by Gore Vidal
Meanwhile, like most writers-to-be, the young Sciascia read whatever he could. He was particularly attracted to the eighteenth-century writers of the Enlightenment. If he has a precursor, it is Voltaire. Predictably, he preferred Diderot to Rousseau. “Sicilian culture ignored or rejected romanticism until it arrived from France under the name of realism.” Later, Sciascia was enchanted—and remains enchanted—by Sicily’s modern master, Pirandello. As a boy, “I lived inside Pirandello’s world, and Pirandellian drama—identity, the relativeness of things—was my daily dream. I almost thought that I was mad.” But, ultimately, “I held fast to reason,” as taught by Diderot, Courier, Manzoni.
Although Sciascia is a Pirandellian as well as a man of the Enlightenment, he has a hard clarity, reminiscent of Stendhal. At the age of five, he saw the sea: “I didn’t like it, and I still don’t like it. Sicilians don’t like the sea, even those who live on its shores. For that matter, the majority of Sicilian towns have been built with their backs to the sea, ostentatiously. How could islanders like the sea which is capable only of carrying their men away as emigrants or bringing in invaders?”
Immediately after the war, the revived Mafia and their traditional allies (or clients or patrons) the landowners were separatists. When the government of the new Italian republic offered Sicily regional autonomy, complete with a legislature at Palermo, the Mafia’s traditional capital, landowners and mafiosi became fervent Italians and the separatist movement failed. But then, it was doomed in 1945 when the United States refused (unkindly and probably unwisely) to fulfill the dream of innumerable Sicilians by annexing Sicily as an American state. In those innocent days, who knew that before the twentieth century had run its dismal course the Mafia would annex the United States? A marvelous tale still in search of its Pirandello.
Although everyone agreed that Sicily’s only hope was industrialization, the Mafia fought industrialization because industry meant labor unions and labor unions (they thought naïvely) are not susceptible to the usual pressures of the honorable society which does and does not exist, rather like the trinity. The first battle between Mafia and industrialization occurred when Sciascia was twenty-three. The communists and socialists held a meeting in the piazza of Villalba. Authority challenged, the local capo ordered his thugs to open fire. Legal proceedings dragged on for ten years, by which time the capo had died a natural death.
What happened at Villalba made a strong impression on Sciascia. Sometimes, in his work, he deals with it directly and realistically; other times, he is oblique and fantastic. But he has never not, in a symbolic sense, dealt with this business. Even Todo Modo (1974) was an attempt to analyze those forces that opposed one another on a September day in 1944, in a dusty piazza, abruptly loud with guns.
Today the Mafia thrives in Sicily. Gangs still extort money from citrus growers through control of water sources as well as through what once looked to be a permanent veto on refrigeration, a situation that has made Sicilian oranges noncompetitive in Europe. Mafia gangs control dockworkers, the sale of contraband, construction permits, etc. Meanwhile, as Sciascia has described more than once, those continentals who come to Sicily as prosecutors and police inspectors soon learn that the true lover of justice must love death, too. Many of Sciascia’s tales have, at their heart, thanatophilia. Lately, he has extended the geographical range of his novels. All Italy is now in the process of being Sicilianized. But then, ever since World War II, Sicilians have been overrepresented in the country’s police and judiciary in rather the same way that, post Civil War, American Southerners took control of the Congress and the military and, until recently, had a lock on each. Also, with the influx of Sicilian workers to the northern cities (not to mention to the cities of the United States, Canada, Australia) the Mafia mentality has been exported with a vengeance.
What is the Mafia mentality? What is the Mafia? What is Sicily? When it comes to the exploration of this particular hell, Leonardo Sciascia is the perfect Virgil. As we begin our descent, he reminds us that like most Mediterranean societies Sicily is a matriarchy. The father-god of the conquering Aryans has never had much attraction for Mediterranean peoples. Effigies of the original Great Goddess of the Mediterranean can still be seen all over Sicily; and as the idol simpers at the boy-baby clutched in one hand, the other hand is depicted free to stir the life-giving minestra—or wield a knife.
