By now we’re the last guests in Piccola Napoli, the old woman at the till is already starting to cash up for the day. She’s a bit like the grim-looking old Sicilian woman that I saw in a pizzeria in Duisburg. A policeman had recommended the restaurant to me: ‘I can assure you that the kitchen’s clean, we searched the place only recently,’ he said.
I had gone to Duisburg with my uncle, an undercover agent in a sailor’s cap. My uncle is a pensioner and a former miner, so he’s the ideal companion for looking around Duisburg without drawing attention to yourself. We had lunch in the Sicilian pizzeria that had already been searched by the criminal investigation department. No one in the restaurant spoke even halfway decent German; they didn’t even speak Italian, they just communicated in a Sicilian dialect which they muttered through unmoving lips, as if they’d been catapulted into the present of Duisburg from the depths of the Sicilian past. My uncle was eagerly wolfing down a plate of salmon with prawn sauce when the old woman came out of the kitchen. She was very short, had eyes like bits of coal and her hair was in a thin bun at the back of her neck. She poured herself a glass of mineral water at the counter. When I saw her, a film played out in my mind’s eye, showing all the encounters that I’ve ever had with Mafia wives. I couldn’t help thinking about suspicious glances behind fly-curtains, the severe faces of the black dwarves of Corleone, of Mafia mothers who call their sons vermin when they have left the Mafia. But perhaps the old woman with the coal-black eyes was just a generous Sicilian grandmother helping out in this restaurant for a few hours a day. Perhaps.
But this restaurant was actually only a warm-up. The destination for our outing was the Landhaus Milser. A hotel that was ‘the expression of Southern vitality’, according to the prospectus. It was on the edge of Duisburg, between meadows and little pieces of woodland.
My uncle stepped into the hotel lobby as if into a church; he crossed his arms behind his back and stepped across the terracotta tiles with great deference. Displayed in a case next to the entrance were medals won by the weightlifter Rolf Milser, who had founded the hotel along with the Calabrian Antonio Pelle. The hotel became famous in 2006 when the Italian national football team stayed there. And when the Duisburg massacre took place. During those August days there was barely an interview in which the Calabrian owner, Antonio Pelle from San Luca, endeavoured to avoid arrest on grounds of kinship: not all Calabrians were mafiosi, he’d rather have been born on the moon than in San Luca.
In fact, the hotel had attracted the attention of the Federal Criminal Police (BKA) before. The BKA report from 2000 on the ’Ndrangheta in Germany mentions both Rolf Milser and Antonio Pelle, who were under investigation for money laundering. Even though neither Antonio Pelle nor Rolf Milser had sufficient funds, the report said, they were able to raise 19 million Deutschmarks for the Landhaus Milser hotel. Subsequent investigations found no evidence of money laundering activities – they just established that the hotel had been financed with the help of EU grants and loans from the federal government, the state and the city. Antonio Pelle was related to the Romeo ’Ndrangheta clan. And Rolf Milser was related to him: Rolf Milser’s ex-wife is Antonio Pelle’s sister-in-law.
Even if no illegal flow of cash could be demonstrated, the hotel presented an excellent opportunity to hide internationally wanted clan members and to launder money by redeeming the loans, the BKA report established. According to Italian investigators, the clan leader Antonio Romeo, wanted internationally, had been held in the hotel for a while. And one fugitive mafioso stated that the hotel’s food supplier, on record as an ’Ndranghetista, was supposed to have paid 15 million Deutschmarks for a hotel in Duisburg. The Landhaus Milser. But there were no definite findings.
So much for the BKA report. But I said nothing of that to my uncle. We stepped through the light-drenched hotel lobby, poked our heads into the Da Vinci restaurant and admired the photographs of the Italian national team. My uncle thought everything was very nice, very well cared for.
As we left, my eye was drawn to a gold plaque that hung in the lobby, on which Antonio Pelle was celebrated as a ‘successful migrant’ who had brought honour on Calabria. The medal of honour had been awarded by the Pro Loco of San Giovanni di Gerace, one of those associations devoted to the fostering of local traditions. The medal was signed by the Pro Loco president, Dr Mario Carabetta. And I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the companion of the hit man from San Luca who drove through Duisburg in a bugged car the summer before the assassination bore the same surname: Michele Carabetta.
