Caltanissetta is a busy town of some 45,000 inhabitants near the middle of the island and about 2000 feet above the sea. It depends for its prosperity on almonds, grapes, olives and sulphur, especially the last, for there is much sulphur in the pores of the rock. I have several friends there of whom one, Beppe (Giuseppe) Catena, is an engineer with an interest in Trabonella, the largest sulphur mine in the neighbourhood, and another, Gigino (Luigi) Cordova, is an advocate. Sometimes Beppe is in the town and sometimes Gigino and I go to Trabonella and find him there. It is an hour’s drive along a road that winds among rolling hills. Through the depressions between the near hills other hills appear, and through their depressions higher hills, and beyond these are higher hills again until the view is bounded by the Monti delle Madonie where the snow lingers until May. It must have been some such country as this that was in the mind of him who first spoke of the sea running mountains high.
I do not know whether it is more beautiful in spring or in autumn. I know that in spring the grass under the orange trees is spotted with purple flowers, and that crimson vetch incarnadines the hills, as though Lady Macbeth had dipped her little hand into their multitudinous green; the hedges bloom with rosemary and scarlet geranium, the banks with sweet pea and brilliant mesembryanthemum, and the rough places are full of asphodel; there are a few eucalyptus trees and now and then a solemn row of cypresses; we may pass a hut of grey thatch and perhaps a few horses or a sprinkling of tethered goats; sometimes we see a herd of bullocks tended by a boy who has come out this morning in black sheep-skin leggings up to his hips, and I think he learnt his song from happy nightingales that set the April moonlight to music.
But in autumn the prospect is as fair. The harvest is over; the earth, bronzed by the summer heat, is resting after her labour and nature is making variations in the ochres and umbers that in spring were half hidden, huddled together in the steep places where nothing will flourish; the stubble shows in lines of pale yellow on the brown earth among patches of almost colourless green and other patches black with burning which change the value of the olives, pistachios, carubas and aloes; here and there is a shrivelled thistle, here and there a lone pine; sometimes we see a string of mules winding in and out on its way home, losing and finding itself among the undulations like a little fleet of fishing boats that rise and fall with the swell, and I think Schubert must have passed this way when he felt stirring within him the mellow loveliness of the second Entr’acte to Rosamunde:
Rosamunde
We need not choose one or the other, we need only wait to have both; for spring is the modulation to the dominant, the awakening, the going out in search of adventure, while autumn is the return to the tonic, the coming home in search of repose, the falling asleep; the first leads to the second as naturally as youth leads to age.
Last time Gigino and I went to Trabonella it was spring, and we took with us his young brother Michelino, aged thirteen, who had never been there before. We arrived in the afternoon and found Beppe, who took us round, and we showed Michelino the works. Empty trucks were gliding down a sloping railway into the mine, while others were gliding up filled with the harvest of the deep. We saw the broken pieces of rock being put into great furnaces and we watched the treacly sulphur that was melted out of the pores and came oozing through a tap into a mould. It is then purified and made into shapes like candles, and I thought of Kentish giants handling such bars of sulphur to fumigate the hops in the glow of an oast-house fire. We introduced Michelino to the overseers, directors and managers and to the doctor. We returned to the hut where Beppe lives, and dined out of doors in the yard behind. It all seemed to me very healthy and like the accounts one reads and the illustrations one sees of life in a new country, with the advantage that Caltanissetta is only about eight kilometres away. But Beppe objected that the nearness of Caltanissetta was no advantage because it induces a feeling of “Well, it doesn’t matter; I can always go to town for that,” and so they put up with much that they might remedy if they were really beyond the reach of civilisation. Consequently he was not able to treat us as we deserved. We replied that we were glad it was so, because he was treating us much better.
After dinner we joined the other managers and directors in a room of a larger building; a mandoline and guitar were brought and some of them played. Presently Michelino sang. He surprised me by the beauty and power of his young voice and by his management of it, also by his musical intelligence and by his complete self-possession. He sang the tenor songs of many operas and other popular melodies, especially I remember his singing the Stornelli Montagnoli, which is so beautiful that the buffo said it would save itself in the Escape from Paris. To all this the guitar-player vamped an accompaniment which Michelino relentlessly silenced by a gesture when it became unbearable. It was absurd to see him lording it over the company, nearly a dozen of us and the youngest nearly old enough to be his father. When it was time to retire, beds were found for the visitors and I passed a comfortable night in Beppe’s hut.
