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Cosa Nostra: Our Thing.
It was Friday morning, just before 8 a.m. I locked the door of my apartment atop the spiral staircase that overlooks the courtyard of my building. I could hear the echo of straw scratching and sweeping the floor below. Adrianna was attending to her daily duties at the door. I was carrying a suitcase and quickly realized how slippery the marble steps were. Not just slick from being polished by 200 years of footsteps, the stairs were wet. Down below, Adrianna is in customary black to match her short black hair and new Max Mara glasses. She is a stout woman of 60 years, about 60 pounds overweight and when wearing her New Balance sneakers she is about 60 inches tall. Good morning. Where are you going? She points her broom in the direction of my suitcase. I am off to Palermo this morning. In those shoes? She waves the broom at my black cloth, Chuck Taylor Converse. Is there something I should know about Palermo I ask? No. Nothing. There are many beautiful churches. Be careful, and she attends to the pile of dust she pushes away from her new white sneakers. I walk away with the squeaking of water in the rubber crevices in the soles of my shoes. Last night I was reading Midnight in Sicily. A book that force-feeds its reader a history of Southern Italy's Mafia culture with side dishes of food writing worthy of a healthy appetite. The book opens with a memorial to Palermo's Vucciria - an open-air market that is a shell of its former lush fruits and vegetables, fishmongers with aquarium like offerings and farmhand animals flayed for you. The Vucciria can be accessed down a slope from the Piazza of San Domenico on Via Roma. A statue of Mother Mary is raised on a column that sits before the church of St. Dominic. The statue, the church and the Piazza are surrounded top to bottom with white, skeletal structures spotted with lights. I am taken back at the tackiness a two hundred year old church is treated, but I immediately follow the arches of white plastic down the side street into the Vucciria. My first steps are met with fresh water spewing from fish guts and blood sliding from chopping blocks - years of intense market vending and Mafia executions that paint the path of the cobble-stoned pavement. I stop to get my footing and wonder what this place was like twenty years ago when transvestites turned tricks and men were strung from stalls with their throats cut. Adrianna was right; I look at my sneakers and wonder if they will be stained with a history of evidence. My shoes will never be the same and neither will the Vucciria. The sterile market and toys for sale that accompany it is just one of the reform efforts of the anti-Mafia authority trying to make the city accessible to countable tourists. I pass through the market unmoved. My emotional apathy compounded with fatigue. After I left Adrianna and my taxi driver who deposited me at the bus depot, I encountered my first Italian sciopero - a strike. Stooped outside the ticket office, I stared at a handful of strikers who parked a bus at an angle to prevent other buses from leaving the depot. A single man paced and waved a flag. Cops outnumbered the strikers and rested against a wall talking amongst themselves and with the protesting workers. Everyone was chatting as if they haven't seen each other in quite some time, maybe the last strike. But no one knew when the strike would end or if the next bus would depart today. So, I followed my fellow Sicilians to the coffee bar and had my breakfast. I checked the clock and questioned my next move. We passed the train on the way to the station. I retraced the path in my memory and found I wasn't the only one following these thoughts. I sighed my disbelief to the counter clerk and bought a ticket for the next train westward. Palermo is complex. It is a city layered with culture and was once considered the capital of the Mediterranean by the many who fought their way through its harbors and on to its shore. Sicily was desirable because it is the gateway to the East and West. Greeks, Arabs, Africans, Romans, French and Spanish all sat on its throne and in the modern era, the Mafia has been at the helm. Around every corner conquering influence of art and architecture is mixed with undesirable history. In the Norman Piazza San Spirito on Easter Monday in 1282, when Sicilians were preparing for vespers, a French soldier insulted a woman in waiting. Locals came to her defense and the scuffle resulted in a small group of aristocrats planning a revolt against French rule. Nicknamed "stutterers" because the French had the inability to pronounce Italian properly, war was waged on anyone who could not say 'Cicero' correctly. Slayings in the streets started slowly until a full out massacre of the French drove them from the island. Palermo is an enigma. Midnight in Sicily can be summarized as the paradox of Sicily's parasitic rule that exists in the shadow between the state and its people. Robb writes of the modern day Mafia, but his story harkens the slaughter undertaken by the Sicilian Vespers, "the outlaws were tolerated, secret but recognizable, criminal but upholding order." And so, from the shadows, blood from Mafia killings seeped into the streets, into the consciousness and into the politics of Sicily. Cosa Nostra literally translates to "our thing." And as I learned on Saturday night at an art exhibition honoring Palermo's portrait painter, Antonio Cutino, "our thing" is not only the creed of the Mafioso, it is the struggle of Sicily and its people. The exhibit consisted of over 100 works and select studies for those paintings. At first pass, you are warmly welcomed into the soft light of several naked bodies, all women. You are intrigued by the artist's intelligence of his peers and predecessors. Many paintings cast resemblance to Picasso's Rose period, Degas' figure paintings and van Gogh's desperation. As a namesake of Cutino spoke about his grandfather, he pointed out a piece that may go unnoticed in the exhibition of women. He spoke about a portrait of "A Man from the South." One of the larger paintings in the portfolio, the older man is depicted wearing rustic clothes and a threadborn hat. He is seated but his left hand rests on the handle of cane. His face is weatherworn and wrinkled. His eyes are a faded blue and he is sullen. "We are old. We are tired." The grandson's words describing this painting echoed in the galleries like the words written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in his novel, The Leopard, echo in the minds of everyone born to this island. The Leopard was set against another upheaval in Sicilian society, the Risorgimento of the 1860's when the Italian state was attempting again to unite itself for the first time since the Roman Empire. Lampedusa wrote: In Sicily doing well or doing badly doesn't matter. The sin that we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of doing. We're old, terribly old. For at least twenty-five centuries we've been carrying on our backs, all of them coming fully perfected from the outside, none sprouted from ourselves, none that we've made our own. For two thousand five hundred years we've been a colony. I'm not complaining when I say it. Most of it is our fault. But we're worn out and exhausted all the same. Sleep. Sleep is what Sicilians want, and they always hate anyone who wants to wake them. Those who have crossed
Post 13 - October'05 Back to home...
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