Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  Yet despite the power of the Mafia, and the secret labours of the service chiefs and the Freemasons, the House of Savoy was to founder, and to the peasants’ enormous astonishment, Umberto seen by them as the patron and ally of the feudal landowner – was – sent packing. The figurehead of an invincible order had been thrown down. Suddenly the peasants understood that there were weaknesses in what they had previously supposed to be the undivided ranks of their betters, and that their position at the bottom of the feudal pyramid was not necessarily preordained. Some of them certainly took the King’s word for it that the Republicans were Communists, and gave the Communists the credit for the demolition of the Royal House. There was some point, after all, in fighting for their rights.

  The peasants took heart again. With the exception of Sicily’s northwestern corner, where Giuliano still reigned unchallenged in the mountains that look down on Palermo, the bandits were gone. Despite the Mafia bullies and the police who seized on any excuse to intervene that presented itself, the occupation of the uncultivated estates began again. In September 1946 the Prefect of Caltanissetta finally gave in to peasant pressure to enforce the law and signed the document by which five uncultivated estates were handed over, and within the next few weeks fourteen more estates were occupied, cleared of stones and brambles and put under the plough. When in one case a gang of ruffians was hastily organised in an attempt to drive the peasants out, a general strike was called throughout Sicily. At Sciara, when land due for legal expropriation was held back, the peasants thoroughly scared the authorities by arriving on horseback, six thousand strong, to protest at the town hall. To the Sicilian landowners, it must have seemed as though their gloomiest prophecies about the Red tidal wave that would eventually engulf the country if abandoned to irresponsible democracy were about to be fulfilled.

  * * *

  This was the stage-setting for the elections to the Sicilian Regional Parliament which took place on April 20th, 1947. The Separatist and Monarchist Parties had faded out of the picture now, and the real contenders for power were the Christian Democrats – which had absorbed the members of the two defunct parties of the Right – and the Popular Front amalgam of the parties of the Left: Independents, Socialists and Communists. The Christian Democratic Party supported by the Church and by the feudal landowners was considered a certain winner. A strong majority in the Regional Parliament was essential to the landowners at this strategic moment, because once they were in full control of local government, nothing would have been simpler than to neutralise the irksome measures of reform enacted from time to time by the central Italian government in Rome.

  The electoral proceedings were conducted in the usual atmosphere of cajolery, intimidation and sheer violence. It was no longer possible, as it had been in 1900, to administer a thorough beating to the elector before allowing him to enter the polling booth, but many and varied were the forms of psychological coercion applied. The Church, more politically-minded possibly in Sicily than anywhere else on earth, electioneered in energetic fashion. On the Sunday preceding the voting a sermon was preached, by order, from every pulpit in the country extolling the benefits of Christian Democracy, and warning churchgoers against the atheism, licence and depravity of the state in which the ideals of the Popular Front were allowed to prevail. The usual inducements were held out to those whose votes could be cheaply acquired. To turn to the evidence of Danilo Dolci (To Feed the Hungry):

  … The Sisters came to every house in Petralia with presents of food and 1,000-lira notes…. ‘I’ll give you a kilo of pasta,’ they say, ‘if you vote for our party….’ They bribe people to vote by giving them presents and promising them this and that … Yes, the vote’s bought, all right – with packets of pasta.

  And then there was the other side of the medal. ‘Vote for our party, and you can keep your land – if you don’t you’ll be kicked off, double quick!’ … Just before the election the landowner sends for the tenant and says: ‘Vote for me, otherwise out you go!’ … ‘Put your mark against No. 1 and No. 8,’ the master says to them, and they daren’t do otherwise for fear they’d lose their jobs. The scrutineers check the slips as they come in, so they know whether you’ve voted for their party or not.

  That was the worst risk of all – the risk of losing one’s job in a country in which, as Dolci’s informants told him, most people couldn’t even be sure that the ballot was secret. And there was not only the risk of losing a job that one had, but the fear of never being able to get a job again if one voted for the wrong party. No one in Sicily would ever think of presenting himself for employment without a ‘recommendation’ from either a priest or a politician (in 1963, 35,000 such recommendations were received by a petroleum company at Gela which had advertised eight hundred vacancies). It was unlikely that a recommendation would be forthcoming in the case of a man known to have voted for the Popular Front.

  The final guarantee – or so one would have imagined – of a triumph by the Christian Democrats – was that Don Calò, in accordance with the Honoured Society’s tradition of supporting and then endeavouring to control the strongest political party, had ordered all the mafiosi of Sicily to back the party of the landowners and the Church. Popular Front political meetings were outlawed in Mafia territory, and when election day came, gun-slinging thugs hung about the polling stations to remind the voters where they were expected to put their cross. In these circumstances it seemed almost incredible that the Christian Democrats could have been defeated – but defeated they were, and by a substantial majority. At the very moment, in fact, when the feudal landlords and their allies believed that at last they were going to be able to put their house in order, this catastrophe – all the more terrible because so unexpected – confronted them with the spectre of the howling revolutionary mob, and Red ruin.

