The Four Corners of Palermo (8 page)

It was a late-July morning; they’d set off a car bomb in the center of Palermo to kill an honest magistrate. They’d been successful: along with the judge, three others were killed.

That day was supposed to have been set aside to recover from a hangover. I’d stayed up late the night before at a friend’s pool party, in Mondello, celebrating his girlfriend’s new college degree. It was hot out on those July nights, a muggy heat that highlighted the shapes of our bodies, making the clothing stick to our muscles, our fat. After dinner we stripped down to our boxer shorts, our panties, our bras, and plunged into the swimming pool in search of the coolness that during the summer in Palermo remains pure theory; basic theory such as material physicists might pursue. The water was lukewarm, the temperature differential was minimal at best, but at least, once we were in the pool, the tropical effect of the muggy air was abolished. We set two bottles of spumante, a bottle of whiskey, another one of vodka—and that one, at least, was frosty cold—on the terra cotta lip of the pool, and our bodies found a way out. There were couples who floated away in the darkness of the water like beach balls, driven by the levity of the alcohol. People brushed against each other, touching each other; there was no illicit kissing, but our hands roamed free, making our time in the pool exciting and, with it, even our friend’s new law degree—if you didn’t look too close, in the night, she resembled a Sicilian Liz Taylor, young and ready for anything.

I was twenty-four years old, I was a working journalist, and like a naive character out of Flaubert, I believed that everything was still possible. And to some extent, it was.

There were those who left the party at 2:00 a.m., while others lingered on, waiting for who knows what. I was one of the hangers-on: just under the surface of the tepid baby-blue water, I’d withstood the advances of someone else’s lusty young wife, while a girl from Rome in her early twenties, whose acquaintance my fingertips had made first, and who closely resembled Barbra Streisand in
What’s Up, Doc?
, decided to come home with me, on my oversized gray Vespa scooter, dressed in nothing but a white sheet that on her looked like an evening gown by Fausto Sarli. Her name was Livia; she had elongated eyes and a Streisand nose, of course, a mouth that looked like something out of Man Ray and breasts that helped me to understand the meaning of the word “breasts.”

She wrapped her arms around me, clinging to my belly—still flat in those days—as I drove back from Mondello and did my best to remember where I lived. The warm air of the Palermo night dried our hair. There had been so much alcohol, and all we wanted was to survive. Me, her, the Vespa. We’d get around to sex, all in good time, or not at all. Back then, that word didn’t conjure up great expectations. We had sex, we dreamed up sex, we rejected sex: every day was an erotic calendar without any preset appointments. All we knew about AIDS was that it was an exotic novelty that appeared in articles datelined from the United States.

“Fabrizio sleeps in there, and this is my bedroom.”

Livia allowed herself to be led into the apartment that I shared with my best friend. The guided tour ended on my bed.

That morning I was awakened by a noise louder than my alarm clock, which at 6:30—precisely and mechanically—had
performed its assigned task but had then been hushed by my floppy hand, in a complete and irresponsible post-alcohol haze. The noise came from the rotors of a helicopter whose blades were chopping several hundred yards straight overhead. It was a summer of serial massacres, a couple of corpses a day, but police and Carabinieri helicopters rose into the air only when the murder was something “enormous.” That morning, something enormous must have happened, and I was in bed, naked, next to a young woman who was making the noises someone makes when they’re having a hard time regaining consciousness.

I hopped out of bed and called the newspaper, and the switchboard operator told me about the car bomb.

“It just happened a little while ago. The boss says you need to get down there immediately, that you’re an asshole for not being there already … Get moving.”

I ran my fingers over Livia’s derriere, told her that there was breakfast in the other room, a generic “in the other room” that I indicated somewhere between the hands of a generous fate and those of my good friend Fabrizio, who was in his room, still asleep. I brushed my teeth, put on the red jeans and white shirt I’d been wearing the night before, grabbed my Ray-Bans, the keys to the Vespa, a pack of cigarettes, and my wallet, and set out on an obstacle course through the paralyzed city of Palermo. A blend of fear and shock, shattered nerves, the after-scent of a dynamite explosion in the air, detectable five hundred yards away from the smoking urban crater.

After spending an hour at the blast site, I went back to the newspaper. The doorman didn’t smile; he limited himself to arching his eyebrows: “It was terrible, right?” The day went
by in a tangled neurosis: we reporters writing articles about death, laying out horrifying pages, screaming headlines; the newsies shouting in the street, with stacks of papers poised on their left arms: “
Quanti nni murieru!
”—the death count. Evening never seemed to arrive, and those long days did nothing to help us forget or find a place of solace. We were young people, witnesses to a massacre, and we had no way of conveying to the world what was happening before our eyes. Witnesses unable to speak, newspapers printed in blank ink.

For me, the evening came on muggy and dolorous. We went our separate ways, back to a Palermo that, far from the bomb crater, could seem like any seaside city caught in a moment of summertime chaos. Not the slaughterhouse it had become. When I got home, I saw that my answering machine was blinking.

“Buddy, there’s a party at Totino’s house, out at Vergine Maria. Call me and I’ll tell you all about it.” It was Paolo. He wasn’t working: lots of little clues pointed to that. The message was one of them.

I took a shower at room temperature, one hundred degrees. I put on a pair of dark Wranglers and another white shirt. I found a note from Livia, under the carriage return of my Olivetti Lettera 22: “I had a good time: I like Palermo.
Ciao
. Livia.” I folded it and set it on the nightstand. The judge and his bodyguards thought they liked it, too.

I called Paolo back.

“It’s me. What is this party?”

“What have you been doing until now?”

“Collecting corpses.”

“Well, did you at least wash your hands?”

