because it was the toughest place he could find, and there were more poor people here than elsewhere. In his book James says that at the time of Danilo’s arrival 2,500 out of 5,100 children in the area did not go to school. He watched with compassion, James mentions, while a man to whom he had given his coat immediately sold it and drank the proceeds. Someone told him of a Partinico slum called the Spine Sante – meaning the Sacred Thorns - which was supposedly the worst in Sicily. He immediately moved in and married an abandoned widow with five children.’

  ‘Did you ever go there?’

  ‘Sadly no. I was not invited to. Danilo may have thought I was too squeamish to tackle the experience. James mentions the mounds of dung and rubbish lying around like booby traps. Two of his neighbours got hold of a can of industrial spirit and drank themselves to death.’

  ‘Who killed this man outside Dolci’s headquarters?’ Lesley wanted to know.

  ‘The Mafia always does the killings.’

  ‘Why in this case?’

  ‘Probably because he would have been mixed up in the business over the Iato dam. They would have seen him as a troublemaker - one of those who had organized themselves to pressure the authorities into doing something about the water shortage. People like Dolci had difficulties with the landowners, who knew perfectly well that if something was done to irrigate the wasteland they’d lose half their workforce. You can be sure that Danilo got himself involved, and that would be the reason for dumping the corpse outside his door.’