by Norman Lewis
On November 3rd, 1962, the day after Giovanni Mesina’s death, the body was taken to the Mesina house for the lying-in-state. Here, with all the members of the family present, the professional mourners entered the room and began their dirge. Only in the last verse, after a recital of the virtues of the dead bandit, of his strength, his charity, his courage, and his manly beauty, came the moment so long awaited: the shrieking denunciation by the leading wailing-woman of the name of the man held responsible for his death. However much this may have been common knowledge beforehand, the mourners would have kept up a ritual pretence of their ignorance of the killer’s identity until this moment. But now, against the sobbing of the women of the household and the shrieks of the corps of wailers, the calls for vengeance were heard. This is the moment when the death sentence of the family council is entrusted to the member or members of the family most fitted to carry it out.
In a large clan well-supplied with vigorous males, the execution will take the classic form – a purely Sardinian variation on the theme of the vendetta in which the honour and responsibility is shared by several volunteers. These, because justice should be seen to be done, choose a public place to approach their victim, draw him aside, whisper his sentence to him, and shoot him down. Instantly, the streets empty, passers-by slip into obscure alleyways and disappear. Doors and windows close. Nobody has seen or heard anything. The town averts its head and acquiesces in its muteness in what has happened. But a small family like the Mesinas must cut its coat according to its cloth. The only suitable male – if one exists at all – may have emigrated, or he may even be in gaol. When the news of his brother’s death reached Graziano Mesina, he was in prison, held as a suspect. By feigning madness, he had himself transferred to the prison infirmary, and from this he easily escaped and made for the region of Orgosolo.
For ten days he scoured the bandit hideouts, the caves and grottoes on Supramonte searching for the men who had killed his brother. Failing to find them, he decided to enter the town itself and arrived there on November 13th just after dark. He was incited by others, the prosecution said at his trial, to do what he did.
He was seen by a number of people that evening as he walked up the narrow, badly lit main street. His appearance must have been dramatic indeed, for despite the presence of a strong body of police in the town, he was armed to the teeth including the inevitable hand-grenades and sub-machine-gun, and it was evident to the bystanders from his ‘iron face’, as they described it, that he was about to accomplish a ‘mission of honour’.
Mesina went into the town’s principal bar almost opposite the town hall, which is hardly larger than a cell and furnished with a few shelves carrying bottles of wine and cognac, an enormous refrigerator and three low tables with even lower bench-seats about nine inches high. Antonio, the bar’s proprietor, was refilling a row of the tiny wine glasses used in Orgosolo. ‘As he came in our eyes met, and I knew what he had come for,’ he says. Mesina said nothing. He simply gestured with his machine-gun, and the patrons quietly left their tables and lined up against the wall. Among them was Giovanni Muscau, twenty-two-year-old brother of Giuseppe Muscau. Mesina believed Giuseppe to have been Mattu’s friend and protector and to have ordered the killing of his brother, and so – as Giuseppe could not be reached – he had decided to make do with Giovanni. Graziano beckoned to Giovanni Muscau to leave the men standing against the wall, shoved him against the bar with the barrel of his gun, and then fired two bursts into his chest. Muscau slid to the ground and Mesina gave him a final burst as he lay there.
Now Mesina turned to leave and the incredible happened. The custom of Orgosolo absolutely forbids interference in a vendetta by outsiders, and even recommends an onlooker, who believes a vendetta killing to be about to take place, to throw himself face downwards on the ground, to avoid seeing, and therefore being capable of identifying the assailant. The deed is done; the women draw their black veils over their faces, the men slip away into the shadows, the executioners pocket their weapons and disappear.
In this case, to the astonishment of all Sardinia, what happened was that as Mesina turned to leave the bar, someone picked up a bottle and struck him on the head from behind. He fell to the ground, stunned, and was then overpowered and handed over to the carabinieri. This was a break with the past indeed, and the notables of the town are said to have shaken their heads in consternation at what was regarded as evidence of the moral corruption of their young men. Terrible reprisals were predicted but, so far, the Mesina faction seems to have been content to bide its time. Memories are long in vendetta country and it is nothing for a man to nurse his private vengeance for ten years or more – even to appear to have become reconciled to his enemy – while he awaits the right time and place for the settlement of the score.
