by Peter Robb
The Leopard in its first version was finished in March 1956 and two more chapters were added a year later. It’d been sent to Mondadori, Italy’s biggest publisher, when it was still unfinished. It was rejected with intense regret at the end of the year. Seven months later Lampedusa was dead at sixty of lung cancer. Another copy of the typescript had been sent off anonymously not long after the first. It lay unread and ignored for over a year until someone sent it on to the novelist Giorgio Bassani, who found it the work of a real writer … a real poet, and wanted to publish it immediately. Bassani had no idea at first that the author was the Sicilian prince he’d met four years earlier. He went to Palermo and pieced together a version incorporating some further parts of the manuscript he found in the care of Lampedusa’s young friends. The Leopard was published by Feltrinelli in November 1958. In just over a year fifty-two further editions followed.
The little world of letters in late fifties Italy wasn’t pleased at all that the country’s first-ever international bestseller should be such an unfashionable work, even though its author was already dead. Cardinal Ruffini, uncle of that DC minister elected by the friends, said The Leopard was one of three things that dishonoured Sicily. The other two were Danilo Dolci, the reformer and writer who was drawing the world’s attention to Sicilian poverty, and people who said the mafia existed. In the ideology-ridden culture of those cold war days, however, the people who most disliked it were the progressives, and what they most disliked was distilled in don Fabrizio’s great denunciation of hopes for change. When the liberal functionary Chevalley comes from the north to ask him to join the Italian senate, the prince refuses.
In Sicily doing well or doing badly doesn’t matter. The sin we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’. We’re old, Chevalley, terribly old. For at least twenty-five centuries we’ve been carrying magnificent and heterogeneous civilizations on our backs, all of them coming fully perfected from outside, none sprouted from ourselves, none that we’ve made our own … for two thousand five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I’m not complaining when I say it. Most of it’s our fault. But we’re worn out and exhausted all the same … Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who wants to wake them …
Among the many who found this defeatist and retrogade, the apologia of a failed ruling class, was Leonardo Sciascia, who was then starting out as a writer. When The Leopard came out Sciascia’s own first novel and biggest success, The Day of the Owl, was a couple of years off. Assimilating the prince in the novel to the prince who wrote the novel, as most of the book’s critics did, Sciascia charged him in a 1959 review with making a climatic-geographical abstraction of Sicily and assuming an aristocratic detachment from its realities. He was still saying this twenty years later. In 1978 he repeated
It’s always seemed to me that the Sicily described by Lampedusa in The Leopard is nothing other than a geographic and climatic abstraction removed from time and history. Maybe that Sicily inhabited by sceptics and aristocrats afforded Lampedusa a way of writing a fine book, but if Stendhal had had the time to make that journey to Sicily he so much wanted to, he could have written that book a century earlier.
Sciascia claimed in the sixties that in The Day of the Owl of 1961 he’d been the first Sicilian writer to deal with the mafia in a work of imagination. Nobody had underlined this problem in a work of fiction for the mass market. I did, he said firmly in 1965. What, I wondered, could have made him forget the vivid and crucial part that don Calogero Sedàra plays in The Leopard?
* * *
THE CARAVAN of carriages moves through the parched heat of central Sicily in summer and reaches the perimeter of the family estates. Things are noticed in the landscape that are far from aristocratic and not at all abstract. For instance, the well:
… it served as a swimming pool, drinking trough, prison, cemetery. It slaked thirst, spread typhus, guarded the kidnapped and concealed the carcasses of beasts and men until they were reduced to smooth anonymous skeletons.
A lot of rural Sicilian life and death is condensed into that informed glance. Those carcasses are recalled not only in the stories of kidnappings and dismemberments with which Tancredi later teases the northerner Chevalley, but quite soon in the figure of Tancredi’s future father-in-law, Angelica’s father don Calogero. Arriving in his palace, the prince learns from his estate manager that don Calogero Sedàra, the local mayor, has been buying up land to the extent that his income from it is drawing level with the prince’s own, and that around here is the least of his properties. Sedàra’s political influence has grown too. He’s vaguely understood to have been very busy at the time of the liberation and now leads the local liberals, the new political force, and is sure to be a member of the new national parliament.
