Gomorrah

  “Nico’s going to live here now. In this country. In his father’s country.”

  I don’t know why, but the little boy turned sad and dropped his ball. I managed to stop it with my foot before it was lost forever in the crowd.

  All of a sudden the smell of salt mixed with dust, cement, and trash came back to me. A damp smell. It reminded me of when I was twelve years old and was at the shore at Pinetamare. I had just woken up when my father came into my room. Probably a Sunday morning. “Do you realize that your cousin already knows how to shoot? And what about you? Are you less than him?”

  He took me to Coppola Village on the coast between Naples and Caserta. The beach was an abandoned mine of tools devoured by sea salt and caked in calcium crust. I could have dug around there for days, unearthing trowels, gloves, worn-out shoes, and broken hoes, but I hadn’t been brought there to play in the trash. My father walked around looking for targets, preferably glass. Peroni beer bottles were his favorite. He lined them up on the roof of a burned-out Fiat 127— one of the many car carcasses in this field of burned and abandoned getaway cars. I can still remember my father’s Beretta 92FS. It was so covered in scratches it looked gray—an old lady of a pistol. I don’t know why, but everyone refers to it as an M9. I always hear it called that way: “I’ll put an M9 between your eyes. Do I have to take out my M9? Hell, I have to get myself an M9.” My father handed me the Beretta. It felt heavy. The butt was rough, like sandpaper, and stuck to my palm, its tiny teeth scratching my skin. My father showed me how to take the safety off, cock it, extend my arm, close my right eye, spot the target on the left, and fire.

  “Robbe’, your arm has to be loose but firm. Relaxed, but not flabby … use both hands.”

  I closed my eyes, hunched up my shoulders as if I were trying to cover my ears with them, and pulled the trigger as hard as I could with both my index fingers. Even today the noise of gunshots really bothers me. I must have a problem with my eardrums because I’m always half-deaf for a while afterward.

  The Coppolas, a powerful business family, built the largest illegal urban complex in the West on Pinetamare. Eight hundred sixty-three thousand square meters of cement: the Coppola Village. They did not ask for authorization. They didn’t need to. Around here construction bids and permits make production costs skyrocket because there are so many bureaucratic palms to grease. So the Coppolas went straight to the cement plants. One of the most beautiful maritime pine groves in the Mediterranean was replaced by tons of reinforced concrete. You could hear the sea from the buildings’ intercoms.

  When I hit the first target of my life, I felt a mixture of pride and guilt. I could shoot, I finally knew how to shoot. No one could hurt me anymore. But I had learned to use a horrendous instrument, one of those tools you can never stop using once you start. Like learning to ride a bicycle. The bottle hadn’t fully exploded; it was still upright, its right side disemboweled. My father headed back to the car, leaving me standing there, pistol in hand, but strangely I didn’t feel alone even though I was surrounded by trash and metal ghosts. I stretched out my arm toward the waves and fired two more shots. I didn’t see them hit and maybe they didn’t even reach the water. But it seemed courageous to fire on the sea. My father came back with a leather soccer ball with the face of Maradona on it. My reward for my good aim. Then, as always, he put his face close to mine. I could smell the coffee on his breath. He was satisfied: at least now his son was not less than his brother’s son. We performed the usual chant, his catechism:

  “Robbe’, what do you call a man who has a pistol and no college degree?”

  “A shit with a pistol.”

  “Good. What do you call a man with a college degree but no pistol?”

  “A shit with a degree.”

  “Good. What do you call a man with a degree and a pistol?”

  “A man, papà!”

  “Bravo, Robertino!”

  Nico was still learning to walk. My father spoke to him nonstop, but the little boy didn’t understand him. He was hearing Italian for the first time, even though his mother had been clever enough to give birth to him here.

  “Does he look like you, Roberto?”

  I studied him closely, and I was happy—for him, that is. He didn’t look like me at all.

  “Not in the least, lucky for him!”

  My father gave me his usual disappointed look, which seemed to say that I never said the right thing, not even when joking. I’ve always had the impression that my father was at war with someone. As if he were engaged in a battle of alliances, precautions, and big stakes. For my father, staying in a two-star hotel was like losing face. As if he had to give an account to an entity that would punish him harshly if he didn’t live in style, didn’t play the boss and the comic.

  “Robbe’, the best don’t need anybody. Sure they have to know, but they also have to make people afraid. If you don’t scare anyone, if nobody feels uneasy looking at you, well then, in the end you haven’t really succeeded.”

  It bothered him that when we went out to eat, the waiters would often serve certain people ahead of us, even if they’d come in an hour after us. The bosses would sit down and a few minutes later their lunch would be ready. My father would greet them, but deep down he would have liked to get the same respect. Respect that meant generating the same envy of power, the same fear, the same wealth.