A few days after my arrival in Sardinia, Graziano Mesina stood up in the iron cage, in which he had been kept like an animal in the courthouse of Cagliari, to hear sentence passed upon him. This conclusion of the sanguinary episode in the bar at Orgosolo had been long deferred because, in the meantime, Mesina had broken Italian records by escaping from five different gaols and one prison hospital. He had never used the slightest violence in these evasions, nor had he attempted to avoid re-arrest. Throughout the trial, he had shown no more than the mildest curiosity in what was going on, ‘the master’ – as one report put it – ‘of a sphinx-like imperturbability.’ When asked why he had killed the innocent young Muscau, Mesina considered the question for a moment and said, ‘It was his brother Giuseppe I was after. I thought that by killing Giovanni I might tempt him down from the mountains to settle accounts with me.’
Present to hear this admission along with a great contingent from Orgosolo, the women with their black veils drawn half across their faces, the men in stiff dark suits kept for trials and funerals, was none other than the famous Giuseppe himself. Giuseppe Muscau had been captured and put on trial for banditry a year or so before, and as happens in about two such cases out of three, he had been acquitted for lack of sufficient proof. He is now unofficially the town’s leading citizen, described as the possessor of great dignity and charm as well as something of a poet, and the highest honour Orgosolo can confer upon a visitor is to arrange for a presentation to the great man.
Giuseppe’s demeanour on this occasion remained stolidly unrevealing, matching in every way in correctness by the standards of Orgosolo that of the protagonist in the dock. Both men were in the eye of a critical public. One supposed that one day if things hadn’t changed by then, it would be Giuseppe’s sacred duty, or that of his son, to kill Mesina – but it would be many, many years before that day could arrive. Only once Mesina was stirred from his apparent indifference. This happened when the Public Prosecutor suggested in his final speech that Mesina had killed a helpless and unarmed lad because he had been afraid to confront this smallish, mild-looking, middle-aged man sitting there with bowed head and clasped hands in the body of the court. Mesina smiled.
The defence’s only hope was to extricate him from the ultimate calamity of a life sentence, and the strategy employed was an uphill struggle to create sympathy for a man who clearly hadn’t had much of a chance in Orgosolo’s battle for survival. ‘The negative circumstances of his childhood’, as the defence counsel called them were enumerated. Graziano Mesina had been orphaned at the age of twelve, and then a few years later, the family suffered ‘moral and economic disintegration as a result of the arrest of the three adult brothers who were kept two years in prison on suspicion of murder before it was decided to release them as innocent. Graziano had had to support his mother and sisters through the long months of misery and near starvation. Then came the Townley affair, and the eldest brother’s death. ‘Don’t think of Graziano Mesina as a cold-blooded murderer,’ his counsel pleaded. ‘He’s just an impulsive headstrong boy, incapable of premeditation.’ He gave a few instances of Mesina’s typically impulsive actions such as tearing down the sheepfold of a man who had killed his dog, and then, pe
rhaps to demonstrate that his client was essentially reasonable, recalled Mesina’s protest earlier in the trial: ‘After all, the younger brother was in the bar as well, and I might have finished him off too while I was about it. But there was no question of that. One was enough.’
A psychologist’s report was read out in court, which described Mesina as legally sane and of above average intelligence, although egocentric and remarkable for his ‘moral coldness’. Sentence of twenty-six years was then passed, and the judge added that only a consideration for the special social climate, of which the prisoner was a product, had prevented him from sending him to gaol for life. Emotional scenes are not unusual in Italian courts at moments like this, but here Orgosolo dominated in its taciturn acceptance of victory or defeat. The sombre men and women in the public gallery got up and filed away in silence. No one looked again in the direction of the prisoner still standing motionless and expressionless, hands clasped behind his back in the cage, waiting for the chains to be fastened on him.