Sedàra can barely speak Italian. He’s small, mean, avid, less than clean shaven, highly intelligent and already very rich. He has a beautiful uncouth wife kept under wraps. The prince learns from his hunting companion that her father, so filthy and foul tempered everyone called him Peppe Shit. Excuse the word, Excellency, was found dead on a country path two years after her marriage to don Calogero. Peppe Shit had twelve shotgun blasts in his back. Always lucky, don Calogero. That fellow was getting greedy and overbearing. Out hunting, the prince learns not only that the woman his nephew Tancredi, prince of Falconeri, wants to marry is the granddaughter of the rural mafia hit victim Peppe Shit. He also discovers that her father the mayor rigged the local vote in the referendum on the unification of Italy. The vote had been announced as a hundred per cent in favour. The prince remembers.
Italy was born that frowning evening at Donnafugata, born right there in that forgotten town just as much as it was in the lethargy of Palermo or the agitation of Naples … it was born and one had to hope it would survive in this form. Any other would have been worse. Agreed. Yet this persistent unease had to mean something. He felt it during the too-dry announcement of the figures, the too-emphatic speeches. Something or someone was dead in God knew what hidden corner of the country or fold of the people’s consciousness.
Now he understands what it was.
What had been strangled at Donnafugata and a hundred other places during that night of filthy wind was the newborn good faith … Don Ciccio’s negative vote, fifty similar votes at Donnafugata, a hundred thousand NOs throughout the kingdom would have changed nothing in the result. Rather, they’d have made it more meaningful and the twisting of minds would have been avoided.
Tancredi wants to fuck Angelica simply because she’s so desirable, but he wants to marry her to recover his family’s lost wealth and restore that abandoned villa with the bougainvillea. The prince his uncle understands this strategic necessity, and ends up himself recommending don Calogero Sedàra as a senator instead of himself. Even lifted here from the body of the story, this didn’t look to me like an abstraction out of time and history. Spare and barely suggested, it’s the most succinct representation in fiction of that original Sicilian confluence of business, crime and politics in modern Italy, the germ of everything that was to come. There’s a sly unspoken analogy running through the story of don Calogero and his political rise through the liberation of Sicily in 1860. It’s with the later American liberation of 1943 and those local elements who were rising through Christian Democracy when Lampedusa wrote. The Leopard’s don Calogero Sedàra shares more than his first name and his shabby appearance with don Calogero Vizzini, the capo di tutti i capi who welcomed the American armies when they arrived with Lucky Luciano’s yellow silk foulard. Don Calogero also bears a strong and quite ahistorical resemblance to Totò Riina, the scruffy nondescript illiterate who ran a multinational with a turnover in billions from pencilled sums in a dog-eared notebook. Lampedusa doesn’t talk of mafia here, but he shows its essential presence. The well, the corpses, the sudden wealth, the prince’s armed campieri, the estate guards whose shotguns were not always innocuous. There is a direct glance at rural men of honour in a
later episode, Father Pirrone’s descent to the netherworld of his home village. The Jesuit priest returns for a family visit and becomes involved in a brutal episode of feuding, seduction and inheritance, which he resolves by arranging a strategic marriage of interests that parallels Tancredi’s and Angelica’s.
If we want everything to stay the same, everything’s got to change, says Tancredi early in the novel, as he eagerly explains to his uncle why he’s joining Garibaldi. It’s an acute summation of the way the Sicilian ruling class has always sought accommodation with the island’s new invaders; and having found the accommodation, gone on to bend the outsiders’ will to their local interests. It’s not quite true that everything stays the same, as the prince knows and the novel shows. History showed it too. What was to stay the same, through the shifting alliances at the top, was the lives of the Sicilian poor.
