The Last Cato (45 page)

“We are businessmen!”

“Sure, dear! Well, so are the Sciarra of Catania! The problem is that in Sicily there are 184 mafia clans organized into just two families: the Sciarras and the Salinas. ‘The double S,’ the antimafia authorities call us. My father, Bernardo Sciarra, was the don of the island for twenty years, until your father, a loyal
campieri
who never caused any trouble, slowly took over and killed off the most prominent capos.”

“You’re crazy, Doria. I beg you, for the love of God, stop.”

“Don’t you want to know how your father killed the great Bernardo Sciarra and how he got control of the capos and
campieris
faithful to my family?”

“Shut up, Doria!”

“Well, you see, Ottavia, he used exactly the same method we used to terminate your father and your brother Giuseppe: a supposed traffic accident.”

I was dumbfounded.

“My brother has four children. How could you do something like that?”

“You still don’t get it, dear. We’re the Mafia, the Cosa Nostra! Our great-grandfathers were mafiosi. We kill, control governments, plant bombs, shoot off Luparas,
*
and respect the
Omerta.
No one can bypass the rules and ignore the vendetta. And you want to know the funniest part?”

As I listened to her, I clenched my jaws so tight they ached. I tried to breathe and hold back my tears, while contracting the muscles in my face until there was a grimace of pain on it. That seemed to delight her; she smiled like a happy child on her birthday. My entire life was crumbling. I closed my eyes, they were hurting so bad, and the knot in my throat was choking me. Doria was malignant, she was perversity incarnate, but maybe I deserved all that. Maybe I had closed myself up in the dreamworld of the church so I didn’t have to accept reality. I shut myself away so nothing could hurt me. And in the end, it had done me no good.

“The funniest part is that your father never could stomach being a don. He was a
campieri;
he liked being a
campieri.
Behind him was someone who
did
have the strength and ambition to start a turf war. Do you know who I’m talking about, Ottavia, dear? No? I’m talking about your mother, my friend, your mother—Filippa Zafferano, who now is the acting don of Sicily!”

She broke out in happy cackle, throwing up her hands to show how funny that was. I looked at her without blinking, without erasing the sad look on my face, without doing anything except swallow my tears and purse my lips.

“Filippa, your mother, feels strong and safe in Villa Salina. Tell her to stay inside and not come out, because there are many dangers.” As much as I didn’t want to believe her, I realized it was a clear threat.

That said, she turned back to Farag, who was talking with His Most Divine Holiness. My entire body was paralyzed, almost lifeless. My head, on the other hand, was a whirlwind of thought. Now I understood why they sent Pierantonio, Lucia, and me away to boarding school when we were so young. Now I understood why my mother never allowed the three of us to take part in certain family matters. Now I understood why she had always encouraged us to stay as far away from home as possible and to devote ourselves so completely to the church. It all fit so perfectly. The puzzle of my life was now in place; the picture complete. My mother had selected us to be her counterweight, her spiritual and earthly guarantee. Pierantonio, Lucia, and I were her jewels, her works of art, her justification. To my mother’s old-fashioned way of thought, that absurd, compensatory view of the world fit perfectly. It wasn’t so bad that the Salinas were Mafia if the three of us were near God, praying for the rest, occupying positions of responsibility or prestige within the church, as a way to expunge our name. Yes, it all made perfect sense. Suddenly, the great respect and admiration I’d always felt for her transformed into immense pain in the face of the enormity of her sins. I wanted to call her and talk to her, ask her to explain why she had acted so, why she had lied to Pierantonio, Lucia, and me all our lives. Why she used my father as an instrument of her greed. Why she let her other six children—now just five, with Giuseppe dead—kill, extort, and rob. Why she allowed her grandchildren, whom she said she loved, to grow up in that environment. Even now, she wanted to head an organization that went against the laws of God and mankind. Nonetheless, I knew I couldn’t ask her for those explanations. If I did, she would probably quickly figure out how I’d learned the truth, and the war between the Salinas and the Sciarras would leave too many dead in Sicily’s gutters. The time for deceit had passed. I had to acknowledge that I wasn’t as innocent as she would have liked. Neither was Pierantonio; after all, his dirty dealings inside the church simply followed a family tradition. Good Lucia wasn’t much better, always on the fringe, so detached and naïve. The three of us blissfully lived a lie in which our family was like a fairy tale, a perfect family with its closets filled with corpses.

