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In the Kingdom of
Persephone My whole childhood
was always a leaving and returning, from Sicily, the island of my father, to
Florence, the city of my mother, an alternating of places, houses, people.
Even my feelings oscillated, from the shifting rhythm of curiosity, which
did not have time to take root, to exclusive passion. Florence seemed sweet
to me. The tenuous colors of the dome and the Battistero, the clear facades of its churches and its palaces,
made me say, upon returning to the island, that over there they grew sugar
houses. Sicily, instead, left me dizzy with its dark green carpet of almonds
that filled the country terrace during harvest time. And there were the
freezing waters of Alcantara, the deep holes between one granite stone and
another, where I would anchor myself so that the fruit I ate at snack time
tasted fresh to my palate. Then it was Bologna.
The city of emigration, the foreign city, for me, as a child. In the
obscurity of its long arcades, in the elegant severity of Piazza Maggiore, the feeling of
nostalgia was born: the island—so far away that it represented the other side
of life, the side in the shadow of earth—became, in this way, the dream of
origins. In reality I no
longer belonged to a place. Wherever I went I felt “distant.” Free. Free to
leave, free to go back, free to choose. The peninsula was a long strip of
land to explore, an unknown continent: for those who left the domestic
haven, for all those who abandoned the safe protection of their sky and
climbed up, up to Piedmont: it was like arriving in America. Veneto, incomprehensible like the
Argentinian pampa, the golden
Madonna on the dome of Milan, unreachable like the Statue of Liberty. Only in the profound
collective motivation, in the unattainable waters of an ancient time, in a History that gathered and yet obscured
the individual stories of each man
and each woman, only in the well of utopia, in the distant desire, the desire
of the risorgimento of the nation, or in the conveniences of the
modern industry, was Italy “one and united.” The differences—of culture,
customs, daily habits, rituals, mourning, and celebration—tried with
difficulty to compose themselves into a complicated mix of people and
languages. And in this live
interweaving of beliefs and prejudices, of cold climates and warm
remembrances, of northern fogs and African Sirocco winds, I occupied a place
apart. I was different. So different that I spoke only Italian, which is
everybody’s and nobody’s language. The dialects sedimented inside me, my
mouth played with words, my mind amused itself with syntactic constructions,
but my accent remained terribly “other”: neutral, aseptic. Italian. Italian
and nothing else. Nothing tainted it. Not one smudge, not one lexical
imperfection. Where did I come from? Nobody could guess. I
could choose the mask most suitable for the moment, the situation, my mood or
the moods of others. I was the unstable element in a stable world. I escaped
every territorial classification. Everyone belonged to a tribe. I, instead,
could move from one tribe to another. And, unlike the others, I was
interested in the journey and not the destination. The path, with all its
infinite points of escape, and not the point of arrival, not the refuge. But others asked for
the certainty of identification, expected a “place” to locate me, demanded
identification papers. It was then that I
chose the island of my father. The salt of Sicily resurfaced on my lips,
erasing the sugary taste of the maternal city. I chose the island because I
felt it was strong, tragic, and sunny, classical and baroque, cowardly and
invincible. But I chose it especially because I felt it was threatened. For
the northerners, Sicily had only the colors of mourning. No longer the land
of culture but of blood and misery. Of a contagious misery that the sea could
not contain. I suffered—I who had
fragile roots, unsuitable for clinging to the earth, ready for transplant to any
soil—I suffered facing the ignorance and loathing, the intolerance and the
rejection. A rejection that, on the surface, did not touch me: daughter of a
scientist and a green-eyed Florentine with a love for literature, despite the
poverty of those years that forced us to ration bread and milk, I did not
belong to that mass of miserable and obstinate people climbing the ridge of
the Appennines to converge on the crowded outskirts of the northern cities.
