Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey Through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean

by John Keahey

  He has been involved in the restoration of the prison behind what was once the Steri Palace, known in later centuries as the Palazzo Chiaramonte. Vito asked if I would like to meet his father there and see the prison, briefly opened to the public in 2007 and now closed. I needed no further prodding. I called the B and B on Etna and delayed my stay there by a day.

  Vito and his wife, Anna Kowalska, meet me, and we drive to the Chiaramonte. At the rear stands the three-story former prison, which later served as an archive. The cells had been converted into record repositories with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering the newly whitewashed walls. When the archive was moved decades ago, workers began to find, beneath two or three layers of whitewash, drawings and inscriptions on the cell walls left there by the generations of men and women imprisoned while undergoing torture by inquisitors.

  I do not know, nor does his family, if Leonardo Sciascia had ever been inside before he wrote The Death of the Inquisitor. But he certainly knew about it and about drawings and writings on the wall. In fact, he starts the tale with the words

  Patience

  Bread, and time

  that had been scratched onto the wall of a cell and deciphered, in 1906, by Sicilian folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè (1841–1916). Pitrè had peeled away the layers of whitewash of three cells uncovering vast fields of drawings and scribbling, the medium used coming from feces and charred sticks.

  Nino Catalano showed me those three cells and several others that had been restored over the intervening years. At the end of a few hours of studying what his father-in-law, Sciascia, described as this “obscure, anonymous, amorphous drama” of drawings depicting saints, prayers written in Latin, “verses in Sicilian dialect expressing suffering and despair,” Nino took me to an elevated landing at the south end of the former prison. There, leaning against a wall, was a drawing by the Sicilian painter Renato Guttuso, a friend of Sciascia’s. It portrays a wild-eyed and heavily bearded Fra Diego la Matina, fully manacled, beating the inquisitor.

  The spot where we are standing, Nino believes, is where the seventeenth-century beating occurred. Then, he tells a remarkable tale of how, in the early 1990s, well after his father-in-law’s 1989 death, a document written by an eyewitness to the beating was found in the Madrid archives of the Inquisition.

  According to that account, La Matina was not manacled when he was brought before the inquisitor. Some manacles or other devices made from heavy metal were left on a table in the room, noted the report in typical inquisitorial detail, and La Matina grabbed those when he started his assault.

  Nino says, “There is speculation, therefore, that someone wanted the inquisitor killed, and they knew that La Matina was capable of doing it. It could have been a setup.”

  In rereading Sciascia’s story, I wish he had lived long enough to know this development concerning his Racalmutese friar.

  * * *

  I have returned to the Chiaramonte Palace a few times since that hot July visit and have wandered into the room beyond the entrance of the main palace, the building in front of the former prison. Near the back of that room is that large hook embedded into a high ceiling beam. This was a torture chamber, where ropes were tied to hands behind the backs of the accused. The rope was placed through the hook and the man or woman was yanked upward, throwing their bones out of their shoulder joints. Sometimes a heavy beam was tied to their feet to increase the downward pull.

  The only answer the inquisitors wanted to hear to their questions was “I am guilty.” Nothing else was accepted. Some knew this and said it quickly; others never knew it and were confused about why they were there; still others, on principle, refused to say the words when they were not guilty of anything, enduring the sheer, unrelenting pain.

  It was the scribe’s job to record every intimate detail, taken down in impassive Spanish script. One wonders: When the scribe wrote, in his dispassionate style, the simple word “ah” as coming from the victim’s mouth, what sound actually did escape the lips?

  [A]nd when she was brought out she was again ordered to confess.

  She said: Here I am; I know not what to say.

  And it was ordered that she be attached to the rope, and the ministers attached the beams, and crying she said: If I knew I would say it.… And when they hoisted her up off the ground, she sweated and said: My Lord, I know nothing, my enemies have accused me wrongly; help me, Christians; ah, my Lord, you’re torturing me wrongly.

  … And she was let drop … Again hoisted high up and again exhorted.

  She said: I know nothing.