I was so absorbed in my thoughts I didn’t hear Captain Glauser- Röist calling me, but I got to my feet like a robot. Farag and Doria’s infatuation didn’t matter. Nothing could be more painful than what I was feeling. I didn’t care if they stayed together for the rest of their lives. My mind was going from the past to the present, from the present to the past, tying up loose ends and merging lost threads into one. Everything in my life took on a new color.

Suddenly I felt very alone, as if the entire world had emptied of people, as if my ties with life had unraveled. My brothers and sisters had lied to me, too. They all had kept quiet and played the game my mother decreed. They weren’t the siblings I thought they were. We didn’t form that indivisible group we were so proud of. In fact, Giuseppe and Filippa’s real children were those five living in Sicily; they were the ones who were part of the family business. We three who lived apart were deceived, detached from the daily reality of the household. Giuseppe—may he rest in peace—Giaconda, Cesare, Pierluigi, Salvatore, and Agueda must have always felt we were marginalized or perhaps that we were privileged. The trust among the nine siblings had always been a sham: Three were destined for the
church;
the other six shared the fortune and disgrace, the truth and fiction. They lied because their mother ordered them to. And Father? What was Father’s role in all that? At that moment, I understood that my father was only a
campieri,
a simple
campieri
who liked his hateful work and gave in to the orders of his wife, the great Filippa Zafferano. Everything fell into place. It was so simple.

“Dr. Salina? Are you feeling alright?”

Family images were erased from my mind, and out of the fog emerged the Rock’s face. We were in the vestibule of the patriarchate and I had no idea how I’d gotten there. I’d seen the captain every day for the last three months, but he suddenly looked like a total stranger, like Doria before she told me her name. I knew I knew her, but her face gave me no clue to her identity. Parts of my brain had short-circuited and weren’t functioning. I was feeling completely lost.

“Dr. Salina, please.” He shook me by my arms. “What’s going on with you?”

“I need to call home.”

“You need to do what? Everyone’s in the car, waiting for you.”

“I need to call home,” I repeated mechanically, as I noticed how my eyes were flooding with tears. “Please, please…”

Glauser-Röist observed me for a couple of tense seconds. He must have concluded that things would go faster if he let me call than wait for my distress to pass or argue with me. He turned me loose suddenly, went over to Father Kallistos and the patriarch, on the other side of the glass doors, and explained that we needed to call Italy. They exchanged a few words; then the captain returned to my side, somewhat annoyed.

“You can call from the phone in that office over there. Be careful what you say. The lines are bugged by the Turkish government.”

I didn’t care. All I wanted was to hear my mother’s voice to end once and for all that hateful feeling of abandonment and solitude that was at that moment twisting my soul. Something told me that if I talked to her, even for just a minute, I would be able to come to my senses and get my feet back on the ground. I closed the door, picked up the phone, dialed home to Sicily, and waited for the phone on the other end to ring.

Matteo answered—the most serious and laconic of my nephews, one of Giuseppe and Rosalia’s children. As usual, he didn’t show the slightest joy at hearing my voice. I asked him to pass the phone to his grandmother, and he told me to wait; apparently she was busy. I suddenly realized even the children were involved. I’m sure they’d been told thousands of times not to explain what anyone was doing when Uncle Pierantonio, Aunt Lucia, or Aunt Ottavia called. When we were around, they shouldn’t ask questions or comment about this or that. Once again I felt the vertigo of the hypocrisy, the solitude, and that strange feeling of abandonment eating me up inside.

“Is that you, Ottavia?” My mother’s voice sounded delighted to get my call. “How are you, dear? Where are you?”

“Hi, Mom.” It was difficult to wrench my voice out of my body.

“Pierantonio told me you spent a few days with him in Jerusalem!”

“Yes.”

