Читать книгу Fighting the Mafia & Renewing Sicilian Culture - Leoluca Orlando - Страница 6

CHAPTER 2

In 1965 I took my final high school exam. Called the Maturità, it is administered by a public commission and focuses on an area of academic specialization, mine being Greek and Latin. The most prestigious public school in Palermo was the Garibaldi, and there was a lively competition between its pupils, known as the Garibaldini, and the Gonzaghini, as we were called. On our part the rivalry was tinged with envy, not only because the Garibaldi was a co-ed school but also because it had as good an academic record as Gonzaga, but without the repressive atmosphere that characterized our school.

That year I had the highest marks of any Maturità classica in Italy. I became something of a phenomenon and ended up in all the Sicilian newspapers. In a sudden accession of pride and enthusiasm, my father ordered a magnificent car for me, a red Porsche. But after getting some perspective on my achievement, he decided that it would not be “educational” for an eighteen-year-old to have such a flashy and expensive vehicle, and he bought me a small Fiat instead. Since I had never even been allowed to own a moped, I was thrilled to have any car at all.

As it turned out, the local Communist afternoon newspaper, L’Ora, had staged a competition in which the student in the province of Palermo scoring highest on the Maturità classica would win ten days in Moscow, all expenses paid. So as soon as the results of the exam were made public, I went to L’Ora’s headquarters to claim my prize. After a long wait, I was finally received by one of the editors. As I explained who I was, he got the look on his face of someone suddenly forced to converse with an extraterrestrial. It was 1965, a high point in the Cold War, and here was a Gonzaghino produced by the Jesuits, sworn enemies of the Communists, trying to collect a free trip to the motherland!

“You can’t participate,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because you come from a private school.”

“Whether I studied at a private school or studied in Timbuktu has nothing to do with it. I sat for the exams in front of a public commission, just like everybody else! You promised a trip for the highest score. I got it.”

A look combining boredom and triumph came over his face: “I’m sorry, but we can’t permit a pupil from a private school—and a religious one at that—to go to Moscow.”

The trip went to Salvino Mazzamuto, the boy whose score was just below mine. He had attended a public school and was an activist in the young Communist movement, and he would later become a good friend of mine.

This episode had an odd effect on me. At first I felt a keen sense of injustice. But then, as that emotion receded, I began to wonder if the contempt I had seen in the eyes of the editor of L’Ora might somehow be justified. It was true that my social world thus far had been bounded by the walls of my family’s palazzo in Palermo and our villas in the country and at the seaside, and by the walls holding in my companions and me at Gonzaga—all of us rich, Catholic Daddy’s boys. What was the relationship of the real world to the world of my experience? To annual rites like the Carnival parties I attended as a little boy, dressed as Aladdin or Pinocchio, in the beautiful frescoed rooms of Palazzo Ziino (the Ziinos being great friends of my family), along with all the other little Aladdins and Pinocchios from “nice” families? Or the Christmas receptions in Palazzo San Vincenzo, whose magnificent rooms were filled with the cream of Palermo’s aristocracy? No wonder others regarded me as a member of a strange species!

The perplexity these thoughts caused me was increased by another encounter I had that summer of 1965. One day a school-mate and friend named Nanni came to pick me up to go with him to San Martino, a beautiful place in the hills above Palermo. He’d had an argument with another boy named Marco Lupo and wanted me to help him get even. By the time we got to San Martino, however, I knew that this minor argument was not the real reason for the trip. In fact, Nanni was interested in a girl named Valeria, who was staying with Marco Lupo’s family. When we arrived, Valeria came out to talk to us. With her was her friend Milli, Marco Lupo’s sister. Milli’s dark hair was tied in two little pigtails, emphasizing a small, pretty face that reminded me of a frightened bunny. Because my score on the Maturità exam had made me locally famous, Milli immediately asked my opinion on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. And I, to my shame, was all too willing to give it to her.

We walked under the pine trees of San Martino, drinking in the resin-perfumed air, talking philosophy until we were invited up to the villa for cake. The house actually didn’t belong to the Lupos; they had rented it while they were building their own villa. But it struck me as being very different from the houses I had always known. It was a house filled not only with jokes and laughter, but with real joy. It made me realize the extent to which the homes I had lived in had been beautiful, serene, and happy, yet never joyous. In this exciting house, the conversation leaped from philosophy to cinema to history to music as we ate our cake.

