Life as an inmate teaches you a lot. Most of the things that you learn inside a prison, however, aren’t of any use whatsoever in the outside world. One of the fundamental things that an inmate learns is how to read the guard’s epaulette. Prison guards appreciate it when an inmate acknowledges their rank. The first time that I called an officer an assistant, he almost spat in my face. I never served in the military and this kind of information was difficult for me to digest. It would have been surreal to work in an editorial office where colleagues addressed each other with names like department head or vice managing editor. In prison, however, this shit was real. When the epaulette doesn’t have a grade or it only has a red arrow, it means that the person is an officer; a two or three red arrowed epaulette means assistant; the bars are for superintendents; the pentagon shape is for inspectors. Easy as pie.
Then you have to learn all the times, the rituals, the places and the few rights that remain to remind you that you’re not a bag of rubbish, that despite everything you’re still a human being. A human being who still has connections outside the prison. Each inmate is allowed six one hour slots to see visitors and, once a week, with the authorisation of the magistrate, you are allowed one call to relatives or friends. I had asked Roberto not to let our mother or Maria visit me while I was in prison. He was the only relative that I had left to talk to during the visiting hours, and yet his visits weren’t considered as part of my visiting hours, as he was also my lawyer. Roberto was a pretty damn good lawyer. During the interrogation by the public prosecutor, he had performed his duty with great professionalism. These interrogations were the only times that I was allowed to step foot outside the prison – although in a high security reinforced van.
To end this tangent description of the interrogations and get back to the visiting hours, I didn’t really receive visits from anyone, apart from my brother, who looked exhausted and on the edge of a nervous breakdown. He tried to instil courage in me but betrayed his strong attitude with his eyes, which revealed his concern for my condition. I could still use the telephone, of course. This was one of the elements that revealed how alienating it can be to be locked inside a prison. When you’re outside, whenever you have to make a call you just press a button and that’s it; when you’re inside a prison, each telephone call has to be formally approved by the magistrate, who’s usually the person who has decided that you’re guilty – in my case, it was a scowling man with bad breath. But there’s more to it. It takes days before you receive the authorisation – in my case, it took seven days. After the magistrate has granted you permission to make a phone call, you then have to fill in a form where you specify the date and the time of your requested call. If during that date and time the receiver of your call doesn’t answer – for whatever reason, even if they’re just in the toilet – you’re fucked. Those were the exact the words I thought the first time I filled in one of those papers. Eventually, after I had overcome all the bureaucratic hurdles of the telephone system, I managed to make my first call. Being able to hear Maria’s voice again after twelve days felt like breathing fresh air.
I inhaled deeply to avoid bursting into tears. I imagined her doing the same on the other end of the line.
“How are you?” She asked with a kindly tone that I’d never heard before.
“I’m fine, don’t worry. I eat, I walk and I go to the gym. It’s nowhere near like those American films where you have to be careful when you bend down to pick up your soap. Nobody likes my ass.”
She laughed. Her laughter was like a ray of sunshine on a grim, cloudy day.
“That’s good.”
“Were you worried about my ass?”
Another giggle.
“I miss you. I can’t wait to see you again.”
“I miss you too, but I want to see you in our home. Not here.”
“Yeah, Roberto told me. I need to see you, though.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Stop pushing.”
“I need to see you, Fabrizio.”
“Not here, stop it.”
“Why?”
“When I’m out of here, I don’t want to be thinking about this place every time I hug you.”
I shouldn’t have told her. I shouldn’t have. Three seconds later, she was sobbing like a baby.
“Don’t worry, Maria, Roberto will get me out of here.”
“I’m sorry, it’s all my fault.”
“What? Don't be an idiot.”
“I’m talking about my uncle. If it wasn’t for him, for this coincidence, you wouldn’t be in jail.”
“It’s not your fault, nor is it his, Maria. It was just fate that made me find the dead body. Bad luck.”
“How can they think that it was you? It’s absurd.”
“We’ll be out of this soon. You’ll see, this hell will be over soon.”
“Some of your colleagues tried to get in touch, even those who are retired now. Pippo Nocera calls me twice a day, that man really cares about you.”
Super Pippo, my old friend. I wished he was here with me – we would have had fun even in a terrible place like the Ucciardone prison.
“Say ‘hello’ to him. Call my mother for me too, please. Tell her that I’m fine and not to worry.”
“Your mum’s here with me. Hang on in there, Fabrizio. I love you. I’ll pass your mum over to you now.”
I wasn’t expecting that. The hand with which I was holding the handset began to shake. A knot made its way up my throat, making the very task of breathing a little difficult.
“Fabrizio.”
She whispered my name softly, just like she used to when she woke me up for school years ago. Roberto used to get out of bed straight away; I would doze for ages. She always sat patiently by my bed to nudge me awake.