Glimpsed in the livid light of half past five in the morning, Donnafugata was deserted and looked despairing. In front of every habitation the rubbish from wretched tables piled up along the leprous walls. Shivering dogs rifled through it, their eagerness always disappointed. The odd door was already open and the stench of the huddled sleepers spread through the street. By the flicker of oil lamps mothers examined their children’s trachoma-inflamed eyelids. They were almost all dressed in mourning and quite a few had been the wives of those scarecrow corpses one stumbles over at the bends in the country tracks. The men had grabbed their hoes and were leaving to look for anyone who might, God willing, give them work. Stupefied silence or exasperated screeching hysterical voices …
Just before he wrote The Leopard, Lampedusa in 1955 had made his first-ever visit to Palma di Montechiaro, the town near Agrigento of which he was duke, a town founded by his ancestor in 1637 as a New Jerusalem. Some of the details in The Leopard were clearly derived from what Lampedusa found at Palma, for instance the closed convent where the prince’s ancestress had withdrawn, in life and in the novel, and where another forebear had spent his last years sleeping in a coffin. The year after The Leopard was published, in 1959, a young doctor from Bologna, a parasitologist, spent several months in Palma studying conditions of life in Sicily. He found a town where over half the people were illiterate and child mortality ran at fifty per cent. Farm animals, mules, horses, goats, cattle, pigs lived with their owners in their houses. Only a third of the houses had running water, in any case polluted, and twenty council cleaners, who hadn’t been paid for seven months, carried off the nightsoil in open mule carts. Sewers ran open in the streets, flies swarmed and the stench was overpowering. Apart from a rich fauna of intestinal parasites, malaria, typhus and trachoma were rampant, and other more obscure viruses thought not to exist in Europe. The children worked in the lime quarry and almost nobody ate meat. The prince’s town in 1959 was the town of a hundred years earlier, and to describe Sicilian wretchedness in his historical novel, in those lines about the town at daybreak, Lampedusa had merely to record what he found on his visit. Nothing had changed.
* * *
FROM MARSALA, after landing in 1860 and liberating Palermo and the island, Garibaldi fought his way north with relative ease. The picciotti fought with him in Sicily, as Sciascia reminded Andreotti one of the few times they met, because they’d been sent by their bosses, and in Naples the guaglioni of the camorra were transformed temporarily into a national guard to keep order, and thrown into jail when the liberator passed. The Bourbon monarchy was swiftly defeated and the Mezzogiorno soon incorporated into the united Italy that was now ruled by the Savoy monarchy from Piedmont in the north. It was a shift in Italy’s economic and political centre of gravity from which the south never recovered. Naples went into an irreversible decline. All its embryonic heavy industry was carted off to fuel the growth of the north, where the industrial heart of Italy remained. Protectionist tax concessions were granted to the companies of that industrial triangle whose apices were Turin, Genoa and Milan. By the beginning of the twentieth century the economy of the industrialized north had taken off. Turin, the old capital of the house of Savoy, became the headquarters of the Fiat motor company, one of the biggest industrial groups in Europe. In the same years, the southern economy plunged into crisis as the prices of oil, wine and wool dived, setting off the huge turn-of-the-century peasant emigration to the Americas. Through all this, and though it was poorer, the Mezzogiorno was still paying higher taxes and getting less back in public expenditure and capital investment than Italy’s northern regions. The savings of the south, and the money sent home by emigrants, were sucked toward the north and the gulf widened between developed and underdeveloped Italy. In the modern state of united Italy the Mezzogiorno remained what pope Leon X had called it, the tail of Italy. The southern ruling class, with its reactionary and parasitic representatives and its criminal allies, was the political expression of these realities. Everything, as The Leopard’s bright-eyed young Tancredi had foreseen, had changed, and everything had remained the same.
