Read The Four Corners of Palermo Online

Authors: Giuseppe Di Piazza

The Four Corners of Palermo (29 page)

Eight minutes later I was pulling up outside the shop that sold the finest
brioche con gelato di caffè
ever produced in Palermo. Pastries filled with coffee-flavored gelato.

Rosalia was in the back, sitting at a little table. She wore seventies-style sunglasses with oversized lenses, in black plastic frames, and her gray overcoat; an appearance that overall seemed hardened, if that was possible. I sat down with her, and we ordered mineral water.

“You have to stop writing.” Just like that, without preliminaries.


Ciao
, Rosalia. What’s this all about?”

“You have to stop, you have to stop.” Her voice broke, and she was sobbing.

“What’s happened?”

She lifted her sunglasses, and she had a black eye, her left eye—bruised and swollen shut.

“A man, last night. He was waiting for me by the bus stop. He told me that if I wanted to know the truth, he’d be glad to tell me all about it. The way they’d told my father. I tried to run away, and he gave me a tremendous punch. I flew to the pavement. And he strolled away, in no hurry, lighting a cigarette.”

I took her hand in mine. It was icy cold. She put her sunglasses back on, squeezed my fingers, and I saw a tear make its way past the barrier of the sunglass frames and streak its way down her cheek.

“I promised to help you, to find the truth so you could get your life back,” I told her.

“I know you did. But now I’m afraid.”

My mind went to the anonymous note in my pocket. The truth was written on it, and maybe I’d just have to keep it to myself. Maybe.

I moved my chair over closer to hers.

“Rosalia, you need to go away. You’re a smart, beautiful, proud girl. Go on, get out of here, run away.”

“I’m a daughter: I’m not going anywhere.”

She let go of my hand. She stood up, adjusting her overcoat.

“But do me this favor: stop writing about what happened to my father.”

I said yes, with the immediate rush of guilt that comes when you’re a bad liar: I’d stop writing, but the police wouldn’t stop investigating.

We said goodbye with a single kiss on the cheek, the way we do in Palermo. Then I watched her go. She didn’t turn around. She’d given up.

In the late afternoon I went to see Gualtieri. I gave him the anonymous letter and told him about the threats and the violence targeting Rosalia. I asked him to take it easy. To keep it all under wraps. He asked me why.

“That girl would like to have a future,” I tried to explain.

He eyed me curiously.

“If you ask me, the only future she can hope for is one where we catch the people who murdered her father and say just how things went. What do you say to that, young investigator?”

“Yes and no.”

“Meaning what?”

“Antonio, you ought to know: in Palermo there’s never a full yes, nor is there ever a direct no. The way we say things is
a trasi e nesci
, in and out, enter and exit. Forward and back, start and stop: never clearly in one direction.”

“So what are we supposed to do, arrest a little bit and a little bit not arrest?”

“No, I’m just asking you to be discreet. Don’t let the press write the whole truth about the beheading of her father.”

“I don’t know the whole truth yet.”

“You’ll find it, trust me. You start the way I did from the ex-voto to Saint Rosalia and this anonymous note. I could have thrown it away, but I brought it to you precisely because I want the truth to be told, but discreetly.”

He was a Turinese cop in Palermo; but then and there he felt like a human being, the only human being, on Mars.

“Fine. I’ll protect the girl.”

I smiled gratefully. We chatted for a few more minutes about the soccer player Zbigniew Boniek and the coverage he got in
France Football
, and then I left.

The night sky was dark; there was a storm on its way. In the street, I felt the first few drops hit my face. I chained the Vespa to a lamppost near the door to my building. I needed a sense of safety.

Lilli was in the kitchen; Serena and Fabrizio were in their bedroom. Cicova rubbed his back against my left calf. I heard the slow notes of “Us and Them” from the living room, the intertwining voices of Gilmour and Wright. I’d landed back on my own happy planet, I was breathing the air of my own generation, there was shared DNA in our cells.

“Welcome home,
mio amore
,” Lilli said, as I walked toward her down the hall. I hugged her so tight it took her breath away.

“I love you,” I whispered, letting her catch her breath. She, too, was a daughter; I, too, was a son. We all were, in a place where the meaning of the word “family” is love today, horror tomorrow.

The evening slipped away peacefully, over a bowl of spaghetti and a few LPs of progressive rock. I did my best to forget about Rosalia’s tears. I suggested we play a game of Trivial Pursuit. Two hybrid teams: Fabrizio and Lilli against me and Serena. We were quickly beaten: they knew everything, they were intolerable.

Lilli yawned and Serena and Fabri said
buona notte
. We went to bed, too.

I couldn’t get to sleep. It wasn’t the adrenaline; I’d exhausted that with Rosalia and Gualtieri. It was a sense of inadequacy with respect to my working days: I did my job, I dealt with death, I talked to policemen, women, little kids. I searched, I found, and I wrote. But I understood nothing. I couldn’t see a reason why. A reason why there was another world, so different from the one I know that surrounded me, outside that apartment, a world that was “plus fourteen” away from Palermo. All it took was a train, a night in a sleeping car, and I’d see in the rest of Europe how different the late twentieth century was.

