View of the World

by Norman Lewis

  Orgosolo was once more in the limelight. Newspapers delved into history for accounts of the exploits of the innumerable bandit chieftains it had produced. The masterpieces of the illustrations of the old Tribuna Illustrata were rediscovered and reproduced, and they offered a highly seasoned choice of scenes full of heroic action, savagery and anguish. A favourite was the attack on the Cagliari-Ussassai train carried out in 1922 by a force of about a hundred bandits. Another was the last stand of Salvatore Pau. It shows the bandit perched on one leg – the other having been broken by a bullet – waving his pistol defiantly while smoke spurts simultaneously from the muzzles of the rifles of the dozen soldiers who have him cornered. A third records the return of troops from a successful anti-bandit operation – the bandits roped to the backs of horses and the commanding officer receiving the congratulations of a government official, who receives him with raised bowler hat. There was also a highly imaginative reconstruction of the marriage in 1929 of the bandit chief, Onorato Succu, celebrated in the Church of San Leonardo in Orgosolo after the regular publication of the banns, and followed by a banquet at which members of the local police force and government functionaries were entertained.

  This was all very well, but most Italians took the view that such things belonged to the romantic past, and they were startled to learn that despite half a dozen full scale military expeditions since the turn of the century, the bandits were still there. A few serious commentators stopped to enquire into the anomaly that at a time when the nation’s industrial growth-rate as a whole was the highest in Europe, areas existed in Sardinia where a tourist’s life was not safe and where the social pattern typified by the tradition of the vendetta hardly differed from the description of such authors as Diodorus and Strabo.

  Isolation, poverty and neglect no doubt explained the situation in part, but there were other areas – in Calabria and in much of Sicily – even more poverty-stricken, if slightly less isolated. This being so, the determining factor must be sought in history.

  The Mediterranean islands, Sardinia included, became the colonies of the ancient world as soon as the continental nations developed into sea powers. Their colonisation was brutal, wasteful and forthright; analogous to the destruction by the Spanish conquistadors of the Caribbean Indians, and their replacement with plantation slave-labour brought from overseas. In the late Bronze Age, the indigenous civilisation of Sardinia had reached a degree of prosperity evidenced by its trade in luxury articles with Egypt, Phoenecia and Etruria, and it was protected by 6,500 fortresses – the nuraghi, some of them most ingenious and complex in construction, and large enough to shelter a whole village in times of danger. By the end of the sixth century, the Carthaginians had occupied all but the mountainous areas of the island, dismantled the nuraghi and massacred all the natives within reach. These they replaced by Libyan slaves, who laboured and died to produce wheat to feed the Carthaginian armies. Diodorus noted that a few Sardinians managed to survive by building underground shelters, and these could only be caught by waiting until they were forced to come out to visit their religious shrines – a problem the Romans surmounted by importing police dogs to chase the refugees from their hideouts.

  New conquests brought new masters. After the Romans, came the Byzantines, then, following a thousand years of independence, the Aragonese – bringing with them their own brand of torpid feudalism – the Piedmontese and the Italians. Only the mountains of central and eastern Sardinia were never occupied and settled – visited at the most by punitive expeditions – and here in the Barbagia with its spiritual capital, Orgosolo, a little of the old independent Sardinia, however degenerate, survived intact.

  All the men, who farmed in the plains, made roads, and built towns, were strangers and enemies to the untouched mountain peoples, and the Italians, who took over Sardinia in 1848, were as foreign as their predecessors. With the Italian arrival, the Sardinians got their first taste of capitalism and found it even more bitter to their taste than the anachronistic feudalism they were accustomed to. First of all, the common grazing lands were expropriated, sold by auction, and acquired at knock-down prices by the church. After that, a law was passed permitting any Italian colonist to claim as much land as he could afford to build a wall round. Italian timber companies then came on the scene and cut down the forests – a project which was completed in ten years. As a result, the climate changed and a number of small rivers dried up. The equivalent of the Elizabethan ‘Statute of Sturdy Beggars’ was enacted to deal with the vagrant dispossessed, who soon filled the prisons. ‘The time has come to ask ourselves if, in the past, we have not wasted scruple’, Cavour said. ‘… Treat them as the English treat the Irish.’ The Italian police and troops, who poured into the island, did their best to comply with true Britannic ferocity.

