There was a sort of malaise in the air in Syracuse, on the afternoon of May 23, 1992. An indefinable sensation that seemed to shake the air and alter the atmosphere of that afternoon. But we pupils of a class of the Ximenes classical high school in Trapani, who came to attend the performances of classical tragedies, barely perceived it: we were on a school trip, too busy munching on chips and playing pranks. We already smelled the scent of summer after a school year stingy with satisfactions. Nothing could have upset our desire to have fun.
The memory of those moments seems shattered, like a paper exposed to fire which, however, did not have time to burn completely. Among the marbles of the theater which turned pink in the light of the sunset, we saw our professors getting nervous; then we noticed other spectators getting up, dark-faced, hurrying off at the end of the show. Soon after, the rumor spread that there had been a very serious accident on the motorway near Palermo: a landslide, or perhaps a collapse in one of the tunnels outside the city, immediately after Capaci had destroyed a piece of the motorway. I walked next to Salvo, my best friend. We walked quickly, with our heads down, wondering what could have really happened.
When we got to the bus that was supposed to take us back to Trapani, “the” word arrived. The real one. The right one.
Attack.
It was the bus driver who told us that a section of the highway had blown up and that it was a bomb. “They killed in iddo, in Falcone,” he said in a shocked tone, running his hands through his hair. “And not only that: they say that there are other dead. They made us take a flight like the little ones of Pizzolungo”.
We immediately remembered Barbara Asta and her children blown up in Pizzolungo, a short distance from Trapani: their car had stood in the way of that of judge Carlo Palermo and the car bomb that was supposed to kill the judge, instead, had blown up. in the air the woman with her six-year-old children. Shortly before, there had been Gian Giacomo Ciaccio Montalto in Valderice, killed by gunshots in his car; and then again, Mauro Rostagno, killed in Lenzi.
For us the mafia was the darkness behind the closed door, the word that is not said, the look that turns away. It was silence for quiet living.
Personally, I had read the news about the maxi trial in the newspapers and I had read “Cose di Cosa Nostra”, the book that Giovanni Falcone had written together with Marcelle Padovani. I sensed that there was an opaque world that little or nothing was known about, and too many things were different from how they were told. But they were the naïve thoughts of a teenager who listened to Queen and dreamed of writing her novels.
I had the opportunity to reflect for a long time during the journey that brought us back to Trapani. I listened to the news on the radio. The reporters told of a disaster that we could hardly imagine. How could we have thought that the highway we had passed that morning no longer existed, and that there was a crater in its place? In the yellow light of the bus, I scrutinized the faces of my companions and sensed an inexplicable strangeness. I didn’t know how to give emotions a body of words, because terror was what I felt, and I was totally unprepared to face such a violent feeling. It was overwhelming fear.
From that May afternoon, the mafia no longer had the inconsistency of a toxic gas: it was strong, powerful, real. If Falcone had died, the judge that many young people of my generation had seen as a symbol, who would have protected us? Who would have been our point of reference? Who would allow us to be carefree and free?
I really understood the enormity of what had happened the next morning when, still immersed in a torpor dictated by little sleep and shock, I saw for the first time the images of the site of the attack. There were the cars submerged in debris and the policemen wandering through the rubble, incredulous for what had happened. There was a phrase that could be heard clearly amid the din of helicopters circling the highway. “And what did they give us, the atomic bomb?”
In the days following the attack, I shut myself up in stunned silence. What will become of us? I was wondering. We all wondered, in truth, without having the courage to say it aloud. I had only one, dramatic certainty: the mafia had proved to be the real mistress of the territory. The power of the Italian Republic had been wiped out by hundreds of kilos of TNT.
In those days I often found myself thinking of Paolo Borsellino, whom I had met during a round table on the Mafia a few years earlier. In his words full of firmness and calm I found consolation. He reassured me to know that he was there, and I found strength in the generous and concrete humanity that he showed during the interviews.
Not even two months had passed since the attack on the highway that blew him up too.
Even that Sunday afternoon remained engraved in my memory: I had spent it at the seaside with my friends. School was over: my senior year was waiting for me, and then university. I still did not know which faculty I would choose: I had many fears, perhaps I was also afraid of making a wrong choice.
When I got home, I found my father in front of the television in the study and my mother beside him hissing “damned wretches”. On the screen, the images of a new explosion: the smoke, the crumpled cars, and again, the helicopters in the sky of Palermo and the excited voices of the reporters.
I stayed until late at night looking at the images of via D’Amelio. My skin was still dirty with salt and sand but I couldn’t move. Sicily would remain an unfortunate and mute land, where the slain dead were defined as heroes in public, but called mad or worse, deluded in private.
“It’s all over”. This was said by Antonino Caponnetto, who had directed the Antimafia pool and who had had a relationship of esteem and affection with Falcone and Borsellino. I thought so too. We all thought so.
In those days that I realized that the former life was no longer there and could no longer be otherwise. After the anger and dismay came the pride for me and for many, many Sicilians: if we had not reacted after such violence, we would have no longer had any freedom. And no, it would not be only the fault of an absent or worse, hostile state: the fault would have been ours, of our cowardly indifference, of the inability to take responsibility each for his own part. Because freedom must be deserved, and must be held tight, and fight to defend it. True, more massacres would come, more deaths. Don Pino Puglisi would have died, there would have been the arrests of Riina, Brusca, Bagarella, of the Graviano brothers. But we would have been different.
Telling these things today may seem repetitive or worse, rhetorical. But this is how the memory is preserved: by telling what those days were. Self-awareness is achieved by proceeding by trial and error, through the fear of making mistakes and the courage to get involved in the first person. Here: what happened in the summer of 1992 has had a decisive influence on the life choices of my generation. But not only that: it has changed the way people talk about the mafia
If I look back, I realize that I have changed dramatically in that period. In the summer of 1992 I chose the university faculty: Law. A choice made with passion, which I would repeat a thousand and a thousand times. And today, as a teacher, I find myself working in a school that by chance – or maybe not – bears the name of Paolo Borsellino. And that’s something I’m very proud and proud of.