“Mum.”
I didn’t manage to say anything else.
“Don’t worry, we’re all waiting for you.”
“Yes, mum, don’t worry.”
I swallowed, my cheeks were already wet with tears.
“You’re a strong man, Fabrizio. You’re like your father. Don’t give in to them.”
I nodded, as if she could see me. My sobs broke up my breathing.
“Goodbye, mum,” I managed to say, after taking a deep breath.
“Bye, darling.”
I lowered the handset and wiped my tears away with my sleeve. I remembered the time when I had scraped my shins as a little kid, I had wept the same way then. My father had lifted me up onto his shoulders, he had smelled of cigars and Eau de Cologne. I’d been invincible up there.
*
I worked hard at the gym. I would sweat, get tired and sleep better at night. When you’re in prison, you can focus on a concept that’s difficult to grasp anywhere else outside – life’s often reduced to an immense struggle to find a distraction. People don’t like to think. Reflection sometimes pushes on the edge of insanity, it imposes questions that cannot be answered, and it tastes bitter like death. To survive, it’s important to keep the mind busy with anything, even rubbish. When you’re in prison, the task becomes more difficult – the extensive amount of free time becomes a viscous swamp full of dangerous thoughts that you can sink into if you don’t find something to hang onto. I spent most of my time working out in the gym and reading books. During the first twenty days in prison, I managed to read seven books. Maria and Roberto had sent some of the books to me, a couple more I’d taken from the prison library, a place that was staffed by two polite volunteers who wore thick glasses. I spent hours lying in bed reading, blessing the writers who had conceived these beautiful stories, and even the less beautiful ones – they were something to cling onto, the lifeboat that saved me from sinking into madness.
Day after day, I forced myself to make new friends. I engaged in some conversation with my fellow lodgers, especially when Lo Nigro, the most talkative of us all, wasn’t around. Yussuf, the man from Morocco, sounded like the most sensitive man. Every now and again he asked me to explain to him an expression in Italian. He was a shy, kind man, one of those who never raised their voice. The few words that he uttered always carried with them a poisonous, painful inflection, which triggered in me a melancholic feeling. It was a feeling that blended well with the other negative emotions that inhabited the prison.
Sometimes I thought about Palillo. In fact, I thought about him more often than just sometimes. When I had no other distraction to save me from drowning in the sea of pain, my mind would stretch in a continuous spasm, reliving that day. I cursed myself for every single wrong decision and I pictured myself behind the bars during my trial shouting a desperate statement to the world that Fabrizio Corsaro was not a murderer, only a dickhead who grabbed the knife that killed a motherfucker that he had never seen before. At that point I always felt like crying, I dwelled on my thoughts to avoid sinking into desperation. I asked myself the same questions over and over again, most of which remained unanswered – why hadn’t the murderer hidden the weapon? Why had he left the front door and the building entrance door open, letting anybody – in this case, myself – discover the body? These were the questions that I hit my head against constantly, like a fly against a pane of glass. Every time, I ended up giving myself the same tentative answers. The first hypothesis was that the murderer had been surprised by my arrival and had rushed off sooner than they’d intended to. But no matter how hard I thought about it, I didn’t remember seeing anybody in the neighbourhood where Palillo lived. The second hypothesis was a little more disquieting – somebody had laid a trap for me that afternoon, and I had fallen into this trap like a rabbit. And it was at this point that I realised I was becoming paranoid. I was beginning to scare myself.
*
During yard time, Pino Mistretta was always with me, day in and day out. He was a funny man, his spontaneity was enjoyable, despite me generally not liking clingy people. Pino was a little naïve, a quality that gave him some of the innocence that children have, as absurd as it may sound to speak so highly of an inmate. One day – it was the beginning of my fourth week in prison – he stood in front of me while I was eating lunch. I didn’t know where he’d come from – it was almost as if he’d appeared from another dimension, holding half a sandwich in his hand and wearing a worried, thoughtful look.
“Have a seat, my friend,” I invited him, pointing to my bed. Lunch was served inside our cells at the Ucciardone prison – hotel style room service.
“Good morning, Mr Corsaro.”
“Good morning to you, how are you today?”
He stared at me for a while.
“You’re not just a journalist – you’re half psychologist, aren’t you?”
“Yeah sure – I mean, anyone can see a bad mood from miles away. You don’t need a psychologist to understand that.”
“I overheard something.”
He was good at overhearing people in prison. What could have bothered him?
“What did you hear?”
“You’re a good man, Fabrizio. You’re my friend. And Pino Mistretta respects his friends. Don’t ask me why I refer to myself in the third person.”
“Yeah, I think you might need a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Now tell me what you heard?”
“Have you finished eating?”
