At the time of my birth, August 1, 1947, these facts of the Mafia were not known, let alone written; the time for looking backward at its history had not yet arrived in Sicily. My parents were uneasy as they watched the Mafia use the crises of the postwar world as a cover to enter our country’s political and cultural bloodstream. Yet they had more immediate concerns, notably their fear that the pneumonia which had killed their firstborn son, Carmelo, a few days after his birth in 1941 would now take me, too.
Penicillin was still an exotic substance in Sicily at the time of my infancy. But through my mother’s family connections and my father’s prestige as the most prominent civil lawyer in Sicily, they managed to get the precious medicine—in this case from the Vatican pharmacy—and I recovered. Yet instead of diminishing, their fears about my health became an obsession that burst into near-hysteria a few years later when it was discovered during a routine physical exam that my heart was on the wrong side of my chest. This discovery was made by a radiologist who, upon seeing an x-ray, first furiously berated his assistant for having printed the film incorrectly, only to realize after further examination that not only was the image accurate, but all of my organs were reversed. Since then I have always worn a gold medallion around my neck inscribed with the Latin words Situs viscerum inversus—and I’m sure some would say that I have pursued my political life in reverse order, too.
I had two older sisters, but I was given my dead brother’s role of firstborn son, a treasured position in a Sicilian family that requires a loving diminutive, however old the boy is. I was “Luchetto,” especially when my parents were exhorting me to do those things they hoped would ensure my survival. “Luchetto, put your coat on, otherwise you’ll catch cold and be seriously ill!” or “Luchetto, be careful, you’ll hurt yourself!” or “Luchetto, don’t do that, remember that you’re very fragile!” In time I would have two younger brothers and two more sisters, but in some peculiar way I would always be the baby of the family as well as the “firstborn.”
Not surprisingly, I grew up with the conviction that death was anxious to claim me, and that I therefore had to live as well as I could in the brief time I had been allotted. It is probably also why later on, during the years when the Mafia had decided to kill me, I found myself not particularly afraid; after all, I had been condemned since birth. I feared the pain, but death itself had been my companion for years.
The rhythms of a Sicily that was almost gone when I was a boy and has now vanished forever were still part of my growing up. The first twenty days of our summer holidays, for instance, were always spent at Imbriaca, one of several vast agricultural properties belonging to my father in an area near Corleone, about forty miles from Palermo. Named after the Sicilian word for “drunk,” Imbriaca bordered on one of the many properties owned by my mother’s family. It was called Margi, which derives from the word “soaked.” This area, with its breathtakingly beautiful valleys, woods and towering cliffs, has little rainfall but is very rich in underground waters, and thus all the aqueous names.
The properties of Imbriaca and Margi are separated by a stream, crossed by a small bridge which we children jokingly called the Ponte dei Sospiri, “the Bridge of Sighs,” a reference to the romantic landmark all lovers visiting Venice feel obliged to pass under in a gondola. This bridge at Imbriaca was where my father, Salvatore Orlando, would meet my mother, Eleonora, youngest daughter of the aristocratic Cammarata family and many years his junior, when they were courting; so we imagined the romance of their trysts.
Theirs was a love match but also, by Sicilian standards, something of a mismatch as well. The Orlandos were landed gentry, and my father, whose family came from the charming town of Prizzi (in whose central square the wedding scene in The Godfather Part II, which supposedly takes place in Corleone, was actually shot), became a civil lawyer, just as his own father and grandfather had been. The Orlandos were part of that Catholic rural bourgeoisie whose strong moral principles became even more rigid in my father’s case through study of the law in Heidelberg. His morality was matched only by his piety. My father always paid his taxes fully and punctually, while others in his social class scornfully evaded them. He was seen as foolish for complying with the letter of the law, but for him the letter was the law in microcosm.
My mother descends on one side from the Marquises of Arezzo—of the oldest mid-Italian aristocracy—and on the other from the Cammaratas, Barons of Corleone. In fact, the Cammarata family palazzo in Corleone, which dominates the small central square of the town, is now the seat of municipal government. The Sicilian heritage of the Arezzos was literary in origin, beginning when one of them wrote a biography of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, Naples and Sicily. Charles was so pleased with this work that he showered money, titles and Sicilian land on the writer, and so the Arezzos joined the country’s nobility.
The fact that my mother had technically married beneath her class sometimes worked its way into her conversation. It was her only strength against my formidable father, and she used it with elegance and innuendo, often in the form of a melancholy observation that for reasons not entirely clear to her, she did not frequent as often as before the high society salons of Palermo where she belonged by birth. In truth, it was because of my father’s moral rigor, not the stigma of his bourgeois background, that both had chosen to shun this environment. Apart from close family members, I cannot recall a single friend of my mother’s or father’s frequently visiting our home. We were far more likely to entertain a worker or foreman from one of our country estates than non-family members of Palermo’s high society.
All this struck me as quite odd when I was growing up. Eventually I realized that it was my father’s way of keeping us from possibly being tainted by people casually associated (as so many upper-class Sicilians have been) with the Mafia. Later on, after the war against the Mafia had been fought and won, one of the wealthiest and best-bred individuals in Palermo, a man who had not offered any help when the fight was taking place, came up to me and said, “I want to thank you for what you’ve done. We offered them our fingers and they took our hands. You’ve given us our hands—our freedom—back again.”
There was no running water in our country house at Imbriaca, and as a five-year-old my great joy was to sit astride a mule led by one of the peasants who worked for our family, and go to fetch water from the spring. The water was put into enormous clay jars, attached to stout hooks on either side of the mule’s saddle, and brought back to the house, where it remained sweet and ice cold. Imbriaca had no electricity; illumination came from oil lamps, giving a dim, romantic light to our quiet evenings together. It was not until the 1960s that my father finally had a generator installed, but it made such an unholy racket at night that we switched it off and continued to go to bed with our oil lamps.
After the mule came a small Sardinian donkey. It was a present from my father and belonged to me alone. It took the place of horses, which I was rarely allowed to ride because, as the movie Gone with the Wind showed, they can cause one to fall and die. My parents continued to fret about their precious Luchetto’s mortality, even though in fact I was as healthy as my brothers and sisters. At the slightest sign of illness, Doctor Michele Navarra—referred to as my pediatrician, although he was actually the only available doctor in Corleone—was immediately summoned to thump my chest and give them reassurances.
The word “Mafia” being forbidden in our house, it