by Norman Lewis
The familiars of the Inquisition dominated Sicily for three centuries. Until the time of their disbanding in 1787 there were never less than two thousand of these psalm-singing marauders, each in command of his own band of retainers – all of whom enjoyed the same extra-legal privileges. They stripped rich men of their property, and sentenced them to murus largus – the most comfortable kind of incarceration the day had to offer. The poor were punished for their lack of seizable goods by torture and murus strictis, which meant that they were flung, fettered, into a deep dungeon and endured ‘the bread and water of affliction’ until they died. Horrified by these excesses, which he was quite powerless to check, the Spanish Viceroy, the Duke of Medinaceli, wrote: ‘It would take a year to describe the things they do. Unheard of things – the most hideous and frightful enormities.’ The poor man’s only shield was the Mafia and the vendetta. Justice was not to be come by, but the association of men of honour, silent, persistent and inflexible, could at least exact a bloody retribution for the loss of a wife or daughter, or the burning down of a house. Colafanni, an authority on the period, sums up: ‘The Mafia in Sicily under the Bourbons provided the only means for the poor and humble to make themselves respected … To the Mafia, then, went all the rebels, all those that had suffered injuries, all the victims.’
It was in the school of the vendetta, too, that the traditional character of the mafioso was formed. The common man, a victim of absolute power, had to learn to stomach insult or injury with apparent indifference so that vengeance could be delayed until the opportunity for its consummation presented itself. The mafioso therefore developed a kind of self-control closely resembling that quality known as giri by the Japanese, and so much admired by them. A true man of honour never weakened his position or armed his enemy in advance by outbursts of passion or of fear. When he sustained some grave injury he made a pact with himself to be revenged, and thereafter would wait patiently and unemotionally, half a lifetime if necessary, until his moment came – often seemingly on excellent terms with the man he proposed to destroy.
But when a man lost his head, threw Mafia-inculcated secrecy and caution to the wind and struck back openly, his only chance of salvation was to take to the maquis. For this reason there was never a time when Sicily was without its bandits. At the end of the Second World War thirty separate armed bands terrorised western Sicily, while even in the late winter of 1962–3 motorised bandits were still staging highway robberies on the main provincial highway between Castellamare and Ballestrate. A hundred and fifty years ago the Bourbon authorities decided to deal with this situation by creating the first pseudo-police force. The only qualification for enrolment in the ‘Armed Companies’, as they were called, was ruthlessness. Many of these upholders of the law were ferocious criminals reprieved from the gallows and allowed to rehabilitate themselves in this way. What the familiars of the Inquisition had overlooked, the Armed Companies took. After the depredations carried out in the name of religion, Sicilians were now doomed to suffer voicelessly under the agents of the State. Since then they have quite simply turned their backs on authority of any kind. For this reason the police charged with the investigation of the highway robberies of February 1963 met with nothing but the most intractable hostility from local villagers, while even the victims of the robberies appear not to have been specially helpful. For this reason, when a man is found lying seriously wounded, possibly dying, and the police appeal to him to identify his aggressor, the reply is usually couched in a formula: ‘If I die, may God forgive me, as I forgive the one who did this. If I manage to pull through, I know how to settle my own accounts.’
This is the famous Sicilian omertà – ‘manliness’, which rules the public conscience and is sustained so often even in the face of death. It is a word which calls for further examination, and is best understood by the study of an extreme case of omertà in action.
Some four or five years ago one of two brothers living together in a Sicilian farmhouse disappeared. The men were known to have been on the worst possible terms for years, and the younger and stronger one frequently knocked his older brother about and even threatened to kill him. Finally the older brother vanished and the police got to hear about it, searched the farmhouse, and found inefficiently cleaned-up bloodstains on the floor. It is a popular misconception that a case for murder cannot be made out if no body can be found. In this case it was decided by the examining magistrate that a corpus delicti existed, constituted by the threats of murder known to have been made, the man’s disappearance, the bloodstains, and the suspect’s immediate assumption of his brother’s property. The younger brother was accordingly tried for murder, found guilty, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.
