Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System (23 page)

The day of the pope’s funeral, Rome was jam-packed. It was impossible to make out what street you were on or where the sidewalk was. One gigantic sea of flesh had covered asphalt, doorways, and windows, a lava flow that oozed into every possible space and seemed to increase in volume, exploding the channels through which it ran. Human beings everywhere. Everywhere. A dog was trembling under a bus, terrorized at having all of his usual space invaded by legs and feet. Mariano and I had stopped on the steps of a building, the only shelter from a group that had decided to show their devotion by singing a little song to Saint Francis for six hours straight. We sat and ate a sandwich. I was exhausted. Mariano, on the other hand, never got tired; being compensated for every drop of energy he spent made him feel constantly charged.

All of a sudden I heard someone call my name. I knew who it was even before I turned around. My father. We hadn’t seen each other in two years, and even though we lived in the same city, we never met. It
was unbelievable that we ran into each other in this Roman labyrinth of flesh. My father was highly embarrassed. He didn’t know what to say or even if he could greet me as he’d like. But he was euphoric, the way you get on trips that promise intense emotions within the space of a few hours, beautiful experiences you know you won’t have again for a long time, so you try to drink it all in quickly, fearful that you’ll miss out on other joys in the brief time you have. Taking advantage of a Romanian airline’s reduced fares on flights to Italy for the pope’s funeral, he had bought tickets for his lady friend and her whole family. The women were all wearing scarves, and rosaries wound around their wrists. It was impossible to figure out what street we were on; all I remember is a huge sheet hanging between two buildings: “Eleventh Commandment: Do not push and you will not be pushed.” Written in twelve languages. My father’s new relations were happy indeed to be taking part in something as important as the death of the pope. They were all dreaming of an amnesty for immigrants. For these Romanians, the best way to become Italian citizens, sentimentally if not legally, was to participate in such an immense and universal event, to suffer together for the same reason. My father adored John Paul II. He was fascinated by the man who let everyone kiss his hand, and intrigued by how he had been able to obtain such vast power and popularity without open threats or obvious stratagems. All the powerful people had knelt in front of him. For my father, this was enough to earn his admiration. He and his companion’s mother knelt down, spontaneously reciting the rosary right there on the street. I saw a child emerge from the mass of Romanian relatives. I realized right away it was my father and Micaela’s child. I knew that he had been born in Italy so as to receive Italian citizenship, but that he had always lived in Romania because his mother needed to be there. He was anchored to her skirt. I had never seen him before, but I knew his name. Stefano Nicolae. Stefano after my father’s father, Nicolae after Micaela’s father. My father called him Stefano, and his mother and
Romanian relatives called him Nico. The name Nico would eventually win out, but my father hadn’t given up yet. Of course the first gift Nico had received from his father when he got off the plane was a ball. This was only the second time my father had seen his little son, but he acted as if they had always been together. He scooped him up in his arms and came over to me.

“Nico’s going to live here now. In this country. In his father’s country.”

I don’t know why, but the little boy turned sad and dropped his ball. I managed to stop it with my foot before it was lost forever in the crowd.

All of a sudden the smell of salt mixed with dust, cement, and trash came back to me. A damp smell. It reminded me of when I was twelve years old and was at the shore at Pinetamare. I had just woken up when my father came into my room. Probably a Sunday morning. “Do you realize that your cousin already knows how to shoot? And what about you? Are you less than him?”

He took me to Coppola Village on the coast between Naples and Caserta. The beach was an abandoned mine of tools devoured by sea salt and caked in calcium crust. I could have dug around there for days, unearthing trowels, gloves, worn-out shoes, and broken hoes, but I hadn’t been brought there to play in the trash. My father walked around looking for targets, preferably glass. Peroni beer bottles were his favorite. He lined them up on the roof of a burned-out Fiat 127— one of the many car carcasses in this field of burned and abandoned getaway cars. I can still remember my father’s Beretta 92FS. It was so covered in scratches it looked gray—an old lady of a pistol. I don’t know why, but everyone refers to it as an M9. I always hear it called that way: “I’ll put an M9 between your eyes. Do I have to take out my M9? Hell, I have to get myself an M9.” My father handed me the
Beretta. It felt heavy. The butt was rough, like sandpaper, and stuck to my palm, its tiny teeth scratching my skin. My father showed me how to take the safety off, cock it, extend my arm, close my right eye, spot the target on the left, and fire.