Very soon after this I traveled to London to study English for a month. One day the phone rang. It was Milli, who was staying in London too and had gotten my number from Nanni. Over the next few weeks, we explored the Tate Gallery, the British Museum, the Tower of London, the Victoria and Albert Museum. We walked in the parks. We went to the theater. We saw My Fair Lady and came out humming the tunes together. Milli’s chief appeal was her normality. I was in love with it and with her. I always saw Milli home on the tube train—she lived in Watford, the last station on the Bakerloo line—and then returned in a state of euphoria to Finchley Street, where I lived in a huge house converted into a student hostel.

Milli’s stay in London was over before mine, and on the night of her departure, I took her to a roaring party the Young Conservatives were throwing at Heathrow Airport and then put her on the plane. As a parting gift she gave me The Charterhouse of Parma. The next day I started feeling bad—so bad, in fact, that a few days later I ended up in Paddington Hospital. I had pneumonia, for the second time in my life. I called my parents, knowing they would be worried if they didn’t hear from me for a long time, and I told them I would be away on a brief trip.

Was it the quality of my voice? Had my tone been too breezily nonchalant? Or was it some kind of sixth sense? Whatever it was that gave me away, my father and mother arrived at Paddington Hospital that very evening and immediately moved me to a private clinic, the Italian Hospital in Queen’s Square, where I battled my illness for the next three weeks with my parents at my bedside, as I feverishly followed the fortunes of Stendhal’s Fabrizio.

It was autumn when I returned to Palermo, just in time to register for the university. Since I had no particular preference of field and a test I had taken indicated that I was “qualified for all faculties,” I followed the Orlando family tradition and decided to study law.

I also picked up my relationship with Milli, who had taken it upon herself to “normalize” me. People in the aristocratic world where I had lived shed easy tears over the starving children in Biafra, but knew nothing—or chose to know nothing—of the everyday tragedies of life among the underclass of Palermo. Through Milli I discovered that there were poor people and social outcasts in my own city. My first impulse, given my upbringing, was to pay someone to help them. Milli did the helping herself, and made nothing of her charitable acts. She was the sort of person who wrote to the Pope telling him that the Church should do more for the poor. Writing the Pope! Unthinkable! She also taught me to swim—I who had spent two months of every summer of my life in a magnificent villa at the seaside, and was afraid of the water.

In 1968, after the earthquake in Sicily’s Belice Valley killed hundreds and left thousands homeless, I took a truckload of clothes and other necessities to the disaster area as part of an effort organized by an association of former Gonzaga students. I didn’t get close to the victims, but like others of my class, I could congratulate myself for having done what in the United States would be called “feel-good” work. But Milli was actively involved. She took me to meet a family who had lost both their home and their small shop. They had five children but couldn’t support them any longer. Out of desperation they had decided to go to Germany as “guest workers,” taking their oldest son with them. The other four children, aged from one to eight, they gave to Milli and me to keep. For the next three years, after settling the children in various homes, we acted as parents, looking after their material and emotional needs. When their parents had finally saved enough money to return to Sicily, it was Milli and I who introduced them to their youngest child, who no longer remembered them.

I never would have undertaken the fight against the Mafia just for the sake of law and order. I fought because I knew how the tentacles of the Mafia strangled the lives of common people. And I learned to care about these people in the first place because Milli opened my eyes to them.

I was the fourth generation of Orlandos to study law, but the first Orlando to do so at a school where his father was not only a professor but also the dean. This led to an awkward situation. Like most other major Italian universities in 1968 and 1969, Palermo was occupied by student protestors, and I was involved in this movement, but was regarded with suspicion by my comrades. After all, I was the son of the dean. What my companions could in no way even vaguely imagine was the uncomfortable, almost surreal atmosphere at home when I sat down to our meals, perhaps coming there directly from a tumultuous demonstration. There I was, being served by Giuseppe in his white jacket and gloves, sitting beside my father whose building I had been occupying—and nothing was said. The subject hung heavily in the space between us, but was never put into words.

It was during this time that I also met a Jesuit priest, Father Ennio Pintacuda, brother of my professor of history and philosophy at Gonzaga and a man who would have a profound effect on my life. The Pintacuda family were country folk who came from Prizzi, the town where my grandfather was born, and all three of their sons became Jesuit priests. Because Sicily is in effect one big small town, the Pintacudas were people I had always known without knowing them well.

