With the Mafia to Mars

He lost sight of the Sicilian sea as the taxi drove into the clouds.

He stopped at the edge of a small parking area, right next to a bus.

The taxi driver told him to get out.

There was not a single hotel or apartment in the neighbourhood and in unintelligible Italian, he was told that he had to wait there for a couple of minutes and that something or someone would come to pick him up.

Things went exactly as planned : almost down to the minute, another Italian guy picked him up, drove through a medieval gate and made his way through a jumble of cobbled alleyways to eventually drop him in front of a big gate.

Because of the thick fog, every attempt to orientate himself was futile.

Like a blind man he let himself be led to a newly rebuilt apartment within the gates of the Villa San Martino.

Michael Corleone was invited as a guest of honour and sponsor of the congress on  proton therapy and cosmic radiation (“Hadrons in Therapy and Space”) that was to be held in the small Sicilian town Erice.

Dr. Marco Durante, an Italian physicist who lived in Darmstadt, had taken the initiative to invite an international group of radiotherapists and physicists to debate on the clinical effects of proton therapy and the consequences of exposure to cosmic radiation during space flight.

Erice was believed to have been founded some seven centuries before Christ by exiles from Troy. Since then it had been part of the Hellenistic civilisation, incorporated into the Roman Empire, ruled by the Vandals, briefly besieged by Muslims and for a long time controlled by the Norman monarchs.

The town was located high on top of the Monte San Giuliano in the westernmost part of Sicily, with the port town Trapani at its feet.

Over the years Erice had grown to be a mainly medieval museum with numerous gothic churches, castles at the outskirts of town and a touristic variety of restaurants, shops and small hotels intricately woven in between.

In August 1982, Antonino Zichichi, whose brother was cardinal to the pope, had established a cultural-historical foundation in Erice that, within the walls of a renovated monastery, hosted many international congresses.

The mission of the so-called “Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture” was to facilitate top research in a transparent manner and with a view to promoting peace, not for instance on the use of technology for nuclear warfare.

It was at this sacred place that Marco Durante had invited Michael to give a lecture on “Crime and punishment in a cosmic dimension”.

After the murder of his daughter, Michael Corleone had fallen in a deep depression. During his young years as a talented “college boy”, he had at one point decided to break away from his Mafia family.

The assassination of his brother and the assault on his father however shaped him into the new Godfather he ultimately became.

Some considered him to be even more ruthless than his father, especially after he had his brother drowned.

His wife, Kay, had been banished from the family and just as, at the time, his father had always had ambitious plans for him, Michael had gone to great lengths to secure a legitimate, Mafia-free future for his daughter.

Before her death and before she fell in love with Vincent Mancini, tipped by many as his successor - he had already attempted to put his Mafia past behind him and earn indulgences from the Catholic church through acts of charity.

However, he soon recognised the world of money, power and corruption he had grown accustomed to.

But why did he come to Sicily, his father’s homeland? What was he looking for?

The day before, he had spent the night in Castellamare Del Golfo, the eagle’s nest of the Mafia, where just decades ago eighty per cent of the men had been in prison at some point.

There was nothing to suggest that this rustic harbour had once been the centre of drug smuggling and organised crime.

The dilapidated fishing boats had in the meantime been edged out by luxury yachts and pleasure boats that lined the harbour up to the jetty.

The pastel-coloured town was nestled against the hills that embraced the bay like a patchwork quilt.

Was the Mafia invisible or non-existent here?

After the attacks on judge Falcone and Paolo Borsellino (the magistrate who worked with him) in 1992, several of the Mafia’s notorious leaders like Toto Riina (1995) and Bernardo Provensano (2005) were arrested, but as a couple of months ago the pope found it necessary to disprove that the church had ever shown any clemency towards the Mafia, this was a sign that the Mafia had not yet been completely eradicated.

Or maybe ‘mafia’ just happened to be an Italian word for abuse of power, corruption and merciless clanship, which can also be found in other (all) countries and cultures.

Where lies the difference between the Mafia and the Marxist dictatorship in North Korea, the Syrian regime of Assad, the fascist dictatorships of the Second World War and, on the other hand, revolutionary groups like the Shining Path, IS or the Rwandan death squads of ’94?

Where does one draw the line between corruption and the white-collar crime that is affecting our Western top democracies?

The old godfather let his thoughts drift to his Sicilian wife, Appolinia Vitelli.

