THE COUNCIL OF EGYPT
Leonardo Sciascia
Translated from the Italian by Adrienne Foulke
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About The Council of Egypt
The Benedictine whisked a brush of multicoloured feathers over the top of the book, puffed out his plump cheeks like the god of winds in an old nautical map, blew black dust from the leather cover, and, with a shiver of what in the circumstances seemed delicate trepidation, laid the volume open on the table.
Palermo, 1783: The barons pursue their feuds and petty plotting. Their wives indulge in forbidden French novels. And the porcine abbot, Vella, eager to curry favour with Naples, ‘invents’ an ancient Arabic chronicle, The Council of Egypt, that rewrites Sicilian history.
We can see [Sicily] from here, the way you can look from the Tuileries across to the Faubourg Saint-Germain; the Strait – my word, it’s scarcely any wider than that, and yet we are in difficulties over the crossing. Would you believe it? If all we lacked were a good wind, we could do as Agamemnon did, and sacrifice a young maiden. We have more than enough of them, thank God. But there’s not a boat to be had, that’s the dilemma. One will be coming in, they say; so long as I have hopes of this, never suppose, Madame, that I will cast a single backward glance toward the country where you live, much as I delight in it. Now I want to see the homeland of Persephone, and discover why the Devil took himself a wife in that country.
—COURIER, Lettres de France et d’Italie
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
About The Council of Egypt
Epigraph
Introduction
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part 2
Part 3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
About Leonardo Sciascia
About the Introducer
Endpapers
About the cover and endpapers
More from Apollo
About Apollo
Copyright
Introduction
In 1783 Sicily was struck by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tidal waves, the worst in its history. Leonardo Sciascia ignores this spectacular seismology in The Council of Egypt, set like so many of his novels in Palermo, and dealing with the political and moral corruption of a society stifled for more than two millennia (‘the obscure, immutable centuries’) by a succession of foreign oppressors, millennia which have made Sicilians great deceivers and illusionists. While they seem to accept domination, they shape it to their individual advantage.
In The Leopard, Sicily’s greatest novel, published in 1958, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Prince boldly enunciates the conservative axiom: ‘We must change to stay the same’. Sciascia, with very different politics, is Lampedusa’s eloquent and radical heir. His chosen genre is the detective novel with its slow and telling disclosures, but in Sciascia’s hands the detective often dies before the crime is solved. In that sense, the author is a truth-teller: pessimistic but plausible.
The Council of Egypt is a historical detective story. More than that, it is a political fable – Sciascia’s hardest and wittiest. Published in 1963 when the author was forty-two years old, Sciascia was a schoolteacher, journalist, communist, an amateur scholar of the great Sicilian playwright Pirandello, a short-story writer and an emerging novelist. His first major novel, The Day of the Owl, had appeared two years earlier.
The action begins in something like a historical 1783. The Moroccan ambassador to the Court of Naples, returning to Africa, is shipwrecked on the Sicilian coast. He is entertained by the Viceroy of Sicily, who employs a poor Maltese monk as interpreter, imagining him to be proficient in Arabic. The priest grows in fame and, when the Ambassador puts to sea again, is asked to translate an ancient codex – a relic of the years of Moorish occupation – from the Arabic.
The Sicilian prelate, Monsignor Airoldi, commissions the work from the penniless Benedictine Giuseppe Vella. Hitherto he has made his living as a chaplain of the Order of Malta and a numerist – assigning numbers to the figures in people’s dreams in order to ‘interpret’ them. Vella has only rudimentary Arabic, but seeing a chance to change his circumstances for good, he obliges. Here begins his career as a forger, and also as a highly effective storyteller. ‘This is the lie that tells the truth’, the poet says. The truth Sciascia explores is not what is written in the ancient codex, but what is revealed in how people respond to Vella’s translations and inventions, his spurious, but initially unchallenged, authority. The Abbot’s forgery, laced with sufficient fact to fool the antiquarian Monsignor, illuminates the larger picture of Sicily at a time when the forces of change, notably the French Revolution, are quietly becoming irresistible.
The characters, events and families the forgery describes are drawn from history. The principled and progressive viceroy of the Two Sicilies, Dominico Caracciolo, is also based on an actual historical figure. He proposes reforms to the feudal order, but comes up against the hardening opposition of reactionary forces. The stolid barons and their church block the way. The Council of Egypt is the story of their obduracy and its unmasking.
Caracciolo, with his ‘Voltairean nose’ poking into every corner of Sicilian life, was in fact a great letter-writer, and Sciascia finds his way into the period by means of the immediacy and candour of Caracciolo’s writings. Caracciolo’s pursuit of corruption, his impatience with the feuding and shuffling for advantage of the island’s aristocracy, were Sciascia’s timeless subject. He saw in Caracciolo’s struggle a modern struggle: that of Sicily emerging from fascism yet still in the grips of the dark forces that held it in thrall for centuries.