On the cross-country journey to Orgosolo, one need only leave the main coastal road at Cagliari to experience an immediate transition from a familiar to an alien civilisation. In a matter of minutes, the Bruegel-like world of the laborious peasant bent over his crops, is left behind, and one finds oneself enclosed without warning in noble and arid landscape, devoid of humanity. In this hard air, details of rock, tree and ruin are painted with gothic exactitude; rusted ferrous earth is relieved with the greyish green of oaks; sun-flayed mountains lie all along the horizon; there are no isolated houses, no small villages; an occasional town like Santu Lussurgiu is the site of an ancient nomad encampment built where precious water gushes miraculously from a rock. Besides the flinty chatter of wheatears and the occasional screaming of an eagle, there is an omnipresent sound that is at once gay and sinister. This is the lively discord of bells – all of different tones – as a flock of goats goes by. They come through the dark bloodily red trunks of the cork-oaks at a quick, stealthy trot moving as fast as a man can walk. One knows that the shepherd is there too slipping from tree to tree, or out of sight over the lip of a ravine, or behind the rocks; never coming into view. The sensation is an uncomfortable one remembering that there is nothing of the meekness of the shepherd of Christian parable in this man, that he is a cruel, hungry dreamer with a gun, and that in this austere, archaic world where human life counts for so little, the shepherd is often separated by a hair’s breadth from the bandit.
Santu Lussurgiu is a cheerful-looking village unusual for the fact that most of the houses have flower-gardens, and, here on a hillside in the pinewoods, the government has built a tourist hotel with a swimming pool and children’s playground, and picnicking areas with fountains and waterfalls among the trees. Nightingales were singing in all the bushes when I was there. I was the only guest staying at this hotel, which has some fifty rooms, and the barman was also waiter, chambermaid and receptionist.
‘Thing’s aren’t so bad as they were,’ he said. ‘Two years ago, we had hold-ups almost every day, but last year it calmed down a bit. We’re keeping our fingers crossed … Dangerous to go out alone? Not really, but it’s a smart idea not to carry too much money on you if you go out for a stroll.’
The day’s newspaper from Nuoro was open in front of me and there was Santu Lussurgiu itself in a headline: ‘Like the Wild West,’ judge says. I read on. ‘In this part of the world, life seems more and more to imitate the standard Western movie, a continual real-life battle between outlaws and the sheriff and his men – and all we ordinary citizens can do is to look on.’
In the year 1966, in fact, there are estimated to be a hundred bandits at large in Sardinia, about ten of them regarded as particularly dangerous. The majority are centred in the province of Nuoro where the Questore (the chief of the Public Security Police) recently said: ‘At nine o’clock, people shut themselves in their houses. Outside you’ll find only police and soldiers. All traffic stops at night. If there’s a car on the road, you can safely say it’s a bandit’s.’
Through the window, I could see the barman’s children picking wild narcissi at the edge of the wood. Santu Lussurgiu looked as peaceful at that moment as a garden-suburb of London.
‘The other day they put the pressure on a neighbour of ours, Francesco Atseni,’ the barman said. ‘You can see his house from here. Told him to hand over five million lire – or else. He went straight to the police, and while he was about it, bought himself a new rifle. What good did it do him? They got him all the same, and not only him but his shepherd Salvatore. Waited outside the house one night and machinegunned the pair of them. We’ve learned our lesson now … I expect you’ve heard of the famous Antonio Michele Flores of Orgosolo. He used to operate round here until the police killed him last year. He was only twenty-five when he died and he’d been a bandit since he was fifteen. I saw him once or twice. Good-looking kid, but his eyes scared me stiff.’
I brought up the fact that Orgosolo was thirty-five miles from Santu Lussurgiu, but the barman said that that was nothing to the special kind of bandit Orgosolo produced. They’d been known to cross the country and carry out a raid as far afield as Oristano, fifty miles from their base. When I told him I was going to Orgosolo next day, he was astonished. Not one Sardinian in a thousand has ever visited Sardinia’s most famous town.
