In Sicily

by Norman Lewis

  Provenzano, it was generally assumed, was far too intelligent ever to be caught, and the accepted rumour was that he was now enjoying a rest-cure in Bagheria, which, as an admirer of Sicilian baroque architecture, he visited frequently, sometimes, it was said, even to be seen sketching the grotesques of the Villa Palagonia. Like Salvatore Lima, another top mafioso, who had dared to correct an assize judge, about to pass sentence, for his faulty quotation from Shakespeare, Provenzano held the classics in respect. He was known to possess only two intimate friends, both of them females approaching middle age. They were well-known intellectuals, one of them with a university degree in philosophy. The other, only recently released from prison, practised faith-healing and curative magic for which she made no charge. It was this lady, using her powers of divination, who unmasked the designs of Provenzano’s only male confidant, Luigi Llardo, who had become alarmed by Provenzano’s fearful energy and his obvious but risky intention of taking over every enterprise of importance in the country.

  There had also been a growing coolness between the two men over the matter of a private extortion carried out by Llardo, 500 million lire of which had gone into his own pocket instead of being handed over to the clan. Llardo decided to play for safety by making a cautious approach to a senior police officer, Colonel Riccio, with whom the question of his acceptance as a collaborator with justice might be broached. Such confidential allies of the police were treated with every respect, guarded wherever they went, and in general lived pleasant lives.

  The meeting between the two men was arranged by Riccio with considerable skill. Llardo was arrested on some trivial charge and, following their secret discussion, released on the grounds of ill health. It seems likely, however, that the alert and watchful Provenzano would have suspected a certain artificiality in this encounter, and been at the back of what happened next.

  Leaving the colonel that night, Llardo was driven home, and was on the point of entering his house when a stranger waiting in the shadows emptied a pistol into his head.

  If the results of the Grande Oriente operations had at first seemed hopeful, proof that the Mafia was undefeated was soon forthcoming. The latest news from the south of the island in 1998 was of an extraordinary deal made between the clans of Cosa Nostra and a local version of the Mafia few had heard of called the Stidda. If a confrontation threatened, it would be agreed to limit the number of casualties involved. Those concerned were natives of Gela, Nisceni and Vittoria - the first two rather dull little towns where there was little for the active young to do beyond playing computer games in the bars and planning ineffectual criminal coups. Vittoria, the third town, is something quite different, for it possesses several square miles of the finest market gardens on the island which through a splendid conjunction of climate and soil produce fruit such as peaches several weeks before they are marketed in quantity elsewhere in Sicily, and therefore fetch high prices. My own interest lay in the area’s production of such rare wildflowers as terrestrial orchids, which flower in profusion wherever the original soil is left intact. These, indeed, proved to be spectacular.

  Predictably, the productive market gardens had attracted Mafia attention to Vittoria, and eventually a proportion of the native population turned into mafiosi, enriching themselves by extortions imposed upon fruit-growers who were doing only too well. What, however, appears as quite new in a situation where opposing Mafia groups began, as expected, to come into collision, is that they should seek to impose restraints upon the damage inflicted when it came to armed conflict. Other intelligent safeguards on outright criminal activities were imposed in Vittoria. Leading lights among the clans were selected for employment in Caltanissetta and Catania, where they studied how up-to-date businesses were conducted with the object of employing the experience thus gained in the operations at home. From then on, when the time came to collect extortions a member of each clan was present to ensure that all was well and truly above board. Clan members were paid a family allowance while in prison - if married, nearly double the amount a bachelor received. It is interesting that at about this time Vittoria’s highly respected maga (witch), previously employed to deal with the citizens’ emotional problems, should have been pensioned off.

  Despite a show of modernity in their organization, the Vittoria Mafia clans suffered from basic weaknesses due to a series of factors over which the predominantly young mafiosi had little control. Thus when a sudden and unexpected crisis arose safeguards went by the board. Vittoria was a small town, and probably without realizing it subject in every way to the influences of its powerful near-neighbour Catania - the culturally dominant town in eastern Sicily. Catania was ‘extreme’ in comparison to Cosa Nostra’s ‘moderates’ in Palermo, and many of the town’s numerous men of respect had been able to defend themselves a month earlier against the Grande Oriente operation, it turned out. Fatally, the mentality created by the extremists of Catania called not for conciliation but action in Vittoria. But Vittoria was small in population and resources, and with a lifestyle suited more to the moderation of Sicily’s western clans than the Catania Mafia’s ideal of the all-out attack. In addition to this, Vittoria suffered from a class-ridden society dominated by a small handful of ‘old’ families who had little contact with the majority of its people, and, besides cornering much of the local wealth, remained wholly aloof. Even in the case of the Mafia community of old where the capo-mafia and a few of his henchmen shared between them nine-tenths of the production of the land, these men had always been accessible to members of the lower class. In Vittoria the top families isolated themselves, and were thus exposed to the detestation of the underdogs.

