Roberto Saviano - Gomorrah - A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System

“That stuff they make them haul, the more they breathe it in, the sooner they’ll drop dead. They send them to die, not to drive.”

The more the young drivers hear it said that theirs is a dangerous and deadly job, the more they feel up to such an important mission. They stick out their chests, arrogance glinting behind their sunglasses. They feel fine, better all the time. None of them could imagine, not for an instant, that in ten years time they’ll be getting chemotherapy, vomiting up bile, their stomachs, livers, and intestines reduced to a pulp.

It kept on raining. The ground, unable to absorb anything else, quickly turned soggy. The shepherds, unperturbed, went and sat like three emaciated holy men under a makeshift shelter of sheet metal. They kept their eyes on the road while the sheep sought safety by clambering up on a trash heap. One of the shepherds used his walking stick to tilt the roof so that it wouldn’t buckle under the weight of the rain and come crashing down on their heads. I was soaked to the skin, but all that water wasn’t enough to extinguish the burning sensation rising from my stomach and radiating up my neck. I tried to fathom whether human feelings were able to withstand such a vast power machine, if it was possible to act in a way, in any way, that would permit me to live outside of the dynamics of power. I tormented myself trying to grasp if it was possible to try to understand, to discover, to know, without being devoured or destroyed. Or if the choice was between knowing and being compromised, or ignoring—and thus living serenely. Perhaps the only option was to forget, to not see. To listen to the official version of things, to half-listen, distractedly, and respond with nothing more than a sigh. I asked myself if there was anything that held out the possibility of a happy life, or if perhaps I just had to stop dreaming of emancipation and anarchic freedoms and throw myself into the arena, stick a semiautomatic in my underwear and start doing business for real. Convince myself to be part of the connective fabric of my day, to gamble everything, to command and be commanded, to become a beast of profit, a raptor of finance, a samurai of the clans; to turn my life into a battlefield where you don’t hope to survive but merely to go down after a good fight.

I was born in the land of the Camorra, in the territory with the most homicides in Europe, where savagery is interwoven with commerce, where nothing has value except what generates power. Where everything has the taste of a final battle. It seemed impossible to have a moment of peace, not to live constantly in a war where every gesture is a surrender, where every necessity is transformed into weakness, where everything needs to be fought for tooth and nail. In the land of the Camorra, opposing the clans is not a class struggle, an affirmation of a right, or a reappropriation of one’s civic duty. It’s not the realization of one’s honor or the preservation of one’s pride. It’s something more basic, more ferociously carnal. In the land of the Camorra, knowing the clans’ mechanisms for success, their modes of extraction, their investments, means understanding how everything works today everywhere, not merely here. To set oneself against the clans becomes a war of survival, as if existence itself—the food you eat, the lips you kiss, the music you listen to, the pages you read—were merely a way to survive, not the meaning of life. Knowing is thus no longer a sign of moral engagement. Knowing—understanding—becomes a necessity. The only necessity if you want to consider yourself worthy of breathing.

My feet were deep in the mire. The water had risen to my thighs. I could feel my heels sinking. A huge refrigerator floated in front of me. I threw myself on it, clutching it tightly with my arms, and let myself be carried. I thought of the final scene of Papillon, based on the novel by Henri Charrière and starring Steve McQueen. I felt like Papillon, who escapes French Guiana on the tide, floating away on a sack of coconuts. It was an absurd thought, but at certain moments there’s nothing else to do but humor your own delirium as something you don’t chose but simply endure. I wanted to shout, to scream, to tear my lungs out like Papillon. I wanted to howl from deep down in my gut, my throat exploding with all the voice left in me: “Hey, you bastards, I’m still here!”