The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (14 page)

On the wall hung a quote from Giovanni Falcone, which Valeria translated:
“Man passes, but ideas remain . . . Everyone has to continue to do his part, big or small, everyone has to make his contribution to improve the living conditions of Palermo.”

The group arrived, with reddened shoulders and sun-kissed hair, the result of a morning swim in the sea. They roamed around the store, examining the cheeses and pastas, the teas and chocolates, the soaps and lotions, the jars of pesto and pine nuts, the bottles of wine and olive oil. There were shelves of
coppole,
the caps traditionally worn by Sicilians before the Mafia appropriated them as its symbol, and shelves of books. There were even two computers providing
pizzo
-free Internet access.

Eventually we made our way down a side street to Antica Focacceria San Francesco. As on Sunday, no armed guards stood in front. There were twelve of us; we took the stairs to the second floor and commandeered three tables under large black-and-white photographs. The place was packed, and I hadn't yet met the owner, but out of the chaos emerged, in fairly short order, drinks for everyone, followed by croquettes of mashed chickpeas, followed by numerous pastas and a few of the famous cow-spleen sandwiches. Spleen, I discovered on trying my neighbor's, tastes pretty much as you'd expect spleen to taste. We concluded our final meeting with a dozen large cannoli.

In the evening I took the bus out to Falcone-Borsellino Airport and picked up my suitcase, which had, remarkably, been brought back from oblivion. Returning to the city, I deposited it in my room and then headed out for a celebratory meal. A small crowd stood outside a pizzeria on Piazza Castelnuovo, including a trio speaking accented English. I asked them if the place was good, and the shorter of the two men told me it had the best pizza in Palermo—and that was coming from a Neapolitan. He introduced me to his friends, a young couple from Paris, and invited me to join them.

After we were seated, I asked him what he was doing in Palermo.

“I am a carabinieri captain,” he said.

He had wanted an assignment in Milan; he got Palermo instead. He said he knew Zen 2. Though I'd been told the police didn't go near the place, he said he had been there fairly recently, with a large unit. “This is a terrible period for Italy,” he said. “People are stupid—they watch TV and they believe what they hear. They don't read books. It takes too much time.”

I brought up the Mafia. He said that after the killings of Falcone and Borsellino, the Mafia realized it couldn't beat the state, so it decided to infiltrate it. “The sergeants are in Palermo,” he said, “the generals are in Rome.”

“You mean the politicians?” his Parisian friend asked.

“Yes,” he said coldly.

Father Miguel made a rare trip into town to meet me for lunch, though he ordered only juice. With apologies, he explained that he'd been testifying in court the day of my visit. Then he looked around the outdoor terrace of the Bar Aluia, just off the upscale Via della Libertá, and said with a smile, “This is not Palermo.”

He appeared to be in his late thirties, a handsome man of easygoing warmth in a white, short-sleeved shirt with a Roman collar. He was Argentinean, but his parents were Italian, and he had studied biblical languages in Rome. He had been teaching in the capital when, in 2008, he was assigned to San Filippo Neri parish in Zen 2. “I am a priest,” he said, “but also a missionary.”

Of the six thousand families in Zen 2, half did not have work—
legal
work, he clarified. Children didn't study; boys stopped going to school after the fifth grade.

“There are people forty and fifty years old who don't know the cathedral. Boys who don't know the sea. And it is two kilometers away. You can't talk of culture. You can't talk of foreign countries. The newspaper doesn't exist.”

The place was shut off from the rest of the world. “Inside the Zen quarter, you feel there is no Italy. Palermo doesn't invest in our neighborhood to get people to become citizens,” he lamented. Politicians periodically showed an interest, though: some paid as much as 50 euros for a vote.

That payoff paled in comparison to the 500 euros a kid could make selling cocaine for a night, though Father Miguel said that a carabinieri station was going to open soon and that would deter Palermitanos from coming out to buy drugs.

“There are many good people, good families,” he insisted, estimating that of the 30,000 people who live in the two Zens, possibly a thousand were connected to the Mafia. The Zens also had one of the youngest populations in Italy: six hundred children in catechism classes.

