The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia (6 page)

Then she said nothing all the way through the panel discussion. She later told me how angry her mother had been when Rosaria had insisted on being seen in public in a sand-colored blazer and not in black.

We had met at the regional administration, her new place of work. As is generally the case with victims of the Mafia, a job
had been hastily found for her to supplement her meager widow’s pension. But she hadn’t been given any actual work, just a reason to leave the house in the morning. Her office was empty. The phone was out of order, the desk hadn’t been used for ages, the shelves were bare and dusty, and Rosaria talked about the profound shame she felt at never having taken an interest in what Mafia really meant. “Even two days after my husband’s death I didn’t know who Totò Riina was!” she exclaimed. After the murder she had approached the public prosecutor, Paolo Borsellino. Once she had asked him if he was scared, and Borsellino had replied: “I’m only scared for my wife and children.” Fifty-seven days after the assassination of Falcone, he too was dead.

After her husband’s death Rosaria became a driven woman: one who wanted to know what was happening around her, how it had come to this, how it could have been prevented. “Tell everyone what happened to you,” one widow advised her. “Shout it out. Everyone must know, go into the schools and speak to the children. Headlines aren’t enough to reach the hearts of the children.”

And Rosaria followed her advice. She took part in demonstrations and panel discussions, she visited schools and juvenile institutions, and she published a book of her talks, dedicating it to her little son. In her open letter to the mafiosi, Rosaria wrote: “You are murderers. Let’s say it out loud, so that your sons can look you in the eyes and see what murderers’ eyes look like.”

Perhaps that was the moment when Palermo became strange to her. She was a diva, people said, only interested in getting on television. And she was a lunatic. An attention-seeking lunatic.

Even if her husband had been killed by the Mafia, a Sicilian widow has to deal with her pain in silence.
Fatti gli affari tuoi e campi cent’anni
. Mind your own business and you’ll live to a hundred.

Soon Rosaria stopped taking part in panel discussions, in memorial services, demonstrations, and candlelight processions. I still heard from her from time to time. I heard she’d left Sicily. That she’d married again. That she’d had another child. She never wrote another open letter. The mafiosi who murdered her husband have been sentenced in the meantime. Some of them have repented. None of them has bent the knee.

Some have even managed to get college degrees, like the boss Pietro Aglieri. And they hope for their sentences to be overturned. Perhaps not entirely without justification. In the years following the assassinations, the anti-Mafia laws were gradually abolished. There is effectively no longer such a thing as high-security detention, no life imprisonment, and anyone who has been sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment for drug dealing can expect to be out of jail again in seven years. The last president of the Sicilian regional assembly, Salvatore “Totò” Cuffaro, was sentenced in the first instance to five years’ imprisonment, which he celebrated with a little communal drink and a tray full of
cannoli
, that traditional sweetmeat that every Sicilian emigrant devours until the day he dies. Cuffaro was celebrating because he knew that he would never have to serve his sentence; by the time it was confirmed by the supreme court, it would have lapsed. But he was wrong: in January 2011, Cuffaro went to prison. You never know what’s around the corner.

Today, even the commemoration of the victims is too much. The former president of the Sicilian regional assembly,
Gianfranco Miccichè, has demanded that the name of Palermo airport be changed as a matter of urgency:
Aeroporto Falcone e Borsellino
smacks too much of the Mafia.

Perhaps Rosaria was right after all, and all that remains is hope of a divine plan.

S
AN
L
UCA

“
M
A
,” SAYS
S
ALVO
,
AS IF HE COULD READ MY MIND
.
M
A
means “but.” In Sicily, though, the word
ma
has many more meanings than that. According to emphasis,
ma
can mean: “Everyone here has gone mad,” or “If you think so,” or “Do what you like.” And if the
m
is particularly protracted,
mmma
means: “The longer you think about life, the more you reach the conclusion that everything is in vain.”

