In Naples, everyone knows that the Camorra isn’t a foreign body but has been part of the city for two hundred years. Today the reality is that a hundred Camorra clans rule the city, and that in 2006 alone one tonne of cocaine and six tonnes of hashish were impounded in Naples – no more than 10 per cent of the drugs traded in Italy, however – while politicians justify the existence of the Camorra as a kind of social shock absorber which keeps public order because it guarantees the survival of whole social classes.
The morality of lawlessness denounced by the judiciary has produced a network of Camorra, contractors and politicians from which all three participants derive great benefits. In economic theory this is known as a win-win situation. The politicians support the Camorra to guarantee themselves votes. And they ally themselves with the contractors in order to enjoy bribes in return for public contracts. The Camorra in turn receives bribes from the businessmen for public contracts, as well as contracts for subcontractors, which enables the Camorra to create jobs and thus assure itself of social legitimacy. And the politicians guarantee the Camorra protection from prosecution by the police and the judiciary.
The benefit to the contractors in this business lies in the fact that by eliminating their competitors they always obtain public contracts, that the safety of building sites is guaranteed, no kind of pressure can be exerted by the trade unions, and the conditions for tax avoidance, slush funds and investments in tax idylls are all in place.
And thanks to its inexhaustible sources of money, the Camorra no longer needs to resort to violence. It operates quite legally by buying up the market: every espresso drunk in a cafe is controlled by the Camorra. It dominates the markets of everyday consumption – meat, mineral water, coffee, dairy products, cattle feed – without any kind of hygiene control. Not to mention the waste business.
As I’m straightening the chairs on Shobha’s terrace, my foot bumps against something that looks like a stone in the darkness, but reveals itself to be a tortoise: the terrace is home to two tortoises which have belonged to the family for over forty years. Shobha likes to talk with them as if she still hasn’t given up hope, even after forty years, that they might one day reply.
The two tortoises stick out their little pink tongues and creep towards the food bowl. Mafia wars, murders, bloodbaths and trials drifted across Palermo. The Corleonesi slaughtered their enemies, they murdered everyone who got in their way – ‘illustrious corpses’, as they say in Palermo when a politician or a civil servant is killed. The Palermo Spring came and faded; bed sheets bearing the words Down with the Mafia! were hung out and brought back in again. Giulio Andreotti – ‘Uncle Giulio’, as the mafiosi called him – was accused, acquitted and finally sentenced for supporting the Mafia, a crime that had already lapsed when the sentence was passed. Cosa Nostra sealed a pact with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, Onwards Italy! Minister-presidents, senators and mayors were accused of supporting the Mafia and acquitted. And the two tortoises did nothing but eat bits of chopped apricot, banana and tomatoes. Organically grown tomatoes – Shobha sets great store by that.
In the distance you can see the harbour, with the ferries that are lit up at night and lie there like whales with their mouths wide open. When I was in Naples, I took a drive through the mountains of containers at the harbour, with two ‘falcons’, the name given to the plain-clothes policemen who patrol on motorbikes. Since Roberto Saviano’s book Gomorra, the world knows that the Neapolitan port has no competitors when it comes to the smuggling of forged goods, which are sold in Germany and elsewhere – by Camorristi like the ones in the Licciardi clan, who not only dealt in forged trademarked products, from clothes to drills to cameras, but also in drugs and who, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, extended their area of activity from Germany to Hungary and Poland. When I talked about that with the Neapolitan public prosecutor Franco Roberti, Duisburg came up once again. Duisburg hadn’t been a coincidence, the prosecutor said, Germany was just as solid a basis for the Camorra’s businesses as it was for those of the ’Ndrangheta, with restaurants and clothes shops used for money laundering.
‘In Germany, if you see a Neapolitan or a Calabrian opening a shop, you should take a closer look at where the money comes from,’ public prosecutor Roberti said.
The traffic snarls up from below, police sirens wail, and even up here on Shobha’s balcony Palermo’s breath smells of sulphur, dark soil and corruption. And basil, oregano and thyme, all the herbs of the Mediterranean. Shobha has transformed her terrace into a thicket, a thicket of jasmine and bougainvillea, of palms and olive trees, geraniums and little lemon trees. She loves picking off dry leaves, watering and fertilizing. In another life, I’m sure she would have been a gardener.
