Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  The effect of reading The Context is of a concentrated hit of the daily papers in Italy during the period of The True History. Hideous deaths, disturbing coincidences, plenty of detail, enveloping menace and no real knowledge at all. Inspector Rogas, like every self-respecting investigator, that is, one who has that respect for himself that he wants to win from his readers, lives alone, with a vague memory of having once been married. Toward the end of the story, he goes to his Thursday restaurant to think things over at lunch. Rogas also knows his food and eats at a different restaurant for every day of the week, so that each of the seven considered him a good customer but not so trusting and regular that they could treat him badly. After carefully choosing food and wine, he eats distractedly, his mind on the problem.

  Within the problem of a series of crimes that it was his duty and his profession to solve and hand their author over to the law, if not to justice, another problem had arisen. It was highly criminal in nature, a crime contemplated in the fundamental principles of the State. But it had to be solved outside his professional duty, against his duty. It was a question in fact of defending the state against those who represented it, those who held it in their power. The State was held prisoner and needed setting free. But he too was a prisoner. All he could do was try to open a crack in the wall.

  To reread The Context after an immersion in The True History of Italy is to be struck by how early and how acutely Sciascia sensed what was going on in Italy. The quotation above could stand as an epigraph to The True History. Italy’s history in the seventies and eighties is foreseen in The Context. Rogas happens on his secret meeting of the chief justice, heads of the police and armed services and members of the government ten years before the P2 conspiracy was revealed. The Context’s judges and politicians are assassinated years before the Red Brigades and the mafia began killing them in life. The equivocal behaviour of the left opposition party at the story’s conclusion greatly disconcerted the communist party when the book appeared. And when Rogas observes a state limousine discreetly leaving the chief justice’s house after the secret meeting, and sees inside shrinking so far into one corner … that it seemed empty, the minister for foreign affairs, I made an instant reality check, only to find that Giulio Andreotti was still a year or so from becoming prime minister and over a decade from becoming minister for foreign affairs. He did spend the greater part of the sixties as minister for defence.

  Having a feel for the subterranean movements in Italian society, and a particular sensitivity to those tremors that started in Sicily and later hit the mainland, Sciascia condensed tendencies into images and acts with such precision that reality followed where his imagination led. Evidently, he had the feeling as he wrote that he was being overtaken by events, even as his story moved away from its starting point in reality. He wrote in an afterword to The Context in 1971 that having begun his story as a joke,

  … the story shifted to a quite imaginary country; a country where ideas were no longer current, where principles, though still proclaimed and acclaimed, were daily mocked, where ideologies in politics were reduced to mere names in the power play, where power for its own sake was all that counted. An imaginary country, I repeat. Italy and Sicily might also come to mind, but only in the sense my friend Guttuso intends when he says, Even if I paint an apple, it’s Sicily. The light. The colour. And the worm eating it inside? The worm, in my parody, is quite imaginary. The light and the colour, if there are any, may be Sicilian and Italian, the incidents, the details. But the substance, if there is any, is meant as a reflection on power in the world, on the way power degenerates into the impenetrable form of a chain of connections that we can roughly call mafioso.

  He’d kept the parody in a drawer for two years after writing it. It was, he said, perhaps because he’d started it as an entertainment and when he got to the end it no longer amused him at all.

  Not that Sciascia, even in his lightest moments, is ever a laugh a minute man. His next book, Todo Modo, later translated as One Way or Another, was published in 1974 and set in a place of spiritual retreat for a group of very worldly demochristian politicians and power brokers. The retreat is held in a luxury hotel built over an old hermitage by the entrepreneurial priest who leads the spiritual exercises. A famous chef’s brought in so that the politicians can dedicate themselves for a whole week to spiritual gymnastics without mortifying the flesh. During the networking and sex, a series of murders takes place, and as in the earlier novel solutions to the deaths are implied but never revealed. The first murder victim is a former senator, a man with an acute, foxy face … far from ill informed in matters of patristic and scholastic theology. The former senator is shot dead during the evening recitation of the rosary, and a few days later the investigating magistrate receives a mountain of photocopies of cheques signed by the victim. They’ve been drawn on special or secret funds he had access to.

  – Are there any cheques made out to someone here?

  – Someone? Everyone. There’s not one person here who hasn’t had his share.

  The time lag was shortening here between Sciascia’s premonitory imaginings and the reality that followed them. Todo Modo was only two or three years ahead of the Italcasse scandal. This huge and complicated matter was seething away underground in the late seventies and is extensively described in The True History of Italy. It was so complex and the efforts to suppress it were so far reaching and effective that only twenty years later were the details coming to light. Italcasse was an Italian government-owned bank, controlled in effect by the DC, and The President’s Cheques were the subject of a very celebrated article, written about five years after Todo Modo, about cheques drawn by Giulio Andreotti on funds he had access to and made out to some very dubious people indeed. Nobody’s ever read The President’s Cheques because the article disappeared before publication and its author was shot dead. A film made of Todo Modo a year or so after the novel came out made the book’s outlined characters readily identifiable as real DC potentates, and another of the characters was easily recognizable as Aldo Moro.

