The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature: Life Sentences and Their Geographies 9781442625778

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THE MAFIA IN ITALIAN LIVES AND LITERATURE Life Sentences and Their Geographies

Drawing on a wide variety of documents and texts from 1990 to the present, including diaries, testimonies, fiction, films, online video postings, and contributions to antimafia social networks, Robin PickeringIazzi explores the mafia’s pervasive influence in contemporary Italian life. In particular she examines the complex urban geographies (the “cityworlds”), both physical and imaginative, associated with these narratives. She also shows how the texts themselves offer implicit challenges and a quiet code of resistance to the trauma and injustice wrought by the mafia throughout Italy. Despite a long tradition of Italian drama, poetry, and fiction in which the mafia has a strong narrative presence, there have been few studies of this body of work. And at that scholars have largely overlooked the voices of women and youth. Through engagement with these voices, and a wider selection of texts and the latest theoretical approaches, Pickering-Iazzi encourages renewed critical reflection on the mafia’s role in Italian society, while shedding light on our understandings of crime fiction, Sicily and Sicilian identity in literature, the discursive strategies of the new Italian epic, and the cultural and social functions of storytelling. (Cultural Spaces; Toronto Italian Studies) robin pickering-iazzi is a professor in the Department of French, ­Italian, and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee. She is the editor of the widely acclaimed anthology Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature.

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ROBIN PICKERING-IAZZI

THE MAFIA IN ITALIAN LIVES AND LITERATURE LIFE SENTENCES AND THEIR GEOGRAPHIES

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

 ©  University of Toronto Press 2015 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-3189-2 (cloth)   ISBN 978-1-4426-2908-0 (paper)   Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. Cultural Spaces: Toronto Italian Studies ______________________________________________________________________ Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Pickering-Iazzi, Robin, author The Mafia in Italian lives and literature : life sentences and their geographies / Robin Pickering-Iazzi. (Cultural spaces) (Toronto Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-3189-2 (bound).–ISBN 978-1-4426-2908-0 (paperback) 1. Mafia in literature.  2. Crime in literature.  3. Mafia–Italy–History.  4. Italian literature–History and criticism.  I. Title.  II. Series: Toronto Italian studies  III. Series: Cultural spaces PQ4053.M315P53 2015  850.9’3556  C2015-905549-0 ______________________________________________________________________ This book has been published with the assistance of the University of WisconsinMilwaukee Department of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an Ontario government agency.

    Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

In memory of my mother, Norma C. Pickering (1931–2012)

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Contents

Acknowledgments  viii Introduction: Mafia Cityworlds: Geographies of Narration  3 1 The Female Mafia Imaginary: Contemporary Mafiose and Gabriella Badalamenti’s Come l’oleandro  22 2 The Mafia and the (Non)sense of Place: Amelia Crisantino’s Cercando Palermo  62 3 Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Postmodern Geography of Impegno: Mafia Urban Desertification in Canto al deserto: Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia  104 4 Mafia Geographies of Voicelessness: Silvana La Spina’s L’ultimo treno da Catania  148 5 Engendering Testimonial Geographies of Legality: Bodily Interiors, Urban Faces, Cyberspatialities  193 Notes  239 Works Cited  252 Index  267

Acknowledgments

The various journeys charted in this book have been made possible and enriched by many individuals. I thank my colleagues and friends in the Department of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature for creating convivial spaces for research and writing. I have particularly benefited from the support, insights, and good humour of Caroline Seymour-Jorn, Peter Paik, Jennifer Peshut, Simonetta Milli Konewko, Lucia Soldati, and Eric Anderson. Carlotta Generali guided me through the bewildering terrain of Word functions in preparing the final manuscript. I extend my gratitude to Rodney Swain, Dean of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Jennifer Watson, former Associate Dean of Letters and Sciences, and Michael N. Liston for the diverse ways in which they supported this project, including approval of a sabbatical leave for 2008. My perspectives on issues that the geographies of narration pose about the mafia, justice, memory, and the culture of legality have benefited in manifold ways from the provocative studies authored by fellow travellers Norma Bouchard, Mark Chu, Paula Salvio, Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Carla Bagnoli, and Lara Santoro. I extend heartfelt thanks to Dana Renga, who read various versions of the chapters and generously provided observations, suggestions, and amazing intellectual dynamism. I owe a debt of gratitude to my family, who have left their traces on what became an unexpectedly long journey. I extend loving thanks to Norma C. Pickering, for her grace, sense of dignity, and spirit of debate and to Wayne L. Pickering for his passion for work and storytelling. Paolo Iazzi has given great love throughout the precious moments of packing and unpacking our lives that make up our everyday adventures. I have been inspired by Andrè Iazzi’s sensitivity and gift of magical

Acknowledgments ix 

nights of music, and Sarah Iazzi’s humour and strength of character. And everyone in the Bitti and Duca families ensures that my research trips to Italy are always a delectable coming home. I wish to voice deep appreciation to the University of Toronto Press for fashioning an exceptional place for doing Italian and Cultural Studies, and to Siobhan McMenemy in particular for the incomparable expertise, verve, and spirit of collaboration that she has shown in guiding this work through its final stages. I wish to praise both Anne Laughlin for the care and editorial skills she devoted to the project, and Terry Teskey for rigorous copyediting. Some sections of this book were published in different form. Part of chapter 2 appeared as “The Mafia and Palermo in the Postmodern Urban Imaginary: Cercando Palermo” in The Poetics of Crime, edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 151–69. (Copyright 2014.) It is elaborated here by permission of the publishers. The analysis of Rita Atria’s writings in chapter 5 was published under the title “(En)gendering Testimonial Bodies of Evidence and Italian Antimafia Culture: Rita Atria” in Italian Culture 28, no. 1 (2010): 21–37, also accessible in the online journal version, www.maneyonline.com/itc. I thank Maney Publishing for permission to reprint portions of the earlier essay, and Joseph Francese for his assistance. Gaetano Cipolla granted permission to quote from his beautiful English translation of the poem “A Tree of Peace Is What You Called Me Once,” originally published in Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy, edited by Luigi Bonaffini (New York: Legas, 1997). Finally, some of my ideas concerning testimonial discourses in No al pizzo and the YouTube video Storie di resistenza quotidiana were first presented in “Le donne e l’inventiva delle testimonianze antimafia,” Le siciliane: Così sono se vi pare, edited by Giovanna Summerfield, 100–16 (Novi Ligure: Puntoacapo, 2011).

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THE MAFIA IN ITALIAN LIVES AND LITERATURE Life Sentences and Their Geographies

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Introduction: Mafia Cityworlds: Geographies of Narration

It was a mistake to have the trial in Perugia. I met those people.They’re ­civilized people who can’t understand the world I lived in and the men I loved, who ended up in a tomb. I heard them talking and had the sensation that my Sicily couldn’t exist for them. They couldn’t even imagine it. Serafina Battaglia, “La Battaglia,” 11 Do words account for an instinct to peregrinate around the world? Does a geography of narration exist? Do feet walk and the stories follow? Do eyes watch and the words take shape? Does the metamorphosis of the journey become the metamorphosis of news? Dacia Maraini, “Geografia della narrazione,” 7

The diverse stories from contemporary Italian lives and literature that I discuss below transport readers beyond the boundaries of civil thoughts and behaviours into foreign terrains produced by mafia codes of belief, action, and culture. Written by some of Italy’s most talented authors, as well as protagonists in the infinite arts of invention producing a culture of legality in daily life, many of the narratives unfold in places that can be located on a world atlas, pictured in high definition on Google Earth, or visited as sites on the tourist itinerary. Travellers, virtual or otherwise, might set eyes upon the Teatro Politeama or the world-renowned Vucciria market in Palermo, investigated by a Turinese sociologist in his quest to discover the metropolis in Amelia Crisantino’s Cercando Palermo (Searching for Palermo, 1992). Or they could contemplate the rich hues and textures of the tall, shapely statue of Ceres, known by locals as the “nude woman,” that dominates Piazza Umberto in Gela,

4  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature

and the attentions of the outlaw Tina as she attempts to make her own way in the urban desert conjured by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli in Canto al deserto: Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia (Song to the desert: The story of Tina, a mafia soldier, 1994). Orienting their gaze towards the northeastern regions of Sicily, voyagers in mind or body can peruse Catania, dubbed the “baroque city,” whose cathedrals and churches provocatively epidomize ornamentation, contrasts, and tensions, making up the built and metaphoric urban texts that Inspector Di Marco must navigate as he investigates the murderous crimes of politics and the Italian state dramatized in Silvana La Spina’s L’ultimo treno da Catania (The last train from Catania, 1992). However, these and other authors create keys for interpreting such urban sites that appear substantially different from atlases, zoomed street views, or tourist guidebooks. They bring into high relief mafia laws of thought, behaviour, and interactions with the familial, social, economic, and political spheres making up the cityworlds, as well as the microgeographies invented by the characters and citizens inhabiting them. Comprising a range of voices, angles of vision, topics of inquiry, and modes of representation, this mafia geography of narration enables readers to imagine and gain knowledge of what Serafina Battaglia evokes as an unfathomable criminal world. The works I consider, all produced between 1990 and today, delineate particular features of the mafia and its territorial relations of power on diverse scales. For example, the diary entries, autobiographical fragments, and poems written by Rita Atria conjure the psychic and emotional space within her bodily borders, as she struggles against the embedded ideas of honour, loyalty, and vendetta with which she was raised in a mafia family and, as a witness for the Italian state, endeavours to reconstruct her identity according to the values of civil law and justice. Forming a markedly different theatre of operations for understanding the structures and functions of criminal notions of self, the declarations of loyalty made by mafia women to the media enact spectacular public performances of female mafia identity, and raise important questions about their roles as agents of crime in the family and society at large. On a different scale, the novels by Cutrufelli and Crisantino train attention on the complex ways in which the mafia figures in the relations between bodies and cities. Cutrufelli creates permeable boundaries between history and fiction, crafting a cartography of the economic, social, and political conditions that form the ground for Cosa Nostra and Stidda’s horrific battles over territory, which produce the stories of Gela and of Tina, a

Mafia Cityworlds: Geographies of Narration   5 

character inspired by Emanuela Azzarelli,2 dubbed the Bonnie of Gela in the 1980s. The author’s representation of the steps taken by the narrator to discover the imbricating traces of the city and the young girl draws readers into the process of deciphering the signs of the mutually informing outlaw geographies and the mafia signature underwriting them. The legibility of the urban text is also problematized in Crisantino’s citystory of Palermo. Rocking the entrenched foundations underpinning the criminalized image of Palermo as Mafiopolis or the mafia’s casa madre (headquarters) that often looms over the cultural imaginary, the author creates polyphonic, fluid, spatially and temporally fragmented microgeographies, illicit and otherwise, that exceed the city limits. Moreover, she narrativizes the performative interplay between the characters’ diverse desires, fantasies, and fears, and their perceptual experiences, which constitute the heterogeneous Palermos projected on their psychic screens and the geographic city alike. In contrast, La Spina shifts the investigatory gaze to the national stage in a radical critique of the Italian state’s collusion with the mafia. She crafts what I call an echogeography of Catania, formed through resonances with the new map of mafia power exposed by General Alberto Dalla Chiesa shortly before his 1982 murder, and traces back to the foundations of the First Republic the junctures generated between the criminal organization, political figures, and big business, which interactively constitute the spaces of Catania and nation alike. Finally, cultivating a theoretically infinite virtual landscape, Italian filmmaker and citizen artists’ postings of YouTube videos, and verbal and visual texts shaping the Ammazzateci Tutti (Kill us all) antimafia social network, provide examples of new, web-based interconnectivities designed to propagate a culture of legality that challenges mafia organizations and to operate simultaneously in local and transnational geographies. The diverse mafia geographies conceived by La Spina, Cutrufelli, and Crisantino represent a relatively unexplored frontier, given the paucity of book-length studies on representations of the mafia in Italian literature as well as the ways in which a literary canon on this subject has been constructed. Since the early 1980s, stories about Cosa Nostra and such other crime organizations as the camorra and ’ndrangheta have proliferated in Italian fiction, poetry, drama, and film. A similar swell of interest is evident in the number of scholarly books analysing the mafia in history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and macroand micro-economics. Although genres related to crime fiction, including the mystery novel, the police procedural, and noir, have recently

6  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature

been the subject of monographs and critical volumes,3 few book-length studies have focused on the locations, movements, and functions of the mafia in literary culture. Among these few are the anthologies La mafia nella letteratura by Pietro Mazzamuto (1970), La letteratura sulla mafia by Elena Brancati and Carlo Muscetta (1988), and Letteratura sulla mafia: Dal sonno alla speranza by Vito Mercadante (1998), as well as the works of literary criticism Tutti a cena da don Mariano: Letteratura e mafia nella Sicilia della nuova Italia by Massimo Onofri (1995) and The Mafia in Sicilian Literature by Corinna del Greco Lobner (2008). For those reading for pleasure or to gain knowledge about the mafia in Italian society, culture, and politics, the anthologies serve several functions. Most obviously, they provide the reader with varied points of entry into what compilers deem exemplary works. In the process, the relative orientations, values, and aims guiding the practices that create anthological spaces also exert formative influence on canon production. Each separated by the space of a decade or more, and thus the profound sociohistorical changes in mafia practices and the ways works of literature represent them, the collections designate several recurrent authors and writings, which become landmarks that serve as points of orientation for locating affiliated discourses in richly expanding terrains. Among the authors who recur are Giuseppe Rizzotto, Luigi Pirandello, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Federico De Roberto, Carlo Levi, and Leonardo Sciascia. It is also worth noting that each collection provides samples from a variety of genres. Mazzamuto’s groundbreaking volume features narrative fiction, poetry, ballads, and drama by critically acclaimed and popular male artists. Offering by far the richest ground of selections and information, Brancati and Muscetta’s compilation broadens the temporal and generic boundaries to incorporate testimonies, film narratives produced in both Italy and the United States, and essays analysing diverse aspects of the mafia in culture, history, and society, as well as antimafia resistance, which spans the years between the late 1880s and the 1980s. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, the publication of such important testimonies and novels as Felicia Bartolotta Impastato’s La mafia in casa mia, Livia De Stefani’s La mafia alle mie spalle, La Spina’s L’ultimo treno da Catania, Rita Atria’s writings in Sandra Rizza’s Una ragazza contro la mafia, and Cutrufelli’s Canto al deserto drastically altered the boundaries, features, configurations, and dynamic spatiotemporal relations creating mafia regions conceived in life and literature. Yet these works are conspicuously absent from the volumes by Mercadante, Onofri, and del Greco Lobner. It is true that Mercadante’s survey and Onofri’s

Mafia Cityworlds: Geographies of Narration   7 

analysis evidence traces of women’s voices: Mercadante, for example, includes an excerpt from Vera Pegna’s Tempo di lupi e di comunisti, an autobiographical account of her experiences as director of the Italian Communist Party headquarters in Caccamo in which she delineates the symbiotic relations between the criminal clans and the Christian Democrat Party, and Adele Rivarola’s poem “La croce della storia,” a lament for those who sacrifice their lives in the battle to create a just, ethical society. Nonetheless, given the broad interest generated by the awardwinning novels and testimonial writings of the women writers mentioned above, this choice of texts appears puzzling. Of deeper concern, however, is that the presence of the two texts among some twenty-one selections by men writers, some critically acclaimed and others rather obscure, makes the women writers appear marginal and isolated, partly due to a lack of commentary linking them to the larger, multiform corpus of Italian women’s discourses on the mafia. A similar spatialization of gendered configurations of presence, meanings, and value subtends the critical space created by Onofri’s itinerary and practices of reading. Here, however, Leonardo Sciascia’s works serve as interpretive touchstone in understanding how a spectrum of short stories and novels by Verga, Pirandello, and Tomasi di Lampedusa, for example, relate to omertà, speaking, injustice, and mafia modes of thought and action. Indeed, Sciascia dominates the panorama, as signalled by Onofri’s title, “Everyone at Dinner at Don Mariano’s Home,” which invokes the famous mafia boss of Sciascia’s creation in The Day of the Owl. The pre-eminence Onofri accords to Sciascia as arbiter of knowledge about the mafia’s origins and development, sicilianicity, and Sicily is made manifest by both the spatial metaphor in the title of the chapter devoted to this author, “Il pianeta Sciascia” (the Sciascia planet) and the close textual analysis contained therein.4 As planetary body, Sciascia provides the bearings for Onofri’s charting of what he calls “an expanding galaxy” (219) of mafia stories published from the 1950s to the mid-1990s. Curiously, the critic includes in his galactic map works where the mafia figures peripherally, such as Andrea Camilleri’s The Shape of Water and The Terra-cotta Dog, both published in English translation in 2002, with the original Italian volumes published respectively in 1994 and 1996. Yet he discounts Livia De Stefani’s Black Grapes, inspired by a news article about the Badalamenti clan, because, he argues, the violent features that define the mafioso Casimiro serve “to elevate the story in an arcane aura of Greek tragedy” (256). He fails to mention altogether her insightful autobiographic testimony in La mafia alle mie spalle. However, he tells

8  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature

us, Silvana Grasso and Silvana La Spina contribute to the expanding dimensions of mafia literature. With increased numbers of mafia stories authored by Italian women in the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, and the manifold innovations in points of view, language, rhetorical figures, and styles fashioned to tell those stories, one might expect these writings would capture greater space in geographies of critical invention. Yet del Greco Lobner’s literary study and, I suggest, the spectacular impact of Roberto Saviano’s particular strategies in Gomorra on modes of representing the various mafia organizations in Italy, construct borders for the terrain of mafia narratives that make women’s works of the 1980s and 1990s fall off the margins. Endeavouring to chart the literary expressions of il sentire mafioso (mafia feeling) in writings by Sicilian authors, del Greco Lobner follows well-worn paths leading to the by now classic examples provided by Rizzotto, Verga, De Roberto, Pirandello, Tomasi di Lampedusa, and Sciascia, and, for the most part, veers from neither the established sights nor senses. In the process, the strains of women’s discourses vanish altogether. Even more troubling are the benevolent images of mafiosi that the author creates, ostensibly from her own experiences, and her conclusions on the relations between Sicilians and the criminal association in daily living. In extra-textual descriptions of her research, del Greco Lobner portrays members of Cosa Nostra in terms that hark back to founding myths of mafiosi as benign, generous, and ready to provide assistance with no expectation of profit; the book’s back cover tells us that the author “engaged in conversations with mafioso [sic] who became sympathetic to her quest and shared their insights during meetings at a Palermitan bar.” Thus, as guides along her journey, the mafiosi play an important role in her research. Furthermore, in her Acknowledgments she extends her gratitude, stating “My sincere appreciation goes to the amici degli amici, friends of friends, who met with me every day in Palermo at a small bar near the port. Omertà forbids me to mention their names.” While operating within the discursive and material mechanism whereby such social institutions and bonds as family and friendship are appropriated for criminal designs, del Greco Lobner also uncritically invokes omertà, the code of silence critiqued by the very authors whose texts she examines, as well as those she does not venture to explore. Such oversight pertaining to the critical perspectives on mafia codes made available by Sciascia and other authors may explain in part why she concludes that, with regard to mafia ways of thinking and feeling among Sicilians, they

Mafia Cityworlds: Geographies of Narration   9 

“do not seem inclined to change” (128). In 2008, this position is untenable, especially given the many murdered antimafia activists, mass protests against Cosa Nostra, and the founding of numerous associations and initiatives intended to diffuse a culture of legality. The construction of Sciascia’s crime stories as a signpost in the mafia geography of narration is obliquely reinforced by the reception of Saviano’s Gomorra, wherein critics present the story of the camorra as a watershed in the tradition. This representation creates a vanishing point for the many other fictions of the time that depict the crime organizations. Saviano thrusts readers into the deadly streets that are produced by the camorra in Naples and environs by means of extortion, illegal toxic waste dumping, and trafficking in human beings, counterfeit products, drugs, and weapons. Numerous critics and authors credit Saviano with opening a new frontier of mafia storytelling through the fashioning of narrative practices associated with the non-fiction novel. Incorporating a range of materials such as the author’s eyewitness experiences and reflections, research, court documents, and novelistic forms of narration, the story, according to Saviano, addresses a mass audience in order to inform and cultivate ethical changes in citizens and society. The author’s “inside story” achieved unprecedented popular success, with worldwide sales reaching four million in 2008 and over two million copies sold in Italy by 2009. The attention it commanded among literary and social critics is equally remarkable. Saviano’s storytelling strategies, forms of reader address, and the scope of educating and inspiring ethical codes of living have generated debates about the specific tradition of Italian literature that portrays the mafia as well as the forms of experimental fiction associated with what is called the new Italian epic, for which Gomorra frequently serves as exemplary text.5 Epitomizing this trend, the acclaimed author Carlo Lucarelli invokes as paradigmatic example Saviano’s exposition of the camorra’s criminal tactics shaping the private and public dimensions of everyday life, and maps the spatiotemporal configurations and features of a new, wild frontier of narration. This territory is “projected into the past, future, and also present,” ready to be “penetrated,” he explains, in the sense of literary praxis, of research conducted with books and novels which ... attempt to gather the fascination of the frontier, the challenge of a new far west. A new frontier that is not only physical (new settings, new worlds to create and explore), and is not only narrative (new plots, new adventures, different compositional techniques, subjects and extreme

10  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature emotions), but is also stylistic (new words, new constructions, new constructions in what the Wu Ming call mutant novels). (“Noi scrittori”)

Lucarelli, among fellow enthusiasts of Wu Ming’s propositions, thus directs attention towards a diverse body of alternative works signalled by Gomorra. Yet, in the context of mafia narrative history, through the representations of Sciascia’s novels and then Saviano’s bestseller as model texts, the other stories and spaces authored in the intervening years are elided.6 Critical Itineraries and Spaces Every day [stories] traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories ... Where stories are disappearing ... there is a loss of space. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 115, 123

My discussions of the stories and testimonies about the mafia by Italian women authors and citizen storytellers chart neither the planets suspended in expanding galaxies nor the epic places of the new Wild West. Rather, taking a literary turn towards the vanishing point, the analyses explore microgeographies created in citystories and different forms of testimony that enable readers to think about the myths, values, codes of behaviour, and relationships produced by the mafia, which generate structures of power, as well as points of resistance, informing sociospatial relations of citizens and the cities they inhabit. As de Certeau explains, practices of storytelling transform places into spaces, fashioning them through gestures, signs, and movements. Just as writing practices perform such transformations, so do those of reading and interpretation. Orienting my peregrinations through the varied cityscapes and spatial bodies of testimony is the proposition that the storytellers create performative geographies operating as life sentences, a term I employ to denote two primary senses, one carceral and deathly and the other vitally generative, while retaining the tensions and ambiguities between them. As evidenced in particular by Badalamenti’s contemporary mafia legend, Cutrufelli’s lament to the desert, and La Spina’s novel of inquiry into mafia related state crimes of murder, the authors’ delineations of mafia cityworlds graphically detail their diverse urban codes, arrangements, and power mechanisms that create deadly geographies of injustice through violence and the denial

Mafia Cityworlds: Geographies of Narration   11 

of access to the rights, freedoms, and public services ostensibly guaranteed in a democratic state. At the same time, these representations enable critical awareness of the criminal architecture as a construction, and not a natural outgrowth of either Sicily or Sicilian culture, and thereby create thresholds for its dismantling. The life sentences in these works thus also posit possibilities for the creation of life-fostering geographies of justice, constituted by sociospatial practices of a culture of legality. Signs of this form of subjectivity and spatial practice are implicitly inscribed on Crisantino’s Palermo cityscape through the itineraries created by such characters as the carriage driver and the student Mario, and are explicitly articulated through the life stories told by Rita Atria, Gabriella De Fina, Pina Grassi, and the citizen writers of the communities linked to the antimafia organization Ammazzateci Tutti, as I explain below. “Life sentences” also bears another meaning: the interrelations between individuals’ life stories, history, and literature, crafted in strikingly different ways by some of the authors. For instance, Badalamenti draws upon the life of the historical mafioso Faro Badalamenti to create her contemporary mafia legend of the night wolf. Shifting to the mean streets of Gela in the late 1980s, Emanuela Azzarelli, the ex-boss of a so-called baby gang, inspires Cutrufelli’s denunciation of various crimes contributing to mafia expansion and the wasting of a generation. In contrast, La Spina’s novel invokes in subtle ways Dalla Chiesa’s battle against the mafia during his final months as prefect of Palermo before his murder. Through their first-person testimonies, the citizen writers featured in the final chapter narrate histories in the making of the mafia, antimafia, and a culture of legality. The interpretative practices employed here create critical space engendered by the stories examined, through reflections upon the authors’ experimentations with genre, narrative forms and perspectives, settings, characters, and language, which produce their mafia geographies of narration and the meanings they make available. In Come l’oleandro, Gabriella Badalamenti’s highly evocative language creates an oneiric landscape of memory, conjuring Mount Pecoraro as it looms over Cinisi and serves as the site of myths that make up the legend of the night wolf, mafia boss Faro Badalamenti. Although the firstperson narrator in Cutrufelli’s Canto al deserto also travels the avenues of memory, broken by shifts between spaces and temporal frames, the author’s various figurations of the desert chart dystopic urban bodies in and around Gela, produced by material economic, political, and criminal conditions. The cartography of narrations – performative,

12  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature

polyphonic, multi-perspectival, and diachronic – is charted not as an alternative space, but situates the writings in relation to both canonical and lesser known works. It thereby constructs a dialogically engaging space, by indicating the many different ways of seeing and writing about the mafia, and how these may intersect with, contest, or echo related discourses. Especially important are the forms of intertextuality, a pronounced strategy of citing canonical texts by Sicilian authors in place-writing that endeavours to represent Sicily and Sicilian identities.7 La Spina’s suspenseful portrayal of an investigation into political and state crimes exemplifies this feature. Fashioning resonances with Sciascia’s tales of power and politics, she incorporates images from his novel To Each His Own, as well as allusions to Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Pirandello’s play Il piacere dell’onestà, and the map of mafia power that Dalla Chiesa publically unveiled in 1982, thus locating the characters’ values and manners of action in relation to the law and criminality. Though this form of textuality as crafted in works by Vincenzo Consolo and Gesualdo Bufalino positions their texts, Catherine O’Rawe proposes, “as monuments to a disappearing place” (“Mapping Sicilian Literature,” 81), in La Spina’s case, they serve to create a conflictual space marked by embedded mafia politics that betray the ideals of honesty, justice, and freedom even before they might materialize the democratic state. In delightful contrast, Crisantino invokes images from discourses constituting the monolithic construction of Palermo as Mafiopolis, yet shatters its foundations through multiple, competing representations of the metropolis in a process of transformation, driven by heterogeneous practices of daily living. By so doing she highlights the characters’ fabrication of geographies of mafia injustice and criminal fantasies, as well as civil commitment, dignity, and moral conduct, and forces readers to engage in judgments about Palermo, its identity, and possibilities for productive change. The critical approaches elaborated here employ key concepts developed in cartographic studies by such authors as Iain Chambers, Donatella Mazzoleni, and Edward W. Soja, which enable different ways of locating the works of fiction and non-fiction in relation to fundamental topics of investigation debated in mafia studies and beyond, thus opening up different perspectives on both the works examined and the debates shaping the literary panorama. Two concepts in particular orient my analyses: microspatialities, conceived as the geographies social subjects invent and live through their interactions (real, imagined, or desired) with the built city and the dynamic human activities making

Mafia Cityworlds: Geographies of Narration   13 

it up; and the city as a performative geography produced through the interactivity between built, social, psychic, and fantasy components. These critical framings serve to develop my engagements with broader discussions about the postmodern urban imaginary and postmodern impegno (social commitment), the relations between aesthetic acts and ideology, voicelessness and the narrative possibilities of giving voice to historical victims of traumatic violence, memorialization, and the modes and functions of bearing testimony and witnessing. Such topics also raise problems concerning memory, justice, and ethics. Specifically, while exploring the female mafia imaginary articulated in Badalamenti’s contemporary legend, I work through Fredric Jameson’s concept of the production of aesthetic form as an ideological act that functions to create an imaginary solution to irreconcilable contradictions in society. Badalamenti’s novel operates, I propose, as a restructuration of social conflicts between mafia and antimafia elements in the nation space of Italy in the aftermath of the catastrophic loss of lives caused by Cosa Nostra in the 1980s and the early 1990s. Aggravating the traumatic wounds on the landscape are historical mafia women who represent the feminine face of the crime organization as they perform female mafia identity on the public national stage through declarations of loyalty to the mafia as a point of honour. Key elements of Badalamenti’s recreation of the legend of the night wolf, and the attributes, feats, and extraordinary abilities that go into the making of Faro Badalamenti’s formation as mythic mafia boss, echo ideals invoked by women mafiose – honour, loyalty, and justice – and ultimately provide a formal solution to the underlying conflict between good and evil. At the same time, a dissonant key runs through the imaginary geography of Cinisi, the environs, and the Sicily the narrator harbours within, crafted through the oleander as metaphor as well as signs, gestures, and reflections that form a reverse discourse and redefine the mafia in an oppositional strain. Fantasies of mafia power, the performative aspects of geography, and postmodern impegno link the novels by Crisantino and Cutrufelli, yet their particular itineraries, settings, spatial metaphors, and aesthetic designs create citystories of Palermo and Gela that are worlds apart. In Postmodern Impegno, their analysis of postmodern commitment, Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussnug comment that this kind of engagement does not operate in relation to a broad hegemonic project, as for instance in the case of postwar impegno. Rather, working through microspatialities, postmodern impegno in the context of Italian culture

14  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature

can be approached as ethical or civil commitment, frequently articulated with regard to specific issues among an open range of problems.8 In the course of the journeys authored by Crisantino and Cutrufelli, the sights in the criminal imaginations and built cities, and dynamic elements interacting with both, construct a critical understanding of the mafia and the complex socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological conditions it exploits, and thus explicitly evidence the need for change. In Crisantino’s urban text, the disrupted and disorienting sentences creating itineraries in the Sicilian metropolis project readers into the minds of four characters, where the mafia, real or imagined, and criminality play prominent roles in the Palermos projected on their psychic screens and their relations with the geographic city. Her representation of the built and mobile city as performative construction, intertextual references to sociological and urban models of development, and portrayal of Armando Berti’s quest articulate the practice of socially committed writing. The narrative strategies Crisantino designs challenge the notion of a stable urban essence and identity, highlighting the ongoing fabrication and refabrication of interactive social and spatiotemporal components, which create multiple possibilities for civil transformation. Lingering on the threshold of Cutrufelli’s song to the desert as formed by the words from Santo Calì’s poem “A Tree of Peace Is What You Called Me Once,” which inspires both the title and the opening epigraph, I propose the intertextual relations thus formed and the figurations of the desert in her mafia geography perform significant operations. They situate the narrative in a genealogy of impegno represented by the poets Calì and Roberto Roversi, answering the calls to break the silence on crimes of injustice, and position readers as interlocutors who bear the responsibility of making ethical judgments. Furthermore, the intertextual spatializations of the desert provide a key for reading the specific terms of social and ethical engagement elaborated in Cutrufelli’s cartographic project. Concentrating on the explicit craftings of the desert and spaces encoded as desertlike, my discussion reflects upon how they operate in the author’s depiction of Cosa Nostra, Stidda, and material and psychological forces driving what I call “urban desertification,” conceptualized as a process that transforms both Gela and Tina into blighted landscapes incapable of sustaining life. The material and symbolic signs of desertification as it operates on Gela and on Tina, as discovered, recollected, and fantasized by the narrator, voice a denunciation of various crimes, from toxic pollution to mafia land speculation and illegal housing construction. The despoiling of Gela and

Mafia Cityworlds: Geographies of Narration   15 

Tina sheds light on the growing problem of what Cutrufelli terms “perverse emancipation,” whereby the subterranean of the feminine world erupts onto the surface as girls and young women become agents of criminal codes of behaviour and violence. Cutrufelli’s richly wrought representations of female fantasies of and claims to mafia power offer a different, fuller perspective on the relations between women and crime organizations, as also delineated in Rosalia’s command by proxy in Come l’oleandro and Ida’s criminal undertakings with mafia enterprise in Cercando Palermo. As Cutrufelli, Badalamenti, and Crisantino illustrate, in the cartographic delineations of the personal, social, and political spaces constituted in the process of mafia territorializations, the loss of voice through omertà or violent death and the claiming of voice enacted by characters, authors, filmmakers, citizens, and cultural critics have profound implications for thinking about the victims of traumatic violence, justice, and memory. Indeed, in the past twenty years a host of Italian novels, biographies, first-person testimonies, and biopic films has endeavoured to give verbal and visual presence to the life stories – in other words, the lived microgeographies – of victims of mafia murder and put them into cultural memory. Such works have prompted substantial debate about the rights of mafia murder victims, unanswered calls for justice among the dead and their survivors, and the forms and workings of justice as well as the roles that narratives may play in relation to these issues. In a thoughtful contribution to this discussion, Sergia Adamo and Clotilde Bertoni explore several lines of thought related to the operations of silence, voice, memory, and justice in contemporary Italian texts, and posit that in the case of historical figures represented as characters, the narrative space may function as a “place for recovering voice and overcoming voicelessness as objectification” (“On Voice and Voicelessness,” 8). Conceived with respect to this current of thought, my examination in chapter 4 of La Spina’s brilliant novel L’ultimo treno da Catania has two overarching aims. First, I propose that La Spina’s text constructs an innovative vantage point on this problematic precisely because its narrative practices appear to explicitly renounce attempts to give voice to historical victims of mafia murder, as illustrated by La Spina’s representation of Dalla Chiesa, who was killed along with his wife Emanuela Setti Carraro and bodyguard Domenico Russo in a horrific ambush on 3 September 1982. Dalla Chiesa never appears as a dramatized character. Readers never “hear” a word spoken directly by him in dialogue or otherwise. Rather, the presence of his voiceless absence is invoked through

16  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature

appellations such as “the general” and “the prefect of Palermo” and by second-hand comments from a cast of characters, which echo ideas, actions, and, most important, elements defining the map of mafia power with Catania as new epicentre, made famous in Dalla Chiesa’s interview with Angelo Bocca shortly before his murder. To examine La Spina’s echogeography, which problematizes the personal exercising of voice and its severing, I turn to Adriana Cavarero’s elaboration of the “vocal phenomenology of uniqueness,” bringing me to the second aim of the chapter: to foreground the material body in relation to personal, unique voices and the irredeemable subjectivities they articulate, rather than the notion of voice in the abstract or figural sense, in the critical spaces devoted to speaking about mafia victims. Lending itself to such an endeavour, Cavarero’s model conceives of the speaker’s voice as the acoustic emission from the material body in “flesh and bone” that reveals the “unrepeatable singularity of each human being, the embodied uniqueness that distinguishes each one from every other” (For More Than One Voice, 9). Adapting Cavarero’s phenomenological model to the possibilities and clear differences posed by the literary text as signifying system, my discussion focuses on the interplay between the particularized voices embodied by individual characters producing mafia politics of power, which is to say, the interchanges between agents of the criminal organization, politicians, members of the Sicilian elite, and the Knights of Labor, and the voices of the characters investigating them. La Spina’s representations of dialogic acoustic relations enacted as Inspector Di Marco conducts an inquiry into the murder of a member of Parliament, in appearances a political crime, and the killing of the historical separatist Antonio Canepa, a crime of state, launch a pointed indictment of mafia politics of power and suggest that the historical interworkings between elements of the mafia, political, and business interests destroy the foundations of a demo­ cratic state in Italy before it even comes into existence. ­More­over, La Spina’s inscriptions of the breathless presence of Dalla Chiesa’s voicelessness recontextualize his murder as a crime of state in the ethical, if not juridical, sense. The final chapter attempts to map apertures into relatively uncharted, multiform geographies created through the culturally inventive acts of everyday stories, but in a different key. I focus on a range of verbal and visual texts by citizen storytellers, whose sentences create antimafia trajectories through testimonies and by bearing witness to the experiences, ideas, and values such discourses affirm. The itineraries move

Mafia Cityworlds: Geographies of Narration   17 

from the embattled spaces of the psyche and body to which mafia families lay claim, as exemplified by Rita Atria’s testimonies, to urban sites of Palermo reappropriated by breaking mafia laws of place such as omertà, submission to extortion, and vendetta, voiced in Pina Grassi and Barbara Cittadini’s life stories, and ultimately to cyberspatialities, the hybrid microgeographies formed and lived through interconnections between material bodies, biographies, and virtual practices, illustrated by the diversified modes of testimony in the YouTube video Storie di resistenza quotidiana (2010) and in the verbal and visual components of the Ammazzateci Tutti social network site. In examining the forms, performative functions, and sociospatial relations fashioned in these texts, I employ Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s work on the relations between life stories, art, and testimony, which conceives of the bearing of testimony not only as the creation of a narration but also as an act of committing oneself and the narrative to other people. The speaker thus takes responsibility for the truth of what has happened, which has consequences for the broader community. The conception of giving testimony and bearing witness advanced by Felman and Laub is particularly useful for understanding the sociospatial dynamics at work in Italian antimafia testimonies, where great importance is placed on the listener’s bearing of responsibility, articulated through practices of memory, resistance to the mafia, and the creation of a culture of legality. Pietro Grasso explains the latter in the context of the battle against the mafia in Italy by stating, “[it] is something more than observing laws and rules; it is a system of principles, ideas, and behaviors that must move toward the realization of a person’s values, human dignity, human rights, principles of freedom, equality, democracy, truth, and justice as a method of living together in civil society” (Per non morire di mafia, 294). Signs of these principles as terms of subjectivity are inscribed in Rita Atria’s testimonial fragments voicing her intimate struggle to survive a crisis of identity and rebuild her notion of self. From her self-disclosures readers gain insight into the struggle to examine what she calls “the mafia within,” to renounce the code of behaviour, thoughts, and loyalties constituting it, and then to combat the mafia among family, friends, and Partanna society. The testimonies solicited by Gabriella De Fina, which feature the life stories of Pina Grassi and Barbara Cittadini, provide a different dynamic of bearing testimony and signal a shift in the spatiotemporal cartography of signs and operations cultivating the elements of legality in daily living. In contrast to the impossible solitariness of Rita Atria’s position as testimonial subject, addressing an internal

18  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature

interlocutor of her own invention, the antimafia activists and entrepreneurs entrust their life stories of sometimes traumatic experiences, fears, and hopes to De Fina on the express understanding that those stories will be made public, written under their proper names and with individual faces in full exposure, in order to create a social and symbolic collective. This collective operates to provide ethical terms of identification, support so that fellow citizens need not wage their battle alone, and the lawful practices for transforming the economic and cultural processes shaping urban spaces and the lives of the inhabitants who interact with them. Here, as in my analyses of web-based cultural practices of legality, de Certeau’s formulation of the inventive strategies people employ to transform the spaces and itineraries of their everyday lives, and to create sites of agency to subvert hierarchies of power, enables interpretations of the functions performed by quotidian antimafia tactics of legality. Although my discussion of web-based productions of a culture of legality ventures into largely unexplored territories in mafia studies, I suggest that they do not represent a watershed break from other forms of antimafia practices in daily living. Rather, as illustrated by the YouTube video posting of Storie di resistenza quotidiana and features of the Ammazzateci Tutti social network site, I locate such mediated practices in historical and social relation to affinitive strategies of resistance and examine the points of similarity and difference exhibited by the modes of testimony they produce, engendering cyberspatialities of legality, which is to say, socialized spaces in the human geographies people live. Mobile technologies and online activities are increasingly incorporated in the daily habits and habitats of Italians who have invented a diverse array of sites and activities that produce and circulate cultural signs of legality through postings of photographs and videos, blogging, presenting ideas in collaborative platforms, and engagements with social networks. Such culturally creative acts participate in the current proliferation of tactics of legality that reappropriate, transform, and generate socialized spaces in geographic cities as well. Among such spatial operations are, for example, public events such as bike rides, demonstrations, and street performances in memory of victims of mafia murder; book festivals such as “Trame” (plots), featuring antimafia publications and speakers; art exhibits, like Fiorenza Stefani’s “Il mio sguardo libero: 41 volte per la legalità” (My free look: 41 faces for legality), which in train stations and similar public sites showcases the open gazes of writers, singers, priests, and judges, for instance, who work

Mafia Cityworlds: Geographies of Narration   19 

for social justice and moral conduct; or the “pizzini antimafia,” antimafia notepads, designed by Salvatore Coppola precisely to reappropriate the meaning of the word “pizzini” from the mafia connotations attached to it by the mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, who used sheets of paper to communicate orders to the mafiosi under his command. The pizzini were cast in criminal light through the mass-mediated, spectacularized news of his arrest, with such pieces of paper on him.9 In contrast, Coppola’s antimafia note pads, sold in bookstores, newsstands, and restaurants, circulate the words of such activists and victims as Peppino Impastato, Mauro Rostagno, and Rita Atria, altering the visible and symbolic geographies in which they travel, and providing forms of agency for those who purchase them for their own use, or as gifts. If, as argued above, practices producing narratives in verbal or visual language, reading, viewing, and interpreting create spaces, then the performance of such creative cultural acts by means of web-based media operates similarly, while constructing some different possibilities. In creating practices of legality, and thus the performative geographies they enact, through the dynamics of bearing testimony and witnessing, the YouTube video Storie di resistenza quotidiana exemplifies innovative potentialities. Drawn from the eponymous documentary, on which filmmaker Paolo Maselli and author Daniela Gambino collaborated, the video posting puts into storable cultural record the ephemeral elements of individual voices, faces, gestures, and words as Italian citizens bear their testimonies. The medium thus opens multiple possibilities for viewers to connect, retrieve, watch and learn, creatively reflect, and recirculate the stories. Via an examination of the verbal and visual elements of the life stories, I explore the ways in which they engender spatialities of dignity, justice, and legality and solicit viewers to assume responsibility for the fragile testimonies that they receive. Shifting attention to the creative production and spatialization of a culture of legality through Italian social networks, I perform a reading of the verbal and visual elements constituting the geography of the Ammazzateci Tutti site as a sample case. In contrast to the narrations of mafia geographies crafted by Badalamenti, Crisantino, Cutrufelli, and La Spina, which critique the local and national dimensions of Cosa Nostra’s power relations, Ammazzateci Tutti and such similar networks as the Associazione antimafie Rita Atria and Libera now explicitly position themselves in opposition to all mafia associations and acts of criminal corruption. They thus put under public scrutiny other Italian crime organizations such as the camorra, ’ndrangheta,

20  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature

and Stidda. My critical approach draws upon the studies of mobile technologies and new media by W. Lance Bennett, Luca Raffini, and Gitte Stald, which enable analyses of individuals as actualizing social and political agents whose employments of web-based media articulate civic engagement and challenges to hierarchies of power. I consider the distinctive features of the Ammazzateci Tutti site’s forms of self-­presentation and address to visitors, as well as the topography and dynamic components constructing what is a mobile geography of legality, in terms of both its changing internal features and the sites and means through which we can access and participate in it. Of special concern is how various elements of the social network site relate to other modes of testifying and bearing witness, illustrated for instance by the association’s narrative of origins and the video posting “In Palermo in Order to Not Forget.” Such features, I propose, create engaging spatiotemporal relations, recalling to memory people and events of the past and projecting them into the future, while soliciting travellers through activities cultivating identification with lawful models of identity as well as fostering visitors’ own invention of expressions and acts composing cultural products of legality. As outposts on largely overlooked geographies of mafia narrations, the diverse works of literary and cultural invention explored here increase our knowledge about the criminal organization and its formative relations of power, as well as about the different ways of speaking about them. These works thus create new framings for reflection upon place-writing and the discursive mappings of Sicily and the nation, the conventions of crime fiction, the debates about the substance and narrative traits typifying the new Italian epic, and, moreover, the social and symbolic functions of storytelling as resistance, in life and literature. Discussing the civil role of literary production with respect to historical acts of crime and injustice in Italy, Lucarelli asserts, “Narrating is resisting. It is not forgetting” (qtd. in Adamo, “The Voice of the Forgotten,” 45). Where omertà serves as the dominating mafia law of place, narrating performs a twofold act of resistance. It claims the right to speak out against crime and oppression, and also puts the mafia’s crimes in the public eye, which becomes all the more important in times such as these, when the crime organization employs strategies of lupara bianca, leaving no trace of the murder victim’s body, and collaboration with state institutions, politicians, and big business, aiming to leave no signs of its presence on the visible landscape. As Grasso cautions, the mafia thrives on silence, and so long as it exists, people must “talk about it,

Mafia Cityworlds: Geographies of Narration   21 

discuss it, and respond” (Per non morire di mafia, 294). Approaching the notion of resistance to mafia organizations from a different direction, don Luigi Ciotti maintains that “The word ‘to resist’ comes from the same root as ‘to exist.’ It means substance, being there. It means doing” (Storie di resistenza quotidiana, 2010). The culturally creative acts of doing that here enjoin readers as fellow travellers within the performative psychic, social, and material geographies produced by agents of mafia power and oppression and by agents of civil consciousness, responsibility, human rights, and dignity, form a substantive presence that calls for our ethical responses about the trajectories their sentences create. We don’t want to find a place in this society, but create a society where it’s worth finding a place. Mauro Rostagno, killed 26 September 1988, Pizzino antimafia

1 The Female Mafia Imaginary: Contemporary Mafiose and Gabriella Badalamenti’s Come l’oleandro

Cruel voices and disquieting silences have broken the traditional reservedness of mafia women. It is as if this female universe, always a spectator, at times passive, at times consenting, its life choices violent and cruel, upon facing the breakdown of a wheel in the mafia mechanism, claimed its visibility, coherence of behavior, and faithfulness to the clan, publicly affirming an indisputable role in the complex criminal structure. Simona Dalla Chiesa, L’Unità, 30 June 1995 Of all those figures, don Faro, the night wolf, fascinated me the most, because his inaccessible hideout had been on that mountain that towered before me, Mount Pecoraro, where I could imagine him, as my mother used to tell me, wrapped in his large black cloak, riding his horse on that huge rock that dominates the town, so that everyone would see and fear him. For me, that man had become a fearless hero. Gabriella Badalamenti, Come l’oleandro, 14–15

How might a book be mafioso, or in other words, have an existence and the same affiliative connotations constituting the class of the mafia? What distinctions, if any, can be drawn between a narrative about the mafia and one that is mafioso? And if a story is mafioso, what does this suggest about the author as speaking subject, the readers who may listen, and their respective positionalities in relation to an ostensibly criminal system of signification? Cristina Lanfranco’s review of Gabriella Badalamenti’s Come l’oleandro (Like the oleander) implicitly raises these questions, among others concerning mafia subjectivity and ideology, the varied roles performed by women in the criminal association,

The Female Mafia Imaginary  23 

and images of Cosa Nostra created by the female imagination. Indeed, she indicts Badalamenti’s tale about mafia boss Faro Badalamenti, declaring “This book is mafioso, a book dripping with connivance” (“Recensione”). Her use of “mafioso” in this manner suggests Come l’oleandro does not merely narrate a story about the mafia; it possesses the very properties, and thus functions, of the mafia. For this reason, she censures the publisher for bringing out the work on the tenth anniversary of Cosa Nostra’s brutal murders of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, along with Judge Francesca Morvillo and eight bodyguards. It is unclear whether Lanfranco objects to the year of publication or the fact that the book was published at all, for she concludes that it would have been better to speak about someone else, such as the courageous antimafia activist Giuseppe Impastato, slain by order of Gaetano Badalamenti in 1978. Via this claim and a litany of further criticisms, she essentially buries the story Badalamenti has to tell, denying it any sort of value or significance. To be sure, in her oneiric narrative, Badalamenti spins a tale of don Faro’s life cloaked in such heroic myths as iron strength of will, honour, loyalty, and protection of the weak, endowing him with legendary stature. It is precisely because of these features that Come l’oleandro affords an invaluable opportunity to analyse elements constituting the mafia in the female imaginary, and to gain insights about mafia women and the roles they play. In fact, the perspective the author creates is unique within stories of mafia experiences told by Italian women. Generally non-fiction narratives, the forms of testimony provided in such works as Connie Transirico’s Braccata (1994), Giusy Vitale’s Ero cosa loro (2009), and Carla Cerati’s Storia vera di Carmela Iuculano (2009) mark the breaking of omertà and relations with the mafia, and thus inscribe a new critical awareness of the oppressive, violent code of behaviour to which the women had adhered. Also of exceptional importance are the life stories narrated by Antonietta Renda, Giovanna Terranova, and Camilla Giaccone in Anna Puglisi’s Storie di donne (2007), and Piera Aiello and Umberto Lucentini’s Maledetta mafia (2012), which bear witness to the women’s longstanding antimafia activism. Documenting heterogeneous relations to the criminal organization and the justice system, the variety of works contributes to our knowledge of the diverse positions women adopt, develop, or alter as they negotiate particular material and psychological realities. In contrast, the first-person narrator in Come l’oleandro shamelessly reveals her lifetime fascination with the mafia boss, giving full rein to her fantasies as she reimagines don

24  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature

Faro’s ideals, character, code of daily living, and feats. The elements of the contemporary legend genre she exploits and the aspects of mafia ways of thinking and being, which are highlighted in the novel, inform what could be called the text’s mafiosità, its mafia character, and not-sosecret sympathies that Lanfranco adjudicates. In what follows I map the distinguishing features, properties, dynamic arrangements, and voids that make up the female mafia imaginary as fashioned by Badalamenti and, in the process, suggest how the narrative components function as a site for the production of femalegendered mafia ideology. This study thus posits a relatively different avenue for understanding women’s relations to the criminal association. For instance, Anna Puglisi and Umberto Santino, perhaps the most authoritative scholars in mafia studies, define Cosa Nostra in terms of its opportunistic strategies of adaptation, which capitalize upon changing social, economic, and political conditions. Thus, they state, “The mafia has no ideology and its praxes are characterized largely by opportunism” (“Appunti sulla ricerca”). I fully concur with the importance Puglisi and Santino place on the role of opportunism and adaptation in mafia aims and the tactics developed to achieve them. At the same time, in both the social and literary spheres, it is unquestionable that certain features recur in the imaginary gendered identities of the mafioso and female counterpart, serving as images of coherence for individuals and as constitutive elements of the criminal ideological apparatus. The term “man of honour” exemplifies this point. Indeed, honour, respect, loyalty to family and friends, and the execution of justice in this context consistently structure the ideal self-image created by the mafia for internal and public consumption. I interrogate the complexities of Badalamenti’s contemporary mafia legend as a site for ideological production, employing Fredric Jameson’s notion of the relationship between ideology and cultural objects. I take as axiomatic his proposition that “The aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions” (The Political Unconscious, 79). Following this line of thought, I posit Come l’oleandro as a restructuration of social conflicts between mafia and antimafia camps generating the macrogeography of Italy in the 1990s, traumatized by the slaughter of some ten thousand people at the hands of criminal organizations, with mafiosi, innocent victims, prominent agents of the law, and, some would say, the democratic state itself among the dead.

The Female Mafia Imaginary  25 

Complicating what can be conceived in ethical and narrative terms as a battle between good and evil are the mediated scenarios played out in the 1990s by mafia women, speaking publicly in defence of Cosa Nostra. I examine the women’s public claims of loyalty to and positions in Cosa Nostra as utterances informing collective mafia discourse. Of particular concern here are the images, values, and myths employed as the women serve to mediate contact zones between criminal and civil societies through public performances of female mafia identity. As Alice De Toni has illustrated, certain ideal images of the criminal organization recur in the declarations of both women and men, for instance, the image of an “old mafia” that was good and just (“Dolentissime donne”). Yet the female body carries different sociosymbolic valences in mafia thought and, as I illustrate, is located differently in its hierarchy of power. Explicating this point, Alessandra Dino writes that the female body “(i.e., an unsearched body) is frequently used to send messages, signs of a vicarious presence: a body exchanged in marriage strategies; a body raped to show power and supremacy; a body killed in ‘vendette transversali’ [reprisal murders], or a body used for transporting illegal goods” (“Symbolic Domination,” 79). Thus, this study explores how a variety of different material conditions may figure as the female body becomes the performative site of production of mafia identity and ideology. This analysis of women’s fashionings of mafia identity serves as a critical framing for the mapping of Badalamenti’s criminal imaginary and the ideological elements of its invention. Foremost among the latter is the significance of the genre in which the author writes, for as Fredric Jameson proposes, narrative form itself bears an ideological message. My examination of the generic features of the contemporary legend created by the author also takes into consideration the properties of mafiosità it shares with discursive strategies shaping the declarations of mafia women in the 1990s. Utilizing Louis Althusser’s concept of ideology as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (“Ideology,” 165), my discussion shifts focus to the interpellations of the legendary boss don Faro and of supporting mafia women as produced by the female imagination. Significantly, the mythic characteristics the author ascribes to the heroic mafioso are not merely reproductions of features that recur in the idealized selfimages that historical mafia men attempt to project, whether during interviews, court proceedings, or in their autobiographies. For example, Faro is cast as a hopeless romantic with a profound desire for love.

26  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature

Moreover, Badalamenti dedicates substantial space to the female figures’ formations of identity and roles as agents in the production of sociospatial relations forming mafia territories. As in the case of Faro, the author fashions the identities of women in mafia families in terms of coherence, ideal images of key importance to ideological operations, creating a nearly ironclad consonance between values, beliefs, and actions that is unmarred by the murder of loved ones or attacks launched by the Italian state. The ideal images of mafia identity, such myths as honour, family loyalty, and justice, as well as the desire to penetrate secrets also raise the issue of how the narrative may align male and female readers in the production of criminal fantasies of social power and ideology, and largely reconcile the ethical opposition between good and evil that subtends it. This exploratory inquiry into Badalamenti’s redaction of the mafia imaginary thus offers, I argue, different clues and approaches to the mystery surrounding the 1990s groundswell of women’s voices publicly raised in support of the mafia, the very system of oppression that denies them, along with all affiliated members, the freedom to make individual choices and to live free from perpetual threats of aggression. At the same time, I suggest, a faint narrative strain, first signalled by the title’s spatial metaphor of the oleander, creates the terms of a reverse discourse that challenges the text’s properties of mafiosità by critically redefining the very elements and ideals upon which imaginary mafia identity depends, and thus produces the possibility for antimafia consciousness and resistance. The Feminine Face of Cosa Nostra: Performing Female Mafia Identities in the 1990s I viewed the mafia like Natale viewed it ... Like a means for justice ... They didn’t touch women or children ... I didn’t think it was bad ... I didn’t see the cruel things you see now ... Now I know I was wrong. But the mafia used to be different once. Giacoma Filippello, quoted in Madeo, Donne di mafia, 64

It is useful to situate Come l’oleandro in relation to historical shifts in Cosa Nostra’s gender arrangements, which place women centre stage in the 1990s, as mediators between the inner realm of the secret society and the social public. This refashioning of mafia women’s roles and, moreover, the discourses thereby produced, provide an interpretative frame for examining the affiliative or contending images and myths

The Female Mafia Imaginary  27 

evoked in the form of contemporary legend by Badalamenti. A substantial body of scholarly studies focusing on women and the functions they perform in Cosa Nostra documents a varied range of activities. Apart from their central role of educating children in the mafia system of thought and behaviour, women with close mafia relations have a relatively longstanding history of involvement as agents of criminal activities that dates back to the 1800s, according to Giovanni Fiandaca (Women and the Mafia, 2). They range from working as messengers, suppliers, and drug couriers to serving by proxy as head of the clan, as in the case of Maria Filippa Messina (Principato and Dino, Mafia donna, 67). The foregrounding of women as the public persona of the mafia, designed to perform vital communication roles, emerges in the wake of several historical phenomena that destabilized the organization. Most important was the wave of affiliated male members who turn state’s evidence in the 1980s, dubbed “emergenza pentiti,”1 which exposed a breach in omertà, the wall of silence shielding the crime syndicate’s affairs from public view. Further challenging the self-styled myths of mafia invincibility and omnipotent power over the families, both biological and criminal, of its rank and file, some women related to mafiosi, such as Piera Aiello, Rita Atria, and Filippa Inzerillo, became collaborators with justice. Finally, the numerous images of mafia men being shackled in handcuffs or caged behind bars during the maxi-­trials and shots of grisly crime scenes with hundreds of slain mafiosi and innocent victims, broadcast on television and splattered across newspaper pages, put into doubt any lingering illusions about the mafia as a tool for justice adhering to a strict code of honour. It appears hardly by chance that superboss Bernardo Provenzano’s post-1992 prohibition on public acts of violence as part of a strategy to make the criminal organization invisible coincides with the spectacular display of the “feminine” face of the mafia. Hardly frivolous, the performances staging women’s mafia identity in the public eye of the 1990s provide an unprecedented wealth of materials for analysing images of honour, injustice, and shame, contributing to the criminal cultural formation in which Badalamenti’s work participates. As De Toni illustrates in “Dolentissime donne,” an insightful analysis of representations and self-representations of mafia women in the Italian press, such figures appear more or less regularly in the media from 1963 to 1982. However, their statements in court or to the press, like the mafiosi’s, largely deny the existence of the criminal organization, a position that then becomes impossible in light of

28  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature

testimonies given in the mid-1980s by such pentiti as Tommaso Buscetta and Salvatore Contorno. Thus, in acts breaking omertà, orchestrated by Cosa Nostra and, as Dino tells us, designed to convey messages of stability addressed to both those associated with the mafia and the general public, certain female figures openly proclaim their position in and loyalty to Cosa Nostra (“La mafia nei silenzi,” 51). They employ diverse tactics to do so in interviews and statements to the news media.2 A case in point is the declarations of women in the Di Filippo family when news breaks about the arrest of the “superfugitive” Leoluca Bagarella and the key role played by Pasquale and Emanuele Di Filippo, affiliated members of Cosa Nostra who turn state’s evidence. Taking the lead speaking position, Giusy Spadaro, Pasquale’s wife, contacts the Ansa news agency and announces for all to know that her “ex-­husband,” as she refers to him, and his brother “are disgusting. We disown them ... Better to have dead men than pentiti. For us they don’t exist anymore” (Mignosi, “Hanno tradito Bagarella,” 11). Although Spadaro later shifts position, defining Cosa Nostra as two words that mean “death and destruction” (qtd. in Principato and Dino, Mafia donna, 18), here she appears firmly anchored in the criminal code. She portrays her husband and brother-in-law as disgusting non-men, reduced to abject objects by their betrayal, which she expels from the mafia body. Spadaro’s pithy words on death and collaborating with the Italian state as pentiti also convey ideas about the concepts of honour and shame, and their relations to gender roles, which provide insights about the acts of disassociation performed by wives, mothers, and sisters in mafia families. As if warning members of Cosa Nostra, she obliquely asserts in the form of an adage that it is better to be killed as a mafioso, with honour intact, than to become a witness for the justice system, a betrayal that brings dishonour and thus shame on the entire family, but women in particular. For it is incumbent upon mothers to raise and educate their sons and daughters in the sociocultural mafia code of behaviour, a role that wives then assume, while also bearing responsibility for the conduct of their spouses. Such precise female gender roles provide the sense of cohesive social and psychic identities that incorporate girls and women into the hierarchy of power and form the “we-ness” that I discuss in relation to Rita Atria. However, in this structure, if a son, husband, or brother collaborates with the state, the betrayal of Cosa Nostra’s secrets indicates the women’s “failure to fulfill their charge that justified their existences, to educate and form a ‘real man of honour,’” as Principato and Dino explain (Mafia donna, 29).

