by Norman Lewis
The spot chosen by the Townleys for their picnic-lunch was a tiny triangular field half a mile from the outskirts of the town. Looking down from Orgosolo, it is the only green and pleasant place to be seen in any direction among the browns of the lean, sun-scorched earth. The owner of this small oasis of wild flowers and grass died mysteriously leaving no heirs to cultivate it. By chance, it offered an unusual amenity in the form of a small, oblong, flat-topped rock. It was the obvious – the only place for a picnic along the whole of the road they had come, and the Townleys, having pulled their small car into the roadside, climbed the low bank into the field, unpacked their luncheon boxes, and set out the contents on top of the rock. This would have been about mid-day, and the Townleys had their lunch and were perhaps given a little time, too, to relax in the pleasant sunshine before they were interrupted by the appearance of a stranger.
Two days later, on October 30th, the London Times published a short description of the discovery of their bodies by shepherds. They had been riddled by bullets but, said The Times, ‘the motive for the killing is not clear. Wrist watches and other objects of value were left untouched. The theory is that they may have come across a band of outlaws, who impulsively shot them and fled.’
Other reports were more erratic and fanciful and, in the case of the Daily Telegraph, even self-contradictory: ‘… they were preparing for a picnic … the couple must have stumbled on a bandit hideout, and the bandits in the dusk mistook them for approaching police and opened fire.’ And a few lines further on: ‘According to a reconstruction of the crime, the attack took place (by the roadside) shortly after the passing of the regular bus in the early afternoon.’ The Daily Telegraph has the couple killed by a large calibre shotgun which it erroneously describes as ‘the customary weapon of Sardinia’, but next day it found that Mr Townley’s own pistol had been used. This report ends by sketching in the Orgosolo background, where some years before more than twelve people were killed ‘one by one after announcing the next victim’s name in crude paint on the white walls of the churchyard’.
But even the Times theory was not a tenable one. The Sardinian outlaw is rarely a pathological criminal, but almost inevitably a man who considers himself an unfortunate victim of circumstances with as clearly defined a moral code as the man who has not been obliged to take to the mountains. Under pressure of hunger, he will commit acts of banditry, but the Robin Hood image is always there at the back of his mind. He robs with a certain flair, never molests a woman, never takes from the poor. If obliged to kill, such a man does not act impulsively but after extreme premeditation. Never in these mountains had a bandit been known to kill a foreigner. Seventy-five years previously, in fact, when two Frenchmen had been abducted by bandits who had believed them to be Italians, they were released as soon as the mistake was realised and sent back to Nuoro laden with propitiatory gifts. All Sardinia was aghast at this meaningless tragedy and, in due course, other and even less profitable theories were produced in an attempt to explain the inexplicable.
One of these was an attempted sexual assault on Mrs Townley, but it had to be dismissed as more than unlikely, for not only was the lady fifty years of age, but there were no signs whatever of any interference or struggle. A local newspaper improbably suggested that the Townleys’ death might have been the result of a suicide pact and printed an interview with a fellow guest at their hotel who, although he understood no English, claimed to have overheard them quarrelling. But if this was so, how was the fact to be explained that the Townleys had been killed with an Italian weapon which was never found?
By the middle of November, more sinister allegations were appearing in the Italian press. The suggestion now was that the apparently motiveless killing of the Townleys had been an act of terrorism designed to disrupt the nascent Sardinian tourist industry, and to discourage such projects as the Aga Khan’s development on the Costa Smeralda. On 15th November, Le Ore said:
Sardinian banditry is perhaps divided into two camps; one committed to impeding the country’s tourist development in which numerous financial interests are involved, and in particular those of the Aga Khan Karim; the other to protecting the operation. Naturally, the bandits of the first group are in the pay of obscure personalities and the most reactionary cliques, who are interested in keeping the island in backwardness and misery. In this light, the murder of the English couple would appear not as a stupid and meaningless crime, but an act of purposeful intimidation intended to terrify the future clients of Sardinian Tourism.