Father Pintacuda was a small man with a beak of a nose and a balding head that seemed to rest directly on his slightly hunched shoulders. Soft-spoken, with penetrating eyes staring out from behind large glasses, the priest conveyed shrewd intelligence and calculation. His attraction for me lay in his combination of moral imperatives and political pragmatism. For him social change was the art of the possible, a process of getting from one place to another.

In later years, his room at the Center for Social Studies, which he founded together with another Jesuit, was crammed with books, publications, magazines, clippings and newspapers, deposited in Leaning-Tower-of-Pisa-like piles on the shelves, on the floor, on the chairs. It was mesmerizing to watch him navigate through this benign chaos, his slender body dwarfed by his desk, small parts of which were periodically cleared to allow for writing. Father Pintacuda had, as I would discover, an obsession for documentation, for press clippings on a variety of subjects, which he would jealously preserve long after anybody else would have cleared them out.

He put this material to good use. In the years ahead, he would become a central figure in the fight against Cosa Nostra and corrupt politics, which for him were two sides of the same coin. A Christian Democrat by background, he was disgusted by the growing evidence of corruption in the party. Yet for obvious reasons he could not align himself with the Communists either, despite their courageous stand against the Mafia. So he steered his own course, forming a succession of organizations to build a cadre of energetic, educated individuals who with him would live their Christian convictions in their political actions.

I saw Father Pintacuda as someone with a compelling vision for the social world I was just then beginning to discover. He saw in me a potential disciple who could help him “remoralize” Sicilian society. In picking me for such a role, he was acting according to the old way of the Jesuits, who believe that if they can cultivate one “leader,” they ultimately have the potential for influencing thousands of people. Pintacuda soon became a father figure for me in an area, politics, which had always been anathema to my real father. In time he would become my spiritual as well as my political advisor.

Influenced by Father Pintacuda, I worked with other students to found the Gonzaga Cultural-Artistic Association, whose aim was to open windows in our minds and force us to study issues outside our small, protected little slice of the world. This association would meet once a week at Father Pintacuda’s room at Casa Professa, the Jesuit headquarters for Palermo and the whole of Sicily. Casa Professa is attached to one of the most extraordinary churches of Palermo, the Chiesa del Gesù (Church of Jesus), and a visitor entering it is bowled over by the overwhelming richness of the pink, white, black and ochre baroque marbles and stucco work.

Each member of the Gonzaga Cultural-Artistic Association was assigned a specific newspaper or magazine to read carefully, and every Monday we would meet in Father Pintacuda’s room to discuss what we had learned. I was assigned Rinascita, the Communist Party weekly magazine, to study and report on, which I did faithfully during the next two years, always with a sense of unease. The magazine encouraged one to criticize all dominant concepts, except for those it rested upon. It struck me as being negative and destructive. Yet I understood that the task at hand was not just acquiring information, but probing political meanings and viewpoints. How did the Communists think about politics? Why had they fought against the Mafia? How did they try to embody their precepts in specific political positions?

My parents approved of my relationship with Father Pintacuda, regarding him as one of those maîtres à penser who would mold my mind in such a way as to make me useful and—if the truth were known—powerful. The only one who expressed any doubts was Milli, who saw in Father Pintacuda a certain Machiavellian quality. At a time when my relationship with Milli was troubled by wavering commitment on my part, the influence I allowed Father Pintacuda to exercise over me became another disquieting development for her. In 1967, after our umpteenth breakup, Milli decided to move to Catania, the other major Sicilian city, and go to school there. She visited Palermo off and on over the next two years, and we maintained our off-and-on relationship.

That same year, in the summer of 1967, I went to the University of Heidelberg to study German for a month on a Ferienkurs, a “holiday course.” Why Heidelberg? Because it was the city where my father had studied in the early 1930s, and I remembered his after-dinner tales of the beerhouse Zum Zepp’l, where the young German students would challenge each other to duels aimed at slashing the opponent’s cheek—the more slashes, the greater dexterity; the more scars, the greater proof of bravery. One of the first things I did upon arriving in Heidelberg, in fact, was to find Zum Zepp’l, which amazingly enough was still exactly as he had described it. In fact, my month in Germany was a sort of Proustian recovery of lost time—my father’s time. I went to Unter Schloss Weg, a narrow street under the castle, where he had lived during his stay. I got at least a glimpse of that other self he had inhabited before he was my mother’s husband and my father.

Upon returning to Palermo I still had Heidelberg on my mind, and I applied to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a scholarship to the Max Planck Institute. I was accepted and offered 800 deutsche marks a month (about 100 dollars at that time). It was a fraction of what I had lived on before, but I was enthusiastic not only about attending Heidelberg University full time, but about not being “the son of” for the first time in my life.

