I don't know whether discovering a mafia cemetery is, in itself, big
news. For me, it was - shortly after the '92 attacks - near San GiuseppeJato, a stone's throw from where, ten years earlier, Saro Riccobono and
four others had been killed. But even that - setting aside the objective
complexity of the sites - isn't what matters most to me. After all, it's
a story which, retraced years later, reads like a tragicomic, almost
Fantozzi-style tale. A cranial vault protruding among the debris on
pizzo Mirabella, along the stream of the Vallone Procura. A vault I
mistook for a sort of shapeless shell; I pulled it out, handled it and,
finally, once I realized what I had in my hand, I interpreted it as a
Mesolithic man - and managed to take it home. Back then, as a Natural
Sciences student, that's how I saw it. It seems incredible, but that's
truly what happened, at least until some people I turned to for a
"determination" opened my eyes. What followed was something like a dash
to the carabinieri and further twists. The news hit all the papers: four
skeletons were recovered. A fact I've never hidden, though it has
remained unpublished until now. In the end, after not too much prodding
from friends, I decided to publish everything in a book I titled exactly
as it happened: "How to Discover a Mafia Cemetery in San Giuseppe Jato
and Take It Home." Because that "Corleonese necropolis" (as the
newspapers called it) allowed me to "re-see" places and sensations,
until I focused everything on a concept that today seems faded: people
don't want to see the mafia because it is very close to us. We even
distort its historiography by making it begin in the peasant world
which, with class detachment, we point to as brutal, uncultured or - to
use a word with fully negative connotation - "viddano." Yet the mafia
wasn't born that way: it appears along the trail of the management of
violence that belonged to the feudal nobles and then to the bourgeoisie
which, in the very first decades of the '800, emerged from its social
oblivion. The fiefs in which the economy of the time turned (only
apparently erased but substantially reappearing in the latifundium)
changed hands; the new owners were up-and-coming bourgeois with solid
political ties, ready to take over (also by force) the management of an
economic system based on the most degrading control of peasant masses
who continued to be deprived of everything. The new masters were
notables, in any case well-off people ascribable to the so-called
galantuomini, by which term a prestigious class role was meant. Among
them, according to historian Giuseppe Carlo Marino, the mafia godfathers
have their origins. The mafia defended the interests of the bourgeoisie
because it was itself bourgeois. There are many examples, and in the
book I tried to leave a record of them, also mixing in stories from my
own life, because the mafia - whether deliberately or not - we have all
breathed. Some rejected it; others made of it, with only apparent
detachment, a class dis-honor. But in those mountains I lived my
Anarchy. I went for the birds (ornithology has always been my passion)
and I almost felt I was rereading Histoire d'une Montagne by the
anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus, who "felt" Nature, noting aspects
that foreshadowed environmentalism. Reclus had been to Palermo; in his
Nouvelle géographie universelle, printed in the second half of the '800,
he described the contrast between noble palaces and the poverty of the
masses; and then the number of Palermo's «maffia» affiliates, estimated
between 4,000 and 5,000. I, instead, have written only a tale in which I
revisited the mafia "close" to me - not the murderers' mafia (luckily it
never brushed my family), but that of the "Sacco," of the notables I
came to know, of respectability, of the churches of Palermo bene and of
the racism toward poor neighborhoods (of course branded as "mafia"). I
saw again the Conca d'Oro and the Vallone Procura, which I bade farewell
to amid carabinieri with pickaxes and shovels, already wrapped in the
darkness that carried the scents of the evergreen maquis. In those years
the most sensational attacks occurred, for the prominence of the victims
and the force of the blasts. Only those who refuse to see pretend not to
think of the subversive potential of those events, which thus far have
lacked judicial truth about the possible real masterminds. It had
already happened when the State sent, for a police crackdown, the famous
Cesare Mori and, earlier still, Prefect Malusardi. We forget it, but the
criminal pyramid had been well described precisely for the Partinico
area decades earlier, while, earlier yet, the mafia associations and the
very structuring of the organization were known - which, with the
arrival of Lucky Luciano after the war, would become the Sicilian Cosa
nostra. The Fantozzi-farce elements lie not only in my tragicomic find,
but also in the way the general public learned terms like mafia
commission and its branches into families and "tens." Terminology made
known by the "fascinating" film The Godfather. Practically everything
was there, including the "pentiti," influential friendships, esteemed
professionals. In those years, however, Palermo's politicians and
prelates denied the existence of the mafia. Had they not noticed? Its
elimination could only have occurred within a social uprising which,
however, when it broke out (the most formidable example is that of the
Fasci dei lavoratori siciliani), was crushed by the State and by the
mafia itself. Perhaps Ciro Troiano, criminologist, is right, who in the
book's preface recalls how, as a boy at a relative's house, God and the
State fell on my head. Without that restless episode - which I still
"feel" today - I am certain I would never have found that piece of
skeleton I brought home.
Giovanni Guadagna
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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