The Council of Egypt

by Leonardo Sciascia

  “Not only by the peasants’ ignorance, as I remember.”

  “Right. He pointed to other causes, but the principal one, according to him, is the ignorance of the peasants. Therefore, he says, let us educate the peasants. Now I ask you: Where do we begin?”

  “On the land, of course. Teach the peasant how it must be worked, what are the best methods, the best tools, which crops are best suited to a particular soil and terrain, how one lays out an irrigation ditch—”

  “And his rights?”

  “What rights? Whose?”

  “The peasant’s right to be a man, for one... How can you possibly expect a peasant to do an intelligent man’s job without at the same time giving him the right to be a man? A well-cultivated countryside is the image of applied reason: it presupposes that the person who tends that land is effectively sharing in universal enlightenment and universal rights... Now, do you believe that a peasant on one of your estates really shares in any universal rights when a letter from you to the overseer is enough to have him thrown into jail? Just two words: ‘So-and-so is to be jailed for good and sufficient reasons of my own.’ And that man will stay in jail so long as it suits your convenience... These things still happen, the law of ’84 notwithstanding.”

  “What you are saying is very important,” said Don Saverio, “and interesting too, very interesting. But I can’t help always seeing the reverse of the coin, the amusing side. You make me think of the Baroness di Zaffú. She was only fifteen when she happened to notice that a peasant is a man, and she never changed her mind about that even when she was an old lady.”

  “According to Montaigne, if I’m not mistaken, the discovery that a peasant is a man was made by the nuns in some convent or other hundreds of years before the Baroness di Zaffú.”

  “Amazing. Montaigne, eh? One of those Frenchmen of yours, I suppose... I say, things are going rather badly for those people up there in France, don’t you think?”

  “Not for Montaigne, in any event,” Abbot Carí said with an ironic cackle, “not for Montaigne.”

  “I’ve never had the pleasure of reading him,” Don Saverio said. “But Montaigne aside, those Frenchmen are beginning to muck— Excuse me, to be a nuisance, in a word.”

  They were beginning to be a nuisance, a bit more of a nuisance than Don Saverio and the Sicilian nobility were inclined to put up with, and a little less of a nuisance than Monsignor López y Royo, to consolidate his position as future viceroy, would have liked.

  In the Di Blasi home, at the periodic meetings of the Sicilian Academy of Rhetoric, arguments over the French were becoming more heated than the discussion of Sicilian poetry, to which the Academy was dedicated. In fact, the idea of reviving the Academy had occurred to Di Blasi, whose father had at one time supported it, while he was casting about for some instrument to advance the political aims he was secretly pursuing: that is, through dialect poetry and research to create a more unified dialectology, to give concrete and democratic meaning to Sicilianism, to Sicilian nationalism, which most people cherished only in the abstract; and, at the same time, to develop cautiously a program for propagandizing such ideas and winning converts. Years of uneasy concern for his country had finally brought Di Blasi to envision a Sicilian republic: the death of Caramanico, with the subsequent elevation of López, was now pushing him into action. There was no hope of returning to the spirited days of Caracciolo, no hope, even, that the mild era of Caramanico would continue: within a month, within a year, Monsignor López would have become a kind of Spanish viceroy; with him in office, the barons would revert to their old arrogant ways and recapture the privileges that Caracciolo had unraveled and nibbled at.

  There was no more opportune moment to attempt to crush the old order by force: a viceroy whom the nobles despised and whom the people hated, who was a sharp man in disreputable dealings but absolutely lacking in the intelligence and courage needed to face a critical situation; discontent among the urban workers and the peasants; troops stationed in Palermo and throughout the island, few in number and of by no means certain loyalty; and the French, who were shifting their armies and fleet so that no one could tell where they would strike when, thus keeping the Naples government in a state of severe anxiety. On the other hand, there was France. To Di Blasi and to those few friends who had joined with him in the conspiracy, France was both idea and passion; the French Revolution, the French Republic, and the armies of Revolutionary France spelled the hope of prompt and fraternal aid to the future Sicilian republic. Yet that same France posed the threat of failure. The name France alone awakened echoes of hunger and suffering among the people; memories of their long-ago Angevin rulers and the bloody massacre known to history as the infamous Sicilian Vespers had been quickened in recent times by the Duc de Vivonne, Marshal of His Most Christian Majesty Louis XIV. The people constantly harped on their hatred of the French and the Jacobins. Every misfortune was attributed to the French and their local friends: the war and the revolution that they were bringing, or threatening to bring, to Sicily; the anger of God that they had provoked; black blight among the corn; phylloxera in the vineyards; overabundant rainfall; drought.