At first I stayed in the Students’ Hostel, but soon decided that if I didn’t go out to eat in restaurants and always ate—for the sum of one mark per meal—both lunch and dinner at the canteen, and if I did my own washing and ironing, I could afford a room at Palmbräuhaus, a sort of boarding house right in the old center of the city owned by an Italian who also ran a small trattoria called Sole d’Oro (The Golden Sun). Apart from the name of this restaurant, Heidelberg was cold and grey, and to guard against the dangers of a northern winter, my parents, still worried that I might die, had provided me with heavy coats, long underwear, a variety of jackets, lined gloves and even a fur hat. It was indeed very un-Mediterranean, but I loved Heidelberg for the freedom it offered—most of all, freedom from my own family and upbringing.

The revolutionary winds of 1968 were still blowing strongly in Germany, and the old wooden-beamed halls of the medieval university rang with the voices of some of Europe’s most celebrated student leftists. One was Rudi Dutschke, who came up with the idea that radicals should stop toying with revolution and begin “the long march through the institutions.” Another was Ulrike Meinhof, who believed the opposite and took revolution the next step into terrorism when she formed the Bader-Meinhof Gang. Yet I was more fascinated by two of our professors, whose lessons I never missed: Martin Heidegger and Hans Georg Gadamer, world-famous philosophers who were regarded as rather conservative.

I made friends with students of various nationalities and backgrounds. John, from California, had a Peugeot that was the envy of all the students, and we toured the German countryside in it every weekend. I became close friends with a Greek student who had fled from his country, then in the hands of the Colonels, and of course I made many German friends. One of them was one of my professors, Christian Tomuschat, responsible for the Italian section of Max Planck, with whom I played soccer every Thursday afternoon.

To me, these friends represented the wider world. To them, I represented Sicily. “Ah! Here comes the Mafioso!” they would joke. This was before the rise of the Corleonesi, the Mafia clan which a few years later would associate death and Palermo on front pages around the world. Yet even at this time, the Mafia was inching its way into the news, largely as a result of what came to be called the First Mafia War of the early 1960s (a name applied when we were in the middle of the second, far more apocalyptic conflict). Competition over the spoils of the Sack of Palermo led to a clash between various Mafia factions, culminating in a car bomb that killed seven police and bomb disposal experts in 1963.

I could have taken umbrage when my German friends called me “Mafioso,” but I shrugged it off with a laugh. I was secure in the thought that the Mafia had nothing to do with me and, more importantly, I had nothing to do with it.

After two years at Heidelberg I returned to Palermo to take a position in the law school, feeling that I had finally thrown off most of my emotional shackles. My relationship with Father Pintacuda intensified, and under his influence I did a study called “Under-development, Cultural Power and Mafia” for a 1970 conference organized by our Cultural-Artistic Association. It caused a scandal. This was not because I named names or made bold charges about who in Sicily’s political world was complicit; nor did I discuss the Sack of Palermo or describe the Mafia’s contamination of our culture. In fact, the paper was rather obtuse, dealing with the Mafia as if it were a tribe tucked away in some valley, which none of us had ever met. The study created a scandal simply because it was the first time ever that a non-Communist, a Catholic of the Gonzaga-Jesuit species, had written about this subject.

There was no road-to-Damascus epiphany. Like practically everyone else in Sicily, I had my insights by fits and starts. If I was a few steps ahead of most of my fellow citizens, it was only because of the moral prodding of a few people like Father Pintacuda and my own father. There was ample evidence of how dangerous it was to become too identified with this subject. There had been several Cassandras in our recent past: a handful of trade unionists, a brave Protestant pastor, a few Communists. Most of them were not merely ignored, but killed—not the highly public murders that lay a few years in the future, but almost inaudible thumps in the Sicilian night.

Still, I knew I was embarked on a path from which there would be no turning away. As a lawyer, I saw that the law was one place to wage the struggle. In the aftermath of the First Mafia War, a national Antimafia Commission had been established, and its findings encouraged a legal response by authorities. But while an individual Mafioso was brought to trial now and then, perhaps even jailed, there was no action directed at the Mafia per se. Father Pintacuda’s view became mine as well: law enforcement was only part of the task ahead. In addition to trials and imprisonment, we somehow had to inject immunizing antibodies into Sicilian culture.

