Chapter 1 The separation was sharp, obvious, desired. Two contrasting worlds--the city and the Villaggio--contiguous yet light years apart. The Villaggio arose to make a space for hope, for modernity. And to achieve this aim it seemed necessary to separate the modern from the ancient, the past from the future. To create a break. The Villaggio was the new. It flaunted its still flawless asphalt, the perfect, white street markings. To show off the goodness of the new was necessary, so that the laceration would transform into an opening toward the world. So that the arrow of development would shoot from the unfathomable depths of the cut and land solidly in the future. The Villaggio was the dream of the new. On the small plain at the foot of the town--the ancient Piano Notaro, feudal lands belonging to a large estate owner--the streets intersected according to an orderly design of geometric simplicity. At each street corner stood the sign with its name: Via Cortemaggiore, Piazza Caviaga, Viale Enrico Mattei, in honor of the man who had insisted on building AGIP--the Petrolchimico refinery--in Gela, on the southern coast of Sicily. Cortemaggiore, Caviaga . . . Names from the mainland, foreign names. Perhaps that was why the buildings had those smooth stark facades, without any terraces, without balconies--there was a link between those two things. "Just like at San Donato Milanese," my friends maintained. To me, who had never been to San Donato Milanese and therefore couldn't confirm or deny it, the whole thing sounded strange. Those Milanese must have been strange, too, building their homes so they looked onto the interior, without the caprice of a curly balustrade, a pot-bellied curve to soften the street's profile. "Not even a little balcony to look outside, nothing, are you sure?" "Of course. Why would they need to look outside? To see the fog, the rain?" Then with an eloquent, definitive gesture, "All of the buildings look like this. All of them just like this." The people who'd entered those buildings as renters or owners couldn't sit outside in their undershirt on the terrace, or enjoy watching others on the evening stroll from a balcony. Nonetheless, they showed off their pride of ownership and boasted about their good luck. Life was decidedly more comfortable there, in the "Villaggio of the masters," as the people living in town called them. A self-sufficient nucleus, which had to be one of the creators' intentions. There was more than enough water--they could even wash their cars in the street--public services, a church, a health clinic, a fully equipped beach open only to the residents. In town, water was available only for a few hours each day. At a distance of two, maybe three kilometers, Gela perched on its hill, unstable on the slope toward the sea, unhealthy and malarial on the slope to the plain, looking down at the Villaggio, sheltered behind her archaic poverty, ensconced in the pride of a splendor that lived only in the quotations of her professors, or erudite notaries. "Aeschylus came here to die," my uncle, an Italian and Latin teacher at the high school, invariably reminded every guest, every foreigner. "There must have been a reason," he would insinuate, with the hint of an allusive smile. "One of the most powerful cities in Sicily. That's what Gela was when Agrigento still hadn't been founded." For a while, at the beginning of the sixties, the flames of Petrolchimico also seemed to become part of the landscape, to renew the town's forgotten glory. People who arrived from the Ionian Coast, after leaving behind the Mountain, La Montagna--as Etna is called, a womanly volcano with generous hips and slow lava flows--after leaving the citrus groves of Catania's green plain and crossing the stony peaks and the scorched high plains of Caltagirone, caught sight of a glow, dispersing mists there on the horizon, while little by little a futuristic geometry of pinnacles, pylons, and a rotundity of immense cylinders rose into the sky. The towers shot long tongues of blue smoke straight up in the sky, piercing the horizon. They spewed a persistent, invasive smell that announced the approach to Gela while it was still hidden from view many kilometers off in the distance. But in the face of the wide opening of the future, what did it matter, that smell of rotten eggs that stung people's eyes and burned their throats? Petrolchimico's flames promised work and a comfortable life, while the flames of the Mountain on the island's other shore offered only earthquake tremors and storms of lava grit. Gela still lived on fishing--though little--and raising cotton and tomatoes, cultivating its great, sunny plain, the "Geloi fields," the Roman Empire's breadbasket. Thirty-five thousand inhabitants holed up around the piazzas and the few kilometers of the main street, which bore the name of Vittorio Emanuele. A custom. An homage. A name that is repeated with regular monotony across the entire island. A street named Vittorio Emanuele runs from one end to the other of towns barricaded between the mountains or sloping down toward the sea. The alternatives are few: Corso Umberto I, Corso Principe di Piemonte, Via Garibaldi, Via Roma. If