‘And have you seen this Carmine again since?’ asks Shobha. The episode with the two financial policemen cheers her up. Is life in Naples tragi-comic? Or is it more that it’s tragic and you can only endure it by looking for comedy?
The founder of the Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples once said to me: ‘The low-lifes are still in power, even today. The Camorra are the bourgeoisie of Naples! They’re the people that power talks to. The state has no monopoly on force here! The evils of Naples are the evils of Italy! Europe has to get moving! It can’t afford to lose Italy!’
Just as the Bourbon King Ferdinand IV of Naples always tried to stay close to the notorious lazzaroni, the low-lifes whom he showered with gifts as a way of securing his power, even now Italian politicians are wheeling and dealing with the Camorra in just the same way.
After the financial police had left Carmine’s agency with unfinished business, Carmine Sarno had suggested showing me the video that he had had made for the boy who died in the accident. For Francesco Paolillo. Sarno closed up the agency and walked to his car, a silver S-series Mercedes. As we drove past he showed me the chapel of the Madonna dell’Arco, which he had had built between the rows of houses and which looked like a little mosque. A bit further along, at the edge of the road hung the house altar that Carmine Sarno had had built for the dead boy: For that little blossom that was stolen from the earth to flower in the hands of the Lord. That was what the inscription said. Signed by the Sarno family.
Sarno quickly climbed the stairs to the Paolillo family’s flat. He didn’t knock, but stepped inside the flat just as naturally as a king coming to greet his subjects.
The mother had her late son’s name tattooed on her lower arm. For months she had slept in a tent at the spot where her son had died, to demonstrate that children have to play in derelict buildings here. At the weekend a sports ground was due to be opened in Ponticelli. It was that mother’s victory. Against defeatism, against resignation. Regional president Antonio Bassolino and mayoress Rosa Russo Iervolino had announced their arrival, the dead boy’s brother, Alessandro, proudly informed us – a tall, fair, unemployed kid. Neither the regional president nor the mayoress had ever set foot in Ponticelli; it was all down to his mother that the politicians were interested in their fate, he said, and his mother mutely put on DVD of Sarno’s video.
The clip was shot in black and white. Carmine Sarno had seen it thousands of times and still had tears in his eyes at the end. ‘Everyone has his feelings,’ he said later.
Shobha has turned up the music: David Bowie, ‘We can be heroes, just for one day’. The music has startled the tortoises, which are now pretending to be dead. Often when we’re travelling in Sicily or Calabria, Shobha and I feel the need to listen to music at deafening volume and sing along. Driving through Brancaccio, Castellamare, Cinisi, through all those Mafia villages with their Padre Pio statues behind glass, with the fat men sitting on plastic chairs lined up at the edge of the street, waiting for their telefonini to ring, while we screech ‘Is there life on Mars?’ Displacement activity? Perhaps. And our only salvation.
Carmine Sarno had arranged to meet me that night. He was accompanying his singer Alessio to various performances around Naples. And I was to be there.
Sarno had dis
covered Alessio when he was sixteen years old and singing ‘Vola cardillo’, the prisoners’ hymn to freedom. Now Alessio was the best horse in his stable. Tens of thousands of people cheered him at his concerts in the Teatro Palapartenope, and Alessio couldn’t complain about performing as a star guest at family parties and discos. Forty minutes of Alessio cost 1,500 euros, and he could do as many as five performances in a single night.
Carmine Sarno was waiting for me in the car park behind his house. He drove ahead in his silver Mercedes, Alessio followed in a grey van, along with the guitarist, keyboard player, drummer and roadie. Before the tour began, Carmine Sarno distributed Madonnas to his musicians. Keyrings that his wife had brought back from Lourdes. Then he put the lock of the seatbelt into the lock without the belt – so that the alert wouldn’t constantly remind him to do himself up. Seatbelts aren’t for men like Sarno.
