Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  A large proportion of the horses and mules supplied by Zu Calò died of glanders, heart disease, pneumonia, malnutrition, or sheer old age before they could be transported to the battle areas, and this contretemps was followed by a whispering campaign and then allegations in the Press that the Army had become the largest-scale receiver of stolen property in Italian history.

  The Ministry of War instituted an enquiry and a General Moccia was sent to Palermo to investigate. As a result, Calogero Vizzini and a number of his accomplices, both civilian and army, appeared before a military tribunal. What happened at that trial has happened a hundred times before and a hundred times since, and has come to be regarded as the inevitable outcome of all such criminal proceedings when an attempt is made to bring the Mafia to justice. Witnesses, who outside the courtroom had been voluble, were now obstinately silent. Every single person who had made a statement of any kind likely to incriminate the formidable pezzo di novanta in any way, forthwith withdrew it. In the course of the brief and frustrating proceedings nine witnesses were condemned and sentenced on the spot for perjury or ‘muteness of malice’, and it is recorded that the only emotion they showed on hearing their sentences was one of relief.

  The defendants were acquitted, to the enormous enlargement of Zu Calò’s prestige. The trial had amply shown that he had powerful friends in the Army, the administration, and probably in Parliament itself. Moreover, Sicilians had little stomach for wars that they were involved in by the Italians, and were inclined to throw their caps up in the air when anyone succeeded in making a laughing-stock of the government of Rome.

  * * *

  It was soon after his discomfiture of the Italian army that Calogero Vizzini, now considered the second Mafia personality of the island and entitled as such to the honorific prefix ‘Don’, completed a social process that had been going on since 1860 and forms part of the theme of The Leopard. The Mafia has at all times delighted in fishing in troubled waters, and has therefore always been ready with its support for any attack on the central government, whether that of Italy or its predecessors. In keeping with this traditional policy, it came to the aid of Garibaldi in his overthrow of the Bourbon kingdom and was properly rewarded for its services. Don Calogero Sedara, Lampedusa’s sinister and powerful Mayor, is shown as having made a fortune out of the war and as already overshadowing the Prince of Salina, left defenceless (as the Prince sees it) by his breeding, his gentlemanly scruples, and a somewhat atypical preference for the study of astronomy to the collection of rents. With melancholy resignation Salina foresees the eventual replacement of a class of other-worldly, enlightened aristocrats by one of money-grubbing realists. With allowances for the special angle of the Prince’s view, this is roughly the historic process completed by Don Calogero Vizzini sixty years later.

  * * *

  Sicily is not Italy, nor – with the exception of the spas, the palms, and the mimosa of its eastern seaboard – is it even recognisably a Mediterranean country. Scenically as well as sociologically, this country is an archaism. The unbroken, limitless monotony of its interior landscapes has survived from Roman antiquity, when a ground-down multitude of slaves produced nothing but corn for export. A sullen mental climate of those days has not been wholly dispersed. By comparison with the Italy of Rome – above all of Naples – Sicily is morose and withdrawn.

  Most Sicilians are peasants who live not in the country, but in small towns. There is only one village in the whole island having less than a thousand inhabitants. This phenomenon – unique in the Mediterranean area – is explained by the chronic and ineradicable banditry with which Sicily has been plagued throughout recorded history, and which itself is an inevitable side-effect of an archaic social system. For this reason, the only isolated houses are the administrative buildings, the granaries, and the warehouses of the great feudal estates – the latifundia – which tend to assume a fortress-like character and are defended by armed guards. Much of a peasant’s time is taken up in reaching his work in the morning and in returning at night, and the streets of small Sicilian towns come alive long before dawn as long processions of shrouded figures go through, clip-clopping on their mules, towards the distant fields. Sometimes, in periods of seasonal urgency, the peasants live temporarily where they work, in an African-looking straw shelter called a pagliaio which serves also as a store for tools. An untouchable caste of petty criminals exists which specialises in robbing pagliai, and these are hunted down and slaughtered like animals by the Mafia. The men of respect do not tolerate small-scale unorganised crime. A visitor to the latest motel, built by the Italian petroleum company Agip on the outskirts of Milan, is warned not only to lock his car but to remove every article from its interior. This would be unthinkable in Sicily, where a traveller’s hotel bills are a little higher, but where, whether he realises it or not, he is under Mafia protection.

  Sicilians are delivered up from the all-too-brief respite of work to restlessness and boredom. The narrow, shadeless channel of the main street of a small Sicilian town is full of wandering men. They walk together interminably, displaying their thoughts with small, precise hand-movements, as if assembling delicate machinery. This sombre and solemn human current courses sluggishly up and down the street, into the piazza, and out again. The movement is like a torpid circulation of blood through heart and arteries. There is no trace of the corvine affability, of the companionable noisiness of the southern man. This eternal womanless tramping of the streets is conducted in a glum half-silence only crashingly interrupted by the bells of the church in the piazza, which is usually as big as a cathedral. A stranger meets stares, and is sometimes followed nostalgically, as if for the momentary distraction of his presence from indestructible time. The chronically unemployed are not only labourers who work on average one hundred days a year, but a miscellany of the town’s impoverished middle class, whose income is provided in one way or another by the peasant, and who are therefore compelled to share in the peasant’s enforced idleness and lack of prosperity. Pacing up and down in this interminable and frustrated perambulation, they are like bored animals behind invisible bars. The street imprisons them, just as their women are imprisoned in their dim harem quarters behind the shuttered windows. The headlines of the newspaper nailed up on the kiosk shout the twentieth century, but the rest of this scene remains the Europe of the Middle Ages.