D. H. Lawrence once described an exchange he had with an old woman in a Sicilian church. Why, he wanted to know, was the tortured figure of Jesus always shown in such vivid, such awful detail? Because, said the old woman firmly, he was unkind to his mother. The sea at the center of the earth is the sea of the mother, and this blood-dark sea is at the heart of Sciascia’s latest novel Candido: the story of a Sicilian who, during an American air raid in 1943, was born to a mother whom he was to lose in childhood to another culture; thus making it possible for him to begin a journey that would remove him from the orbit of the mother-goddess.
Sciascia has made an interesting distinction between what he calls the “maternal man” (someone like Robert Graves who serves the Great Goddess?) and the “paternal man.” Although “I spent my infancy and adolescence surrounded by women, with my aunts and ‘mothers’…I became a rather ‘paternal’ man. Many Sicilians are like me: they have hostile relations with their fathers during their youth and then, as if they’ve just seen themselves in a looking glass, they correct their attitude, realize that they are their fathers. They are destined to become them.” For Sciascia,
many wrongs, many tragedies of the South, have come to us from the women, above all when they become mothers. The Mezzogiorno woman has that terrible quality. How many crimes of honor has she provoked, instigated or encouraged! Women who are mothers, mothers-in-law. They are capable of the worst kinds of wickedness just in order to make up for the vexations they themselves were subjected to when they were young, as part of a terrifying social conformism. “Ah, yes,” they seem to be saying, “you’re my son’s wife? Well, he’s worth his weight in gold!”
These women are elements of violence, of dishonesty, of abuse of power in Southern society, even though some of that ancient power was reduced when the American troops landed in Sicily during the last war. And so it is that Candido (the character in my book) loses his mother at the moment of the arrival in Palermo of U.S. soldiers. If that event dealt a hard blow to the matriarchy, it also introduced “consumerism,” a taste for modern gadgets, possessions, a house….From the moment that they began building new housing in Sicily, the sons (and the daughters-in-law) began to leave the old tyrannical hearths of their mothers, thus undermining, in part, the ancient power structure.
After the bombardment, the child is named, “surreally,” Candido: neither parent has ever heard of Voltaire. The town is occupied by the American army and Captain John H. (for Hamlet) Dykes becomes, in effect, the mayor. Candido’s lawyer-father asks the American to dinner, and Candido’s mother falls in love with him. Sourly, surreally, the father comes to believe that Dykes is the blond Candido’s father even though the child was conceived nine months before the arrival in Sicily of the Americans. Nevertheless, in the father’s mind, Candido is always “the American.”
As a result of the April 18, 1948 election (when knowledgeable authorities told me to flee Italy because the Communists would win and there would be—what else?—“a blood bath”), the Christian Democrat Party doubled its vote and Candido’s fascist grandfather, the General, was elected to parliament while the General’s aide-de-camp, a local nobleman, was also elected, but on the Communist ticket. Nicely, the two ex-fascists work in tandem. Meanwhile, Candido’s mother has divorced his father and gone to live with her American lover in Helena, Montana. Candido is left behind.
Sciascia’s Candido is a serene, not particularly wide-eyed version of Voltaire’s Candide. In fact, this Sicilian avatar is a good deal cleverer than the original. As a boy, “His games—we can try to define the
m only approximately—were like crossword puzzles which he would play with things. Adults make words cross, but Candido made things cross.” One of the things that he makes cross…cross the shining river, in fact…is his lawyer-father who has assisted in the cover-up of a murder. When Candido overhears a discussion of the murder, he promptly tells his schoolmates the true story. As a result of the boy’s candor, the father commits suicide and Candido, now known as “the little monster,” goes to live with the General. At no point does Candido feel the slightest guilt. Pondering his father’s death, he begins to arrange an image in his mind “of a man who adds up his whole life and arrives at a sum indicating that it would be right for him to put a bullet through his head.”
It is now time for Dr. Pangloss to make his entrance, disguised as the Archpriest Lepanto. Highly civilized priests keep recurring in Sciascia’s work, although he confesses that “I have never met one.”
