It was during this time that I also met a Jesuit priest, Father Ennio Pintacuda, brother of my professor of history and philosophy at Gonzaga and a man who would have a profound effect on my life. The Pintacuda family were country folk who came from Prizzi, the town where my grandfather was born, and all three of their sons became Jesuit priests. Because Sicily is in effect one big small town, the Pintacudas were people I had always known without knowing them well.
Father Pintacuda was a small man with a beak of a nose and a balding head that seemed to rest directly on his slightly hunched shoulders. Soft-spoken, with penetrating eyes staring out from behind large glasses, the priest conveyed shrewd intelligence and calculation. His attraction for me lay in his combination of moral imperatives and political pragmatism. For him social change was the art of the possible, a process of getting from one place to another.
In later years, his room at the Center for Social Studies, which he founded together with another Jesuit, was crammed with books, publications, magazines, clippings and newspapers, deposited in Leaning-Tower-of-Pisa-like piles on the shelves, on the floor, on the chairs. It was mesmerizing to watch him navigate through this benign chaos, his slender body dwarfed by his desk, small parts of which were periodically cleared to allow for writing. Father Pintacuda had, as I would discover, an obsession for documentation, for press clippings on a variety of subjects, which he would jealously preserve long after anybody else would have cleared them out.
He put this material to good use. In the years ahead, he would become a central figure in the fight against Cosa Nostra and corrupt politics, which for him were two sides of the same coin. A Christian Democrat by background, he was disgusted by the growing evidence of corruption in the party. Yet for obvious reasons he could not align himself with the Communists either, despite their courageous stand against the Mafia. So he steered his own course, forming a succession of organizations to build a cadre of energetic, educated individuals who with him would live their Christian convictions in their political actions.
I saw Father Pintacuda as someone with a compelling vision for the social world I was just then beginning to discover. He saw in me a potential disciple who could help him “remoralize” Sicilian society. In picking me for such a role, he was acting according to the old way of the Jesuits, who believe that if they can cultivate one “leader,” they ultimately have the potential for influencing thousands of people. Pintacuda soon became a father figure for me in an area, politics, which had always been anathema to my real father. In time he would become my spiritual as well as my political advisor.
Influenced by Father Pintacuda, I worked with other students to found the Gonzaga Cultural-Artistic Association, whose aim was to open windows in our minds and force us to study issues outside our small, protected little slice of the world. This association would meet once a week at Father Pintacuda’s room at Casa Professa, the Jesuit headquarters for Palermo and the whole of Sicily. Casa Professa is attached to one of the most extraordinary churches of Palermo, the Chiesa del Gesù (Church of Jesus), and a visitor entering it is bowled over by the overwhelming richness of the pink, white, black and ochre baroque marbles and stucco work.
Each member of the Gonzaga Cultural-Artistic Association was assigned a specific newspaper or magazine to read carefully, and every Monday we would meet in Father Pintacuda’s room to discuss what we had learned. I was assigned Rinascita, the Communist Party weekly magazine, to study and report on, which I did faithfully during the next two years, always with a sense of unease. The magazine encouraged one to criticize all dominant concepts, except for those it rested upon. It struck me as being negative and destructive. Yet I understood that the task at hand was not just acquiring information, but probing political meanings and viewpoints. How did the Communists think about politics? Why had they fought against the Mafia? How did they try to embody their precepts in specific political positions?
My parents approved of my relationship with Father Pintacuda, regarding him as one of those maîtres à penser who would mold my mind in such a way as to make me useful and—if the truth were known—powerful. The only one who expressed any doubts was Milli, who saw in Father Pintacuda a certain Machiavellian quality. At a time when my relationship with Milli was troubled by wavering commitment on my part, the influence I allowed Father Pintacuda to exercise over me became another disquieting development for her. In 1967, after our umpteenth breakup, Milli decided to move to Catania, the other major Sicilian city, and go to school there. She visited Palermo off and on over the next two years, and we maintained our off-and-on relationship.
That same year, in the summer of 1967, I went to the University of Heidelberg to study German for a month on a Ferienkurs, a “holiday course.” Why Heidelberg? Because it was the city where my father had studied in the early 1930s, and I remembered his after-dinner tales of the beerhouse Zum Zepp’l, where the young German students would challenge each other to duels aimed at slashing the opponent’s cheek—the more slashes, the greater dexterity; the more scars, the greater proof of bravery. One of the first things I did upon arriving in Heidelberg, in fact, was to find Zum Zepp’l, which amazingly enough was still exactly as he had described it. In fact, my month in Germany was a sort of Proustian recovery of lost time—my father’s time. I went to Unter Schloss Weg, a narrow street under the castle, where he had lived during his stay. I got at least a glimpse of that other self he had inhabited before he was my mother’s husband and my father.
Upon returning to Palermo I still had Heidelberg on my mind, and I applied to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a scholarship to the Max Planck Institute. I was accepted and offered 800 deutsche marks a month (about 100 dollars at that time). It was a fraction of what I had lived on before, but I was enthusiastic not only about attending Heidelberg University full time, but about not being “the son of” for the first time in my life.
At first I stayed in the Students’ Hostel, but soon decided that if I didn’t go out to eat in restaurants and always ate—for the sum of one mark per meal—both lunch and dinner at the canteen, and if I did my own washing and ironing, I could afford a room at Palmbräuhaus, a sort of boarding house right in the old center of the city owned by an Italian who also ran a small trattoria called Sole d’Oro (The Golden Sun). Apart from the name of this restaurant, Heidelberg was cold and grey, and to guard against the dangers of a northern winter, my parents, still worried that I might die, had provided me with heavy coats, long underwear, a variety of jackets, lined gloves and even a fur hat. It was indeed very un-Mediterranean, but I loved Heidelberg for the freedom it offered—most of all, freedom from my own family and upbringing.
The revolutionary winds of 1968 were still blowing strongly in Germany, and the old wooden-beamed halls of the medieval university rang with the voices of some of Europe’s most celebrated student leftists. One was Rudi Dutschke, who came up with the idea that radicals should stop toying with revolution and begin “the long march through the institutions.” Another was Ulrike Meinhof, who believed the opposite and took revolution the next step into terrorism when she formed the Bader-Meinhof Gang. Yet I was more fascinated by two of our professors, whose lessons I never missed: Martin Heidegger and Hans Georg Gadamer, world-famous philosophers who were regarded as rather conservative.
I made friends with students of various nationalities and backgrounds. John, from California, had a Peugeot that was the envy of all the students, and we toured the German countryside in it every weekend. I became close friends with a Greek student who had fled from his country, then in the hands of the Colonels, and of course I made many German friends. One of them was one of my professors, Christian Tomuschat, responsible for the Italian section of Max Planck, with whom I played soccer every Thursday afternoon.
To me, these friends represented the wider world. To them, I represented Sicily. “Ah! Here comes the Mafioso!” they would joke. This was before the rise of the Corleonesi, the Mafia clan which a few years later would associate death and Palermo on front pages around the world. Yet even at this time, the Mafia was inching its way into the news, largely as a result of what came to be called the First Mafia War of the early 1960s (a name applied when we were in the middle of the second, far more apocalyptic conflict). Competition over the spoils of the Sack of Palermo led to a clash between various Mafia factions, culminating in a car bomb that killed seven police and bomb disposal experts