  Pastoral letters in which the Jacobins were called horrible wild beasts, bloodthirsting and voracious – panthers, wolves, bears, sly and malevolent foxes – thundered in the churches of the Kingdom; the people prayed to the Madonna and to the Saints to keep the French far from their shores, as once they had prayed to fend off the Turks, and to wipe out and send to the Devil, for suitable torture, those fellow countrymen who secretly belonged to the infamous Jacobin sect. Yet Francesco Paolo Di Blasi was attempting to organize a Jacobin revolt.

  He was encouraged by the faraway examples of Squarcialupo and D’Alesi, who had been successful at least at the outset, and by the recent revolt against Viceroy Fogliani – by all the popular uprisings, that is, which in the more or less remote past a handful of men had been able to spark in Palermo. He believed that the very elements that those movements had carried within them as the germs of failure, or that had made them easy to suppress, destined for success the movement that he captained. It would not be a riot that would break out on April 5, but a revolution fired by a great idea, and it would not be limited to the city of Palermo, but would spread throughout the island. The participation of the peasants was a primary, an essential, condition for the success of the revolution: the conspirators gave more time and energy to agitating out in the country, arousing the peasants in the name of the hunger and oppression they suffered, than to stirring up the servile, treacherous city.

  But while men talked in Di Blasi’s house of the French and the spurious Arabic codices, and while Abbot Meli was reciting an anti-Vella poem to just a small circle of friends, so as not to hurt the feelings of his host and his host’s uncles, who had been supporters of Vella, in the Church of San Giacomo alla Marina, the eighty-year-old priest Pizzi, palpitating with joy and horror, was listening in his confessional to a revelation of the conspiracy.

  Chapter X

  When young Giuseppe Teriaca came out of the silversmith’s shop where he worked, the time being almost two o’clock in the morning, he found the Church of San Giacomo still open; he walked over wearily to undo the knot he had felt tightening inside him for several days. Also, it was near Easter and, as the Church asked, at least at Easter a man should confess and take Communion; all the more so if he felt trapped in a plot in which he could not tell good from bad. At almost the same moment, Corporal Karl Schelhamer of the Foreign Regiment began to feel about the army of which he was part very much as Teriaca was feeling about the Church.

  The result was that Brigadier General Jauch and Father Pizzi appeared simultaneously at the Royal Palace with, respectively, the corporal and the silversmith in tow.

  Had the watching eye of the world and his own age allowed, Monsignor López would have scampered up the curtains, the draperies, and onto the chandeliers, such was his joy to hear their revelations. The group was in the salon that,
taking its name from the still recent frescoes by Giuseppe Velasquez, was beginning to be called the Salon of Hercules; Monsignor had transferred himself and his surprise guests to this room from the little study where he had first received them, judging the salon more likely in size and acoustics to shield such a fearsome and secret business from the trained ears of the servants, by whom he was hated and whom he hated in return.

  The silversmith and the corporal had had from Monsignor the formal promise of immunity that Father Pizzi and Brigadier Jauch each had dangled before their eyes; now they were talking, and it was a pleasure for Monsignor to listen. Also listening were the Royal Procurator, Damiani; the Prefect, the Prince del Cassaro; and the Captain General of Justice, the Duke di Caccamo. If Damiani’s joy equaled Monsignor’s, that was justified by his occupation; the other two were listening with mingled disgust and dismay, particularly the Duke di Caccamo. Indeed, when Monsignor López turned and ordered him to proceed to arrest all those whom the spies’ evidence had implicated in the conspiracy or merely cast suspicion on – with special attention and care to be taken with Di Blasi – the Duke, his face drawn but his voice quietly decided, said that he really did not feel he could arrest Di Blasi.

  Monsignor bridled. “Why not?”

  “Because he is my friend,” the Duke replied.

