Honoured Society, The

by Reski, Petra; Whiteside, Shaun

  When we arrive in the Piazza Marina, the waiters are already laying the tables for lunch. It’s one restaurant after another – and no reminders of the years when the mood was one of permanent curfew and not a single sound. No one in their right mind would ever have thought of setting foot in the Kalsa in those days. No one would ever attend a vigil of their own free will. Forty years of Mafia city administration had led to the abandonment of the old town. Forty years during which the bourgeoisie of Palermo had turned a blind eye to Mafia mayors and kowtowing city councillors, submissive architects and venal city planners. As far as those people were concerned, the decay of the old city couldn’t happen quickly enough; ideally, they would have knocked the whole lot down so that they could fill the place with the tower blocks that had already disfigured the rest of the city. It was only since the Mafia had put money into the tourist industry as well that some of the baroque palazzi had had their façades restored.

  In the middle of Piazza Marina there’s a huge magnolia fig tree that has grown into a vast and magical forest. The trunk is reddish brown, like the Sicilian soil, and has transformed itself into some fabulous creature that consists of knotted, frozen snakes, dragons half hidden in the ground and elongated elephants. Every time I turn my back on this tree I half expect it to stretch out its arms and grab me.

  Shobha immediately directs her mother to stand under the tree and starts taking pictures and I take notes about Letizia, about her red fringe, which even today makes her look like a Parisian student who’s just climbed down from the barricades. She’s always been a reporter, commander and spy all at once; she comforted widows, saw her friends die and crept behind enemy lines. She photographed Giulio Andreotti holding out his hand to a Mafia boss – something that Andreotti still tried to deny decades later, when he was on trial for supporting the Mafia. But Letizia’s photograph was among the evidence produced.

  ‘And I only remembered that photograph when the police came looking for it in my archive,’ Letizia says with amazement.

  When Shobha directs her mother towards the roots of the magic tree, I hear brass-band music floating across from the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Not a day passes in Sicily without a religious procession of one kind or another. Curious, I walk towards the street to take a look – before coming back, disappointed: there isn’t the usual sea of people, just a scattered troop of believers following the crucifix. It isn’t a procession as such, just a small penitential pilgrimage. The Jesus being carried along the Corso has bashed knees and a slightly crooked crown of thorns; he’s followed by a handful of believers being spurred on by a priest with a loud-hailer. ‘Lord, we beg thee,’ the believers cry, asking for healing for the handicapped, for those who have succumbed to alcohol, for those who have fallen under the spell of evil. Would they include the mafiosi? Like the turncoat Marcello Fava, for example? Until his arrest he belonged to the congregation of Santa Teresa alla Kalsa, just a few steps behind us on Piazza Marina. There he had prayed to Santa Maria del Carmelo, when he wasn’t meeting the other bosses outside the church to discuss business with them. When I interviewed him in Rome he repeatedly stressed the importance to him of the spiritual assistance given to him by a nun after he had decided to turn state witness. But now that I’m standing only a few yards away from his church, I wonder whether these people here mightn’t see betrayal of the Mafia as a greater sin than actually belonging to the Mafia.

  Salvo stands next to me. He casts an indifferent, if not contemptuous, glance at the procession moving past us, before staring again at the display of his telefonino, because he’s in permanent contact with his fiancée. But when the Jesus with the crooked crown of thorns is carried past, even Salvo glances up and crosses himself. Briefly, with his thumb, the way people do in Sicily.

  While Shobha and her mother are still trying to find the best perspective in the shadow under the magnolia fig tree, Salvo and I start walking towards Santa Teresa alla Kalsa. As always, a man sits opposite the church in the shade of a tree, frying croquettes in an aluminium pot full of seething oil. Santa Teresa alla Kalsa is a small, sand-coloured church with bashful baroque forms. Stucco saints stand in the niches, sighing for all eternity from their half-open mouths. It’s here that we find Padre Frittitta. The priest Don Pino – the priest from San Luca – reminded me of.

