In Sicily

by Norman Lewis

  It had to be admitted by all concerned that some initial cheating had come into this. Palermo’s leading theatrical make-up artist was engaged to change the colour of Giovanni’s skin. Released from this man’s studio he was at first hardly recognizable even to himself. An hour or two earlier he would have been seen as no more than a reporter keeping a watch on the morning crowd in the Via Lincoln della Marina, and trying to think of something to write. Now along with his colour even the shape of his head seemed to have changed, and studying his reflection in a shop window, he was reminded, he said, of a poverty-stricken African onlooker at the camel festival at Ain Sefra about which he had once written a piece.

  With his brown skin and cast-off clothes from the flea market he was committed to scraping a living in competition with destitute Africans at the very bottom of the human market. From preliminary enquiries he had learned that this involved polishing the windscreens of cars trapped in the innumerable traffic jams of Palermo, and then selling the driver a cheap lighter or a scratch-card purchased from wholesalers specializing in such junk. Even in the case of such simple occupations there were skills to be learned, and the competition was intense; nevertheless these were the only activities in the city in which the Mafia took no hand. Experts, most of them black, who had followed this trade for years, knew everything that was to be known about which were the best places to operate. The windscreen-polisher spots his prey stuck at the lights, dashes in, gets to work on the screen, then hopes to persuade the driver to buy a scratch-card or lighter in exchange for the work he has done. The method is to catch a car with a full sixteen seconds left to work on before the lights change to green and it hurtles away. Allowing himself a day to study all the variables, Giovanni had learned that an accomplished polisher managed to score in one case out of six. Above all it was essential to avoid annoying the driver by being too persistent over the loss of a potential sale.

  There were many lessons to be learned, the first being that as a black he had become invisible. Previously, in the briefest of street encounters, there had always been an instant of mutual scrutiny. In his new avocation this had been lost. Almost in his first few minutes as a black pedlar he had lost his human identity, and his presence was no longer registered. Palermo, he learned, is not racist, but merely wholly indifferent to coloured people. Other friendly invisibles or semi-invisibles taught him where and with whom to try his luck with a car, and thus something about cars themselves, but far more about human nature. Sales were low there, but if you accepted that any reward was better than nothing you found out that the Piazza Giulio Cesare was the place. The drivers there drove old Fiats and were poor, but comparatively rich in humanity and usually good for a few lire. He was warned to avoid drivers in the smart Piazza Croce ensconced in the air-conditioning of their BMWs who corrected the focus of their eyes to infinity at the mere approach of a black man. You polished the screen, then sometimes without recompense there was an imperious touch of the horn and the rich man departed.

  Thus the day passed. On the scorching afternoons he sweated profusely but could not wipe away the perspiration because of his make-up. Tired, he longed for a coffee after an endless morning’s work. But despite everything he’d learned he still had not fully grasped what is acceptable in a black man, and what is not. Seating himself like any normal customer at one of the small tables provided by a bar, he noticed the waiter’s stunned expression. It was one of those places to which, apart from customers, only sellers of roses are permitted access. He realized he was no longer invisible. Instead of coming to take his order the waiter went to talk to the owner who, seated at the other end of the bar, was heard to say, ‘Ask him what he wants.’ The English learned so many years ago at school came to Giovanni’s rescue, as he replied in that language, ‘Black coffee if you please.’ Despite another startled expression from the waiter this was instantly served.

  The afternoon was a poor one for the windscreen-polishers. It was one of the hottest days of the year with patrons in the open-air restaurants dropping off to sleep in their seats. Traffic was very light, with cars expertly parked in the small spaces everywhere, as if for the night. It was five in the afternoon before a few cars appeared. Giovanni sold three scratch-cards and, suddenly overtaken by hunger, found a place down in a cellar at the back of the San Domenico market where he exhausted the day’s income on two pig’s trotters.

  After that, the problem was where to sleep. Despite the temptation to call on one of his colleagues to beg a bed for the night he chose to sleep in the shelter for down-and-outs in the semi-slum of the Albergheria run by the aged Silesian priest Don Meli. This time his highly professional make-up threatened to cause a problem. He had interviewed the priest, regarded locally as a saint, on several occasions and saw him as a friend, but due to the old man’s deafness, his weak eyesight and the make-up, Don Meli failed to recognize him. ‘We’re pretty full at the moment,’ the old priest said. ‘It’ll have to be just for the night, and you know the rules. Up for a wash-up at five-thirty.’

  A single day was enough to provide Giovanni with the experiences he had to describe, and to teach him that those scratching the most meagre of livings should not polish windscreens of BMWs in the Piazza Croce but stick to Fiats driven by egg-dealers in a less glamorous square. Human kindness in its manifestations in Sicily is richer - probably as everywhere - as one descends the human scale, but even there the poor man is almost invisible to the rich. Nevertheless the generosity and good grace with which the island’s working people take in so many foreigners in distress, whatever their colour, cannot be surpassed anywhere else on earth.