When Don Pino, the parish priest of San Luca, had travelled to Duisburg to deliver his mass of reconciliation, he spent the night in the Landhaus Milser. As befits a Calabrian. Compatriots always look out for each other.
Mafia Women
When we leave the trattoria at last, the women of the Piccola Napoli look up for the first time. The old woman stares at us and at the money that the waiter brings her on a little silver tray, the daughter-in-law finally stops polishing the counter and wipes her hand on her apron. But not even Shobha can wrest a smile from the daughter-in-law, not even when she takes a picture of her and admires her delicate profile. The daughter-in-law shrugs carelessly, as if she thinks her symmetrical face is entirely uninteresting.
Outside, the light has softened again; we stand irresolutely in the street, Letizia lights a cigarette and looks through the smoke at the clear, endless sky as if expecting a sign.
‘We could drive to Mondello,’ Shobha suggests. ‘We could take a few pictures on Monte Pellegrino first, and then a few on Mondello beach.’
Letizia looks up in astonishment, as if remembering only now that this is all about her. ‘Haven’t we finished?’ she asks. She hesitates for a moment between protest and resignation, and then opts for an aggressive: ‘Let’s get it over with.’
Shobha calls Salvo, who is clearly in the middle of his siesta, because it takes him ages to answer. He suggests that we go in the direction of Ucciardone prison, where he’ll pick us up to take us to Mondello. First he has some things to do for one of his ladies.
‘Madonna,’ says Shobha, as she puts the telefonino away again, ‘they’ve really got him over a barrel.’ So that we don’t have to wait too long for Salvo, we walk through the Borgo at a leisurely pace, as slowly as tourists, past the piles of rubbish from the market stalls, through air that smells as if it’s fermenting. The green of artichokes lies next to burst watermelons and shimmering grey fish scales. Not a single car drives past; nothing stirs around here before five o’clock. A deep silence prevails in the street, on the artichoke-green, on the fly-curtains of the balconies. The silence of paused time. The sacred southern Italian lunch break is even respected by the dogs in the street, which lie snoring in the shade on the pavements. Beside them, fat women sit spread-legged on plastic chairs outside the front doors of their houses. The women sleep open-mouthed, hands folded on their bellies.
The plastic chairs aren’t the usual white ones that pollute the world, but chairs stretched with strips of plastic, old chairs that look almost beautiful next to the omnipresent white plastic stacking chairs. It’s not just traditions that last longer in Sicily than elsewhere, chairs do too. They remind me of Rita Atria’s mother’s chair. It was in their living room, made of white and yellow plastic strips, with an old sofa cushion on the seat.
Rita Atria was a Sicilian girl, about whom I wrote my very first book. She was eleven years old when her father, a Mafia boss, was murdered. She was sixteen when her brother was killed. She took her own life at seventeen. She had grown up in the Mafia. Rita wanted to avenge her father and brother by collaborating with the judiciary and telling them what she knew about the Mafia in her village. Since then her mother had rejected her.
Rita lived in Rome under a series of assumed names – with her sister-in-law, her brother’s widow, in an apartment that the Ministry of the Interior had rented for the two young women. They were filled with hope for a new life beyond the Mafia, until public prose
cutor Paolo Borsellino was murdered. A week after the assassination Rita Atria jumped from the seventh floor of a block of flats in Rome. She would have turned eighteen four weeks later.
A state prosecutor gave me a photocopy of Rita Atria’s diary. In it she wrote:
No one can understand the emptiness that Borsellino’s death has left in my life. Everybody’s scared. But the only thing I’m scared of is that the Mafia state will always win, and the few poor idiots who tilt against windmills will be murdered too. Before you start fighting against the Mafia you have to test your own conscience – it’s only when you have defeated the Mafia within yourself that you can fight against it in your circle of friends. Because the Mafia is us and our twisted way of behaving. Borsellino. You died for what you believed in. But without you, I’m dead.