I hadn’t, but I wasn’t craving the food that they served. I shrugged and got up. Pino hadn’t touched his food. We walked a little further away from the others down the corridor. Mistretta lit two cigarettes and passed one to me. After a few greedy drags, he opened his eyes wide and whispered.
“There’s someone in my block. I barely know him. I mean, he’s not my friend, but it’s easy to speak to people here.”
He paused to smoke. He was one of those men who enjoyed filling their talks up with breaks. A bad quality. You get stuck with these people. It happens that you talk to them when you’re walking together, and they stop all of a sudden. You don’t realise and find out after a few metres that you’ve been talking to yourself.
“Carry on?” I encouraged him.
“He’s a bad guy, but he also likes to talk a lot, if you know what I mean…”
This was going to be a long conversation – I surrendered to it.
“Now this guy – whoever he is, it’s not important – he knows somebody else who’s also in here. And do you know who that is?”
I’ve always found people who set up their conversations like a quiz really annoying. You know what I fancy? You know what I don’t like about you? No, I fucking don’t – who do you think I am, some kind of mind reader? If you really want to say it to me, then just do it. Just quit the quiz.
“Who is it?” I asked. I was beginning to feel impatient.
“Somebody who was very close to Palillo.”
We were finally getting somewhere. Palillo was a damned motherfucker and he was still haunting me from hell. I still dreamed about his hoarse voice and I would often wake up terrorised.
“How well did he know him?”
“It’s a guy who worked for some gentlemen, he was brought up in the area where Palillo lived. He collected the stuff from the workers,” that means that he collected hush money – as the gentlemen called it – from the shop owners of the area. He belonged to the gang of Porta Nuova, which had been decimated in recent years after many police crack downs. He was an extortionist, in a way, part of a race of vile parasites that had always repelled me.
“Did he know Palillo?”
“Mate, you’re a clean cut kind of guy, I respect you for that, but I can teach you street rules. It’s impossible that somebody like Palillo started up a business in Palermo – and I’m not talking about selling bread and cheese – without the gentlemen knowing about it and earning money from it.”
Of course. The usurer had to be well known to the Mafia gangs of the area. These gentlemen, most likely, taxed the dishonest man and took part of his income. “Sea salt should rain on Sicily,” the police sergeant said in Sedotta e Abbandonata – as he was trying to wipe Sicily off the map, he wanted the island to be swallowed by the sea.
“I understand.”
“Good. This guy that we’re talking about… let’s pretend that he’s called Ciccio, right? This Ciccio arrived last week. They brought him to the Pagliarelli prison a couple of days later. That’s where they keep all those who belong to the Mafia.”
“You just said he isn’t one of those gentlemen.”
“We’ll debate later whether he’s a gentleman or not. Listen to me. Ciccio is one of those conceited guys, he talks a lot. I was smoking a cigarette with them the other day. They asked me about you.”
The fact that they were interested in me didn’t sound like the sort of news I’d be happy about.
“What the fuck did they want to know?”
“No, don’t worry. They were just trying to be polite – they often see me walking around with you and your face isn’t known in some circles. They just wanted to know who you were. They also ended up talking about Palillo. Ciccio said that he was friends with Mr Palillo and that he was a motherfucker who sucked the blood out of those sons of bitches who blew their money on horses or gambling. Someone from the bank would bring them to Palillo – they worked together, he earned a percentage from working with Palillo.”
Sea salt. For forty days, like the biblical flood.
“Well done.”
“My dear, the world is full of motherfuckers,” the habitual pusher, who was now my friend, looked indignant as he said it.
“Do you know anything else?”
“I know that Mr Palillo was a scumbag. He didn’t have friends or a woman. He would pay a bitch every now and then, that’s what the guy said. He also said something else, I’ve been thinking about it all day. Maybe it’s just bullshit, but I said to myself – maybe it’s important information and what if my friend actually needs it? When I was little, my father watched Murder she Wrote all the time, and I had to watch it with him. The lady investigator had an eye for detail. Sometimes she heard a phrase, or saw a hair on the floor, something apparently irrelevant and she would understand who the murderer was through that tiny detail. That’s exactly what I thought this morning – this information might be full of shit, but maybe a good investigator could find out who the murderer is with it?”
That moment, I promised myself that if I was ever freed from this prison, that Pino Mistretta would be my friend for life.
“Spit it out then.”
“Ciccio told me that Palillo had been talking more than usual recently. He looked happier. Ciccio asked Palillo if he’d won the lottery? Palillo told him that he was doing better than usual. It was like he’d found the golden goose. Palillo also said something else, something a little strange, in my opinion.”
“What?”
“He said that he’d received some kind of present from the military.”
“And what the hell does that mean?”
“No idea, only he would know. A present from when he was in the military. It sounds like a Murder she Wrote kind of mystery.”