“Cut it out, I don’t feel like going.”

“But you ought to: Totino has invited lots of lovely people to come to his
tonnara
.”

“Who’ll be there?”

He reeled off a list of names I’d never heard before. Then he added: “Ah, Elena’s going to be there, too, with a Belgian girlfriend.”

Two hours later I was pulling up in Vergine Maria. Night was coming on, signaled by the drop in muggy humidity, the sky over the sea was spangled with stars, and my mood was like that of somebody who’d been heavily drugged.

Totino’s
tonnara
—a watery maze just offshore used to catch and slaughter tuna, which can be fourteen feet long and weigh close to a thousand pounds—was one of the few places left from the Palermo of the past, the
Palermo felicissima
, to have survived the ravages of the twentieth century. It was from there, a century ago, that the launches set out for the
mattanza
—the slaughter. The “chamber of death” was devised at the orders of the
rais
, or local headman, off what was now a provincial coastline filled with dives and garbage; in 1880 it had been a fisherman’s paradise, just three miles away from a city that had until recently been under Bourbon rule. The
tonnara
had always belonged to Totino’s family, the Guardalbene family of Santa Flavia. They were out of money as the second millennium drew to its end, but they had plenty of crumbling properties and a great personal allure. Totino was one of those Sicilian hidalgos who had, at age thirty, done everything except the normal things that thirty-year-olds have done. He’d spent two seasons in Madagascar, where he’d made a living by recovering wrecks from the bottom of the sea; he’d
made cocktails in a hotel in West Berlin and he’d started a flourishing florist’s shop in New York in 1981. More recently he’d withdrawn to the family home, to the
tonnara
, to explore the relationship between preamplification and amplification. That summer he intended to show us the results of his studies. His garden was blessed with perfect acoustics and sound quality. Totino and I shared a common credo: the music of the eighties wasn’t worth listening to. Everything that humanity had to say in terms of rock music had already been said during the previous decade. And so, that night, on the two Thorens turntables, only records by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, Yes, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and Genesis were welcome: the musical language that allowed us to understand each other at first glance. At first hearing.

I glimpsed the silhouette of Paolo in the garden, where Totino had set up a rudimentary dance floor. I got closer. He was lost in an unlikely slow dance to the tune of “Money,” with a short girl, a redhead with a red face and red lips.

“Paolo, I’m here,” I broke in, giving her an out. The girl, freed from the embrace, nodded a hello and moved quickly away. I liked her red lips. Paolo was clearly feeling the urge to hit me. But all he said was: “What the fuck?”

“Okay, sorry. How was I supposed to know that you were holding her prisoner?”

Paolo asked me about my day, with the vagueness of someone who lives on a different planet from you and is showing interest in the problems facing your species purely out of courtesy.

“Turn out all right in the end?”

“No, it turned out all wrong. We’re destined for extinction,” I replied.

“Look, we’re at a party, you know. You can’t bust my balls like this.”

“It’s been a terrible day, Paolo. Too much blood. Palermo’s going to drown in it.”

Paolo took one look at me and understood that I wasn’t trying to make myself tormented and interesting in the eyes of women who weren’t there, that I wasn’t playing the part of a character out of Chandler, that I hadn’t stepped out of the screen from
Chinatown
with my nose cut to ribbons. It was as simple as that: we were drowning in blood. He didn’t know whose blood. I did.

“Okay, okay, but see if you can stop thinking about it for two hours. Just promise me that.” His gaze went past me, and his eyes lit up: “Oh, Elena’s here.”

She came toward us with a smile on her lips, hand in hand with a slender blonde girl who was taller than her, prettier than her, and that’s saying a lot. Elena was twenty years old and she dressed like the sister of everyone we knew, like the girlfriend of everyone we knew: jeans hugging her hips, close-fitting blouses that let you guess at her breasts, or else solid-colored stretchy T-shirts, because we were left-wingers, and as far as we were concerned, pastel colors were strictly for Fascists. For some girls who weren’t exactly endowed by nature, that uniform spelled death for any hope of romantic adventures, but for girls like Elena it was quite the other way around. Her southern Italian eyes, full of warmth in every gaze, her low voice, her pitch-black hair, thick and glistening like an Asian woman’s, her curves, revealed at every step, and that smile she wore as she approached us, made her—to Paolo, to me, to our group of friends—a catalog of femininity to leaf through
at our leisure, the album of all desires and also, amazingly, of friendship. She was easy to be with, but she was very hard to
be with
. Elena was a dancer, she wanted to become an
étoile
, and she’d moved to Belgium to study. But she didn’t have the gift, as a pitiless
madame
of Maurice Béjart’s school in Brussels had told her during a three-month course she’d taken there. She’d returned home with the bitter taste of her first frustration still in her mouth. She was the daughter of one of the haut bourgeois citizens of Palermo, the daughter of intellectuals, with a brilliant and beautiful mother who was a fine sculptor.

The months she’d spent in Brussels with Béjart had left Elena a legacy: aside from her first bitter aftertaste, she’d made a new friend. One of those friendships that form between shipwrecked survivors, as they cling to the cobbled-together rafts of chance, on the rough swells of growing up; friendships that, if life is generous, can become formative friendships, friendships of passage, friendships for a lifetime. Gifts of fate destined to change us, to make our lives more complete, or, in most cases, experiences of a summer, destined to amount to nothing. That gift with an uncertain future, the night of the
tonnara
, was holding Elena by the hand.

“
Bonjour, je m’appelle Sophie
,” she said in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

It was night, and the speakers were pumping out impressive bass lines, possibly Greg Lake. It occurred to me that when French people are introduced, they say
bonjour
even in the dark.