Their drama was not mine. I could pass untouched through the territory of
exclusion, through the humiliation of racism. Yet that sense of humiliation
had been forging inside me the reasons for a sense of belonging, one that
until then I had ignored and kept silent. There was a battle to
fight and I have never run from a battlefield. Thus I traced
backward the path of emigration and, as an adult, I went back for a few years
to the island. * Those were strange
and important years, years of social commitment and writing: for me the two
will always be linked. In some mysterious way, even when I experiment with
new forms of narration, even when I sink into unknown linguistic forms—in
fact, especially then—I feel all the responsibility of writing, my
involvement in the things of the world, the burden of a search. I wrote a book about
Sicilian women, a study that was part historical analysis, part social
analysis, and part field work. Voices of factory workers, of peasants, of
jobless women, of white widows, of students, of restless girls and subdued
wives, of rebels and conformists: voices that always defied the legend of a
“historical silence.” Woman and Southerner:
this was the stigma that I carried with me. My body was marked by a sense of
belonging, while in my imagination I incessantly re-created a place of
origins, the point of departure and return. It seemed that arrival could not
be granted me. I never arrived anywhere. I could only explore the route, a
route that suddenly curved, always turning back on itself, and then again
moved beyond, escaping towards infinity. Woman and Southerner. There was a
link between the two, a bond made of sorrow, pride, and passion. I was a
double. Doubly susceptible, doubly trapped in the consciousness of my being,
in the representation of my self to myself. I was also a matriarch without
power, like the women I had given voice to in my book. I, too, rebellious
and submissive, disobedient and acquiescent, ready to change and tenaciously
clinging to ancient customs. I, too, defied the law of the father, and I,
too, bent to its will. Again, I started leaving and returning, returning and
leaving. Always farther away, on the other side of the world. Every time for
longer periods, in a new temporal dimension. It is impossible to stop; it is
impossible to separate oneself definitively from the island. And every time, upon
every return, I saw the contradictions grow, the violence grow. What also
grew was the power of the mafia. Re-reading my book twenty years later—a book
thanks to which I had traveled throughout Sicily, from one end to the other,
trying to flatten its thousand folds, probing its cuts, its crevices, its
fractures—I find only a few sentences about the mafia. Just a few lines,
sketchy bits of news, in passing. I was writing, then, of the “concept of
honor” and the “cult of virility.” The “mafia spirit” seemed to me directly
linked to the mythology of masculine virtues. Something that was fueled and
confirmed in the tradition of the overbearing power of the male. “The mafia has always
been cosa di uomini,” I wrote then.
Only the names of two
women had appeared then on the pages of the local news. Maria Antonietta,
Liggio’s sister, was indicted at age sixty-three for aggravated extortion and
the purchase of land with dirty money, serving as her brother’s name-lender;
Antonietta Bagarella, the fiancee of Totó Riina, who was then Liggio’s
lieutenant, had disappeared from Corleone with her brother after
two-and-a-half years of special surveillance. Two women involved in mafia
business through a man or through the family, intended as a space for the
protection of the masculine, a sanctuary where one celebrated and perpetuated
it, the cult of virility and the sacrifice of the feminine. Two elusive,
undefinable figures, indicating unexplored life paths. Women and southerners,
they were somehow the darkest part of me, of my origins. Stand-ins. Shadows
who emerged from a sinister kingdom of Hades and replicated, on a modern
scene, the Sicilian tragedy of Persephone, perennially divided between the
solar world of the mother and an attraction for the gloomy god of darkness. Perhaps it was then
that I began to feel tempted by the desire to explore. It was then that I
welcomed inside me the first germ of another book and the seed of a different
story began to grow, the seed of a narration that would juxtapose the light
and the darkness, which would find a seam or, conversely, break the thread,
between the inside and the outside of one plot. My desire to go
beyond critical analysis and to narrate the subterraneans of the feminine
world was born in those years. * Unlike essay
writing—analytical, logical even when passionate—the novel, creative
writing, enters with empathetic participation into the hearts of individuals,
seeks to capture the vital essence of things: this was the writing that I
needed to approach the disquieting universe of the women who have chosen the
route of perverse emancipation and
believe (delude themselves into believing?) that power can exist without
freedom. A universe in
expansion, claim the statistics, the investigators, the experience of this
social reality. There is a growth of feminine subjectivity that cannot be
contained, which violently impacts the sharp rocks of discrimination, of
denied development, of the distorted mechanisms of a violent market, of a
society that obstructs, instead of encouraging, self-affirmation and the
search for a complete existence. No wonder there is a
“feminine machismo,” which, in the submerged world of illegality, replaces
the desire to exist, that hunger for citizenship which is by now common to
all women. With their active complicity, or with autonomous gestures of
violence or adherence to criminal models of life, these women sanction a
paradoxical “right to cruelty.” Song to the Desert: Story of Tina, Mafia Soldier is the novel with which I have attempted
the juxtaposition. Two feminine lives, two diametrically opposed destinies,
an identical anxiety to impress upon the world one’s own mark, a powerful
desire to exist that renders dangerously thin the line between good and evil.