  SEVEN

  Sicilitudine

  The traveler disembarking in Palermo is immediately assaulted by an atmosphere of violence.… The violence of the scirocco, the red wind blowing from Africa, which squeezes your head in a fiery vise.… “Once there was a special room in old Sicilian houses,” Sciascia tells us, “that was called ‘the scirocco room.’ It had no windows, or any other communication with the outside other than the narrow door … and this is where the family would take refuge against the wind.” He adds this melancholy note: “The scirocco, too, is a dimension of Sicily.”

  —Marcelle Padovani, Sicily as Metaphor

  I HAVE allowed myself to swim around in the soup that is Sicily, a type of minestrone, perpetually simmering and made up of whatever history has tossed into it. Sicily may be part of Italy, a political subdivision, an autonomous region, but its people are not of Italy. Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1916, “Sicily is the region which has most actively resisted this tampering with history and freedom.” Sicilians might be viewed in America and elsewhere as “Italians,” but in their hearts and souls they are Siciliani.

  Siciliani are in a world apart, a world that does not have much to do, really, with what comes out of Rome. The ruling coalition there may want, for example, to attach the peninsula physically to this island with a bridge, but everyone here believes that such an act is neither out of benevolence nor out of a desire to bring the islanders closer into the fold; it’s because northerners see euros in such a bridge—in construction contracts, in a way to get northern Italian and European products onto the island faster (but not necessarily as a way to get Sicilian products off and into Europe). If it ever is built, it likely would not have much impact on the islanders’ daily lives. It may be physically attached, but Sicily likely will remain emotionally detached from its continental sibling for many lifetimes to come.

  This sense of Sicilian separateness, this so-called Sicilitudine and Leonardo Sciascia’s representations of it, were made clearer during a conversation in Rome with Francesca Corrao, a professor of Arabic literature and language. Born and raised on the island, she shares a look into Sicilian feelings about such things as national government control over it despite its status as an autonomous region. Through Corrao’s examples, one can begin to understand why such a thing as the bridge to Messina can be built, despite opposition by Sicilians and many southern Italians.

  We are drinking tea in her Rome apartment, from where she commutes to Naples during teaching stints at the three-hundred-year-old Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale.” She tells the story of how her father, Ludovico Corrao, when he was mayor of the western Sicilian village of Gibellina, negotiated directly with the Russian government to sell Sicilian oranges and wine. His sin was failing to go through the appropriate ministries in Rome.

  “That’s why they destroyed him,” Francesca said with barely disguised bitterness. “Even though Sicily has regional autonomy, it does not apply.” She points to Sigonella, the U.S. Naval Air Station near Catania. “If we want it, we [Sicilians] should have the agreement with U.S., not the national government. It is in my territory. If Rome does it, they do not give a damn about what is going on down here.” Another example: “Say the national government makes an agreement with Morocco to sell Italian automobiles there. In return, Italy imports Moroccan oranges. And the Sicilian oranges? They rot, because they cost more than the oranges from Morocco in exchang
e for cars.”

  I realize after numerous conversations with Sicilians over a period of months that others share her anger. But, unlike Francesca Corrao, they offer a characteristic shrug, knowing that such things are beyond their control.

  When I see this shrug, I think of an expression I’ve heard from a Sicilian-American friend that is typically used by people from his ancestral village of Racalmuto: simmo sùrfaru. I am told it has slightly different spellings and pronunciations in various parts of Sicily. It means, in its most basic sense, “We are just sulfur,” or, Sùrfaru sugnu, “I am just sulfur.” Literally translated, these expressions indicate that people, like chunks of that nonmetallic element being tossed into a cart for transport, have no control over what is happening to them or where they are going.

  * * *

  Chiara Mazzucchelli, in her marvelous doctoral dissertation “Heart of My Race,” which she adapted for a paper in the Tamkang Review, puts this north-south divide this way: “Admittedly, since Unification in 1861, the Italian southern masses as a whole have experienced various degrees of difficulty in accessing the decisional spheres of institutional power.” The industrial North, trying to keep pace with its industrialized European neighbors, had little time to spend on the agrarian South—except as, in Antonio Gramsci’s words, “exploitable colonies.” The Sardinian-born Gramsci, a leftist political theorist of the early twentieth century, meant that southern Italy and Sicily are a source of cheap labor and a market for northern products.

