In Sicily

by Norman Lewis

  12

  I WAS EAGER to revisit Mazara del Vallo - on the south-west coast of Sicily and one of the most charming of all Mediterranean towns - best reached on this occasion by by-roads through a landscape that seems largely to have avoided the twentieth century. This is yet another area much affected by a drop in rural population following the human haemorrhage of the immediate post-war period, when the United States opened its gates to the exploited peasantry of southern Europe. Tens of thousands of peasants took the opportunity to escape the age-old tyranny of the Sicilian countryside. A half-century of slow leakage of people from one continent to another had left emptiness and silence in many villages along these meandering roads. Even the dogs of old had gone, and sometimes only two or three houses gave signs of occupation. Farm-carts slumped on broken wheels in a courtyard strewn with ancient debris. Barn doors fell away from broken hinges and sometimes even the remnants of decayed harnesses hung from walls, although the horses were no more. The village shops had closed down, deserted by the last of their customers, and a traveller in these parts could be in difficulties because there were no road signs and no one was available to point out the way.

  Most of those who refused to emigrate made for already overcrowded towns where they shared the poverty of the original inhabitants, half of whom lived below the poverty level. Remarkably Mazara was exempt from such melancholy statistics. Its citizens had never been toilers on the land, for the Carthaginians who built the original city had chosen the site for its proximity to the richest of Mediterranean fishing waters, and it is a source of wealth that has never declined. On all counts Mazara is to be admired for its elegance and its calm. It is a ghost of a corner of the French Riviera of old, with a promenade and palms, grotesque old cars with squeaky horns kept by their owners out of affection, a background of baroque churches of splendid proportions, and even a Norman cathedral to which a baroque façade had been added. This town is notable in Sicily for its civic pride and, apart from helpful directions displayed for the benefit of visiting strangers, the municipality has done its best to foster good manners and a caring attitude among its citizens by the discreet posting of notices saying no more than Cleanliness and Civility. They had obviously been effective, for Mazara turned out to be indeed a civilized place where nostalgia was blended with imagination and even a touch of showmanship. The lengths to which its people were prepared to go to be kind to strangers was exemplified by the response of a driver caught up with us in a traffic jam, whom we asked for directions to our hotel. ‘You’ll never find it,’ he said, and turning his car around led the way through the traffic to look for it at the other end of town.

  We arrived shortly before dark in time to enjoy a pleasant local phenomenon frequently experienced in such conscientious Sicilian towns. Clumps of trees with suitable foliage are planted along quiet streets and above all the sea-front parade, if - as in this case - one exists. At sunset, in the absence of other roosting sites in this treeless country, these attract innumerable small birds. We stood outside the hotel and watched thousands arrive, settling to screech happily and twitch their wings among the leaves. It was a performance repeated in all the trees planted along the promenade, producing such a localized din that within a few yards of a tree it could be heard above the noise of the traffic.

  Our arrival in Mazara coincided with news of a sensational find in local waters. A bronze statue had been hauled off the sea bottom in a fisherman’s net and had immediately become the subject of intense discussion between experts sent to Mazara from various Italian cities, including Rome.

  The statue, said the man at the hotel desk, was roughly two metres long, and had been seen by a friend shortly after its recovery from the water. It had first been accepted as a representation of Aeolus, god of the wind, but this opinion had been rapidly discarded and it was now generally known as ‘The Dancing Satyr’. It was supposed to have been on the seabed since about 400 BC, and was much damaged. The story was that this unique archaeological treasure had been caught up in the nets many times before and simply thrown back. My friend found it ironic that what had been no more than a nuisance to local fishermen was suddenly regarded as of such importance that it had to be locked away out of sight and could only be inspected by permission of the municipal authorities - this being granted only in the case of accredited experts. Many people, he said, were of the opinion that this was the result of a conspiracy originating in Rome. It had been stated locally, he went on to say, that the processes of restoration would take a minimum of two years to complete, the first stage being a six-month immersion in fresh water in an attempt to reduce the action of the salt that had penetrated the metal. He passed me a blurred newspaper photograph showing the statue immediately after recovery. It looked no more than a shapeless object covered in seaweed and slime.