  On 2 January 1999 five feuding members of Cosa Nostra and Stidda were shot dead in the Esso bar in Vittoria, possibly, it has been suggested, on orders communicated by mobile telephone from Germany. It became clear from police investigations that the old-fashioned Sicilian Mafia was becoming steadily more international in character. Suspects picked up by the police spoke of foreign connections. It was clear that even in Sicily - still in so many ways encased in its primeval traditions - change could come about. Even the attack in the Esso bar had been a highly modernized version of the old gang warfare, this time fought with mobile phones and Kalashnikovs. Christmas festivities were hardly at an end and the first reporter to arrive after the shoot-out noted the large luminous sign Buon Natale was still over the bar’s door.

  A few days later simultaneous funeral services were conducted in two of Vittoria’s churches. It was instantly apparent that the town’s tragedy had done nothing to draw the members of a divided community closer together. Huge public resentment was shown when half an hour before the cortege formed by the two leading families, Motta and Mirabella, was due to arrive at the gates of the Cathedral of St John, these were closed to everyone else to make certain of the exclusion of any member of what is known in Sicily as ‘the family classes’. This almost produced a riot in the main square by groups of youths who screamed abuse at the privileged mourners under the protection of the police.

  For the rest it was to be the lesser Church of the Sacred Heart, a fine baroque building, although devoid on such occasions of prestige. Vittoria is a city obsessed by football, and within minutes of the opening of the doors the church was packed with players in the colours of their local team, a group even chanting its anthem against the hardly audible dirge of those who had come there to mourn.

  Inside the cathedral, the Motta and Mirabella families gathered in a small, silent group in the shadows of the majestic nave to listen to a suitable homily delivered by its archpriest, Giuseppe Cali, who addressed the two dead man in their coffins in an easy and familiar way, as if they were still able to follow his logic. ‘Claudio and Angelo,’ he began, ‘society has been unable to come to your rescue.’ He made use of the kind of familiarity permissible in the case of a close relative. ‘As a boy I remember once giving you a smacking. In the way a father does to his son. An affectionate reprimand. Nothing more.’

/>   19

  WITH THE SOUND of bells at midnight 1998 reached its end. It had been notorious for excesses of all kinds. Even the weather had been extraordinary; in February hot sunshine had driven city sun-worshippers to the beaches, while in August torrential rain sent muddy flood water coursing down the capital’s streets. This was a year in which Lo Zingaro, the nature reserve overlooking the island’s northern shore, had come under attack by obviously demented arsonists on no less than four occasions. Mysterious superficial damage had been inflicted upon the marvellous Roman mosaics of Piazza Armerina, the last of these acts of vandalism within weeks of the New Year. The bronze effigy known as ‘The Dancing Satyr’, recovered from the waters of Mazara del Valo after an immersion of 2,500 years, had eventually been surrendered to Rome following a national dispute as to where it was to be housed. An eruption of Stromboli, at least three years in advance of the time when it was calculated to take place, caused a four-fold increase in the insurance premiums of fashionable people living in that area.

  Of the ten thousand or so illegal immigrants who had discovered means of entering the island in 1998, a hundred, it was said, had actually arrived by helicopter. A few of these, and others picked up by the police, had been served with expulsion orders, but the general belief was that the rest were in the process of being absorbed into the local population, and that their offspring would rate as Sicilians.

  The mafiosi, for whom above all else the island was famous, had had a good year, with prominent figures such as Vitale of the enormous telescope fame still in the limelight. After a trial in which a life sentence had been confidently predicted he had been released due to insufficient evidence.

  For the first time in his existence Totò Riina had actually been found not guilty in a criminal court. Charged with the murder of Judge Scopelliti, he had been instantly freed, instead of going through the farce of a guilty verdict which would then be quashed. For all his crimes, Sicily’s supreme murderer had in fact remained as free as air for much of his long life.

  In 1980, when I had spent some weeks touring the island with Marcello, I asked about the possibility of meeting with Riina. ‘In this part of the civilized world anything can be arranged,’ he replied. I laughed and he said, ‘It’s something you should know well by now. It costs a donation to one of the churches - I believe through some kind of religious agency.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Several million last time it came up in conversation, a year or so ago. It’s almost certainly more by now. Another thing is that he’s a man of habit. He goes for a morning walk at the same time every day up the same two or three streets, and that’s the only time when he’ll talk to you. If you’re interested I’m sure that’s another case where an agent’s involved. You pay a million or two for five minutes’ chat and the agent tells you what you can say and what you can’t. Riina is always well wrapped up against the cold, so you see practically nothing of his face. No photographs, I should add. It hardly seems worthwhile, does it?’

  ‘I agree,’ I said.

  Finally, this was the year when the Vatican had condemned the return to Sicily - and to the Italian mainland itself -of the local witches and exorcists known as maghi. These had reappeared in their hundreds in areas either where no doctors were in practice, or where the sick were unable to scrape together the money to pay their fees.

  In Sicily low incomes and ignorance have protected simple beliefs. The peasantry pay little attention to astrologers and their stars, and are lukewarm in attitude even to conventional religion. In many cases a maga provides the well-tried old remedies and will stroke a sick child’s brows with healing fingers in return for a couple of slices of bread. For those who can afford the outlay, few maladies can resist a cock’s throat cut for a few coins, and a little of the blood rubbed well into the roots of the tongue. Should the maga be from Nigeria - as many are these days - she will carve a neat little pattern designed to ward off the evil eye in the skin on the small of the back or between the breasts. All that is needed is the ability to believe; the maga’s power is to call this tiny geyser of acceptance and hope to life in the depths of her patient’s soul.

