After two years at Heidelberg I returned to Palermo to take a position in the law school, feeling that I had finally thrown off most of my emotional shackles. My relationship with Father Pintacuda intensified, and under his influence I did a study called “Under-development, Cultural Power and Mafia” for a 1970 conference organized by our Cultural-Artistic Association. It caused a scandal. This was not because I named names or made bold charges about who in Sicily’s political world was complicit; nor did I discuss the Sack of Palermo or describe the Mafia’s contamination of our culture. In fact, the paper was rather obtuse, dealing with the Mafia as if it were a tribe tucked away in some valley, which none of us had ever met. The study created a scandal simply because it was the first time ever that a non-Communist, a Catholic of the Gonzaga-Jesuit species, had written about this subject.
There was no road-to-Damascus epiphany. Like practically everyone else in Sicily, I had my insights by fits and starts. If I was a few steps ahead of most of my fellow citizens, it was only because of the moral prodding of a few people like Father Pintacuda and my own father. There was ample evidence of how dangerous it was to become too identified with this subject. There had been several Cassandras in our recent past: a handful of trade unionists, a brave Protestant pastor, a few Communists. Most of them were not merely ignored, but killed—not the highly public murders that lay a few years in the future, but almost inaudible thumps in the Sicilian night.
Still, I knew I was embarked on a path from which there would be no turning away. As a lawyer, I saw that the law was one place to wage the struggle. In the aftermath of the First Mafia War, a national Antimafia Commission had been established, and its findings encouraged a legal response by authorities. But while an individual Mafioso was brought to trial now and then, perhaps even jailed, there was no action directed at the Mafia per se. Father Pintacuda’s view became mine as well: law enforcement was only part of the task ahead. In addition to trials and imprisonment, we somehow had to inject immunizing antibodies into Sicilian culture.
My intuition that the problem of the Mafia would be my life’s work is probably what gave me confidence finally to propose to Milli, with whom I had maintained a fitful courtship while abroad. There were still tensions between us, but they seemed only to have strengthened our bond. Now that I had a job at the University of Palermo and would also be working in my father’s law firm, it was time to get serious about our relationship.
Although she didn’t belong to “our world,” my parents had embraced Milli because of her loyalty and love for me. In choosing her I had gone against unwritten class laws, but so what? My mother too had “married beneath herself.”
Our engagement was to be celebrated with a traditional acchianata, an old Sicilian term deriving from the verb acchianare, “to climb up.” In the past, when two young people wished to be betrothed, custom dictated that the prospective groom’s parents make a formal visit to the chosen bride’s parents, going “up the stairs” to their living area. There would be cakes and a little Rosolio wine, and the parents of the young man would praise his morality, his capacity for hard work and his future financial prospects. The bride’s parents, in turn, would praise her piety, her excellent housekeeping abilities and—often more important—what she would bring as dowry to her husband. In fact, the terms of the match had already been negotiated by a go-between before this meeting took place, but the ritual had to be respected in full. After a couple of hours, the bride and groom would be called in and formally “introduced” to each other, and then the engagement declared official.
My parents and I were to go to the Lupos’ house, not for cakes and Rosolio wine but for dinner. My mother had given her own engagement ring, a superb diamond, to my brother Antonio’s bride when he had become engaged. (The most rebellious and independent of the seven of us children, Antonio had married at the age of eighteen and was already a happy father.) For Milli, my mother went to Bulgari, the most prestigious Italian jeweler in Rome, and bought a ring that equaled in value and appearance the one she had already given away. Everything was fixed and confirmed. We were expected for dinner at the Lupos’ home at nine.
At four o’clock in the afternoon of that memorable day, I picked up the phone in a panic and called Milli. “I don’t want to become engaged,” I blurted out. “I’m sorry but I can’t do it….I can’t do it!”
She neither cried nor became upset. She didn’t yell “You’re crazy!” as she probably should have. She accepted it and immediately began thinking of what to do about the visit that had been so meticulously prepared. We agreed that I would tell my parents and she would tell hers that the engagement was off.
When I explained to my mother that I had changed my mind, her reaction was mixed. “Marriage and an engagement are something very important, not to be entered into lightly,” she said, “so if you’re not sure, you shouldn’t force it.” But then, after a short pause, the bon ton of generations of Cammaratas came into play: “But there’s a matter of the proprieties, of good manners. We’ve been invited to dinner by these people and we can’t not go. The engagement is over, but we can’t not go to dinner. We’ll put the ring into the strongbox and bring Milli something else.”
My mother had a rather lovely gold bracelet my father had given to her when I was born, to which she was very attached. Nonetheless, she carefully wrapped it in tissue paper and then the three of us went to dine with the Lupos.
Milli lived with her family in a beautiful, huge attic apartment with breathtaking views of the whole city. When we arrived, the house and the terrace were all lit up, and there were vases of flowers artistically placed in all the rooms and an elegantly laid table with an embroidered tablecloth. As we sat down to dinner, I felt we were in a situation that was almost comic. Six people eating excellent food (Milli’s mother was a superb cook), drinking excellent wine and making charming conversation, although they no longer had any reason whatsoever to be having a formal dinner together.
That we shared the meal that evening and had fun doing so was probably responsible for the fact that a year later, in 1971, Milli and I finally did become engaged. This time the Bulgari diamond ring was rejected as unlucky and another was bought in its place. And having put aside all fears and uncertainties, we were married in the historic Church of the Magione, a wonderful Arab-Norman church situated in one of Palermo’s ancient Arab quarters.
Milli wore a white dress with a white sable-trimmed hood, a delicate spray of white flowers in her hair framing her lovely face. Ours was the marriage of that season, attracting aristocrats, my Gonzaga friends, the important lawyers and professional bourgeoisie—all the men attired in swallowtails and top hats and the women all nearly as magnificent as Milli herself. The gossip columnists were kept busy for days describing the reception for hundreds of guests which was held at the Savoia Club, the most exclusive club of Palermo’s nobility and still bearing the name of the exiled Italian royal family.
We honeymooned in Mexico for a month, then went to New York and Canada before returning home to settle in a small house where we would live for the next twenty-five years. We had two beautiful daughters whose pictures, like Milli’s own, never appeared in the newspapers because of my fear that they would possibly be killed by the Mafia, which made no secret of the fact that it intended to kill me.
CHAPTER 3
Why did I become involved in the fight against the Mafia? Why did I start saying the word and repeating it until it became something like an obsession? There were small things: the murder of our doctor; my father saying he could not run for office because the Mafia had corrupted our politics. But the primary reason, as I later understood, was the awareness of my Sicilian identity. My family and Father Pintacuda set the process of such an awareness in motion. It was Father Pintacuda in particular who not only said the word “Mafia”