  By this stage other members of the hotel staff had gathered to listen to our conversation. They did their best to show enthusiasm for this remarkable find, but could not disguise the fact that what really mattered to them was where the statue would be restored. Mazara possessed a properly equipped laboratory, used on many previous occasions for restorations of this kind, so why should the city be robbed of its statue? There were hints that Palermo might lay claim to it, but it was even more likely that Rome, with its political clout, would brush all local opposition aside and move in to take over.

  The local view, including that of the hotel staff, was that after restoration the statue should be allowed a permanent home in the cathedral. But now, quite suddenly, this had been opposed by influential members of the community. The assistant manager, who was passing through, stopped to join the discussion and explain why this should be so. After a general clean-up, he said, the statue’s detached leg had been temporarily replaced in position. This, it was found, emphasized a posture already described as ‘orgiastic’, thus - as he himself believed - making its presence inappropriate in a temple of the Christian faith.

  The grace and splendour of Mazara failed quite to conceal the presence of a strange phenomenon of the kind least to be expected in the sprucest of cities. The grandest of its buildings, the castle, cathedral and several of its most imposing churches, are clustered at the south end of the promenade, and behind it in the Piazza della Repubblica, described by a guidebook, much given to overpraise, as ‘perhaps the most beautiful in Italy’.

  An after-dinner stroll there was to produce the surprise of a lifetime. The visitor is surrounded by superb ecclesiastical buildings, normally immaculate in their pale limestone but on this occasion defaced with graffiti up to the height the tallest vandal could reach. These were no mere scrawlings but legible inscriptions carried out in white or red paint. It is possible that technically speaking they could not properly be described as graffiti - the appellation normally applies to the primitive and incoherent drawings disfiguring walls in many parts of the world. These were plain, unadorned statements, usually of distress, and evidently in most cases the work of adolescent girls who wrote of the transports and miseries of sex - sometimes in a single blasphemous sentence, but also almost at essay length. Now came the real surprise, for in almost every case English was the language employed. ‘Shield me from the sight of this man again,’ one wrote. ‘My life is in ruins.’ ‘How long will God allow me to be left alone?’ another appealed. ‘Let us turn our backs on each other and walk away,’ wrote a third. But why, we asked, should English be chosen by these superbly educated young sufferers as the language of hatred or love? We would never know, but of one thing I was certain: whatever was written here across so many square yards of wall was well constructed, well spelt, pithy and concise. There was no doubt about it, Sicilian language teachers were of the best.

  Here in Mazara people led a good, bustling life, a result, I suspected, of a long process of human trial and error sifted out slowly over the centuries from what had been on offer by the ancient world. This was a great place for human contact. The young were to be seen everywhere locked together in amorous ob
livion at bus stops. Everyone carried a mobile telephone. The locals were generous; when I tipped a waiter he dropped a picture of the Spice Girls by my plate. At sundown all the old men came out and stood packed together, two deep along the main street’s eighteen-inch-wide pavement, to enjoy the sight of the traffic going by. Mazara had taken 2,500 years to become what it was.

  Mazara was an old town, but Gibellina, thirty miles away inland, was the newest in Sicily. Gibellina had been knocked down along with every other village in a couple of hundred square miles across the Belice River by the 1968 earthquake - the last of many in an area of chronic seismic disruption in which the ancients had been clever enough not to settle. The old Gibellina had been left as a pile of rubble, and construction of a new town started several miles away. This, it was announced, was to be ‘unlike anything on earth’.

  The description was impossible to resist, and we drove through rolling, treeless country to reach the new Gibellina in an hour or so.