Lilli had fallen asleep with her arms around me, a sweet ball of wool, a tiny island of meaning.

I didn’t turn off the lamp on the nightstand. In my hands I was holding a copy of
The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
. I kept rereading the same two lines without registering a word. I
decided to get up and do what I ought to have done at the end of the afternoon: write my piece about the death of Giovanni Neglia.

I pulled my pistachio-green Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter out of its case, took out a sheaf of millimeter graph paper, and went into the dining room to keep from awakening Lilli. I sat down at the dinner table.

The mystery of the severed head has been solved: Giovanni Neglia, age 50, was beheaded because he stole a necklace from the home of Ruggero Pecoraino, cousin of a Mafia boss. The necklace had belonged to his daughter, little Filomena, who died of cancer at age 12. The murder was committed by Salvatore “Salvo” Incorvaia, a mob boss with ties to the Corleonese clan and Pecoraino’s brother-in-law
.

In the eighty lines that followed, I gave an account of the murder and its solution, explaining that the beheading had taken place in the Incorvaias’ warehouse, a place normally used for the decapitation of tuna. The head had been severed with a meat cleaver and then left to bleed out, hung up near the fish until it was drained of blood. The killer had then placed the body in the trunk of the car and had left the Ford Escort in front of the station to make the whole thing that much more evident, a clear and unmistakable lesson. I ended the piece with a reference to the suffering of the Neglia family.

I read it over. I crumpled it up and threw it in the trash.

I stretched out on the sofa and picked up a book of poetry by Giorgio Caproni that Serena had left on the coffee table. A postcard of the catacombs of the Capuchin monks bookmarked page 81.

I opened the book and read from the beginning:

Amore mio, nei vapori d’un bar

all’alba, amore mio che inverno

lungo e che brivido attenderti!

My love, amid the fumes of a bar

at dawn, my love, such a long

winter, I shiver as I wait for you!

It was all too much. Too many different gazes, impossible to meet at that point of the night: Rosalia’s black eyes, once again dark in her unconditional surrender; Lilli’s blue eyes, transparent with gentle sweetness; the eyes, closed forever, of that bodiless head; the ferocious eyes of a man who chops, beheads, and bleeds out a human being. And now the sigh of those lines of verse, the certainty of a different world, far away, in the eyes of a man in love, waiting in a café at sunrise.

I shut the book and set it down. Cicova slowly came over to me. He pushed his nose against my whiskers. He wanted me to go on reading. I paid no attention to him, but I should have: cats are always right.

Place Names

The heart of Palermo is split into four parts by the intersection of two main thoroughfares: Corso Vittorio Emanuele, also known as the Càssaro (from the Arabic
“qasr,”
“the fortress”), a road first built by the Phoenicians to connect the port to the necropolis; and Via Maqueda, built at the end of the sixteenth century at the behest of the Spanish viceroy at the time, Bernardino de Cárdenas, Duque de Maqueda. The crossroads where the two main thoroughfares met became a piazza commonly known as the Quattro Canti di Città. Each
canto
, or canton, is the
spigolo
, or corner, or a
mandamento
, one of the four historic quarters of the city: Tribunali, Castellammare, Palazzo Reale, and Monte di Pietà. A
canto
, in Palermo, is a corner.

But of course, a
canto
in Italian is also a song, or a section of an epic poem. In the pages that you have just finished reading, the four cantos form a fifth canto, invisible to the eye but unmistakable to all those who have left Palermo:
il canto dell’assenza
—the canto of absence.

Acknowledgments

I thank:

My father for his silences.

My mother for her words.

My sister, Gianna, for the love in her eyes when she looks at me.

My friends Fabrizio Zanca and Antonella Romano for the feelings we’ve shared.

I thank:

Camilla Baresani, Francesca Lancini, Alberto Cristofori, Alfredo Rapetti, Laura Ballio, Alba Donati, Alessia Algani, Roberto Andò, and Roberto Gobbi for their invaluable help; Filippo la Mantia for having taken a picture I’ve kept with me since 1983; Ferdinando Scianna and Marpessa Hennink for their generosity.

I thank:

Elisabetta Sgarbi for being the rockingest publisher I’ve ever known.

And I thank Palermo for my being born there.

GIUSEPPE DI PIAZZA
began his career in journalism in 1979 with the newspaper
L’Ora
. He has worked for such Italian publications as
Sette
, where he was director, and for
Max
as editor in chief. He is currently an editorial director at
Corriere della Sera
and teaches a master’s course in journalism at the IULM University of Languages and Communication in Milan.
The Four Corners of Palermo
is his first novel.

ANTONY SHUGAAR
’s most recent translations include Strega Prize winners
Resistance Is Futile
by Walter Siti and
Story of My People
by Edoardo Nesi, as well as
On Earth as It Is in Heaven
by Davide Enia,
Romanzo Criminale
by Giancarlo De Cataldo, and
Not All Bastards Are from Vienna
by Andrea Molesini. He is currently writing a book about translation for the University of Virginia Press.

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