The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia by Petra Reski Page B

complicity with the Mafia, is so keen on disseminating his so-called culture that he has established hundreds of clubs all across Italy. When I asked a young man what they talked about in those culture clubs, he told me they often discussed issues such as “Is Italy a constitutional democracy?” Because in Italy, he argued, people had no protection once they fell into the clutches of the legal system.
    I looked at the young man in amazement. Because it didn’t seem likely to me that these young people were at risk of falling permanently into the clutches of the Italian legal system. In fact, these ambitious, talented, and probably privileged neoconservatives gave the impression of being intoxicated from their immersion in the sea of Berlusconi’s propaganda.
    “We want to prove that it’s not only the left that does any thinking, we also discuss issues like ‘Karl Marx and God—what’s left?’” said the girl with the Cleopatra eyes.
    They all spoke eloquently, word perfect in fact; they talked freely. Only the minister didn’t say a word and kept his eyes firmly closed. I wondered if he was bored. Or was it his heavy lunch? In fact, the minister had gone to sleep. He was snoring—itwas impossible to ignore. And the Gianfranco boys just went on talking about their cultural activities and about how not everything in Sicily should be all about morality. The minister’s head was tilted to one side and his mouth slightly open, noises issuing from his soft palate.
    And the next day there was an interview with him in Il Giornale in which he promised to bless Sicily with ten golf courses: “We will bring Sicily back to the fore.”
    “Hmm, yeah, golf courses,” says Letizia, drawing on her unlit cigarette. For a while she moved from Palermo to Paris because she didn’t want her whole life to be eaten up by the Mafia. Because she couldn’t bear to stare into the triumphant faces of politicians who were collaborating with the Mafia. The former minister for infrastructure and transportation, the Lega Nord politician Pietro Lunardi, had with disarming honesty told the Italians they must finally get used to living with the Mafia: the Mafia and the Camorra had always existed, he said, and they always would. “Since then, politicians have lost their shame,” Letizia says.
    Up until a few years ago Letizia had also run a publishing company, Edizione della Battaglia, bringing out books about the Mafia and the southern hemisphere. She had sold these books in a little bookshop not far from the Teatro Politeama—until the day a man came in and asked her very politely for a donation for the prisoners. The second time he asked for a donation she closed the bookshop.
    “You know, I got the message,” she says, staring with amazement at her cigarette, still unlit.

P ADRE F RITTITTA
    L ETIZIA’S DOG WAKES UP WHEN HE HEARS S HOBHA’S FOOT -steps on the stairs. He runs over and licks her too. “If I might briefly interrupt your conversation,” Shobha says, pointing at her watch and at the sun, which is already high in the sky. “Before midday, perhaps we could take a few pictures, in the Kalsa, perhaps, not far from the Piazza Marina.” She had had the idea, she says, of taking a photograph of Letizia in front of the church of Santa Maria della Pietà in Kalsa; Salvo is already waiting downstairs. Letizia nods, somehow resigned. She prefers to stand behind the camera. Particularly since she’s just been given a new camera, a digital Leica, which she now throws over her shoulder.
    As usual, Salvo has triple-parked, but it’s not a problem. Unusually, he isn’t in a hurry, the Kalsa isn’t far away, and his ladies are still engrossed in their game.
    When we arrive in the Piazza Marina, the waiters are already laying the tables for lunch. It’s one restaurant after another—and no reminders of the years when the mood was one of permanent curfew and not a single sound. No one in their right mind would ever have thought