“How was he? Okay?”

“Yes, Mom,” I said, trying to feign a happy tone of voice.

My mother laughed. “Well, well. How about you? You haven’t told me where you are!”

“Right, Mom. I’m in Istanbul, in Turkey. Listen, Mom, I’ve been thinking… I wanted to tell you… You see, Mom, when this is all over, I’ll probably quit my job at the Vatican.”

I don’t know why I said that. I hadn’t even been thinking about it. Maybe I just wanted to hurt her, return part of my pain. There was silence on the other end.

“Is that so?” she finally asked, an icy edge to her voice.

How could I explain it to her? It was such an absurd idea, sheer lunacy. However, at that particular moment, leaving the Vatican represented freedom to me.

“I’m tired, Mom. I think a retreat to one of the houses my order owns in the country would do me good. There’s one in Connaught, Ireland, where I could take over the archives of several libraries in the area. I need peace, Mom—peace, silence, and a lot of prayer.”

It took her several seconds to react. When she did, she took a very disparaging tone. “Come on, Ottavia, that’s nonsense! You aren’t going to quit your job at the Vatican. Are you trying to upset me? Now, when I have so many other problems? Your father’s and brother’s deaths are still very fresh. Why do you tell me these things? Well, that’s enough. Let’s not talk about this any more. You’re not leaving the Vatican.”

“What if I did, Mom? I think the decision is mine.”

It was my decision, no doubt, but it also was an issue for my mother.

“Enough! Are you determined to upset me? What’s the matter, Ottavia?”

“Nothing really, Mom.”

“Then come on, get to work. Don’t think about this foolishness any more. Call me another day, okay, dear? You know how much I love hearing from you.”

When I got in the car, my feet were firmly anchored to the ground again. I knew I wouldn’t forget the matter for a second, because my mind was functioning in obsessive spurts. But at least I could face my current situation without losing my mind. As much as it pained me, as much as I rejected the idea, it was inevitable: I would never be the same. A painful fracture had occurred in my life; a fissure split me into two irreconcilable parts and distanced me from my roots forever.

T
he car we took to the Fatih Camii wasn’t from the Vatican enunciator. To be discreet, Monsignor Lewis and the captain thought it best to take an unmarked car from the patriarchate. Only Doria came along to drive us; she sped down the Horn of Gold and Atatürk Boulevard. The Mosque of the Conqueror loomed suddenly at the far end of the Boxdogan Kemeri (the Aqueduct of the Brave)—enormous, solid, and austere, with very high minarets covered with balconies and a large central cupola encircled by a large number of semicupolas. Bordered by madrassas, it looked down on the faithful coming and going across the esplanade in front.

Doria and I didn’t say a word to each other during the entire trip. She parked in front of an apartment building at the far end of the plaza, from where we walked to the entrance like any prowling tourists. Farag lagged farther and farther behind until he was at my side, abandoning Doria to the captain. I didn’t have the strength to deal with him, so I walked faster and caught up with the Rock. Because of his standoffishness, he was the only one sure to leave me in peace. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone.

We crossed the threshold and found ourselves in a large, covered patio with trees and a central shrine that looked like a newspaper kiosk but was actually a fountain used for ablutions. The atrium columns were colossal, and it struck me that, despite being a Muslim building, the entire complex had a distinct neoclassical look. This initial impression disappeared completely when we took off our shoes and went inside. Doria and I also covered ourselves up in long black veils given to us by the old doorman whose charge it was to oversee the morality of the infidel tourists. I held my breath before such splendor. Mehemet II had constructed a mausoleum truly worthy of the conqueror of Constantinople. Covering the floor were gorgeous red rugs that compared favorably to Saint Peter’s in the Vatican. Brightly colored stained-glass windows were wisely placed in the cupola’s domes and in the niches of the three cupolas. A powerful, horizontal light filtered in through those windows and filled the space. The arches and domes stood out, accented by their showy red and white voussoirs. On each pendentive, large or small, was an eye-catching blue medallion containing luminous inscriptions from the Koran. A web of cables held up a multitude of gold and silver lamps.