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“I’m not married.” Not entirely true. Not legally, at least, but that was just semantics.
Giusy didn’t press me. Instead, she shifted the conversation to why I was in Sicily in the first place.
“My aunt wanted her ashes to be scattered here when she died.” I opted for the simplest explanation.
“We get a lot of that. Also, all the people looking for their distant relatives. Everyone comes looking for cousins. What do they hope to find? A missing piece of themselves. Like we are the answer to all of their problems. We can’t even take care of ourselves. Also a lot of people come here looking for Don Corleone or Tony Soprano or the funny guy from Goodfellas. The little one. With the voice. You Americans love your clichés and your drama.”
This coming from a woman with the theatrical flair of Liza Minnelli.
“They think the Mafia is all shiny suits and machine guns and cars getting blown up in the piazza. Ha! They don’t want to see that guy.” She pointed to a dopey-looking dude in his thirties with large ears and a weak jaw, sitting in the corner of the restaurant and muttering into a wireless headset with four smartphones littering the table in front of him. He looked bored, or maybe stoned.
“That guy. That guy’s one of the biggest mafiosi in town. And look at him with his big ears and little dick. Always doing all his work on the phones. Chit, chit, chit, chit, chit.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Drugs. Moving cocaine and heroin from the port in Sciacca, switching the drugs between the African ships and the European ships, paying the right guys, messing up the right guys. He does it all from his phone while he sits at that table. And then he goes home and plays with his small dick.”
“He’s a friend of yours.”
“He is my cousin.”
“Why didn’t you say hi to him when we came in?”
“Because we despise each other.” She turned to holler at the man on the phone. “Mangia merde e morte!”
When he looked up she flicked the backs of her fingers beneath her chin, a gesture known the world over as the Italian fuck-you. He returned the sentiment with a raise of his middle finger, thus concluding the familial exchange.
More wine arrived. Giusy explained that the Nero d’Avola from Sicily is the most delicious grape in the entire world, but it may not be for long. The climate is expected to change because of the forest fires.
“You had forest fires?”
“You do not know about the terrible fires here? Do you not get the news?”
“We get too much news in America. It’s hard to keep track of everything. Tell me,” I insisted as the waiter brought over another carafe.
“OK. So this is a Mafia story. I know you Americans love those. And, also, a story of things being lit on fire like they do in your city. Get yourself ready. The government is always saying that they are cracking down on the Cosa Nostra, but the Mafia here is in our DNA. It is a parallel state. It exists in every level of Italian bureaucracy. But the government and the police say they are fighting it. A lot of the big bosses went to prison. A lot of government contracts with firms owned by the Cosa Nostra were canceled. So a few years ago the bosses got into a new business. Forestry,” Giusy explained.
“Forestry?”
“Replanting forests, growing trees. The problem was that no forests needed any replanting.”
“Seems like a crappy business plan.”
“It was. Until they burned them down.”
“The forests?”
“The national forest, nearly the entire thing. The Cosa Nostra burned down all of the trees in the Madonie Mountains so the government would pay them to replant them.”
“How long ago was this?” I assumed it was at least many decades.
“It just happened. But that’s not the worst thing. Who cares about a few trees? They’ll grow back.” Giusy had a twinkle in her eye and I could tell she was excited to tell me the part that came next, the worst thing. “It is how they did it.”
“How?” I took a sip of my wine and remembered how jazzed Rosie used to get over the punch line to a good story. She would have thought Giusy was a real trip.
“Cats. They greased up stray cats in kerosene, lit a long fuse on their tails, and sent them into the woods.”
The wine ejected out of my nose and onto the table.
