Their relationship did not feed on subordination; fuel was a professional project, even a metaphysical-romantic one, that of being able to transform the country with the instrument of law. Giovanni Falcone and Francesca Morvillo they were united by the mortar of this boundless dream. Can you share life with a man obsessed with reading judicial documents if you don’t love them too? Can you, in turn, be loved by a man when you spend most of your time studying, analyzing, underlining with lapis and at lunch and dinner you talk about codes and procedures and, even when you’re joking, you mention procedural events? The adage of opposites that attract each other is suggestive, but in reality the magnet loves end up functional badly, to tolerate each other, to understand each other the most.
Here, however, we were on the same side: a wonderful and above all rare thing. And I keep asking myself: how did they resist? I have always been interested in the intimacy of the people I have chosen to choose as a guide; intimate, not private: there is a big difference. The intimate is the space where you move away from the public, it is there that the crucial choices mature, that you find the deepest pain, uncontrolled happiness. Observing the intimate is following the path of choices, of reasons; the intimate is the place where everything matured before it happened. The intimate, that space in which Pannella writes “you want to be honest and truly understood”. And the underwear is opposed to the private individual who instead is spying on the lock, finding the rough detail, sticking the nose. Private individuals are interested in file dealers, blackmailers, and those who want to know their first feelings.
Francesca Morvillo and Giovanni Falcone
The daily life of Francesca and Giovanni was made of sieges, of continuous attacks, of attempts to boycott their serenity. Interviews against, colleagues who attacked out of envy pretending to give critical substance to their accusations: but how did they keep their nerves steady? Not to shout at each other just for relief? Not to doubt each other? I have always wondered how it is possible to love in inhuman conditions, yet it happens, we love each other. In 1978 Falcone arrives in Palermo, his first marriage is in pieces and who knows how much responsibility in this epilogue counted the tensions that he experienced in Trapani. In Palermo he was called by Rocco Chinnici, who arrived to take the legacy of the judge Cesare Terranova killed by Cosa Nostra, went to the Education Office of the penal section. In the same year he met Francesca Morvillo during a dinner in Salemi. Somewhere I remember reading that Francesca Morvillo realizes the courtship because Falcone does not stop wanting to make her laugh, takes care of her mood, sees her melancholy and wants to transform the mutria for heavy days into a smile. In 1980 he received the escort he would never lose again. But were the few moments of freedom enough for Francesca and Giovanni to feel their bodies? In Rome it happened that they managed to make short sorties without escort, just as abroad – in New York, Greece – they had no protection. And how did they act in those moments?
Could they feel somehow light, almost on vacation? Or were they uncomfortable because that was no longer going away? But how, you wonder, in the US where was Cosa Nostra or in Greece or in Rome at night (sometimes they went to the cinema unprotected, even the mobsters sent to the capital knew it) were they without escort? That’s right, because the mafias when they kill do it symbolically and at home. A murder thousands of miles away loses value. It does not shake the territory, it does not terrify it with the TNT, there are no witnesses who can report. But how can, I wonder, lead a normal life when everyone is observed and judged? And don’t make the mistake of believing that they were observed with devotion, with admiration, quite the opposite. They had even been asked to move away from the city because supplies disturbed the public peace. On the love between Francesca Morvillo and Giovanni Falcone I have always and only conjectured, if I could describe how, in my fantasy, I touch their figures when I imagine them together, I should mention the wadding. I even bother those who call them Francesca and Giovanni, a right that only those who knew them in life acquire, and who shared the good in life. They get married eight years after their first meeting. They get divorces, but for years gossip, delegitimization weighs on them: “Cut your beard, so they end it with the story of the communist judge” and “Bride Francesca, so they end it with the story of the judge with the lovers”.
And then there is the reality of blood. In 1982 they killed Calogero Zucchetto, in 1983 they killed Chinnici with a 127 filled with explosives and in 1985 they killed Beppe Montana and Ninni Cassarà. But how did Francesca and Giovanni manage to handle all this when they returned home? Two months before Falcone was killed – said Ilda Boccassini – in a meeting of the ANM, a magistrate took the floor and said: “Falcone is a political enemy”. Here, I wonder, can you really survive such a massacre? I imagine this: you become irascible, tense, you cannot collaborate with those around you. At home you can’t do anything other than think about what they are doing to you, what strategy to adopt, understand if there is a strategy or if what they are doing to you is too much bigger than you and you will end up succumbing. “Love that conquers everything” does not exist. Love is not a principle, it is everyday life, but if you cannot protect it from barbaric ruin like anything else. Needless to lie, an absurd life corresponds to an absurd relationship: loneliness, tension, incomprehension, suspicion, perhaps even disorder, melancholy, uneasiness. Love dies in these conditions, only its metaphysical aspect survives, the least necessary part.
How did Francesca and Giovanni manage not to fight constantly? To manage distant nights, the danger, the silent gossip that chased them? When did they accuse Falcone of procuring the Addaura bombing themselves, how did they react? Did they close in an embrace or, on the contrary, did they not touch each other, did they close in silence? Did they support each other for sleepless nights or did they say nothing like those who watch the fire burn together and there is no need to add anything to the flames? How damn can you survive when your colleagues and (self-styled) friends claim that you put a bomb on your career?
After the Addaura Falcone wanted to divorce Francesca to save her, to avoid that she was a target of the mafia, but not only does she understand that mud is now an ocean against him, she wants to save her from the liveliness of “respectable” people. They don’t break up, in the end they die together. The last minutes are the synthesis of tension and intimacy. Falcone is driving the armored car (since then the escorted people will not be able to drive the car, but at the time it was customary to do so), his driver Giuseppe Costanza is in the back seat. Francesca Morvillo suffers from a car sickness, so she climbs up in front of the passenger.
Francesca Morvillo’s letter to her husband Giovanni Falcone
Husband and wife are next to each other, like a normal couple going home. The car runs along the road from Punta Raisi to Palermo, Costanza asks Falcone to be able to have the house keys. It is more a reminder than a request, but Falcone, thoughtlessly, removes the keys from the dashboard to give them to him, a very dangerous gesture because the car turns off suddenly while it is at full speed, Falcone has time to apologize, it will be the last words, Brusca seeing the car slow down suddenly suspects that they have known something and activates the bomb earlier than expected. That gesture made by distraction, and perhaps because the mind was crowded with worries, saved Costanza’s life who was in the back seat because the car slowed down and the explosion did not take her in full. They crashed into a concrete and tar wall, the TNT had made the highway vertical. “Where’s Giovanni …” are Francesca’s last words, a policeman will pick them up while being transported to the hospital.
But the last words of their love reached us were others. Years later, Giovanni Paparcuri, a collaborator of Falcone who survived the attack on Rocco Chinnici, found them written on a white cardboard in a book that Francesca Morvillo had given to Giovanni Falcone. A thought full of delicate hope that betrays the fear that everything will end in an instant, but relies on the certainty that somewhere, in the part that pulsates gives rise to everything, what they have lived together will remain: «John, my love, you are the most beautiful thing in my life. You will always be inside me as I hope to remain alive in your heart, Francesca ».
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