I asked him about the difficulty of his work. “You can forget that you are a priest,” he said. “You can think that you are a social worker. We must do social work, but as priests.”

He and his two fellow priests always dressed in clerical garb. “People respect priests,” he said. “They like priests.” He noted that people like Maruzza, as well as NGOs, do good work in the neighborhood, but they always leave at the end of the day. “We are the only ones that live there, and that's a big difference. But that's why people feel that we love them. Because we are like them.” Yet that hadn't prevented a resident from trying to kill him. Father Miguel mentioned the fact casually, dispassionately, saying the would-be assassin was a man (not a mafioso) who was trying to do something that would bring him attention. I assumed this was why he'd been testifying in court. I asked if he knew the people involved.

“Yes,” he said. “I live with them. We are a family.” He laughed. “A special family.”

 

There was one more person I wanted to see in Palermo, and on one of my last days in the city I made my way down now-familiar streets to Antica Focacceria San Francesco. On the way I stopped at L'Emporio to say hello to Valeria and to buy my only Sicilian souvenir: a white T-shirt imprinted with a drawing of a tombstone inscribed
'U Pizzu
and backed by a crowd of cheering children.

Inside the restaurant I asked at the register for Vincenzo Conticello. My pronunciation and my tortoiseshell glasses must have marked me as harmless, because after only a slight hesitation the man pointed outside to two men sitting at a table under an umbrella, just in front of the Focacceria café.

Sipping mineral water at a nearby table, I waited for Vincenzo to finish his meeting. When, after twenty minutes, he joined me, I asked about the history of the place. He told me the Focacceria had opened in 1834 and been in his family for five generations. When he and his brother took over in the '80s, they expanded the menu, adding pastas and fish, and put tables in the piazza. “Before, this was used for parking,” he said, “and rubbish. There was rubbish everywhere.”

I mentioned that the last picture I'd seen of the restaurant showed armed guards standing in front.

“They're still here,” he said quickly, “now in plainclothes. Look behind you.”

I turned and saw two fit young men sitting at a table and conversing quietly. I'd noticed them earlier and hadn't given them a second thought. “I have four bodyguards with me twenty-four hours a day,” Vincenzo said. “Three more work in the piazza. I don't come here very often,” he added. “It's not safe.”

It had started in 2005, when he found a letter in his car demanding that he pay 50,000 euros and indicating that the price of refusal would be his life and the lives of his family. Then one day a mafioso visited the Focacceria. As soon as he was gone, Vincenzo called the carabinieri. An investigation followed, and five men were arrested; Vincenzo attended the trial and identified his extortionist. That man and the four others were sentenced to a total of fifty-five years in prison.

“Palermo is a very complicated town to work in,” Vincenzo said, showing a gift for understatement. His cat had been killed, and his business had suffered.

Remembering the crowd at lunch the other day, I expressed surprise about the effect on his business.

“Many people in Palermo that like the Mafia don't come to Focacceria,” he explained. “Especially politicians. And owners of shops that pay the
pizzo.
” He said a lot of his business comes from foreign tourists and students who attend the university and the international school.

He had had big plans for expansion—not only in Italy but in Europe and the U.S.—but the events of 2005 had sapped his energy, which was only starting to return.

I asked about children. He had a daughter, but she was no longer living in Sicily, and he didn't identify her new home. “To see my daughter is very complicated,” he said wearily. “I must make four or five reservations in different towns.”

The waiter approached, and Vincenzo translated the day's pasta specials. I ordered the spaghetti with tomatoes, swordfish, and mint. When he was gone, I asked Vincenzo about vacation.

“I prefer to take my vacation outside Italy,” he said. “Because in Italy it would be with carabinieri.”

He estimated that 20 to 25 percent of Sicilians are connected to the Mafia and that another 25 percent have “a mafioso mentality.” And it would take generations for the situation to improve. “Mentality is very difficult to change. The teachers in the schools work well,” he said, echoing Edoardo, “but the families don't do the same at home.”

