The Four Corners of Palermo (25 page)

“What was Giovanni doing in Porticello?”

“When he left he was just fifteen years old. He was tired of going out on the fishing boat with me. So was his brother, Castrenze, another fine piece of work.”

“And what did Giovanni want to do?”

“What he’s always done: be dishonest. He used to rob the other
picciriddi
when he was ten years old. He was clever and fast. But the idea of working? He wouldn’t hear of it. Fishing is a life for men, not for the dishonest.”

“And he was dishonest.”

“How dare you say such a thing?”

“But you just said it yourself.”

“I’m his father. But you, who the fuck are
you
to say that my son, a good Christian, God rest his soul, was dishonest?”

I realized I was heading down a dead-end street. I quickly covered my tracks, trying to become invisible: “Please forgive me, I was rude and thoughtless.”

Just then, the Moka Express started to gurgle. Peppino Neglia stood up, turned off the flame, picked up a demitasse spoon, and stirred the freshly made espresso.

“If you don’t do that, the strong coffee stays at the bottom and the
leggio
, the light coffee, the last to come out, floats on top. No,
’u cafè
should always be stirred.”

He shoveled two spoonfuls of sugar into each cup and handed me one. I was out of the tunnel.

“
Grazie
, Don Peppino.”

He smiled faintly at me. He’d decided that I was basically a good
picciotto
. A little rough around the edges, but harmless.

“You want to know what Giovannuzzo was doing?”

“If it’s possible.”

“Nothing. He stole in Palermo and every once in a while he’d come to see me and bring me a little something.”

“What did he steal?”

“Honest things.”

I looked at him fondly: the man had loved his son with all the love a father is capable of. A thief of a son, who stole
honest things
, as if he were a Robin Hood of the Conca d’Oro surrounding Palermo, a paladin of justice who restored fairness and order to the distribution of earthly goods. He saw things just the way his daughter-in-law did. But someone else begged to differ.

I drank my coffee, we talked about the price of squid, I thanked him, and I headed for the local police station.

The officer on duty took me for what I was: a source of irritation in the quiet of the winter seaside. He told me that the file his office had on Giovanni Neglia was practically empty. He went and got it, and there was only one prior report, sent from police headquarters in Palermo, for a
break-in that took place on Corso Calatafimi. Nothing much stolen; no evidence, only suspicions; nothing solid against Neglia. I thanked the man and left him to his contemplation of the winter calm.

I went home, convinced I’d only wasted my time and enjoyed a good cup of coffee. I’d had worse days than that.

“There’s a
signorina
downstairs for you,” Saro, the doorman, called up to tell me.

“Who is it?”

“She says her name is Rosalia.”

“Send her up.”

I had started the afternoon with a pile of papers on my desk: the notes of the past year, to be sifted through. What should be kept? What should be tossed out? Which of those notes would prove useful in the future? I had no idea. I was rummaging through that dusty mountain in search of some clue to its usefulness. I was tempted to keep it all: I was a rookie reporter.

As I was reading back through the notes on my pointless journey to Porticello, the young quasi–Claudia Cardinale materialized in front of me. She was wearing a gray coat over a black knit dress. He eyes were made up to go with her mouth. Her mouth, the only dot of color on her oval face, was the natural pink that I remembered.

“I’m Rosalia Neglia, do you remember me?”

She had a gray purse clutched in one hand; it seemed to vanish into her overcoat.

I got to my feet.

Of course I remembered her. Her eyes, filled with rage and tears. Her hand, in which her little sister’s hand had found a nest.

“We were on a first-name basis.”

“You’re right. It’s just that I didn’t know if you still remembered, whether I’d made an impression.”

An indelible one. Like an embossed seal on a page in a book. But all I said was: “Yes, I remember you perfectly.”

“My mother doesn’t know that I’m here.”

“Has something happened?”

Rosalia was standing in front of me, on the other side of the linoleum desktop heaped high with papers.

“I have some things to tell you, maybe someplace quiet.” And, jutting out her chin, she indicated my three colleagues sitting at their desks on that sleepy afternoon. The newsroom had never been quieter.

“If you like, we can go upstairs to the room the photographers use. At this hour of the day there shouldn’t be anyone there.”

“Macari.”

I translated the word in my mind: “Yes,
grazie
.”

I ushered her in. The reporter covering politics, Pippo Suraci, leapt to his feet as we went by, introducing himself with a certain unctuousness. As long as I’d known him, I’d never seen him miss a chance to take the hand of a young woman entering the newsroom: pretty or ugly, he shook hands with them all, blithely indifferent to his own sweaty palm. And Rosalia was the prettiest one ever to have set foot in our workplace. All she said was: “Pleasure to meet you.” I placed a hand on her back and pushed lightly, to move her past Suraci. We climbed the stairs.

On the third floor, the photographers’ room was, as I’d hoped, deserted. All the same, when I’d chosen that as a private place to have a conversation, I’d neglected to take into
account the personality and habits of Filippo Lombardo. As soon as I opened the door, the severed head of Rosalia’s father appeared before me, on the far wall. I quickly shut the door, asking her to be so kind as to wait for a moment.

“I just have to put something away.”

She gave me a blank look, but didn’t object.

I walked in, took the photograph off the wall, and hid it in the drawer with the unused AGFA developing paper. Then I let her in.