  Moro was the prime minister before Andreotti in the later seventies, the consummate catholic ideologue and the patient, tireless great weaver of that new understanding with the communists that the communist leader Enrico Berlinguer called the historic compromise and Moro called the inevitable convergence of parallel lines. It would be another exploit of Italian transformism, when the establishment swallowed the opposition and assimilated it. Everything would change so that everything could remain the same. The left had been growing stronger. The communists wanted to govern and were already moving hopefully to the right to show how responsible they were. Some were unhappy about this, especially the Red Brigades, who’d killed fifteen in the previous two years in their strategy of annihilation against the Italian ruling class and were determined to wreck all understandings. So were the plotters and terrorists on the right, and maybe the great and powerful friends. When Moro had tried to explain the inevitable convergence of parallel lines, in Washington, Henry Kissinger had shouted and threatened him in a rage. Yet the demochristian snake had patiently, quietly hypnotized the communist bunny and was ready now to devour it.

  * * *

  MORO WAS heading for parliament for the swallowing on the morning of March the sixteenth in 1978. The day was already a success for the president of the DC. A new government was being sworn in, headed by Giulio Andreotti. It was actually the third consecutive government headed by Andreotti, his fifth that decade, but this new one would have the support of the communists. The great weaver Moro had won the support of the communists without having had to give them any power, and who better now to swallow and transform the communist challenge than the archdemochristian Giulio Andreotti? Power wears out those who don’t have it was his personal motto. He’d promised to consult. The communists would be in the area of government and they were thrilled. Moro, in his lugubrious way, was satisfied.

  He’d hardly left home that morning when he and his sec
urity escort were ambushed in the middle of Rome. A BR commando blocked their cars in via Fani, killed Moro’s driver and his four bodyguards and hustled Moro into another car and disappeared. Except by his BR jailers, and in the polaroids they issued from the people’s prison, Moro was never seen alive again.

  For fifty-five days the BR held Moro prisoner in Rome while the Italian police and security forces tried with marvellous inefficiency to find him. A series of BR communiqués and letters from Moro punctuated the drama. Nobody seemed to know what to do. Nobody seemed to expect the police or security forces to save Moro as he was tried in hiding by a people’s tribunal. There was a strong whiff of hidden secret service agendas. The socialists wanted to open negotiations with the BR for Moro’s release. The communists, now so close to respectability and yet still so far from real power, had a peculiar horror of acquiring guilt by association with this nightmare left fringe and urged that the state not deal with the kidnappers. The DC leaders already thought this but the communists were the firmest of all. No deal with the BR. Aldo Moro was condemned to death.

  Not simply and quickly however. Fifty-five days was a long time and the arguments went back and forth on what to do. Moro sent out letters to his closest DC friends begging them to negotiate, offering reasons for saving his life, using his years of intimacy to second guess their thinking and their moves. The communists were closed and frozen, but in the DC Moro’s colleagues read the communiqués about interrogation and trials with growing alarm. Moro knew all the DC secrets and a lot of them were deeply compromising. Some DC leaders were more gravely compromised than others and would’ve felt unease at Moro’s telling all. A year earlier, defending his colleagues caught in the Lockheed scandal, Moro had said ringingly

  There must be no scapegoats, no human sacrifices … The DC stands firm in defence of its men … You won’t judge us in the piazzas, we won’t let ourselves be put on trial.

  His old friends and allies failed to reciprocate this loyalty. They found they shared the communist concern to save at all costs The State, which the demochristians had always tended to identify with the DC, when they thought of it at all. As the weeks passed, some of those who thought saving a life was worth some compromise, and that a deal needn’t necessarily mean the end of the world, or the state, began to wonder at the DC’s readiness to wrap itself in the national flag, began to wonder about individual motives. But hearts hardened as Moro’s letters grew more desperate and bitter, and prime minister Andreotti had no trouble keeping his troops in line. There was no deal and on May the ninth Moro’s body was found in the back of a red or purple Renault 4 parked contemptuously in via Caetani in the centre of Rome, exactly midway between the DC’s headquarters and the PCI’s.