  Until 1848, the people of Orgosolo had lived as semi-nomadic shepherds, pasturing their animals on the mountains in the summer and moving down to the valleys in winter. Now they found access to the old grazing grounds denied to them, and much of the hill pastures had withered away. Some starved, but many turned to banditry. The acts of legalised robbery, by which they were deprived of much of their livelihood, have never been forgotten and are the unfailing justification for the criminality of these days. When a bandit kidnaps a rich man and holds him to ransom, he says, ‘They robbed us, didn’t they? I’m only getting back a bit of what belongs to me.’

  The loss of the traditional grazing lands meant that the law of the survival of the fittest was applied with mathematical exactitude in central Sardinia. In good years, the herdsmen of Orgosolo contrived to pull in their belts and carry on somehow, living on their sheepsmilk curds and the occasional animal rustled from the flocks of the rich Italian settlers. But after a bad winter, the choice was rebellion or death from hunger. The best pastures were claimed by other villages further down the valleys, and over and over again they were forcibly taken over after terrific pitched battles. These were the notorious bardanas, raids organised for the extermination of competitors for meagre food supplies, and every man of Orgosolo expected to be conscripted by the shadow council of village elders for such an expedition at least once during his lifetime. All the nearby villages, Oliena, Marmojada, Formi, Desulo, Arzano, and Locoe, were the targets of these assaults. Locoe had to be abandoned for a number of years, and in an attack on Tortoli in 1894, every male inhabitant was either killed or wounded. More than once armed bands from Orgosolo fought their way right across Sardinia to Oristano on the coast to capture the salt needed for their cheese-making.

  The men of Orgosolo went to the bardana to clear the way for their flocks, on foot, on horseback, even on bicycles; a small, compact and infallibly victorious horde reflecting in microcosm the sorties of famished Asiatic nomads into the plains of Eastern Europe of the Middle Ages. Orgosolo, the tiny microcosm of a State and conscientiously ignoring the State that contained it, saw these local conflicts as necessary, justifiable and as patriotic as the wars waged by the nation in pursuit of its larger interests. Reprisals by police or army were never more than temporarily effective. One might as well have tried to debar the bedouins of Arabia from their oases.

  Parallel with these wars in miniature went the endless internal struggle of the poor against the rich – against the descendants of the Italian colonists, who had established themselves in the fertile valleys, and the rich native families, who had slowly accumulated grazing land which they now let to the disinherited at extortionate rentals. The shepherd steals with perfect conscience from the rich proprietor and, year by year, the number of cattle thefts increases. There is little trace of the Christian ethic in these mountains where Christianity gropingly established itself only by the early seventeenth century. The impoverished, self-sufficient, semi-nomadic shepherd simply cannot understand the philosophy of nonresistance, of turning the other cheek, of laying up for oneself treasures in heaven. The very word ‘good’ has its own special meaning in Orgosolo. A good man in the Orgosolo version is one who never pu
ts up with an injustice, and his opposite ranks with a cuckold in the scale of public contempt. Meekness and submission belong to the code of the man who has allowed himself to be disarmed.

  A final factor – one that is not completely detached from the subconscious – completes the picture of the shepherd-warrior mentality. Wealth, possessions and the strength they imply are magical substances, wholly good. The unconcealed ambition of every shepherd is to possess flocks and land, and to lead the life of a rich man. To be rich is to be virtuous and if in seizing the possessions of others more virtue is acquired, then the act is sanctified by the end.

  Both Giovanni Mesina and Salvatore Mattu were the sons of families that had never quite got on their feet, that had always lacked the mystic attribute of possessions, and could do no more than reproduce generations of landless, hired shepherds, who still in the year 1966 must be on watch all day or all night over their master’s sheep for a payment in kind of twenty sheep per year.