The Archpriest and the boy spar with each another. “Up to a point, the Archpriest also was convinced that he was a little monster…whereas Candido had discovered that the Archpriest had a kind of fixed idea, rather complicated but reducible, more or less, to these terms: all little boys kill their fathers, and some of them, sometimes, kill even Our Father Who is in Heaven.” Patiently, Candido sets out to disabuse the Archpriest: “he had not killed his father, and he knew nothing, nor did he want to know anything, about that other Father.”
Sciascia’s themes now begin to converge. The mother has abandoned the son, a very good thing in the land of the Great Goddess (who would be Attis, who Pan could be?); the father has killed himself because of Candido’s truthfulness or candor when he made cross the thing-truth with the thing-omerta; now the Heavenly Father, or Aryan sky-god, is found to be, by Candido, simply irrelevant. Plainly, Candido is a monster. He is also free. He becomes even freer when he inherits money and land. But when he cultivates his own land for the good of his tenant farmers, they know despair. When a parish priest is murdered (with the regularity of a Simenon, Sciascia produces his murders), Candido and the Archpriest decide to assist the inspector of police. When, rather cleverly, they apprehend the murderer, everyone is in a rage. They—not the killer—have broken the code. A theologian is called in by the local bishop and an inquiry is held into the Archpriest’s behavior. It is decided that he must
step down as Archpriest: he could not continue to fulfill that office if all the faithful now disapproved of him, even despised him. “And further,” the learned theologian said, “not that truth may not be beautiful, but at times it does so much harm that to withhold it is not a fault but a merit.”
In handing the theologian his resignation, the Archpriest, now archpriest no longer, said, in a parodying, almost lilting voice, “ ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life,’ but sometimes I am the blind alley, the lie, and death.”
With that, the moral education of Candido is complete. On the other hand, that of Dr. Pangloss has just begun. The Archpriest—now Don Antonio—becomes a militant communist. To an extent, Candido goes along with Don Antonio. But he is not one to protest too much. He cannot be a protestant if only because he “was utterly averse to believing that there were any sins other than lying and seeking the pain and humiliation of others.”
The political education of Candido—as opposed to moral—begins in early manhood. Like so many educated Italians of that time, he regards communism as a replacement for a church that has not only failed but in the land of the Great Goddess never truly taken hold. Candido likes the writings of Gramsci; finds Marx boring; as for Lenin, “he had come to picture Lenin as a carpenter atop a scaffolding who had worn himself out hitting the same nails on the head, but all of his efforts had not prevented some nails from being poorly set or going in crooked.” (I am not always enchanted by the translation of Adrienne Foulke.) Although Candido believes that “to be a Communist was, in a word, almost a fact of nature” because “capitalism was bearing man toward dissolution,” he much prefers the imaginative writers to the contorted Machiavellianism of the communist theoreticians: “ ‘Zola and Gorki, they talk about things that used to be, and it’s as if they were talking about things that came later. Marx and Lenin talk about things that would happen, and it’s as if they were talking about things that are no longer.’ ”
But Candido becomes a member of the Communist Party even though he is more repelled than not by its sacred texts (excepting, always, Gramsci). Acting on principle, Candido offers his own land for a hospital but because of the usual collusion between the condottiere of the left and the right, another piece of land is bought by the community and the condottiere make their profit. Candido is thrown out of the Communist Party. In due course, after he is done out of his fortune by his own family, he goes off with his cousin Francesca to Turin, “a more and more sullen city….The North and the South of Italy settled there; they sought crazily to avoid each other and, at the same time, to strike out at each other; both were bottled up in making automobiles, a superfluous necessity for all, a necessary superfluity for all.” Just before the young couple move on to Paris, Candido says to Francesca, “Do you know what our life is, yours and mine? It’s a dream dreamed in Sicily. Perhaps we’re still there, and we are dreaming.”
