In Sicily

by Norman Lewis

  10

  MANY PLACES OF special interest to me were in the less accessible west of the island, which through poor communications was little influenced by the outside world. An immediate problem arose. It is an area more or less dominated by Corleone - the only large town - and its sole hotel, recently opened, had only stayed in business a few months before being closed down. There were several small towns in reach of Palermo to be visited - one of these, San Giuseppe Iato, was currently filling the newspapers with accounts of its bloody feuds - but we were put off making short trips from the capital by the traffic jams that imprisoned cars entering or leaving Palermo both in the morning and evening.

  A solution was proposed by Marcello’s sister-in-law, Gabriella, in a suggestion put rather cautiously as if she was not quite sure that it should be made. Renowned in Palermo as the leading artist in the creation of theatre backgrounds and effects, Gabriella lived alternatively in the heart of the city and in a forest retreat on the margin of the famous and somewhat sinister Ficuzza wood, some twenty-five miles from the capital. This was the only woodland to survive in Sicily since the island’s deforestation by the Romans and such was its reputation that when on a previous trip I had mentioned to Marcello my intention of visiting it he had emphasized the necessity of my employing an armed guard.

  Gabriella was by nature adventurous. Ficuzza, she said, defeated the tameness of normal existence. She knew of a place nearby where we could find a room. ‘It’s rather private. All the people who go there know each other. They don’t take to outsiders. But if you feel like staying there I’ll do my best to arrange it. Just keep on going until the road stops, and you’ll see it where the trees begin. It’s very small and quiet. We call it the kingdom of silence.’

  ‘Sounds just what we’re looking for,’ I said, and we set out.

  The guidebook still speaks of the road running south from Palermo to Agrigento branching away ‘into bandit country’ and passing through ‘some of the finest inland scenery that Sicily has to offer’. This is an understatement - certainly in the opening days of spring. There were no houses, villages, people, animals, trees, and little by way of scenery but vague mountain shapes scribbled on milky skies. Further on, vast, immaculate, although almost colourless valleys offered surrealistic tableaux of rocky outcrops, tiny pyramidical mountains capped with enormous crags and, once, the image of a castle in miniature, appearing then dissolving in wraiths of mist. This was the earth as it had been in the depths of the past, before human interference. It was also the former heartland of the Mafia, as described by the guidebook.

  Our approach to Ficuzza was through Godrano, a village wound round a hilltop with its oldest houses perched on the edge of a precipice with a tremendous view of a tree-choked ravine far below. Here the houses are of the kind known as bassi, consisting of a single room with a wide door opened as required to let in the light, although resourceful occupants will have knocked holes in the walls themselves to serve as glassless windows. This village is too poor to possess a shop. A van, we were told, arrives once a day and was there at that moment, alerting the inhabitants to its presence by a few bars of oriental-sounding recorded music - indistinguishable so far as I was concerned from the Muslim call to prayer. In the cold spring weather the road verge sprouted innumerable tiny blue flowers and in the gorge below owls hooted, like the sound of crying children, in broad daylight. A story put about locally was that the villagers were the descendants of an ancient non-European tribe, that many suffered from colour-blindness, and that sickly children were fed by them with thimblefuls of blood.

  II Rifugio, our destination, came into sight at the end of a downhill mile full of twists and turns - a grey little fortress of a place at the very edge of the forest and within sight of Ficuzza itself. Men were at work in a nearby shed chopping logs. With their unnaturally large muscles and empty faces there was something about them that spoke of forebears whose lives had been used up down the centuries in this way. Four large, unkempt dogs made a stealthy approach, heads fastidiously turned away. They were of a strange, square-jawed breed with yellowish eyes - of a race as old perhaps as the forest itself. Behind this scene the rays of the early evening sun lit up a façade of tall oaks. A deep lane had been cut through these and in the far distance the forest closed in on a gloom approaching that of night.