The Female Mafia Imaginary  29 

Thus, the way in which Marianna Bruno, Pasquale and Emanuele Di Filippo’s mother, entirely disassociates herself from her sons may be read as both a judgment on their “vile” conduct and an attempt to suture the rift in her sense of self as a loyal mafia woman. She states, “I don’t consider Emanuele and Pasquale my sons anymore. I didn’t make them. I don’t want to see them again” (qtd. in Principato and Dino, Mafia donna, 29). As she disowns her sons, she denies having brought the traitors into the world, perhaps deflecting some of the shame they cast on the entire family. For members of civil society, these declarations by Spadaro and Bruno may seem to be high melodrama rather than evidence of a system of values, beliefs, and principles structuring psychosocial and emotional life in the criminal geography. Focusing on the spectacular elements that characterize some public disavowals of relatives who collaborate with law enforcement, the journalist Claudio Fava argues, “It is not simply contempt for their men that these women recount. It is more of a theatrical escape in the only geography they have lived, in the only hierarchy they have known: the mafia” (qtd. in Dino, “La mafia nei silenzi,” 51). Although the elements distinguishing the performance of female-gendered mafia identity warrant attention, we cannot minimize the depth of pain experienced with the assaults made by shame on the women’s sense of self. In this respect the signature of mafia subjectivity written through Agata Di Filippo’s words and body provides tragic evidence, and also frames the role of sisters in biological families adhering to the criminal code, which is especially important in Badalamenti’s representation of don Faro’s family story. In a statement published in the daily newspaper Giornale di Sicilia, Agata Di Filippo adopts the same position as her mother and sisters-in-law, publicly cutting all ties with her “ex-brothers,” “vile things wreaking tragedy” (qtd. in Puglisi, Donne, mafia e antimafia, 65). Addressing members of the public, she attempts to give voice to the experiences of disgrace and asks for understanding: “We’re shut up inside our house. We don’t even open the shutters because of the shame. Understand us, for our family it’s a tragedy” (65–6). As if in mourning, not for the brothers who no longer exist but for the honour their identities as members of Cosa Nostra bestowed upon the family, the Di Filippos retire from the space of community and shield themselves behind domestic walls. Commenting on the positions of respect and privilege conferred on relatives by a man’s membership in the criminal association, Franco Di Maria and Girolamo Lo Verso observe that the man of honour who becomes

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a state witness “deprives the women in his family of this status, earning them the scorn of others” (“Women in Mafia Organizations,” 97). In contrast to Giusy Spadaro, who directs her aggression at the sources of disgrace with the judgment that it would be better if Pasquale and Emanuele were dead, Agata Di Filippo turns her aggression on herself, internalizing the shame, and attempts suicide on 28 June 1995. This act of self-destruction may also be interpreted as a way of materializing the extremities of invisible psychic pain. As the Di Filippo family illustrates, a complex variety of psychological, emotional, and individual factors informs women’s public voices of loyalty to the criminal clans which, it must be remembered, are authorized by Cosa Nostra and in some instances coerced through threats of violence. In the short story “A piedi nudi,” Dacia Maraini creates an explicit representation of the criminal tactics of intimidation and use of the media to project images of mafia women and Cosa Nostra. During a secret visit to the gravesite of her son Peppineddu, a mafioso turned collaborator, the mother chastises him for his conduct, and offers various clues about her own actions. Thus, she first claims she has come specifically to tell him that she no longer recognizes him as her son and repudiates him as part of the family, as signified by her act of breaking his tombstone (a fictional detail that resonates with the case of Rita Atria, whose mother shattered the tablet at her grave, graced with her daughter’s photograph and the words “The truth lives”). However, complicating what might appear to be a transparent inscription of mafia subjectivity, Maraini gradually shades in elements of the material realities situating the mother in the system of power as the object of shame and, moreover, of verbal and physical intimidation that ultimately makes her conform to the laws of Cosa Nostra. The mother confesses to her son, “They left me dead rats on my doormat. One time, even a knife in an envelope. That’s why I had to call the newspaper and tell them I repudiate you. You’re not my son ... The newspaper wrote it in big big letters: The mother of pentito Storpinato broke her son’s tombstone out of disdain. She disowned him. And after that they left me alone” (21). While casting the meanings of mafia women’s public performances in a more equivocal light, Maraini’s evocative images of the protagonist’s conflicted emotions – affection, love, and pity for her son as well as shame and fear – suggest how they threaten to fragment the very image of wholeness Cosa Nostra’s ideology of the maternal figure appears to provide. Her fictional representation thus enables us to imagine how the criminal economy of violence and fear, in which

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betrayals of Cosa Nostra’s laws are paid for in blood through forms of torture and murder performed in vendettas, may push its members to do what is normally unthinkable. The death of Enrico Incognito demonstrates this dynamic. When word spread that the young mafioso was collaborating with law enforcement, his family received a message from the mafia stating, “See to it yourselves to make him shut up or we’ll be forced to intervene” (qtd. in Puglisi, Donne, mafia e antimafia, 60). Assuming the threat is aimed at the entire family, they act, Puglisi explains, as “substitutes for the mafia organization; they identify with it and assume the task of executing the death sentence” (60). Curiously, they record the events on videotape, perhaps to furnish the mafia with visible evidence of the murder, which takes place 26 March 1994 in the presence of a neighbour, Enrico’s father, his weeping mother, and the brother who fatally shoots him.3 I now turn to a final body of textual evidence, provided by Maria Concetta Riina, the daughter of Salvatore (Totò) Riina, the boss of bosses in Cosa Nostra until his arrest in January 1993. The ideas that the twenty-one-year-old expresses in an interview conducted by Sandra Amurri and published in the popular weekly magazine Panorama in December 1995 are significant for several reasons. First, she clearly articulates a form of female-gendered mafia subjectivity that, however, refuses to speak its name. Second, the associations she makes with the notions of pride, courage, and rebellion against injustices illuminate myths incorporated in mafia ideology that, as discussed shortly, also define Badalamenti’s representation of don Faro as a man of honour. Last, the images of deep love and affection for her father offer further insights about the psychological defences children of mafiosi erect to protect their idealized attachments and thus their own notions of self. The scenario played out by Maria Concetta Riina is staged in the court of public opinion, though prompted by different circumstances than those framing the declarations of mafia women analysed thus far. She agrees to the interview because she wants to be heard and clear up “misunderstandings,” which arose during controversies that exploded in 1995 when she was elected the student representative of the Don Giovanni Colletto high school in Corleone. Amidst calls from some camps for the young woman to voice her disassociation from the mafia and its culture, she responds in the interview with a rhetorical question that evades the main issue of her position on the mafia and recognition of her father’s criminal history: “From what should I disassociate myself? From the affection and love my papa has given me ever

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since I was born?” (10). The daughter directs attention to the sphere of personal emotions, and thereby employs a strategy similar to the one consistently used by her mother, Antonietta Bagarella. Dubbed the “little schoolteacher from Corleone” by the press, since the 1970s Bagarella has consistently countered what she terms “unjustified accusations” about her family’s involvement in Cosa Nostra with declarations of love, such as the one captured in the title of Mario Francese’s newspaper article, “Amerò Riina per tutta la vita” (I’ll love Riina my whole life; 1). Here Bagarella tells the journalist that Salvatore Riina is not at all what police reports make him out to be: “Instead, he’s a normal man, good, able to cultivate emotions, able to love and care for others” (4). In like fashion, Maria Concetta evokes a sentimental image of her father. Echoing the idealized portraits of the paternal figure fashioned by Rita Atria in her diary, she describes the father-daughter relationship solely in terms of bonds of love and affection, and thus situates her father as a privileged object in her notion of who she is. This move shields the father, and Maria Concetta Riina’s own psyche as well, for to recognize Salvatore Riina as a killer convicted of over one hundred counts of murder would implicate her in guilt too, for loving him. Such faith in the father and her inability to accept volumes of verbal and physical evidence documenting his crimes as the superboss of Cosa Nostra also illustrate that she is embedded in mafia ways of perceiving, thinking, and acting. As Maria Concetta Riina fleshes out the portrait of her father, she employs a discourse that may seem highly ambiguous in comparison to the women’s explicit claims of loyalty to Cosa Nostra discussed above. I propose, however, that the very points of the ambiguity and the paternal features she highlights chart the configurations of mafia subjectivity. The mafia system of signification, with its self-styled codes, signs, symbols, and silences, allows for different degrees of understanding and interpretations that are contingent upon the interlocutor’s geographic, social, and civil or criminal situatedness. As a recent study on mafia communication illustrates, the general public, lacking analytic tools, can understand only the form of the message; residents in the criminal territory grasp the substance; and members of the criminal organization understand the message’s form, substance, and motivations (see Dino, “Symbolic Domination,” 68–9). Also pertinent to my interpretation of Maria Concetta Riina’s manner of speaking are the foundational functions in all dimensions of mafia life performed by the verbal and visual language of Cosa Nostra. Elaborating these functions, Dino maintains that “to communicate,

The Female Mafia Imaginary  33 

appear, exhibit oneself, transmit messages, conduct business, affirm one’s own supremacy and respectability, educate one’s children, define one’s role, consolidate the sense of belonging – all the elements essential to Cosa Nostra’s daily life – have always required that the mafia organization make use of languages, codes, and communicative forms and make reference to a specific cultural horizon, to tap and draw strength from it in order to affirm its own power” (79). Read in this frame, Maria Concetta Riina’s statements to the media send a powerful symbolic message to mafiosi and those in the organization’s orbit. The loyal (read mafiosa) daughter speaks in defence of her father who, in the geography produced by Cosa Nostra, is the steadfast mafioso, ex-superboss, from Corleone. Furthermore, she taps into that shared “cultural horizon” when she glowingly recounts the life lessons imparted by her father, and reproduces two archetypal myths in mafia ideology: “He repeatedly told us that the most important thing is to fight for what you believe in and rebel against injustices” (Amurri, 11). Clearly, such values are laudable in the context of civil society, if pursued according to laws and legal processes designed to protect citizens’ rights and safety. But in mafia culture, the Italian state and the laws governing civil life are the source of the so-called injustices against which the members fight and rebel, according to longstanding tradition. The young woman crafts a highly equivocal image of the democratic state, arguing that “a real democracy must be ruled by just laws, equal for all. Laws can be just, but then they can be interpreted according to convenience” (14). This general proposition implicates the Italian state in what she suggests is a miscarriage of justice, for she claims the Riina family is the victim of injustice and violence. Her words can be read in the criminal system of thought as a justification for the violence she also attributes to the mafia. (It is worth noting that violence, though condemned in civil society, carries a positive value in Cosa Nostra as the means and sign of being a “man of respect.”) As final evidence of Maria Concetta’s speaking position as mafia woman, the daughter voices her pride in bearing the family name. Perforce! Salvatore Riina is serving out his prison sentence like mafiosi of bygone ages, as an exemplar of omertà, protecting the secrets of his family and the mafia, or, as it is called among members, the “great mother” (mammasantissima). Indeed, in an interview given some fourteen years later, the now thirty-four year old woman draws attention to her father’s silence, assuring that he “would never have named any names. They asked him explicitly so many times to turn

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state’s evidence, but he always answered with a definitive no” (Attilio Bolzoni, “La mia vita”). An Archaic Mafia Legend for the New Millennium: Explorations in Genre and Ideology What is not true is verisimilar, and sometimes reality is stranger and bloodier than the most fervid fantasy, and what has never happened before could happen tomorrow, at the house next door ... if you live in our land of Sicily. Gabriella Badalamenti, Come l’oleandro, 9

Unlike Giusy Spadaro or Maria Concetta Riina, Gabriella Badalamenti was not born into a mafia family or raised in the values, forms of thought, and code of behaviour that inform the grooming of girls to become a mafioso’s wife. Several aspects of the author’s biographical information are worth noting, as they bear upon how she is situated in relation to mafia culture as well as to its sociospatial and textual production. Born in Cinisi in 1947, Badalamenti enjoyed the socioeconomic privileges of her wealthy family. In 1967 she married Silvio Badalamenti, nephew of Gaetano Badalamenti, the mafia boss who headed Cosa Nostra’s infamous commission in the 1970s, and dominated the city until his arrest in 1984. The author thus became privy to an inside view of the secret society, participating, perhaps peripherally, in its interests, rules of daily living, and conflicts. On 2 June 1983 Silvio was gunned down as he left his home for work, in downtown Marsala. Based on the testimony provided by the pentito Antonio Patti, he appears to have been a victim of the Corleonesi’s planned executions of hundreds of mafiosi and their relatives in order to establish their supremacy. At the same time, Gabriella Badalamenti’s husband, the director of tax collection in the Marsala office, was not entirely extraneous to the family’s illegal activities. The pentito Angelo Siino maintains he was kept abreast of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Giuseppe Impastato, and may have overseen some of Gaetano Badalamenti’s business affairs. This speculation gains credence in light of Silvio’s arrest in 1982, in connection with Giovanni Falcone’s investigation of international drug trafficking. What concerns me here is not how Silvio’s criminal profile can serve as a measure of truth or falsehood in the author’s representations of family members and events. That profile points, rather, to the paradox of Gabriella Badalamenti’s speaking position, inasmuch as it aligns with those of mafia women of the 1990s. Though a social actor

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in the tragic culture of death staged by Cosa Nostra, she tells a story that harks back to past times, revitalizing the myths of an archaic, good mafia bound by folkloristic values. By so doing, the text rehabilitates the organization and makes her position, as woman and author, translatable for readers. Paradox also abounds in the text’s jacket copy, extra-textual material generally intended to pique a reader’s interest in the book, but that in this case raises central questions about genre and thus ideology. The text describing Come l’oleandro opens with an enigma concerning the category to which the book belongs – fiction or non-fiction. The first line reads, “A biography, powerfully imagined, legendary, but modelled on the historical figure of a man of honour.” The shifts between terms associated with biography and fiction leave the reader in a quandary that only becomes more perplexing as further descriptors associated with different genres appear: the text is described as a biography, a “life story of Faro Badalamenti” though lived like a “feudal knight,” an adventure story, and “a grim fable: perhaps the first fable of the mafia.” This portrait is not entirely inaccurate, just problematic. As it evokes features of the narrative that derive from genres with different conventions, devices, and principles, the language mirrors Badalamenti’s prevarication in her author’s note to readers. Written in the form of a disclaimer, her statement situates the narrative not in the sphere of biography or life story, for she states that all of the references to real places, people, names, and events (names of Badalamenti family members and other mafiosi, place names such as Cinisi, Castellamare, and Terrasini) are “the pure fruit of imagination” (9).4 But in the second part of the sentence, quoted at the beginning of this section, she widens the lens to include the land of Sicily as a frame for remarks on verisimilitude and fantasy, which claim the purchase on reality she has just denied. The cryptic representation she creates charts the story and the Sicily of which it is a part as special kinds of space, where nothing is as it appears and everything is possible. With no equivocation, I interpret Come l’oleandro as a contemporary example of the legend genre. Useful here are J.A. Cuddon’s comments on definitions of the term “legend,” one meaning of which is a narrative that “lies somewhere between myth ... and historical fact and which, as a rule, is about a particular figure or person” (Dictionary of Literary Terms, 484). This conceptualization of narrative space resonates with the author’s notion of the roles fact and fantasy may play in the creation of her story. Indeed, her narrative exhibits a number of features

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distinctive of the genre. Most important, her tale is inspired by the life of a historical figure, mafioso Faro Badalamenti, and unfolds in a specific setting, Cinisi and surrounding territories, during an identified time period, the years from the turn of the century through the 1960s. Also notable are the pronounced elements of hyperbolic and mythic representation, especially in her images of don Faro as a heroic figure possessing extraordinary physical presence and strength, intellect, and nearly supernatural powers. For instance, even as a boy, his proud appearance commands respect; he rarely goes to school, yet assimilates all of the teacher’s knowledge; his unequaled physical prowess enables him to scale the rocky face of mountains no one else can climb. Last, the plot highlights the amazing feats carried out by the fearless hero. Significantly, this variety of textual elements is enveloped in an oneiric atmosphere self-consciously conjured, as the first-person narrator tells readers, as an invention of the female imagination. Although Badalamenti incorporates substantial details of the historical, social, and economic conditions in which events occur, these ultimately serve to illuminate the beliefs, practices, and conflicts that bear upon don Faro’s life and formation as a man of honour. Indeed, this story shares much with the lineage of such precursors as the legends devoted to Faust, Robin Hood, the Beati Paoli (Blessed Paulists), and Salvatore Giuliano. The myths produced in the creation of such figures have a particularly strong purchase on the popular imagination, as I discuss below. Badalamenti crafts a fairly complex architecture for a diachronic narrative marked by spatial and temporal shifts. She employs the device of a frame story set well after her husband’s murder, which establishes important features of the first-person narrator’s speaking position, voice, and motives for telling the legendary tale, whose episodes are filtered, ostensibly, through Faro’s memory and the storyteller’s as well. These elements also provide the underpinnings for a critical reading of the text as a restructuration of the deep contradictions produced by the mafia, which shape the social geography of Italy in the 1990s, evoked in the very opening of the story. Portraying the ideas linked to Sicily in the cultural imaginary, the narrator maintains that when the word “Sicily” is spoken, “images of murder victims, ugly mafiosi and crying women dressed in black spring to people’s minds” (11). Casting in a more personal light the struggles between criminal forces that produce tragedy and mourning and the forces of civil life, the narrator invokes her husband’s murder, noting the date and the fact that this “devastating

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event” sparked innumerable others, a subject to which she returns in the concluding part of the frame story at the end of the book. There, she represents herself as a “survivor of a war whose motives we do not know” (123). The war is clearly the mafia war of the 1980s and early 1990s, for she immediately recalls Silvio as an object of esteem and affection whose memory elicits the pain of a question with no answer: “Why?” (123). This question about the motivations driving the mafia’s extreme use of violence, bloodshed, and murder forms a subtext for understanding the author’s representation of the reasons she tells her tale, and the functions that tale performs within her designs and in collective mafia discourse of the 1990s. In a discursive move similar to that performed by mafia women speaking in the organization’s defence, the narrator shifts attention from (or represses) the inscriptions of mafia violence that wound the Sicily charted in the frame story, and declares she does not want to tell the story of Silvio’s death. Rather, she wishes to give narrative expression to the Sicily she bears within. The figuration of the island that emerges in her psychic space at the sound of its name captures aspects of nature’s beauty, appealing to all of the senses – the sight of the deep blue sky, the inebriating scent of the flowers for which Sicily is known, and the sun’s warmth that infuses her body. This Edenic imagery begins a chain of signification that situates don Faro, as yet unidentified, as part of her imaginary Sicily. She tells us, “I want to speak about the Sicily I carry within me ..., about a figure, a man, a symbol that I’ll call Badalamenti, whom I met in a time long ago” (12–13). The author represents Faro Badalamenti both as part of the imaginary landscape and as symbol, yet remains silent about what he stands for, forcing the reader to engage in the very process of deciphering she envisions for readers who will listen to her words, her grandchildren, and herself. Making this project explicit, she declares that she wants to speak about “my difficult experience as a Sicilian woman, so that they might know about it and I might understand” (11). This reconstruction of the legend of Faro Badalamenti, read in relation to the narrator’s questioning of the reasons for the mafia war and Silvio’s murder, can be interpreted as a search for knowledge about the mythicizing of popular heroes of the so-called benign “old mafia,” wherein answers about the contemporary, bloodthirsty “new mafia” may lie. Let me be clear: references to “old mafia” and “new mafia” are rhetorical strategies. From its beginnings, the mafia has been an industry of violence performed for its own self-interest.

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Various narrative devices link the telling of don Faro’s life story to the tradition of popular legends. Particularly significant is the author’s self-representation as a cantastorie, a figure linked directly to heroic discourse and the dissemination of truth and knowledge. In his rich work Usi e costumi credenze e pregiudizi del popolo siciliano, Giuseppe Pitrè traces this particular Sicilian tradition of public storytelling back to the 1600s. It featured, he tells us, artists who performed their works in Sicilian dialect, uniting song, music, and mime to narrate heroic tales drawn from chivalrous poetry and novels, as well as popular legends. The art practiced by the storyteller functions as a means for the production and transmission of knowledge and memory, as the legends of old are passed from one generation to the next. Worth noting here are the innovative uses of the cantastorie in Marco Amenta’s 1997 documentary One Girl against the Mafia and Pasquale Scimeca’s 2000 biopic Placido Rizzotto, as a figure investing with heroic status the respective struggles of Rita Atria and Placido Rizzotto against Cosa Nostra. In Badalamenti’s narrative, the image of the narrator as cantastorie invokes both the mythic status of her subject and a sense of bygone times. The prominence the figure of don Faro enjoys in popular legend is also highlighted by the various oral sources for the narrator’s tale, which include the stories her mother told her, other people’s accounts, and rumours circulating in Cinisi. The dramatized author recollects the fragments of the protagonist’s life story, some of which don Faro shares with her, incorporating them in a cohesive narration of a man of honour’s formation of identity. Yet the process of putting spoken words to paper, and thus materializing them in cultural memory, is not merely an act of transcription. The storyteller reveals that she is trying “to enter the mystery of that man and the fascination that he had exerted over me as a girl, and then exerted over me as a woman who had become part of his family and never ceased, because for me, that mystery is the mystery of the land where I was born and that I carry within” (23). This observation highlights elements of female subjectivity engaged by the mysterious allure and power of the mafioso, which, along with desires, fears, fantasies, and memories, go into the creation of the legend that is Faro Badalamenti. Every hero needs a suitably dramatic stage for performing spectacular feats. In contrast to the crypts hidden beneath Palermo, where the secret society of the Blessed Paulists devise their plots to strike in the name of justice, Badalamenti sculpts the mountainous heights dominating the Cinisi landscape as don Faro’s theatre of mythic deeds. Her fashioning of

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the mountains, and Mount Pecoraro in particular, functions in significant ways. Most important, the mountain stands as a formation in the narrator’s psychic imaginary and an external screen on which she plays out memories and stories, first as a young girl listening to her mother’s tales and reinventing them, with eyes focused on what she calls “‘my’ mountain” (13), and then as an aging woman. Touching upon popular psychology, the narrator observes that children are attracted to frightening things; she herself recalls asking her mother to tell stories about violent, bloodthirsty bandits, mafiosi, and – most spellbinding of all – don Faro, precisely because she could picture him on Mount Pecoraro. Thus, the figuration of the mountain acts as a site of interplay between the space of memories, fantasies, and fears within bodily borders and the space of the narrative images they inform. A childhood fantasy conjured by the narrator exemplifies these spatiotemporal relations. Envisioning the frightful sight of the night wolf on Mount Pecoraro, she reveals, “that man had become a fearless hero, who in solitude had learned to talk with the animals, an almost supernatural being, and sometimes I’d find myself thinking that if I’d been in danger he would have come to help me” (15). This image is also important for the way the typical trappings of childhood imagination, which invest don Faro with the power to talk with the animals and magically come to the rescue, also articulate the desire, not uncommon among adults, for a superman hero, an idea I develop below. Mount Pecoraro, as well as nearly assuming the traits of a character in Come l’oleandro, also performs topological and symbolic functions in the legendary history of both the region surrounding it and the hero. Unlike Castellammare, whose panorama opens onto the Gulf of Sicily, Cinisi’s horizon is dominated by the rocky face of the mountains, a topographical landmark distinguishing sociospatial relations, criminal and civil, that constitute it. Badalamenti lingers over a detailed description of the mountain’s structural features, fauna, and meaning for the inhabitants of Cinisi. Representing the mountains as a sign of collective identity, she foregrounds them as the object of the Cinisi people’s “proud love” (59). They captivate the townspeople with their magical aura, attributed to the “fickleness of their sovereign immobility” (59), for the stony face constantly changes, marking the time of day, weather, seasons, and human vicissitudes. Furthermore, by virtue of the symbiotic relationship that the author elaborates between the mountains and don Faro, the protagonist becomes inseparable from the topographic symbol of local identity.

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Throughout the tale of don Faro’s legendary life, Badalamenti traces intimate associations between the towering formation of rock and the towering formation of the man of honour. For example, mystery, supremacy, domineering presence, and sense of immovability accrete to the hero as features exhibited in key scenes illuminating stages, in the sense of phase and space of performance, in his life. As a young boy, he penetrates the stony heights, discovering all of the crevasses, caverns, and secret places they harbour, ultimately making the mountainous territory his own dominion. The remote, hidden space serves as a refuge, offering protection from agents of state law and mafiosi levying the law of the lupara (the sawed-off shotgun often used in murders). It is also a place of peaceful solitude, as when Faro, having killed a forest guard, goes into hiding, “nourishing his wandering life on the mountains, scents, sky, stars, wind, complicity, freedom, fresh cheese, leavened bread, wine, and a few pieces of boiled sheep’s meat” (25). This description also exemplifies the mythic heights to which the author transports don Faro, for she foregrounds the intangible natural phenomena of sights and scents upon which he lives. Mythic discourse linking the mountain and man also figures prominently in a key episode following his beloved wife’s attempt to kill Faro by placing explosives under the nuptial bed in revenge for his murder of her younger brother. The betrayal sends the distraught mafioso back to the mountains, where he roams from one peak to another, howling at the gods for days on end, without eating or drinking. He defies death and, the narrator recalls, his fury “terrorized” all who caught sight of him. Describing the myth of origins giving rise to the name “the night wolf” and local legend, she tells us, “Since then, his solitary wandering on the mountains around Cinisi and his ghostly figure on horseback, which on moonlit nights appeared on the crests so that everyone would see and fear him, accompanied by the howling of dogs, began to create the legend in town. People nicknamed that frightful black shadow ‘lu lupu di notte’ [the night wolf] and the forces of the law began to attribute him with more misdeeds than he committed” (62). This dramatic portrayal evokes the very ingredients of mystery, extraordinary strength, and supernatural powers with which Badalamenti endows the hero and that she elaborates within the frame of mafia beliefs, thought, and action. The author invests don Faro with a number of features typifying the ideal model of the mafia male that are manifest well before he becomes an affiliated man of honour, suggesting that he is innately suited for the role.

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Among these are his sense of honour and supremacy, presented as characteristics of the Badalamenti lineage; loyalty to family and friends; and perfect accordance between word and deed. However, I want to begin with the analysis of the character’s perception of social inequity and justice, which have profound implications for reading this legend as a site for the production of mafia ideology and the restructuration of the national conflicts of the 1990s. The author depicts the young man’s social consciousness thusly: “He observed immense poverty and excessive wealth that surrounded him, punctually registering in his memory men’s dramas, vexating power, and the silence of fear, against which he set his thirst for justice and the silent, devastating force of his anger” (24–5). Although the critical awareness of socioeconomic injustices and the desire to alleviate them hardly evidence the criminal, the writer explicitly situates Faro’s way of thinking within the mafia system of meaning. As a consequence of the young man’s “thirst for justice,” he becomes close to people “considered men of respect, and when one tragic day his fury fell upon a cruel forest guard who was torturing a small fox, the military police went after him” (25). With this relatively brief episode, the author draws upon the core elements of mafia ideology. Situated with like-minded men of respect opposed to the power of the state, don Faro imposes swift justice, using mortal force in defence of the fox. The irony that the hero saves the fox but hunts down men cannot escape readers. At the same time, the anecdote clearly suggests that Faro acts with no self-interest. Furthermore, as readers learn, in those remote times in Sicily being sought by the police is “the mark of honour” (25). This comment distinguishes the protagonist and suggests the community shares sympathies with mafia ideals as well as distrust of the state and its authority. In order to understand the particular elaboration of mafia ideology in Come l’oleandro and its relation to mafia women’s discursive constructions of the 1990s, it is necessary to look briefly at that work’s famous precursor, Luigi Natoli’s serialized novel I Beati Paoli (1909–10). This riveting tale has long been recognized as an influential literary work implicated in the invention of legendary images of rebel heroes united in a secret society by blood, honour, and a pure commitment to justice, which the Sicilian mafia has appropriated. Set in the 1700s, the story takes readers through the twists and turns of Palermo streets and the subterranean city, as the members of the sect act to right the wrongs suffered by the powerless, bringing down unerring justice on the heads of the powerful who abuse their social station. In a pivotal scene, the leader

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of the secret society, Coriolano, states the ideals driving the members’ actions: Our justice is not written in any royal constitution, but it is carved in our hearts. We observe it and force others to observe it ... We open our ears and hearts to the voices of the weak, of people who don’t have the strength to break the tightly woven net of domination in which they struggle in vain, of people who thirst for justice and ask for it in vain, and suffer ... We punish [the offenders] and vindicate the offence. No one sees the arm of punishment, no one can escape it. This is our justice. It has never punished an innocent person, and has dried many tears. (qtd. in Pickering-Iazzi, Mafia and Outlaw Stories, 44)

Here we see the key components ultimately constituting the ideology of the mafia, its imaginary relation to social realities. In the context of an abusive, dominating state, the secret society purports to perform a necessary service; it delivers justice to the defenseless and punishes only the guilty. Although there are no historical ties between the Sicilian mafia and the Blessed Paulists, the novel’s representation of the sect, Amelia Crisantino argues, provides “the ideology of the mafia as a secret society that defends justice and protects the weak, carefully cultivated by the interested parties” (La mafia come metodo e come sistema, 44). In fact, the novel has had a profound impact on the image of the mafia in the popular imaginary and on the myths the crime organization cultivates. In a striking example, Jane C. Schneider and Peter T. Schneider recall that during their 1969 stay in a Sicilian town, a local mafioso advised them that if they wanted to understand the mafia they should read I Beati Paoli (“Mafia, Antimafia,” 240). More surprising, Gaia Servadio reports that during trial proceedings, some lawyers representing mafia defendants invoke what is called the “Blessed Paulist defense,” claiming for their clients the idealized identity of hero delivering justice to the victims of an unjust society (Mafioso, 19). The essential elements of this mythicized image of the mafia are also evoked by both women of Cosa Nostra and Gabriella Badalamenti to serve different functions in relation to the embattled space of the Italian nation in the 1980s and 1990s, fraught by the Manichean struggle between criminal and lawful forces. As illustrated by the declarations made by mafia women, they launch their defence of Cosa Nostra by invoking mafia honour, and thus summon up the age-old values through which it is maintained, such as justice, omertà, solidarity, and loyalty to family

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and friends. They disown husbands, sons, and brothers precisely for their betrayal of honour and of the values for which it stands. Some women reference specific aspects of mafia ideology. Giacoma Filippello, for example, emphasizes the mafia’s role as a means for justice, and calls up the myth that it did not harm women or children, as opposed to present-day clans who commit acts of cruelty and unspeakable violence. Similarly, Felicia Bartolotta Impastato, wife of the mafioso Luigi Impastato and mother of the antimafia activist Giuseppe Impastato, alludes to an old mafia as if it were a true, good one, stating the organization “was a mafia ... it wasn’t like this one now” (La mafia in casa mia, 11). Expressing her loyalty to the mafia, Serafina Battaglia explains, “I believed in the mafia, I was raised with respect for men of honour, their code was my code” (qtd. in De Toni, “Dolentissime donne,” 97). Though the mafia code and the members who uphold it are, from her perspective, worthy of respect during her childhood and youth, the violent slaying of her son signals the breaking of the code by which mafiosi purportedly lived and earned their reputation as men of honour. These declarations show the women’s tendency to conjure myths of an archaic mafia that was good, as opposed to the mafia of the 1980s and 1990s. De Toni interprets these imaginary creations as driven by “the almost unconscious need to construct solid points of self-­determination” (90). In other words, we can say the female speakers recognize themselves as subjects in relation to the images of the mythic mafia incorporating values of honour, loyalty, respect, and family. The invocation of such images also functions as a defensive strategy, enabling the women to distance themselves from the so-called new mafia as a corrupt instrument of death. In an analogous gesture, Badalamenti calls up the mythic terms of an archaic mafia, defined by its strict adherence to the code of honour. In her legend of Faro Badalamenti the traits invoked by the women associated with Cosa Nostra are fully elaborated and create an ideal mafia identity that exhibits perfect cohesion between character, values, thought, and deed. Specifically, the representation of the hero incorporates exceptional courage, the sense of honour and justice, omertà, steadfast fidelity to the biological and criminal clan, and adherence to the law of vendetta. For both the cohesive image of self and the features constituting it, this interpellation of the mafia hero fulfils narrative and ideological functions best understood in the frame of Umberto Eco’s conceptualization of the superman hero in the popular novel, elaborated in his introduction to Natoli’s I Beati Paoli. Several of his ideas are

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relevant here. First, in the battle between good and evil, the superman hero may be on either side but is always an outsider to the established system of power, which he opposes. As in the case of Faro, the hero serves as the source and tool of his own justice, whether entirely on his own or as part of a secret society, which is the “collective incarnation of the superman” (xxiii). This kind of hero, Eco maintains, enacts “autonomous laws that he puts above those of society in order to realize his own kind of justice and his own kind of rationality” (xv). Significantly, Badalamenti’s representation of don Faro suggests that the conviction driving his acts of justice, first demonstrated by the murder of the forest guard and then by killings performed as vendettas, remains unwavering even in his old age, despite its consequences, such as the murder of his younger brother and his serving a thirty-five-year prison sentence. According to Eco, violent acts of this kind require that the hero, like Faro, “be endowed with exceptional qualities and have a charismatic power that legitimates their apparently destructive decision” (xxii). Last, as criminality performs a masquerade as virtue, the class of the oppressed suffers at the hands of dominating powers of both good and evil, locked in a never-ending cycle of conflict. From Umberto Eco’s perspective, I Beati Paoli and similar popular novels provide consolatory images of justice performed, making readers “forget that in reality justice is denied” (xxiii). I propose, however, that in mafia stories, and specifically Come l’oleandro, the ideal images of coherence in which each man and woman has a clearly defined role to play, offering a sense of security in an uncertain world – which is in essence the fiction that Cosa Nostra endeavours to project – may also engage readers in the criminal fantasy of social power. Performances of Mythic Mafia Identity Even though he was convinced that clothes do not make the man, Faro knew that the possibility to dominate men and circumstances begins with appearance and can disappear with ridiculous clothes. Gabriella Badalamenti, Come l’oleandro, 27

If, as the narrator tells readers, the reconstruction of don Faro’s story is designed as a means to gain understanding about the legendary hero as part of the geography of Sicily within and beyond the narrator’s bodily borders, then the particular aspects of mafia identity she refabricates and the manner of doing so say something about the female

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mafia imaginary. In this regard, the gaps or silences are also revealing, and serve in part to safeguard the mythic construction of the mafia that the author creates in her reinvention of the night wolf and the remote Sicilian land and times of the early 1900s. Although the author represents several traditional components of mafia codes of thought and behaviour structuring concepts of self, which I discuss below, she is surprisingly silent about the ideal of performing justice in an oppressive state, the centrepiece of the crime organization’s ideology. Apart from the brief passage describing young Faro’s perception of economic injustice separating rich and poor, there are few signs of abuse or violence performed by representatives of the Italian state. For example, in I Beati Paoli Natoli places horrendous abuses of power before our eyes: starving children, girls raped by landowners, homeless widows, in whose name the secret sect carries out its own justice. No such scenes portray Faro acting in defence of the wronged, beyond the circle of men of honour and their families. The author weaves into the tale the historical roundups organized by Cesare Mori to capture mafiosi during the Fascist campaign against the mafia. However, with the exception of the conflict with the forest guard, Faro’s encounters with authorities representing the law are more or less cordial. The prison guards treat him with the respect due a man of honour, and during his trial the members of the court are charmed by him. As well, understandably, there is complete silence on the historical, deadly conflicts between mafiosi working in collusion with large estate owners and the poor peasants who in the early 1900s took up the battles for land fought by the Sicilian leagues in the 1890s.5 Instead, justice appears to be performed strictly within the code of honour and vendetta ruling the lives of mafia families, its acts of murder isolated and never directed at women or children. In this manner, Gabriella Badalamenti’s narrative reproduces myths about the “old mafia” even when she shifts from the discursive register of legend, marked by hyberbole, to the register of realism. In the contemporary legend, substantial attention is devoted to representing don Faro’s formation of identity as a man of honour, drawing out his deep sense of honour, supremacy, and loyalty. However, what the narrator highlights about her first encounter with the flesh-andblood man is precisely his cohesiveness of self, such that mafia codes of behaviour seem to form his corporeality in an innate manner. Signs of the internalization of these ideals appear in the aged boss’s language, his particular use of words, silence, and gestures. When Silvio takes his young wife to a Badalamenti family gathering in the mountains, she is

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immediately drawn to two strong, “charismatic” personalities, Gaetano, just released from prison, and don Faro. As the men share stories, she hangs on their every word. Her questions and curiosity, which cause Silvio to caution her, later spark Faro’s momentary distrust of his niece. Situating herself as an outsider, the narrator explains, “I didn’t know the codes of behavior that had to be strictly followed with a man like don Faro” (17). Thus, the mafia rules structure both don Faro’s sense of self and his relations to others, who without exception are expected to treat him accordingly. In this respect, the hero is not presented as an extraordinary case. On the contrary, Badalamenti depicts this adherence to the criminal organization’s codes and rituals as embedded in mafiosi of the time. For example, when mafia bosses don Diego Censuales and don Rizzo extend an invitation to meet with the brothers of Angelina, whom Faro wishes to marry, their steps require no strategizing: “The formalities of the invitation were not dictated by chance and they were not studied either. The two dons simply had the rules running through their blood” (39). This image quite literally presents the criminal code as the mafioso’s life’s blood, and thereby runs the risk of biologizing criminality as a part of Sicilian tendencies. Moreover, it masks the constructedness of mafia codes and culture as learned ways of thinking and acting. In similar vein, the representation of the Badalamenti family suggests the men possess an extraordinary, inborn sense of pride and supremacy, which the author links to equally crucial abilities to dominate and inspire fear. In two stories purportedly told to the narrator by Faro, which are enclosed in quotations as if we were reading his very words, the power exerted over others distinguishes the Badalamenti male genealogy, signified also by the nickname “Battagghia” (bell-clapper). Describing his grandfather Faro, his namesake, he recalls how the old herdsman put larger bells on his cattle, which dwarfed the sound of smaller ones, in order to announce his passage. Pride and the assertion of dominance also produce the prominent position of Faro’s father and uncles, remembered as “exuberant men who kept all of their friends under their control” (21–2). To avoid misunderstanding, Faro attributes their dominance to “natural supremacy and general adoration” (22), earned by their recognized expertise in raising cattle and making cheese, and not by violence. However, the author complicates this image. Faro tells the narrator that when the Badalamenti men and herds passed through town or countryside, everyone else, even the animals, yielded their way. The author suggests that such behaviour is a sign

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not of adoration, but subjugation, for the narrator reads in don Faro’s eyes that “everyone was afraid of the Badalamenti family” (22). Gabriella Badalamenti explicitly presents the instantiation of supremacy as a foundational element of the criminal society. For example, the narrator reveals that she thought of Castellammare as the birthplace of the mafia due to the townspeople’s “sense of natural supremacy with regard to others and an equally natural expectation that others submit” (40). Locating Faro as offspring in the Badalamenti lineage and the features defining it, the author employs narrative practices typical of both legend and realism as she represents the roles of domination and fear in his formation of mafia identity. Both of these elements are united in the mythic figure of the wolf, implicitly linked with Faro, as discussed above. Don Faro also refers to the wolf to explain his philosophy of life in Sicily, asserting that “in this sweet, insinuating land of ours one is either a sheep or becomes a wolf” (23). Although the wolf may stand as a symbol in myths narrating the founding of civilizations, such as that of the she-wolf in the story of Romulus and Remus, here Faro’s words invoke the wolf as predatory leader, and thus call up its associations with destruction, death, fear, and fascination, properties that are attached to the hero by virtue of his imposing presence and actions. It is precisely this mythic aspect of the wolf that, in the estimation of mafia boss don Diego, makes Faro a man of distinction, worthy of being an affiliated member of the mafia. Describing the young Faro, the narrator tells us “the spirit of the wolf that dwelled within him permitted don Diego, who intuited in the young man a possible leader of the highest order, to admit him officially into the ranks of men of honour” (55). Although the narrative includes several scenes in which the use of violence in the course of fulfilling vendettas underscores the night wolf’s capacities to produce fear and death, it devotes substantially more attention to the hero’s crafting of other strategies of domination, thereby reinforcing the notion of an old mafia, whose bosses endeavour to keep the peace and mediate disputes. A prominent aspect of the portrayal of the legendary “man of honor” is the significance the author attributes to Faro’s cultivation of a visual image and knowledge, both of which operate as tools of domination. These ideas bring to mind the depiction of mafia boss Vito Pispisa in Amelia Crisantino’s Cercando Palermo, which elucidates how appearance and knowledge function as instruments of power. In similar fashion, giving literary representation to the detailed system of mafia language and its complex functions in everyday life described by Dino

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in “Symbolic Domination,” Badalamenti suggests that mafia designs of self-fashioning employ the body, expression, gesture, and attire to create an image of imposing presence, strength, and superiority. When Faro serves as a soldier in the military during WWI, as a way to triumph over the law with legal weapons and no longer live as a fugitive, he has a tailor fit his ill-shapen uniform. In contrast to other soldiers, he never betrays through body or word a sign of surprise, weakness, or fear. This performance and his conscious striving to acquire knowledge are aimed specifically at dominating others. Summarizing Faro’s combat experience in the war, the storyteller states, “It served him in order to become stronger and learn a thousand life strategies and a thousand tricks; constantly measuring himself against others, he learned how to know what other men were made of and proved his conviction that it is not difficult to subjugate them” (29). Indeed, the hero even manages to stage his acts of courage in order to curry favour with the commander, whose life he saves on the battlefield. Victorious, don Faro earns a medal of valour and his freedom, in a sense outwitting the Italian state. Different aspects of performance and knowledge are highlighted in the portrayal of Faro as a prisoner in the Ucciardone jail. In this case the hero voraciously reads books in order to master the penal code and challenge the justice system. The performance he stages in court, for which he dresses with impeccable elegance designed to convey the “image of a self-assured man” (91), is important for both the impression he creates and its effects on spectators: “The man who appeared before the court was neither an obtuse herdsman nor a folkloristic caricature. He was a thirty-five year old man in the height of his maturity, and proud, who did not apologize for his misdeeds but explained the reasons behind them ... He expressed himself in a voice that was calm and always serious, sometimes ironic, but never disrespectful or servile” (90–1). At the outset, the author underscores how the mafioso’s studied use of physical appearance, intellect, and language dashes the stereotypes of rural Sicilians and outlaws in dominant discourses of the time. The famous outlaw upholds the code of honour and firm belief in mafia logic, and gives a rational explanation of his actions. Testifying to his exceptional skill at fashioning an image and intellectual prowess, these features, the narrator informs us, “fascinated the judges, lawyers, and the crowd attracted by his fame” (91). Although Faro’s rationality does not prevail over the system of justice, the guilty verdict that system delivers does not prevail over the hero’s own system of law and justice, for which he has no remorse.

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In Badalamenti’s construction of don Faro as legend, particularly significant meanings and roles are attached to the vendetta, the law defining mafia identity and justice, which is transmitted from mother to children and safeguards honour and the power to command. In the narration of the hero’s life during the roughly twelve years between his return from WWI combat and his trial, much of the plot is driven by a cycle of murders and vendettas in which approximately eighteen people are killed. Commenting on these episodes, Lanfranco argues that the killings “appear as if they arrive from a world of the beyond, or like summer storms, with no motive ... treated as if they were a natural phenomenon, with no remedy or cause” (“Recensione”). A closer reading reveals how the distinct images of the vendetta tell readers much about the mythic and ideological configurations of the mafia. Most important, as noted above, is that these mortal attacks are confined to the sphere of mafia members and family in an atmosphere of isolation, as if totally separate from the surrounding society. The narrative thus works within the myth of an “old mafia” that does not pose threats to citizens beyond its ranks, a sociocultural construction belied by police reports that document mafia murders dating back to the 1800s of both women and children with no ties to the mafia. It is also worth noting that in each conflict ignited by a murder and resolved with the vendetta, Badalamenti portrays Faro’s biological family or mafia family, the clan headed by don Diego, as the victim of the offence, whose honour must be restored through the vendetta. Among these victims are the hero’s uncle Paolo, shot just outside his home during a celebration of carnevale in 1920; don Diego, the head of the Castellammare mafia to whom Faro swears his undying loyalty; Faro’s youngest brother Vito; and Peppe, don Diego’s son. In the imaginary mafia geography of the author’s invention, Faro is thereby cast as a “good” mafioso (an unavoidable contradiction in terms) in a struggle between good and evil, fought according to a criminal scale that contrasts with the conception of good and evil generally observed in civil societies. The character may thus engage readers’ sympathies, if not understanding. The unsuspecting reader’s alignment with complicit positions in mafia thought forming the text’s mafiosità, may also be achieved through the seductive myth of the crime boss as peacemaker. As we discover, Paolo’s murder is motivated by conflicts over grazing lands and therefore territorial power, and gives rise to clan warfare. The depiction of the aftermath of Paolo’s killing beckons us to follow as Faro decodes the signs and message conveyed by the staging of the crime.

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The author then takes readers inside the secret proceedings conducted by the bosses of the involved territories. Don Diego, a man of honour who loves “celebrations and not tragedies” (34), organizes the meeting of the commission. Passing judgment, the bosses rule that the Badalamenti family is the offended party, and the Vaccaro brothers of Carini are guilty of both the murder of Faro’s uncle and the vendetta that claimed the lives of four mafiosi. They sentence the Vaccaros and their inner circle of clan members to exile, forcing them to immigrate to the United States. With their judgment, the narrator specifies, the mafiosi work to prevent further crimes and guarantee peace in the region. Although peaceful conditions also enable them to conduct business affairs without the law’s interference, the representation underscores the popular myth of the mafioso figure as a mediator of conflicts, and not an instrument of violence. Although Faro’s life as a man of honour during the 1920s and 1930s is portrayed largely in terms of his role in the power struggles between the clans of Cinisi, Terrasini, Castellammare, Partinico, and Carini, the representational strategies fashioned by the author evacuate details of the pain and violence inflicted on the body as Faro fulfils vendettas. She thereby minimizes the risk of alienating readers. Such a gloss also forestalls the kind of critical awareness of mafia destruction encouraged, for instance, by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli in Canto al deserto in her depiction of the murder of Tina’s brother and cousin in Gela. There Cutrufelli forces us to witness and feel, however vicariously, every terrorizing sight, smell, thought, and sensation experienced by the sixteen-yearold Francesco as he is cornered and shot. Badalamenti, by contrast, rarely reconstructs the actual murders of which she writes. In the case of Paolo, three gun shots are heard and, as in other episodes, the consequent vendetta is reported in spare, factual prose: “Friday morning the next week, one man of respect from Cinisi and three from Carini died inside their stalls” (33). The storyteller often employs euphemistic expressions such as “to fall at the hands of someone” in place of harsher words that would shatter the oneiric atmosphere. Finally, in only a few cases does she develop the circumstances or ramifications of the killings. The death of don Diego, killed by mafiosi from Partinico, exemplifies this point. The author invests his murder with critical importance in the history of the rural mafia, suggesting it signals the impending death of the “old mafia.” Don Diego’s killing, she tells us, “produced a gash in the mafia that would never heal and would determine substantial transformations” (58).

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It is reasonable to speculate that foremost among these changes is the increasing use of deadly force – as opposed to the strategy of mediation embodied by don Diego – in ways that break the idealized cultural myth of the code of honour. In fact, the next victim in the Badalamenti family is Vito, Faro’s younger brother who, by all accounts, is entirely innocent. He has no involvement in the criminal society and never committed any wrongdoing that might offend. Both the sorrowful scene in which the donkey returns to its stall alone, pulling the cart with Vito’s lifeless body, and the family meanings made of the vendetta cast in sympathetic light the mafia justice that Faro serves on eight men of respect involved in committing the crime. He therefore restores the Badalamenti family honour and, moreover, knows “that the blood of the vendetta would bring peace to [his mother’s] heart” (79). This invocation of the mother veils the central role that women fulfil in the family transmission of the pedagogy of the vendetta. As Renate Siebert shows in Secrets of Life and Death, women are not passive objects of mafia thought and action, as shown by their funeral laments, which exhort the men to carry out the vendetta. Imaginings of Mafia Women For years, she was the one who helped and comforted him, also transforming herself into the accomplice arm of that astute, revengeful mind. Gabriella Badalamenti, Come l’oleandro, 62

Although the dominant strains of the discourse in Come l’oleandro fabricate an imaginary geography as product and producer of mafia myths and ideology, the images of mafia women exhibit forms of agency that are generally denied by the age-old cultural construction of the criminal family matriarch governing the domestic sphere alone. Recent scholarship demonstrates that woman as symbol and protagonist performs indispensable roles in the psychosocial structures underpinning mafia identity and interpersonal relations. The figure of the mother, as Di Maria and Lo Verso observe, is elevated to the sacred, and in the world of mafia symbols and codes “the mafia is (was?) the ‘Great Mother’ who protects; mafiosi hold the power of death and destruction; the home is the reign of the family, and the mother the ruler of this reign” (95). Mafiosi also take actions in the name of the mother, such as the vendetta. Yet women, from the very beginnings of the mafia, also assert agency in forms that change along with transformations in socioeconomic and political conditions. Dino’s meticulous research identifies

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multiple spheres in which mafia women perform roles: operating in communication networks, ratifying relations between criminal families through marriage, collecting extortion payments, ruling the clan in emergencies, and becoming “symbolic instruments and victims in ... cross-vendettas against the next of kin” (“Symbolic Domination,” 75). In these capacities, among others, women often exploit assumptions and stereotypes about female gender in Sicily as a guise, enabling them to carry out illegal activities undetected. Badalamenti’s portrayals of Angelina, Faro’s beloved wife, and Rosalia, his sister, invest them with agency in criminal undertakings, while also operating in service of the popular legend of the man of honour. The representation of Angelina develops the ideals of female purity, love, honour, and loyalty and simultaneously elaborates the ways in which girls are educated to fulfil the role of wife in mafia culture. Her marital union with Faro also illuminates the functions of marriage in mafia affairs. Faro catches his first glimpse of the girl, just fifteen years of age, at festivities organized to ratify the peace accord agreed upon after the battle between clans involving the Badalamenti and Vaccaro families. In the midst of the mafiosi, the wives who “knew how to keep their mouths shut” (35), and playing children, the hero’s eyes light on a young girl, framed by a door cast in shadow. The narration shifts into high mythic mode: “A ray of sunshine illuminated her face and blond hair. It was all in an instant, an instant of curiosity, and it was fatal! Faro fell in love with that luminescent statuette” (36). For the first time in his life, the hero, who is pure of heart, feels as if he were captured in a spell. With meticulous attention to detail, the author represents the strict rules and rituals that must be followed just in order for Faro to meet Angelina, and then proceed to courtship, and ultimately marital union. Not surprisingly, the longstanding antagonism between Faro’s family of Cinisi-Terrasini and hers, the Zancla of Monreale, complicates the plot in useful ways. During a meeting arranged by don Diego, at the broaching of a meeting between Faro and their sister, the Zancla brothers’ blood runs cold. They ultimately must control their hate and anger towards the Badalamenti, and grant their permission because the mafia bosses in the territory are invested in the marital union as an instrument to sanction and maintain peace. Developing this idea, the narrator states, “The moods of the men of honour in the territory were pushing for the union to materialize. Everyone was tired of the constant wars in the surrounding countryside and they saw a possibility for peace by creating family ties” (42). The brothers and Angelina must therefore

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obey the will of the bosses. This episode exemplifies how the mafia hierarchy of power makes impossible the individual choices of men and women affiliated with the criminal society. Describing the love between Faro and Angelina in idyllic terms, the author suggests her heart belongs to him even before she knows the destiny decided for her by the mafia. She asserts her desire through the language of food, and makes a raviolo with a small heart in the corner for Faro, telling him “I made it for you myself” (53). The representations of deep love and of the rules of the code Angelina is taught as preparation for becoming a wife construct an intriguing frame for thinking about the gender roles of daughter and wife in mafia power relations. Generally in mafia families, girls are groomed to become the wives of mafiosi. As the pentito Leonardo Messina explains in his testimony, “Women have never been officially affiliated and never will be. But they have always had a fundamental role. Men like me marry a suitable woman: the daughter of a man like me. Cosa Nostra controls them from the time they’re little girls, like us ... A man of honour’s patrimony is primarily to have a woman who is aware of her role” (Principato and Dino, Mafia donna, 14). Badalamenti engages with the specific issue of the female position in Cosa Nostra in the early 1900s, and the concepts of love and belonging. The storyteller reveals that for her brothers, once Angelina becomes Faro’s betrothed, “their beautiful, proud sister was no longer just part of their things. She became a person to be taught astuteness, distrust, and one rule above all others: One owes love and belongs to blood relatives alone ... almost as if she were a soldier sent to infiltrate enemy lines” (44). What is interesting here is how the imperative of exclusive loyalty and obedience to the biological family conflicts with the mafia law of obeying only the orders of clan bosses. In other words, the so-called mafia family determines the actions of its members and their families. And in fact, men of honour even kill members of their biological families when deemed necessary. Antonio Pipitone, for example, had his own daughter Rosalia killed for what he saw as dishonourable behaviour in the mafia code of living. The signs of an ideal love and ideal wife prove illusory for Faro, ultimately lending a tragic air to his legend. According to Faro, Angelina takes to heart the rule her brothers taught her, and never trusts or abandons herself with him after they marry. This lapidary pronouncement on Faro’s relationship with Angelina as well as specific narrative strategies draw readers into the machinations of mafia thought. First, the author weaves gestures of foreboding into the love story. For example,

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Faro avoids paying visits to Angelina every week during their engagement because he feels a sense of melancholy tainting his joy. As well, the storyteller piques curiosity when she informs us that weddings celebrated on 4 June in years ending in “4” are considered unlucky – Angelina and Faro were wed on 4 June 1924. Later, when Faro lives the life of a fugitive in the mountains, on his rare visits home Angelina is distant. Thus, when Faro wonders whether or not his wife knew he had killed her younger brother, most readers could reasonably provide the answer – yes, especially in view of her interiorization of her brothers’ rule. The reader’s desire to have this confirmed is soon satisfied. On a stormy December night, Angelina takes their son to her mother-in-law’s house. During Faro’s visit, she slips out of bed once she thinks he is asleep. Breaking out in a cold sweat of instinct, Faro leaps from the marital bed just before it explodes. As the hero of legend, Faro demonstrates extraordinary courage and honour, but also extraordinary pain, for he is “the most solitary man ever created, betrayed by a vendetta at the hands of the most honest of wives” (62). The tragic dimensions of this betrayal are underscored by the fact that it becomes part of popular memory through the superstitions attached to his wedding date. Moreover, the scene gives representation to the mafia woman of the 1920s as an agent of violence, a critical issue posed also in Cutrufelli’s depiction of Tina in the 1990s, and increasingly in scholarly studies.6 With the interpellation of Faro’s sister Rosalia, the author enables a better understanding of the code of conduct prescribing Angelina’s deadly attack on her husband – which might otherwise be viewed as a deviant act of insanity – and the roles women are educated to perform in the criminal family. As in Angelina’s family, in the Badalamenti clan primary importance is placed on ties of blood. The position and power of Faro’s mother exemplify this notion. She essentially forbids her daughters to marry. Maintaining that no one could love them more than she, the mother aims to keep blood family and property together. In the narrator’s words, “With the double-threaded pact, his mother united blood relations in the knot of true ‘good’” (64). Furthermore, the mother protects her daughters’ purity of loyalty and body, for she perceives love between a woman and a man as tainted by the sinfulness of sexual desire. What interests me most here is how Badalamenti manages to portray Rosalia’s complete dedication to the family not as a form of self-sacrifice or blind obedience, but as a role in which she articulates her strong character, intellect and skills, initiative, and desire

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to command. These elements resonate with the images crafted by mafia women of the 1990s, who proudly claim their place in Cosa Nostra and the roles they perform in the name of family. Throughout the story of the night wolf, the author develops the different aspects of Rosalia’s strong character, describing her as an “ironclad, impassive woman” (62). She does not hesitate to voice her opinions, even when they go against the hero’s. Acutely perceptive, she recognizes the danger posed by Faro’s union with Angelina and voices her opposition, telling him time will reveal that she is right. She even conveys her disapproval in public, by wearing a dark blue dress to the first meal shared by the Badalamenti and Zancla families, where the details of the engagement and wedding are to be established. With a calm head, she patiently waits for vindication. When Angelina betrays Faro, Rosalia quickly takes her place, driven in part by “that indissoluble bond of blood” (62). Acting as her brother’s right arm, she not only serves as a messenger, keeping him informed of developments in his territory, but provides critical support in a number of other ways. For example, she helps him to stage his fake death so he can escape the mafiosi trying to kill him and hide out in Tunisia. On her own initiative, she brings him news of Peppe’s murder and a rifle and ammunition so that he can perform the vendetta. Bringing to mind the contemporary phenomenon of mafia women ruling clans by proxy when their husbands are in jail, Rosalia makes sure that Faro’s orders are followed. As the storyteller explains, “Through his sister Rosalia, yet again the arm of his will, he arranged for everything to run according to his volition outside the prison walls” (91). It is true that the actions taken by Rosalia are performed in Faro’s name, to assert his domination over the territory. Yet the depictions of her actions also convey the mafia woman’s desires and abilities to act as agent. Furthermore, by acting as agent, she fully upholds the values of family, loyalty, omertà, and vendetta of which the code of the man of honour is formed, embodying a cohesive identity incorporated into mafia ideology. Legendary Endings and Beginnings He did not have even a second of remorse for all of the crimes he had committed and all those he promised himself to commit later. He felt he was in the right. After all, if it pleased God to make him stronger than others, and if He protected him, it meant that His will was for him to be what he was. Gabriella Badalamenti, Come l’oleandro, 89–90

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The images fashioning the hero when he emerges from prison, having served his thirty-five-year sentence, provide a resolution to the conflict between good and evil, which both sustains the legend of the night wolf as man of honour and recuperates the power of evil that he exerted. Expressing an absolute lack of remorse, Faro remains true to the code by which he lived. A hero as good as his word, he builds a house beside an oleander in the mountains, fulfilling the promise he made to God if He let him survive prison. Instead of force, he uses his vast knowledge, acquired by letting his mind roam the world of books in prison, as a weapon that subjugates others but does not kill. He becomes the epitome of “the old, wise godfather” (111). Indeed, his actions as man of honour appear in benevolent guise. He intervenes on behalf of Giovanna, a friend of don Diego’s daughter Ninì, in order to discover who is threatening to kidnap her son for a large ransom. Even before he successfully helps Giovanna figure out the culprit’s identity, Ninì declares her faith in him, proclaiming, “You are the only real man left!” (114). The author thus reinforces Faro’s identity as a “real” man of honour, and establishes his difference from the mafiosi of the late 1960s and 1970s who, by implication, are not real men of honour. The idea that the criminal organization has become something else, a false, tainted simulation of the real mafia, to echo Felicia Bartolotta ­Impastato’s words, is developed through diverse images. Most important, Faro views the changed realities of the mafia as a betrayal of the code of honour: he “did not believe in the gatherings and thought it was unworthy to make yourself be respected by sending others to shoot someone in the back. Just the thought of this disgusted him, and he thought, ‘They think themselves men of honour! ... Is there no honour left anymore?’” (111). In fact, in his view honour is what distinguishes him from the ostensibly transformed mafia: “Above all he knew that the word ‘honour,’ for which he had sacrificed his life and made him proud, had become so perverted that it represented an index of criminality” (106). He therefore distances himself from the arena of clan conflicts and wars. In this way the author thus situates the night wolf beyond the fray of good and evil, and creates a false distinction between the mafia of the past and the mafia of the 1970s. The distinction safeguards the myth of an old, honourable, and just secret society which defines the legend of the night wolf that Gabriella Badalamenti invents, as well as mafia ideology. By so doing, the legend also engages with the conflicts marking the material realities and discourses of the 1980s and early 1990s, creating an imaginary resolution.

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For readers attentive to narrative signs and gestures, a thread of discourse running through the fabric of the night wolf’s legend mars engagement with the fantasies of mafia power and justice. Indeed, fulfilling the storyteller’s desires to reconstruct the popular hero’s story as part of cultural knowledge in order to understand its meanings, the imaginary geography functions not only as a site for the fabrication of mafia ideology, but also as a critical consciousness of opposition. A number of images, symbols, and ideas exemplify Michel Foucault’s notion of reverse discourse, according to which polyvalent discourses of power foster multiple strategies to both exert and challenge it.7 In this key, Badalamenti invests critical terms of mafia ideology such as “justice” and “honour,” which constitute a code employed to create group identity and control members in the hierarchical system of power, with different connotations that inscribe the potential for antimafia resistance. The first signs of the oppositional vein appear at the outset of the legend, and erode the ideological cornerstone of the mafia as a means for justice. Recalling her childhood idolization of the night wolf, the narrator comments, “I forgot that by then he had been in prison for so many years” (15). The act of remembering draws a distinction between fantasy and social reality and the laws governing civil life in community. In reality, the night wolf cannot freely roam the storyteller’s beloved mountains; he is imprisoned precisely because the laws designed to provide justice and freedom deem him a criminal. It is true that according to mafia thought, expressed in literature, film, and the testimonies of ex-members of Cosa Nostra, the juridical system is unjust and therefore purportedly supports the need for the secret society. However, Badalamenti explicitly redefines what the mafia stands for. Reflecting upon Faro’s official induction into the mafia, with don Diego as his godfather, the narrator maintains, “At first because of the enticement of personal prestige, then out of greed and finally, his taste for power, Faro dove into that black well with no escape” (55). By employing the hero to expose the untruth of the image the mafia seeks to project, as a tool of justice with no self-interest, the author dismantles the false distinction between good mafiosi and bad, suggested by both Faro’s positioning in the cycle of murder and vendetta and the differences between “old” and “new” mafia. The author’s representation of mafia subjectivity underscores the subject’s engagement with power, profit, and social prestige, conferred on women in the family too, which are achieved by using violence to dominate citizens of the community

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beyond the borders of the criminal body. The image of the mafia as oppressor and not defender is created from a social perspective when Faro goes to prison just after killing one of the Vaccaro brothers who had returned to Cinisi. The narrator tells us, “Certainly a lot of people were happy that two domineering bosses had been taken from their midst” (88). Although she goes on to note that others were “desperate” because they had lost protectors, we should remember that such protection is part of the mafia industry of violence and extortion, paid at a high price. As the process of decipherment builds to a close in what represents a lapidary redefinition of the central law defining the code by which members of the mafia live, the author creates images that recast the notions of mafia honour, courage, and virtue. This recasting is foreshadowed by Faro’s own fleeting insight. Poised between Faro’s return from hiding in Tunisia and his plotting of the vendetta against don Stefano for the murder of his godfather don Diego, the scene pictures Faro on a mountain peak, where he has an epiphany: “He saw his entire life in just one image, his senseless battle ... and for the first time those elegant reeds swaying in the morning air made him understand the smallness of his existence” (74). However fleeting, this observation inscribes the possibility of a critical awareness that there is no honour and courage in the laws of violence and vendetta governing the hero’s actions, rendering them senseless and himself insignificant. In similar fashion, what is for many in Italy a common scene of domestic intimacy between family or friends in the Christmas season becomes an uncommon stage of mafia paranoia. The narrator and her husband pay a visit to uncle Faro and his family, bringing a panettone for the occasion. During the sociable encounter, Faro’s family eats only one kind of pastry. As Silvio explains to his wife, the Badalamenti family eat only foods they prepare themselves for fear someone will poison them. This fictional incident expresses the idea that paranoia, a true “everyday psychopathology” of mafia life according to Di Maria and Lo Verso (91), and not courage dominates the mafia psyche. As well, the narrator’s story of the last time she saw the aged godfather explicates the creation of a reverse discourse in its performative dimensions. Closely observing Faro and Angelina at the funeral of their only son, an event that puts them together for the first time in fifty years, she notes the closed, indifferent, and stony demeanours of both, which cause a change in her perception. She invokes ideas she previously entertained and invests them with different meanings.

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She begins, “That old man, whom I had judged to be wise, but a victim of the world in which he was born, now seemed like a puppet ... Later I learned that the indifference hid something much more terrible, it was a veil, a black veil, to mask hate, a secret essential emotion: a rule, an ancient mafia rule” (122–3). Thus, Badalamenti unmasks the criminal masquerade of virtue, staged through the legend of the night wolf she both constructs and deconstructs. She pictures the old man as a mere puppet in the crime society, shattering the illusion of the courageous, free wolf scaling mountainous heights no one else can reach. Most important, she redefines the mafia as a force living by the law of hate; her insight here marks the presence of antimafia consciousness and resistance, which is subtly evoked by the oleander featured in the book’s title and developed as a symbol within the text. The symbol of the oleander, with its heady, enchanting scent and deadly flowers and leaves, serves as an interpretative key for charting the antimafia vein running through the textual geography. In a lengthy passage narrating Faro’s return to the stone house in the mountains after his years in prison, the author creates provocative links between the oleander, Sicily, and Faro. Envisioning the scene, she presents the protagonist’s reflections on the old, contorted oleander tree: Faro breathed in the scent, careful not to brush his face against the flowers and leaves. He’d lost so many calves because of their poison! That’s it, he said to himself. If he had had to explain what Sicily was like, he would have pointed out the oleander. It could be a shrub, it could be a tree, in lunar flower with the sweetest and most intoxicating scent, but its flushed, innocent seduction hid death. The lanceolate leaves deadly poisonous, the flowers untrustworthy, a lair of bacteria. But he was a Sicilian, a Sicilian of the oleander, and would build his house around that tree. (110)

This evocative passage raises several significant ideas. The author emphasizes the plant’s alluring yet deceptive powers of seduction, which hide its poisonous, deadly force. Significantly, the protagonist perceives both Sicily and himself as possessing similar attributes, calling to mind the signifying chain linking the mystery of Faro to the mystery of Sicily, and the land the storyteller harbours within. As a Sicilian of the oleander, the hero does indeed build his house around the poisonous tree. Thus, literally and metaphorically, the intimate space of home, generally perceived as shelter, is defined by

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its ­potential for danger and death, just as Faro is defined. In fact, in the Manichean battle between good and evil, the author places him squarely on the side of evil: comparing him to his friend Pitrinu, the embodiment of goodness on the island, she declares the mafia boss is the incarnation of evil (119). By evoking the seductive yet deadly allure of the oleander in the title Come l’oleandro, the author also attributes these qualities to multiple spatial geographies. First, they define the imaginary space of legend fabricated in the text, which is constructed as a projection of the psychic terrain within the storyteller’s bodily borders. In both of these spatial dimensions, as well as the land of Cinisi where the narrator is born, Faro, like the oleander, stands as symbol. In this sense, the title may serve as metanarrative sign, alerting readers to the seductive enchantment of the legend of the night wolf that masks the deadly violence of Faro Badalamenti and the mafia for which he stands. The serious danger of ennobling mafia criminals by making them the protagonists in literary works has been raised by Andrea Camilleri. He maintains that “the very act of writing ennobles. You confer an identity on these people.”8 As a metatextual commentary, the title of Gabriella Badalamenti’s book speaks to this very issue: the dangerous fascination of mafia stories in the popular imagination, fuelled by literature, film, and media. It is a danger Badalamenti does not escape, in part because her reconstruction of Faro’s life story takes the form of popular legend, a genre designed to aggrandize the hero. Furthermore, the construction of the narrator’s imaginary Sicily as synecdoche for the geographic island, achieved through imagery as well as sociological and linguistic observations, collapses distinctions between the beliefs, values, and practices of the citizens making up the island, in a totalizing vision that criminalizes all who inhabit it. Nonetheless, by both reinventing the legend of the night wolf and penetrating the mystery of its allure to discover what it hides, the narrative enables an analysis of the particular images, myths, fantasies, and fears of which the criminal legend is made, and the functions it performs in general and as a product of the female mafia imagination. As this examination demonstrates, the different ways in which authors imagine mafia criminality construct new avenues of inquiry for understanding crime and its purchase on collective emotions, fantasies, and attitudes. It therefore also evidences the necessity to give serious critical attention to works that may be silenced by the problematic tendencies in some quarters of mafia studies that seek to

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determine appropriate objects for textual study and so-called inappropriate ones, such as Come l’oleandro. And a boy came to us with his shining eyes and full lips, to our youth consumed in the town and brothels. He did not say a single word and made no gesture at all: This silence of his and his immobility opened a mortal wound in our consumed youth. No one will vindicate us: Our pain has no witnesses. Giuseppe Impastato, Amore non ne avremo, 159

2  The Mafia and the (Non)sense of Place: Amelia Crisantino’s Cercando Palermo

Charged with the dangerous exoticism that its name evoked, the city had caused a false interpretation of events ... The city’s mystery is hidden within a non-category, its nonsense being ... Will the city let itself be read, and finally revealed? Amelia Crisantino, Cercando Palermo, 185–61

As noted by cultural critics who employ cartographic concepts, the various discourses that represent a specific city can produce an equally rich variety of images in the cultural imaginary. Nonetheless, the farranging writings and films that seek to portray a sense of place imbuing Palermo tend to make up an embattled space, as perceptions vie over the city with respect to state law, mafia law, or no law at all. For instance, since the foundation of the Italian nation, a preponderant number of works produced in the arts, sciences, and media have focused their sights on Palermo, with an eye to mapping the signs of the mafia on the cityscape. In the 1860s, Gaspare Mosca’s uproarious play I mafiusi di la Vicaria recreated the world of the secret society housed inside Palermo’s Ucciardone prison, transporting it to metropolitan audiences throughout Italy, who delighted at the discovery of the mafia’s dealings, politics, and cryptic language. While pursuing various analytical aims, in his 1876 study Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia, Leopoldo Franchetti devotes much attention to recording the traces of the mafia in the sensorial experiences, emotions, and social observations prompted by his time in Palermo. In contrast, in The Swan, a fictional retelling of events surrounding the shocking murder of Emanuele Notarbartolo, Sebastiano Vassalli imaginatively tracks henchmen

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and public figures affiliated with the mafia through city streets and neighbourhoods, spatializing the ways they operate in and fabricate the city. In film culture, the visual language crafted by Francesco Rosi in Dimenticare Palermo evokes the mafia’s presence through mysterious events unfolding in an atmosphere that makes palpable the metropolis’ exotic, dangerous allure, an element that fades from view in Roberta Torre’s Angela, where spectators follow the protagonist’s steps through Palermo, as her shuttles to deliver drugs and shoes become an everyday affair.2 Though offering a mere glimpse of the multitudinous stories about criminal elements dwelling in the city, inspired by daily life or imagination, such examples evidence underpinnings of the image of Palermo as the “casa madre” (headquarters) of the mafia, which looms on the cultural imaginary.3 However, this easy semiotic linkage between Palermo and the mafia has been increasingly complicated since the 1980s, in a variety of works that refabricates the city through visual antimafia signs and spatial practices. As richly documented by Jane C. Schneider and Peter T. Schneider in Reversible Destiny, city leaders and local organizations have endeavoured to transform elements of the built environment, and thus also the sense of the city. These enterprises include the civic re-territorialization of historical sites and neighbourhoods through restoration projects that save them from decay in the mafia clans’ hands; the memorialization of individuals who fought against the mafia, by renaming streets or installing plaques and monuments in their honour; and the use of urban space to cultivate a culture of legality, by staging antimafia processions, performances, and special events such as the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, which opened at the restored Teatro Massimo in 2000.4 Operating at the social and symbolic levels, such public works, the authors suggest, may recast the meaning of Palermo from the “capital of the mafia” to the “capital of the antimafia” (Reversible Destiny, 2). Possibilities of identifying Palermo with civil law and justice also appear in numerous literary and filmic geographies, shaped by the dynamic presence of antimafia forces. In their respective genres, the fiction film Excellent Cadavers by Ricky Tognazzi and the documentary Excellent Cadavers by Marco Turco both represent the battles fought in the Palace of Justice and on the streets by such members of the Palermo antimafia pool as prosecutors Rocco Chinnici, Giovanni Falcone, and Paolo Borsellino, while dramatizing the vital interrelations between city space, society, and history. In the course of doing so, these depictions create visible evidence of

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the wounds marking the city via graphic scenes of mafia murders, and of the shifting moods and loyalties of the citizens, which resist firmly anchoring Palermo as a symbol of the antimafia. The deadly conflicts between the worlds of state law and the mafia also structure the imaginary cities of Palermo in such recent works as the bestselling novel Più scuro di mezzanotte by Salvo Sottile and the six-part television film Squadra antimafia – Palermo oggi (Antimafia squad – Palermo today), directed by Pier Belloni. Significantly, both narratives portray the metropolis in the period following the arrest of the mafia superboss Bernardo Provenzano, and focus on the prominent roles that women perform on both sides of the law in battles over territory, power, justice, and meaning. Stories of this kind clearly enrich thoughts and fantasies making up the urban imaginary. At the same time, since it is virtually impossible to invoke the antimafia without invoking the presence of its other, the narratives operate within the same economy of signs that links the sense of Palermo to the criminal. In light of this bind, the urban geographies created in Lo spasimo di Palermo by Vincenzo Consolo and Cercando Palermo (Searching for Palermo) by Amelia Crisantino are especially significant. Although antimafia and mafia forces appear on their imaginary cityscapes, the authors’ narrative practices confound the possibility of reading Palermo in relation to any one particular law, whether in the sense of binding rules of the urban grammar, of the state, or of social and criminal communities, by conjuring the city through multiple, discordant senses, which readers must decipher. As brilliantly analysed by Norma Bouchard, a disorienting spatiotemporal cartography arises from Consolo’s crafting of hybrid linguistic forms and juxtaposition of fragmented images of tragic historical figures, events, and places that “haunt the surface of his narratives with the intent of making current the wounds and the lacerations of history” (“Vincenzo Consolo,” 17), as a means for producing change.5 Indeed, through the eyes of Gioacchino Martinez, the protagonist in Lo spasimo di Palermo, Consolo ultimately envisions Palermo streets as a “battlefield, a daily slaughter” (128), a convulsive space shot through with signs of mafia violence, traumatically marking land and psyche, as evoked by “the infernal crater in the road to the airport” (128). This image, and the concluding fragmented sights of human and material wreckage, which respectively call to memory the mafia murders of Judges Falcone, Morvillo, and Borsellino, along with their bodyguards, culminate in an open ending. The author thereby creates multiple possibilities for making sense of the chaotic