“Robbe’, your arm has to be loose but firm. Relaxed, but not flabby … use both hands.”

I closed my eyes, hunched up my shoulders as if I were trying to cover my ears with them, and pulled the trigger as hard as I could with both my index fingers. Even today the noise of gunshots really bothers me. I must have a problem with my eardrums because I’m always half-deaf for a while afterward.

The Coppolas, a powerful business family, built the largest illegal urban complex in the West on Pinetamare. Eight hundred sixty-three thousand square meters of cement: the Coppola Village. They did not ask for authorization. They didn’t need to. Around here construction bids and permits make production costs skyrocket because there are so many bureaucratic palms to grease. So the Coppolas went straight to the cement plants. One of the most beautiful maritime pine groves in the Mediterranean was replaced by tons of reinforced concrete. You could hear the sea from the buildings’ intercoms.

When I hit the first target of my life, I felt a mixture of pride and guilt. I could shoot, I finally knew how to shoot. No one could hurt me anymore. But I had learned to use a horrendous instrument, one of those tools you can never stop using once you start. Like learning to ride a bicycle. The bottle hadn’t fully exploded; it was still upright, its right side disemboweled. My father headed back to the car, leaving me standing there, pistol in hand, but strangely I didn’t feel alone even though I was surrounded by trash and metal ghosts. I stretched out my arm toward the waves and fired two more shots. I didn’t see them hit and maybe they didn’t even reach the water. But it seemed courageous to fire on the sea. My father came back with a leather soccer ball with the face of Maradona on it. My reward for my good aim. Then, as always, he put his face close to mine. I could smell the
coffee on his breath. He was satisfied: at least now his son was not less than his brother’s son. We performed the usual chant, his catechism:

“Robbe’, what do you call a man who has a pistol and no college degree?”

“A shit with a pistol.”

“Good. What do you call a man with a college degree but no pistol?”

“A shit with a degree.”

“Good. What do you call a man with a degree and a pistol?”

“A man, papà!”

“Bravo, Robertino!”

Nico was still learning to walk. My father spoke to him nonstop, but the little boy didn’t understand him. He was hearing Italian for the first time, even though his mother had been clever enough to give birth to him here.

“Does he look like you, Roberto?”

I studied him closely, and I was happy—for him, that is. He didn’t look like me at all.

“Not in the least, lucky for him!”

My father gave me his usual disappointed look, which seemed to say that I never said the right thing, not even when joking. I’ve always had the impression that my father was at war with someone. As if he were engaged in a battle of alliances, precautions, and big stakes. For my father, staying in a two-star hotel was like losing face. As if he had to give an account to an entity that would punish him harshly if he didn’t live in style, didn’t play the boss and the comic.

“Robbe’, the best don’t need anybody. Sure they have to know, but they also have to make people afraid. If you don’t scare anyone, if nobody
feels uneasy looking at you, well then, in the end you haven’t really succeeded.”

It bothered him that when we went out to eat, the waiters would often serve certain people ahead of us, even if they’d come in an hour after us. The bosses would sit down and a few minutes later their lunch would be ready. My father would greet them, but deep down he would have liked to get the same respect. Respect that meant generating the same envy of power, the same fear, the same wealth.

“You see them? They’re the ones who are really in command. They’re the ones who decide everything! Some people control words, and others control things. You have to figure out who controls things, while pretending to believe the ones who control the words. But inside you always have to know the truth. You only really command if you command things.” The commanders of things, as my father called them, were sitting at one of the tables. They had always decided the fate of this area. Now they were eating together, smiling, but over the years they slit each other’s throats, leaving thousands of deaths in their wake, like ideograms of their financial investments. The bosses knew how to remedy the insult of their being served first; they paid for everyone else’s lunch. But only on their way out, so as not to garner thanks or adulation. Everyone’s lunch except for two, that is. Professor Iannotto and his wife. The couple hadn’t said hello, so the bosses hadn’t dared to pay for them. But they had a waiter bring them a bottle of limoncello. A Camorrista knows to take care of his loyal enemies, who are always more valuable than his false friends. Whenever my father wanted to give me a negative example, he would bring up Professor Iannotto. They had been in school together. Iannotto lived in a rented apartment, had been kicked out of his political party, had no children, dressed poorly and was always in a rage. He taught high school, and I still remember him arguing with parents who asked him which of his friends they should hire to tutor their children so they would pass. To my father, Iannotto was a condemned man. One of the walking dead.