Next day we were taken into the mine to see what goes on underneath the freedom of the rolling hills. We dived down in a lift, ever so deep into the darkness, and probably it was dangerous, but when I go down lifts and see over mines, as when I wander among the tottering ruins of Messina, I have learnt to hope that the accident will be some other day. We saw nearly naked men, monsters of the abyss, crouching in cavernous places, pick-axing the sulphurous rock in the dim light of their miner’s lamps, while others were bringing broken pieces along the low, dark galleries and sending them up in the trucks to the light. And the workers were groaning and moaning as they worked. Day after day, always the same monotonous groaning and moaning, always the same monotonous pick-axing the rock in the dim light, always the same monotonous sending up the broken pieces. It was very hot in some places and very cold in others, and I was glad to follow the broken pieces up and return to the fresh air and the sunshine.
Beppe told me that Trabonella is the largest sulphur mine in Europe, that the total length of its galleries is thirty kilometres, which is about as far as from the Albert Hall to Windsor Castle. They employ a thousand miners, and the boys begin work outside the mine at twelve and inside at fifteen. There has been an alteration in the law; formerly they began younger and were deprived of the little education for which they now have time, and the hard work so deformed their tender bodies that they could not pass the army test. This is their modulation to the dominant, their awakening to life. It is not a pleasing prospect; nor is the early autumn of ill-health and decrepitude to which it naturally leads any more pleasing. They pass their lives in the dark, morally and physically, and frequently a sudden fall of rock cripples, if it does not destroy, the victim; then there are broken pieces of a different kind to be taken along the low dark galleries and brought up to the light.
I was in Caltanissetta one Saturday evening and saw the funeral of two who had been killed in this way that morning. First came a band playing a funeral march, that was all the more melancholy because the instruments were distressingly discordant, as though in their grief the men had not had time to tune them. Then came comrades carrying candles, and comrades bearing first one coffin, then the second, plain wooden coffins with no pall. Others carried chairs on which the coffins were rested when the bearers were changed. There were no priests. But there were priests the next day for the wedding of another comrade. Beppe told me that about 90 per cent of their funerals are conducted without priests and about 90 per cent of their weddings are conducted with priests.
They told me of one sulphur-miner who, having seen enough funerals, left the mine and went to Palermo in search of work. He was taken on by a contractor who was levelling a piece of high ground, on which blocks of dwellings have since been erected behind the Teatro Massimo, and began work at six o’clock one morning. Five minutes later he was killed and buried by a fall of earth.
In the mine they are in constant fear of this death. They work very hard and the air is bad; they come up to sleep, to eat and to gamble. The air they sleep in cannot be much better than that in the mine, for they are laid out in close huts on shelves, like rolls of stuff in a draper’s shop. They hardly know the difference between youth and age, between spring and autumn. They scarcely get a glimpse of the landscape except on Saturdays and Sundays, and then they are intent upon something else. After their week of labour they feel the necessity of expansion; they receive their wages and go to Caltanissetta; those who are married sleep with their wives, while those who are unmarried sleep quite alone as the soldiers did after the death and burial of l’Invincible Monsieur d’Malbrough. They become free human beings for two days. I have seen the piazza full of them on Sunday morning—so full that I thought it would have been easier to walk across it, treading on their heads, than to push through the crowd. Unfortunately their notion of the life of a free human being does not stop at loafing about in the piazza. They also go to the wine shops, where they offer one another the means of forgetting that their oases of rest lie in a desert of drudgery, and sometimes this becomes the means of their forgetting everything else as well.
Gigino has written a paper upon the connection between alcoholism and crime. He told me that the consumption of alcohol in Sicily is less than in northern countries, but that there is more crime. I naturally inquired whether it would not tend to lessen the crime if the Sicilians would drink rather more. He replied that, as so often happens at the beginning of any inquiry, there are other considerations and I must not be in a hurry. As for the sulphur-miners, they need not drink more, but if they would spread fairly over the week the amount they consume during Saturday and Sunday, then, although they would risk incurring the consequences of chronic alcoholism, they would avoid those of acute alcoholism. For the need of expansion causes them to drink more than they can stand all at once, then they quarrel and commit murders. So that many of those who begin life as boys in the mine, and week after week escape the falling rocks, live to be killed in a drunken brawl, and one does not know which prospect is the more ugly.