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urban text, a site of a different breed of ethical judges committed to battling criminal forces harboured within and beyond the halls of justice, of the mafia clans endeavouring to rule over the city, and potential divine intervention, solicited in the final lines. Published in 1990, Crisantino’s Cercando Palermo6 shares some general narrative traits with Consolo’s novel, such as fragmentation of space and time, representation of heterogeneous signs of the city, and cataclysmic urban scenes that form an open ending. Yet the author’s particular ways of crafting these elements in a polyphonic narrative that articulates competing points of view opens different avenues for thinking about constructions of Palermo in the cultural imaginary and how the law and the mafia figure in the meanings attached to the metropolis. Focusing on this problematic, my discussion adapts concepts from cartographic studies by such scholars as Lea Vergine, Edward W. Soja, and Doreen Massey in order to examine facets of the urban imaginary created by Crisantino. Here, Soja’s concept of the urban imaginary is useful. As he explains, it denotes a cityspace as “a mental or ideational field, conceptualized in imagery, reflexive thought, and symbolic representation, a conceived space of the imagination” (Postmetropolis, 11). Expanding upon this model, I propose that Cercando Palermo performatively enacts the process by which diversified discourses contribute to the thoughts, fantasies, and fears forming the “Palermos” in the imaginary each character carries within, and consequently interplay with her or his sense of the city in relation to civil, criminal, and social elements. The resultant spatial practices act upon the city and, at the same time, the built environment and dynamic aspects of Palermo act upon the characters. In the process, the itineraries that key characters create as they write Palermo in mind and body articulate a protean irreducibility of the urban sense of place, a term I employ to designate three directions of inquiry. First, it indicates the sensorial dimensions of characters and the metropolis: sights, smells, sounds, rhythms, sensations, and feelings that evoke a “sense” of place. Crisantino’s depictions of such features inform the various inventions of Palermo, thus bearing upon a second avenue of analysis, the sense of the city in terms of what it stands for in the textual system of signification. Last, “sense of place” denotes the ways the author situates Palermo and its dwellers in relation to the rational, an issue raised explicitly in the novel. In fact, one of the main characters, Doctor of Sociology Armando Berti, travels to Palermo with the precise aim of studying the urban traits that make it a “non-sense” city. My analysis explores how the representation of

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his imaginary world of Palermo and the portrayal of characters operating inside or outside the law challenge the foundations of dominant discourses that cast the city, and the south in general, as criminal and therefore irrational. Moreover, I suggest that the senses Crisantino makes of the non-sense metropolis elucidate the importance of micro­ spatial practices for needed social and economic transformation. Staging Criminal Geographies The city is a play performed in the imagination. Lea Vergine, “Paesaggio con rovine,” 29

A citytext per eccellenza, Cercando Palermo resembles a travel narrative in certain respects, though one hardly suited to the distracted tourist desiring to master the city through the major sights and customs for which Palermo is known. Rather, challenging various faculties, Crisantino’s novel leads readers on a quest in search of Palermo and, at the same time, undercuts the very intelligibility of the city in relation to dominant paradigms of development, whether urban, social, civil, or criminal. To these ends, the author crafts several structural and narrative strategies. Set during the summer, from early June to July 15, the novel is divided into forty-eight relatively short chapters. The narrative shifts between four main points of view, representing glimpses of the characters’ thoughts and actions in episodic fashion. Indeed, some of the events occur in the space of moments, as suggested verbally as well as visually through chapter and page breaks. Similarly, Crisantino conjures the senses of the metropolis through disrupted and disrupting itineraries marked by spatially and temporally fragmented images that arise from the diverse Palermos created in the characters’ psychic and social lives. The element of dislocation also applies more or less to the main characters through whose eyes we see the geographic and imaginary city. Not one of them was born and raised in Palermo. Armando, born in Turin and educated at Christie’s College of Oxford, intends to conquer the city with the trained eye of the detached observer, yet disorientation plagues his intellectual and physical navigation of the urban text. Although Olga and her husband don Pino easily negotiate the city’s streets and rhythms, Palermo provokes alienation and nostalgia for their home town. In contrast, the move from town to city offers Ida Benelli a much grander stage to dominate. Significantly, Crisantino does not portray Palermo from the point of view of the mafioso don

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Vito Pispisa, who expanded his rural control over goods and services to the city, making his name and fortune in the black market with the aid of the American troops occupying Sicily during World War II. Crisantino’s artful depictions of the diverse scenery and scenarios producing Palermo in the minds of the main characters play important roles in interpreting the sense of place she creates. They clearly highlight the interrelations between psychological forces and the ways in which urban spaces may be perceived and experienced, a key topic in debates about the city. Illustrating this point, Lea Vergine speculates, “If psychic life is a constant flow, an indistinct succession of qualitative episodes, it nevertheless has a relation that is determined by spaces and determining for them, for the way in which they are lived by us” (“Paesaggio con rovine,” 28). In Crisantino’s citytext, the characters’ respective anxieties, fears, desires, and fantasies structure their views of and engagements with Palermo, while also fostering contradictions within and between their visions. In the process, the author stages Palermo as a performative construction, thus opening the city to infinite refabrication and interpretation. In other words, the narrative strategies and urban images suggest the city has no “natural essence”; it is, for example, not innately exotic, lawless, or lawful. Rather, such traits derive from rhetorical constructions enacted performatively through ideas, images, and metaphors disseminated in a variety of discourses that drives psychic phenomena. The author’s depiction of Armando exemplifies this process while also elucidating the concept of the nonsense city, a fundamental interpretative key for understanding how Crisantino’s postmodern story of Palermo operates within an ethics of social commitment. With her fictional explication of the non-sense city as urban category, Crisantino calls up a rich intertextual web of discourses in Italian sociology, urban studies, and theory.7 The most important elements of the author’s conceptual invention are presented in a scene where Professor Patrick P. McPerson, chair of the Institute of Economics and Social Sciences, invites Armando to become a member of the team assembled for the international research project “Non-sense Cities: Nightmare or Reality?” The overarching aim of the initiative popularizes a traditional premise in urban studies; the scientists will test and perhaps refute the thesis that urbanization is contingent upon various kinds of production, such as diversified industries and the development of technologies, by studying non-sense cities. Expounding the general features of such urban sites, McPerson notes that they defy all rational categories of

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classification, largely because they appear to experience autonomous growth with virtually no forms of production yet high levels of luxury consumption. They also escape sociological models. But theories are not the only thing at stake, for as the professor explains, such cities “need support, constant stimulus. They remain in perpetual limbo. They exhibit different, antithetical characteristics that could not rationally coexist. They are anomalous semiperipheries. We have to check the borders, and see how real the danger of expansion of this model is over the long run” (46). This passage highlights the threats non-sense cities pose to national and global hierarchies of production, which undergird relations of power between centres and margins. Moreover, it presents ideas that shape discourses about the Italian south, and Palermo in particular. In order to understand the meanings of non-sense in debates about southern Italy, the analysis conducted by Umberto Santino in his introduction to Crisantino’s meticulous sociological study on Palermo, La città spugna: Palermo nella ricerca sociologica is indispensable. At the outset Santino poses a deceptively simple question about the possible analogy between Palermo and Montegrano, provocatively reinscribing an earlier notion of the term “non-sense,” and the controversies it generated in contemporary debates about the Sicilian metropolis. As he reminds readers, Montegrano is the make-believe name E.C. Banfield adopted for the town analysed in his The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, which showcases his theory of amoral familism. Since then, scholars have critiqued his thesis and research method on a variety of points. Most pertinent here is the critical analysis produced by Alessandro Pizzorno, and specifically his response to Banfield’s claim that the townspeople of Montegrano lack civic engagement and initiative and therefore perpetuate their own misery. Pizzorno argues that such inaction is entirely rational because there is nothing that can be done in the town, and “any kind of personal project for a career or success is nonsense” (“Familismo amorale,” 250).8 He supports this position with spatial imagery, stating that the town exists on the margins, far from centres that produce history, progress, values, and goods. He thereby denies the possibility of change, of improving the social, economic, and personal conditions in Montegrano, creating a position that fuelled its own round of debate. Turning Pizzorno’s idea of non-sense on its head, social critics like Domenico De Masi argue that there is, in fact, nothing to do in urban centres like Milan or Turin, and everything to do in Montegrano and all of the rural southern towns for which it stands.9 Although Palermo

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would appear to have little in common with such towns, Santino points out that the city has been the target of similar conclusions, which insist that nothing can be done. As the studies gathered in La città spugna illustrate, in the 1980s Palermo does not fulfil functions as an urban centre for its citizens. Characterized as a stagnant metropolis, the city is dependent upon government funding, lacking modes of production and skilled workers to operate them. Clientelism and the mafia aggravate these problems, while creating others in such sectors as housing, public services, and health care. Nonetheless, Santino rejects Pizzorno’s notion of non-sense as a rationale for assessing, if not foreclosing on, the future of Palermo. He argues instead that through the cultivation of micro-entrepreneurial subjectivity already operating in some neighbourhoods and antimafia practices of daily living, the urban structure of production can be recreated, along with a sense of social citizenship. This critical gloss enables the analysis of ways in which Crisantino’s fictional representation of Palermo engages with these debates as a socially committed practice of writing. The representation of the investigatory gaze Armando casts upon Palermo during his search for evidence that would explain its “nonsense being” dramatizes the performativity of psychic life in the process of reading the urban text, with no lack of ironic effects. The character is, after all, a researcher, expected to conduct a systematic examination untainted by prejudice or emotion. Yet his perspectives on the sights, sounds, and rhythms of the city and its inhabitants have an increasingly sinister cast that ultimately materializes as signs of the criminal and the mafia projected from his mind’s eye. This predisposition becomes evident in the character’s response to seemingly mysterious sounds that awaken him during the first night he spends in his apartment, in a building in Via Ponte dei Picciotti where Olga, don Pino, and Ida also reside. The sharp noises, later described as “inhuman screams from the bowels of the earth” (110), come from the depths of the building at the break of dawn, yet cause no alarm among fellow residents. Armando reasons, “If no one was frightened by it, then the cause of such a lacerating sound cutting through the stillness of the night was something familiar, that didn’t shock anyone, however horrible this hypothesis might seem to any civilized man” (109). His conclusion subtly introduces a familiar binary logic in discursive constructions of northern and southern Italy, which governs his judgments. Like diplomats from the House of Savoy before him, he posits his reaction to the noise as civilized (refined, progressive, rational) and normative, in contrast to

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that of the other residents living in the building, whose “lack” of shock is uncivilized (crude, backward, irrational) and deviant. Significantly, he extends this logic to all of the city dwellers, as seen when he later reflects on the sound, which, he learns, is produced by water pumps. Imagining that those “sharp sirens cutting through the silence” (111) every single night in all of the homes in all of the skyscrapers and buildings across the metropolis would assault the inhabitants’ senses, their bodies, brains, and dreams, he speculates about the effect on the people’s behaviour, which could shape the city’s “character.” In fairness, Armando considers another possibility, in which the adaptation to such inhuman conditions would be symptomatic of the city itself. In either case, his reasoning associates Palermo’s spatiality – its built forms and social relations producing cityspace – with irrational and malevolent forces. Although Armando’s observations about the city confirm ways in which it defies traditional models that attempt to rationalize urbanization, to break laws of urban development is not necessarily criminal. Nonetheless, the semiotic linkage between Palermo, the irrational, and the criminal is created in an important scene that also elucidates features of Armando as observer. Venturing beyond his neighbourhood, he scans contrasting shops and wares in the vicinity of the Politeama Theater and concludes: “A hostile city, dirty and noisy, the scent of orange blossoms Franchetti wrote about had vanished forever” (126). All of his senses apparently assaulted by the atmosphere, sights, sounds, and smells of the city, he invokes Franchetti, an allusion that operates in several ways. First, Armando bears more than a passing resemblance to the Tuscan author, whose pioneering book Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia had a formative influence on debates about the Southern Question in the late 1800s. Like Franchetti, Armando is a man of the north, and uses his experience of the industrialized, civic cityspace as his intellectual point of departure in analysing the socioeconomic differences that mark Palermo as non-sense city. Second, though over a century separates their respective historical and fictional journeys to Sicily, both travellers are outsiders who experience disorientation.10 Armando exhibits an exceptional inability to navigate the geographic city, causing Olga to wonder whether he is drunk or an idiot, as she watches his inept movements from her balcony and thinks, “He wasn’t able to choose the shortest path, instinctively decide which way to take so he could stay on the sidewalk and go straight ahead without any problems ... He always went the wrong way, he’d step up on the

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sidewalk and then down, he wanted to step up again and couldn’t, went around two cars, got back up and couldn’t go straight anymore” (133–4). Crisantino draws out the metaphoric significance of the character’s sense of misdirection, portraying his errant perceptions and ideas, which are related to the Palermo of his imaginary, as shaped in part by Franchetti’s words binding the city and the mafia. In fact, Armando’s thoughts about the people he encounters, events, and places in Palermo are haunted by spectres of the mafia. This tendency appears to lack foundation in his own experience of the city, since he is neither victim of nor witness to a mafia crime during his brief sojourn. However, by returning to the original statement made by Franchetti, which inspires Armando’s thoughts on orange blossoms, we gain insight about the unconscious and conscious forces constituting the Palermo enacted in his imagination and affecting his relations with the city. In the sections of Franchetti’s travel notes devoted to Palermo, he relates numerous stories he has heard about heinous crimes and murders committed by bandits and mafia henchmen, concluding that “after a number of such stories, the scent of orange and lemon blossoms starts to smell of corpses” (4). The fragment that Armando reiterates to express what he sees, hears, and senses in that moment of the metropolis may prompt readers to finish the by now infamous pronouncement, which conflates Palermo and the mafia in an aura of death. This image of the city engages the character’s anxieties, fears, and thoughts, skewing his sense of vision, as clearly evidenced by his reaction to a card he spies under his doormat. Signalling his lack of popular cultural literacy, he ponders the image of a knight with a sword facing point down behind his back, with no spark of recognition. His detailed analysis of the figure on what is, he later discovers, a card from a common deck for playing briscola, leads him to conclude that it represents a personal threat to him. Considering who might be involved, he reasons, “The sword is there alone, you can’t see who uses it. It means the person who’s guilty will never be discovered. So the mafia is involved. There’s no doubt. I’d be the knight. Someone is warning me that if they decided to kill me the culprit would never be discovered” (182). Since the sight of briscola cards is fairly commonplace in Italian daily life, with slight regional variations, the twists and turns of Armando’s thinking here, as he desperately recalls faces and sights in Palermo wondering if he has uncovered something related with mafia affairs, produces a comic strain. Yet Crisantino also raises serious problems concerning the production of spatiality and Palermo. Urban spatiality, as Soja explains, indicates “the

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particular configurations of social relations, built forms, and human activity in a city” (Postmetropolis, 8). Crisantino’s story of Palermo suggests that the imaginary cities of psychic life have material consequences for these interrelated elements engaged in the making of urban geographies. In the case of the hapless Armando, this proposition is illustrated by the ways in which his thoughts of the mafia, pervading his own sense of Palermo, significantly influence some of his social interactions. Among the most revealing of such scenes is Armando’s first encounter with a Palermitan carriage driver. Dignified and possessing a wealth of information about the city’s diverse marketplaces and history, the driver engagingly touches upon phenomena related to his customer’s research, noting that money, goods, and resources are not materials of production in the urban centre. Rather, they arrive mysteriously from far away. His exposition takes a philosophical turn when he proclaims that the human reason for being is to understand, in order to behave in an upright manner. As a student of human behaviour, he arrives at conclusions about tourists that pertain to Armando, and resonate with Lea Vergine’s notion of the imaginary city as a formative influence on the relations one has with the geographic space. He explains, “They all want something that they already created in their minds. They try to find out if they were right and don’t look beyond those exterior manifestations that, if they looked for them, can be found in almost every place on earth” (130). Like the tourists just described, Armando ponders the driver, his thoughts straying under the influence of his fantasies and fears of the mafia. Speculating about the man’s occupation, he thinks, “Did he perhaps work for the mafia? He had his rounds. Did he keep watch over some strategic location? He checked out people visiting the city, he said so himself ... Armando stared at his eyes, trying to see behind the many masks that man, sly like all of the islanders, certainly wore” (131). This baseless fabrication transforms the carriage driver into an object of suspicion, and highlights as well the regional stereotypes associated with Sicilians that Armando entertains. The persistent presence of the mafia as a touchstone shapes Armando’s errant reasoning, which deviates from the scientific standards ostensibly governing his investigation. It could be said that Crisantino thus blurs the boundaries between the imaginary city and the geographic city. I would argue instead that the author’s representation of Armando’s views of places, people, and events, as well as what he makes of them, illustrates the inseparability of the imagined and material metropolis in perceptual experience. As a consequence, Armando

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is blind to heterogeneous practices of work, leisure, and social commitment that produce cityspace in terms of honesty, lawfulness, and civic values. In his first meeting with the carriage driver the reader sees this lack of regard. The driver offers to take Armando on one of his tours of “civil indignation,” which have varying prices and itineraries, and include the sites where such historical figures as Costa, Dalla Chiesa, and Chinnici were killed. Armando chooses the least expensive because, he thinks, “If you’ve seen one of these places you’ve seen them all” (132). This idea is striking for a few reasons. Since the mafia haunts Armando’s image of Palermo, one might expect him to show interest in seeing how the criminal organization’s violent acts mark the face of the city and perhaps affect citizens traversing such spaces. Granted, the carriage driver’s enterprise makes a commodity of the tragic sites where antimafia figures were slain. But Armando’s thoughts evacuate the particularities of the personal and social lives of La Torre, Chinnici, and Dalla Chiesa, among other famous mafia victims, ignoring their historical and symbolic significance as agents of the law and justice in Palermo. Although Armando later acknowledges that he has conducted erroneous readings of the urban text, he attributes them not to his own oversights but to the city itself, which, he claims, is “charged with dangerous exoticism” (185). Nonetheless, he continues to operate within the same parameters, shaped by imaginary properties reproducing the linkage between city and mafia, thus also conveying the power and embeddedness of such discursively constructed images. Although the sources, staging, and scenarios of Palermo in the female-gendered imaginary harboured by Olga differ markedly from those of Armando, the urban moods and emotions imbuing their psychic spaces bear a resemblance. Unlike Armando, Olga was born and raised in a small Sicilian town where chickens still roam the dirt streets, and moved to Palermo with her husband don Pino. A resident of the metropolis for over twenty years, she has gained mastery over certain elements of the city’s built environment and dynamic rhythms; an intuitive knowledge informs her manoeuvres on streets and sidewalks, amidst cars, walkers, and bystanders as she travels routine itineraries to the beauty shop or cleaners. Yet in thought, Olga expresses no affinity for the city. In fact, as in the Palermo produced by Armando, in Olga’s imaginings of the city fear plays a dominant role, representing “the only true connection between signora Olga and the neighborhood” (119). The object of her fear is not the mafia that looms large on the cultural imaginary, generated in part by foundational works of

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sociocultural analysis, literature, and film. Rather, Olga fears common thieves who, she imagines, lie in wait to strip her home of all the family’s belongings. Among the issues raised by Crisantino’s depiction of Olga’s particular sense of Palermo are the varied performative functions fulfilled by discourses produced by news media and everyday verbal practices of the neighbourhood, and moreover, how the resultant constructions of the city bear upon spatial relations in both the domestic and public domains. For instance, Olga avidly watches the regional news broadcasts and pores over the daily papers seeking out reports of crime and tragedy, which fuel her fears and fantasies. Yet, as the narrator reveals, these activities also serve her consciously held beliefs, for they enable her “to cultivate her conviction about how dangerous it was to live in that city” (121). More important, the author elaborates the arts of invention this character fashions in the form of chatting, delineating the significance of this common practice in the production of Palermo as criminal. In general, chatting has a vital purpose in practices of the neighbourhood. As Pierre Mayol explains, it fosters motivations for relations among neighbours and also operates as “a repeated exorcism against the alteration of the social space of the neighborhood by unpredictable events that might cross it” (The Practice of Everyday Life, 2.19). Although infinite topics could arise in the course of such conversations, for years Olga has been dropping in at the local laundromat to chat with the woman who works there solely about robberies in the city. As they put into their own words what they have heard about the burglaries that have befallen relatives, friends, or anonymous residents in Palermo, their exchanges have the air of ritual, and certain generic traits. It is always Olga who voices the prelude with the words “Such unbelievable things” (120). Furthermore, the shocking details are punctuated by stock comments and reflections. Their tastes in plot are especially revealing, for the women have a predilection for stories in which, while family members are at home in the kitchen, the thieves steal all of the jewellery and money hidden in the bedroom. Such tales highlight the daring and skill of the robbers, and also bolster the women’s shared belief that people are not even safe in their own home, which would ideally be a peaceful, protective space. The Palermo crime stories told by the women engage their imagination, constituting perceptions of the city that also shape social relations between self and others, which in their case are defined by distrust of everyone and everything and the inescapable need to stay constantly vigilant.

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These vivid images of thieves lurking in Palermo created through the women’s chats also figure prominently in Olga’s occupations as homemaker, in the sense of activities and material arrangements that produce spatial relationships within the abode and between the interior and exterior. It bears noting here that Crisantino’s portrait of Olga’s life at home with don Pino and Marisa, their only child, is hardly painted in tranquil hues of domestic intimacy and affection. Epitomized by a scene in which the three adults retire to separate rooms where televisions blare different programs in a cacophonic assault, the private territory registers the disaggregation of the characters and their respective beliefs, desires, customs, and manners of home life. When Olga is home alone, she occupies a good portion of her time churning over in her mind the stories of burglaries shared in her neighbourly chats at the laundromat, and she embellishes them. The Palermo thus fabricated through her imagination becomes not only a source of anxiety, but also pride about never being caught unawares, and agency, because she invents and refines a variety of tactics. The most basic is her use of the balcony, that exposed extension of personal territory into public space, as a look-out for surveilling the neighbourhood for new faces, potential thieves casing the building. More intricate are the operations designed to protect the family treasures: she arranges and rearranges them in different hiding places, some intended to foil the robbers and others as a trap, so that Olga might catch the thieves in the act. In addition to such measures, she varies the hours of her comings and goings. Through these diverse activities, Olga produces her domestic space through the repeated invention and warding off of the very unpredictability of the criminal metropolis she fearfully imagines. In her mind’s eye, both the home where she resides and the city surround appear with alienating force, as indicated by her thoughts during one of the trips she and her husband make to their home town every weekend. She conjures the images, reflecting, “Her home in the greyish-green building, of which she had been proud at other times, now seemed like a prison, the entire city alien and hostile, noisy, full of garish stores that sold useless stuff” (70). Here she echoes Armando’s words, and enjoys no respite that distance from the city might offer. Rather, she reinforces the threatening contours defining the Palermo of her imaginary. As she chats with the townswomen, she solicits their choral responses of commiseration, telling yet again the stories of thieves slipping into the homes of unknowing city dwellers. Significantly, Crisantino does not reproduce the binary between Olga’s imaginary criminal city and an Edenic countryside.

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Olga takes in the parched land and struggling wisps of vegetables, then muses about the town as the only good place for her, a place where she would have lived like a “queen” (70). While betraying a desire for social dominance, Olga’s thoughts and feelings about town life suggest they simultaneously heighten the sense of belonging in her home town, whose local values, customs, and mores she shares, and of displacement in the Palermitan metropolis. Performing Criminal Identities and Urban Space With the infinitely different Palermo staged in Ida Benelli’s fantasies and everyday practices, Crisantino effaces any foundation for interpreting the criminal, threatening city enacted in Olga’s psyche as an exemplification of a monolithic, female-gendered urban imaginary. She also puts into doubt the privileging of geographic provenance as a primary determinant shaping relations between resident and cityspace. Both Ida and Olga are middle-aged women of the middle class with grown children, and Ida also moved with her husband from a small Sicilian town to the city. Yet the imaginary Palermos that Olga and Ida project onto the urban landscape are worlds apart. In the space of Ida’s imagination Palermo appears like a grand stage, offering riches and territory that she desires to conquer, “to dominate the noise from above, to have the city at her feet” (88). Her urban fantasies are represented as both the product and producer of such features as the theatrical, playfulness, pleasure, and desire, which characterize her fashioning of lived spatiality, and are often associated with postmodern subjectivity in consumer societies. Furthermore, the author draws an explicit linkage between Ida’s consuming desires and criminal elements of the metropolis that enables an analysis of female agency in mafia relations and the sense of Palermo thereby produced. The consumption of mass culture has a formative function in Crisantino’s representation of the relations between Ida’s body and spaces on diverse scales, ranging from home to the city at large, as well as in her spatialized social relations. As readers learn in the novel’s opening pages, Ida is a loyal viewer of daily soap operas and models her self, articulated through make-up, dress, gestures, and manners, after female movie stars. For instance, she gives no attention to passersby because “since she was a girl, she had long admired the icy stars of the movies, and convinced herself that a truly elegant woman always looks straight ahead, never down” (6). Fashioning both body and ­adornments

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as performative instruments, she sports a tan year round to create a healthy appearance, bestows a smile like a “prima donna’s,” and dresses up in bright colours, accessorized by scarves and hats galore. Her apparel and accoutrements are carefully chosen to suit particular scenes and, moreover, the effects that Ida desires, as illustrated by an episode in which Olga arrives at her home for tea, “the stuff of movies” (6) according to Olga. Totally taken aback, the rather frumpy Olga sees the woman open her door done up in a luxurious dress, which the narrator describes as “a sort of kaftan, that signora Benelli always wore on the first dramatic entrance for the benefit of a guest she wished to conquer. It had a sensational effect, she knew it. Seeing her for the first time in that outfit, no one expected it, it blew all of them away. And then the shoes, just right, naturally, some Arabian slippers that were all red and gold” (17). This passage highlights the theatrical and playful elements of the character’s performative self-crafting, which also produce pleasure. In fact, Ida delights at the shock her image produces in Olga, whom she perceives as “an audience, virgin territory to conquer” (22). The performative elements distinguishing Ida’s psychic and social life also characterize the spatialization of these existential dimensions at home and on the streets of Palermo. In the scene analysed above, the author describes in detail the interior of the Benelli abode, which exhibits an abundance of props and ornamentation to create the stage for Ida’s performance of her life. As Olga notes, the furniture, dating from the 1960s, appears chosen not for functionality or comfort but for effect, with some pieces in the Empire style. The walls are crowded with framed paintings and photographs of subjects that, despite their variety, have an air of banality – two horses galloping, a little girl with a tear in her eye, kittens, an old man in a sailor’s cap, and so forth. Even to Olga’s untrained eye, the pieces convey their provenance as objects of mass production; the photograph of a woman and man walking hand in hand along the seashore seems just like the one she saw hanging over the display of condoms at the drugstore. In a further display of standardized notions of good taste, Ida sets the scene for tea time, appearing with a glass and gilt tea cart crowned with an English porcelain tea set. Two large mirrors ornament the home’s entryway, material evidence of Ida’s preoccupation with appearances, as both coming into public view and visual image. They literally provide opportunities for Ida to see reflections of herself from various angles as she makes her exits and entrances. The mirrors also raise issues concerning the relationship

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between the specular body and space, and specifically the images of her self and urban scenes created and reflected on her psyche. In several episodes scattered throughout the novel, Ida engages in wakeful dreams that feature mirrored images of herself in various interior and exterior settings of the city. Each of these more or less underscores the significant psychic and social roles played by the character’s desire for material riches, self-performance, pleasure, and mass culture. In the following discussion I want to focus on three key episodes that conjure strikingly different imaginary Palermos and dramatize the equally diverse trajectories in which Ida projects herself. Whereas the first scene represents a relatively innocent flight of fancy, the second charts spaces of the criminal underworld implicitly produced by mafia associations, and ultimately leads to a nightmarish street scene of murder. Early in the story, as Ida suffers from a bout of insomnia during the dead of night, her mind turns to fantasies of “another life” for which, to her mind, she was truly made. As if her psyche were a movie screen, she first pictures herself in diverse settings, dressed in exquisite finery and always attracting the gaze of spectators: in a fashionable salon, Valentino graces her body; at a premiere, she is adorned by reams and reams of black lace so voluminous that her dress fills the entire box seat; in winter, she luxuriates in a long fur outfit with a train, ready to have women friends to tea, an event creating such a stir that police have to disperse the crowd of curious onlookers in the street. The final sequences elucidate the meaning fashionable attire has as a signifier of the socioeconomic power that Ida desires. Her collection of apparel, she imagines, is destined for a museum, that arbiter of elite aesthetic value, which will exhibit the pieces for public viewing and preserve them for history. She fantasizes the highlights of her life story, to be preserved in a spectacular film, as she says, “a fairy tale for our times, from country woman to middle-class lady ... she conquers the heart of a banking magnate. She gets involved in the business, now she’s the one who runs the show. Thanks to her talents, the business’ fortune multiplied” (24–5). Although self-aggrandizing and driven by crude materialism, the desires articulated in this fantasy and the means of achieving them have no hint of the illicit. In contrast to the urban dreamscapes building up to Ida’s stellar rise to fortune, which make no reference to specific landmarks or places in Palermo, sites particularizing the geographic city inform the following wishful fantasy, in which Ida’s scenarios produce the imaginary metropolis through mafia practices of space. As she pages through a

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women’s magazine featuring current events, culture, and fashion, her eyes light on the article “Living in Palermo.” Accompanied by a photo layout picturing the Politeama Theater, the nearby beach-town resort of Mondello, and neighbourhood festivals, the reportage offers insider information on the best places to shop and dine, and the urban renewal projects underway in the downtown. But what captures Ida’s imagination are the financial aspects of Palermo, which, she concludes, “is a rich city and money is circulating, the city with the highest sales of high-­horsepower cars. The stores are more luxurious than Milan’s” (Pickering-Iazzi, Mafia and Outlaw Stories, 108). Furthermore, as she recalls reading, in Palermo rags-to-riches stories are possible; in a matter of a day “a butcher turns up buying an entire building for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lire” (108). This example subtly alludes to mafia business associations and codes, omertà in particular, for as Ida notes, when such stories become public knowledge the people “meet a bad end,” and in other cases silence is guaranteed. As Crisantino portrays the character’s thoughts drifting further into her desires and devices to fulfil them, she creates a daydream that intermingles fantasy, rational reflection, and historical references with mafia operations. The various enterprises considered in order to make a rich living in Palermo are typical of the criminal association’s lucrative activities: robbery; loan sharking, which requires a person commanding respect; blackmail; selling heroine or becoming a drug courier. Among these crimes, blackmail appeals strongly to Ida’s imagination. As the discursive register shifts to fantasy, she casts herself as blackmailer. “I’d be great!” she exclaims (109), in a scenario supplemented by scenes from American movies. In contrast, she does not picture herself as courier while considering the drug trade, a reference that introduces the important issue of how women figure in the socioeconomic territories of Palermo, produced in part by the mafia’s hegemonic control over illegal activities ranging from the pizzo (the extortion of protection money) to kidnapping. In fact, in the 1980s certain middle-aged housewives living in the poorer neighbourhoods of the city became involved in the entrepreneurial activities of the mafia, working as couriers who transported heroine by plane from Palermo to New York. As Renate Siebert explains in Secrets of Life and Death, most of the women had no criminal record and were not personally related to mafiosi through marriage or birth. Their motivation was economic. Weaving elements of fact into her fiction, Crisantino alludes to their fate in Ida’s concluding thoughts. To be a courier is “stuff for the real down-and-outs. All those

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housewives who ended up in the newspapers. You couldn’t say they got rich” (Mafia and Outlaw Stories, 109). Ultimately, she rejects the idea on the grounds of her social standing as well as fear of bringing shame and dishonour on her family, by breaking the rules of propriety in the neighbourhood. Here, as in her reasoned analysis of the risks and benefits presented by investing money in trafficking, what is striking is the absence of moral considerations or a sense of civil law, the rules ideally enabling citizens to live together in the city. Indeed, from Ida’s perspective, making an investment in trafficking would be perfect, due to the incredible profits. The final images of Palermo mounted on the stage of Ida’s psyche are not the creative product of a waking dream, but a nightmare that brilliantly elucidates the dynamic interacting between elements of the material city and psychic forces. They highlight as well the part played by the criminal in the spatial production of the metropolis as an alienating power. As Ida yields to a restless sleep, the subsequent mise-­en-scène and scenario incorporate certain sights and senses that reappear with a vengeance following her actual attempt to write her fantasy of making a fortune in trafficking onto the urban text of daily life produced by mafia relations. First among these significant details is the character’s manner of walking. In the earlier sequence, having capitalized upon her schoolgirl friendship with Mariannina, whose brother was reputedly involved with the mafia before his murder, Ida traverses the city in order to make a transaction with the widow, Maria Righi. For the first time, readers see the would-be criminal break her rules of propriety, as trepidation and fearful anxiety make her steps harried and unsure, conveying an altered relation to Palermo, where she had always felt at ease.11 Furthermore, built and transient features of the metropolis seem antagonistic. For instance, although she tries to walk on the sidewalk, “often a car was parked crooked, forcing her to step down onto the street, and go around heaps of garbage and holes dug because of the constant repairs to the underground pipes, which made ‘to circulate’ a word with no sense. So she walked on the asphalt that emanated waves of heat, in the middle of exhaust fumes puffing at her legs” (188). Filtered through Ida’s anxiety, everyday city street phenomena appear as obstacles hindering her movements and creating a sense of hostility that radically intensifies in her nightmare. In the suspenseful dream sequence, Crisantino portrays Ida’s return home from the successful meeting with the mafioso’s widow, expressing the changes in subjectivity and in her relations to the law, to the

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city, and to its citizens through a decidedly spatial imagination. As she “relives” her walk home, Ida’s specular body again moves in a harrowing fashion. However, as an agent of crime her uncertain steps now bear the burden of growing fears and anxiety about getting away with the kilo of gold jewellery acquired in her illicit dealings, and guilt. These psychological and emotional forces transform her imaginary images of Palermo, which is now “a maze of crossroads that are all the same, she is walking haphazardly inside the labyrinth, she has lost her bearings. Long, narrow streets that never end, clothes hanging out to dry everywhere” (240). Playing upon the double meaning of “bearings,” the author suggests that Ida has lost her sense of direction in both geographic and moral terms. Moreover, in the horrific scenario that follows both people and space seem to conspire against her, indicating signs of deepening guilt. The women that Ida saw during her prior walk through the neighbourhood of the mafioso’s widow reappear, sitting again in their doorways, but they do not sew or chat as they did before. They sit still, only their eyes moving to follow her. The men who had been playing cards are also now motionless, their eyes upon her. Although Ida sees the neighbours watching her on the way to the earlier meeting, here the sensation intensifies, culminating in a feeling of entrapment: “They seem to be waiting for her, everybody is watching her, a spider’s web that is closing in around her” (240). As she sees herself frantically search for a way to escape, the spaces between homes and walls also close in on her. It is noteworthy that the horror of these sights derives, in part, from the absence of common city activities and sounds, creating a “frightening silence” (241) from Ida’s perspective. Hence, when she arrives at an outdoor market and hears the confused chatter of everyday life, she feels safe. Ultimately, however, subconscious guilt erupts in scenes of judgment and punishment. Throughout the fragmented episodes of the criminal’s nightmare journey home, children appear in various roles, as part of the landscape, as accusers, and as deliverers of a violent justice. For example, trying to escape, Ida carefully climbs over children’s bodies “lying on straw mattresses ... and is afraid of stepping on them” (241). She makes use of a worn-out baby carriage as a prop, attempting to draw protection from social ideas and behaviours associated with the maternal, feminine image. But groups of children follow her threateningly, their unnatural silence finally broken by a boy who, as if passing sentence, yells, “You have our gold, you have our gold” (242). The twists and wends of Ida’s efforts to evade the children and growing crowd

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culminate in a dramatic scene of attempted restitution and death, in which sensorial dimensions of the dreamed and geographic cities intermingle. Confronted by a group of small children who are armed, she tells them to take the gold. But as she opens her purse, a boy shoots her, and she watches herself die, thinking how terrible it is. The banging noise of shots continues in her psychic space and in the streets beyond her home, thus haunting her first moments of wakefulness. Although the nightmarish Palermo of her psyche seems to dissipate with consciousness, its lingering effects on her perceptual experiences of the city manifest in the final scene, discussed below. The field of ideas that Crisantino creates while crafting the imaginary Palermos looming in don Pino’s mind’s eye also foregrounds the mafia in diverse citytexts of his making. However, shifting the focus from explicit crimes, the author directs the reader’s attention to the roles played in the production of the urban criminal geography by relations between white collar workers in Italian political and institutional offices and the mafia, a subject of increasing scrutiny in recent studies. Lirio Abbate, for example, whose investigative reporting on the mafia in published articles and his book I complici has drawn attempts on his life, underscores the importance of the “colletti bianchi” (white collar workers) “armed with pens” (Storie di resistenza quotidiana) for the continued strengthening of the mafia and its collusive relationships with the Italian state. Like many of these living counterparts, don Pino is not a mafioso. Nor does he deal in drugs or stolen goods. Rather, he traffics in information that he receives through a network of “friends” who work with him in the Assessorato, a category of public offices akin to the Council Clerk’s office at the local level. He in turn passes on the information to his “friend,” mafia boss don Vito Pispisa. What interests me most are the beliefs, reflections, fantasies, and illusions informing the ways in which don Pino imagines Palermo and his relationship with the mafioso, and the resultant social activities that generate diverse citytexts. The fragmented episodes articulating don Pino’s perceptions suggest that the small town origins he shares with don Vito have crucial importance for his sense of the city as well as his acts of so-called friendship that organize criminal structures of urban privilege and oppression. Both characters moved to Palermo during the occupation of Sicily by American troops, due to circumstances that, though unspecified, were likely related to the mafioso’s expansion of business in the city’s black market, where he made a fortune and a name for himself as mafia boss.

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In don Pino’s case, however, geographic and class origins form primary terms for his sense of self and city, and both frustrate the fulfilment of his desires for peace and pleasure. This idea is exemplified as he walks along the streets, returning home from don Vito’s house: “He passed in front of the stores, looked around, and where he would have liked to let at least his eyes indulge in that abundance of colors and shapes, his distrust as a peasant who has become old far away from the land would not let him” (38). The character’s distrust is not purely a static byproduct of city life. Rather, the author suggests it stems from both the particular traits of the peasant and the effects of the city that “fermented what was his own natural character” (38). Cast in the shadow of distrust, the Palermo staged in his imagination is ruled by illusion and deception, projected onto his perceptual engagements with urban sights and dwellers, as illustrated by his reflections on the lush displays of fruits and vegetables. For don Pino, produce stands and markets, a commonplace in Palermo neighbourhoods that suggests the literal daily nourishment of citizens and the symbolic sustenance of the metropolis, break the laws of natural rhythms, of seasons and life, for they offer up what should be seasonal crops every day of the year. The unnaturalness of the supply of nourishment is also manifested in the gap between appearance and reality, as epitomized by don Pino’s contemplations on the eggplant. Gazing at the tantalizing appearance of the fruit’s taut, shiny, deep purple skin, he is certain it hides only mushy pulp within. The profound hostility defining his situatedness in the city and the spaces thereby produced takes on life-threatening overtones in the imagery employed as he passes judgment on Palermo in lapidary fashion, thinking, “Here everything was poison, fruit plumped up to the verge of exploding, food that is fake like everything in that city” (38). In fact, whatever nourishment don Pino has in the metropolis seemingly fails to sustain him. As Olga notes, the signs of the young man she married, slender and tan from country life, have been supplanted by a flabby body and yellowish skin. A markedly different cartography of Palermo arises from the depiction of the activities to which don Pino is privy in the Council Clerk’s office, charting the sites and mechanisms generating a geography of mafia power. The setting is critical for understanding the ways in which criminal and lawful spaces may be produced, as Soja illustrates in Seeking Spatial Justice. In his analysis of scales and modes for producing unjust urban geographies, he explains that city administrations

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perform key roles in the organization of space by allocating permits, contracts, and economic support, for instance. Such functions then determine zones of accessibility and inaccessibility to myriad resources necessary to daily living, such as work, housing, transportation, and medical services. In the specific context of Italy, the potential for profit and power located in city and regional administrations has made them strongholds of mafia activity throughout the nation, aimed at securing construction permits and all forms of city contracts ranging from tax collection to street cleaning. Crisantino’s fictional delineation of the centre of local public and political power in Palermo trains the eye on the innermost workings of figures and activities affiliated with don Pino, as the mafia boss’s intermediary, and evocatively renders the ambiance, moods, and rhythms they create. As the narrator reveals, the circle of friends employed in the Council Clerk’s offices comprises individuals occupying different rungs in the institutional hierarchy, yet are all bound to don Vito Pispisa by their provenance from the same town and its environs, and by gratefulness. Providing no particularizing traits, physical or otherwise, the author focuses on their forms of acknowledgment, movements, and notion of friendship, conceived as a system of mutual assistance. Indeed, there is a flow of comings and goings around the office of don Pino, who welcomes his colleagues inside and then habitually checks the hallway, suggesting the furtive atmosphere. As gestures of gratitude and friendship towards the mafioso don Vito, the co-workers feed don Pino confidential information from their respective departments, including news that might be useful for personal gain or to thwart the interests of outsiders. In the following description of the insiders’ movements and demeanor, Crisantino conveys the guise that shields the illicit flow of information: “They would just happen to stop by his office, to hear what was in the air and talk over a few ideas with an older colleague who was an expert, something that did not break any regulations and did not compromise anyone. As they left, they asked him a favor, mere trifles among people from the same town who put great store in not forgetting their friends” (Pickering-Iazzi, Mafia and Outlaw Stories, 102). The artful couching of the encounters as commonplace also imbues them with an air of complicit participation in wrongdoing, which becomes clear in the episodes devoted to don Pino’s recounting of the information to the mafia boss. From the raw materials supplied by fellow workers, don Pino creates yet another citytext of Palermo, in this case serving the designs of criminal spaces conceived to augment the mafioso’s power and prestige.

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In a large journal, he records the essence of the conversations at work, noting the people, plans, business deals, and developments in Palermo. The exchanges between don Pino and don Vito explicate the value of the inside stories of urban planning narrated by the bureaucrat, as well as the mafioso’s skills of interpretation. From don Pino’s point of view, don Vito “had proved himself to be a master at tying together threads, acquaintances, and pieces of information that, at first glance, seemed so far removed ... Sometimes it just so happened later that from his reserve of the most disparate, scattered bits of news, memories of things were pulled out that were useful for jamming up one person or intimidating someone else” (Pickering-Iazzi, Mafia and Outlaw Stories, 104). Crisantino’s use of the word “reserve” is suggestive, for it implies the information has value as currency kept on hand for a variety of enterprises that create structures of oppression, an “artfully woven web of favours and blackmail” (104), which restricts lives and livelihoods in the city. Her description of don Vito’s activities also highlights how the mafia and like criminal organizations such as the camorra create a market for what Paolo Macry terms “fake goods,” brokering public services that should be free, in an entirely rational manner serving their self-interests (“The Southern Metropolis”). The beliefs, values, and practices attributed to don Pino elucidate elements with which the mafia boss’s apparatus of spatial production is made and, conversely, can also lead to its unmaking, as illustrated by intriguing fantasy sequences that the city functionary writes onto the urban landscape. Two plot developments shatter the character’s perception of his relationship with the mafioso as one of mutual loyalty, respect, and friendship that serves both their interests. Most important, though he has served don Vito faithfully for some thirty years, the first favour he asks for, a job for his daughter, is deemed too insignificant to warrant the mafioso’s intervention. And disingenuously to be sure, he realizes that visits to don Vito entail “exposing oneself” before the eyes of the law, when his department superior asks him to deliver a letter because he cannot run the risk. The transformation in consciousness that foregrounds the fantasy scenes unfolds in spatial terms. As don Pino walks down the street to meet with don Vito, he churns over in his mind the mafioso’s failure to uphold his part of the friendship, and upon arriving at his house thinks they are not friends, but enemies. Likewise, the story of vendetta for the betrayal of their so-called friendship is enacted simultaneously in the spaces of the city and his imagination, interwoven with elements of the war films he obsessively watches on the television.

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The fantasy scenarios that don Pino plays out in the streets along his route to the office are significant for what they reveal about mafia ways of thinking and acting embedded in the character’s psyche, and that inform the sense of place in the metropolis. Reworking the plots and scenes from war movies viewed the night before, he adapts them to perform imagined scenes of mortal combat in which he kills off don Vito. The features of the war film genre filtered through his spectatorial gaze bear comment. In general such films tell stories of wars fought in the name of country and its real or desired territories, ideals, culture, and traditions, issues pertaining to don Pino’s perception of his own conflict. Furthermore, don Pino’s scripts play out according to a Manichean scheme opposing hero and villain, good and evil, in which the aging bureaucrat accomplishes the heroic feat of killing don Vito. Crisantino’s representation of don Pino’s thoughts and actions clearly suggests they derive from mafia beliefs, codes, and practices. In this respect, he stands in stark contrast to the protagonist in Mirella Lentini’s novel Elegia di un assessore pentito. In that mournful narrative, a corrupt lawyer employed as council clerk undergoes a redemptive transformation, foreswearing his complicit relations with the mafia in public works and, moreover, committing himself to aiding victims of tragic injustices. Don Pino exhibits no such changes. On the contrary, he conceives of the murder as a vendetta to restore his own honour as husband and father. And, as readers see in an imagined court sequence, don Pino targets don Vito not because he is a mafioso, but because he does not perform the role of mafia boss to perfection, and fails to uphold fundamental principles of the idealized code, specifically trust and friendship. As he explains to the judges, “For a man of honour trust is everything” (165) and friendship is “another sacred cause” (166). Elaborating this point, he insists that trust and friendship are also indispensable for being a man, a belief that sheds light on a graphically detailed murder fantasy in which landscape also plays a part. As don Pino sits at the steering wheel of his car in the garage below the building where he lives, he imagines don Vito walking down the ramp from the street: He was in the middle, exactly half-way down. He would have hit him with tremendous joy, run over him, and ground up his arthritic carcass, running the car back and forth until he was just like one of those dogs killed on the highways. In the end, there’s only a shapeless mass squashed flat on the asphalt, nobody can tell anymore what it was. Maybe a dog, a

The Mafia and the (Non)sense of Place  87  cat, or a bag of garbage? Taking a close look, there are still some clothes. Could that thing ground entirely into the cement have been a man? (216)

Blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality, both don Pino’s specular and physical bodies go through the motions of driving his car back and forth in the garage, as if actually reducing don Vito to formless matter, which brings to mind the mafia conception of existence prior to becoming a made member of the organization. As Girolamo Lo Verso notes, before being a mafioso, one is “nuddu ammiscatu cu nenti, no one mixed with nothing” (“Per uno studio,” 28). Don Pino transforms his imaginary Palermo into a site of crime and death, making don Vito part of the urban landscape. However, the fantasy does little to fulfil his desire to obliterate the mafioso. Providing further evidence of the mafia within don Pino – what Rita Atria called entrenched thoughts and behaviours that derive from mafia culture and structure social relations12 – the character ruminates on ways to actually carry out the vendetta, or at least devise a criminal scheme to profit from the information recorded in his journal. Geographies of (In)justice: Ethics, Trauma, and Memory Urban “reality” is not single but multiple ... inside the city there is always another city. Iain Chambers, Popular Culture, 183

Further complicating the legibility of Palermo’s sense of place, Crisantino crafts contrasting citytexts written onto the urban landscape by three characters whom Armando encounters during his search for enigmas that defy rational laws and make Palermo a non-sense city: Mario, a university student, employed at his father’s bar L’americano; Paolo, a fifteen-year-old boy who gives an oral interview to the researcher; and the elderly carriage driver. Focusing on the characters’ distinct performances of self and spatial practices, which in turn compose spaces, I propose that their city stories articulate senses of Palermo that express facets of what Santino calls “a new social citizenship” (“Introduzione,” 17), a microgeographical phenomenon he charts in certain neighbourhoods in the Palermo metropolis. The traces of this new form of affiliation with the city mapped onto Crisantino’s fictional spaces of Palermo include the values of education, private enterprise, and work; lawful, antimafia ways of thinking and acting; and propriety as an ethics of

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social relations. The Palermos imagined and produced by these three figures thus diverge markedly from those fabricated by Armando, don Pino, Olga, and Ida Benelli. Several other differences, which bear on the characters’ relationships to the city, are worth noting. Paolo, Mario, and the carriage driver represent the working class, and have longstanding ties to the city. The driver, for instance, demonstrates a knowledge of Palermo’s history and inner workings gleaned through over sixty years of guiding visitors through its streets. Mario and Paolo, representing the younger generation and the future, were both born in Palermo. However, Paolo spent three years of his childhood in Germany, while his father worked in a factory there. Moreover, in contrast to the characters whose relations to the city are marked by hostile disassociation or criminal designs, the carriage driver, Paolo, and Mario articulate attitudes, dreams, sentiments, and customs that create meaningful bonds with Palermo as well as transformative senses of place. The features characterizing the signature that Mario writes onto Palermo with mind and body comprise civic pride, tolerance towards differences, propriety, as well as the ideal and practice of lawful enterprise. The author represents these components of subjectivity not by taking readers directly inside the character’s fantasies, but through dialogue and narratorial comment in three key episodes portraying Mario’s encounters with Armando. The earlier two of these occur inside the neighbourhood bar L’americano, and illustrate Mario’s tolerance of Armando’s breach of common codes of etiquette governing exchanges between customers and workers. To the researcher’s probing questions about the bar’s profits and whether his father made pizzas while working in America, the young Palermitan gives measured responses.13 And as he proudly explains market conditions and the extraordinary skills of his father, who owns the establishment and makes unique flavors of ice cream, he articulates the elements of microentrepreneurial subjectivity. This concept has important implications for socioeconomic relations and thus the spatial production of Palermo. As Mario tells Armando, “There are certain specialties only he makes. You can eat good ice-cream all over the city. So if you want to really sell it, you have to try to make the best in the area. A simple system. If it were like that for everything this would be a happy island” (173). This elucidation of the laws of free enterprise envisions a form of spatial justice, in part through equal access to modes of production, services, and consumption. In this regard, it implicitly critiques systems of clientelism, patronage, and the mafia, which fetter such access, as in the network of

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favours and blackmail constructed by don Vito and his circle of friends. Yet the desire that Mario voices pertains not only to the material economy of goods and services; it concerns the island’s psychological and emotional economies as well. He wishes that “everything” would operate according to the principle of striving to do one’s best, thus altering the terms of identity, practices, and relations in the personal and social spheres, which would transform Sicily, and hence the city within it, into a space of happiness, the highest condition of well-being. During the final encounter between Mario and Armando, the young man authors a literal and metaphoric citystory that creates Palermo’s sense of place through its particular history, traditions, culture, and manners, fostering spaces of festive sociability between inhabitants and visitors, however fleeting. Mario writes his story of Palermo during the city festival honouring Santa Rosalia on 15 July, as he takes Armando on a tour. The destinations he selects for the itinerary do not include the new city, the northern zone of Palermo. Instead, Mario guides the researcher down Corso Vittorio Emanuele to the historic centre of the working classes, and ultimately, as he says, to the famous market painted by Guttuso, the Vucciria. Adorned for the celebration, the face of the city boasts banners, decorated carts, stages for puppet shows and street musicians, and stands displaying wares and foods, which are punctuated by Mario’s comments on history and customs. Following a random encounter with a street vendor selling briscola cards, for instance, Mario explains the figures and game to Armando, assuring him that the use of a briscola card to threaten someone is not among Sicilian traditions. Moreover, the journey linking place to place in the celebrating city also links guide and visitor in a sense of fellowship. Drawing attention to the sights, the narrator comments, “They encountered stilt walkers, Sicilian carts, flag throwers, the historical parade with representatives of the guilds, fire eaters, in short, they were in the middle of a huge country fair. For a while they felt almost like friends” (220). The experiences of the lived festive city seem to create a bridge between the Palermitan insider and the Turinese outsider, and the respective differences – social, intellectual, and cultural – that situate them in relation to the city. However, Crisantino immediately draws attention to the embeddedness of the mafia in the northerner’s imaginary Palermo and the limits it imposes on relations with the city and its inhabitants, for out of the blue Armando asks Mario if he has ever met any mafiosi. The young man’s response, expressed through language and body, directly calls into question Armando’s exoticization of

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Palermo, which makes city and citizens the objects of vision determined by the criminal as the defining term of difference. He answers, “We’ve all met one. You give the impression of someone who has just arrived in an exotic land” (220). This description of the impression projected by Armando indicates both the process of objectification and the distance created between self and other, registered first on Mario’s body when he stiffens at the mention of mafiosi, and then when the sense of intimacy vanishes. The final stages of Mario’s city tour spotlight heterogeneous aspects such as excess and moderation, deviation and propriety, the latter of which involves laws of place and sociosymbolic placement in the urban text, and thus constructs a different vantage point for viewing Palermo. The setting, the Vucciria market, invites such contrasts due to its particular features as well as those generally constituting spatial and social relations of the market, versus for example the supermarket. Most pertinent differences between markets and supermarkets are the organization of space, which in the case of markets may not follow rational design, since produce stands may intermingle with dairy or dry goods stalls; the festive atmosphere that borders on the carnevalesque; and the unpredictability of social encounters among vendors hawking their products and customers. As Pierre Mayol explains, “Markets are places in which the social environment is barely controllable because of the extreme complexity of the random relationships that overlap there” (The Practice of Everyday Life, 2.29). Markets also bear particular traits, exhibited and imagined. The Vucciria, recognized as one of Europe’s great markets, is renowned for its abundance: crowds of shoppers, all variety of fruits and vegetables, fish fresh from the sea, meats, and so forth. What strikes Armando is the intensity of the sensorial stimuli. Entering the market, he thinks, is “like being immersed in another element, another planet. He was dazed by the shouting, by the extremely bright colors, by the smells. He kept looking at Mario’s head in front of him, afraid that the crowd might pull him along between little streets and shops, unable to resist” (221). While confirming Mario’s observation on Armando’s predisposition to regard Palermo solely in terms of foreignness, Crisantino also injects a sense of irony: Armando’s doctoral thesis examined customer purchases in shopping centres, and thus the marketplace would present reasonably familiar ground – yet the Vucciria appears unreadable to him. Moreover, the image of being swept away by the crowd, senses overcome and with no power to act on his own volition, resonates

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with the familiar discursive construction of Sicily as an intoxicating land associated with irrational forces. Mario’s comments following the scene played out at the Vucciria differ from Armando’s less in the extremes registered than in the position he adopts towards them. After crossing the border between the Vucciria and the city beyond, Mario tells Armando, “Here everything is like this ... Beauty and other things. Everything in excess, the good and the bad” (221). Echoing Armando’s thoughts, Mario appears to present the excess visible at the market in metonymic fashion, as a property of the city, and thus the human activities creating it. However, when the itinerant observer overindulges by drinking too much wine and becomes literally inebriated, it is due not to the city’s influence but to boredom with his guide’s stories about the festival and historical traditions. Furthermore, readers discover that in the face of the extreme poles of behaviour, of good and bad, Mario fashions a middle course. He drinks in moderation and, as seen in his exchanges with Armando, adheres to laws of propriety governing the performance of self in public spaces. Such codes of behaviour are expressed in myriad ways, through the body, gestures, dress, speech, and manners of everyday living, and perform important sociospatial functions. For example, they serve to link urban inhabitants to each other and to spaces of different scales, ranging from one’s residence and the neighbourhood to the outreaches of the metropolis. They may also function in an exclusionary sense, as a measure of difference between insider and outsider, social partner or rebel, as in Ida Benelli’s case. The doorman in Ida’s building sees her as a disruptive element, due to her manner of dress and constant comings and goings, which are in his eyes inappropriate for a woman, and especially one of her age. In contrast, Mario practises arts of propriety in his encounters with customers, neighbours, and Armando, even resisting impulses and desires. Although he abhors drunks and wishes he could abandon the inebriated Armando on the spot, Mario pays the cook to watch over him while he retrieves the Vespa to take him home. Such behaviour elucidates the ethical dimension of the character, informing the sense of place thereby created, which should not be taken as anomalous. Explaining the relation of propriety to the field of the symbolic, Mayol argues that the latter “is ‘equivalently’ that of the ‘cultural rule,’ of the internal regulation of behaviours as the effect of a heritage (emotional, political, economic, etc.) that overruns from all sides the subject implanted hic et nunc in the behaviour that allows him or her to be located on the

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social surface of the neighbourhood” (The Practice of Everyday Life, 2.18). Hence, through propriety, Mario’s story of Palermo particularizes laws of local customs and manners as expressions of his social identity in affiliation to collective life, refabricating sociospatial relations in terms of civil responsibility. The rules of appropriate social conduct also appear with particular force in the images of Palermo delineated in Paolo’s narration, due in part to their civil functions in a microgeography of injustice formed by agents of both mafia law and state law, which deny freedoms of everyday living, of movement and play, for instance. Several other features differentiate this character’s urban text. Most important, Palermo is conjured through the eyes of a young adolescent and his childhood memories, which Crisantino represents as a form of eyewitness testimony given in an oral interview. Framed by a description of the setting in Armando’s rented apartment late in the evening, the beginning of Paolo’s city narration is visually set off from the accompanying text and bears the title “Paolo’s Story” (156). Following the general order of topics suggested by Armando, the boy first shares information about himself and his family, which clearly foregrounds the foundational role of “educazione,” the development of intellectual and moral qualities of proper behaviour, in his formation of self and relations to the city and its inhabitants. This heritage is transmitted to Paolo through the value his father places on education at school and on taking the right path in life. In fact, as Paolo explains, his father breaks off all relations with his part of the family precisely because, in his son’s words, he thinks that “they’re a bad example, they can lead us down the wrong path” (157). As if responding to a cue for an example, Paolo recalls an incident that prompted the break, and, moreover, illustrates the father’s intolerance of any infraction of the laws governing civil society. While running his usual card gambling operation, in full view of the police, an uncle, Gerlando, taught Paolo the game. When his father discovers this he cuts off all contact with his blood relatives. Thus, Crisantino textualizes a forceful example of the practice of spaccatura in everyday life, the clean break of all relations with individuals or companies that have proven or apparent links with criminal activities, which such antimafia figures as Giovanni Falcone and Leoluca Orlando made widely known.14 While evidencing the internalization of his father’s moral sense, the story that Paolo tells about the sights and lived experiences of the neighbourhood charts degrading conditions of the material landscape and of the norms of civil life. In fact, in “Paolo’s Story” Crisantino

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introduces the important subject of children who are victims of various forms of psychological and physical violence in territories structured in part by the mafia. From the boy’s perspective, drug trafficking is the worst problem of daily life. Providing a view of the underbelly of the mafia controlled “business” that Ida fantasizes, Paolo creates images of the streets dotted with used syringes and people who are high or dead from an overdose with the needle dangling from their bodies. His critical remarks on such sights, and the dealers who “are always buzzing around here like flies on sugar” (160), demonstrate his ideal of civil conduct and concern for fellow neighbours. He tells Armando that due to the moral and physical dangers posed, his father and other families with children want to move out of the neighbourhood, driven largely by fear. In a related anecdote, the author suggests that Paolo’s geographic placement in the neighbourhood makes him a victim of the mafia controlling the drug traffic and the conditions it creates, and, collaterally, also a victim of the agents of state law. To combat the drug trade in the area around his home, the police conduct random searches. As readers see in the chilling scene that follows, agents upholding civil law do not spare children its full force. Rather, the author suggests, since they perceive the activities in the neighbourhood as criminal, the children are suspect, their bodies criminalized too. Explaining the details of what he experienced during a random body search, Paolo vividly recalls: They said “put your hands up” and I immediately put them up, good as can be, my face all meek, cus you can never know, they can get nervous ... and then, it’s not like it’s a nice thing. They come with submachine guns and they point it here at your head, one time one of them even put it right against my skin and I felt the cold barrel, and I started to sweat. (158)

Indicating that Paolo has mastered tactics of living in the battle zone of his neighbourhood, his initial response to police commands deploys the body to perform obedience and compliance. As he shifts focus to the police officer’s actions, he re-enacts the experience through gestures and sensations, suggesting the enduring traces of profound fear and violence to which he is subjected at the hands of the law. Thus, the forces of civil order transform streets and piazzas into hostile, unpredictable spaces, as further illustrated by Paolo’s remarks on the officers cutting open the children’s soccer balls during their games. It is true that children twelve years old and sometimes younger become instrumentalized by

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the mafia to run drugs or even commit murder. But what Crisantino’s portrait suggests is the spatialized criminalization of children, producing their bodies as indiscriminately suspect. Thus the battle over urban territories fought between agents of the law and those of the mafia denies children access to city spaces to play freely and feel safe, and robs them of their childhood. The position of Paolo, vulnerably poised between antagonistic criminal and lawful forces, is particularly important for understanding his recollection of what he saw as an eyewitness to a mafia murder and of its aftermath. Here, as throughout the boy’s oral account, the word “mafia” is never spoken. In this case, a Palermo street is unexpectedly transformed from a site for playing soccer into a scene of horrific crime and trauma. As Paolo tells Armando, when the ball rolled into the street, he and his friends saw two motorcycles, one in front of a car, blocking its way, and the other behind, from which they sprayed gunfire into the stopped vehicle. The children all ran away, their initial fright at witnessing the murder compounded because the killers saw them. Later, Paolo learns the man killed was Pio La Torre. In contrast to the episode of the body search, narrated in the present perfect tense, here the adolescent uses the remote past tense, generally indicating that the events have no continuing relation to or effect on the speaker. In fact, several years have passed since he witnessed the murder. Scattered chronological signposts suggest the events in the novel take place in the late 1980s, and Pio La Torre, the Communist Party leader renowned for antimafia legislation, was assassinated in 1982, putting Paolo at about eight or nine years old at the time. The age of the fictional character is significant for two reasons. First, the episode raises the issue of childhood trauma caused by exposure to mafia acts of violence. As Lara Santoro argues, child witnesses of mafia crimes represent “absolute victims,” trapped in the ongoing trauma of sights and experiences of violence.15 Indeed, as Paolo sums up what it is like to live in his neighbourhood, the murder resurfaces in his mind and he confesses, “I still remember it sometimes” (160). In other words, his testimony bears witness to the lasting psychological and emotional effects of the traumatic memory, which the narration in the remote past and almost casual style seem to belie. It is also interesting that his recollection of two motorcycles differs from the historical reports, which place at the scene one motorcycle blocking the car and an automobile behind it, from which the gunmen shot La Torre and Rosario di Salvo. This discrepancy may function as an expression of traumatic memory,

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which often diverges from historical accounts, or it may suggest the story is a fabrication. In the latter case, the story may testify to the incorporation of Palermo’s violent criminal history into the image of the city playing out in Paolo’s psychic space. Paolo’s age at the time of witnessing the mafia murder also bears upon the account of his subsequent actions, which provide insights into the complex norms constituting sociospatial relations in the neighbourhood. From the questions that Paolo poses to Armando, as if in response to the latter’s interview questions, readers can surmise that the researcher wants to know if the boy went to the police and told them what he saw. What strikes me first is the way such questions criminalize the child victim, lacking any attempt on Armando’s part to imagine himself in the place of that victim. Furthermore, as seen in the boy’s lucid explanation of his rationale for not reporting what he saw to the police, fear and norms of conduct binding neighbours in collective life make such actions unthinkable. Paolo first clarifies that he saw nothing particular to help identify the shooters or their motorcycles. Thus, he argues, by going to the police he would only sentence himself to living the rest of his life in fear of reprisal, and would also place his family and friends in danger. As well, he would be labelled an informant, and no one would have anything to do with him or his family; they would become outcasts. His description reveals the entrenched role of omertà in the local social contract that governs living together with neighbours who may have no association with the criminal organization. It also enables an appreciation of Paolo’s difficult negotiations of conflicts between the conduct of propriety transmitted from his father, customary neighbourhood practices, and the codes of the mafia and the state. The dimensions of the city’s history evoked in Paolo’s eyewitness testimony to the La Torre murder are articulated in different fashions by the carriage driver’s innumerable fabrications of Palermo, enacted as he links the outreaches of city and time, calling forth ghosts of the past that are mapped onto the landscape. In the process, he builds upon sights of collective memory, ceaselessly recreating a fluid sense of place incorporating human reason, dignity, responsibility, and civil conduct. These elements emerge from Crisantino’s evocative representation of the driver, as well as the performative roles urban memories play in the images of the city and the sociospatial relations between present and future. Elucidating the complex ways in which memory works in the production of urban space and meaning, Marino Niola proposes

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that we should not understand memory only in terms of the past. For memory is also a presence constituting urban space and the sense, not always transparent, which this space assumes for people who inhabit it. This sense constitutes one of the visible manifestations of time’s action on places ... In other terms, memory appears like a signifying order that articulates time and space, making the latter a deep, synchronically and diachronically stratified reality, which extends simultaneously through many dimensions: present and past, structure and history, continuity and discontinuity, real and imaginary. (“Margini del tempo,” 174–5)

This notion of memory enables an interpretation of the complex temporal and spatial modalities informing the sense of the lived and imagined Palermos crafted through the driver’s self-styled itineraries. With the figure of the carriage driver, Crisantino opens up a treasure of metaphoric and historical connotations that bear upon the city texts of his making. Since ancient times, such conveyances as the chariot and carriage have served as metaphors for the journey of life and the hereafter or the quest, all of which pertain to Cercando Palermo. Readers embark on a quest for the city amidst the diverse fragmented images of Palermos projected by the characters onto the psychic space or geographic city, much as Armando does in the course of his investigation. The philosopher–carriage driver’s life quest, conceived in his words as a search for knowledge, is made up of innumerable discrete journeys, criss-crossing the city as a guide for tourists on their own travels. The carriage and carts also have importance in local Sicilian history. In the 1800s, Palermo was acclaimed for the exceptional art of its decorated carriages, some of which still dot the cityscape today. Carriages and the like also form a striking motif running through Crisantino’s fictional cityscapes. For example, while walking through the streets, Armando spies the carriage with the statue of Santa Rosalia, adorned for the celebratory procession through the city on the day of the festival. More important, the festival of Santa Rosalia coincides with the last day of an entire conference devoted to professions linked to the cart in Palermo during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A snippet from one of the papers, which Armando overhears, presented on the social and historical functions of the cart driver offers insights that are also useful for thinking about the carriage driver. Characterizing the historical figure as an “unsung hero,” the speaker presents him as the bearer of

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news and civilization, who stirs the people of Sicily to rise up against the oppressor. The comments refer to the context of the revolution against the Bourbons, yet the notion of the driver as a force of change and civilization dovetails with Crisantino’s characterization of the carriage driver. Indeed, Armando is inspired by the driver’s “contagious visionary power” (131). I also want to speculate that the clustering of the figure of the driver, the carriage, and philosophical ideas about knowledge, human conduct, and the city seems hauntingly familiar, and may call to mind Plato and his famous recasting of the allegory of the chariot in Phaedrus.16 Briefly, the philosopher likens the rational soul to a chariot driver who must use wisdom to handle two horses of different dispositions, one inclined towards truth and moderation and the other given to pride and all types of excess, in order for the chariot to proceed in the correct manner. Several points here cast critical light on Crisantino’s images of the carriage driver, as well as the ways in which he guides visitors on their journeys through the city. First, the Palermitan coachman might be seen as analogous to the chariot driver, the rational soul, and thus as aspiring to knowledge as a means to live in an upstanding manner. This existential principle is clearly demonstrated as the aged driver explains to Armando the motivation for his questions, stating, “When I ask a question, or interrogate a problem in my own mind, I’m only obeying a higher order, because the aim of man is to understand. Only by understanding the purpose of things can one behave correctly” (128). The driver articulates primary elements defining subjectivity and practices of everyday living that, given the interaction between psychic, social, and spatial relations, operate as a force of reason and civility moving through the cityscape. And by harking back to the ancient allegory, Crisantino artfully creates a twofold temporal turn, towards Sicily’s civic past that intertwined with the life and works of Plato, and towards the future, through its ongoing fictional inscription. As a product of reason, the carriage driver’s reflections on Palermo have a particular purchase on Armando’s thoughts, and also inflect the driver’s own position of enunciation as he takes visitors on journeys through sights of memory, creating a sense of place and space that signifies civil consciousness and practice. Among examples of the driver’s influence are the fragments from his exposition on the city markets, “the womb, the mysterious place from which everyone draws their nourishment” (130), which resurface in Armando’s reflections in various forms and ultimately lead to an epiphany. Convinced that the driver’s idea

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on production and supply is right, Armando thinks he makes sense of why Palermo is a non-sense city. Following a different trajectory, the itineraries that the carriage driver fashions for his “personal catalogue” all give a sense of the city’s “historic dignity” (132). Readers are left to imagine which squares, theatres, or monuments might be featured in the full range of his tours, since the author describes only one, his tour of “civil indignation” (131). He proposes this route because Armando, it appears, has a bearing of civility, perhaps implying the visitor could appreciate the sites’ significance. Yet the city guide provides the barest of details, stating, “I can take you where Costa, Dalla Chiesa and Chinnici were killed, they’re all within earshot from here. If we want to add La Torre, it’s fifteen thousand lire just for him, since that’s a good distance away. One can choose to ask for my commentary on the various sights or not. In either case, it doesn’t cost anything” (132). The driver’s narrow focus on destinations and prices clearly raises the issue of traumatic history as commodity, but I want to develop a different direction of interpretation for the listing of these fragmented sites in the city, unconnected by some sort of narrative story. In order to conduct the kind of archaeological project thus required, and construct a context for interpreting these signposts of “civil indignation” and what they might say about the driver’s production of Palermo as geographic and metaphoric city, the article “Scusi, dov’è finita la mafia?” by Fran­cesco La Licata is useful. In an examination of mafia strategies developed since 1992 to become imperceptible to the senses and facilitate collusive affairs with the state, La Licata presents several lines of thought about commemorative plaques, monuments, and street names in Palermo that honour the victims of mafia killings. Like Jane C. Schneider, La Licata conceives of the Palermo cityscape as a battleground of sign warfare between antimafia and mafia camps. For example, as walkers traverse the geographic city today, they may enter Via Mattarella, renamed in honour of Piersanti Mattarella, killed in 1980; they may spot the plaque in Via Carini placed in memory of General Dalla Chiesa, his wife, and his bodyguard, killed in 1982; some may view the Falcone tree, planted to memorialize Judge Giovanni Falcone, killed in 1992, or read the marker identifying the childhood home of Judge Paolo Borsellino, also killed in 1992. Such visible signs, La Licata argues, play especially important roles in Palermo in periods when there is no evidence of sights and sounds produced by mafia murders. The criminal organization’s conscious tactics of invisibility and silence lull collective memory of the mafia and the real dangers it poses, causing it to fade.

