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Mendoza, Wright and Carlotto
talk about the new mafias |
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| 14/12/2012 |
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In a snowy Courmayeur, Mexican writer Élmer Mendoza spoke about stories centered on a different kind of snow: cocaine. And the new mafias. The protagonist of his Cartel del Pacifico is Edgar Mendieta. “A 43-year-old man who,” according to the author, “still hasn’t worked out his emotional problems. Then the woman he loved, with whom he could never take the big step (essentially, marriage), is found dead. She was a very beautiful woman, I think we’re all destined to succumb to a very beautiful person - a woman, man or some third gender. Obviously, Edgar isn’t clear-headed during the investigation, he often makes mistakes, blinded by rage.”
The story is told in a highly person style: rapid-fire dialogue, a third-person voice that seems to precede events. Says the writer: “I’m very worried about style. A writer must have a style that identifies him. I’d like a reader to recognize me upon randomly opening my book on any page. I try and elaborate a unique form, not copied and impossible to copy, and then modify it each time, so that it’s always original. I work a lot on the tone, the pace, how the characters speak. This is why I pay a lot of attention to language, and how my books are translated.”
Evan Wright also wrote about the mafia, in the biography of American Desperado Jon Riccobono (real name: Jon Roberts), a Miami crime boss, FBI informer and friend of Jimi Hendrix and Manuel Noriega, who passed away from cancer last year. Wright is a journalist who has been to numerous war zones and has investigated American neo-Nazis. He says he always tries to withhold judgment, to let readers evaluate the moral value of the situations and characters he writes about.
“Jon was a strange character,” admits Wright. “I went to his home in Miami five times, for various months, over three years. He was a very thoughtful host: I once told him I liked blueberries and from the following day he made sure I had blueberries at breakfast every morning. But he could also take the dog of his nine-year-old son, a really heavy creature, and throw it against the wall because it had wet the floor. He was a very complex person, and he was a new mafioso. At the start of his career, back then the children of the bosses were beginning to deal drugs, but they kept it hidden from their parents who would never have accepted the situation. He stole from these people, who couldn’t get even with him, or else they’d have had to reveal themselves in the eyes of their parents. They say he inspired Scarface, but the character in De Palma’s film was very different. Jon wanted a world without arms and without violence. The crazy ones were very different. Like Albert San Pedro, for example, who is talked about in the book: cross-eyed, extremely violent.”
Jon Riccobono’s world is one without morals, or at least where a personal morality rules, exactly like Marseilles today, as depicted by Massimo Carlotto in his novel Respiro Corto.
“Starting this January, Marseilles will be the European Capital of Culture,” says Carlotto, “but right now it’s the capital of crime, with a corrupt and violent police force. Arrests of police officers are the order of the day: they just put 18 heads of the Anti-Crime Brigade in jail. The regional chief of police was arrested for sexual molestation. The Minister of the Interior of the Hollande administration spends more time in Marseilles than in Paris. The city is changing, many neighborhoods have to be reconstructed, many new neighborhoods are about to come up. The number of construction contracts is dizzying. But it’s also a highly politicized city, in which the National Front dominates, and with a violent war on drugs that is above all a social war, in which the residents of the northern neighborhoods open take the side of those we consider evil. A city in which the average age of a murder victim is 20. But it’s also a joyful city, in which people who live there live well. It’s a Mediterranean city, a foreign body in French culture.”
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