Tina, Mafia Soldier - Softcover

Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa

 
9781641294638: Tina, Mafia Soldier
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1641294639 ISBN 13: 9781641294638
Verlag: Soho Crime, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A classic of Italian feminist mafia literature about a gender-bending mafiosa and the writer who becomes obsessed with telling her story

Sicily, 1980s: When she was just eight years old, Tina watched as her father, a member of Cosa Nostra, was murdered in cold blood. Now a teenager, she terrorizes her hometown of Gela, having made it her mission to join the mafia, an organization traditionally forbidden to women as made members. Nicknamed ’a masculidda, or “the tomboy,” Tina has taken charge of her own gang, and is notorious for her cruelty and reckless disregard for societal expectations.
 
When a news article is published about Tina’s latest crimes, a teacher living in Rome feels compelled to write a novel about her—even though it means returning to her native Sicily to gather material. She and Tina circle around each other in a dangerous dance of obsession and violence until their first, and last, explosive meeting.
 
This groundbreaking exploration of gender identity and clear-eyed presentation of an unseen side of the mafia is a landmark literary achievement by one of Italy’s feminist icons.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Maria Rosa Cutrufelli was born in Messina, Sicily and raised shuttling back and forth between Sicily and Bologna; she now resides in Rome. A major figure in Italian feminist movements, she boasts a long, prolific career as a journalist, cultural critic, and novelist. After earning her degree in Literature from the University of Bologna, she founded and directed the journal Tuttestorie. She also authored several works of travel literature, largely devoted to Africa, where she lived for three years. Her works have been translated into some twenty languages.


Robin Pickering-Iazzi is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Among her published works in translation are the novel Suspicion by Laura Grimaldi, Unspeakable Women: Selected Short Stories Written by Italian Women during Fascism, and the widely acclaimed Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature.

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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 the horizon. They spewed a persistent, invasive smell that announced the approach to Gela while it was still hidden from view many kilometers off in the distance.
     But in the face of the wide opening of the future, what did it matter, that smell of rotten eggs that stung people’s eyes and burned their throats? Petrolchimico’s flames promised work and a comfortable life, while the flames of the Mountain on the island’s other shore offered only earthquake tremors and storms of lava grit.
     Gela still lived on fishing—though little—and raising cotton and tomatoes, cultivating its great, sunny plain, the “Geloi fields,” the Roman Empire’s breadbasket. Thirty-five thousand inhabitants holed up around the piazzas and the few kilometers of the main street, which bore the name of Vittorio Emanuele. A custom. An homage. A name that is repeated with regular monotony across the entire island. A street named Vittorio Emanuele runs from one end to the other of towns barricaded between the mountains or sloping down toward the sea. The alternatives are few: Corso Umberto I, Corso Principe di Piemonte, Via Garibaldi, Via Roma. If nothing else, the Unification of Italy locked the islanders’ toponymic imagination in the rhythm of obsessive celebration.
 
By the beginning of the seventies, Gela’s population had already doubled. Petrolchimico’s settlement had brought work: twenty thousand jobs promised or dreamed up, two thousand five hundred actual plant jobs in 1970 and an indeterminable number of related jobs. Young couples or single males attracted by the miracle of industrialization and the salaries (“northern” salaries, people said, to indicate the considerably high pay) flowed in from every ridge like thawing river waters. A hunger for the good life exploded, a voracious consumption, a desire for revenge for the eternal abomination of poverty. At that time, Gela wasn’t a mafia city.
     Of course in those days, there were people throughout Sicily and Italy and the world who could say: The mafia doesn’t exist. Because you saw the blood, but not the men. The men stayed invisible, cloaked in their silence.
     But Gela wasn’t a mafia city. It wasn’t completely devoid of mafiosi, but there were just a few, small stuff, enough to not belie local folklore.
     The town and the Villaggio still faced each other, distant and alien. The Petrolchimico employees, who were the inhabitants of the Villaggio, could go to work and return home without passing through Gela. They could tranquilly ignore the town, live in a kind of suspension, an island in the island. But it was perhaps only the comparison between the two realities that made the protected life in the Villaggio enviable.
     Back then, in the 1970s, I lived in the historic part of the city, in a house—not old, but already in disrepair—near the seashore promenade. A place to land, a needed break. When I was a little girl they had taken me away from Sicily, and I wanted to return to Sicily during that time of passage from the life of...

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Verlag
Soho Crime
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1641294639
ISBN 13 
9781641294638
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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Pärnu mnt. 139b-14
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