Honoured Society, The

by Reski, Petra; Whiteside, Shaun

  ‘Ma,’ says Letizia, stretching out the m for so long that her ma sounds like ‘all striving and straining is in vain’. Then she slowly walks down the steps to her flat. When Shobha calls after her to ask if she doesn’t want to stay to dinner, she declines. She doesn’t want another bite, with all due respect to Shobha’s caponata, but the very thought of aubergines with tomatoes and pumpkin makes her feel bloated.

  Shobha showers, and I turn off the sound when the news returns to the rubbish in Naples. ‘Now there’s rubbish on the elegant Via Chiaia, too!’ I see a sea of blue, black and white rubbish bags, bursting, fermenting, rotting rubbish bags – fruit crates, cardboard pasta boxes, detergent bottles, nappies. I don’t want to hear for the thousandth time the commentators describing the rubbish as some sort of mysterious force of nature which sweeps across the city like a hurricane every few months, leaving behind it a trail of devastation. Each time, politicians wholeheartedly announce an irrevocable victory over the rubbish, waste incineration units will be put into operation straightaway, the army moves in, special commissioners are appointed and dismissed again, special trains are loaded with rubbish and sent to Germany – and no one says the evil word: ‘Camorra’. It makes money out of the waste disposal and landfill, both legal and illegal, with which it has contaminated the whole of the Neapolitan hinterland, with industrial waste that it imports to Naples from all over Europe, and with toxic waste that is illegally burned and which has poisoned the groundwater and the air with dioxins.

  ‘At least here in Sicily we have no problems with rubbish,’ Shobha says, coming out of the shower with freshly washed hair and pointing to the pictures on television. She adds ironically: ‘Having the water supply in the hands of the Mafia is quite enough.’

  When Shobha moves, her bracelets jangle. She brings them back by the kilo from India, where she spends the winter. In this way, she escapes not only the damp climate but also Sicilian reality – where people try to change things in such a way that everything stays exactly as it was. Today I sometimes wonder what it would have been like for me if I’d grown up not in the Ruhr but in Sicily. If my first flat of my own had been not in the university district of Münster, but in Monreale, near Palermo, where mafiosi would have destroyed all my furniture. In that case I’d probably have yearned for India too.

  When Shobha was back in India, I was in Naples. As befits an old married couple, we sent each other text messages and said: ‘Wish you were here!’ Instead of Shobha, I had a bald photographer by my side, which didn’t exactly make my research easier. Men always arouse suspicion in southern Italy. Women, on the other hand, are generally underestimated, particularly if they’re blonde. And being underestimated is the best thing that can happen to a journalist on an assignment.

  That’s why Carmine Sarno wasn’t even slightly suspicious when I stepped into his music agency, La Bella Napoli, and asked him about the lyrics of the songs he had composed. Sometimes you can strike up an acquaintanceship as easily as that.

  ‘You know who I am. You know my name,’ Carmine Sarno said softly.

  He didn’t need to say anything more than that. He sat with his legs crossed on a little gilded rococo chair, a dainty man on a dainty chair. Carmine Sarno has very small feet for a man; he’s unusually delicate overall, his waist as slender as a woman’s. His shirt was open to the navel and revealed an almost hairless chest and a heavy white-gold chain from which hung a heart-shaped medallion and a portrait engraved in gold. In his trouser pocket he carried a roll of 20 euro notes, held together with a thin rubber band. With this he was paying a man who had printed up some posters for him for a concert by the singer Antony. ‘Is that spelled right?’ the man asked, pointing at the name ‘Antonj’.

  ‘I think that should be a y,’ I said.

  And Carmine Sarno said: ‘That’s how we spell it here.’

  Carmine Sarno belongs to one of the city’s most powerful Camorra clans. The Sarnos rule in Ponticelli, that peripheral quarter of Naples into which neither tourists nor Neapolitans stray: a landscape of containers, forgotten by the world, a district that consists largely of oil refineries, arterial roads on stilts, warehouses and potholes. And which is only ever mentioned if another Camorrista is murdered. Or if a gypsy camp is set on fire, as happened that spring, after a gypsy had tried to abduct a child in Ponticelli. For respectable Neapolitans, Ponticelli is a far-off galaxy, its existence known only from the newspapers.

