What Hell Is Not Read online

  ‘In Palermo?’

  ‘Yes, Palermo.’

  We say goodbye. As I walk away I can’t help but be proud of having made it here without sticking out like a sore thumb. I’m beginning to shake things up and to liberate myself from the softest ideology in existence. It’s soft because it wears slippers and not shoes: Platitudinism. When I turn around, Riccardo is still watching me. I say goodbye one more time.

  When I get home, it’s almost time for dinner. My brother opens the backdoor for me so I don’t have to ring the doorbell. I gave him the signal by calling our house phone. I go into my room and Manfredi gives me an update on the negotiations. His diplomatic efforts as my ambassador to the country of Unable-to-Understand-an-Adolescent have resulted in an acceptable outcome. I can go to Brancaccio until everyone leaves for the summer vacation at the beach. I’ll go with them, and that’s non-negotiable. The cost for my course in England will be reimbursed even though we cancelled at the last minute. The cost of my flight won’t be reimbursed. So I’ll have to get a job to pay it back.

  ‘Deep down inside, Dad is proud of you. He’ll never tell you that. But I was able to convince him that you haven’t lost your mind. Mom, on the other hand, is terrified that you’re going to end up going down the drain, just like the bourgeois revolutionaries.’

  ‘Who are the bourgeois revolutionaries? Have you ever been able to figure that out?’

  ‘I think they’re the ones who have a vacation home.’

  ‘Is there anything wrong with that?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  I can hear Mom calling us to dinner. I apologize to my parents and life begins anew. At least, I let them believe that.

  Chapter 35

  ‘Weren’t you supposed to be leaving?’

  ‘I’m here to pick up some starfish.’

  ‘But what happened?’

  ‘Giuseppe.’

  ‘Malaspina?’

  ‘Yes. What was the point? I would have learned the language and the customs of another city when I don’t even know what’s happening in my own city.’

  ‘What did your parents say?’

  ‘If they get wind of this, they’re going to send me to a mental hospital. They lost the money that they spent on the ticket. But the cost of the course was reimbursed. Either way, they think I’ve lost my mind.’

  ‘People are always sad when it rains. But when someone in love goes to visit his girlfriend, he can’t help but start singing. He seems like he’s crazy when, in fact, he’s the only normal one. So are you going to help me?’

  ‘Would I be here if I wasn’t? Don’t make me regret it.’

  ‘Should we make a bet that you won’t ever leave?’

  ‘Let’s make a bet.’

  Don Pino smiles and hugs me.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I hug him back and I feel at home. It’s a home with rooms that still need to be decorated, but with solid walls and lots of light.

  ‘Let’s take a walk and I’ll explain on our way.’

  The shadows seem to have been sent into exile by the sun’s ferocity. It’s as if they have fled into people’s homes, where they are hidden and cared for.

  ‘We need to walk around the streets and let people see that we are here. With our heads held high, afraid of no one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To let people know that there are other things they can harvest besides poison darnel.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Do you remember the landowners that I was telling you about a few days ago? Those who sold their land became very rich. As often happens in Sicily, Mafiosi rose from their ranks. They continue to demand protection money from people who have homes in their territory. They have substituted farming with extortion. The poison darnel of the Mafia continues to grow unabated, thanks to ignorance and poverty. I see Brancaccio as an enormous field, where wheat and darnel grow side by side.’

  ‘I still don’t understand what this “darnel” is. Is it something you eat?’

  ‘You’re not paying attention. It’s a weed that looks like wheat in every way. The difference is that when you thresh it, the wheat becomes grains. Darnel also becomes grains but the grains are unusable and if you mill them, the flour is poisonous. There’s plenty of wheat here but it’s too often suffocated by weeds.’

  ‘Are the politicians doing anything about it?’

  ‘Politicians? Politicians aren’t interested in saving men. Politicians are often part of the problem. The thing that counts is the choices that individuals make. You are politics, my boy, the choices that you make every day as you walk these streets. Do you remember the boy that hit you? What did you want to do to him?’