He hurtled through the night at 125 mph, and was in a mind for confessions. About the fact that he was a former gambler, but had overcome that addiction. That after leaving jail he had slept in the car for eight months because he didn’t want to go back to his wife at the flat. That apart from his four legitimate children he had two illegitimate ones. That there had only been one turncoat in the Sarno clan – one infame, although he wasn’t a blood relation. And about the fact that his brother Ciro had got five degrees in jail and was now writing his life story. ‘If you see him, you’ll think he’s a professor,’ said Carmine Sarno.
He’d already been offered a transfer fee of 700,000 euros for Alessio, although Sarno had turned it down. Alessio was more than a singer to him, he said.
‘It was through me that Alessio was born,’ said Carmine Sarno. ‘And he will die with me.’
That night Alessio had his first performance as a star guest at Anna Chiara’s first communion party, in the Piccolo Paradiso restaurant, where the children had already drunk themselves into a Coca-Cola rush by the time Alessio entered the room. He was twenty-three, wore a retro-style leather jacket, a Rolex on his wrist and a lot of gel in his hair, and said: ‘My songs come from my heart.’
The communicant Anna Chiara weighed about twelve and a half stone and wept into her napkin when she saw Alessio. When he started singing, all the females in the room between the ages of eight and eighty started screeching as if the Messiah had suddenly appeared. Twitching ecstatically, they sang along and took photographs with their mobile phones, and the mother of the communicant cried: ‘Take him, take him!’ – until at last her daughter embraced him with her short, fat arms and kissed him, blushing, on the cheeks. At the end of the concert, Carmine Sarno applauded too, for politeness’ sake.
Then we glided on through the night, the moon hung like a bisected disc above a mountain, and Carmine put on his singers’ CDs. In the distance you could see the sea, with the moonlight reflected on it. Next stop was the bingo hall in Teverola. Here it was as silent as a church – not a sound apart from the rustle of paper and the creak of the chairs when the winning numbers were read out. It was already midnight when a security man started setting up crowd barriers for Alessio’s performance. The security man had mascara on his eyelashes and upper arms like oak trees, and didn’t reply when the girls asked him if Alessio had already arrived. The huge hall was completely packed. Fat women, whose bodies spilled like soft mountains over the edges of the chairs, chain-smoked. An orange carpet swallowed the sound of every footstep. Sometimes the women whispered to the moneylenders who ran back and forth like stray dogs between the players’ tables.
Bingo halls are Camorra money laundering institutions, although Carmine would never have put it like that – quite the contrary, he felt sorry for the people there, everyone has his feelings after all, he himself had been a gambler, and many of the people who win something here will be robbed when they leave the bingo hall. A woman turned to Carmine, pointed to me and said she knew me off the television. Sarno didn’t reply, he just gave a flattered smile. Then Alessio came and a whirlwind swept through the rows of seats, a wave of weeping girls surged against the barriers and it was all the security man with the mascaraed eyelashes could do not to be crushed.
‘Sei bellissimo,’ screamed the girls, ‘you’re gorgeous,’ and Carmine Sarno looked at his watch.
The next morning the sports ground in honour of the late Francesco Paolillo was opened in Ponticelli. When I arrived, there was no sign of Sarno. Presumably he was still sleeping. Or pretending to, because he doesn’t like appearing at public events. Listening to politicians’ speeches. After all, he knows the politicians better than anyone. He knows how high their price is.
Alessandro, the dead boy’s brother, was very excited; he kept running along the seats where his neighbours were all sitting, repeating that the limousines of mayoress Iervolino and the regional president Bassolino would soon be there. The sports ground looked like a cage; it was laid with green artificial lawn and surrounded by high fences. The dead boy’s sister delivered a speech inside the cage. ‘Francesco, we’ll never forget you,’ she said, and her mother bit her handkerchief. A single local politician had come; he too delivered a speech in the cage and managed not to use the word Camorra once.
While the speeches were being delivered, Alessandro, the fair-haired, unemployed kid, looked into the street. And then he turned away and said: ‘They haven’t come again. They’ll never come.’
