The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia by Petra Reski Read Free Book Online

be something, after all, don’t you think?”
    And I said: “Yes, sure.” Because she was looking at me so piercingly with those black eyes of hers. And because I didn’t have the courage to rob her of her hope. Hope of the divine plan. When I was sitting in the bar with Rosaria, her husband Vito Schifani, Giovanni Falcone’s bodyguard, had only been dead for six months.
    “They only showed me his hands,” she said. “His hands. They were the only bits undamaged. He had such lovely hands.”
    Rosaria had been widowed at the age of twenty-three and had become an anti-Mafia icon. Her son, Antonio Emanuele, was only four months old. Even today, everyone in Palermo remembers Rosaria haltingly trying to read out a text at Giovanni Falcone’s funeral, supported by a priest who kept encouraging her to go on reading—until Rosaria threw aside the pages of her prepared text and cried out her true feelings: “They’re even herein the church, the mafiosi.” And: “Too much blood, there is no love here, no love of anything or anyone.” And: “I forgive you. But you must kneel.”
    Everyone sensed that this wasn’t the usual forgiveness, that empty ritual of absolution that everyone in Italy always has to defer to; before the corpses are even cold, the first television reporter has asked the victims about forgiveness. Only very seldom does anyone have the courage to step aside from this sale of indulgences. Like Rita Costa, the widow of the public prosecutor Gaetano Costa, shot by the Mafia in the center of Palermo. “I forgive no one and nobody,” she said. “I could kill my husband’s murderers and then calmly go off and have an espresso in a cafe.”
    I had first seen Rosaria when Margarethe von Trotta was in Palermo introducing her film The Long Silence , a film that paid tribute to the women widowed by the Mafia. Rosaria wore a sand-colored blazer, sat next to Rita Costa on the podium, and looked as if she’d rather have been a million miles away. Far from the widows, far from having to set an example, far from Palermo. She almost crept to the microphone as she said: “When I talked about forgiveness in church, that sentence was my personal affair. Whether a person can forgive is, of course, a matter for each individual.”
    Then she said nothing all the way through the panel discussion. She later told me how angry her mother had been when Rosaria had insisted on being seen in public in a sand-colored blazer and not in black.
    We had met at the regional administration, her new place of work. As is generally the case with victims of the Mafia, a jobhad been hastily found for her to supplement her meager widow’s pension. But she hadn’t been given any actual work, just a reason to leave the house in the morning. Her office was empty. The phone was out of order, the desk hadn’t been used for ages, the shelves were bare and dusty, and Rosaria talked about the profound shame she felt at never having taken an interest in what Mafia really meant. “Even two days after my husband’s death I didn’t know who Totò Riina was!” she exclaimed. After the murder she had approached the public prosecutor, Paolo Borsellino. Once she had asked him if he was scared, and Borsellino had replied: “I’m only scared for my wife and children.” Fifty-seven days after the assassination of Falcone, he too was dead.
    After her husband’s death Rosaria became a driven woman: one who wanted to know what was happening around her, how it had come to this, how it could have been prevented. “Tell everyone what happened to you,” one widow advised her. “Shout it out. Everyone must know, go into the schools and speak to the children. Headlines aren’t enough to reach the hearts of the children.”
    And Rosaria followed her advice. She took part in demonstrations and panel discussions, she visited schools and juvenile institutions, and she published a book of her talks, dedicating it to her little son. In her open letter to the