  ‘I wanted to kill him.’

  ‘I know. But if you don’t learn to love, you will continue to be a child just like him. Loving children like him is the only thing that can change Brancaccio. Judging him is too easy. Blaming the political system? Too easy. You have to let the wheat grow together with the darnel. They grow and will always grow together. Darnel grows fast. It has shallow roots and is perfectly camouflaged in the wheat fields. You can’t rip it out without harming the wheat. There are no “good” and “bad” people. But there is wheat and darnel in everyone. The difference will emerge at the right moment. You use wheat to make bread, darnel to make bonfires. We need to reduce the influence of darnel little by little.’

  ‘But I don’t know how to do that.’

  ‘Does anyone know how to? Quannu l’amuri voli, trova locu, the saying goes. Love will find a way. But love is something that belongs to the world of men. We can learn anything. We can be taught anything. But love, the most important thing and the most difficult thing, is something that no one teaches us. Yet, if you don’t learn to love, you remain an illiterate liver of life.’

  Old folks sit in front of their homes. Worn playing cards lie idly on a table. Some of them say hello to Don Pino, who answers with a nod and a smile. Not far away, children hurl rocks at glass bottles lined up on a little wall. When they burst in the sun, they look like hailstones of light. A young man with hair hardened by gel burns through the tires of his moped turning in circles, going nowhere. A woman plows along the street with her shopping bags that seem to nail her to the ground with their weight. A girl in slippers sweeps the sidewalk in front of her house as she shouts her rage and frustration in a dialect known only to the dwellers inside. My visual horizons expand and my muscles melt slowly from the tension that an explorer feels as he penetrates the tropical forest.

  ‘It won’t be a war on the Mafia that will change Brancaccio, but the patient and constant resistance to ignorance and misery. I need to get the summer games ready for the kids and take them to the beach and to see the stars. Then we will do the sports tournament in honor of Borsellino. It’s the first useful Sunday since the anniversary of his martyrdom. I need you to give me a hand.’

  ‘Sounds like a good idea. But how is it that you are never discouraged?’

  ‘Jesus is with me always. And I always try to be like a farmer. I try to treat everyone like wheat. If they are wheat, then they become bread. Charity is not enough. It takes love. You can see the signs of so many defeats on the faces of the kids, the wounds from too much humiliation. My job is to walk these streets and love everyone.’

  Don Pino speaks of love as if it were a concrete thing. It’s kind of like what Petrarch does when he writes Love with a capital L and he compares it to an invisible presence. Invisible but looming and determined.

  ‘If I had been born and raised on Via Hazon, I wouldn’t have had a choice either,’ he continues. ‘If you are born in hell, you need to see at least a fragment of what hell is not to understand that something else exists. And this is the reason that you need to start with the children. You have to get to them before the street eats them up, before a crust forms around their hearts. That’s why we need a preschool and a middle school. It doesn’t take strength. It takes the heart and mind. And it takes hard work. Y
ou have no idea how much can be done with these three things.’

  You can’t take anything for granted on the other side of the train tracks that I crossed. What have I seen up until now?

  ‘And then there are the girls. They are still adolescents, in need of safe places. They go out with someone who gets them pregnant. And they “elope.” If things go well, they get married. But most of them end up as teenagers with a child to raise, alone like a mother dog with her pups.’

  I notice Don Pino grimace and clench his jaw in rage. I’ve never seen him like this, and have no idea where it’s coming from.

  ‘I don’t want Lucia to end up like that.’

  That’s what I said. Or at least, someone inside me with whom I have yet to become acquainted.

  ‘She won’t.’

  ‘She seems like she’s different.’

  ‘She’s not different. She’s just like the others. But she has been brought up in a different way. This is what makes the difference between those who become men and those who become just another member of the pack.’

  Even the name itself, Brancaccio, seems like a pejorative for something rapacious: branco, the pack, the gang. Who would ever believe that at the beginning of the second millennium it was an Arab–Norman Eden full of fruit trees and plenty of water?