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In this context, the author proposes, “Palermo seems to be able to remember through the physicality of places” (94). Therefore, while paying tribute to the sacrifice of individuals who fought for civil justice against the criminal organization, the visual elements of antimafia discourse also call to memory the mafia presence as an industry of violence. La Licata concludes that after 1992, “The mafia exists ... only in the symbols and toponymy, which in this area is always tied to painful episodes in Sicilian history” (94). The social and symbolic operations the author attributes to the visual language of memory written onto the built city offer a pertinent framework for approaching Crisantino’s representation of the audiovisual itinerary proposed by the carriage driver. Due to the character of the places the philosopher guide shows to Armando and the route’s title, “the tour of civil indignation,” I suggest the driver’s remembering produces spaces in Palermo that enact not only the presence of the antimafia and mafia, but also an implicit claim to justice, thereby breaking the binary economy. The sights featured in the itinerary are places where each individual working to defeat the mafia died an especially traumatic, violent death at criminal hands. Crisantino does not employ the words “mafia” or “antimafia” in reference to either the victims or the killers. However, anyone with some knowledge of the city’s contemporary history would be able to recall Judge Costa, Chief Prosecutor Chinnici, and General Dalla Chiesa as figures of national stature engaged in antimafia operations. The author’s invocation of these tragic crime scenes invites an interpretation of the itinerary as a wound charted onto the landscape, a prominent line of thought advanced in commentary on the mafia, Palermo, and Italian national identity.17 According to this perspective, the wound marks the absence of justice, due to both the failure of state law to solve such crimes and punish the guilty, and the very impossibility of giving adequate redress to the dead. However, as Sergia Adamo observes in her insightful analysis of Italian narrations of justice, a full range of images of justice, often conflicting, exists. Working through Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the paradoxes adhering to the idea of justice and the dead forgotten, Adamo proposes that “justice can only be defined as a paradoxical giving of a voice to silence, as a demand deeply rooted in the limits of memory and in the need to articulate discourses of the past” (“The Voice of the Forgotten,” 40). Furthermore, resultant narratives constitute resistance, she argues, since they combat forgetting. Read in the key of Adamo’s insights, the carriage driver creates a multisensorial discourse, remembering through the physicality of

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movement and place, sound, and vision the geographical sites where historical individuals standing for truth, justice, and civil ideals were slain, their voices silenced. As suggested by the guide’s speaking position, evidenced by the tour’s name, the sites on the itinerary represent the sense, as feeling and meaning, of deep disdain produced in citizenry by an injustice. Therefore, the Palermos fabricated through each such journey are constituted by performative acts of civil consciousness, inscribing the silent absence of the victims, a presence of absence that Silvana La Spina also textualizes so compellingly in her 1992 novel L’ultimo treno da Catania. Such discourses of memory also voice resistance, and a call for justice on the part of the living that makes no appeal to the state or the laws it ostensibly upholds. Nor does that call for justice operate to maintain the bifurcated image of Palermo, split into antimafia and mafia territories. Rather, the work of memory, justice, and resistance is performed by the individual in the microsocial and spatial spheres. The particularities of such work are untold in Crisantino’s story, just as she forces readers to use their own memory, intellect, and fantasy to create the imaginary scenario played out by the carriage driver and Armando on the streets of Palermo. Apocalyptic Palermos This metropolis is not simply the final stage of a poignant narrative, of apocalypse and nostalgia, it is also the site of the ruins of previous orders in which diverse histories, languages, memories and traces continually entwine and recombine in the construction of new horizons. Iain Chambers, qtd. in Soja, Postmetropolis, 71

The imaginary Palermos made up of don Pino’s fantasies, desires, and fears, as well as those playing out on the psyches of Ida Benelli, Olga, and Armando, come crashing in on the characters in the final apocalyptic scenes of the novel, dominated by signs of urban destruction that, however, do not bring an end to the metropolis. Rather, they appear to foster possibilities for change harboured within, much like the traces of memory, propriety, civil consciousness, and resistance playing out in the metropolis in general. Crisantino’s staging of the cataclysmic scenes in Cercando Palermo is especially significant, for they take place, it appears, on the evening of 15 July, during “il festino,” a festival actually held every year in Palermo to honour and give thanks to Santa Rosalia, the city’s patron saint. According to popular legend, she saved

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residents from the plague in the 1600s. The author’s representation of this celebration thus calls upon ideas associated with the identity of Palermo and the history, legends, traditions, and culture informing the sense of place. Furthermore, the seasonal rhythm of the July festival links the city with past and future, continuity and change, as the celebration sets the occasion for transitory acts of affiliation and collective engagements with public spaces, streets, sidewalks, squares, and open markets. This idea is suggested in scattered scenes picturing crowds of residents and visitors partaking in various festivities, listening to music, watching puppet shows, or sampling special foods and wares on display. And during the spectacular show of pyrotechnic art, the windows in nearly all of the houses are dark, suggesting most everyone has emptied out into the streets to watch, with the exception of Ida, Olga, don Pino, and Armando, another sign of their disassociation from Palermo. The apocalyptic connotations of the novel’s final sequences, in terms of both catastrophic destruction and final judgment, are conveyed in diverse manners that underscore the forceful interplay between the characters’ imagined Palermos and their bodily, psychological, and social relations with the city. With imagery that appeals to the senses, Crisantino invests the fireworks scenes with ominous overtones, foreshadowed by Armando, who tells the carriage driver, “All this will come to a conclusion ... Every night in my bed I hear the trumpets announcing the Day of Judgment” (240). During the fireworks, he thinks the sky has a pernicious tint to it; in Ida’s eyes the sky appears red, with “fog the colour of blood” (244). The bursts of colour are accompanied by “violent noise,” which at one point seems like “one hundred blasts all together” (244) and shakes the very foundations of their building. The fragmentation of sounds and the lights in the sky is mirrored in the fragmented content and form of the narration, which shifts between the four main characters’ perceptions, also imbued with a sense of destruction and judgment. The imaginary Palermos staged in the minds of each of these characters all have some relation to the criminal, and function as the perceptual key for the different ways they experience the events of the geographic city. Thus, when the horrific blast of fireworks shatters the windows in buildings, raining shards of glass on the streets, a desperate Ida immediately thinks the children of her earlier nightmare have tracked her down and a swarm of them will come through the door at any moment. Olga, convinced thieves have bombed the building, fears they will steal everything. As the explosions

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of the fireworks intermingle with those of bombs dropping in a dozing don Pino’s dream of flying in a WWII fighter plane, he awakens, and in front of don Vito’s house yells for him to come out if he is a man. His attempt to carry out the vendetta is foiled when he is wounded, mortally it seems, by shards of falling glass, and exclaims, “They got me. All because of that damned journal” (246). Armando, certain the destruction is caused by a bomb, wonders if it is some sort of warning for him, or a civil war. The chaotic shattering of elements of the built and imagined Palermos, signified by the reflective surfaces of the broken glass and the diverse images mirrored in the psyche, might be read as signs indicating the city’s doom. However, Crisantino’s fragmented cartography also underscores traces of the ruins already in the process of transformation in the post-apocalyptic moment. As Armando waits for a taxi to take him to the airport, “an ephemeral rain of golden stars fell from the sky” (247). This imagery imbues Palermo’s new horizon with an air of calm, casting multiplicity, signified by the stars as celestial symbol, as a productive principle enriching the urban landscape. Furthermore, the author writes a new beginning into the story of the city and the search for Palermo. In an intertextual gesture to Leonardo Sciascia’s famous novel The Day of the Owl, Armando, like Captain Bellodi from northern Italy, will return to Sicily and again begin his search for Palermo. The contradictory, fluid fantasies, thoughts, and engagements making up the spatially and temporally fragmented urban imaginary in Cercando Palermo might lead readers to think the representation of the city suggests a total lack of a sense of place, both in terms of a sense of locality and reason. I would argue instead that Crisantino’s performative cartography of the various Palermos playing out in psychic and geographic spaces textualizes the intimate interaction between fantasies, desires, and fears, and the multiple discourses in the sciences, media, and arts that engage them in the production of sociospatial relations constituting the city, and thereby mark not a lack of sense, but a surfeit of conceivably infinite senses.18 Such excess of meanings shatters the binary economy of the mafia and antimafia undergirding dominant images of the Sicilian metropolis. The author makes this interplay the object of scrutiny, and thus implicitly calls for a deeper understanding of how canonical texts in such discursive fields may be implicated in the production of the very criminal predispositions and behaviours they claim to record, as provocatively illustrated by Armando’s investigatory gaze. The variable, dynamic, and contradictory features of Crisantino’s

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postmodern mappings of Palermo resist quantifiable analysis and monolithic classifications such as Mafiopolis or Parasitopolis. It is precisely the excess, antitheses, and unpredictability of the citytext, what cannot be contained by laws of rationality, or those of the state and mafia for that matter, that form the never-ending senses of place articulated through the diverse dimensions of the characters’ itineraries. Crisantino’s story of Palermo thus makes a unique contribution to the important literary current created by such authors as Vincenzo Consolo and Gesualdo Bufalino who, as Robert Dombroski argues, foreground “empirical variation, randomness, and ambiguity as the deep structures of a cultural system” in Sicily (“Re-writing Sicily,” 262), which operate in complex, productive ways. Indeed, in a democratizing gesture that challenges hierarchies of power through richly designed images of the urban text, Crisantino makes it incumbent upon the individual reader to make her or his own sense of the myriad possibilities for imagining, fabricating, and transforming Palermo.

3 Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Postmodern Geography of Impegno: Mafia Urban Desertification in Canto al deserto: Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia

There’s everything in this photo: the story of Tina and the story of Gela. But the one is the story of the other, and together they form the story of Sicilian unhappiness. Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Canto al deserto, 232

Although Palermo looms large on the cultural imaginary dominated by the mafia, since the 1980s Italian novelists have substantially expanded the geography of urban mafia stories beyond the boundaries of that metropolis, setting their crime narratives in cities as diverse as Messina, Agrigento, Bagheria, and Catania. In Elegia di un assessore pentito, for instance, Mirella Lentini charts the entwined forces of political corruption and the mafia that cast the cityscape of Agrigento and its inhabitants into a state of catastrophic destruction. In contrast, Silvana La Spina represents ominous signs of mafia families and their affairs in the social, economic, and cultural fabric of Catania, where the popular character Inspector Maria Laura Gangemi conducts labrynthian investigations in Uno sbirro femmina and La bambina pericolosa.1 Furthermore, as exemplified by Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra and Giuseppe Catozzella’s Alveare, metropolitan cities along the Italian peninsula have been incorporated into the geography composed by mafia stories, exposing to public scrutiny diverse criminal organizations, their activities, and the sites where they perform them. Drawing upon the authors’ own life experiences, investigations, and research, Saviano creates a graphic picture of the camorra and its operations in the urban centre and outskirts of Naples, whereas Catozzella conducts a meticulous inquiry into the Calabrian ’ndrangheta’s penetrating expansion into neighbourhoods of Milan.

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Both of these journalistic novels examine such dire urban problems as drug trafficking and addiction, loan-sharking, and illegal construction practices and real estate transactions, implicitly calling for social, economic, and civil redress. In so doing, these works articulate diverse forms of postmodern impegno. Several key features crafted in these contemporary narratives of criminality contribute richly to what can be called a socially engaged postmodern geography of mafia stories. This kind of geographic terrain, I suggest, is made up of discrete, microspatial interrogations of the ways specific criminal organizations perform illegal activities that act upon spaces and socioeconomic as well as cultural relations constituting them within particular city boundaries and environs. Multiperspectival, polyphonic, and infinitely variable, this fragmentary cartography registers formations of postmodern impegno as conceptualized in recent scholarship. While underscoring the range of narrative topics and modes socially committed fiction may represent, the analyses in Jennifer Burns’s “Re-thinking Impegno (again),” Sergia Adamo’s “La giustizia del dimenticato,” and Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug’s Introduction to Postmodern Impegno devote substantial attention to the mystery novel, the noir, and the non-fiction crime novel. They take as their foundational premise Burns’s proposition that in contrast to the social engagement expressed by postwar literature, which tended to be linked with an overarching leftist social enterprise, postmodern arts of impegno devote “fragmentary attention to specific issues” (Fragments of Impegno, i).2 Among the features associated with this new paradigm are the ways in which the representations of criminal organizations and their varied activities may operate as investigative critiques that denounce injustices committed against individuals and society. Theorizing the relationship between literary invention and material realities, Antonello proposes such narratives also display authorial and textual movement “beyond the boundaries of literature, of fiction writing, in an actual engagement with facts, historical events, political and social reality” (“New Commitment,” 249). Novels like Gomorra and Alveare demonstrate this notion, and highlight as well the important roles played by documentation and research designed to bring to light forms of illegality and oppression, thus putting them into cultural record. Finally, an innovative aspect of postmodern committed crime fiction is its appeal to mass audiences, both in the sense of soliciting readers through popular forms of address and in terms of success. This appeal is especially true in the case of contemporary mafia narratives.

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In what follows, I situate Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Canto al deserto: Storia di Tina soldato di mafia in relation to the postmodern geography of engaged mafia narratives outlined above, and also examine the specific terms of impegno elaborated in her cartographic project. A vanguard work of its kind, this exquisitely crafted 1994 novel is in part inspired by the historic case of Emanuela Azzarelli, who in the late 1980s captured the popular imagination and national headlines in the daily press, which dubbed the young girl the “Bonnie of Gela,” due to her exploits as purported leader of a criminal gang of male minors. It would be shortsighted, however, to view the novel as a veiled life story of Azzarelli. As the quotation that opens this chapter suggests, Cutrufelli creates a fundamental correlation between Tina and Gela in the novel, positing them as mutually informing products of particular social, economic, and political conditions generating the criminal destruction of citizens and city alike. In fact, the vicissitudinal fragments of the fictional lifestory and citystory are inextricably interlaced in her meticulous representation of unique historical features of Gela, produced as factions of Cosa Nostra and Stidda territorialize the city, once famed for its breathtaking archaeological sites and Greek artefacts. In point of fact, the criminal clans transform the city streets into scenes of violence, unprecedented for their brutality, frequency, and the numbers of children involved. As Alexander Stille notes, from 1987 to 1990 over one hundred people died in mafia clan warfare in Gela, which had some 90,000 inhabitants (Excellent Cadavers, 328). Moreover, the pitched battles between Cosa Nostra and Stidda put into effect the wholesale exploitation of children, with the documented result that the number of minors in Gela who committed crimes ranging from theft to murder far exceeded those in other Italian cities.3 Exemplifying Antonello’s notion of the movement between sociohistorical reality and fiction (“New Commitment in Italian ‘Theatrical Story-telling,’” 244–5), Cutrufelli’s citystory explicates how these problems, among others produced by microspatial criminality, mark Gela’s streets, piazzas, neighbourhoods, and inhabitants. This is particularly so in the case of Tina, as both creation and creator of ruthless sociospatial relations. While telling her stories of Tina and Gela, which also stand in synecdochic relation to Sicily, Cutrufelli creates a performative geography of impegno that functions, I propose, as an indictment of social, political, economic, and criminal forces producing material and existential bodies of urban desert.4 As indicated by the novel’s title and its opening epigraph, the spatial metaphor of the desert performs complex functions

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that, I argue in the following section, locate the narrative in a genealogy of impegno constituted by the poets Santo Calì and Roberto Roversi and also form an interpretative frame for reading the urban crime story that unfolds. Exceeding the general symbolism of the desert as a pure, radiant place inspiring spiritual revelation, Cutrufelli’s allusions to the desert loom on her mapping of internal and external spaces, and bear a range of meanings that are contingent upon specific contexts. For instance, at one point in her “song to the desert,” the author pictures the Petrolchimico oil plant as “a desert of cement and iron” (125). In another case, the space Tina harbours within is a “desert of sensations” (55). Focusing on both the explicit evocations of the desert and the spaces encoded as desertlike, my analysis explores how they figure in the author’s portrayal of Cosa Nostra, Stidda, and related forces driving a process of what I call urban desertification. By this term I do not mean the urban planning strategy of so-called benign neglect (supervised urban decay), deployed to shrink the population in poor neighbourhoods of New York City in the 1970s so that upper-class citizens might take up residence and “rehabilitate” them. Nor does the notion elaborated here work through Jean Baudrillard’s wonderfully provocative concept of desertification presented in America as marking both a vanishing point of “the real” and entry into the territory of the hyperreal of simulation, though I will have cause to consider features he perceives as traces of the social and cultural desert in relation to Gela. Rather, I conceptualize urban desertification as a critical model for analysing Cutrufelli’s complex inquiry into the transformation of the once-functioning city of Gela into a blighted, forsaken urban landscape that cannot sustain forms of civil life. Thus, this study takes into particular consideration the roles and activities attributed to Stidda, Cosa Nostra, and the youth gangs under their sway, while also scrutinizing the author’s representation of how agents of the law and state institutions relate to power apparatuses producing the urban wasteland. Among the latter are the carabinieri, the education system, and the political establishment. Of particular concern in this exploration are the material and symbolic signs of desertification inscribed on the fragmented geography arising from the traces of Tina and the traces of Gela, discovered, recollected, or fantasized in the course of the narrator’s investigation. As spatialized terms of impegno, they articulate the denunciation of a varied field of problems that concern the built and dynamic configurations of sociospatial relations and identity. They range from tangible elements threatening

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the basic requirements for daily living, such as noxious pollution, lack of water, and criminal destruction of human life and the built environment, to intangible ones creating a dystopic landscape in and around Gela. In this regard, Cutrufelli’s encoding of bodies of desert is important for understanding what the crime narrative suggests about notions of justice and injustice in the ethical sense, the culture of civil responsibilities and the right to the city, and especially her particular elaboration of “perverse emancipation,” as illustrated by the story of Tina, which is, the narrator reminds us, the story of Gela. Voices in the Desert and Sociospatial Discourses of Impegno Supra la sciara, ammenzu a li jinestri fracchi di suli, alivu millinnariu sugnu stancu di cantu a lu sdisertu. (Above the lava rocks, amidst the broom / withered by the sun / I, ancient olive tree / am weary of singing to the desert.) Santo Calì, “Mi chiamastiru albiru di pace” (You called me the tree of peace), 19725

The evocations of the desert in the novel’s title and opening epigraph create complex discursive relations between each other and the urban crime story that they prefigure, while also introducing key terms of Cutrufelli’s geography of impegno. The intertextual references, I suggest, serve to establish the speaking narrator as eyewitness who denounces forms of crime and their perpetrators, and to situate readers as interlocutors. Furthermore, when the first epigraph is read in relation to the novel’s second epigraph, lines drawn from Roversi’s lyrical introduction to La paci (Peace) by Santo Calì, the resultant web of meanings speaks to the imperative functions served by Cutrufelli’s novel, which breaks the silence and puts criminal evidence into cultural record. At the outset it should be noted that if the first part of the novel’s title, Canto al deserto, is considered as a discrete unit of meaning, “canto” could be interpreted as either “I sing” or “song.” Given the apparent parallel between “canto” and “storia,” it is reasonable to think the title means “Song to the desert: The story of Tina, mafia soldier.” In fact, in the article “In the Kingdom of Persephone,” Cutrufelli refers to the novel as “Song to the desert” (105). Therefore, the song to the desert has

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an analogous relation to the story of Tina. Less clear are the associations the suggestive metaphor of the desert might evoke. For some, the initial allusion to the desert could inspire a sense of beauty, precisely for its evocation of barrenness, space unburdened by the sights and sounds of human civilization. However, if the song to the desert stands as an analogue to the story of Tina, who is a mafia soldier, then the desert is cast as a particular kind of space, associated with such criminal codes as omertà, vendetta, and violence. In this system of signification, silence, as well as the voice and song breaking it, have special valences bearing upon the sociospatial relations and meanings of the desert, which become clearer when considered in connection with the first of only two epigraphs in Cutrufelli’s novel. Spatially positioned on a page of their own, preceding the story proper, the brief citations of Calì’s words and then Roversi’s fulfill functions typical of the epigraph: serving as a heuristic device, they bring to the reader’s attention certain images, motifs, or ideas that provide interpretative keys. As Patricia Tallakson states, the epigraph’s “shadow falls across and affects the reading of the text it precedes” (“Epigraph”). In fact, in the initial epigraph, which appears in its entirety above, the desert looms as the space of enunciation conjured through both the arid landscape and the words of the ancient olive tree that explicitly invoke the desert as a silent, solitary space, indifferent to the tired voice singing. In terms of the poetic metaphor of singing to the desert in the novel’s title, telling the story of Tina may be interpreted as similarly breaking the silence about the mafia and the ways in which it blights life and land in Gela. The relationship between this epigraph and storytelling also bears upon the narrative form. In her pithy essay on the novel, Giada Fricano suggests that the author’s denunciation of the abhorrent realities of daily living in Gela is “modulated according to the tonalities of a ‘song to the desert’” (“Maria Rosa Cutrufelli,” 1). What concerns me here, however, is how the epigraph and its evocation of the desert as dispassionate, unhearing receptacle for the song may serve as signs of impegno marking Cutrufelli’s cartographic project as well as a system of address to readers. In general, epigraphs create a form of intertextuality that opens a dialogue between source texts and authors, as well as readers, as Tallakson tells us. In the case of Cutrufelli’s selections, the dialogic intertextual relations have important literal and symbolic implications for understanding the sociospatial figuration of the desert in the ­narrative system.

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Here, a few observations about Calì’s poem are helpful. Significantly, it is titled “Mi chiamastiru albiru di paci” (You called me the tree of peace). Writing in the local dialect of his hometown Linguaglossa, the poet immediately creates a dialogue between the olive tree, symbolizing a peace that has yet to visit Sicily, and a collective you. In other words, the speaker was not always a lone voice singing in the desert, whose barren space is evoked in the first verse of the poem and again as it reaches the final lines. In fact, amidst the images of a dying, desolate landscape where dead crabs lie in dried canal beds and even rabbits refuse to eat, the olive tree’s thin voice, a “filu di jirmana” (stalk of rye), directly addresses those who have forsaken God, Christ, and their own innocent children, and remembers their acts of stealing, hate, and vengeance. In this light, the desert that cannot sustain life is the product of human destruction. Yet the poem also reminds people who might listen of a different ideal voiced in a moment of the past, as the olive tree sings, “You called me the tree of peace,” which is repeated at three points in the body of the poem and, following another invocation of the desert, serves as the final line. Considering in dialogic relation Calì’s poem, the source text for the epigraph and the inspiration for the novel’s title, and the story Cutrufelli tells, I want to propose that the desert, as literal and metaphoric space, serves in like manner. Produced not by nature, but by destructive human emotions and actions, the urban desert of Gela is the site of enunciation for the narrator, who denounces specific agents, criminal and otherwise, blighting the landscape and dwellers. Moreover, it is reasonable to speculate that, just as the solitary voice of the olive tree conjures through memory a listener for his sorrowful lament, Cutrufelli posits interlocutors for the song to the desert that she crafts. She positions readers as witnesses to the evidence discovered as they follow along in the narrator’s footsteps during her search for Tina in the urban desert of Gela and its environs. With the second epigraph, Cutrufelli expands the dialogue on silence and speaking, while also shedding light on the solicitation of readers as engaged interlocutors in what can be viewed as a material, social, and ethical desert. The citation, separated from Calì’s verse by four blank lines and appearing directly below it, is drawn from Roversi’s poetic introduction to La paci, the second volume of Calì’s poems published in La notti lunga (1972), where “Mi chiamastiru albiru di paci” appears. In contrast to the voice of Calì’s olive tree, waning as it sings to the desert, the speaker in Roversi’s text expresses the inability to talk about Sicily at

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all, as we see in the first line of the epigraph selected by Cutrufelli, which is translated here in its entirety. I can’t talk about Sicily because I love it and it scares me. ... I mean that there in your parts anger runs thicker and the almond of pain ripens.

While naming what renders the poet unable to speak about the island, Roversi creates a spatial image of Sicily mapped in terms of the conflicting emotions it either evokes or exhibits. The conflict between the love felt for the island and the fear Sicily thereby produces, along with anger and pain, which together create a negative landscape, resonates with themes introduced in Calì’s poem and Cutrufelli’s novel. Indeed, upon the narrator’s return to her beloved island, she shares memories and reflections that suggest she is both attached to and repelled by specific features making up life in Sicily. Noting similar intersections, Donatella La Monaca asserts that “a knot of ancient pain, the ambivalence of an unbreakable yet suffocating bond, and the impulse of violently imploded revenge run through the entire narration and link in ideal consonance the authorial conscience to Roberto Roversi’s verses” (Scrittrici siciliane del Novecento, 16). In my view, the intertextual relations reach beyond these particular thematic features and sensibilities. A look at Roversi’s original verses, summoned by the epigraph, provides a context and a contrast for understanding the respective conceptualizations of Sicily as desert, those in and beyond it, and writing as engaged social practice. The desert images of Sicily fashioned by Roversi and Cutrufelli, created in two different historical moments – respectively, 1972 following what is called the first mafia war6 and the early 1990s in the aftermath of the Capaci and Via D’Amelio massacres – constitute dystopian landscapes, exhibiting some similar and divergent features. Murderous acts of violence, anger, revenge, pain, and fear mark the spatial and social dimensions of existence, rendering the land hostile and deathly in both imaginary geographies. Roversi suggests such acts of human agency have brought the island to its final extremity, conveyed with the apocalyptic imagery of Sicily as a ragged sun “ready to fall ready to explode ready to crack apart” (“Premessa,” 5). The sense of impending death in a desert of social and moral decay is underscored

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in the poet’s reinscription of Calì’s olive tree. In the forsaken landscape the tree does not sing; it “is dying today for a dead Christ.” Directly addressing his “Sicilian friends” invoked early in the poem, Roversi articulates a notion of writing as a practice of impegno, urgently needed at the juncture between death and life. In verses that build in force and momentum, as if the speaker were gaining his own voice, he declares the power of the printed words in Calì’s book of poetry and “the book” in general to perform myriad functions, life nourishing and life denying, as illustrated by the following series of noun pairs, “Book home, book river, book wheat / book field tool / book mace, book shotgun” (6). Here, as in the sixth line of the poem, the book is associated with topographic, built, and dynamic aspects of the landscape. Moreover, reaching a crescendo in an exhortation urging addressees to read Calì’s book line by line, he links writing, reading, and speaking out as interrelated tools for social change. He enjoins readers, declaring, “Turn the page don’t stay silent. / Turn the page read until tomorrow. / Don’t let time pass without turning the page” (7). Playing upon the literal and metaphoric meanings of turning the page, here Roversi explicitly presents change as breaking the silence and speaking out against not only the injustices suffered at the hands of the mafia, but other forms of injustice on the island and peninsula of Italy, and around the world as well.7 The final lines underscore the consequences of silence; to remain silent, the poet unequivocally states, means you’ll be killed. Thus, in the badlands of the desert, it is imperative to break the silence in life and literature. The diachronic space of the desert constituted by Calì’s poem, Roversi’s verses, and Cutrufelli’s invocations of them exhibits various signs of impegno that bear upon the relations between writers, texts, and the specific modes of address to readers crafted in Canto al deserto. Cutrufelli gives symbolic placement to her novel in relation to antecedents that exemplify engaged poetic discourse critiquing social conditions in Sicily, thus casting it in similar vein. Both the reinscription of the verses created by Calì and Roversi, which recalls their words to the minds of contemporary readers, and Cutrufelli’s own song to the desert represent a response from the author that marks the presence of a listener in the desert. Furthermore, she answers Roversi’s call to break the silence and speak out against forms of oppression and justice denied, thereby altering the social, political, and spatial arrangements of what appears to be an otherwise forsaken landscape. In this sense, her denunciation of crimes of commission and omission on the part of Cosa Nostra, Stidda, and state institutions evidences Cutrufelli’s own civil and ethical impegno, as that

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term is analysed by Antonello and Mussgnug. This postmodern type of committed art, they argue, posits “individual responsibility and critical awareness as cornerstones of its definition and practice” and “its conceptual umbrella includes existential, intellectual and ethical experiences that are not the outcome of deliberate projects or interests” (“Introduction,” 11). This notion of impegno also bears upon the positions and responsibilities of contemporary readers. By virtue of the spatial metaphor of the desert in the title and epigraphs, Cutrufelli situates us in the resultant dialogic relations as we embark upon the journey into the mafia badlands of Gela. Solicited as potential listeners, we travel alongside the narrator as she searches the streets of Gela for traces of Tina and breaks the silence on unspeakable crimes in a song to the desert that enables a raising of critical awareness, and engages us in a process of ethical judgment. The Postmodern Geography of Urban Desertification The trees in the grove, laid bare by the puffs from the smokestacks, exposed their skeleton of branches and, pitiful cemetery ghosts, cast a sick, white light on the oily water of the river. At times a yellow cloud billowed out from the Petrolchimico towers. Up there, poised between those lunar volcanoes, it swelled up and then fell, rolling vertiginously down onto the city, spraying black lightening. Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Canto al deserto, 110

With an idiosyncratic mingling of fact, fantasy, and analysis, Cutrufelli creates a microspatial cartography of material and existential bodies of urban desert in Gela and its inhabitants, particularly the young dwellers of the ghetto streets for whom Tina stands. Through the eyewitness narrator’s acute reflections upon the sights, events, and figures appearing along the paths of memory and the streets in and around the city, the process of desertification is made manifest as a diachronic phenomenon reaching back into the 1950s, with particular social, economic, cultural, and political tributaries. In this sense, the modality of vision, images, and ways of thinking about desertification contrast, for the most part, with models elaborated by Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, and Paul Virilio, which foreground speed, surface, and dematerialization.8 The deserts of these various authors’ makings share with Cutrufelli’s similar signs of disaffection, indifference, solitude, and death. However, the investigative travels in Canto al deserto lead not into the ether of the hyperreal, but down into the nether regions of the urban “real” of Gela,

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making visible the specific sociospatial practices that turn the vital urban centre into a desertscape, lacking forms of nourishment for individual and collective civil life. The underpinnings of my exploration of the ways in which Cutrufelli represents traces of desertification and the roles they play in the imbricating stories of Tina and Gela are provided by Soja’s ideas of the sociospatial dialectic and the ways in which it relates to the construction of geographies of justice and injustice. According to him, “The spatiality of whatever you are looking at is viewed as shaping social relations and societal development just as much as social processes configure and give meaning to the human geographies or spatialities in which we live” (Seeking Spatial Justice, 4). This conceptualization enables an analysis of how the author represents spaces observed, recalled to memory, or imagined on the psychic screen, as they actively interplay with everyday attitudes, behaviours, and activities, driving urban deterioration. Especially important in this respect are the images and ideas Cutrufelli crafts in relation to the forms of spatiality produced by Petrolchimico, Cosa Nostra, and Stidda. In different ways, the changes they bring to Gela lay waste to the material landscape and the geographies of individual and collective life, which become dominated by cruelty, oppression, fear, and death, echoing elements of the deserts evoked by Calì and Roversi. In turn, for a variety of reasons inhabitants of the city may adapt to or adopt the laws of the desert, perpetuating the very means of their destruction. Exemplifying this form of what Soja calls “socio-spatial causality” (Seeking Spatial Justice, 14) in the specific context of Gela, the story Cutrufelli tells about Tina unequivocally critiques the contemporary female role, as product and agent of this devastating process, diffusing criminal practices of behaviour aimed at accruing authority, power, and respect through the wielding of violence. By denouncing the systemic violation of civil rights, freedoms, and access to the bare necessities of life that shapes human geographies in the urban desert, Cutrufelli engages with issues of injustice. Elucidating how space and society relate to unjust geographies, Soja tells us that “the spatiality of (in)justice (combining justice and injustice in one word) affects society and social life just as much as social processes shape the spatiality or specific geography of (in)justice” (Seeking Spatial Justice, 5). From this critical perspective, Cutrufelli’s representations of the dystopic wastelands of poverty, exploitation, and corruption in the entwined stories of Tina and Gela expose precise mechanisms of desertification as a process deriving from the social construction of spaces that deny any

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form of juridical or ethical justice. However, by so doing, her song to the desert also suggests the desert bodies of (in)justice are open to change. The readers’ first sight of Gela’s environs reveals the foundations of desertification and distinct components of Cutrufelli’s sociospatial imagination shaping her postmodern cartography, which is composed of fluid, shifting fragments of diverse kinds. Foremost among these are the equivocal, moving pieces making up the narrator’s notion of self in relation to Gela and Tina;9 contradictory traces of Tina gleaned from agents of the law, media sources, family, and the narrator’s imaginings; fragmentary shifts between multiple perspectives, sites, and temporal frames; changes between the narrative registers of fact, fiction, and fantasy; and the fragmented geography of Gela and the land surround. Significantly, the song to the desert begins with the social infliction of a wound on the landscape, described in increasingly violent language as the author elaborates the tangible and symbolic elements that define the sociospatial relations between Gela and the Villaggio (Village), constructed for managers and employees of the Petrolchimico oil refinery. “The separation was sharp, obvious, desired,” declares the storyteller, “Two contrasting worlds – the city and the Villaggio – contiguous and yet light years apart from each other” (7). Marking the space of the Villaggio Michitella and establishing it as the foundational pole of reference for the rationalized transformation of Gela into a binary opposite, the author gives voice to the wound in ever more traumatic language. She begins each of the three subsequent paragraphs with the words “the Villaggio,” and with the accompanying descriptions of its attributes the initial “separation” is then pictured as a human-made “fracture.” Here, the rationale for the creation of the break, of the gap in space, is critical. Indeed, the Villaggio is conceived ostensibly in order “to give a place to hope, to make space for modernity” (7). Furthermore, the inner space of the village must “exhibit the goodness of the new” (7), which is designed to perform key operations. It would ideally make what is now pictured as a “laceration” of the land into “an opening to the world” and, “from the unfathomable depths of the cut, shoot the arrow of development firmly into the future” (7). With this last image of the wound so deep it defies human comprehension, Cutrufelli suggests the space constitutes a site of socially inflicted violence, loss, and pain, irreparably altering sociospatial and economic relations within and beyond the borders of Gela. Representing in critical fashion the logic of binary opposites at work, Cutrufelli maps the Villaggio and the city in terms of their separateness

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and differences that convey the ways in which Gela becomes not the site of possible urban renewal, but the object of neglect and decay, buried in the past. Thus, since the Villaggio symbolizes hope, modernity, openness to the entire world, mobility, and the future, Gela stands for lost hopes, the ancient, insularity, immobility, and the past. The images of the Villaggio’s features convey endeavours to define the space as different from the ancient city, and from Sicily as well. Difference from the space surround is built into each component of the residential area, including the urban plan, street names, and architectural style. Unlike the majority of cities in Sicily and the peninsula, the village is constructed following a “rational” urban design, exhibiting, the narrator states, “geometric simplicity” (7). The names of the streets that give residents and visitors their bearings for everyday movements of body and mind have an air of the foreign, such as Piazza Caviaga and Viale Enrico Mattei, named after the man responsible for building the Petrolchimico oil refinery in the Gela area. Even residential buildings, shaping the private space generally fashioned to the customs, cultural practices, and needs of the people in the community, reject local architectural designs. The homes are built according to models from northern Italy, typified by Milanese suburbs, with smooth exterior walls that orient domestic life towards the interior, in insular fashion. From the perspective of Gela’s residents, the absence of eye-catching balconies, a local architectural flourish that breaks the monotony of uniform surfaces, also denies the pleasure of watching live spectacles unfolding in the streets below. From another perspective, it suggests a rejection of partaking in the different moods, rhythms, sounds, and sights of the neighbourhoods. Among the most important elements that Cutrufelli highlights in her charting of disparities between the Villaggio and Gela are services, which have critical importance for understanding the modes and forms constituting Gela’s desert lands and the forces deriving from them. The residents of the Villaggio, which was historically designed as a “selfsufficient nucleus” (8), have a full spectrum of services at their disposal. In addition to new, clean streets and homes, the community has its own church, health clinic, and a fully equipped beach area for recreation. Moreover, as if it were an oasis in the desert, it boasts an abundance of running water, to use however and whenever residents wish, even to wash their cars. Gela, by contrast, in the 1960s and 1970s already bears the initial signs of urban desertification, evoked through the narrator’s memories. For example, water, the major constituent of living matter upon which human life depends, “would arrive for only a few hours

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a day” (8). As if under attack, the city sits on the hill, flanked on one side by earth given to landslides and on the other by malarial land, and is “ensconced in its archaic poverty” (8). Although one might expect that the industry of the Petrolchimico plant, “the cathedral in the desert” (33), would create an influx of resources to alleviate dire material conditions in Gela, Cutrufelli suggests the city is forsaken by economic and political powers, and left to deteriorate. Shifting to the 1990s, the narrator’s friend Ignazio, a resident of Gela, decries the virtual absence of basic services necessary for civil life. He pays the same taxes fellow Italians pay in the north, but, as he says, “I don’t have sewers, I don’t have water, I don’t have schools, I don’t have services” (201). Describing Gela through all it lacks, the representation of this negative cityscape also illustrates the geography of injustice in which Tina grows up. The citizens of Gela are denied the bare necessities of civilized life that residents in other cities of Italy, and the Villaggio, have at their disposal. Through the diachronic spatiotemporal mapping of Gela, the author clearly elucidates how Petrolchimico’s “penetration” of the delicate ecosystem composed of the civil centre and environs actively contributes to socially creative blighting, by producing hazards to habitat and inhabitants, some of which can be linked to the encroaching territorialization by Cosa Nostra and Stidda. First, the oil refinery pours noxious toxins and waste into the precarious environmental, economic, and social systems upon which the city’s survival depends. At the time of the Petrolchimico plant’s inauguration, the narrator recalls, life in Gela is sustained primarily by agricultural activities (growing grains, cotton, and tomatoes) and the fishing industry. Putting into record the company’s crimes of pollution, Cutrufelli writes their effects onto bodies of air, land, water, and living organisms, suggesting how they alter the spatial relations. Conjuring the panorama, she describes the refinery as a futuristic sight that breaks the flow of the rural landscape with its huge cylinders shooting out “tongues of blue smoke” that “pierce the horizon” (9). The pollutants also penetrate the body, as the “smell of rotten eggs ... would sting your eyes and burn your throat” (9). As further evidence of the company’s role in producing the devastation, by the 1970s, industrial wastes have turned the clear sea water near Gela “cloudy and yellow” (87). Near the polluted mouth of the Gela river, empty barrels are stuck in the mud amidst the “dying foam of industrial wastes” (109). Such images implicate local and national political forces as well, for their indifference or complicity that enables

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the unchecked environmental destruction and the production of other criminal byproducts, in both the juridical and ethical senses. Cutrufelli’s fashioning of images of Gela in the 1970s and the 1990s calls into account how the socially constructed forms of spatiality shaped by the state directed Petrolchimico give rise to the illegal activities of Cosa Nostra that consume the city and its citizens. The insights provided by Anna Maria Costantino and Salvatore Ingui in their meticulous study “Un approfondimento su Gela” are useful in better understanding these relations and the ways the author interweaves factual information and invention in the stories of Gela and Tina. Significantly, Gela had never been a mafia stronghold. However, when Agip’s discovery of oil near Gela in 1956 promised an economic miracle, it actually delivered an onslaught of immigration to the city; its population exploded from forty thousand inhabitants to some one hundred thousand, resulting in a dire lack of housing, water, sewers, schools, and services. As the authors explain, the Cosa Nostra clan of Riesi took advantage of the resultant prime conditions for land speculation and various lucrative activities related to illegal housing construction, unrestrained by local agents of law and politics. In consort, these state and illegal forces alter social, economic, and cultural configurations of relations between citizens and Gela, which bear upon the growing phenomena of criminality among the city’s children, exemplified by the character Tina. During the onrush of “forced industrialization” (“Un approfondimento su Gela,” 61) members of the peasant and lower classes abandon work in fishing and agriculture, and, Costantino and Ingui argue, citizens become objects of a process driven by “economic forces whose interests are extraneous to local needs and by political forces that don’t represent them” (61). The changes erode local systems of belief, values, and forms of affiliation supporting notions of identity, which are more or less supplanted by the influx of consumer goods signifying status and success, with disastrous effects on younger generations. As Costantino and Ingui observe, “In a reality like Gela’s, lacking basic services and opportunities for cultural growth, in total violation of their rights, young people searching for an identity have been able to adhere more easily to models and values founded on violence and abuse, which appear to be the only possibility for self-­ affirmation” (63). In fact, this tendency escalates in the 1980s and 1990s as the clans of both Cosa Nostra and Stidda exploit children of Gela as an expendable resource for committing thefts, extortion, arson, and murder, in what become pitched battles over the territory of Gela.

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The fundamental roles the criminal organizations and children play in the codes, practices, and activities structuring the formations of desert in Gela in Cutrufelli’s fiction serve as a key for interpreting the fragmented geography composed of microspatial images of different neighbourhoods, streets, and squares in and around the city. Indeed, as the narrator approaches the urban site to begin tracing Tina’s steps and clues for understanding her life, she declares that Gela appears “so young and cruel” (12). The perception of youth derives from the age of the population making up the urban text, one third of which is under eighteen, the majority being male. She attributes the perceived cruelty of Gela to the ways it differs from the “map of [her] memory” (12), which are then epitomized by the brutal elements ruling the sociospatial relations of the Scavone neighbourhood, a space that serves as a gateway. The first stop on the itinerary of interviews and on-site investigations of Tina’s life story, Scavone, for the narrator and readers, represents the crossing of a border into outlaw territory, which Cutrufelli describes in graphic detail. Scavone is also the place where Tina Cannizzaro briefly lived before witnessing her father gunned down in their home. Separated from the Villaggio by the mere space of a street, the Scavone neighbourhood, nicknamed “the Bronx” for the rough, criminal elements dominating the area, is evoked through language and images of an urban Far West, written largely under the visible signatures of the mafia. Cutrufelli represents the criminal organization as a producer of space and the relations informing it on various scales, ranging from the neighbourhood at large to the domestic interior of home. For instance, dotting the Bronx landscape of homes for the working classes are illegally constructed residential buildings, the work, we may assume, of mafia-related enterprise. Moreover, the description of weapons found in an abandoned mafia hideout, located in the basement of a Bronx building of condominiums, clearly conveys the dangerous, wild, and violent strains of daily life. Among the items discovered by the military police are a two-way radio tuned to police frequencies, a kilo of highpowered explosives, a fake license plate, and wigs, all typical tools Cosa Nostra uses to threaten or kill those who do not bend to its will. Also significant is the discovery of a master list indicating the names of victims of extortion, money collectors, and profits, since extortion is a primary sector of Cosa Nostra’s industry, keeping under threat the lives and livelihoods of the citizens. As Cutrufelli shifts attention to the scale of the home, and the relations between the body and space, she suggests there is no safe haven

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from the dangers ruling life in the badlands. During the narrator’s conversation with an elderly man who was a neighbour of the Cannizzaro’s, he reveals that his son and two sons-in-law are all military police officers. In what might seem a light-hearted response, Mimmo, the narrator’s cousin, comments that they “could play cops and robbers in the building’s stairwell” (17). But Mimmo’s explanation is sobering: “A killer lives in the apartment above this. A famous killer. Good people and rotten ones, police and murderers, side by side, right next door to each other. That’s how it is in this building. That’s how it is in the whole neighborhood” (17). With these words the author denies readers the possibility of approaching the material conditions of this case as an anomaly. Instead, in the course of the storyteller’s wanderings, her observations register further images of city places and scenes that intersect with elements revealed in this microspatial depiction, thus enabling an appreciation of the catastrophic effects and dimensions of criminal activities in Gela. The scenes set in the elderly man’s home are also significant for what they say about the citytext traumatized by mafia violence, which is inscribed on the geographical places where it occurs and on the psyche of citizens, indelibly altering relations to space and their meanings. Here it is useful to return to Mimmo’s remark on playing cops and robbers, whose tragic irony should not be lost on readers. In another place, or a different time in Gela’s history, the activity would be an entertaining game for children, who would play the roles of cop or robber, pretending to take shots at each other. In the case of the Bronx apartment building, real people are the police and the killers, and “gunplay” generally involves actual shootouts. All the more chilling is the fact that in the 1990s, children increasingly count among the ranks of the killers and the dead in shootouts that can break out anywhere at any time of day around the city. Indeed, Tina’s father, a small-time mafioso, is killed in the building next door. The author makes it clear that various acts of crime are signs of the contemporary deterioration of civil life, and not so-called backwardness, for the elderly resident recalls that the neighbourhood had been “better than paradise on earth” (17), an image he later repeats. The loss of his “paradise” alters the emotional landscape within his bodily borders, a desert barren of all pleasure and, moreover, consumed by a “passion of hate” (18) he seems barely able to repress. Echoing the lament of Calì’s solitary olive tree in the desert, the motif of hate recurs in fragmented urban sites, remapped by the author as an undercurrent of dark social forces destroying life in Gela, as denoted

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by images of wounds inflicted by the mafia on the city and on memory. For instance, marking the place in the city street where Tina’s brother Francesco was slain is the rotting stump of what was a healthy oleander, sawed off by the mafia to indicate that the boy died like an animal. By doing so, the mafia alters the sight, meaning, and functions of the city text and spatial relations. For Francesco’s grandmother, the mutilated tree warns her off from continuing to bring flowers every day, an act of love and remembrance that recognized his value as a human being. For others, it stands as a reminder of the mafia’s indisputable power over life and death. Underscoring the magnitude of the threats the mafia poses for children, Cutrufelli reinscribes the infamous “Children’s Massacre,” as the historic event was dubbed by the press, in her tragic citystory. In two separate scenes, the author calls up the actual event, first profiling the factual information and then portraying the changes it produces in the perceptual experiences of places in Gela, as well as its image in the national cultural imaginary. As the narrator walks towards a small entertainment park located near the seashore, she recalls it as the place where one of the men killed in the Gela massacre had worked. In spare prose fragments the author recounts historical facts of the event, which took place on 27 November 1990: “Eight dead, the majority very young, seven wounded, three, maybe four groups of shooters and the same number of ambushes in the dirt alleys in illegal housing neighborhoods and in the crowded downtown avenue, beneath shining Christmas decorations” (90). The bare information suggests how criminal clans have turned diverse areas of the city centre and periphery into a war zone, creating a geography of fear and injustice where children live and are deployed in an apparently unending cycle of attacks and counterattacks. Such horrific loss of life affects the notions of place in complex ways. As the narrator explains, in Gela the warring clans strategically carry out murders on holidays and festivals, when the city’s inhabitants are distracted. Mafia murders thereby produce a spatiotemporal marking of the urban text, whereby sights or the date on a calendar may prompt the memory of traumatic violence and shape perceptual experiences. Cutrufelli portrays the effects of this socially produced phenomenon on the local and national imaginary through the dialogue between the narrator and the owner of the Las Vegas videogame hall. Located on the Vittorio Emanuele Avenue in downtown Gela, the Las Vegas stands a few doors down from where one of the ambushes in the Children’s Massacre took place. However, due to an error produced by the news

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media, the Las Vegas is identified as the crime scene. Thus, as the narrator reflects, “By now everyone knows the Las Vegas as the place of the massacre” (185). The sight and meaning of the Las Vegas are thus reconstituted, and serve to recall traumatic memory. Indicating that the tragic notoriety of the Las Vegas exceeds the borders of the city and local popular memory, the owner laments how the videogame hall has become Gela’s “new tourist attraction” (185). Tourists visit the city not to relish its extraordinary Greek artefacts but to satisfy a ghoulish desire to see with their own eyes the locale where they think the children were murdered. Indeed, as Cutrufelli suggests, extraordinary criminal events and outlaws, namely the Children’s Massacre and Tina, fuel the image of Gela as a badlands, a Far West on the imaginary cultural map of Italy. I want now to shift attention to the diverse narrative strategies that Cutrufelli fashions as she maps onto the Gela citytext illegal housing areas, a branch of the mafia industry that yields high profits and a variety of problems contributing to the mechanisms of desertification in the urban centre and environs. The prominent features of such residential spaces suggest the author encodes them as “deserts.” Through this particular strategy, the scattered visions of the desertscapes of mafia construction call up and recontextualize the respective figurations and meanings of the desert in the poems by Calì and Roversi. The visions also register the progressive laying to waste of the city and its surrounding landscape. As the narrator summons in her memory space features of land just outside Gela travelled in her Fiat 500 earlier, in the 1970s, the images literally make up a unique song in the desert, while charting the distant danger posed by illegal residences. Heading towards Riesi, she discerns the “desolate, threatening profiles of illegally built neighborhoods” (11). Although not yet finished, the abandoned constructions give a sense of decay. Building materials – tubes and cables – litter the land on the sides of the road where dust, parched grass, scorching heat, and silence can be read as signs of desert space. And from the light silver tubes and cables, the narrator senses a vibration emanating, “almost a faint song or the soft, hypnotic lament of a marranzano, a deep resonance that seemed to spring from a source hidden in the bowels of the scorched land” (11). With the artistry typical of Cutrufelli’s crafting of language, she evokes the sad song in the desert as an expression of Sicily’s land and culture, through the marranzano, a small musical instrument whose vibrating tongue produces a light, clear sound.

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In jarring contrast to the delicately wrought signs of foreboding marking the terrain in the 1970s, the sight of the landscape that meets the gaze the narrator casts from her rented Fiat Uno in the 1990s registers the devastating injuries done to Gela’s environs by the mafia’s booming construction of illegal housing. In the twenty years since her departure, masses of illegal homes, over twenty thousand she specifies, have consumed the entire hillside, reaching clear to the sea’s edge. Cutrufelli describes the ruin in terms of loss in a passage that also exemplifies diachronic spatiotemporal relations distinguishing her cartography. She invokes yet again the tubes and song mentioned above. As the returning Sicilian woman observes, the open land beside the road has disappeared, and along with it “the long tubular ribbons that unfurl, modulating one of their songs to the desert of dry twigs” (11). The dry twigs, parched scrub, dust of fallow fields, and scant signs of human settlement making up the desert of the Gela countryside have vanished. The contemporary symbols that the author fashions to chart bodies of desert both underscore the incommensurability of this loss and the “creative” blighting of Gela. The reader’s first close-up view of illegal housing is set in the elderly man’s home in the Bronx, and enables an understanding of how the criminal activity creates an urban wasteland, in terms of both its visible effects and the illicit system supporting it. As the narrator lingers to take in the view from the terrace at the back of the small building, rows of illegal constructions, one nearly on top of the other, loom, their upper floors empty, the roofs missing. If at first glance this landscape appears to be merely an eyesore, Cutrufelli makes clear the diverse problems underlying it and their effects on Gela and life therein. As we learn from the man’s wife, the shameful state of two unfinished buildings nearby is due to non-payment of the extortion money for permits. The author thereby raises the issue of the criminal system of extortion and the complicity, if not corruption, of local politicians and civil functionaries. These figures would normally oversee the approval of housing permits in spaces zoned for residential construction and adherence to building codes that establish the legal requirements for construction plans, materials, the building of the structures, worker conditions, and the like. Instead, the mafia makes a commodity out of such civil services, and evades the laws those agencies are meant to enforce. As part of these operations, the criminal organization chokes off needed legal housing construction by companies that abide by the law. This system of illegal construction has a primary role in the process of desertification in Gela, as illustrated by the following passage, which

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pictures the narrator’s last view from the terrace: “Below us, to the right, an open space with dirty, straggly grass, piles of garbage, and the carcass of a bus. Toward the line of the sea, an abandoned construction yard: two large skeletons of cement homes, already old, already broken down, the nighttime meeting place for drug dealers and addicts” (28). In contrast to the highly lyrical invocation of the song to the desert recalled from the 1970s, here the fragmented, bare language conveys a sense of disjointed elements. Moreover, the passage highlights how the author fashions signs of a dead human civilization and its detritus, the bus carcass and skeletons of homes, for instance, which conjure the urban desert consuming Gela. Revisiting the entrenched problem of illegally constructed housing, Cutrufelli crafts subsequent images of the desert spaces that reveal the complex sociospatial, economic, political, and ethical relations informing them, as viewed from different perspectives. Particularly important here are the perceptions of the Settefarina “neighborhood,” constructed from the respective angles of vision of the narrator as observer and of a young woman as resident. The mapping of the residential area’s topography includes graphic, evocative signs of a humanly produced desert, cast again in a deathly light. Describing the sights, the narrator laments, “They’re all the same, these narrow alleys made of dried dirt or badly asphalted, these brick homes that in the sun turn the deep red of an open wound. Between large mounds of excavated dirt and eviscerated furniture, in the middle of debris, the spot of green of a lone palm tree” (177). Recalling the “laceration” visited upon Gela’s environs by Petrolchimico’s construction of the Villaggio, the homes, often a symbol of refuge from the bustle and assaults of city life, appear as an angry wound, an injury violating land and law. But unlike the Villaggio, where the built neighbourhood embodies the laws of modern urban design and provides the comforts they promise, Settefarina is represented as a virtually unsettled frontier. As the narrator points out, it does not exist on any map, and thus lies beyond the laws governing civil society. Even the elements of its geographic and built spaces have an air of frontier desertland. The dirt streets have no names, and everything appears makeshift; the dwellers must live by expedients. Thus, the hookups to the essentials of water and electricity are stopgap, and illegal. Garbage is stacked behind the homes and liquid waste tossed out in front. Though recently constructed, the area is marked by what are typically signs of deterioration, such as the broken furniture and debris. Another passage pictures a little boy playing alone in “the carcasses of incinerated cars” (103).

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Such signs suggest the palm tree stands not for some kind of oasis, but for what is lost in the wreckage. In this sense, the lone palm can also be likened to the solitary olive tree singing to the desert. Shifting the perspective on Settefarina to the view from inside, Cutrufelli represents how various urban problems underlie illegal housing construction, and raises ethical issues related to civil rights and responsibilities. Significantly, she humanizes the position of some who reside in urban deserts like Settefarina, through her depiction of Giovanna’s cousin and her family, who are for the most part law-abiding people. Indeed, as the woman points out to the narrator in the beautiful, sparkling clean interior of her home, no one in her own family is involved in anything illegal. On the contrary, her husband has a “clean job” (98), as she calls it, working as a truck driver, and her children follow the rules. The family does not appear to be an exception among the people of Settefarina. This depiction raises the ethical question of the interconnections between the mafia, politics, and citizens, which figure in the desertification of Gela. As both this fiction and history tell us, there is a dire housing shortage in and around the city. And in civil society one expects the right to shelter. As the woman explains, they did not purchase the land in a speculation scheme. They paid for the lot and all of the construction costs in order to live there. However, Cutrufelli suggests these circumstances do not erase the illegality of the husband and wife’s actions, as illustrated by the woman’s acknowledgment. She confesses, “we made a mistake, it’s true, I recognize it” (99). In essence, such complicity enables corruption and illegality to thrive in a system linking agents of the mafia, the law, and politics. Indeed, the notary witnessed the deed of purchase. Ultimately, the author’s delineation of these residents enables scrutiny of the active role they play as instruments in the proliferation of illegal housing as well as their own victimization, poised precariously between forces of the law and lawlessness. As readers discover, everyday fear shapes the young woman’s relation to the domestic space, since an ordinance has been passed to raze her home and four others to the ground. Subterranean Bodies of Urban Desert Beneath a grandiose, superfluous overpass. A monument to the impossibility of escape, to the barrier against all development. Triumphal arch that celebrates the fracture, the leap that falls into nothingness. The leap of young lives wasted in the streets of Gela. Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Canto al deserto, 111

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The terrestrial bodies of urban desert examined thus far, consituting Cutrufelli’s cartography of impegno, chart geographies of desertification in Gela and produce, I propose, the desertification of geographies lived by children, in terms of both criminal elements that shape them and institutional powers forsaking them. The visual traces of the geographic city – its arteries, built features, and topography – that fabricate the story of Gela, and thus the story of Tina, articulate both the entrapment of young people in the urban badlands and the ways in which mafia practices consume psychic space and properties of identity formation. Resonating with the sociological delineation of the relation between children living in the ghettos of Gela and criminal models presented in Costantino and Ingui’s work, Canto al deserto gives fictional representation to the effects that adherence to mafia roles may have, producing interior wastelands. Indeed, through the depiction of the narrator’s imaginings, Cutrufelli gives readers an inside view of Tina’s social and psychological life as an aspiring mafia soldier, sounding the depths of what she elsewhere calls “perverse emancipation” and the “subterranean of the feminine world” (“In the Kingdom of Persephone,” 104). In this world, she explains, “With their active complicity, or with autonomous gestures of violence or adherence to criminal models of life, these women sanction a paradoxical ‘right to cruelty’” (105). In the course of charting the subterranean desert produced in and by Tina, who epitomizes young people in Gela’s ghettos, Cutrufelli indicts specific criminal, social, and institutional parties to the crimes laying waste to younger generations. At the same time, her song to the desert denounces all who misconstrue the use of various forms of criminal violence as a means for self-affirmation and emancipation. Indeed, the representations of vicissitudes in the lives of Tina and the city indicate how the subterranean world of crime ruled by mafia laws allows no space for autonomy, for freedom of movement in mind and body. Cutrufelli builds the notion of the crime world in Gela as a deathly subterranean sphere entrapping children into the visual elements of the geographic city, observed by the narrator at the outset of her quest. The author rearticulates the Greek myths of Ariadne and the labyrinth to delineate the spatial, social, and temporal frame of Gela in the 1990s. The following description illustrates this narrative strategy and reveals the literal and symbolic meanings that she attaches to the spaces of the city and the story in the process of its fabrication, and the relative positions of the narrator and Tina in them. Scanning the city of her youth, now perceived as “chaos” (11), the narrator situates herself at the entrance to the

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maze where she will “unravel the thread of Tina’s life” (12). Envisioning her journey and Gela, she resolves: “I will have to descend there. I too will have to lose myself in the labyrinth of buildings that fill the horizon and seem like a precarious game 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” (12). In this description, the visual images of children’s building blocks and the labyrinth evoke mortal dangers posed to young people and others, locked within Gela’s borders. A brief return to the Greek myth of King Minos, his daughter Ariadne, and the Minotaur illustrates this point. As legend has it, King Minos had a maze of tunnels built underground to imprison at its centre the monstrous Minotaur, part bull and part man. On Minos’s orders, every seven years fourteen children – seven boys and seven girls –were taken to the labyrinth as a tribute to the Minotaur, who would devour them. Thus, Cutrufelli’s envisioning of descent into the labyrinthine space of Gela introduces the idea of children as sacrificial victims consumed by violent forces. Her reference to the thread of Tina’s life is also significant, situating in a modern context the ball of twine Ariadne gives to Theseus so that he can find his way out of the labyrinth, which he does, after slaying the monster and saving the children to be sacrificed on that occasion. With the twofold objective of finding Tina and achieving an understanding of the realities she lives, the narrator journeys into two labyrinthine spaces, the geographies lived by Tina and Gela, noting her positions along the way. In fact, at one point she worries, “I chose a story that’s gotten out of hand and won’t leave me alone, that has entrapped me” (198). In this regard, the literal and symbolic meanings of the labyrinth are significant, bearing upon the challenges both the narrator and female outlaw must confront. Known for being difficult if not impossible to escape, the labyrinth symbolizes “the loss of the spirit in the process of creation,” which requires that one “seek out the way through the ‘Centre,’ back to the spirit” (Cirlot, Dictionary of Symbols, 173). In this light, the attempts of the narrator and Tina to escape the criminal underworld of Gela can be read as measures of their abilities, or lack thereof, to find their ways back to vital principles of life, threatened by the mafia culture of death. The chaos defining Gela derives not only from its visual architectonic appearance, but also from its lack of fundamental services to support the safe physical, emotional, intellectual, and social development of its inhabitants, which Cutrufelli unequivocally links to the mafia and the

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consequent disintegration of civil life that threatens Tina and fellow young people in several ways. Commenting on the relations between the material deterioration of Gela and the erosion of order, the resident Ignazio declares, “Without work, streets, water, sewers, gymnasiums, schools, hospitals, I wonder how any kind of order can exist – or resist” (33). Such symptoms of desertification are not only due to misgoverning on the part of local and national politicians. They also arise from the mafia’s intercessions in sociospatial relations, which territorialize the various neighbourhoods of Gela, structuring the material and existential configurations of daily life to their own interests. Thus, as Cutrufelli demonstrates, every contract for public works, every business, every resource essential for life in the city, every space for legal or illegal activities becomes a battle point for warring clans. She describes the consequent effects on the urban text: “Corruption, common criminality and war between the old clan of shepherds and the emergent mafia clans. A bloody war that is fought amidst the counters of butcher shops, in construction work-yards, where a school, a sewer main, a dam should be” (68). In this terrain, ruled by microspatial mafia tactics, the price of needed civil projects is measured in human lives; clan warfare over the Disueri dam claimed the lives of seventy-five people. Furthermore, the consequent lack of functioning schools and safe places for children to play, to learn social skills required for life in communities, to be introduced to other worlds through music, films, and books, produces a void, which the mafia readily fills with the culture of illegality. From the narrator’s research we learn that the majority of children inhabiting Gela’s poor, inner-urban deserts, who number some thirty-five thousand (51), move from elementary school directly to the streets, where the mafia conducts its recruitment for “jobs” in drug trafficking and robbery, for instance. As suggested by the commonplace sites that become violent contact zones for the mafia, such as butcher shops and construction yards, the criminal clans produce an unrelenting state of everyday fear and risk, which also blights the interior spaces of psychological, emotional, and moral life, inhibiting interventions on behalf of children and others. This general condition is personalized through the representation of Ignazio, who works as a doctor at the elementary school Tina attended. In many ways this character epitomizes a life of socially committed practice performed to improve the conditions of Gela’s children and families. However, as he confesses to the narrator, his attempts to help Tina, who comes to trust him, are ultimately truncated by the mafia.

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Striking at his family, they send a bouquet of flowers to his home, with a condolence card to his wife. In view of this death threat, readers can understand why Ignazio withdraws from Tina’s life. But the gravity of the situation fails to assuage his guilt over betraying his moral principles and abandoning her, which plagues Ignazio’s inner life. Cutrufelli’s mapping of diffuse mafia signs and practices of microcriminality written onto the cityscape serve to evidence how they block possibilities for young people to see, think, or imagine other avenues for making a life in Gela, thus creating a frame for understanding material realities of the avenues Tina takes. I propose they also deconstruct the illusion of criminal lines of occupation as a means for economic and social mobility, or freedom. Through the narrator’s reconstruction of Tina’s life story, the author represents how mafia concepts may structure the inner landscapes of psyche and emotions, and the relations between Tina’s body and spaces, crafting spatial imagery that denotes the increasing constriction of movement to the point of complete paralysis. In the course of this process, readers also witness how Tina functions first as the object of destructive urban forces and then as an agent destroying both city and self. As the narrator progresses in her quest to “get inside Tina’s life” (39), she reflects upon and fantasizes contrasting images of the girl that evoke vital properties of personality charged with the potential to develop in myriad ways. The dynamic visual and verbal traces of Tina force questions, also posed by the narrator, concerning why she would become part of the criminal system, and intimate what is lost in the process. Viewing photographs snapped at different times during Tina’s adolescence, the fictionalized writer is fascinated by what she perceives as a “childish mischievousness” (14) and “laughter playing around her eyes” (47). The diverse interpellations of Tina provided by Ignazio, the television reporter Graziella, and the defence attorney Laura Tilaro also underscore such fundamental traits as the desire for selfaffirmation, strength and complexity of character, and a lively sense of performance in terms of both the fashioning of self-image and actions. Finally, accounts provided by Tina’s relatives, as well as the narrator’s perceptions, suggest Tina feels deep love, respect, and perhaps desire for Giovanna. Thus, articulating ethical terms of her cartography, Cutrufelli invites readers to decipher how Tina comes to affirm such traits by aspiring to become a mafia soldier in the subterranean world where young boys she knew died gruesome deaths, tortured, hung, or riddled with machine-gun fire.