  “You see them? They’re the ones who are really in command. They’re the ones who decide everything! Some people control words, and others control things. You have to figure out who controls things, while pretending to believe the ones who control the words. But inside you always have to know the truth. You only really command if you command things.” The commanders of things, as my father called them, were sitting at one of the tables. They had always decided the fate of this area. Now they were eating together, smiling, but over the years they slit each other’s throats, leaving thousands of deaths in their wake, like ideograms of their financial investments. The bosses knew how to remedy the insult of their being served first; they paid for everyone else’s lunch. But only on their way out, so as not to garner thanks or adulation. Everyone’s lunch except for two, that is. Professor Iannotto and his wife. The couple hadn’t said hello, so the bosses hadn’t dared to pay for them. But they had a waiter bring them a bottle of limoncello. A Camorrista knows to take care of his loyal enemies, who are always more valuable than his false friends. Whenever my father wanted to give me a negative example, he would bring up Professor Iannotto. They had been in school together. Iannotto lived in a rented apartment, had been kicked out of his political party, had no children, dressed poorly and was always in a rage. He taught high school, and I still remember him arguing with parents who asked him which of his friends they should hire to tutor their children so they would pass. To my father, Iannotto was a condemned man. One of the walking dead.

  “It’s like when one person decides to be a philosopher and one a doctor. Which of the two do you think is decisive in a person’s life?”

  “The doctor!”

  “Good. The doctor. Because you can decide about another person’s life. Decide whether or not to save them. You only do really good when you also have the ability to do bad. But if you’re a failure, a fool, a do-nothing, then you can only do good, but it’s just volunteer work, leftovers. Real good is when you choose to do it even though you could do bad instead.”

  I didn’t answer. I could never understand what he really wanted to prove to me. And I still don’t understand even now. Maybe that’s why I decided to major in philosophy, so I wouldn’t have to decide for anyone. As a young doctor in the 1980s my father had worked on an ambulance crew. Four hundred deaths a year. In areas with up to five murders a day. They’d pull up in the ambulance, the wounded on the ground, but if the police hadn’t arrived, they couldn’t load him onto the stretcher. Because if word got around, the killers would come back and track down the ambulance, stop it, climb in, and finish off the job. It had happened lot
s of times, so the doctors and nurses knew to stand by, to wait till the killers came back to complete the operation. But once my father’s ambulance was called to Giugliano, a big town between Naples and Caserta, part of the Mallardo fiefdom. They got to the scene quickly. The victim was eighteen, maybe younger. He’d been shot in the chest, but one of his ribs had deflected the bullet. The boy was gasping for breath, shouting, losing blood. The nurses were terrorized and tried to dissuade my father, but he loaded him into the ambulance anyway. Clearly, the killers hadn’t been able to get off a good shot; they had probably been sent running by a passing police patrol, but they’d be back for sure. The nurses tried to reassure my father: “Let’s wait, they’ll come back, finish the job, and then we’ll take him in.”

  But my father couldn’t wait. There is a time for all things, even death. And eighteen didn’t seem to him the time to die, not even for a Camorra soldier. My father got him in the ambulance and took him to the hospital. The boy survived. That night the killers who hadn’t hit their target dead on went to his house—to my father’s house. I wasn’t there, I was living with my mother, but I’ve been told the story so many times, always broken off in the same place, that I remember it as if I had been there and had witnessed the whole thing. My father, I believe, was beaten bloody and didn’t show his face for at least two months. And for four months after that he still couldn’t bring himself to look anyone in the eye. Choosing to save someone who is supposed to die means you want to share his fate, desire alone isn’t enough to change anything around here. A decision is not what will get you out of trouble, and taking a stand or making a choice won’t make you feel you’re acting in the best way possible. Whatever you do, it will be wrong for some reason. This is true solitude.

  Little Nico was laughing again. Micaela is more or less my age. The same thing probably happened to her when she told people she was leaving, going to Italy; they probably wished her well without asking anything, without knowing if she was going off to become a prostitute, a wife, a maid, or a factory worker. Without knowing anything more than that she was leaving. That was good fortune enough. But Nico was obviously not thinking anything, his mouth clamped to yet another fruit shake his mother had given him to fatten him up. To make it easier for him to drink, my father set the ball down near his feet, but Nico kicked it away with all his might, sending it bouncing off people’s shins and shoes. My father ran to retrieve it. Knowing Nico was watching, he humorously pretended to dribble past a nun, but the ball got away from him. The little boy laughed. Maybe the hundreds of ankles that spread out before his eyes made him feel he was in a forest of legs and sandals. He liked seeing his father—our father—tire himself out chasing that ball. I raised my arm to say goodbye to him, but a wall of flesh had come between us. He would be trapped for a good half hour; there was no point in waiting. It was really late. I couldn’t even make out his silhouette anymore; it had been swallowed into the stomach of the crowd.

  Mariano did get to meet Mikhail Kalashnikov. He spent a month traveling around Eastern Europe. Russia, Romania, Moldavia: a reward from the clan. I saw him again in the usual bar, the bar in Casal di Principe. Mariano had a stack of photographs bound with a rubber band, like baseball cards for trading. Autographed pictures. Before coming home he had hundreds of copies printed up of Mikhail Kalashnikov wearing his Red Army uniform, his chest dripping with medals: the Order of Lenin, the medal of honor from the Great Patriotic War, the Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. Mariano was introduced to the general through some Russians who did business with the Caserta clans.

  Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov lived with his wife in a rented apartment in Izhevsk, formerly Ustinov, a city at the foot of the Ural Mountains, which didn’t even appear on the map until 1991. One of the many locations the USSR had kept secret. Kalashnikov was the town’s big draw. He had become a sort of tourist attraction for elite visitors, so they set up a direct connection from Moscow just for him. A hotel near his house, which is where Mariano had stayed, was making a mint putting up the general’s admirers, who would wait there for him to return from some Russian tour or simply for him to receive them. Mariano had his video camera in hand when he entered Kalashnikov’s house, and the general had allowed him to use it as long as he didn’t make the film public. Obviously Mariano agreed, knowing full well that the person who had arranged the meeting knew his address, phone number, and face. Mariano gave Kalashnikov a Styrofoam cube sealed with tape with buffalo heads on it. He had brought a box full of mozzarella di bufala all the way from the Aversa Marshes in the trunk of his car.

  Mariano showed me the video of his visit to Kalashnikov’s home on the little screen that folded out from the side of his camera. The images jumped around, and the zoom action deformed eyes and objects, the lens rattled by thumbs and wrists. It was like a video from a school trip, filmed while running and jumping. Kalashnikov’s house resembled Arzano secessionist boss Gennaro Marino McKay’s dacha, or maybe it was simply a classic version, but the only other dacha I had ever seen was his, so it looked like a replica to me. The walls were plastered with Vermeer reproductions, the furniture was laden with crystal and wooden knickknacks, and every inch of the floor was covered with carpets. At a certain point the general placed his hand over the lens. Mariano told me that, traipsing around with his camera and a huge dose of bad manners, he had gone into a room that Kalashnikov didn’t want filmed under any circumstances. In a small metal cabinet on the wall, clearly visible through the armored glass, was the first AK-47, the prototype built from the designs that, according to legend, the old general—then an unknown, low-ranking officer—had made on scraps of paper while in the hospital recovering from a bullet wound and eager to create a weapon that would make the Red Army’s frozen and starving soldiers invincible. The first ever AK-47, hidden away like the first dime earned by Uncle Scrooge McDuck, the famous Number One he keeps in an armored shrine, far from the clutches of Magica De Spell. It was priceless, that model. A lot of people would have given anything for a military relic like that. As soon as Kalashnikov dies, it will end up on the auction block at Christie’s, like Titian’s canvases or Michelangelo’s drawings.

  Mariano spent the entire morning at Kalashnikov’s house. The Russian who introduced him must have been quite influential for the general to treat him so warmly. The video camera was running as they sat at the table and a tiny, elderly lady opened the Styrofoam box of mozzarella. They ate with relish. Vodka and mozzarella. Mariano wanted to record it all, so he set the camera at the head of the table. He wanted proof that General Kalashnikov ate the mozzarella from his boss’s dairy. In the background the lens also captured a piece of furniture covered with framed photos of children. Even though I wanted the video to end as soon as possible as I was already feeling seasick, I couldn’t contain my curiosity:

  “Mariano, Kalashnikov has that many children and grandchildren?”

  “They’re not his children! They’re all photos people send him of children named after him, people whose lives were saved by a Kalashnikov or who simply admire him.”

  Like doctors who put pictures of children they have treated on their office shelves as mementos of their professional success, General Kalashnikov had photographs of children named after his creature in his living room. A well-known guerrilla fighter with the Popular Liberation Movement in Angola once told an Italian reporter, “I named my son Kalash because it is synonymous with liberty.”

  Born in 1919, Kalashnikov is now a well-preserved, sprightly old man. He’s invited all over the place, a sort of movable icon that substitutes for the most famous assault rifle in the world. Before retiring from the armed services, he received a general’s stipend of 500 rubles, at the time more or less $500 a month. If Kalashnikov had been able to patent his weapon in the West, he would undoubtedly be one of the richest men in the world. Approximately—for lack of concrete figures—more than 150 million Kalashnikovs of varying models have been produced, all based on the gener
al’s original design. Even if he had only earned one dollar for each weapon, he would be swimming in money now. But this tragic loss of wealth did not bother him in the least. He had given birth to the creature, had breathed life into it, and that was gratification enough. Or maybe he made a profit after all. Mariano told me about presents arriving every now and then from admirers: financial tributes, thousands of dollars deposited in his bank account, precious gifts from Africa—there was talk of a gold tribal mask from Mobutu and a canopy inlaid with ivory that Bokassa had sent him. And it is said that a train, complete with locomotive and cars, arrived from China, a gift from Deng Xiaoping, who knew of the general’s difficulty in boarding airplanes. But these are merely legends, rumors that circulate among journalists who, unable to interview the general—he receives no one without an important introduction—talk instead to the employees in the arms factory in Izhevsk.