In the Garden of Death and Plenty

Every afternoon when I was a child, my Sicilian grandfather would climb the stairs to the top of the house on our African farm, and lie down on his bed. He did not sleep. Instead, he crossed his arms on his chest and stared at the ceiling, and every now and again, like a tropical parrot, he would shout at the top of his voice: ‘Mamma mia! Mamma mia!’

My grandfather had never meant to leave his orange groves outside Palermo, but he ran away with someone else’s wife. When he returned a year later, his mother was dead; killed by fear and by shame. The Mafia had spoken out against this defiling of the Sicilian code of honour, and their word was law. My grandfather’s family and his village turned their backs on him. Stripped of everything, he left his native island and sailed for Africa, forever to weep for his mother and his home. My grandfather recreated Sicily at his African table. Alone among our friends, we grew up on the Italo-Arab delicacies that Sicily has made its own: minty pasta colle sarde, sweet-and-sour caponata, breasts of cassata and phallic cannoli. Supplies for the table came from the kitchen garden, where my grandfather spent his days grafting bitter Sicilian oranges and experimenting with seed varieties. When Peter Robb first visited Sicily in 1974, he was so taken by the food in Palermo’s Vucciria market that he wrote down this description in his notebook: ‘Purple and black eggplant, light green and dark green zucchini, red and yellow peppers, boxes of egg-shaped San Marzano tomatoes. Spiked Indian figs with a spreading blush, grapes, black, purple, yellow and white, long yellow honeydew melons, round furrowed cantaloupes, slashed wedges of watermelon in red, white and green and studded with big black seeds, yellow peaches and percocche, purple figs and green figs, little freckled apricots.’ Robb had left his native Australia and was passing through Sicily on his way to South America. A former nightclub bouncer and philologist, he had no idea that he would remain in southern Italy for the next fifteen years, and end up writing Midnight in Sicily – one of, if not the, richest and most subtle books in English about this island of paradoxes. Unlike many foreigners who regard Italy as a nation of Captain Corellis – of strong women and silly men – Robb grasped at once the serious intent in a place where death is always intertwined with plenty. Leonardo Sciascia, Sicily’s most famous writer after Giuseppe Tommasi di Lampedusa, used to describe the island as a metaphor for the modern world, a place where life is always lived intensely, for the shroud of death hangs over everyone. This view was shared by another Sicilian artist, a painter named Renato Guttuso. Like my grandfather, Guttuso’s fate would also one day be determined by the Mafia. For the moment, all this lay in the future. When Robb first visited the food market of Palermo, Guttuso was struggling only to lay down in paint his own sense of why death and food are so interlinked. It would take Sciascia, later a friend to both men, to explain in words the crucial importance of La Vucciria, the painting that Guttuso was working on at the time: how it wasn’t really about the abundance it portrayed, but about its absence, about hunger – and its brother, greed. Like my grandfather’s horticultural recreation of his Sicilian youth, Guttuso’s painting of La Vucciria, Sciascia said, was ‘a hungry man’s dream’. At the time of Robb’s first visit, when he ate mouth-watering panelle under the market awnings and tried not to look at the flayed goat’s heads with their melancholy black eyes and the coils of pearly intestines, the Vucciria market was already changing visibly. The emptying of the centre of Palermo, which had started during the Second World War, quickened in the 1970s. The population of the old centre fell by two-thirds while the overall population of Palermo doubled. In just four years, 4,200 permits were released for new building in the city. More than 3,000 of these were given to five obscure, illiterate, retired men. These five were fronts for the Mafia, whose activities after the war not only made Sicily the biggest per-capita consumer of cement in the world, but also covered every economic sector from supplying water and collecting the island’s taxes to the more lucrative businesses of prostitution and drugs. For nearly half a century, the Mafia ruled, marshalling votes for the Christian Democrat party in Rome in return for a free hand in Sicily. ‘You do what we say,’ they insisted, adding on one occasion to the Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti (their ‘friend’), a particularly Sicilian phrase: ‘Giving orders is better than fucking.’ Senior mafiosi such as the Salvo cousins, the richest men in Sicily, liked to stage elaborate luncheons for the politicians they bossed about: anelletti and lasagne, followed by lobster and king prawns, sucking pig and wild boar, huge fish grilled over charcoal and cakes of ricotta and whipped cream. After lunch, they would plot the next killing. And those who did not obey often paid with their lives, which is why the murder rate in Sicily during those years was ten times that of the rest of Italy. By 1992, the marriage between the politicians and the Palermitan bosses was beginning to unravel. The Cold War was over. America no longer needed to protect Andreotti and his Christian Democrat machine. Faced with an impasse, the Mafia leadership began to devour itself. Suddenly, men who had once been terrifying spectres began to turn themselves in and to talk to the authorities. After decades of dead-ends, a small group of anti-Mafia prosecutors started to make progress in patching together the mob’s political and financial interests and in bringing those responsible to account. In 1994, Andreotti, his head shrinking like an aged tortoise inside the vast collar of his winter overcoat, also went on trial. Peter Robb uses the Andreotti episode, ‘when history itself was on trial’, as the skeleton on which he hangs his magnificent contemplation of the confusions of the Italian south. Unlike the prosecutors’ account, La Vera Storia d’Italia, which stretches to five volumes, or its eminently more readable counterpart, Illustrious Corpses, by Alexander Stille, Robb does not try to stuff the legal detail down your throat. Instead, he whips up his thoughts on art, ice cream, forks, food, history and travel to try and explain the very Sicilian muddling of myth and reality. What is strange is how long it took for this jewel to surface. A small Australian imprint, Duffy & Snellgrove, first published the book in New South Wales in 1996. But it was another two years before Midnight in Sicily came to the notice of a British publisher. Nearly ten years on, its magnificence is there for all to see. I have read and reread my copy so often that its pages, ink-pocked by the pens of many readings, hardly hang together anymore. What seems to be and what is are chalk and cheese in Italy; so much so that Italians have invented a perennial conversation which they call la dietrologia – ‘behindology’, or the study of what is really going on beneath the surface. History, mythology, eating, Robb traces invisible connections between all of them. But in his narrative, it is to Guttuso and La Vucciria, Sicily’s most famous painting, that he always returns. Guttuso was a Communist, a lapsed Catholic who recanted on his deathbed. Neither group would have liked his motifs: the whip, the snake, the V of a woman’s legs encased in stockings. Nor would they have understood why his paintings contained so much suppressed violence. After all, for those close to power, Sicily in the 1950s and 1960s was a golden place. That Guttuso enjoyed its fruits as much as anyone was obvious from his fortune, which was estimated after he died at anything between $100 million and $300 million. But even Guttuso had to pay. As Robb tells us, when Marta Marzotto, his long-time mistress, opened the safe-deposit box where Guttuso had kept gold ingots, jewellery and his most erotic drawings, and for which only the two of them had a key, it was empty. A young civil servant from Palermo, a friend of the ‘friends’, it turned out, had been adopted by the painter a fortnight before he died. Guttuso’s fortune and his paintings had disappeared. Sicily is difficult to understand, even for Sicilians. It is one of the first things people will tell you when you visit the island. Robb quotes from an interview Guttuso once gave about Sicily’s heterogeneous richness. In Sicily ‘you can find dramas, pastorals, idylls, politics, gastronomy, geography, history, literature . . . in the end you can find anything and everything, but you can’t find truth’. As a young man, my grandfather had met a young Sicilian boy called Giovanni Falcone, who grew up to become one of the prosecutors murdered by the Mafia. Falcone was not given to smiling much, but he understood the ironic fatalism inherent in his search for truth and for justice: ‘The culture of death doesn’t only belong to the Mafia. All of Sicily is impregnated with it. The day of the dead is a great holiday with us. We offer sweets called heads of the dead, made of sugar hard as stone. Solitude, pessimism, death are the themes of our literature from Pirandello to Sciascia.’ He might have added Peter Robb’s name there too.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © Fiammetta Rocco 2005