Autoritratto

Davide Enia

I have no memory of 23 May 1992. I do not remember where I was, with whom, or how and where I first learned of the bombing on the motorway that killed Judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife, and several members of his escort. My relatives, friends, and comrades all have a clear recollection of that day. I have a void that cannot be filled. My psychological defences have produced a form of repression that is as deep as it is painful. But is not repression one of the effects of neurosis?

In Sicily, practically all of us had — at least until the massacres — a purely neurotic relationship with Cosa Nostra. This relates to a shared collective consciousness, to everyday practices, to thousand-year-old structures of thought. For various reasons, the Mafia has been downplayed, underestimated, trivialised, removed, or, conversely, mythologised. In other words: it has never been addressed for what it is. And this blurring of the object of study has been accompanied by an unconscious introjection of the same patterns of behaviour, practices, and emotional responses.

A glance lingering on a detail — an “aggàddo” — can be enough for a fight to break out in Palermo. A father who forces his son to enrol in a specific university faculty reproduces the logic of the patriarch who must be obeyed. The difficulty of naming desire, and the resulting surrender to the dictatorship of silence, allows the logic of Power to assert itself and strike with greater ease.

One of the problems we have with Cosa Nostra is that, in a painful and disconcerting way, the Mafia sometimes mirrors our family life, our decision-making and operational processes, our way of observing the world and understanding relationships, even our relationship with religion. These processes operate at an unconscious level, and it is precisely within our shared linguistic foundation that they first leave emotional scars.

In a cultural context where “a megghiu parola è chìdda ca 'un si dice” — the best word is the one left unspoken — which constitutes the first threshold of “omertà”, confronting Cosa Nostra also means beginning a process of self-analysis. It is therefore not so much about understanding the Mafia itself, but about understanding the Mafia within me. This assumption establishes a necessary biographical framework for the construction of the text.

In Palermo, we all have very few degrees of separation from Cosa Nostra. I saw my first murdered person at the age of eight, on my way home from school. I knew Judge Borsellino; he lived opposite our house, and I grew up playing football with his son. Father Pino Puglisi, the priest killed by the Mafia, was my high school religious education teacher. Like me, my friends, classmates, and fellow citizens have all had direct contact with the Mafia. We all carry a constellation of mourning, in which the stars are people killed by Cosa Nostra.

This is a constant for the people in Palermo: a pervasive sense of danger.
Neurosis is inscribed in our very horizon of experience.

The performance focuses on a specific case, a true watershed in collective consciousness: the kidnapping and murder of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the young son of a justice collaborator, held captive for 778 days in appalling conditions and ultimately killed by strangulation before his body was dissolved in acid. An inhuman story that reveals evil in its most absolute form, sacred in its darkest declination. We are confronted with horror, with boundless brutality, with a sequence of acts so abject as to defy description. And over it all vibrates the sacrifice of an innocent victim. The verticality of the story contains all the elements of tragedy, especially in the formulation of questions that cannot be answered.

The linguistic tools available to address this work are those that theatrical language has built in my Palermo: the body, song, dialect, puppetry, acting, the “cunto”. It is within this circumscribed language that this linguistic problem must be confronted, dissected, questioned, resolved.

This new work is a tragedy, a civic oration, a process of personal and collective self-analysis, a confrontation with the State, a series of questions addressed to God himself. Therefore, it is at once an intimate and collective self-portrait.

Davide Enia