I asked whether their condition could not be improved by raising their wages. They asked whether I wished to dislocate the commerce of the world by raising the price of sulphur. I had no such desire and, indeed, did not know, till they told me, that sulphur enters into so many manufactures as it does. Here again in seeking to ameliorate conditions with which one is imperfectly familiar one must not be in a hurry. It is not altogether a question of raising their wages, they receive from four and a half to five francs a day, which, for five days, amounts to between twenty-two francs fifty and twenty-five francs a week; there are many labourers who receive less and do more with it. Of course, they would like more wages—everyone would like more wages—but what the sulphur-miners really want is the intelligence to use wisely what they have and also some change, if it were possible, in the conditions under which their work is done. Beppe assured me that the question is not being overlooked, but it has roots which extend further and are more complicated than the galleries in the mine—roots which are tangled with the roots of other questions affecting other interests, and these again affect others. So I bowed before the other considerations and hoped that with the changes that are continually taking place in Sicily something may soon be done for the sulphur-miners, trusting that in the meantime we are not paying too dearly for the advantage of getting our sulphur so cheap.
CHAPTER XIII
OMERTÀ AND THE MAFIA
When the drunken sulphur-miners quarrel and kill one another on Saturdays and Sundays, the murderers are seldom brought to justice because of OmertÀ; a word which is said to be derived from uomo and to signify manliness in the sense of power of endurance, the power, for example, of keeping silence even under torture; hence it comes to be used for an exaggeration of that natural sense of honour, that Noblesse Oblige or Decency Forbids, which makes an English schoolboy scorn to become a sneak. It may be false and foolish, it may be noble and chivalrous, whatever it is, they say, it has such a firm growth among them because the history of Sicily is the history of an island which has for centuries been misgoverned by foreigners, and the people have lost any faith they may ever have had in professional justice. If one were to be involved with a Sicilian in committing a crime, one might be perfectly certain that he would never turn King’s evidence, he would say, “Io son uomo, io non parlo” (“I am a man, I know how to hold my tongue”) and he would rather die than betray an accomplice who is his friend and probably his compare. Nor need the criminal fear that the victim or anyone in the secret whether accomplice or not, will blab. A man with a wound on his face, made obviously by a knife, will swear to the police that in drawing a cork he fell and cut himself with the bottle. He does not intend his assailant to go unpunished, but he will not have the police interfering if he can prevent it; he means to look after his own affairs himself. If a murder has been committed a crowd will collect round the murdered man—a crowd that includes the police and also the murderer—but no one has any idea who committed the crime, not even those who saw it done, and not even the dying man, who may carry his assumption of ignorance so far as to call his murderer to his side, embrace him affectionately and give him a Judas-kiss which bears a double meaning; for the police and the general public it is evidence that there can have been no ill-feeling between the two, while for the friends of the murdered man it confirms their suspicions as to the one on whom the vendetta is to be executed. So many have told me this that I cannot help thinking that, if it really is done as often as they say, it must by now have lost some of its power of deceiving the police. Probably it was done on some occasion which took the public fancy, and they keep on repeating it because it makes a dramatic close.
Giovanni Grasso has a play called OmertÀ: La Legge del Silenzio. Don Andrea has been murdered by or at the instigation of Don TotÒ (Salvatore), who is an overbearing bully, nevertheless Saru (Rosario) has been sent to prison for the crime and, during his absence, his girl has married Don TotÒ. The play opens with the return from prison of Saru, acted by Giovanni. He comes to the house of his mother, with whom Don TotÒ and his wife are living. The length of the play is provided by the disappointments attending his return: his setting up for himself and painting paladins on Sicilian carts; a scene of passionate tenderness with his mother, during which he convinces her of his innocence, but refuses to reveal the name of the murderer which he has learnt in prison; a beautiful interview with Pasqualino, his young brother, who shows he is the right sort of boy by declaring of his own accord that he hates Don TotÒ; a magnificent interrupted quarrel with Don TotÒ, and scenes with the police and with the priest to whom Saru refuses to give any information about the murder. Towards the end Saru staggers in wounded. They all try to make him tell the name of his murderer, but he will not. Finally, he is left alone with Pasqualino to whom he gives his revolver with these dying words:
“For Don TotÒ, when you shall be eighteen.”
Pasqualino understands, kisses the pistol and accepts the obligation, saying:
“I will see to it.”