A far-fetched solution, perhaps, but not without its germ of possibility. In our own days, vestigial feudalisms, which have survived centuries of opposition by political reformers and well-meaning governments, have collapsed and died when exposed to a tourist boom lasting hardly more than a decade. In 1950, in the South of Spain, where the conditions in those days were roughly comparable to the most distressed areas in Sardinia at the present time, the Andalusian field worker was paid fifteen pesetas a day, and when laid off between sowing and harvest, sometimes lived on such things as roots, frogs and snails. The same man, transformed into an unskilled labourer on a holiday building site on the Costa del Sol or in Majorca, is now paid three hundred pesetas a day. His daughter, rescued from the expiring feudalism of the South to become a chambermaid, earns almost exactly the same in one week as in a year in service in one of the great houses of Andalusia. Despite all the increases in the cost of living, the advance in the standard of living of the labouring class is huge.
The object lesson is not lost on the landowners of such countries as Sardinia where tourism remains an infant in swaddling clothes. Labourers employed on the Aga Khan’s project near Olbia receive at least ten times the pay of a peasant on an estate, and work an eight-hour day as opposed to anything up to fifteen hours demanded from his workers by one of the landowners of the old school. A shepherd, who has been tempted from his skilled and ancient trade to become a waiter in one of the Costa Smeralda’s luxurious and expensive hotels, may occasionally expect to receive in a single tip as much as he could have earned in a week trudging over the desolate mountains after his sheep. Insidiously and indirectly, everywhere, a tourist boom destroys privilege and imposes its own democracy whatever the form of the regime. It begins by mopping up the pool of unemployed upon which feudalism depends, and in the end entices away the workers that remain, thus depriving the feudalist of the labour he needs to carry on. He cannot possibly feel anything but hatred for the interlopers of the tourist trade, and if he is strong, unscrupulous and bred in a tradition of rapid authoritarian action, he may be ready to fight back – and with whatever weapon he can.
But the theory of the Black Hand of the diehard feudalist and devilish manipulations behind the scenes – however tempting to the Latin sense of the dramatic – had to be abandoned as a succession of macabre happenings, following immediately on the heels of the Townley killings, were considered and eventually related to the murder of the two British visitors. Now, too, the suicide-pact rumour, so eagerly seized upon by the Sardinians following the story that the Townleys had been shot by Edmund Townley’s own gun, had to be relinquished.
On November 2nd, the Daily Telegraph said:
The bullet-riddled bodies of two notorious bandits were found today under a bush less than two miles from the spot where a British couple, Mr and Mrs Townley, were killed last Sunday.
One of them, Salvatore Mattu, twenty-three, was said to have killed a policeman when he was only nineteen. There was a price of £600 on his head. The other, Giovanni Mesina, forty, was released from gaol a short time ago.
Police investigating the deaths of Mr and Mrs Townley are inclined to admit that some connection exists between the two bandits’ execution and the motiveless murder of the British couple. The most likely theory is that bandits executed the two for having killed foreigners.
In addition, the bandits hoped that by ‘having done justice’ for the murder of the British couple the duel between bandits and the polic
e will again return to its previous comparatively leisurely course.
The use here of the word ‘executed’ is significant, and it is correct enough in the case of Mattu, although a much less appropriate definition of the manner in which Mesina met his death. What this report does not make clear is that the discovery of Mesina’s body followed that of Mattu. The story of Mattu’s supposed murder of a policeman at the age of nineteeen cannot be confirmed. At the time of the Townley incident, Mattu was a fugitive from justice suspected of the kidnapping and murder of a rich landowner two years previously. Mesina, having come out of prison, had married and settled down in the town. Like forty per cent of the employable men of Orgosolo, he was without a job.