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The novel’s representation of the criminal forces generated by socially produced spaces suggests they operate to entrap Tina, constructing the parameters in which she conceives of her desire for self-affirmation. In this sense, the character is an object in the criminal system that lays waste to the lives and promise of Gela youth. In fact, the captain of the carabinieri denies the possibility that Tina, or children of mafiosi in general, might think or act otherwise: “Ever since she was a little girl, she was already inside. And once they’re inside, males or females, getting out of the circle is impossible. There’s no way back. Those who try are killed by their very own friends. We’ve found so many graveyards of victims of lupara bianca” (56). Charting the territory ruled by the mafia, this transparent vision evokes the confines inside the circle, whose borders are maintained through threat of death. The reference to the graveyards is especially chilling, since killing by lupara bianca aims to leave no traces of the victim’s body or existence. The corpses may be dissolved in acid or burned to ashes, for example, with only the tongue of a belt buckle or part of a shoe marking the murder site of the anonymous victim, and leaving no possibility for justice. The notion of the inescapability of labyrinthine mafia designs in the stories of Tina and Gela recurs in the sorrowful lament to the desert, delineated in diverse spatial dimensions, including the domestic, social, and psychic spheres. The scene playing out the events surrounding the murder of Tina’s father exemplifies this point. This particular segment of Canto al deserto has received brilliant analysis, conducted by Graziella Parati in “The Impossible Return” and Lara Santoro in “I bambini e la mafia.” Developing different lines of inquiry, Parati interprets the tragic event as a catalyst for Tina’s redefinition “as her father’s daughter” (259) in the role of rebellious woman warrior; Santoro argues instead that Tina “redefines herself as her father’s son” (185), employing feminist and queer theories to demonstrate how the apparent challenges to gender constructions in lawful and lawless circles are actually no threat at all, and in effect reinforce the patriarchal system (200). Shifting the perspective, here I want to examine the sequence for what the spatial imagery says about the internal and external geographies of Tina’s fabrication and how they function in Cutrufelli’s social critique of mafia desertification and, subsequently, violent feminine machismo. Cutrufelli’s use of spatial imagery is particularly striking in the fantasy scene and scenario projected onto the narrator’s psychic screen as she imagines the sights, smells, and senses ostensibly registered in the

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eight-year-old girl’s memories of witnessing her father’s murder. The signs, symbols, and ideas that the author crafts graphically represent the domestic and psychic space as sites of devastating trauma. The relations between these two dimensions become clear at the sound of the third rifle shot, which causes her father to fall on his back with, as we learn, his face obliterated, exploding “into a pool of blood” (25). Deftly moving from the literal register of tangible destruction to the metaphoric, the author describes the signs of family and home for which the father stands, as they collapse and disintegrate with his demise. In seven brief, declarative sentences, the author repeats the verb cadere (to fall), as pieces of furniture, knick knacks and, most important, the husband and wife’s framed wedding picture each fall to the ground. As Santoro observes, the “hammering repetition of the verb ‘cadere’ is proof that Tina’s whole world is shattering” (“I bambini e la mafia,” 184). What I find most remarkable for my discussion is the interrelation between Tina’s body and the space surrounding her, evoked through the onomatopoetic effect achieved by repeating “cadde” and “caddero,” as if the sound of each object falling penetrates her body as a blow to her psyche. Ultimately, the violent shocks breach the borders of the girl’s mind, as illustrated through evocative spatial metaphors: “The entire home fell down. And it shook, in [her] head, clear to its foundations, all the way into the ground, which in turn was shaking, crumbling, giving way, and each landslide started another one that tumbled deeper and deeper into her own bowels” (25). Crafting the landslide as metaphor, Cutrufelli calls up the unstable land on Gela’s hillside, creating a correlation between the girl’s inner topography, visceral and psychic, and Gela’s; both Tina and the city are traumatized by mafia attacks that cause the structures of their identities and the ground upon which these are founded to give way. In this scene of bloodshed and death, which portrays the destruction of the family according to the law by which Tina’s father lived as a mafioso, the author introduces the idea of escape in the geography Tina lives. At the literal level, the meaning of escape, conveyed only by her desire “to get out” (26), is relatively clear. The little girl must get out of the ruins of her home, the immediate source of pain and fear assaulting her. At the same time, the images of the character’s psychological state and richly fashioned details of the process make the meanings of escape more equivocal. Indeed, in order “to get out” the daughter must find a way over “the threshold blocked by her father’s body” (26). The threshold itself represents a transitional space, marking

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the boundary between endings and beginnings. As well, according to Cirlot it often symbolizes “the reconciliation and separation of the two worlds of the profane and the sacred” (Dictionary of Symbols, 341). Thus, in the microspatial geography of Gela, the architectural symbol might denote the separation between the dark criminal world of the father and another world of light beyond. In view of the devastated foundations of the little girl’s life and the fact that she must figuratively rise above the body of the father, the guarantor of mafia law, crossing the threshold might indicate a latent desire to escape from the criminal. In fact, Cutrufelli describes Tina’s search for an escape as an attempt to find “small oases where she could step” (27), thus conjuring as desert the criminal space signified by the father’s bullet-ridden body. This line of thought is enhanced by the representation of Tina’s reflections when later, cornered during a mafia ambush, she tries to discern a way to escape the immediate threat of death and, ultimately, the mafia system, which appears impossible. For escaping is just like “crossing the threshold blocked by her father’s body again” (214). The various ways Cutrufelli evokes the themes of escape and entrapment serve in part to denote the existence of other possibilities that, however, lie beyond the spaces of Tina’s self-conception and the familial and social forces informing it. Although the evocative language of the threshold may initially invite readers to imagine a range of beginnings for Tina, Cutrufelli provides signs evidencing the impossibility of escaping criminal manners of thought and action. Among the first things she does is to gather her father’s weapons. As an expression of her territorial body, the product of criminal forces in and beyond family, she orients her steps towards her old street, where her grandmother lives and ekes out survival through petty crime, which she teaches to her grandchildren. In effect, Cutrufelli suggests, family and social realities provide no alternative or escape. As Ignazio explains, Tina has nowhere else to go. Her mother disappeared right after the murder, though she later returned. What is not said here is also significant: there is no word about social networks to aid or protect the three orphaned children of the Cannizzaro family. Moreover, in a passage conveying Tina’s sense of loss over what she has never had, the author maps the constrictive borders of psychic life created by criminal culture and practices. While sharing a meal with the eight-year-old Ciuzzo, Tina asks him what he wants to be when he grows up. The question prompts her to reflect on her own childhood: “Since she was Ciuzzo’s age she felt deep inside her life, way too deep

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inside to imagine a time for herself as a ‘grown up.’ She hadn’t had any way to carve out a space for herself where she could fantasize a life as a ‘grown up.’ And maybe all of her battles were born from that, from the desire to feel herself grow, to have an ‘after’ to imagine” (176). Powerfully articulating Tina’s entrapment, this description highlights how even as a little girl she is enveloped by criminal codes of behaviour, values, and ideals, to the extent that they consume the spatiotemporal dimensions of her psyche, leaving no space or time to conceive of or even imagine herself growing outside the borders they define. On the basis of this cartography, we can reasonably say the mafia forces deriving from socially produced spaces define the architecture of the character’s thought, emotions, and behaviours, within which she articulates the desire for self-affirmation by developing the ambition to be a mafia soldier. Let me be clear that I am not suggesting the author portrays the relations between sociospatial elements and subjectivity in facile terms of cause and effect. On the contrary, the song to the desert highlights intricate interplays through both the specific descriptions of Tina’s itinerary and the representations of diverse geographies produced by characters that are subject to similar criminal relations of power and violence. For example, even among the Cannizzaro children, all raised by the same mafioso father, all witnesses to the gruesome sight of his corpse, the relations to the mafia differ. Tina’s sister Saveria stays within the affiliative circle, marrying the small-time mafioso Nele (with whom Tina aligns herself). Hardly benign, this too common occurrence perpetuates the pedagogy of oppression, violence, and death. But Saveria does not act as a protagonist in violent attacks. It is true that Francesco, their younger brother, becomes an active member of Tina’s gang and, more disturbing, thinks how easy it is to shoot a human being when he does so during a robbery. Yet, as readers discover, he also attempts to break out of criminal life. For a time, he looks for legal work and applies to the technical school run by the Salesians, where he could learn a trade. And as the elderly man’s wife points out to the narrator in the kitchen of the Bronx home, there are many Sicilian stories to write about daughters whose fathers are slain by the mafia and who then become collaborators with justice. On the other end of the spectrum, though not detailed in the novel, women have historically developed varied, active roles in the circle of mafia enterprises. As documented by Renate Siebert in Secrets of Life and Death, they work as agents in such enterprises as kidnapping, drug trafficking, robbery, and extortion. Situated within this lineage, Tina operates within the space of

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the subterranean circle, but with a difference. She rejects such conventional female roles and, with a vengeance, works to fashion herself as a mafia soldier, using body and mind as a weapon. In terms of the process of desertification that transforms the lives of Gela and Tina into terrain blighted by the mafia as a sociospatial power, Tina appears not to cross a threshold from object to subject. Rather, the geography she lives within and beyond bodily borders suggests a transformation in which she becomes simultaneously object and agent. First, as demonstrated above, these terrains are already consumed by the mafia. Furthermore, the images of her interior in the after moments of her father’s murder show the inexorable marks inscribed therein, which contribute in different ways to her criminal remodelling. Through the narrator’s fantasy creation of Tina’s memory of emerging on the other side of the threshold in the Bronx home, the author underscores how, ever since that moment, her mind is barren of registers of emotion. Even the intense fear assailing the little girl cannot penetrate it. Cutrufelli concludes the description of that murder scene with the image of Tina living under “numbed emotions” (42). Moreover, she elucidates the site of inception for Tina’s notion of becoming a mafia soldier as a vehicle for making her own mark under the name of her choosing. As she walks to her grandmother’s home, “from the repressed pain pushed with desperate strength into some remote part of her body, a strange, prodigious idea was appearing, almost comforting her” (27). Dispelling ambiguities about the nature of “the idea,” Cutrufelli signals the point of transition with the character’s renunciation of the name “Cettina” and adoption of “Tina.” Yet the act of selfnaming and the modes of thought and actions it underwrites are hardly liberating. They are conceived precisely out of the traumatic, repressed pain produced by the mafia, pain that is thus always embedded in her own aspirations to assert herself within the confines of criminal codes. The intercut fantasy visions of Tina’s modes of self-fashioning as a so-called woman of respect chart the desert that she thereby produces within and beyond her bodily borders, while also deconstructing the notion that achieving an active position in association with criminal elements could represent a form of female emancipation, providing access to power, autonomy, and respect. At the same time, the stories of Gela and Tina further a social critique levelled at the growing numbers of Italian girls and women who, Cutrufelli tells us, “armed and with cruel determination, impose their authority on the margins of the empire of Cosa Nostra” (“In the Kingdom of Persephone,”105). This phenomenon

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is driven, she argues, not only by the expansion of criminal clans, but also by varied socioeconomic forces, such as discrimination, financial markets, and the general obstruction of routes for women’s meaningful, civil development. Anna Puglisi’s insights on this critical issue in Italian life and society are pertinent here. Arguing against viewing women’s roles as protagonists in crime as a sign of woman-centred emancipation, she lays out the foundations of emancipation conceived as the “advancement of women,” which means, “to have a role equal to the other half of society’s in the places and moments in which decisions are made that proceed to civil growth and the well-being of all” (Donne, mafia e antimafia, 81). In contrast, the itinerary conceived by Tina in the subterranean labyrinth of Gela demonstrates what Cutrufelli calls “perverse emancipation,” the exercising of the power to oppress and do violence, but no freedom, as suggested by both the plot and spatial imagery that the author creates. The concept of perverse emancipation and the signs of feminine machismo making it visible form provocative keys of interpretation for the delineations of Faro’s sister Rosalia, who rules by proxy in Badalamenti’s Come l’oleandro, and the female crime boss Lucia Rizzo in Edoardo Winspeare’s 2008 film Galantuomini (Brave Men). Rizzo, like Tina, shows exceptional abilities to head her clan of the Sacra Corona Unita (United Holy Crown) in Puglia, as she organizes crimes and performs vendettas, wields power and guns with prowess, and firmly observes omertà. In contrast to Cutrufelli, Winspeare situates his film character firmly in the heterosexual script through her roles as lover and mother, yet also shows the merciless criminal confines that deny autonomy and freedom.10 The parameters within which Tina conceives herself appear bound to the criminal law of the father, yet Cutrufelli also underscores her agency in the process of change. These points are exemplified by the representation of the intimate space the character creates by and for herself in the domestic sphere of her grandmother’s home. Unlike the more isolated Bronx house, the residence in the old Gela neighbourhood is described in contradictory terms, as both an extension of the inner-urban mean streets and a haven. Indeed, at her grandmother’s, “the street came directly into the house” and the house “opened onto the street” (20). Yet the house is also a “lair” (65), in whose tight spaces and squalor Tina creates her own intersubjective space through the earphones of her Walkman and particular music. As Iain Chambers observes in his work on everyday living and the metropolis, such commonplace items as the transistor radio and Walkman, or the Ipod today,

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perform significant functions, as they are “increasingly miniaturized and personalized, ... [and] lead to individual ‘urban strategies’” (Popular Culture, 194). Mobile, always at her disposal, the Walkman enables Tina to create a musicscape serving as a private “refuge,” which the author evokes through sensorial imagery: “The light wire, the small plugs that softly pressed against the inside of her ears enclosed her in a music all her own, that didn’t filter outside her” (65). The kind of music she employs to create this space of her designs is particularly telling for the way it reveals the properties of self-reinvention. She chooses songs not by Italian or American singers popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, but sentimental Neapolitan melodies, evoking the sadness of poor children whose fathers are far away and, moreover, the desire to “change in order to fight” (66). This latter element emphasizes the notion of selftransformation with the specific aim of using physical violence, which is then situated in direct relation to the role Tina’s father plays in the process. The song’s lyrics foster a memory space where the father links past and future, recalling happy times of singing after Sunday family meals, and represents the daughter’s incorporation of the mafia man of honour and respect whom she emulates, at her young age of fifteen. The ideals and behaviours that Tina adopts as her own to fulfil her desires for self-determination manifest the elements of feminine machismo that define Cutrufelli’s notion of the criminal perversion of emancipation, which are mapped as destructive sociospatial formations of the geographies of Gela and Tina. Following the father’s example, the adolescent girl adheres to the masculinist mafia ideals of honour, exaggerated virility, and respect that, in the criminal economy, are demonstrated and achieved through violence as well as death. Tina’s process of self-construction may be viewed as an endeavour to embody the criminal code, while inscribing her particular signature through personalized tactics that employ a variety of visual props and gestures. Such strategies participate in the broader phenomena of contemporary urban life where, Chambers tells us, “the realization of your ‘self’ slips into the construction of an image, a style, a series of theatrical gestures ... [and] the body becomes the canvas of changing urban signs” (Popular Culture, 11). In this context the visible signs and actions deployed by Tina to craft an ostensibly personalized image as mafiosa also tell us about the signifying system organizing the criminal geography of Gela. At fourteen, the character’s fashioning of this image through both visual markers and behaviours exemplifies the visible evidence of feminine machismo. Ignazio, for instance, unequivocally claims she is the perfect image of a male, achieved

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in part through her leather jacket, jeans, passion for driving fast motorcycles and luxury cars, and, as readers know, her father’s gun, the instrument and symbol of mafia power. Moreover, as he specifies, she demonstrates “the obsession with commanding others and respect. Not the respect a female can expect from a male – that’s the tradition – but respect as men intend it. And that means fear” (46). It is worth noting that Tina’s singleminded focus on authority and respect is not limited to the psychic sphere, but also structures her sociospatial relations with Gela. Conceived in the context of masculinist criminal codes, power, authority, and respect engage Tina, representing key properties of her model of identity, which she articulates in daily urban life. She invents and shapes her own criminal talent, specializing in robbing travelling salespeople, and commands her own street gang of male minors, over whom she exercises power. Cutrufelli’s representation of Tina’s illegal activities maps how they function in an increasingly intensified process of desertification undergone by Gela and Tina. The first of the gang’s illegal exploits warrants attention not for the physical destruction of the built city, but for the abusive exercise of dominance through the threat of violence. The scene also elucidates how the female adoption of masculinist markers may function in the gendered hierarchy of power relations. Discharged to vindicate Francesco for the teacher’s derision of him, and thus also Tina’s sense of honour, two members of what becomes the gang stride into the boy’s elementary school, where elevenyear-old Tina assumes the lead. Cutrufelli directs attention to the elements of performance, as the narrator envisions the scene. Drawing her Beretta and assuming a shooting stance, gun aimed at the custodian, Tina delights at the success of her costume, gestures, and “playing” of the traditionally male-gendered role, which is measured, in part, by the terror written on the man’s face. While appreciating the pragmatic advantages she gains through the tactics of masquerade, which serve to foil identification, she appears struck most by the power she gains from it. As the author points out, “more than anything, the deception gave her a wonderful sense of invincibility” (42). As the final act of this spectacle draws to an end, Tina unwaveringly points the gun at Francesco’s teacher while the two boys urinate on her desk and calmly rub each page of the grade book in the puddle. This finale is important, and suggestive. On the one hand, as Santoro observes in “I bambini e la mafia,” it marks Tina’s difference within her gang and the mafia system at large; she has no penis, and thus the scene exposes the disjuncture between the girl’s anatomical body and the criminal identity

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she desires to perform, a point to which I return below. However, if, as I propose, we interpret Tina as an exemplar of the feminine machismo Cutrufelli critiques, then the disjuncture is not between the body and violent criminal behaviours, but between the body and dominant societal expectations and beliefs about female gender. This gap represents a powerful tool, for Tina maintains “her sex becomes a weapon to use against the police” (45). As an example of perverse emancipation, the episode enables some understanding of the particular sense of power females may derive from violently preying upon codes of gender and criminality, which disrupts both lawless and lawful elements of the urban text. Furthermore, the subsequent criminal acts Tina organizes, which include mafia-sanctioned jobs of blowing up part of a supermarket and robbing a jewellery store, demonstrate the escalation of deadly violence that lays ruin to the sociospatial landscape of Gela and interior terrain of Tina. Drawing out the complexities of Tina’s character as a product and agent of criminal powers deriving from socially produced spaces, Cutrufelli conjures images of her interior encoded as a wasteland of repressed pain, desire for vendetta, violence, and forsakenness, which echo landmarks of the desert poetically charted by Calì and Roversi. For instance, in an important delineation of the criminal body that the character creates, the author likens that body to the mechanical apparatus of a gun. As Tina lies in wait for the next criminal action, her body is “a desert of sensations” (55), a terrain barren of the joys, pleasures, or sadness of everyday events. It springs to life only in acts of crime: “Her body was like a weapon left loaded for too long and then emptied in just one shot. Loaded and empty. Loaded and empty” (55). This quintessential image of the non-human evokes disaffection, coldness, and death, features not unlike those typifying Baudrillard’s notion of desertification. His cartography, as well as Žižek’s in Welcome to the Desert of the Real for instance, suggests there is a dominant tendency to escape from banal daily life into the world of hyperreality, where simulations produce stronger emotional engagements. In fact, the owner of the Las Vegas videogame hall notes a similar phenomenon among the well-off youth of Gela. They appear empty, indifferent, with no substantive pleasures or commitments. In contrast, Tina’s body goes through the motions of intense animation, engaging not with video games simulating destruction, but with actions of material destruction of lives and sites in the city. The song to the desert includes various other allusions to the deadening of Tina’s life, which serve paradigmatic functions illustrating the

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effects on children of mafia recruitment, training, and employment. Here, Cutrufelli’s envisioning of Tina’s body as a space of numbed emotions (42), enclosed by an impermeable shell once she crosses the threshold of the Bronx home, warrants further scrutiny. This deadening of emotional life is directly related to the violent death of her father, yet as portrayed by the author, in the criminal sphere it continues to serve as a protective armour against pain and fear, and as a life-denying force of desensitization. In fact, the loss of feelings is a product and condition of mafia pedagogy, which affects the notion of self. Addressing this point, Siebert states, “There’s no space for emotions while on the job. Mafia education as socialization to become non-persons, ‘violence as a form of indifference toward the other’, ... Non-persons who acquire a perfect professional capacity to eliminate other non-persons” (“Prefazione,”15). Cutrufelli indicates that Tina’s case is not exceptional in this regard, as readers see from the carabinieri captain’s observations on the growing criminal delinquency among minors in Gela: arrests of adult mafiosi, he explains, have caused the clans to recruit younger and younger children from the poorest neighbourhoods of Gela. Underscoring the notion of the inescapability defining the criminal labyrinth in the city, he details the resultant process of desensitization afflicting young recruits. What disturbs him most is “these children’s awareness that their lives are marked. They become hardened, deadened, turn into statues of salt. It’s not resignation. It’s something worse. Something that makes doing violence to others and receiving violence seem as if it were a normal event, expected, foreseen. At eighteen, even younger, they’re already set in this direction, with resigned determination” (51). Here violence and death are presented as normative material conditions of daily life in the urban desert, transforming both the human features of the forsaken children and their abilities to value humanity in others. The metaphor of “statues of salt” is significant for what it suggests about the criminal and the perils of taking the path of criminality. Calling up the biblical figures of Lot and his wife in the Book of Genesis, Cutrufelli recontextualizes the episode in which the woman disobeys God’s command not to look back, and is turned into a pillar of salt. Hence, in the subterranean world of Gela, it is mafia lawlessness that turns human form and matter into hardened, immovable objects, evoking the sense of young lives lost in Gela. The opposition between the rigid criminal geography that annihilates expressions of individual properties of subjectivity and the geography Tina desires to live under a personalized signature “to affirm her own

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existence” (122) is richly delineated during one of the narrator’s travels into what has become the wasting heart of the city, Gela’s Piazza Umberto. The map of her memory traces serves to measure the decay of the urban desert. The space was once a “living room” (136), a domestic image evoking it as an intimate place for meeting friends and acquaintances, for pleasurable sociability, she specifies, among good people of the middle class. Now, the piazza instead functions primarily as a place for conducting mafia business and recruiting; the nearby Church of San Giacomo, where young people used to share songs and stories, is occupied by drug sellers and addicts. Although criminal forces appear to dominate the social relations producing spatial dynamics, Cutrufelli disrupts the syntactic flow through the description of the “nude woman,” as the people of Gela call her: the tall statue of the goddess Ceres that stands high on her pedestal in the middle of the square and “continues to reign over the space” (136). In general, monumental spaces are intensely complex, Steve Pile explains, functioning as “matrices of meaning and power, where these are simultaneously cartographies of social, historical and geographical space, and where these cartographies are written through, and read through, the body, subjectivity and language” (The Body and the City, 214). Several elements of the bronze statue enable us to discern the meanings made available by Cutrufelli’s representation of the spatial and social features and Tina’s relation to them. Inaugurated in 1952, in Gela’s main square, Piazza Umberto, the statue’s shapely figure, with strong thighs and full hips iconographically evokes the concepts of fertility, earthly fruitfulness, and life for which the maternal goddess Ceres stands in Roman myth. Significantly, both Ceres and the Greek goddess Demeter with which she became identified have direct associations with the underworld and death.11 Ceres is linked with the dead by a pit connected to their world (Caereris mundus), which is opened up three times per year, according to legend, and thus creates the danger that the dark subterranean world might attract the living. The goddess of fertility Demeter, also worshipped for protecting the bounty of crops on earth, has more tragic ties to the netherworld, since her daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped by Hades, lord of that world. Ultimately, Zeus allows Persephone to spend just the winter months with Hades in the realm of darkness, and the rest of the year with her mother in the realm of light. The myths of Ceres, Demeter, and especially Persephone inform Cutrufelli’s literary and critical perception of increasing female criminality in Sicily. Reflecting upon women who have performed relatively influential roles in the

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mafia, she conceives of them as “shadows who emerged from the sinister Kingdom of Hades and replicated, on a modern scene, the Sicilian tragedy of Persephone, perennially divided between the solar world of the mother and an attraction for the gloomy god of darkness” (“In the Kingdom of Persephone,” 104). This insight bears directly on the author’s depiction of Tina as an exemplary sign of the eruption of the violent subterranean forces of feminine machismo onto the geography of Gela, altering social relations. Let’s now return to the sight of Piazza Umberto, focusing on how the narrator fantasizes Tina in relation to the ideals, values, and possibilities represented by the statue of the maternal goddess Ceres and by the mafia men, whose bodies and voices fill the space, making it appear to be a “male place” (137). Not surprisingly, Tina wears her usual attire of pants and either a denim shirt or leather jacket closed “all the way up to her chin” (137), as if hiding the signs of her female body. Her manner of being in the square is important, for she is walking and “slips in between one male and another” (137). The act of walking, Pile notes, involves “a lack of space” (The Body and the City, 224).12 In this case, however, at street level the square itself is conceived as constituted by male mafia relations, and Tina moves fluidly within it, though lacking, to be sure, a “proper place.” Thus this element may suggest the flexible sociohistorical character of the mafia, which combines “continuity and transformation” (Puglisi, Donne, mafia e antimafia, 81), provisionally accommodating female presence. Tina’s movement, I propose, also indicates the undecidability of the character’s position as illustrated by her attractions to the two different forces of power making up the space. Again underscoring the nature of Tina’s motion, Cutrufelli describes her as follows: “But alone and silent, she continued to slip in between the male voices. Masculi [males] dominated by the green flesh of the nude woman” (137). What I find notable here is the unquestionable attraction to the female figure that the author attributes to Tina. In this part of the sequence, Cutrufelli draws attention to the goddess’s powerful body, indifferent to the trappings with which mortals adorn her on holidays and festivals, her “indulgent gaze” sensed on Tina’s neck, and the green patina of her “round shoulders, arms, and breasts” (137), which remind the girl of Milli, an aging prostitute to whom Tina is fondly attached. This allusion creates a correlation between the feminine figure and the female body as a site of sexual desire, echoing the only scene in which Tina appears to experience erotic pleasure, as Milli “slips her hand” (92) under the pitiful simulacrum of a penis moulded

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out of paper tissue, and knowingly excites the girl’s female body, bringing her to orgasm. Indeed, in Piazza Umberto, surrounded by the men of Cosa Nostra, the statue elicits Tina’s desire, and “brings to her mind the fantasy of going up to it to smell her, to see if she had the same scent on her body” (137). The representation of Tina’s attraction to the statue of Ceres, identified with Demeter in Greek myth, suggests that like Persephone, Tina is drawn to both the solar realm of fertility and the dark realm of death. I use the word “fertility” in its broadest sense, to indicate the capabilities to produce, sustain, and develop life in its multiple physical, emotional, intellectual, psychosexual, and social possibilities. These components provide the very means necessary for the personalization of the signature that Tina desires. In contrast, the subterranean world of death, of which both Cosa Nostra and feminine machismo are an expression, is a force that annihilates self, others, and the terrain upon which either might grow, producing arid wastelands. Ultimately, during the final fantasy images of Tina in Piazza Umberto, readers can infer the overriding strength of the character’s attraction to Cosa Nostra. She rejects her own body, attempting “to escape the weight of her small breasts” (137), and, likewise, the “nude woman” has become alien, her presence now “ambiguous and soft” (137). Just before the narrator’s fantasy is broken, she envisions this shift in perspective, for the feminine body of Ceres now stands as a reminder of Tina’s exclusion from Cosa Nostra, “a man’s thing” (138), and thus of the impossibility of fulfilling her desire to become an affiliated member of the criminal organization. In the images of Tina that build to her climactic final performance, Cutrufelli constructs a microspatial cartography of her contingent, increasingly constrictive position in the hierarchy of power relations formed by the clans of Cosa Nostra, Stidda, and street gangs. Providing a profile of the criminal panorama, the captain of the carabinieri notes the entrenched mafia families controlling the countryside, the battles between emergent clans of Stidda and Cosa Nostra, and the recent appearance of professional criminal gangs, which, he maintains, destabilize the internal and territorial structures of power and, in some cases, gender relations. As he explains, “In the multiplying of gangs outside of Cosa Nostra, in this dust cloud of small-time hoodlums, even some women manage to make their way, to take on the weight and role of leader” (53). In these microspatial criminal relations, Cosa Nostra adapts its strategies to dominate disruptive challenges to its power, and co-opts such gangs or eliminates them, as demonstrated by the fortunes of Tina

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and her gang, which is, in her eyes, a “jealously protected space” (189). Although she and her gang first become aligned with the clan led by Nele and perform certain jobs for them, her notoriety becomes a liability – both for the attention it draws and for the potential power it represents – that is quickly discharged by killing her sixteen-year-old brother Francesco and their cousin Liborio. Among the motives for the murder, according to the pastry shop owner at the scene, is precisely Tina’s extraordinary expansion on criminal terrain: Tina was “a plant that had grown roots and branches and leaves. It took up too much space. It had to be pruned” (135–6). Developing the metaphor of the plant in the context of the mafia landscape, the representation indicates that “pruning” – the shaping of a plant to suit human (read criminal) purposes – has become something of a common social occurrence. This relatively benign image is in stark contrast to the painfully detailed narration of Francesco’s murder, which serves several functions. Recreated from the boy’s perspective, each occurrence and thought assailing him is conveyed through the language of the senses. Thus readers are assaulted by the visual signs of the ambush as he perceives death closing in on him, and the sights, smells, sounds, and sensations of being shot. Serving as an object lesson in the mafia’s pedagogy and practices of death, the moving sequence also rehumanizes Francesco,13 delicately portrayed through his first declaration of love and familial affection, conveyed by his purchase of pastries for the younger children’s celebration of the Day of the Dead holiday. Such elements enable an understanding of both the human destruction caused by the mafia, and what is precisely at stake for Tina, once she barely escapes the vicious ambush in which Nele and Antonino are gunned down. Orchestrated to extraordinary effect, the fragments that reconstruct the stories of Tina’s life and Gela’s build in intensity, articulating the sense of borders closing in on her with full force in a wild frontier desert ruled by the law of the gun. Indeed, encamped in the Motel Agip where the narrator stays during her sojourn, described as “a mirage, an outpost in the middle of the desert” (32), are some two hundred armed police officers, soldiers, and carabinieri sent to Gela to restore public order. Presenting a macrospatial perspective of the urban text, Cutrufelli cites Gerardo Chiaromonte, president of the Antimafia Commission, who in 1989 stated that in Gela “the laws of the Republic and the principles of the Constitution have not been in force for years” (32). In view of the social upheaval and civil disorder consuming Gela, the sending of

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agents of state law to the city might appear to signal productive change, a reappropriation of city space for law-abiding citizens. However, as Cutrufelli’s critique illustrates, the timing and tactics of military intervention operate as an invasive, occupying power, much like Petrolchimico in the 1960s. Such show of force appears to be just that, proving ineffectual against systemic political corruption and, moreover, mafia violence ubiquitously marking the territories of city and countryside. This point is evidenced in one of the final images of Gela’s plains, a panorama “devastated by fire” (171), the visible signature of the mafia, which exacerbates the ruin of the land caused by “draught, landslides, erosion, the desert that descends from the rocky mountain sides, crumbling to pieces in the valley floor” (171). As the narrator tells us, in the space of two days, the mafia sets some forty-five fires, one of their usual weapons in the battle for the monopoly over grain. They thus terrorize farmers and merchants as well as urban dwellers in the “besieged city” (171). Underscoring the criminal organization’s power over the landscape and those who inhabit it, the character Graziella affirms that in Sicily, “when they say the mafia has control over the territory, that’s just what they mean” (212). Thus, as she explains, the space structured by Cosa Nostra affords no avenue of escape for Tina. These criminal laws of space and resultant material realities inform the closing fantasy sequences of Tina projected onto the narrator’s psychic screen, and foreshadow Tina’s climactic gesture. As the narrator conjures the thoughts running through Tina’s mind during the ambush that claims Nele and Antonino’s lives, she articulates a profound sense of entrapment, as she realizes “There’s no place for [Tina] anymore” (215). At the same time, Tina voices the resolution to not allow the mafia to lay hands on her, a sign of her desire for self-affirmation, the same desire she voices to the narrator during their physical encounter. Speaking for herself, Tina tells her, “I want you to fill your eyes with my gift. And make a beautiful story out of it” (227). In fact, the narrator serves as eye witness to the spectacular gesture written, it appears, under Tina’s personalized signature. This ostensible agency is suggested by the narrator’s vision of Tina stating aloud, “My life is in my hands alone” (222). Hence, Tina revs her motorcycle, gains speed and, seeming to attack the wasted landscape beyond, drives off the parapet, making the leap into nothingness that stands for the leap into nothingness of Gela’s youth, whose lives are wasted like the city surround. The manner of death is significant, since the speeding motorcycle again invokes the notion of not having a proper space or place. Although Tina’s authoring of the

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scene, timing, action, and style of suicide can be read as an escape from the hands of the mafia, and a way of leaving her mark, the meanings are highly equivocal here.14 It could be argued that Tina remains bound within the confines of mafia thought and practice, by essentially finishing their job for them in an act of self-annihilation that epitomizes Cutrufelli’s idea of an “impossible emancipation” (“In the Kingdom of Persephone,” 106) for females who aspire to advance in the mafia system. Moreover, I propose that the representations of the spaces within Tina’s bodily borders and beyond suggest she continues to be defined by the labyrinthine criminal elements as object and author of the forces creating the urban desert, inscribed climactically with the violence of her own death, which should not be evacuated. It is true, as the narrator explains, that through her suicide Tina “invents a way to exist, to make a space for herself and enter the collective imaginary” (231). But if to personalize is understood as a process of authoring without the intervention of others, then the mark of Tina’s itinerary entrusted to the narrator can hardly be considered a gesture of self-affirmation. Unlike the narrator, who finds her way back to the spiritual centre, and thus escapes the subterranean labyrinth of Gela, Tina remains caught in the labyrinthine criminal logic and performs her own act of selfdestruction. Her body literally becomes part of the wasted landscape, veiled by a white sheet, and her image in the imaginary is, presumably, the story of a girl who desires to be a mafia soldier. Cutrufelli’s cartography of the socioeconomic, political, and criminal powers producing bodies of urban desert composing the geographies of Tina and Gela bears directly on Sicily as object of desertification, and, I propose, the spaces of resistance created by socially produced forces seeking to reclaim sites for civil life. Establishing the synecdochical relationship between the young girl, the city, and the island, the narrator conceives of the story of Tina as the story of Gela, which together “form the story of Sicilian unhappiness” (232). This mapping of Sicily in terms of sorrow implicitly calls up the intertextual linkage between Cutrufelli’s lament in her song to the desert, and the poetic maps of the island’s desert space created by Calì and Roversi. Echoing the sentiments and thoughts expressed therein, the narrator evokes Sicily as an “island of shadows and ghosts – immigrants, fugitives, murder victims, clandestine activities and lupara bianca, small time criminal killings and momentous crimes – ... [an] island open to invasions and shut tightly around its secret pain” (230). Thus, what was once the rich garden of Sicily has been made into a hostile, deathly landscape bearing the signs

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of trauma and pain. This process, Cutrufelli suggests, also threatens the ground for ethical action, as exemplified by Ignazio’s insight that “there’s not just one Sicily, you know. There are many Sicilys. Islands on the island” (201). However, the different Sicilys are linked by complicity, and persist with “the wall of reciprocal indifference” (202), which he fails to break. Cutrufelli’s song to the desert serves not only to indict elements of society for forsaking the island and its inhabitants. Though fleeting, images of individual and collective resistance to the various forces of desertification present avenues for change. Significantly, the examples derive from local, community-based initiatives. The narrator’s friend and his fellow members of the newly named former Communist Party, serving on the city council, have reclaimed and equipped some ten kilometres of land along the shoreline. Through environmental reclamation efforts, Petrolchimico’s water treatment plants now process the residential and industrial waste, and the beach forms a hospitable space for soccer, socializing, and leisure, eliciting the narrator’s exclamation, “So much life” (87). The Salesians’ institute serves the educational, employment, and medical needs of young people from poor inner-urban neighbourhoods, caring for those who suffer from drug addiction and providing education and job training, opening possibilities for them to see ways of being and living beyond the strictures of the mafia. And Giovanna’s cousin organizes women’s demonstrations for housing in Gela and Palermo. It is true that she is embroiled in a struggle to save her own illegally built home. At the same time, she uses legal means to conduct this battle. Similarly, the text’s references to collaborators with justice inscribe the presence of females and males producing a culture of legality by testifying against the mafia. More important, however, like Calì and Roversi before her, Cutrufelli breaks the silence in the desert and speaks out, giving voice to the injustices of Tina and Gela, in a lament that reaches beyond them. Highlighting this point, the narrator explains, “I put Tina in the centre of a story that’s no longer only hers, or ours” (216). I want to speculate that this use of the plural possessive “ours” incorporates readers in the “we” of the song to the desert. This spatialization of impegno calls upon our ethical engagements with the geographies of individual and collective life, enjoining us not to abandon “islands” of crime, poverty, violence, environmental ruin, and despair to the kinds of social, economic, and political forces that the author maps. Indeed, her cartography suggests that such forces and the spaces they produce are subject to change.

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In contrast to the criminal desertification performed through mafia ways of thinking and being such as feminine machismo, as well as other forms of crime and oppression, such engagements would ideally enable the democratization of the mind and body, promoting the freedom to think, imagine, and invent the self in relation to family, community, and nation in ways written under personalized signatures.

4 Mafia Geographies of Voicelessness: Silvana La Spina’s L’ultimo treno da Catania

Along with the right to obtain reparation and justice, the right of victims is precisely to be remembered. Remembered in all their uniqueness and individuality. In their work and the results achieved. In their everyday humanity. And first of all, in their name. Don Luigi Ciotti, preface to L’altra storia, xii

Since the early 1990s, many works in Italian literature, film, and history have created a polyphonic body of stories about people, renowned or anonymous, who have been killed by the mafia, which marks a striking antinomy that bears directly on notions of justice, memory, and loss. While endeavouring to give voice to the names, ideas, emotions, and actions of the human beings bearing them, and commit their lives to public memory, the teeming words of journalists, screenplay writers, family and friends of victims, and even ex-mafiosi also inscribe microgeographies of “voicelessness.” By this term I do not mean only the silence that remains as voices are truncated by mafia murders, nor do I mean the lack of voice in the figural sense. Rather, in this discussion, the term denotes something more encompassing. Inspired by Adriana Cavarero’s elaboration of a “vocal phenomenology of uniqueness,” “voicelessness” means the irremediable absence of the speaker’s voice as the acoustic emission from the material “flesh and bone” body that reveals the “unrepeatable singularity of each human being, the embodied uniqueness that distinguishes each one from every other” (For More than One Voice, 9). Various works pose the seemingly unresolvable contradiction between giving vocal presence to life stories while at the same time

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marking the absence of the very voices transmitting the unique identities of the human beings who inspire the stories. Nando Dalla Chiesa’s Il giudice ragazzino and the homonymous film by Alessandro Di Robilant memorialize the young Sicilian judge Rosario Livantino for his extraordinary efforts to prosecute mafia cases in Agrigento, confronting collusion between figures in the criminal organization, the intellectual community, the political elite, and the very state he served. In contrast, Marco Tullio Giordana’s celebrated The Hundred Steps crafts moving visual testimony to Giuseppe Impastato’s militant life’s activism against the mafia dominating Cinisi. Among recent amplifications of the varied discursive formation of memorialization are numerous works inspired by Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The indispensable two-volume set Falcone e Borsellino 1992–2012: Il coraggio e l’esempio, edited by Marco Ascione, constructs a public archive of their lives, featuring invaluable photographs, social commentary, and articles. Laura Anello’s L’altra storia shifts focus and creates a space for the voices of bereft family members who recollect for readers idiosyncratic, unduplicatable features of the lives of Falcone, Borsellino, Judge Fran­ cesca Morvillo, and the bodyguards killed with them. Underscoring the importance placed upon the right of all victims of mafia violence to be remembered, such works as Ad alta voce by Antonella Azoti and Se muoio, sopravvivimi by Alessio Cordaro and Salvo Palazzolo train attention on lesser-known people killed by the mafia. These narratives challenge the oblivion of historical forgetfulness in diverse ways. Azoti’s autobiography articulates the personal and political dimensions of family life with her father, Nicolò Azoti, secretary of labour, killed by the mafia in 1946. Cordaro’s collaborative work with the journalist Palazzolo conducts an investigation into the death of his mother, Lia Pipitone, who was murdered upon orders of her father, a mafia boss. By virtue of their attempts to summon up particular individuals through life stories and to impress them on living memory, these films and narratives, among a host of others, participate in a broader cultural phenomenon of works reconstructing often traumatic events in Italian history that have claimed numerous lives, yet remain obscured by mystery and controversies or, not infrequently, buried under the designation of state secret, all of which deny any form of justice. Pertinent here are, for example, the Massacre of Portella della ginestra (1947), the terrorist bombing of the Bologna train station (1980), and the Ustica Massacre, which refers to the 1980 crash of a commercial airplane in the Tyrrhenian Sea near the island of Ustica. Italian authors, in retelling such events from

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perspectives attributed to individuals among the dead, and often forgotten, expose complex relations between the narrative functions and possibilities of silence, voice, and justice, a problematic acutely examined by Sergia Adamo, who proposes that such texts “give voice to silenced demands [for justice] coming from the past” (“The Voice of the Forgotten,”41). Moreover, she and Clotilde Bertoni speculate about how, in the cases of historical figures represented as characters, “the space of narration, in the different forms it acquires, can posit itself as a place for recovering voice and overcoming voicelessness as objectification” (“On Voice and Voicelessness,” 8). The films and writings devoted to representing the particular stories of Giuseppe Impastato, Giovanni Falcone, and Lia Pipitone provide diverse, fruitful terrain for exploring this proposition, and particularly the ways narratives may challenge if not overcome voicelessness caused by the extreme form of objectification suffered by victims of mafia murder: the obliteration of the essential, vital substance and singular qualities of a human being, as a practice to increase power, material and symbolic. Here, however, I want to think about the discursive bounds of possible relations between speaking, silence, memory, and justice from a different vantage point, constructed in Silvana La Spina’s 1992 novel L’ultimo treno da Catania. This work shares the thematic concerns artfully explored in this award-winning author’s body of fiction, such as the dislocations between the ideal and practice of justice, investigated in Morte a Palermo; constructions of history in service of hegemonic power and the quest for truth, problematized in Quando marte è in capricorno and Un inganno dei sensi maliziosi; and the mafia, whose historical, socio­ logical, and political dimensions are analysed in La mafia spiegata ai miei figli (e anche ai figli degli altri). The criminal association also plays varying roles in the mysteries investigated by police inspector Laura Gangemi in Uno sbirro femmina and La bambina pericolosa. The most recent novel in this series, Un cadavere eccellente, focuses on the mysterious circumstances surrounding the murder of a member of parliament, as in L’ultimo treno da Catania. What distinguishes the engagements with these problems in the earlier novel is the way the narrative practices appear to self-consciously renounce the possibilities of giving voice to historical victims through the representation of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, murdered along with his wife Emanuela Setti Carraro and bodyguard Domenico Russo by a mafia hit squad on 3 September 1982. In fact, in this evocatively crafted mystery, which resonates with elements of Leonardo Sciascia’s stories of mafia power and injustice, Dalla

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Chiesa never appears as a dramatized character. No specific words are attributed directly to him in dialogue or any other form. In other words, readers never “hear” him speak. Furthermore, he is invoked not via his proper name, but only as “the general” or the “prefect of Palermo,” appellations that I also employ to distinguish between the fictional character and the person Dalla Chiesa. Allusions to the historical figure Dalla Chiesa, as well as his ideas and actions, arise throughout the narrative as the investigation into the murder of Rapisarda, a member of Parliament, unfolds in Catania during the months of the general’s tenure as prefect of Palermo. These narrative invocations, I propose, perform critical functions driving the plot and representation of mafia politics produced by the state, business enterprise, and the criminal organization, thereby positing questions about voice, justice, and memory. Drawing upon Cavarero’s conceptualization of voice and Edward W. Soja’s insights on the spatiality of human life and the modes of its production, I argue that La Spina’s mystery novel, which is also a remarkable citystory of Catania, charts a mafia geography of voicelessness that encompasses two mutually informing temporal frames. First, within the spatiotemporal bounds of the fiction portraying Judge Di Marco’s search for truth so that justice may be served, the voices of politicians, intellectuals, Knights of Labour, and agents of the mafia mark the objectification and devocalization – the severing of speech from the material body emitting it – of the figure of the general standing for Dalla Chiesa, which culminates in the definitive rending of his voice invoked through the story’s final sentence. La Spina’s narrative serves here as a forceful indictment of the Italian state, yet also functions as a discursive transmission of voicelessness on the part of the historical person Alberto Dalla Chiesa. In the process, La Spina recontextualizes the murder of Dalla Chiesa as a crime of state in the ethical if not juridical sense. Dalla Chiesa’s particularized life, work, and sacrifices are more or less overshadowed in the second temporal frame of the 1990s, when the novel is published in November 1992, just months after the mafia murders of Falcone, Borsellino, Morvillo, and their bodyguards, which cast much of the nation into mourning. The following section reconstructs key ideas distinguishing Dalla Chiesa’s endeavours to assess and combat the mafia, inasmuch as they bear upon La Spina’s text. The resultant mapping of antimafia and mafia forces shaping sociospatial relations in Italy, and on the microgeographic scale of Catania, informs my analysis of this citystory. Venturing to chart what I call a mafia geography of voicelessness, I focus on the spatiotemporal configurations and meanings attached to

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devocalization and the severing of voice by the narrative strategies La Spina fashions to represent the silent presence of Alberto Dalla Chiesa. Several components elaborated in Cavarero’s vocal phenomenology of uniqueness inform the analysis. Most important, she insists upon the corporeality of the voice and the singularity of each human speaker revealed through acoustic signs modelled for speech. This way of thinking shifts attention from voice as an abstract or universal to the distinctive, finite attributes of utterances as uniquely unreproducible expressions of subjectivity, and thereby enables different understandings of testimonies in mafia studies. It also directs this analysis of the narrative more towards the characterization of the figures who speak and their manners of doing so in the interplay of voices, and the relations or absences they may inscribe. Indeed, Cavarero conceives of vocal utterances as actions that perform both self-revelatory and relational operations. She explains, “Precisely because speech is sonorous, to speak to one another is to communicate oneself to others in the plurality of voices. In other words, the act of speaking is relational: what it communicates first and foremost, beyond the specific content the words communicate, is the acoustic, empirical, material relationality of singular voices” (For More than One Voice, 13). Especially pertinent here is how these relational acts of speaking constitute what she terms the “absolute local,” which she perceives as a “taking-place of politics” (204) that produces spaces of interaction. Cavarero’s conception of such spaces highlights their contingency, unforseeability, transitoriness and, moreover, independence from the material space surround. Adapting these phenomenological concepts to the clear differences and possibilities posed by literary narration, I apply it to the fictional terrain of La Spina’s citystory, in order to explore the potential interaction between the spaces generated through reciprocal acts of speaking and devocalization, and the spaces of Catania and the nation. Here I follow the avenue of inquiry indicated by Soja’s notion of spatiality, which is to say, the formative interplay between lived microgeographies constituted by psychic, social, and political forces of engagement and fluid social relations and societal conditions. My discussion examines the voices engaged in the creation of mafia politics that produce human geographies making up the city and nation, which mark the voicelessness and thus corporeal absence of the general as character and, extra-textually, Dalla Chiesa as human being. The resultant cartography then serves to scrutinize critical ideas about memory, history, fiction, and justice with respect to the dead and the living, and the roles they play in the ideation and practices of antimafia spatialities.

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General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa: Reconfiguring the Geography of Mafia and Antimafia Relations in History and Memory The problem is whether historical truth also ensues from historical inquiry. It is not the first time that facts are mangled and justice is never attained. Silvana La Spina, L’ultimo treno da Catania, 98 “Look, I know absolutely nothing about this Inzerillo story. It’s something I know nothing about ... and so I couldn’t have told it to Dalla Chiesa ... I’ll say it again, he must have confused me with someone else or summarized conversations with other people in his diary.” “This refers directly to you, Mister Minister, and it is Dalla Chiesa who says it in his diary.” Alfredo Galasso, La mafia non esiste, 241

Despite General Dalla Chiesa’s unquestionable importance in the national history of the mafia and antimafia forces, his name, ideas, and the strategies he devised to put the law and justice into practice have been somewhat eclipsed. To be sure, in the aftermath of his murder several works appeared, staving off his drift into the recesses of memory. In 1984, Nando Dalla Chiesa’s Delitto imperfetto attracted a vast readership, bearing painfully honest witness to his father’s battle against members of Cosa Nostra and indicting the political figures aligned with them. The same year, Giuseppe Ferrara’s film Cento giorni a Palermo, with screenplay by Giuseppe Tornatore, created dramatic images of the final hundred days Dalla Chiesa lived as prefect of Palermo. He also plays a fundamental role in the lightly veiled account of the maxi-trial portrayed in Alfredo Galasso’s 1988 novel veritè La mafia non esiste, which creates insider views of the court proceedings, with particular attention to the links, by commission or omission, between the minister (Giulio Andreotti) and the murder of Dalla Chiesa. Today, however, some thirty years after the atrocious slaughter in Via Carini, and the increasingly spectacular massacres of Punta Raisi and Via D’Amelio in 1992, the topography of collective memory has understandably altered. In a constant process of fabrication and renewal driven by the media, histories, testimonies, documentaries, and fiction, the geography now features numerous works that put into relief the figures of judges Falcone and Borsellino, thereby orienting the trajectory of the mind’s eye and the consequent relations perceived between

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lawful, criminal, and political formations. As a result, Dalla Chiesa now tends to be cast on the periphery, if he appears at all.1 For instance, in John Dickie’s foundational Cosa Nostra, only two of the book’s nearly four hundred and fifty pages are devoted to the general, primarily highlighting his death and televised funeral. He fares better in Alexander Stille’s Excellent Cadavers, which situates him in relation to Cosa Nostra’s territorial expansion and its alliances with criminal politicians and financiers. Pasquale Scimeca’s film Placido Rizzotto also warrants mention for its scenes representing Dalla Chiesa’s investigation into the murder of the slain secretary of the local labour office and for its inclusion of his photographic image in the concluding montage, which gives him symbolic placement among the antimafia martyrs memorialized therein. Although this sketch suggests the fading of Dalla Chiesa’s voice, in the figurative sense of speaking to the collective imaginary today through the multiple discourses that keep stories and memory alive, during the four months he served as prefect of Palermo (30 April2 to 3 September 1982) he played key roles in the national vicissitudes of antimafia consciousness, sentiments, and activism, which persisted in the days after his death. In fact, in the frame of the mafia mattanza (slaughter) that turned Palermo streets into a war zone from 1978 to 19833 and claimed the lives of some one thousand mafiosi, agents of the law, and bystanders, General Dalla Chiesa functioned as a pivotal symbolic figure in the collective imaginary, whose death, according to Umberto Santino, “provoke[d] the most widespread emotion at the national level” (Storia del movimento antimafia, 251) and changed the ways diverse sectors of the Italian populace perceive the mafia. His case shattered the intransient image of the criminal organization as a localized “Sicilian” phenomenon bound by the sea, revealing its national dimensions and thus the threats posed to the democratic rights of all Italian citizens by its embedded relations in the political apparatus and institutions, a major problem developed artfully in La Spina’s novel. Revisiting Dalla Chiesa’s words and ideas about Cosa Nostra and how they operate in the system of signification reconfigures, I argue, the geography of mafia power in its insular, peninsular, and transnational dimensions, and the relations with the political and economic interests upon which it depends. The resultant cartography enables an understanding of the complex interplay between history and fiction crafted by La Spina in her images of the voicelessness inscribing the general that stands for Dalla Chiesa, and the voices of Catania registering its

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criminal elements in the political, economic, and intellectual spheres, as they collude to conceal their roles in at least two murders. Furthermore, I propose that the narrative provocatively suggests this palpable collusion creates the ground for the murder of Dalla Chiesa. The spatial relations between Cosa Nostra, the urban metropolis of Palermo, and the nation cast particular light on Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini’s request that Dalla Chiesa accept the position of prefect of Palermo in the spring of 1982, exposing its pragmatic and symbolic functions. The years of the second mafia war see Palermo neighbourhood cafes, piazzas, and streets, generally places of everyday sociability and festivities in the lives of city and inhabitants, transformed into gruesome crime scenes that increasingly mark the murders of high-­ profile servants of the state, creating traumatic rifts within landscape and psyche alike. Today in Via Libertà, a plaque reminds passersby of the sacrifice made by regional president of Sicily Piersanti Mattarella, who was gunned down just as he got into his car with his family on the day of the Epiphany in 1980. Via Cavour bears a similar plaque, memorializing Judge Gaetano Costa, the head of the Procura della Repubblica, murdered a few months after Mattarella as he browsed through items at a bookstand. Mafia attacks on agents of the Italian state also reach beyond the borders of Palermo. The same year, while Monreale is swept up in the celebration of the Holy Crucifix, carabinieri captain Emanuele Basile is ambushed in a hail of bullets, which miraculously misses his daughter in his arms and his wife nearby. The increasing sites of traumatic death and mourning alter the features of lived spatiality, and create an outlaw geography, which puts into relief the absence of the state and its inability to protect citizens within its borders, calling to mind the philosopher carriage driver’s tour of civil indignation in Amelia Crisantino’s Cercando Palermo. In such terrain, the government’s enlistment of Dalla Chiesa as prefect of Palermo performs fundamental functions. First, his expertise in the development and execution of strategies to combat terrorism in the 1970s earned him the stature of national hero among many in Italy, fostering grounds for hope of similar success in the battle against the mafia. This was territory with which he was intimately familiar, having investigated the murder of Placido Rizzotto, which led to the arrest of Corleone boss Luciano Leggio, and worked as commander of the carabinieri in Palermo from 1966 to 1973. Moreover, by deploying Dalla Chiesa in Palermo, the Italian government mobilized such symbolic meanings as honesty, justice, and democracy, for which he stood and thus conferred, by association, upon the state.

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The nomination of Dalla Chiesa consequently projects the idea of the state’s political commitment to his mission of fighting Cosa Nostra and establishing law and order. General Dalla Chiesa’s correspondence, interviews, and thoughts committed to his journal represent various discursive registers through which he articulates an acute understanding of the role that the state casts him to perform on the local as well as national stage, and the complex, unedited relations between the political and outlaw figures involved. Especially important here are the entries written in a daily appointment book that he used as a journal. In contrast to Rita Atria, who crafts her diary as addressee, Dalla Chiesa conjures as interlocutor his first wife Dora, who died in 1978, and whom he endearingly calls “Doretta.” His words fashion the pages as an intimate, self-revelatory space, in which he shares his innermost thoughts, fears, hopes, and ideals. The following passage is important for the way it introduces components of his perceptions of self and the Italian state, which recur in the journal writings. Speaking to Dora, his “precious,” he reveals on 8 March 1982 that though the future nomination to prefect of Palermo may represent a form of recognition for his career achievements in the army, it also has potentially devastating implications. He tells her: I’m about to become again an instrument of political policy that’s leaking from all sides, it seems that everything may crush my entire lifetime, a lifetime made of the army, built in the army, lived for the army. Yes, I say crush, in that everything smacks of violence, trauma, closure. Everything smacks of something ineluctable and new, undecipherable and strange, almost as if everything behind me were suddenly erased, almost as if your Carlo were being put to new trials, new torments, but in a world that isn’t his, that doesn’t feel like his own. (Stajano, Mafia, 228)

What arrests my attention here is how his awareness of the political leadership’s objectifying use of him to shore up its ineffectual attempts to stem mafia violence cascades into images evoking the traumatic destruction of his image of self. Dalla Chiesa envisages his assumption of the role of prefect of Palermo as obliterating the endeavours, accomplishments, and dispositions making up his military life. Ultimately, as seen in his shift to the third person in speaking about himself, the position in which the government proposes to put him culminates in a splitting of the self. Voicing deep apprehensions, he pictures Dora’s “Carlo” as the other in a foreign, antagonistic world, cut adrift from his past lifetime.

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Transformed from an object of reflection into a material reality to be confronted, the government’s (anti)mafia politics receive a particularly elaborated critique in Dalla Chiesa’s sustained conversation with Dora dated 30 April 1982. The tragic events surrounding Pio La Torre’s murder on that date inject an air of urgency into the impetus to converse and the self-images the speaker articulates. Caught unawares in Pastrengo, he tells Dora, “Your Carlo ... was suddenly catapulted to Rome under the auspices of the Prime Minister and then to Palermo to assume the position of prefect” (Stajano, Mafia, 230). As if dispossessed of the agency his military rank and stature bestow, he describes himself as “catapulted,” like an object moved by forces beyond his control, an effect, we can say, produced by both the mafia through the creation of the crisis and the state as it attempts to respond. Through a question posed to Dora, he registers his own shock at the killing of La Torre in downtown Palermo: “Do you realize, my darling, what has happened in me, inside me, and the reactions it set off in an atmosphere inflamed by such a profoundly serious event ...?” (Stajano, Mafia, 230). Casting his gaze from the interior to the national panorama, he explains the enormity of what has taken place and its direct bearing on the Christian Democrats. He observes, “Italy has been rocked by the episode, especially on the eve of the congressional meeting of a Christian Democrat Party that lives off Palermo with the worst expression of its mafia activism, let alone political power” (Stajano, Mafia, 230). The vampirish image of the Christian Democrats feeding on Palermo, draining the metropolis of resources that should sustain city and citizens, offers contrast to the nation in mourning, and introduces interconnections between political and mafia interests that generate the urban text Dalla Chiesa is ostensibly called upon to reform. In what Dalla Chiesa calls “a realistic evaluation,” in the journal entry of 30 April, he continues to chart the topography of collusion between Italian politics and the mafia, and situates himself in the resultant hierarchy of power, highlighting the solitariness of an impossible position. As illustrated in the following passage, he represents his function as an alibi for a fugitive state, which both evades a materially committed campaign against organized crime and evades the law, since political parties and state institutions comprise criminal elements. He explains to his dear confidant: I was catapulted from a ceremony that was special to me, that should have constituted a seal on my long career in the army, into a treacherous

158  The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature environment, rich in mystery and a battle that could elate me, but without anyone around me, without the help of a friendly presence, without the comfort of having a family behind me as I did ... when the entire army was with me. I’m suddenly on someone else’s home ground, in a place that on the one hand expects miracles from your Carlo and on the other curses my destination and arrival. I’m in the middle of ... a state that entrusts its peace of existence not to a clear will to fight and weaken mafia politics but to the use and exploitation of my name to silence the irritation of the political parties. (Stajano, Mafia, 230)

The spatiotemporal features of the terrain Dalla Chiesa describes to his listener denote significant aspects of his material and psychological position. Here again, the use of “catapulted” underscores both the unexpected and the uncontrollable nature of the deployment to which he is subject. This movement marks a rupture between spaces, the celebratory space of the ceremony held in his honour and the hostile space of his pitched battle against the criminal organization; a rupture between past and present, or endings and beginnings, the latter of which hold none of the promise they might augur. Although he also invokes the restorative presence of public esteem in this passage, his words bear testimony to his overriding sense of isolation in an antagonistic terrain, an isolation unmitigated by fellow agents of the law and the state that should uphold that law. This solitary position has ominous implications when considered in relation to his observations about Judge Costa’s murder, shared with Giorgio Bocca a few months later, to which I return shortly. In contrast to the evocative images of hostile territory delineated in his journal, Dalla Chiesa constructs a relatively detailed cartography of mafia power in a letter to Prime Minister Spadolini, which warrants attention for his perception of a Rome-Palermo axis that organizes political and criminal arrangements producing terms of the lived spatiality he must negotiate. The spatiotemporal configurations of the representation are also significant. Dated 2 April 1982, the letter indicates ongoing changes in the landscape produced by mafia and political forces, where General Dalla Chiesa then projects himself into future time, envisioning the hostile resistance he will face. Significantly, he charts the Rome-Palermo axis as one of the “multiple manifestations” of the mafia through signs delivered by means of the media prior to his investiture as prefect. He informs Spadolini that “messages already sent by the most corrupt ‘political family’ in the area have reached the press” (Stajano, Mafia, 232). In the mafia context, where language consists of signs, gestures, symbols, and

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silences that enable diverse levels of meaning among local communities and affiliated members, discussed in chapter 1, the importance of the messages to which Dalla Chiesa refers cannot be underestimated. Such members of the Christian Democrat “political family” (read political mafia) as Giulio Andreotti in Rome and Nello Martellucci in Palermo released press interviews and statements that put into question the general’s understanding of Cosa Nostra and Sicily, and thus also the scope of his mission. Such signs can be read as defensive gestures against the threat of Dalla Chiesa’s future presence in Palermo, yet they also initiate assaults on his expertise, capabilities, and heroic stature, attempting to strip his voice of authority and symbolic power. In his closing remarks to Spadolini, Dalla Chiesa shifts to a personal register, and envisions his geographic story as it promises to unfold, determined by the criminal associations between Rome and Palermo. He says, “I’m personally destined to undergo operations of subtle or brutal local resistance, if not rejection on the part of the ‘famous palaces’” (Stajano, Mafia, 232). With the image of the “famous palaces” the writer conjures the grand seats where political power is brokered, likely alluding to the Andreotti entourage. Particularly germane here is Dalla Chiesa’s journal entry for Tuesday, 6 April 1982, which explicitly demonstrates the linkage between Andreotti and the affairs of his political family in Sicily. As Dalla Chiesa notes, Andreotti requests a meeting due to his interests among the Sicilian electorate. Unequivocally marking his position in this respect, Dalla Chiesa writes, “I was very clear and let him know for certain that I would not give special consideration to that part of the electorate on which his important supporters draw” (Stajano, Mafia, 229). Significantly, his account of the words spoken by Andreotti during the encounter focuses on a story the ex-prime minister shares. According to Dalla Chiesa, Andreotti tells him “that in regard to the Sindona affair a certain Inzerillo died in America and arrived in Italy in a coffin, with a ten dollar bill in his mouth” (Stajano, Mafia, 229). In view of the matters prompting the meeting – the scope of Dalla Chiesa’s antimafia mission in Sicily – Andreotti’s story can hardly appear casual. In fact, in Delitto imperfetto, Nando Dalla Chiesa devotes substantial analysis to the tale’s significance within the conversation and to the events that unfold thereafter, noting that his father did not read it as a warning, in part because the nature of the elderly statesman’s role in the Sindona affair, which involved the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli (the lawyer who investigated Sindona’s illegal banking deals) and mafia boss Totò Inzerillo, emerges only after 1982. I speculate,

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however, that the significance of the space, whose details we can only imagine, conjured by Andreotti for Dalla Chiesa’s ears alone, lies also in its figurative elements. From this perspective, the historical figures of Girolamo Messeri, also recalled in the meeting as the Christian Democrat involved with the priest Agostino Coppola, and implicated in a trial for mafia association; the wizard of high finance Sindona, who staged his own kidnapping with the help of Totò Inzerillo; and the mafioso’s murdered brother Pietro Inzerillo represent the key forces of politics, church, big business, and the mafia producing a conspiratorial network of power driven by self-interest and protected by lethal violence, which the man of the law, General Dalla Chiesa, aims to penetrate. Thus, the reference to the Inzerillo clan is critical, since mafia boss Totò Inzerillo ordered the killing of Judge Gaetano Costa, who posed a similar threat. I now want to recall to public memory the map of mafia power elaborated by General Dalla Chiesa, which rocks the foundations of the various licit and illicit seats of power across the nation by speaking to audiences throughout Italy about the reconfigured designs of mafia territorialization that reach across local, national, and transnational borders. The cartography bears directly on the ideas, imagery, symbols, and events making up La Spina’s imaginary Catania and the geographies she fashions for the figure of the general standing for Dalla Chiesa, honest citizens, and criminal elements. Disclosed not in a private meeting with officers of the law or local dignitaries, but in an interview with journalist Giorgio Bocca, and originally published in La Repubblica on 10 August 1982, the map of criminal expansion is drawn by Dalla Chiesa at a particularly critical juncture of mafia activity that strews the land in what is known as the “triangle of death,” comprising Bagheria, Casteldaccia, and Altavilla, with audacious signs of its presence. From Thursday, 5 August to Sunday, 8 August mafia clans kill some eight people. However, the visible, escalating violence shaping local social arrangements of injustice is not the focal point of the geography Dalla Chiesa charts. Rather, his map traces “invisible” expanding conduits and junctures of criminal affairs that span the distances of the peninsula and beyond. Indeed, over twenty years before Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra and Giuseppe Catozzella’s Alveare earn headlines for their explosive journalistic fiction accounts that document the monopolies created by, respectively, the camorra in Naples and the ’ndrangheta in Milan, Dalla Chiesa declares, “The mafia is now in the largest Italian cities, where it has made sizeable investments in construction, commerce, and perhaps industry.”4 Yet the most stunning revelation, which puts

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both speaker and mafia under threat, is the acute visualization of the tributaries feeding the amassing of illegal mafia capital, extorted from architectural and building firms and then transformed into luxury hotels, restaurants, or homes. Dalla Chiesa states, “What interests me more is the mafia network of control that, thanks to those homes, firms, and business deals passing through honest hands above suspicion, is located in key points, guarantees shelters, procures laundering channels, and controls power” (Bocca, “Dalla Chiesa”). Through such power junctions, the mafia essentially robs citizens of access to public services and commercial enterprises that should be free in democratic society, and produces a system that, Dalla Chiesa asserts, must be fought “in a global manner.” Underscoring the expansion of the crime organization’s territories and interchanges with both private and state enterprise, Dalla Chiesa produces a microgeography of Catania as a model urban centre of mafia design. With no equivocation he tells Bocca and readers, “Today I’m struck by the mafia’s policentrism, even in Sicily. This is truly a historical turning point. The mafia of western Sicily defined geographically is a thing of the past. Today the mafia is strong in Catania too. In fact, it comes from Catania to conquer Palermo. With the Palermitan mafia’s consent, the four largest Catania real estate developers are now working in Palermo. Do you believe they could do that if there weren’t a new map of mafia power behind it?” (Bocca, “Dalla Chiesa”). Though casual readers might not discern the sharp resolution of Dalla Chiesa’s delineation of the criminal landscape, his reference to the four urban developers precisely pinpoints the entrenched structural relations between business, the mafia, and political figures, which quite literally change the face of city and state. Indeed, the largest four construction firms belong to Carmelo Costanzo, Mario Rendo, Gaetano Graci, and Francesco Finocchiaro, who hold the distinction of Knights of Labour, conferred on them by the Italian state for meritorious achievements in economic development. These Knights of Labour – or the “four knights of the mafia apocalypse,” as the famed Catanian journalist Giuseppe Fava dubbed them5 – form foundational connections between political and criminal forces. Costanzo and Finocchiaro, for example, are linked directly to Salvatore Lima, the strong right hand of Andreotti in Sicily, who rose from mayor of Palermo through the ranks, serving later as a member of the Italian and European parliaments. The mafia boss of Catania, Nitto Santapaola, appears on Costanzo’s payroll, and also provides automobiles for Rendo’s construction firm.6 The blurring between political and mafia “families” becomes even more pronounced