In Paris, at the Brasserie Lipp (August 1977), Candido runs into the long-mislaid mother and her husband, Mr. Dykes. Don Antonio is also there: he is now as doctrinaire a Communist as he had been a Roman Catholic. Predictably, the Americans have little to say to the Sicilians. But Don Antonio does ask former Captain Dykes: “How did you manage, only a few days after you had arrived in our town, to choose our worst citizens for public service?” Dykes is offhand: he had been given a list. Yes, he had suspected that the people on the list were mafiosi, “But we were fighting a war….”
When Candido’s mother, rather halfheartedly, proposes that Candido visit America, Candido is polite. For a visit, perhaps. “ ‘But as for living there, I want to live here….Here you feel that something is about to end and something is about to begin. I’d like to see what should come to an end come to its end.’ Embracing him once again, his mother thought, He’s a monster.” Mother and son part, presumably forever.
Rather drunk, Don Antonio has, once again, missed the point to what Candido has been saying. Don Antonio says that “here,” meaning France, “something is about to end, and it’s beautiful….At home, nothing ends, nothing ever ends.” On the way back to his hotel, Don Antonio salutes the statue of Voltaire as “our true father!” But Candido demurs; and the book’s last line is: “ ‘Let’s not begin again with the fathers,’ he said. He felt himself a child of fortune, and happy.” Margari, as the Italians say.
I am not sure just what it is that makes Sciascia’s novels unique. Where “serious” American writers tend to let the imagination do the work of the imagination, Sciascia prefers to invent for us a world quite as real as any that Dreiser ever dealt with, rendered in a style that is, line by line, as jolting as an exposed electrical wire. I suppose, as a Pirandellian, Sciascia is letting a very real world imagine him describing it.
Candido is bracketed by two political events: one of importance to Sciascia, the other to the world as well as Sciascia. From time to time, Italian political parties will propose for election a sympathetic non-party member, preferably a “technico” (usually, an economist who has managed to jam the central computer of a major bank) or a “personaggio,” a celebrated man like Sciascia. One year before Candido was written, pensioner Sciascia was a Communist Party candidate for the Palermo city council. “My ‘debut’ was solicited by the local [party] leaders as an event destined to have consequences at the local level.”
Sciascia accepted the Communist nomination for city councilor with a certain Candide-like innocence. Like most Italians of his generation, he is a man of the left. Unlike most Italians, Sciascia is a social meliorist. As a public man, he has an empirical streak which is bound to strike as mysterious most poli
tically minded Italians. Sciascia has ideas but no ideology in a country where political ideology is everything and political ideas unknown. Sciascia’s reasons for going on the city council are straightforward. Grave problems faced Palermo, “in certain quarters there was no water, whole neighborhoods lacked sewers and roads, and the restoration…the rehabilitation of the historic center presented all sorts of problems,” but “during the eighteen months that I served on the city council, not once did anyone talk about water or any other urgent problems….”
Sciascia was also shocked to find that the council seldom met before nine in the evening; then, around midnight, when people were yawning, a bit of business was done. Finally, Sciascia was wised up,
off the record, thanks to the benevolence of a socialist councilman who spelled the whole thing out to me in real terms, clearly: thus, I was able to understand how the Communists and the Christian Democrats did business together and I was less than pleased….Aware that my presence in the bosom of the city council was inopportune and useless, and that the possibility of a row between me and the party that had put me there seemed more and more likely, it was obvious that I’d have to quit. I wanted to go without slamming the door, but that wasn’t possible.
There was a good deal of fuss when Sciascia quit the council in 1975. But though he may, personally, have found the experience “inopportune and useless,” he was able to make good use of it in Candido: when Candido tries to give the city land for a hospital, he discovers that nothing can ever be given in a society where everything is bought and sold, preferably twice over.
Sciascia entered Italian political history in the wake of the kidnapping and murder by terrorists of Aldo Moro, the president of the Christian Democrat party. More than anyone else, Moro was responsible for the tentative coming together of left and right in what the Communists like to call the “historic compromise” between Christ and Marx, in what Moro himself used to call, with a positively Eisenhowerian gift for demented metaphor, “the inevitable convergence of parallel lines.”