The others return and ask Pasqualino whether Saru told him anything before he died, and Pasqualino, concealing the pistol in his bosom as the Spartan boy concealed the fox, bravely answers:
“Nothing.”
One may object to the play on the ground that it breaks off instead of coming to a conclusion—one is left wishing to see Pasqualino, grown up and acted by Giovanni, executing the vendetta—but it is a good play and shows what is meant by omertÀ. The dramatic critic of the Times (2 March, 1910), on the morning after Giovanni produced it in London, opened his notice of it thus: “OmertÀ must make things very difficult for the Sicilian police.” This is precisely what they intend.
Without omertÀ the mafia would hardly flourish, and the mafia is not so easy to understand. I suppose the reason why Sicilians explain it badly is that they understand it too well. The inquiring outsider cannot see the trees for the wood, and the explaining insider cannot see the wood for the trees. They labour to make clear things with which I am familiar, and take for granted things which are strange to me, treating me rather as my father treated the judges before whom he was arguing some legal point. Their lordships interrupted him:
“Yes, Mr. Jones, you say this is so and that is so, but you do not produce any authority in support of your statements.”
“Authority, my lord?” exclaimed my father, as though perhaps he might have forgotten something: then, leaning over the desk, he said, in a stage whisper: “Usher, bring me Blackstone—or some other elementary work.”
Thus we do not make much progress, but by degrees one picks up a few ideas about it.
My friend Peppino Fazio, of Catania, allowed me to copy and translate part of an article he wrote in a newspaper. He is speaking of Palermo as long ago as 1780:
The Albergheria was the quarter that harboured those men who were most ready with their hands and most quarrelsome; they were expert also in using their knives, with which they fenced by rule and according to art; they obeyed a certain code of chivalry of their own, not permitting the weak or the unarmed to be bullied, treating as criminals those who used fraud and treachery, and not brooking the intervention of the police. They were men whom an exaggerated sentiment of honour and of individual courage had decoyed from the path of social conventions, but in whom there was a fundamental notion of right conduct and a generosity at times magnanimous. They held each other in great mutual respect, free from any element of servility or cowardice, not recognising grades, nor conferring any right to command—a respect that was the more profound according as its object was the more distinguished for acts of valour and grandeur of soul. It was the tacit homage that one pays to heroes, poets, artists and to every kind of genius.
These men, slowly degenerating, have produced the mafia, which is associated with bullying, blackmailing and crime. The word mafia has been applied in this bad sense only in more recent times, as we are assured by those who have studied the subject. The ancestors of the mafiosi used to call themselves Cristiani—that is Men in the sense of men of courage and silence.
The Cristiano carried in one pocket his rosary and in the other his knife. Outside his own class he recognised the higher social distinctions and, while preserving his own self-respect and never stooping to obsequiousness, felt for the galantuomini (that is for the townspeople) and for the signori (that is for the patricians) a real submission which he displayed both in acts and words by protecting their persons and their reputations; so that no thief or evil-liver dared to commit any crime against one who was known to be protected by a Cristiano.
One recognises about this something of the chivalry of Robin Hood and of more modern highwaymen. The conditions of life in the albergheria are not identical with those of life in the open country, either in England or in Sicily, nor with those of life in the orange-groves of the Conca d’Oro round about Palermo. Both in the Conca d’Oro and in the open fields the guardians employed to protect the crops are all mafiosi and are able to prevent the employment of any who are not. The conditions in a sulphur-mine again are different. Confusion arises unless one knows which conditions are present to the mind of him who is trying to explain the mafia. Besides which, the words mafia and mafioso are still often used in a good sense.
There was something mafioso about Michelino when he was singing to us at the mine, keeping us all in order and silencing the guitar with a wave of his hand. There is something of it in a girl who is not ashamed of her beauty and does not blush to be admired. It was the mafiositÀ of Guido Santo, the mule, at Castellinaria, that sunny morning when he trotted up and down in his new harness before taking us to the shore, which put it into our heads to make it also his festa. There is something of it in the attitude of King Henry VIII, with his hat on one side and his arm a-kimbo, as he appears in a full-length portrait by Holbein. There was a good deal of it in the conduct of Giovanni in his Teatro Machiavelli on one occasion when a lady music-hall singer failed to please; the public hissed her and made such an uproar that she could not proceed. Giovanni was, or pretended to be, furious. He behaved to his audience as Nino Bixio behaved to his men on the Sicilian expedition. He came on and abused them with gesticulation and language; he swore and stormed at them; he appealed to their sense of chivalry; he threatened to come down among them and teach them manners; he declared that they should hear her. He made the piano-man play; he went and fetched the lady; he stood by her side, frowning, with his arms folded, ready to break out, the personification of angry determination and suppressed energy. The people acquiesced and listened. When the singer had finished, they applauded; and they were applauding not only her, but also Giovanni because he had dominated them. It is a small theatre and their numbers may have been four or five hundred—it would depend upon the programme and the kind of evening it was—but if it had been the Teatro Bellini he would have subdued them just as well, unless there had been present someone to resist him with a stronger personality, and his experience had taught him that the chances were against that.
