by Peter Robb
The truth is at the bottom of a well. You look in a well and you see the sun or the moon, but if you jump in there’s no longer the sun or the moon, there’s the truth …
You’ve helped a lot of men find truth at the bottom of a well …
* * *
THE MAFIOSO opens up to the young carabiniere because he’s treated for once with intelligence and respect. This was a value that survived the move to the cities, and something Giovanni Falcone would’ve appreciated in Sciascia, and maybe learnt from. Thirty years later Falcone explained the phenomenon of the pentiti, and why it was he who’d gained the confidence of mafiosi in crisis.
… why have these men of honour shown trust in me? Because, I believe, they know what respect I have for their torments, that I don’t deceive them … I’ve tried to enter into their human drama and before going on to the real interrogation, I’ve always tried to understand each one’s personal problems and place them in a precise context.
Within the mafia the overriding imperative for each man of honour was to tell the truth. Falcone explained that when a mass of complex activities were all conducted by word of mouth, this was a matter of organizational necessity. Embodied in mafia culture, it became something more, as Falcone recognized.
The categorical imperative of the mafiosi, tell the truth, has become a key principle in my own personal ethic … however strange it might seem, the mafia has taught me a lesson in morality … Knowing mafiosi has deeply influenced my way of relating to others and even my beliefs.
Falcone went on to say that his experience of the mafia-state made him realize how much more functional and efficient it was than the Italian state he was representing. All this was close to the empathy and respect that pass between the young captain and the old boss in the novel, and to Sciascia’s recognition in himself of the mafia mindset. The Sicilian writer and the Sicilian magistrate were both able to interiorize mafia values and identify with men of honour. This, though unspoken in anything I was later able to elicit from the magistrates I met who were now working on the mafia in Palermo, was what Falcone and the antimafia pool and its successor magistrates found really valuable in Sciascia and why they continued to revere him as a master. It was knowing the mafia’s part in Sicilian history, being aware they were themselves a part of that history and culture. A sense of relatedness, empathy and, yes, respect.
It wasn’t any special knowledge Sciascia had of what Cosa Nostra was and how it worked. As he sat with Guttuso on Palermo city council in the seventies, then in the eighties sat in parliament in Rome and later still Strasbourg, Sciascia developed a brilliantly inward knowledge of Italy’s mafioso politics, as he showed in his essay on Moro’s death. He didn’t show any particular sense after the sixties and his first two novels, The Day of the Owl and To Each His Own, of the social reality of Cosa Nostra and how it was changing. The more Sciascia became known as an authority on Sicily and the mafia, the more out of touch he became with what the mafia was becoming in that time of rapid change.
He wasn’t particularly alive to the momentousness of the maxitrial, and the blow Falcone and Borsellino struck at Cosa Nostra at a time when Cosa Nostra was incomparably more rich and powerful and cruel than it’d ever been in history. Thinking more of the past, and Mussolini’s fascist repression of the mafia, than of the present, he rather misread its significance. Alexander Stille rightly calls the maxitrial indictment, largely written by Falcone, a truly magisterial document: a great historical saga with the sweep of a Tolstoyan novel. It opens
This is the trial of the mafia organization named Cosa Nostra, a highly dangerous criminal association which through violence and intimidation has sown and continues to sow death and terror …
Like The True History of Italy, the corresponding document for the Andreotti trial, the maxitrial document published in Italy as Mafia transfixes the reader by its wealth of detail and the power of its organizing intelligence. Fourteen years before the maxitrial opened, when Sciascia wrote the afterword to The Context in 1971, he was able to say quite correctly that imaginative writers were the only people to have really examined the criminal and political realities of modern Italy. Seven years later he returned to the theme in his essay on The Moro Affair and he was still right. Seven years on, however, the real history was being recorded by people involved in making it, the magistrates of Italy. In the nineteen-eighties Sciascia was at the apex of his prestige and authority as a writer and intellectual, but he’d lost that central awareness he’d once had.