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as the interviewer brings up the case of Alfio Ferlito, member of a rival clan challenging Santapaola’s power in Catania who was killed, along with the carabinieri escorting him, during a prison transfer. Bocca asks Dalla Chiesa whether Ferlito was the cousin of the Catania public works assessor. Again, the speaker’s voice is patent: he replies, “Yes.” As a performative space, the last interview Dalla Chiesa gives to Bocca also warrants critical attention for what it says about the speaker, his words, and the complex dialogic functions each fulfills in the context of August 1982. In this representation of speaking, Dalla Chiesa constructs his strategic stance in the fight against the mafia, conducted, as he says, “in the interests of the state” (Bocca, “Dalla Chiesa”). The discursive elements of the map marking visible and invisible lines of mafia expansion prompt ideas of reconnaissance, strategizing, and manoeuvres, all elements of the military expertise that invest Dalla Chiesa with authority and symbolic power. Furthermore, he responds to the questions posed in an assertive, clear, and forthright manner, which attests to his credibility. Even when Bocca brings up points of contention, such as whether the general heads a local or national campaign against the criminal organization, Dalla Chiesa is not evasive, but replies that his responsibilities have not been officially codified. This statement of fact calls to mind his letter to Spadolini, dated some four months earlier, requesting a clear definition of duties, in order to aid his mission and convey the public support of the state. Instead, the ongoing absence of such codification reinscribes the fugitive state and the resultant position of isolation in which it places Dalla Chiesa, in terms of both the literal and the symbolic geographies constituted by mafia relations. In addition, I suggest that Dalla Chiesa represents his own position of isolation through his comments on Gaetano Costa in the interview. “Costa becomes too dangerous,” he tells Bocca, “when he goes against the majority in the prosecutor’s office, and decides to indict members of the Inzerillo and Spatola clans. But he’s isolated. So he can be killed, wiped out like a foreign body.” The references to Costa’s isolation and the “foreign body” echo the terms of self-representation Dalla Chiesa fashions in the journal entry and passages of his letter to Spadolini discussed above, which create visions of the solitary “I” as a foreign body cast by politicians onto alien, treacherous ground. Responses to Dalla Chiesa’s revelations indicate their incendiary strength, which perhaps intensifies acts of sign warfare staged on the man’s own body map by mafia and antimafia forces. As Nando Dalla Chiesa recalls, “The interview is like a bomb. In Palermo drawing

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rooms ... there’s more and more talk that the prefect won’t see Christmas” (Delitto imperfetto, 110). Palermo mayor Martellucci and prefect of Catania Abatelli are quick to deny the existence of the mafia in their circles. Martellucci, priding himself on his acute “vision,” declares he has never witnessed any collusion with the mafia, and repeats the tired refrain that such claims are a product of northern prejudice.7 Similar assaults arrive from diverse quarters, which derisively depict General Dalla Chiesa as an aging body whose powers of sight and intellect are in decline. At the same time, such figures as Father Francesco Michele Stabile, the Common Counsel of Alia, and the national federation CgilCisl-Uil voice unconditional support for Prefect Dalla Chiesa, arguing that he cannot be left standing alone to fight the mafia. The various threads in the mass-mediated fray over Dalla Chiesa and what he stands for symptomatically inscribe the impossibility of his position. Though the attacks on him can be interpreted as defensive gestures in reaction to the ways he threatens the mafia system, his body is under assault, with little if any aid from the Italian state. In fact, on 2 September 1982, in one of the last representations of Dalla Chiesa speaking, he chooses the American Consul in Palermo, Ralph Jones, as interlocutor to bear witness to his isolation. Again, as in his portrait of Costa’s murder, he tells a story about another person embroiled in the fight for justice in order to cast light on his own geography. According to Jones, a captain of the carabinieri stationed in Palma di Montechiaro phoned Dalla Chiesa because he was receiving threats from the mafia boss. Dalla Chiesa joined the captain in the town, and made a public display of strength by walking arm in arm through the street. They stood in front of the mafioso’s home, Jones tells us, “long enough to make it clear to everyone that the captain was not alone” (cited in Stille, Excellent Cadavers, 71). Dalla Chiesa tells Jones, “All I’m asking is that someone take me by the arm and walk with me” (71). Here one can only imagine the various tonalities, inflections, and resonances projected or betrayed by Dalla Chiesa’s voice. Yet, as remembered by Jones, in the transitory relational space constituted by the act of speaking, Dalla Chiesa reveals his humanity, made manifest through both compassionate identification with and aid to his fellow officer, and his entreaty for similar sodality. The words creating this image of self say much about the contingent, unrepeatable geography written in the name Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa and constituted in dialogic relation to the structures of enmeshed political, criminal, and entrepreneurial powers that he elaborates in his private and public maps in 1982. Yet the meanings transmitted through the

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speaker’s embodied voice in this instance are as always unsignifiable, and forever irremediable, marking what becomes traumatic absence on 3 September 1982, which, I propose, is explicitly reinscribed by La Spina, along with the questions it raises about voice and vocalization, truth, acts of judging, and justice. Limnings of Voicelessness: The Echogeography of Mafia Politics “Don’t you know that the dead don’t speak?” ... “But they listen.”  Silvana La Spina, L’ultimo treno da Catania, 133   [Speakers] are unique beings in flesh and bone who, unlike the abstract and universal “individual,” have a face, a name, and a life story. Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 193

A speaker’s voice, as conceived in Cavarero’s vocal phenomenology of uniqueness, understandably escapes the powers of literary invention, which offer no sign or symbol to inscribe in its plenitude the unique vibrations or sonority manifested in the twang, cackle, or lilt of the acoustic emissions, or, more important, the singular aspects of the self that they reveal through the act of speaking to another person. Likewise, inscribing the definitive absence of a historical person’s voice produced when the body expires challenges the possibilities of language and imagination. How can the embodied voice that exists no longer be transmitted on the page without first conjuring it in terms of presence, which might imply the recuperability of voice in some form? What kinds of narrative techniques might be fashioned in order to express the irredeemable loss of the particularized material reality of a historical person’s voice? And if, as Cavarero argues, the act of speaking is both self-revelatory and relational, how can writers convey meanings of voicelessness, which truncates multiple relations in personal and collective spheres? Several elements of La Spina’s novel create extraordinary ground for exploring these questions. For example, apparently oblique references to “the general” or “the Prefect in Palermo” objectify the figure conjuring the absent presence of Dalla Chiesa in a process of devocalization. Furthermore, allusions to the figure of the general, as well as the features of self and relations revealed in the depiction of vocal interplay between characters representing mafia interests, politics, finance and construction, and the Catholic church, generate what

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can be called an echogeography closely structured along the lines and arrangements of Dalla Chiesa’s new map of mafia power, but whose echoes are severed from their original vocal source. In this frame, I maintain, La Spina’s fictional inquiry into the murder of Rapisardo, classified as a political crime, which forces the return to the historical state crime of Antonio Canepa’s murder on 17 June 1945, also invests the voiceless absence of Dalla Chiesa with new meanings that indict the Italian state for the political mafia, and the institutionalized practices of violence and secrets constituting it, and for justice denied in the murder of Dalla Chiesa. Unlike individual speakers, or even such historical victims of mafia violence as Falcone, Borsellino, and Rita Atria, whose names, physical features, and particularizing traits are represented, however partially, in prose and film texts, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa has no proper name, no face, no life story, and no words attributed directly to him in L’ultimo treno da Catania, which is otherwise an exceptionally descriptive tale of murder and intrigue. However, the figure of the general is explicitly conjured in no fewer than eleven episodes that run through the course of the narrative, forming a significant feature that has eluded critical attention. Donatella La Monaca makes no mention of these allusions to the general at all. Focusing instead on La Spina’s complex depictions of the other characters and the city, she praises the noir mystery, which is “enriched by ever refined urban and architectonic references to Catania, a theater mingling ‘light and mourning,’ as Bufalino would say” (Scrittrici siciliane, 55). To his credit, Renato Olivieri explicates the historical significance of the date referenced in the novel’s last sentence (Review, 32), informing readers it was the day Dalla Chiesa, his wife, and his bodyguard were killed in Palermo. From this idea, presented amid absolute silence on the other signs and expressions alluding to the historical person, he concludes that the novel suggests Sicily is a land bereft of peace and hope. Similarly scant attention is devoted to the topic in Daniela Privitera’s examination of the Sicilian mystery novel’s history and conventions. In fact, her comments on Dalla Chiesa appear as an aside, detached from any textual reference. La Spina’s text, an “anomalous mystery novel” as Privitera terms it, “revolves around bartering of power for power. Blind greed is configured as an obstacle opposing the sense of justice of many Sicilians who believe in it, those Sicilians who placed their hopes in Dalla Chiesa (spoken about in the novel) and will continue to believe in the apostles of the idea: Falcone and Borsellino” (Il giallo siciliano, 84–5). Shifting blithely between the

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spheres of fiction and material reality, Privitera overlooks how the fragmented utterances voiced about the fictional general evoking General Dalla Chiesa cast those very issues of power and injustice in the particular frame of mafia politics. The initial episode invoking the general, staged as the novel opens, exemplifies how La Spina’s dramatization of the vocal exchanges between characters marks the space of absence and voicelessness of Dalla Chiesa. In the process, this scene also provides clues about the pivotal functions the fictional general performs as an interpretative key. In the moments before Rapisarda is pushed over a rocky precipice to his death in Taormina, readers follow in his footsteps as he strolls through the streets exalting in his performance of power, achieved through arrogant carriage, gestures, and expression, which produces the pleasure of “having human life at his disposal” (9). Yet his sense of satisfaction is tainted by mourning over the impending demise of his public civil identity as a member of Parliament, disclosed during a meeting with Baron Panebianco-Ruiz earlier that evening. Reliving the encounter in his psychic space, he again hears the baron’s “hoarse voice” (9) telling him that he will be substituted in the upcoming elections. The discussion that ensues reveals important elements of the characters and their relations to the hierarchy of power and the law. In response to Rapisarda’s questions about who will replace him, the baron responds: “It’s none of your concern. What’s important is that his name hasn’t been exposed like yours in certain dirty business deals ... times are difficult, you know ...” “Times are always difficult,” the honourable member resentfully objected. “Never like now ... the general they put in Palermo has his ears pointed like a cirneco hunting dog. Let it be for one or two legislatures and then we’ll see.” (9–10)

What distinguishes this scenario from the more common variety of political scheming is the relatively spare allusion to the general, which, in the temporal frames of the narrative (22 June and 3 September 1982) and of the book’s publication (just after the tenth anniversary of Dalla Chiesa’s death) calls forth an array of intra- and extra-textual meanings that bear upon the mystery’s focus. In the dialogue, La Spina crafts the figure of the general through the metaphor of the Cirneco, a hunting dog native to Sicily and thus familiar with its terrain. Its ears are pointed,

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indicating that the general has the scent of his prey. At the same time, with the appellation of “the general,” La Spina summons the voiceless spectre of Dalla Chiesa, who looms over the narrative space, recalling the ideals of law and justice for which he stood, and the battle against the mafia written in his name. This invocation and varied subsequent ones thus indicate the ground of investigation, which is produced not by power in general but by mafia politics of power, echoing Dalla Chiesa’s perception of the criminal interconnections and arrangements jointly generated by members of the mafia, political agents, and other parties with vested interests. Through diverse representations of characters engaged in the act of speaking, La Spina elaborates the practices of mafia politics that make up the geographies of political life, and thus the social, economic, and cultural configurations of lived spatialities. The ideas and secrets divulged by Rapisarda, the baron, Giulio Navarro (dubbed “the president” for his positions as head of multiple corporations and banks), and the priest Cosimo suggest not merely collusion between agents of the state and the crime organization. Rather, political aims, modes of thought, and tactics appear largely indistinguishable from mafia codes and practices. Rapisarda’s recollected conversation with the baron makes abundantly clear that the choice to participate in the Italian government does not arise out of commitment to a democratic system, wherein power is vested in the people and exercised through representatives chosen in free elections. On the contrary, the sounds and semantic content of the voices enacting the creation of politics in that conversation reveal the articulations of an apparatus driven by selfinterest and profit, whose power is instantiated through the exchange of positions affording personal benefits, privileges, and economic gain. This idea is highlighted when Rapisarda asks the baron what he will receive in exchange for relinquishing his place as candidate. The compensation consists of “a long list of positions as head of public offices, official appointments, and offices involving little work and high income” (10). As in mafia relations, here information functions as currency to exert leverage and control. Indeed, dissatisfied with the proposed terms of trade, Rapisarda employs the tactic of a verbal threat to reveal a secret from their shared past, related to the separatist movement. The force of Rapisarda’s threat to disclose certain information is registered in both the baron’s voice as conjured in the former’s imaginary and in his own memory, precipitating typical mafia actions to neutralize it.

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In Rapisarda’s acoustic memory-space, his adversary’s voice takes on a “strident vein” (10) at the idea that he might talk, and expose the secret. In an evocative sequence, the theme of menace recurs as the baron’s thoughts return to the verbal encounter, and is attached to Rapisarda’s voice and other sources: Now he was thinking about the words he had exchanged with the honourable Rapisarda, about the latter’s impudence, the note of alarming threat in that voice. And then the strictly confidential news that reached him from Rome, Palermo, about new restrictions, rumours making him out to be a figure corrupting political culture ... For a while he let [Sasà’s] chattering serve as background noise, then suddenly turned around. “But who are you talking about?” “About the General, baron ... About the new Prefect of Palermo. This morning on the radio they were saying such things ... But I ask myself, who told them all those lies?” “All those things that are true, you must mean, Sasà.” (27)

Focused on acoustic elements, this sequence has particular significance for what it says about the baron as “puppet-master,” a recurrent image in the narrative, and the criminal geographies of mind and nation that he authors, which appear under siege. Employing mafia ways of thinking and acting, he expeditiously uses murder as a means to solve problems, and eliminates Rapisarda, the most immediate threat, as evoked through the voice replayed in his memory. To be clear, Baron ­Panebianco-Ruiz is not portrayed as a member of the mafia. Rather, with inventive power, La Spina evokes the embedded relations between mafia and political practice. With the title of baron, the author calls up a longstanding history of the roles played by large estate owners in Sicily, boasting titles of nobility acquired by blood or money, in the system of mafia and state oppression of the lower classes. Moreover, like the mafia bosses, with a few well-placed words the baron has Rapisarda murdered at the hands of another, and escapes the reaches of justice in the juridical sense. The baron’s intermediary position also takes shape in vocal terms of spatiality; as elucidated by his reflections, he is privy to unauthorized disclosures of secret information that arrive from Rome, the seat of national government, and Palermo, the seat of the mafia. Functioning as a sound bridge, Sasà’s chatter links the spaces of interior and exterior, and develops the thematic of menace. The baron tunes in to his manservant’s allusions to the general as they express

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dismay over damaging public disclosures, of an unspecified nature, broadcast on the radio. Sasà’s words bring into high resolution the fictional identity of the general as the prefect of Palermo, and thus also the historical figure of Dalla Chiesa, the missing original and the signifier of the lawful arm of the state as well as of truth. In fact, in a rare revelatory moment, the baron acknowledges the veracity of the things said on the radio, which, given the reference to the general, must reasonably concern the mafia. Crafting a provocatively complex relationship between voice, voicelessness, and space, La Spina creates a performative geography of politics that echoes the territorial contours and power formations articulated by Dalla Chiesa in his map of mafia expansion, but that does not speak his name. The traces of the map, given verbal expression in Dalla Chiesa’s interview with Bocca, are apparent in La Spina’s particular foregrounding of Catania in the panorama of national politics and her depiction of the players producing it according to their own designs. The correspondences between these two cartographic representations, conceived in life and fiction, are elucidated by the way the author initially describes and stages the departure of the “last train from Catania,” which provides one of the indices for interpreting the title’s bearing on the citystory. As readers quickly learn from local knowledge imparted by an omniscient narrator, the last train scheduled to depart from Catania every day, number 327, leaves punctually at 23:10, bearing politicians and their retinue, who dominate the compartments, to Rome. The points of departure and arrival thus create an axis between Catania and Rome, organizing the political landscape, which is generated through “the most perverse way of managing public matters” (13). This detail casts the image of the train in significant light, for it is bound to the tracks, never veering off course or overshooting its destination; it shuttles back and forth in a predictable form that perpetuates the perversion of political practice, and denies the ideas of social progress or mobility sometimes associated with movement. In the local verbal and bodily language of daily living invented by the inhabitants of Catania, the number 327 has become “the honourable members’ train,” spoken with “a grimace of disdain and glimmer of envy” (13), prompted by the politicians’ privilege of using public transportation free of charge. The encoding of the figures affiliated with the political entourage during the spectacle that plays out on the platform while they prepare to board merits consideration for the way it depicts the associations enabling, if not driving, a range of criminal political activities. The scene

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focuses almost exclusively on visual elements, filtered through the consciousness of the prosecutor Seba Di Marco, who represents the law of the state, to which he appears committed in thought and action. Seated inside the train on the very night of Rapisarda’s murder, he watches the flow of the “flock guided by unscrupulous goat herdsmen” (16), thus evoking their substantial numbers, a common bond, and perhaps the voracious appetites of goats, who will devour most anything. La Spina then sketches bare essentials of the public identities that distinguish one fellow traveller from another, and locates them in a hierarchy of power relations. Significantly, the sequence opens with two Knights of Labour at the head of the procession. Taking in the display, Di Marco “recognized two very well-known Knights of Labour in the front row, with a greedy look about their faces and eyes watchfully peering into the night” (16). For the uninitiated, this spare description might suggest merely distasteful avidity. For Italian readers in 1992, however, the title “Knight of Labour” as linked to Catania would reasonably call up a multilayered web of meanings that connects the characters to the historical mafia and politicians. In the years following General Dalla Chiesa’s assassination, Fava’s articles about the Catania Knights of Labour, the evidence compiled about them for the maxi-trial, and media coverage that blanketed the nation fully schooled Italian citizens in the business affairs conducted by Rendo, Graci, Costanzo, and Francesco Finocchiaro. Among the activities forming their interlinkages with the state and mafia are bribes to the Christian Democrat and Socialist parties, often to secure state contracts for public works, payoffs and bribes to individual judges and politicians, and various tax fraud schemes, many of which are executed through the assistance of mafia-controlled contractors.8 Each piece of information harks back to and expands upon General Dalla Chiesa’s revelations about the owners of the four largest construction companies in Catania and about mafia expansion. Similarly, La Spina’s foregrounding of the two greedy-­ looking, watchful Knights of Labour in Catania echoes Dalla Chiesa, suggesting the presence of his voiceless absence. In doing so, the author opens up questions about both the past and the present, as they concern the disavowal of how implicated sectors of the Italian state may be in mafia-related crimes such as the cases of General Dalla Chiesa, Portella della ginestra, Salvatore Giuliano, and Antonio Canepa. Returning to Di Marco’s view of the procession, we should note the author’s positioning of political figures and state functionaries. Following close behind the Knights of Labour are “three undersecretaries,

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some honourable members of Parliament whose actions were dishonourable, and some monsignors” (16). This group intermingles what might normally be incompatible elements of church and state, such as the values of honesty and truth generally associated with the former versus the dishonour of politicians noted by Di Marco, yet the parties travel together in close proximity to the businessmen. The critical gaze of the law Di Marco casts on the dishonourable conduct of government representatives also introduces the issues of judging and passing judgment, explicitly thematized in relation to the murders, history, the Catholic Church, and the Italian state. In this regard, La Spina’s portrait of the ranks bringing up the rear of the cortège is trenchant. They consist of “the useless, grandiose executives of state corporations, an abyss of public waste, bent forward as if walking against the wind. Their shapes recalled gloomy gravediggers at a phantom funeral” (16–17). Closing the representation of the Italian state in miniature, this image suggests it too may be dead. In fact, the cadaverous political body travels between Catania and Rome, where bureaucrats serve “as tentacles for the Sicilian honourable members” (23), suggesting the absence of vital civil functions in the nation. I now return to the sphere of vocal registers, to sound the terrain that Di Marco investigates in his search for the motives behind Rapisarda’s murder and examine how it echoes Dalla Chiesa’s map, yet also charts the subterranean territory below. In Dalla Chiesa’s cartography, Catania stands as a new centre of mafia expansion in the early 1980s, presented as a contemporary development. In contrast, while creating resonances with Dalla Chiesa’s model of Catania, La Spina invents a particularly complex spatiotemporal representation, tracing the Catanian and national junctions between criminal elements in the political and socioeconomic spheres back to the end of Italian Fascism and the conception of the democratic state, which dies, she suggests, before it even materializes. These relations and the death of the state, evoked through the image of the phantom funeral, are explicated by the author’s portrayal of figures and actions operating within and beyond the Movement for the Independence of Sicily, commonly referred to as the separatist movement. As Di Marco discovers, the inner circle of suspects and the victim are bound by their participation in the separatist group led by Canepa and, moreover, by the secrets surrounding the latter’s death, which Rapisarda threatens to reveal to Angelica Solarino for her dissertation on separatism. Here it is important to clarify that Angelica Solarino, her grandmother, and Rapisarda’s mother provide valuable

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clues about who the characters involved in the case are, and their relations, yet are situated on the periphery of the criminal structures of power. Thus, in the shadows cast by Etna towering over Catania and emitting its own threats, the interviews Di Marco conducts under the purview of the law and the private conversations that readers overhear create relational spaces, which bring into being predominantly malegendered perspectives on separatism, ranging from a heroic, romanticized tale to perverse criminal scenarios. La Spina opens her polyphonic orchestration of perspectives on separatism with contrasting views from the inside, voiced by Torrisi and Magnano, in a sequence that calls attention to acoustic elements of the city, and therefore the contingent factors constantly engaged in a process of change. As Cavarero argues, the sphere of sound is dynamic, transitory, and uncontrollable, rendering the hearer “completely exposed to sonorous events, which come from an exterior that the hearer does not fully control” (For More Than One Voice, 37). Thus, she concludes, “What characterizes sounds is not being but becoming” (37). La Spina’s depiction of Torrisi making his way through the labyrinthian streets of Catania fashions the sounds in the baroque style of the city, with complex juxtapositions, contrasts, and drama, and calls attention to his passive, vulnerable position. The engineer is bombarded by the reverberating noise of the crowded market near Piazza Carlo Alberto, fractured by the loud sounds of venders hawking their goods, some voices deceptively flattering, others biting, as they hurl compliments and insults in colloquial form. In contrast, an almost funereal hush permeates the private space of Magnano’s family home, where the two former schoolmates reveal their fears, fantasies, and memories of their experiences in the separatist movement. Their acts of reciprocal address and self-revelation enact, according to Cavarero’s conceptualization, a “taking place of politics” (204), generating spatial relations. Torrisi, shot through with fear over what Rapisarda might say about their clandestine activities for his own political gain, expresses an equivocal position on the separatist affair. Professing absolute ignorance about what might have transpired, he describes the movement as a “farce” (40) and attributes his involvement to chance, a “foolish” (40) misadventure of his youth. Yet this apparent levity is betrayed when he attempts to put Magnano’s belief in the movement in doubt. He tells him, “What did you understand about it ... We all went into it like mice into a trap, we all followed behind that crazy Canepa without knowing what we were aiming for. Maybe even he didn’t know” (41). The analogy between the

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group of schoolmates and mice suggests the speaker’s sense of being lured into something with no clear objective or avenue of escape. In contrast to Torrisi, Magnano, who is considered one of the most brilliant minds in Italy and represents the intellectual elite, reveals the ongoing strength of his conviction in separatism’s promise and critical social function, which he recalls and recontextualizes in the contemporary frame. In hushed tones, he says, “I believed in a Sicily finally freed from guttersnipes like you, bloodsuckers like the baron, swindlers like our honourable member Rapisarda ... Sicily to the Sicilians. Becoming the masters of our own land again, the saltpans, tuna fisheries. Regaining our dignity, the past. A flag without Bourbon lilies or the tricolour of Italy.” (41). Magnano vocalizes ideals of freedom, self-determination, and human dignity for the inhabitants of Sicily, and denounces their corruption, evidenced by the illicit roles he attributes to the baron, Rapisarda, and Torrisi. With melancholy, he conjures the moment of possibility for realizing those ideals as “dreams, the most beautiful dreams” (41), an idea he reiterates in a later conversation with Di Marco (114). The varied representations of Luciano La Barbera as speaker construct images of separatism that elaborate its conflictual, ambiguous features and, moreover, elucidate how it ultimately incorporates the self-same agents of criminality and practices of mafia politics that perpetuate the oppressive elite rule during Italy’s purported change from Fascist to democratic state. This critical idea is broached by La Barbera, the provincial secretary of the Italian Communist Party in Catania, in response to his young Triestine assistant’s apparently ingenuous notion of Sicilian separatism as, in his words, “the highest expression of your antifascism” (44). The elder politician’s retort highlights the unstable, equivocal relations between Sicilian separatism as signifier and what it signifies. The movement, he tells the young northerner, has also been defined as “the last form of Italian Fascism: the antifascism of the Fascists” (44). His explication draws out the Janus-faced character of the movement, which presents a noble face, theoretically embodying many ideals evoked in Magnano’s wondrous dreams, such as self-rule and land for the peasants, and an ignoble one, the product of “mafia interests, agreements between estate overseers and landowners, the American mafia leading General Alexander’s military” (45). Here La Spina identifies the major parties that found the system of governance in Sicilian territory, and which clearly betray the ideals of freedom and democratic rule ostensibly promised by the Allied landing in Sicily on 10 July 1943, and the defeat of the German Nazi and Italian Fascist troops.

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As meticulously documented by Santino, in roughly ninety per cent of towns and cities Allied leaders appointed mayors of mafia extraction, creating what he calls a “formal criminalocracy” (Storia del movimento antimafia, 134). This system of mafia politics, La Spina proposes, essentially serves the longstanding hierarchy of power controlled by the ruling class, as illustrated by La Barbera’s discussion with Di Marco about political crimes and separatism. Sighing, he explains the aims of entangled outlaw forces of separatism, telling Di Marco “Mafia, corruption, collusion between private and public interests ... And then always with the same motive. Always for the transformism of the old dominant class, that pinned the yellow and red cockade (the separatist symbol) on the chests of their mafia field guards and bodyguards, and suddenly declared they were ‘supporters of the cause to liberate Sicily from the superpower of the Italian state’” (91–2). This passage exemplifies gattopardismo9 as the elite’s performance of change, which functions as a masquerade of change operating to preserve the corrupt governing body. The specific ways in which this form of mafia politics is elaborated in Catania and links the city to the highest echelons of the state are exemplified by La Spina’s provocative fictional retelling of the events involved in Canepa’s killing. In order to understand the nuanced questions about political and state crimes, justice, and voicelessness that she raises in the process, it is necessary to shift attention briefly to the annals of history from which this figure is drawn. Born in Palermo in 1908, Canepa was a significant protagonist in the dynamic sociopolitical relations forming the microspatialities of Catania during the years of Fascist rule and separatism. His covert and public actions as a militant opposing Fascism, for which he served a prison sentence in the mid-1930s, and fighting for the independence of Sicily testify to his commitment to freedom, equality, and the betterment of social conditions among the lower classes. Canepa exemplified the notion of the engaged intellectual: in the late 1930s, while a professor of the history of political doctrines at the Università degli studi di Catania, and during World War Two he conducted clandestine operations with the antifascist group Justice and Liberty and the British Intelligence Services. After the Allied landing in Sicily, he became head of the leftist wing of revolutionary separatism operating in eastern Sicily, envisioning Sicilian independence as a vehicle to achieve progressive social and economic freedoms for the poor, an idea developed in his manifesto “La Sicilia ai Siciliani,” published under the pseudonym Mario Turri in 1942.

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This radical position places Canepa in direct conflict with the allied dominant forces of the Italian state, agrarian landowners, and the mafia, the latter of which also served as a source of soldiers among the ranks of EVIS, the volunteer army for the Independence of Sicily. Just a few months into his command of a paramilitary force, on 17 June 1945, Canepa was killed, according to official accounts, in a gunfight with carabinieri that took place near Randazzo, located at the foot of Mount Etna in the province of Catania. Persistent intrigue, secrecy, and speculation about the roles played by the mafia, powerful landowners, the Italian state, and international secret services continue to surround Canepa’s killing in what Santino characterizes as “an episode that is still hazy” (Storia del movimento antimafia, 135). Thus, like the Massacre of Portella della ginestra (1947) and the killing of the bandit Salvatore Giuliano (1950), it marks a local and national site of ongoing trauma that cannot be worked through due to both the leaden silence under which it is buried and, hypothetically, the continuing political and state crimes executed to protect secrets binding the parties involved. The temporal and spatial dimensions of this intergenerational problem should not be minimized. In I bambini della ginestra, for example, Maria Rosa Cutrufelli poignantly represents the psychological and emotional dimensions of the problems caused by deferred justice deriving in part from state secrets. Also important is the founding of the organization Non solo Portella (Not only Portella) in 1997, which she notes in her historical materials accompanying the fictional narrative. Headed by Giuseppe Casarrubea, whose father was killed in Partinico (1947), the association was formed by survivors of the massacre of Portella della ginestra and families of relatives who, in their roles as leaders in politics and unions, had been killed in Sicily since 1944. Its stated aim is to abolish the “state secret” prohibition on public disclosure about such murders. La Spina sheds light on the Canepa affair by means of fictional disclosures that indict specific figures in the hierarchy of power for the responsibility they bear for political practices of violence and a code of silence, which inaugurate the very conception of the First Republic. Rich details of setting, acoustic features, and silence conjure the imaginary scene of disclosure, which plays out in a secret meeting between the mysterious gran vecchio, a grand master of conspiracy, and Di Marco, with whom readers are aligned in a process of judging historical truth and ethics. Broken only by a sliver of moonlight, the depths of darkness “drink in the silence” (135), the water lies stagnant, and the air “echoes a thousand

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fevers and a thousand deaths” (135). In this isolated place that speaks of decay, death, and barren waste, metaphors for the product and production of the politics soon revealed, the gran vecchio speaks out first, in a “quiet, polite voice” (135), pronouncing the name “Canepa” in a way that reveals his status as outsider to the Catania area. As in all verbal exchanges, the information divulged will leave no traces of its presence as a register of truth, and is thus immaterial for obtaining justice, as the shadowy speaker cautions. Situating Canepa in the context of the German occupation of Catania, a city beset by dire poverty and the depredations of the black market, La Spina depicts his activities as a spy for the British, later recruited by the grand conspirator. The images of Canepa voiced by the knowing elder man unequivocally attest to greatness and ethical consistency between the militant’s ideals and deeds. Shifting to the character’s role as commander in EVIS, the author suggests that the strength of his commitment to a radically egalitarian form of democracy, exceeding the bounds of marxism and the Communist party, make him a threat that must be eliminated. Yet she avoids creating an uncritical, reproduction of glorified images depicting Canepa in heroic discourse. In the following passage, the gran vecchio brings into view Canepa’s tactical errors, while also profiling the criminal forces to which the gran vecchio belongs: We who do a certain kind of politics aren’t so difficult ... and we’re much more intelligent than you all think. At least those of us among the old guard. The new ones are pitifully stupid. I’m saying this to console you about certain things, the way certain things have gone recently ... Do you know what Cànepa’s biggest mistake was? Accepting the support of common criminals, like Giuliano and his band, to fight beside him. (138)

Shattering the illusion of romantic tales spun around the struggle for the independence of Sicily, La Spina draws attention to the roles played by violent outlaws recruited into EVIS’s ranks. Noting the significant historical consequences, Santino maintains that these recruits contributed to the “criminalization of the separatist movement and the use of violence against the peasant movement” (Storia del movimento antimafia, 136). The meanings La Spina attaches to the participation of mafiosi and bandits in the independence movement form a more radical critique, for she suggests the collaboration between criminals and political interests is symptomatic of the mafia politics upon which the Italian First Republic was founded. In fact, though the contours of the gran vecchio

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are vague, he operates as one of a group conducting conspiratorial politics that makes tactical use of lethal violence. As he tells Di Marco, “We enter the field of battle” (138) to put an end to the Canepa episode, and blackmail the young Comis in order to obtain information about the leader’s movements on 17 June 1945. Although the conspirator feigns poor memory about whether the orders given were to shoot Canepa, the portrayal of his outlaw politics enables readers to fill in the gap. According to the perspective La Spina constructs, the barons are also deeply implicated in this tragic episode. Although they briefly ally with EVIS, by the end of 1944 the landowners strike agreements with the Italian state that afford them some autonomy. At the same time, the gran vecchio reveals, the barons bolster the image of Giuliano in order to rob Canepa of credibility. Thus, the barons and the grand conspirator’s circle exemplify the ideology and practice of power at the local and national levels, much like what has been called the mafia state. This idea does not escape Di Marco, for he charges his interlocutor with serving not the state, but power alone. The provocative manner of representing the gran vecchio and the Canepa killing implicitly reframes the Dalla Chiesa case in relation to the concept of state crime, as a paradigm for thinking about the government and this order of criminality, as well as its implications. In the passage cited above, the grand conspirator alludes to “things” happening recently – thus in the early 1980s – for which the homicide investigator likely needs consoling. One may reasonably speculate that these things include the rampant mafia murders, le stragi, that Di Marco bemoans at several points. Moreover, towards the end of his colloquy with the shadowy figure, Di Marco, “suddenly horrified” (140), concludes that the killing of Canepa was a state crime. The gran vecchio’s response is shocking for what it implies. He states, “If by state crime you mean a way to save the state from something that threatens it, then yes, it was a crime of state” (140). This conception allows for individuals acting beyond the rule and protection of the law to murder a person who represents something that they independently deem threatening to the state. The history of separatism and the many mysterious deaths linked to Italian politics tell us that, in this respect, the Canepa affair is not anomalous. Similarly, La Spina implies the political and outlaw alliances forged during separatism inaugurate such criminal practices to preserve the system of power. This idea is presented in revelations provided by Comis, a member of Parliament and historian. Though his own ethics

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are presented as dubious early in the novel – first indicated by an intertextual reference to Sciascia’s A ciascuno il suo, which pictures his face standing out like “a worm in the cheese” (96)10 – his expertise in separatism is unimpeachable. In his estimation, separatism “is like a lead blanket to cover the facts that no one wants to remember. Otherwise, let me tell you, not just Sicily but the entire nation would explode ... What’s more, even now, in Parliament, as soon as someone utters the term ‘separatism’ you see ten, a hundred frightened faces turn around ... Everyone knows that if you thumb through that affair, page after page, you find in nuce the Moro affair, Sindona, Gelli and P2, and even Calvi hanging from the Blackfriars Bridge” (97). With this representation, La Spina situates the subversive corruption of democracy at the very base of the postwar party system, which operates through alliances between political representatives, elite agents in commerce, the mafia, and the Vatican, whose contemporary collusion is evidenced by the chain of criminal cases. Sindona and Roberto Calvi, often referred to as “God’s bankers” due to their financial handling of the Vatican Bank’s affairs, laundered money respectively for the Inzerillo and Corleonesi crime families, and had indisputable ties with the Christian Democrats. They were also members of the Masonic Lodge Propaganda 2 (P2), headed by Grand Master Licio Gelli, which counted among its membership some forty-four parliamentarians, leaders in the secret services and military, police officers, and even journalists, as well as Nino and Ignazio Salvo, who were affiliated members of the mafia and the Christian Democrat party. This network of power produced a widespread institutionalized system of bribery, kickbacks, and, one can speculate, related state crimes.11 It is worth noting here that in 1982 Calvi was murdered, staged as a suicide hanging from the Blackfriars Bridge in London. In 1986, Sindona died in prison, poisoned by coffee dosed with cyanide. The complicated web of political subterfuge called up by the author’s crafting of history in Comis’s remarks provides contemporary evidence of the power system also articulated by the gran vecchio in his secret confabulation with Di Marco. Attempting to dispel what he presents as Di Marco’s misplaced belief in the existence of a liberal democratic state, he tells the investigator, “We are all at the service of Power with a capital p” (140). If readers listen closely, there is a resonance between La Spina’s depiction of the criminal elements of the state apparatus and Dalla Chiesa’s charting of mafia politics in his letter to Spadolini and his journal entry recording Andreotti’s reference to the Sindona affair. This resonance assumes richer, critical tones when considered in

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relation to Nando Dalla Chiesa’s 1984 critique of “a network of criminal powers” (Delitto imperfetto, 229) working within the state. Among the “zones” comprised by the network are the mafia, such organizations as P2, corrupt institutions, and criminal financial groups. Although such spheres of activity enjoy relative autonomy, this does not, he cautions, “exclude the presence of a unitary political network” (229). Moreover, he proposes that such historic crimes as the Piazza Fontana bombing and the multiple assassinations of prominent public figures in Palermo “always lead back to the same ‘places’” (230). In this particular cartography, he hazards, “the theory of the ‘grande vecchio’ of the mafia has its own acceptable validity” (230). What concerns me here is not the theoretical presence of a flesh-and-blood mafia mastermind. And Nando Dalla Chiesa explicitly opposes the reading of history in the key of one conspiratorial plot. Instead, the figuration of the grand master of conspiracy in his text and in La Spina’s fiction creates interstitial relations between their respective indictments of the Italian state for systematic practices of illegality that, at the very least, make it complicit in and morally responsible for the severing of voice from General Dalla Chiesa’s flesh-and-bone body. It is highly significant that the most explicit and developed evocation of Dalla Chiesa’s voiceless absence in La Spina’s novel appears immediately following the gran vecchio’s discourse on crimes of state and power. Placing the figure of the general in direct dialogic relation to the gran vecchio’s “justification” (144) for eliminating threats to state power, La Spina recontextualizes the Dalla Chiesa case as a crime of state. She does so not through a fictive redeeming of voice. Rather, she crafts a dramatic sequence that enacts a performative geography of voicelessness, enunciated through remarks that echo and engage with General Dalla Chiesa’s disclosures about Catania and mafia expansion in his interview with Bocca on 11 August 1982, and perhaps other public statements as well, without directly quoting the words first emitted from his body. In the specific spatiotemporal territory of Catania in mid-August, readers first hear of the interview from the perspective of the carabiniere officer Elia, who assists Di Marco in the investigation. In the following quotation, La Spina calls attention to the enormity of the threats posed by and to the general by virtue of his act of speaking out publicly. Among the things for which Elia would remember that time, “the biggest, most indelible one burned in his memory was the news that just then the general in Palermo had given interviews that thundered like threats against the powerful people in Catania.

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Reading that interview sent chills up the officer’s spine, out of fear for the general (‘He’ll end up getting himself killed,’ he commented)” (141). This passage features several important elements. First, the use of the word “threat” and of murder to eliminate it echo the gran vecchio’s words and thoughts, suggesting a familiar code of logic, while also foreshadowing the commission of a state crime, as defined within that code. Second, note that La Spina describes those threatened by the interview as the powerful people in Catania (i potenti catanesi), with no specific reference to the mafia, which might deflect attention away from the political mafia. Instead, she trains attention on the network of criminal alliances and arrangements between mafia, business, and politics making up the powerful. Last, here the author’s conjuring of the interview leaves the specific nature of the threatening information vague. Yet the danger is denoted by the chills running up Elia’s spine and the comment that he cannot contain. Thus, the author calls upon readers to perform the work of imagination and memory for a story in history whose ending they likely know. Further elaborating the presence of Dalla Chiesa’s absence, in the same sequence, which shifts between lawful and lawless voices of Catania, the author conjures the general in the space created as Di Marco and the attorney general discuss the dire situation. As in Elia’s case, the attorney general voices fears elicited by the prefect of Palermo’s words concerning the rule of law and democracy. Revealing his own commitment to a state of rights, he judges the risks of implementing special laws, thus transforming the nation space into a police state. At the same time, La Spina fashions sonorous resonance with Dalla Chiesa’s fears expressed in his letter to Spadolini and his comments to Bocca on Costa’s murder, as she depicts the attorney general outlining the protocol of vendetta executed in mafia politics. “‘You’ll see, [the vendetta] will be ferocious. But slow and painless in all appearances, like mild fevers that seem innocuous, and then kill ... They’ll begin by putting the General’s credibility in doubt ... they’ll start rumours, vague remarks. For example “but who does he think he is,” “but what is he really after,” “but are we sure he’s as honest as he says.” In short, they damage his image, demolish the myth ... Then ...’ and he left that ‘then’ hanging in the air, like a threat that not even the prosecutor could make concrete” (143). Here La Spina maps the verbal tactics of innuendo that progressively depersonalize and undermine the individual’s power of voice in the figurative sense, preparing the ground for the ultimate severing of voice from the material body, which produces the geography

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of voicelessness. This passage also recalls to mind the plurality of historical voices, those of Andreotti, Lima, Abatelli, and Martellucci, for instance, that undermine General Dalla Chiesa’s position in television interviews and newspaper articles, and thereby places those voices under scrutiny. In considering the diverse valences of the general’s disclosures in La Spina’s imaginary cartography of Catania within the state of mafia politics, narrative sequencing is again paramount. Following Elia’s fearful outburst about the general getting himself killed, the author shifts immediately to the reactions of the powerful people in Catania. Appearing first are the Knights of Labour, who “bombarded their friends and political godfathers in Portofino, Tunisia, and Sardinia with telephone calls. Their protests arrived on the tables of government ministers” (141). This dramatic representation makes clear that the Knights of Labour are the primary objects of the threat posed by the general’s words and intended actions. By describing their state allies as “political godfathers” (compari politici), the author encodes their affiliative roles as agents of mafia criminality, though they are not identified as members of the mafia. She elaborates the significance of such unlawful associations with the example of one owner of a large construction company in Catania. “In order to muddy the waters around all of his mafia ties,” the narrator tells us, “he hurried back to the city, threw an enormous party at his villa near Fornazzo, carried on and on all evening promising threats to the person who was threatening him” (141–2). This portrayal underscores the importance of the performance of power and the fears inciting it. In fact, despite this individual’s bravado, he breaks down in tears when his property is sequestered by Internal Revenue agents, a detail that materializes the general’s actions against mafia crime. In the final image articulating a discourse of fear, the light of guilt that La Spina casts specifically on the Knights of Labour, the construction sector, and their political accomplices also illuminates the private spaces of Catania, hidden from view; fear reaches into “the drawing rooms, homes, and clubs” (142). In explicating the primary source of fear, she evokes the general, attaching symbolic meanings to his functions. “What seemed impossible was happening. A man of the state wanted to show the powerful people of Sicily that the state was still alive. But he wanted to show it too late. Everyone had forgotten long before that they were living in a state” (142). These comments on the state echo Dalla Chiesa’s conviction, voiced to Bocca in the interview, that “the presence of the state must be visible” in Sicily. Moreover, ­situating the

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fictional general in relation to the cadaverous state drained of vital promise by the agents of mafia politics at the founding of the First Republic, La Spina fashions him as a symbol of surviving commitment to a democratic state of truth, law, justice, and hopes to revive it. Senses of Justice and Lived Spatialities Few people realize that this nation is thirsty for justice ... What little good, or great, there is in this nation has an extreme physiological need for justice. And not abstract justice, spectacular, rhetorical, proclaimed, and hazy. But the small daily acts of justice that then constitute the large network of civil living. Dacia Maraini, Sulla mafia, 65

The narrative space created by La Spina’s representations of the interplay of voices and the breathless silence of Dalla Chiesa and the democratic state he attempted to serve, forces serious reflection on justice in diverse senses and in spatiotemporal spheres of past and present. In fact, the author specifically thematizes the problematic of justice and judging through varied references. For example, in a conversation with Di Marco, the priest Cosimo bemoans how the Catholic church continues to be judged for its tribunals during the Inquisition, a symbol of the perversion of justice that recurs in the narrative. Judge Di Marco, as Professor Alfio Restivo reminds him, forms part of “the wheel” (87) of justice. Moreover, in typical mystery genre fashion, the discussions conducted between Di Marco and various interlocutors align readers with the investigator’s position, engaging our faculties in the process of judging who is guilty of the crimes. Employing an acoustically oriented approach, I want to explore some of the diverse perspectives on justice articulated through the geography of voicelessness produced by mafia politics, moving from the microspatial frame of the urban imaginary of Catania to the macrospatial context of national history and memory. In the process, the examination situates La Spina’s novel of inquiry into the criminal corruption of power as a groundbreaking eccentric work in relation to what Adamo terms “a kind of counternarrative of justice, alternative to institutional reconstructions of national history, where the voices of the victims are taken out of silence and passed on” (“The Voice of the Forgotten,” 43). I then speculate about how the acoustic cartography of voicelessness fabricated by La Spina engages with Agamben’s idea of justice for the dead and forgotten.

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La Spina’s detective novel incorporates features distinctive of the contemporary variant of the Sicilian mystery genre, which call into question the relation between democratic models of justice founded on truth and equality and the execution of justice in material reality. Drawing out the distinct character of this generic lineage, Privitera writes, “What characterizes the peculiarity of the Sicilian mystery novel from Sciascia on is the absence of any normative hypothesis in the search for truth, which tends to become problematized and increase the unlimited gnoseological possibilities” (Il giallo siciliano, 41). Thus, works contributing to this literary current deny readers the consolatory certitude provided by traditional mystery novels in which ratiocination enables the discovery of truth and the equitable meting out of justice.12 Instead, Privitera notes, the Sicilian mystery novel tends to be crafted as “a vehicle for generating reflection on the corruption of Power and the world, against which it is necessary to continue to fight” (66), taking as exemplars Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl and To Each His Own. The form of textuality La Spina creates operates in similar manner, interrogating the diverse elements that generate the corrupt hierarchy of mafia politics through a plurality of vocal registers of truth, each one particular and especially partial. Furthermore, the narrative includes rich intertextual gestures towards Sciascia’s novels, which foreground the ways that chance and coincidence produce pivotal developments in the search for truth. But in contrast to Sciascia’s foundational works, in which perpetrators are discovered but cannot be brought to trial before the law, L’ultimo treno da Catania delivers the murderer in the Rapisarda case to the law. In the process, however, the author problematizes equally lethal forms of culpability that lie beyond the reaches of the juridical, and scrutinizes different senses of justice. In a dramatic encounter between Di Marco and Baron PanebiancoRuiz, their acts of speaking reveal elements of self and the parts each performs, wittingly or not, in the legal mechanism of justice. In both the Rapisarda case and the Canepa affair before it, the baron conceived of and set into motion the respective crimes of murder and betrayal committed by Comis. He authors these crimes of politics and state, La Spina makes clear, to satisfy his lifetime desire for absolute power over fellow human beings. As he confides to Di Marco, “One time when I was a little boy, they took me to see the puppet show ... I watched the puppets moving around that way ... and I wondered ‘how do they do it? Who makes them move?’ And even more perplexed, ‘But who makes them speak?’” (184). The image of the puppet master he ultimately

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fashions himself to be denotes both his corruption of democratic politics and moral culpability in the crimes committed to preserve his own power, which he details with no remorse. Confirming the gran vecchio’s assessment of the political positions of the barons during separatism, ­Panebianco-Ruiz recalls for Di Marco his actions in EVIS with Canepa and his shift to the opposition, stating, “Then the wind suddenly changed direction and it was necessary to follow another flag” (182). The metaphor of shifting winds suggests the change in political alliances was something uncontrollable, or immaterial, but the results are not. Upon orders from Palermo, Canepa must be eliminated, and the baron singles out Comis as an individual capable of the traitorous act of delivering him to his death. Later, he manipulates Comis to commit the murder of Rapisarda, but not because of potential revelations about Canepa’s death, as Di Marco thinks. Calling attention to both the inadequacies of reason and the unbreakability of the code by which mafia politics is governed, La Spina crafts the motive as Rapisarda’s refusal to obey their agreement. Employing the logic of mafia ways of thinking and acting, the baron concludes, “There was no other way, I had to have him eliminated” (186). Though representations of the baron and Judge Di Marco underscore the failings of justice in the juridical sense, La Spina presents the laws of nature as an alternative form of justice in what is a highly problematic line of thought. As the baron, the real executioner according to the investigator, tauntingly notes, “I’m not materially involved, and justice already has its victim in which to delight ... You delivered him up yourself” (181). Thus, the judge is also a party to what is in a sense a miscarriage of justice. Although the baron escapes the reach of laws constructed by men, La Spina indicates that he will be duly punished by the laws of natural selection, since he is dying. He describes the cause of his impending death as “a kind of virus, they say, but they don’t really know which one ... One that doesn’t directly attack the organism, but the defensive barriers” (187). As readers learn early in the story, Baron Panebianco-Ruiz and Professor Comis are homosexual and had an intimate relationship as schoolmates. The baron’s description of his disease forms a relatively clear reference to the AIDS virus. Thus, the depiction of these two characters and the kind of politics they are made to represent takes a troubling turn for the apparent alignment of homosexuality with the criminal. For the author also portrays these characters as emblematic figures in the murderous politics of power, bearing responsibility for the deaths of the teacher Caruso, Canepa,

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Rapisarda, and the democratic state. In fact, in Privitera’s words, La Spina’s novel features the story of “powerful homosexuals who perform the function of puppet-masters that cynically manipulate the destinies of men in this unfortunate land” (Il giallo siciliano, 84). What escapes Privitera is the way such a representation in La Spina’s text and in her own commentary spatializes homosexual desire in a sphere of deviant politics, criminalizing both. Building upon associations between sexuality and politics, this articulation of a form of so-called natural justice suggests the subjects of mafia politics and the homosexual desires they here embody must be puni­ shed. This notion of justice is presented from the perspective of the law, as Di Marco reflects upon the implications of the baron’s fatal disease: He suddenly understood that human justice is nothing compared to natural justice, that all the codes in the world, with their captious cavils, are nothing but a puddle of water, a rivulet, in comparison to ancient justice, selected by billions of species over billions of years. And this was the only real justice in the world. (187)

According to this rationale, Baron Panebianco-Ruiz’s body is punished by the process of natural selection operating from time immemorial. Such a view may serve to show the blind spots of Di Marco, who otherwise appears free of prejudicial judgments. For instance, he demonstrates a recognition of the other in the case of Muslims in Catania. And readers might conclude that if such natural laws form the only real justice, then no justice exists at all. However, Di Marco’s concluding pronouncement weakens such a reading. The baron angrily tells his interlocutor to say something. In response, the judge points out that after all the years performing the role of God as puppet master, the baron succeeds “at delivering his own death sentence,” an answer given “with a long breath of satisfaction” (187). It is true that the baron is morally guilty for inciting the murders of Canepa and Rapisarda. However, by representing AIDS as just punishment, the text blames a victim of disease for his own death, and criminalizes homosexuality in the process. The words and deeds making up the criminal politics authored by the gran vecchio, the baron, and Comis also represent an alternative system of justice bearing strong resemblance to mafia justice, a system of unwritten laws and codes designed according to the exigencies of power, and whose infractions carry the death sentence. The baron elucidates this point when he reveals to Di Marco the motive for Rapisarda’s murder.

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This criminal code of justice is conceived and executed beyond the legal boundaries of the state, but operates in dynamic relation with the city of Catania, Sicily, and the nation, producing spatialities of democratic injustice, as illustrated by Di Marco’s vocal confrontation with Comis. He charges the latter with having “a hand in history, the worst kind, naturally. This city, this island, are what they are thanks to you too ... You made it so the mafiosi and the old conservative aristocracy would win, you eliminated a man like Canèpa, men like Caruso. You disrupted Evis” (174). While indicting Comis for the defeat of liberatory forces of democracy, which enables the allied mafia and landowner camps to perpetuate the oppressive hierarchy of power, Di Marco’s references to Canepa and Caruso underscore Comis’s traitorous abuses of power. Working as a spy for the Fascist Secret Services, Comis settles a personal score against professor Caruso, who separated him from the baron at school, and denounces him as antifascist. Caruso is then delivered to the Germans, and dies in a crematorium. Though the evil personified by Comis may appear extreme, and thus anomalous, the sociopolitical relations he fosters form a web of complicity involving a variety of characters to greater and lesser degrees. For example, worried about Di Marco’s safety, his uncle, the honourable Rosario Salvatore Del Carmine, telephones the priest Cosimo, asking him to arrange the meeting between the judge and the gran vecchio. La Spina thereby affiliates the representative of state and the representative of the Catholic Church with the political network structured by the criminal code of conduct, each one possessing partial knowledge of the secrets at its core and the tactics devised to protect them. Her depiction of the honourable member of Parliament Navarro opens a more ominous perspective on the collusion between political and criminal sectors, indicated through physical appearance and the positions of power he holds. He appears in a “suit of dark grisaille material like an estate overseer of bygone times, with greed seeping out of every pore” (50). In a rich representation of a vocal encounter between Di Marco, Del Carmine, and the president, each speaker reveals himself in relation to the general. In fact, the banter between the two politicians about their respective constituencies, mafiosi included, takes a hostile turn when Di Marco alludes to the general. While maintaining that outsiders have never changed anything in Sicily, Navarro articulates a Sicilianist perspective that privileges a form of body politics of identity. He tells Di Marco, “Inasmuch as we are concerned, dear judge, ... we don’t need anyone to come and tell us what we already know or must

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do, also because we (and he slowly savored that ‘we’ with his tongue, as if it were a Jordan almond) know full well what to do” (52). Putting the antagonistic territory the general attempts to transform into sharp definition, La Spina textualizes the very ideas and dispositions that cast him as a foreign body, like the historical figure he mirrors. Furthermore, in response to Di Marco’s caustic questioning of why “we” don’t do what must be done, Navarro abdicates all responsibility, arguing that such matters are under the purview of antimafia commissions, which, La Spina’s narrative suggests, fail to achieve material change. The signatures of mafia oppression and justice produced by the political practices of Comis, in consort with the baron, the gran vecchio, and vested criminal interests, are etched on the urban text of Catania through overt signs of fatal violence and the depiction of the affective dimensions of the geographies lived by the citizens. La Spina presents particularly graphic evidence of mafia murder and the codes written onto the body and land. For example, while Di Marco watches the “setting sun melt like sorbet on the buildings in piazza Università and the church spires spent in the Angelus” (99), he thinks about the investigation, and notes that in Sicily murders happen every day: “Bodies appear commonly served up on their back with their bleeding genitals in their mouths, slaughtered with gunshots along narrow paths, their throats slit in stalls like goats. Men of honour, clan godfathers, young men, sometimes even boys” (99). Foregrounded by the dying day in Catania, these corpses are encoded as countless mafia murders that give the landscape of city and countryside a cadaverous cast. Focusing attention specifically on the urban space of Catania generated by criminal laws of justice, La Spina crafts a dramatic encounter between agents of state law and mafia women, which takes place at the Istituto di Anatomia. Di Marco watches the spectacle as the women attempt to breach the borders of the entrance, protected by the police. “Sounds of yelling and moaning filled the air, an elderly woman suddenly dug her fingernails into her cheeks, leaving two streams of blood. Busily taking action, the police proceeded cautiously. The women belonged to a famous mafia clan, whose neighbourhood boss had been killed by a rival clan that night” (81). Thus, mafia murder marks the urban space as a site of trauma, and of mourning performed by women adhering to the very beliefs and practices that perpetuate an unending cycle of violent death. This point is underscored as Di Marco remarks, “When will this slaughter end? ... Is it possible that no one can do anything about it?” (81). This observation on the need for someone to re-establish

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law and order in the badlands of Catania forms an oblique allusion to the general’s mission, thus also summoning up Dalla Chiesa’s missing presence. The imagery, signs, and gestures of traumatic death chart the geographies of a cadaverous Catania, barren of justice in the civil sense, and lived through an affective economy of fear and hate, which erupts in multiple spaces created as characters engage in vocal exchanges. The relationship between affect and the potential life or death of a city is best understood through Agamben’s reflections on the cadaver of Venice and what he terms its “larval spectrality,” a condition that may follow death and decay. Asserting that it is the responsibility of the living to perform “the work of love in recollecting the one who is dead” (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of Living among Specters,” 474), he suggests that Venice suffers from its citizens’ lack of love. Admittedly, he tells us, loving the dead is a difficult task: “We flee from and neglect them” (474). But as a consequence of love denied, the city subsists in a state of larval spectrality, “born from not accepting its own condition, from forgetting it so as to pretend it still has bodily weight and flesh” (475). Moreover, spectres of this kind are generated in part by people’s “bad conscience” and deceit. The urban designs of Catania, produced through the sociospatial relations of mafia politics of which Comis is co-architect, share several features with the spectral Venice conceived in Agamben’s thought. Catania represents a more extreme case, however, because fear and hate constitute the dynamic relations between the city and the Catanians making it up. The role of fear is described best by Di Marco’s father. The young man conjures his father’s voice in acoustic memory and hears again his words of guidance: “Remember, you either inspire fear or suffer from it. For this reason, in our land – his father pronounced the word ‘land’ moving his lips as if he had that land between his teeth and felt it crunch – you have to be a lawyer or a judge” (60). Fear thus structures the microgeographies lived in Catania. The choices perceived by the father identify the Di Marco family with the culture of legality, in contrast to those who attempt to dominate and inspire fear by adhering to the mafia code of power. Moreover, fear can be read as symptomatic of the lack of justice, the absence of rights and protections generally guaranteed by civil law, and, in Sciascia’s words, “freedom, human dignity, and respect between human beings” (cited in Adamo, “The Voice of the Forgotten,”48). As further evidence of such negativity, La Spina represents hate as an essential bond between Catanians and their city.13 This aspect

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is best illustrated by the observations Professor Restivo shares with Di Marco. First confessing that he, unlike the judge, is tied to the city by hate, he repeats the idea, declaring, “I hate this city, I hate its inhabitants, who in turn hate each other ... And after all, we all feed on this hate like roundworms feeding on rotten prey” (121). Defined through the abject negativity of hate, the social relations making up Catania parasitically consume its cadaverous body, which cannot be disguised. In the aftermath of the fictional general’s interview, for instance, there is an attempt to dress up the face of Catania with adornments and festivities organized for the hundredth anniversary of Bellini. Preparations include a media campaign designed to recuperate “the name of the city as the birthplace of Bellini and not just mafia traffickers” (145). Yet, as in the case of Venice, Catania’s corpse causes its inhabitants to flee. The motif of escaping from Catania runs through the narrative, bearing diverse meanings in relation to death and justice. Indeed, the idea of fleeing the city appears as a defining component of its inhabitants’ desires and fantasies. Reflecting upon Bellini, Torrisi perceives the composer as a prototypical Catanian, thinking, “The musician left the city, like Catanians always dream of doing at the first opportunity” (30). Di Marco’s uncle, Anselmo Salemi, also flees Catania, driven away by a “ferocious hate for his city” (18). More important, Judge Di Marco has dreamed of leaving Catania since childhood. In contrast to most Catanians, he is tied to the city by love, and thus represents a vital emotional and ethical force that might revive the city. His role as poet is also worth noting: it suggests a surviving vein of dynamic cultural production. More important, he operates as an agent of justice, however imperfect, based on the principles of truth, honesty, and equity. However, he too ultimately flees and, unlike Bellodi in Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl, has no intention of returning to continue the struggle. Crafting a conclusion that is hardly optimistic, in the closing pages La Spina has readers accompany the judge on a final walk through the baroque streets of Catania. The last visions of the urban geography are projected from Di Marco’s psychic space, imbued with signs of death, artistic splendour, and material destruction. Approaching the train station, he envisions the city behind him, with streets reaching through Catania like “dark tongues made of basalt and lava stones” towards the volcano, “which is her soul and despair, a perennial, piercing walk beside death” (189). The buildings stand in all their splendour and arrogance, in a spectacular baroque display, while bulging church domes mask the sacking of cultural riches within, performed by “greedy” city politicians. The only

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sign of hope in this imaginary Catania is represented by leaving it to begin anew elsewhere. Thus, Di Marco boards the last train from Catania, the honourable members’ train, ultimately bound for Pavia, where he will devote himself to writing poetry and working at a publishing house. The author highlights Di Marco’s hopes, in part through the reference to the closing lines of “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Shelley, written near Florence. He recites the words to the steward, “Winter is coming. Spring can not be far behind [sic]”14 (190). However, the infinite possibilities for change – personal, political, and moral – resonating in the words are violently severed in the last line of the story, which appears after several lines of blank space. It simply states, “It was September 3, 1982” (190). Thus, the author invokes only the historical date of General Dalla Chiesa’s murder, whose voiceless absence is etched on the urban text of Catania and the nation comprising it, now totally bereft of justice and the hopes to achieve it, which he embodied. The imaginary cartographies of Catania and the Italian nation invented by La Spina posit diverse senses of justice through the utterances of characters with access to the voice and those whose voices are severed – Canepa, Caruso, Rapisarda, the general, and ultimately democracy itself. The resultant eccentric, fragmented history, communicated largely through Di Marco’s vocal encounters with the agents of mafia politics, creates not a counternarrative of justice, but rather, a narrative of injustice, bearing the strident indictment of the state for its founding crime betraying justice, conceived as applying the law according to the principles of truth, honesty, and equity. In this vein, the eruptions in these acoustic spaces of La Spina’s narrative invocations of the general, which make present the absence of Dalla Chiesa, pose provocative questions about the Italian state’s implicatedness in his murder as a crime of state, and others buried in silence.15 The particular inscriptions of Dalla Chiesa’s voicelessness on the geography constituted by mafia politics poignantly articulate the idea of the only approximation of justice desired by the dead, which Agamben proposes as a transmission of oblivion (“The Idea of Justice,” 79–80). Indeed, La Spina makes no gesture to retrieve Dalla Chiesa’s words, to make him speak through powers of literary invention. On the contrary, she transmits only his breathless silence, forcing readers to acknowledge the infinite loss caused by the severing of voice from the flesh-and-bone body. The plural acoustic memory spaces constituted by La Spina’s representations of speaking and silence broach critical lines of inquiry for thinking about justice, myriad forms of verbal and visual testimony,

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and the cultivation of an antimafia culture of legality that might construct the democratic state, for that is what she suggests is at stake. As Nando Dalla Chiesa argues, collective memory performs a crucial function in the battle against mafia politics and enterprises operating under the auspices of the Italian government, because “the mafia and criminal power have a vital need for the collectivity to lose its historical memory” (Delitto imperfetto, 226). Thus, he cautions, we must listen closely to and remember what is revealed through the voices, words, gestures, and acts of the people who publicly appear and speak in the name of the state and its institutions. Such a proposition, like Cavarero’s vocal phenomenology of uniqueness, places value on the embodied singularity of each person, not as essence or abstract entity but as a social subject with a face and a name, who is at once multiply located in relation to such terms of identity as sex and gender, race, generation, and socioeconomic class, yet also lives a life uniquely his or her own, bearing responsibility for it. This concept presents alternative ways of interpreting the individual stories in life and fiction that articulate the struggles to break the life sentences written under the signature of the mafia by fashioning the body as a site for the enunciation and practice of the work of justice. These analyses would not take as their point of departure such terms of interpellation as “pentito,” “mafioso,” “mafia woman,” “collaborator with justice,” or “excellent cadaver,” which may drown out the sounds of singularity produced by the person who speaks out. Rather, critical consideration of, for example, writings by Rita Atria, Piera Aiello, Giusy Vitale, or the individual testimonies gathered by Mario Gelardi might begin by examining who each speaker is and becomes as she or he reveals the self to us as interlocutors, attending to the particular aspects of subjectivity that through each unrepeatable story enable a more nuanced understanding of engagements with the kinds of collective identities referenced above, producing material relations with legality and illegality. I do not mean to suggest that such individual testimonies are transparent or give unproblematic access to singular or shared features of subjectivity. On the contrary, I would argue that verbal encounters and the non-fiction and literary texts representing them are constructions. However, by further developing the concept of embodiment, critical studies can complement the valuable approaches in psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, and gender studies adopted to interrogate problems related to the mafia, antimafia, and the culture of legality. Significantly, both Cavarero’s phenomenology of vocal uniqueness and Soja’s conception of spatiality place primary

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value on the body. From Soja’s perspective, the process of “‘making geographies’ begins with the body, with the construction and performance of the self, the human subject” (Postmetropolis, 6). In like manner, for Cavarero the body produces the vocal emission revealing the singularity of the speaker who, in the act of speaking to another, generates the “taking-place of politics” (For More than One Voice, 204). In the context of mafia geographies of voicelessness produced by adherence to omertà and by complicity, fear, and murder, by listening closely to the diverse ways embodied voices – material and imagined – speak, we can gain knowledge about the production of the little acts of justice that create geographies of everyday civil life.