A year or two later a carabiniere, who knew the older brother, suddenly found himself face to face with the ‘murdered’ man. He was working quietly as a labourer on a farm in the mountains, only two miles away. It emerged that as part of his plan to be revenged on his brother, the man had changed his name, although most of his fellow labourers and some of the neighbours knew who he was all the same. This was omertà with a vengeance. It simply did not occur to these people to go to the police, despite the terrific injustice that had been done. It was ‘manly’ to solve one’s own problems in one’s own way and leave others to do the same, and one ‘lost respect’ by poking one’s nose into other people’s affairs.
The Sicilian conscience is further bedevilled by an unfortunate linguistic confusion, arising out of the similarity between the words omertà and umiltà – humility, the Christian virtue so much extolled in the Church. Many illiterate Siciliane have combined the two words to produce a hybrid of mixed pagan and Christian significance. The virtuous man is in Mafia fashion ‘manly’ and silent, and as a Christian, humble.
Far from protecting the underdog, the Mafia today has taken the place of the oppressors of old, but it still benefits from a moral climate formed in past centuries. The Sicilian is a trifle cynical and quite self-sufficient. He fights his own battles, keeps his mouth shut, and has little interest in the doings of humanity outside the circle of his family, extended perhaps to include his second cousins. ‘Manliness’, once a barricade raised against injustice, now serves to keep justice out.
* * *
In the past it was the Mafia – the product of weak government that had developed its own vested interest in governmental weakness – that whipped up the frantic jacqueries of 1820, 1840 and 1866. The savageries of these outbursts of peasant hatred are quite inexplicable to anyone unaware of the long years of contempt that had preceded them. As in Spain, the targets of popular fury were always the same: the landlord, the Church, the police. There is no better description of the kind of thing that could happen than that given by Giovanni Verga in his story ‘Liberty’, which is largely factual and based on the rising at Brontë, put down by Nino Bixio, lieutenant of Garibaldi – the man who was to have given the land to the peasants.
Like the sea in storm, the crowd foamed and swayed in front of the club of the gentry, and outside the Town Hall, and on the steps of the church – a sea of white stocking-caps, axes and sickles glittering. Then they burst into the little street.
‘Your turn first, baron! You who have had folks cudgelled by your estate guards!’ At the head of all the people a witch, with her old hair sticking up, armed with nothing but her nails. ‘Your turn, priest of the devil, for you’ve sucked the soul out of us!’ … ‘Your turn, police-sergeant, you who never took the law on anybody except poor folks who’d got nothing!’ ‘Your turn, estate guards, who sold your own flesh and your neighbour’s flesh for ten pence a day!’
Now they were drunk with the killing. Sickles, hands, rags, stones, everything red with blood. The gentry! Kill them all! Kill them all! Down with the gentry!
‘Don’t kill me,’ pleads the priest, ‘I’m in mortal sin!’ Neighbour Lucia being the mortal sin; neighbour Lucia, whose father sold her to the priest when she was fourteen years old, at the time of the famine win
ter. But the priest is hacked to pieces on the cobblestones of the street. Then it is the turn of the apothecary, the lawyer, and the lawyer’s eleven-year-old son. The estate guards fire on the crowd from the castle, but the castle is stormed and the defenders massacred, the baron’s young sons trampled to death, the baroness and her baby thrown from her balcony to the street.
And then suddenly the slaughter is over. They are free of the gentry and rage is dead. Now they have their liberty, but nobody knows what to do with it. And in any case there is no time to learn, for the Army, with its firing squads, is on the way. Quietly and sadly, arms folded, they sit waiting behind closed doors.
In those days the Mafia was still with the people; then, gradually, as it gathered its power it began to draw apart. The Mafia was paid for its part in Garibaldi’s triumph, it organised the plebiscite (at Lampedusa’s Donnafugata – Voters, 515; Voting, 512; Yes, 512; No, zero); its chieftains, like his illiterate Sedaras, married their daughters to penniless princes. From that time on the Mafia began to elbow the feudal aristocracy aside. By 1945 the process was complete. Don Calogero Vizzini was the feudal overlord of all Sicily as well as head of the Mafia. And thereby he had become the worst single thorn in the peasants’ side since the bad old days of the Bourbons.