Four days after the Townleys met their deaths, Mattu’s body was found – in accordance with local tradition, ‘by a young and innocent child.’ He had been shot to death and the corpse was displayed in what might be described as ceremonial fashion. Like a princeling of Ancient Egypt prepared for his journey to the underworld, his weapons and portable possessions had been placed at his side. This signified to a student of the mores of Orgosolo that he had indeed been executed following sentence by a secret court of the heads of the clan-families of the town. Someone let drop the fact that among the objects found with the body had been a pair of binoculars belonging to Edmund Townley. The natural assumption was that the crime for which Mattu had been judged, sentenced and executed in such short order was the Townleys’ murder. But before the amateur investigators had had time to prise more information out of their contacts in Orgosolo, the situation was complicated by the discovery of Mesina’s corpse. There was nothing this time to suggest a formal execution. Mesina had simply been murdered by a burst of fire from a sub-machine-gun, and his body flung contemptuously face downwards on the ground. But the fact that both Mattu and Mesina had been found in the same place in some way linked their deaths together. It was known that Mattu and Mesina were sworn enemies.
In the meanwhile, police investigations had dragged to a standstill routed, as usual, by Sardinian Omertà – ‘manliness’ – the silence, the wilful ignorance, the honourable non-cooperation with the law, which is the normal citizen’s defence against what is seen as the inhumanity and the essential ‘foreignness’ of Italian justice. Several hundred Carabinieri and members of the Public Security force abetted by a helicopter wandered aimlessly and forlornly about the rocky trackless wilderness of the mountain of Supramonte, lost themselves, broke their limbs when they fell into crevices, chased after shepherds who behaved like deaf mutes whenever they were cornered, and shone their torches into the blackness of caverns as big as cathedrals in which a thousand bandits could have hidden themselves and never been found. In Sicily, a politician was quoted as saying, ‘a pity we can’t lend them our Mafia.’
The middle-class Sicilian and Sardinian attitude towards both the Italian police forces are practically identical, one of amused contempt; and this quip was in recognition of the well-known fact that, after the Italian police (aided by an army division) had battled ineffectively against the thirty bands of outlaws infesting Sicily after the end of the last war, these bandits were liquidated in a matter of months, when the job was unofficially confided to the Mafia. But then there has never been a Mafia in Sardinia, where this famous and ferocious secret society is temperamentally as alien as it would be, say, in Holland or the West Riding of Yorkshire. At the time of the Townley tragedy, there were ten outlaws on the mountain of Supramonte alone, despite the fact that a recent intensive police drive had resulted in forty of the citizens of Orgosolo being in prison serving life sentences.
As all these men would be normally covered by the blanket description of bandits, it is necessary to consider and attempt a definition of the word. Few of the forty lifers from Orgosolo dispersed about the island’s maximum-security prisons would, in fact, have committed any crime by local standards. They would have been no more than the executors of long-standing feuds, quarrels passed down from generation to generation, faded and hardly identifiable hatreds taken over as a matter of social obligation by sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of the original disputants. Dimly reflected are the customs and the lex talonis of the nomadic hunters and migrant pastoral peoples of immense antiquity, of Homeric Greece and the Near East of the Old Testament, people without settled property forced to push on endlessly in the search for sparse pastures, or follow the movement of hunted animals into territories claimed by other tribes. These conditions still persist in the Barbagia in Sardinia, and they have been fostered by poverty, isolation, the remoteness of the central government, and by tradition. In such fossilised societies, the power normally confided to the State in a more advanced civilisation is stubbornly retained by the family – the Mediterranean ‘compound family’ of the anthropologist, which may number anything up to 100 members – a tribe in miniature composed of the ‘senior father’, then sons and grandsons, and all the wives (the women leave their parents to live in the patriarchal home). The family inhabits a single house, or a number of adjacent houses, is ruled by a Council presided over by the ‘senior father’, and holds all family property in the way of buildings and livestock in common. The compound family’s strength lies in its utter self-sufficiency and its single will, and its weakness is its terrible memory. It is found in remote corners of Sicily and Corsica, as well as in Sardinia. Even in the tiny Spanish island of Ibiza – hardly visible on a small-scale Mediterranean map – a few such archaic family amalgams still exist, living in fortified towers, atalayas, which are architecturally related to the nuraghi of Sardinia, dominated by formidable patriarchs who a generation or two ago would have seen to it that their commands were enforced, if necessary by knife or gun.