We’ve left the bypass, and we’re very close to the Piazza Indipendenza. And we’re in a traffic jam. There’s always a traffic jam in Palermo; the traffic is in a constant unforeseen state of emergency. A state of emergency that lasts from eight in the morning till midnight. Four-lane bypasses end up in one-way streets. Or nowhere. In the Palermo suburb of Mondello there’s a four-lane road that looks as if it could be somewhere in Los
Angeles. It comes from nowhere and peters out as a dirt track half a kilometer farther on. A boss wanted it.

Salvo opens the window a crack. A hubbub of voices enters from outside, scraps of music, exploding firecrackers, the wail of a burglar alarm. Faded blue saints glow in the wall of a house, promising two hundred days of absolution to anyone who says the credo before them. Finally we’ve arrived in Corso Vittorio Emanuele, outside my hotel. The Centrale Palace is my home in Palermo, a home that has survived even extensive renovation unharmed. Where hotels are concerned, I fear nothing more than alterations. That’s why I love the familiar faces at the Centrale all the more. The head porter wears a pair of glasses that sit on his nose like a pince-nez; his center parting looks as if it’s been drawn with a ruler. The Tunisian hotel servant has frozen into a statue, and the old maître d’ serves the breakfast tea with distracted dignity. Anyone who stays at the Centrale Palace is living not in a hotel but in a nineteenth-century Sicilian novel.

As soon as I enter the lobby, the receptionist bows in greeting. He purses his lips as if to kiss my hand and scatters a few compliments: “Time simply doesn’t pass as far as you’re concerned,
Dottoressa
!” he says.

Since the day I was picked up by the lawyer defending the Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, the receptionist has respectfully addressed me as
Dottoressa
. The lawyer was pleasantly touched not to have had to introduce himself. The receptionist obviously knew his name.

I have my case brought to my room and rejoin Salvo in the car. To get to the restaurant, we have to turn onto the Via Roma. As it is every Sunday, the Via della Libertà is closed to through traffic. The Sunday evening stroll from the Teatro Politeama
to the Teatro Massimo is one of Palermo’s sacred rituals. Wives are dressed up in outfits that look like suits of armor. They hold their handbags pressed under one arm and their husbands under the other. And by the boutique window displays the women sink into a dreamlike state—until their husbands drag them away.

Shobha is already sitting on the terrace of the Fresco when I get there. Her blond hair flashes in the darkness. Piano music drifts from the restaurant, and sitting on the terrace you look down on the yellow volcanic walls of the Ucciardone prison, an old Hohenstaufen fortress with floodlights and sentries behind armored glass. The mafiosi called the prison Grand Hotel Ucciardone; they had champagne and lobsters delivered until they were released, usually after just a few months. After the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, a stay in the Ucciardone temporarily became rather less comfortable. Temporarily. Because lately the prison attracted a certain amount of attention when guards were found to have distributed
telefonini
among the bosses.

“You’ve gotten blonder,” Shobha says.

Every time we see each other again, we behave like an old couple who have been apart for a few weeks and are now looking at each other with a critical eye: Is your hair shorter or longer? Are your earrings new? Yes, they really suit you, and what wonderful shoes you have, I want some pointed shoes like those. We’ve been working together for so long that we’ve decided to stop counting the years, because then anyone would be able to work out how old we are.

The pianist comes to our table, makes sheep’s eyes at Shobha, and asks if she’ll be coming to eat here again tomorrow,
then she could go with him to a concert afterward. Shobha doesn’t even turn around, and says: “I’m busy over the next few weeks. And the next few months, and the next few years as well. I’m sorry.
Scusami
.”

And then we stare at the walls of the Hohenstaufen fortress until the pianist wanders back, shoulders drooping, to his piano and plays something that sounds like Chopin’s Funeral March.

“And your mother?” I ask Shobha.

“Tomorrow,” Shobha says. “We’ll get to work tomorrow.” Then she adds: “At least it’s a good story. Not something like San Luca.”

At the end of every report we swear we won’t do any more Mafia stories.
Basta
. We plan only to cover stories about Sicilian wine and fine hotels. About the wonderful quality of Calabrian olive oil. About Naples without rubbish in the streets.