Don Fabrizio, the ruminative and unworldly princeling of Lampedusa’s novel, philosophical in his acceptance of Garibaldi and the Mafia, felt queasy at the first sight of the infant democracy newly delivered at Donnafugata. ‘Something had died, God only knew in what back-alley, in what corner of the popular conscience.’ People always had done, and always would do, what they were told, and he found it in some way demeaning that anyone should find it necessary to construct this elaborate edifice of pretence dedicated to the lie that free will and freedom of choice actually existed.
However sickening to Don Fabrizio’s stomach the newly imported democracy might have been, for the Mafia it was an invention as promising as the new steam-engine. In the old days the Viceroy had given the orders – at most, and as a matter of courtesy, taking the advice of his council of nobles. Now it was to be the turn of anyone who could fight his way to the controls of this wonderful new machine. In 1881 communal elections were held at Villalba – the town that was to become Don Calogero Vizzini’s capital – and the Marchese of Villalba, supported by the Mafia, took his precautions ten days in advance. The two hundred and fourteen citizens possessing the qualifications entitling them to vote were locked up in a granary, from which they were released, eight at a time, and escorted by the Marchese’s armed guards to the polls. The Marchese was elected.
Later the Mafia invented and perfected new methods of democratic suasion. By the time the government of Giolitti reached power, the Mafia had become the only electoral force that counted in Sicily and the Government was realistic in its acceptance of the fact. Alongi, who published a study of the Mafia in 1902, describes the arrangements for voting he had witnessed a year or two previously: ‘Some short distance from the polling station the road was barred by a group of sinister figures. Here each voter as he approached was seized, thoroughly bastinadoed, and forced to drink a huge glass of wine. There followed a thorough search of his person, after which the government candidate’s voting slip was put into his hand and he was led or dragged to the ballot box, where the president took the slip from him and put it in.’
Later still, this physical suppression of the element of choice gradually came to be considered unnecessary; it was found that the same result could be obtained by making the voter understand what he stood to lose by voting for the wrong side. As it was never explained to the voter what programme the candidates stood for, and he was assumed to be quite ignorant of the function of Parliament, the contending parties might be represented by symbols such as the mule and the ox, and the agricultural voters warned that it was either a case of voting for the mule or looking elsewhere for work in future. The system recalls the last election held under French tutelage in parts of then colonial West Africa, where bloody disputes took place between villages over the relative merits in terms of strength, courage and sagacity of the lion and the elephant, which were the symbols adopted by two of the parties soliciting their votes.
This somewhat special interpretation of the democratic process persisted in Sicily even after the end of the Second World War. In 1945 when the Mafia and most of Sicily’s aristocracy were hoping that Sicily would secede from Italy to become an American state, or at worst a British colony, a Separatist congress was convened at which Don Calogero Vizzini appeared unexpectedly and without formal invitation. When asked who he represented, he replied with proud simplicity: ‘I have only to whistle, and every man in the province of Caltanisetta will vote Separatist.’
When a year or two after that the Mafia threw the idea of Separatism overboard, and became, by order of Don Calò, Christian Democrat, there was one serious breach in the Honoured Society’s political unity in the person of the awe-inspiring Don Vanni Sacco, head of the Mafia of Camporeale. To the remonstrations of Don Calò, when he refused to accept a badge sent him in the form of a cross on a shield – the Party emblem – Vanni Sacco replied: ‘I’ve been a liberal all my life, and my father before me. After all, politics, as I see it, is a stick, and I’ve got used to the feel of this one.’ It took lunch with the Archbishop of Monreale, Monsignor Filippi, and the Archbishop’s consent to Vanni Sacco’s request that his daughter, Giovanna, should be granted the honour of christening the cathedral’s new bell, before Don Vanni would agree to change his politics.
