‘So where are we going, then?’ Carolina asked.
‘I forgot to tell you,’ Giuseppe said. ‘The news is good. One of my favourite restaurants has opened up again, so I thought we might go there. I managed to book the last table they had for lunch.’
‘Why had it closed?’ asked Agostino.
‘They got caught by the police fiddling bills to get out of paying income tax. They couldn’t buy their way out.’
‘The story is they were also in trouble for having protected fish on the menu,’ Carolina said. ‘It was in the Giornale.’
‘Anyway, the main thing is they’re open, and I thought we might as well go over there before the police move in on them again,’ Giuseppe said.
‘When you say “protected fish” you mean neonati, don’t you?’ Agostino asked.
‘Right, neonati.’
I asked what sort of fish this was, and Giuseppe explained that it was a kind of spawn taken in special ultra-fine nets only a few days after hatching out. ‘I think you call them small fry,’ he said. To this, Agostino, who was cynical in such matters, added, ‘Three restaurants out of four will cook them for you on the quiet. Your people just weren’t fast enough with the protection money, that’s all.’ Turning to Lesley, he said, ‘Laws don’t really exist in this country.’
At that moment the restaurant came into sight. It was a large blue cube of a building with seagulls in flight painted all over its façade. We agreed this was a disastrous intrusion upon an otherwise unspoilt and almost romantic seaside environment. There were about twenty cars, most of them German, in the car park, and a Tunisian in farcical pseudo-oriental garments welcomed us at the door. We went in and a stern-faced employee checked our identities and led us to a table. ‘Unfriendly here, aren’t they?’ Agostino said.
‘They have to be,’ Giuseppe told him. ‘They have to pretend to be mafiosi, even if they aren’t. It’s all part of the scene.’
‘But why do people come here?’
‘Because it’s smart. If you call a superboss by his first name it impresses your friends.’
‘What was the waiter writing on the pad?’ Agostino asked, and Giuseppe told him: ‘Our order.’
‘But we haven’t given him one,’ Agostino said.
‘It wasn’t necessary. There is a standard menu. He just took a look at us and decided how much we’d pay.’
‘So what are we getting? Neonati?’
‘Right. They just brought them for the people at the next table, so that will be our first course, too.’
‘Surely we can refuse it,’ Carolina said. ‘Can’t we tell them that we didn’t order whatever it is, and please take it away?’
‘Not here,’ Giuseppe said. ‘The way they see it is, you come here, you’re on their side. You leave the food - it’s an insult. They’re quick to take offence.’
Nevertheless, when the waiter came with the neonati, Agostino put it to one side. The boss, who was behind the waiter, stood back and watched. His face was smooth and red and expressionless, like the faces at Ficuzza, and like them, he probably rarely, if ever, smiled.
The hubbub of chatter around the tables in our vicinity had quietened as the diners sensed the unusual tension in the periphery of their well-regulated lives. My impression now was that the fury lurking in the boss’s face that I had at first taken to be directed at us was in fact a permanent feature of his expression. Lips compressed and cheeks aflame, he turned and went off and the waiter took the neonati away. The slaughter of the innocents was clearly a feature of the cuisine, for the next course displayed the tiny limbs of a newborn lamb. It proved to possess such delicacy of flavour that it was regrettably easy to overcome shame. It was no wonder that the place’s regular customers had found a way to keep it in business.
With the meal at an end the time had come for fond farewells, for Carolina was obliged to put in an appearance at her office before closing-time at the bank. A car had been sent to pick her up and the others decided to take advantage of a lift back to the centre. This left us with the rest of the afternoon free, and we decided to visit the eastern outskirts of the capital, which were reported as being of exceptional interest.
We managed to pick up a taxi which drove us across the network of roads leading into the capital from the east, finally dropping us near Villagrande. It was a region where the countryside still encroached on the outer suburbs of Palermo, and was said to be remarkably unchanged since the beginning of the century. The city’s exhausted expansion had left no more than a scattering of modern buildings among untended fields in which scrubby bushes and even the odd misshapen tree had survived. The stillness here seemed to be emphasized by the soft orchestration of the traffic in the Corso a mile or so away. Ten years back ex-villagers who had taken employment in the city still rode on their bicycles to work. Their little grey houses with tiny windows out of reach from the ground were still there and in good shape. Some of the present occupants had gone in for a few yards of walled garden with a row of spikes set into the top bricks.