  The fifty-five days of Moro’s imprisonment had transfixed Italy, including, it turned out, the Antistate of Cosa Nostra. The very first pages of The True History of Italy contain a recollection of the Moro kidnapping as the Cosa Nostra commission lived it. In the summer of 1991 the mafia pentito Francesco Marino Mannoia recalled those days to magistrates from Rome and Palermo who were interrogating him in New York. Cosa Nostra’s leaders had split over Moro, Mannoia said. The boss Stefano Bontate, a convinced demochristian with many political ties, had wanted to mount a mafia operation to free Moro. He argued strongly for this in a commission meeting held a couple of weeks after the kidnapping. He was opposed by the boss Pippo Calò, who was based in Rome. Calò skirted the issue for a while, posed logistical problems and finally turned on Bontate and said, You still haven’t got it, Stefano. Leaders in his own party don’t want him free. This split over Moro was an early sign of the coming war of extermination that was already looming over Cosa Nostra. Calò had allied himelf to Riina and the Corleonesi, who mistrusted politics and hated politicians. Bontate was eliminated three years later.

  I found another recollection of those days of 1978 on page 225 of The True History, from the prosecutors’ third volume. Claudio Martelli was the socialist party’s young deputy leader and later minister of justice in the last Andreotti government. It was he who’d become Falcone’s ally in Rome at the beginning of the nineties and enabled Falcone’s battery of antimafia measures to become law, for which Riina had added Martelli’s name to Falcone’s and Borsellino’s on the death list. Recalling the Moro kidnapping to the prosecutors, Martelli compared the Andreotti government’s intransigence over Moro with the DC’s behaviour during BR kidnappings a couple of years later, when the government had gone to quite embarrassing lengths to meet the BR’s demands and save the prisoners. It had shut down a prison to save a judge, and enlisted the Neapolitan camorra to release Ciro Cirillo, a close political associate of Andreotti’s man in Naples, Antonio Gava. Martelli told the prosecutors about

  the suspicions aroused in us socialists about the way the Moro kidnapping was handled … then as now I was convinced that there was some obscure motivation behind the flaming shield of intransigence [of which] Andreotti was the main proponent … we socialists were struck humanly and politically by Moro’s letters and his not accepting to be sacrificed to reasons of state. Andreotti maintained that the letters weren’t his, that they couldn’t have been written by him …

  * * *

  ONE PERSON who’d followed the events of those fifty-five days with peculiar horror was Leonardo Sciascia. That summer, a couple of months after Moro’s murder, he wrote a pamphlet on the whole affair that came out in October. It was elegantly and austerely printed for the Palermo publisher Sellerio, a little over a hundred pages, small rectangles of type surrounded by vast creamy margins and a good deal of the text taken from Aldo Moro’s own letters. It arrived bound in a fine white paper cover and finished in a rétro French manner with a striking engraving by the metaphysical artist Fabrizio Clerici on the front cover. The cover was covered itself in turn by a dustjacket of semi-transparent glassine paper. A special run of a hundred and twenty copies, presumably hors commerce and numbered from 1 to 100 and I to XX was printed on hand-made paper and issued each with a hand-pulled copy of Clerici’s engraving and signed by the author.

  The trade edition’s wide creamy pages were uncut, and gaining access to the text by means of a knife, a process that both distracted and concentrated the attention, imposed reflective pauses and prolonged and intensified your involvement with what Moro and Sciascia had to say. This pamphlet was altogether a physical experience. It arrived with a downbeat warning printed on a bookmark insert, written surely by Sciascia himself,… the book is not fascinating, not moving, has no literary quality and is only a hard and naked search for a hard and naked truth. It was about how the politicians condemned Moro to die. Sciascia used public pronouncements and Moro’s published private letters to trace the story of how the government decided not to deal with the BR, how it justified its decision to the public, and how the decision led down to its inevitable consequence, the assassination of Moro. The pamphlet was an exercise in reading the language of Moro’s letters, what they said and what they didn’t say. In his two months in the people’s prison, Moro has written and the BR delivered some fifty to seventy letters to colleagues and family.

  Sciascia started his pamphlet by remembering an old friend, a writer, now dead, who’d had a polemical vein to more than match his own. Pier Paolo Pasolini, the poet and film maker who was murdered in November 1975, had often denounced the DC regime in the last years of his life. I know, Pasolini had written on the front page of Italy’s most influential and widely read newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, a year before his death.

  I know the names of those responsible for the slaughter …

  I know the names of those responsible for the slaughters …

  I know the names of the summit that manipulated …

  I know the names of those who ran …

  I know the names of the powerful group who …

  I know the names of those who, between one mass and the next, made provision and guaranteed political protection …

  I know the names of
the important and serious figures who are behind the ridiculous figures who …

  I know the names of the important and serious figures behind the tragic kids who …

  I know all these names and all the acts (the slaughters, the attacks on institutions) they have been guilty of …