Tina, Mafia Soldier


 Contents
 
 Title
 Copyright
 Chapter 1
 Chapter 2
 Chapter 3
 Chapter 4
 Chapter 5
 Chapter 6
 Chapter 7
 Chapter 8
 Chapter 9
 Chapter 10
 Chapter 11
 Chapter 12
 Chapter 13
 Chapter 14
 Chapter 15
 Chapter 16
 Chapter 17
 Chapter 18
 Chapter 19
 Chapter 20
 Chapter 21
 Chapter 22
 Translator’s Note
 
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Start
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 First published in Italian in 1994 under the title
 Canto al Deserto: Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia.
 Copyright © 1994 by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli
 English translation copyright © 2023 by Robin Pickering-Iazzi
 Translator’s note copyright © 2023 by Robin Pickering-Iazzi
 All rights reserved.
 First published in English in 2023 by
 Soho Press, Inc.
 227 W 17th Street
 New York, NY 10011
 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa, author. | Pickering-Iazzi, Robin, translator.
 Title: Tina, mafia soldier / Maria Rosa Cutrufelli ; translated from the Italian by Robin Pickering-Iazzi. | Other titles: Canto al deserto. English Description: New York, NY : Soho Crime, 2023.
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022032811
 ISBN 978-1-64129-424-9
 eISBN 978-1-64129-425-6
 Subjects: LCGFT: Novels. | Classification: LCC PQ4863.U75
 C8713 2023 | DDC 853/.914—dc23/eng/20220708
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032811
 Interior design by Janine Agro
 Printed in the United States of America
 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Above the lava rocks, amidst the broom
 withered by the sun, I, ancient olive tree
 am weary of singing to the desert.
 —SANTO CALÌ
 I can’t speak about Sicily
 because I love her and it scares me.
 . . .
 I want to say that in your land
 anger runs thicker
 and the almond of pain ripens.
 —ROBERTO ROVERSI
 CHAPTER 1
 The separation was sharp, obvious, desired. Two contrasting worlds—the city and the Villaggio—contiguous yet light years apart.
 The Villaggio arose to make a space for hope, for modernity. And to achieve this aim it seemed necessary to separate the modern from the ancient, the past from the future. To create a break.
 The Villaggio was the new. It flaunted its still flawless asphalt, the perfect, white street markings. To show off the goodness of the new was necessary, so that the laceration would transform into an opening toward the world. So that the arrow of development would shoot from the unfathomable depths of the cut and land solidly in the future.
 The Villaggio was the dream of the new. On the small plain at the foot of the town—the ancient Piano Notaro, feudal lands belonging to a large estate owner—the streets intersected according to an orderly design of geometric simplicity. At each street corner stood the sign with its name: Via Cortemaggiore, Piazza Caviaga, Viale Enrico Mattei, in honor of the man who had insisted on building AGIP—the Petrolchimico refinery—in Gela, on the southern coast of Sicily.
 Cortemaggiore, Caviaga . . . Names from the mainland, foreign names. Perhaps that was why the buildings had those smooth stark facades, without any terraces, without balconies—there was a link between those two things.
 “Just like at San Donato Milanese,” my friends maintained. To me, who had never been to San Donato Milanese and therefore couldn’t confirm or deny it, the whole thing sounded strange. Those Milanese must have been strange, too, building their homes so they looked onto the interior, without the caprice of a curly balustrade, a pot-bellied curve to soften the street’s profile.
 “Not even a little balcony to look outside, nothing, are you sure?”
 “Of course. Why would they need to look outside? To see the fog, the rain?” Then with an eloquent, definitive gesture, “All of the buildings look like this. All of them just like this.”
 The people who’d entered those buildings as renters or owners couldn’t sit outside in their undershirt on the terrace, or enjoy watching others on the evening stroll from a balcony. Nonetheless, they showed off their pride of ownership and boasted about their good luck. Life was decidedly more comfortable there, in the “Villaggio of the masters,” as the people living in town called them. A self-sufficient nucleus, which had to be one of the creators’ intentions. There was more than enough water—they could even wash their cars in the street—public services, a church, a health clinic, a fully equipped beach open only to the residents.
 In town, water was available only for a few hours each day.
 At a distance of two, maybe three kilometers, Gela perched on its hill, unstable on the slope toward the sea, unhealthy and malarial on the slope to the plain, looking down at the Villaggio, sheltered behind her archaic poverty, ensconced in the pride of a splendor that lived only in the quotations of her professors, or erudite notaries.
 “Aeschylus came here to die,” my uncle, an Italian and Latin teacher at the high school, invariably reminded every guest, every foreigner. “There must have been a reason,” he would insinuate, with the hint of an allusive smile. “One of the most powerful cities in Sicily. That’s what Gela was when Agrigento still hadn’t been founded.”
 FOR A WHILE, AT the beginning of the sixties, the flames of Petrolchimico also seemed to become part of the landscape, to renew the town’s forgotten glory.
 People who arrived from the Ionian Coast, after leaving behind the Mountain, La Montagna—as Etna is called, a womanly volcano with generous hips and slow lava flows—after leaving the citrus groves of Catania’s green plain and crossing the stony peaks and the scorched high plains of Caltagirone, caught sight of a glow, dispersing mists there on the horizon, while little by little a futuristic geometry of pinnacles, pylons, and a rotundity of immense cylinders rose into the sky. The towers shot long tongues of blue smoke straight up in the sky, piercing