These people had remained country folk, happy to forfeit the regularities and benefits of urban life, the set hours of work, the exactitudes of pay and pensions, and the medical care. By contrast certain pleasures had survived, long lost elsewhere when the city houses closed in. They grew vines in these back gardens, producing each year a few bottles of sweet and invigorating white wine, celebrated all the feasts, married virgins and reared for the market those long-legged cockerels strutting so confidently in the streets of the Vucciria on their way to their doom.
Here we were on the frontier of two versions of civilization, as recently reported upon by the sociologist Professor Angelo Reina. In the depressed outskirts of Palermo, he noted, adults had lost on average three-quarters of a centimetre in height over a decade - as a result he believed of deprivation of light. Villagers colonizing semi-deserted areas such as this had actually become three-quarters of a centimetre taller during the same period, benefiting, he believed, from ‘unofficial cultivation’ - meaning take-overs of abandoned land -which had enabled them to improve their diet.
We stopped at a miscellaneous collection of hutments and half-built houses, named, according to a noticeboard, Conforto - Comfort. After a chat with a group of its natives who came into sight, this seemed not an unreasonable description. They were clearly delighted and stimulated by strange faces in their midst, and they seized on this excuse to put aside whatever they were doing and gather round for a chat. The dialect here was a difficult one, but a gleeful veteran with understandable Italian made his approach, dragging a piglet on a lead. We had seen no farms in the area - what did people do for a living? I asked, and his smile widened. They grew vegetables, he said, including the longest zucchini in Sicily, which they exchanged for meat. They hoped to develop tourism. There were caves at the back of the village where cavemen once lived, and one of these contained a portion of fossilized bear.
Were they ever troubled by the Mafia? I asked, and the man laughed at the idea. ‘We’re poor,’ he said, and it sounded like a boast. ‘Why should they bother with us? The Mafia feeds on the rich. We’ve never set eyes on one. Sometimes the carabinieri send a collector for a contribution to their funds and we give him a few onions. There’s no money here to pay for doctors, but the mago casts a spell and gets the same result for a couple of cabbages. The nearest school is ten kilometres away so he teaches the kids arithmetic while he’s about it.’
A small boy passed, whistling, with golden wings attached to his shoulders. ‘It’s for his saint’s day,’ the old man explained. ‘Something they make a big fuss of here. The family and a few friends will eat rabbit tonight. Why don’t you stay with us and wish him a long life?’
Thanking him, I explained to him that we were on our way to Punta Raisi to catch a plane.
‘Pity,’ he said. ‘If you come back this way don’t fail to stop and give us your news.’
I assured him that we would and a long handshake in the old-fashioned
Sicilian style followed before I signalled to the driver to start up, and we moved off. It had been an experience that renewed the memory of the good fellowship and the dignity of the Sicilian countryside which had remained for so many years unchallenged in the mind’s eye, and I knew that once again I would leave the island with regret.