Messina Denaro
When Shobha steps on to the terrace, she’s turned herself into a glittering apparition with sparkling earrings, a deep décolleté and coal-black eyes. And pointed shoes. At the end of the day she always needs to get rid of the flat shoes and trousers that she makes herself wear when she’s working. Making herself feminine again. Although this time we don’t have a sense of having worked at all. It’s more as if we’d just taken a walk, like the French and American tourists who walk through Palermo, always slightly anxiously, pressed close to the walls of the houses, in the deluded hope that they won’t be recognized as tourists. Whose tour guides do everything they can to ensure that visitors to Sicily think not about fugitive bosses but about the ancient theatre of Segesta, the colonnade of the cathedral of Monreale and the oratory of Santa Cita, where myriads of angels whirr about – the baroque extravagance, the Sicilian excess.
From Shobha’s roof terrace you can watch the city getting ready for nightfall. Putting on stars and bathing in moonlight. The domes of the baroque churches curve triumphantly next to Palermo’s single, rather anorexic-looking skyscraper, and in the distance the lights gleam from the illegally built houses on the hill of Mondello. Shobha has uncorked a bottle of Chardonnay from Planeta; we listen to David Bowie and a jingling wind chime.
‘Trapani,’ says Shobha, after she has tasted the wine. Strange, it tastes like Trapani. The sea and wisteria. The way it smelled in the morning when we used to go to processions.
I hold the wine under my nose, close my eyes and try to smell Trapani. I actually smell jasmine, rosemary and oregano. A hint of wisteria. Perhaps some salt in the air, and, if I put my mind to it, I can also smell a bit of myrrh. For years we took a pilgrimage to the Good Friday procession of Trapani, La processione dei misteri. We set off from Palermo at night and drove, drunk with sleep, down the autostrada to reach Trapani at dawn. We parked the car in the harbour and walked shivering through the night air, always heading towards the funeral march. You could hear the music from a long way away, music that sounded beautiful and skewed and grabbed our hearts in its clutches.
When we got there, the faithful had already been following the penitential procession for hours. Men in dark suits carried the enormously heavy stations of the cross: Christ before Pilate, the scourging, the crown of thorns, the raising of the cross, the entombment, the mother of sorrows. Each time the bearers set down the bier, lit with incandescent bulbs, for a few minutes, they passed around bottles wrapped in brown paper, and the women leaned against a house wall, closed their eyes and murmured the rosary to keep from falling asleep. ‘Santa Maria, Madre di Dio,
prega per noi peccatori.’ As day palely dawned, the world stood still for a moment. Just long enough for the music to start again and the sea on the horizon to colour itself pink.
We felt intoxicated. Shobha photographed angels, Roman legionnaires in shimmering gold armour, brides of Christ and little girls carrying the crown of thorns through the streets on purple velvet cushions. She photographed mothers holding their handbags in front of them like protective shields, she photographed the notables in their sashes, all the presidents who take very small, important steps – president della confraternità dei pescatori, president dell’associazione SS. Crocefisso, president della società sanguinis Christi – and I walked behind the brass bands with my tape recorder, in search of funeral marches. ‘Una lacrima sulla tomba di mia madre’ remains my favourite funeral march, ‘A Tear on my Mother’s Grave’ – Chopin, Op. 32, with the tuba at the beginning, the tremolo clarinet and the trumpets which, when they come in, sound as if the funeral march is about to turn into a piece of dance music.
The climax of the procession was reached when the stations of the cross were carried back into the Chiesa delle Anime del Purgatorio in the early afternoon: a finale like a never-ending act of coitus, the church struggling against it doggedly and without success. With seeming hesitancy, the individual groups of figures were carried in and out through the portal of the church, rocking back and forth, amidst applause, a rain of rose petals and out-of-tune trumpet entries. Inside the church it looked as if a weary travelling circus had collapsed: on the floor, amidst damp sawdust and crushed blossoms, the bearers sat blank-faced, others hugged and wept with exhaustion – whether it was the exertion of carrying things for hours, or the contents of the bottles in their brown-paper wrappings, everything was discharged in a collective crying fit, the men wiped the tears from their eyes with white damask handkerchiefs, and we wept along too.
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