There were older causes too. A political scientist from Harvard called Putnam has found the paths of northern and southern Italy were already diverging nearly a thousand years ago. The feudal kingdom founded in the south by the Norman mercenaries was, like the Byzantine and Arab states before it, a centralized and absolutist state. Administratively, economically, socially the southern regime was very advanced. Its constitution in 1230 included Europe’s first codification of administrative law in seven hundred years. It founded Europe’s first state university in Naples in 1224. It was a multicultural society ante litteram, tolerant in religion, in which Greek, Arabic, Jewish, Latin and Italian vernacular arts flourished together. But wealth in the south came from land, not commerce, and the regime’s efficiency of rule reinforced the social hierarchy. Its very strengths inhibited change, while in the north by the twelfth century Florence, Venice, Bologna, Genoa, Milan had already evolved into a network of communal republics. They were city states with an active citizenry and a professional public administration. They made their money in finance, trade and commerce and the institutions of modern capitalism had their origins there. For Putnam, the split between the hierarchical, autocratic and bureaucratic south and the democratic, entrepreneurial and outward-looking north was formed then. By the end of the seventeenth century, aristocratic power was already eroding in the north, while the Bourbons in the south ruled the biggest and worst-administered Italian state. In 1791, when it was twice as big as Rome and three times the size of Milan, its capital Naples was
a grotesque parasite, many of whose inhabitants were royal employees, priests, domestic servants and beggars … [living] on the back of a desperately overworked, desperately poor peasantry who were given no civic rights.
After unification it was the south that overwhelmingly filled the emigrant ships to the new world. From the Mezzogiorno, nearly one and three-quarter million immigrants entered the United States between 1901 and 1910. From the north in the same time came a third of a million. Colonies and communities formed beyond the ocean. In the early nineteen twenties the quota acts in the United States reduced the flood of immigrants to a trickle, and Italy was closed off by fascism and another world war. Twenty years later the Italian economy was in ruins and most of the south was starving. When the war ended many young southern men migrated north, strangers in their own country, to be the cannon fodder of Italy’s postwar reconstruction and the coming economic boom. Some, mostly single men, went further north, to Switzerland and Germany and the mines of Belgium. In 1977 Manlio Rossi-Doria, the great student of southern agricultural society, wrote that
Of all the changes brought about in the Mezzogiorno in the last thirty years, the emigration to the northern regions of Italy and Europe of nearly five million southerners has certainly been the greatest, the most painful and the most distressing … It is impossible to calculate the enormous cost of emigration for those who took part in it …
Some still looked overseas. In the eleven years after the war, between 1946 and 1957, Italy’s emigr
ants outnumbered the homecomers by well over a million and nearly three-quarters of them came from the south. After Argentina, sixty per cent of whose people were of Italian origin and where most still went, Australia was one of the few foreign destinations left. It was terribly distant but more or less promising. Many stayed away for ever. Between 1951 and 1971, even counting those returning home, the Mezzogiorno lost over four million people out of a total population of little over eighteen million. It was a phenomenon of colossal dimensions. The poor farming communities of the interior, Rossi-Doria’s naked south of grain and pasture, a third of the Mezzogiorno’s population, lost half their inhabitants. The gap between the two Italies got wider and wider.
V
A PRISONER
IN 1971, Leonardo Sciascia published a short book rather different from any of his earlier novels, which had all treated their Sicilian themes in a straightforwardly realistic manner. Il Contesto, however, or The Context, which later became known in English as Equal Danger, was subtitled una parodia, and was a detective story, or a parody of one, set in a context of political intrigue in an unnamed country very like Sicily. A literary detective called Inspector Rogas, who as his Latin name hints is a patently literary creation as well as a detective who knows his Voltaire, investigates the serial murders of a string of distinguished judges. He soon finds his own line of thinking, which is that the murders are revenge killings by an unjustly convicted man, is in conflict with the one his superiors would like him to pursue, which would lead Rogas to discover political killings by left-wing groups. In Sciascia’s story, however, the logical processes of detection, clarification and resolution are reversed, and what seems at first a reasonably straightforward problem, susceptible to rational solution, starts spiralling down into a murky vortex of hidden powers, obscure relationships and concealed motives. At the end of the story Rogas himself is murdered. Rogas has confided his suspicions to a writer friend the day before, but the reader never learns quite what these suspicions are. By the end of the story, the reader knows nothing. Yet in trying to make sense of the abruptly concluded novella, the reader is forced into trying to relate the incidents into a series of gut-clenching hypotheses. Sciascia vanishes and a faint sense of nausea descends. My own queasiness was enhanced by a French critic who wrote that it was possible, though difficult, to reconstruct the dynamic of the killings in the art gallery at the end. I’d tried and failed, and felt now I’d missed the point.