For my narration I have drawn from the news of the last few years, which
tells us of women in leadership positions in the mafia, women who become the
bosses of criminal bands (not of mafia organizations except indirectly, as
“substitutes” for the men in jail or killed), women—more and more often,
girls—who, armed and with cruel determination, impose their authority on the
margins of the empire of Cosa Nostra. One of them
especially, immediately, attracted my attention. Because of the melancholic
awareness of her eyes, because of her defiant, childish knavery. The process of
creation of a fictional character is perhaps unfathomable. A thousand
elements mix, amalgamate, and then converge towards a center that catalyzes
everything—fantasy, observation of reality, sudden epiphany born from a
gesture snatched away, a distracted word, the hard labor of interpretation—and
there emerges from this magma the unique and unrepeatable character, the
shadow that yet pulsates with life and blood, that demands the same attention
paid to a living person, that should be approached with the same caution.
But as it is in love, the relationship between the writer and her character
is something passionate, something that refuses distance and does not tolerate
barriers. With this passion I
created the character of Tina, the young mafiosa of Song to the Desert. And while I was creating her—arrogant and
defenseless, desperate and inflexible—I was mixing news and invention, social
data and bursts of fantasy, until I reached that unmistakable color: the
color of Tina, character and person. Persona and person. Tina, who lived only
thanks to me, through me. And yet from her eyes the powerless rage of a real
girl, in flesh and blood, continued to emanate. Or was I only imagining it?
Was it I who modeled, to my liking, the brutish matter of narration? Or was
it reality that was beginning to possess my imagination? A question that I
could have never solved by myself. Tina would have remained only Tina—the
exemplary figure of an impossible emancipation—if this girl with rebellious
and sad eyes had not come forward to proclaim her existence as “protagonist.”