  ‘I don’t suppose you want to have another chat with Padre Frittitta?’ Salvo asks and laughs. I involuntarily stick out my little finger and my forefinger, to ward off evil. Everyone in Palermo knows the name of Padre Mario Frittitta. On one occasion Don Mario had been arrested for supporting the Mafia because he had heard fugitive Mafia boss Pietro Aglieri’s confession in his hiding place and had read him private masses. After the arrest of Padre Frittitta, his congregation had organized street demonstrations. Only four days later Padre Frittitta was released from the Ucciardone prison: a lenient judge had released him on condition that he leave Sicily. But even that punishment wouldn’t last for long: we met the Carmelite priest shortly after he returned to the bosom of his church amidst the triumphant cries of his congregation.

  There was quite a tense atmosphere around the meeting because Padre Frittitta no longer gave interviews to journalists. He had only agreed to talk to us because we had been recommended by the lawyer defending the Mafia boss Pietro Aglieri.

  It was a very hot day in October when we met Padre Frittitta. He was walking busily through his church. Against the light I could see his Carmelite habit slipping across the floor and swirling up dust. At first, the only sound was that of his crêpe soles squeaking across the marble – Padre Frittitta arranged a bouquet here, straightened an altar cloth there – until he greeted us very cordially and led us through his church, past the statues of the saints with their electric candles, past the church’s patron, St Teresa of Avila, past Sant’Anna, Sant’Antonio and Santa Rita – who actually had no business in this church, Padre Frittitta observed, but had been put here for the devotion of the little people, the lower classes, the popolino, Padre Frittitta sighed.

  As Shobha prowled around the church taking pictures of the saints, I sat down on a pew beside Padre Frittitta and became aware that the church air was making me a bit dizzy. It smelled sweet and sour at the same time: it smelled of faded lilies, of muttered sins and stale air, of myrrh, of absolution and of old men. I held the microphone of my tape recorder at arm’s length and Padre Frittitta said: ‘God is everywhere.’

  He told me his favourite saint was Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity, because she had taught him that God dwells within us.

  ‘God is in the mountains, in the sea and in the trees,’ Padre Frittitta said. His voice sounded like whispering from hundreds of years ago, a hoarse susurration, a quiet murmur. ‘I don’t have to seek God in the clouds,’ said Padre Frittitta, ‘because I carry him within me, and that is what gives me courage and strength. That’s what I always preach: “Take God with you wherever you go!”’

  So Padre Frittitta had also brought the Lord God to the hiding place of the fugitive mafioso Pietro Aglieri. There, in front of the home altar, he had served the mass to the murderer, had taken his confession and granted him absolution. Since then, the law had investigated the Carmelite priest and Padre Frittitta no longer understood the world. He spoke without waiting for a question, as if he had pressed a button deep within himself. The button of absolution.

  Of course, Pietro Aglieri’s involvement in the assassinations of the two public prosecutors, Falcone and Borsellino, was a grave matter even in the eyes of Padre Frittitta, not to mention the thirteen other accusations of murder – involvement in the murders of general public prosecutor Antonino Scopelliti, the MP Salvo Lima, the sisters of the turncoat mafioso Marino Mannoia, and murders during the Mafia war in 1983. But still.

  ‘However, it was right for me to go there,’ Padre Frittitta whispered, ‘it was right, because Jesus preached: “Go out and bring back the lost sheep!” So I went. Because this individual had to change. The church must help these people: t
hey too have dignity; they too have a soul that shouldn’t be kicked and battered with laws. Laws, laws, of course, but to achieve what? What?’

  As he spoke, his eye slipped across the pews to the wooden crucifix, the crown of thorns, the wounds, to Jesus, his legs polished smooth by the hands of the faithful who touched him during the Easter processions. ‘And Jesus went to the sinners,’ Padre Frittitta whispered. ‘Yes, he went to them, so I went to them too, and I knew that I was taking a risk.’

  Fury sprayed from his mouth in fine droplets of saliva, incessant, dense and sticky. After all, everyone in Palermo knew how devout the Aglieri family was. Her son believed in God, Pietro Aglieri’s mother herself had insisted; he wasn’t pretending, he respected the Christian commandments, and all the things that had been circulated about him were false. His sister lived in a closed order, his cousin was chaplain at the Palermo polyclinic, an aunt was a nun, and Pietro Aglieri himself had attended the archiepiscopal seminary in Palermo where he had acquired his knowledge of Latin and Greek.

