The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (12 page)

If any of the Garbage City elders fear a new era in which the younger zabaleen base their decisions on money instead of family, Riz will allay their concerns. While he invests in growing his business, he also invests in his family; Riz pays tuition for all of his younger siblings, takes care of his grandmother, and even set his father up with a small shop in the neighborhood. He pays his workers more than they would earn with a multinational—more, in fact, than Riz made as a government teacher. Riz has never forgotten where he came from.

 

At about midnight one evening toward the end of my trip, I ride up to the Garbage City to meet a garbage collector who agreed to take me on his route. The taxi driver laughs when I ask him to take me to Manshiet Nasser.

“You're kidding, aren't you?” he asks.

When I get to the coffee shop where I arranged to meet the collector, he's nowhere to be found. He probably got worried that I would attract too much attention from the police—the most common reason every collector but him refused to take me along. As luck would have it, I find Riz at an Internet café across the street. He joins me for a cup of anise-flavored
yansoon.

I tell him that Moussa and Samaan have been fighting constantly and that Moussa threatened to give up recycling altogether and try to find work as a tour guide. I tell him how Moussa said, “I am tired of carrying my whole family.”

“It's not true,” Riz says. “It's just that he has changed and now he looks at them as simple. He just doesn't see how much they do for him.” Riz takes a sip of his
yansoon
and leans in across the table.

“Believe me,” he says, “nobody does anything alone in this place.”

FROM
The Missouri Review

 

S
HE SAT READING
in the garden of Monreale Cathedral, dwarfed by an ancient, leathery ficus. Except for the book, she fit the popular image of the young Siciliana: black hair, black dress, black shoes. She looked as if she'd come from Mass. I took a seat at the other end of the bench, from where I could make out the title of her book:
The Portrait of a Lady
. “That's a good book,” I said.

“Scusi?”
she asked, startled by my intrusion.

“Henry James is a wonderful writer.”

She smiled without looking at me. “I'm trying to improve my English,” she explained.

Her name was Rosalina. She had recently returned from Milan to look after her ailing mother in Palermo. “A lot of young people leave Sicily,” she said. Her brother lived in Milan. “We are not good citizens,” she said bluntly. “Do you know what I mean?”

I mentioned the litter, which, after only two days, had made an impression.

“Yes. We live in a kind of paradise. We have the sun and the sea. We think everything will take care of itself.”

I told her I had come to write about the anti-Mafia organization Addiopizzo.

“I think a lot of people don't understand the importance of this organization,” she said.

“Perhaps the new generation will.”

She looked unconvinced. “People were more active in the '80s,” she said.

My bed-and-breakfast sat at the end of a quiet street not far from the port. I had arrived on a cruise ship Friday evening and stayed onboard for the weekend excursions, the last of which was to Monreale. There was no sign outside the building, just the name SoleLuna among the names of tenants on the list by the door. I took the elevator to the third floor and rang the bell on the right. The door opened to reveal a woman in big round glasses with a tousle of salt-and-pepper hair. “I am Patrizia,” she said, pretty much exhausting her English, if not her warm welcome. Then she showed me to my room, where two single beds sat a little forlornly under a high ceiling.

Going out to explore, I found Palermo in a deep sleep. It was midafternoon on a Sunday in mid-August. Streets narrowed and darkened, at one point opening up to a sunlit intersection of stupendous decay. Abandoned buildings, sick with graffiti and boarded-up windows, seemed in competition to see which one could hold up the longest. I had read that some bombed-out neighborhoods in the city had never been restored after World War II, that Sicily was perennially ignored by Rome. But stumbling upon a decades-old dereliction—after two days of churches and palaces—was deeply alarming. This looked like Havana, not a major city of the European Union.

I crossed Via Vittorio Emanuele and plunged into another maze. A clutter of balconies blackened the airspace until I emerged into a small square filled with café umbrellas. An aproned waiter stepped from a door above which were the words
Antica Focacceria S. Francesco.
I knew the place from photographs, though they had always shown armed guards near the entrance, placed there because the owner had not only refused to pay protection money; he had gone to court and identified his extortionist. I imagined their absence was due to the drowsiness of August.