  Gramsci, in the midst of a satirical tirade mocking northern prejudices about the South and southerners, notes that through all this, the South has managed to produce “a few great geniuses, like isolated palms in an arid and sterile desert.”

  One of those geniuses, of which Sicily has produced many, is Leonardo Sciascia (1921–1989), an intellectual and prolific writer of literature that ranges from detective stories and historical novels to political tracts and memoirs. He became the twentieth century’s successor to Giovanni Verga (1840–1922) and 1934 Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936), both of who comfortably straddled the two centuries. Sciascia is a guiding light to younger writers still producing remarkable fiction with a uniquely Sicilian voice. Not an Italian voice, but a Sicilian voice.

  Sciascia understood his fellow Sicilians. He was born deep in the Arab-rooted culture of the island’s sulfur-rich southwestern edge in Racalmuto. Its name, I was told by historian Leonard Chiarelli, is derived from the name of a tenth-century Arab landowner, Hammud. Put that with rahl, which means village, and you get Rahl Hammud. There are variations on spelling and disputes about the origins, but whatever the etymology, Sciascia cherished his own deeply implanted Arab heritage.

  In an interview, he told a journalist that the original spelling of his name, until Unification in 1861, was the purely Arabic “Xaxa.” Francesca Corrao, who was a longtime friend of his and who speaks Arabic fluently, told me that the name means “a kind of soft material, like netting.”

  Sciascia said he was told by the Libyan consul in Palermo it means “head veil.” And as further evidence of his ties to that ancient culture, he pointed out that there are people in the southern Italian region of Apulia with the name Sciascia. Apulia, sometimes called Puglia, is the region that encompasses Italy’s heel, and it is where many Sicilian Muslims were deported—because of their rebelliousness, not their religion—between 1160 and 1246.

  Sciascia believed that Sicilians were perpetually insecure, a condition generated by the island’s continuous colonization by outsiders. Writes Mazzucchelli:

  One can safely say that insecurity … affects the behavior, the way of being, the take on life—fear, apprehension, distrust, closed passions, inability to establish relationships outside of the private sphere, violence, pessimism, fatalism—of both the collectivity and single individuals.

  It is simmo sùrfaru incarnate. Forced colonization and the inability of its inhabitants to follow a course of self-determination metaphorically imprinted insecurity on Sicilian DNA. Over the space of thirty centuries, Sicilians sought to cover this helplessness—again in Sciascia’s words—with “attitudes of presumptuousness, haughtiness, and arrogance.”

  Sciascia’s fellow writers, contemporaries as well as predecessors, also appear to hold that belief. Academics put him into the Sicilian school of literature that includes Verga, Pirandello, Lampedusa, Elio Vittorini, and Maria Messina, who wrote from a rarely told woman’s perspective. Academician Fred Gardaphé, in the introduction to Messina’s book Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House and Other Stories of Sicily, writes: “She takes us into another side of Sicilian irrationality that Sciascia described … in a land often constricted by the spirit-killing irrationality of industrial capitalism, which ultimately sent thousands of Sicilians away from the island forever.”

  Mazzucchelli believes that it is impossible to discuss Sicily and Sicilians today “without questioning or concurring with Sciascia’s speculations. Sicilian-ness [Sicilitudine] became, in his articulation, a ‘way of being,’ the inescapable condition of a population marked by ‘a history of defeats.’” And, in a side note, Mazzucchelli felicitously points out how Sicilitudine rhymes with the Italian word “solitudine,” solitude, loneliness, “which hints to the isolation of the island.”

  * * *

  Francesca Corrao has deep insight into Sciascia’s thinking. She grew up knowing him during the time her family lived next door to the writer’s Palermo apartment, where he spent most winters. Her father and Sciascia were close friends; both were leftists and politically in tune with each other.