  16

  IN PARTS OF the south Mediterranean vestiges of an August fair remain, commemorating the Great Emperor as well as hailing the traditional triumph of midsummer. In remote Sicilian villages where a little of the past still shows through, the Sicilian Ferragosto, as the fair is called, still survives, and a few very old and perhaps confused people dress for its entertainments and ceremonies as if for church. The big towns can afford to do the thing in style with processions and firework displays, but the most destitute of the villages struggle to contribute their mite of thanksgiving and mirth as best they can. Danilo Dolci helped his neighbours to assist in meagre celebrations in the drab surroundings of Partinico, and even at Favara near Agrigento, where Mussolini was so shocked by Mafia excesses, celebratory horse play at Ferragosto was attempted. Where local prosperity reflects an excellent fishing season or even a record influx of tourists, all work for a day or two comes to an end and Ferragosto reigns supreme. Millions of cars seem to take to the roads, and average speeds in the neighbourhood of the big cities drop to three miles per hour. A huge, almost frenzied rush to the beaches takes place, where the bodies stretched out there are sometimes separated in the most popular areas by no more than five inches of sand. The population of the small scatter of the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily increases from 1,200 to an estimated 25,000, prices rise two and a half times, and up to six tourists are occasionally called upon to sleep in a single room.

  The only island to have lost visitors in this season was the volcanic Stromboli, where we watched an eruption in the manner of the most spectacular firework display, although in 1998 the opening of a new crater, filling the night sky with its sparks, came too early to ruin the holiday proceedings. The year, apart from the new crater and its fiery outbursts, was remarkable for freak rainstorms. The temperature, rarely less than 100°F, fell in an hour by thirty degrees, but this was nothing compared to the situation in Palermo, where cars dragged themselves through liquid mud coursing down the gutters of its narrow streets.

  Above all, given the right age, company and opportunity Ferragosto is accepted as the time of romantic adventure, when young men and women respond with awakened interest to impulses too often numbed or suppressed in the average working life.

  While we were in Sicily the reputable and somewhat conservative Giornale della Sicilia published the extraordinary statistic that 6
7 per cent of Sicilian married couples are unfaithful to one another, adding the even more astonishing rider that in the case of both sexes these infidelities are often committed with prostitutes.

  There are a number of areas, some already mentioned in this book, where sexual encounters take place in cars - frequently in broad daylight - in narrow one-way streets where there is little or no passing traffic, and it is probable that a proportion of these adulteries occur there. The newsmen noted that the peak period in one such street coincided with the midday break, and that the turnover was rapid. It was thought that in some cases the spirit of adventure came into the thing, for as one investigator reported, certain males, although by no means short of money, derived a perverse satisfaction at the idea of being paid for sex by a woman - however small the sum involved.

  Apart from such well-known streets there is nowhere within reach of the romantically minded to compare with the Parco della Favorita - the small unspoilt wilderness holding back the houses where Palermo comes suddenly to a stop, and the ancient trees climb into the crags of Monte Pellegrino overhanging the city. It is a scene that has turned its back on the years, remaining part of a past that is fading rapidly. The separation between the two areas comes suddenly and is complete. Within yards the rumpus of traffic is smothered in the leafy cloak of the forest. With the arrival of summer one or two eagles return, and sometimes come floating into sight between the peaks. Prints made by Palermitan artists a century and a half ago show these surroundings just as they are now - a superb trysting place reached on foot within minutes from the road to Isola delle Femmine, and thereafter screened from the alien eye.

  There appears at first to be no one in the forest, although there are always people about, moving stealthily among the trees. These are often luccioli (fire flies), black prostitutes from one or other of the impoverished countries of North Africa. They are usually in search of work of any kind, but are driven through the lack of its availability to take up their present occupation. No census can be taken among this dense woodland but with every year the numbers increase, although this passes almost without notice, for the luccioli dress in green garments matching the forest glades, and they are unobtrusive and well behaved as they lurk silently among the spread of leaves.

  There is a single striking fact about the luccioli that so far has received no wide publicity in Sicily although it is accepted in the Muslim countries from which many come. This is that they are regarded as bearers of good luck. It is a credence that has assumed spectacular form in some areas. In the mountains of Algeria, where I spent five months of the last war, men of intelligence among the local population frequented prostitutes not so much for physical satisfaction as in the belief that they were the possessors of psychic powers and could cause their enemies to disappear. In the mountains behind Philippeville (now Skikda), spring was celebrated by the arrival of a kind of super-prostitute inhabiting for a few days a shrine among the trees. She had a small retinue of attendants and was treated with enormous respect, a lottery being organized among the local tribesmen to determine who would be the first to have sex with a partner that in origin must have been a local pre-Muslim goddess of fertility. A long list of suitors followed the winner, upon whose successful conjunction, taking up to an hour to complete, depended the tribal fortunes for that year. Each of these presented en nisa – the holy prostitute - with a gold coin, with which he bought not only love, but baraka, good luck.