Via Merlo led to Piazza Marina, where the shuttered windows of old palazzos overlooked the dusty Giardino Garibaldi, its fence a rusting riot of nautical themes. It struck me as possibly the psychological heart of the city, the place where people would gather—if there were people. As I was admiring one of the ficuses in the garden, I came upon a plaque:

 

IN QUESTO LUOGO IL 12 MARZO 1909 ALLE ORE 20:45
PER PRODITORIA MANO MAFIOSA TACQUE LA VITA DI
Joe Petrosino
Lieutenant della Polizia di New York

 

LA CITTÀ RICORDA ED ONORA IL SACRIFICIO DELL'
INVESTIGATORE ITALO-AMERICANO

 

(IN THIS PLACE ON MARCH 12, 1909, AT 8:45 P.M.
THE HAND OF THE MAFIA SILENCED THE LIFE OF
Joe Petrosino
New York Police Lieutenant
THE CITY RECORDS AND HONORS THE SACRIFICE OF THIS
ITALIAN-AMERICAN INVESTIGATOR)

 

Not far away, an inscription on a wall, in Italian and German, identified the house as a place where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had stayed while on his visit to Palermo in 1787. It noted that his subsequent book,
Italian Journey,
had called Sicily “the key” to understanding Italy.

A little to the east, Piazza Kalsa showed some life. Two boys rode one bicycle back and forth, and a father pulled down his son's pants so the boy could urinate into the bushes. Smoke from grills wafted over from surrounding streets. Next to the Church of Santa Teresa, a large hand-painted cart held a statue of the Virgin. The floor of the cart was covered on two sides with artificial roses, while the center sparkled with shards of broken glass. It seemed an odd decorative touch, but perhaps it doubled as a glittery warning to would-be thieves.

I ate my first breakfast at SoleLuna in the company of two young women from Genoa. They had come to the B&B on the recommendation of a friend. They hadn't realized that it was a member of Addiopizzo, the organization that supports businesses which refuse to pay protection money
(pizzo)
to the Mafia. They were accidental ethical tourists.

Patrizia joined us, and I asked Francesca to inquire about her membership in Addiopizzo. She said she had never been asked to pay the
pizzo;
she had joined the organization out of a sense of solidarity. (The full name of her lodging is SoleLuna della Solidarietá Bed & Breakfast.) I wondered if she was afraid. “No, no, no,” she said dismissively, waving her hands and shaking her mop of salt-and-pepper hair. “No problem.”

Addiopizzo was launched in 2004, when a few recent university graduates were considering opening a bar in Palermo. Of course it would entail, as someone pointed out to them, paying protection money. At the time the Mafia extorted an estimated $200 million annually from Palermo businesses, with rates that ranged from about $300 for a bar to as much as $1,500 for a large hotel. Instead of starting their new business, the young men went out late at night and blitzed the city with stickers that read: “An entire people that pays the
pizzo
is a people without dignity.”

It was a courageous act. In 1991 Libero Grassi, the owner of a textile firm, had sent an open letter to the
Giornale di Sicilia
that began: “Dear Extortionist.” Nine months after it was published, he was killed. Other people who had stood up to the Mafia had had their factories torched, their stores ransacked, their pets killed. The retaliation of the so-called Honored Society is a well-documented phenomenon.

Support for Addiopizzo grew, so that today it has over 460 members—ranging from the Accademia Siciliana Shiatsu to the Zsa Zsa Monamour
discoteca
—that refuse to pay protection money. Considering all the businesses in Palermo, this is still a modest number, however, and skeptics say that many people who claim they don't pay the
pizzo
actually do. There is a store on Via Vittorio Emanuele that sells only products made by
pizzo
-free enterprises. Comitato Addiopizzo has a comprehensive website, giving information in most EU languages (including Finnish and Lithuanian), and it even has a travel arm, which offers anti-Mafia tours. I was signed up for one on Tuesday.