An imposing personality is a useless possession unless there are others willing to be imposed upon, and it is this willingness to be dominated quite as much as the love of dominating that makes the mafia possible. If I may “quote from memory”:
Surely the pleasure is as great
Of being beaten as to beat.
Possibly the Sicilian charm contains among its many ingredients a trace of this love of being dominated which, in England, we associate more particularly with women, spaniels and walnut trees; and if it were not so, history might contain less about the misgovernment of the island by foreigners.
The mafia is not like the Neapolitan Camorra, it is not an organised society such as one reads about in books for boys, nor is it a recognised trade union with a president, secretary, officers and so on. It is rather an esprit de corps, and no more a secret society than omertÀ is a secret society; nevertheless, they speak of the mafia as being more highly organised in some districts than in others, and there are secret societies whose members are mafiosi, so that for a foreigner to speak of the mafia as a secret society would appear to be an excusable error.
Among every collection of men, and even in a herd of bullocks, one is always the acknowledged leader, and in a sulphur-mine it naturally happens that one man has a more dominating personality, more prepotenza, than any of the others; this capo-mafioso takes the lead and is king. When, as often happens, he is a man with a respect for law and order, willing to be useful to the managers, the mafia can and does supplement in an amateur fashion the deficiencies of professional justice. If Giovanni Grasso were really a worker in a sulphur-mine, as he sometimes appears to be on the stage, he would certainly take the lead, and no one who knows him will believe that he could ever be capable of a bad action. But few men can safely be trusted with absolute power. Sometimes this capo-mafioso is a villain who glories in a record of crime, a brow-beating bully who will stick at nothing. Here is a situation for a melodrama—the Wicked Despot. He does as he chooses with those around him, who fear lest he should treat them as Don TotÒ treated Don Andrea before the opening of OmertÀ, and as he treats Saru in the course of the play; and they not only fear, they also admire an unscrupulousness of which they feel themselves to be incapable. They refer their disputes to him and execute his orders. They do not pay him money for adjudicating between them, it is enough for him to have the satisfaction of being asked to arbitrate and, by giving his decision and seeing that it is carried out, he consolidates his power. But he exacts from them a percentage of their winnings at cards as tribute, and they pay it willingly so as to keep on good terms with him. Of course, under the throne of any of these tyrants, among those who have sufficient daring, conspiracies are continually surging and, sooner or later, whether he is a good or a bad man, he has to give way to a stronger—perhaps a fresh arrival, who takes the public fancy. Sometimes there are two with apparently an equal power of dominating; they agree not to quarrel openly, but, between themselves, each is on the look-out for an opportunity to annihilate the other’s influence.
One Saturday, in the street at Caltanissetta, Beppe showed me marks of bullets on the wall. He said that only a week before there had been a row among a score of men with revolvers about some question of precedence among the mafiosi in a neighbouring mine arising out of the terms proposed for ending a strike. One of the men was killed and several were wounded, but the question of precedence could not be settled that day because the survivors were all put into prison.
According to the plays, the prisons are to the mafiosi what the ganglia are to the nerves, and give the prisoners an opportunity for talking matters over, thus providing an effective means of continuing the plot of the drama. And though the criminals feel secure in the knowledge that omertÀ will prevent their confederates from giving information, yet the police, of course, know who is who all the time, just as the police in London know who are the criminals; the law, however, is jealous of the rights of the people and does not move on suspicion. And too much of the modern police methods would not combine well with the requirements of melodrama.
