Genoa – Business, power, favours, bribes, luxury stays, champagne and caviar, bragging, insults and contempt. The investigation that has upset the system that has kept Liguria afloat for almost ten years reveals a small microcosm of people capable of influencing decisions, contracts, careers and elections. An oligarchy founded on the exchange of gifts and profitable contracts: provided that the investigators demonstrate the validity of their accusation.
The oligarchs in question are all men, male. Men now advanced in years, with their bags full and never satisfied, men halfway through their journey who want to shore up their stature and enjoy the fruits of their power, men who have just blossomed who glimpse prairies of money and intrigues. They are all male. They divide tasks, income, hustlers and entertainment, disassemble and reassemble coats, cut summary judgments, fail or promote: everyone does their part and anyone who goes wrong is apostrophized.
They lock themselves in the rooms of multi-starred hotels or on the 9 million boat, calling for order. Consuming foods and wines to show off. There isn’t a woman, not even one. The women who appear in the wiretap sketches are dozens of steps lower in the invisible but granitic hierarchical ladder of Ligurian power. There are women considered objects, used as gifts by the clan; there are women capable of giving massages, of hosting illustrious men in spas or restaurants, of ensuring a good impression at the casino or at the gala evening; there are women betrayed and denigrated by men who feel like great hoplites who have come to command an impregnable citadel.
Then there are women who constitute the executive gear of the system, women who are granted access to the halls of power, delegated to concretely implement designs and projects, to collect money or letters, envelopes, bottles, orders or requests. To do the dirty work, if necessary. Women forced to live in the reflected light, without ever opening their mouths, of their male bosses in exchange for some career boost or a permanent job. And for those women who end up on the edge of the enclave, the clumsy chauvinist label immediately comes into play which identifies them as “wife of”, “daughter of”. The lump of power and business, therefore, is a lump of only men. And the phenomenon obviously becomes titanic in the port, where the frontier raised by males on the threshold of economic power prevents any access.
The port is male and men have always plotted to keep the scepter in their hands. The women lap the dock, limit themselves to offices and bureaucracy, they are only tolerated when they exercise their competence, often unknown to those who hold the keys to the terminals. As in the case of the foreign fund official who, in her role behind the scenes by definition, brands the ploy invented by the elderly man with the bag in his hand as an attempt at corruption. Moreover, this is an endemic disease in Liguria and especially in Genoa (where, among other things, the perennial fratricidal clash reigns between male Genoese people, who attend the great banquet of those arriving from outside).
Male power self-regenerates in a patrilocal residence that seems to come directly from primitive man, from apes. Dressed in the great toga of the doges, surrounded by troops and crew, bold and unbeatable until proven otherwise, the oligarchs always kept women who aspired to upset the balance at a distance, they resented women who arrived from far away in clashing positions, they made a square by purging the intruders and asphalting the gaps. Except getting caught with your hands stuck to greasy paper. Once again only men.