  I showed the man who ran the inn Gabriella’s note and his expression changed as though a key had been turned in his brain. ‘You are from the Signorina,’ he said, opening the door wide. The room we were shown into was awash with the scent of wood smouldering in a vast hearth. At this moment the landlord’s wife was busy in her cavernous kitchen preparing the evening meal which, as was the custom in these parts, the man of the house would eventually cook. Both were slow, bulky, watchful and uncommunicative, and there was an emptiness about the building emphasized by the distant slamming of heavy doors. We saw only one other guest, an elderly lady of slightly ethereal presence who appeared at frequent intervals to make small changes in the position of the room’s moveable objects before withdrawing from sight.

  Everything in the atmosphere and mood of this place differed from our experience of Palermo and the north. These quiet, unemphatic, reserved people seemed of a different race - and perhaps they were. Antonio, the owner, listened attentively to whatever was said to him, and replied with the minimum of words. He was constantly in physical action, sawing up branches to feed the enormous fire or preparing a meal for which the ingredients were cut up with a kind of surgical skill. Later, more unsmiling guests arrived and were seated at separate tables where they engaged each other in low-voiced conversation. At intervals of fifteen minutes these mutterings were submerged in the chiming of a clock, almost as powerful as that of a church.

  After an early supper we went out to look at the view, which except for a single corner of the horizon was largely of trees, but five miles to the south the Rocca Busambra thrust its enormous tombstone bulk up through the woodlands. This ashen breach in the deep greens was dyed by the sunset almost to the colour of blood. It was here, I remembered, that the remains of Placido Rizzotto, an anti-Mafia trade union leader from Corleone, had been brought to be thrown down a hundred-foot-deep crevice. Visiting it two years later, the fire brigade brought up in their first sack five shoes, a pair of braces, an ankle bone, a piece of overcoat and a human head. The head had been lying in the mud and the features had gone, but Placido’s father recognized his son’s chestnut hair, and also a piece of his overcoat. He had only had it made the year before, ‘with buttons down the middle in the new fashion’. Further searches by the fire brigade produced more sacks full of bones. For many years this had been the hiding place of bodies of the men of Corleone who had fallen foul of the Mafia.

  ‘You’ll find it very quiet,’ Gabriella had said of Ficuzza. She was right, but the vicinity of II Rifugio generated sounds of its own: the muffled yelps with which the dogs signalled their presence as they patrolled under the walls through the night, the mewing of the owls, the thump of the inn’s heavy doors, and above all, through the windows, the dry lisp of the wind from all sides of the surrounding thickets. The inn itself had inherited a perpetual hubbub from the Middle Ages -of pots being washed in the enormous sink and the woodsman dragging in heavy branches to hack to pieces on the stone floor.

  Gabriella had come to be accepted by these people after a long fascination with the tribal intricacies of Ficuzza. She told us that the surname of all local families was Lupo (Wolf) and that the Wolves were divided into two clans, the White Wolves and the Black Wolves. Of these, the Whites formed the upper crust, voted for the party of the Church, listened to taped opera music and ate white bread. The Blacks supported the Popular Front, hummed or whistled tunes one might have heard in the mountains of Morocco, and forced themselves in hard times to chew on the flesh of the prickly pear, which although nutritious was revolting to the taste buds. Woodsmen who spent their lives hacking up oak trees were Black Wolves, but the owner of the
village cafe who sat in an armchair waiting for the telephone to ring was definitely White. A scientist from Palermo claimed to have found a difference in the thickness of the cranial bones of these two clans but the locals were supremely sceptical about such theories and poured scorn upon his views.