  The Sarnos have ruled in Ponticelli since the early 1980s. Seven brothers and five sisters. Three of the brothers were in jail; altogether, sixteen members of the Sarno family were in jail. The oldest brother is called Ciro; even at the age of thirty he was one of the most dangerous Camorristi in Naples and had been in jail for almost eighteen years, with interruptions – which is why Carmine Sarno had dedicated the song ‘Ciro, Ciro’ to him, lamenting his brother’s lot. Because Carmine Sarno wasn’t just a member of one of the most powerful Camorra clans in Naples, he was also a poet.

  We had only known each other for a few minutes when Carmine awkwardly told me how his first wife had put him in prison. He had stuck the barrel of his gun in her mouth, his wife had told the carabinieri. Shortly after that, they arrested Carmine Sarno. He was behind bars for nine months for attempted murder. When he was released from prison, his wife really wanted to kill him.

  ‘I’m telling you all this because I see you as a sister,’ said Carmine Sarno.

  How had we got on to the story of his wife? Oh, yes, it was all about love. Lots of his songs are about that. In ‘Ci soffro ancora’, ‘I’m still suffering’, an abandoned man confides in a friend. ‘Mi telefoni’, ‘Call me’, is about a secret adulterous affair. Then there are titles like ‘Notte d’amore’, ‘Night of Love’; ‘Brivido’, ‘Shiver’; or ‘Estate d’amore’, ‘Summer of Love’. Sometimes love is not requited, sometimes it lasts only a heartbeat, sometimes it is a dead end. But it is always heartbreaking. Carmine had composed two dozen songs, at night when he couldn’t sleep because he was nervous or filled with longing, or because inspiration had suddenly come upon him.

  Carmine represented the best singers in Naples. In his agency, one wall was papered with his stars’ posters. They were men whose tattoos crept from their shirt collars, men with pin-sharp sideburns who called themselves Alessio or Nello Amato or Maurizio, men at the sight of whom girls in Naples started weeping as hysterically as if the blood of San Gennaro had just liquefied in front of their eyes.

  ‘E carcerate’ was the name of one of the hits from Sarno’s workshop: ‘The Prisoners’, a martyrs’ hymn about men who aren’t allowed to see their children growing up. Carmine Sarno is a man with a soft heart. And armoured glass in his window panes. The armoured glass was necessary because sinister characters made the area unsafe from time to time, he said. Which was an elegant circumlocution for the Camorra war between the Sarno and Panico clans – manifest now in a car bomb, now in a bullet to the head. The war between the clans had also killed Sarno’s nephew, whose face, engraved in gold, rested on his chest. The boy had been blown sky-high by a car bomb meant for his father: only his hands were left, Carmine Sarno said.

  Later, he invited me to lunch. We ate with one of his friends, an impresario who looked as if he’d been dressed by a costume designer: with a lot of hair gel and an awful lot of artificial tan, a light-grey suit, a white shirt open to the chest and the usual medallion with the picture of a dead person around his neck. The impresario was telling Carmine Sarno that he had been checked by the DIA, the Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia, the national anti-Mafia office. Turning to me, he added apologetically that it must have been a case of mistaken identity: ‘We’re always talking about various artists on the phone,’ he said. The police, he explained, had confused that with some sort of secret code.

  Carmine Sarno saw my interest in him as a piece of jewellery that you pin on yourself. After all, there had been bosses in Naples who had dictated legends from their lives straight into the notebooks of sel
ected journalists. Unlike the Sicilian or Calabrian bosses, the bosses of the Camorra are not embarrassed about putting their wealth on display. Camorristi are known for building themselves Hollywood-style villas and speeding down the alleyways of the Spanish Quarter in their Ferrari Testarossas. When I accompanied a Neapolitan wedding photographer to the baptism of a Camorrista’s child in the Spanish Quarter, I witnessed the mother giving the godfather a diamond-encrusted platinum bracelet. And the godfather responding with a diamond-encrusted platinum cross for the child. The clan of the Giulianos, the legendary Camorra family that ruled Naples until the 1990s, loved making a show for the cameras: the photograph of Diego Armando Maradona, lying in the Giulianos’ scallop-shaped pool drinking champagne, became a Camorra icon.

  The smart restaurant where I ate with Carmine Sarno and the impresario rose like a chimera from the wasteland of Ponticelli, with a marble terrace and brightly coloured awnings; the waiters served frittered fruits de mer and we drank wine adorned with slices of fresh peach and delicate mint leaves.