5 Engendering Testimonial Geographies of Legality: Bodily Interiors, Urban Faces, Cyberspatialities

Before fighting against the Mafia you have to examine your own conscience and then, after you have defeated the Mafia inside yourself, you can fight the Mafia that’s in your circle of friends. We ourselves and our mistaken way of behaving are the Mafia. Rita Atria, Rome, July 19921

With the first news reports that a young girl named Rita Atria, a protected state’s witness in antimafia prosecutions, had thrown herself to her death from the seventh-floor balcony of her safe-house in Rome, Italian media set into motion a process of onomopoesis, which would transform her proper name into a name-symbol.2 They focused on actions constituting views of her identity as a collaborator with justice (collaboratrice con la giustizia) and linked heroic socio-symbolic meanings to her name.3 Journalists highlighted, for instance, the seventeen-year-old’s renunciation of the mafia codes of behaviour with which she was raised and, most significant, her violation of omertà, the law of silence.4 They reported that she provided valuable testimony about murders committed by local clans, which had claimed the lives of her father Vito Atria in 1985 and her brother Nicola in 1991. In the course of retelling these elements of the witness’s story, media and popular representations crafted the name “Rita Atria” into a symbol standing for courage, the struggle for truth and justice, and female rebellion against mafia violence and death, which resonated particularly among women. Indeed, Rita Atria’s body was lain to rest by women from Palermo, Rome, Bologna, and even England, who gathered in Partanna and created a femalegendered site of enunciation for the meanings that they gave to the

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young witness’s life and death.5 Reportedly, Michela Buscemi, also a collaborator with justice, honoured Rita Atria with the words, “Rita, you were a little girl, but you did great things” (13). Contesting the local priest’s pronunciations on suicide and sin, a young woman from Rome declared, “Rita didn’t sin. Rita spoke out. Never again will we let a woman stand alone” (13). Underscoring the paradigmatic value of Rita Atria as speaking subject, a letter signed by the magistrates of Marsala, Sciacca, and Trapani and delivered to the cemetery voiced their trust that “Rita’s example, made all the greater by her premature death, will be received by many other people bound by the yoke of silence” (13). Such tributes cast Rita Atria as a heroic antimafia model to emulate and a galvanizing force for collective female activism. The ideals and values initially associated with Rita Atria recur in an array of subsequent commemorative discourses that serve vital functions, yet present significant problems that bear upon ways of understanding this witness’s changing, conflictual components of subjectivity as a collaborator with justice, and her relations to fellow young people, women, and men engaged in struggles to transform mafia territories of crime and oppression within and beyond bodily borders into geographies of justice, constituted by civil rights and responsibilities. For example, such works as Sandra Rizza’s biography Una ragazza contro la mafia, Marco Amenta’s documentary Diario di una siciliana ribelle, and Petra Reski’s book Rita Atria: La picciridda dell’antimafia renew the significance of Rita Atria as name-symbol, bearing unequivocal testimony to her battle for justice and freedom from mafia oppression.6 Yet as these representations put the raw materials of Rita Atria’s life into narrative form, they tend to adopt a model of linear development that progresses from her origins as the daughter of a mafioso to an unconditional break from mafia culture and practice, resulting in a coherent, stable antimafia identity. This is not to say portrayals of the young witness fail to mention pain and conflict. The images of her suffering and struggle, however, focus on external sources, such as threats on her life and the murders of family members and Judge Borsellino. Such discursive strategies clarify the ideals that the texts link to Rita Atria, making her name and what it symbolizes more easily remembered. But by eliding the points of inner conflict and ambivalence voiced by the witness as she battles to defeat what she calls “the mafia within,” such interpellations hinder understanding of the complex problems posed by the very changes in subjectivity that are commemorated. Furthermore, by monumentalizing Rita Atria for her unquestionable heroism,

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commemorative discourses cast her as an exception, and sever ties with women who spoke out before and with her. Paolo Borsellino elucidates the significance of these female-gendered bonds in his comments on the juridical, social, and symbolic value of the legal testimonies given to Judge Alessandra Camassa by Rita Atria, her sister-in-law Piera Aiello, and Rosalba Triolo. Underscoring the threats to the mafia posed by women, he declares, “The investigation was launched by a woman, and was developed and conducted by other women” (qtd. in Cavallaro, “Collaborò con Borsellino,” 2). Similarly, as stories told about Rita Atria spotlight her stance against the mafia as solitary and singular, they obscure the unspectacular, yet meaningful, cultural practices of legality in daily living, and thus a fuller understanding of the innovative sites, modes, and meanings of both testifying and bearing witness. The following study endeavours to conduct a preliminary mapping of geographies of legality of various scales, ranging from the material body to virtual landscapes, produced through diverse modes of antimafia testimonies and bearing witness to the experiences, thoughts, and ideals to which such discourses testify. Gender and generation form fundamental interpretative keys for the critical cartography, which is oriented by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s notion about the relations between life stories, art, and testimony. As Felman explains, the witness who tells her or his own life story testifies not only to what she or he saw, lived, and experienced; bearing testimony means “not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to commit the narrative, to others: to take responsibility – in speech – for history or for the truth of an occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes beyond the personal, in having a general (nonpersonal) validity and consequences” (“The Return of the Voice,” 204). Working through this concept, I chart the inventions of geographies of legality in the embattled spaces of antimafia and mafia forces, produced by different forms of testimony. The analysis reflects first upon the bodily spaces articulated by Rita Atria in self-disclosures committed to her diary, which include passages intended for an autobiography, fragmentary entries, and poetry. Inflected by studies on testimony and trauma, my reading charts the signs of traumatic conflict and pain inscribed on her body of evidence, a term I employ to denote both the corpus of diverse testimonial writings and her specific representations of the body and psychic interior that testify to the witness’s struggle over “self” and relations to family, the law, and death as she endeavours to recreate her identity as a collaborator with justice. I then turn to the public, audacious self-exposures of urban

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faces of legality, delineated in the testimonial life stories in Gabriella De Fina’s No al pizzo. Here also, I am interested in the images of subjectivity, by which I mean the ways in which witnesses are both subjects of desires and actions and subject to laws determined by civil society and the mafia. In this respect, De Fina’s refashionings of the roles and relations between speakers testifying and listeners who assume the responsibility of the testimonies committed to them have particular significance. I propose they mark a shift in antimafia sociospatial relations as the microgeographies of legality created through each uniquely unreplicable story, lived and spoken by a witness with a name and a face, perform interactivities with the urban environs that are conceived to create a collectivity with which fellow citizens can identify and unite. The last section of this analysis undertakes a preliminary charting of the spatiotemporal geographies of interconnectivities, focusing on inventive forms of testimony and witnessing that engender and are engendered by online antimafia practices, cultures, and communities. This is relatively unexplored terrain in studies on antimafia movements and initiatives, despite the proliferation of sites and social networks that solicit visitor engagements specifically through stories, video postings, blogs, ideals, and projects generating creative products and practices of legality. At the same time, users affiliated with the mafia, through material or fantasy relations, have also capitalized upon the possibilities created by new media as a means for territorialization. Prompted by the arrival on Facebook of pages idealizing sanguinary mafia bosses, Marco Fattorini offers an intriguing assessment of the battle over virtual spaces conducted by antimafia and mafia camps, stating that “the social network is just revealing a chaotic ‘real’ map of Italy” (“La mafia arriva su Facebook”). Developing a more speculative position designed to open avenues of inquiry, my exploratory foray into the virtual landscape provides an examination of two case studies, the YouTube video Storie di resistenza quotidiana (18 July 2010), drawn from the homonymous documentary by Paolo Maselli and Daniela Gambino, and the Ammazzateci Tutti social network. The critical framework is anchored by analyses by W. Lance Bennett, Kathryn C. Montgomery, and Luca Raffini, which enable conceptualizations of various online activities as practices of civic engagement, politics, and culture. The examination focuses on the ways in which the performative modes of testifying and bearing witness crafted by the YouTube video and various verbal and visual features of interconnectivity generated by the Ammazzateci Tutti site enable the consumption, appropriation, and creative reinvention of

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antimafia culture, producing cyberspatialities that operate simultaneously in local and transnational geographies engendered by agents of new media. Rita Atria: Testimonial Bodies and Witnessing In general, studies on Rita Atria view the meaning of writing in her diary as a defensive strategy, a way to combat her sense of isolation and fear. Several diary entries from November 1991 exemplify this idea, as well as their evidenciary functions. The diarist describes life-threatening events, which begin just one week after she gives her first deposition and ultimately precipitate her transfer to Rome on 21 November 1991. Although the affective register of the entries shifts from trepidation to terror, she is careful to note dates, times, actions, and perpetrators, as if she were building a case for the prosecution of her would-be killers. Once she is transferred to Rome, however, the writings engage increasingly in a process of self-scrutiny. I propose that Rita Atria’s autobiographical utterances construct the testimonial subject while also crafting the diary as witness. In this frame, the diary functions as a recipient for the testimony that externalizes the witness’s struggle with various kinds of trauma, including the very process of providing legal testimony, which, I speculate, enables her incorporation of perspectives of the law yet results in a profound crisis of identity. The salient work on testimony conducted by Felman and Laub is particularly useful for elaborating this interpretative model. First, as they demonstrate, the testimony of those who have suffered psychic trauma as a result of witnessing horrific events, crimes, and loss is unique, especially in relation to historical recordings of events, for in such cases, Laub maintains, “trauma precludes its registration,” and “the emergence of the narrative which is being listened to – and heard – is, therefore, the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the ‘knowing’ of the event is given birth to ... The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time” (Testimony, 57). The role of the listener in the process of bearing testimony should not be underemphasized. In fact, Laub mentions cases in which the speaker creates an “internal witness” in the absence of a listener, to bear witness in daily life (87). Adapting these two key ideas to Rita Atria’s case, I suggest that the words she entrusts to her “dear diary” register psychic trauma that derives not so much from the deaths of her father and brother as from the very process of bearing

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legal and personal testimony. She fashions the diary as her own witness, a sympathetic listener to whom she voices her sufferings, doubts, and convictions. Based upon the intimate revelations authored by Rita Atria and the kinds of factual evidence governed by the rules of law, it is reasonable to speculate that the “blank screen” of the diary and the judges eliciting her legal testimony serve different, though not mutually exclusive, modes of truth-telling. Clearly, neither mode gives transparent access to truths. Yet in the context of the law, as Leigh Gilmore argues in Autobiographics, testimony is largely a product of institutionalized relations of power, authorizing what constitutes truth, and who may judge its veracity. In Rita Atria’s case, this point is clearly illustrated by Judge Camassa’s representation of the young woman’s position in the juridical testimonial process. She recalls, “Rita was a seventeen-year-old girl, inflexible, tough, full of preconceptions, steeped in the mafia, as I’ve often defined her, with clear ideas about what she was supposed to say to us, or better still, the things she had to tell us ... I wanted facts, and she was weaving great, idealized fabrications” (“Lo psichismo mafioso femminile,” 124, 125). Although Rita Atria appears self-assertive, Camas­ sa’s following remarks suggest the young woman is subject to and not the subject of the imperatives of giving legal testimony. “The most difficult thing,” she informs us, “was to make her tell the facts, eliminating her illusions and denials of reality” (124). Not surprisingly, the areas of investigation that frustrate the judge’s attempts to obtain evidence of probative value concern the activities of Vito and Nicola Atria. Thus, when Rita Atria calls up memories of her father as the respected peacemaker, who unselfishly mediated conflicts in Partanna, Camas­sa parries with hard facts. Vito Atria rustled livestock, with the aim of extortion. In fairness, Camassa expresses an acute awareness of the power she wields as well as apprehension about her role as “authoritarian educator” (125). Yet ultimately, the young girl’s claims to truthtelling are authorized only inasmuch as they conform with the facts in Camassa’s possession, which represent attacks on Rita Atria’s idealized images of the loving, protective father and brother. In this sense, the process of providing legal testimony may heighten the testimonial subject’s psychic trauma, as well as her need to create a “listener” for the truths and questions she voices on her own volition. At the same time, Rita Atria’s disclosures about self, family, and the mafia illustrate her engagements with perspectives of the law expressed by the agents upholding it, such as judges Camassa and Borsellino, as

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suggested by the opening self-portrait that Rita Atria intended for her autobiography. Since she refers to writing this book in a diary entry made in Rome sometime after January 1992, this self-portrait is likely produced some three months into the series of legal encounters of the sort recalled by Camassa. Read in this context, the witness’s words may attest to her internalization of the gaze of the law as she struggles to examine her own body of evidence and the conscience/­consciousness within. Crafting the looking glass as a site for elaborating the relationship between the bodily exterior and what it harbours inside, she writes: A large mirror in which to look at what you believe you see, where you try to understand but you don’t understand. I try to see deeper, but a veil of dark fog prevents you from looking beyond that face, that image full of magic. You attempt to see, but what appears is only a haggard face, two large lips, and two eyes, indescribable, to say the least, bright, but a dark colour, like obscurity, like the night’s silence, like two small falling stars. In the image that appears so sweet, melancholy, full of hate, love, disdain, silences that are almost frightening, not one face, but many faces all together, as if nature had amused itself by playing and mixing them all up – the mystery that hides behind that image bearing human features. Who knows why such cruel nature wanted to play a trick on that woman, if she really was a woman. I couldn’t understand if it was only my imagination that made me see her that way. (162–3)

While exhibiting the kind of doubling common to autobiography, the initial images construct shifting subjects of the gaze and angles of vision. Thematically, the notion of trying to understand and being unable to do so has meaning for the speaker and the law. Here clear self-knowledge escapes Rita Atria. And, as she states to Camassa, it is impossible for the law-abiding to understand what she carries within, a conviction shared by numerous mafia women, who underscore the untranslatability of growing up and living according to mafia codes of attachment, beliefs, and behaviours. (See “Lo psichismo mafioso femminile,” 125.) The description of her eyes is particularly evocative, as she likens their dark colour to “two small falling stars.” Throughout her writings, Rita Atria refers to her father and brother as her two stars. It is possible that this image, in contrast to others, conveys their “fall,” admitting criminal elements to which her depositions finally attest. However, this angle of vision is neither stable nor stabilizing; the images conveying

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the fragmentation of the body, multiplicity of faces, and contradictory emotions underscore the undecidability of the self and conflict. As Rita Atria continues to interrogate her self in the same passage, she creates vivid images of the body and psyche in pain, inscribed for instance on the haggard, wasting lines of the face and on her heart. Redirecting the reader’s attention to the eyes, she notes that fear has made them hard, threatening, and unable to “see the sun” (163). Furthermore, they blind her from self-knowledge, hiding what lies within. She confides: Those eyes hid everything, everything she had left by then. Pain, an enormous pain that her heart suffocated inside her, making her become almost cruel in other people’s eyes. Not even she could ever have discovered what was hidden in her soul, too complicated. Ever since she was a little girl she had desperately tried to understand what was right and what wasn’t. She tried for years and years to discover, to see what everybody had kept hidden from her for so long. But what she discovered hurt her so badly that she could no longer distinguish what was good and what was bad. (163)

In this representation of bodily and psychic space the subject appears compelled by a lifelong desire to breach the barriers concealing secrets both within and around her. Moreover, Rita Atria perceives her struggles to discover the truth as the source of confusion about right and wrong. She thus brings to mind the internalizations of contradictory gazes: the gaze of state law, which sees father and brother as criminal, and the gaze of the beloved father, the keeper of secrets who stands for the law of the mafia by which the Atria family lived. In fact, the witness’s expressions of suffering and ethical turmoil lead to thoughts on family origins, destiny, and death (163). Rita Atria’s descriptions of the testimonial body register contradictory terms of subjectivity, as well as psychic trauma and fear, intensified, I suggest, by points of potentially irreconcilable conflict produced as her collaboration with the law puts into doubt beliefs and affective attachments constituting her notion of self and family. While performing a critique of secrets and silence, her testimony also articulates the psychological and affective repercussions that may be traced to breaking omertà. In order to understand these problems, the interdisciplinary collection La mafia dentro, edited by Girolamo Lo Verso, is especially useful. Amidst a varied panorama of topics and approaches, d ­ eveloped

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by Italian experts in psychoanalysis, group therapy, as well as juridical culture, the perspectives on identity formation in mafia family relations dovetail. The authors devote substantial attention to the psychodynamics of male members of the mafia and their effects upon the biological or marital family, shaping psychosocial relations, beliefs, and practices of everyday life. (Here I am speaking not about the family model appropriated by criminal organizations.) Their studies take as a point of departure the sociological model of amoral familism developed by Edward C. Banfield in The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Yet they do not recycle the concept in a transhistorical manner or apply it to explicate general trends in southern Italy, tendencies that have received warranted critiques.7 Rather, the authors insist on the need to examine articulations of family as contingent on specific historical, social, geographic, and personal differences, as they analyse identity formation in families where a mafia member resides and interrogate how the privileging of family strength may determine rules of conduct, affective ties, and such values as loyalty and obedience. Based upon their psychoanalytic and legal work performed with members of the mafia and their biological families, the researchers note that the family is conceived as a haven from hostile forces lying beyond its borders, and fulfills vital social, economic, and personal functions for its members. As Gioacchino Natoli explains, the family “offers the individual protection, and as a consequence, the more each of its members contributes to the wealth of the family, the more everyone feels protected by it” (“La mafia dentro,” 18). Focusing on how this familial system structures the concept of self, Natoli argues that it produces a deep attachment of the “I” to the “familyWe,” the latter of which is interiorized, saturating the psychic space. In the process, both the notion of self and the social sense of belonging to a community beyond the family sphere are weakly constituted, bound within the terms of attachment-protection that only the family can satisfy.8 Since psychic phenomena may not operate so seamlessly, we can speculate that the repression of desires, needs, and attachments opposing the good of the family also plays a significant role in personal relations. In this system, the mother fulfils vital functions. As argued by Innocenzo Fiore in “La mafia nel ‘pensare mafioso’” and Renate Siebert in Secrets of Life and Death, she serves as a symbol of continuity, security, and protection. Furthermore, the mother acts as agent, cultivating filial dependence upon the family in a system of exchange where loyalty and obedience form the currency for protection and ensure the family’s future survival. At the same time, such relations also nurture the fear of

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abandonment, a key issue for Rita Atria. Thus, for individuals bound in mafia culture as a system of signification, Franco Di Maria cautions, “collaborating with the law means, from the point of view of the emotions, entirely severing an umbilical cord that up until that moment guaranteed a strong, vigorous identity, even if dogmatic and repetitive” (“Identità e sentire mafioso,” 44). Placing primary importance on the functions of omertà, he underscores that breaking this tabu can understandably cause “a true, real crisis of loss of identity” (44). Following this line of speculation, the incoherence and multiplicity marking the visages created by Rita Atria function as signs of a complex crisis and reformation of identity. Collaborating with the law clearly entails the conscious renunciation of mafia ties, values, and practices designed to provide an ostensibly stable family identity. Yet, as Rita Atria’s insights suggest, such a disavowal does not unproblematically erase entrenched traces of mafia thought. Thus, a critical model that conceives of reforming identity as a collaborator with justice as an ongoing process requiring the constant negotiation of oppositional psychological, affective, and ethical pulls appears useful.9 Indeed, Camas­sa suggests that mafia codes are not easily eradicated. Maintaining that the young witness for the state had “an absolute respect for mafia rules” (“Lo psichismo mafioso femminile,”125), she recalls an episode in which Rita Atria happened to cross paths with another collaborator with justice, and recoiled. Explaining her actions, she declared, “He’s a traitor because he used to be a man of honour ... I didn’t have that role and so I didn’t betray anything” (125). This comment is important for several reasons. Though perhaps a defensive gesture, it indicates that the mafia system of values and conduct, particularly omertà, continues to bear upon Rita Atria’s judgments. In fact, collaborating with justice itself could be interpreted as working both within and against the mafia logic of vendetta. It provides women with the possibility to act as agents vindicating the injustice of a loved one’s unavenged murder (a role denied by gender laws in mafia cultural practice), but with a difference, for such vindication is legally sanctioned and encouraged. At the same time, seeking justice with and from the law betrays the very codes by which the family member lived. Indeed, Rita Atria’s reference to betrayal reveals a strain informing the psychic dynamics of her representations of self and family. Yet the self-reflections Rita Atria records in her diary also tell a different story as she deliberates on ethical quandries. I suggest that the very process of questioning certain embedded family beliefs and rules

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of conduct registers the beginnings of different ways of thinking about the self, and thus the psychic separation from the “family-We” as the primary determinant of identity. However, the emergent separation in Rita Atria’s case does not announce the beginning of some sort of linear individual development or coherence. On the contrary, it produces painful despair that consumes the collaborating subject, as we see in the description of the testimonial body in the diary entry dated 12 January 1992, the last to bear a specific date, as if marking time by the calendar becomes meaningless thereafter. Her allusions to despair, darkness, and death resonate with the thematic concerns discussed above. However, here the diarist shifts the focus of her testimony. Significantly, her eyes, which previously hid a presence, now behold only darkness, as if she were speaking from the grave. From the position of abject solitude, Rita Atria creates a discourse of loss, of her brother, possibilities for happiness, and the void that is her self. She concludes: It’s almost nine at night, I’m sad and demoralized, perhaps because I can’t dream anymore, in my eyes I see so much darkness and so much blackness. I’m not worried by the fact that I will have to die but that I will never be able to be loved by anyone. I will never be able to be happy and realize my dreams. I wish so much that I could have Nicola here beside me, to be able to feel his loving touch, I need him so much, but the only thing I can do is cry. No one will ever be able to understand the emptiness inside me, that immeasurable emptiness that everyone, little by little, has made even greater. I don’t have anything anymore, all I have are crumbs. I can’t tell good from bad, everything is so dark and gloomy by now. I thought that time could heal all wounds, but no, time opens them up more and more until it kills you, slowly. When will this nightmare end? (157–8)

While recognizing the veritable impossibility that others will understand what is within her, she nonetheless endeavours to give voice to the interior, to the infinite emptiness that wells over the bodily borders of the psychic space. What also strikes me here is the way the witness implicates everyone in the creation of her increasing emptiness. The declaration highlights a sense of abandonment and the aloneness of her position, with everyone else on the other side. As Rita Atria struggles to make her emptiness speak, she bears witness to living death, represented by the wounds that time opens wider, slowly killing her. This evocative imagery textualizes the testimonial body, offering readers carnal evidence of her traumatic struggle and suffering.

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In contrast to the figurations of the body that expose fragmentation and emptiness, representations of the body in terms of a womanliness in excess – what cannot and will not be contained or hidden away – c­ reate a particularly complex range of images inscribing the vicissitudes of Rita Atria’s views of self. For instance, as the diarist contemplates her self in relation to being a woman and what that might mean, she crafts a fascinating vision of plenitude. Her perceptions are also important for the way they implicitly engage with concerns related to truth, believability, and the law. Sometime after 12 January 1992, she wonders: “Woman would I be if I were really woman: What detail differentiates me and a woman? Maybe I haven’t experienced the pleasure of the flesh yet? I didn’t realize how important that could be. Maybe I’m not old enough to be a woman. Maybe I don’t have the ideas and her ambitions” (158). In the very first line, Rita Atria creates an equivocal speaking position in relation to woman. The syntactical arrangement, opening the question with “woman” and repeating the word at the end, boldly calls attention to woman as a signifier. At the same time, the hypothetical construction “if I were really woman” expresses only the possibility of being woman, which here the speaker does not claim. Rather, she speculates about the differences that may exist between her self and woman, and how she may or may not fulfil the socially constructed criteria assigned to designate woman – c­ hronological age, sexual initiation, ideas, and ambitions. Such musings could appear in the diaries of many adolescents. Yet for Rita Atria, questions about her standing as girl or woman have particularly serious implications, associated with her identity as a collaborator with justice. From her first attempts to provide testimony as an antimafia witness for the Italian state, she had to battle to make herself heard, largely because of her civil status as a female minor. But something more is at stake. Elsewhere in her diary, Rita Atria suggests that before the eyes of the law, the girl’s body is situated in a weak position, lacking credibility and authority as witness. In fact, the manner in which gender figures in the juridical authorization of truth-telling forms a recurrent problem in the cases of female witnesses who have appeared for the prosecution in mafia trials. Siebert argues that women providing such testimony tend to be transformed from witness into accused, a process she links specifically to the female body, as well as gender biases. She states, “A woman in a courtroom is, first and foremost, a female body, an obstruction on the straight road of the search for ‘their’ truth” (Secrets of Life and Death, 101).

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Drawing from a Freudian model, Siebert’s representation of the institutionalized ­spacialization of sexual difference and gender relations aligns the female body with the feminine, a passive obstacle that the agent enjoying the active masculine positionality must overcome, following the oedipal trajectory of the quest for truth. Located within the female body, which is always suspect in patriarchal culture, the mind is similarly dismissed with prejudice, for as Siebert tells us, court proceedings exhibit “[a] systematic disavowal of the ‘civil,’ ethical aspects of a woman who assumes the freedom ... to denounce the violence suffered, whether as a body or as a moral being” (101). Notions of woman as prey to fickle emotions, irrational, and untrustworthy situate women not as speaking subjects, but as the objects of suspicion.10 These concerns form a critical frame that enables an interpretation of the complexities of Rita Atria’s thoughts on her relation to woman. Amidst the diverse measurements of being woman, the diarist associates sexual experience and pleasure with womanhood, and as the diary entry continues, stages what appears to be a scene of sexual initiation. She provocatively writes, “Then take me out into the middle of an audience, lay me out on a bed, and only then will you all understand how old I am. I’m younger than you could know, but I’ll give you such immense pleasures that your soul will delight in them more than you could dream. And if an adjective greater than woman exists, fine, that adjective will be mine” (158–9). Despite the way the performance authored by and enacted in Rita Atria’s imagination breaks the taboo on the public exhibition of sexual acts in many societies, it could be viewed as one of a multitude of sociocultural and religious rituals marking the passage from girl to woman. Indeed, the image of initiation suggests a trial of some sort, exposing herself to judgment in the eyes of spectators, whose presence is invoked in Italian with the plural “you” as the object of address. With this staging of carnal knowledge, Rita Atria fashions her body as a veritable habeas corpus ad testificandum, a site of gendered identity, sexuality, pleasure, and truth, which insists upon being recognized. She creates an image of self-corporeality that exceeds the bounds of what is signified by woman, claiming the signifier of whatever may be even greater as her own. By so doing, the testimonial subject also claims, if only momentarily, a position of authority, which contrasts with instances where she presents herself as “just a young girl” fighting for justice.

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(Re)formation of Identity and Meanings of Death Although Rita Atria offers images of self that link working with the forces of justice to the possibility of building a new life and future, such collaboration is also inextricably bound to the testimonial subject’s sense of imminent death. Her expressions of this persistent awareness range from such explicit statements as “I will have to die” and “I won’t be able to live anymore” to more enigmatic allusions to destiny (157, 159). The witness’s contemplations of her own death offer compelling testimony to the diverse material, psychic, and affective dimensions making up the geography she lives and fashions as a collaborator with justice. Furthermore, they provide insights that may enable us to develop some understanding, necessarily incomplete, of her suicide, an act that relates directly to issues of the body, speaking, silence, memory, and bearing testimony. Although one might conceive of the act of suicide as a form of self-imposed silence, it may also be a way of speaking, as Simona Mafai proposes in “Con dolore e con rispetto.” She suggests, “Suicide is not proof in support of something or against it. It is perhaps the attempt to create a comprehensive, extreme discourse addressed to us, we who remain, but which we are not able to decipher” (1). Leaving aside speculations about what precisely motivates Rita Atria to be the author of her death, I want to examine some of the meanings she attaches to dying, and what they can tell us about her notion of self and the testimony that survives her. The recurrent allusions the witness makes to her death are not surprising, given the gruesome mafia murders of her father, brother, and prominent figures in the antimafia forces with whom she aligns herself. And, in general there is a significant relationship between death, trauma, and testimony. Elucidating this idea, Laub states, “The fear that fate will strike again is crucial to the memory of trauma” (Testimony, 67). Casting this notion in a different light, the thoughts and desires Rita Atria expresses in her diary as she speaks about death suggest that the threat of dying and psychic trauma are relived with the repeated acts of bearing testimony against members of the mafia, and ultimately her own father and brother. This process produces profound psychological conflicts between her growing attachments to antimafia ways of acting and those who uphold them and her idealized attachment to her father and brother as the objects of her love. The ways in which collaborating with the law figures in her perceptions of self,

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f­amily, and death are poignantly evoked in the following diary entry, dated 21 December 1991. I’m starting to write again because you can never be too careful. What I want after my death is a funeral with very few people. My sister-in-law and her family should be there. My sister Anna Maria and the entire corps of carabinieri who want to be there, all the people who helped me obtain justice for the deaths of my father and brother. My mother must not come to my funeral or see me after my death for any reason ... I’m sure I won’t have a long life, whether I’m killed by the people that I’ll accuse during the trial or because of a promise with destiny. I’d be happy if I could live together with Nicola and my father. (157)

Anticipating her death, Rita Atria records her last wishes in her diary so that those who survive her will carry them out. Yet the discursive functions performed by what appear to be purely practical instructions for funeral arrangements have rich connotations. What this seventeenyear-old contemplates is the aftermath of her own death, the death of the witness, tantamount to the silencing of her voice. Yet, as if resisting the laws of silence imposed by omertà and death, the witness stages her funeral, stipulating who can attend as well as details regarding the setting, music, the casket, her own attire, and hairstyle. She insists that her clothing be black, and preferably consist of “a jacket and pants, with a black bow tie” (157). The witness’s choice of attire is important. In “Lo psichismo mafioso,” Camassa interprets it as a form of cross-dressing, a desire to be buried dressed like a man because, she maintains, knowing that as a woman she could not carry out the vendetta in traditional mafia practice, the young witness did so by collaborating. Certainly plausible, this idea associates Rita Atria with the code of vendetta. Yet, given the instability of contemporary women’s fashion codes, which can shift from the vaunting of tailored men’s wear staples to feminine frills with each new season, it may be difficult to simply equate wearing pants with assuming a male-gendered position and the desire for mafia vendetta in this context. I will offer a different interpretation, based on issues that Rita Atria raises in this diary entry and others. First, her renunciation of the conventional dress or skirt refuses to clearly encode the body as either girl or woman, a theme related to her legal standing as state’s witness. Similarly, the protective draping of the jacket and pants, covering the body from shoulders to ankles, allows for the undecidability expressed

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in her diary entries. Yet what I find most remarkable is the black bow tie, a rather audacious sign of frivolity in men’s and women’s neckwear. It calls attention to the speaker, drawing the eye to the neck and head, parts of the body she attempts to decipher earlier. Last, she wants her wavy hair worn loose, creating a typically feminine frame for her face and voice as witness. The predetermination of the final image Rita Atria desires to project and the selection of the individuals who will attend her funeral rites may be interpreted as an endeavour to speak after the body’s demise, to shape how she will be remembered and by whom. Thus, the list of individuals and groups included in and excluded from the small ceremony is significant. In fact, Rita Atria bars her mother, who vehemently opposed her daughter’s collaboration with the justice system, from the funeral and any future contact at all. With the exception of her sister, who fled to Milan, she wants only the people who have supported her as a collaborator with justice, whose knowledge and memories of her would thus encompass her rebellion against the mafia. Rita Atria thereby creates a symbolic community, whose kinship is determined not by blood but by shared support for her fight to obtain justice through legal means for the deaths of Vito and Nicola Atria. By writing an ending to her life story that focuses on the meaningful engagement with new ideals and hopes, she also creates points of aperture for the future. This does not mean, however, that the bonds of love Rita Atria bears for her father and brother wane or are supplanted. On the contrary, the imagery she adopts in her representations of Vito and Nicola Atria attests to the continued idealization of father and brother as the privileged objects of the witness’s love, strongly suggesting that she is unable to complete the work of mourning and relinquish them. These ideas are exemplified by the last diary entry written before 19 July 1992, the date of the mafia assassination of Judge Borsellino. It’s a long night and there are millions of stars in the sky, one more enchanting than the other. In each one of them there’s a little secret, each one has a long journey to make. One of them, precisely the smallest, the brightest, the farthest away, is making the slowest and longest trip of all for me, in order to reach a place called infinity. That is right where my two great loves are. Right there in infinity, I’ll be able to embrace my stars again one day. Those stars will have the power to illuminate the immensity of the heavens, and no one will ever be able to extinguish them again. (160–1)

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As Vamik D. Volkan explains, successful passage through the stages of adolescent mourning entails the acknowledgment of separation and achieving relatively realistic mental representations of the other (The Need to Have Enemies and Allies, 157–60).11 In Rita Atria’s representation, however, father and brother are virtually untainted, evoked through celestial imagery that marks a shift from the plane of the physical body and matter to the spiritual, unbound by material laws. As she identifies herself, her father, and brother (her two great loves) with particular stars in the sky, each one with its own secret, she invokes a rich array of symbolic meanings. According to J.E. Cirlot, the star is frequently associated with order and destiny, due to its celestial location (A Dictionary of Symbols, 309–10). Thus, as the speaker gazes at her star, embarked upon a journey that is hers, she envisions herself already on the path charted in the skies, to meet her destiny and destination with her loves. These thoughts echo the witness’s allusions to destiny in her earlier writings describing her origins and death. Here, the references to destiny may function as metaphors for suicide. She anticipates the fulfilment of destiny through the embrace of celestial bodies celebrating her reunion with father and brother. The final line is particularly suggestive in the context of traditional star symbolism and in the frame of Rita Atria’s family history. Generally, as a light set against a dark sky, the star “stands for the forces of the spirit struggling against the forces of darkness” (Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 309). Evidence of Vito and Nicola Atria’s criminal activities, provided by Judge Camassa, would likely lead one to associate them with forces of darkness. Yet Rita Atria represents these figures as two stars with a power of illumination that is boundless and invincible. The metaphoric allusion to death, conveyed by the verb “extinguish,” is significant. As lights shining in infinity, father and brother obviously reside in the spiritual realm beyond the reaches of mortal danger. Yet the use of the future tense with “ever” and “again” in the final clause creates a temporal mode that suggests her loved ones could still be threatened until then. Thus, we might interpret her representation as a defensive strategy, a way of immortalizing her father and brother so that memories of them, assaulted by the forces of the law with each new piece of information implicating them in the very mafia violence she denounces, will not perish. Moreover, she thus purifies and protects their memory from her own betrayals, represented by the legal evidence she provides against them. In this sense, the diary bears witness to Rita Atria’s inability to testify to her father, brother, and family as criminal, which would entail the disillusionment

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of her idealized attachment. If this is so, her thoughts offer some insight into similar cases of daughters of mafiosi who adopt various psychological defences when faced with what Rossana Campisi calls “the double father,” one loving and protective, the other lawless and violent, as examined in her “Sul lettino per liberarsi del padre” (87). In the aftermath of the mafia murders of Judge Borsellino and his five bodyguards, Rita Atria composes varied writings that have crucial implications for understanding her (re)construction of identity as a collaborator with justice. The first of these documents is her last diary entry, devoted to the meanings she derives from the death of Borsellino, with whom she had worked closely and viewed as a father figure, according to Piera Aiello and Camassa. Although the first lines voice feelings of emptiness and the fear that the “mafia state” will win out, she then makes the declaration quoted at the beginning of this chapter, calling upon her listeners to examine their own consciousness in order to defeat the mafia within. Unwavering and explicit, this avowal articulates the terms of antimafia subjectivity marking Rita Atria’s speaking position. Yet Borsellino’s death also contributes to a crisis of witnessing, deepened by the fear of mafia reprisal and the psychic threat of abject despair, as illustrated by the handwritten note left on her nightstand: “Now there’s no one to protect me, I’m discouraged, I can’t take it anymore” (cited in Sandra Rizza, Una ragazza contro la mafia, 174). What these utterances highlight are the unbearable solitude of her position and the impossibility of continuing to bear testimony. In this context, the third piece of writing, written not in her diary but on the wall of her apartment in Rome, warrants attention for what it says about Rita Atria and the transmission of her testimony. Significantly, she continues to create an interlocutor, a recipient for her words, which read, “I love you, don’t abandon me, my heart is not alive without you” (Rizza, Una ragazza contro la mafia, 159). This declaration expresses connection with the other, as well as an appeal not to be abandoned, in other words, an appeal to be remembered. If to be forgotten is to be cast into silence, then we can also read the young witness’s desire to be remembered as a will to speak, to testify in the terms proposed by Felman. Rita Atria commits her self to others, through the entreaty on the wall and the truths about her life entrusted to the pages of her diary, thus bearing a testimony that may survive her death. The words that Rita Atria addresses to her diary voice the shifting, multiple, at times contradictory terms of subjectivity inscribed on the body of testimony, a site of struggle over identity and meaning as a

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c­ ollaborator with justice. Struggles over the meanings of antimafia collaboration also inform commemorative discourses in general, and those dedicated to Rita Atria in particular, while substantiating the value of the subject memorialized. Yet this very struggle also points to questions about the potential functions of commemorative interpellations of the female-gendered collaborator with justice in the discursive field of antimafia cultural production. Certainly, Rita Atria’s example can serve other women associated with the mafia, as a model for the transformation of impotence and rage into personally and socially meaningful action. Furthermore, the rebellion against the mafia and tragic struggle for justice that her name has come to symbolize have engendered renewed feminist activism that participates in the social phenomena of what Gabriella Turnaturi and Carlo Donolo call moral familisms.12 The bonds that constitute moral familism, distinct from the institution of family, derive from personal relations perhaps based on ties of blood or feelings of solidarity with the victim of a socially produced tragedy, generating collective meanings from individual experiences of loss (“Familismi morali,” 164). Moreover, such ties serve to produce “strategies to overcome isolation and singleness, to be an active subject with others in order to represent the material case” (174). Indeed, in memory of Rita Atria and the ideals her name symbolizes, women have fashioned instrumental feminist practices of moral familism, a form of collective activism that, the authors propose, creates a different space, a space of “an unedited mediation between public and private, a zone of society that becomes civil” (172). At the same time, we must bear in mind the risks of commemorative discourses that monumentalize Rita Atria. As such representations make Rita Atria into an example to emulate, they may also create a normative model of the female collaborator with justice that collapses significant differences that locate mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters in the system of mafia relations, thereby casting non-conforming bodies onto the margins or eclipsing altogether the ongoing inventions of diverse manners of bearing testimony and witnessing.13 Urban Faces of Testimony I believe it is fundamental to make public the testimonies of each person who wages her or his solitary battle against the mafia, because it can give strength to break the wall of silence to all of the other people. Gabriella De Fina, 201014

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In relation to Rita Atria’s testimonial writings, Gabriella De Fina’s work poses a diverse dynamic of bearing testimony that enables different understandings of the possibilities, modes, and meanings of testifying. Furthermore, the life stories committed to the author and readers as listeners mark a turning point in the spatiotemporal cartography of signs, arrangements, and formations inscribing social consciousness and the antimafia practices that put it into action in daily living. The spaces in which individuals make up the itineraries of their daily lives, as Michel de Certeau lucidly argues in The Practice of Everyday Life, have critical functions in relations of power, operating as sites of agency for the inventive strategies performed to subvert imposed hierarchical systems. The various practices of resistance to which the witnesses attest in De Fina’s collection break the mafia’s disciplinary law of place and networks of surveillance, re-appropriating the terrain for lawful civil forms of living in community. Doing so has profound implications, as Mario Gelardi explains. Calling attention to the difficulties of telling the story of the antimafia in daily life, he delineates it as the antimafia “made by men and women who are on the front line every day because they made a certain life choice, among so many possible ones, that inexorably conditions their existence too, a choice of responsibility and civil commitment” (La giusta parte, 9). Similar lines of battle are declared, audaciously, by De Fina’s book cover and title, No al pizzo: Imprenditori siciliani in trincea (No to extortion: Sicilian entrepreneurs in the trenches). In effect, day after day, entrepreneurs, company owners, and executives in various businesses are on the front line, armed with ethical practices in this case, designed to combat the system of mafia extortion, which operates through an apparatus of threats, acts of violence, criminal collusion with elements of the state, and the network of “favours” that guarantees employment and privileges. One cannot overestimate the ways in which acts of intimidation performed to force adherence to mafia codes of behaviour shape the geographies of daily life negotiated by individuals in the commercial sector, ranging from the owners of neighbourhood cafes to corporate managers. Signs of mafia destruction of lives and property mark urban landscapes as reminders of the punishments delivered for opposing the system. The documentary film Oltre la paura: Bruno contro la mafia, by Alberto Coletta, clearly illustrates this point. Viewers follow in the footsteps of a common working man, Bruno, who takes what is extraordinary action, filing official complaints against local mafia extortionists, only to see his pub bombed three times and to become the target of death threats.

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Like Bruno, other figures have undertaken public opposition against the mafia. De Fina’s volume, however, signals a difference in the sociospatial relations between antimafia and mafia forces. The testimonies gathered therein narrativize the intimate details of sometimes traumatic experiences, personal emotions, desires, and fears disclosed by witnesses with the aim of creating a public sociosymbolic collective that provides ethical terms of identification, support, and means for transforming the economic and cultural processes shaping urban spaces and the lives of inhabitants who interact with them. This public position, crafted by the diverse individuals who testify, is suggested by the visual and verbal language of the book cover where, beside an image of the actor Filippo Luna that evokes to perfection the greed driving the accumulation of illegal money, we see the first and last names of the thirteen Sicilian business people who serve as antiracket witnesses. Exposing themselves in this manner, they run even more risks, yet also represent a substantial presence, a united collectivity others may join. Among the elements of No al pizzo that innovatively refashion properties of the primary modes of bearing personal testimony, such as the autobiographical monologue or dialogic oral interview, are the roles fulfilled by De Fina. A critically recognized theatre actress and playwright, De Fina has made pioneering contributions to antimafia culture with her book of poetry Baci d’onore e non d’amore and her co-founding of the White Sheets Committee (Comitato dei lenzuoli), which gave rise to the public display of white sheets that transfigured the visible city of Palermo following the mafia assassinations of Falcone, Morvillo, Borsellino, and eight of their respective bodyguards.15 Indeed, through this inventive act, what is generally a commonplace household item becomes a form of testimony for witnesses to the trauma wrought by the murders; the white sheet calls up the memory of the victims, their bodies covered by the bloodstained white cloth, and stands for assuming the personal responsibility of a public stance against the mafia, articulated also through ethical practices of daily living. By hanging white sheets from their balconies or pinning a square of white cloth to their clothing, sometimes with names of victims or antimafia declarations written on them, individuals become creators of a culture of legality and the collective founded through it. De Fina conceived No al pizzo in similar terms, as a critical intervention in the quotidian sphere, a means to bring to light life stories testifying to truths of historical occurrences, emotions, and ideas in battles against extortion and other acts of mafia criminality, whose significance reaches beyond the women and

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men conducting them. She both solicited the testimonies and, always under the protection of bodyguards, listened to the life stories. In this manner, De Fina performed the role of secondary witness to the narration committed to her, with the aim of recording and transmitting it. Furthermore, her presence as listener may mitigate the solitude of the testimonial position, often unbearable, as in Rita Atria’s case, and also serves to valorize the social importance of the testimony. It is worth noting that the narrations do not unfold according to the dialogic conventions of the oral interview. Instead, endeavouring to facilitate the flow of testifying, De Fina crafted a process whereby the stories are recorded, transcribed, and then adapted to the form of first-person testimony rather than an oral interview. Elucidating her perspective on the texts, De Fina suggests they construct a discursive space “where facts intermingle with the emotions of the moment, where dramatic events of the past are relived without external interruptions and without any defenses, almost as if one were on the psychoanalyst’s couch” (No al pizzo, 8). Further enriching the spatiotemporal relations between the events lived, memory, emotions, and narration are the visual signs of evidence. Each story opens with a black-and-white photograph of the person who bears testimony to what she or he has experienced. The shots vary, ranging from extreme close-ups of the face to mid-distance framings of the body, yet always capture the facial features clearly. Similarly, the visual images seem to convey a spectrum of states and dispositions, for instance dynamism, intense reflection, joy, and tranquility. In this regard, the photograph of Pina Grassi is remarkable. In a close-up that occupies the entire page, with no margins, the image of her smiling face looks directly into the camera, as if she were looking us in the eyes. The photograph creates a sense of excess, of a force that cannot be contained in any way and spills beyond the page. In the case of each witness, the relations between the visual elements of the photographic image and the verbal ones in the narration vary, posing an intriguing line of interpretation that goes beyond my scope here. However, in the genre of testimony, the photograph has certain more or less stable functions, serving in part as evidence of the authenticity and veracity of the narration as a story lived by the flesh-and-bone person photographed, identified with her or his proper name when possible. Certainly photographs add another sensorial dimension to the texts and to the experiences of readers and observers. But in the context of antimafia testifying there are more serious implications: antiracket witnesses exhibit themselves

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as public evidence, and their photographs signify the strength of their rebellion against the mafia and their commitment to the principles that unite them. The thirteen witnesses who narrate their life stories in No al pizzo differ in a number of ways. The women and men belong to diverse generations, born between 1928 and 1976, and completed their education in different regions throughout Italy. Residing in cities on Sicily’s coasts and interior, they work in fields that vary from, for example, commerce to the health industry and the law. In this frame, Pina Grassi and Barbara Cittadini’s testimonies introduce elements that counter stereotypes of Sicilian women in general and antimafia women in particular. In the cultural imaginary conjuring Sicily, the figure of the Sicilian woman dressed in black who dedicates herself exclusively to the family in the domestic sphere looms large. As the common story goes, only when a beloved member of her family is killed by the mafia is it possible to imagine her collaborating with agents of the law or antimafia organizations.16 In contrast, Grassi, born in 1928, finished her degree in architecture, which she applied in the field of interior design textiles; Cittadini, with a degree in political science and graduate course work in health sciences, is the director of the Clinica Candela in Palermo. It is true that Grassi’s husband Libero was killed by the mafia in 1991. However, the murder was motivated precisely by the actions both he and Pina took against the mafia’s attempts at extortion, and the fact that he spoke out about those attempts in the newspaper and on television. Cittadini attributes her acts of resistance to mafia illegality to the moral education imparted by her family. I now focus on the female engendering of antimafia microgeographies performed by the individual testimonies of Grassi and Cittadini, which articulate diverse practices that serve to rehabilitate as civil geographies of justice and legality urban spaces ruled by members of Cosa Nostra or, equally important, mafia ways of thinking and behaving among citizens at large. These two testimonies particularly interest me because their gendered positions fashioned to contribute to the culture of legality give a fuller understanding of the spectrum of women’s locations in relation to the mafia, represented by Rita Atria, mafia women examined earlier, and the forms of subjectivity inventively crafted in the novels of, for instance, Badalamenti and Cutrufelli. They thus expand cartographic possibilities for mapping potential intersections and divergences. In fact, the stories Grassi and Cittadini put into testimonial discourse exhibit diverse features of the movement

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against criminal extortion and notable differences between the two women, which distinguish female models of resistance in everyday life. The life story voiced by Grassi serves particular personal, historical, social, and symbolic aims. She gives vocal expression to thoughts, experiences, and values filtered through memory and desires reaching from her childhood and the years of World War II to the present day, evoking events and attitudes related to the history of the mafia. Her testimony, the first in the collection, creates a context for the ones that follow, and testifies to the long history of mafia oppression and to the sociocultural rebellion that is still in the making. In the history of the antiracket collectivity, the way this witness recalls to memory her intimate life shared with her husband Libero, a symbol of popular rebellion against extortion, is significant. In vivid, dynamic turns of expression, Grassi evokes the interior of their home in downtown Palermo as an intensely vivacious space, brimming with affection and, as a meeting place for artists and intellectuals, with lively exchanges of social, political, and cultural ideas. Against this backdrop, she recalls in precise detail the series of mafia attempts at extortion, followed by threats, robberies, and physical violence, to which Libero responds by making an official police complaint. Grassi then registers the time, day, and date when the mafiosi murdered her husband, but does not linger on any other details. She says nothing at all about the scene where he died. Instead, her declarations place great emphasis on the public interventions she and Libero had made in order to speak out openly against the criminal system. Among these are the antiracket conference of 1991 and the publication of its proceedings; the famous letter Libero addressed to the “Dear Extortionist,” published first in the newspaper Giornale di Sicilia and then in Corriere della Sera; and television appearances with Michele Santoro and Maurizio Costanzo. Thus, she highlights not the traumatic way Libero Grassi died, but the way he lived, breaking the wall of silence, as the reason for remembering him. The value of the life story told by Pina Grassi consists not only of the way she thereby testifies to what she and Libero lived in the past. Instead, challenging the stereotypical image of the Sicilian woman who silently withdraws to the interior domestic space of mourning, she testifies to her ongoing battle against the mafia today. In lively, enthusiastic language she tells readers who listen about the various initiatives she undertakes with the young people of Addiopizzo17 and members of the magistrature. She articulates her self as a militant woman who puts into practice the concept of the personal responsibility incumbent

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upon each citizen, a way of thinking and being that her memory links to Libero. Her testimony thus bears the signs of the past struggle while registering new activities, which project into the future. Framed in the middle of an interior doorway, the image of Barbara Cittadini that meets readers’ eyes reveals a young woman, just fortyone years old at the time she bears public testimony, apparently strong of body, head slightly tilted, her eyes looking somewhere to the left of the camera. The brightly illuminated space behind her casts gentle light on the crown of blond hair, which cascades to her shoulders and softly frames the well defined lines of her forehead, high cheekbones, and chin. Amidst the strong vertical lines established by the architectural details and the black suit worn by the subject, as Cittadini leans against the door jamb with a glimmer of a smile on her face, we might think she is lingering to chat a moment with a colleague. By virtue of this photographic image and the fundamental meanings Cittadini assigns to being a woman in her life and career, her testimony fashions a different visage of mafia resistance in daily living. She locates herself in a genealogy of female entrepreneurial enterprise that reaches back to the early 1900s, when her aunt Eva Sapuppo Candela began managing the Candela Clinic, and takes that aunt as “a life model” (66). Conjuring the specific features of her aunt’s manner of acting that bear upon Cittadini’s fashioning of self, she underscores her strength, sense of commitment, dedication to work, and most of all “an extremely strong moral heritage” transmitted to the witness (67). The emphasis here placed upon moral practice is critical. In her work on the authority of ethics, Carla Bagnoli proposes that “the moral ideal is a regulative ideal with which we must compare ourselves, on the basis of which we are called upon to judge our motivations, habits, practices, convictions, bonds, affections, and projects” (L’autorità della morale, 152). Engagement in this ongoing process of self-scrutiny produces, she maintains, the sense of autonomy as agents, which, however, is always relational, bearing the obligation of mutual respect, and constituting a revolutionary power to transform self and society. In fact, as Cittadini clearly declares, it is precisely this moral sense, combined with a commitment to improve socioeconomic conditions in Sicily, that motivates her public stance against the mafia-designed criminal system of business that attempts to coerce honest citizens into submission through threats and acts of violence. She presents her choice as one freely taken as a female citizen with rights and duties, rather than a decision made under duress. Cittadini’s final reflections serve not as a form of closure, but instead testify to the truths of arrangements and structural formations of

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thought that produce a geography of illegality in Sicily, and to her commitment to dismantling them. Resonating with Rita Atria’s notion of the mafia within and the fundamental importance of overcoming it, Cittadini describes what she terms the “relational logic” (76) composing an entrenched grammar of personal and social relations. Describing the everyday operations of this logic, she tells us that when in need of something, “You call a friend who asks his friend, who asks a friend of the friend, and you probably get what would be due you by your rights” (76). From her perspective, this mentality presents more pernicious threats than those of organized crime because it operates in the multiple, diffuse sites where individuals perform their tasks of day to day life and thus creates myriad forms of illegality, perpetuated by business people sporting “double-breasted suits.” Adopting medicalized discourse, Cittadini portrays this entrenched, “mortifying” system as “the real cancer of our land” (76), evoking its threats to the life of the island and its inhabitants. In fact, she argues, this oppressive code of socioeconomic relations drives the exodus of young people born in Sicily. Thus, employing a “we” that incorporates reader-listeners, she states, “We must discover and eradicate all these variants” (76) of illegality, thereby projecting a course of committed action to recreate sociospatial relations forming Sicily for the future. Such terms of address and the enterprise we are called upon to perform create possibilities for material and symbolic engagements with the civil collective, offering an alternative to carrying on a solitary battle or languishing in acquiescence and silence. Cyberspatialities of Antimafia Testimony: Web-Based Media and Cultural Practices of Legality in Daily Living The only way to eliminate this plague is to make young people who live amidst the Mafia aware that there is another world beyond it, made of simple yet beautiful things, of purity, a world where you are treated for what you are, not because you are the child of so and so, or because you paid the price to have someone do you a favour. Perhaps an honest world will never exist, but who prevents us from dreaming. Perhaps if each one of us tries to change, perhaps we will succeed. Rita Atria, 5 June 1992, Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature, 162

Since the 1990s, works in literature, film, and the sciences have increasingly foregrounded the fundamental importance of children and adolescents in

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both the entrepreneurial networks of the various mafia crime organizations operating throughout Italy and the network of antimafia associations. Drawing out the complexities of young people’s relations to the laws of civil society and those of the diverse mafias are such novels and films as Cutrufelli’s Canto al deserto; Lara Cardella’s Finestre accese; Diego De Silva’s Certi bambini, the inspiration for the film A Child’s Story by Antonio and Andrea Frazzi; and Roberto Faenza’s Come into the Light.18 Nonfiction works have also registered a boom in production; among them the edited volumes Ragazzi della mafia by Franco Occhiogrosso and I ragazzi le mafie, containing research conducted under the auspices of the Istituto centrale di formazione di Messina; La mafia spiegata ai ragazzi by Antonio Nicaso; and the collection La mafia fa schifo: Lettere di ragazzi da un paese che non si rassegna, edited by Nicola Gratteri and Antonio Nicaso. Contributing to this field of cultural and critical intervention are richly varied products of antimafia ways of thinking, being, and acting, fashioned by individuals and organizations through web-based media in the form of photograph and video postings, blogs, entries in collaborative platforms, and diverse engagements with social networks. The proliferating employment of Internet tools to create, consume, refashion, and recirculate cultural inventions of legality clearly participates in the process of changes generated by mobile technologies and online activities, which, especially among younger generations,19 alter perceptions and experiences of the body, voice, presence, civic engagement, and community constituting lived human geographies, and therefore make the virtual antimafia territories of everyday living an important area for study. In fact, scholars have begun to examine the ways in which young people in Italy engage with new media, as in such useful studies as Nicoletta Gay et al.’s Giovani, media e consumi digitali, Barbara Saracino’s Giovani e nuovi media, and Elisa Manna’s Anima e byte. However, the engaging interconnectivities in virtual antimafia environs have received scant critical attention. Among the notable exceptions are Baris Cayli’s “Creating Counterpublics against the Italian Mafia: Cultural Consequences of Web-based Media,” which works through critical models in anthropology and journalism to examine Libera Informazione as a case study, and Paula Salvio’s “Eccentric Subjects: Female Martyrs and the Antimafia Imaginary,” which scrutinizes Francesca Morvillo’s Facebook site, an “archive of feelings,” to analyse issues related to gender, memory, and commemoration. Various notions shaping conventional paradigms of what constitutes civic engagement, the spaces of its enactment, and features of legitimate

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social agents have contributed to the paucity of studies examining online antimafia cultural production. In general, traditional models of civically engaged action focus upon citizens working in relationship with various forms of institutionalized politics and civic activism in the material public spheres, for example, participating in initiatives launched by political parties, government institutions at the national or local levels, or grass-roots organizations that militate literally on the ground. However, in his study on forms of citizenship in the digital age, W. Lance Bennett maintains there has been a general erosion of credibility of traditional political parties and government institutions among those born after the 1970s, which some commentators interpret as a sign of “disengaged youth” (“Changing Citizenship,” 3). Against this, Bennett argues that younger generations have fashioned new forms of civic identity, practices, and spaces, evidenced by online activities and communities organized around particular social issues, such as sustainability, providing education or medicines to the poor, and so forth. Such modes of engagement, he suggests, mark a transformation of the traditional “dutiful citizen model,” working within conventions of political life and culture, into “an actualizing citizen model favoring loosely networked activism to address issues that reflect personal values” (14). Bennett’s observations are useful for conceptualizing webbased productions of antimafia culture of legality as committed social engagements, and raise another key issue underpinning reasons why they have been overlooked. The innovative designs, modes, and spaces of online antimafia civic participation are often fashioned by young people who, as Bennett notes, tend not to receive recognition as “legitimate social and political actors” (ix). Finally, in the specific context of Italian organizations focused on the diffusion of a culture of legality and opposition to the mafia, it is crucial to note the lack of value placed upon social media as a tool, a position documented by Baris Cayli in his groundbreaking study “Italian Civil Society against the Mafia.” According to the results of a survey he conducted among seventy-two antimafia organizations, although some 28.3 per cent of respondents underscored the value of mass communication tools in the fight against the mafia, not one respondent voiced the perception of social networks as an important means for engaging and mobilizing the public (89–90). With the concept of the actualizing citizen in mind, this discussion charts new forms of interconnectivity and collectivity invented by Italian Internet travellers as they create ideas, practices, and initiatives engendering – in the sense of bringing into existence – what I call

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cyberspatialities of legality. My conceptualization of this term draws upon both Soja’s model of spatiality and the proposition that the configurations of Italian life are undergoing “biomediacal” transformation. Human spatiality is, Soja explains, a “complex social product, a collectively created and purposeful configuration and socialization of space that defines our contextual habitat, the human and humanized geography in which we all live out our lives” (Seeking Spatial Justice, 17–18). In Italy, a recent article in La Repubblica20 suggests, human geographies are undergoing a process of transformation driven by the usage of mobile technologies and web-based activities such as Facebook and YouTube, which is reconfiguring the relations between biological, biographic, and virtual dimensions of habitats and the ways they are constructed and lived. The changes mark a new era, a “biomediacal era” (era biomediatica), “in which the virtual transcription and telematic sharing of personal biographies through social networks are fundamental.” I am interested in the ways that the invention and socialization of networked spaces according to principles of truth, honesty, justice, and dignity, for instance, function as integral parts of quotidian habitats. As such, these web-based productions of lawful selves, modes of being, objects, and affiliational relations should be taken seriously and examined, not as a radically separate sphere of operations, but in relation to the infinitely creative arts of antimafia invention in everyday life. Furthermore, I argue below that such modes of civil engagement have intrinsic value, independent of their translation into offline initiatives. The very act of bringing into virtual existence verbal and visual images of lawful identity, ideals, and practices inscribes key terms of antimafia subjectivity and enables other web users to perceive, imagine, or identify with them, thus contributing to cyberspatial habitats. In view of the vastness of antimafia territories cultivated by citizen authors and artists, organizations, and social networks, as well as the equally vast array of features and issues to sound out, I here restrict examination to two case studies, the YouTube video Storie di resistenza quotidiana (18 July 2010) by Paolo Maselli and Daniela Gambino and the antimafia social network Ammazzateci Tutti, in part because YouTube and social networks appear to play formative roles as products and producers of the hybrid biomediacal geographies the majority of young Italians now live. These texts raise a variety of critical issues that merit attention. I want to focus, however, on their diverse modes of bearing online antimafia testimony as they constitute cyberspatialities of legality, and to reflect upon their systems of address, social, civil, and symbolic

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functions, and the creation of possibilities for engagements that produce ongoing transformations of interactive, lived geographies. The polyphony of voices and life stories created by the video Storie di resistenza quotidiana includes several themes that resonate with those articulated by witnesses in No al pizzo, yet through the composition, visual language, and means of diffusion, the text invents diverse testimonial correlations, some of which emerge during the conceptualization of the full-length documentary project, on which the Roman filmmaker Maselli and Palermitan author Gambino collaborated. In the initial phase, Gambino serves as witness to the phenomena of the mafia and the material, social, and political conditions deriving from it. As she states, she lived through the period of intense reform and support for antimafia enterprises in Palermo under the leadership of Leoluca Orlando, dubbed the “Palermo Spring,” and the traumatic massacres of 1992. From this position, Gambino says, she attempts to explain to Maselli “the mechanism regulating mafia dynamics,” and in the process “I explained them to myself again too.”21 Gambino’s impulse to bear testimony by means of the documentary derives from these encounters. She states, “Telling my accounts created the spark that drove me to carry on testifying to those gestures in daily life that enable anyone to participate, to take back their right to resist, knowing she or he is one of many, and without being afraid.” In this relational context, Maselli performs the role of secondary witness, who listens to and creates audiovisual records of the testimonies represented in the film, fulfilling the implicit pact of disseminating them. He thus enables spectators to share in the witnesses’ experiences, memories, and arts of antimafia resistance. In this respect, both the documentary film and the YouTube posting are critical for the ways they preserve and make possible future circulation of the testimonial stories. Elucidating this function of video testimony, Aleida Assman maintains it serves to “transform the ephemeral constellation of an individual voice and an individual face into storable information and to ensure its communicative potential for further use in an indefinite future” (“History, Memory,” 270). Uploading such texts, whether found in archives, social networks, or YouTube as in the case of Storie di resistenza quotidiana, creates multiple possibilities to connect, retrieve, learn, create, and recirculate the stories of witnesses, which may become objects of commentary and dialogue among Italian speakers in a transnational context. For instance, as in the case of this itinerant traveller who came upon the video by chance while browsing through sites of antimafia resistance, the YouTube posting enables

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viewing by spectators across the globe who may not have access to brick-and-­mortar venues showing the documentary. Yet, as scholars have commented, such possibilities depend on the accessibility and use of mobile technologies and the Internet. According to the 2013 Italian census, Internet usage among the general population stands at 63.5 per cent, reaching 90.4 per cent among the young; of Italians with Internet access, 69.8 per cent use Facebook and 61 per cent use YouTube. Also significant is the usage of smartphones, which ranks at 66.1 per cent among Italians under thirty years old. Like the other testimonial texts discussed in this chapter, Storie di resistenza quotidiana unites stories articulating practices of resistance against the mafia that are conceived and materialized largely by common citizens in their daily lives. This subject of truth, together with the particular visual and verbal ways of testifying to it – through graphic captions, use of colour and lighting, the framings of shots, and musical score – differentiate this work from other non-fiction films within the genre of testimony, such as Marco Amenta’s One Girl against the Mafia and Marco Turco’s Excellent Cadavers. In the former, Amenta puts into story form the fragmented, conflictual utterances of Rita Atria’s traumatic struggle, ultimately commemorating her as a heroic symbol of female resistance to mafia oppression whose death will ideally inspire women and men to follow her life example. Through Turco’s documentary gaze, spectators view the historical enterprises conducted by Falcone and Borsellino, among other antimafia figures, but the archival footage and evidence documenting the mafia’s long history of carnage producing trauma of national proportions cast the various testimonies in particularly dark light. More important, both films structure and incorporate the testimonies according to conventions of documentary film, employing them to construct a clear linear narrative in Amenta’s case and a logical argument in Turco’s, achieved in part through Alexander Stille’s role as social actor and narrator. Such conventions, as Assman argues, tend to construct a sense of coherence, implying unspeakable incidents of trauma can be understood rationally. In contrast, Maselli and Gambino’s YouTube video puts fragments of testimony before our eyes, as witnesses conjure a variety of episodes, emotions, and in some cases profoundly painful loss irredeemably altering the survivors’ lives, and of which no meanings can readily be made. This is not to say the video presents no argument or position. Rather, spectators are called upon to make meanings of the testimonies, and, I suggest, assume responsibilities for change.

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The various scenes of bearing testimony address online viewers through a rich, multisensorial system. We see the witnesses with their individual faces and proper names as their expressions and gestures convey subtleties of meanings. We hear each of their visually embodied voices in changing tonalities that, firm, strong, serious, or impassioned, express the particular vicissitudes of stories uniquely their own, as well as their commitment to practices that both challenge the mafia power system and create spatialities of justice and legality. Among the diverse testimonies, images, and captions, several elements call viewer attention to the destruction, death, and trauma produced by the mafia. Exemplifying this current are the close-up shots of Vincenzo Agostino, whose son, police officer Antonino Agostino, was killed with his wife Ida Castellucci, at the time five months pregnant. Speaking into the microphone, he passionately evokes the present absence of mafia victims through the senses that can no longer perceive them, through the present absence of their voices or scents of their bodies. Addressing listeners on screen and online, he asks, “Our loved ones who are here no more, how can we remember them? The scent of our loved ones, we can’t smell it anymore. Can you all smell the scent of your loved ones? I can’t smell them anymore.” Through the words enunciated and through his long white beard, Agostino creates verbal and visual signs of the wound that is still open, and will remain so until he has the truth and justice, and can then finally cut his beard. This wound recalls Rita Atria to mind, with her wounds that time won’t heal, and ultimately, she concludes, that kill. The pain to which Agostino testifies offers a resonant counterimage to the silences about Libero Grassi’s death in Pina Grassi’s written testimony, discussed above, silences that perhaps register the unspeakability of trauma. Significantly, the words of both witnesses denounce the Italian state in ways that illustrate the ongoing importance of the issues raised by Silvana La Spina in L’ultimo treno da Catania. Grassi voices an image of the fugitive state, conspicuously absent following Libero’s murder, whereas the court case for the murder of Antonino Agostino is blocked due to “secrets of state.” Indeed, the presentation of ample evidence attesting to the state’s collusion with the mafia, produced through various illegal acts on the part of politicians and representatives working in public institutions, may incite viewers’ desire to know and their recognition of the need to assume responsibility for the testimony received in the ways they conduct their own lives. This point is illustrated by the sequence featuring Lirio Abbate as witness, which is composed of several evocative shots.