  Prostitution by black luccioli has established itself in Sicily largely since the war. When I first went to the island at the end of hostilities its presence was discreet in the extreme. Then slowly over the succeeding years the coloured girls began to appear.

  ‘Where do they all come from?’ I asked a journalist friend.

  ‘Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, Tunisia. Even Sierra Leone, I believe. The poorest countries. This is like the kingdom of heaven after Mali, with its diet of brown rice, two or three handfuls per family a day.’

  ‘Would you say you see many more about the place than you did a few years ago?’

  ‘Oh, many more. Maybe two or three times as many. Most of them don’t have papers, but they get away with it. The police just look the other way.’

  ‘What’s the attraction for the Sicilians? I suppose you’re going to tell me they’re cheap.’

  ‘Well yes, I suppose, but it’s not only that. The real thing on the whole is that most of them are nice people. It may be because they started out poor, but they’re well brought up. Their mothers warn them, “Don’t be greedy.” They come over here and maybe work for two or three months before they get picked up by the police and sent back. They’ve usually put by a few lire to help with the family situation at home, and then when funds run out they come back again.’

  ‘Don’t the police do anything about it?’

  ‘They’ve too much on their hands as it is without having to bother about a few pros. I’ve talked to girls who’ve been served with an expulsion order a half-dozen times. They always come back. They see it as a holiday when they go home. A family meal and fresh chicken and souvenirs all round, and they’re on their way back here again. Why should the police care? Half the foreigners working in this country don’t have documents anyway.’

  ‘Speaking of Sicily, would you say there’s any drawback in being black? Are any of their customers put off by their colour?’

  ‘Not in my opinion. If anything I suspect it’s the reverse. Some of them probably get a kick out of it. At first, anyway. A friend at the university told me about a professor who’s only interested in the black ones. And look at the fuss about that film Roberta Torre is going to produce with a Nigerian girl in the leading part.’

  ‘Joey, you mean,’ I said, ‘but surely it’s off? Didn’t I read that they’ve put her back in the Trapani camp?’

  ‘Yes, but she’ll be out next week. They’ve already put a billion lire into the project. They’re not going to lose out on a certain winner because someone’s taking a few weeks to fix the papers. Roberta Torre can’t talk about anything else right now. Of course they’ll fix the papers. Of course she’ll do the film and it’ll break all box-office records.’

  ‘A film about a black prostitute,’ I said. ‘I still find it incredible.’

  ‘The thing is there’s nothing crude about it,’ my friend said. ‘This isn’t about being on the game for the money. It’s about sacrifice. She’s doing it for a starving family. In the end she’ll marry a Nigerian husband in a proper church ceremony, and he’ll love and respect her all the more for following the call of duty.’

  My friend showed me Roberta Torre’s description of her protegee in his paper. ‘She is a young, black goddess, as graceful as a gazelle,’ the producer had said, and was on the point of embarking on a brilliant future. She had been obliged to live in a way that no girl would chose, but had changed everything, even a name nobody could pronounce. Now, as she went out to face her new life, she was to be Joey.

  An immense publicity campaign was under way, said my friend. The fact that Joey was temporarily in custody at Trapani was of slight importance. With regular employment guaranteed by the film company her release was certain in a matter of days.

  By coincidence it was precisely at this moment that Syracuse was faced with a crisis in which luccioli were heavily involved. As a busy port its population of prostitutes was inevitably high. They were part of the accepted life of the town. Cheerful and well behaved, and often appearing, according to Roberta Torre, in the crowds down by the station as ‘little oriental princesses.’

  The station - also part of the port area - was the centre of the current problem, for it had always been accepted as the meeting place of the luccioli and their potential clients. Now suddenly the girls, speaking as if with one voice, had described this environment as unacceptable for their purpose. With an upswing in the business life of the area the station had become very crowded and noisy. These days travellers were in a hurry. Leisurely contact and discussions with prom
ising clients were no longer easy and a shortage was growing in temporary accommodation likely to facilitate such encounters.

  A number of the more intelligent and purposeful girls arranged a meeting at which it was agreed that they no longer wished to accost men who were weighed down by baggage and usually in a hurry, and with that the decision was made to move en masse to a more sedate area in the vicinity.

  The Corso Umberto was chosen. It is in what is officially designated the historical centre of the city - a place of splendid buildings now approaching decay, frequented by substantial bourgeois citizens, an occasional police officer in ceremonial dress and a few priests pecking at their coffee in sidewalk cafes. Here the mass invasion by black luccioli produced a stunned outcry among the resident population followed by endless telephone calls in protest to the nearest police headquarters. The situation, thoroughly ventilated in the press, was to produce surprising disclosures. It was, for example, discovered that the best business of the day, from the girls’ viewpoint, was negotiated with travellers who arrived on the last train from Catania. They took them to the ornamental gardens of the neighbouring Foro Italico, from where, to use a picturesque police description, they ‘turned into vapour’ at dawn. The newspapers emphasized that this was not a wholly satisfactory solution from the public health point of view.