  * * *

  At the root of the trouble one discovers the extraordinary fact that the feudal system, discarded elsewhere many centuries ago, has managed almost miraculously to survive in this neglected and mountainous corner of the Mediterranean. When the Norman invaders occupied the island, huge corn-growing estates – the largest in antiquity – still survived from Byzantine and Roman times, and the Normans were content to parcel them out without further thought among their followers. Subsequent monarchs regarded Sicily as a colony and ruled from a distance, so that provided the peace was kept and the taxes paid, the barons of Sicily were left to their own devices. Many of these lived outside the country, in Rome or even Paris, and never set foot in their domains. The few who chose to remain in the island were notorious for their detestation of a rustic environment, and preferred to keep to their palaces in Palermo.

  Estates were originally administered by all-powerful stewards, who ground the last lira out of the peasants, raised private armies for the defence of their masters’ property, and dealt out their own form of justice in the feudal court. Later the gabellotto came on the scene. The Italian word means ‘tax collector’, but the gabellotto was more than that. A creeping social indolence had induced the aristocracy to adopt the practice of selling their feudal rights at auction to the highest bidder for a specified number of years. The gabellotto was the man who thus bought the lease, and he was usually a member of the Mafia. He in turn leased out the land to sharecropping tenants, who were responsible to overseers and a manager, and the gabellotto hired armed guards to see to it that everyone kept his place. The estate normally consisted of huge fields,
dedicated in the main to the raising of cereal crops, while the peasants, for reasons of security, would live, not dispersed about the countryside, but in the nearest village, from which they would be obliged to cover immense distances to reach their daily work.

  This was feudalism in its simplest form – a rough-and-ready system adapted to the urgent needs of conquest and domination, but unsuited to a settled society. The feudal lord, as in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in England and Germany, finally gave away everything in return for a cash payment. The artificial prolongation of such an order produced not only extreme hardship but grave inefficiencies that would normally have brought about the decay and disintegration of the system. The gabellotto, for example, was not encouraged to interest himself in the improvement of the estate when he could only count on a few years’ tenure – and the same applied to the sharecropper who worked for him. What he did was to negotiate an extortionate contract with the sharecropper, who was then obliged to deal with his day labourer with equal severity. The outcome of this grinding-down process was the endemic banditry of desperate men who had nothing to lose, plus two or three peasant revolts a century of the kind northern Europe has not known for five hundred years.

  Don Calogero Vizzini had no fault to find with the feudal system as such; in fact he was to become its greatest exponent and protector in modern Sicily. What he objected to was the fact that a somnolent and, as the Prince of Salina put it, a ‘defenceless’ aristocracy should have any part in its benefits. Previously it had become a function of the Mafia to keep a benevolent eye on the feudal estates and to suppress any of the periodical attempts on the part of the peasants to occupy uncultivated land. Now, under Don Calò’s leadership, the Mafia proposed to shoulder the barons aside. When, therefore, in 1922, the neighbouring Suora Marchesa estate came under the hammer in the usual way, Don Calò was a bidder, and quite naturally the only bidder, since it was obvious that no other contestant felt like presenting himself at the auction. The estate was knocked down to Don Calò for a derisory figure. The idea quickly spread among the Mafia, and the lease of feudal lands began to fetch a tenth and a twentieth of their normal price. An attempt was made to withdraw lands from the market, but it was hopeless. There was nothing to be done. One or two aristocrats put aside their astral telescopes, bought themselves a farmer’s corduroy suit and a pair of top-boots, and appeared on the scene with the intention of organising resistance to this takeover. Within a few days, after they had found a percentage of their grapevines cut down and a few of their livestock with their throats cut, they gave in and went back to their decaying palaces. The Mafia had become the feudal lords of all Sicily.

  A further profitable brainwave was Don Calò’s last before the cataclysmic advent of Benito Mussolini. In appearance it was a patriotic gesture in favour of the ex-servicemen just returning from the war. There was still a fair amount of uncultivated land about, and Don Calò put forward the idea of forming an agricultural co-operative for the men who had deserved so well of their country. With the government’s drugged assent, and the provision by the government of free land and equipment, the co-operative was founded under the presidency of Don Salvatore – Don Calò’s brother, the parish priest. When a year or two passed and not a single ex-soldier had been given an acre of land and it was evident that the Vizzinis were working the co-operative for their own benefit, yet another scandal exploded. A charge of fraudulent misappropriation was brought against the whole family. Twenty years later, when the Allies arrived, proceedings were still pending and the case was finally dropped. Three other co-operatives got off to a limping start in the Villalba area in the first years of Fascism, but the members were dogged with incessant ill-luck. Their crops were destroyed by mysterious fires, and their animals sickened and died. The co-operatives appeared to many of the conservatives of Villalba like a malevolent challenge to a system of property backed by divine law, and no one was surprised when all three co-operatives failed and Don Calò took over. Don Calò’s overthrow of the co-operatives was his last major coup before the providential arrival of the Allies. In between stretched the lean years of the Mussolini dictatorship.