Index
Aci Trezza 8
Acquaviva, Dukes of 47
Aeolian Islands 129
African immigrants 118–27, 131–7
Agrigento 86, 120, 122–3
Ain Sefra 124
Aiutamicristo 34
Alcamo 37–8
Algeria 131
Algerians 120
Altofonte 16
Andreotti, Giulio 55, 145
Anti-Mafia Commission 19, 22–4
Assurrino, Pietro 141
Bagheria 35–7
Villa Palagonia 149
Baida, Maria Lo 83
Banco di Sicilia 161
Barretta, Girolama 79–80
Bell, Malcolm 116
Berne 3
Bolognetta 40
Borgetto 80
Borsellino, Paolo 60
Bronte, Nelson estate 24
Brusca clan 56
Buono, Signor Lo 27–32
Buscetta, Tommaso 53, 81
Caesar, Julius 147
Calabria 26, 60–2
Cali, Giuseppe (archpriest) 153–4
Caltanissetta 151
Cammarata Mountains 13, 107
Camorra (Neapolitan Mafia) 60
Cannabis indica 76
Cantoniere di Etna 10
capi-mafia 36–7, 152
Carthaginians 99
Caselli, Procuratore Giancarlo 58
Castellammare del Golfo 66–7, 142
Castelvetrano 20–1
Catania 8–10, 28, 135, 148, 151–2
Christian Democrats 18, 55, 96–7
Cimino, Marcello 13–19, 23–4, 27–8, 33–6, 41, 86, 147, 156
Cinquefronda 61
Communist party 18
Conforti, General 114–15, 117
Coppola, Francis Ford, Godfather films 75
Corleone 37, 40, 49, 75, 85, 89, 91–7
Piazza Garibaldi 93, 96
Corvaja, Ernestina 1–2
Corvaja, Ernesto 1–5
Corvaja, Prince 2
Cosa Nostra 36, 56, 58, 107, 114, 150, 152; see also Mafia
D’Almea, Angelo 4–5
‘The Dancing Satyr’ 100–102, 155
De Maria (mafioso lawyer) 20–1
Descartes, Rene 20
Di Maggio, Baldassare 54–5
Di Maggio, Emanuele 55
Di Maria, Professor Franco 58–63
Di Matteo, Giuseppe 56–7, 146
Di Matteo, Santino 56
Di Mauro, Mauro 57
Dolci, Danilo 49–50, 68–75, 77, 128
Duce see Mussolini
Egypt 121–2
Enna 116
Falcone, Giovanni 60
Fava, Marcello 52–4, 57
Favara 26, 128
Ferdinand IV 46, 90–1
Ferragosto 128–9
Festa della Morte 38
Ficuzza 66, 86–7, 89–91, 163
Gambino, Francesco 49, 93–4
Gazzetta del Popolo 21
Gela 150
Getty Museum, California 115
Ghana 132
Gibellina 103–5
Giornale della Sicilia 51, 129–30, 162
Giovanni (journalist) 123–7
Giuliano, Boris 26
Giuliano, Enrico 30–2
Giuliano, Salvatore 18–22, 30–2, 68, 76, 145
Godrano 87
Grande Oriente (Great Eastern) police offensive 147–8, 150–2
Gravina family 36
Guardia di Finanza 119
Hansen, Christina 93
The Honoured Society 13
Hussein, Saddam 147
Huxley, Aldous 70
Iato dam 71
I Baby Killer 61
II Rifugio 87, 89
Intelligence Corps 6–7, 12
Interior, Ministry of the 23, 94
Iraq 123
Islam 139
Islamic fundamentalists 122
Isola delle Femmine 130
Joey (actress) 133–4, 136–7
Jorgens, Kenneth 93
La Forte (public attorney) 56
Lampedusa 120–3
Lavanco, Gioacchino 34–5, 37–40, 57–8, 61–4, 68–9, 92
The Mafia Feeling 57
Leggio, Luciano 36–7
Lewis, Lesley 42, 58, 69, 71, 160
Libya 123
Lima, Salvatore 149
Linguaglossa 12
Llardo, Luigi 149–50
London 3, 6–8
School of Oriental and African Studies 6
L’Ora 13–14, 18–19, 23, 27–8, 30, 33, 45, 57
Lo Zingaro 66–7, 155
luccioli (African prostitutes) 131–2, 134–6
Ludovico (cousin of Giuliano) 31–2
McNeish, James 13, 49
Fire Under the Ashes 70–1
Mafia/mafiosi 13–15, 18, 20, 22–3, 26, 29, 36, 38, 39–40, 53, 54, 56, 59–62, 65, 67, 71–2, 74–6, 78, 81, 87, 93–4, 96–7, 107, 110–11, 115, 117, 124, 128, 135, 139, 146–7, 150–2, 156, 163, 166; see also Cosa Nostra