She put her overcoat on the table where Filippo laid out his prints when they were dry. Her dress, black for mourning, revealed her shape, reminding me of Angelica in
The Leopard
. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the full curves of her bosom.

“What is it, Rosalia?”

“You have to help me. I need to know why they did what they did to my father.”

“The police are investigating. I’m just a journalist.”

“They’ll never find out anything. They don’t care enough. But I need to know.”

“I understand: the pain a daughter would feel …”

“You don’t understand. It’s not just the pain. My mother says that this is an enormous disgrace. But I want to understand what was such a big disgrace. A person has to know why. It’s the only way that I can ask forgiveness.”

She picked up her purse. She opened it and pulled out a handkerchief: her eyes were dry, but she’d gotten it out just in case.

“Why do you have to ask forgiveness?”

“I don’t know. But taking a father’s head off takes the children’s dignity with it.”

I was starting to understand.

Then she added: “And I want it back, my dignity. I’m eighteen years old; one day, perhaps, who knows when, I want to get married myself. Who’s going to marry the daughter of the guy whose head they cut off?”

I looked at her fondly. A girl dressed in mourning, nicely made up, had come to me in search of the dignity that a headsman’s ax had robbed from her. I thought of the despair inhabiting a city where lives ripened like this, the pain of a daughter who couldn’t simply mourn her murdered father, but was also forced to worry about the need for social redemption that such an atrocious death imposed upon her. I hated those mean streets, those cruel codes of behavior, that violence.

I walked over to her. I’d been silent, and the absence of words had defused the dramatic nature of the situation. Her mouth was quavering faintly. She might have felt like crying, but she didn’t.

My fingers brushed hers.

“All right, Rosalia: I’ll help you. Even if the police won’t do anything, I’ll give it a try.”

It was she who took my hand. She squeezed it until it hurt; she bit her lower lip until it turned pinker still. Then she let me go. She put her overcoat back on and headed down the stairs.

“Come to my apartment in half an hour,” she said as she was leaving. “My mother’s gone out with my sister: there’s something I want to show you.”

At the front desk we ran into the news editor. He looked us up and down.

“Life is good, eh?”

The stupidity of that wisecrack crashed helplessly against the gaze of her black eyes. She wasn’t a pretty girl paying a call: Rosalia was the victim of several millennia of Sicilian ideas. But then, how could he know that?

She refused to come with me on the Vespa.

“I’ll see you there; I’ll take the bus.”

Of course, I got there before she did. I waited a few doors down the street, leaning against the wall. Via Perpignano was a main thoroughfare channeled, rushing, through a narrow alley, an artery choked by the city’s massive cholesterol. The cars were inching forward in single file, bumper to bumper, from both directions. A Fiat 128 tried to get through ahead of an Alfa Romeo 1750 that was turning off Palermo’s ring road, the Circonvallazione. The two cars faced off, radiator to radiator. The two drivers shot each other frosty glares: neither of them said a word. They sat there in silence, both gripping the steering wheel white-knuckled, as if fighting telepathically. Neither wanted to fight: each just wanted to win. I pondered the fact that in the streets of Palermo, no one started a fight, for the simple reason that if a fight were to break out, someone would inevitably be killed. And no one was really willing to commit murder over a traffic jam. Back then, there were so many other more respectable opportunities, such as heroin smuggling, the arms racket, robberies, the gang war for Mafia supremacy, crimes of passion, exemplary punishments. Cars were like dumb, useful mules, and nobody was willing to kill for a mule’s sake.

From Piazza Principe di Camporeale I saw the silhouette of an oncoming bus, the same one Rosalia had boarded.
It stopped fifty feet away. She got out, tightening the belt around her gray overcoat, opened the door to her building, and, as she closed it behind her, shot me a glance. I was going to have to wait a few minutes before going upstairs. I saw the bus speed away, rocking wildly, narrowly missing a balcony.

The door clicked open.

I found her framed in the doorway, her eyes blacker than the darkness.

“Come here and I’ll show you.”

I followed her into her bedroom. Two beds, side by side. She sat down on the bed by the window; I heard the noise of cars going by on Via Perpignano.

“How can you sleep with this racket?”

“It’s the noise of my whole life. We’ve always been here.”

From a drawer in the nightstand that separated the two beds, she pulled out something small, wrapped in a rag.

“My father gave this to me a month ago.”

She pulled open the rag and I saw a gold chain, marine link, heavy, glistening: it looked new.

“I cleaned it myself; it’s my dowry.”

The chain had an oval pendant, also gold. I turned it over: it was a reproduction of a woman’s leg, in low relief.

An ex-voto.

“Rosalia, do you know what this is?”

“A leg, what else would it be? My father gave it to me because he used to say that I had the most beautiful legs on earth.”

“Where did he get it?”

“One morning, he came home from work with two watches and this necklace. He never told us where he’d been. He always said the same thing: just don’t worry, I’ve been careful. One time he brought Mamma a blender with a big
glass jar. It needed cleaning. The night before, someone had made fava bean soup in it, and once the beans are dry they’re almost impossible to get off.”

I examined the pendant more closely. I’d seen something similar once at the sanctuary on Monte Pellegrino. Actually, hundreds of similar things. Lots of people left phrases of gratitude next to their ex-votos—for grace received—so that anyone who wanted to know could read about the family’s devotion to the Santuzza.