  ‘Without parsley for you, as always, Carmine,’ said the waiter as he served the pasta, and Carmine Sarno’s eye drifted carelessly over the businessmen who greeted him. ‘Carmine, you’re the greatest!’ a man called from the next table, but Sarno didn’t respond.

  Unusually, he drank wine, in my honour, although he had just had a serious stomach operation. ‘To your health, Petra,’ he said, and straightened the red ruby ring on his right hand – a present from someone thanking him for a favour he had performed. Then Carmine spoke quietly about the benefit concerts that he organizes every year: one for children at Epiphany, and one for the physically handicapped in September.

  Why did he do that?

  ‘Because I have been lame since childhood,’ he said.

  Carmine Sarno lived in one of those industrialized blocks on stilts of which the whole eastern edge of Naples seemed to consist, all the way inland. Ponticelli was the Sarnos’ fortress. With solariums called fuego, fire, and the Coppola bar, in which young, nervous men drank tumblers full of whisky sour even in the morning. Before going on to sing a verse from a love song. When they saw Carmine Sarno, they smiled so broadly that I could see their cocaine-eroded gums.

  Nothing stirred here without the consent of the Sarnos. Bodyguards reported every suspicious movement – a hidden investigator, a turncoat clan member, a motorbike driver in a helmet. In Naples only hit men wear helmets. Unlike the old town of Naples, Ponticelli couldn’t hide behind the enchantment of Renaissance marble cornucopias, baroque churches decorated with death’s-heads, and rococo palazzi. There were no frescoes here, no marble columns scattering poetry like jewels over everyday life among the Camorra; there was nothing here but rubbish bags which flourished like carbuncles along the roadside ditches, and which at night, once they had been lit, blazed like beacons of perdition.

  Unlike the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra is organized horizontally: there is no hierarchy and there are hardly any rules, everyone wants to be the boss, and that doesn’t happen without a murder. Every third day someone is killed in Naples. A few months before I met Carmine Sarno, the police in Ponticelli had arrested seventy-one clan members: for nine murders, two attempted murders, three instances of grievous bodily harm and one thwarted assassination attempt; for robbery, profiteering, drug and arms dealing. Kalashnikovs, rapid-fire rifles, pistols and explosives had been smuggled into Naples in the buses bringing Polish home helps into town. Thanks to the arrests, an attack by the Panico family on the Sarno clan had been thwarted; the prepared explosives had been impounded, along with twenty businesses, properties worth millions, cars and yachts. And in Ponticelli you saw nothing but burned-out car wrecks, home-made house altars and the graffito My breath belongs to you.

  Carmine’s brother Ciro was called o’ sindaco, the mayor, because he had appointed himself master of the Terremotati, the people displaced by the 1980 earthquake, who occupied Ponticelli’s ruined buildings, shells left behind by Neapolitan speculators after they had cashed in their grants. Ciro o’ sindaco had allocated the flats. And taken care of electricity, water and gas connections. And thus won himself the unconditional devotion of people who had nothing more to lose. When Ciro Sarno was arrested in 1990 for illegal arms possession, there was a revolt: frying pans, flowerpots and crockery rained down on the police. One clan member relieved Ciro Sarno by assuming responsibility for the illegal arms possession. Ciro was released again. Temporarily.

  Carmine Sarno didn’t like to talk about such sad things. He preferred to talk about his songs, which were, he said, always inspired by true stories from Ponticelli. The song ‘Frate mio’, ‘My Brother’, is about a pair of lovers who discover they are brother and sister. Social workers make the couple part. ‘Mi telefoni’, ‘Call me’, is about a secret adulterous affair and ‘Sora mia’, ‘My Sister’, is about the death of a woman who dies of an incurable illness at the age of only thirty, leaving behind a little daughter.

  Later, when we were sitting in his agency again, Carmino Sarno tried to make it clear to me he didn’t use the sources of his inspiration without their permission: of course, he always asked the families beforehand whether they minded him writing a song about them, he said. Like the parents of little Francesco Paolillo, for whom he had written the song ‘Insieme con Gesù’, ‘Together with Jesus’. Francesco died while playing in an unsafe derelict building. In memory of him, Sarno had produced a video clip and had a little altar built near the spot where he had fallen to his death.