  * * *

  Seven days later occurred the turning-point in the bandit Giuliano’s criminal career when his brother-in-law, Pasquale Sciortino, reached his headquarters with what seems to have been a long-awaited letter. Several members of the band were present, but Giuliano and the brother-in-law went aside to read the letter, after which it was carefully burned. Giuliano seemed greatly excited by its contents. At the mass trial of the Giuliano band in 1950 for the massacre of the peasants at Portella della Ginestra, the judge said of this letter: ‘That it had some bearing on the crime that was to be committed a few days later by Giuliano and his band, there can be no doubt whatever.’

  The judge’s opinion was based on a description of what took place by Giovanni Genovese, given to the examining magistrate at Palermo, and the inevitable conclusion is that the letter did in fact contain the order to carry out the massacre.

  On April 27th, 1947, in the morning at Saraceno near Montelepre, Salvatore Giuliano came to see me, with the brothers Pianelli, and Salvatore Ferreri, so-called ‘Fra Diavolo’. They had something to eat in my croft, and then stayed to chat a bit. About three o’clock Pasquale Sciortino showed up. He had a letter for Giuliano and called him on one side. The two of them went to sit down behind the wall, where they read the letter and discussed it. It must have been an important document, seeing that after reading it, Giuliano burned it with a match. After that Sciortino went off. Giuliano came over to me and asked me where my brother was. I said he was probably in town, because he was suffering from a boil. Then Giuliano said to me, ‘The hour of our liberation has come.’ I asked, ‘How’s that?’ Giuliano said, ‘We have to go into action against the Communists; we’ve got to go and shoot them up on May 1st, at Portella della Ginestra.’

  It is here that Giuliano’s obsession with liberation from his predicament is revealed. The muddled romanticism of the Robin Hood has been driven out by a bitter realism. Giuliano no longer thinks of punishing the Mafia, avenging the poor, or of ruling in a brigands’ cloud-cuckoo-land – a kind of police-free Sicilian Valhalla. What he craves now is simply ‘to go free’ at any price. The sterile liberty of the fugitive is no longer freedom, and the vast, silent
amphitheatre of mountains has closed in on him to become a prison cell. Eighteen months before this Giuliano had treated on equal terms with the nobility of the country, who had promised to repay him for his support with high office in the government of a Separatist Sicily. Then, when Giuliano had agreed to assist in refurbishing the lost lustre of kingship, there had been more promises. But despite the bandit’s massive influence with voters at the time of the referendum, the King had gone, and Giuliano still trudged the prison corridors of his empty mountains. Now he dropped his price. All he asked was to be allowed to escape with his men – if the worst came to the worst, even to Brazil. The only political party in a position now to do business with him – or even to pretend to do business – was the Christian Democrats, who were in power in Rome but had suffered their unpredictable setback in the Sicilian elections. Giuliano had already followed Don Calò and the Mafia into Christian Democracy racy, and now for the third time a bargain was made, but this time the terms were cruelly high. At the great trial of the bandits held at Viterbo, Pisciotta, Giuliano’s lieutenant, summarised these occult transactions.

  I don’t hide the fact that I was a member of the Giuliano band at the time when it formed part of the Separatist army, and Baron La Motta, the Duca di Carcaci, the Honourable Finocchiaro Aprile, and the Honourable Gallo told us that we were fighting for the freedom of Sicily. That was the first deception. With Separatism over and done with, I thought that everything was finished for us, but the Christian Democrats and the Monarchy got interested, and managed to swindle Giuliano into fighting for them. The Monarchists and the Christian Democrats promised us that if they won the election we should go free, and that if they lost it, it would be fixed up for us to emigrate to Brazil, on the property Prince Alliata has there. I didn’t share Giuliano’s opinion when he tied himself up with these two parties, and I told him so one day. ‘Watch what you’re doing,’ I said, ‘this lot will let you down just like the Separatists did.’ But Giuliano said it was none of my business. I was too sick to go with him on that bloody job at Portella, or to attack the various Communist headquarters, or when they massacred the carabinieri. Anyway, those who made us all the promises were Bernardo Mattarella, Prince Alliata, the Monarchist Deputy Marchesano, and also Scelba [Scelba was Minister of the Interior at this time]. The first three used the Honourable Cusumano Geloso as their go-between. I was present at the meetings with this gentleman, but the instigators didn’t put much faith in me. It was Marchesano, Prince Alliata and Bernardo Mattarella who ordered the massacre at Portella della Ginestra. Before the massacre they had a meeting with Giuliano.

