by Peter Robb
To my joy, he told me what I wanted to hear. There was a railway line. There was a station. I might be able to leave this place. To get there, he told me, I had to go back along the way I’d come. And start going up the steps. And then—I asked. Just keep climbing, he said. Just keep on going till you get there. He was silent for a moment, looking into some inner space. You’ll get there in the end, he decided. I retraced my steps, turned right and started climbing. My heart was insanely light. It buoyed me and carried me up the hill. Taking deep lungfuls of chill night air, I danced up the deserted steps, toward an ugly baroque church lowering indistinctly on the brow. The flight didn’t end at the church, but continued on up, slightly displaced to its side, and this time the upward vista was dizzying. Up I sailed. Wherever a baroque church provoked a kink or a break in the upward flight and brought on uncertainty, a youth seated on a stone marker was there to wave me on. At last the buildings gave way to open ground and I saw a railway line.
The woman in the station had a small child with a large ball beside her in the ticket office and they were helpfulness itself. There was a local train down to Agrigento in an hour and a half. Forty-five minutes after that a train left Agrigento for Palermo. I could be back in Palermo by eleven. The iron grille stopped me from embracing her, but we had quite a chat as she thumbed through schedules for the fares and the times and wrote the tickets out laboriously by hand. Not many people made this journey it seemed. I settled on to the wooden bench of the graffito-covered waiting room. On that bench, thinking about the huddled defensive secretiveness of the Sicilian hilltop towns of the interior, I recalled something I’d read some years before, at the Istituto Orientale in Naples.
The Orientale, now a university, had been founded in the eighteenth century by the Jesuits as a college for training Chinese acolytes and was known, in those heady days of the great plan to Christianize China, as the Chinese college. The French philosopher Montesquieu observed the firework display that was part of the opening celebrations and said he thought the educational effort might’ve been more usefully directed at Chinese business people. There was a painting in the rector’s office of the founding father with two ostensibly Chinese boys who looked strangely like Neapolitan scugnizzi. Teaching English there to students of Arabic and Chinese, I used a text once on Islamic architecture, knowing nothing about this, and was struck by its exposition of the interiority of Islamic design in cities and buildings. Unlike European architects who were much concerned with a building’s external appearance, Arab architects ignored or minimized the outside and turned wholly inward to the harmonies of interior space and interior decoration. The same was true of Arab town plans, with their bewildering maze, for those who didn’t know them, of irregular streets, blind alleys, hidden almost private courtyards on to which a cluster of houses linked by family or trade would open. What I was starting to discover was how much Racalmuto, like many other old Sicilian town centres, kept to the patterns laid out by the Arab planners a thousand years ago, patterns that persisted through the monumental design imposed by later rulers, even though the mosques and nearly all the Arab buildings themselves had long ago disappeared.
It was as if this town embodied the hidden secrets and the vertiginous symmetries or asymmetries in the architecture of Sciascia’s own labyrinthine stories. Many readers of his books had remarked that unlike the investigative thrillers they seemed to be, which started from a problem and arrived at a solution, Sciascia started from a problem that looked susceptible of rational solution and moved carefully and logically to a conclusion of total unknowing and enveloping dread. Was it the same funeral in the same street, or different funerals in different streets, or the same funeral in different streets, or … The naturalistic Sciascia owed to his master Borges that sense of an annihilating metaphysics hidden in experience, that narrative shock you got when experience was thrown on to another plane of reality altogether. And if Sciascia’s great enabling influence was Borges, perhaps the key text in Borges’ life and work, as Robert Irwin wrote, was the great secular book of Arab literature The Thousand and One Nights.
Borges found in the Nights precisely what he was hoping to find—doppelgängers, self-reflexiveness, labyrinthine structures and paradoxes, and especially paradoxes of circularity and infinity.
Borges had mentioned an almost apocryphal moment in the Nights,
when Queen Scheherazade, through a magical mistake on the part of her copyist, started to tell the story of The Thousand and One Nights, with the risk of again arriving at the night upon which she will relate it, and so on to infinity.
Something odd was going on here. The oddness was that all this literary filtering and indirection from Arabic to English to Spanish to Italian came back to the old Arabic starting point. Through the Arabian Nights, Borges was making it possible for Sciascia to make stories out of an Arabic reality he lived in all his life in the closed and secret hilltop warren of Racalmuto, the dead village. Sciascia’s very name was Arabic, meaning head veil, and until Italian unification had been written Xaxa. These closed and enigmatic alleys bodied forth what Sciascia found in Borges. Or Borges codified the physical and social world of inland Sicily. And not only Racalmuto, but all of Sicily and in the end Italy itself.