He then paid a visit to the old town Segesta, which was founded more than 6 centuries before Christ by the Elymians who later mixed with the Greek-Ionic population.

The city had been in eternal conflict with Selinunte and had sought aid from the Greek and later Carthage.

In 260 before Christ the city surrendered to the Romans and in the 5^th century after Christ, it was conquered and destroyed by the Vandals.

The temple of Segesta was a Greek, Doric-style sanctuary that was never actually finished. It was built around 430-420 BC by the Elymian people on a hill just outside the ancient city of Segesta and was a reference point in the panorama of the city, which was built on top of the hill.

Today the temple is one of most important and best preserved Greek temples in the world.

This is where, during his Sicilian exile, Michael and Apollonia ran up to the top of the mountain, to the amphitheatre, where he proclaimed a new future for themselves and the child she carried in her womb.

This time, the trip to the lost city of Segesta was ‘breath-taking’, too sweaty, with too little air.

He stood there, startled, as he found himself all alone in an empty theatre. 

He saw death and remained silent.

After lunch in Erice, that was completely ruined, with black pasta and messed-up fish, he decided to explore the city.

The Castello di Venere reminded of Norman times and did in no way reveal that it was built on the remains of the temple of Venus Erycina.

The misty whiffs, rising from the valley to over the merlons of faded power, mixed with the nervous impulses somewhere between his hippocampus and his limbic system, the brain regions involved in memory and emotions.

Slowly the sky began to open up and from the Piazza Grammatico one could admire the view of Trapani, the peninsula with its narrow, curving shape (Trepanon is Greek for “sickle”) that used to serve as the harbour of Erice.

With the cable car one could smoothly glide down the mountain, cross the city and take the boat to the Egadi islands, Favignana, Lévanzo and Maréttimo.

Although you could hardly get lost in a city the size of a postage stamp with three corners, Michael had the impression he was running around in circles through the small Paris Roubaix alleys.

Two Koppenbergs  and a Patersberg later he felt lightheaded, as if his cortical pathways were exchanging impulses criss-cross.

He sought comfort in one of the medieval churches, where he lit two candles. He didn’t really know why he lit two, it just seemed to fill him with a feeling of solidarity, a feeling he had lost years ago.

In this medieval town he felt walled in, oppressed, and he was glad that the organisation hosting the congress invited him for diner in Marsala, a town at a one hour’s drive from Erice.

He was dropped off in one of the side streets of the Piazza della Republica, at a restaurant, where a pretty Sicilian waitress showed him to a plastic chair that fit in perfectly with the hypermodern interior.

He couldn’t figure out the menu which included tradizionale bottega, kebrilla grillo fina and cappiddruzzi con ricotta.

But accompanied by a white Marsala wine and a light-blond donna servanta, the meal briefly took him back to his time in seventh heaven with Apollonia and his daughter.

That night he dreamt he was lost in an apocalyptic maze of rocks not far from the sea.

At some places crevices had formed, through which light carefully penetrated and pierced the dark, just enough for his retina to capture the grey coldness of the rock formations.

He heard Kay’s and Fredo’s voices echo and a bit further along the coast near the Cala Rossa it seemed as if shredded bodies had slid off the hollowed-out rock face.

He had breakfast with the Cern crew, the Nasa boys and the radiation oncologists in the best bakery of Sicily, where he had to choose from 3 long rows of exotic pastries.

During the session that followed, he was profusely thanked for his presence and financial support of the project, after which Marco Durante offered him a local specialty.

He then witnessed a lively discussion between space specialists and radiation-oncologists.

The physicians were amazed by the amount of radioactivity humans are exposed to during space travel and could not believe that the cancer incidence among astronauts in the long term had risen by only a few percentages.

 “Obviously we can speak of a mega bias here”, a Belgian physician argued, “Medical selection standards for astronauts are so strict that you cannot simply compare them to an average population sample.”

Nasa was looking for a volunteer that would be willing to sacrifice at least one year of his life to set foot on Mars and hopefully not immediately succumb to a massive dose of radioactive radiation.

Michael Corleone, who had dozed off to the sound of the unintelligible scientific babble, woke up with a start.

 “A new life”, he thought, “a brand new life, miles away from here, where no one knows me, on a planet with no past, close to the sun”.

“I volunteer”, he shouted, “I am the best qualified person, I survive anything. Just check my curriculum vitae. And I will sponsor the entire trip.”

The whole room looked at the old Mafia boss with astonishment.

 “An offer you can’t refuse”, they thought in unison.