  “Ah, he’s your friend! The King, God keep him, will be happy to hear that he is your friend,” Monsignor said with a ferocious sneer.

  “I can do nothing about that,” the Duke said. “I have never approved of his ideas, and I believe that there can be no doubt about his guilt, precisely because I know his ideas and his character... I will say more: I detest his crime. But he is a friend.”

  “And in what is he your friend? Do you go to women together?” Women were forever brushing their way through Monsignor’s thoughts. “Play primero? Go on picnics?”

  “And study Latin, study Aristotle,” the Duke said; the edge of his scorn for Monsignor was flawed by the emotion these memories aroused.

  “Foolishness, rubbish,” Monsignor said, and then in a persuasive, paternal voice, “You are the Captain General of Justice. Your duty, my dear Duke, is very clear; you cannot do less. Suppose that the Procurator and the Prefect and everyone else invested with authority were to entertain the same feelings for Di Blasi as you. What would happen? The enemies of God and Crown here in Palermo could make merry when and as they liked, and the King, God keep him, would be in a fine quandary for having put his trust in you and in your loyalty... At any moment, the end of the world will be upon us, the wrath of God will be breaking over us, and here you sit quietly and...” His voice rose and cracked in anger. “And the King, God help him, what is he to you? Something to be kicked around?”

  “Your Excellency can order me in His Majesty’s name to do anything else, to put a bullet through my head even, and I will do it – here, in front of Your Excellency.”

  “I cannot order you to do any such thing, but I leave it to you to weigh some other opportunity for just that. What I can order you to do is perform your duty and make the arrests. We will see later what they think about all this in Naples. Meanwhile, arrest Di Blasi—”

  “I will go,” Damiani said.

  “If you happen not to be a friend of his, if you will deign to,” Monsignor said scathingly. The Duke of Caccamo had blasted his euphoria. Why should a man deny himself the pleasure of annihilating another man, if his mind were not tainted by the same filth, his heart corrupted by the same guilt? Might this mass arrest bring out something about the Duke di Caccamo?... What a joke that would be. But the Duke truly did detest the Jacobins, almost as much as Monsignor López y Royo detested them; only, unlike Monsignor, he had friends. As he rode home in his carriage, he was moved by the image of himself behaving as a loyal friend, until Monsignor López’s threats began to make that image twitch with apprehension and fear, even as the Duke contemplated it.

  Meanwhile, Damiani was putting the entire police force of Palermo on an emergency basis; some were unleashed to descend on the silversmith’s quarter to capture the four companions whom Teriaca had informed on; others went to the barracks of the Calabrian Regiment to arrest Corporals Palumbo and Carollo, denounced by Schelhamer; still others hurried to arrest Master Builder Patricola, whose name had come up in the vague testimony of the two informers; this was the Patricola who in the eyes of his contemporaries enjoyed the merit of having raised the cupola above the Norman Cathedral which today makes us regret their not having arrested him earlier and for less idealistic crimes. The cream of the police force Damiani reserved to follow him on the more arduous maneuver against Di Blasi. For with Di Blasi one had to move carefully on account of his rank and his reputation, but especially so as not to allow him time to destroy documents that, as a top figure, if not actually the leader of the plot, he in all probability had somewhere in his possession.

  Di Blasi was not at home. After the meeting of the Rhetoricians, he had gone in the company of Baron Porcari and Don Gaetano Jannello, who were part of the conspiracy, for a stroll along the Marina, for the night was very mild and people were resuming, as they did every spring, the habit of an evening promenade by the sea. Damiani was glad of it; he posted his men around the house, and himself hid in the doorway of the house opposite, ordering the night watchman to leave him a candle and betake himself to bed. Everything was much easier this way. And indeed, after perhaps an hour, as the servant who walked a few steps ahead of Di Blasi, carrying a torch, was about to open the door, the lawyer found Damiani by his side and the police surrounding him; he had a moment, barely a moment, of confusion, like an attack of vertigo. But swiftly, lucidly, he saw that the game was lost and his own life finished, his destiny fulfilled.