And she claimed it in
her own way, by her own ways and means. With arrogance she wanted to enter
the world I had built on paper, to bring it back to a dimension that was more
convenient for her. When I saw her coming towards me, in front of the desecrated
church of Saint Biagio in Gela, where the first official presentation of my
novel was to take place, when I saw her pale and insolent in her combat
fatigues (pants and heavy shoes, as the carabinieri
told me later), even before she struck me and threw me on the ground with the
precise blows of a professional, I understood what I had always been afraid
of while I was writing. Not of the violent
reaction of the little mafiosa in flesh and blood. The aggression. The
threats. No, it was not these I was really afraid of. But of the
superimposition of reality and fantasy. Of the splitting, mine and hers. Of
the materialization of a ghost created in this back-and-forth game of
exchange with reality. A ghost that would have tied me and her, the “real”
“girl,” in a Gordian knot of emotions that could not be untied. For this reason,
perhaps, I had imagined, at first, a different conclusion for my novel. The
two women would never meet. Never. I did not want the unfolding of what I
nevertheless considered necessary and inevitable. I could not tell that
story. But then my publisher, to whom I tried to explain this dilemma (the
literary necessity of the encounter and the desire to place it at a
distance), asked: Why? What are you afraid of? Do you want to avoid immediate
communication? Are you afraid of the direct glance? the labor? the pain? No
matter what, your search is taking you there, to the short-circuit of the
encounter. And then it was clear
to me that I could not avoid it. I was inside the spider’s web of my own
writing. But in the ordered
threads of that labyrinth I was no longer the only fly writhing, trapped, in
the web. She was also there, the girl who had entered with aggressive force
into a story as much mine as hers. Illiterate, she had
no direct knowledge of the book. But she had someone else tell her about it
and that was enough. A book, for her, could never assume the dimension of a
concrete object, of a finished work. When it is published, a text escapes the
tyranny of its author. Even if it assumes diverse colorings in the souls of
diverse readers, it maintains its own coherence, a truth that must be sought,
page after page. But for her, for the little, illiterate mafiosa, all of this
did not make sense. What is a book, what else can it be if not a switch
necessary to ignite the imagination, a small lever that anybody can pull up
or press down, turn on or flip off. And then she had
attempted an incursion, a gesture dictated by the will to erase “my” sign and
to impress hers. She believed that this “sign” would be sufficient to break
the plot and bend the written word to the laws of oral narrative. Laws that
ignore the fixity of writing and open up to every external intervention,
every unforeseen event, to every change dictated by the necessity of the
real. She thought that it
was all right to intervene because her code of life dictated it, but
especially because she liked to recognize herself in Tina. She became angry
and did not understand when later, after the aggression, I explained that no,
it was not exactly that way. For me, at most, she represented a distant model
to whom I was pleased to be unfaithful. (But up to what point? And up to what
point was I now sincere?) Tina, in any case, was not her image on paper. This
is what I told her at the table in the restaurant where she continued to
recite her part and I tried to escape mine. At most, a reflection—quick,
partial, incomplete—in the distorting mirror of writing: to this I stubbornly
reduced her role, her function. Knitting her brow, with a simple reproach,
she erased my sophisticated, abstruse explanation, while she candidly
revealed her deepest resentment. “With the two
beautiful names that I have, just Tina,
you had to call me?” Emanuela: the true
name. Daniela: the combat name. Emanuela-Daniela had come forward. She asked
for attention: not with words, but with her body. Not through verbal mediation,
but with the gestures of violence. Those she was used to. Those she knew. In order to assert
her right to be present, in flesh and blood, in “our” story, she had
neglected any caution. She was on probation, and, had I reported her
aggression, she would have gone back to jail. But could I report her? Perhaps
she had counted on this “complicity.” I also, in any case, had not been
cautious. I was playing a dangerous game, and I knew it at every moment of
the writing, when the imagination sent me back to the reality, when my
fantasy saturated itself with living images. Just as I knew that it was a
challenge to present that book in Gela, in “her” territory. I knew she would
have answered the challenge. She had to. These were the rules of her world.
Because, perhaps, she desired the encounter, face to face. I also, perhaps,
wished for it: exactly like the protagonist in my book, at the end, wishes
for the encounter with “her” Tina. Fiction and reality.
Gestures and writing. Events and words. Emotions born on the thread of a
fantastic imaginary. Emotions born from the harsh encounter with a different
truth: the truth of the real. Everything became confused while I crossed this
threshold of the impossible. I had descended to the subterranean kingdom of
Persephone and I had brought her back with me to the light of the world. Here
ended my function. My responsibility. * A
year has passed since then. Emanuela-Daniela is in jail again. Tina lives in
the unsettled minds of her readers. I continued to go back and forth: life
on the run, nomadic feelings. But I think I have finally identified a point
of arrival, of landing, because even when I do not write about the island,
it is in its imaginary harbors that my writing—a place of eternal crossings—is
solidly anchored. Rome, Italy |