Beppe assured me that in his mine the mafiosi are mostly good fellows and do not do any harm, except among themselves when they quarrel, get drunk and murder one another. He admits that the making use of them in the management of the men is like playing with fire, but he agrees with all who have gone into the matter that a stranger falling among them, wherever he might meet them, would be treated with the most extreme respect and courtesy. This is not because they are afraid of giving themselves away, distrusting the stranger’s omertÀ, it is because they have a real self-respect and wish to pass in the eyes of the world for men of good position. The presence of a stranger among them is a challenge to their chivalry and to their oriental sense of hospitality.
Anyone wishing to study the mafia from books might begin with La Mafia e I Mafiosi, by Antonio Cutrera, Delegato di Pubblica Sicurezza (Palermo. Alberto Reber, 1900), and continue with La Mala Vita di Palermo (I Ricottari), by the same author. If he will also read all the numerous books by other authors cited in the notes to these two works he ought to gain a fair knowledge of the subject.
CHAPTER XIV
MALA VITA
Sicilians sometimes claim that much of what has been stated in the foregoing chapter is now out of date, and that, with the advance of civilisation, the power of the mafia and the respect for omertÀ are giving way to confidence in the police. And they go on to regret that Giovanni Grasso should have so much success with his plays in foreign countries, because they contain a great deal of mafia and mala vita which he presents with so much realism that foreigners are encouraged in the idea that all Sicilians are for ever sleeplessly going about with knives in their belts seeking to execute vendettas. But most theatre-goers know by this time that melodramas are not made up of the events of ordinary life. A man does not discover every day that he has been deceived by his wife or that his sister has been betrayed by his compare; when he does make such a discovery he may be pardoned if he loses his self-control. Anyhow, the sleepless vendetta notion is so ludicrously contrary to the fact that Sicily can afford to take the risk. One might as well treat seriously the complaint against the marionettes, that the swaggering talk of Orlando and Rinaldo encourages the boys to behave in real life as though every fancied insult must be wiped out with blood. The boys certainly do fight—they can be seen fighting in the fish-market, one armed with a basket for his shield and another with a stick for his sword, his Durlindana. But boys fight, even in England, with no marionettes to inflame their imaginations, and sometimes they cut one another; still, no one would take too seriously the exclamation of that schoolmaster who, on being called to deal with some such incident, hurried from his study muttering:
“Knives, knives—dangerous weapons; would to heaven they had never been invented!”
What was he going to do at dinner-time? And if the marionettes are to be abolished, what is the Sicilian boy to do when it is time for him to sit down to his evening meal of romance? It is even possible that if he were starved of his marionettes he would more frequently substitute the dangerous weapon for the stick.
We see Sicilian life only in bits at a time and any bit we see may turn out on investigation to be only a bit of acting; and, whether real life or acting, we see it through the veil of romance which is held in front of it by their language and by their gestures, which cause their acting to appear more real—that is, which help it to be more deceptive. By their language I do not mean merely their words and their grammar—we also have a grammar, and our dictionary contains words as many and as expressive as theirs—the romance is rather in their attitude of mind and the consequent use they make of their words. I have read with disgust in an English newspaper an account of a squalid Pentonville murder which, as described in a contemporary Italian journal, appeared worthy to be set to music by Puccini. We are like the audience in Giovanni’s theatre—dominated by the imposing romance of the language, and we prefer to be so dominated. Or we are like the audience in the teatrino at Palermo, when the buffo performs a miracle; as soon as we get behind “la mala vita” and see it as “the life of the criminal classes” we have caught a glimpse of how the illusion is worked.
By their gestures I mean something about which in England, in France and even in Northern Italy, nothing is known. It is true that we Northerners can and do communicate with one another in gesture, but in England we mostly omit gesture and use speech, while in France and Northern Italy the gesture is only slight. A Sicilian sometimes omits words, but if he omits gestures it is only by exercising great self-control. When he is talking naturally, every muscle of his body is at work helping him to express his meaning. It is as though he had not yet learnt to trust speech, everything must be acted too, as half-educated people have not yet learnt to trust the written word and if they read must read aloud. At a cinematograph show, when a letter or telegram or the title of the piece is shown on the screen, a murmur goes round the hall; it is the people reading the writing out loud to assure themselves of its meaning. So the talking Sicilian is telling everything twice, once with his voice and once with his gestures and there is so much oil in his backbone that there is nothing creaky, awkward or grudging in his movements; the gestures are made with an exuberance, an intensity and a natural unconscious beauty which seem to lift the matter above the plane of ordinary life. So habitual is this gesticulation that it is often useless. I have been behind the scenes in a marionette theatre, watching the man declaiming for the figures. His energy was tremendous, no wonder he drank out of a black bottle from time to time. I knew he was hidden from the audience and thought he might be suggesting movements for the marionettes to the man who was manipulating them, but that man could not see him either and was improvising the movements of the figures unaided.