  You can still see some of the faded signs of this water that nourished everything here: The Castello della Sorgente, ‘the castle of the spring’, the Favara (from the Arabic al-fawwāra, meaning ‘spring’), and Queen Constance of Sicily’s camera dello sirocco, ‘the chamber of the sirocco’, where legend holds that Frederick II’s beautiful mother cured her sunburned skin. Back then, Palermo was a verdant city despite the heat, thanks to a system of underground canals that had been devised by the Arabs toward the end of the first millennium. They gushed throughout the city into wells and grottos. The miracle-workers of the era were the water-diviners. They were able to conjure water from the rich water table beneath the city. And everything seemed to flower on that land. Unaware of the divining arts, many visitors believed that Palermo’s gardens were sacred in origin.

  Don Pino walks across the asphalt desert and, like those masters, he conjures that water from the deepest depths as he digs, digs, and digs. The water hidden in the stone of every human heart, even the most arid one.

  The Mafia is pushing the city to abandon its water table, to drain it, and convince the people of Palermo that they have no water. Little by little, people start to believe that they really don’t have any water and that it will be given to them only by virtue of charitable donation. Instead, it simply hasn’t surfaced. And in the place of the green parks and gardens, weeds grow, like darnel. The city could use water-diviners, but it is the lords of the sirocco who proliferate instead.

  ‘Do you know where I was born?’

  ‘You weren’t born in Brancaccio, were you?’

  ‘In the United States.’

  ‘Really, Father?’

  ‘I’m telling the truth.’

  ‘But you don’t know how to speak English.’

  ‘That’s true. But I’m talking about another United States. It’s the poorest part of Brancaccio, the ghetto within the ghetto. It’s bordered by not one but two sets of railroad tracks. It was built for the railroad workers who came from other parts of Sicily and Italy. And so it seemed like it was foreign. My grandfather lived there. He was a railroad worker. And that’s where Lucia lives.’

  ‘When were you born, Don Pino? In the nineteenth century?’

  ‘You rascal! I was born in 1937. September 15, 1937, with the sound of trains and the clanging of the couplings in my ears from when I was just a baby. I used to watch the trains and dream of traveling far, far away. And yet the train of my life brought me back here as a priest, in October 1990.’

  ‘Do you ever get lonely?’

  ‘I’m not alone. The Mafia is strong. But God is omnipotent.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t He do something about it?’

  Don Pino doesn’t speak. He smiles at me. He gestures for me to come closer to him, as if he wants to confide a secret.

  ‘He did do something.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You and me.’

  ‘With all due respect, it’s not much. He could have done a lot more.’

  ‘My friend Hamil knows the desert well and he always says that those who plant date palms don’t eat dates.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means that it takes at least two generations for the date palms to bear their fruit. If I plant a tree today, in fifty years someone will eat the dates and cool off in its shade.’

  ‘I see. So what’s in it for the person who plants the date palms?’

  ‘You’ll understand that when you become a father.’

  ‘But I want to understand now.’

  ‘I’m getting worried about how combative you’re becoming. A father takes joy in the joy of his children. His joy multiplies and it becomes much greater than his own personal joy because it is nourished by everyone’s joy.’

  ‘Is that what happens to you?’

  ‘Every day.’

  Chapter 36

  The sun is stuck behind the sea and the last stars are winding up like ivy in the twilight. How beautiful it would be if the sun were to rise on a new and changed city, full of gardens and men who work and love. Men whose work is a bridge between dreams and reality and not an exile from themselves. In the dark, a man inhabits the city of God.

  I found heaven in hell.

  It’s much smaller and briefer than hell.

  It resembles the corner of a garden or a moment. But it’s everything.

  It is the fulfillment of everything.

  Of the seed in the rose.

  Of man in man.

  Of woman in woman.

  Of God in all things.

  And it triumphs in silence even when it shows just an incomplete face of a beauty that seems almost foreign. In exile.