There were more concrete reasons for that grim silence too. Between Sciascia’s birth in 1921 and his death in 1989 Racalmuto’s population fell by more than three thousand, a quarter, most of them gone in the last forty years. Some of those closed and lightless houses were simply abandoned. The thousands were lost to emigration in the hard times as the sulphur mines closed one by one: the crisis came after the war, when the young Sciascia was teaching hungry children in a local school. The mine work itself had been a horror. Children sent down sometimes as young as ten, buggered as their induction to the bottom of a hierarchy of naked labourers slaving in the scorching airless underground passages. Sciascia’s grandfather, whom he worshipped, had been one of these. At the age of nine he’d taken his father’s place in the mine and stayed there all his life. He taught himself to read and write in the evenings after work in the mine. He was a mine foreman by the end, who never did deals with the mafia. His son, Sciascia’s father, worked as a mine clerk, which meant that the child Sciascia wore shoes to school, unlike the children of the miners and peasants. Guttuso painted the bare forked carusi of the sulphur mines, an image of the oppressed that was already out of date.
Sciascia’s childhood and adolescence were the years of fascism, and as he told it later it was fascism that shaped and drove his nonconformism. His father had put on a black shirt to keep his job. My grandfather would never have done that. They were the years of mean compromise and little humiliations. Pirandello had left earnest instructions when he died that he be buried naked, appalled at the thought the regime might display his corpse in the fascist hierarch’s fig he wore in life. About the mafia Sciascia’s feelings were more complex. Fascism had been imposed from outside, from the continent. It was less easy in Racalmuto to separate yourself from an expression of your own culture.
Take this Sicilian reality I live in: a lot of things that make it up I disapprove of and condemn, but I see them with pain and from inside … It hurts when I denounce the mafia because a residue of mafia feeling stays alive in me, as it does in any Sicilian. So struggling against the mafia I struggle against myself. It’s like a split, a laceration.
The Day of the Owl was in 1961 the first Italian novel to take the mafia as its subject, and Sciascia was always proud of this. It was immediately successful and for years now, suitably expurgated of the odd coarseness in the dialogue, has been taught in Italian schools as a classic. Remarking on the rather long time it had taken him to complete a novel of barely a hundred pages, Sciascia wrote that most of that time had been spent cutting. He added that the cutting was directed less at honing and refining the narrative art than at
fending off the possible intolerances of those who might consider themselves more or less directly attacked by my
representation. Because in Italy, as is well known, you’re not allowed to play round … so imagine what might happen if instead of playing round one wants to be serious. The United States of America can have in their novels and films imbecile generals, corrupt judges and crooked cops. Even England, France … Italy’s never had them, hasn’t now and never will. That’s how it is … I don’t feel enough of a hero to provoke charges of slander and libel, not deliberately. So when I realized that my imagination hadn’t taken sufficiently into account the limits imposed by the laws of the state, and even more than the laws, the susceptibilities of those who enforce them, I set myself to cut, cut, cut … a few characters have disappeared, a few others have retreated into anonymity, a few sequences have gone. The story may even have been improved. Certainly, however, I haven’t written it in that complete freedom a writer (and I call myself a writer only because I happen to write) should always enjoy.
The usual legal disclaimer follows. Thus are new art forms born. The Sciascian art of the word not spoken, the missing fact, the eliminated detail, the unstated relation, sleight of hand, banality knitted into something that constricts and chokes, started from the legal need to strip away politically sensitive detail from a flatly realistic scene of life in a Sicilian town. This is the kind of problem writers used to have in the countries of really existing socialism, to which the cold war Italy of limited sovereignty had more in common culturally than the Italians or their friends liked to admit.
That the three most famous Italian writers of this time, the friends and exact contemporaries Calvino, Pasolini and Sciascia, all in their early twenties at the war’s end, all moved rapidly from a confidently realistic fiction to oblique, enigmatic and allegorical forms is worth pondering. It made for formal interest in their work at the expense of life. There is something pinched and limited in the solutions each found, a withering of promise. The most variously and openly productive, the most careless in the good sense, was Pasolini with his poetry, novels, films, journalism, and Pasolini was hounded all his life until his murder by hundreds of court cases for obscenity, blasphemy, immorality. Art was never untrammeled in postwar Italy.
The best fiction writer of postwar Italy was wholly forgotten and ignored well before the nineties. Giorgio Bassani’s cluster of novels and novellas and stories, which he called The Novel of Ferrara, has a sensuous and subtle economy, a fulness of dramatic life and a depth of art that none of the other three come near. Bassani was somewhat older, and the difference was crucial, since his subject emerged from the unmentioned loss and devastation of the war and the annihilation of Ferrara’s Jewish culture. He wrote about exclusion, desire, betrayal, memory. To read Bassani is to see why the others aren’t novelists. It’s telling that it was Bassani who recognized The Leopard as a masterpiece after the manuscript had been rejected in Lampedusa’s life by the influential and progressive Sicilian writer Vittorini.