The gesticulating Sicilian, however, is not more deeply moved by what he is describing than the phlegmatic Englishman is when he is quietly telling something. I have sometimes ventured to laugh at the Sicilian for his unnecessary vehemence, and he has stopped in the middle of it all and joined in the laughter. It would be extremely interesting to see Giovanni Grasso in the part of an English gentleman, a Wyndham or a Hawtrey part. I believe he would succeed because I believe he would succeed in anything he set his mind to do, but for him to reproduce an Englishman’s tranquillity would be as much of an effort as it would be for an English actor to reproduce a Sicilian’s mobility.
Their power of acting is not confined to those who are actors by profession; the love of improvising little scenes in daily life may be said to be characteristic of them. To suppose that they do this from a love of lying would be to simplify unduly; they have the artist’s power of seeing a thing in two senses at once, and they assume that they will not be misunderstood, at all events, they are not going to give it all away by explaining, and if the stranger is taken in—well, as a rule, it does not very much signify. Just as omertÀ makes things difficult for the Sicilian police, so this love of acting makes things difficult for the foreign traveller. There is a story in the form of a dialogue between a foreigner in Palermo inquiring of a native about a tree that was clipped into a fantastic shape. It can hardly be given in English because it turns on the double meaning of “naturale,” which means sometimes “natural” and sometimes “naturally,” but if it be added that “scusi” = “excuse me”; “quest’ albero” = “this tree”; “È” = “is”; “o” = “or,” any reader will be able to understand it:
Foreigner: Scusi, Signore; quest’ albero È artificiale o naturale?
Palermitan: Artificiale.
For: Oh, artificiale?
Pal: Naturale.
For: È naturale?
Pal: Artificiale.
For: (getting irritated): Scusi, Signore; quest’ albero È artificiale o naturale?
Pal: Artificiale, naturale.
And then the foreigner goes home and writes a book about his travels, saying that the natives are so stupid they do not even know whether their trees are clipped into odd shapes by nature or art. But the apparently grave and courteous Palermitan knew what he was doing all the time and was enjoying it as a child enjoys committing a harmless piece of mischief.
If one were to pierce through it and understand them as they may be supposed to understand themselves, one would not necessarily be in a position to give an opinion about the mafia, for, besides those who speak of the growing confidence in the police, there are others who assert that the improvement, if any, is slight and only on the surface, and that the spirit of the mafia is not confined to the mala vita, but extends to the upper classes and influences even the administration of justice and the elections. When the natives differ on such a point, a mere foreigner can hardly decide; but I have more frequently heard the opinion expressed in favour of improvement. Certainly, in the Teatro Machiavelli, when murderers are taken by the police it is often done now with the approval of the audience, which they tell me would not have been the case some years back.
Before writing about the mala vita one ought at least to have seen a man murdered in the street. I have never seen this, nor have I ever even seen the body of a murdered man lying in the street. All that I know about the mala vita in Sicily has been gathered from conversation, books and plays. Lest it should be thought that in thus disclaiming practical knowledge of the subject I am inspired by omertÀ—as a traveller may shut his eyes to unpleasant incidents out of regard for his hosts—I will here collect together all the occasions when I have thought myself to be in the immediate neighbourhood of the mala vita.
At Castellinaria the barber who keeps the shop opposite the Albergo della Madonna—the shop in which Alfio Mascalucia was assistant—always seemed to me to be a man one would readily trust with all one’s possessions. He must be now over forty, married and with a family. Peppino told me the other day that in his youth, meaning between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, this barber had been a notorious ricottaro and had often been in prison for crimes of various kinds. When I heard this, his extremely courteous manner reminded me of the Robin Hood side of the Cristiani, and of the oriental hospitality of the mafiosi towards strangers. I asked Peppino whether I ought to discontinue my custom. He said not unless I was dissatisfied with him as a barber. Then I realised that I must have forgotten where I was for the moment.
Carmelo and his brother Rosario at Castellinaria have both been in prison for attempting to murder, but they can neither of them be said ever to have belonged to the class of habitual criminals.