That first day, however, I needed to go shopping, as I hadn't seen my suitcase since check-in in Miami. I walked the length of Via Roma, stopping in every men's store I passed. As disheartening as the merchandise—shirts defaced with logos, zippers, bogus coats of arms, meaningless scraps of English—was the reception from the shop assistants. It wasn't a surprise, though: in
The Honoured Society: The Sicilian Mafia Observed,
the British travel writer Norman Lewis wrote: “By comparison with the Italy of Rome—above all of Naples—Sicily is morose and withdrawn.” Lewis developed a great affection for the place but noted in a later book,
In Sicily,
that he rarely heard the sound of laughter there.

The shop assistants along Via Roma and Via Maqueda lived up to the stereotype. Granted, it was a stifling week in August, when anyone still working had a right to be irritable and pining for the beach. But at most of the places I went in Palermo—cafés, newsstands, gelaterias—I was met with an impassive stare that seemed the fixed facial expression of a people who had long ago learned to be suspicious of strangers.

In every store, I wondered if the owner paid the
pizzo.

The bus traveled north along Via della Libertá and dropped me on a wide boulevard lined with large apartment houses. Heading toward the entrance of one of them, I saw a handsome young man dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. He introduced himself as Edoardo, the man I'd been corresponding with by e-mail. The T-shirt, I now noticed, displayed an anti
pizzo
message.

I followed Edoardo up to his office on the second floor. He told me the previous tenant had been a mafioso. In one corner hung a large cutout of a tree with head shots of men—Libero Grassi, Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino (the two anti-Mafia magistrates assassinated in 1992)—pasted on its branches. Above them arched the words, in Italian, “You are not alone anymore.”

Edoardo gave me a booklet that listed Addiopizzo businesses and a large city map with their locations, including that of his office, clearly marked. Then, taking a seat, he told me his story.

In 2004 he had been working at a small publishing company with one of the originators of the sticker campaign. He asked if he could join them. They would go out once a week, often as late as 2
A.M.
; some wore hoods to hide their identities. “We were scared,” Edoardo admitted. “We were not sure what we could risk.”

After spreading their message through stickers and the Internet (methods ancient and modern), they started to recruit businesses. It was hard to ask shopkeepers to join a
pizzo
-free organization, so they began with businesses that had never paid the
pizzo
or whose family members had been Mafia victims. After two years Addiopizzo had a hundred members.

They also recruited consumers. Edoardo got up to show me another wall hanging, a framed page from the
Giornale di Sicilia.
It contained a list of names of “normal citizens,” 3,500 of them, who were committed to shopping at
pizzo
-free establishments and, even more impressively, who allowed the fact to be reported in the newspaper. It was a striking testament to the courage of the common Sicilian. And it seemed to refute what Rosalina had said.

Edoardo stressed that Addiopizzo is not running a boycotting campaign. “We don't want to accuse those who pay the
pizzo,
” he said. “Most of them are victims. And they are scared.”

People who have refused to pay have paid the price. Having armed guards outside your restaurant, for instance, is not exactly a boon to business. One man with a paint and hardware store saw his warehouse destroyed by fire. “In the last years,” Edoardo said, “the Mafia prefers not to kill people. But destroying this man's business was like killing him.”

But, he added, it didn't work. Addiopizzo gave him assistance, as did a lot of those “normal citizens,” who collected money for his employees. Usually employees flee a company that's been attacked by the Mafia.

The government provided the man with another warehouse, and the boss who had ordered the fire and the henchman who had set it were both arrested. It was a critical moment, Edoardo said. It demonstrated that the city had changed, and that people were ready to stand up to the Mafia.

Our chat was interrupted by the arrival of the tour group. They entered the room and took seats in a circle; then Edoardo gave them an extensive briefing. He spoke more fluently in Italian than in the English he'd been using in our own conversation, but with the same quiet intensity. When he finished, he asked everyone to say something about themselves. There were two middle-aged women from Rome, a couple from Milan traveling with their teenaged son, a twenty-something couple from Verona, three young women from Veneto, and a vintner, Beatrice, from central Italy, who sat next to me and occasionally translated. Even when a bottle of wine was opened and some cookies passed around, the assembly had more the air of a mission than that of a holiday.