  20

  WE ARE ALL drawn by the magnet of the sea. Boys born within sound of the waves long to be ship’s captains, or at least fishermen. The child released on holiday from buildings and streets stares entranced at the purity of the rocks, waves and the deserted beach, and reluctantly rejoins parents to be led back to house-confinement. In his imagination the Sicilian child steers a boat through uncharted waters or lends a hand to haul in a net full of fish. These are pleasures inherited from the past which few will ever enjoy.

  If the sea itself is now beyond reach for everyday involvement, the next best thing may be settling in a town by the sea. Such towns are inclined to be more animated, more attuned to pleasure and less involved in the dullness of commerce and industry than those of the interior. The heart of the inland city will almost certainly be an ebullient and traffic-congested central square. The life of the coastal town is normally concentrated along the shore of the sea’s great oasis of calm, and few urban areas exist where it is simpler to relax.

  Palermo is well sited and rich enough to possess both attributes. Its city-centre traffic is infernal, but the gardens, ancient palaces, squares and promenades down by the water place it in a class of its own. The traditional centre of the city at the Quattro Canti is linked to the port area by the dead-straight mile of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, but many visitors take a short cut through a maze of side-streets as complicated as any on earth.

  Down by ‘the water’, as the port is called, a man in a hurry who has slipped through the labyrinth of the old town is about to enter another world. The wind in the salt marsh ahead veers round with a temperature drop of several degrees. With this the odours of the Vucciria market are blown away, and only the faintest whiff of farm animals remains. As the port comes closer a landscape of the far past is lost, and ahead the profiles of magnificent churches rise from the flatlands into the clear sky. The Piazza Marina, coming into sight, is perhaps the most interesting square in Palermo, the whole of its vast area being surrounded by palaces slowly approaching decay. Of these the largest is the huge Palazzo Chiaramonte - for a century the headquarters of the Inquisition - a sinister building flanked by the splendid Renaissance church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli.

  This is the homeland of the traditional Sicily of wealth, creative genius, and the monstrous powers of Church and State. A human aspect of local life has been preserved in the Piazza as in so many other open spaces. Here in the cool of the evening among the pleasant muddle of eastern Palermo, the elderly citizens carry out their green baize tables to enjoy a game of cards. Above all, the port area is given up to leisure and display. Smiling Tunisians pour cups of the world’s best coffee. The florists are at their stalls embowered in the costliest flowers. The doorman at a prestigious hotel rushes out to assure guests arriving by car that it will be safe to leave it unlocked. There is even a magnificently cool and calm hospital on the sea front, of which Lesley, having been treated there free of charge for her damaged hand, speaks with utmost praise.

  On the eve of our departure, we had been invited by some friends to join them for a farewell lunch somewhere on the front. We thus became components of the maritime scene to which the crowds are attracted on fine weekends. All the usual participants were present, some dressed in slightly nautical styles suited to the occasion. A handsome young priest who strode past in a black soutane was by no means out of place. Nor was a carabinieri maresciallo, inscrutably watchful from a street corner, nor certainly the stylish lady in control of three quarrelsome dogs. We moved towards the agreed meeting place with little idea of where the restaurant could be. In Palermo, all the best places to eat in are tucked away down backstreets where the rents are low and the owner can afford to splash out on the quality of his food. The Sicilian diner has long trained himself to ignore dreary surroundings in the knowledge that a sea-vi
ew will double the bill. Entering the restaurant of his choice, he is inspired by the confidence that the fish brought to his table will often have been caught on the same day, thus providing a gastronomic experience calling for appetite alone.

  A stroll to the end of the promenade was enough to convince us that this was not a place for gastronomic surprises. We were there to see and be seen. People scrutinized each other conscientiously. A man unwrapped a telescope and focused it on the passengers on the deck of the nearest ship, and a respectful crowd gathered nearby as a TV crew went into action, calling upon onlookers with anything exceptional in their appearance to say a few words.

  Owing to the density of the weekend crowd we had had some difficulty in locating our friends, but further on, where the Foro Italico follows the seashore and the crowd thins, we ran into them. As it transpired, the occasion for our last outing together had been particularly well chosen, for two of our friends had just had good news. Carolina, who worked for the Banco di Sicilia, had heard on only the previous day of a promotion, and almost simultaneously Giuseppe, a struggling author, had at last found a publisher for his book.

  The third member of our party, Agostino, had long since been freed to some extent from the immediate necessity of windfalls of this kind. For owing to a tremendous stroke of luck some five years before, he had become one of six top prize-winners in the Superenatallo lottery, enriching him by the equivalent of almost a million pounds. He had immediately given up work, explaining to his friends that all he hoped to do from that time on was to learn to think more clearly. Nevertheless he had also taken time to brush up his fluency in several languages, and like our other two Sicilian friends spoke English almost as well as a native of our country.