Shortly before the maxitrial began, Leoluca Orlando was elected mayor of Palermo. As a demochristian politician trying to break the city’s long habit of cohabitation and connivance with Cosa Nostra, Orlando like Falcone and Borsellino had many political enemies. It wasn’t surprizing that in the middle of the maxitrial, at the beginning of 1987, Borsellino and Orlando and by implication Falcone should have found themselves, not for the first time, under heavy attack in the media. What surprized and disoriented people was that the attack was led by Leonardo Sciascia. In one of his pieces for the Corriere della Sera, reviewing a book on the mafia under fascism, he’d drawn a parallel between Mussolini’s repression and the suddenly effective antimafia effort of the eighties. Borsellino by name and Orlando by unmistakeable allusion were accused of using the antimafia stance to promote their own careers. The attack was soon out of Sciascia’s hands. It was seized on by antiantimafia interests who used the cover of his great prestige to pump it into one of those controversies that were so often made to serve dubious politics in Italy, a duststorm.
Sciascia’s article led directly to Falcone’s defeat at the end of 1987 in the election of a new Palermo chief prosecutor. A magistrate was chosen whose last case as criminal prosecutor had been in northern Italy in 1949. Some magistrates cited Sciascia’s piece and the controversy to justify voting against Falcone. That was when they began to kill him, said Paolo Borsellino after Falcone died. Meanwhile a lot of very dubious people not hitherto known as readers found that they agreed with Sciascia. Orlando and Borsellino kept their own counsel. Sciascia is the Italian language, Orlando told a reporter wanting a soundbite. I have the greatest respect for the Italian language. Borsellino merely said how much he admired Sciascia the writer. It was the time of Riina’s secret order to kill them.
Sciascia never retracted his words. He became increasingly intolerant of imbeciles, cretins and anyone, always in bad faith, who disagreed with him. He showed a certain odd self-identification with Voltaire and some reluctance to admit in those confused and violent years that he might not know the answers to questions about mafia and politics. Earlier he’d sometimes seemed like an Italian Orwell, a careful, scrupulous truth teller who valued his integrity more highly than his art, and the sick and pessimistic Sciascia of the last years also recalled the blackness of the dying Orwell. Sciascia’s deepening gloom was sometimes lit by flashes of arrogance, meannness or perversity. He didn’t seem to realize how much people had come to value his thought or what damage he did. He didn’t seem to realize how dangerous a gift a nonconformist reputation was. He later admitted privately to Borsellino that the accusation of careerism was based on misinformation. The day after Sciascia’s attack on the antimafia professionals appeared, Falcone and Orlando flew to Moscow together. Orlando quoted a Sicilian proverb about how when it rained all the snails put out their horns, and Falcone laughed. When Sciascia was dying, Orlando visited him to make peace. I’m finished, Sciascia whispered. But so are you, mayor. Orlando told him, Don’t you worry about me, and he was right. Orlando was a survivor.
Racalmuto closed for Sciascia’s funeral in 1989 and maybe seven thousand people crowded outside the church, more than half the town. His coffin was carried by some he’d taught as children. The old carusi from the sulphur mines rang the bells and the funeral notice posted on the town’s walls by the labourers who’d occupied the feudal estates fifty years earlier remembered Sciascia tersely as a friend of the oppressed. His publishers Einaudi and Sell
erio were there; and the Mezzogiorno’s film directors Lina Wertmüller and Francesco Rosi, and the writer Gesualdo Bufalino, a Sciascia discovery, who remarked that maybe his true religion was doubt. Orlando came, and a number of politicians from the three major parties, including the socialist leader and former prime minister Bettino Craxi, the former minister Giacomo Mancini and the demochristian minister Calogero Mannino. Craxi found time to say, as he elbowed his way with his bodyguards to his armour-plated car, that Sciascia was a man who loved the truth, who searched for it and wrote it. He was a free mind who opposed above all fanaticism and intolerance.
Sciascia would’ve liked the compliment, but I wondered what he would have thought of its source. I sat in the waiting room at Racalmuto and my eye fell on one of the extensive pencilled remarks on its painted wall. CRACI IS COKSUKER. In the eighties, a lot of people thought that was why the then prime minister had built himself a lavish villa on the beach in Tunisia, but instead it was foresight. Tunisia has no extradition treaty with Italy and three years after Sciascia’s funeral Craxi had skipped abroad just ahead of his first arrest warrant, and he’d been living in Tunisia ever since, mounting up sentences for corruption of twenty-five-odd years in all and a court order to repay at least fifty million dollars of the money he’d pocketed in office. The former minister Mannino was in jail now on charges of mafia membership and the former minister Mancini was about to be convicted of the same thing in Calabria. It’d been an equivocal funeral homage for the truth-seeker.