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In particular, a close-up shot frames his eyes looking into the camera, establishing him as expert witness who, speaking in his capacity as a journalist dedicated to telling the truth, testifies to what he has seen or discovered in person. In fact, in addition to the book I complici, an investigative examination of the ties between political figures and members of the mafia working under superboss Bernardo Provenzano that Abbate co-authored with Peter Gomez, he has published numerous articles in the Giornale di Sicilia and Corriere della Sera newspapers. His penetrating revelations about the criminal organization have made him the target of mafia murder attempts. These experiences lend credibility to his assertions about the interconnections between the mafias armed respectively with Kalashnikov assault rifles or pens, which is to say white-collar workers in political offices and public institutions. Furthermore, he testifies to the necessity of translating the principle of resistance into action, which he exemplifies by continuing to investigate and write about mafia affairs in business and politics, though it requires that he live constantly under the protection of bodyguards in Palermo. Among the ideas that recur in the diverse life stories told to YouTube viewers are the importance of resisting all forms of criminal oppression and collusion and the duty of each person to do her or his part in daily life to build civil society. The visual and verbal features that represent these ideas and address spectators form an appeal that is both local and global, as demonstrated by the scenes picturing the testimony of don Luigi Ciotti, the founder of Libera, an antimafia network of over thirteen hundred associations, schools, and groups located throughout Italy. Out in the open countryside, bathed in the bright light of day and warm colours, the camera first focuses on Ciotti’s eyes, gradually pulling back to a close-up of his face as he explicates the meanings of resistance in the life each of us lives, or in other words, the microgeographies produced through the relations between the body and spaces in the dynamic process of socialization. He reminds us that “‘to resist’ comes from the same root as ‘to exist.’ It means substance, being there. It means doing.” He adds that everyone has his or her part to play, a principle Pina Grassi also emphasizes in the life story she commits to De Fina, recalling a logo created by her husband Libero, with the image of a finger pointing forward accompanied by the word “TU” (YOU), conceived as an emblem of personal responsibility. As she explains, “You. You citizen, in your own small way, have a function and must assume responsibility for it” (No al pizzo, 24–5). Elaborating this precept

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from a different point of view, Ciotti creates diverse possibilities for putting individual responsibility into action as a global force of resistance to “the globalization of the mafias.” He asserts the current process of “globalization of a society that does not tolerate illegality,” declaring that “we are a society of responsible people ... who assume our responsibility, or better yet, co-responsibility ... We do our part too.” In his use of “we,” he addresses and incorporates not only online spectators who may reside in Italy, but also those of us among the global civil community, who are solicited to bear witness to the truths entrusted to us by doing our part to create a culture of legality. In the relatively short space of nine minutes, the skillfully constructed video puts before viewers’ eyes a range of images evidencing ways in which citizens fashion practices of civil responsibility. For instance, Ciotti’s testimony is intercut with shots of Abbate telling parts of his story, exemplifying the act of reclaiming the right to speak out in one’s own voice, for decades silenced by a culture of omertà maintained in part by mafia threats of violence or murder. Also important are the representations of the pizzo-free movement: participating business owners refuse to pay the extorted protection money and identify their establishments as “pizzo-free.” Shoppers can support these businesses through what is called “consumo critico,” a form of ethical consumerism, by purchasing goods and services there. Such acts might appear trivial, particularly in view of the transnational systems of trafficking in humans, weapons, and drugs operated by Cosa Nostra, ’ndrangheta, and the camorra. However, such actions perform critical economic, social, and symbolic functions. Both operating as a pizzo-free business and shopping as an ethical consumer deny the mafia “the money that is used to pay affiliated members, to support the families of criminals, and to pay the court expenses of the mafia boss,” as a video caption explains. Equally important, making such choices asserts the moral agency that produces the form of autonomy discussed above, and functions as a tactic to subvert the criminal power system. While building microspatialities of justice, antimafia tactics of resistance documented in the video also form ties of affiliation with the lawful sociosymbolic community, whose presence and actions are substantiated through several scenes in which Italian youth figure prominently. Two sequences in particular suggest that the young people of Italy are recreating rural and urban territories, along with the sociospatial relations forming them. Sumptuous shots in warm colours pan over lands confiscated from the mafia and entrusted to Libera Terra cooperatives,

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named in memory of such antimafia martyrs as Placido Rizzotto, Pio La Torre and, most recently, Rita Atria. As the camera focuses in on the fields’ details, young women and men engage in various activities to make the land productive through honest labour. In stark visual contrast, the other sequence features footage shot in the dark of night in Palermo on 24 June 2004, which captures acts of urban “sabotage” performed by young social actors rebelling against mafia extortion in the name of ethical consumerism. Literally recreating the face of the city, they attach stickers bearing the by-now famous phrase “An entire populace that pays extortion money is a populace without dignity.” The ways such interventions may alter the material conditions are not negligible: in the following days, over 270 business establishments declared themselves antiracket, or in other words “pizzo free.” The different strategies of resistance and activism enacted in such scenes attest to the young persons’ self-transformations from objects of mafia oppression into active social agents whose new terms of subjectivity may foster viewer identification. The video’s invitingly convivial images of collective action may strengthen this prospect, as suggested by footage of a bicycle ride on 29 August 2009 organized as a mode of testimony in remembrance of Libero Grassi. In this instance, closeup and medium shots of bike riders of all ages, from small children and older girls and boys to adults, represent the bearing of responsibility shared by the civil collective as well as, I suggest, the pleasures of honesty, which warrant further critical attention. By recording the fragile testimonial episodes creating lawful itineraries and making them accessible to Internet travellers, Storie di resistenza quotidiana and similar videos posted by otherwise anonymous individuals have crucial implications for the production of memory, knowledge, and tradition. In his analysis of new technology, which takes the tape recorder as a prime example, Michel de Certeau maintains that it “can help to reactivate the memory of everyday life and reconstitute the narrative of daily practices and anonymous itineraries hidden in the thick folds of the social fabric” (The Capture of Speech, 131). Such narratives are the memory of a life and “a craft ... [that] establish a link between generations, transmitting to the youngest members fragments of earlier practices and ways of know-how” (131). Thus, the tactics of resistance conveyed through testimonial words and images constitute knowledge about lawful ways of being and acting, about a different world made of simple things, as Rita Atria imagines, which can be transmitted to future generations. In the face of the plentiful, spectacular images devoted to the mafia in

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cinema and the media, video documentation of individual testimonies contributing to antimafia tradition and history is essential. In the new millennium, growing numbers of Italian groups and organizations have created online social networks whose primary terms of self-identification and solicitation of visitors are youth and opposition to all mafia organizations for the production of a culture of legality. The specific address to young people, a generational group often associated with impulsiveness, self-absorption, and civic disengagement, and these sites’ status as social media might lead us to view them as spaces for personal socializing that bear no significance for society at large. This perception conforms with the tendency in the United States to undervalue the roles social networks play in the relations between Italian crime organizations, antimafia associations, and social subjects whose support each camp endeavours to enlist. As illustration, we need only think of the controversies that ensued in 2009, when Facebook decided to remove images of women breastfeeding their babies, which it deemed pornographic, yet allowed pages idolizing sanguinary Italian mafia bosses like Salvatore Riina. While Facebook dismissed the importance of what some call “Facebosses” on the social network’s geography, Italian citizen protest groups organized online campaigns and petitions calling for a ban on the mafia fan pages. Some members of the National Antimafia Commission in Italy threatened to cancel their own Facebook pages if the mafiosi’s were not removed. In contrast, Rita Borsellino, antimafia activist and member of the European Parliament, argued against censorship on Facebook, to her mind a democratic territory aligned with the ideals of justice, freedom, and equality. Drawing a parallel between Facebook and Via D’Amelio, the “sacred” site of the massacre in which her brother, Judge Paolo Borsellino, and his bodyguards were slain by orders of Riina, she contended, “We must occupy [Facebook] so people with bad intentions can’t find any space” (“Borsellino: Restiamo tutti”). Among the social networks taking on the battle against all crime organizations in virtual geographies are Legalmente m’intendo, Ammazzateci Tutti, Addiopizzo, and the Associazione Antimafie Rita Atria. Such online associations have the capabilities to address unprecedented numbers of Internet travellers who act as agents of the current hybridized biomediacal practices of daily living, and to challenge hierarchies of power. Indeed, some maintain that young people’s employment of digital media “disrupts the existing set of power relations between adult authority and youth voice” (Ito et al., Foreword, ix). Applying this idea to territories ruled

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by mafia tactics of intimidation and violence designed to preserve the power structure by isolating and silencing people who challenge it, it is reasonable to say that antimafia social networks provide spaces for asserting public voices of opposition, creatively engaging with lawful ways of thinking and acting, and belonging to substantial communities of support and activism. More specifically, Ammazzateci Tutti and like social networks solicit travellers through various verbal and visual landscape components, such as articles, discussion forums, videos, and comment postings, that enable identification with lawful models of identity and, in turn, the visitors’ own invention of expressions and activities composing a culture of legality online and offline. The very formation of the social movement Ammazzateci Tutti bears explicit relations to testimony, as do key components defining its own concept of identity and its address to fellow young people. It is significant that the group formed in interaction with the traumatic material realities produced when Francesco Fortugno, then vice-president of the regional council of Calabria, was killed by ’ndrangheta in Locri on 16 October 2005.22 According to their narrative of origins, which appears on their website, the movement formed through the “spontaneous initiative of young people of Locri,” whose first public appearance is at Fortugno’s funeral on 19 October 2005, with the by-now famous banner mounting a challenge to the members of ’ndrangheta with the provocative words “And now kill us all.” The narrative of origins thus also becomes a mode of testimony, because the public emergence of the movement is bound to the founding members’ presence at the funeral, where they testify to both their loss and the bearing of responsibility to remember the sacrifice Fortugno and other mafia victims have made and to take on the responsibility of the battle against ’ndrangheta, soon broadened to target all criminal organizations. Such links between antimafia social networks and testimony are not entirely unique to Ammazzateci Tutti. The Associazione Antimafie Rita Atria, for instance, was founded in 1994, with the aim of transforming the images of the 1992 massacres “safeguarded” in the young students’ minds into actions that would give material evidence bearing witness to the words addressed to the mafia about Falcone and Borsellino, “You didn’t kill them. Their ideas walk on our legs.” What is unique to Ammazzateci Tutti is their stunning growth and effectiveness at rapidly mobilizing large-scale public protests and events, primarily attributable to their creation of the online social network just a few weeks after Fortugno’s funeral. It attracted over two hundred thousand hits in one week. Indeed, capitalizing

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on web-based media, the movement organized the first of many antimafia initiatives, a demonstration in Locri on 4 November 2005, which generated an unprecedented show of rebellion against ’ndrangheta in Calabria, with over fifteen thousand participants. Among the noteworthy features distinguishing Ammazzateci Tutti’s self-representation and the cyberspatiality it creates are youth, autonomy, and an implicit commitment to bear witness, which is articulated through verbal and visual elements of the home page, a rich variety of video postings, and volunteer activities. These components also operate in the forms of address soliciting the participation of young people, as illustrated by the lively invocation at the top of the home page (as accessed March 2012 and February 2014), aiming to grab the visitor’s attention: “Hey, you! This movement can live thanks to you alone. We’re young people unbridled by this or that political party’s wagon. Help us to not lose our voice!” From the start, the appeal is voiced with the informal tu, typically used among Italian youth, and colloquial expressions of daily life. The issue of autonomy from political parties is particularly important, for its local Italian and global appeal. The seismic eruptions of scandals, corruption, and collusion with crime organizations that have rocked virtually all of the major parties forming the political landscape in Italy since the 1990s make Bennett’s insights on the erosion of government credibility and invention of the actualizing citizen model especially pertinent. In a salient examination of the relations between young Italians, new media, and politics, Luca Raffini notes a similar “disconnection” between youth and political institutions, which he attributes not to a form of disengagement among younger generations but to the government’s failure to address those generations and the issues they see as relevant. As a consequence, he observes, adolescents and young adults in Europe exhibit distrust towards political parties, and in the network society they produce a “secularization of the political” whereby “it is privatized, individualized, fragmented, and recomposed within a plurality of social relations beyond the confines of the traditional political system” (“Giovani,” 3). Current networking practices in Italy suggest, Raffini explains, that young people prefer to “mobilize in self-organized, non-institutional online spaces” (4), created around specific issues in civil society. In this sense, the ways in which Ammazzateci Tutti represents its online identity as a self-generated, autonomous movement of “young people against all mafias” perform important functions in the system of address. Though we should bear in mind that the association collaborates with certain individual political

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figures and has proposed legislation, its autonomy and freedom from political, institutional, and financial interests is underscored in diverse linked spaces forming its antimafia territory of legality. For instance, the “Support us” space potentially draws in navigators with the fundamental idea that “being free people pays off, but freedom has its price,” and then explicitly marks the group’s position, which is “to not hitch ourselves politically or financially to any wagon so we can really be free to say, do, and denounce anything.” Also notable is the use of gender-specific terms constructing an inclusive image that can solicit both females and males. Defining their civil collective and scope, they state, “The commitment all of us young men and women in the Ammazzateci Tutti Movement have is social volunteerism.” Pertinent here is the composition of regional coordinators and directors, with 70 per cent being women as of 2012, ranging from sixteen to twentyeight years old. (Particularizing aspects of this female antimafia protagonism are elucidated in the video testimony and posting materials I discuss below.) Finally, as noted above, the various modes of online testimony, participation, and volunteer work made accessible through the network appear well tailored to the practices of civil and social networking among younger generations. In order to have some idea of the effectiveness of such terms of address to engage young individuals in the practices producing cyberspatialities of legality some statistical data serves as a partial indicator. Since founder and president Aldo Pecora took Ammazzateci Tutti online in late 2005, it has registered remarkable growth from local to national and now international scale. According to information posted on its website, as of 2009 it attracts from forty-five thousand to sixty thousand visitors per day. Over eighty-four thousand people subscribe to the online newsletter and, significantly, some thirty-three thousand young people have provided contact information in order to perform volunteer services in the various territories where the movement has offices, such as Milan, Verona, Rome, Bari, and Palermo. Its fans on Facebook number over eight thousand, as do subscribers to the telematic forum on the Internet. Furthermore, offering evidence for the claim that new media make possible the rapid mobilization of large networks for protests or demonstrations, Ammazzateci Tutti regularly draws thousands of Italians of all ages to its public events. From a critical perspective, what interests me more than the network’s numerical profile are the ways the images, ideas, initiatives, and interactive elements of Ammazzateci Tutti’s virtual environment appear

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to engage navigators with terms of subjectivity fostered by antimafia, civil models of identity, while also empowering them as social agents. Here I employ the term “subjectivity” in the dual sense of being subject to laws of society, for instance, and being the subject of desires and aims, what Teresa de Lauretis conceives as “the capacity for self-­ determination, self-defense, resistance to oppression and to the forces of the external world, but also resistance to and self-defense from forces that act in the internal world” (“Subjectivity,” 120). Even for accidental or casual visitors, the verbal and visual signs creating the Ammazzateci Tutti home page space clearly mark it as an encampment of activism against the mafia culture of oppression and death, whose presence is inscribed in various ways. One of them is a brief message addressed directly to mafiosi who may infiltrate the borders demarcating the group’s terrain of legality: “Dear mafiosi, all of you powerful conspirators navigating this space, please leave. This site is incompatible with you.” For some, this invocation might engage fantasy and the thrill of being present in a space mafiosi may frequent, yet it is not a theatrical ploy. In fact, the movement’s site has been the target of cyber-attacks. Moreover, the message evokes the tactics of surveillance crime organizations routinely employ in daily life, and Ammazzateci Tutti’s awareness of them. Two additional features that may attract visitor attention indicate the complexity of the spatiotemporal relations deriving from forms of testimony. Occupying a substantial space next to the current events section, which on my last visit reported the sequestration of fifty pieces of land owned by the mafia in Lombardy, is a close-up colour photograph of an open palm holding bullet casings, with a caption urging us to use our “5x mille” (five per thousand) to fight the mafia. The 5x mille clause in the Italian tax code permits taxpayers to give 0.5 per cent of their income tax to non-profit organizations. The text accompanying the graphic attests to the truths of the war against the mafia fought by people of the past, and the ongoing opposition that reaches beyond the personal and the present. Delineating in simple language the “invisible war” that has lasted over two hundred years and, they explain, continues to claim hundreds of victims every year, the movement situates their current practices of resistance in relation to future generations. They declare, “We want to create conditions so that our children know about this war only through history books.” The eyecatching scroll titled “The frailties of memory. First and last names not to forget” attests to the bodily and temporal dimensions of the struggle against the mafia, as the first and last names of victims killed by all of

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the crime organizations appear and disappear before our eyes. Clicking the heading takes you to the full list of children, women, and men, who appear in chronological order based on the year of their murder, beginning with Emanuele Notarbotolo in 1893 and, at this writing, ending with Fabrizio Pioli in 2012. The sheer numbers of first and last names standing in for each face, each voice, and unrepeatable relations and stories lived, is shocking. These names represent a very partial story of traumatic loss, as the final entry of the list indicates: “And all of the other innocent people whose names we have not managed to discover.” Navigating further into the architecture of legality structuring the various antimafia microgeographies that visitors may access, view, and creatively reinvent through comments and recirculation, we reach the the video archive, available through the Online Resources link as well as Ammazzateci Tutti YouTube, which illustrates the emphasis placed on testimony and the innovative forms it may take. The archive includes news items informing viewers about antimafia figures and events, for instance, the movement’s annual Legalità meeting or the ceremony for the naming of a street in commemoration of Judge Antonio Scopelliti, murdered by the mafia in 1991. Other texts offer video testimony exemplifying the performative roles of both testifying to personal losses and assuming the duty to continue the battle against the mafias, as well as the diverse manifestations of criminality Cosa Nostra and other crime organizations produce. A video titled “In Palermo in Order to Not Forget,”23 which has attracted over four thousand viewings (as compared to an average of one to two thousand for other selections uploaded the same year, 2009), warrants special attention. Composed largely through visual images and music, the narrative situates spectators to become fellow travellers, along with the young women and men of Ammazzateci Tutti as they make their pilgrimage from Calabria to Palermo to commemorate the life’s work and loss of Paolo Borsellino, on 19 July 2009, the seventeenth anniversary of the massacre in Via d’Amelio. Aligning us with their antimafia itinerary and the members constructing it are close-up shots of individual faces and medium and long shots of sights throughout the journey – the embarking at the ferry dock, the panorama viewed from inside the bus, where the footage is shot, and the highway stretching out before them. Effective orchestration of visual images, sound, and silence highlights actions and sentiments of resistance and the enacting of social engagement. The first parts of the journey are accompanied by a collaborative, moving rendition of Francesco De Gregori’s “Viva l’Italia.” Sung in Pino Daniele’s thready voice, the

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first lines conjure contrasting images of an Italy liberated, robbed and wounded, yet surviving. In the last stanza, the deeply resonant voice of Fiorella Mannoia, which swells as no other, gives sonority to an Italy rent by the massacre in Piazza Fontana on 12 December 1969, but which resists. The consonance between the words of resistance and the images of the young Ammazzateci Tutti activists walking down the Palermo streets with banners held high suggests the latter serve as a synecdoche for the Italy that resists death and oppression. As members of the crowd approach Via d’Amelio, handheld camera work places spectators amidst the participants, creating the illusion that we too become part of the commemorative space and witness the bearing of testimony of Rita and Salvatore Borsellino, sister and brother of Paolo Borsellino. Reappropriating the space of the massacre and investing it with new meaning, Rita shares the words of her own children, who told her, “This place is sacred and we have to safeguard it.” Further underscoring the critical role younger generations have to play in such embattled territories, Salvatore tells the crowd, “You are our strength ... stay close by us.” Aldo Pecora speaks from a different perspective, testifying to the sacrifices made by the dead and the living, and the debt of thanks the young people owe them. These various shots in the sequence offer compelling evidence of the members of Ammazzateci Tutti and fellow participants as engaged social subjects, publically opposing mafia power and strategies designed to silence them. Furthermore, as in Storie di resistenza quotidiana, medium and close-up shots of the young members as they walk together or share food and conversation at a pizzo-free restaurant, with the song “Fango” (Io lo so che non sono solo) (Mud [I know I’m not alone]) playing in the background, represent acts of pleasure and socializing also defining the collective, and the production of a culture of legality in daily living. The postings accessed through the News link provide especially rich indications of how Internet users engage with principles, ideals, and practices defining Ammazzateci Tutti’s collective identity and the various online means they provide to “make the movement,” and thus collaboratively constitute lived spatialities. Unlike e-mail, which typically represents a personal or professional form of discourse, the postings in social cyberspaces constitute the creation of a public voice and identity, as Peter Levine proposes in “A Public Voice for Youth.” Thus, the materials in the News space are significant; they include articles disseminating critical information designed to inform the visitors, and comments crafted by speakers responding, which can be read as their

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own inventions of antimafia culture through meanings they make of the source texts, elaborations of ideas, and creations of new insights. More specifically, these comments enable an understanding of how the speakers fashion notions of self in relation to criminality and legality, to Ammazzateci Tutti, and to the Italian state. In what follows I consider some of these matters, based on postings prompted by three texts: the 2008 article “Antonino Scopelliti: Il giudice (non più) solo” by Aldo Pecora, with some 550 comments; a 2008 interview with Antonio Nicaso on the children of the ’ndrangheta, by Lia Staropoli, logging over 600 p ­ ostings; and Pecora’s position piece “Le ragioni di un’assenza,” which signals a refocusing of the movement in 2009, emphasizing “concretezza,” in other words, material offline projects. It registers over 400 comments. (A caution: the number of comments can be deceptive. In general, an article may elicit ten to thirty clearly engaged comments, with a subsequent shift to generic postings, such as “Nice article,” or even ads for fake Prada purses.) The ideas and observations of the speakers commenting upon the texts unequivocally voice terms of antimafia subjectivity and a commitment to justice, legality, and the work necessary to change Italian society, which can be interpreted as signs of the mediacal, hybridized spatialities produced in the process. In her important study “Mobile Identity,” which analyses how mobile communications media figure in adolescent identity formation, Gitte Stald argues that mobile phone users have the experience of presence in shared social spaces during mobile forms of communication (143), which might include oral speech, texting, or posting comments on various online social networks. While creating the shared space of the Ammazzateci Tutti site, some writers include themselves in the “we” of Ammazzateci Tutti, and others position themselves outside the group of members, addressing them as “you,” plural. For instance, Marilena, synthesizing expressions of the engaged civic position, writes that after hearing about Legalità at an event organized by don Ciotti, “I’ve never stopped! ... All I do is try to understand and dedicate myself to social projects.” It is also worthy of note that the identification with values and everyday practices of legality for which Ammazzateci Tutti stands and works is not contingent upon geographic location or on proximity to Calabria. Several writers state that they live in urban areas in the north, and present organized crime as a national Italian problem that afflicts cities throughout the peninsula and islands. Some speakers supporting the movement write that they reside beyond Italy’s borders. Thus, the virtual space of legality enables

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Italian-speaking individuals from diverse regions, Italian and global, to participate in the antimafia collectivity working for a shared goal. As Vanessa93 declares, “The important thing is that we all unite with one thought alone, to defeat omertà, the mafia and all of those things that don’t let us live.” The ideas voiced by Marilena and Vanessa93 testify to networked inventions of female-gendered identity that foreground socially committed actions of legality, claiming the right to speak out, and defeating the mafia as primary terms of engagement. In the postings to each of the three texts, substantive comments articulate the speakers’ perceptions of self as subjects committed to defeating the mafia and diffusing a culture of legality, in contrast to their perceptions of the Italian state, which suffers a severe lack of credibility, resonating with La Spina’s critique in L’ultimo treno da Catania. The majority of interlocutors view the Italian state as complicit, if not working in collusion with the mafia. Specifically, they criticize its failure to provide protection to agents of the law, police officers, judges, and collaborators with justice. Many speakers also fault the state for its silence about individuals killed during their battles against the mafias, and its apparent indifference or inability to execute effective strategies to defeat the various criminal organizations. For example, Pererira concludes a thoughtful posting with the observation “Very often, Cosa Nostra was the state.” Taking a sharper tone, Michael Lusi charges, “The state doesn’t care about seeing judges and ex-collaborators with justice die. In fact, for them it’s an advantage, the state isn’t with us, if we want to win this challenge we’ve got to do it on our own.” Along similar lines, Agostino Nicolò notes the inability of Italian institutions and the political class to provide solutions to the citizen’s problems. In tune with the notion of assuming one’s own responsibility for making society civil, he states his intention to create plans in a proposed Ammazzateci Tutti forum, in order to do something “useful for society, for justice, for all of the problems.” Thus, in the perceived vacuum ostensibly created by the Italian state, participants posting their ideas attribute all the more importance to the roles that Ammazzateci Tutti fulfils. Among the tasks identified as crucial are the dissemination of information on the antimafia and practices of legality, the remembering and commemoration of victims of the mafia, and the volunteer social projects. In other words, the comments testify to the speakers’ desires and efforts to assume responsibilities for fashioning socially engaged geographies of honesty and justice. Such declarations are not empty chatter. In fact, the members of the movement and fellow travellers translate such practices into offline

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interventions in the material landscapes of daily living. In addition to organizing public events throughout Italy that are designed to inform about the mafias and antimafia, the members conduct volunteer instructional activities in middle schools and high schools, enabling students to learn about the history of the criminal organization and strategies for living according to the laws of civil society. Among such recent initiatives is the creation of the official twinship between Catania and Lombardy, inaugurated in 2012, featuring pedagogical encounters between students, activists, and civic leaders. As Libera Terra and Addiopizzo have done, Ammazzateci Tutti launched its English website, with plans to make it multilingual and thereby expand its antimafia activism as a transnational movement. The concepts, articulations, and modes of dissemination of the testimonial discourses by Rita Atria, Gabriella De Fina, Paolo Maselli and Daniella Gambino, and members of Ammazzateci Tutti represent diverse innovations in the modalities of bearing antimafia testimony and witnessing, and thereby open critical fields of inquiry that need to be sounded in greater depth. There is a need for more archival research to recuperate and put into public record the testimonial fragments of witnesses testifying to what they have experienced or seen in mafia territories, which may be scattered in police records and evidence, epistolary writings, diaries, or memory spaces, awaiting solicitations to voice them. Such work would enable a fuller understanding of the various criminal organizations’ dynamics operating in rural and urban zones among diverse sectors of society that are multiply located through gender, generation, and class, as well as the strategies invented to resist if not defeat them. These enterprises would open new perspectives on the modalities of testimony as well, which theories tend to bind to trauma, as shown in the case of Rita Atria. However, as the life stories narrated in No al pizzo, Storie di resistenza quotidiana, and “In Palermo in Order to Not Forget” illustrate, the words, gestures, and self-images also testify to the complex relations between bearing testimony to traumatic loss and bearing the responsibility of that testimony through the embodied engendering of microgeographies of daily life, constituted upon the agency of ethics and the values of human dignity, freedom, equality, honesty, and justice. The ways in which antimafia cyberspatialities figure in this process of social transformation are open to question. The roles of social networks in embattled spaces of conflict between mafia and antimafia forces revealing the so-called “chaotic, real map of Italy” (Fattorini, “La mafia arriva sul Facebook”) also require further exploration,

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as expanding cartographies that always bear multiple, changing Italys within, constructed through relations between the body and spaces inside its own borders, and those marking the city, nation, and virtual worlds beyond. The promise of such critical itineraries gives reason to believe in the powers of civil resistance against the mafia articulated by an ethics of representation performed with the arts of invention in Italian life and its fictions.

Notes

Introduction: Mafia Cityworlds 1 Unless otherwise indicated, throughout these chapters all translations from Italian to English are my own. 2 In the late 1980s Emanuela Azzarelli captured the popular imagination and national headlines in the daily press, which dubbed the young girl “the Bonnie of Gela” due to her exploits as purported leader of a criminal gang of male minors. 3 The critical essays in Giuliana Pieri’s Italian Crime Fiction address the significant lacuna in genres related to the mystery novel in Italian literary studies, and offer insightful directions of inquiry into the artful works produced by Italian authors. Elena Past’s recent study Methods of Murder: Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction challenges the dominant notion that the crime novel genre originates in Italy in the 1920s, by tracing its lineage back to Cesare Beccaria and formative intersections between scientific, philosophical, and literary discourses. See also Privitera, Il giallo siciliano da Sciascia a Camilleri; Pistelli, Un secolo in giallo; and Crovi, Tutti i colori del giallo. 4 To his credit, with “Sciascia and Sicily,” Mark Chu is among the first critics to pose serious questions about the blind spots, silences, and claims in Sciascia’s representations of Sicily, which enable new perspectives on Sciascia’s textual production and how it figures in discursive constructions of Sicily and the mafia. For a historical analysis of Sciascia’s controversial positions on the mafia and antimafia, see Schneider and Schneider, “Il caso Sciascia.” Spatafora explores Sciascia’s portrayals of women and the mafia in Sciascia: Le donne, la mafia. 5 The term “new Italian epic” was coined by the Italian author Wu Ming 1, the pseudonym adopted by Roberto Bui, who is a member of the collective

240  Notes to pages 10−28 writing group Wu Ming. For a comprehensive explication of this kind of experimental fiction see Wu Ming, New Italian Epic. See also the volume of essays Raccontare dopo Gomorra, edited by Paolo Giovanetti, and Maurizio Vito’s engaging discussion in “A Discursive Construct of the XXI Century.” 6 Although the women authors referenced in Onofri’s analysis disappear from the canon of mafia narration, works by Cutrufelli, De Stefani, and La Spina are profiled in Donatella La Monaca’s informative work Scrittrici siciliane del Novecento, and have received critical attention in diverse articles. 7 Catherine O’Rawe conducts a particularly thoughtful analysis of the narrative strategies crafted in narrational geographies of Sicily, and how the works by Vincenzo Consolo and Gesualdo Bufalino figure in them. See also Mark Chu’s critical reading of Sciascia’s position in such discourses, and his insights bearing upon Bufalino’s idea of the plural island of Sicily, elaborated in “Sciascia and Sicily.” 8 Antonello and Mussnug, Postmodern Impegno. 9 Andrea Camilleri includes an informative entry for the word “pizzino,” in his Voi non sapete, explaining its original meaning in Sicilian dialect, and those it accrued through the publicized practices of mafia boss Provenzano (121–3). Adriana Cerami examines the mafia meanings and uses of pizzini in the context of Sicilian literature in her “Pizzini and Sicilian Literature on the Mafia: A Study of Literary and Cultural Motifs.” 1  The Female Mafia Imaginary 1 The term pentito is adopted for members of the mafia who turn state’s evidence. This word was first widely applied to Italian terrorists of the 1970s, who voiced remorse for their past actions during the trial proceedings, thus earning special legal consideration. Tommaso Buscetta is perhaps the most famous mafia boss who broke the code of silence, divulging information that enabled Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino to prosecute over three hundred mafiosi in the maxi-trial of 1986. Though such other mafia members as Salvatore Contorno, Antonio Calderone, and Francesco Marino Mannoia began providing evidence to the Italian justice system in the 1980s, the numbers of pentiti surged in the early 1990s, creating a perceived crisis in the crime organization’s hierarchy of control. For comprehensive analyses of the roles of turning state’s evidence and the controversies it has raised in Italian society, see Dino’s edited volume Pentiti. 2 Several important studies on women’s roles in the mafia include excerpts from public statements, interviews, and letters. Among these are Madeo,

Notes to pages 31−63  241  Donne di Mafia; Principato and Dino, Mafia donna; Puglisi, Donne, mafia e antimafia; Ingrascì, Donne d’onore; and De Toni, “Dolentissime donne.” 3 In “Women in Mafia Organizations,” Franco Di Maria and Girolamo Lo Verso recount the events of Enrico Incognito’s murder to illustrate that the ties linking members of a biological family to Cosa Nostra are stronger than those linking biological family members to each other. Thus, the individual often chooses Cosa Nostra over his or her own biological family. 4 In her review, Cristina Lanfranco notes several of these contradictions, which she sums up: “Therefore this book that speaks about the Badalamenti family, does not speak about the Badalamenti family, and the story that unfolds in Cinisi, the historical place of the criminal, bloodthirsty power of the Badalamentis, does not unfold in Cinisi.” 5 See Umberto Santino’s Storia del movimento antimafia for a richly researched analysis of the antimafia movement from its beginnings in the 1800s through the 1990s. 6 Giovanna Fiume breaks important ground in her 1984 study on female violence in Sicily of the 1800s, “Violenza femminile nella Sicilia dell’Ottocento.” For more recent analyses see Fiandaca, Women and the Mafia; De Toni, “Dolentissime donne”; and Renga, Unfinished Business. For fiction and non-fiction treatments, see Parrella, Il verdetto, and Merico, L’intoccabile, published first in English as Mafia Princess. 7 See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 100–2. 8 For this quotation and a fuller discussion conducted by Camilleri, see Mark Chu’s “Crime and the South,”107. 9 I thank Melinda Reina for making this work available to me. Umberto Santino’s edited volume Lunga è la notte includes a variety of poems and writings by Giuseppe Impastato, which are invaluable in understanding his notion of self, ideals and values, class relations, and militant activism against the mafia. Impastato was brutally slain in 1978, on the orders of mafia boss Gaetano Badalamenti, who ultimately received a life sentence in 2002. 2  The Mafia and the (Non)sense of Place 1 Some passages cited from Cercando Palermo appear in my Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature, and are cited as from that work. Quotations that provide only page number are drawn from Cercando Palermo. 2 Dana Renga’s Mafia Movies: A Reader is an invaluable resource, with articles on over forty films and television series about the mafia produced in Italy and the United States. See especially Renga’s Introduction, which provides

242  Notes to pages 63−8 an indispensable critical frame for examining the topic. In Unfinished Business, Renga devotes substantial analysis to the spatial relations between the protagonist Angela and places in Palermo, the hierarchy of power, and the mafia “family.” 3 Umberto Santino notes the tendency to view Palermo as the capital or “casa madre” of the mafia in his “Introduzione,” 13. 4 This list gives only a slim idea of the events and practices designed to combat the mafia in daily life, which continue to grow in number and inventiveness. In addition to Schneider and Schneider’s Reversible Destiny, Leoluca Orlando’s Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture and Santino’s Storia del movimento antimafia provide a wealth of critical information on the history of antimafia initiatives since the late 1800s. 5 Among the growing number of studies devoted to Consolo’s writings, Joseph Francese elaborates a discerning interpretative approach that focuses on the author’s “poetics of memory” (“Vincenzo Consolo’s Poetics of Memory,” 44), and Robert Dombroski locates literary works by Consolo, Luigi Pirandello, and Gesualdo Bufalino in relation to their respective notions of chaos and heterogeneity, elucidating how representations of multiplicity resist the homogenization of Sicily and Sicilians as “Sicilia mafiosa” or “Sicilia terra dell’onore” (Sicily, land of honour), in “Re-writing Sicily” (271). 6 A prolific author, Crisantino has published notable non-fiction works on the mafia and on various sociological aspects of Palermo. Among these are La mafia come metodo e come sistema, which she co-edited; the edited volume La città spugna: Palermo nella ricerca sociologica; Capire la mafia; Ho trovato l’occidente: Storie di donne immigrate a Palermo; and Della segreta e operosa associazione: Una setta all’origine della mafia. 7 The intertextual allusions to urban sociologists and their concepts go well beyond the borders of Italy, including for instance R.E. Park and Immanuel Wallerstein. 8 Pizzorno’s article appears in the important volume edited by Domenico De Masi, Le basi morali di una società arretrata (1976), which gathers together an array of critical essays shaping debates about the theory of amoral familism in the 1970s. Pizzorno’s article was also published in English translation, under the title “Amoral Familism and Historical Marginality” (1971). Unfortunately, the author’s use of the term “nonsenso,” or nonsense, is lost in translation. 9 De Masi presents this argument in his introduction to Le basi morali di una società arretrata.

Notes to pages 70−99  243  10 See Nelson Moe’s brilliant analyses of Franchetti’s works in “The Emergence of the Southern Question” and in The View from Vesuvius. 11 In an important scene, Ida explains to Armando her sense of Palermo, “a special city” that has “something different about it that makes it unique in the world” (177). From the contrasts that she draws out between Palermo and Turin, she conveys a pleasurable fluency in the feel, rhythms, and codes of behaviour distinguishing the Sicilian metropolis. 12 In his beliefs, behaviours, and fantasies, don Pino embodies il sentire mafioso, a structure of thinking and acting typical of many characters created by Leonardo Sciascia in such famous novels as To Each His Own, The Day of the Owl, and Sicilian Uncles. 13 Armando insistently pushes the possibility of Mario’s father making pizzas in America, which may be a veiled derogatory linkage between Sicilian immigrants and mafia crimes in New York. Mario has to repeat that his father did not make pizzas, and asks, “Why? Should he have made pizzas?” Armando replies, “A lot of them worked in pizza parlors” (141). The referent “them” is ambiguous: it may refer to Italian immigrants in general. At the same time, it may be an allusion to the Pizza Connection case of the 1980s, which culminated in the FBI’s arrest of hundreds of American and Sicilian mafiosi who distributed heroine through a network of pizzerias in New York. See Alexander Stille’s Excellent Cadavers for a detailed account of this operation and the investigations conducted by both Italian and American law enforcement agencies. 14 In “Wounded Palermo,” Jane C. Schneider and Peter Schneider examine the controversial effects of spaccatura as a policy in Palermo urban development. 15 Santoro’s dissertation “I bambini e la mafia” provides an insightful, meticulously researched analysis of the diverse relations between children and the mafia represented in Italian film and literature. 16 Several topics thematized in Crisantino’s novel resonate with ideas developed by the Greek philosopher, who made three trips to Sicily. Among these are the differences between appearance and truth, society as a living organism, and the importance of ethics and justice in sustaining civil and political life. 17 While noting the problematic implications of employing the organic metaphor of the wound, Jane C. Schneider and Peter Schneider approach Palermo as a wounded city in “Wounded Palermo.” At the same time, their examination casts a steady eye on the programs and strategies in the process of rebuilding the city and its forms of production, structured by a culture of legality. In contrast, in The Dark Heart of Italy Tobias Jones popularized the notion of Italian national identity as suffering from open wounds created by unsolved murders committed by the mafia, as well as

244  Notes to pages 102−8 other traumatic conflicts during World War II and the years of terrorism, spanning the decades between the late 1960s and the 1980s. 18 In Logique du sens, Gilles Deleuze proposes that nonsense denotes an excess of sense rather than its absence. 3  Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Postmodern Geography of Impegno   1 La Spina’s earlier novel L’ultimo treno da Catania is another fascinating citytext, examined in chap. 4, that takes readers through the streets and famous piazzas of Catania.   2 For Burns’s original elaboration of postmodern impegno see her Fragments of Impegno. This work has had a formative influence on conceptualizations of socially and politically committed postmodern art in Italy, some of which are featured in the insightful collection Postmodern Impegno, edited by Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug.   3 In Ragazzi della mafia, Franco Occhiogrosso conducts a detailed analysis of the relations between criminal organizations and children, and brings together essays by experts from cities throughout Italy. For information on minors and crime in Gela, see especially pp. 60–4 in “Un approfondimento su Gela” by Anna Maria Costantino and Salvatore Ingui, who work in the Office of Social Services for Minors. Also of particular value is the testimony of Rosario Crocetta, published in La giusta parte, edited by Mario Gelardi. Crocetta grew up in Gela, literally in the shadows cast by Petrolchimico’s smoking towers. Transforming his horror at the industrial blighting of Gela and the mafia Children’s Massacre in 1990 into socially committed politics, he became mayor of Gela in 2003, and has successfully implemented policies and practices of legality that restore access to goods, services, contracts, and justice. He has lived under twenty-four-hour police bodyguard protection every day for seven years.   4 In her review of Canto al deserto, Giada Fricano notes this aspect, stating that the narrator “formulates her J’accuse against the Gela reality” (“Maria Rosa Cutrufelli,” 1). While I agree, I suggest Cutrufelli’s denunciation articulates a more complex, radical element of impegno, because she levels the indictment at the specific agents who produce the material realities of Gela, through actions, words, or silence.   5 The entire poem by Santo Calì, from which Cutrufelli draws the first epigraph in her novel, is available in the original dialect, Italian, and English translation in an essay by Lucio Zinna, “Santo Calì,” http://userhome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/bonnaffini/DP/cali.htm. The English translation quoted here is by Gaetano Cipolla, and appears in Zinna’s text.

Notes to pages 111−54  245    6 In his richly researched study Cosa Nostra, John Dickie examines the events and effects of the first mafia war; see pp. 305–28.   7 Roversi artfully evokes this concept through direct references to Bonanno in Sicily; the Russian poet and activist Yuri Galanskov, who died in the Potma labour camp in 1972; and the young people at the Murate di Firenze, a prison in Florence until the 1980s.   8 Among their works elucidating this important line of thought on desertification are Baudrillard’s America and Simulacra and Simulation, Žižek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real, and Paul Virilio’s “The Twilight of the Grounds.”   9 Graziella Parati in “The Impossible Return,” and more recently Lara Santoro in “I bambini e la mafia,” provide insightful analyses of the ways in which Cutrufelli represents the narrator in relation to Sicily and Tina’s story. Also invaluable are Cutrufelli’s essays “In the Kingdom of Persephone” and “Travestimenti di carta e sangue,” in both of which she elaborates her critical insights on her position as author in the creative process of writing the novel Canto al deserto, and explicates how she perceives the relations between her factual research, encounters with Emanuela Azzarelli, and fictional invention. 10 In Unfinished Business, Dana Renga performs an extraordinary analysis of the cinematic representation of Lucia Rizzo in Galantuomini, drawing out the complexities of the character in the context of melodrama and trauma theory. 11 See Willis, Dictionary of World Myth, for detailed information about Ceres and Demeter in ancient Greek and Roman mythology. 12 In “I bambini e la mafia,” Santoro conducts a close reading of this scene, demonstrating how it elucidates Tina’s “in-betweenness,” the lack of a space and place in mafia social relations. My interpretation presents a different, though complementary, inflection. 13 Pertinent here is Alberto Casadei’s “La narrazione etica,” an interpretation of the ethics of narration in Diego De Silva’s crime novel Certi bambini, which also scrutinizes issues related to the mafia’s exploitation of children, trained as thieves, arsonists, and killers. 14 For a different interpretation of Tina’s suicide see Santoro’s “I bambini e la mafia.” 4  Mafia Geographies of Voicelessness   1 Although General Dalla Chiesa now appears to be fairly peripheral in relation to Falcone and Borsellino, several books about him have recently

246  Notes to pages 154−74 been published, among them Sapegno and Ventura, Generale; Armeni, La strategia vincente del generale Dalla Chiesa; Mirone, A Palermo per morire; and Bolzoni, Uomini soli. Recent films include the biopic Il generale Dalla Chiesa by Giorgio Capitani and the documentary Generale: Rivivendo Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa by Lorenzo Rossi Espagnet. 2 In Delitto imperfetto, Nando Dalla Chiesa states that his father arrived in Palermo to begin his service as prefect on 30 April 1982 (67). 3 According to research conducted at the Centro documentazione Giuseppe Impastato, about 1,000 people were killed between 1978 and 1984, including murders by lupara bianca, cases where the bodies are destroyed and disappear. Of the 332 documented mafia homicides, some 203 targeted members of the mafia. See Santino’s Storia del movimento antimafia, 245–7 for an analysis of this mafia war and its significance in the histories of the mafia and the antimafia movement. 4 On the thirtieth anniversary of Dalla Chiesa’s death, La Repubblica published the original interview with the title “Dalla Chiesa, l’ultima intervista a Giorgio Bocca.” All quotations from the interview are drawn from the republished text, accessible at www.repubblica.it/cronaca/ 2012/09/03/news/dalla_chiesa_ultima_intervista_bocca- (accessed 13 July 2013). This interview is reprinted in Nando Dalla Chiesa, Delitto imperfetto, 243–8. 5 Fava coined this phrase in his first editorial for the magazine I siciliani, which he founded in 1983. His articles consistently conducted well-documented critiques of the mafia’s growing power in business and politics. He was killed in front of the Teatro Verga in Catania on 5 January 1984 by the mafioso Maurizio Avola, on the order of Catania boss Nitto Santapaola. 6 It is beyond the scope of this study to investigate the network conjoining these figures, and thus the spheres of business, politics, and the mafia. In Mafia Stajano provides ample legal documentation of these criminal relations, and Stille in Excellent Cadavers offers a historical examination of expanding mafia affairs. 7 For more thorough discussions of the positions political figures and social commentators developed in response to the interview, see Nando Dalla Chiesa’s Delitto imperfetto, 107–116, and Stille’s Excellent Cadavers, 66–71. 8 See both Stille’s Excellent Cadavers and Stajano’s Mafia for fuller accounts and analysis of the crimes that attest to the relationships between the four Catanian Knights of Labour, politicians, and the mafia. 9 The term gattopardismo derives from the famous lines spoken by Tancredi to the Prince in Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” (40). Based on this

Notes to pages 178−90  247 

10

11 12

13

14

15

premise, though the unification of Italy, and the founding of the First Republic for that matter, appear to create change, through adaptation the agents of the established hierarchy of rule retain their power in a new guise. In Sciascia, A ciascuno il suo, the priest of the Sant’Anna parish tells Laurana, “I’m a worm in the same cheese, and I see the feet of all the other worms” (74–5). See Dickie, Cosa Nostra, for a detailed historical analysis of these figures and events, especially pp. 362–6. Carol Lazzaro-Weis, in From Margins to Mainstream, performs a brilliant reading of how La Spina employs feminist theories in her representations of the contradictions between models of ideal justice and its practices, in order to critique the ways such power oppresses women. La Spina makes a similar connection between oppression and hate in Catania in Uno sbirro femmina. There she draws a parallel between the female figure and Catania, stating that the city “is like you: subjected, destroyed by the indifference of its inhabitants” (144). What distinguishes the depiction of Catania in L’ultimo treno da Catania is the way the author situates the city in relation to mafia politics, attributing its urban subjection and decay to criminal activities. There is a substantial difference between the words that Di Marco cites and those Shelley wrote: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” La Spina transforms the interrogative into an affirmative statement, as if spring, and the promise of new life were a certainty, which the novel’s last line then undercuts. The reframing of Dalla Chiesa’s murder as a crime of state, in the sense of having moral or material culpability, is worth reflecting on. As Nando Dalla Chiesa notes in Delitto imperfetto as he examines the political environment in which his father was murdered, several avenues of inquiry leading to political figures were never explored. More recently, the ex-mafioso Gaspare Mutolo shed light on some of the problems Dalla Chiesa posed and the language employed by politicians and mafiosi. As he recalls, a politician complained about Dalla Chiesa, telling Mutolo, “This guy’s breaking our balls, he’s checking out the driving schools” (La mafia non lascia tempo, 108). Driving schools were crucial in providing members of Cosa Nostra with mobility. Mutolo clarifies that when a political figure tells a mafioso about a problem, “it’s because he wants to ask a favour” (109), and expects the problem to be presented to the boss of the district, and solved.

248  Notes to pages 193−4 5  Engendering Testimonial Geographies of Legality 1 Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations of Rita Atria’s writings are drawn from my Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature. The texts in Italian can be found in Sandra Rizza’s Una ragazza contro la mafia. 2 Anna Makolkin conducts a brilliant analysis of name-symbols and heroic discourses in Name, Hero, Icon. 3 The term “collaborator with justice” (collaboratore con la giustizia) is used to denote individuals who are not guilty of mafia crimes and provide evidence in trials against members of the mafia or involving acts of mafia criminality. For members of the mafia who turn state’s evidence, the term pentito is adopted. The use of these terms in everyday life is less clearly defined than this profile suggests. Indeed, due to her birth in a mafia family, Rita Atria was dubbed a pentita in some of the first newspaper articles reporting her death. Among the intitial reports are Cavallaro, “Collaborò con Borsellino”; Di Giovacchino, “Funerali difficili”; and Farkas, “Storia di Rita.” The term “witness for justice” has recently replaced “collaborator with justice,” due to the latter’s negative undertones. 4 In addition to the many authors in Lo Verso’s volume La mafia dentro, who analyse omertà in relation to psychic structures, Gaia Servadio in Mafioso examines the ways omertà structures the identity of mafia members as well as their relations in the biological and marital families, and in the social community. Noting that fear and idealism are fundamental to omertà, Servadio defines it as “an extreme form of loyalty and solidarity” opposed to outside authority (27). In practice, the unwritten law of omertà consists of maintaining silence about the activities of mafia members and avoiding the intervention of the forces of state law and authority in any dispute. Omertà may often determine the conduct of people with no connections to the mafia, who adhere to the law of silence for a variety of reasons, including fear of reprisals. Appreciating the complexity of the issue, Donatella Maura calls for serious examinations of omertà, stating, “I don’t know how far omertà goes when you realize that speaking means dying” (cited in Siebert, Secrets of Life and Death, 100). 5 Cavallaro, “Ripudiata dai boss, sepolta dalle donne,” 13. 6 Artistic and scholarly works devoted to Rita Atria continue to flourish. Among the analytical studies are Donne di mafia by Liliana Madeo; “Lo psichismo mafioso femminile” by Alessandra Camassa; and “La paura” by Saverio Abbruzzese. The array of creative texts includes poetry; plays, such as Gabriello Montemagno’s Il sogno spezzato di Rita Atria; and such nonfiction works as Andrea Gentile’s Volevo nascere vento: Storia di Rita che

Notes to pages 201−9  249 

  7

  8

  9

10

11

sfidò la mafia con Paolo Borsellino and Alberto Castiglione’s documentary Picciridda . For an analysis of the issues posed by heroic antimafia discourse in Amenta’s documentary film see my “Re-membering Rita Atria.” Amenta has also directed the fiction film La siciliana ribelle, released with English subtitles as The Sicilian Girl, very loosely inspired by Rita Atria’s life, and very problematic, as Dana Renga saliently argues in Unfinished Business. Debates among scholars working in Italian history and sociology have produced a range of positions on both the term “amoral familism” and its applications. Umberto Santino conceives of his study Storia del movimento antimafia as refuting such notions; Gabriella Gribaudi has suggested dispensing with the term “familism” entirely, in “Familismo e famiglia a Napoli e nel Mezzogiorno”; and Paul Ginsborg, in L’Italia del tempo presente, argues that the concept is useful, but only if applied in an explicatory manner. See Banfield’s Le basi morali di una società arretrata edited by Domenico De Masi for comprehensive critiques by diverse scholars. This process has more profound implications for members of the mafia, according to Lo Verso. Based on his clinical experience treating pentiti, he argues, “The I, this mafia-egocentrism is in reality another we, the we of the family, of friends, of allies. This second ‘we’ is also inside the individual and structures and saturates his identity” (“Per uno studio,” 29). For an acute analysis of this structure and mafia women’s formations of identity, see Di Maria and Lo Verso “Women in Mafia Organizations.” In the context of philosophical inquiries, the majority of commemorative discourses devoted to Rita Atria conform with the conversion model. In contrast, Carla Bagnoli elaborates an insightful transition model, arguing that in Atria’s case “legal examination becomes internalized as the model of self-scrutiny” and thus exemplifies moral thinking (“The Mafioso Case”). Also pertinent are her engaging discussions of practices of reflexivity, autonomy, and agency, which appear in her L’autorità della morale. In Amenta’s documentary, the footage from the 1993 trial of the mafiosi that Rita Atria accused illustrates the transformation of female witness into suspect. With the faces of the defendants blurred in the background, the camera focuses on their attorney, Ferruccio Marino, as he infantalizes the deceased and attempts to assassinate Atria’s character. He states, “It’s a matter of a little girl with such a worrisome and such a pathological personality.” Most of the defendants received lengthy sentences. Volkan points out that the gruesome nature of some deaths can complicate this psychological work. He also notes that in cases of dependent personalities, the extreme idealization of the deceased may result in the inability to “‘kill’ him, and in this way the mourning process can be

250  Notes to pages 211−13

12

13

14

15

arrested” (The Need to Have Enemies, 160). I thank Lori E. Amy for bringing Volkan’s work to my attention, and for enabling me to sharpen my arguments on testimony and trauma. Originating in the 1980s, as Turnaturi and Donolo explain, moral familisms gave rise to the founding of various activist associations designed for local intervention in tragic problems produced by society, such as drug trafficking, and violence perpetrated by terrorist groups and the mafia. These associations have varied structures, modes of operation, and aims, yet arise in general from an actual event involving the tragic loss of someone dear. Italian women, and especially women whose lives have been changed by mafia violence, have developed particularly effective feminist practices of moral familism. The authors state, “In moral familism one rediscovers a women’s culture, a practical, quotidian feminism ... The experience of moral familism changes women first of all. The anxiousness to impose their own visibility transforms them from victims into accusers, from a passive public into protagonists. Contacts with the judges, politicians, and journalists put them on a stage that is outside the domestic theater. They thus go through a peculiar emancipation from traditional roles, almost professionalizing being managers of daily life” (“Familismi morali,” 174). In her article “Non è solo paura,” Simona Dalla Chiesa expresses the shattered hope that more women would collaborate with the justice system, as she describes the effects of women who disavow their family members, particularly husbands and sons, when they turn state’s evidence and become pentiti. She argues, “It’s a deeply troubling reality, especially for people who in recent years wanted to believe and hope that women might actually be the ones to send a message of peace, that the mothers and wives, daughters or sisters might be exactly the ones to break from the inside the frightful spiral of death that has bloodied our nation in these dramatic years.” I thank Gabriella De Fina for providing me with this insight in a communication (22 May 2010), in which she generously offered information about her professional activities, the book project, and the mafia. I also thank Anna De Fina for introducing me to No al pizzo, a pioneering work. Although what can be called a sub-genre of antimafia testimony has flourished in the past ten years, most works of this kind are written by an individual author, who tells his or her story. Another noteworthy exception is Gelardi’s La giusta parte. See Siebert, Secrets of Life and Death, for an informative history of the White Sheets Committee, enriched by personal perceptions of the meanings participants and observers made of the display of white sheets.

Notes to pages 215−33  251  16 See Puglisi, Donne, mafia e antimafia, for a discussion of additional stereotypes of Sicilian women and antimafia women. 17 Addiopizzo (Goodbye pizzo) begins in 2004, with a group of young Italians whose first act of urban warfare against the mafia in Palermo was attaching stickers against paying extortion money on storefronts, restaurants, and local businesses. It was officially founded as an organization in 2006, and comprises businesses who refuse to pay the mafia “protection money,” or pizzo, and the consumers who support them with their purchasing power. Libero Grassi was one of the first businessmen to refuse to bow to the mafia’s attempts at extortion of pizzo. I discuss the pizzo-free movement in greater detail below. 18 For a foundational analysis of representations of children and the mafia in Italian literature and film, see Santoro, “I bambini e la mafia.” 19 The terms “young” and “youth” can be slippery, denoting a range of age groups for different readers. For the purposes of this discussion, the terms refer to generations born from 1980 to the present, as based upon the distinctions drawn by new media scholars. 20 “Italiani, il 63% è sul Web,” accessed 2 June 2014. 21 Communication with author, 28 May 2010. I thank Daniela Gambino for information about the development of the documentary and her collaboration on the project in a communication to the author dated 28 May 2010. 22 Unless otherwise indicated, information provided about Ammazzateci Tutti is available at their home page, http://www.Ammazzatecitutti.org (accessed summer 2012 and spring 2014). When last accessed, in February 2015, the site had undergone major revisions and now appears in different hypermediated form. Some elements of the site that I analyse here have been retained, while others have not. As this book goes to press, I can not address here the kinds of changes and their implications. 23 At Ammazzateci Tutti YouTube, the video is titled “19 luglio 2009: Ammazzateci Tutti a Palermo 17 anni dopo la strage di Via d’Amelio.”

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Index

Abbate, Lirio, 82, 224–5, 226 Adamo, Sergia, 15, 99, 105, 150, 182 Addiopizzo, 216, 227, 236, 251n17; and consumo critico (ethical consumerism), 226 Agamben, Giorgio, 99, 182, 188 Agostino, Antonino, 224 Ammazzateci Tutti (Kill us all), 5, 11, 18, 19, 196, 221, 229–37, 251n22 Andreotti, Giulio, 153, 159–60, 178, 181 Anello, Laura, 149 Angela (Torre), 63 antimafia, 45, 63–4, 87, 98, 145–7, 152, 193–5, 196–7, 211–13, 222–3, 226; and web-based media, 18–20, 196–7, 219, 228–9, 230, 237 Antonello, Pierpaolo, 13, 105, 106, 113, 244n2 apocalyptic discourse, 100–3, 111–12 Ariadne, 126–8 Assman, Aleida, 222, 223 Atria, Rita, 4, 17, 27, 28, 30, 38, 87, 156, 193–5, 197–211, 218, 224, 227, 237, 248n3, 248n6 Azoti, Antonella, 149 Azzarelli, Emanuela, 5, 11, 106, 239n2, 245n9

Badalamenti, Faro, 36; as legend, 36, 37–51 Badalamenti, Gabriella, 11, 13, 34, 215; Come l’oleandro, 13, 22–6, 34–61, 135 Bagnoli, Carla, 217, 249n9 Banfield, E.C., 68, 201, 249n7 Battaglia, Serafina, 3, 4 Baudrillard, Jean, 107, 113, 138, 245n8 Beati Paoli (Blessed Paulists), 36 Bennett, W. Lance, 20, 220, 230 Bocca, Giorgio, 158, 160–2, 179, 181, 246n4 Borsellino, Paolo, 23, 63, 149, 153, 195, 208, 210, 213, 228, 234, 240n1 Borsellino, Rita, 228, 234 Bouchard, Norma, 64 Brave Men (Galantuomini, Winspeare), 135, 245n10 Bufalino, Gesualdo, 12, 103, 240n7 Burns, Jennifer, 105, 244n2 Calì, Santo, 14, 107, 108–12, 120, 122, 138, 145–6, 244n5 Camassa, Alessandra, 195, 198, 199, 202, 207, 209, 248n6

268 Index Camilleri, Andrea, 7, 60, 240n9 camorra, 5, 9, 19, 85, 104, 160, 226, Campisi, Rossana, 210 Canepa, Antonio, 165, 171, 172, 174–7, 184 cantastorie, 38 Canto al deserto: Tina, soldato di mafia (Cutrufelli), 4, 11, 14–15, 50, 106–47 Cardella, Lara, 219 Casadei, Alberto, 245n13 Catania, 4, 104, 161, 169, 172, 176, 179, 187–8, 189, 230, 247n13 Catozzella, Giuseppe, 104, 160 Cavarero, Adriana, 16, 148, 151–2, 164, 172, 191–2 Cayli, Baris, 219, 220 Cento giorni a Palermo (Ferrara), 153 Cercando Palermo (Crisantino), 3, 5, 14, 65–103 Ceres, 3, 140–2, 245n11 Chambers, Iain, 12, 87, 100, 135–6 Child’s Story, A (Frazzi and Frazzi), 219 Chu, Mark, 239n4, 240n7, 241n8 Cinisi, 11, 38, 39–40 Ciotti, don Luigi, 21, 148, 225, 226, 235 Cittadini, Barbara, 215, 217–18 collaborator with justice (collaboratore con la giustizia), 248n3 Come into the Light (Faenza), 219 Come l’oleandro (Badalamenti), 13, 22–6, 34–61, 135 commemoration, 98, 193–5, 211, 236 Consolo, Vincenzo, 12, 64–5 Cordaro, Alessio, 149 Cosa Nostra, 4, 5, 8–9, 13, 14, 20, 23, 24, 57, 106, 107, 112, 114, 117, 118, 119, 134–5, 142, 144, 215, 226, 233, 236, 241n3; Dalla Chiesa’s fight

against, 153–64; and women’s construction of mafia identity, 25, 26–44, 53–4 crime organizations. See camorra; Cosa Nostra; ‘ndrangheta; Stidda Crisantino, Amelia, 3, 12, 13–14, 42, 155, 242n6; Cercando Palermo, 3, 5, 14, 65–103 culture of legality, 11, 17, 145–7, 152, 188–9, 188, 191, 196, 215, 219–20, 221, 226, 234–6 Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa, 4, 11, 13–15, 53, 175, 215, 244n4; Canto al deserto: Tina, soldato di mafia, 4, 11, 14–5, 50, 106–47; and perverse emancipation, 15, 126, 134–5, 136, 140–1, 145 cyberspatialities of legality, 221, 229, 234, 235 Dalla Chiesa, Alberto, 5, 11, 15–16, 73, 98, 150–2, 153–64, 179, 245–6n1, 247n15 Dalla Chiesa, Nando, 149, 153, 159, 162–3, 179, 191, 246n2, 246n7 Dalla Chiesa, Simona, 22, 250n13 de Certeau, Michel, 10, 18, 212, 227 De Fina, Gabriella, 17, 211–14, 250n14 de Lauretis, Teresa, 232 Deleuze, Gilles, 244n19 De Masi, Domenico, 68–9, 242n9, 242n10, 249n7 desertification, 14, 107, 108–13, 123–4, 126, 134, 147 De Silva, Diego, 219, 245n13 De Stefani, Livia, 6, 7 De Toni, Alice, 25, 27, 43, 241n2, 241n6 Dickie, John, 154, 245n6, 247n11

Index 269  Di Maria, Franco, 29, 51, 58, 202, 241n3 Dimenticare Palermo (Rosi), 63 Dino, Alessandra, 25, 28, 32–3, 47–8, 51–2, 240n1 Dombroski, Robert, 103, 242n5 Donolo, Carlo, 211, 250n12 Excellent Cadavers (Tognazzi), 63 Excellent Cadavers (Turco), 63, 223 Eco, Umberto, 43–4 ethics, 91, 97–100, 108, 113, 146, 202–3, 217, 237, 238, 243n17, 245n13 Falcone, Giovanni, 23, 34, 63, 92, 98, 149, 153, 213, 240n1 Fattorini, Marco, 196, 237 Fava, Giuseppe, 161, 246n5 Felman, Shoshana, 17, 195 female mafia imaginary, 23, 24–6, 37, 39, 43, 44–5, 55–60 Fiandaca, Giovanni, 27, 241n6 Fiore, Innocenzo, 201 Fiume, Giovanna, 241n6 Foucault, Michel, 57, 241n7 Francese, Joseph, 242n5 Franchetti, Leopoldo, 62, 70, 71 Fricano, Giada, 109, 244n4

geographies of injustice, 10, 83–4, 92, 114, 123–5, 127–9 Grassi, Libero, 215, 216, 227, 251n17 Grassi, Pina, 11, 17, 214–17, 224 Grasso, Pietro, 17, 20–1 Gribaudi, Gabriella, 249n7 Hundred Steps, The (Tullio Giordana), 149 I Beati Paoli (Natoli), 41–2, 43–4, 45 Il giudice ragazzino (Di Robilant), 149 imaginary: female mafia, 23, 24–6, 37, 39, 43, 44–5, 55–60; urban, 13, 64–7, 72–3, 74, 76, 78–9, 82, 88, 96, 100–3 Impastato, Felicia Bartolotta, 6, 43, 56 Impastato, Giuseppe, 23, 34, 43, 61, 149, 241n9 impegno (social commitment), 13–14, 69, 105–6, 107, 112–13, 146, 244n2, 244n4 Italian state, 156, 165, 169–71, 176–7, 181, 190, 235; and collusion with mafia, 82, 84, 151, 176–7, 236 Jameson, Fredric, 13, 24 justice, 99, 148–52, 182–92, 202 Knights of Labor, 151, 161, 170, 181

Galasso, Alfredo, 153 Gambino, Daniela, 19, 196, 221, 222, 251n21 Gela, 4, 106, 114–18, 140–1, 145–7, 244n3; and Children’s Massacre, 121–2 Gelardi, Mario, 191, 212, 244n3, 250n14 Generale: Rivivendo Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa (Rossi Espagnet), 246n1

La Licata, Francesco, 98–9 La Monaca, Donatella, 111, 165, 240n6 Lanfranco, Cristina, 22, 49, 241n4 La Spina, Silvana, 4, 12, 15–16, 104, 150, 224, 236; L’ultimo treno da Catania, 4, 5, 15–16, 149–92 Laub, Dori, 17, 195, 197, 206 Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, 247n12 legend genre, 35–6 Lentini, Mirella, 86, 104

270 Index Libera Terra, 225, 237 life sentences, 10–11 Lobner, Corinna del Greco, 6, 8–9 Lo Verso, Girolamo, 29, 51, 58, 87, 200, 241n3, 248n4, 249n8 Lucarelli, Carlo, 9–10, 20 L’ultimo treno da Catania (La Spina), 4, 5, 15–16, 149–92 lupara bianca, 20, 130, 145, 246n3

Morvillo, Francesca, 23, 149, 213, 219 Movement for the Independence of Sicily, 171, 173–4, 176, 184 Mutolo, Gaspare, 247n15

Macry, Paolo, 85 Mafai, Simona, 206 mafia, 57–8, 62–3, 71, 79, 85, 87, 118, 128, 142–3, 144, 154, 155, 160–2, 187–8, 212, 223; and children, 93–4, 106, 118–19, 121, 130, 139, 218–19, 232, 244n3; female mafia imaginary, 23, 24–6, 37, 39, 43, 44–5, 55–60; and ideology, 24, 30, 41–4, 55, 57; and language, 28, 32–3, 47–8; and literary canon, 5–6, 9, 12, 62–3, 104–5; and myths, 8, 23–6, 31, 35, 42–3, 197; and psychic structures, 58, 201–3, 210, 249n8; and shame, 29–30; and strategy of invisibility, 20, 98, 130; and webbased media, 228; and women (see women: and mafia); and woman as symbol, 33, 51, 201 mafia politics, 12, 151, 152, 157–9, 161–2, 167, 174, 176, 178, 180, 190 Makolkin, Anna, 248n2 Maraini, Dacia, 3, 30, 182 Maselli, Paolo, 196, 221–2 Mayol, Pierre, 74, 90, 91 memory, 38, 39, 95–6, 97–100, 119, 148–52, 153–4, 191, 213, 227, 232–3 Moe, Nelson, 243n11 Montemagno, Gabriello, 248n6 moral familism, 211, 250n12

Oltre la paura: Bruno contro la mafia (Coletta), 212 omertà, 7, 8, 15, 17, 20, 23, 27, 28, 33, 42, 43, 55, 79, 95, 109, 135, 192, 193, 200, 202, 207, 226, 236, 248n4 One Girl against the Mafia (Amenta), 38, 194, 223, 249n10 Onofri, Massimo, 6, 7–8, 240n6 O’Rawe, Catherine, 12, 240n7

Natoli, Gioacchino, 201 ’ndrangheta, 5, 19, 104, 160, 226, 229–30 new Italian epic, 9, 20, 239n5

Palermo, 5, 62–5, 68–9, 99, 102–3, 155, 243n12, 243n18 Parati, Graziella, 130, 245n9 Past, Elena, 239n3 pentito, 27, 28–31, 240n1, 248n3 performative geography, 10, 13, 67, 105, 106, 169 Picciridda (Castiglione), 249 Pieri, Giuliana, 239n3 Pile, Steve, 140, 141 Pipitone, Lia, 149, 150 Pirandello, Luigi, 6, 12 Pizza Connection, 243n14 pizzini antimafia, 19, 21, 240n9 pizzo (mafia extortion), 79, 212–13, 226 Pizzorno, Alessandro, 68, 69, 242n9 Placido Rizzotto (Scimeca), 38, 154 Plato, 97, 243n17 Privitera, Daniela, 165, 183, 185, 239n3 Puglisi, Anna, 24, 135, 141, 251n16

Index 271  Raffini, Luca, 230 Renga, Dana, 241n6, 241–2n2, 245n10, 248–9n6 Reski, Petra, 194 Riina, Maria Concetta, 31–4 Rizza, Sandra, 6, 194, 210, 248n1 Rizzotto, Placido, 38, 155 Roversi, Roberto, 14, 107, 108–12, 122, 138, 145–6, 245n7 Salvio, Paula, 219 Santa Rosalia, 89, 96, 100–1 Santino, Umberto, 24, 68, 87, 154, 174, 241n5, 242n3, 249n7 Santoro, Lara, 94, 130, 131, 243n16, 245n9, 245n12, 251n18 Saviano, Roberto, 8, 9, 104, 160 Schneider, Jane C., 42, 63, 239n4, 242n4, 243n5, 243n18 Schneider, Peter T., 42, 63, 239n4, 242n4, 243n15, 243n18 Sciascia, Leonardo, 6, 7, 102, 150, 178, 183, 188, 189, 239n4, 243n13, 247n10 sense of place, 65–6, 70, 74, 87, 95, 99–100, 102–3 Sicilian Girl, The (Amenta), 249n6 Sicilian leagues, 45 Sicily, 11, 36, 37, 59, 88–9, 103, 106, 111–12, 145–6, 218; occupation of, 67, 82, 173, 174 Siebert, Renate, 51, 79, 139, 201, 204–5, 250n15 Sindona, Michele, 159, 178 Soja, Edward W., 12, 65, 71–2, 83–4, 114, 151, 152, 191–2, 221 Sottile, Salvo, 64 spatiality, 12, 70, 71–2, 114, 152, 168, 234, 235

Squadra antimafia – Palermo oggi (Belloni), 64 Stajano, Corrado, 246n6, 246n8 Stald, Gitte, 235 Stidda, 4, 15, 20, 106, 107, 112, 114, 117, 118, 142 Stille, Alexander, 106, 154, 223, 243n14, 246n6, 246n7, 246n8 Storie di resistenza quotidiana (Maselli and Gambino) 19, 21, 82, 196, 221, 222–8, 236 Tallakson, Patricia, 109 testimony, 17–18, 98–100, 190, 195–7, 206, 210, 212–14, 221, 222, 223–5, 229, 233–4, 237 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 6, 11; and gattopardismo, 246–7n9 trauma, 24, 64, 94–6, 99, 121, 131, 148–52, 164, 197–8, 223–4, 229, 237 Turnaturi, Gabriella, 211, 250n12 urban imaginary, 13, 64–7, 72–3, 74, 76, 78–9, 82, 88, 96, 100–3 vendetta, 25, 31, 49–51, 202, 207 Vergine, Lea, 65, 66, 67, 72 Virilio, Paul, 113, 245n8 voicelessness, 148, 150–2, 154, 192 Volkan, Vamik D., 209, 249n11 women: and antimafia, 16–19, 23, 27, 195, 204, 215, 217, 231, 235–6; and mafia, 13, 15, 22, 23–34, 42–3, 54, 80–1, 129, 199, 215, 240–1n2, 250n13; and mafia gender roles, 25, 27–9, 51–2, 53–5, 79, 133–5, 137–8, 141–2, 201–2, 207 Žižek, Slavoj, 113, 138, 245n8

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CULTURAL SPACES Cultural Spaces explores the rapidly changing temporal, spatial, and theoretical boundaries of contemporary cultural studies. Culture has long been understood as the force that defines and delimits societies in fixed spaces. The recent intensification of globalizing processes, however, has meant that it is no longer possible – if it ever was – to imagine the world as a collection of autonomous, monadic spaces, whether these are imagined as localities, nations, regions within nations, or cultures demarcated by region or nation. One of the major challenges of studying contemporary culture is to understand the new relationships of culture to space that are produced today. The aim of this series is to publish bold new analyses and theories of the spaces of culture, as well as investigations of the historical construction of those cultural spaces that have influenced the shape of the contemporary world. General Editor Jasmin Habib, University of Waterloo Editorial Advisory Board Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University Hazel V. Carby, Yale University Richard Day, Queen’s University Christopher Gittings, University of Western Ontario Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto Heather Murray, University of Toronto Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney Rinaldo Walcott, OISE/University of Toronto Books in the Series Peter Ives, Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School Sarah Brophy, Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning Shane Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies Jasmin Habib, Israel, Diaspora, and the Routes of National Belonging Serra Tinic, On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market

Evelyn Ruppert, The Moral Economy of Cities: Shaping Good Citizens Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greg de Peuter, eds., Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization Michael McKinnie, City Stages: Theatre and the Urban Space in a Global City David Jefferess, Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation Mary Gallagher, ed., World Writing: Poetics, Ethics, Globalization Maureen Moynagh, Political Tourism and Its Texts Erin Hurley, National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion Lily Cho, Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan, eds, Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir Gillian Roberts, Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture Lianne McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum: A Case Study of the Challenges of Exchange Misao Dean, Inheriting a Canoe Paddle: The Canoe in Discourses of English-Canadian Nationalism Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki, eds, Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography Robin Pickering-Iazzi, The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature: Life Sentences and Their Geographies