  It came almost as a surprise, isolated among sparse olive groves and patches of abandoned land. The streets into which we shortly drove were wide and quiet and we saw only a few pedestrians before we reached the centre of town. What had become of the estimated population of five thousand? There was an overall impression of space still to be filled and in the architecture of what had been so far completed the feeling was of an ardent search for novelty of shape and colour. We passed a fountain shaped - by intention, as we were later to learn - like a lock. Houses were outstandingly angular. Some, perhaps the first to be built, were painted in strident colours, which later lost out to black and pastel shades of all kinds. But this introduction to the city of the future was short-lived; we were soon in an area where the brave-new-world effects had surrendered to an urban standardization, which appeared in this context surprisingly out of place.

  The approach road swung in a wide curve down into the centre and here the town planners had set out in earnest to épater les bourgeois with what appeared as a small park enclosed by a low wall painted with vast imitation graffiti. These, I suspected, had been based on photographs taken in some lively slum. It was an idea that had failed, because whereas the originals would have been created with the determination of provoking distaste, or even rage, these, offered solely as decoration, could stimulate little but boredom.

  The town came down to earth with a Spar supermarket much like any other, but there were no customers in sight, and the lady at the check-out appeared at first glance to be asleep. The only attempt to liven up this area of the city was a huge ragged shape cut out of tin supported on a pole, which after the first few days of being on view could not possibly have been accepted by the residents with more than indifference. It would have been interesting to have had facts and figures about Gibellina - how many houses were occupied, how long was it on average before a new houseowner decided that it was time to move on, and what the residents did for a living - and to have been able to study the proposals of those who had planned it. We tried the information office but it could not help. Its leaflets were about tours to Venice and Rome, but little else. Nevertheless the man in charge had one piece of cheering news. ‘You can park here wherever you like. Nothing to pay.’

  The verdict then, was that as a living, working, expanding town it was non-existent, because its purpose had gone. But this must also have been true in the case of the town’s predecessor that was wiped out by the earthquake, which must also have been by then at the end of its natural life. A handful of the occupants of the new Gibellina could presumably commute by car to Mazara, but where else could they find work, for what was there to do here? The earthquake of 1968 that had laid the old town in ruins had in effect only accelerated what was already happening. By that time much of the population, having passed so many years in the drudgery and poverty of feudal agriculture, had already made their escape.

  13

  FROM A GLANCE at the map I could see that Villalba, capital of the rural Mafia in the old days, was not more than a two-hour drive across country at this point. Here, I thought, was a place that would have been caught up in - perhaps even obliterated by - the flood-tides of change, and in a burst of curiosity I decided the time had come for a second visit.

  Villalba of old had been the undisputed capital of the unkempt and uncouth old ex-farmer, Calogero Vizzini (Don Calo), known to the Allies as ‘General Mafia’ due to his effective assistance to the American Seventh Army following their landing on the south-east coast of Sicily on 10 July 1943. A British contingent had landed too, but mistakenly had advanced against tough enemy resistance up the eastern coastal highway, involving them in a month’s delay and the loss of several thousand men before reaching their objective at Messina.

  In the west, the Americans, choosing a difficult and mountainous route, had taken only seven days to bring their part of the campaign to a conclusion. Their only losses had been through minor accidents of various kinds. The Axis defenders surrendered at Mount Cammarata, and Don Calo, having managed the campaign from behind the scenes, now arrived in a U.S. tank. He had only recently been released from Mussolini’s prison to become mayor of Villalba, and now, travelling westwards with the advancing Americans, he busied himself by replacing existing mayors in the towns successively occupied in the advance by others of his own choosing. From then on the Mafia, at that time suffering a wasting sickness, began to recover health and strength, but in a new form: the old rural version of the Honoured Society was doomed and Cosa Nostra, imported with the American troops, was on its way.

  In July 1943, when Don Calo had waved from his tank to the welcoming crowds, the Mafia had been a rural phenomenon sucking leech-like at the blood of the three-fifths of the population condemned to live on the land. Another decade was enough to spread the cancer cells of Cosa Nostra not only to the outskirts of Rome, but to establish a vigorous satellite in North America specializing in the manufacture and distribution of drugs. The headquarters, however, always remained in Palermo.