A life-sentence for carrying out the obligations of the vendetta carries no social stigma in Orgosolo – in fact, quite the reverse: it is seen more as a kind of sombre accolade, the admission to the exclusive club of men who have not hesitated to sacrifice themselves on the altar of honour. In gaol, the ergastolano with an honour killing or two to his credit is usually a model prisoner, entitled to an Olympian aloofness, treated with respect by prisoners and warders alike, often addressed by prison officers using the polite form lei where a swindling millionaire must content himself with the familiar and contemptuous tu. From Enquiry on Orgosolo by Franeo Cagnetta: ‘An ex-prisoner who comes back from serving a life-sentence finds a wife who has awaited him in perfect fidelity, and who has brought up and educated his children. Thereafter he occupies in the community a position of special respect.’
Cagnetta was referring here to the vendetta killer, but another and far more numerous class of outlaw must be included in the general category of bandits. This is a purely Sardinian speciality, the dogau, or semi-bandit, who is the creation of a catastrophic error on the part of the police. The police’s mistake was the employment of secret informers, and action was taken without any check being made on the veracity of their reports. This created an immediate vested interest in banditry. The informer – paid a small lump sum for every arrest – denounced all and sundry, and a single anonymous accusation was enough to secure a man’s arrest and imprisonment perhaps for years while awaiting trial. Worse still, acts of banditry were encouraged and organised by informers, who took a share of the loot before selling the participants to the police. The logical outcome was that when a man – however impeccable his previous record – had reason to believe that someone had denounced him to the police, he took to the mountains. After that, it was usually only a matter of time before hunger drove him to become a bandit in reality.
These borderline outlaws – suspects who cannot be charged with any specific crime – still exist off and on by the hundreds in the mountains of central Sardinia, and they form a pool of tough and embittered humanity – Samurai of our times, who are available for employment in any kind of dangerous or illegal activity. Last year, when possibly a record number of animals were stolen in Sardinia – no official figure is available because less than
half the losses are reported – a rich man, the descendant of one of the original Italian ‘Colonists’, for whom the Sardinian underdog cherishes an inherited detestation, complained to a magistrate that the police couldn’t protect his property. ‘Why come to me?’ was the magistrate’s astonishing reply. ‘Surely there are plenty of dogaus about on the look out for a job? Take on a few like everybody else does. You’ll find you’ll have no more trouble.’ Cagnetta believes that practically every male citizen of Orgosolo has been a dogau at least once in his life.
The ill-fated Mattu and Mesina, the one presumed to have been sentenced and executed by a secret court, the other whose death still remained a mystery – although almost certainly linked with the execution of Mattu – had both started their careers as dogaus. After that, they kept the wolf from the door by staging a few unimportant hold-ups. These happen by the hundred in the remoter parts of Sardinia, are often carried out in an apologetic fashion with the nearest approach to courtesy possible when one man is holding a tommy-gun pointed at the chest of another, no one is hurt, and the bandit gets away with the equivalent of a few dollars. From modest hold-ups of this kind, however – almost enforced charities – Mattu and Mesina graduated to kidnapping, in this way passing the point of no return. Public opinion in Orgosolo would still have remained sympathetic to them as the victims of circumstances, and when either man came into town to visit a parent or relation, he would have been given food and shelter, protected from the eye of the informer, and smuggled back after the visit to the safety of the labyrinths of Mount Supramonte. Even if Mattu or Mesina had found themselves compelled to kill a policeman while avoiding capture, it is unlikely that Orgosolo would have held it against them. But the purposeless murder of a foreigner would be regarded with horror, as a stain on the honour of the community and, therefore, to be dealt with implacably.