The Four Corners of Palermo (16 page)

The sharp angles of her face had hardened into marble. That expression was a bad sign—
disappearing
someone is a phrase they use in the “family” to mean …

“
Signora
, can you tell me what kind of person your husband is?”

“I already told that police inspector from up north. They already knew about him: he’s a
fissa
. A guy that in my family is considered a
mafallannu
, someone who doesn’t know how to do anything.”

“And what do you think of him?”

“I belong to my family.”

“But you had three children with somebody like that.”

“These things happen,” she replied, adjusting her taupe skirt.

I didn’t know how to talk her into telling me her story. I understood that she was accustomed to the dominion and silence of power. The daughter of a boss, but married to a
fissa
: I couldn’t see why she’d chosen to spend her life with a mediocre loser and a coke hound who walked around town in a bulletproof vest.

“And a year ago they shot him. Shot your husband, I mean.”

“Family matters,” she replied.

The voice of the older woman, from the next room, asked: “Did you offer him
’u cafè
?”

“No, Assunta.” Rosaria Savasta asked me, “Would you like some?” Adding, after a brief pause: “That’s my elder sister, who is a
signorina
: she’s come to stay with me since Vito took the children away.”

“No,
grazie
. Just a little bit of Idrolitina, if you don’t mind.”

“Assunta, the journalist wants bubbly water. My children like it, too.”

Maybe I’d found the first crack in the wall.

“Could you explain to me just what your family is planning to do with Vito?”

“Why should I? Why should I care about you, no offense meant?”

“I might be able to help you: you want to get your children back, and I want to give you a hand. If I find something out, I’ll tell you immediately. And I’d expect the same thing from you. That way, I can print the truth in the newspaper I work for.”

“My husband doesn’t deserve the truth. The truth is for honest people. Someone who steals his children from behind your back is a dishonest coward.”

“While the rest of you, your family, prefer honest people.”

“My father likes real men, not half-men who pull armed robberies in tobacco shops, get drunk, take drugs until they don’t know what they’re doing, half-men who raise their hands to their wives …”

Half-men who raise their hands to their wives, a private and concrete action. Like all the actions that marked the code of behavior in the old Cosa Nostra at the end of the seventies: you don’t behave like buffoons, you don’t take drugs, and you don’t beat women. Ever.

She watched me drink the Idrolitina that her sister Assunta had brought me. Assunta was a dried-out old crow with sunken eyes. Rosaria’s expression was neutral. The list that she’d made sounded like a succession of offenses from the criminal code, uttered by a bailiff: a distant tone of resentment, the colorless voice of the law.

“And one day my father just got
siddiatu
. Fed up, if you follow me.”

“And he had him shot.”

“I never said that.”

“Fine. Someone shot Vito, and after that he went off to live somewhere else.”

“I threw him out of the house myself.”

“But you came to an arrangement for him to see the children.”

“What could I do: he’s still their father, after all.”

“Twice a month.”

“That’s right. He’d come on Saturday morning, they’d go downstairs. And then on Sunday evening they’d come back. I’d ask and they’d say: Papà took us to eat sea urchins, Papà took us to shoot at targets at the fair, Papà bought us cotton candy … I’d ask if he’d done anything odd and they’d tell me that he was always on edge, sweaty, that he wouldn’t tell them anything, but he’d always buy them something.”

“Had you had any fights recently?”

“Yes, one night. In front of the children. I told him that he couldn’t bring them back home to me in that condition: filthy, their clothes a mess, dropping with exhaustion. He told me to keep my mouth shut or he’d kill me. He even slapped me twice in the face, with the children staring at us. Then he left.”

“Did you tell your father?”

“What else could I do? Two weeks later, when he came home with the children, my father was here waiting for him. And he said terrible things to Vito, in a calm voice: that Vito wasn’t a man, that no one should behave like that, that if he kept behaving that way, then …”

“Then what?”

“Nothing. But Vito’s always been afraid of my father. He left then and there, without a word of farewell; let’s just say that he took off running.”

“Do you know where the children go to sleep on Saturday nights?”

“At my sister-in-law’s place. In Passo di Rigano.”

“Did you ask her?”

“Certainly.”

She looked daggers at me: stupid question, icy answer.

That adverb rang out like a gong. Round over. I thanked her for the Idrolitina and said goodbye, knowing full well that I’d never write a line. That conversation, she’d told me with a glance, as she saw me out, had never taken place.

Judging by appearances, Cosa Nostra has never offered women a particularly important role. It entrusted women to their men,
and those men, in turn, entrusted their wives with their own offspring. A silent matriarchy, which inspired even Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: the role of Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, so central to the plot and to historical analysis, is strictly secondary once the front door of Casa Salina swings shut. And his wife, Maria Stella, is the real head of the family. She knows everything about her husband, all about his weaknesses, and she lets him play, the way you do with a pet cat. Meanwhile, it is she who runs everyone’s lives
.

Ninetta Bagarella, the younger sister of a bloodthirsty mob boss, Leoluca, was engaged in 1974 to Totò Riina, the best friend of another of her brothers, Calogero. It was a way of strengthening relations, sealing a bond between families, as well as creating a more powerful military force. Signora Bagarella Riina, described in online encyclopedias as “an Italian schoolteacher and criminal,” is a perfect reflection of Sicilian matriarchal pragmatism. She was well aware of her own role, she married the
capo di tutti capi
while he was on the run from the law, she gave birth to four children, some of whom are currently guests of the Italian prison system, she was ordered to pay restitution to Judge Borsellino’s family of 3,365,000 euros, and before every judge she spoke to she always described herself as a woman in love
.