Railway users in Racalmuto turned out to be highly opinionated, though terrible spellers. One ancient inscription read ANDREOTI IS MAFIA BOSS. There were imprecations against the antimafia Network, the DC, the Pope, the Vatican and Palermo. THE MAYOR OF RACALMUTO MAFIA read another. Judgements extended to economics: THE ITALIAN LIRA MAKES ME SIK. The most striking phrase wasn’t pencilled but done with a housepainting brush in big brown letters. DON’T BETRAY US NITTO SANTAPAOLA. Santapaola was a very important figure in Cosa Nostra, the most powerful boss of the Catania mafia, at least until his arrest. Was the exhortation not to talk, not to repent, or did it predate the arrest and refer to some internecine conflict, maybe the reason Santapaola’s wife had been murdered at home by gunmen? As areas of influence went, it was a puzzling message to find in Racalmuto. I was brooding on it when the train arrived. After a wait in the warm drizzle of a dark and deserted Agrigento, I headed north to Palermo and made it to the Sant’Andrea in time for a grilled fish at nearly midnight.
* * *
NO ARTIST made art of the mafia before Sciascia and nobody has so far followed him. His own first master had been Pirandello and the first book Sciascia ever wrote was on Pirandello and Sicily, on the metaphysician of uncertain identity, the social mask, appearance and reality. They were almost neighbours, Sciascia and Pirandello. Agrigento where I was changing trains just down the hill on the sea was Pirandello’s town. Even in Pirandello’s time it was a great mafia centre but you’d never know it from Pirandello’s work, however well you saw his themes belonged, once you did know, to the world of the mafia.
As for Sciascia himself, after his first novels on the mafia and politics, he turned more and more to working in a genre he’d practically invented, probing into the documents of old real life mysteries, reconstructing and interpreting events of the past. If the turning point in his writing seemed to be marked by the pamphlet on the Moro affair, that was hardly an accident. At the start of the essay he’d remarked on the frightening way the whole business seemed to have been anticipated in his fiction, making him seem almost responsible for what’d then happened in life. This wasn’t just an opening cleverness, as his work after that showed. To make it even clearer he explained a few years later,
Since Moro’s death I no longer feel free to imagine things. This is one of the reasons I prefer to reconstruct things that have already happened. I’m afraid to say things that might happen.
XII
MIDNIGHT IN SICILY
THE TWENTY-SIXTH of September was a very hot late summer day in Palermo. The air was full of heat and dust and reflections of the blinding sun. Outside the high steel fence that protected the bunker courtroom, reached at the end of a rustic alley cut below the level of the main road, having passed the soldiers in camouflage standing by a truck with their submachine guns ready, having shown their documents to these and been fed down the path to the steel fence and the gate, three hundred and twenty-eight accredited members of the international media sweated and jostled in a narrow space as the sun inched higher and the light became blinding and they wondered whether the trial would ever start. An Italian journalist was trying to explain in halting English to a Japanese TV reporter just who Andreotti was and why he was on trial. The Japanese had no idea. Most people had no idea, but they knew the word mafia and clung to it. The word created a fleeting sense of community and solidarity as we all jostled for precedence and pretended not to jostle. It was the word everyone knew. We were here for the mafia. Our various publics wanted to know about the mafia. Perhaps our publics didn’t, or not all that much, but they’d like to see a mafioso for a moment on the evening news. They’d see at any rate the event, the guards, the machine guns, the dogs, the fence, the helicopters, the TV crews, the crowd. Giorgio Bocca was feeding sound bites to a series of TV cameras, and when he’d finished and they’d turned away we spoke and made an appointment for the Villa Igiea that evening. Then we turned our attention once again to the narrow gate in the high steel fence.