  Ficuzza’s days of fame and fortune had depended upon its having been chosen in 1800 by King Ferdinand to be the site of his palatial hunting lodge, still perfectly preserved in its gardens a couple of hundred yards back from the village. The King, well known to be infatuated with boar-hunting, had been told that for devotees of the sport no area could compare with this one. He came here whenever he could and, supported by a regiment of soldiers, killed a hundred or so animals a day. His arrival was a mixed blessing for the local people, who had always hunted here for their own food. This was now classed as poaching, and punished by the amputation of both hands, most poachers dying immediately from shock, or soon after from loss of blood. Some cattle had also been brought by the royal household to Ficuzza, and there were cases of hungry peasants cutting collops of meat from the cows, then sewing the skin back to cover the wound. For this the punishment was branding, and by Sicilian law of the time the poorer the offender the severer was the punishment to be inflicted. Some probably garbled accounts of these happenings had survived in local folklore but I was distracted from further historical investigation by my desire to see Corleone again. We cut short our visit, packed up and set out.

  11

  APART FROM THAT brief visit with Gioacchino in 1990, it had been years since I had seen anything of Corleone and now I found it tremendously altered. New suburbs had overflowed at the top of the hill and huge sales stickers half covering the windows of shopping parades had reduced the slightly sinister surroundings of old to an environment which was no more than ordinary. Supermarkets full of bargains had opened as well as health-food shops selling an enormous variety of witches’ brews made from the organs of such animals as salamanders and snakes.

  In spite of its unsavoury history, the town had gained a new respectability. Our friend Gabriella had spent time there and praised it for its clean streets, quiet nights, mountain views and fresh food. These calm virtues were not enough, however, for Corleone’s citizens who were intent on refurbishing the town’s image by adding fashion and drama, and publicity experts had been called in to advise how this could best be done.

  Their solution was imaginative: the Sicilian Regional Government invited a Danish couple, Christina Hansen and Kenneth Jorgens, to celebrate their wedding at Corleone and, accompanied by twenty Danish journalists, they duly arrived to be pelted with flowers by schoolchildren dressed in typical local costume. Following the ceremony the newly-weds were offered lunch in the Piazza Garibaldi - tagliatelle con ricotta with grilled sausages, described in the press as a typical Danish meal. The Danish consul then spoke, dismissing accounts of past Mafia atrocities as ‘a pernicious legend from which Corleone has so long suffered’, and he was loudly applauded. This, it was clear, was a festival of mealy mouths; nevertheless it was judged a huge success. The happy couple planted an olive tree and departed.

  Christina and Kenneth, we learned, were to be followed by an adventurous Japanese pair, who it was hoped might be induced to complete the last lap of their journey by balloon. Negotiations were afoot, it was said, to entertain them with the first showing in Italy of the film Titanic.

  In the matter of press coverage this had been a good day for Corleone, but the one that followed was less satisfactory with the town again back in the headlines. A seventy-four-year-old man called Francesco Gambino, describing himself as a healer and magician and said to have a large following of believers, had been driven from his home; his two cars (one a BMW) had been set on fire. In the course of the inquiry it was stated that Gambino, ‘noted for his long pigtail and his extravagances, has twenty-five children by four wives, the youngest child being a baby of two by a girl of twenty-one’. He kept his house full of chickens and other domestic animals used in his cures. The attack was prompted by neighbours who could no longer stand the smell. He was charged with ‘abuse of credulity and ignoring hygienic laws’, and is considered to have exposed himself to the risk of extra-legal action on grounds of immorality, this being in the eyes of the Honoured Society one of the cardinal sins.

  Since my last visit the Ministry of the Interior in Rome had sent a commission with special powers to take over Corleone. It had succeeded in suppressing muggings, burglaries and petty thefts, and the municipality’s present claim is that it is one of the few large towns in Europe where cars parked at night may be left unlocked. Thus encouraged, solid Sicilian bourgeois moved in, in no way dismayed by the open and continuing presence of the Mafia leader Toto Riina, who walked its streets unmolested despite twenty-three life sentences, none of which had been served.