The Day of the Owl tells the spare and simple story of a mafia killing, later three mafia killings, in a Sicilian town and their investigation by the local police and carabinieri. A small building contractor is murdered in the town piazza for having resisted mafia protection offers. A witness and an informer are later eliminated. The captain of carabinieri is a bright young northerner, in whom some thought they recognized the young Dalla Chiesa, who by cunning entraps the killers and more dangerously ensnares in the process the powerful old mafia boss of the district, or maybe the capo di tutti i capi of all Sicily, who looks and sounds a lot like don Calò Vizzini. The game of entrapment is the story’s real spark, the germ of Sciascia’s future art. The rest is economical, generic, sometimes witty. It opens on a bus leaving a country town piazza early on a cold morning, the driver and conductor and the peasant women with their produce, the seller of hot panelle and the two shots in the grey light and the boarding passenger in the dark suit who falls back off the step. The ashen faces of driver and conductor, bound to be witnesses, the panelle man, shuffling crabwise off toward the church door. Even as the carabinieri arrive, the passengers vanish.
In apparent indolence, turning back as if trying to gauge the right distance from which to admire the bell-tower, they moved off toward the margins of the piazza and after a final glance, slipped away.
Nobody’s seen a thing. The captain’s investigation is intercut with conversations, some in Rome and others over the telephone, in which the speakers aren’t always identified. This is the story’s other level and it corresponds to what The True History calls the third level of mafia activity, the political one. The conversations variously involve nameless mafiosi in Rome, a nameless minister and his parliamentary factotum, the nameless commander of carabinieri, a nameless member of parliament. Other politicians are named, and you’re left uncertain whether the compromising words are theirs. The young captain’s investigation connects the killers and the mafia boss, and the conversations trace the links between the mafia boss don Mariano through the great chain of political being to the minister. Clearly, this was where Sciascia did his airbrushing.
Young captain Bellodi works away at the case, unaware of what his superiors are saying about him, or then again, perhaps not. For the minister, Bellodi is
one who sees mafia in everything, one of those northerners with their head full of prejudices who start seeing mafia everywhere the moment they get off the ferry … he’s said things that’d make your hair stand on end: that the mafia exists, that it’s a powerful organization, that it controls everything: sheep, market produce, public works and Greek vases.
The captain is duly reproved by his nameless superior for insisting that the mafia exists.
… is it possible to conceive of the existence of a criminal association so vast and well-organized, so secret and powerful that it dominates not only half of Sicily but the United States of America as well? And with a chief here in Sicily, visited by journalists and then presented in the papers, poor man, in the darkest tones … has there ever been a trial in which it has emerged that a criminal organization called the mafia existed, and that the order and execution of any crime could be attributed to it with certainty? Has any document ever been found, any testimony, any proof of any kind that proves a connection between any criminal act and the so-called mafia?
The parliamentarian frets as
the chain gets longer and longer, long enough for me to get caught up in it, and the minister and the heavenly father himself. A disaster, my dear friend, a disaster …
while Bellodi, aware of the boss’s social power if not yet of the protection he enjoys, reflects as his investigation begins to stall, that it’s
useless trying to catch out someone like him in breaking the law. There’ll never be sufficient proof, the silence of the honest and the dishonest will always protect him … get them on tax evasion, like they do in America … you’d have to raid the banks, get expert hands on the accounts books, usually double accounting, of the big and little firms, look into property values …
The crux of the story is the confrontation between the cunning old boss and the bright young carabiniere captain, in the discovery of a reciprocal respect, essential Sicilian concept, which momentarily disconcerts captain Bellodi. The mafioso don Mariano lists the degrees of being in his all-male mafioso hierarchy of humanity.
Real men, half-men, little men, the ones who get fucked over and the quackers, total nobodies,… You, even if you nail me like Christ to these documents, are a man.
And so are you, said the captain with some emotion. And in the unease he soon felt at this exchange of military salutes with a mafia boss, he recalled, to justify himself, having shaken the hands of the minister Mancuso and the Hon. Livigni … over whom don Mariano had the advantage of being a real man. Beyond law and morality, he was an unredeemed mass of human energy, a mass of solitude, a blind and tragic will. And as a blind man reconstructs the dark and shapeless world of objects in his mind, so did don Mariano reconstruct the world of feelings, laws, human relations. And what other notion of the w
orld could he have, if around him the voice of the law had always been stifled by force and the wind of events had only changed the colour of the words on an immobile and putrid reality.
The fatalism of the last lines is very like that historical fatalism expressed three years earlier in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, a book Sciascia had sharply criticized for its fatalistic vision of an unchanging Sicily. Sciascia’s is a deeply sympathetic portrait of the mafioso in rural Sicily as a principle of order, however imperfect, and a helpless victim of outside forces.
Sciascia’s picture of the mafia as an essentially rural force was losing actuality even in 1961. By the end of the fifties, the mafia’s centre of gravity had shifted to the cities and Cosa Nostra was heavily into construction and real estate. This was four years after the 1957 summit at the hotel Delle Palme when the Cupola was formed and the Sicilians took over the international drug traffic. The acuteness, frankness, daring and the sheer novelty of the way Sciascia linked the political complicities reaching from a murder in rural Sicily to the government in Rome obscured the affectionate nostalgia in his portrait of the old killer. The folk wisdom offered by Sciascia’s capo, and the captain’s response, are picturesque and almost reassuring.