  11

  THE SMALL TOWN of Piana dei Greci differs principally from the other small towns of western Sicily in being a tourist attraction – which the others emphatically are not. Piana dei Greci has colour and folklore to offer, although it is supplied strictly to order. The girls still possess the Albanian-Greek national costumes handed down by their great–great-grandmothers, and these are charmingly illustrated in leaflets produced by the Sicilian Office of Tourism. The drive out to Piana dei Greci takes only an hour and gives the visitor a chance to see some of Southern Europe’s most eerily impressive mountain scenery. Palermo’s leading hotels are happy to arrange such an excursion, and if the party is large enough to make it worth while, a dance can be arranged. This, after four and a half centuries of transplantation from its native Albanian soil, still remains curiously oriental in feeling. It will be remembered that King Vittorio Emanuele was bored by an entertainment of this kind when he allowed himself to be persuaded to pay a visit to Piana dei Greci and was subsequently tricked by its mafioso mayor, Don Ciccio Cuccia, into becoming the godfather of Don Ciccio’s son.

  After these brief eruptions of organised gaiety, Piana dei Greci relapses into the brooding calm of its everyday existence. Life is monotonous, and too often divided between huge surfeits of enforced leisure and brief spells of crushing labour. The men of Piana dei Greci are yoked to the cruel and complacent fertility of the feudal estates, and their town lies on the frontier between the ancient corn-lands and a sun-flayed mountain wilderness that is the colour of leprous skin. Two desolate and fateful peaks that look as though they were made from ashes rear up behind the town. A wind bickers ceaselessly in the streets, tears at the sails of a half-dismantled windmill, puffs white grit into the eyes, and ruffles the festoons of washing into a brisk, scudding sea. Most of the citizens of Piana dei Greci go in black, speak in low voices, and use the gestures of a tragic resignation.

  In 1959 Professor Silvio Pampiglione of the University of Rome investigated the lives of six hundred families living in such a town and produced a report which startled the Italian conscience, although it did little to modify the conditions the Professor described. The six hundred families, the Professor found, lived in a total of seven hundred rooms – 4.86 persons to a room – two hundred and sixteen of which possessed no window. (In most other cases the ‘window’ was nothing better than an opening in the wall, hardly ever covered with glass.) Only fifty-two houses possessed a water supply and eighty-two a lavatory – which in only three cases was anything more than a hole in the floor in the corner of a room. A quarter of the houses possessed floors of beaten earth or of bare rock.

  The acute shortage of living-space invoked other problems. Every family was obliged to supplement its minute income by keeping a variety of animals, and as there were no pens or outhouses in which these valuable possessions could be enclosed, they had to be brought in to sleep with the family at night. Thus, sharing the seven hundred rooms with 3,404 humans were 5,085 animals, among them goats, pigs, donkeys, horses and mules. On one occasion the Professor was hospitably offered a glass of goat’s milk. ‘Where does the goat sleep at night?’ he asked. ‘Under the bed,’ was the reply. ‘But doesn’t the stink of it kill you?’ ‘You get used to it, like everything else, in time.’ The hygienic implications were clearly catastrophic, because there were ten bakeries in the area embraced by the Professor’s enquiries, and in every case the inevitable animals were lodged and slept in the bakery – often a single room – along with the baker and his family. In one case there were the man and wife, seven children, a nanny-goat, four hens and a dog. In another the dough was prepared and loaves finally produced in a cavern which sheltered three humans, a donkey, a mule, four goats and twelve hens. As one newspaper summed up, with bitter humour, ‘This kind of thing could never happen in England. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would see to that.’

  The town investigated by Professor Pampiglione was Palma di Montechiaro – which incidentally contains one of The Leopard’s splendid baroque palaces – but it might as well have been Piana dei Greci, or any other of fifty or so small towns of western Sicily. Each town wears the same kind of misery like a threadbare reach-me-down suit. Where Piana dei Greci differs perhaps, apart from its astutely commercialised folklore, is in its tradition of resistance, which has given it a bad name with the authorities for a hundred years or more. Not even the Mafia has been able to beat this germ of defiance out of existence. In the early ‘nineties Piana dei Greci was involved in the agitations of the peasant leagues known as the Fasci, and shared in their violent suppression. When Mussolini visited the town in 1924 the memory of those turbulent days was still sufficiently fresh for his secret police to place the distinguished visitor under the protection of Piana dei Greci’s ridiculous mafioso mayor, Don Ciccio Cuccia – an experience which convinced the Dictator of the necessity of crushing the Mafia.

  In spite of this mute but persistent spirit of rebellion, it would be an error to believe that in the days of the fateful elections of 1947 more than the tiniest proportion of the people of Piana dei Greci were either Socialists or Communists. Their lack of education, if no other reason, would have prevented them from grasping more than a few homespun economic facts. The traditions of such communities are Tolstoyan, pacifist, and puritanical – government is seen at best as useless, and at worst as an evil fraud: a
conspiracy of visibly corrupt politicians, lawyers and policemen, abetted where necessary by criminals, by which the land – stolen from its cultivators in an unremembered past – is to be kept for ever beyond their reach.