Happy Ant-Heap

by Norman Lewis

  The father of the owner of a small hotel in which I stayed was by birth an untouchable. In the days before the Temple Entry Proclamation in 1938, which was designed to put an end to untouchability, he was obliged, if he wanted tea, to throw his money through the teashop window, and the tea would be poured down a bamboo chute projecting over the street, to be caught in his cupped hands. This man’s son, although still regarded as a member of the lowest caste, had become an affluent member of local society.

  An intriguing recent development is that, owing to the spiritual cleanliness they are still believed by many to exude, Brahmins are much in demand as cooks, and our friend is quite likely to employ one sooner or later in the kitchen. The caste system then—whatever its original function—has become an absurdity. The revolt against it spreads and gathers speed. The following advertisements from the Match Makers columns of the Keralan Indian Express would have been unthinkable thirty years ago:

  BRIDE WANTED An irreligious or moderately religious, beautiful, educated girl for secular-minded graduate government employee. Caste no bar. No dowry.

  GROOM WANTED for white-complexioned attractive girl from upper middle-class family of Kerala. No faith in caste system. Individual merit. Simple early marriage. Furnish horoscope.

  About 20 per cent of the matrimonial advertisements in the Saturday issue of this paper reflect similar viewpoints.

  Christianity offered the underdog a way of escape from caste, although only too often strings were attached. Fishermen had always provided a high proportion of Kerala’s food but, although not quite untouchable, were kept in contemptuous isolation close to the bottom of the caste pyramid. They offered an easy target for the early Portuguese missionaries. Almost the whole fishing population switched faiths. The converts then discovered that the Church proposed to take over ownership of the boats and divide the proceeds of the catch on a fifty/fifty basis. Additionally, a tithe was imposed upon the fishermen’s share of the sales. It was a system that remained in force until 1957, since when reforms have reduced Church ownership to about one boat in ten. As is to be supposed, fishermen vote Communist to a man; remarkably enough, they have remained steadfast Christians throughout—still poor but much benefited by the creation of co-operatives, which have taken over sales and provided refrigeration plants making possible the export of fish, principally to Spain and Japan.

  I went to see the fishing village of Pullivil which, although only six miles from the fashionable resort of Kovalam, is so little known in the area that the taxi driver who took me there had to stop twice to enquire the way. The coastal belt, hardly more than two miles in depth, in which this and a number of other fishing villages are built, manages in some way to have double the population density of the rest of Kerala.

  Yet the only evidence of human presence when breasting a low hilltop overlooking it was the triple towers of an enormous Portuguese church, soaring from what might have been the jungle of the Amazon.

  Pullivil appeared at the bottom of the hill as row after row of thatched cabins among the tree trunks. In its severe order, its adaptation to its environment, and the absence of any of the visible adjuncts of our days, it gave the impression of being of tribal origin, conceivably unchanged since before the arrival of the first Aryan immigrants some 2,000 years ago. The tall, broad-leaved native trees were interplanted with others: coconut palms, arecas and pepper trees grown for their crop. The road from Kovalam had been stifling; here, under swaying lattices of shade, Pullivil was cool and green. What little tidying-up there was to be done was attended to by crows, spaced evenly like black fruit on the branches overhead, or by scuttling piglets. Pig-keeping is the custom in such Christian communities throughout India—eating pork being accepted as the best proof of sincerity of faith.

  My arrival in this place, almost hermetically sealed off from the intrusions of the outside world, caused some excitement, and two young, smiling and voluble young men were found to show me round. They introduced themselves as Ambrose and Wilfred (their names, they said, had been chosen for them by the priest). We exchanged personal details in the customary manner of Kerala: father’s name, religion and political affiliation. They were, of course, Communists; fishermen’s sons studying political economy at the University of Trivandrum, home for the weekend. Together we visited the enormous church, the playschool (where on spotting us, the toddlers broke into a vociferous version in the local language of ‘Goosey Goosey Gander’), the library and the Culture and Science Club—both wonderfully scoured and polished and smelling faintly of Methodist chapels. Next we moved on to the beach.