  Both men had been dogaus many times. In a criminal or semi-criminal capacity, Mesina – who was by this time on the threshold of middle age – had made something of a reputation for himself. He was bold and intelligent, the stuff of which the founders of the powerful families of Orgosolo are made, and he could stand alone. In Sicily, he would probably have been a fairly influential member of the Mafia.

  Mattu, in his early twenties and having still to win his spurs, had become a junior member of a band by October 1962. In 1960, both men had been denounced to the police as implicated in the murder of Pierino Cresta, who had been kidnapped and then killed as a matter of principle when the ransom was not forthcoming. Giovanni Mesina had been arrested, but Mattu had managed to escape and had been in hiding ever since on Supramonte. After two years, Mesina was released but found himself under a cloud back in his home town, where it was rumoured that he had secured his release by putting the blame for the Cresta killing on the missing Mattu.

  By a strange, almost exhibitionist quirk in the occult mind of Orgosolo, newspapermen are warmly received and spoken to with surprising frankness, and the friendships they form in this most reticent of towns show them glimpses of a secret life, which is completely denied to the police in their isolation from the community. Thus it was that although the Townleys’ killing remained officially a mystery, by the end of the month Italian newspapers were publishing an account, pieced together from inside information, of what had happened at Orgosolo shortly after noon on 28th October, and the succession of bloody events of the week that followed.

  Mattu, it is accepted, had challenged Mesina to a duel to be fought in traditional style, ‘at high noon’, and the place chosen for this encounter was none other than the green field where the Townleys had stopped for their picnic.

  It was Mattu who arrived first, and found the English couple resting after their picnic. He kept out of sight and waited for some time, and then, as there were no signs of Mesina, decided to return to his mountain hideout. At that moment, he noticed a pair of binoculars left by Edmund Townley on the ground beside the rock that had been used as a table, and although Mattu is supposed to have protested, when hauled before the secret tribunal that sentenced him, that he had no intention of robbing the Englishman, he said that he felt justified in his present emergency in helping himself to the binoculars.

  A fearsome figure he must have appeared to the Townleys as he came into the open, unkempt from his two years in the mountains, and armed with pistol, sub-machine-gun, hand-grenades, and a dagger. What precisely happened next? In the light of what we know of Townley’s character, his aggressiveness, was he imprudent – even contemptuous – in his handling of this desperate man? The facts as accepted are that Townley, realising that Mattu was a bandit, put his hand in his pocket, perhaps to offer him money, and Mattu, mistaking the movement for an attempt to draw a gun, drew his own pistol and shot him dead. He then destroyed Mrs Townley – out of pure compassion, as he claimed ‘so as not to leave a widow.’ The cynics of Orgosolo say that he simply decided to eliminate an eye-witness.

  At this moment, Mesina, attracted by the sound of shooting, came on the scene and immediately realised what had happened. He hid until Mattu had gone off, taking Townley’s binoculars with him, then scrambled down the hillside for a closer inspection of the bodies. He is alleged to have said that he realised that there could be no question of a duel now because he would have considered himself dishonoured to fight with a common murderer. Instead, he went back to Orgosolo and told all he had seen – not, of course, to the police but to the shadow authorities of the village. Mattu was promptly caught, interrogated, sentenced and executed. But in the light of what followed, one has the feeling that Mesina had few sympathisers in Orgosolo – a man the whole town believed had allowed himself to be broken by the police.

  It appears too that Mattu had left powerful friends, who were not disposed to allow the matter to rest as it was. He had been an associate of the then celebrated Muscau band, and a mutual allegiance may even have been established by an archaic blood-mingling ceremony. However much the Townley murders undoubtedly scandalised the bandits on Supramonte, there were loyalties that could not be dissolved, and consequently only one course to be followed. Within hours of the traditional exhibition of Mattu’s body, Mesina had been spirited away from the house where he lived with the wife he had married only twenty days before, and was never seen again alive.