Somewhere outside of this crowd, somewhere out of the choked city centre, in some as yet unidentified shed on the outskirts of the city, was Giovanni Brusca. Riina had been taken and Bagarella had been taken but still there was Brusca. He was the man who’d pressed the detonator under the olive tree that’d exploded under Falcone’s caravan of armourplated cars on the way from the airport to Palermo. Brusca was the man who’d had a child kidnapped and strangled and dissolved in acid because the child was the son of a pentito. Brusca, when he wanted to know something, asked questions with a chain saw. Brusca was known now to have in his as yet unlocated shed on the outskirts of Palermo a missile launcher, and it was thought he might be aiming it now at the bunker courtroom. Fortunately for the good humour and serenity of the cosmopolitan group now chatting and jostling and pretending not to jostle outside the gate, the fact was not yet widely known.
After nine and already sweltering, the soldiers and the police and the carabinieri braced themselves and opened the narrow gate to the members of the media who were authorized to enter and who’d converged distractedly on the heat and dust of Palermo from different parts of the world and were now slowly filtered into the bunker through documentary scrutiny and three separate sets of electronic controls, pushing and pretending not to push, their documents in many languages scrutinized, their names checked off lists at the gate, their bags opened and passed through metal detectors, slowly, interminably, along to another checkpoint, fed in through a kind of decompression chamber, peered at through bulletproof glass, heaving at the massive door, fed into a sloping corridor and into the aula bunker, bigger than a football field, with kilometres of polished wooden benches, thousands of mikes like drooping silver poppies, a dais for the judges that could’ve handled a rock concert, and at the back, lining the interminable and slightly curved walls, the dozens and dozens of green-barred empty mafia cages that still bore the scars and smears and stains of the maxitrial. In the gallery above the cages were a handful of ordinary Palermitans and the TV cameras and the photographers. The media were allowed now on to the benches that had once been the lawyers’, the hundreds of lawyers of the maxitrial. A little cord separated the first three rows that were now the lawyers’.
On the left of a central dividing corridor was the Palermo chief prosecutor Gian Carlo Caselli, slender in a dark suit, carrying his mane of snowy hair like a banner of righteousness, Falcone’s and Borsellino’s successor, by now one of the best known names and the most seen coiffures in Italy. Beside h
im were Gioacchino Natoli, Guido Lo Forte and Roberto Scarpinato the three prosecutors, the three who’d assembled the mass of memories and accusations that was The True History of Italy. Beyond them, beyond another little chasm between rows, was Leoluca Orlando sitting with the lawyers of the city of Palermo, dark faced, dark haired, dark suited. I sat near the front and near the middle. I looked around the air-conditioned vastness of the courtroom. THE LAW IS EQUAL FOR ALL said the letters on the judges’ empty bench. I took in the prosecutors and Orlando, the carabinieri standing in pairs, the mob of unshaven bodyguards lounging around the prosecutors in jeans and vests. I wondered when the judge would appear, the little man they said was inflexible, incorruptible, the iron toga, Ingargiola. I rang Australia on my cellular phone. Then I noticed, last, the little knot of people just in front of me. The little unnoticed figure between two lawyers. There was something almost familiar in that figure. I hadn’t seen him come in.
Hunched and immobile between those costly lawyers, big head still thick with hair, triangular ears projecting horizontally, the tiny seventy-six-year-old body was collapsed in on itself, drained of power, and the hump a kind of bulwark. It was good luck in the Mezzogiorno to touch a hunchback’s hump, and from my front row seat I could have leaned over the intervening bench and reached it, that hump. Ingargiola had entered flanked by his deputies and the prosecution was well into the elaborate and lengthy expression of its opposition to the live TV broadcasting of the trial then starting, when, for the first time since proceedings began, the stony figure moved. Only a little. Lizard-like. Crunching sweets inside that lipless mouth They sounded like breaking stones. Toying with a pen in those diaphanous hands. Then the head swivelled almost imperceptibly to his right, as if feeling the weight of the gaze I was unable to lift, and through the glittering lenses, for an instant our gazes locked. Clever and cunning and with friendships beyond all imagining, the pentito Marino Mannoia had said. The little hairs on my spine stood on end. This was Life Senator Andreotti. This, dressed in a dreadful little double breasted suit the colour of the uniform worn by employees of the Italian state railway, with under the jacket on this sweltering day a heavy grey long-sleeved cardigan like a priest’s, was Beelzebub.