  The climate here was as soft as Portugal with a hint of approaching rain, and a water meadow carpeted with sparkling grass of the European kind separated the front row of the village houses from the sand. In this buffaloes mooched in a languid fashion among patches of lotus and reeds. It was a Saturday and jubilant scampering children released from morning school played a game by which home-made kites were induced to swoop down suddenly over the heads of passing adults—principally fishermen on their way to the boats—in the hope of entangling their legs in the strings. The boats, lined up at the top of the beach, presented black Viking profiles with white tracery painted over their prows. They were of inconceivable antiquity, made of thick teak planks sewn together with coir rope, and, as noted by the Dominican Fray Domingo Navarrete, who passed this way in 1760, no nails are used in their construction. He was taken for a trip in one, complaining that the water entered ‘by a thousand holes and although the Moors assur’d us they were safe, yet we could not but be in great fear’.

  The fishermen were preparing the boats to go out that night. They were lean men, calm and slow in their movements, and with expressions of great serenity. Each man wore a white cross, some three inches long, dangling from a string of turquoise beads at his neck. The nets used were heavy and enormously long, and had been deposited in piles at a distance of about thirty feet from each boat. A method of folding and stowing them had been worked out by which a team of twelve (the number of the disciples) loaded boat after boat. A man picked up the end of the net and began to walk towards the boat. After three paces a second man took up the net and followed him, and so on until nine men held the net, fully stretched. They began the process of folding it, then passed it up to three men waiting to stow it in the boat. The procedure, carried out in silence and with military precision, was ritualistic and archaic.

  With the first boat dealt with in this way the team moved on to the next. It would take most of the afternoon before some thirty boats were ready for the sea. Ambrose explained that the work of stowing the nets, of launching the heavy boats and beaching them on their return had always been shared in this way; so too were the rewards. The fishermen’s existence depended on perfect co-operation. ‘We have always been Communists,’ he said. ‘Now we vote. That’s the only difference.’

  ‘Do you intend to become fishermen yourselves?’ I asked.

  The question was ridiculous. How could a graduate with a head full of data and figures be expected to go out and catch fish. Nevertheless there was a trace of embarrassment in the answer. ‘We shall be putting our knowledge at the service of the community,’ Ambrose said.

  ‘But in what way?’

  He shook his head in gentle exasperation. ‘These people are not understanding money. When there is a good catch they are buying jewellery for their wives.’

  ‘What should they do with it?’

  ‘They must be learning to save—to invest. They must be moving with the times. The future is good. All the time we are making improvements. But have you seen Kovalam? In Kovalam there are twenty hotels. This is a backward place but I am thinking one day we must catch up.’

  1989

  Where the Mafia Brings Peace

  SICILIANS LIVING IN THE tightly packed, traffic-jammed city of Palermo do their best, naturally enough, to escape, whenever the opportunity arises, into the country or to one of the rare havens of peace still to be discovere
d by the sea.

  Inland, a favourite excursion is to a small town with a relaxed and somewhat ecclesiastical atmosphere. Twelve churches—some superbly baroque—are crammed into the surroundings of the small square. In addition to its ample provision for the devout, the town possesses seven schools, an excellently equipped hospital, and various benevolent institutions. People drive more than thirty miles from Palermo just to stock up with exquisite bread baked in wood-fired ovens and to buy meat free from those adulterations and tamperings associated with city markets. The streets are clean, there is no petty crime—the last burglary took place three years ago. It is a relief to visitors from the city, where muggings happen in broad daylight, to find that here they can stroll in the streets by night in perfect confidence and security.