  The stern obligations of the vendetta now fell upon the Mesina family, and ritual vengeance was entrusted to twenty-year-old Graziano, a young man of saturnine good looks and acute intelligence, as he frequently demonstrated in his subsequent trial. At the time of his brother’s death, he was being held by the police in gaol under investigation over a charge of sheep-stealing, and on being told what had happened, he carried out the first of his many gaol-breaks.

  The Mesinas had once before been involved in a vendetta. This was the celebrated Great Quarrel – a small war à outrance, lasting from 1903 until 1917, conducted between a number of allied families over a disputed inheritance. In the course of this, although the Mesinas survived, some families lost all their males – including any children over the age of thirteen. One faction was headed by the town’s priest, the ‘senior father’ of a group of a half-dozen families, a sinister cleric whose popularity in Orgosolo was such that he was accustomed to celebrate Mass with an armed policeman standing on each side. Father Diego Cossu, a rich man, and an efficient deployer of the power inherent in his position, hit on the ingenious idea of buying the complicity of the police to have his opponents – the Mesinas included – declared bandits. This was effective in terms of short-term policy – perfectly honest citizens, who happened to be the father’s opponents and who decamped in terror, being promptly shot down by the police. In the long run, the plan failed simply because the many fugitives the police failed to imprison, or kill, were transformed into real desperadoes. The Great Quarrel produced several novel situations in the history of outlawry and the vendetta. There were occasions when the police masqueraded as bandits and murdered along with the bandits, and others when bandits dressed up in borrowed uniforms and passed themselves off as police. Some rich sports even formed a band as a diversion from the boredom of hunting and cards – Robin Hoods in reverse, who armed and disguised themselves to rob the poor.

  This was the golden age of Orgosolo’s special contribution to the arts, the funeral lament; and Bannedda Corraine, most famous of Orgosolo’s professional mourners, found her vocation when at the beginning of the vendetta her brother died in ambush. She was eighteen years of age and the most beautiful girl in Orgosolo. She sang,

  Oh, my brother Carmine, flesh of platinum and porcelain

  Where is Carmine, tinkle of precious metals, glimmer of gold?

  Her laments have the passion and the imagery of the poetry of Garcia Lorca, perhaps occasionally even of the Song of Songs, and are still sung at Orgosolo funeral wakes. Some of the figures Bannedda clothed in death in her hyperbole seem unsu
itably described. Onorato Succu – ‘the golden-eyed flower’ he was to become in death – was a bald, middle-aged man of repellent ugliness, who had committed twenty cold-blooded murders, and had made no attempt to stop a lieutenant from strangling two thirteen-year-old children of the enemy clan – ‘to save an effusion of innocent blood’ the man said, when asked why he had not shot them.

  There has always been a class of professional peacemakers in Orgosolo, whose office it is to compose the differences of warring families when things appear to be getting out of hand. This they usually do by arranging a marriage between suitable members of the opposing parties. Such a traditional marriage of convenience was once attempted in the Great Quarrel, but was quashed by the macabre Father Cossu who objected that as all the families were related, the laws of consanguinity would be endangered by the proposed solution. However, with the near-extermination of family after family, peace had to come in the end and when it did, it was the relief of all Italy. The petty slaughter in Sardinia had been an unpleasant distraction to a nation in arms, absorbed with the patriotic holocausts of the First World War. Seven bandits, who had been in prison six years awaiting trial, were pronounced innocent and released as a gesture of good will on the authorities’ side. A celebratory banquet at Orgosolo followed at which the survivors were reconciled. It was graced by the presence of the Prefect of Sassari, the Bishop of Nuoro, a member of parliament, numerous police officers and the richest of the local landed gentry. Civic dignitaries and men who had committed multiple homicide with huge prices still on their heads, embraced and got drunk together. Mesina’s grandfather knelt with the rest to receive the Bishop’s blessing, but nothing is recorded of his action in the vendetta. He was one of the small fry who had served without distinction or notice in the band led by the golden-eyed flower.