  “The first time I really remember him was around the time I was a teenager,” she told me. “Every morning I would wake up, and he was just sitting in the window of his study in the building in front of our house.”

  He came often for dinner with her family. Early on, “it was more me being a young lady listening to older people, maybe discussing politics or literature. When I was nineteen, twenty, when I was starting working on my studies, he was very curious about them.”

  Corrao lived for seven years in Cairo, Egypt, studying Arabic and Arab literature. It was there that she realized that a character from Arab folklore—Juha, a medieval Arab trickster—bore strong similarities to a similar character in Sicilian folklore: Giufà.

  “We shared this common love for Giufà,” she said of her friendship with the Sicilian writer. Arabic tales about this character were apparently introduced into Sicily in the ninth and tenth centuries during Muslim control and were fully assimilated into the Sicilian consciousness.

  “I knew about Giufà because my mother told me the stories. When I went to Cairo, I discovered that my mother’s stories were the same ones I found there. Sciascia knew it, too. In his introduction to my book he writes that his grandfather told him the stories of Giufà. He had read them in [Italo] Calvino and [Giuseppe] Pitrè; they thought it was of Arab origin, but no one knew they were the same stories until I wrote the book.”

  Then Sciascia wrote his own story. It is found in his short-story collection The Wine-Dark Sea, titled simply “Giufà.” The opening lines state matter-of-factly: “Giufà has been living in Sicily since Arabian times … A thousand years later, Giufà still shambles along the roads, ageless like all simpletons and up to all kinds of mischief.” It is in this thought about “a thousand years later” where I believe Sciascia takes a backhanded swipe at all the elements of Sicilian society that have held his island in limbo through history and continue holding it in check today: politicians, mafiosi, police, the Catholic Church.

  Giufà, a human creature, takes everything literally. He is told to take a weapon and kill something red, meaning he should go after some kind of bird with a red head, for these are the tastiest. He takes down from over his bed an ancient harquebus—a heavy, portable matchlock gun from the fifteenth century—and, as instructed, goes hunting. He sees a red head bobbing along on the other side of a hedge, fires, and drops the creature. He carries it
home, presents it proudly to his mother, and she shrieks, “You’ve killed the cardinal!”

  Says Corrao, “In this case, Giufà is too literal, but he is also the paradox of human beings. Sciascia is describing humanity.”

  * * *

  In my American way of thinking, I interpret this as a symptom of Sciascia’s deep and abiding cynicism. I suggest this to Sciascia’s oldest daughter, Laura Sciascia, a medieval historian at the University of Palermo. In my ignorance of the nuances of the Italian language, my observation comes close to offending her. She immediately sets me straight.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” she says with finality. “He was skeptical! Cynical has another meaning in Italian. To say someone is cynical is to say he has no principles!” She offers an example: A cynic is a person who changes as easily as the wind changes direction—one who can support a cause, and when that cause loses cachet such a person can switch sides and change so-called belief systems without feeling any guilt. Americans might describe such a person as a blatant opportunist or hypocrite; Sicilians and Italians say that person is a cynic.

  Hearing this, I think of Tancredi, Don Fabrizio’s nephew in Lampedusa’s The Leopard. He shifts with the tide, doing what is necessary to survive the rapid changes then sweeping the island along with Garibaldi’s army. He could be the classic cynic in the Italian/Sicilian definition of the word.

  In Sicily as Metaphor, Sciascia delves a bit into the healthiness of being skeptical. “Skepticism isn’t an acceptance of defeat,” he says, “but a margin of safety, of elasticity … Skepticism is healthy. It’s the best antidote to fanaticism.” He sees skepticism “as the safety valve of reason. And so is pessimism, with which many people charge me.” As I read this, I remembered a newspaper editor I once worked for who gently chastised me for my extreme American-style cynicism. “Reporters should always be skeptical; that’s healthy and a requirement for the job,” he told me. “You’re too cynical, and that’s not healthy.”