  This is Corleone, made famous by the book and the film The Godfather, and generally accepted as being under the stern and watchful control of a man held in custody since 1974, who is currently serving a life sentence for multiple murders and for being ‘promoter and organiser of a criminal organisation’, in the maximum-security prison of Termini Imerese. This surely is a phenomenon without parallel in the modern world and hardly in history. Many Palermitans seeking refuge from the bustle, clamour and insecurity of the city have decided to settle here, although once, back in the Forties, thirteen bodies of murdered men were recovered from the streets in as many days. It holds special attractions for families with children to be educated.

  If schooling is of no consequence, townspeople in search of peace may opt for Ficuzza, nine miles away, located in Arcadian surroundings under the portentous shape of the Rocca di Busambra, and at the edge of the Ficuzza wood, once the hunting preserve of the Bourbon King Ferdinand II, whose palatial baroque lodge is just round the corner of the single street. It was the ambition of the Sicilian friend who accompanied me on this trip, and who had taught philosophy for two years at Corleone, to buy a house here. Prices are high—for Ficuzza, too, is under uncontested, and therefore pacific, Mafia control. Cars are left unlocked in the street at night while the populace sleep quietly in their beds. Once a day or so, a policeman on a motorcycle may pass through without stopping. There is nothing for him to do.

  The Corleone landscape is dramatic, even formidable, backed by harsh mountain shapes, perpetually misted and aloof; a proper setting for the atrocious deeds of the past. Forty years ago the traveller would have been careful to avoid the Ficuzza wood, for it was here that outlaws kept rustled cattle. In 1947 police investigated a deep crevice on the flat top of the Busambra mountain, discovering the remains of trade union leaders and peasant malcontents, dumped there by the feudal Mafia of those days. There are no isolated farmhouses hereabouts. Those who work on the land live in villages, often built in a circle for purposes of defence, their backs forming an unbroken wall.

  This is bandit country, riddled with secret caves and hidden tunnels, and the bandits were here from the beginning of Sicilian history to the end of the Second World War. At that time thirty bands roamed these mountains, a pool of desperate men from which were recruited the private armies of the feudal landlords. In 1950, with the passing of the agrarian reform law, these things came to an end. The social conditions in which banditry had flourished ceased to exist, and the private armies had gone. Those bandits who remained at large were no more than an intolerable nuisance, and, with their usual efficiency, the ‘Men of Honour’ arranged for their extermination.

  Many theorists see Sicily’s history of banditry interwoven with that of the Mafia as a kind of continuing resistance to foreign occupations—six in all—which never permitted the creation of a stable state. As a matter of routine each incoming regime abolished all freedoms granted by its predecessor, cancelled the title deeds to ownership of land, and changed all the laws to suit themselves. Thus, at intervals of roughly one and a half centuries, Sicilians found themselves reduced to pauperism by some new category of foreigners, governing inevitably through a corrupt and brutal police. Since the state offered no protection, it fell to the individual to do what he could to defend himself, and his best recourse was to join forces with other victims of oppression in the organisation of underground action. Thus, according to the theory, the Mafia was born.

  When in 1860 Garibaldi arrived on the scene to bring about Sicily’s unification with Italy, it became clear that there was much to be done before the island could be governed from Rome. It was therefore decided as a temporary measure to make do with political remote control through ‘families of respect’—which may have been in effect governing from behind the scenes for centuries before his arrival.

  The surrender of land in 1950 to the once land-hungry peasantry saw the end of the old-fashioned rural Mafia, now that their function as guardian of feudalism had ceased to exist. Calogero Vizzini of Villalba and Genco Russo of Mussomeli had shared enough power in 1943 virtually to hand over western Sicily to the invading American forces, with hardly the loss of a man. Their kind was now extinct, and with them had gone all the traditional godfathers, to be replaced by young men of quite exceptional ferocity, who began their conquest of the towns.

  In 1950, at the stroke of a pen, a Sicilian lifestyle came to an end, and in the countryside the change was instant and profound. The old system here had been based upon a vast reserve of labour; now almost overnight the labour market collapsed. There was no one to sow, tend or reap the crops. Agricultural wages doubled, then increased five-fold, but there were still no takers. A few field workers busied themselves with the tiny patches allocated in the reform, but most of them either moved into the towns or went abroad—and they would, never be back.