Cosa Nostra never applied hiring quotas when it came to women. Cosa Nostra never had to
.

“
Ciao
, journalist. Tonight the apartment is a no-man’s-land.”

“Where’s Fabri?”

“Playing soccer. Don’t you remember that your friend is an athlete first and a man second?”

Serena was barefoot, wearing a blue-and-white striped man’s shirt and white shorts, and her forefinger was marking a page roughly two-thirds of the way through
The Red and the Black
.

“Busy day?”

“We went to Mondello: bread and
panelle
and a stroll on the beach. A seagull followed us, scavenging the crumbs we dropped on the sand. Fabrizio talked to me about next summer. Do you really want to spend a month in France?”

“Paris, more than France. There’s a girl …”

“And I’ll come with you.”

“Is Fabri okay with that?”

“He wants me.”

“So do I.” I corrected my phrasing: “So do I, want you to come with us to France.”

She smiled and set down the book, dog-earing the top right corner of the page.

“Do you know what time he’s coming home after soccer?”

“Late: a match and then a pizza with the team. Are you going out?”

“No. I wanted to read, watch TV. Listen to music. I don’t know.”

“Shall we eat?”

“I can make spaghetti with tuna roe. I bought some just the other day at the Vucciria market.”

Serena grabbed me by the hand and dragged me into the kitchen, as if it was an emergency.

“All right then, get to work, journalist. And work quickly, I’m hungry. I want roe, tuna spaghetti, whatever you’ve got.”

I managed to toss my fatigue jacket on the sofa. I washed my hands in the kitchen sink.

“You work, I’ll be the DJ.”

I recognized the first few notes of Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”: piano, string bass, drums. And then the hypnotic sax came in. I loved evenings that emerged out of pure chance and pure jazz.

In fifteen minutes the water was on the boil. Just enough time to grate some tuna roe, heat up some oil in a small pan with red pepper, mince the parsley, choose the spaghetti, set the table, open a can of cat food for Cicova, and find a bottle of white wine in the fridge to polish off.

Serena played at being the guest. I found her sitting at the table, her hair tied back in a ponytail. I knew the weight and texture of her hair, and I liked it. I served her deferentially.

“What did you do today? How many people did you kill?” she asked.

“I just count the dead bodies. There are other people who do the actual work.”

“How many?”

“None. But I talked to a woman who’s trying to find her children.”

“Where did she lose them?”

“Her husband took them, a violent man, half a Mafioso. A troubled family history.”

Serena stopped asking. After the spaghetti, she made me look around the house for some rum: “I want to see what it’s like.”

“Sweetish,” I told her, “it’s made out of sugar cane. You ought to try some whiskey.”

“I don’t even like the word. I want something sweet.”

I found the rum, tucked away behind a bottle of Yoga peach nectar, in the pantry. A friend of my sister’s had brought it one night so he could make us a cocktail that he claimed was described in a book by Hemingway.

Serena took a sip of rum. She made a face like an orchid and looked at me.

“What about you, journalist?”

“The word I like is ‘whiskey.’ ”

I poured myself two fingers of scotch. I sat down on the sofa; Serena took off Coltrane and put on
Kind of Blue
, by Miles Davis. The first piece was like an endless question: “So What.” Serena gave me a
so what
look. Well?

She sat down next to me. It was nine o’clock on a warm autumn night. She was wearing a shirt of Fabrizio’s and it did little to conceal her naked body underneath. Her breasts weren’t big but they had balance and perfection, qualities that right then were picturesque more than erotic. But still.

But still, she was curled up next to me, a little too close to me, and we had two, maybe three hours to endanger our senses. I asked her about Stendhal.

“He teaches you to value love.”

She admitted that she’d fallen in love with the character of Julien Sorel. I told her that stories made out of paper and words usually end badly. I quoted from memory, and therefore incorrectly, a phrase of Henry Miller’s that I took as a guide in those years: “What doesn’t happen in the open street is false: literature.”

She smiled, picking up on the sense of reality that I was trying to impart. Then I asked her about seventeenth-century art.

She grimaced. Miles Davis didn’t go with Annibale Carracci. And just then, she’d chosen “So What.”

“Well, so?”

She looked inside me. The place was a mess.

“So what?” I gulped.

“I’m talking about you. You and other women. That Simona the other night. What are you doing to yourself? Why are you scattering yourself in all directions?”

“I didn’t choose. That’s the way I like it, that’s all; all I want is a night’s pleasure, two nights if it’s something that seems to be working.”

I threw back a swallow of scotch, saying a mental prayer to Humphrey Bogart in
To Have and Have Not
. Serena took my hand: her skin was dry. My heartbeat went all syncopated; Bill Evans was setting the beat on the piano.

“But if I were a girl who’d just come to Palermo on vacation, and if you met me at a party, and if I made you laugh and you made me laugh, and then we came home, here, to this apartment … would you or wouldn’t you go to bed with me?”