Rita’s mother didn’t come to her daughter’s funeral. Eight women from Palermo carried Rita’s coffin on their shoulders: they were the women from the committee of ‘Women against the Mafia’, and one of them was Letizia. Rita Atria’s grave was marked with a small headstone with the inscription The Truth Lives. Rita’s sister-in-law had had this gravestone erected – the sister-in-law who had lived with her until her suicide. It was only months after her daughter’s death that the girl’s mother visited the grave – and shattered the gravestone with a hammer that she had hidden in her handbag. She went on striking the stone until only a few splinters remained of Rita’s photograph and the inscription The Truth Lives.
To understand Rita’s story, I had driven alone to Partanna, the village in the Belice Valley, south-east of Trapani. A taxi driver from Palermo had brought me to Partanna and promised to pick me up again when I called him. I stood in the road and watched his car disappearing into the distance, and felt as if I had been dropped off on an alien planet. I felt even more abandoned when I moved into my room at the only inn in the village, a narrow room with a metal fly-curtain outside the window which rattled gently when the trucks drove by on the through-road below my window.
The inn was actually a pizzeria that also rented rooms – rooms without phones. You could only make phone calls from the dining room, and you could only do that with coins. The only other person staying in the inn was an old man, a Sicilian who had emigrated from Partanna to America in the 1940s and who, since he had retired, came back to his village every summer. He spent his holidays sitting in the front door of the pizzeria and hoping to fall into conversation with someone. He usually waited in vain. Because he spoke only English – and remnants of the dialect that people in Partanna had spoken in the 1940s and which hardly anyone understood now. Sometimes I translated for him from English into Italian. In the evening the old Sicilian waited for me; he sat in his vest on a plastic chair and told me his house had six bedrooms and wasn’t far from Niagara Falls. And I sat next to him and smoked and thought about the day’s encounters – with Rita’s sister-in-law, who had come back to visit her village under police protection; with Giovanna Atria, Rita’s mother.
Everyone in the village knew that I had come because of Rita’s story. I could feel their eyes glued to me as I walked along the street to buy cigarettes in the village’s single tobacconist’s shop, or when I made a call from the only phone box that took phone cards. But when I asked anyone a question, they all acted as if Rita had never existed. Every day I tried to allay the suspicions of Rita’s mother, who didn’t want to talk to anyone about her daughter. At first, she only opened the door a crack and then slammed it shut again as soon as she saw me. But I refused to be discouraged and stood outside her house every day, hoping to persuade her to give me an interview. Until she finally invited me into the living room.
Even though it was light outside, we sat behind closed shutters in the light of a fluorescent strip, in a room that looked as if it had never been lived in, with a walnut vitrine full of liqueur glasses that no one had drunk from, with a sofa that no one had sat on. I sat on one of the dining-room chairs, which had not had its plastic covering removed in all those years. The only piece of furniture that was actually used was the chair stretched with strips of plastic on which Rita’s mother sat. Her favourite place to sit was in a corner behind the living-room window, from where she could see the comings and goings in the street as she sat on her chair, peering out from behind her crooked blinds.
The mother didn’t regret rejecting her daughter, nor did she regret shattering the gravestone. The betrayal of the family had to be paid for. Washed away, scrubbed away, chopped into tiny pieces. Giovanna Atria repeated only that her daughter’s actions had been wrong, wrong, wrong – and that she had been hexed by her sister-in-law, the hated sister-in-law.
The mother spouted her accusations, her breath rattled, and I had difficulty following her through her thicket of accusations and suspicions. I saw her sitting, legs spread, on the plastic-strip chair in front of me and heard her complaining without once using the word Mafia. I dreamed about her at night. The metal chains of the fly-curtain jangled, and she came flying through the window into my room at the inn, and tried to strangle me.
By day, on the other hand, she reminded me of my East Prussian grandmother. She too had done everything she could to keep her family together. The family here meaning only blood relations. Also like a Sicilian woman, my grandmother distinguished between flesh by blood and flesh by marriage contract. And my mother was flesh by marriage contract. She had been widowed at the age of twenty-seven, when my father died in a mining accident. When my mother went out dancing for the first time, six years after my father’s death, my grandmother cast her out of the family.