  ‘These people must be saved,’ whispered Padre Frittitta, ‘and it’s not prison that saves them, not solitary confinement, no. Certainly, they must make good their injustice, that’s one thing, but the other thing is surely to convert them. And that requires someone who will sow supernatural, moral values in them. And only the church can do that!’

  Padre Frittitta groaned, as if he were living through it all again: the policeman arresting him, the dazzling flashlights as he was dragged from his church in handcuffs – all the humiliations, all the insults, all the indignities still lay heavy on his heart.

  Then, on the evening news, the whole of Italy had been able to see the pictures of Pietro Aglieri’s hiding place with its little chapel, its prayer stools, the statue of Saint Francis, the Bible, the gospels, the books by Edith Stein and the files of the Second Vatican Council, crumpled and scattered on the floor. The newspapers reported how after his arrest Pietro Aglieri had spent hours in solitary confinement immersed in prayer and said at last: ‘I have repented before God.’ Which, admittedly, he said more to himself than to the policeman who had opened the door and asked with surprise: ‘You want to repent?’ And Aglieri had replied: ‘Before God. Not before you.’

  Padre Frittitta wouldn’t have expected anything else of him. Who cares about earthly justice?

  It’s heavenly justice that Cosa Nostra hopes for. Earthly justice it creates itself. Trials can be fixed, judges and politicians bought. The turncoat mafioso Leonardo Messina said: ‘Of course my wife and I are religious. I was taught that the Mafia exists in order to administer justice. So there is no contradiction. On the contrary, it’s now that I feel like more of a traitor. Before, when I was a murderer, I was relaxed as I walked into the church. Now that I’m a turncoat I can no longer pray with a clear conscience.’

  When Nitto Santapaola, the boss of the Catania Mafia family, was arrested, before the handcuffs were put on him he picked up the Bible and kissed it. And when the boss Michele Greco, known as il Papa, the Pope, was called to account for hundreds of murders at the maxi-trial, he merely remarked: ‘I have an invaluable gift – inner peace.’ On the bedside table in his prison cell there were four books that he read to make his life sentence go by more quickly: the gospels, a prayer book entitled Pray, Pray and two liturgical books.

  The reference library of Mafia boss Totò Riina is very similar: he never sleeps without pictures of the saints at the head of his prison bed. And Bernardo Provenzano’s knowledge of the Bible is legendary. When he was arrested at the end of his forty-two years, eleven months and two days in Corleone, the police found five Bibles with annotations and passages underlined. At his desk the boss surrounded himself with pictures of the saints, the Last Supper framed in dark wood, the Mother of God in various versions, a calendar with a picture of Padre Pio, the boss’s favourite saint. There was even a rosary in the toilet. After Provenzano’s arrest, the police counted ninety-one sacred statues, seventy-three of them Christ figures with the inscription Jesus, I put my trust in you. No one was surprised that Provenzano’s messages, the pizzini, those little pieces of paper, folded and sealed with adhesive tape, with which he managed to remain invisible in the age of the internet, bugs and satellite surveillance, always ended with the same phrase: May the Lord bless and protect you.

  The messages to his followers, delivered in the solemn and affectionate tone of a good father, were typed up by Provenzano on a typewriter. When he was arrested, thirty little pieces of paper were ready to be collected and distributed to their addressees. The Provenzano code didn’t just consist of numbers – the boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo was no. 30, his son no. 31; only the boss Matteo Messina Denaro had the honour of being addressed by a codename, ‘Alessio’ – but also his own personal, individual spelling: Provenzano wrote as he spoke, he confused t and d, g and c, in line with Sicilian dialect. But the lines of prayer and Bible quotations were by no means the expression of religious fanaticism, they were the vehicle of a secret code. When the boss Pino Lipari received a prison visit from his son Arturo, it concerned the content of the piece of paper that Arturo had copied down for his arrested father. The content had not been complete, his father complained. When his son justified himself by saying that there had been a lot of Ave Marias in the message, to which he hadn’t paid much attention, his father rebuked him: ‘Next time, copy out everything, because in the middle of all those Ave Marias there’s something that I need to understand, have you got that?’

  The commandments of the church are the commandments of the Mafia. But for the Mafia the significance of the commandments is less ethical than practical. God exists in order to be useful to Cosa Nostra.