“It’s like when one person decides to be a philosopher and one a doctor. Which of the two do you think is decisive in a person’s life?”

“The doctor!”

“Good. The doctor. Because you can decide about another person’s life. Decide whether or not to save them. You only do really good when you also have the ability to do bad. But if you’re a failure, a fool, a do-nothing, then you can only do good, but it’s just volunteer work, leftovers. Real good is when you choose to do it even though you could do bad instead.”

I didn’t answer. I could never understand what he really wanted to prove to me. And I still don’t understand even now. Maybe that’s why I decided to major in philosophy, so I wouldn’t have to decide for anyone. As a young doctor in the 1980s my father had worked on an ambulance crew. Four hundred deaths a year. In areas with up to five murders a day. They’d pull up in the ambulance, the wounded on the ground, but if the police hadn’t arrived, they couldn’t load him onto the stretcher. Because if word got around, the killers would come back and track down the ambulance, stop it, climb in, and finish off the job. It had happened lots of times, so the doctors and nurses knew to stand by, to wait till the killers came back to complete the operation. But once my father’s ambulance was called to Giugliano, a big town between Naples and Caserta, part of the Mallardo fiefdom. They got to the scene quickly. The victim was eighteen, maybe younger. He’d been shot in the chest, but one of his ribs had deflected the bullet. The boy was gasping for breath, shouting, losing blood. The nurses were terrorized and tried to dissuade my father, but he loaded him into the ambulance anyway. Clearly, the killers hadn’t been able to get off a good shot; they had probably been sent running by a passing police patrol, but they’d be back for sure. The nurses tried to reassure my father: “Let’s wait, they’ll come back, finish the job, and then we’ll take him in.”

But my father couldn’t wait. There is a time for all things, even death. And eighteen didn’t seem to him the time to die, not even for a
Camorra soldier. My father got him in the ambulance and took him to the hospital. The boy survived. That night the killers who hadn’t hit their target dead on went to his house—to my father’s house. I wasn’t there, I was living with my mother, but I’ve been told the story so many times, always broken off in the same place, that I remember it as if I had been there and had witnessed the whole thing. My father, I believe, was beaten bloody and didn’t show his face for at least two months. And for four months after that he still couldn’t bring himself to look anyone in the eye. Choosing to save someone who is supposed to die means you want to share his fate, desire alone isn’t enough to change anything around here. A decision is not what will get you out of trouble, and taking a stand or making a choice won’t make you feel you’re acting in the best way possible. Whatever you do, it will be wrong for some reason. This is true solitude.

Little Nico was laughing again. Micaela is more or less my age. The same thing probably happened to her when she told people she was leaving, going to Italy; they probably wished her well without asking anything, without knowing if she was going off to become a prostitute, a wife, a maid, or a factory worker. Without knowing anything more than that she was leaving. That was good fortune enough. But Nico was obviously not thinking anything, his mouth clamped to yet another fruit shake his mother had given him to fatten him up. To make it easier for him to drink, my father set the ball down near his feet, but Nico kicked it away with all his might, sending it bouncing off people’s shins and shoes. My father ran to retrieve it. Knowing Nico was watching, he humorously pretended to dribble past a nun, but the ball got away from him. The little boy laughed. Maybe the hundreds of ankles that spread out before his eyes made him feel he was in a forest of legs and sandals. He liked seeing his father—our father—tire himself out chasing that ball. I raised my arm to say
goodbye to him, but a wall of flesh had come between us. He would be trapped for a good half hour; there was no point in waiting. It was really late. I couldn’t even make out his silhouette anymore; it had been swallowed into the stomach of the crowd.