  Heaven becomes wider and nothing and no one can grab and cage it.

  Intrepid like truth, indomitable like beauty.

  Have pity on me for all the times that I have slowed the flowering.

  Have pity on me, dear God, have pity on me for having built that hell through my own sloth. It’s not enough to avoid evil. One must also do good.

  There is little in me today that evokes the light. But every seed hidden in the blindness of the earth is shaking. Perhaps that seed does not evoke the light but invokes it.

  And so I invoke You. Like a seed.

  Too small for a land so desolate and dark like my own.

  Help me, dear God, to not remain alone.

  Help me to find faith in You.

  In that city, in Him, it becomes real. It frees you from the most enduring of dreams like the ancient master who knew how to find the water, even in stone. In the meantime, the sea breaks on the solid shore like dogma and it forces that endless port to have faith in that which is constant. You cannot help but hope where there is a never-ending port.

  Chapter 37

  ‘Will you tell me the story of Turiddo?’

  ‘Again?’

  Don Pino likes telling stories. It’s the best way to teach anything, as he often tells his students: The Italian parlare, ‘to speak’, comes from parabolare, which means ‘to tell stories’. Don Pino never stops teaching. And for fifteen years now he’s been a schoolteacher, even though he’s had to reduce his hours recently in order to devote himself to the neighborhood. He’s taught thousands of kids over the last fifteen years. Eighteen hours in eighteen different classes at a crowded public high school. Every year, he had somewhere between twenty and thirty students in each class. That makes nearly 10,000 students who were greeted by his smile over fifteen years. And he knows what difference one smile a week can make in the life of a teenager. He’ll never leave teaching. Who knows? In the end, that number could reach 100,000 students. You can change a nation with 100,000 teenag
ers. But even 10,000 are enough for a revolution. Every teacher is the most dangerous military threat of any given nation, a fuse capable of triggering unforeseen atomic reactions.

  In another time, it was his mother who told him stories, when they didn’t have a television or even a radio. They were traditional stories, the type of story that threads its way through the alleys of Palermo and then lingers like an echo from the past. A people that holds onto its stories always harbors some hope that it will be saved.

  ‘Well?’

  With the fingers of one hand formed like an inverted bird’s beak, Francesco makes the Sicilian hand gesture used to ask for something. He closes the beak two or three times with his fingers pointing toward his chest, as if he were going to knock on it like door.

  ‘There was once a boy named Turiddo . . .’

  ‘No, no! You have to tell me the first part, about your mother and how she was a seamstress and how she had the fastest hands.’

  ‘You’re a hard-headed one, aren’t you?’

  ‘Just like you.’

  ‘One day, my mother, who was a seamstress and had extremely fast hands when she sewed, told me that God is like a mother in His mercy and like a father in His strength. And I could understand the part about His strength but not the part about His mercy. And so I asked her to explain it to me. She was a simple woman who hadn’t had much schooling. But she knew how to tell stories and how to use stories to explain even the most complicated things. And so she told me the story of Turiddo.’

  Francesco’s eyes open wide as he waits, once again, for the fable to reveal the secrets of the world. Nothing can distract him from a good story. Useless thoughts and even the hidden pain inside of him just vanish. Everything just disappears. And Turiddo enters into the scene.

  Once upon a time, there was a mother who had lost her husband and children to the plague. Only one of her sons had been spared. His name was Turiddo and he was his mother’s favorite. She was so poor that she had to break her back day and night to raise him. She washed clothes for rich folks, and that allowed her to buy prickly pears for him to eat so that he could grow properly. He loved prickly pears, especially the ones that were red like his hair. And so he was able to grow. And indeed, he became a healthy boy, full of dreams. But he began to hang around with friends whose souls were the color of night. They were always playing cards. Sometimes he would win. But, for the most part, he was the one who would lose. His mother would sit in her kitchen and wait for him every night, sometimes until dawn. And every night she would set out a plate of fresh red prickly pears for him. He would eat them without saying a word. But he had made a silent vow to change his life.