Somehow we never manage to put our good intentions into action. Even while we were on the ferry from Sicily to Reggio Calabria we remembered our plan to do a report on something positive at long last. But instead we were sitting a short time later in the Grand Hotel Excelsior in Reggio Calabria, looking at a sea that looked as if it was poisonous, shimmering in tones of greyish blue with oil tankers in the glaring light. The 1970s hung in the hotel’s heavy curtains; they fell from the neon light of the restaurant and settled on the faces of the hotel guests, who all looked like pharmaceutical salesmen passing through. In the elevator, one of them asked if we were hostesses.

“It isn’t so bad here,” we reassured each other, like a mantra.

“You don’t find such lovely cafes that often. We haven’t got such an elegant seafront in Palermo,” said Shobha.

Like a woman whose eyes are so beautiful that you forget her short legs, Reggio Calabria is saved by its seafront. The cafes stood side by side under palms and magnolias and cast-iron arches. Later, we walked through the warm sirocco night down Corso Garibaldi and established that you would have to go to the Via Montenapoleone in Milan to find a greater density of luxury boutiques: Valentino, Alexander McQueen, Versace, Rolex, Gucci, Prada, Cesare Paciotti. The ’Ndrangheta’s shopping mile. Nothing but marble temples with salesgirls who look like something halfway between nuns and museum attendants. And whose eyes are as icy as the breeze from an air-conditioning system.

We drove in silence along the coast road to San Luca. We glided through a diffuse grey light, as if the sky were filled with sand. We drove past shells of buildings, orphaned houses, prickly pears, and crippled olive trees, past concrete posts for bridges that had never been finished, street signs riddled with bullet holes and a tugboat rusting away on the beach amid driftwood and bits of plastic. People trafficking is a source of income for the ’Ndrangheta, and the villages of the Ionian coastal region are its fortresses: Platí, Áfrico, San Luca.

Since the murders in Duisburg, San Luca had become almost more famous than Corleone. The blood feud had broken out eighteen years before, and since then the clans of the Nirta-Strangio and the Pelle-Vottari seemed to have been persecuting one another with an Old Testament thirst for revenge, as if time were still being measured with hourglasses and honor could only be redeemed with blood. Because the Mafia thrives on symbols, murders tend to be carried out on feast days—Christmas, May 1, Assumption. Behind this lies the message: “Until the end of
my life I may remember the murder of my wife every Christmas; but for you, Assumption will never again be a feast day because on that day, until the end of your life, you will think about your murdered brother.”

The investigators know, beyond the bloodlust, the Mafia always thinks pragmatically. The blood feud is by no means entirely archaic. The criminal prestige of the family that organized the Duisburg massacre has risen enormously, and that’s where economic profit lies. Now they just have to present themselves to a member of the regional government and say: “We’re the people from San Luca.” And the next public bid will be in their favor.

The ’Ndrangheta has divided Calabria up into three territories: the Tyrrhenian coast, the Ionian coast, and the city of Reggio Calabria. Even if you didn’t know, you would smell it. In the air, which always smells a bit burned. In the 1960s and 1970s the ’Ndrangheta bought up the biggest agricultural enterprises, vineyards, and olive groves, and the public prosecutor’s office couldn’t bring a case against it because the owners hadn’t reported the extortionate purchases. The ’Ndrangheta now controls every breath anyone takes, every inch of road, every thought.

When we arrived in San Luca that autumn, after the assassination, the day lay there like a piece of wet gray cotton wool, between the Aspromonte mountains and the dry bed of a river called Bonamico, “good friend.” In San Luca every hour seemed as long as a day of atonement, as weird as an endless Day of the Dead when you’re forever bumping into ghosts.

We stopped outside a bar that sparkled like a crystal. One wall was decorated with the glittering image of the Madonna of Polsi, and the barman ceaselessly polished the marble counter,
the glass shelves, the brass-colored water taps, and served three young financial policemen their espressos. One of the cops had flaming red hair. He was constantly checking the position of his beret in the mirror beside the bar, and Shobha was so taken with this that she casually took a picture. When we stepped up to the bar, he told us that on one of their patrols a few days previously they’d noticed a Volkswagen Golf which, it turned out, had been hired in Duisburg and not taken back. And they’d found half a kilo of hashish in its boot. No big deal. But still.