Sedilo was two villages, one nuraghe, and a cavalcade of gypsy horsemen further on. It looked deserted, and in fact half its population happened to be in Cagliari at that moment for the trial of Pepino Pes (sometimes known as the bandit of the decade) who had been born there. Pes, a lover in the grand manner, as well as a mere killer, with some facial resemblance to young Ramon Navarro, was alleged at the trial to have paid forty thousand lire (fifty-five dollars) for a killing, when too busy to attend to the job himself. He had many friends in Sedilo still, and one of them had written that day to each of the judges of the Supreme Court threatening them with death. ‘Not perhaps the best possible part of the world to be in for the next week or two,’ the senior British resident in Cagliari had said of this region. ‘Always a fair amount of highway robbery when a big bandit trial’s going on. These people’s families need money for their defence counsels. They’re very punctilious about paying for their legal advice.’ To avoid discouraging me, the lady then added, ‘Mind you, the chances of being held up aren’t terribly high. Say, one in ten at the most.’
The last stop before Orgosolo was Oliena. This town has stood a dozen times in the path of the erupting Orgosolo horde, and as a result has a makeshift and haphazard frontier character. Carlo, the guide I had picked up in Nuoro, was a native of Oliena, and he pointed out a local Alamo where, in the days of his grandfather, a last-ditch battle had taken place between townsmen and invaders. Now cautious and exploratory friendships were beginning to link the two communities. The two wars had exercised a liberalising influence, and the fierce endogamic rule of Orgosolo had been relaxed to permit one or two outside marriages. Carlo was very proud to have friends in Orgosolo.
Oliena seemed to believe that tourism would eventually appear like some fairy prince to rescue it with a kiss from the servitude and drudgery of the present, and as an act of faith, and quite astonishingly, a roadhouse had been built on the outskirts of the town, overlooking a natural curiosity, a deep, onyx river gurgling out of an unexplored cavern in the mountainside. Thirty or forty tables were laid in the dining room, in a vaguely Hawaiian ambience, neat little waitresses with pretty identical Sardinian faces stood by, and the menu offered porchetto (roast sucking pig), but no guests arrived. The only customers at the bar were police, and armed shepherds in velveteen who stacked their repeater rifles in the corner before ordering their drinks. A rich farmer of the neighbourhood, Antonio Listia, had been carried off from his home by four armed men on the previous day, and as the mechanism for paying the ransom had broken down, his life was feared for. The shepherds were members of a search-party.
Hereafter, followed a Sardinian no-man’s
-land, a deserted landscape composed of the cautious greens of spring, but dramatised with a bold infusion of red – the red washed walls of a refuge for road-menders; the sanguinary red of newly flayed oak trunks; the bluish bruised-red of the Sardinian prickly pear, which grows here everywhere and is quite unlike the prickly pear in other Mediterranean countries. Supramonte rose up over the horizon, silhouetting the green hills against the skull-whiteness of its rock.
A last curve in the road revealed Orgosolo clinging to a hillside, drab as the outskirts of some mean industrial town. Greystone unfinished houses stood among old middens of building materials. In a moment, a dejected street began, hardly wide enough for two cars to pass. Then an arched doorway under the sign Municipio, through which a man could be seen hunched over a desk in a dim bare room, announced that we were in the administrative heart of the town. Black hairy pigs cantered up and down the street, and a sharp penetrating odour of animals hung on the air.
A few yards up the street from the decrepit Town Hall was Tara’s barber’s shop reopened some years back under new ownership. Tara himself was under one of the wooden crosses in the churchyard. He had been suspected of informing to the police, and after his assassination, his body had been exposed with the corners of the mouth carved to the ears (the punishment prescribed for the false witness in the ancient Carta de Logu).
The atmosphere of this town was furtive. Although architecturally it was at first sight quite formless – a jumble of mean, dissonant buildings – one soon divined premeditation in this anarchy. Houses were built at more than one level on steeply sloping, zig-zagging alleyways having in many cases, I learned, multiple exits, escape routes to interconnecting cellars, concealed passages and rooftops. It was a town designed to shelter the fugitive; a labyrinth behind blind walls and barred windows, where a sick or wounded outlaw unable to face the life on Supramonte could take refuge for weeks and months at a time. Paska Devaddis, Orgosolo’s only female bandit, who died of tuberculosis in 1914 after a short life full of trouble, never once left the town.