In the Teatro Machiavelli Peppino Fazio gave me as a ricordo one of the knives used by the mafiosi. The blade doubles on the handle, so that when open it is about twice as long as when shut; some are as long as twenty-four inches when open, mine is only eighteen. Being intended for the theatre, it has never been sharpened or pointed but, except for this it is a real mala vita knife. They told me there would be nothing to fear so long as I continued the life of blameless respectability which had no doubt become habitual to me—or some nonsense of that kind—but that if I should happen to be caught by the police in doubtful surroundings and searched, even this knife, in spite of its arrested adolescence, might get me into trouble.
“So you had better be careful,” said one of them; “but if you do get put into prison, let us know and you shall be treated as well as any ricottaro. I will bring you a good dinner every day.”
“Yes,” said another, “and I will bring you cigarettes.”
“And I,” said a third, “will fetch your linen and bring it back to you nicely washed and ironed.”
Whenever I show my knife to any of my English friends, for I am happy to say I got it safely home, they always exclaim that it is an entirely prosaic object. And so it is. It is as unromantic as an escape of gas.
Several times I have been in a theatre when the performance has been interrupted by a disturbance among the audience, but I have never seen it develop into a serious row.
Once in Palermo my bedroom looked over a small piazza, and one night I heard talking and looked out. I saw a crowd and distinguished a man disputing from below with another man on a balcony about fifteen feet from mine, and there was a woman in the room behind him. The dispute was all in dialect, but evidently they were very angry. Presently the man on the balcony drew a revolver, it shone in the doubtful light, and he threatened the man below; but nothing further happened and presently the crowd dispersed, the man on the balcony retired and all was quiet. Perhaps this was the prelude to a murder, and I may have read about it afterwards in the newspaper without knowing how near I had been to the crime.
There was one other occasion when I thought I was going to see something of the mala vita. On the cliff at Castellinaria are some remains of polygonal buildings which have been made a national monument. The custode’s cabin is just below, in a sheltered place where Peppino and I sometimes go and sit after supper. One moonlight evening, it was rather late, but the lamp was still shining in the cabin and the custode was still hanging about, I heard someone approaching and, looking up, saw, against the sky, a sinewy, slight woman in a long black dress with a black shawl over her head. She was coming rapidly along the edge of the cliff with a shuffling, swaying motion, and as she came she was continually rearranging the shawl over her head and chattering volubly to herself in a hoarse, coarse, raucous voice. The custode glanced at her as she drew near and I thought he flinched. I do not know how I knew it, but I was sure she was his wife. She was beside herself with passion. She must have found out something—something about some other woman. I felt as I have felt at an Ibsen play—as though I were looking through the keyhole into a room where dirty linen was about to be washed. She shook and trembled all over like an express train approaching a country station. Reason told me that Peppino and I were safe, we were on the platform; nevertheless accidents do happen and there was the poor custode on the line. She drew up in front of us, and her draperies swirled round her with the suddenness of her stopping. She became silent and still, while she looked at me as though fixing my appearance on her brain for this life and the next; she looked at Peppino in the same way and at the custode. Then the chattering began again and the restless rearranging of her shawl over her head. Suddenly she turned, poured herself into the cabin and exploded. It was not as with an earthquake, for the walls were left standing and the roof and foundations were unshaken, and an earthquake, they say, seems to last for an eternity, whereas this woman seemed to take but a moment to complete her work of desolation. She pounced upon something among the debris and laughed hysterically as she hid it in her bosom.
The storm was over. She was transformed into a rather beautiful and extremely graceful woman of about thirty. She exchanged a few words of friendly chaff with her husband, smiled at Peppino and bowed to me as she passed out, went up the path against the moonlit sky and faded into the night.
All this was about a pack of cards. She had promised to lend the cards to a neighbour that evening; her husband was to have brought them home early in the day; he had forgotten to do so and she had come to fetch them. So there was no murder and no dirty linen, but the cabin had to be tidied.
What would this woman do had she the motive and the cue for passion that I had supposed for her? If her husband ever does entertain another lady in his cabin and his wife hears of it, I hope I may not be in the neighbourhood. But if I were to be there and to witness the crime, omertÀ would forbid me, as a good Sicilian, to say anything about it. I should have to forget the claims of justice and go to prison, if necessary, rather than give such information as might lead to the conviction of the person or persons guilty.
Lastly, there was the lady in the restaurant-car—but perhaps she ought not to be included in the list. Let her have the benefit of the doubt and a chapter to herself.