maga (witch) 151, 157, 166
Malaspina prison 83
Malta 122
Manganelli, Antonio (chief of police) 51–2, 54, 136
Marineo 40
Maritime Police 120
Maximianus, Emperor 112, 128
Mazara del Vallo 98–103, 105, 155
Piazza della Repubblica 102
Mediterranean 13, 119, 122, 128
Meli, Padre 45, 126–7
Mesopotamia 3 Messina 106 Metropolitan Museum, New York 116
Milo 12
Mirabella family 153–4
Monreale 145
Monte Pellegrino 130
Montelepre 21, 31, 68, 76
Morgantina 3, 115–17
Demeter sanctuary 115
Moroccans 120, 122
Morocco 90, 123, 132
Mostella, Armando 4–5
Motta family 153–4
Mount Etna 8, 9–12
Mussolini, Benito 14–15, 26, 96, 107, 117, 128
Naples 60
Vicaria district 45
Navarra, Dr 97
New Yorker 13
Nigeria 132, 157
Nigrelli, Ignazio 116
Nisceni 150
North Africa 6, 14
Official Assessor of Agriculture 121
Ostend 2
Pafundo, Senator 19
Pakistanis 120
Palermo 3–4, 14, 16–17, 25–6, 40–1, 43–4, 46, 68, 77, 81, 85, 88, 101, 107, 120, 124–5, 136, 142, 147, 152, 160–4
African immigrants 118–27
Albergheria 45, 50, 126
Ballaro market 48–9, 52
Bar Lux 26
capi-mafia conference 145–6
Corso Vittorio Emanuele 44, 159
Cortile Cascino 49–50
Foro Italico 161
II Gesu 52
Intelligence Corps’ section 8
Mafia trial 27
Palazzo Chiaramonte 159
Palazzo Galletti 47
Parco della Favorita 3, 50–1, 130
Piazza Croce 125, 127
Piazza Marina 47, 159
port 47
Punta Raisi Airport 33, 166
Quattro Canti 42, 44, 159
San Domenico 44
Santa Maria dei Miracoli 159
University of 57–8
Via Filangeri 51–2
Via Lincoln della Marina 124
Via Maqueda 33–4
Via Roma 147
Vucciria market 44–5, 165
Palma di Montechiaro 24–5
Pampiglione, Professor Silvio 24–5
Parco, Filippo 143–4
Partinico 31, 67–76, 79–81, 108, 128
Fountain Adonis 69
Piazza del Duomo 69
Spine Sante 71
Philippeville (now Skikda) 131
Piana degli Albanesi 14–19, 24
Piazza Armerina 112–17, 148, 155
Villa del Casale 112, 114
Pietra Tagliata, Dukes of 46
Pisciotta (cousin of Giuliano) 20–2, 30
Pizzuta 19
Popular Front 18, 90
Porta Nuova family 53
Portella della Ginestra 17
massacre (1947) 17–19, 22–4, 27, 31–2
Provenzano, Bernardo 36, 147–50
Pubblica Sicurezza 26, 77, 79, 82, 84, 146–7
regional government 18, 92–3
Reina, Professor Angelo 165
Riccio, Colonel 149–50
Riina, Toto 36–8, 55, 62, 78, 94, 156–7
Rizzotto, Placido 37, 89, 95–7
Rocca Busambra 89
Roman Catholic Church 18, 22, 29, 78, 90, 110, 139, 159
Rome 3, 101
University of 24
Rubens, Peter Paul 117
Russo, Giuseppe Genco 110–11
St Agatha 11
St Cosima 139–40
St Damiano 139–40
St Gennaro 60
St Rita’s bones 49
Saladino, Giuliana 34–5
San Giuseppe Iato 54, 56, 85
San Vito lo Capo 66
Saracenic school of medicine 139
Schirro, Father Enrico 83
Scopelliti, Judge 156
Scordato, Padre 54
Sferracavallo 138–44
Shakespeare, William 20, 149
Sierra Leone 121, 132
Solarium (welfare project) 63–4
Southern Arabia 6
Stidda (southern Mafia) 150–2
Stromboli 129, 155
Sunday Times 13, 27
Superenatallo lottery 161
Syracuse 120, 122, 134, 136
Corso Umberto 135
Foro Italico 135
Syria 123