  “If, in the circumstances, my word were worth anything, I would assure you that you will not find any papers in my house worthy, so to speak, of your attention.” The light of the torch flickered over the deepened pallor of his face, but he was calm, and he spoke in the low, distinct voice that Damiani had always admired in him during trials and in conversation, and with that vein of irony which people who keep watch over their feelings inject into everything they say. “I should like not to disturb my mother at this hour and in the company of these gentlemen.” He gestured toward the police.

  “I am sorry,” Damiani said, and he was truly sorry, for in the land of Sicily, a mamma establishes communion even between State offenders and Royal prosecutors.

  “Come,” Di Blasi said, moving up the stairs, preceded by the servant who was lighting the lamps, and followed by Damiani and the police. He walked into his study. There stood his mother, motionless in the middle of the room, her hand to her heart, a waxen statue in which the one sign of life was the feverish anxiety of the eyes. The smell of burned paper filled the room. When Damiani had come looking for her son and not found him, she had sensed unerringly why they were searching for him and had gone down to his study to burn the papers she believed might compromise him. But compromise him in what connection? She knew nothing about the conspiracy; nor was there in the study a single piece of paper that had to do with the conspiracy. Who knows what she’s burned, the young man thought, and now this fellow is growing suspicious. Damiani was sniffing the air like a hound dog.

  Di Blasi was exasperated. These mothers of ours! They foresee everything, know everything, and only complicate everything! His annoyance enabled him to assume a stiffness, an appearance of coolness, that he needed at that unnerving moment.

  “These gentlemen must waste some of their time looking about here. It’s their duty... An official search, in a word.”

  Donna Emmanuela nodded; she was looking into her son’s eyes and shaking her gray head to say yes, she understood, she had always understood. Destiny, the son was thinking, yes, that she has understood. Her own destiny... How to accept sorrow and death, to which her life has always been bound. But Donna Emmanuela understood also that at this moment her son wanted to send her away: a man has the right t
o be alone when he faces his own fate, when he must confront betrayal, police, death. She said, “I’m going to the next room. Send for me if you need me.”

  She turned to leave. “Thank you,” her son said. During the years that remained to her, these were the words that would blossom in her heart, in a long, an endless, mad colloquy. She paused by the door for a moment. Don’t turn, don’t turn around, her son prayed silently. His heart was thudding the way it sometimes did in dreams, when he would cling to a slender branch or thicket above an abyss. He closed his eyes; when he opened them again, she was forever no longer there.

  Damiani had rushed to the drawers of the desk. Not that he was convinced he could find anything, but duty is duty. He looked through the letters, one by one; he scanned them as if reciting Ave Marias, but he was disappointed in their contents. The police were wheeling around him like a merry-go-round, not knowing quite where to lay their hands. Finally, the Procurator barked, “The books! Clear the shelves. Do you expect me to wait here all night!”

  Di Blasi was sitting almost in the middle of the room, facing the dark walnut shelves from which the police now began to pull books by the armful. They piled them on the floor, near him.

  “Books, these are your books,” Di Blasi said to himself; he had to mock, to wound himself. “Old paper, old parchment. Books were your passion, your mania. But these people care less about books than mice do; at least, mice eat them. But what about you, now? What value can books have for you any longer? Were they ever of use to you, except perhaps to bring you to where you are now? You would have had to leave them behind sometime in any case; now or in twenty years, leave them to some relative or friend or servant... Yes, you could have left them to young Ortolani, perhaps; he loves them as much, maybe more than you do... No, not more than you do. He loves them differently, as a scholar. No danger of his ending his life as you are about to end yours... But you cannot give them to him now; they belong to the King you have plotted against, which is to say, they belong to the police. Look at them carefully – it’s for the last time... Here are the pamphlets in which you wrote about how all men are equal... De Solis, who made you dream of America... and the Encyclopedia, Volume One, Volume Two, Three...” He counted them, volume by volume, as the police stacked them on the floor beside him. “And Ariosto—‘O great conflict in the youthful heart,/ The thirst for fame and thrust toward love contending!’... Not those lines, not those lines now!... And Diderot, five volumes, London, 1773.” He stretched out his foot toward the nearest pile, to kick it over. Damiani, who never let him out of his sight even as he read the letters he kept pulling from the desk drawers, jumped to his feet in alarm, and ordered the police to leaf page by page through the books that Di Blasi had knocked down.