nothing else, the Unification of Italy locked the islanders' toponymic imagination in the rhythm of obsessive celebration. By the beginning of the seventies, Gela's population had already doubled. Petrolchimico's settlement had brought work: twenty thousand jobs promised or dreamed up, two thousand five hundred actual plant jobs in 1970 and an indeterminable number of related jobs. Young couples or single males attracted by the miracle of industrialization and the salaries ("northern" salaries, people said, to indicate the considerably high pay) flowed in from every ridge like thawing river waters. A hunger for the good life exploded, a voracious consumption, a desire for revenge for the eternal abomination of poverty. At that time, Gela wasn't a mafia city. Of course in those days, there were people throughout Sicily and Italy and the world who could say: The mafia doesn't exist. Because you saw the blood, but not the men. The men stayed invisible, cloaked in their silence. But Gela wasn't a mafia city. It wasn't completely devoid of mafiosi, but there were just a few, small stuff, enough to not belie local folklore. The town and the Villaggio still faced each other, distant and alien. The Petrolchimico employees, who were the inhabitants of the Villaggio, could go to work and return home without passing through Gela. They could tranquilly ignore the town, live in a kind of suspension, an island in the island. But it was perhaps only the comparison between the two realities that made the protected life in the Villaggio enviable. Back then, in the 1970s, I lived in the historic part of the city, in a house--not old, but already in disrepair--near the seashore promenade. A place to land, a needed break. When I was a little girl they had taken me away from Sicily, and I wanted to return to Sicily during that time of passage from the life of a student to the life of a working woman. I only chose Gela because an uncle on my mother's side lived there, as well as a cousin I had played with when I was little, during vacations or holidays spent according to the ageless Sicilian habit of exchanging visits from one city to the other, from one town to the other, from one continent to the other. I remained in Gela three years, without ever being able to get used to that harsh dialect, or to life hemmed in tightly between the sea and the main street. When I would drive out of town in my Fiat 500 to clamber up the road toward Riesi and my first job substitute teaching, there was just a single arrow indicating the wide entrance of perfect asphalt leading into the "Villaggio Macchitella." All around it, empty no man's land. Already then, off in the distance, desolate, threatening outlines of illegally constructed neighborhoods ran by, with asymmetric silhouettes of unplastered houses, never finished, with their black, empty window frames of gaping brick. Along the sides of the road were abandoned fields, parched scrub and exposed tangles of wires unfurling endlessly in all directions. Tubes and cables the same color as the dusty land, the houses, and scorched grass--or a pale silver. In the silence of that summer heat wave, I used to hear a vibration rising from that silver, almost a faint song or the soft, hypnotic lament of a marranzano mouth harp, a deep resonance that seemed to gush from a source hidden in the bowels of the scorched earth, a subterranean spring that accompanied me along the entire road together with the waves of heat wafting from the dried asphalt crust. That was twenty years ago. Since that summer, I had never returned to Gela. Now I'm here, at the entrance to the town, looking at the transformed landscape from the window of the Fiat Uno I rented at the Catania airport. For an instant I'm bewildered. The abandoned fields along the side of the road aren't there anymore, nor are the long tubular ribbons that unfurl, modulating a song of their own in the desert of dried twigs. A shapeless mass of illegal houses, over twenty thousand, has submerged everything, pushing down the hills right to the sea. A tide that rose from the inland and swept away Enrico Mattei's dream. The future, broken into black circles of oil sludge on the beach. A familiar and unknown city. That's the impression, that's what I see beyond the dusty windshield. All of a sudden my undertaking seems impossible and absurd. I'll never manage to track down Tina in the chaos that's in front of me. Unable to tolerate the notoriety, after being the object of malevolent, dangerous attentions, she disappeared down there, in the streets of Gela, the protective womb of an immense Kasbah. But precisely this temptation brought me back to the island. I know, or presume to know, which way to take to unravel the thread of Tina's life. I'll have to descend into the town. I, too, will have to disappear into the labyrinth of buildings that fill the horizon, resembling a precarious set of children's building blocks, irregular cubes stacked willy-nilly one on top of the other, one behind the other, denying all vital space, erasing all freedom, and blocking any avenue of escape. Excerpted from Tina, Mafia Soldier by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