We sat quietly for a while; then Vincenzo leaned forward and said, sotto voce, “This man is a killer.”

The words registered, but barely. I looked up as a hulking man in a white T-shirt and red suspenders lumbered past our table. Before he had even reached the street, Vincenzo motioned to the guard who had been standing watchfully by the café entrance. They exchanged words, the only one of which I understood was a sharp
Attenzione.
Then Vincenzo got on his cell phone to another guard, one of the two who had been sitting behind me and who now stood in front of the Focacceria, into which the man had just walked.

I had seen my mafioso—unfortunately, while dining with one of the Mob's most wanted.

Vincenzo continued talking on his cell phone, alerting his men. He was visibly riled, which made me even more nervous. In a matter of seconds the Mafia had moved, for me, from a distant notion, an endless topic of discussion, to a graspable reality, a galvanic presence in red suspenders. Suddenly the idea of gunfire strafing a café—a familiar trope of gangster movies—seemed not at all far-fetched.

Our pastas arrived. They added, I couldn't help but think, another potential cinematic cliché.

The food put a dent in our already disrupted conversation. We ate while lost in our own private thoughts, though our fates, for the moment at least, were inexplicably tied.

“He killed four people,” Vincenzo said finally, adding also that the man had recently been released from prison after fifteen years. “He is a terrible mafioso.”

I mentioned that I'd seen him enter the Focacceria.

“Yes,” Vincenzo said, a bit more calmly. “He looks here. He looks in there. He studies.”

Finished with his pasta, Vincenzo explained that he had another appointment. He apologized, and insisted that I stay for dessert. I thanked him for his time and then watched him climb into the backseat of a squad car, followed by his bodyguards. I hoped some of their colleagues were sticking around.

The waiter appeared shortly, bearing the dessert tray like a frothy distraction. I chose the gelo di melone, another specialty of Sicily. It was delicious, but difficult to enjoy.

FROM
The American Scholar

 

T
HE NUMBER
1
CITY BUS
up the Antrim Road is a leap into Belfast's troubled past and still-turbulent present. Like all bus routes in Northern Ireland's capital city, the Number 1 starts downtown amid glass-and-steel high-rises, trendy shops, and cafés. Locals, international business travelers, and tourists mingle on streets newly adorned with two-story-high curved copper ribs intended to evoke the city's maritime heritage, including the building of the
Titanic
, launched here on May 31, 1911.

Once outside these ten blocks, however, the Number 1 crosses what might as well be an astral divide. Belfast is one of the most segregated cities in the world, an occasionally Molotov-cocktail-bombed landscape of “interfaces” and “peace walls” that have grown higher, longer, and more numerous in the thirteen years since the Good Friday Agreement. The 1998 settlement formally ended the three decades of violence called the Troubles.

In Belfast, an interface is where Protestant and Catholic communities battle and, in the best of times, grimly turn their backs on one another. According to the Belfast Interface Project, there are at least ten in the one-mile stretch between the place where the Number 1 starts and the city's lone synagogue north of downtown. If you go the same distance east and west, the number of interfaces easily triples.

At first interfaces are hard to spot. Uniformed schoolchildren get on and off the bus as they do in any metropolis. Mothers with strollers equipped with plastic shields (for the frequent rain showers) wrestle the carriers to the bays behind the driver and then wrestle them off.

But interfaces quickly become obvious, even to visitors. Snapping in the salty breeze, red-white-and-blue flags mark a Protestant Unionist neighborhood loyal to the British queen, her Union Jack, and the United Kingdom. Across the interface, Catholics and Nationalists who yearn for a united Ireland do errands under the gaze of glowering, ski-masked gunmen depicted in a mural topped by the Irish tricolors. Many Protestants embrace Rangers, a Glasgow-based soccer team. The most visible fans are copiously tattooed men who congregate and smoke in front of a pub as they show off their muscles in light-blue Rangers shirts. In contrast, musclemen in front of Catholic pubs, loyal to the Glasgow team that has a Catholic fan base, wear Celtic-knot tattoos and shamrock-green Celtic shirts.