* * *
At the turn of the century, with the political machine finally and firmly under control, and the manicured hands of that distinguished ruffian Don Vito Cascio Ferro on its levers, the Mafia could go ahead and trim up the details of the ‘state within a state’ that existed until the coming of Mussolini, and was to re-emerge in 1945 under the generalship of Don Calogero Vizzini of Villalba.
It was Don Vito who developed with a certain artistry the system of the ‘pizzi’, as he called it – an onomatopoeic and picturesque word from the Sicilian dialect which translates rather flatly into English as ‘racket’. Pizzi means the beak of a small bird, such as a canary or a lark, and when Don Vito with his inborn habit of understatement spoke of levying a Mafia toll, he called it in Sicilian fari vagnari a pizzi – ‘wetting the beak’. By the time Prefect Mori had succeeded in putting Don Vito away on his faked-up charge, beak-wetting was included in almost every conceivable activity in Sicily.
A great gathering of vulturine chieftains had collected to wet their beaks at the expense of the farmers, whose produce they bought dirt cheap on the spot and carried to the market in the Mafia’s own beautifully decorated carts – or later, trucks. In the market only those whose place had been ‘guaranteed’ by the Mafia were allowed to buy or sell at prices the Mafia fixed. The Mafia wetted its beak in the meat, fish, beer and fruit businesses. It moved into the sulphur mines, controlled the output of rock salt, took over building contracts, ‘organised labour’, cornered the plots in Sicily’s cemeteries, put tobacco-smuggling on a new and more profitable basis through its domination of the Sicilian fishing fleets, and went in for tomb-robbing in the ruins of the Greek settlement of Selinunte – the results of its archaeological excavations being offered at bargain prices to foreign tourists. Looking round for further sources of revenue, the Mafia decided to recommend the owners of country houses and estates, however small, to employ guardians for their property, and after a few stubborn landowners had declined to supply sinecures for ex-convicts and had seen their property burned down, the practice became universal. There were advantages, too, to be gained by stringing along. The Mafia gave monopolies to shopkeepers in different trades and then invited them to put up their prices – at the same time, of course, increasing their Mafia contribution. Some of the Mafia beak-wettings were picturesque in a sort of depraved oriental way. Beggars, for example, would be granted exclusive rights to a certain pitch, thus guaranteeing a displa
y of distorted limbs freedom from competition by simulated idiocy.
The most evident of the Mafia’s criminal functions – and one that had been noted by the Bourbon attorney-general back in the ‘twenties of the last century – now became the normally accepted thing. The Mafia virtually replaced the police force, offering a form of arrangement with crime as a substitute for its suppression. When a theft, for instance, took place, whether of a mule, a jewelled pendant, or a motorcar, a Mafia intermediary was soon on the scene, offering reasonable terms for the recovery of the stolen object. In this way the matter was usually settled rapidly, and to the satisfaction of all concerned. The victim got his property back without delay. The thief received a relatively small sum, but at least escaped the risk of police interference, since no one would have dared to call in the police once the Mafia had interested itself. The Mafia intermediary, of course, wetted his beak at the expense of both parties. The situation was and is an everyday one in Sicily. The police charge nothing to restore stolen property but are only successful in one case out of ten. The Mafia is expensive, and may impose a commission charge of thirty-three and a third per cent. However, the Mafia is successful ninety per cent of the time.
But it was not only the farmer and the merchant who felt the weight of the Mafia’s New Order. The rich man, drawing his income, perhaps, from investments, could not be allowed to escape the net, and he became increasingly the target of letters of extortion. Such letters are commonplace in Sicily, but most of them are composed by novice delinquents who give themselves away by their brusqueness, their semi-literacy, and their habitual decoration with drawings of skulls and crossbones and dripping daggers. Letters of this kind go into the wastepaper basket, or may even be handed over to the police. The genuine Mafia letter-writer is unmistakable in his style, which is likely to have a touch of the nineteenth century about it, with outmoded epistolatory flourishes and protestations. It may even express regret for the inconvenience caused. As no second requests are sent, it is usual for payment to be made promptly.