  Thou shalt have no other gods before me: The boss is infallible, a padre eterno, God’s vicar on earth, master over life and death.

  Honour thy father and thy mother: The preservation of the family goes above all else, even one’s own life. But only so long as individual family members don’t tread the dignity of a man of honour, the clan or Cosa Nostra itself into the mud – a sister who has an extramarital affair that the whole town talks about has forfeited her life.

  Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour: Mafiosi are obliged to be completely honest with one another. A man of honour never lies. Either he says nothing or he tells the truth, because his honesty is of crucial importance to the survival of Cosa Nostra.

  Thou shalt not commit adultery: A mafioso may not deceive his wife: the mother of his children could become an unpredictable security risk if the extramarital relationship came to light. And a lover is often less easily tamed than a wife. Besides, a mafioso who is known to have affairs is seen as someone incapable of controlling himself sexually and emotionally, which means that he isn’t professionally trustworthy.

  There is only one Christian commandment that has not been taken on board by Cosa Nostra: Thou shalt not kill. But can a job be a sin? A man of honour kills without passion. For him, to kill is to fulfil one’s duty – to his state, his people, Cosa Nostra, which he is sworn to serve, since the all-powerful godfather said: ‘Now you no longer belong to this world. Now you are our business. Cosa Nostra.’

  Do they have guilt feelings? ‘Does a judge have guilt feelings when he sentences a defendant to the electric chair or life imprisonment?’ the turncoat mafioso Tommaso Buscetta once asked, and told the story of the mafioso who, before every murder, used to light a candle in front of the statue of Jesus and prayed: ‘Jesus Christ, take him! Take him to you!’ But God did not hear his plea. So the mafioso carried out the murder himself. After that he prayed again: ‘Dear God, you didn’t want him. I have sent him to you.’ And before every murder the hit man Leoluca Bagarella went to church to pray: ‘Lord, you alone know that they are the ones who want to be killed. No guilt attaches to me.’

  Since its origins, Cosa Nostra has tried to merge with the world in which it lives and from which it was born. That is crucial to its survival. The Mafia wants to be invisible, i
t wants to be part of society. It has always relied upon the Italian dislike of the state, and for centuries it has successfully sold the illusion of fighting for a higher justice – as if it were fighting for justice for the individual against a powerful state. This is something it has in common with the Catholic Church, which struggles to comply with the demands of earthly justice. In large parts of southern Italy the state is still seen as an occupying power – as if the Normans, the Hohenstaufen, the Bourbons, the Aragonese and Austrians had passed through here only yesterday.

  As pragmatic as Cosa Nostra is, it would never dare call the church into question. Even in the third millennium, Italy is still a country where, every day, if not the Pope then at least one of his cardinals appears on television, addresses his subjects and urges them to have more children, fewer divorces, to play more sport and use less homeopathic medicine.

  The church fears for souls, the Mafia for its sinecure. And for that reason the Carmelite monks defended their fellow priest Padre Frittitta and instructed the public prosecutor’s office that the church was never against anything, not even Cosa Nostra, but only ever with: with the tormented souls, with every individual sinner who needed salvation. And Novica, a journal close to the Palermo curia, said this: ‘Even the most wanted mafioso in the world must be sure that at any time of day or night he can find a cleric who will hand him over neither to the public prosecutor’s office nor to police headquarters.’

  ‘And through whose fault was Christ nailed to the cross?’ whispered Padre Frittitta. ‘Through the fault of people who had sinned! Through the fault of us sinners! Should I have torn the passion story out of the gospels? Jesus is not only the Jesus of blessedness, but also the Jesus of the passion. That’s why I went.’

  That’s what Padre Frittitta says. And I remember that at some point I lost all feeling in my arm. When I turned the tape recorder off I noticed a faint feeling of dizziness. The heat. The lilies. The incense. The smell of old men. Just before I reached the sacristy I fainted. When I woke up again I saw Padre Frittitta bending over me, rubbing a liquid that smelled like Melissa oil over my face, neck and cleavage, and a deathly pale Shobha dashing in and yelling excitedly: ‘What’s going on here? What’s happened?’ To which Padre Frittitta, bright red in the face, replied: ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing!’