The Council is Sciascia’s most experimental novel; it is also his most European, touching as it does on the contest between the forces of reform and reaction re-emerging after the temporary defeat of authoritarianism in the wake of the Second World War. Remote yet familiar: the fate of late eighteenth-century Sicily and Sciascia’s contemporary Sicily, are both in thrall to corruption, crime and the mafia. Wider, European correspondences can be drawn: the period of writing was, after all, the radical 1960s which did so much to undermine the settled privileges of the post-war establishment in Europe and further afield.
In 1783, foreign books already have an unsettling presence in Sicily: the ladies are kept, and controlled, by their husbands, but secretly they let themselves loose on French novels that teach them the arts of indiscretion. The Council is about the power of writing in a superstitious, repressed, half-literate society. Scripture has undisputed authority, and those who interpret it have power. Abbot Giuseppe Vella, Sciascia’s protagonist, an outsider, Maltese by origin, avaricious and scheming, brings a celibate malice to bear on a society that exploits him as confessor and pardoner. Can he achieve the lavish security of an aristocrat, without aristocratic qualities or gifts of his own? He also partak
es of the experimental spirit of the late eighteenth century. His darker calculation: can he unmask his corrupt patrons, and lay bare what is concealed beneath the pomp and pedigree that feed off the common man?
With a novelist’s creativity, Abbot Vella ‘translates’ what his patrons believe is an old Arabic chronicle, The Council of Egypt. No one can decipher the script in which The Council is written. The Abbot pretends to understand it and gradually discloses what this written authority says about privileges, the different families’ relative prominence, and the sovereignty over Sicily of the Kingdom of Naples. The world may seem ripe for reform, but his forgery exposes the entrenched resistance of the aristocracy. He divides the powerful and controls them. They court, flatter and enrich him. He becomes a falsifying champion of the old (dis)order, the feudal elite. None of his foes can defeat him until his forgery is suspected and then exposed. Even then truth is resisted. The terrible consequences of intended reform for the reformers themselves are made clear in the novel’s violent climax: the execution of a good man and the final imprisonment of the impenitent forger, for whom forgery has become an experiment in the power of language and lies. Sciasica’s tone is cool, unsentimental and as uncompromising as his master Stendhal’s. In depicting a country, its people and traditions, this is Sciascia’s most vivid canvas.
Francesco Paolo Di Blasi, a nobleman with humanist and liberal instincts, is Vella’s articulate ally and then his foil. His authority is no match for the Abbot’s, who gathers behind him an establishment threatened by modern trends and by change coming from Europe that they will resist at all costs. Both men know that the truth is relative: it can be reshaped, traded, devalued. It is not a force but a kind of currency, a form of fiction to be made and unmade. The tortures to which Di Blasi is subjected are elaborately, infernally cruel. However, his nobility, his resistance to the humiliation he is subjected to, are heroic in quite another key. Here the disciple of Voltaire, of Liberty, makes his accommodations with history. He dies, a hero of sorts, while Vella is consigned to a dungeon.
Sciascia is Sicily’s ironic, unforgiving chronicler. He also loves the country, its landscapes and cityscapes, and his writing evokes the place with an unconditional and – again – unsentimental devotion. In the end he admires Vella and lets him triumph in his art: ‘the writer in him had shaken off the hand of the imposter and broken free; like one of those shining, black, mettlesome Maltese horses, the writer was off at a gallop, dragging the imposter behind in the dust, his foot caught in the stirrup’. History may be an imposture composed by, and for, the ruling class; this ‘parody of a crime’, The Council of Egypt, is the imposture that pulls back the curtain on that larger, more destructive and disabling imposture. It reveals human nature for what it is: avaricious, controlling, cruel, and yet capable of great invention.
This is a fable, Sciascia himself makes clear, like one of Aesop’s, but the fox, the gullible ass and the stolid ox are translated back into the human forms from which they were originally abstracted. Towards the end of the novel, Sciascia indulges in a sweeping prolepsis, reflecting on what Vella might have felt had he experienced the lowest points of the twentieth-century’s tragic history; had he seen what human agency was capable of in the Second World War. Vella is spared this revelation, but he is in fact ‘struck by dismay at the sudden idea that the world of truth might be here and now, in the world of living men, of history, of books,’ – this, after he has spent the best part of his life as a paid interpreter of common people’s dreams and a forger.
The Council of Egypt belongs with Pirandello’s plays and The Leopard among the classics of Sicilian, and Italian, writing – a literature of the uncommon man.
Michael Schmidt, 2016
Part 1
Chapter I
The Benedictine whisked a brush of multicolored feathers over the top of the book, puffed out his plump cheeks like the god of winds in an old nautical map, blew black dust from the leather cover, and, with a shiver of what in the circumstances seemed delicate trepidation, laid the volume open on the table. The light fell slantingly from a high window onto the yellowed page, so that the dim characters stood out like a grotesque army of crushed dry black ants. His Excellency Abdallah Mohammed ben-Olman leaned down to study them; his eyes, habitually languid, weary, incurious, were now sharp and alert. He straightened up after a moment, reached under his redingote with his right hand, and drew forth a magnifying glass; the frame and handle were of gold, with green stones so set that the glass seemed a cluster of flowers or fruit on a slender stem.