  At that thought Carmine felt silent, leaving nothing but a feeling of piety and a gentle summer wind that passed through the agency. The breeze drifted over a withered yucca tree, a Padre Pio watching over a keyboard, and a cabaret artist sitting mutely in a corner. He humbly unrolled a poster and tried to excite Carmine about his programme which was guaranteed family fare, simple lyrics, no swearing. He performed with his daughter, who was nine and a half and a natural talent; the act was capable of further development and equally suited to first communions and weddings, to baptisms and confirmations. Then he told a joke from his act. And laughed. Carmine Sarno didn’t laugh. He just looked out of the window into the street. And casually returned the greeting of a passing youth. And the cabaret artist rolled his poster back up again.

  A Sarno doesn’t fritter himself away, either in words or in gestures.

  Carmine Sarno didn’t lose his composure even when he received an unexpected visit in my presence: two men in sunglasses. One of them had white hair and looked like Richard Gere, the other had black hair and looked like Al Pacino. Richard Gere wore a pinstripe suit and a thin D’Artagnan beard, Al Pacino was dressed entirely in black.

  ‘Financial police,’ said Richard Gere, taking out his ID.

  Because I wanted to be polite, I made as if to leave the agency, so that I wouldn’t be witness to what might turn out to be an unpleasant conversation for Sarno. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Sit right where you are, Petra, it’s not a problem.’

  ‘It’s about the income from Alessio’s concerts,’ said Al Pacino. ‘We want to know how many tickets were sold, things like that.’

  Sarno fell silent.

  ‘Can’t you help us in any way?’ asked Richard Gere.

  ‘No,’ said Sarno. ‘I don’t deal with that kind of thing.’

  Then he went to a shelf and took out a folder. He opened it awkwardly. There were documents in it, yellowed licences, which Carmine Sarno looked at as if seeing them for the first time.

  ‘Perhaps your tax adviser might be able to help us. What’s his name?’ asked Al Pacino.

  ‘My what?’ asked Carmine Sarno.

  ‘Your tax adviser. You must have a tax adviser,’ said Richard Gere.

  ‘I don’t know the name of my tax adviser. My wife deals with things like that.’ And then he called to the joiner across the street: ‘Do you know the name of my tax adviser?’

  The joiner yelled back: ‘No idea.’

  ‘Perhaps we could have a word wit
h your wife,’ said Al Pacino. ‘She might be able to drop by later,’ said Richard Gere.

  And Carmine Sarno answered: ‘No, that’s not possible. My wife is in Lourdes right now. On a pilgrimage.’

  ‘Things like that only happen in Naples,’ says Shobha. And please note that the only real question in Italy is what kind of Mafia you can live with most easily – the Sicilian, the Calabrian or the Neapolitan?

  I tap the remote control again, turn over and see the domes of Noto cathedral. On a local channel there’s a programme about Sicily’s baroque town. The presenter is currently raving about how the Sicilian baroque celebrates the moment, movement, the effimero; and Shobha and I are only thinking that there’s resignation in the air today. And not only in Sicily. In Calabria and Campania too.

  While Shobha makes caponata in the kitchen, bracelets jangling, I lay the table on the terrace. Here, above the rooftops of Palermo, you can sometimes forget reality. Only recently we spent an evening on the terrace of Marzia Sabella, the Sicilian public prosecutor who led the investigating unit that arrested Bernardo Provenzano. You could have aimed at the terrace from various windows and balconies, but the prosecutor didn’t care. From here you can see the sea: that was more important to her. Marzia Sabella had decided not to be frightened.

  But when Shobha and I told her about Calabria and Duisburg she shuddered. Calabria makes even Mafia-tested Sicilian prosecutors uneasy. Just as Sicilians sneer at the Neapolitan Camorra. Even the public prosecutors have a certain local patriotism; I often had the feeling that they felt a certain ironic bond with the criminal organization that they fought against every day. The Sicilian public prosecutor thought the Sicilian Cosa Nostra was criminally superior to all other Mafia organizations, at least where its political influence was concerned. The Calabrian public prosecutor thought the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta was nimbler and therefore better equipped for the future in the long term. And the Neapolitan public prosecutor was amused that the Neapolitan Camorristi had always managed to swindle Cosa Nostra whenever they smuggled cigarettes together, regularly failing to share a cargo with them.