‘I thought you’d stay on your own,’ my grandmother had told my mother. I thought about that as I walked back along the main street with the villagers’ eyes on my back, and as I had my dinner in the pizzeria in the evening, eyed suspiciously by old men who were, as always, the only guests. In one corner of the pizzeria there was a television fixed to the wall, turned on all day. In the evening the old men watched soft-porn films, along with the old emigrant in his vest. And when the taxi driver picked me up at last and drove me back to Palermo, I felt as if I was going back to a city of light.
Shobha, Letizia and I sit on a bench by the yellow stone walls of Ucciardone prison, waiting for Salvo. After dinner a wave of fatigue falls upon us, intensified by the heat. Letizia smokes a cigarette and Shobha takes her photograph sitting next to some women. The women are waiting for visiting time at Ucciardone to begin. They sit in the shade, fanning themselves and smelling of perfume. No Mafia wife would neglect to visit her husband in prison. One of them looks like a tragic, crazed Anna Magnani. A face like a figurehead with heavy, blue bags around her eyes. Her hair comes down to her waist and she wears a chain of pearls which falls to her lap. I wonder whether I’ve ever met her before, perhaps in the high-security court at Caltanissetta?
When the trials of the murderers of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were being held there, with perpetrators, instigators and accomplices all in the dock, the wives didn’t miss a single day. Unlike now, when Mafia bosses are usually questioned by video link, the defendants used to be present in person; they sat in barred cages and tried to catch their wives’ eyes. They were men with the air of janitors, men in tracksuits. In front of the cages hung a red cord that was supposed to stop lawyers from getting too close to their clients and passing on messages.
The wives were called the ‘white widows’. They were the first in the viewing seats in the courtroom in the morning and the last to leave in the evening. It is the duty of every Mafia wife to sit through every day of the trial, from the reading of the names of everyone present to the closing of the last document folder. The crazed Anna Magnani was always first in the gallery in the morning. She always sat down in the same place on the spectators’ bench, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, folded her hands over her belly and didn’t rest until the end of the session. Later came the young women – with frothy perms, lilac lipstick and azure, air-hostess eye shadow. Two weeks’ honeymo
on in the Maldives, a fitted kitchen with a microwave and a video recorder had been enough to buy their silence. The Mafia woos the wives of arrested bosses with a lot of money. They mustn’t want for anything. Because if they are unhappy, they could start giving their husbands the wrong idea.
By half past eight in the evening, when the presiding judge declared the trial over for the day, the air conditioning had turned the women’s lips blue. That was the moment they had been waiting for since morning. Because before their husbands were led back to the cells, they managed to blow kisses from their barred cages. The women blew kisses back, kneaded their handkerchiefs and swallowed hard. Their eyes welled up. Real Matres Dolorosae – filled with the kind of devotion that women feel only when they’re convinced they’re on the right side.
These women outside the prison walls of Palermo have, in honour of the day, put on their newest outfits, low-cut floral dresses, polka-dot skirts and bustiers. It occurs to me that in San Luca, back in Calabria, I didn’t see a single woman who had dressed herself up, unless she was seventeen years old. All the married women wore black, or at best a pair of jeans with a black T-shirt. Did they wear the latest designer dresses at home, away from the public gaze? Like Arab women? The smart boutiques of Reggio must have some customers, after all.
The women of San Luca are also sure that they’re on the right side. Wiretap records show that they are by no means the patient, black-clad victims of potentially violent men but that they actively support their husbands, not only in their illegal deals but also in the planning of revenge campaigns. When she visited her husband in jail, Giulia Alvaro, who would later be arrested herself, asked her husband if she should get weapons out of a hiding place for him and bring them to another clan member. Sonia Carabetta made herself useful as an intermediary between her brother and the hit man Marco Marmo. The women disguise themselves, they pass on messages, hide fugitives, prepare murders and maintain the connection between arrested bosses and the clan – which can even win them the honorific title of a sorella d’omertà, a sister of silence.
Honoured Society, The Page 15