“‘The icebound brook,’” he said, displaying the glass. He smiled, for he had intended to compliment his hosts by quoting the Sicilian poet Ibn Hamdis. Except for Don Giuseppe Vella, however, no one present understood any Arabic, and Don Giuseppe was not qualified to grasp His Excellency’s amiable intent in making the quotation, or even qualified to realize that it was a matter of quotation. Therefore, he translated not the words but the gesture – “The glass, he needs the glass” – which Monsignor Airoldi, who was eagerly awaiting His Excellency’s pronouncement on the codex, had perfectly well understood.
His Excellency bent over the book again, moving his glass across the page in a tracery of slow ellipses. Don Giuseppe could see the signs leap up into the glass, but they unraveled and sank back onto the worn page before he could decipher them.
His Excellency turned the page, and again he lingered over his examination. He murmured something to himself. He leafed through more pages, scanning them rapidly through his glass, until he came to the last, which swarmed with silverfish.
He straightened up, and as he turned away from the codex, his eyes were lusterless once more.
“A life of the Prophet,” he said. “Nothing about Sicily. Merely a life of the Prophet. One of many.”
Don Giuseppe turned a radiant face towards Monsignor Airoldi. “His Excellency says it is a precious codex, There is no other like it, he says, not even in his own country. It is an account of the Arab conquest of Sicily, and deals with the history of their rule here.”
Monsignor Airoldi purpled with happiness; he was so moved that he stammered. “Inquire of His...” he said. “I mean, ask him whether in form it is like the Cambridge Chronicle or – oh, like De rebus siculis.”
The Chaplain was not a man to be discouraged by any such vague question; indeed, he was prepared to cope with a far greater challenge. He turned to His Excellency. “Monsignor is disappointed that this codex does not deal with Sicilian matters. But he wishes to know whether lives of the Prophet, like this one, may be found at Cambridge or elsewhere in Europe.”
“In our libraries we have many. I do not know whether there are any at Cambridge or in other cities in Europe... I do regret that I have caused Monsignor a disappointment, but things are as they are.”
Ah, no, Don Giuseppe thought, things are not as they are, and to Monsignor he said, “His Excellency is not familiar with De rebus siculis, naturally—”
“Naturally, of course.” Monsignor felt slightly confused.
“—but he knows of the Cambridge Chronicle. This codex, he says, is something quite different. This is a collection of letters, reports – affairs of state, in a word.” The idea of contriving the fraud had occurred to Chaplain Vella the moment Monsignor Airoldi had proposed the visit to the Monastery of San Martino; the Bishop had remembered that the library there contained an Arabic codex brought to Palermo a hundred years before by Don Martino La Farina, Librarian of the Escorial. What better opportunity could there be to ascertain the contents of the codex? An Arab visitor conversant with literature and history and an interpreter like Vella.
Abdallah Mohammed ben-Olman, Ambassador from Morocco to the Court of Naples, was in Palermo that December of 1782 because the ship on which he was returning to Morocco had been driven onto the Sicilian coast by a storm and smashed. Viceroy Caracciolo, who knew what importance the government in Naples placed on maintaining friendly relations with the piratical Arab world, ha
d acted accordingly, albeit with concealed compunction, and, immediately upon learning of the disaster, had sent sedan chairs and carriages, under strong escort, to rescue the Ambassador, who was stranded on the beach in the midst of his luggage. But no sooner had the Ambassador reached the palace than the Viceroy realized he could not possibly communicate with him: the man knew no French, indeed he did not even know Neapolitan. Providentially, someone suggested that the Viceroy summon a Maltese chaplain who could be found wandering the city streets at almost any hour, always alone, always morose, catapulted into “happy” Palermo by who knows what fate.
The couriers dispatched on Vella’s trail searched feverishly for him throughout the city. At the house of a niece who extended him the grudging hospitality of food and a roof, he was to be found only at mealtimes and at night; the rest of the day he was abroad, engaged in the dual profession of chaplain of the Order of Malta and numerist. The second activity enabled him to supplement the necessities supplied by the first. He did not fare too badly, but he was not yet in a position to dispense with his niece’s hospitality – a most trying hospitality, what with a half dozen children spawned surely from the mouth of Hell, and a head of household, husband of that niece and father of those children, who was a ne’er-do-well and a drunkard.
One of the couriers found him, finally. He was in the shop of a butcher on the Via Albergaria and was engaged in unriddling a rather confused dream for the man. For the Chaplain was not so much a numerist as an interpreter of dreams. From the dreams people told him he selected whatever elements could be arranged in a more or less coherent story, and the images that emerged most prominently he then translated into numbers. It was no easy task to reduce to five numbers the dreams of the people in Albergaria and Capo, the two sections of the city to which he confined his activity. Like the tales in the “Lives of the Paladins of France,” their dreams were endless; they dissolved into a chaos of images and meandered down a thousand and one obscure byways. In the dream that the butcher was relating to him when the courier arrived, there was a pig that laughed, no less, and, to boot, the Viceroy, a neighbor woman, a meal of couscous, and and and... These were the chief elements the Chaplain had managed to extract from the stupendous dream.
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