  I saw Riina only once, when a journalist arranged for me to glimpse him through a peep-hole in a cell wall of the maximum-security prison of Termini Imerese. Riina had deigned to occupy his cell for an hour or two and, clad in a silk dressing gown, was dictating a letter to his beautiful secretary. When news broke that the State had been paying Mafia bosses pensions while in prison or on the run, the name of Toto Riina inevitably appeared on the list. He claimed to be nullatenente – a sufferer from extreme poverty - but the newspapers reported that among his possessions were land, apartments, villas and jewellery.

  Someone had tried to persuade me when last in the town that the famous mafiosi one might occasionally run into were now in retirement. ‘They’re just here because they like the place. Corleone is the Oxford of Sicily. These are sentimental attachments no one wants to break.’

  Sicilians have always believed that banks help to ease backward towns like this into the modern world, and three had been recently opened. Almost everyone I spoke to recommended that I visit the museum, another symbol of modernity which had recently opened. As an experience this proved to be less stimulating than we had hoped for. The door was locked and the lady curator arriving with the key discovered it would not fit, so the lock had to be forced before it would open. Even then the effort proved hardly worthwhile: the only exhibits of interest behind the dusty glass were the fossilized penis of a prehistoric man and a stuffed cockerel of striking deformity.

  The old town, reached with some difficulty through traffic-congested narrow streets, remained largely unchanged and as depressing as before. It was still topped by a singular natural phenomenon in its centre in the form of a towering outcrop of rock. Locally this has been explained as a result of the collapse a few million years ago of part of the earth’s crust, leaving only this monstrous column unaffected. At the time of my previous visit the effect had been all the more eerie due to the fact that the town gaol had been built on its summit. Nowadays it is perhaps less disturbing since this building is occupied by an exceptionally unworldly order of mendicant friars. One of the Brothers is famous for traipsing barefoot from end to end of the town comforting citizens who have suffered from the continuing presence of evil.

  In an effort perhaps to improve the town’s image a ‘commemorative act’ was staged in memory of Placido Rizzotto, the first of Sicily’s trade union leaders, who had been abducted from this spot exactly fifty years before. He appears from all accounts to have been among the most attractive Sicilians of recent history, and the public commemoration occupied three days with the Piazza Garibaldi constantly full to overbrimming. All the usual public figures were there, politicians appeared from all over the country, famous actors delivered funeral odes, a hundred or so island communities had sent representatives, and the survivors of one of those old-fashioned sisterhoods who could weep to order had been tracked down to contribute their own speciality. This they did in the most moving way, on and off, for the whole three days.

  After half a century of near oblivion Placido was at last to be recognized for the hero he was. When hardly more than a boy he had distinguished himself fighting with the partisans in northern Italy be
fore returning home and throwing himself into the struggle to assist the browbeaten peasantry of Corleone.

  In 1947, elections were to be held for the first time since the coming of fascism, the only issue of importance being the peasants’ demand to occupy uncultivated land. But for the Sicilian poor there was even less hope in 1947 than there had been in 1943. Mussolini had been on the verge of destroying the Mafia, but then he had fallen, and all the mafiosi had been released from prison. The victorious Allies replaced all the existing mayors with mafiosi and the Sicilian peasants’ cause was lost. The order went out from the Mafia that everyone should vote for the Christian Democrats, and, as it was generally believed in Corleone that there was no such thing as the secrecy of the ballot, it was to be assumed that most people would. But, to be certain, numerous safeguards were adopted by the party of the landowners and the Mafia. Dr Navarra of Corleone, for example, issued several hundred certificates of blindness or extreme myopia to local women who were then escorted by mafiosi to the polling booths to make sure they voted Christian Democrat. Despite these precautions, and to general surprise, Corleone elected a left-wing council, largely thanks to Placido’s efforts.

  Out for a stroll in his favourite haunt on 10 March 1948, Placido Rizzotto was kidnapped by two men carrying pistols and marched away into the hilly country outside the town. He was never seen alive again, except by a frightened shepherd boy who left his herd and came running to report that he had seen two men hang a third from a tree.