  We had been invited to lunch at the casa padronale of Caltavuturo, south of Cefalu, where the land reform had cost our host all but 1,250 acres of his original 5,000, leaving the estate from his point of view no longer a viable proposition. This reverse had been accepted with dignity and good grace. The small fortress provided at least an excellent backdrop for the entertainment of his friends at weekends.

  Life in the casa padronale, set in the empty magnificence of what might have been a Highland glen, clung to what it could of the style of the past. Power had gone, but its persistent wraith lingered on. A high wall with massive gates enclosed a courtyard in which, when we arrived, a baker was busy at his oven, and servants, formally hatted in eighteenth-century style, cooked an assortment of meats over a great brazier. The servants, led by the major-domo, came forward to shake the hands they would once have kissed. The baroness awaited us at the head of a marble staircase leading to the piano nobile then presented us to the guests, all of them speaking perfect English, learned in all probability from Anglo-Saxon governesses. Courtesy titles had been firmly retained.

  The talk was of English literature of the nineteenth century, of a croquet lawn it was hoped could be created, and the possibility of introducing fox-hunting in this moorland and scrub environment, so unfavourable, one would have supposed, to the sport. Although the people of the estate had received their 3,750 acres, they had all left, and the heather spread a coverlet over the once-cultivated fields.

  Lunch had been based upon a recipe chosen from a selection of British glossies on display, the one medieval touch being that the bread was presented to each guest in turn to be respectfully touched. Strong Sicilian white wine was provided from the vineyard of Conte Tasca D’Almerita, present for the occasion, who announced himself as grandson of Lucio Tasca, deviser of the plan in the late Forties for the ‘tactical utilisation’ of the bandits into a Separatist army. This, it was hoped, would detach Sicily from Italian sovereignty and offer it to the United States. Ironically, the grandson, as he told me, had been captured and held to ransom for some months in a cave by Salvatore Giuliano, most famous bandit of them all. ‘He was extremely polite,’ the count said, ‘and never failed to address me by my title.’ A memory caused him to wince. ‘The food,’ he said, ‘was monotonous.’

  Caltavuturo was a quiet place, perhaps a little dull, but in the pa
st excitements had been frequent. A feature of the house was a tower with two storeys. Three embrasures were provided in each room, through which rifles could be pointed at attacking outlaws, who had never succeeded in scaling the wall. Our charming hostess pointed out the six thrushes’ nests, one per embrasure, each having five eggs. The thrushes had become house mascots, inordinately tame. Sometimes in the bad old days, when an attack was imminent, the nests had had to be removed, but this was done with great care, and as soon as the danger was at an end they were replaced. Usually the birds returned.

  Sicily, apart from the coastal strip in which its principal towns are located, is fast emptying of its people. The autostradas, unrolling their ribbons of concrete across the island from north to south and east to west, are largely devoid of traffic. The monks drift away from the isolated monasteries, and the great feudal houses have lost all purpose. Fields that once produced Europe’s highest yield of wheat are now submerged in gigantic thistles. Only shepherds inhabit this landscape, and if one makes a roadside stop they come scurrying down the mountain slopes to the car, desperate for a moment of relief from their loneliness. Like magicians they draw the new-born lambs from their sleeves, and unburden themselves of pent-up words. ‘Don’t go away,’ they say. ‘Why the hurry? Let’s talk about something.’

  Nostalgia still drags at those who have turned their backs on the scenes of their childhood and emigrated to the towns, and at holiday time they swarm out into the country to pay their respects at the shrines beckoning in the background of their lives. For the ex-villagers who have moved into Palermo, the most powerful of such magnets is the great temple of Segesta, and, making their pilgrimage by bus in spring, they deck themselves with red poppies in tribute, it is to be supposed, to the watchful spirits of the place.