  * * *

  At first Don Calò found it hard to make up his mind about Mussolini. To the extent that he promised to stop the downhill slide towards socialism, he was obviously a good thing. But when he began to talk about governing with a firm hand, the Mafia chieftain was not so sure. Prudently, but without enthusiasm, Don Calò forked out a handsome subscription for the march on Rome. What actually saved him from the hurricane to come was nothing more nor less than a happy chance. In 1922, before Mussolini was finally in the saddle, the ‘Honoured Society’ sent Don Calò a young man, a squadrista who had injudiciously murdered a political opponent, asking Don Calò to look after him until the storm had blown over. This was done, the fugitive being concealed in the Vizzini house. Later, the young man became an undersecretary of state, and when the Mussolini purge against the Mafia was at its height and Don Calò had been sentenced to five years’ confino, a letter to his grateful ex-protégé was enough to procure his release.

  4

  THE CLASH between Mussolini and the Mafia was inevitable, although each side seems to have underestimated the opponent’s strength. Don Calò and the more far-seeing of the Mafia leaders were not the only Sicilians who had thought it advisable to take out an insurance policy by contributing to the Fascist war-chest. The Sicilian nobility also had a paid-up share in Mussolini’s revolution, and an anguished chorus of protest against the virtual expropriation of their land was soon heard in Rome.

  It was clear enough to Mussolini that the Mafia had always had a vested interest in national weakness and division, and that their support for the revolutionary governments of the past had regularly been followed by a stab in the back. The pattern of obstruction and sabotage seemed about to be repeated. Fascist officials sent down to replace the old corrupt administrators controlled by the Mafia were ignored. Fascist courts trying criminal cases in which members of the Mafia were implicated found it was just as impossible to obtain convictions as it had been for the democratic courts of old. Although the Fascist hierarchs might rub their hands at the sight of a nation marching in step, unity and discipline applied only to the peninsula. In Palermo a member of the Party could be shot dead at midday, in the middle of the crowded Via Maqueda, in the sight of hundreds of people, without a single person being ready to admit to the police that they had even heard the shot. The cudgels-and-castor-oil methods the squadrista had used so successfully in northern Italy failed in Sicily against the ancient Mafia defence of silence and vengeance. A carabinieri officer reported: ‘Only two kinds of witness exist. The first live in the neighbourhood where a crime has been committed and in no circumstances have ever seen anything, or even heard a shot. The second category are the neighbours of anyone who happens subsequently to be accused of the crime. These have always looked out of their window when the shot was fired, and have noticed the accused person standing peaceably on his balcony a few yards away.’

  Disturbing facts came to light as the first enquiries into Mafia activities got under way. It was reported to the Duce that the Mafia had been in complete control of the Sicilian electoral machine, and that the deputies it sent to Parliament spent their time blocking investigations of the Honoured Society’s misdeeds, and specialised in the production of speeches attempting to prove that the Mafia did not exist. At this time the incidence of violent crime was ten times higher in Sicily than in the rest of Italy. The case of the small town of Favara was quoted which had suffered 150 Mafia killings in one year and where the Duce was told only one man in the previous decade had died of natural causes and in old age. More displeasing still to Mussolini, with the visions of imperial grandeur and conquest forming in his mind, was the island’s unpatriotic performance in time of war. Once again, at the beginning of the 1914–18 war, the Mafia had succeeded in spreading the old rumour that conscripts called up and sent to Italy for training
were habitually castrated as soon as they got there. Means of evading service had been made available to those who could afford it, and throughout the war years the island swarmed with deserters who were at once protected and exploited by the Mafia.

  Mussolini’s anti-Mafia campaign was finally set off by an incident which took place when he visited Sicily in 1924. Having driven through the streets of Palermo, where it was easy enough to stage-manage the display of noisy enthusiasm he had grown accustomed to expect, the Duce suddenly, and to the embarrassment of his retinue, asked to be shown a smaller town in the vicinity. It seemed that at some stage Mussolini had picked up a pamphlet produced for the tourist industry which warmly recommended a visit to Piana dei Greci. This somewhat wretched little township was peopled by the descendants of Albanian refugees from the Turks, who had been given shelter in Sicily, and tourists were often taken there and treated to a programme of folklore by girls dressed in an antiquated Albanian style. It was the only town in Sicily – or in Italy, for that matter – to have a Greek Orthodox Church, with an officiating ‘Pope’ with a long beard, and high, black hat.