  In the early days of this process of expansion and change, Villalba, birthplace of so many villainies, lost whatever purpose it had ever possessed, unable to adjust its life to the future or to fulfil any of the functions of the past. To see it again, physically unchanged after the passage of thirty years, came as a surprise. There it lay, spread out at the base of the rolling hills, an austere cross-hatching of white streets, low buildings, small windows, and high walls. Women wandered into sight, wrapped in black shawls. Old men walked on the bandy legs of the past. A scattering of teenage boys appeared to create annoyances in the emptinesses of crossroads, then disappeared. A single customer sat facing the street, as they always did in such cases, in the doorway of the only cafe in sight.

  The town lifts itself slowly to its central square with a fine baroque church at one end. The church steps lead up to a platform from which Don Calo, always slovenly and dishevelled, would describe the benefits of hard work and raise his hand to be kissed. Facing the church at the other end of the square, a benchful of old men studied an inactive fountain. A priest walked by in the little black pyramid of his shade. A bell tolled and the intervening silence was broken only by the remote cackle of crows in the sky. Could this place be in the same country as the new Partinico?

  The war had opened its arms like a saviour to Sicily, for after the landings there were few battles to be fought. The armies, heading for the north, drew the corruption after them, leaving Villalba purged of recent miseries and extortions. Even the cruelty of labour in the fields was at an end, although once again Villalba was re-nailed to the cross of tradition, and where only a few decades back vast horticultural prairies had occupied human energy from dawn to sundown, now only an occasional old man was to be seen turning over the earth in his cabbage patch with a spade.

  My first visit to Villalba had been too late to experience the adventure of a meeting with Don Calo Vizzini. A Sicilian friend had, however, enjoyed the rare privilege of being presented to the Mafia chieftain on the famous day whe
n Vizzini met U.S. Army officers in the main square. Describing his appearance on this occasion, he said that Don Calo was as unkempt as usual, in baggy trousers and a rumpled shirt, although a partial transformation had been attempted by persuading him to put on an officer’s jacket with sleeves that were far too long. Vizzini, my friend thought, took some perverse pleasure in his slovenly image, a well-known form of Mafia affectation. Some months before this he had actually appeared in public with unbuttoned flies, causing a young girl who was present to titter. On being rebuked by his angry gesture she had lost the power of speech for a day.

  The incident was seen as another evidence of this illiterate ex-farmer’s almost hypnotic power over his fellow humans. Local worthies, including a baron, had been summoned to Villalba to welcome him and the Americans, but Vizzini had virtually ignored them, the baron being dismissed with a wave of his hand and the request to find someone to look after his dog.

  Despite this arrogant showmanship there was no doubt about the keenness of Don Calo’s brain, his insight into the manipulations of local politics and the spell he exercised over the poverty-stricken peasants who tilled his land. He was seen as useful by the local landowning aristocracy, who emulated the system by which he kept the lower classes in order. They frequently invited him to join in social occasions in their houses, but such invitations were never accepted.

  As the American force began its advance to the north Vizzini’s knowledge of what lay ahead, of the German defenders’ positions and failing strength, and the weakness of the local authorities about to be replaced by mafiosi, was invaluable. The whole campaign was completed in a matter of weeks, although some two years were to pass before democratic rule would be restored in the Sicilian south.

  Two years or so later Don Calo died of a heart attack after a prodigious celebratory meal following a political triumph of a friend. He lay in state in the local church and leading personalities of the government and the Church and heads of all the Mafia families came to pay their respects, and countrymen from local villages flocked to Villalba where they slept under hedgerows or in the street. It was characteristic of such an event that the newspapermen present, even those from the capital, referred in their coverage of the occasion to the almost overpowering fragrance of Don Calo’s body in death. The funeral notice displayed on the church door said that, ‘Wise, dynamic, tireless, he was the benefactor of the workers on the land and in the sulphur mines. Constantly doing good, his reputation was widespread both in Italy and abroad. Great in the face of persecution, greater still in adversity, he remained unfailingly cheerful, and now with the peace of Christ and the majesty of death, he receives from friends and foes alike the grandest of all tributes: He was a gentleman.’