Free Defiance by Tom Behan

other, playing football on a piece of waste ground by pushing two sticks into the ground and fixing a fishing net between them. In any event, as his mother adds in a masterful piece of understatement: ‘in fact he grew up different’. Giovanni, the third son who was born a couple of years later (and named after the child who had died), many years later defined his elder brother Peppino in the following terms: ‘For this culture, Peppino’s break with his family was a historical turning point.’
    Peppino came under the influence of his uncle Matteo, who was a clerk at the council and therefore relatively well educated. He saw that Peppino had a talent for studying and he encouraged him to go further and paid for his schoolbooks. When Peppino was a teenager Matteo took him to his first meetings of the Italian Communist Party.
    Peppino’s rebellious spirit began to emerge when he went to high school in the nearby town of Partinico. His mother remembers the day he handed in a Latin essay:
    the teacher made a correction because according to her he’d made a mistake, but Peppino said ‘There’s no mistake here!’ In other words they started arguing and she told him: ‘You blackguard, go and sit down!’ As soon as he could, he got hold of a dictionary to find out what the word meant, and all hell broke loose when he got home. My brother went and spoke with the headmaster: Peppino was in the right, he hadn’t made a mistake and to top it all she had insulted him!
    Meanwhile, his father only saw him occasionally, and essentially just tried to show off his first-born to his Mafia friends. To be shunted around by a distant father like some kind of trophy must have been irritating for any adolescent, but given that he was growing up outside his father’s influence, the gap could only grow wider over time.
    Back at the family home, Felicia Bartolotta remembers: ‘My husband would tell me nothing. I had to work everything out for myself.’ It wouldn’t have taken much to work out why the police would often call asking to question Luigi, who habitually hid himself inside a large family chest down in the basement. Felicia started to show the first signs of being a free spirit: ‘my mother had taught me about the Mafia’, and made it very clear to her husband that her family would not be a Mafia family: ‘so I told him – “I don’t want people who are on the run staying in my house”. And my husband answered – “well, what if he’s a friend of mine . . .?” “I don’t care, I wouldn’t even care if it was my dad.” I’ve never taken anyone in.’
    The problem was that the Mafia was all around her, and in a town like Cinisi there is no wall that can be built to keep it out of sight and out of contact. Not only was Felicia living with a low-level Mafioso , she was closely related to the town boss, Cesare Manzella. She could maybe hold the line with her husband, but not with her brother-in-law. Despite all that happened in between, looking back many years later Felicia said this about Cesare Manzella: ‘He used to come visiting and was very kind . . . I can’t speak badly of him.’
    One day Felicia found out that Luigi was having an affair with a neighbour and moved back in with her mother, taking Giovanni with her. But Cesare Manzella came and spoke to her, using the coded language typical of a Mafioso : ‘Well, you know how things are.’ He also went to speak to her brother Matteo, who was looking after Peppino. Afterwards Matteo advised his sister: ‘Look, Felicia, move back because there’s nothing else you can do.’ In order to keep a lid on things and avoid any public scandal, Manzella then gave some money to the woman involved in the affair in order to keep her quiet. As Felicia says in her colourful Sicilian: ‘your blood remains dirty, you’re sick to your stomach’.
    It was also in the day-to-day etiquette of showing respect to your relatives and friends that Felicia was unable to keep the