My intuition that the problem of the Mafia would be my life’s work is probably what gave me confidence finally to propose to Milli, with whom I had maintained a fitful courtship while abroad. There were still tensions between us, but they seemed only to have strengthened our bond. Now that I had a job at the University of Palermo and would also be working in my father’s law firm, it was time to get serious about our relationship.

Although she didn’t belong to “our world,” my parents had embraced Milli because of her loyalty and love for me. In choosing her I had gone against unwritten class laws, but so what? My mother too had “married beneath herself.”

Our engagement was to be celebrated with a traditional acchianata, an old Sicilian term deriving from the verb acchianare, “to climb up.” In the past, when two young people wished to be betrothed, custom dictated that the prospective groom’s parents make a formal visit to the chosen bride’s parents, going “up the stairs” to their living area. There would be cakes and a little Rosolio wine, and the parents of the young man would praise his morality, his capacity for hard work and his future financial prospects. The bride’s parents, in turn, would praise her piety, her excellent housekeeping abilities and—often more important—what she would bring as dowry to her husband. In fact, the terms of the match had already been negotiated by a go-between before this meeting took place, but the ritual had to be respected in full. After a couple of hours, the bride and groom would be called in and formally “introduced” to each other, and then the engagement declared official.

My parents and I were to go to the Lupos’ house, not for cakes and Rosolio wine but for dinner. My mother had given her own engagement ring, a superb diamond, to my brother Antonio’s bride when he had become engaged. (The most rebellious and independent of the seven of us children, Antonio had married at the age of eighteen and was already a happy father.) For Milli, my mother went to Bulgari, the most prestigious Italian jeweler in Rome, and bought a ring that equaled in value and appearance the one she had already given away. Everything was fixed and confirmed. We were expected for dinner at the Lupos’ home at nine.

At four o’clock in the afternoon of that memorable day, I picked up the phone in a panic and called Milli. “I don’t want to become engaged,” I blurted out. “I’m sorry but I can’t do it….I can’t do it!”

She neither cried nor became upset. She didn’t yell “You’re crazy!” as she probably should have. She accepted it and immediately began thinking of what to do about the visit that had been so meticulously prepared. We agreed that I would tell my parents and she would tell hers that the engagement was off.

When I explained to my mother that I had changed my mind, her reaction was mixed. “Marriage and an engagement are something very important, not to be entered into lightly,” she said, “so if you’re not sure, you shouldn’t force it.” But then, after a short pause, the bon ton of generations of Cammaratas came into play: “But there’s a matter of the proprieties, of good manners. We’ve been invited to dinner by these people and we can’t not go. The engagement is over, but we can’t not go to dinner. We’ll put the ring into the strongbox and bring Milli something else.”

My mother had a rather lovely gold bracelet my father had given to her when I was born, to which she was very attached. Nonetheless, she carefully wrapped it in tissue paper and then the three of us went to dine with the Lupos.

Milli lived with her family in a beautiful, huge attic apartment with breathtaking views of the whole city. When we arrived, the house and the terrace were all lit up, and there were vases of flowers artistically placed in all the rooms and an elegantly laid table with an embroidered tablecloth. As we sat down to dinner, I felt we were in a situation that was almost comic. Six people eating excellent food (Milli’s mother was a superb cook), drinking excellent wine and making charming conversation, although they no longer had any reason whatsoever to be having a formal dinner together.

That we shared the meal that evening and had fun doing so was probably responsible for the fact that a year later, in 1971, Milli and I finally did become engaged. This time the Bulgari diamond ring was rejected as unlucky and another was bought in its place. And having put aside all fears and uncertainties, we were married in the historic Church of the Magione, a wonderful Arab-Norman church situated in one of Palermo’s ancient Arab quarters.

Milli wore a white dress with a white sable-trimmed hood, a delicate spray of white flowers in her hair framing her lovely face. Ours was the marriage of that season, attracting aristocrats, my Gonzaga friends, the important lawyers and professional bourgeoisie—all the men attired in swallowtails and top hats and the women all nearly as magnificent as Milli herself. The gossip columnists were kept busy for days describing the reception for hundreds of guests which was held at the Savoia Club, the most exclusive club of Palermo’s nobility and still bearing the name of the exiled Italian royal family.

We honeymooned in Mexico for a month, then went to New York and Canada before returning home to settle in a small house where we would live for the next twenty-five years. We had two beautiful daughters whose pictures, like Milli’s own, never appeared in the newspapers because of my fear that they would possibly be killed by the Mafia, which made no secret of the fact that it intended to kill me.